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Irish Republicanism: The Continuity.

2012-02-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

The Continuity. (Anonymous)

Bombs explode in Northern Ireland city - CNN.com

Two bombs went off at separate locations in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, police said Thursday.

The struggle of the IRA or CIRA and RIRA may be more sporadic but I do hope that whatever happens will allow for the final end of colonialism. IRA has done far too much not simply for Ireland but to assist others in their national struggles for me to not feel great affinity with them. And if ever I have sons I hope they are the men that so many of those men have been. So as not to be sexist, ditto with daughters.

British occupation has been worn down over the years. Todya 2/3 of the country surrendered by Britain forms today's Republic of Ireland. There is some governmental representation by the Irish (Catholic) population in the British occupation government. There is continued outflow of the Irish and Northern Irish population into England (and other locales). Even with all the poverty and social ills that come with continued occupation, there has been progress over the centuries for Ireland and its revolutionaries. Continued commitment is a moral one rather than simply the current conditions that make me a continued supporter of CIRA, RIRA, IRA and Sinn Fein, etc.

The danger (and thus in my opinion the need for continued militancy) is to maintain the program and particular values that have been part of the independence movement. Irish revolution still aims to prevent Ireland from becoming independent in name but with none of the social and national platform and values, and just another region choking on debt and led by the dictates of the EU and multinationals (based in more powerful states). This militancy may require the continuation of the armed struggle. But what of peace? I don't see peace as simply the absence of physical violence but also the conditions that cause people to need to use physical violence to obtain justice.

When the Continuity snipers sent those two UK soldiers home in body bags a few months ago, I could not be opposed to that. It was all the more morally justified, actually morally imperative as one of the soldiers was an immigrant (from the Middle East) who was foolish enough to volunteer as an occupying soldier for the UK in NI.

In this on going struggle, I also see cannot entirely despise the Protestants resident in Northern Ireland. Undoubtedly they have been (willing) pawns in the same way that the Irish were used to serve imperialism overseas. But then, I even have (amoral) respect for imperialism itself, even when I find it morally repugnant.

The sentiment "Croppies Lie Down", and the Ulsterman (Protestant) perspective is one of domination, direct and straightforward. There is no lying in them at least, which is more than one can say of most modern imperialism which hides behind ridiculous justifications. Towards those who are direct about what they are doing, and do it for themselves I have a modicum of respect, at least more than I do toward those who operate or use others as willing tools of oppression or those who flee in the face of their own struggle.

The Roman Church has hardly been a friend to Ireland's cause. (It has done far more for the former Irish who immigrated.) Catholicism in Ireland is said to have long been in terminal decline, for good or bad (and I suspect mostly bad). My point here is that the Catholic/ Protestant divide is really a misnomer, or an easy way to track what is a fight between native Irish (who happened to have been historically primarily Catholic) and the settlers, chiefly lowland, Anglo Scots and English from the border country and of course the English elite who by religion were Protestant. (Sometimes Americans get confused with the names, etc.) But it is chiefly an ethnic incursion and colonial or neo-colonial occupation.

So Ulstermen who are killed are fair game but when someone like that British soldier, Sapper Azimkar is shot, I envy the sniper. My only concern is for the sniper and his family and the fear that he will be apprehended.

There is another reason I can't gather the energy to truly despise Ulstermen. Anglo Saxon ethnocentrism seems almost quaint today. (Anglo-Saxon can barely maintain themselves and their identity in England today much less dominate others; their day has apparently come and gone.) Besides, the 'Protestant' population in Northern Ireland numbers under a million people; how many Irish live in England today?

Probably confusing the issue more is that the Irish by circumstance have become Anglicized over the centuries of occupation. In ways it mirrors American slavery (though not as cruel or thorough), people adopted the culture of dominant group both by imposition and because of the benefits that came with assimilation. With so many incursions even the ethnic Irish may be a product of homogeneity. The physical stamp of the English in Ireland is defining and indelible. There is no Derry today without the English- it is part of the original execution of the Ulster Plantation. Most of the cities of Ireland are creations of the English (and earlier the Norman and Norse invasions). Irish institutions also have colonial origins.

Yet the Irish people remain, clinging to their identity and perspective. To me that speaks to a heroic persistence. The work to reconstruct and often to re-imagine and reinvent Irish culture where it was irretrievably lost is an interesting topic in itself. And beyond that, as a rule the people of Ireland have been indefatigable in their support of others who face imperialism.

The global political climate seems against the social aims of the IRA. Lest we forget, the US helped fund British imperialism in Ireland in the last century in no small part out of the interest in studying low intensity conflict, so this is only a change of degrees. Relatively speaking, NI is a small plot of land of limited economic value, and a small population; perhaps outsiders will become disinterested. Frankly neither Irish nor the Ulster nationalism are of any value outside of NI in the new order.

Those who are the Irish people have bravely stood their ground in their land, and fought, survived and even flourished for 500 plus years, so I think they can stick out a few more years to get the remainder of their island and have the real self-determination and the desired social justice in it that eludes so many less powerful nations in this age. Yet history says it will likely be a struggle. Til then, God Bless the (C/R)IRA.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanandjon/10094904/lightbox/

Wal-Mart's attempt at freedom of press thwarted.

2012-02-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

"(Whether or not) the Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message. We simply make it available for those who wish a copy." -Walmart

Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, assistant dean of the international Jewish rights group The Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote to Wal-Mart President Lee Scott expressing their objection that the book was on sale. John T. Walton pointedly refused, reiterating the store's position on the sale of the book and the review.

Was John Walton Murdered?

June 27, 2005, John Walton, of Jackson, Wyo., mysteriously crashed shortly after takeoff Monday from Jackson Hole Airport in Grand Teton National Park, the company said. The cause of the crash was not known and park rangers planned an investigation, officials said. Walton was 58.

Wal-Mart heir John Walton, who died in the crash of his ultralight aircraft Monday, is being remembered as a friendly man who threw his considerable financial support behind efforts to educate low-income children.

John Walton was an Army veteran who served with the Green Berets as a medic during the Vietnam War. He was awarded the Silver Star for saving the lives of several members of his unit while under enemy fire, according to the company.

In 2005, Walmart pulled the book from its shelves and banned it from being sold in the future

John T. Walton

John Thomas Walton (October 8, 1946 – June 27, 2005) was a United States war veteran and a son of Walmart founder Sam Walton. He was also the chairman of True North Partners, a venture capital firm. Walton cofounded the Children's Scholarship Fund, providing tuition scholarships for disadvantaged youth.Early life and service in the Vietnam WarWalton graduated from Bentonville High School where he was a star football player. Walton went on to attend the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio.

He dropped out of college in 1968 to spend more time playing the flute and enlisted in the U.S. Army (after the Vietnamese Tet Offensive).During the Vietnam war Walton served in the Green Berets as part of the Studies and Observations Group. He was involved in combat in the A Shau Valley and in Laos, where he was the medic and second-in-command of a unit named "Strike Team Louisiana". Walton later received a Silver Star for bravery in combat.

Born Again Muslim Terrorists: A Taxpayers' Conversion

2012-02-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

Born Again Muslim Terrorists

Me? Muslim terrorist? But I work for the CIA!

Consider the fact that the one of the leaders of the 'rebel' assault on Tripoli and the current military governor of Tripoli (more or less the commander-in-chief of the Libyan military) is Abdelhakim Belhadj. Belhadj has an interesting past. After a stint as a Mujaheddin fighter (trained and funded by the US) in the Soviet-Afghan war, Belhadj travelled across the Middle East and then came back to Libya in the early 1990s. There he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and tried to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi before being forced to flee in 1998. He then moved to Afghanistan and joined the Taliban. In 2002, after the September 11 attacks and Gaddafi's reconciliation with the West, an arrest warrant was issued for Belhadj by the Libyan authorities. In it, it was alleged that Belhadj had developed "close relationships" with al-Qaeda leaders, and specifically Taliban chief Mullah Omar. Based in Jalalabad, he is alleged to have run and financed training camps for Arab mujaheddin fighters. According to the former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Belhadj was suspected of complicity in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. As a virtual CIA asset, he was being tracked by the agency and was arrested in Bangkok and rendered to a secret prison in Libya in 2004. He stayed there until last year when he escaped and became a CIA-funded leader of the Libyan revolution.

In case you are a little confused by all that, let me spell it out: the CIA is using 'Muslim terrorists', i.e. people against whom America is waging the 'War on Terror', to bring 'freedom and democracy' to states that 'harbor Muslim terrorists'.

Mahdi al-Harat with his wife and some CIA money that he lost, or maybe they just wanted it back.

A fine 'Irish' chap by the name of Mahdi al-Harati was second in command to Belhadj in the Tripoli Military Council until he resigned in October 2011. Married to an Irish national, Mr al-Harati has admitted that he was paid by the CIA to organise anti-Gaddafi fighters in 2011. According to a Sunday World article of November 6, 2011, €200,000 in cash and expensive jewellery was stolen from al-Harati's Dublin home a month previously. The Sunday World reported that a criminal gang working the area found two envelopes stuffed with €500 notes during a raid on al-Harati's family home, October 6. The article, apparently relying on police sources, stated that al-Harati, who had been a Dublin resident and employed as an Arabic teacher for 20 years, when contacted by Irish police, claimed that the stolen cash was "given to him by an American intelligence agency."

"Astonished officers made contact with Mahdi al-Harati who told them that he had travelled to France, the United States and Qatar the previous month and that representatives of an American intelligence agency had given him a significant amount of money to help in the efforts to defeat Gaddafi. He said he left two envelopes with his wife in case he was killed and took the rest of the cash with him when he went back to Libya."

Note that al-Harati resigned from his position on the Tripoli Military Council just a few days after the money was stolen.

Barely two months later, on December 17, 2011, the Spanish paper ABC, carried a report by Daniel Iriarte entitled: Libyan Islamists move to Syria to help the revolution. During his visit with the Libyan rebels in Syria, Mr. Iriarte meets three Libyan rebels: Adem Kikli, who says he works for Belhadj; Fuad, who appears to be a body-guard; and none other than Mahdi al-Harati. Al-Hariti told the ABC reporter that he and his friends are in Syria to "evaluate the needs of our Syrian revolutionary brothers, not to fight". But it strikes me that that is precisely what a CIA agent in Syria today might say if challenged. al-Harati then told the ABC reporter something rather unexpected: "I was injured on the assault on the Mavi Marmara and spent nine days in a Tel Aviv jail." Yes indeed, it seems that this high-profile Muslim CIA mercenary, every-ready to do battle to oust Muslim leaders (secular or not) for NATO, is also a pro-Palestinian (and, we must assume, anti-Zionist) activist! Unless, of course, he was on the Mavi Marmara in the role of spy for the Mossad. What seems to be the case is that these former Muslim terrorists turned NATO freedom fighters are nothing more than unscrupulous hired guns, who will fight for any cause as long as someone is willing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars, with €200,000 or more left over for their spouses.

Members of the 'Free Syrian Army' - they'll shoot at anyone for the right price.

Cut-throats, Thugs and Hired Hitmen

In April 2011, Syrian state television aired the testimonies of three men arrested on suspicion of being involved in attacks on civilians and Syrian security forces. Anas al-Kanj, who presented himself as the head of an "armed terrorist group" is heard saying in a taped broadcast that he received "arms and money" from Lebanese MP Jamal Jarrah through an intermediary, Ahmad al-Uda, who identified himself as a member of Syria's banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Kanj said he was instructed "to incite people to protest, particularly outside the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus" and in the flashpoint protest towns of Daraa, Latakia and Banias, to "incite protests to topple the regime and to carry out acts of sabotage". Agence France-Presse, citing Syria's Ath-Thawra newspaper, said that Kanj was instructed "to open fire on protesters in order to sow disarray and lead people to believe that the security forces was shooting on the demonstrators."

In a December 2011 post on her web site, Turkish-American former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), Sibel Edmonds, stated that, according to her sources, "foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, began to spread near the villages of the north-Jordan city of Al-Mafraq, which is adjacent to the Jordanian and Syrian border."

"According to one Jordanian military officer who asked to remain anonymous, hundreds of soldiers who speak languages other than Arabic were seen during the past two days in those areas moving back and forth in military vehicles between the King Hussein Air Base of al-Mafraq (10 km from the Syrian border), and the vicinity of Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border."

In January this year, the UK website 'Elite UK Forces' published a report that stated:

[...] there has been growing chatter indicating that British Special Forces are in some way assisting forces aligned against the Syrian regime.

Reports from late November last year state that British Special forces have met up with members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the armed wing of the Syrian National Council. The apparent goal of this initial contact was to establish the rebel forces' strength and to pave the way for any future training operations.

More recent reports have stated that British and French Special Forces have been actively training members of the FSA, from a base in Turkey. Some reports indicate that training is also taking place in locations in Libya and Northern Lebanon. British MI6 operatives and UKSF (SAS/SBS) personnel have reportedly been training the rebels in urban warfare as well as supplying them with arms and equipment. US CIA operatives and special forces are believed to be providing communications assistance to the rebels.

Other UK tabloids reported the same story. At this stage, the pattern of events is mirroring that of Libya, where British and French special forces were on the ground prior to the launching of NATO's aerial bombardment.

Mr death squad junior, Ambassador Robert Ford

US ambassador to Syria since 2010 is Robert Stephen Ford. Before Syria, Ford was Political Counselor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 2004 until 2006 under 'Mr. Death Squad' John Negroponte. Before his recent departure and the closing of the US embassy, Ford temporarily left Damascus in October 2011 over fears for his safety after he was attacked with eggs by Syrians and accused by the Syrian media of overseeing the use of death squads in Syria. Having successfully overseen the establishment of his death squads in Syria, Ford is reportedly heading back to his old stomping ground, Iraq, to take command of the ~~death squads~~ US embassy there.

The Syrian 'revolution' proper began in March 2011 when fighting broke out in the relatively small town of Daraa on the Jordanian border, rather than in large cities like Damascu or Homs. Since then, the mainstream media has systematically misrepresented the sizes of the anti-government demonstrations and relied on biased reports for casualty counts.

For example, almost all of the first reports from fighting in Daraa in March made reference to police attacks on 'anti-government' protestors. Yet other reports point to more police being killed than demonstrators. So who, exactly, in this supposedly 'peaceful demonstration' was able to shoot and kill 7 policemen? And what exactly did anyone expect the Syrian government to do in response? After seeing what US police do to actual peaceful protestors, like the OWS movement, we can only imagine what the US government would do if US cops came under fire from protestors.

In June 2011, Syrian state media reported that at least 120 members of the country's security forces were killed in a battle with what it called "armed organizations". According to NPR's Deborah Amos:

"Syrian state television described a heated battle in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, near the Turkish border. Gangs armed with machine guns attacked security forces and set fire to government buildings, according to Syrian state TV. In the broadcast, a frantic resident called the evening news program to ask the government to save the town."

Notice that the reports of the most serious fighting come from border towns, which is indicative of incursions by armed groups from Turkey to the north, Jordan to the south and, of course, US-controlled Iraq to the east. Indeed, the main 'centers of unrest', as they're being called, are Daraa near Jordan, Talkalakh, Homs, Talbiseh and Al-Rastan near Lebanon, and Jisr ash-Shugur near Turkey, all located along Syria's borders. In November 2011, Albawaba reported that 600 fighters had already gone from Libya to Syria in order to support the newly established 'Free Syrian Army'.

On December 23rd, two powerful car bombs exploded outside government security offices in Damascus. 44 people were killed, most of them civilians. Clearly the attack was aimed at the government, but what kind of popular Syrian uprising produces people who indiscriminately attack and kill Syrian civilians? These types of 'suicide bombings' were (and, to an extent, still are) a feature of the attempt by US forces to terrorize a population and justify foreign intervention and occupation. It has worked in Iraq, so why not Syria?

The scene of the Dec. 23rd Damascus car bomb. Who benefits from chaos and the death of civilians and Syrian security personnel?

On January 6th, 2012, another 'suicide bomb' attack in the central Damascus neighborhood of al-Midan killed 26 people, most of whom were civilians. The funeral of the victims coincided with a large pro-Assad rally.

On January 11th, a mortar attack on a pro-government rally in Homs killed a French journalist, Gilles Jacquier of France 2, along with seven other civilians.

Yet another 'suicide bomb' was detonated in the city of Homs yesterday, February 8th, and yet again the targets and dead were civilians and members of the Syrian security forces.

Just out of interest, did you know that between December 24th 2011 and January 18th 2012, there was a League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria that comprised observers from every single country in the Arab world? Did you know that they published a report? Of course you didn't, because the report was suppressed by US and Israeli cronies in the Arab world (think Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar for example) and the Western media. Go ahead, try a web search for 'Report of the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria for the period from 24 December 2011 to 18 January 2012', because that is its title.

In their report, the members of the Mission came to some very interesting conclusions that make it very clear why you haven't heard of this report, until now.

On page 4 the report states:

VI. Implementation of the Mission's mandate under the protocol

A) Monitoring and observation of the cessation of all violence by all sides in cities and residential areas

In Homs, Idlib, Hamaand and Dera'a, the Mission observed armed groups committing acts of violence against Government forces, resulting in death and injury among their ranks... Examples of those acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.

The Mission also noted that, according to its teams in the field, the media exaggerated the nature of the incidents and the number of persons killed in incidents and protests in certain towns. [...]

In Homs, a French journalist who worked for the France 2 channel was killed and a Belgian journalist was injured. The Government and opposition accused each other of being responsible for the incident, and both sides issued statements of condemnation. The Government formed an investigative committee in order to determine the cause of the incident. It should be noted that Mission reports from Homs indicate that the French journalist was killed by opposition mortar shells.

[...]

E) Confirming the accreditation by the Syrian Government of Arab and international media organizations and that those organizations are allowed to move freely in all parts of Syria.

Speaking on behalf of his Government, the Syrian Minister of Information confirmed that, from the beginning of December 2011 to 15 January 2012, the Government had accredited 147 Arab and foreign media organizations.

Some 112 of those organizations entered Syrian territory, joining the 90 other accredited organizations operating in Syria through their full-time correspondents. The Mission followed up on this issue. It identified 36 Arab and foreign media organizations and several journalists located in a number of Syrian cities.

VII. Obstacles encountered by the Mission

A. Monitors

50. Some observers reneged on their duties and broke the oath they had taken. They made contact with officials from their countries and gave them exaggerated accounts of events. Those officials consequently developed a bleak and unfounded picture of the situation. [Ed. note: Can we say 'Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar?]

IX. Evaluation:

75. Recently, there have been incidents that could widen the gap and increase bitterness between the parties. These incidents can have grave consequences and lead to the loss of life and property. Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups. [Ed. Note: But none by the Syrian military or that eeevil dictator Assad?]

71. The Mission determined that there is an armed entity that is not mentioned in the protocol.

79. It should be noted that the mandate established for the Mission in the Protocol was changed in response to developments on the ground and the reactions thereto. Some of those were violent reactions by entities that were not mentioned in the Protocol. All of these developments necessitated an expansion of and a change in the Mission's mandate.

Read the full report here.

In June 2011, even an (unnamed) Obama administration official was forced to admit:

"We see the elements of an armed opposition across Syria, in the northwest, we see it as having taken over. There are a lot of them. We don't really know who these armed groups are," but added they were "religiously based, absolutely."

Obama might not know who these 'armed groups' are, but the CIA/MI6/Mossad nexus of evil certainly do.

Clearly, the 'Syrian Free Army' and those 'opposition groups' are not fighting in the interest of the Syrian people, but in the interest of those that shout the loudest (and can pay the most) for 'regime change' on the fly.

Mainstream Media Make-Believe

Within a few weeks of the beginning of the CIA-sponsored uprising in Syria, the Syrian government expelled most foreign journalists from the country and tightly controlled the activities of those that remained. Given the nature of the Western media - the propaganda arm of the empire builders - this was an understandable reaction. Unfortunately, the Syrian government seems to have underestimated the extent to which the CIA had infiltrated Syria.

With little or no direct access to events in Syria, most Western media reports rely on the claims of unnamed 'opposition activists' who, frankly, could be anyone, and an organisation calling itself the 'Local Coordination Committees of Syria' (LCC), which claims to be a "collection of local committees in towns and cities across Syria that meet, plan and organize events on the ground. Together the committees formed the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria, an umbrella organization with members from most cities and many smaller towns across Syria." Strangely enough, however, the web sites associated with this LCC are based in Germany and owned by a person named Andreas Bertsch.

In short, factual information about what is actually happening in Syria is extremely difficult to obtain, and, given that we are dealing with CIA-sponsored 'regime change', we have every reason to be suspicious of reports of Syrian police and soldiers indiscriminately killing Syrian civilians. We need only remember bogus, emotionally charged claims about 'babies in incubators' leading up to the first Iraq invasion, fabricated WMD claims leading up to the second, and, more recently, false statements that Gaddafi was 'bombing his own people'. Consider this short video report from RT.com for an example of the way in which reports of Syrian government's 'crack down' can be entirely fabricated.

Incidentally, the above report concerns the Syrian Mediterranean town of Lattakia, where tens of thousands marched in October 2011 in support of Assad, which came one day after a similarly strong showing of pro-Assad support in Damascus.

PysOps For The Masses

Speaking of making things up; what we are dealing with here is known in military circles as psychological warfare or 'psywar', which is a kind of warfare that aims to influence a target audience's value systems, belief systems, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior, usually by inventing lies and presenting them as truth. Such operations take many different forms. In our modern internet age, the various intel agencies are well aware of the need to ply their propagandistic trade in cyberspace.

'Amina Arraf' aka a disturbed and bearded American man living in Scotland.

One flagrant example of psywar in cyberspace as it related to Syria was the case of Amina Arraf, an alleged Syrian lesbian blogger ('A gay girl in Damascus') who rose to fame in the first half of last year as a result of her frank posts about her sexuality, the lack of freedoms in Syria and her open criticism of President Assad. In early June 2011, a post appeared on Amina's blog (supposedly by her cousin) telling her fans that she had been kidnapped by armed men. Thousands of campaigners around the world joined protest groups when media outlets picked up on the story and spread it far and wide.

Within a few days however, it was revealed (via IP traces) that this anti-Assad lesbian blogger from Syria was in fact a bearded American male by the name of Tom McMaster posting from his computer in Edinburgh. Why did he do it? According to Tom, it was all about "vanity", and he "never expected this level of attention". Sure. That's why he led a Canadian woman to believe that she was having a 6-month-long relationship with 'Amina'; that's why he created dozens of accounts on social networking sites in her name as far back as 2006. That's why he gave an email interview in her name to CNN. That's why he stole a picture of Jelena Lečić, a Croatian national and expatriate in the United Kingdom, and claimed it was 'Amina'. All very low key stuff.

Interestingly, while her blog was still active, 'Amina' posted a picture of a billboard in Damascus showing President Assad. The image was taken from Britta Froelicher's Facebook page and shows a date of 2006, which suggests that Britta, perhaps with McMasters, were in Syria in 2006, which was the year that the US began to covertly fund the Syrian opposition.

Interviewed by the Washington Post, Tom McMaster admitted to being a 40+ year old native of Virginia who is married to Britta Froelicher. Local real estate records show that MacMaster has owned a house in Georgia since 2000 and that he and his wife lived there until they left for Scotland in September 2010 where they both enrolled as students at Edinburgh University and where she is pursuing a PhD in Syrian economic development.

Tom McMaster - CIA psyops agent? Or just in need of a proper job?

Tom MacMaster's brother, Sam, said that his brother was offered a full scholarship from Emory University in Georgia, where he specialized in Arabic studies. Later he traveled to Syria and Jordan to perfect his language skills.

MacMaster has been active in the University of Edinburgh's Students for Justice in Palestine and has written articles critical of 'Zionists'.

When contacted by the Electronic Intifada, McMasters replied:

"I am not the blogger in question. Whomever that person 'really' is, I have doubtless interacted with her at some point. I do not know further than that about her. When I first read the news story, I momentarily thought I had an idea who she was. As time has progressed that seems much less likely. I understand there are a number of unusual coincidences regarding the blogger and either me or my wife. Those are, as far as I am aware, simply unusual. I am not going to make more of that."

But within a few days he was forced to come clean, at which point he took off ... to Turkey of all places. Here's a video interview of McMasters by the Guardian, and a 2009 interview of his wife about her work for the Quaker 'American Friends Service Committee'. Readers can make up their own minds whether or not these two are conscious psywar agents of empire or just an pair of gullible idiots.

Another interesting piece of trivia; it was the Local Coordination Committees of Syria that first broke the fake story that Amina had been arrested by Syrian police. Coincidence?

Proxy Guvvermints in Exile Я Us

Burhan Ghalioun - Syrian-French tool of the CIA

As was the case with the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, high on the CIA's to-do list for 'regime change' in Syria was the creation of an embryonic Syrian government-in-exile made up of right-wing hardliners and/or convicted conmen. Early last year, the Syrian National Council was created with its headquarters in Turkey. To get an idea of the political leaning of this clique, we need only look to the comments of its Chairman, Burhan Ghalioun, a French professor of political sociology and potential future President of Syria. On December 2, 2011 Ghalioun said that if his regime takes over Syria it would "end the military relationship to Iran and cut off arms supplies to Hezbollah and Hamas, and establish ties with Israel."

This fact alone points to strong Israeli backing and motivation in the effort to oust Assad. With a pro-US/Israel government in Syria, crucial Iranian support to Hizb'allah and the Palestinians would be cut off, leaving Israel free to enact its final solution for its 'Arab problem'.

One World Government

The countdown to NATO airstrikes on Syria has begun. When that happens, it's all over for Assad and a relatively normal life for Syrians. Libya's ~~al Qaeda mercenaries~~ rebels were able to call in NATO air support as they rampaged through the country, brutally murdering and torturing people as they went. The same gruesome story is playing out in Syria. Russia and China recently vetoed the US/UK motion for another NATO war on Syrian civilians. Yet Hilary Clinton still had the gall to be "disgusted" at their veto, declaring:

"We all have a choice: Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there."

Complicit? Clinton is already up to her neck in the blood of the Syrian people, the only problem being that she likes it that way, and the vile harpy will have her way! That's why two days ago, the US proposed a "international coalition [of the willing?] to support Syria's opposition", which is precisely what the US did when they failed to get UN approval for war on Iraq. The result was 1.5 million dead Iraqi civilians.

Taking into consideration what I wrote above about the actual policy-makers transcending the revolving door of successive administrations, the only thing that is certain in a world where most are so abysmally ignorant of the true state of affairs, is that the psychopaths in power will get their way, no matter how many lies they have to tell, or innocent people they have to kill. Syria's fate is tightly bound to Iran's. China and Russia's in turn is bound to Iran's. Things are so chaotic, yet everything remains exactly the same. Only a dramatic intervention, from somewhere, can hasten the final chapter of this insane script.

2011 – Year of the Dupe

2011-12-26T02:34:00.000-08:00

Tony Cartalucci Week of December 25, 2011

A timeline & history: One year into the engineered “Arab Spring,” one step closer to global hegemony.

dupe (dp, dyp)
n.
1. An easily deceived person.
2. A person who functions as the tool of another person or power.
tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

December 24, 2011 – In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. “

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in

February 2011′s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline – 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

Photo: Serbia’s “Otpor,” a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

….

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Libery (RFE/RL) article titled, “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East,” it was stated, “Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield — assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists’ meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.
February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

The Timeline – 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, “Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home,” that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were “triggered” by the convenient release of US State Department cables via Wikileaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the Wikileaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, Wikileaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

A “call for solidarity” by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the “uprising” in January 2011 as “FIDH member organisations.” These include Marzouki’s “Tunisian League for Human Rights,” the “Tunisian Association of Democratic Women,” and the “National Council for Liberties in Tunisia,” or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of “human rights,” is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’ Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarply of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia’s growing crisis. In “All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes,” it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membership within the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side “senior Israeli officials” including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulators including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

Photo: ElBaradei’s ties to the West go much deeper than merely play-acting within the ineffectual, genocide-enabling UN. He is also a member of the corporate-financier funded International Crisis Group.

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Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a rouse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations’ paper, Foreign Affairs’ article “Is ElBaradei Egypt’s Hero?”:

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an “Iranian agent.” This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80′s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.

Photo: Please note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

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February 18, 2011: In the wake of Honsi Mubarak’s ousting, billionaire bankster George Soros’ Open Society Institute was found to be behind NGOs drafting Egypt’s new constitution. These “civil society” groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of NGOs their membership, including Soros, fund that were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.

March 2011′s “US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy,” noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as “peaceful protests.”
February 28, 2011: “Destroying Libya” stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad’s new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both “attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.”

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a “Bay of Pigs” disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In “Globalists Hit in Syria,” the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the “evidence” of Syria’s unrest was being filtered through organizations such as the London-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its website were cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include “activists say” after each allegation. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei’s chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him “an American agent.” Wikileaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the “anti-Western” image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.

Photo: The “barrier of legitimacy” is broken: a mob shouts “American agent” as they hurl rocks at ElBaradei who most certainly is an American agent – a trustee of the US International Crisis Group alongside George Soros.

….

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order” is reported on – exposing the war as not one of a “humanitarian” nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.

Image: Red = US-backed destabilization, Blue = US occupying/stationed. China’s oil and sea access to the Middle East and Africa are being or have already been cut. A similar strategy of isolation was used on Japan just before the onset of World War II.

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April 17, 2011: Syria’s unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, “Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria,” the “Libyan Precedent” is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, “Color Revolution’s Mystery Gunmen,” establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an “Arab Spring-style” insurrection. In, “Besieging Belarus,” documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point’s CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.

Photo: Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying “Al-Qaeda” a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy
to a new level of surrealism.

….

May, 2011: In “Libya at Any Cost,” the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

“America’s Arab Deception” attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In “Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust,” the true agenda behind Egypt’s, and indeed the entire “Arab Spring’s” unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia’s economy into the Wall Street/London international order.

Photo: McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster’s agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s government.

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In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.
July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court’s mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in “It’s Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate,” as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC’s claims against Libya’s Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya’s “human rights” community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi’s “atrocities” were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra’s political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand’s establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets – this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

P
Photo: Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand’s prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

….

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria’s opposition was “mostly unarmed,” or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying out a systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Photo: Libya’s rebels are far from
motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. “Gaddafi supporters” is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes that form the majority of Western Libya’s demographics and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities.

….

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In “Globalists to Rebuild Libya,” NATO’s Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya’s violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the “War on Terror” was. In “Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists,” it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

Image: A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members’ full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US. (click on image to enlarge)

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September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had “leased” from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of “humanitarian concerns” is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London’s interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.

Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company’s despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and “helps” people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was “helping” had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company’s encroachment on their land. These villagers would be forcibly displaced, many of them killed by Ugandan troops acting on behalf of Devereux.

…

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi’s Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.

Photo: It’s all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda’s exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers.

….

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran’s borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Image: MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The “War on Terror” is a fraud.

….

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US “plausible deniability” for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria’s “peaceful protesters” who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledge as such by the corporate-media and more importantly by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In “IISS: Syria’s Opposition is Armed,” it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria’s opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria’s violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London’s assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Photo: And so begins the farce that is Western “democracy.” One corporate-fascist puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya’s fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed “National Transitional Council.”

….

Joining el-Keib would be US-funded activist, Moncef Marzouki, named Tunisia’s president. Marzouki’s organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization. Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored byNED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

Photo: US NED-funded activist leader Moncef Marzouki after spending two decades in Paris, helps foist the facade of “democracy” onto the Tunisian people. Of course, he, or someone of equal servitude to the West was going to become “President.” In 1993 Noam Chomsky would concisely describe the work of NED as “an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures.” In other words, those fighting in the “Arab Spring” did so for gilded tyranny.

….

In Egypt, in late November, a second “revolution” began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian “crimes against humanity” which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged “victims” “witnesses,” and “defectors,” put forth by “all interested persons and organizations.” In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria’s enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the “Arab Spring” was nearly complete. However, the “Arab Spring” was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.

Image: The “String of Pearls:” China’s oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the “String” the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China’s emergence as a regional power.

….

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, “America’s Pacific Century,” a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American “leadership” in Asia for the next 100 years. From “Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

“Upon reading Clinton’s declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting “Project for a New American Century” signed off on by some of America’s most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America’s evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama’s announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.

As reported in June, 2011′s “Collapsing China,” as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the “international order.” Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America’s Asian “allies” as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain “American leadership” in Asia.

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, “it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.” As reported in-depth in “CONFIRMED: Thailand’s “Pro-Democracy” Movement Working for US,” Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.”"

In Myanmar (Burma) “democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand’s proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the defacto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton’s visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

Image: The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September by a campaign led by Wall Street-puppet Aung San Suu Kyi, a stable of US-funded NGOs, and a terrorist campaign executed by armed groups operating in Kachin State, Myanmar.

….

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO “Golos” played a key role in portraying the elections as “rigged” and constituted America’s extraterritorial meddling in Russia’s sovereign affairs.

Image: NATO’s creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of “color revolution” destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

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A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, “Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ,” illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In “Wall Street Vs. Russia,” it was concluded:

“It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in “democracy,” “human rights,” or “freedom” in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO’s aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called “Free Syrian Army.”

This wasn’t the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, “EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq,” that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution’s report, “Which Path to Persia?” where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of “freedom” sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February’s “The Middle East & then the World” is well worth reading again – to see how far we’ve come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia’s doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, “The End Game Approaches:”

“Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered “Arab Spring” reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime…. the End Game approaches.

Now more than ever, “we the people” must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it, boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us – the very source of corporate fascism’s power – and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

It is now “do or die” – unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a “planetary regime.” The End Game approaches.”

Let us not “hope” next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our “leaders” or “representatives,” it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention – each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for “saviors,” but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or “we the people” choose.

The Boule at 100: Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity holds centennial celebrations (2004)

2010-09-15T04:13:00.000-07:00

100 years after six Philadelphia professional men founded Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, the organization returned to Philadelphia with a cloud of blue-ribbon witnesses, living and dead, a record of 10 decades of achievement, and an expanding vision of an international band of brothers committed to service, brotherhood and excellence.

More than 3,000 archons (members) and archousai (wives) attended the Grand Boule Centennial Celebration, the largest gathering in the history of the fraternity, which is oftentimes called the Boule, meaning, in fraternity parlance, "a council of noblemen."

The delegates and attendees, meeting in style in the salons and the grand ballroom of the Marriott Hotel, presented to themselves and to others a telling contrast with the restricted and largely segregated world of 1904 Philadelphia, where on May 15, 1904, a pharmacist, a dentist and two physicians--Henry McKee Minton, Dr. Algernon B. Jackson, Dr. Edwin C. Howard and Dr. Richard J. Warrick--met and announced to themselves, and to others, that a new world was coming. Within two weeks, two more doctors--Robert J. Abele and Eugene T. Hinson--joined, increasing the membership by 50 percent.

The new world the Six dreamed in 1904 materialized and renewed itself in 2004 in a week of celebration and re-bonding, enlivened by a Boule-patented round of social events, including three black-tie affairs, symposia on Black health and Black male incarceration, and major addresses from, among others, Grand Sire Archon (national president) Calvin O. Pressley, the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode and Vernon Jordan Jr.

Almost all major speakers stressed what Pressley called "the connectivity" of the celebration, which blended, he said, Symbol and Substance, and almost all called for a new level of personal and fraternity involvement in the living problems and challenges of the 21st century.

In the keynote address, Archon Vernon Jordan Jr. presented a 12-point program for personal and collective renewal, saying, among other things, that "we must create a new sense of community among our own ... bridge the growing economic gap within the Black community [and] re-Brown Brown to counter the long slide back into de facto segregation." We must also, he said, "constantly remind the new entrants into the Talented Tenth that their exciting jobs in corporate America and investment banking and in law firms are not the result of their grades and their ability and their school all by themselves. They did not get there by themselves ... and they have to know it."

The delegates and attendees who applauded these and other remarks represented 112 member boules (chapters), including a chapter in the Bahamas, and more than 5,000 members. It includes virtually every significant male black elected and appointed official, such as mayors, police chiefs, city managers, state house representatives and federal congressmen. Professors, businessmen, and college presidents (including most if not all male presidents of historically black colleges and universities) also count among their number as do several presidents of Caribbean nations. Ambassadors, doctors, judges journalists (including most of the the publishers of Black newspapers) count among their members. They represent the virtual Who's Who of Black America who were and are members of the group. W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Carter G. Woodson, John Hope Franklin, Charles Drew, Hale Woodruff, William Hastie, Walter White, Martin Luther King Jr., John H. Johnson, Earl Graves, Paul Williams, Arthur Ashe, Benjamin Mays, Maynard Jackson, Kenneth Chenault--call the roll--they were and are members of a bond that is primarily Black but includes at least one non-Black member. One of the best-known and controversial selections was of the Jewish lawyer Jack Greenberg, who was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education. Greenberg also with some controversy succeeded Thurgood Marshall as executive director of the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund and also contentiously secured a role as the head of African American legal studies at Harvard.

Originally conceived as an organization that would contain the attributes that were the "best of Skull and Bones of Yale and of Phi Beta Kappa," as its founders stated, the fraternity stresses, as its founders stressed, family and the need for a social, spiritual and communal gathering space for Black professionals. The need, paradoxically, Calvin Pressley and others argue, is greater in 2004 than it was in 1904. Some of the members are second- and third-generation archons, but an increasing number, like the new leader, Charles Teamer, come from the ranks of high achievers with no previous family connections.

What makes the Boule's success all the more interesting is that it was founded as a secret or quasi-secret organization and did not make public notice until the 1960s and 1970s. It's members are allowed now to maintain their anonymity or to speak of their personal involvement as they chose, but not the internal affairs of the organization. Until the mid 1990's the group created no social programs nor pursued any agenda besides their own networking and support, except through the organizations they were involved in outside the group. Since that time, the organization has mounted a number of outreach programs, including a mentoring program, a public policy committee and a $200,000 scholarship program.

Called by some observers a super-fraternity because its membership includes the members of all major Black fraternities, Sigma Pi Phi, unlike other fraternities, does not have college chapters though it only accepts members with a college degree and "a record of demonstrated excellence" in their field. Members say they have followed the mandate of founder Henry Minton, the pharmacist who later earned a medical degree, who said that new members should not be "selected on the basis of brains alone, but in addition to congeniality, culture, and good fellowship, they should have behind them [at initiation] a record of accomplishments, not merely be men of promise and good education." Minton, who was the first grand sire archon, helped organize the second boule (chapter), Beta Boule, in Chicago in 1907. The third boule was organized in Baltimore in 1908. It is worth noting, at least for perspective, that some of the founders of the first chapters, notably Charles E. Bentley and F. L. McGhee of Beta Boule, were also co-founders of the landmark Niagara Movement, which opposed the policies of Booker T. Washington and created the foundations for the NAACP.

Outgoing Grand Sire Archon Calvin O. Pressley says the Boule is "the quintessential brotherhood for African-American men." The incoming Grand Sire Archon, New Orleans banker and financier Charles Teamer, says the Boule "is unique because no other organization brings together so many talented leaders--sometimes you have in the same room the mayor and the biggest educational and economic leaders in town--and no other organization provides such an unparallelled opportunity to mentor, change structures, and build bridges." He says his administration will concentrate on mentoring, creating new international connections and moving networking to another level.

Teamer, who will head the organization for the next two years, says that in the next 100 years, Sigma Pi Phi will have an opportunity to extend its vision to communities across the world. To meet that challenge, the fraternity must, he said, replenish its roots, bridge the widening gap between male generations and reach out to new constituencies who are dreaming in their own day and in their own language the same dream that moved the six founding fathers who sat down in a house on Philadelphia's South 10th Street in 1904 and dreamed a dream that changed themselves and history.

A Debate at a Website Submitted

2010-08-19T07:18:00.000-07:00

The comments on certain blogs, newspapers and journals can sometimes be more interesting and informative than the featured articles. Because of that we have inverted the order of article and comments, and brought one comment to the fore that deserved particular notice.

Unidentified

I thank the Jewish commenter here for opening the conversation with “Jews don’t kill people, Muslims do”. I am not a Muslim and I have made it clear that I am a Protestant, of the Calvinist and Lutheran variety. But the continued statements characterizing Muslims in a very provocative way with no support, and usually with no relevance opens the door to address the topic at hand, about Jewish dominance.

You may want to cut and paste or copy this because it is dealing with an issue that as a subtext to the causes and symptoms of U.S. decline applies that this site often addresses.

I said this before, I do not want to be blamed for the anger that people are showing a certain peculiar, domination bent and hellaciously tribal people. I did not invent:

Eliot Abrams (PNAC author, author and promoter of the “Salvadoran Option” aka Death Squads and ultra Terrorism);

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,Norman Podhoretz,Douglas Feith, Midge Decter, Bill Kristol (Neo-conservative Israel firsters, Office of Special Plans, Committee for the Free World)…

I didn’t make virtually every head of a financial regulatory or policy setting agency at the federal level members of the same said tribe.

Ben Bernanke (Fed Reserve),
Alan Greespan (Fed Reserve),
Robert Rubin (Sec Tres),
Mary Schapiro (Securities Exchange Comm),
James Wolfensohn (World Bank pres),
Dominique Strauss-Kahn (Director of the IMF),
Paul Wolfowitz (World Bank pres),
Gary Gensler (chairman U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission),
Sheila Bair(chairman, FDIC),
Peter Orszag(Director, Office of Management and Budget),
Lawrence Summers(Chairman National Economic Council)…

I did not make the head of virtually every public or private linchpin position in federal policy circles Jewish:

            Richard Hoolbrooke (UN Ambassador, Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Pakistan),
            Dennis Ross (NSC Advisor, Middle East Special Envoy, Jewish People Policy Planning Institute),
            Richard Nathan Haass (Pres of CFR), (and the majority of the CFR members in policy)

Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff, Campaign organizer and IDF vet),
David Axelrod (Presidential chief strategist and Senior adviser),
Elena Kagan (Solicitor General of the United States , now onto the Supreme Court nominee),
Dan Shapiro (Head of Middle East at National Security Council),
Allen Weinstein (National Endowment for Democracy),
Madeleine K. Albright (National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, frm Sec of State)…

All but one ‘Czar’:
Economic Czar– Larry Summers,
Regulatory Czar – Cass Sunstein,
Pay Czar– Kenneth Feinberg,
Guantanamo/Military,
Jails Czar – Daniel Fried,
Car Czar– Steven Rattner,
Border Czar– Alan Bersin,
Climate Czar– Todd Stern,
Global Warming Czar– Carol Browner…

I also didn’t invent Goldman Sachs, Warburg, Rothschild, Schiff, Oppenheim, as Jewish owned financial entities, etc. nor did I invent their role in the Federal Reserve, the IMF/World Bank system and their continued roles as the largest banks in the world, the largest contributors to presidential and prime ministerial election campaigns in the U.S. and Europe.

I did not make up Michael Milken and his confederates like Alan Greenberg, Ira Harris, Bruce Wasserstein, Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, Peter Cohen, Joseph Flom, Martin Lipton, Victor Posner, Nelson Peltz, the Belzbergs and company who by the admission of Jewish authors, dismantled the industrial ownership (destroying its productivity and market share) and then did the same the community banking system (S&L's) in America, turning it all into profit for their tribe.

I didn't invent the current collusion nor dictate the background of all the current players of the current financial fleecing, whether it be Maurice Greenberg, Chair of AIG, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben-shalom Bernake, Stanley Greenberg of AIG and the Bank of Israel, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein , Managing Director and Chief Officer and Economist of Morgan Stanley Stephen Roach, CEO of Washington Mutual Alan Fishman, and their friends in Congress who authored the bailout bill Barney Frank, head of the powerful House Financial Services Committee (D-MA) and his fellow Committeemen Gary Ackerman (D- NY).

I am not responsible for the autos task force led by investment bankers Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom, both whom took part in the earlier junk bond financial market shakedown and ultimate meltdown.

Surely I did not place the other government side architects of the "crisis" and bailout, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, his predecessor Alan Greenspan, World Bank President Robert Zoellik, UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson Martin Feldstein, President, National Bureau of Economic Research.

Almost every substantial library in America contains a number of books confirming such Jewish control. These include Neil Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented and Hoberman and Shandler's America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting.

These encyclopedic histories of Jewish control of the American media outdo any efforts by so-called “anti-Semites” to document an astonishing, frightening fact: The majority of media news and information to the American public comes from Jews.

An authoritative Jewish website, “Judaism Online,” in a widely republished article, “Jewish Success in the American Media,” documents Jewish media preeminence. It does so not from motives of anti-Semitism, but from Jewish pride. Its most recent list is printed, in part, below:

CBS: Sumner Redstone - chairman of board and CEO of CBS and Viacom, "world's biggest media giant" (Economist, 11-23-02). Viacom owns Viacom Cable, CBS, and MTV all over the world, Blockbuster Video Rentals, and Black Entertainment TV
Mel Karmazin - CBS corporation president and CEO Leslie Moonves (gnephew of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion) - president of CBS Television
David Poltrack - executive vice-president, Research and Planning
Jeff Fager - executive director of “60 Minutes II.”

NBC: Jeff Zucker - president of NBC Entertainment
Neil Shapiro - president of NBC News
Jeff Gaspin - executive vice-president, programming NBC
Max Mutchnik and David Kohan - co-exec. producers of NBC’s “Good Morning, Miami”
Lloyd Braun - chair of NBC Entertainment.

ABC: Michael Eisner - major owner of Walt Disney, Capital Cities, and ABC David Westin - president of ABC News.

FOX: Rupert Murdoch (Jewish mother) - owner of FOX TV, New York Post, London Times, and News of the World
Sandy Grushow - chair, FOX Entertainment
Peter Chernin - second in command at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of FOX TV
Gail Berman - president of FOX Entertainment.
Wolf Blitzer - host of CNN’s Late Edition.

Hollywood Movie Studios:

The prestigious Encyclopedia Judaica, in its article “Motion Pictures,” pg. 449, says: “Thus all the large Hollywood companies, with the exception of United Artists...were founded and controlled by Jews.”
Sony Corporation of America: Howard Stringer - chief
-Columbia Pictures: Amy Pascal - chair
Warner Bros.: Barry Meyer - chair; Jordan Levin - pres. of Warner Bros. Entertainment
Miramax Films: Harvey Weinstein - CEO
Paramount: Sherry Lansing - president of Paramount Communications and chair of Paramount Pictures’ Motion Picture Group.
DreamWorks: Stephen Spielberg, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg (owners)MTV Entertainment: Brian Graden - president
Turner Entertainment: Brad Siegal - president

Radio:
Clear Channel Communications: Robert Sillerman - owner and founder

The Encyclopedia Judaica itself noted unquestioned Jewish preeminence it the print field in its article “Publishing,” lists the following publishing houses, as of 1971, owned or controlled by Jews: Viking, Knopf, Random House, Modern Library, Simon and Schuster, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Greenberg Publishers, Ziff-Davis, Crown Publishers, Dial Press and Dryden Press.

Publishing houses either founded by or with a Jew as editor-in-chief include: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, Abelard-Schumann, Basic Books, Grosset & Dunlap, Federal Writers Project, Gaer Associates, Macmillan & Co., Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Citadel Press, Chanticleer Press, Arthur Frommer, Inc., Hart Publishing Co., Lantern Press, Oceanea Publications, Twayne Publishers, Arco Publishing Co., Grossman Publishers, and Stein & Day.

Publishing houses involved in book clubs, reprints, or children’s literature either founded by or controlled by Jews include the Literary Guild, Book of the Month Club, Limited Editions Club, Heritage Club, Junior Heritage Club, Readers Club, Jewish Book Guild, Military Science Book Club, Natural History Book Club, Book Collector’s Society, Art Book Guild, Science Book Club, Beech Hurst Press, A. S. Barnes & Co., Sagamore Press, Thomas Yoseloff Inc., The Modern Library, World Publishing Co., Little Blue Books, Pocket Books Inc., Avon Publications, Popular Library, Schocken Books, Golden Books, and Golden Press.

In its article on New York City, the Judaica adds to the list of publishing houses owned by Jews, Liveright & Boni, and Anchor Books.

Today Random House, Doubleday, and Anchor Books, while Jewish owned and controlled, participate in the world’s largest publishing consortium, Bertelsmann A.G., benefiting from its staggering distribution advantages.

Bertelsmann’s American operations are headed by Joel Klein, chair and CEO.
David Manaker is executive director for HarperCollins.

Newspapers:

Samuel Newhouse Jr. and Donald Newhouse own Newhouse Publications, which includes 26 newspapers in 22 cities. The Conde Nast Magazine Group includes the New Yorker, Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplements, American City Business Journal, business newspapers published in more than 30 major cities in America, and interests in cable television programming and cable systems serving one million homes.

Wall Street Journal: Peter R. Kahn, CEO
New York Times, Boston Globe, and other publications: published by Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
New York Daily News: Mortimer Zuckerman, owner
Village Voice, New Times and network of alternative weeklies: Owned by David Schneiderman
Washington Post: Donald Graham, chair and CEO, son of Katharine Graham Meyer, former owner of Washington Post
San Francisco Chronicle: Ron Rosenthal, managing editor; Phil Bronstein, exec. editor
AOL-Time Warner Book Group: Laurence Kirshbaum, editor

Magazines.
US News & World Report: Mortimer Zuckerman, owner and chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish-American Organizations, one of the largest pro-Israel lobbying groups
New Republic: Marty Peretz, owner and publisher (NR openly identifies itself as pro-Israel.)
Barron’s: Peter R. Kahn, CEO
National Review: Michael Ledeen, editor
Business Week: Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor
Newsweek: Donald Graham, chair and CEO, and Howard Fineman, chief political columnist
Weekly Standard: William Kristol, editor, also executive director, Project for a New American Century, (PNAC)
The New Yorker: David Reznik, editor; Nicholas Lehman, writer; Henrick Hertzberg, “Talk of the Town” editor

Ivan Seidenberg - CEO of Verizon Communications, Comcast-ATT Cable TV, with Ralph and Brian Roberts as owners.

Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute - regular columnist for USA Today, news analyst for CBS and co-chair with Leslie Moonves of the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligation of Digital TV Producers, appointed by Clinton.

Dennis Lebowitz - head of Act II Partners, a media hedge fund.
Barry Diller - chair of USA Interactive, former owner of USA Entertainment.
Richard Leibner - head of N. S. Bienstock talent agency, which represents 600 news personalities such as Dan Rather, Dianne Sawyer, and Bill O’Reilly.
Stephen Emerson - every media outlet’s first choice as an expert on domestic terrorism.
Terry Semel - CEO of Yahoo!, former chair, Warner Bros.
Mark Golin - VP and creative director for AOL.
Warren Lieberford - president of Warner Bros. Home Video Division of AOL-Time Warner.

I did not make the most of the presidents of Ivy League schools
Columbia, Lee Bollinger
Cornell, David Skorton
UPenn, Amy Gutman
Yale Richard Levin
Brown, Thomas Tisch (Chancellor)

Note that the other two of the other three Ivy League schools have recently outgoing Jewish presidents, leaving after outcry over some misdeed--

Harvard, Larry Summers (outgoing), replaced by Drew Faust Rosenberg, Jewish spouse
Princeton Larry Schapiro (outgoing) replaced by Shirley Tilghman, Jewish spouse

We could go on for the lists of faculty and deans of law schools and medical schools at Ivy League or the top universities in America and the list would be overwhelmingly Jewish.

In the 2009 list of Vault's top 25 law firms where the vast majority have equity partners that are mostly or all Jewish.

And looking further afield, I didn’t make the Jewish oligarchs who despite being less than .01% of the Russian population took over 70% of its economy in the collapse (which they authored) of the the Soviet Union. You will have plenty of sources among Jewish authors, gloating in those efforts as well.

We all know about the richest families in Canada, the Skoll family, Sherman family, Reichmann family and we all know about their influence in Canadian politics by extension of US Zionist groups, despite their being more Red Indians than Jews in Canada.

The Jewish billionaires and power brokers that control Western Europe financial institutions are legendary despite being even smaller as a percentage in Europe than the U.S. But when we also look historically to find the same people wherever there is power, wealth and degradation, so that the Lazards, Sasoons worked with the Rothschilds to control the old opium trade in the last century in India and China.

We see sweatshops in Haiti, the diamonds and metals and minerals of Southern Africa (the Oppenheim family virtually controls all the Diamond and Gold market of the world outside of Russian production).

The banking and currency trading in Latin America and Southern Africa is largely in the hands of a people who compose not even a a tenth of one percent of those populations! I did not cause this or make it up. We see in Latin America the largest mining and precious gems and metals company in Brazil, owned by the Steins, and the notorious Safra family and the Semler family have done a “Michael Milken” on Brazil.

We see the President Ricardo Maduro, a Jew, of Honduras (in a nation where the vast Red Indian descended majority has never held any major office).

We saw Panamanian President Eric Arturo Delvalle, A Jew, as president of Panama and the ringleader of the instability program that saw the U.S. invasion.

We saw Jew Fabio Grobart, the founder of the Communist Party of Cuba who had a decisive role in several presidents election (hardly communists) who then who turned on Castro trying to oust him and he had to be scratched out of their history books.

We see the Venezuelan Jew Moisés Naím, former World Bank head, and also head of the US National Endowment for Democracy (perhaps the most misnamed group in history) and The International Crisis Group (another U.S. gov’t/Worldwide Zionist destabilization plotting group), who also happens to be active with the World Jewish Congress (as are many of the people cited here).

Wherever the rule of this tribe of Zionists exists we see growing inequity, increasing moral depravity, concentration of wealth and power to the few, rampant and crippling debt, internal conflict, displaced industry (the international race to the bottom), AND IN THOSE LUCKY CASES society reacting!

Unfortunately, societies that react and create prosperity and independence are often the victims of the most vicious Zionist aggression. Most often it is by political machinations, coups and economic warfare. When that does not work, the death squads and then genocide comes. It is plotted and planned by the Zionists, call them Neocons, Neolberals, and call it anti-terrorism and “the Salvador Option” (Elliot Abrams, etc. of the Jewish Plan for a New World Order by any means necessary).

The gore, sweat and gold isn’t FROM the Zionist themselves or from their coffers, but by the blood, sweat and labor of Goyim against Goyim. Who will be the victims on any day-- Yugoslavians, Central Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, or tomorrow the Iranians? The victims change but is still the same venomous snakes that hatch murder.

To be clear again, these facts have nothing to do with my invention nor can I be blamed for them by name calling and characterizing. The facts stand alone.

So pretend and blame others in order to make the world fit in our belief in universal goodness, the reality remains. Perhaps we can even engage in intellectual discussions as to why and how this reality came to be, like Wilhelm Marrs, Richard Wagner, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and other German intellectuals did about the dangers of this small, sophisticated foreign-cultural population dominating a larger society. It isn't DOING anything about the circumstances but we can feel better about having discussed them.

Just remember that in the end it was Freud that gave rise to Bernays, Lippmann and ultimately the Frankfurt School that not only redeemed the losses to German peoples in WWII but went to take over the entire West and through it, the world. And remember that the Frankfurt school and the Neoconservatives counted as allies and were themselves (ostensibly) Communists, Liberals, Conservatives, Orthodox, Reform and non-religious, switching as to whatever was most useful, but in the end it was and is to the same end.

I love watching all the need to kowtow and placate and watching how easily WASP are manipulated. (By “love” I mean, torn to shreds inside.)

This isn’t about something abstract. This is why White Protestants in America have become the poorest group outside of Blacks and Hispanics (even as those groups decline, implying another sort of “race to the bottom”).

Virtually all social dynamics and institutions are affected by group dynamics, race and tribalism and that means each one of us individually are affected. In the present circumstances, a single group representing less than two percent of the American population and less than a tenth of the world population has become perhaps the most influential force on the world stage, by as a consequence of their powerful group dynamics, and virulent racism and tribalism. (And that single group are not of Muslim faith.)

Our Jewish fellow commenter explained in detail how a small group, a dozen Muslims attacked the World Trade Center twice and hijacked several planes. He ignores how the West, including Christians and Jews (and often Christians at the behest of Jews) have been waging a war that has cost tens of millions of lives in Muslim world over the several centuries of imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and most spectacularly in the last century, Zionism.

This commenter, after forwarding his blatantly Zionists agenda, stated that he was a "reluctant Zionist" at best and that it was important for (WASP's and Goyim in general) to remember that there's Jews and Zionists.

And he blames OTHERS for pointing out just how dominant the Zionists are and their Zionist agenda.

Don’t fool yourself or be fooled by the line that, “there are Jews and Zionists”. That’s like an Indian saying “there are white people and there are settlers”. And also don’t fool yourself or be fooled into believing that Zionism is about Israel, or religion. It is tribalism, and anyone who would argue that there is not something innate in the behavior is letting their idealism (what they want the world to be like) get in the way of what science, history and sociology (and in the case of the Jews, even their religion) tell us. All tribalism, and even the propensity towards it is not equal.

What we are seeing and have seen is a propensity toward a tribalism that has never had a parallel in history and surely does not in modern society. And now that this tribe has fully ascended, we cannot afford make believe and idealism that flies in the face of the very realities that play out before us again and again. I am not to blame for that.

History does often repeat itself, or at least we carry it forth with us every step we take. In the very conversations we see here- the astounding announcements (for the humpteenth time) about Jewish domination:

The WASP and other Goyim grumbling confusedly at undeniably, unavoidably unacceptable deterioration and destruction of our world and people.

The Jewish facility at turning the WASP into a meek and muddled thing, apologizing in the face of his his own demise and subjugation.

The killer bee discipline of the Zionist propagandist (including the hasbarats) and psychological operators, running to attack anyone that is not its own.

The Zionists use of ruses of fictional enemies, red herrings and attempt to use psychological conditioning and trigger language.

The Zionists insistence on controlling all debate and insinuating into all areas.

The Zionists wolf in sheep’s clothing or any of the many guises taken, eventually to the same end.

At some point in time we have to throw off our own mental shackles. We have to review history, learn, organize, unify in a space where we can express ourselves. We have to look to the actual problem and what it has wrought in a world of warfare moral decadence, and bankruptcy of every kind. We should see the venomous for what it is, without pretending. We have to reach out to others, bitten by this same vile creature and drive it in front of us.

B. Lashley

Regarding the Alex Jones video, mentioned in the previous article. So they are trying to get the Tea Party types are up in arms about the leaked movie by some Mexican Amerian director about Mexicans staging a revolution in California.

Apparently this contents of this likely straight to video film is being released on "Prison Planet and Jones", with their ridiculousness. The sophisticated website and the radio broadcasts and books are obviously cat toys to keep the ignorant busy (and it begs the question of who funds it all). Its tag line should be “Want to know how do you keep a white man busy for hours to no productive end, read this entire site and find the answer at the end.”

Mexicans are reacting in fantasy to their position in society and the hatred, generated by a media controlled by you-know-who. There are Mexicans who have called this out (in fact a rising political structure of Mexicans are doing far better than Whites these days in some parts of California; and blacks have been smart enough to join with them. WASPS in California however are still licking their wounds after getting pounded by the Jewish Machine- with both Senators being Jewish and heavily involved and supportive of Israel- Barbara Levy Boxer, and Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein. Another big power player, Jewess Jane Harman just got away when Obama dropped the charges of her helping AIPAC and the Mossad spy for Israel and she is (un-miraculously) still in her seat.

The fight, led largely by (White) diplomacy, law and intelligence people, was a reaction of a lot of resentment about AIPAC and other Jewish organizations who were leading a more and more aggressive spy ring and political take over of major diplomatic, investigative and intelligence agencies.

The humiliation of the State Department and the prostitution of the NSA, NSC and military intelligence to fight Zionist wars and the FBI being put under new command and put into a position of supporting domestic Zionism and breaking a lot of laws and Constitutional principles, caused a build up of Good Old Boy animosity towards Zionist power brokers and their lackeys. The rejection of longtime intelligence/diplomat Charles Freeman on the grounds that he did not kow tow enough to Israel was really emblematic of just how far things had gotten.

A battle ground became the San Francisco police who acted in concert with a massive AIPAC spy ring with Jane Harman (among others) help. Another battle ground (not related to California) was the Neo-con theft and destruction of crucial documents in the National Security Archives and the Pentagon before and during the multi-fronted war in the Middle East. The AIPAC-Harman case (with links to the two California senators) was especially egregious because it was about the eaves dropping, research and data mining of millions of Americans across jurisdictions (using tools for inter-jurisdictional cooperation and information sharing.)

In LA the Jewish machine that threw the old WASPS out by the scruff of their necks are now surprisingly contending with a new Mexican machine. Like so many Goyim however, they have a bunch of sell-outs (including the Mayor of LA) who any news search will tell you very openly was elected on the strength of Jewish support (which can only mean money since numerically the voting bloc is small.) The mayor has flirted with independence only to be slapped down. And the the old WASP establishment has tried to groom its own Mexican, Rocky Delgadillo, but the Jewish press has savaged him to no end.

I find it telling that Whites (or more likely Zionist sock-puppets) are getting excited about the fantasies of underpaid landscapers. There may be something in the fact that the movie was made (divide and conquer) but realistically I doubt anything really animates Whites in California. Most of the Whites in the state are half Mexican and meth addicts anyway, if they are not liberals way too busy fighting for their gay marriages to be recognized.

Auberon

If by liberal you mean Jewish anti-moralists, yes they are anti – WASP. So are their self hating, defeated minions of the old northern WASP elite. Like any utterly defeated and lost group, they immediately capitulate to their master’s psychological manipulation of self hatred.

I wish it were, as the commenter says, a function of just guilt and directed towards making amends and building a responsible, representative coalition of stake holders, particularly among those who have historically long been part of genesis and building of our nation.

You will not find WASP liberals running around trying to get red Indians on the Supreme Court or get them holocaust museums, or tens or billions of dollars of aid each year. You will not see them attending red Indian religious holiday dinners to show how liberal they are. You will not see them trying to marry off their kids, and praise and elevate them like they were a divine and superior race here to be worshiped.

And of course you will not find this behavior toward the millions of blacks. WASP liberals generally hate blacks for many reasons, including the fact that black, English speaking, socially conservative, government suspecting, corporate suspecting, Jewish burned, gun loving, deeply religious folks remind them of the Anglo-American culture that they have been convinced is bad.

WASP liberals are some of the most discriminatory people around towards minorities. WASP liberal acceptance of blacks for instance takes a combination of the following: at least 50% mixed heritage (automatic entry for being or claiming to be part Jewish), being foreign born helps unless it is from some place black and the black person isn't highly critical of the culture and place, homosexuality is always a winner, a top flight degree, a prestigious job, and finally- a rejection of all the African-American historical cultural attitudes. And still WASP liberals limit these "good blacks" to tokenism.

The conservative White Protestant is almost just as bad but in different ways. He can not come to grips with historical failings, dismiss hypocritical idealism or leave off kicking down and kissing up any more than his liberal counterparts. His new incarnation is just as perverse and slavish- the Libertarian. You can find him in his intellectual sterility worshiping Jewish “Austrian” economists who are preaching the same materialistic worshiping, market worshiping culture, the religion and identity rejecting false idealism of Jewish Marxists.

At least then the Jewish Marxist pretended to exalt man and worker and believe in his good nature. Of course that was only lip service to get workers to overthrow oligarchs and tyranny; they were never committed to Engels, Lenin or even Stalin. We see through Marx, Trotsky (a snake since his days trying to undercut Lenin with the Menshiviks), the infamous “Jewish Doctors” plot and the

Neoconservatives/Frankfurt school and today the Jewish Russian Oligarchs, just how quickly these "Marxists" showed their true colors. Ironically, some part of American and Western Anti-Bolshevism (the Red Scare in America) was nothing but another plot that the Zionist got together when they loss control of the left. I urge the reader to look into this history, to understand just how cynical and conniving this group can be.

Not until the White Protestant has been corrected in America, on the force of sheer numbers, can we deal with our problems. The elite liberals living off the remainder of their family’s wealth are coming down to earth. But it is White Protestant middle class (along with other Whites) who must look to uniting and working with other elements of society to make the changes necessary or they will keep us fighting ghosts- Blacks, Mexicans, etc. while we still are bulk of the helpless masses.

therock

Auberon, that third paragraph was a gem.

The power of the CABAL makes you sell your children.

FreedomUSA
Regarding the Alex Jones Video- I watched the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9tIoJBhp18&feature=topvideos . Alex Jones says 20th century fox is the distributor and I confirmed this on another link. Gee, I wonder who controls 20th century fox (Jones doesn’t say)? At any rate it’s the same old routune, victim (Hispanics this time)/victimizer (always whites, most of whom are WASP) game all over again that the cultural marxists have been playing for 50 years or more. Watch Hollywood go into over drive producing a plethora of similar movies to “Machete”. I wonder if their constant Holocaust propaganda will go into eclipse because of this?

Average Joe

Power and influence is always about representation and position. When WASPs and US Protestants that make up 60% or more of the populace are stripped of representation, it is equivalent to being stripped of relevance. Conversely it means that the Jewish who represent 1-2% are being handed and enormous and disproportionate sledge hammer to wield their power.

Certainly the zealots of Zionism and Judaism will pull out every card in their book of tricks to paint Buchanan as a bigot; but the fact of the matter is that they have wielded their clout and money to disenfranchise 60% of the US population. If the Jewish were absent without any presence on this Court, do you think for a moment they would be quiet about it?

We Protestants need to make some serious waves on this with our elected Representatives and media.

Average Joe

To whom are we apologizing? We’re having a discussion about the 60% of the country (WASPs) that have been discriminated against and marginalized by the forces that nominated Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court Justice. Apologize for those doing it, not to us for discussing it.

BTW Haaretz had a article on this and my comment below never made it into print. Surprise.

“It’s about Diversity”

I agree with him (Pat B.). Diversity is the point he was making and it is needed if the US expects the public to accept the Supreme’s version of justice. Would the ADL and others be complaining about a Court that was 1/3 Muslim, or if there were no Jews, and who then would be considered bigots?

Are Liberals Anti-WASP?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.” (Two thirds of these "whites" were Jewish.)

CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would be criticized for.”

This is an excerpt from the Washington Post about the rising anger in a black community, which voted 24-1 for Obama, that one of their own was once again passed over for the Supreme Court.

Not since Thurgood Marshall, 43 years ago, has a Democratic president chosen an African-American. The lone sitting black justice is Clarence Thomas, nominated by George H. W. Bush. And Thomas was made to run a gauntlet by Senate liberals.

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

Not in living memory has a Democratic president nominated an Irish, Italian or Polish Catholic, though these ethnic communities once gave the party its greatest victories in the cities and states of the North.

What happened to the party of the Daleys, Rizzos and Rostenkowskis?

And not in nearly half a century has a Democratic president nominated a white Protestant or white Catholic man or woman.

The last was Byron “Whizzer” White, the all-American running back from the University of Colorado, nominated by his friend Jack Kennedy. White cast one of the only two votes against Roe v Wade.

What of the record of Republican presidents?

Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford made seven nominations. All were white Protestant males: Warren Burger, Clement Haynsworth, Harrold Carswell, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens.

The diversity Nixon sought was first to put a Southerner on the court. He succeeded in his third try, with Powell. And he sought to put the first woman on the court, but pulled back from nominating Judge Mildred Lillie of California when the American Bar Associated rated her unqualified.

With Ronald Reagan and Bush I came Republican diversity.

Reagan’s first choice was Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever nominated. His second was Antonin Scalia, the first Italian-American. When his third nominee, Robert Bork, a Protestant, was rejected, Reagan chose Bork’s Jewish colleague on the U.S. Appellate Court for the District of Columbia, Douglas H. Ginsburg. When Douglas Ginsburg was pulled because of a marijuana incident in college, Reagan chose the Irish Catholic Anthony Kennedy.

George H. W. Bush picked David Souter, a Protestant from New Hampshire, and Clarence Thomas, the second African-American to sit. George W. Bush chose John Roberts, a Catholic; Harriet Miers, the first Evangelical Christian of our era; and Sam Alito, the second Italian Catholic.

If Kagan is confirmed, three of the four justices nominated by Democratic presidents will be from New York City: Kagan from the Upper West Side, Sotomayor from the Bronx, Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn. Breyer is from San Francisco.

What kind of diversity is this — either in geography or life experience?

While Sotomayor went to Yale Law School, the other three liberals went to Harvard, though Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia. Seems a fairly narrow range for a party that once claimed to be America’s party.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg tied for first in her class at Columbia, but neither Obama nominee is academically distinguished. Sotomayor called herself an “affirmative action baby” who, at Princeton, was urged to read children’s books in the summer to improve her reading and writing skills. Kagan never served as a judge, never litigated a case before being named solicitor general, never wrote a book or anything else anyone has turned up that manifests real legal scholarship.

From her Princeton thesis on the sad demise of 20th-century socialism, to her tears at the defeat of the radical liberal Senate candidate Elizabeth Holtzman in 1980, to her hostility to the U.S. military on the Harvard campus while dean of the law school, Kagan has revealed herself to be one more Ivy League elitist anxious to use a lifetime seat on the court, winning the plaudits of her peers by imposing her ideology on a nation that has never voted for it.

Conservatives will not soon get another opportunity like this to take down Ivy League pretensions to represent and rule America.

The Death of the WASP by Paul Gottfried

2010-08-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Tribes Go to War, Leaving Winners and Losers: Is Paul Gottfried saying what a lot of people are thinking?

Increasingly honest conversations in the post- John Paul Stevens /Barack Obama /Tea Party era.

The Death of the WASP

by Paul Gottfried on June 20, 2010

A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about "how we're all WASPs now" made me realize that Brookhiser's statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he's saying. A journeyman author, long associated with National Review, Brookhiser, to all appearances, is an upper-class WASP endowed with all the proper manners and tics. Nonetheless, for decades he's been in the employ of the neocons, people who would hardly qualify as 'bon gratin'.

A scene involving one of their leaders, John Podhoretz, sticks vividly in my mind. While in the employ of the Washington Times, where Arnaud de Borchgrave entertained him lavishly as a favor to his parents, the present editor of Commentary was known for his crude table manners and general loutishness. I recall seeing him in Borchgrave's office slouched over his chair and (dare I be so frank) picking his nose while in conversation with the apparent boss. (Actually it was Norm and Midge Decter who called the shots at the Washington Times then.) But people like John Podhoretz are precisely the ones whom Brookhiser and other WASPs, and particularly those at The New Criterion, have been kissing up to for years.

This subordinate position certainly does not demonstrate the assertion that "we're all WASP now." The fact is members of our onetime dominant ethnicity and its onetime social elite are down on their luck. They've been reduced to menials serving at the beck and call of other groups, and in the journalistic and media world, this means working for Jewish (psuedo/neo) liberals and Jewish neocons.

Such a situation should distress the new class of menials (perhaps it does!), but as I've indicated in more scholarly venues, their fate is entirely deserved.

Elites that melt into spasms of guilt or niceness and which fail to continue to produce figures of the caliber of George Kennan, the Tafts, Robert E. Lee, Henry Adams, etc are not going to continue to be around as social, political, and cultural leaders. In doing research for my book on multiculturalism, I encountered statistical information that showed the profound decline of WASPdom since the middle of the last century in just about every area of human endeavor.

The exception here (and it's nothing to be proud of) is the disproportionate white Protestant representation at the public trough, and particularly in the ranks of the GOP. The last significant WASP patrician in public service was our recent, unmissed president, George W. Bush, someone whose ancestry is almost as noteworthy as the evidence of his verbal ineptitude. Needless to say, W took orders, whether or not he understood them, from neocon control-persons.

Clearly we're not all WASPs now; and in my book Encounters I described in detail how differently the WASP gentry behaved when I was at Yale in the 1960s as compared to the Jews and even (those few) Irish Catholics. The WASP gentry were noticeable for their lack of élan and for their overpowering desire to be non-controversial.

The Jews, by contrast, were conspicuously nasty. They (or we) had chips on their shoulders, and profoundly loathed the group they were destined to replace. (There are no intellectual movements that WASPs participate in since that time that Jews did not fashion and dominate.) Once they took over academic and journalistic posts these parvenus left no doubt who was in charge. They behaved with an ideological and sociological intolerance that was truly breath-taking.

If there's anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American 'democracy'.

Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.

This tactic worked like a charm because of the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of those doing the climbing and because of the mentality of those they supplanted. Apparently WASPs suffer from an onerous sense of guilt toward others whom their ancestors excluded or were alleged to have discriminated against. Other groups, particularly Jews, blacks, Irish Catholics, and Latinos, consider themselves to have been the victims of discrimination...

One may attribute the WASP's far deeper sense of social guilt to any number of causes. When one of my students, who himself is WASP, noted in class that his ethnic group lost influence in the US "because they practiced discrimination against other people," I asked somewhat impatiently: "How the hell did everyone else get into the country?"

Certainly many other groups have been more oppressive than American WASPs. But no other group, except for their pathological German cousins, seems to enjoy quite as much as WASPs the ecstasy of wallowing in guilt. And no other group seems quite as easily swayed to engage in moral crusades, perhaps to atone for their past sins as racists, sexists, or whatever. Unfortunately these crusades show our WASP population at their worst, trying to save the rest of the world with confected "human rights" after laying waste to their countries.

If there's anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American democracy. But for some reason my Republican WASP neighbors think such devastation is alright and may be redemptive for its victims. After all, blowing up non-democrats is not reprehensible in the same way as refusing to let other ethnicities into WASP country clubs or being against affirmative action for Australoid transvestites.

Although I've loads of respect for their Protestant antecedents, I can't say that I like or respect this present generation of WASPs.

And least of all can I understand why their elites, by the time I was in my teens and early twenties, began to feel guilt toward those who hated their guts. As a great Italian thinker Vilfredo Pareto pointed out about a hundred years ago, ruling classes fall not so much because of opposition from below as they do from disintegration from above. Or as the Russians put it, the fish rots from the head on down.

Senator Webb of Virginia Goes Native

2010-08-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Senator Webb of Virginia Goes Native: Is it a Ploy? And if so will it work?

"Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege" by Senator James Webb, Democrat, from Virginia, and comments

Here is an abbreviated portion of Virginia Senator Jim Webb's July 23, 2010 essay that ran in several major national publications, with italicized points. Some say Mr. Webb is displaying long held Nativists sentiments and sympathies for the WASP-black dichotomy of an older America and particularly his traditional South. Others say he is seeking to take advantage of the Tea Party's overwhelmingly WASP base while also garnering the now-proven power of black voters (who decided a victory for Pres. Obama despite despite the candidate's 40% of the national white vote.)

Combined, the WASP and black electorate are roughly between 70-85% of vote (disproportionate due to many Hispanic Catholics and Asians being either ineligible or not registered to vote). It would be an enviable voting bloc for a presidential campaign by the moderate and popular Senator that is said to have national office ambitions. It should be mentioned that Sen. Webb has hedged strident Nativist appeals (repeal of non-black affirmative action, opposition to single phase immigration reform and support of official English).

Hispanic and immigrant friendly positions such as Path-to-Citizenship support, opposition to all Racial-Profiling including for Immigration Enforcement, opposition to NAFTA and other hemispheric accords without Universal Workers' Conditions and Protection clauses, and support for Employer rather than Employee Undocumented Worker Enforcement measures all make the Senator's positions nuanced enough to win back Hispanic and Union votes lost to his increasingly strident Nativism.

The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations. The battle of the lowly and long tenured continues while neither can question how either group got to be so underrepresented.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government... policies have marginalized many white workers.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans and Native Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Lyndon Johnson's initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate "the badges of slavery." Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans and Native Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all "people of color"—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans and Native Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.

Those who came to this country in recent decades ... did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power...

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed "the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section." At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists (the largest group of White Protestants) nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%, (who have their immigration promoted by the State Department, private industry, ethnic lobbyists and U.S. Foreign Aid programs to receive subsidized education in America or to be given jobs in America after being trained abroad at colleges and universities of wildly varying quality, often far inferior to our own educational institutions.)

White Protestants are now the poorest white group in America and that includes statistics skewed by WASPs who are the remnants of the fallen upper class who one assumes, still has some fortune, social capital and access to the system left.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans and Native Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes...

Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.

Mr. Webb, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Virginia.

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American Ruling Class

2010-07-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Great work by Lewis H. Lapham and company, illustrating the too familiar in a way that is refreshing. The same doesn't necessarily apply to LQ unfortunately.

Part 1/4

Part 2/4

Part 3/4

Part 4/4

Universalism in Two Essays

2010-06-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

Universalism, It Isn't For Everyone

It is necessary to identify that form of Universalism that opposes the particular rights of people to land, culture, identity, patrimony and opposes any particular religion or culture. This Universalism has an alluring but toxic simplicity. It speaks to a desire for justice and equality by removing from the debate all the causes that make justice and equality difficult to achieve. Universalism has origins in the of the philosophies emerging in the Enlightenment period but by no means is inseparable from it. This also coincides with the beginning of the the era of Western Imperialism (and Imperial Commercialism) which Universalism is strongly tied to. In practice Universalism has been anything but universal.

Universalism and the Other

The idea that a nebulous list of individual "rights" are universal and everything else is up for grabs denies most people their rights to a specific identity, patrimony, legacy, culture and perspective. Note that I say some people. This is because that behind the notion of Universalism is its "Western" provenance and implicit in that is superiority of the Western world view.

Rather than being inclusive, as Universalism ostensibly is, it instead defines the Other, those that do not adhere to an iteration of the Western world view as the only legitimate and modern world perspective. Often this Universalism will include hazily defined ideas such as Democracy, Capitalism, secularism and commercialism. Implied is acceptance of hegemonic or oligarchic rule, hostility to “radical” democracy, economic egalitarianism or even “unorthodox” market oriented economies; there is also opposition toward the patrimonial, the culturally specific, the religious and the anti-commercialism.

Another feature of Universalism vs the Other is the notion of traditionalism vs “modernism” with Universalism somehow representing all that is contemporary and the Other being somehow consigned to a time-warp. The individual is thus stripped of his social and historical context replaced by a new context, a replacement of sorts, supplied largely by com? mercialism.

Universalism and Aggression

With the leveling of rights, are actions. Universalism is distinctly aggressive: others must be made to accept Universalism, it is good for them and this prescriptive should and must be implemented by coercion if necessary. The denial of a person's particular rights extends into the world of material rights.

It is unsurprising then that colonialism leaned heavily upon Universalism as a justifying philosophy. The people of China or India for instance did not have a specific set of rights to their country, their land, their economy, government or institutions. How could they? Such rights could not exist. And the various groups, with their familial, ethnic, national or tribal affiliations with certain rights and prerogatives in a certain space could hold no validity under Universalism.

Inequality and Injustice

There is something of the scoundrel's argument in Universalism, i.e., "what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine". We all know the man who gives away all of his possessions in to the end of achieving equality has only accomplished making himself the lesser among the unequal. Such dispossession does not aid equality.

It is reasonable that there can be a "fair" re-allotment but that immediately calls to question what right does anyone have to anything (or what are they entitled to) and what right do they have to dispose of what they possess. Is something yours by right of birth, right of conquest, right familial association, right of investment, right of delegation? And what rightfully belongs to a particular individual or group? An involved business to be sure. When we deliberate on those rights we see there is not much Universal in them in theory or practice-- consider the complexities of property and international law-- but that there are principles to be applied the situational. (Many have tried to apply these wider principles in reforming Universalism, particularly in the post World War era with varying degrees of acceptance.)

Rights and Legacy

Rights are particular to people due to various standings, many of which are non-transferable. For example, if someone inherits something as the child of an individual, they may later give their inheritance but they cannot share their original status as inheritor. What someone inherits as an individual or a class of people, or all that someone might otherwise rightfully possess should not be subject to forced dispossession, whether that be identity, patrimony, culture, institutions or material possessions. It may be in practical and moral terms a good idea to help others (as individuals and groups) gain these things. And if someone or group has come upon their legacy or possessions unjustly it is at the very least incumbent upon them to help others who suffer from the injustice. That is a far cry from the leveling of rights in Universalism.

In asserting its view, Universalism reduces everything to the individual, disregarding all that came before, that exists with and that will come after. It does not acknowledge the nature of human cooperation and competition or group and organization advantages. It denies culture, psychology, human biology, history and religion, and thus ultimately denies humanity part of its very self.

Universalism and Inclusion

Allowing people to have "what is theirs" is a precondition to allowing people to share the wider "what is ours". Diversity and multiculturalism have become part of the wall papering covering Universalism's failure to address equitable inclusion. Universalism has not achieved proportionality, enfranchisement and equality of opportunity nor can it.

Universalism relies upon moral and cultural adherence more than legal and structural imposition. Its adherents offer non-adherents crucial advantages; and the adherents to Universalism make themselves less viable. The universalists surrender their identity and thus cannot achieve any cooperative advantage. Patrimony, legacy and culture are denied so nothing actually “belongs” to the universalist. Crucially, Universalism offers advantage then only when those imposing or promoting it do not actually abide by it. (Here is an irony: Many in Western quarters that once spread Universalism as Ghengis Khan is said to have launched diseased cadavers into enemy encampments have now contracted a particularly virulent and self destructive form.)

Universalism and Justice

We need not claim absolute equality in propensities, abilities and opportunities to achieve justice. Indeed, if we expect that some will have a propensity for injustice or some have greater abilities or opportunities we will structure society to be “on guard” against injustice, oppression and the misuse or harmful use of abilities while providing justice, opportunity and fair enfranchisement whether that be to individuals or communities.

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American Notes on Universalism

America subsumed the Black, Native American and frontier Mexican. Challenged with foreign and unfamiliar surroundings, resources and culture, the early White settlers adopted food, clothing and shodding materials, dyes, agricultural, storage and building techniques, words and forms of entertainment and cultural expression. Nevertheless these things became "American" and thus synonymous in the collective imagination as White Protestant American.

This subsumption was achieved informally by myth making and blood (interracial relationships) and formally by (sometimes extremely) coercive penalties, economic and cultural restrictions as well as education and indoctrination. For centuries (300 years) outside of the loftiest of intellectual circles there was little pretense in American life about practical Universalism . And for three hundred years America formed a national culture that, with exceptions, others could assimilate to.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and virtually all the founding fathers had a view distinctly opposed to Universalism. The then prevalent bias toward English, Scottish or "Germanic" people among the founding fathers and American electorate has become a less comfortable area for discussion in the post WWII era for obvious reasons.

Jefferson made his vision of absorption of Blacks and Native Americans under waves of Germanic people clear, "You will unite yourselves with us and we shall all be Americans. You will mix with us by marriage. Your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great Island." America's constitutional faith was a Northern European thing from which Indians and Negroes, whether slave or free, were severely limited.

Up until Jim Crowism, Blacks and Indians were denied the right to have their own churches and to build institutions. A key understanding of the dominant group was that Universalism hides disproportionate influence, a lack of representation and a denial of healthy identity. It was not surprising then that Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois all argued for the building of Black institutions and for Du Bois, the more radical position of the fair representation in the public arena and communal institutions as well. None of these people wanted to deny their own or others of their legacy, patrimony, identity or culture. And these were not segregationists or separatist- all were of mixed race and active in the open public sphere. For these men the shortcomings, and ineffectiveness in their Constitutional government and institutional arrangements and intrinsically in these, the failings of Universalism were readily apparent.

In time the actual intentions, strengths and flaws of the Constitution has been debated, misunderstood and finally ignored by most Americans. But its most avid acolytes were -- and still today are -- White Protestants whose fanatical devotion to achieving liberty, equality, and fraternity would take hypocritical and incoherent turns that caused them to divest themselves and the country of these these very conditions.

Several decades following the victory of Northeastern states in the Civil War, Universalism was growing as a central value in core ethnie (particularly among White Protestants in the Northeast), while partially assimilated immigrant groups, identities still intact, were pouring into the important cities of that region. Ethnic machines and economics made a more deterministic model than ever, and the more tribal and ethnocentric, the more successful any group was. In this manner the possibilities of economic expansion also grew apace. The core ethnie (White Protestants) began to abandon much of the cities for suburbs and exurbs and those of color were relegated by law, policy and practice into ghettos and systematic oppression (red lining, urban renewal, housing and job discrimination, every type of governmental program and contract awarding discrimination imaginable). This situation continued for the better part of a century, even after immigration had waned.

The post WWII boom led to expansion of social spending that created American suburbia as we know it. Guaranteed student, automobile and home loans, spending for suburban infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, etc. changed the face of the country, with the urban Northeast (as well as the urban Midwest and West) getting the largest share of the spending. These programs through explicit declaration and through structure denied people of color the benefit. The efforts had some success in giving a deeper American identity to late arriving White Americans (non “WASPs”), but it was largely a refashioned identity, an amalgam of consumerism, solipsism, entitlement (thanks partially to successful union efforts and post WWII markets for American manufacturing), state and corporate dependence, faith in authority, intellectual and moral vapidity and varying degrees of narrow political tribalism particularly in local and domestic political affairs. One needs only to contrast this with the formerly dominant “American Protestant ethic” (hard work and austerity, deep dislike and distrust of authority, demands for decentralized and community based press or media, proportional representation, decentralized community based governing, strong belief in privacy, opposition to foreign entanglements large standing armies or military spending, community based and localized economies, standing based on social responsibility.) The governing system, social system and American identity would be forever changed by the "boom", and not necessarily for the better.

In the latter part of this era, non-whites, having long buried their identity and culture into American culture (Black "militants" and intellectuals used the expression “Black Anglo Saxon Protestantism”), out of frustration and influences from post-colonial nationalism began to look for their non “WASP of color” identity as a means to empowerment and social advancement. This resulted in sometimes flailing if valiant efforts at achieving an identity, legacy and context in the denuding wash of Universalism. Easily lost was the fact that American culture was as much their own as it was the culture of White Protestants. While the 400 year plus investment to American society was seldom a voluntary one for Blacks, Native Americans, and frontier Hispanics, it was not easily replaced. These ""minority" groups would also have trouble shifting their attitudes, for years based on traditional American identity and values which they had been force fed to a modern, post White Protestant led (post-industrial, post traditional) society.

For White Protestants, or so-called WASPS, what was loss in the buffeting waters of Universalism was not only identity, legacy and context (witness the upheavals of the 1960’s and 70’s and their legacy). The process of White ethnic (non WASP) expansion enfranchisement in key geographic areas, and the rejection of Universalism and to some extent a shared American identity by people of color all combined to deliver once unthinkable WASP disenfranchisement. And where there is disenfranchisement of such a large group, there is also unhealthy manifestations of resentment (irrational hatred, vicious and fantastical racialism, senseless violence) and those who are even weaker are where resentment is focused. Having such a sizable portion of the population turning to such "kiss up, kick down" behavior jeopardizes an even wider range of the American population.

What eventually is lost is a core ethnie (culturally) of America as well as the political and social influence for largest groups of Americans. There is no rectifying and moving forward. Universalism has rendered all groups that subscribe to it or have who have been victimized in the past by it, into frustration (often manifested in unhealthy ways) and ultimately decadence.

The Myth of the Old Republic And Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia

2010-06-05T01:19:00.000-07:00

The Myth of the Old Republic

And Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia

By A. Frasier

Pat Buchanan expresses the hope that "in the womb of white America" a "new people is gestating and fighting to be born." He is convinced that Middle America is already "beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically" as an ethno-nation alongside African-Americans, American Indians, native Hawaiians, Hispanics, etc.

In fact, what we are witnessing are the death throes of homo Americanus. Mr Buchanan recalls that another "new people ... the Americans" was born two hundred years ago in the colonial struggle to achieve independence from Great Britain. Then, the American Adam declared himself free of the excess historical baggage accumulated during the Dark Ages of Anglo-Saxon Christendom. Middle America is reaping the whirlwind sown in the revolutionary Enlightenment.

The Tea Parties are not symptoms of restored vigour in the body politic. Instead, middle-class white people, drawn mainly from the "founding race" of their senile, degenerate nation-state, are searching for a magic political elixir to bring the decrepit Constitutional Republic back to life. Glaringly there are few real leader or thinkers stepping into the public arena articulating alternatives in the realm of less miraculous possibilities. Even inspired opportunism is failing.

Pat Buchanan, having to the best of our knowledge retired from political campaigning does offer intriguing thoughts though many of those thoughts seem to be in the throes of their own promising gestation. Having first bruited the possibility that white is becoming the new black, he concludes by claiming that the "coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal."

Of one thing we can be sure: the rise of a new tribalism within Middle America must signal the imminent demise of homo Americanus. That "new people" created by the Declaration of Independence boasted of their own immaculate conception and effectively excommunicated any and all forms of ethno-nationalism from the civil religion of the Constitutional Republic.

Shedding his ancestral allegiance to throne and altar, the American Adam sundered the transatlantic, Greater British, community of, blood and faith, memory and tradition. All American citizens, whether of German or Huguenot, Dutch or Swedish ancestry, henceforth stood on an equal footing with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority population.

The American Republic did, indeed, create a new people but it was to be a people finding its poetry in the future not in the benighted past and outworn traditions of the Old World. The first new nation sneered at the "sectarian" ethno-patriotism characteristic of every "backward" province of Christendom born under the auspices of the early Church. Seeking a secular substitute for the age-old union of English blood and Christian faith, the American revolutionary regime invented a form of statist idolatry known as constitutional patriotism.

At first, of course, America's constitutional faith was a "white" thing from which Indians and Negroes, whether slave or free, were almost entirely excluded. But its most avid acolytes were -- and are -- Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose fanatical devotion to the sacred cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity fought their impulses of greed, acquisition and conquest placing them in eventual opposition, first, to genocide and racial slavery then to segregation and, finally, to exclusionary practices generally.

Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America ceased to be an ethno-nation; they found a novel civic identity anchored in the political theology of a federal republic. Although they enjoyed de facto political, economic, and cultural hegemony within the Constitutional Republic, people of British ancestry were never recognized de jure as members of America's founding race.

When, following the Civil War, Anglo-Saxon Protestant opinion leaders in the progressive North made a colour-blind Constitution the touchstone of political decency it was inevitable that, sooner or later, other racial, religious, and ethnic groups would be admitted, along with women, to full membership in the Constitutional Republic.

Buchanan and others still feels the need to wrap themselves in the foundation myth of the Old (White) Republic. Somehow, they hope, a return to a long-since superseded stage in the constitutional development of American civil religion will become possible.

At the same time, by linking the Tea Party movement with the rise of a new tribe, Buchanan implicitly recognizes that the Constitutional Republic is no longer the exclusive property even of white America. But he must understand as well that, if there are to be white tribes, they will have to constitute themselves as autonomous loci of legitimate authority within civil society, outside, apart from, and even against the trans-national structures of state and corporate power.

The USA is no longer an "Anglo-Saxon country." Inter-ethnic rivalry has become an inescapable fact of life for most Americans. But WASPs generally, and the Tea Partiers in particular, remain reluctant to play the postmodern game of identity politics, still preferring to think of themselves as the unhyphenated avatars of homo Americanus.

But WASPs, like other human groups, have distinctive biocultural interests. The refusal of contemporary American WASPs to recognize that obvious fact has transformed the complacent self-deception of their grandparents into outright ethno-masochism. Sooner or later, they will have to defend themselves not just against such obvious enemies but also against renegade kinsmen. It must never be forgotten that it was with the blessing of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches, that a spiritually enfeebled WASP governing class installed the worship of the Other at the core of America's constitutional faith.

WASPs resigned their stewardship of the Constitutional Republic, suffering from the peculiar ethno-pathology that I call "Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia." America's constitutional faith turned into a secular parody of religion; the founders' reign of civic virtue degenerated into a racial spoils system in which fraud and deception became the norm; the federal republic morphed into a corrupt confederation of mutually antagonistic interest groups.

For far too long, WASPs have treated their constitutional faith as a surrogate for their ancestral ethno-religious identity. But WASPs can no longer depend upon the nation-state either as the fons et origo of their collective identity or as the guarantor of individual and collective security.

Accordingly, heavily WASP Tea Partiers should aim not just to secure the survival of their widely-despised and resented ethny but to restore their former condition as a people of destiny. Faced with the accelerating decay of the nation-state, American WASPs can still reconstitute themselves as local, resilient communities whose deep-seated biocultural affinities fit them to participate in a global network of Anglo-Saxon Christian tribes, able to make alliances among and without but maintaining its identity and independence.

Less than a century ago Hilaire Belloc dared to describe The Jews as "an alien organism within the society they inhabit." He went on to propose that Jews should segregate themselves fully in their own communal institutions and their own public spaces -- for their own good as much as for that of the host culture. Needless to say, neither the Jews nor the English governing class took up his suggestion. While I am not suggesting the extreme it is apparent that this is necessary for the WASP, at at least in terms of communal institutions. Such behavior has always been the case and still is, except for the WASP. For a period he was able to claim the American space as his province exclusively and then with others in minor attendance. This is obviously no longer the case. The WASP cannot even achieve proportionate representation and influence and thus as much as anyone needs his own communal institutions, exclusive particularly of alien elements more powerful and influential than the WASP and those that are servile to more powerful interests; this in the same way Blacks needed institutions, whether it was churches or their own Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges and internal establishment organizations that were simply free of those that were stronger, more aggressive and dominating, even if the institutions followed WASP (or in these cases BASP) cultural ethos promoting of amity.

WASPs, collectively, are now the 98 pound weakling sitting alone on the beach while other groups kick sand in his face. In the aftermath of the soon-to-be failed American nation-state, it will be good both for the WASPs and for other peoples if they start to muscle up and show independence. If not the sizable WASP population as a weak-willed and manipulable mass will be used by opportunistic and cunning forces, against other groups and against itself.

The task of inspiring the regeneration of an Anglo-Saxon ethno-nation is one that must not be shirked by American WASP intellectuals and opinion leaders. Harold Cruse, easily one of the more incisive black-nationalist thinker of the Sixties, warned Anglo-Saxon intellectuals that their continued refusal to acknowledge openly the tribal identity of their group had "led this nation to the brink of self-destruction." The frantic spread of the Tea Party movement is but one more sign that homo Americanus finally fell off the cliff.

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Suicide--Or Murder? Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

2010-06-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
By Dr. Kevin MacDonald

Eric Kaufman in his popular work "Rise and Fall of Anglo America" presents the case that Anglo-America committed what one might call “suicide by idea”: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion. The result: immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and WASPS willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the academic world.

Kaufman, who is Reader in Politics and Sociology at London University’s Birkbeck College, explicitly rejects the proposal that the decline of Anglo-America occurred as a result of an attack by some external force. His concept is therefore a direct contrast to my view, argued at length in my book The Culture of Critique, that the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the push for mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions--necessary conditions--to the demise of WASP America.

My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the construction of culture (PDF), that is, the rules and norms by which a society functions. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon America is a textbook case of how deadly the conflict over the construction of culture can be.

In this review —an adapted version of a longer paper posted on my Occidental Observer website--I will show where Kaufmann goes wrong, mainly because he ignores the Jewish role in the decline of Anglo-America. But it must be said that he provides a fascinating historical overview. In this respect, his book resembles a similar conceptually faulty but factually rich work: Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.

As Kaufman notes, it was not very long ago that America strongly asserted that it was a nation of Northwestern Europeans — and intended to stay that way. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was carefully designed to preserve the ethnic status quo as of 1890, thereby ensuring the dominance of Anglo-Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act reiterated the preference for Northwestern Europe and was passed over President Truman’s veto.

But only a decade later, in the 1960s, White America began the process of ethnic and cultural suicide:

“By the 1960s, as if by magic, the machinery of WASP America stalled like the spacecraft of Martian invaders in the contemporary hit film, War of the Worlds. In 1960, the first non-Protestant president was elected. In 1965, the national origins quota regime for immigration was replaced by a ‘color-blind’ system. Meanwhile, Anglo-Protestants faded from the class photos of the economic, political, and cultural elite — their numbers declining rapidly, year upon year, in the universities, boardrooms, cabinets, courts, and legislatures. At the mass level, the cords holding Anglo-Protestant Americans together began to unwind as secular associations and mainline churches lost millions of members while the first truly national, non-WASP cultural icons appeared.” (pp. 2–3)

Of course, other ethnic groups have gone into historical decline or have been replaced by force. But the decline of Anglo-America seems mysterious. There are no visible conquering armies that would easily explain their impending exit from the stage of history.

Despite its obvious importance as an historical phenomenon, however, as Kaufmann notes there has been almost no academic attention to the causes of this very precipitous decline. Perhaps some things are better left unsaid--at least until the losers of this revolution are safely relegated to a powerless position.

That the victors do indeed deliberately intend to make their revolution permanent is to my mind proven by the move, both here and abroad, towards “Hate” laws, which would make a discussion such as this very hazardous. In my view, America’s successor order is likely to be far more like traditional Jewish (dominated) society, with high levels of social control over behavior and thought--and quite different from America of the Founding Fathers. Coercion rather than Liberty will be the hallmark.

Freedom and Individualism as Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Traits

Confident assertions of White ethnic identity are virtually non-existent these days. However, Kaufmann shows that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Anglo-Americans had a strong sense that they were the biological descendants of freedom loving Anglo-Saxon tribes: “The New England town meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon tribal council, and the statements of Tacitus regarding the free, egalitarian qualities of the Anglo-Saxons were given an American interpretation” (p. 18). The “Yeoman Farmer” was considered the ethnic prototype. In 1776 after drafting the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson stated that Americans are

“the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed”. (pp. 17–18; emphasis in text).

As a cultural historian, Kaufmann views ethnic self-conceptions as fallacies. But in fact it is entirely reasonable to look for the particular traits and tendencies of Europeans as adaptations to prolonged life in a situation characterized by harsh climates and the relative absence of between-group competition. I have argued that evolution in the North has predisposed Europeans to the following two critical traits that are entirely unique among the traditional cultures of the world:

1. A de-emphasis on extended kinship relationships and a relative lack of parasitical ethno-supremacism. Anglo Saxon conquest-based genocide, ethnocide and apartheid, whether it be in Britain, or the overseas lands colonized by Anglo Saxons is markedly different in its urge to make a separate space with uniformity rather than a host society. This only failed when what were considered inhospitable conditions such as the American South, Africa or the Caribbean, or when sheer numbers prevented this, as in India and China.

2. A tendency toward individualism or localization in all of its implications: individual rights against the state, distrust of government, belief in localized, participatory government and moral universalism. These values are extended to Anglo Saxon's greatest line of achievement- its tendency to inter-generational institution-building.

In other words, Jefferson was quite probably correct to view the Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward individualism or small communal formations, and deep distrust of government and central authority as ethnic traits.

A critical feature of individualism is that group boundaries are relatively permeable and assimilation is the norm. As Kaufmann notes, even in the 19th century, individualism resulted in assimilation rather than maintaining impermeable boundaries with other Whites: “Interethnic relations followed a pattern of Anglo-conformity. … Immigrants were to be made into American WASPs by absorbing American English, American Liberty, and American Protestantism and, ultimately, by intermarrying with Americans”. (p. 19).

There was an assumption, even among many liberals, that these ethnic Others would look and act like Anglo-Americans. In the 19th century, liberals typically had “an optimistic, expansionist Anglo-conformism that accepted the immigrants, provided they looked like Anglo-Protestants and assimilated to the WASP mytho-symbolic corpus”. (p. 37).

Intellectually, the ideal of assimilation was often grounded in Lamarckian rather than Darwinian thinking. Lamarckians believed that people could pass on to their descendants traits which they had acquired during their lifetimes. With Lamarck rather than Darwin as inspiration, race and culture were conflated. Liberal intellectuals thought that blacks would become White with more education, like “the running of a dirty stream into a pellucid lake which eventually clears leaving no trace of mud”. (p. 56). Immigrants of all strains could become good Anglo-Saxons.

Lamarck's theory has always been a darling of the left because it holds the promise that inherited traits can easily be changed simply by changing the environment. It is no accident that Lamarckism became official ideology in the Soviet Union, and among many Jewish leftists, precisely because it implied that it would be quite easy to mold the new Soviet man — just as Lysenko thought it would be easy to develop crops that could flourish in cold climates.

In the hands of the Anglo-Saxon assimilationists, Lamarckism was part of the optimistic spirit of elite 19th-century liberal intellectuals who envisioned a future America to be people just like themselves, no matter what their origins.

The Period of Ethnic Defense: 1880–1965

The view that America was the product of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity coincided with optimistic ideas among elite liberal intellectuals about an Anglo-Saxon future. Towards the end of the 19th century, however, as America was coming to grips with large-scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, such optimistic views of an Anglo-Saxon future began to fade. A large number of the immigrants were (correctly) seen as politically radical and socially inassimilable.

The decades leading up to the passage of the 1924 immigration law were a period of ethnic defense. Optimistic, liberal views on immigration persisted among a small group of intellectuals, but they were displaced politically. Among many intellectuals, Darwinism rather than Lamarckism won the day.

The result was an effective alliance between the Boston, Puritan-descended intellectual elite and rural Whites in an effort to prevent being overwhelmed by this threat. “Whenever the northeastern ‘WASP’ elite make common cause with their less prestigious but more numerous provincial kin, Anglo-Protestant ethnic nationalism revives”. (p. 26).

Kaufmann notes that business interests remained opposed to immigration restriction. But he fails to mention the very strong role that Jewish organizations played in delaying immigration restriction until the 1920s—long after popular opinion demanded restriction. For example, writing in 1914, sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue:

“Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission’s bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains.” (E. A. Ross, The Old World and the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. 1914, 144–145)

Kaufmann attributes the desire to end immigration to the realization that the new immigrants would not convert to Protestantism and to the rise of race theories--although he does not really discuss the latter.

This is a major failing. One of the most important trends beginning around 1900 was the rise of Darwinism. As I have noted elsewhere, the early part of the 20th century was the high water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races - that races differed in intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in competition with each other for supremacy. Schooled in the theories of Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Pratt Fairchild, William Ripley, Gustav Le Bon, Charles Davenport, and William McDougall, many among the American elite viewed themselves as members of a particular race and believed that racial homogeneity was the sine qua non of every stable nation state. They regarded their racial group as uniquely talented and possessed of a high moral sense.

But, more importantly, whatever the talents and vulnerabilities of their race, they held it in the highest importance to retain control over the lands they had inherited as a result of the exploits of their ancestors who had conquered the continent and tamed the wilderness. And despite the power that their race held at the present, there was dark foreboding about the future, reflected in the titles of some of the classic works of the period: Grant's The Passing of the Great Race and Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man.

Kaufmann’s lack of discussion of the eclipse of racial Darwinism is a significant omission. It was a major objective of Jewish intellectual and political movements, particularly Boasian anthropology. By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish.

Kauffman quotes historian John Higham, who noted that, by the time of the immigration enthusiasts’ final victory in 1965, the Boasian perspective had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that “it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic identity. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon.”

Thus the demise of Darwinism had major consequences. It removed the only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan ideology and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of an intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to conservative religion and the popular folk attitudes of the less educated. These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectuals who quickly became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US—especially the media and the academic world.

The Rise of Jewish Influence

The late 1930s saw the rise of the New York Intellectuals, a movement that I consider among several influential Jewish intellectual and political movements in my book The Culture of Critique.

Kaufmann claims that the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish influences in the New York Intellectuals were equal and influenced each other in dialectical fashion. But I provide several reasons for preferring my view in the longer version of this essay: the opinion of other scholars of the role of the Jewish presence among the New York Intellectuals; evidence that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a strong Jewish identity; the anti-nationalist tendencies of Jewish intellectuals in other countries, and the fact that the organized Jewish community not only funded the activities of the New York Intellectuals, Boasian anthropology, and the Frankfurt School, but also spent lavishly to promote these ideas in schools and the mass media.

Kaufmann also fails to recognize that many of the basic ideas of the New York Intellectuals derived from other Jewish intellectual movements, particularly psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School. For example, the elitist, anti-populist attitudes of the Frankfurt School paralleled the attitudes of the New York Intellectuals and likely influenced them, and indeed some of the New York Intellectuals are also associated with the Frankfurt School (see Ch. 5 of C of C).

Common themes in this body of writing are hostility to American populism, the need for leadership by an elite cadre of intellectuals, and the belief that concerns about ethnic displacement and the rise of the power of ethnic minorities are irrational and indicative of psychiatric disorder.

This point should be emphasized. The New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School developed a widely disseminated theory, based on psychoanalysis (itself a Jewish intellectual movement, see Ch. 4 of Cof C), in which concerns by Anglo-Saxons about their ethnic displacement and the rise of power of ethnic minorities were indications of psychopathology. Although this theory lacked empirical support, and would have been viewed as ridiculous had Darwinism survived in the social sciences, the displacement of Whites had developed an intellectually respectable and therefore powerful rationale.

The ideology of White suicide was therefore not just a self-destructive heritage of the ideals of the Enlightenment, but included a large injection of psychoanalysis and Marxism as formulated by the Frankfurt School and disseminated by the New York Intellectuals.

As Kaufmann notes (p. 165), a critical source of the success of the New York Intellectuals was that they were welcomed by elite universities and the media. The New York Intellectuals achieved “cultural hegemony” (p. 166); they had captured America from the top-down, leaving American dominant ethnicity “rudderless. It was now only a question of time before cosmopolitanism would achieve the institutional inertia necessary for it to triumph as a mass phenomenon” (p. 166). The American dominant ethnicity was left defenseless because of the triumph of Boasian anthropology and the demise of Darwinism in the social sciences.

Kaufmann also stresses the rise of national media with liberal values, resulting in broad exposure to “the New York/Washington/Hollywood elite” (p. 189), with the result that “increased exposure to social idealism brought on by higher education and, vicariously, by a higher-educated media, socialized a larger proportion of Americans into a liberal worldview”. (p. 190).

Although he emphasizes the role of the media in the decline of Anglo-Saxon America and mentions the very large Jewish overrepresentation in the media, Kaufmann fails to consider how this might affect the attitudes championed by the media. . My review of this topic is here under the heading “Jews and the Media: Ways of Seeing,” I note that ethnic Jews have a very large influence on the media — far larger than any other identifiable group. And I show that the attitudes promoted by Jews in the media are influenced by their Jewish identity and interests. The fact that the media championed values that facilitated the demise of Anglo-Saxon America therefore may be seen as a consequence of Jewish influence.

Conclusion: The Fall of the Anglo-Saxons

Kaufmann charts the decline of Anglo-Saxons and the rise of the Jews in all areas of the American elite, from university departments of political science to the federal civil service. “For twenty years, the de-WASP-ing of the ruling elite in America has proceeded at a breathtaking pace.” Kaufmann cites the important study of Lerner et al. (American Elites, 1996) showing that by the1990s there were “roughly the same proportion of WASPs and Jews at the elite levels of the federal civil service, and a greater proportion of Jewish elites among corporate lawyers.” Jews outnumbered Anglo-Saxons 58–21 among elites in television, 48 to 25 among “public interest” elites, and 40 to 21 among legal elites. The same study found that, “in stark contrast to the Jews, WASPs were not overrepresented within the ranks of the national elite.”

Given that Jews constituted less than 2% of the population, these are very high overrepresentations indeed. In contrast, White Protestants became underrepresented in corporate elites by the 1980s, and there was a steady decline in their political power in Congress.

Even people of mixed European heritage now tend to identify with the non-Anglo-Saxon side of the family. For example, people of Italian-Scottish descent chose to identify themselves as Italian by a 3-1 ratio. There was also a heavy decline in White associational patterns and social capital, as described by Robert Putnam: Elks, Shriners, Jaycees, Masons all suffered major declines.

Kaufmann is also correct in noting the gap between elite and non-elite White opinion. Kaufmann emphasizes the class difference among Whites: “We may even surmise a long-run scenario in which lower-status whites retreat to a rural, interior ethnic ‘homeland,’ while upper-status whites pursue their modern lifestyle orientation in the nation’s more dynamic, increasingly hybridized, white-minority cities” (pp. 262–263).

Kaufmann quotes Michael Lind: “during the years that the political class has been almost unanimously in favor of present or higher levels of legal immigration, an overwhelming majority of Americans of all races have favored restriction, a fact that speaks volumes about the alienation of the American ascendancy from the majority’s interests and concerns … like free-market globalism, immigration is an issue that pits the affluent top 20 percent against the wage-earning majority below.” (p. 273).

Congruent with the argument in The Culture of Critique, Kaufmann proposes that once the new value set was institutionalized, it became the focus of status competition within the boundaries set by these movements (p. 247). Kaufmann rejects the logical possibility that Anglo-Saxon decline was caused by the rise of long-subordinate social groups, for example blacks. But, as I have noted, he does not even consider Jewish influence or ambitions as a factor.

A final lapse in Kaufmann’s argument: he never mentions coercion and the penalties that are imposed on people who dissent from the elite cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites who violate these strictures are severely censured — a phenomenon with which I have considerable personal experience.

Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are cooperating in the demise of their own people as nothing more than the enlightened opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of cosmopolitanism have been penalized in a wide variety of ways — from lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to social opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded. This revolution is neither peaceful nor bloodless.

Moreover, the same forces which have legitimated and institutionalized the cosmopolitan zeitgeist for Whites are endeavoring to make this revolution permanent by enacting “hate” laws prohibiting the expression of ideas that conflict with their version of reality. For example, the organized Jewish community is deeply involved in advocating restrictions on free speech in America and throughout the West. The result is that conservatives are forced to couch their ideas in the Universalist language of cosmopolitanism. Kaufmann points out those even measures of White ethnic defense such as Official English measures and immigration restriction have had to be couched in the language of civic universalism.

Shamefully, Kaufmann himself is entirely on board with the idea that cosmopolitanism will have to resort to social controls to make its victory permanent: “Institutional pressure must be brought to bear on ethnic revival [of Whites], prompting the communitarian impulse to discharge itself along liberal lines” (p. 301).

This shows that although the cosmopolitan revolution took advantage of pre-existing Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward individualism, in the end the institutional structure that is being pursued after attaining power is profoundly anti-individualist. America remains somewhat of a laggard in these trends because of the First Amendment, but other Western societies, lacking such formal declarations of individual rights, have succumbed to a stifling political correctness that essentially legislates the triumph of cosmopolitanism - and Western suicide.

If a robust Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place despite the assaults of the Boasians, the Frankfurt School, the Marxists, and the New York Intellectuals, the cosmopolitan revolution never would have occurred. The Anglo-Saxon movement of ethnic defense culminating in the immigration law of 1924 would have become institutionalized. A robust, sophisticated Darwinian culture would have provided a powerful argument for ethnic defense. Critically, such a defense would have emphasized creating a culture in which individualism was seen as a valuable Anglo-Saxon ethnic trait — as was the case during the 18th and 19th centuries. Immigration policy would have been carefully formulated to ensure that immigrants were similar to the founding stock and to ensure the continued dominance of peoples prone to individualism — just as American immigration policy was in fact crafted until 1965. This ethnic defense would have been energized by the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s and the firm mathematical grounding for the understanding that all peoples have ethnic genetic interests.

Instead, in cosmopolitan post-America, even the sociobiological revolution has been stripped of its most dangerous and powerful ideas. As Frank Salter has shown, the revolution in population genetics of the1970s demonstrated very clearly that people controlling a piece of land have a huge genetic interest in preserving their control--but this finding has been suppressed and misinterpreted by people at the top of the academic hierarchy.

This suppression must continue--because cosmopolitanism has a hopelessly shaky intellectual basis. Built on theories that were motivated far more by ethnic interests of the rising elite of Jewish intellectuals than by a respect for scientific truth, cosmopolitanism has no choice but to secure its future by coercion.

And for the Anglo-Saxon Americans--indeed all Christian-stock Americans--this substitution of cultures is a disaster of cataclysmic proportions and incidentally so too for Gentiles globally.

Kevin B. MacDonald is professor of Psychology at California State University at Long Beach and author of The Culture of Critique series, and a director at the American Third Position.

Breaking the Ties that Bind, Not the Faith of My Father

2010-06-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

This following quote from the NY TIMES December 3, 2008 article entitled “Secrets only your witch would know”:

“Enchantments, the witchcraft store in the East Village, recently moved down the street from where it had been a landmark since 1982. Last year, my friend Nancy bought me one of its customized Solar Blast candles for my birthday. After lighting it, a flurry of life-altering changes suddenly occurred — which was, at least, an amusing coincidence. I developed a more absorbing curiosity when Nancy gave me a second Solar Blast this year, and this one, too, seemed to be a cosmic throw-switch, releasing yet another mother lode of life-changing events.

“Years ago, I had been dumped by my boyfriend and was out of my mind,” Nancy told me as we waited at a cafe for Enchantments to open (a bit later than the posted store hours). “This chick walked up to me at a party and told me she was ‘drawn’ to my ‘grief mask.’ ”

I chortled.

“I was in that place where you’ll insinuate yourself on anyone, so I told her my story,” Nancy continued. “She told me that I had to go to Enchantments.

“I said, ‘Wait ... aren’t they, like, Wiccan?’ And she said, ‘Do you want your boyfriend back, or what?’

“I went. First I got a tarot reading from this absolutely stunning witch, with big blue eyes, tons of black hair, a thick Bronx accent and a huge pentagram necklace. I was weeping, and she was so comforting! So maternal! She said, ‘I am going to give you something very hard core.’ She comes back with this fire engine red candle in the shape of a penis."

O Ye of Great Faith! It has been perplexing in conversations to hear how religiously non-Christian so many young people from Christian families are among affluent America.

It isn't so much because there are people that don't believe in anything, quite to the contrary. These young people are willing to accept that there is some truth and spiritual insight in any faith- Wiccan, Word Magic, Karmic Buddhism, "Kabbalah" or any bastardizations of bastardizations thereof. (Seldom Islam however, because the media has informed them that it is bad and even worse, like devout Christianity.) Many also have a faith in their own "psychic" ability to have messages sent or to receive guidance from unknown and supernatural basis.

Any faith but Christianity in any and all forms are an anathema to young, affluent urban Americans, even though they have in general never explored them.

Why then not the interest or approval of Christian mysticism, lectio divina (meditational reading of a NT passage), logos (word magic), do-unto-others ethics (karma), neo-Platonic philosophical discourse, and other alternatives that are more easily accessible and frankly more developed parallels to "exotic beliefs" ? Surely the void filled by the cursory familiarity that so many young adults have with exotic religions could be fulfilled in a religion that was developed within their own cultural and history.

Yet Christianity is an anathema to so many for whom the religion has been passed to for OVER A THOUSAND YEARS.

Let me be clear: these young people are not making a partial dismissal. When "educated" affluent young people hear of someone who has a thoroughly Christian faith, they are apt to guffaw, dismiss and look down upon the person. Undoubtedly a certain number of avowedly Christian politicians have helped keep red states red because so many young people found their Christian faith repugnant.

The rejection of Christianity was not simply rejection of a belief system but rejection of a culture, community and identity. Few young apostates know enough of the religion to dismiss the belief system, but they imagine it to be JUST a belief system, which is of course, dead wrong.

Particularly at the heart of Protestantism is the cultural notion of each church as a "community of faith" interpreting what they believe, working this out in themselves and among each other. A community- people of different ages and occupations, etc. coming together in goodwill and brotherhood, practicing age-old, edifying traditions and marking the days with rituals that they experience in themselves.

Acts of faith, hope, charity are also part of Christian culture. That identity is not wholly dependent but reinforced in a community.Even if just for an odd Sunday, holidays and weddings, birth, christenings, funerals, meetings, events and community projects, etc. (Or let's face it, subsidized childcare, SAT/ACT classes, career networking, and an extra safety net in time of need- and that's fine.)

This Christian culture in the United States has not been replaced of course; such markings are indelible, even with the faux-culture of consumerism and materialism. Where there is not a cultural force to replace American Christianity's impact this is to some extent the "default" influence.

Replacement would require something more than rejection; it would require the comprehensive deconstruction and refashioning of all facets of perspective that individuals in society are just not equipped to enter into as individuals. Never to worry- the market has found part of the solution.

What we have seen is the increase of disparate “quick fixes”: consumerism, commercialism, support groups, entertainment, gurus, drugs and addictions of all kinds.

None of this deals with the lost culture, community or identity. None of it deals with the spiritual experiencing of seasons of the year and cycles of our lives- birth, death, commitment, the sorrow and joy of the spirit. None of this "religion ersatz" deals with the yearnings, fears and loneliness that come in blasts, bustle and our quiet moments.

Rational wondering and irrational spiritual hinting are not explored in any substantial way by the crassness that has replaced Christianity. The wisdom of centuries tucked away in works of religious philosophers (of many faiths) like the collective advice of elders hasn't been replaced by cheap catch-phases and facile advice delivered by our modern commercial gurus. The market has not replaced or offered guidance and strength to the relationships that we have with each other as individuals, families, neighbors, friends, husbands, wives, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers...

So why THIS REJECTION of what has been part of an identity, BINDING SOCIETY AND TRANSMITTING TRADITION AND CULTURE for over a millennium? It would be far too easy to simply say, “social decay”, “the media”, “progressivism gone awry”, “influences in higher education”- though all of these answers would be correct. These are the manifestations, not the causes.

Christianity is today as it has always been- a threat to many powerful interests.

Christianity has at its core a rejection of materialism. The moral issue of whether people gain their possessions in ways that injure others and whether they take responsibility for those who lack basic necessities is problematic for those in power. In Christianity wealth by oppressing others is severely criticized. Failing to share with the weak and powerless is condemned.

Christianity is communal. Naked individualism marks a certain turn in American capitalism (modern, untraditional and seldom in the best interest of the individual). This form which becomes a mindset approaching a religion itself serves powerful interests.

Christian identity also serves as a powerful force for identity and thus a powerful political force. So far political leaders have been able to marginalize, regionalize and manipulate Christian identity in interesting ways: Christian Zionism, or (red herring) single issue activism such as abortion or gay marriage. Ironically none of the supposedly orthodox stances are overwhelmingly popular with Christians or high on their reported list of concerns. To the degree these issues are important for most people they are not triggers of "reactionary Christians" but nuanced arguments rooted in concern for society. The wide platforms of mainline churches, including Catholicism, have had no national impact in recent decades.

There is another actor responsible for the decline among the urban (and suburban) youth. The American church is, perhaps primarily to blame, particularly mainline Protestantism. It has fetishized external philanthropy; rejected communalism; turned away its community; responded with hatred to its own identity and traditions; rejected both utilitarian and spiritual needs of the entire swath of its traditional base; and generally houses clergy ignorant or hostile to the faith which they allegedly serve.

Young men and women in a city like New York who don’t fit into an exotic, or non-traditional category will find it nearly impossible to find a church that addresses their needs. Seemingly every urban church must cater only to the illegal-immigrant, drug-addicted, homeless, HIV positive, homosexual or transvestite population. It also has taken an odd interest in avant-guard performing arts- but never to all the neighborhood denizens or their concerns.

It should be noted that the urban church seldom seems involved in alleviating the causes for the conditions for the perceived less-fortunate but instead in dispensing the charity of yesteryear like a package of band-aids (or in the case of the truly disengaged church, like a performing arts council.) These are not churches that want to involve themselves with a community of men and women who trudge through the day and look for spiritual comfort in a community led by a faithful and wise minister who joins them in their struggles to reconcile their mundane and spiritual affairs. Many clergy have seemingly stopped believing.

The clergy before anyone realizes that the church is an institution and culture. It is not surprising then that some would be satiated by having an authoritative hand in the institution without the bother of maintaining either flock or faith.

Christian apologist GK Chesterton said: "The danger when men stop believing in God is not that they'll believe in nothing, but that they'll believe in anything."

Chesterton wrote those words almost 100 years ago and he wrote them at a time when people like William Butler Yeats were devotees of the New Age fad of their time, namely theosophy. Clairvoyants, palm readers and the most esoteric forms of Eastern mysticism were all the rage. Anything but Christianity was the order of the day. Anything but what is so intrinsically tied to the faith of our fathers.

Faith of our fathers-- It is arguable that the exoticism that the young are so seemingly attracted to can be found not in commercial pop-psychology wrapped in Eastern garb but in Christianity. Irish American Catholicism carries something of the ancient druid in its ritual and understanding; traditional Scottish austerity and communalism are reflected in the Presbyterian Church; more than trappings remain of the pre-Christian Germanic faith in both Protestantism and Germanic Catholicism; the Eastern Church is very apparently Hellenistic, Near Eastern and Slavic- as relevant to its subscribers; the strongest echoes of Africa in America are found in a Black Protestant church; and among some endemic traditions of American Protestantism and Latin American Catholicism the continuation of Native American practices through syncretism. Often there is a cross pollination that is seldom acknowledged or celebrated.

It has been a desperate, punishing effort to retain the faith of our fathers, specifically against Christianity. Faiths pre-dating the Christian Church have struggled mightily to preserve their logic, traditions, spirituality, ritualism, and no small measure of identity; interwoven into religion are accumulated knowledge and responses to conditions and environments. It has been one of the greatest misfortunes of history that the institution of the Church has not been able to spread a simple message without attempting to eradicate other cultures. It is in the church's failure that has come an unintended blessing; Christianity has been as transformed as it has been transformative.

The main thread of Christianity, as much as the gospel itself has been as a central institution BINDING THE COMMUNITIES IT SERVES. American Protestantism can be seen libertarian democracy and reason- in fact IT IS THE BACKBONE OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT; the American Catholic church institution building and social empowerment. And the Black church has not been a celebration of the religion of oppression but a reinterpretation of the faith- supporting resistance, hope and mutual aid.

Any Anabaptist out there don't get in an uproar- while I believe it obviously impossible to divorce religion from culture, Christianity is not just a culture, it is a belief system.

At its simplest Christians are urged to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ (and most say "meddling" Roman and Hellenistic philosophers and vernacular translators.) The faithful try to model their lives on his (perhaps idealized) life. That means living for others and not just for ourselves.

Rather than mount a defense of the supernatural claims of Christianity in the short space left, I'll simply limit myself to pointing out a gigantic qualitative difference between Christianity and the various forms of superficial narcissism that has taken its place.

It is this: Christianity is an ethical system as well as being a religion, and the various forms of fortune telling, greed assuaging, and superficial self-validation are not. They offer no ties of community, overarching ethical guidance, or ongoing religious-philosophical inquiry and exercise.

The deeper rationalism, and yes challenges of all forms of belief that philosophers have worked through under the wide banner of "Christianity" have not been replaced by something more sound, astute or developed (if only because Christianity has tended to be so broad and so old.) Whether proofs or doubts, arguments of efficacy or for that matter mysticism and even psychology can be found in the deep well called Christian thought.

The exotic dilettantism (though not the religions themselves) served by popular pseudo-religion and pseudo-philosophy are all about the self, not others. It is not surprising then that that Western "practitioners" never delve deeply into Eastern beliefs or practice them too strenuously. They have, in their superficial point of view, dismissed religion.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between an ethical system like Christianity, and sub-species of narcissism like consumerism, pop-religious exoticism, etc. needs to come out from behind their own prejudice and perhaps- dare I say show a little bit of reason.

Learning from the Past. What Makes You Think It Will Change?

2010-06-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to consider the situation. He couldn’t see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back. Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.

“Hellooo Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion across the water, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”

“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you won’t try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.

“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. “What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!”

“This is true,” agreed the scorpion, “But then I wouldn’t be able to get to the other side of the river!”

“Alright then…how do I know you won’t just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?” said the frog.

“Ahh…,” crooned the scorpion, “Because you see, once you’ve taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!”

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog’s back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog’s soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream to carry this burden upon the crest, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.

As they came closer to the opposite shore, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog’s back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

Croaked the frog, “Now I shall die and likely you too! Why on earth did you do that?”

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog’s back.

“I could not help myself. It is my nature.”

British National Party's leader Nick Griffin: Hammered or Not?

2010-04-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

BNP 'will shut Britain's doors'

All the political parties say they are happy talking about immigration, but this is the main policy priority for the British National Party. The party's leader Nick Griffin outlines his immigration policies.-BBC

---------------

I thought the host flubbed it if nailing Griffin was her motive (as clearly it was) because she was essentially dishonest.

The host stated that the ONS figures Griffin cited of non "white British" includes people of Irish descent born in the UK which is false and hardly the point. She was futilely trying to assign Griffin the idea of ending Irish immigration or repatriating. It illustrated the host's dishonesty.

She implied that resettlement grants where some far fetched innovation of his, instead of current policy. When Griffin explained this she asked if increases to the resettlement program would come from foreign aid, asserting an increase to the program would be the end to aid. That is absurd in itself. Equally absurd is the implication was that such aid was unassailable.

The idea of the West creating a brain drain through destructive foreign policies (including foreign "aid" lending through the IMF, WB, Paris Club, etc.) and the siphoning students who represent significant investments by their countries is not some "fascist" concoction but a real problem for Third World countries.

Is the host really not aware that US/UK immigration is far more regulated and limited than Eastern European/ UK immigration, and for practical purposes (as an example) Afghan/UK immigration? One would almost think so by the host's histrionic incredulity towards strictly limiting immigration between the UK and US or and France. At any rate, the policies of France and the US are better left out by anyone defending the status quo.

Where Griffin failed was not to be prepared with hard numbers. What constituted "significant" immigration levels should have been presented clearly by Griffin or at least he should have it expressed in some publicly accessible format. I don't think these were requested in the same manner from other candidates but the profile of his party and the stress placed on that issue by the BNP indicates that he should be better prepared. On the other hand, Griffin clearly stated at the outset of the host framing the interview in narrow terms that he "would rather be speaking about the economy like other parties' (guests)".

I find certain attitudes and perspectives of Griffin objectionable. Nevertheless it seems hypocritical that so many easily dismiss him as a "fascist" despite his rare anti-war, anti imperialist stances, and his support for workers rights, while mainstream parties continue to demonstrate rabid fascism in "respectability". That probably speaks more to the failure of real alternatives than the strength of the Nick Griffin and his BNP.

NAFTA and Immigration

2010-04-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy

by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed 'free trade' has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America's 15 million illegal aliens, some of whom are from Mexico.

NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected.

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their 'death warrant.'

NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.

Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China's even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.

But Mexicans must still contend with the results of the American-owned 'maquiladora' sweatshops: subsistence-level wages, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions (cardboard shacks and open sewers), and a lack of resources (for streetlights and police) to deal with a wave of violence against vulnerable young women working in the factories. The survival (or less) level wages coupled with harsh working conditions have not been the great answer to Mexican poverty, while they have temporarily been the answer to Corporate America's demand for low wages.

With US firms unwilling to pay even minimal taxes, NAFTA has hardly produced the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, whose city is crammed with US-owned low-wage plants, expressed it plainly: "We have no way to provide water, sewage, and sanitation workers. Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth."

Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so many desperate Mexicans -- lured to the border area in the false hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras -- are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.

NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to promote rising living standards, health care, environmental cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico. The wholesale surge of Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the border.

NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to heavily-subsidized US agribusiness products, blowing away local producers. Capital could flow freely across the border to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican workers.

Meanwhile, with the planned Central American Free Trade Agreement with five Central American nations coming up, we can anticipate even greater pressure on our borders as agricultural workers are pushed off the land without positive, alternative employment opportunities. People from Guatemala and Honduras will soon learn that they can't compete for industrial jobs with the most oppressed people in say, China, by agreeing to lowering their wages even more. Further, impoverished Central American countries don't have the resources to deal with the pollution and crime that results from moving people from rural areas to the city, often without their families.

Thus far, we have been presented with a narrow range of options to cope with the tide of illegal immigrants living fearfully in the shadows of American life. Should they simply be walled off and criminalized, as Sensenbrenner and House Republicans suggest? The Sensenbrenner option seeks to exploit the sentiment that illegal immigrants entering the US -- rather than US corporations exiting the US for Mexico and China -- are the primary cause of falling wages for most Americans.

The Bush version is only slightly different, envisioning the "illegal immigrants" as part of a vast disposable pool of cheap labor with no meaningful rights on the job or even the right to vote, to be returned to Mexico upon the whim of their employers.

Yet there is another well-known path of economic and social integration that has been ignored in the debates over immigration in the US: the one followed by the European Union and their "social charter" calling for decent wages, health care, and extensive retraining in all nations. Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water, and education. The implementation of democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital pre-condition for entry into the EU.

The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to question the widely-held assumption that what benefits American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn't about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary people being able to achieve their dreams.

The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs -- not maximum profits-- are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.

Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom.

Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter are Milwaukee-based writers and activists. They can be reached at winterbybee@earthlink.net.

-------------------------------
Lost Jobs and Migration: The Real Cost of the Peru Free Trade Agreement
By David Bacon November 2007

Oakland, California - In the 2006 elections, aspiring Democrats attacked the Bush administration's free trade policies, and more than 20 new members of Congress were elected, giving the Democratic Party its new majority in the House of Representatives. Yet two weeks ago, Democratic Party leaders urged those same members of Congress to vote for a new free trade agreement with Peru.

Most rebelled, but enough Democrats voted for the Bush administration proposal, along with every Republican, to push it through the House. The Senate is expected to take up the agreement any day now.

Why would Democrats support the administration's trade policy, when campaigning against it helped them win in the last election? Try money.

Fourteen years ago, the promoters of the North American Free Trade Agreement promised that free trade would produce jobs. We hear the same claim today for the agreement with Peru, as well as the other agreements Bush has negotiated with Colombia, Panama and South Korea.

NAFTA certainly produced some winners. Large corporations moved high-paying jobs south of the US/Mexico border to cut their labor costs and increase their profits. Mexico enriched U.S. tied billionaire oligarchs who in turn helped rig the already corrupt election process to put in a new generation of corrupt and pliable politicians. But rising profits did not produce jobs. Jobs were lost on both sides of the border and wages were driven down.

By November 2002, the US Department of Labor had certified 507,000 workers for extended unemployment benefits because their employers had moved their jobs south of the border. The Department of Labor stopped counting NAFTA job losses, but the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, estimated that NAFTA had eliminated 879,000 jobs. That was five years ago.

But US job loss didn't produce job increases in Mexico - it eliminated them there too. In NAFTA's first year, more than a million jobs disappeared in the economic crisis NAFTA caused.

To attract investment in Mexico, the treaty required privatization of factories, railroads and other large enterprises, leading to more layoffs of Mexican workers.

On the border, Ford, General Electric and other corporations built factories and moved production from the United States to take advantage of low wages. But more than 400,000 maquiladora workers lost their jobs in 2000-2001 when US consumers cut back spending in the last recession, and companies found even lower wages in other countries, such as El Salvador or China.

Before NAFTA, US auto plants in Mexico had to buy parts from Mexican factories, which employed thousands of local workers. But NAFTA let the auto giants bring in cheaper parts from their own subsidiaries, so Mexican auto parts workers lost their jobs, too.

The profits of US grain companies, already subsidized under the US farm bill, went higher when NAFTA allowed them to dump cheap corn on the Mexican market, while at the same time it forced Mexico to cut its agricultural subsidies. As a result, small farmers in Oaxaca and Chiapas couldn't sell corn anymore at a price that would pay the cost of growing it.

When corn farmers couldn't farm, or auto parts and maquiladora workers were laid off, where did they go? They became migrants.

The real, dirty secret of trade agreements is displacement. During the years NAFTA has been in effect, more than six million people from Mexico have come to live in the United States. They didn't abandon their homes, families, farms and jobs willingly. They had no other option for survival.

Farmers and workers throughout Central America, who saw what NAFTA did to Mexicans, have protested, marched and even fought in the streets of El Salvador, Guatemala and most recently Costa Rica, to stop ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Now that rebellion is spreading to Peru.

No major union or organization of poor farmers wants the trade agreement that the Bush administration negotiated. No wonder. They don't want to say goodbye to their families and start looking for work in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York.

To get the Peru treaty through Congress, its supporters claim it will protect labor rights. Peruvian unions don't believe this promise any more than they believe it will bring them jobs.

Today a huge mining corporation, Grupo Mexico, has provoked a strike by demanding that miners work 12 hours a day instead of eight in Peru's largest copper mine. The Peruvian government supports the company, because it believes longer hours and lower wages will attract more foreign investment. Since NAFTA passed, the same company has forced strikes and cut thousands of jobs at its Mexican mines to cut labor costs, and the government there has also cooperated.

NAFTA's toothless labor rights protections never stopped union busting and job elimination in Mexico. They won't in Peru either.

Propaganda and Lies, Now and Then. Fool Me Once... 9/9 and 11/02

2010-04-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

NOW:

Then:

LOST IN TRANSLATION 11/2002

"Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation," recalls the Harvard grad student. "Eventually, someone phoned me asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy." So twice a week, for $3000 a month, the Iraqi student tells the Voice on condition of anonymity, he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the US government.

His job: Translate and dub false Saddam Hussein speeches and newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq.

"I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots," says the student, "but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well funded and completely cut loose."

And that's how Baghdad's best-known oppositional radio personality was born six years ago-during the Clinton administration. It was one of many disinformation schemes cooked up by the Rendon Group, which has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations fighting the psy-op war in the Middle East.

"The point was to discredit Saddam, but the stuff was complete slapstick," the student says. "We did skits where Saddam would get mixed up in his own lies, or where [Saddam's son] Qusayy would stumble over his own delusions of grandeur." Transmissions were once a week from stations in northern Iraq and Kuwait. "The only thing that was even remotely funny," says the student, "were the mockeries of the royal guard and the government's clumsy attempts to deceive arms inspectors."

The Saddam impersonator says he left Rendon not long ago out of frustration with what he calls the lack of expertise and oversight in the project.

"No one in-house spoke a word of Arabic," he says. "They thought I was mocking Saddam, but for all they knew I could have been lambasting the US government." The scripts, he adds, were often ill-conceived. "Who in Iraq is going to think it's funny to poke fun at Saddam's mustache," the student notes, "when the vast majority of Iraqi men themselves have mustaches?"

There were other basic problems, too. Some of the announcers hired for the radio broadcasts, he says, were Egyptians and Jordanians, whose accents in Arabic couldn't be understood by Iraqis. "Friends in Baghdad said the radio broadcasts were a complete mumble," the student says. One CIA agent familiar with the project calls the project's problem a lack of "due diligence," and adds, "The scripts were put together by 23 year-olds with connections to the Democratic National Committee."

Despite the fumbling naivete of some of its operations, the Rendon Group is no novice in the field. For decades, when US bombs have dropped or foreign leaders have been felled, the PR shop has been on the scene, just far enough to stay out of harm's way, but just close enough to keep the spin cycle going. As Franklin Foer reported in the New Republic, during the campaign against Panama's Manuel Noriega in 1989, Rendon's command post sat downtown in a high-rise. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Rendon operatives hunkered down in Taif, Saudi Arabia, clocking billable hours on a Kuwaiti emir's dole. In Afghanistan, founder John Rendon joined a 9:30 conference call every morning with top-level Pentagon officials to set the day's war message. Rendon operatives haven't missed a trip yet-Haiti, Kosovo, Zimbabwe, Colombia.

The firm is tight-lipped, however, about its current projects. A spokesperson refuses to say whether Rendon is doing any work in preparation for the potential upcoming invasion of Iraq. But a current Rendon Arabic translator tells the Voice, "All I can say is that nothing has changed-the work is still an expensive waste of time, mostly with taxpayer funds."

However, Rendon may just prove to be one step ahead of the game. If Saddam is toppled, a Rendon creation is standing by to try to take his place. The Iraqi National Congress (INC), a disparate coalition of Iraqi dissidents touted by the US government as the best hope for an anti-Saddam coup, has gotten the go-ahead from US officials to arm and train a military force for invasion. The INC is one of the few names you'll hear if reporters bother to press government officials on what would come after Saddam.

Among those at the helm of the INC is Ahmed Chalabi, a US-trained mathematician and CIA contact who reportedly fled from Jordan in 1989 in the trunk of a car after the collapse of a bank he established. He was subsequently charged and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison for embezzlement. Back home in Iraq, he's referred to by some as the so-called limousine insurgent, and is said to hold little actual standing with the Iraqi public. Shuttling between London and DC, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq in more than 20 years, and draws "more support on the Potomac than the Euphrates," says Iraq specialist Andrew Parasiliti of the Middle East Institute.

"Were it not for Rendon," a State Department official tells the Voice, "the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map."

With funding first from the CIA throughout the 1990s and more recently the Pentagon, Rendon managed the INC's every move, an INC spokesperson acknowledges, even choosing its name, coordinating its annual strategy conferences, and orchestrating its meetings with diplomatic heavy hitters such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft.

Not that the Rendon Group was the first purveyor of psy-op tactics for promoting U.S. foreign policy in the region. In fact, some of the most impressive spin maneuvers occurred during the Gulf War in 1991, the lessons of which are particularly pertinent as the US again gears up.

Most notorious was the work of PR giant Hill & Knowlton (for which current Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke worked after she was an aide to John McCain and Bush's dad).

H&K dedicated 119 executives in 12 offices across the country to the job of drumming up support within the United States for the '91 war. It was an all-out blitz: distributing tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers at colleges and setting up observances such as National Kuwait Day and National Student Information Day. H&K also mailed 200,000 copies of a book titled The Rape of Kuwait to American troops stationed in the Middle East. The firm also massaged reporters, arranging interviews with handpicked Kuwaiti emissaries and dispatching footage of burning wells and oil-slicked birds washed ashore.

But nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W. R. Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, got the best reaction.

So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and going into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.

The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately, the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.

Only later was it revealed that the testimony was untrue. H&K had failed to reveal that Nayirah was not only a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, but also that her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's well known ambassador to the US.

H&K had prepped Nayirah in her presentation, according to Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur's book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Of the seven other witnesses who stepped up to the podium that day, five had been prepped by H&K and had used false names.

When human rights organizations investigated later, they could not find that Nayirah had any connection to the hospital. Amnesty International, among those originally "duped" (or in league), eventually issued an embarrassing retraction.

When asked if it acknowledges the incubator story as a deception, H&K's media liaison, Suzanne Laurita, only responded, "The company has nothing to say on this matter." Pushed further on whether such deception was considered part of the public relations industry, she reiterated, "Please know again that this falls into the realm that the agency has no wish to confirm, deny, comment on."

Years later, Scowcroft, the national security adviser at the time, concluded that the tale was surely "useful in mobilizing public opinion."

An American Comment On BNP and Their Opponents

2010-04-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Billy Bragg clashes with British National Party's Richard Barnbrook

Singer and activist engages in finger-pointing row with the BNP's London assembly member in east London

Billy Bragg confronts Richard Barnbrook in Dagenham
Billy Bragg was engaged in a finger-pointing row with a senior member of the British National party during a day of action in London, telling him his "racist fascist" politics offered no help to voters.

Bragg was leafleting in Barking and Dagenham, one of the BNP's top target areas in next month's elections, when he bumped into the BNP's London assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, who has attacked the singer on his blog.

Bragg, who was born and raised in Barking, told Barnbrook: "You do not represent the people of Barking and Dagenham," as the pair became embroiled in a heated argument. "You are exploiting the genuine concerns of people here and you are making the problems worse."

Barnbrook, who was elected to the London assembly in 2008, accused Bragg of "mouthing away" and said the "ballot box will determine what happens".

The exchange came during a day of action against the BNP which saw 541 volunteers deliver 91,000 Hope Not Hate newspapers.

The BNP is due to launch its manifesto this week and has claimed it is on the verge of causing a "political earthquake". It claims it has a chance of taking control of Barking and Dagenham council and of gaining two MPs – in Stoke Central and Barking.

----------------------------------------------------
Comment:

As an American, I am an unlikely supporter of BNP, though that may be too strong a word. The BNP are the only party with a stance against British (junior) imperialism including opposition to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the de facto invasion of Pakistan, and they oppose aid to Israel and US and British bases abroad; they oppose the the Third World debt regime, NATO and a host of other positions I (morally if not actively) support.

Having said that, many of their positions are based on the idea that British imperialism and imperialism in general causes peoples of the Third World to come to Britain.

Much of the progressive and reformist domestic policies they espouse come with the caveat that they support ethnic (white) British and are not extended to immigrants and tacitly I suspect they want to exclude people of color in the UK regardless of status.

What comes to mind is Charles De Gaulle's comment that he did not oppose ethnic minorities in France as long as they remained minorities and France remained (under the control and predominant culture of the) French. De Gaulle of course sought to end French colonialism, replaced it with relationships of mutual respect and advantage and made legitimate asylum, refugee and educational opportunities for those from the former colonies. The BNP should learn that while confrontational politics attract attention, a principled and responsible platform and bridge building can win votes.

I support people having a right to dictate what happens in ones homeland (or it would make my arguments against colonialism and imperialism hollow and one way) but I also think the BNP is full of shit if it thinks that it is alright, after hundreds of years of the most vicious imperialism and destruction say, "games up, everyone go home, we're not responsible for what we have wrought and we owe nothing." And that is what it amounts to since they seem to agitate primarily on the strength of ethno-nationalism, not anti-imperialism.

For a nation actively engaged in imperialism that is costing the lives of young Britons one wonders just how committed the BNP is to either their nation's well being and role as a just actor. Recent repudiation of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by certain party leaders calls the party's commitment to nationalism further into question. On the domestic front, the BNP has chosen confrontation when there are many even in ethnic immigrant communities who stand against immigration and for repatriation particularly of refugees and immigrants of war torn countries.

Bragg, well IMHO he's an opportunistic hypocrite who tries to remain musically relevant by riding corporate candidates' coattails while claiming he "radical", whatever that means. His support of New Labor, pro Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan war candidates and campaigning against George Galloway only showed his actual where his sympathies lie.

2 Essays "Gay Rights" vs "Civil Rights"

2010-04-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

I just saw some twitter a friend called homosexual marriage "the new Civil Rights struggle" in "post racial" America.

This twitter was from a gay friend. This friend, affluent, well educated and white, lives in an exclusive neighborhood (white, wealthy and probably significantly gay) and is a welcome and even sought after guest at the best cultural and entertainment venues and gatherings in New York. Of course, the white gay community is more affluent than the white community at large (while incidentally their minority and even female sexual-as-prime-identity compadres lag far behind-- all the attitude of presumed authority and entitlement, less of the children?)

Obviously there are those who are deluded enough to try to lie to themselves about their sexuality being the equivalent of a racial group long suffering in powerlessness on the bottom of society.

I asked my homosexual friend who twittered the message if he really felt his status and aspirations and his quotidian existence were marked by inescapable discrimination, systemic inequality, and perhaps the tangible legacy of persecution, exclusion or second class status-- you know, the realities that fuel the Civil Rights struggle. He has yet to answer.

I can only wonder if, growing up in a gay family, likely living in a gay ghetto, how his life was attending underfunded gay schools, dealing with presumptions made about him because of his gay skin, dealing with a system where most gays are relegated to the economic underclass. I wonder how it is to be followed around by store security because he's gay, or rousted by police because he was walking or driving while gay. Do women cross the street and clutch their purse when they catch sight of him? Do they put him to the back of restaurant? Are their people in his workplace that assume he may not be competent because he is gay? And those condo boards and real estate agents, I wonder if he has been stung by these folks? Well I don't really wonder. His sexual behavior obviously is not ever-discernible, not an inherited legacy and it isn't inescapable and solidified through family and environment.

It may be less material, but an arguable perspective is that there has always been those in modern Western society that engaged in sexual behavior that was frowned upon or illicit at the time—adultery, group sex, pre-marital sex, (especially female) promiscuity, whore-mongering, etc. Homosexuality had the benefit that it tended to be the “love that did not speak its name”, something that people didn’t even gossip about or moral authorities did not shout about. Any of these behaviors could cause ruin, and other serious social penalties in some quarters.

In other quarters however, particularly among the high brow, elite and artistic and literary world (and even in religious communities) it has long been highly accepted and in some circumstances de rigueur for a century. There's is a whole genre of literature speaking about how formerly all male boarding school and elite college culture gave itself to such rampant homosexuality, whether by "experimentation" or life choice.

We can document how (white) FBI chiefs, Congressmen, Prime Ministers, Mayors, Governors Judges, Editors of big city dailies have in their private life been active in homosexual affairs for decades, perhaps even disproportionately. Some were sexually active with men and women, others "confirmed bachelors"- so common has it been that term became a euphemism for homosexual more than men resistant to marriage. And it is now thoroughly documented how some, ahem, institutions at least tacitly were of the view that pederasty was an acceptable if not laudable process. We forget today that it was the middle class and the leftist intelligentsia who decades ago often saw most sexual libertinism to be decadent.

Current conditions means that (yet another) valid issue of discussion and debate in our culture doesn't happen- has our fragmented, ever decaying culture manically fetishized sex to become (at least for whites) mock-ethnicity and culture of primary identity and significance rather than a private act? Has it brazenly stolen reality from same people many white gays perpetuate real current and historical of oppression, stratified opportunism, gross inequality and victimization against? I suspect it has and that is really is cynical, perverse and opportunistic.

The irony is that (combined with the benefits and legacy of race privilege), such rendering of mythology is far more advantages than anyone of a real historically oppressed group could achieve. Ritualized communal identity, recognition of language and behavior, ingroup and outgroup inclusion and exclusion.

Now they have created an ultimate cause cynically built around an issue-- marriage. Marriage is a contract which same sex couples already can possess in legal equivalence under federal case law. Few care enough to oppose the benefits of marriage to couples of all kinds and many support such benefits actively. There are churches that will offer a ceremony and a their certificate of marriage as well. That isn't enough according to most Gay Rights groups. The entire population must give their stamp of approval via the government by using the word "marriage". The more socially conservative, which includes a overwhelming majority of African Americans and Hispanics, and a narrower majority of Whites are not willing to make the same concession. This gives homosexual activists an "opposition" to their rights.

Incidentally for this reason I support homosexual marriage contracts free of semantic difference (as long as it is not forced upon churches or individuals vested with the power to perform ceremonies). Allowing gay marriage would end the charade for the dominant political players in the gay movement, upper middle class white males, who preposterously are looking to be aggrieved even as they look to dispossess others. Divides and affinities really are one of the most important factors in American life but it has also become a tool of "victimization", an avenue for political sophisticates and the entrepreneurial savvy. The real marginalized and downtrodden don't have a chance against. Having worked with minority teenagers and young adults, and thereby taken an interest in their real lives, historical conditions and (statistical) patterns, it is obvious.

Poor, minority teens across America but particularly in our inner cities, are getting no education except one of frustration and lies. And I can totally understand their frustration because they too are denied a realistic look at the "what is what". This isn't a story that is centered in Birmingham and 1960, it is about what is going on in present day Long Island, which has the highest rate of neighborhood and school segregation in the country. In fact, schools today are more separate and unequal than in 1950 and attended college at a higher rate when measured against the rest of society. Blacks also had a higher share of societal wealth, and less income disparity internally and vis a vis society at large in 1965 than in 2005.

I'm not concerned with slavery or even Red Summers, lynchings, etc. except the conditions they leave adults and youth in today; and the causes are real and the conditions stark. One needs only to look at modern slavery, contemporary slavery; housing, communities, high caloric malnutrition, banking discrimination. In fact blacks suffered more from policies barely that we are hardly removed from today more than the hangman's rope, such as business districts systematically destroyed throughout America without compensation, (destroying prospects for generations to come or in other cases shipping people out away only to have future generations work as slaves).

And have no doubt, American we have had a war on a segment of our population, even as we accorded "civil rights". Cointelpro assassinations and witchhunt, denial of work, destruction of institutions, brain washing, underpaying for the same work, joblessness, environmental poisoning.

The teens who I work with contend with court system that is essentially the concentration camp bureaucracy. In a nation with the highest prison rate that is highest ever in history of the world which they, as a small segment of the population will fill. They can look forward to seeing themselves or those around them arrested for offenses that they commit in proportionately less numbers; for example, whites engage in a higher degree of drug use, and have a higher proportion of financially motivated crime. In fact, black crime is overwhelmingly drug related, and motivated by the income derived from drug sales. The real financial crime lies elsewhere and because of it, the incarceration rate for blacks increased .

For the same crimes their arrests will be more frequent, charges will be more serious, conviction rates higher and sentences longer. Privatization of prisons and contracts for prison services (prison industrial complex) started in 1980; in the time since the black and Hispanic incarceration rate has increased by a whopping 400+ per cent. So at any given point, 1 out of 3 black males (and a roughly equivalent amount of Hispanic males) will be engaged in the criminal justice system- awaiting trial, probation, prisoners or parolees. Many will be engaged in labor for minuscule compensation while inside, further enriching the prison industrial complex. Is it then any wonder that the average single black woman has a net worth of $5? (Despite black women having $1 trillion in purchasing power, and a relatively low employment rate, their money is cycled immediately out of their hands.)

For blacks the goal is a return to nuclear families, who have stable gainfully employed parents and children attending good schools. There is a popular line of thought that many black homosexuals see their sexual orientation to be an entree or means of socialization into the dominant white community. There is also a line of thought that sees black homosexuality as an aberration born of incarceration and frustration with futile gender roles in the face of broken homes and economic displacement. Valid or not, it is small wonder that blacks especially resist the comparison of homosexual behavior and Civil Rights.

These conditions are not something that is entirely of a "legacy of racism" from decades ago as Barack Obama put it. And it would be hard to understand the "fatigue" that whites experience from some mythical reparative largesse. For instance minorities get less than 2.8% of Fed contracts (Wait a minute, the statistic is 1.1% because over half of those "minority contracts" go to non-minority prime contractors that "work with" minorities.) And minorities garner less than 1% of state and municipal contracts, despite owning 12% of business and being almost 30% of the population. In a nation where government is directly responsible for 40% of the GDP, and this wealth transference process continues at all levels, one can understand why this is troublesome.

It's almost comical if not for the direness is the fact that it is so ingrained that it never ends, from birth to disease and death. More than economics there is a psychology deeply embedded in whites; and blacks as well. Belief of inferiority, assumption of lower social position and intelligence and inescapable economic, cultural and educational realities are self affirming, compounding victim-hood. And let's face it, victims' behavior tend to distasteful, even to each other and are often made incapable by their very status of fully comprehending or expressing it.

I am still puzzled by what my friend means about the "new Civil Rights". Amongst his friends he has been fair-minded, with integrity on the issues of privacy befitting his work as an attorney. He has argued among amiable and informal gatherings that a single facet of private behavior, should not in his opinion be discriminated against but that no one should insist that others approve and condone what his private behavior is. If you disapprove, fine, just don't bring that disapproval to places where private behavior has no place. Private, independent entities however should be allowed to operate as just that. If a business benefits from government in any specified form, or is organized as a public corporation then the public (including employees) should be defended from discrimination against judgment on personal behavior (in other words the public should not subsidize disadvantage, inequality or disproportionality).

That means that disadvantaged minority groups on the bottom of the pile can expect more displacement and hostility (as can the rest of society). Minorities can also expect a cynical looting of their struggle from much of the homosexual community. As for my friend, I guess privacy, freedom, proportionality, equality and justice have all gone out the window for him. Opportunism and the politics of affinity make these things seem out of date, like a thing from the past.

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Interesting related story following the California Defense of Marriage Act (Prop 8) that passed a year and half ago partly because Blacks voted for it at a 70% clip which drew the ire of White homosexuals.

The openly gay president of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, has released a statement. You could see this coming, and this is what I'm talking about when you ignore the elephant in the room. Rod McCullom of Rod 2.0 blogs reports on the escalation of the "blame the blacks" meme that has been swirling about the blogosphere and the MSM.

A number of Rod 2.0 and Jasmyne Cannick readers report being subjected to taunts, threats and racist abuse at last night's marriage equality rally in Los Angeles.

Geoffrey, a student at UCLA and regular Rod 2.0 reader, joined the massive protest outside the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in

Westwood. Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.

It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU NIGGER, one man shouted at men. If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger. Someone else said same thing to me on the next block near the temple...me and my friend were walking, he is also gay but Korean, and a young WeHo clone said after last night the niggers better not come to West Hollywood if they knew what was BEST for them.

Los Angeles resident and Rod 2.0 reader A. Ronald says he and his boyfriend, who are both black, were carrying NO ON PROP 8 signs and still subjected to racial abuse.

Three older men accosted my friend and shouted, "Black people did this, I hope you people are happy!" A young lesbian couple with mohawks and Obama buttons joined the shouting and said there were "very disappointed with black people" and "how could we" after the Obama victory. This was stupid for them to single us out because we were carrying those blue NO ON PROP 8 signs! I pointed that out and the one of the older men said it didn't matter because "most black people hated gays" and he was "wrong" to think we had compassion. That was the most insulting thing I had ever heard. I guess he never thought we were gay.

The backlash is upon us, and it's going to get uglier unless our organizations step forward and say something. The desire to scapegoat blacks for Prop 8's defeat has exposed the now not-so-latent racism in our movement.

Pam Spaulding :: The N-bomb is dropped on black passersby at Prop 8 protests

On the matter of the blame game, Alex Blaze has an excellent post over at Bilerico that tries to poke at the anger directed at the black community (as you read above, it didn't matter if you were black and gay -- it was hurled at him because he represented The Other regardless of his allegiance to the gay community).What is painful is seeing the how easily I am marginalized... The knee-jerk response in the wake of the painful passage of the initiative was that fast and that irrational.

You know what? This reminds me of the Freeper reaction to Condi Rice making mildly positive comments about Barack Obama's speech on race -- all of a sudden she became a wild-eyed Trojan Horse Black Radical in their eyes, when nothing of the sort occurred. Apparently she needed to completely divorce herself of her blackness for the comfort of the denizens of the swamp, even though nothing had changed about her views on policy.

Discussing the whys and hows of human nature when it comes to these biases shouldn't be such a difficult matter, but it is. I don't have a problem opening the door, but I can't walk through it alone...

Field Experiments on Racism

2010-04-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

When sociologists study something, they usually start by making observations. Maybe they take a survey, in which case they convert our observations to answers on a questionnaire, or maybe they’ll do fieldwork and go out into a social situation and watch what goes on. In either case, they’re not changing what we’re studying, or at least they’re not trying to, but rather they’re just watching it and recording what we learn.

In contrast to these observational studies, they could intentionally change something and then see what happens as a result. This is an experimental approach. With an experiment, you have two or more groups, and the researcher (or somebody) does something to one of the groups but not the other. What the researcher does is the independent variable (or cause). The researcher then measures the outcome of what happens—the dependent variable (or effect).

The idea of an experiment conjures up images of a mad scientist in a castle or at least well-funded psychologists in laboratories messing with introductory psychology students. Another approach, however, is called a field experiment, where the researcher conducts an experiment in a natural setting instead of laboratory.

Here’s a video that illustrates this approach. In it, the reporting team from ABC News sets up an experiment. They park an old car in a parking lot in a predominately white neighborhood. They then have several white teenagers vandalize the car for about an hour. These kids jump on the car, spray paint it, and try to break into it. During this time, several people walking by stop and talk to the kids, sometimes even telling them not to do it. However, during that period of time, only one person called the police.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Next, the reporters repeated the situation but they used African-American teens instead. The kids did the same things to the car for about the same period of time, but this time ten people called the police. The only person that approaches them is a Hispanic woman. The conclusion? The race of the possible offender influences whether their actions are defined as criminal, so it’s not just what people do that matters but also who they are.

Field experiments have a lot going for them. Like all experiments, the causality is clear. The independent variable precedes the dependent variable, and, if the study is done correctly, the change in the dependent variable is the only difference (on average) between the two groups. Sociologists call this internal validity— which means they can trust the causal story of a study.

Also, field experiments measure things that people might not report on surveys, either because they don’t want to look bad or they don’t realize that aspect of themselves. For example, imagine they gave a survey to the people in the community described above, and we asked them if they would be more likely to call police if they saw African-American kids committing vandalism. I imagine that they would all so “no”—who wants to be viewed as potentially racist? Yet, in the field experiment, that’s exactly what they did.

Politics by Any Other Name (Jewish Identity and Language Issues)

2010-04-06T09:39:00.001-07:00

Neither Adam, Seth nor Noah were called Jew; nor were Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Moses was not called a Jew and neither were Saul, David or Solomon called Jew. In fact you will not find the word Jew in the first eleven books of the Bible.

The first time Jews are mentioned in the Bible, is in II Kings 16:6 (and then only in translations revised in the eighteenth century) where we find Israel was at war with the Jews and drove the Jews from Elath. It is interesting that we can read over five hundred pages of the Bible before we find a “Jew” anywhere, yet those who call themselves Jew today claim the first five books of the bible and call it their Torah.

It is strange how modern conventions and politics have so changed language and perception, so that those who claim to have written the first five books of the Bible and call themselves “Jews”, can't find the word Jew written anywhere in the book they call their own.

The term “Jew” originated in the late eighteenth century as an abbreviation of the term Judean and refers to a resident of Judea without regard to race or religion, which we have much evidence for in Biblical passages and more reliably, the historic record. It was also applied to the tribe of Judah by later scholars.

It was not until the last century that we saw the word “Jew” expanded to mean virtually everyone in the region even before there was a “Judah”, and including people who were distinctly not of that tribe.

This particular use was largely taken by Jewish scholars, who were both attempting to solidify their historical identity enjoying a new found voice in European and American scholarship. These scholars were also seeking to blunt the force of biblical anti-Judean sentiment and it was at this time, in Germany that the phrase anti-Semitism came into being, a religious / pseudo-scientific term that broadened Jewish identity to include virtually all of the eastern and southern world from the European vantage point, from the Atlantic to the Indian sub-continent.

In none of the manuscripts of the original Old or New Testament was Jesus described or referred to as a "Jew" nor is Jesus a Jew even by the standards of a person from Judea. But in recent years Jesus has been converted by the power of language application into a Jew!

While the use of term “Semitic” (descended from Biblical personage Shem) has been disputed by scholars who point out that the generational information in the Bible is contradictory and perhaps impossible there is, nevertheless a language, culture and religious similarity that exists. Equally important from a religious perspective is that there was an exchange of religious ideas through out the Near East among this language and cultural group. Egypt is where we see the first documented monotheistic society, and many beliefs and practices, from creation stories, circumcision, to a day of rest and baptism create a sort of religious catalogue. It is thus not surprising when we see tribal gods and personal gods, mutual recognition of gods and an assortment heavenly figures who come into play in the Old Testament.

Jews as Pharisees

As the people calling themselves Jews have a failure of ancient recorded recorded history that there is, prior to the modern period, of a race, religion or nationality, referred to as "Jew" (as opposed to the peoples of Judea, there are traces to particular sects of the people of Judea in the time of Jesus, to which self-styled "Jews" today refer to as "Jews", were known, i.e., "Pharisees" who followed the practices described, controlled the Temple of Jerusalem and all of its offices, and were depicted in the role of “Jews” as is present usage.

Jews as Edomites

In this murky order of things we are left we can apply post fact logic to make the linkage that otherwise does not exist. A Judahite or descendent of the Tribe of Judah are the precursors in name if not descent of Jews though this is not undisputed.

Psalm 83:3 says God's elect are "hidden" or protected ones, and that they are under attack from a coalition of evil groups led by Edom. Who was Edom? Esau, the brother of the patriarch Jacob, became the ancestor of the people called Edom, or Idumea.

The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, XIII ix 1; XV vii 9 instructs us: John Hyrcanus forcibly assimilated the Edomites as a national group in about 120BC. The Jewish historian Josephus, who lived just after the time of Christ, wrote, "They [Edom] were hereafter no other than Jews'.

The Jewish scholar Cecil Roth in his Concise Jewish Encyclopedia (1980) says on page 154, "John Hyrcanus forcibly converted [Edom] to Judaism. From then on they were part of the Jewish people. In the Talmud the name of Edom was applied to Christian Rome, and was then used for Christianity in general". Terrible judgments against Edom are made in most of the prophecies of the Old Testament. For instance, Isaiah 34, 63, Jeremiah 49, and the entire book of Obadiah. To what extent the Edomites then are present day Jews (as a renaming or overlapping or related group) is speculation.

Modern Jews Referring to Themselves as Khazars

Unsuspecting Christians are subjected to this barrage from sources they have little reason to suspect. Jewish scholars such as Arthur Koestler originally asserted the historic accuracy that so-called "Jews" throughout the world today of eastern European origin are unquestionably the historic descendants of the Khazars, a Turko-Finn ancient Mongoloid nation deep in the heart of Asia, according to history, who battled their way in bloody wars about the 1st century B.C. into eastern Europe where they set up their Khazar kingdom.

The historic existence of the Khazar kingdom of so-called "Jews", their rise and fall and how King Bulan and the Khazar nation in about 740 A.D. became "Jews" ) or Hebrews by conversion widely established. In 1945 this author gave nation-wide publicity to his many years intensive research into the "facts of life" concerning Khazars. The disclosures were sensational and very effective but came at a very sensitive moment in history for "Jews" being published at the close of the war.”

It may very well be that Koestler, a Zionist was politically motivated to end the racial and (Christian) Biblical problems that Jewish ethnicity caused for Jews in the West. If Jewish ethnicity and Jewish ties to a condemned people in the Bible was a source of animosity, it was one was also one that would not go away as long as external perceptions of separation and difference on racial and religious grounds existed. That Koestler was a Zionist and influential Jewish scholar fed the impression that Koestler’s motivations might have tainted if not altogether constructed his scholarship.

The Zionist movement in particular felt that there were dangerous implications to their now powerful movement. Koestler became then, a target for some who felt he was doing more harm than good regardless of his intentions. While the scholarship should rightly be contested, it should not be attacked for its conclusion rather than its research and premise.

Regardless of his motivations or the quality of his scholarship, Koestler was a single scholar in a line of those who have tried to research an area where there is historic record is virtually non existent and even the few entries in the religious record are spotty and contradictory. Both religious works and research leaves us with over a millennium of information missing.

In an original 1903 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia in New York's Public Library, and in the Library of Congress, Volume IV, pages 1 to 5 inclusive, appears a most comprehensive history of the Khazars. Also in the New York Public Library are 327 books by the world's greatest historians and other sources of reference, in addition to the Jewish Encyclopedia, dealing with Khazar history, and written between the 3rd A.D. and 20th centuries by contemporaries of the Khazars and by modern historians on that subject.

Language Issues Follow

Synagogue

Synagogue- c.1175, from O.Fr. sinagoge (11c.), from L.L. synagoga "congregation of Jews," from Gk. synagoge "place of assembly, synagogue," lit. "meeting, assembly," from synagein "to gather, assemble," from syn- "together" + agein "bring, lead." The French word of ultimately Greek origin was assimilated by Jews over time and it entered into (European Jewish usage) and Western consciousness as a "Jewish word for their Church" when it is no such thing.

Rabbi

And likewise with “Rabbi” or “Rebbe” being a Greek word presumably influenced by a Semitic word meaning “Sir” or “Master”. It is still in common use in its original form in Arabic “Rahb” or “Rehb” in the same context. The word assumed its use as Priest only in the last late 18^th century, with European Jewry giving it this context as learned borrowing and presumably an alteration to make an equivalent to the (Catholic) Christian function of priest.

Passover

Interestingly, "Passover" is also not found in the Bible. Passover has entered by translation as an often misunderstood language parallelism in Pesach which was a holiday of sacrifice of the Lamb and rest rooted in Canaan and celebrated in ancient times in the entire Middle East and preceding Judaism. Like the exile story itself, which was a story far preceding Judaism (ironically a borrowing of the stories of the Canaanites and Sumerians.) These appropriated phenomena were conflated- a holiday of sacrifice and the "exodus" story particularly among European Jewry. The Biblical and historic holiday event is documented as occurring before the Exodus and among Canaanites, including the consumption of unleavened bread and lamb sacrifice, and lamb (and wine) consumption during a feast. In the Bible the feast event is all that is provided. Historically the only time we come close to anything resembling the story that could be Passover in any Jewish context it is Josephus' account of a tale he supposedly hears from Manetho, identifying the expulsion of the Jews with the expulsion of Hyksos and the expulsion of a group of lepers, led by an Egyptian priest called Osarseph. Other better documented accounts reflect that Josephus' tale itself a conflation of events of the Amarna period, the earlier Hyksos expulsion, and events throughout the 19th Dynasty.

Circumcision

Circumcision is another example of a cultural issue that causes confusion with identities. The Book of Jeremiah lists the Egyptians, Jews, Edomites, Ammonites and Moabites among others who circumcise, and circumcisions seem to include the majority of ancient cultures in the area. Herodotus, writing a century later in the fifth century BC adds the Colchians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, and Nabateans (a catchall term for the trading people of northern Arabia, Canaan, Jordan, Syria and Euphrates) as circumcising. For all of these peoples the reason is described the same, a religious and health act that is tribal in nature.

The Lion and the Lamb, A Story Whose Significance Has Been Hidden of Late

2010-04-06T09:06:00.001-07:00

This is taken from a Popular Biblical sermon/lesson for the old and popular reading of the Book of Revelations. It is especially interesting because this once popular reading of the Bible in recent years has declared forbidden to be taught any longer at churches that are converting to what was once "fringe" Dispensationalism:

To those of you who have been taken in, without reading or glossing over the Book of Revelations by Dispensationalists and others hostile and in political opposition to Christianity and Jesus Christ, read Revelations Chapter 5:5 again. In fact, go back to the beginning of the Chapter or even the beginning of the Book and arrive again. It will become very clear, if you put all your preconceived and willful notions aside that the scene is one of a struggle, replicating the life of Jesus, and the Lion of Judah is the Devil, (the Lion seeing who it can devour) making a false claim to what is his. Repeat, the Lion of Judah is the Devil. And Jesus is the Lamb, slain, that rises.

Now when you read Rev 5:5 you will see it plainly, that the four beasts and the elders, onlookers, who first believe that the Lion of Judah could prevail and break the Seals and deny Christ and the World His Message. But the Slain Lamb takes the Book and Open the Seals and sits upon the throne.

Sounds familiar doesn't it? The Lion of Judah thought it could hold the Word of God and destroy the Lamb! Instead it was the Lamb who brought to us his word and though slain rose again and assumed His throne. We can look then at Revelations understanding that that as it was then so shall it be.

If you think just depicting the Biblical story of the Passion of Christ would raise a firestorm you should not be surprised that so few are brave enough to acknowledge that Revelations tells us that the same perpetrators of Judah will be there trying to prevail over the Lamb and deny him the unsealing of the Book again! So the tribe of Judah is trying again, and thus fulfilling the prophecy.

The latest lie is that Judah will try to tell you that Jesus was not born of God and instead is "Jesus the Jew". To say that is to BLASPHEMY and to do so disingenuously. It is to say that the Bible lies about Jesus being the Son of God and the miraculous Virgin Birth. It is disingenuous because while we have no genealogy of Mary we do know she is from Galilee,(גְּלִיל - הַגּוׁיִם; lit:Glil HaGoyim) "Place of the Goyim", with much of this name being retained in its present name of Galil or HaGalil, not Judea. (As to the esoteric, so called "Synoptic Problem" of contradictory Gospels of His birthplace during the Roman regional Census of 6 AD still presents him as a Galilean, born in Bethlehem or Galilee or the well known expression from Isaiah 9:1 Galilee of the Gentiles.)

Romans authority had no interest in Christ's origins as a colonial subject of Iudaea regardless of tribe, nor his claims of supernatural birth. Judeans and an influx of Edomites, in particular as Pharisee and Sadducee were the administrative power under the Roman colonial province-nation given name "Iudaea". "Iudaea" and "Judea", in English translations since 1800 been translated as "Jew" regardless of context.

Iudaea named incidentally after Judea, as it administered under the Romans, the territory of all around it including Palaestina, Israel, Samaria, Edom, Galilee and Moab among other non-Judean areas. Only the Greeks and Romans in the towns of Decapolis were not subject to being Jews under Judean authority at the time of Jesus. Jesus being a Jewish citizen under Roman colonial administration allowed him to be tried either for sedition by the Romans or the original charge of blasphemy by Jewish (Judean administered law). However Jesus did not have the protections he would had he been a of the Judean (priestly) class, highlighting the division of the class who used appropriately the emblem of the Lion of Judah that would lead the Lamb of God slaughter through falsehood. Luke 23: "And they began to accuse Him saying, We found this fellow perverting the (province), and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying He Himself is Christ a King."

Even from a non-religious view then, this modern "Jesus the Jew" is a cynical and inaccurate ploy by those with an obvious political agenda: 1. Deny Jesus as Christ, 2. Deny Jesus brought to the world a new message and faith, 3. To make Christians subordinate, 4. To deny all implications of the Gospel and Revelations, the story of Jesus and his message, and the fate of the world, respectively; and thus this denial is a refutation of Christianity.

It is also to deny this central part of the Gospel, or life of Jesus. The charge is that as a subject of Judea he was responsible to Jewish charges. Let us look to the Book of John:

³³Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

³⁴Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?

³⁵Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

³⁶Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

³⁷Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

³⁸Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

³⁹But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews?

⁴⁰Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

How is it then that “Christians” who say “Jesus is a Jew” or “the King of the Jews” (or even more ignobly “A Jewish Carpenter” or “A Jewish 'Rabbi' or Teacher”) freely deny Jesus his own message and do so, “upon the cock crow” each day? Will the betrayal of Jesus by his followers and the persecution by Judah continue on a daily basis then until His Return?

Returning to Revelations then, it is no wonder then, to a Christian then why so few from the tribe of Judah in all of history will be among his companions: "12 thousand" Jews plus the same from 11 other tribes of Israel) will enter his kingdom while "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues" will enter and receive the Lord's blessings and protection.

5:1 And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.

5:2 And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?

5:3 And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.

5:4 And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.

5:5 And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

5:6 And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.

5:7 And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne.

5:8 And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.

5:9 And they sung a NEW song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.