How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable

How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable

The following is a modified and enlarged version of an article I posted here last September, which has now been published in The Citizens Informer. Its theme is that the transformation of the meaning of civil rights from equal individual rights under the law, as seen in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, into racial group equality of results, as seen in our current unconstitutional and anti-democratic system of racial preferences, could not be stopped, because the civil rights movement had the effect of morally delegitimizing the only group in America that could have stopped that transformation, namely the white American majority. I argue that the only way to turn back the group-entitlements revolution is through the remoralization of that majority.

How the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Made Racial Group Entitlements Inevitableby Lawrence Auster

Through half a lifetime of observing American conservatives–and neoconservatives–passionate and principled resistance to affirmative action (a resistance that notably waned after the 2003 Grutter decision), I many times heard them quote Hubert Humphrey’s famous pledge that if the 1964 Civil Rights Act required racial quotas, he would “eat the paper it’s written on.” Recently I looked up the text of Humphrey’s remark, which he made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on April 9, 1964:

If the Senator can find in Title VII … any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.

I was struck by these words because, being familiar only with paraphrases of Humphrey’s quote, I had always assumed that he had said something like: “If this bill brings about quotas, I will eat it.” But now I realized that he had said: “If this bill contains language mandating quotas, I will eat it.”

This changed the entire significance of the remark. Of course the bill did not contain language mandating racial quotas. In fact, it contained the very opposite: an amendment declaring that the bill could not be interpreted as requiring racial quotas. So Humphrey’s assurance, upon which conservatives in later decades have placed such weight, was meaningless. The question was not whether the bill required quotas. The question was whether, regardless of any anti-quota provisions the bill might contain, it would lead to quotas. And, of course, it did–and far faster than its critics had anticipated. Immediately after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal enforcement agency created by the Act, declared that the failure of an employer to have the same percentage of blacks in his workforce as existed in the general population was prima facie proof of racial discrimination under the Act. As a result of this regulatory fiat, the only way an employer could prove he wasn’t racially discriminating was to engage in racially proportional hiring. The era of racial preferences had begun. Yet Senator–and soon to be Vice President–Humphrey never ate the paper the 1964 Act was written on, nor was he obliged to, because his claim had been correct, if in a strictly narrow sense: the bill did not contain explicit language that mandated quotas. What the bill did was to create a federal agency that had the power to carry forward the bill’s real, though unstated, purpose.

What was this purpose? Contrary to neoconservatives’ dreamy thoughts on the subject, the true aim of the civil rights movement, of which the 1964 Act was the crowning achievement, was not to attain a universal, race-blind equality of rights for all persons. It was to advance the condition of black people, by any means that would work. Many leading civil rights leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, far from being liberals who believed in America’s essential goodness, were leftists. They saw America as an incurably racist society that would have to be manipulated and coerced into treating blacks decently. Mere equality of rights, they felt, could never overcome whites’ entrenched anti-black prejudices or the black inferiority that the left thought resulted solely from such prejudices. The civil rights movement therefore sought equal justice under the law for blacks, an ideal that mainstream whites would accept. But equal justice was only a step toward the real goal, which was, in President Johnson’s words, equality as a fact and equality as a result. The proof of this observation is that as soon as the principle of equal rights had taken blacks as far as it could take them (with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year), the civil rights movement abandoned equal rights as its defining ideal and replaced it with racial equality of outcome.

In saying this, I am not accusing leaders such as Martin Luther King of insincerity. I do not know what King’s real thoughts were during the earlier, legal-equality phase of the civil rights movement, and it doesn’t much matter what they were in any case. My point is that the civil rights movement, regardless of what its leaders–and followers–conscious purposes may have been prior to 1964, had an inherent tendency toward egalitarianism of result, and that once this tendency kicked in, those who belonged to the movement would support it one way or another, as, of course, happened with King himself.

The dynamics of racial power

Non-discrimination morphed so easily into equality of outcome because, as I’ve said, equality of outcome had been the real end of the civil rights movement all along. But that does not explain why American society failed to reverse this leftist revolution, which was carried out in flagrant violation of both the letter of the 1964 Act and the understanding of most of the legislators and ordinary citizens who had supported it.

Pro-individual-rights conservatives (who in the early 1960s were called liberals) have argued for decades that the proper, individual-rights meaning of the Civil Rights Act should have been insisted on from the start, regardless of the pressures to change it into a group-entitlements law. But these conservatives have never asked themselves a simple, practical question: who was going to insist on it? America]s white majority, perhaps?

The problem with this expectation was that the white majority, in signing on to the Civil Rights Act, had canceled out their own moral authority. They had conceded that they were responsible for the black inferiority that the Act was intended to cure. How then could whites in good conscience stand against further steps designed to help blacks? That would only be repeating the very racial sins of which whites had just collectively repented when they supported the Act.

Whites did not grasp at the time that they were making such an admission or putting themselves into such a bind. Their attitude was, “We acknowledge that our black fellow Americans have been treated unfairly in this country; now we’ll treat them fairly.” They felt that this would allow blacks and whites to move forward together on a more humane racial footing, as represented in the popular imagination by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. They naively thought that passage of the Civil Rights Act would lift a burden of guilt from their shoulders.

In fact, the opposite happened.

As the civil rights consensus unfolded following passage of the 1964 Act, it enunciated a utopian set of rules which said that the races were and ought to be completely equal in their abilities, qualities, and outcomes; that any vestige of racial discrimination in America had to be totally eliminated; that any failure to do so was further proof of white guilt; and that whites as the presumed discriminators were henceforth prohibited from acting in the interests of whites or even from thinking of themselves as whites. The prohibition extended to white defense against anti-white discrimination.

Through this assumption of white guilt, as well as through the outlawing of racial discrimination even in private areas such as businesses, the civil rights movement gave birth to a new America in which race and ethnicity (or rather white race and ethnicity) would have no legitimate place, an America that consisted only of individuals possessing equal rights (or, rather, an America that consisted only of individuals where whites were concerned, but consisting of organized racial groups where minorities were concerned). This new, liberal-individualist order (applied primarily to whites) meant that the white majority as the white majority could no longer play a leading and representative role in America, or, indeed, any role at all, except as the presumed source of horrific injustice that had to be corrected and purged. It also meant that the white-majority culture–meaning Western culture and civilization–could no longer be seen as a worthy ideal for our society.

Further, if these new rules and arrangements were morally right, then the previous social order, which tacitly recognized the importance of race and culture and greatly admired the historic achievements of the white race as the creators of that culture, had been horribly, inhumanly, and indefensibly wrong. All of American and Western history was now judged to be morally defective. These new attitudes led to moral relativism, at least where the inherited moral standards of whites were concerned; to cultural relativism, which said that Western culture was no better than any other, including primitive societies and pre-Columbian human-sacrifice cults; and to multiculturalism, which said that America consists of a collection of equal cultures with no majority or dominant culture.

Another factor in whites’ acceptance of minority group entitlements and multiculturalism was that blacks on average turned out to be much more different from the white majority than idealistic liberals had imagined. It soon became apparent that even in an America with a formal equality of rights, an America where many blacks had attained middle-class status (a phenomenon that had been progressing rapidly before the Civil Rights Act), the black population as a whole remained significantly behind whites in income, law-abidingness, family formation, intellectual achievement, and other social indicators. Since legal equality was not seen as leading to equality of outcome, the left sought to bring such equality about by intrusive and unjust means, including the trashing of society’s behavioral and educational standards, since under those standards blacks on average did far worse than whites. Again, given the white majority’s liberal beliefs, they had no choice but to surrender to this revolution. They had discovered to their shock that black-white racial differences were much larger than they had thought, which meant that mere non-discrimination toward black individuals would not close the racial gap. But since, in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, non-discrimination was now whites’ only officially approved moral principle, they could not simply abandon it. Instead, they redirected it, away from the individual black person, and toward blacks’ culture. Non-discrimination toward black individuals, in the name of blacks’ assumed sameness to whites, was changed into non-discriminatory acceptance and endorsement of the black culture (and soon of other minority cultures) in the name of its ineluctable differences from the white culture.

To criticize the profound harm done to our society by the civil rights movement and its aftermath is not to defend all of the South’s pre-civil rights racial policies. For example, the Jim Crow laws–which not only allowed discrimination against blacks, but mandated it, most notoriously in public accommodations–were an offense to the nation’s conscience and would have had to be eliminated one way or another. But the regime brought into being by the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not stop at correcting specific racial injustices such as those that came under Jim Crow. By attacking, in principle, all racial discrimination, including private racial discrimination, it in effect delegitimized all natural and historical human groupings and cultures, if they were white. It delegitimized white people’s most basic rights of free association and of property, since such rights were now seen as having only one end in view: the oppression of blacks. And, as pointed out above, it said that whites’ entire history as the American majority was a scandal. The ongoing functional and economic deficiencies in the black community were seen as the result of the same historic white sin, which thus seemed to be still operative in the present as well as the past.

So, to repeat the question I asked before: Having allowed the cosmic charge of racism to be heaped on their own heads, would whites find it in themselves to oppose further measures, such as racial group entitlements, seen as urgently necessary to improve blacks’ condition? Having lost their moral standing and self-confidence as a group, would whites have the will to uphold the written provisions of laws against powerful racial and political interests that wanted to use those laws for illegitimate and unconstitutional (though now morally sanctified) purposes? The answer is clear in the record of the past 40 years: they did not have the will.

The dilemma that America has never faced

Contrary to the hopes of individual-rights conservatives, a purely race-blind America was never possible, because once legal racial inequality had been removed, there was the expectation that substantive racial inequality would disappear as well. But enduring racial differences in abilities and behavior meant that substantive equality could not appear spontaneously by itself. That left two alternatives: the institution of race-conscious preferences for the minority, or the successful resistance to such preferences by the majority. Consider Hubert Humphrey’s stand in the Senate, which we discussed at the beginning. Why did he make his passionate assurances that the Civil Rights bill could not possibly mandate racial quotas? Why did he add a supposedly rock-solid amendment to the bill to stop such an eventuality? In taking those positions, Humphrey was tacitly acknowledging that the new law would lead to a call for racial group preferences, a call that, if the Act were to keep its integrity, would have to be opposed. Therefore someone would have to oppose it. Someone would have to insist on upholding the proper meaning of the law against the efforts of those who wanted to bend it into a socialistic shape. But who would that protector be? It wouldn’t be the organized black community; that was simply assumed, as they were gaining too much from preferences to give them up. It wouldn’t be the white civil rights advocates; that was simply assumed. The only possible defenders of individual rights who would have the numbers and political strength to win the battle would have to be white people who were not part of the civil rights movement. But, as we’ve seen, the white majority had been morally discredited, at least in the eyes of the ascendant liberalism, by the very passage of the Act, which implied that America’s entire history was tainted by white sin.

Pro-individual-rights conservatives have always harked back to the dream of Martin Luther King, the Golden Age of a race-blind society that was betrayed by affirmative action. But the Golden Age never existed. The dream is, literally, a dream, as proved by the brute fact that minority racial preference were instituted almost the instant that the 1964 Act–the epitome of the race-blind-society idea–was passed. Furthermore, not only did the race-blind society never exist, it cannot exist. This is because an America that declares itself to be, not just a race-blind government and legal system (which is both right and possible, within reasonable limits), but a race-blind society, can only do so by outlawing any group-consciousness on the part of the racial majority, which delegitimates the majority culture and ethos, which in turn liberates and validates the group-consciousness and will-to-power of minorities, which then begin to tear the society apart.

In sum, though the 1964 Civil Rights Act formally prohibited racial preferences, it turned blacks into a self-interested, aggrieved group that was expected to demand racial preferences, and it delegitimized the very group–the white majority–that was being tacitly depended on by the bill’s leading supporter to resist such preferences and enforce the bill as written. The Act made it impossible for the white majority to lead America, while it transformed blacks into sacred victims whose clamoring for group equality of results could not in good conscience be opposed.

These are the group-power dynamics that underlay the transformation of civil rights into a permanent system of racial privileges for blacks and other minorities in this country. Yet, as alluded to above, during the several decades of this controversy, mainstream conservatives seemed to believe that if they just kept invoking the ever-more-disregarded principle of individual rights, the principle, like an autonomous being, would somehow spring back to life and become once again the law of the land. This was a fantasy, born of the neoconservative view of America as a set of abstract ideas. The reality is quite different. In order for a society to maintain its principles, it must have actual people who are ready, willing, and able to defend those principles. An America whose historic white majority has been stripped of its moral legitimacy lacks such people.

Restoring what was lost

The problem I’ve described provides its own solution. The way out of the crisis is to retrace the steps that brought us into it. Under the impact of such phenomena as cultural leftism, mass immigration, and the group rights revolution, the white American majority lost the sense of its moral legitimacy to lead, while, at the same time, it stopped standing for individual equality under the law. The solution is to restore both of these principles. As paradoxical as it may sound, in order for our system of individual equality under the law to be revivified and preserved, whites must re-assume their historic position as America’s dominant majority group, simply because whites are the only group in America of whom a substantial number really believe in individual equality under the law–and they believe in it, not just for themselves, but for all groups. Also, as the historic and numeric majority, whites still have the inherent power to exercise moral and cultural leadership in this country, if they can find the inspiration and confidence to do so.

As whites re-discover and re-assert their natural status as America’s cultural majority that they gave up 40 years ago, blacks and other minorities will continue to enjoy legal equality of rights. The proper sphere of race-blind equality is in the state’s dealings with individual citizens. Government and law must not discriminate by race. But the same does not apply to society. Society consists of human beings, and race is a part of what human beings are, just as sex and family and nationality and religion are a part of what human beings are. Therefore society cannot be made race-blind, any more than it can be made sex-blind or family-blind or nationality-blind or religion-blind. The cost of trying to do so is the destruction of the legitimate liberty and cultural particularity upon which human flourishing depends.

What is needed, in short, is a balance between our traditional American culture and a liberal legal system operating within the parameters of that culture–a legal system that supports the culture and its values rather than, as at present, seeking to undermine and destroy them. The liberal equality of individuals under the law is part of the essence of America. But it must not be America’s primary value. Liberal values–the belief in free inquiry, the treatment of all citizens according to the same rules–have an indispensable place in our heritage. But liberalism, the ideology that makes the pursuit of equality the most important thing, spells the death of our heritage. If our nation is to survive, it must have ideals and goals higher than the liberal project of treating all people equally, and the leftist project of making all people substantively equal. Liberalism and leftism are unable to supply those ideals, which come from cultural, constitutional, and transcendent sources.

OK, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” Is Not Amnesty—It’s Worse Than Amnesty

OK, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”

Is Not Amnesty—It’s Worse Than Amnesty

By Washington Watcher

Advocates of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. amnesty have been driven underground by the great surge in public support for Arizona’s SB 1070. But they’ll be back. And the possibility that President Obama will be with them can’t be ruled out—after all, everything else he’s ever wanted in his life has been handed to him on a silver platter.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote, “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” There will be a lot of debate over whether or not the various “comprehensive” bills put forth can be classified as an “amnesty”. So I’d like to consider here the precise meaning of the word.

Merriam Webster defines amnesty as “the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals.”

Initially, immigration enthusiast politicians had no problem using the word amnesty.  During the 2004 Democratic primaries, John Kerry said,

“I supported and was prepared to vote for amnesty from 1986. And it is essential to have immigration reform. Anyone who has been in this country for five or six years, who’s paid their taxes, who has stayed out of trouble, ought to be able to translate into an American citizenship immediately, not waiting.” [Kerry on the Record: Amnesty is OK, By Dave Eberhart, Newsmax, March 4, 2004]

But, as it became clear that the American people were dead set against amnesty, pro-amnesty politicians began using different words such as “earned legalization,” “path to citizenship,” and “comprehensive immigration reform.”

This is especially crucial to the regrettably large number of pseudo-conservatives. They know their constituency—and donor base—is especially against rewarding lawbreakers.

Thus recently a group of conservative evangelical leaders including former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University Law School, and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement on “Just Assimilation Immigration Policy”. They claimed the answer to illegal immigration “is neither amnesty nor mass deportation,” but rather a path to “pursuing earned legal citizenship or legal residency” unless they are “undocumented felons.”  (I. E. guilty of crimes in addition to illegal entry.)

The evangelical leaders then condemned those who use the word amnesty, stating

“Let us be clear – an earned pathway to citizenship is not amnesty. We reject amnesty. And we ask those who label an earned pathway to citizenship as amnesty to stop politicizing this debate needlessly and to honestly acknowledge the difference.” [Evangelical Leaders Unite on Just Assimilation Immigration Policy, Liberty Counsel, May 11, 2010]

Strangely, they do not explain exactly what amnesty is, if it’s not a “path to citizenship”.

But others have given a bit more detail.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims that amnesty means “forgiving people, with no consequence,” while they will require the illegal aliens to jump through a few hoops. [Political Players: Sen. Graham Sees A "Schizophrenic" State of the Union, Brian Goldsmith, The Atlantic, January 29, 2010]

Alex DiBranco, an editor at change.org sums up this argument:

“Amnesty would just say hey, undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, you can all just keep hanging out, no fines, no background checks, no six years of conditions to be met before you can even become a permanent resident. The current and expected proposals in Congress are far from offering that…

“CIR ASAP [the 2009 Gutierrez immigration bill] would require undocumented immigrants that have contributed to the U.S. (through work, studying, and/or military or community service) to pay a fine and undergo a background check that shows up clean, with no serious convictions, in order to obtain a conditional legal residence. They would then have to wait a full six years before applying for a green card, during which time they need to demonstrate that they have continued to contribute to the U.S., chipped in with taxes, kept crime-free, learned English, and met certain civic requirements.” [Senator Graham: No, Comprehensive Immigration Reform Is Not Amnesty, Alex DiBranco, Change.org, February 1, 2010]

Here I will agree with Dibranco: OK, “comprehensive immigration reform” is technically not an amnesty: It’s much worse than amnesty.

Amnesties pardon illegal behavior, but they do not legalize that behavior.  When the IRS offers a tax amnesty, they allow delinquent taxpayers to pay the money they owe without any penalties, but people still need to pay their back taxes. Similarly, libraries allow patrons to return their overdue books without a fine. But they still need to return the books.

When Jimmy Carter issued an amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers, the draft had been over for several years.  The equivalent to “comprehensive immigration reform” for draft dodgers would have been if Carter had allowed them to return and not be subject for the draft, while law abiding citizens were still being drafted and sent to war.

The open borders lobby repeatedly creates a false choice between granting legal status to illegal aliens or mass deportations.

Yet from a legal perspective, a deportation is not a punishment.  It is an administrative procedure.  Every second an illegal alien is in this country they are guilty of “unlawful presence” under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and are here in the “improper time or place” under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The former bars an alien from legally immigrating to this country for 3 years if they have been here illegally for 180 days or less, and 10 years if they have been here longer.  The latter imposes criminal and civil penalties including fines and imprisonment of up to 6 months for the first offense and 2 years for subsequent offenses.

An amnesty properly defined, would still require illegal aliens to leave the country, but waive the criminal penalties.

In fact, the Main Stream Media has had no problem accepting an amnesty as such in foreign countries.  Malaysia was swamped by illegal aliens, with estimates ranging from 600,000 to over a million.  In 2004, the Malaysian government issued an amnesty of sorts: illegals had 3 months to leave—later extended due to the Tsunami—or else they’d be caned.

Reuters reported:

“Malaysia has given illegal immigrants one last chance to leave without punishment, an immigration official said on Wednesday, after an appeal from poorer neighbor Indonesia, the home of most of the immigrants.

“Malaysia wants to send home up to a million illegal immigrants, mostly Indonesians working in poorly paid jobs, despite fears many businesses might be crippled by the withdrawal of cheap labor.

“The crackdown would go ahead but each illegal immigrant caught in a national swoop would get a final chance to quit the country, said Ishak Mohamed, director of enforcement in the immigration department, who leads operations against illegal immigrants.

“‘The operation is in a ‘soft’ phase right now,’ he told Reuters. ‘The approach will be different. Rather than arrest the illegal immigrants, we will advise them to return to their countries of origin and apply for documents from there.’

“Immigration authorities checked 1,497 workers in their first soft operation on Tuesday night, Ishak added, and found that about seven percent had no valid documents at all.

“Facing the threat of jail, fines and, for men under 50, a whipping, nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants left Malaysia under an amnesty during the last three months, Ishak said.” [Malaysia dons velvet glove in immigrant crackdown, Clarence Fernandez, Reuters, February 2, 2005]

(Note that, in addition to providing a crystal clear example of a properly-defined “amnesty”, Malaysia’s policies show that illegal aliens will go home on their own if the government gets tough.)

All this being said, I am happy to call the policies of Gutierrez and Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention an amnesty.  Americans understand amnesty to mean something that allows the illegal alien population in this country to stay here legally.  Attempts to use the words “comprehensive immigration reform” or any other euphemism are designed to hide the actual policies rather than the technical English definition of amnesty.

With all due respect to Orwell, we can’t “bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end” in a Spanish-speaking country.

“Washington Watcher” [email him] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway.

The War Over America’s Past

The War Over America’s Past

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother.

And so we come to the battle over history books in the schools of Texas. Liberals are enraged that a Republican-dominated Board of Education is rewriting the texts. But is the rewrite being done to falsify history, or to undo a liberal bias embedded for decades?

Consider a few of the issues.

The new texts will emphasize that the separation of church and state was never written into the Constitution.

Is that not right? The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion. But, in 1776, nine of the 13 colonies had state religions established in their constitutions.

Thomas Jefferson‘s words about a “separation of church and state” were not written until 1802, when he responded to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association. Not until after World War II did the Supreme Court begin the systematic purge of Christianity from American public life.

Barack Obama may have declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” But Woodrow Wilson said, “America was born a Christian nation,” and Harry Truman wrote Pius XII to affirm, “This is a Christian nation.”

The Texas school board wants the U.S. economic system called “free enterprise” rather than the term Karl Marx used, “capitalism.”

Anything wrong with that?

The Christian Science Monitor cites one professor Phillip VanFossen [email him] as appalled the new history texts will put a “more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt.”

Witch hunt?

The FDR and Truman administrations were shot through with treason. Alger Hiss, who was with FDR at Yalta and Truman in San Francisco when the U.N. was founded, was a Stalinist spy, exposed by Whittaker Chambers and Rep. Richard Nixon.

Harry Dexter White, Treasury’s No. 2, who pushed the infamous Morgenthau Plan to turn Germany into a pastureland, was a Soviet agent, as was White House aide Laughlin Currie and State’s Laurence Duggan, whose treason was confirmed by the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables in 1995.

William Remington at Commerce was convicted of perjury for denying his ties to a spy ring. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for their role in betraying the secrets of the atom bomb.

The VENONA transcripts contained the names of scores of U.S. citizens assisting known Soviet agents during and after World War II.

By 1952, Truman, having been repudiated by his own party in New Hampshire, was down to 23 percent, and was the most unpopular president ever to leave office.

But Joe McCarthy’s approval, four years into this crusade in January 1954, stood at 50 percent, with only 29 percent disapproving.

And was that really a time of anti-communist hysteria?

Why, then, does not a single Gallup poll from 1950 to 1954 show even 1 percent of Americans giving anti-communist extremism or witch hunts or Joe McCarthy as an issue of concern?

Not only did Joe Kennedy Sr. admire and support Joe McCarthy, Jack Kennedy befriended him, Bobby worked for him, Teddy played touch football with him at Hyannis Port and the Kennedy girls dated him.

When, at a Harvard reunion, Jack heard a speaker say he was proud the college never produced an Alger Hiss or Joe McCarthy, JFK roared, “How dare you couple the name of a great patriot with that of a traitor?” and stormed out.

That 1954 was a year of disaster for Joe, with the Army-McCarthy hearings and censure by the Senate, is undeniable. But Joe is hated today not for what he got wrong, but for what he got right.

What is the purpose of teaching America’s children the history of their country? Few said it better than Ronald Reagan in his farewell address: “An informed patriotism is what we want. …

“So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important. … You know, four years ago, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, ‘We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.’ Well, let’s help her keep her word.

“If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”

Teaching American history to America’s children is done so that they will come to know and love their country. And while all nations have sins of scarlet, none has a greater, more glorious past than ours.

And if teaching that is what the Texas Board of Education is all about, ensuring that the children of Texas know both sides of every great American quarrel and come away loving their country all the more, then God bless ‘em.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

Norway/Sweden: When the Locals Become a Minority

Norway/Sweden: When the Locals Become a Minority

More news stories on Scandinavia

Åse Brandvold, Islam in Europe, May 9, 2010

“Why is it racism is we call them ‘black’ and not racism if they call us ‘white’”?

“I never called anybody ‘Nigger’ or ‘Black’ or anything like that. On the other hand, those of us who were White were talked about derogatorily. It was negative to be White, Christianity and Norwegian culture was negative and there were many curses,” says Mari Morken (16) and rattles them off “Whitey, potato and white cheese”

Three years ago she couldn’t take it any more. She moved from a school in Groruddalen to a school on the west side. Every morning she takes the subway to the other side of the city to escape the curses and the bad class-environment. Where she goes now, it’s good to have good grades, and she doesn’t stand out because she’s light. Before she made dark stripes in her medium-blond hair. Now she dyes her hair a bit lighter. She’s in the process of ‘taking back’ her Norwegianity, and is happy to be blond without being branded ‘whore’ and cheap’.

“Ah, girl, blond whore!”

‘Josephine’ was met with these words on the first school day at a high-school in an immigrant-dominated suburb south of Stockholm. Josphine was quite baffled, since aside from her hair color there was nothing about her appearance that would indicate she was promiscuous. She didn’t use makeup and had completely neutral clothing. It was exclusively her hair-color that branded her a ‘whore’.

‘Josephine’ is one of the informants for researchers Maria Bäckman, who did an ethnographic field study in a suburb south of Stockholm, where ethnic Swedes make up about 20% of the population. They’re therefore a minority. Klassekampen met Bäckman this week when she visited the University in Oslo and the Culcom research program (cultural complexity in the new Norway). She’s the first in Sweden who researched ethnic Swedes as a minority. A similar study was not done in Norway.

“In the suburbs the invisible Swedishness become visible. Ethnic Swedes experience being defined and labeled by their culture and religion, similarly with minorities of a different background,” Bäckman told Klassekampen.

In her study she focused on ethnic Swedish girls. They experience being linked to the notion of free, Swedish sexuality, which in the densely immigrant suburbs is not necessarily linked with something positive. The strategy for the suburb girls was therefore to play down their Swedish identity.

“Several dyed their hair. Not necessarily because they wanted to look like immigrants, but because they didn’t want to look so Swedish,” says Bäckman.

“Yes, it’s typical, Exactly like that.” Mari Morken nodded vigorously to us from the other side of the cafe table when we repeated some of what Maria Bäckman has found out. “I was called a whore so many times, I became immune.”

We meet her and her mother, Kristin Pedersen, for a talk about why Mari changed schools. They tell of systematic bullying and harassment since Mari reached puberty when she was 10-11, till she transferred school when she was 13.

Pedersen is still upset at the school’s lack of handling of the case.

“They laid the responsibility for the situation on Mari. She just had to cope, because she was strong in resources, white middle-class. But Mari also has a right to a good and safe environment,” says Pedersen, who tried to address the harassment repeatedly without anything being done. She was told that the bullies had a very difficult time at home.

Mari says that now, after three years, she’s distanced herself enough to come forward with it. “I want to show that I won’t let it break me.”

Although school was a nightmare, they like their home area, and they have a good relationship with their Pakistani neighbors. Mari remembers her childhood as safe and nice. She also enjoyed school during the first years. In first grade a third of the students were of non-Norwegian background. When she left, barely a third of the class were ethnic Norwegian.

“At first all the Norwegian girls were active in class, but in the end we Norwegian girls sat in the back of the classroom and were silent as a mouse while the others made a racket,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen thinks it happens when the group of immigrant background becomes too big and dominating. Something which isn’t positive. The elementary school Mari started at, has just 5% ethnic Norwegians. Mari knows three girls who started there but then moved to a school with a smaller proportion of immigrants. All the girls are naturally blond, but had dyed their hair dark.

Althoguh Mari got negative attention from the boys, it was a girls’ gang made up of an ethnic Norwegian and three girls of Pakistani background who devastated her.

“the girls too on the boys’ role in a way. They were into fighting and conflicts,” says Mari, who was also physically attacked.

Once, the situation escalated so much that the teacher chose to calm the situation by asking Mari to go home. After school eight of the students trooped home with her.

For a long time Mari didn’t dare go to the local center. She knew that the girls had told older boys in the A and B gangs [ed: Pakistani gangs] that she had said nasty things about their skin color and religion.

“That’s what provokes them the most,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen says that boys who parents are assumed to be linked to the gangs, had for a long time acted threateningly towards Mari’s father.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mari was that when she was in 7th grade, she got the responsibility to teach the others in class choreography for a school play. Mari was mainly active in dance and the school therefore thought she could take the job. Of course everything went wrong when she was supposed to teach the bullies.

At that point, Pedersen and her husband got tired of the lack of response form the school and complained about it to the county, which agreed with them on several points. A few days after they lodged a complaint, the principal was put on early retirement.

Klassekampen has been in contact with the retired headmaster. She says it’s a positive thing that we’re dealing with the issues regarding how we live together, but thinks maybe we should take with somebody else. For reasons of confidentiality, she didn’t want to go into the specific harassment case. She didn’t want to comment on the decision of the county either.

“Before I always went in long pants and t-shirts, regardless of how warm it was,” says Mari.

She changed after transferring schools. She replaced the hooded sweater with tight clothes and makeup. This summer she will go with a singlet, which she didn’t dare do before. She was ashamed if her bra strap was showing. But now she’s decided not to care about the stares.

Maria Bäckman’s field work outside Stockholm shows the same trend. Girls dress neutrally and tone down their femininity, in order to avoid stares and attention. Another thing she found out was that several went with a cross. Not necessarily because they were so Christian but because it was embarrassing not to have a religious identity.

Mari nods vigorously again.

“I know people who go with a cross in order to be accepted. It’s a little like going with brand clothes. There are just some codes you need to follow.”

“Now I’ve been confirmed secularly, but I think it would be difficult to be accepted for that, if I had continued to go to a school in Groruddalen,” she said.

Though Mari doesn’t see herself as Christian, she sees Christianity as ‘her religion’.

“We learned more about the others’ religion than about our own.”

“We thought it was more exciting with other religions, but our religion never got the same positive attention,” she says.

Upbringing, education and living conditions are the key words for the government’s effort in Groruddalen, which will continue till 2016. Mother and daughter have noticed that there’s new recreational activities for the youth, but Mari has stayed away, both because she’s uncomfortable in the community, and because she feels foreign in those activities.

“They reach group who don’t have any activities today. It doesn’t unify. Many of the ethnic Norwegian don’t go to this. It actually reinforces the differences,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen thinks the problem is the attitudes of the responsible politicians and the professions who work with integration.

“They need to understand that were we live, we could all feel like a minority. Therefore it’s also necessary to have a minority perspective for the ethnic Norwegian parts of the population,” she says.

When it comes to the teachers and school administration in Groruddalen, Pedersen thinks that they should be trained in creating a positive environment.

“They are so afraid of being called racists. They fear getting involved with the difficult things, because they’re afraid it will be used against them,” she says.

Source: Klassekampen (Norwegian)

Original article

Email Åse Brandvold at ase.brandvold@klassekampen.no.

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

Hard Line on Immigration Marks GOP Race in Arizona

Hard Line on Immigration Marks GOP Race in Arizona

More news stories on Elections

Peter Slevin, Washington Post, May 22, 2010

J.D. Hayworth is a {snip} border hawk who called his book about immigration policy “Whatever It Takes.”

But [John] McCain, seeking his fifth term, is not about to be out-toughed this year. Once seen as more moderate on immigration, McCain has also endorsed the state law [SB 1070], which requires police to question people they “reasonably suspect” are here illegally. And he wants to send thousands of National Guard soldiers to the border.

McCain’s advertisements boast that he is “Arizona’s last line of defense.” In his newest spot, he walks the border with a county sheriff, who turns to McCain and declares, “You’re one of us.” {snip}

McCain’s repositioning has fueled Hayworth’s claim to be the “consistent conservative” while the incumbent is at best unpredictable. {snip}

Although McCain won the Republican nomination for president just two years ago, Hayworth pays little homage to his pedigree. He foresees an upset, thanks to the country’s anti-incumbent mood and the candidacy of a 73-year-old politician who ran an uneven presidential campaign and is distrusted by many conservatives.

Yet McCain remains the favorite with the Aug. 24 primary still three months away. He has money in the bank—$4.6 million to Hayworth’s $861,000 at the end of March—and a lead in the polls. Public Policy Polling showed McCain 11 points ahead in mid-April and the Rocky Mountain Poll showed him leading by 26 points. No top-tier Democrat has entered the race, which makes the winner of the GOP primary the favorite to win in November.

{snip}

“We’ve recognized correctly that we need to be aggressive,” said Brian Rogers, McCain’s campaign spokesman. “Immigration is the dominant issue. It’s that and the economy, and they’re connected in people’s minds.”

McCain is likely to benefit from the party’s decision to hold an open primary, allowing independents, who typically favor the senator, to cast ballots. He also won the endorsement of former running mate Sarah Palin and got a boost when Arizona’s four largest tea party groups decided not to endorse a candidate.

{snip}

Hayworth, too, was once more moderate on immigration, and he faces his own challenges, including ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. As a six-term congressman, he used sports skyboxes that Abramoff billed to clients, but did not report that fact to the Federal Election Commission until Abramoff’s criminal troubles became public. Hayworth’s campaign committee later repaid the Choctaw and Chitimacha tribes $12,800 for using the suites.

{snip}

In Sun City, where more than 100 people gathered under a golf course gazebo to hear Hayworth, he said to applause that when he served as a congressman, he took an oath “to the Constitution of the United States and not the charter of the United Nations.”

{snip}

Original article

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

On Immigration, Racial Divide Runs Deep

More news stories on Immigration Law

Mark Murray, MSNBC, May 26, 2010

White and Latino Americans are deeply divided over immigration, their allegiances to the nation’s political parties and their opinions about President Barack Obama, according to a new NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll.

And in the wake of Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law, the survey suggests that Republicans could get an immediate political boost, but may face a long-term problem among Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group.

{snip}

Breaking down the white-Latino divide

In the poll, 61 percent say they favor Arizona’s new anti-illegal immigration law, {snip}.

But there’s a divide among white and Latino respondents: 70 percent of whites support the law, versus just 31 percent of Latinos. In fact, 58 percent of Latinos say they strongly oppose it.

That’s not the only chasm between White and Latino America. While 68 percent of Latinos believe that immigration strengthens the United States, just 43 percent of whites think that.

And they differ in their perceptions about Obama and the political parties. Although the president’s job-approval rating sits at 48 percent overall, down two points from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month, only 38 percent of whites approve of Obama’s job, versus 68 percent of Latinos who do.

What’s more, 37 percent of whites view the Republican Party favorably, while just 22 percent of Latinos have a favorable impression of the GOP.

And although only 34 percent of whites hold a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, 54 percent of Latinos view the party in a positive light.

{snip}

Short-term and long-term political fallout

According to the poll, Arizona’s law could benefit Republicans in the short term if they choose to make it a campaign issue. {snip}

Forty percent of registered voters say they would side with a Republican congressional candidate who supports the law, compared with 26 percent who would back a Democratic candidate who opposes it.

In particular, Hart notes that women over 50 and white suburban women—who tend to support generic Democratic congressional candidates—are more inclined to vote for a Republican who supports the Arizona law.

{snip}

{snip} Latinos remain a sleeping—yet growing—political giant. In the poll, 23 percent of Latino respondents said they aren’t registered to vote, versus 12 percent of whites and 16 percent of African Americans.

In addition, Latinos under the age of 40 have a stronger attachment to President Obama (73 percent of them approve of his job) and a stronger dislike of Arizona’s law (75 percent of them oppose it) than older Latinos do.

And Latinos young and old think Democrats would do a better job than Republicans in protecting the interests of minorities (58-11 percent), in representing the opportunity to move up the economic ladder (46-20 percent), in dealing with immigration (37-12 percent) and in promoting strong moral values (33-23 percent).

The only advantage that they gave Republicans was in enforcing security along the U.S.-Mexico border (31-20 percent).

Early support for comprehensive immigration reform

{snip}

Yet the NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll shows early public support for comprehensive immigration reform, with 60 percent of all adults favoring it and 29 percent opposing it.

Also, supermajorities back the individual components of this reform.

For example: 73 percent support imposing new fines on businesses that hire illegal immigrants; 71 percent support increasing border security by building a fence along the border and training more Border Patrol agents; and 65 percent support allowing undocumented immigrants who are already in the country to pay a fine, learn English and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become U.S. citizens.

McInturff, however, cautions against reading too much into this early support—given that the poll didn’t test the language that opponents of comprehensive immigration reform would use. In addition, he points out that only 19 percent of all adults say they strongly favor the legislation, which suggests soft support.

{snip}

Other results

Here are some other results from the NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll:

{snip}

* And 49 percent say the U.S. should continue to grant citizenship to all children born in the United States, versus 46 percent who believe the law should be changed so that children of illegal immigrants are not automatically granted citizenship. (Among Latinos, a whopping 79 percent believe the country should continue to grant automatic citizenship.)

Original article

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

Locust:

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Lets cut the B.S. democraps and liberal progressives alike don’t want to secure the border because it would cut the flow of Latino voters coming from Latin America. Republicans only offer lip service and delay the inevitable formation of a white nationalist party. We can’t save this nation. Even if we militarize the border now, what about those already here? What about their anchor babies? What about those people who are citizens but whose parents came her illegal, that now vote in our elections, (anchor adults)? The nation is done people, all we can do now is prepare for the economic collapse and resulting ethnic war that is to come. Don’t join the tea parties, it will do little too late, buy land away from the major population centers, stock pile guns, ammo, food, water and anything else you will need to survive. We will retake our nation, and those who have destroyed our nation will be wiped clean from the earth.

Where is Inclusiveness Taking Us?

Where is Inclusiveness Taking Us?

By James Kalb

[The eighth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII.]

What’s it like to live in a modern, diverse, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive, multicultural society? Everyday experience in early twenty-first century America is enough to sketch the situation in bold strokes.

Growing up absurd

Such a society lacks sustaining stories, symbols, and models of a good life, and indeed intentionally eradicates them. Such things are racist, since they reflect the specifics of a particular culture, and sexist and heteronormative, since they express fundamental patterns of human life. They’re also theocratic, since they connect the order of human life to a particular understanding of the order of the world.

The result of the lack is that life, art, and human relations become crude, rude, perverse, willful, violent, and boring. Doing away with recognized patterns of a good life frees up the baser motives: lust, envy, ambition, greed, hate, domination. Personal attachments and sentimental altruism provide some leavening, but without concrete images of moral order there’s nothing reliable to limit immediate impulse and bring it into a humane system.

In such a society education disintegrates for inability to treat one thing as better than another. Human personality comes to base itself on narcissistic self-affirmation that masks emotional fragility and depression. Young people deprived of culture invent their own or absorb commercial pop culture. They live in a world populated by jocks, nerds, wimps, players, hipsters, couch potatoes, and other trivia. If they reject such identities they define themselves by reference to “alternative” culture, a negation of the trivial that lacks substantive content and has no way to rise higher than what it rejects.

Nor do they grow up. How could they, where there’s nothing to grow into and no serious responsibilities to give adult activities weight? Marriage and family can’t amount to much among people who idealize self-creation and feel no settled connection to anything. So young people don’t get married, or if they do their marriages are sterile, fragile, or both. Without a higher pattern to aspire to the relation between the sexes sinks into low-level war: hos and playahs at the lower levels, game and the New Girl Order at the higher. Refugees from the conflict swell the ranks of homosexuals, porn fans, video game addicts, feminists, misogynists, and the new sexless.

Children are badly brought up, never born at all, or brought up to be winners in a competitive game of careers and consumption. Foreign workers are imported to fill the gap. Their presence and numbers help disintegrate weakened local cultures while absence from their homeland disrupts their own. Those who assimilate soon reproduce the problems of the native population; those who don’t sink to the level of a hereditary and radically uncultured proletariat.

The older generation, who after all created or at least accepted the situation, are no better. They have gotten along by going along, and soon enough accommodate themselves to whatever comes up. More often they accept it as good and take advantage of what it offers.

A world without independent standards

Under such conditions personal identity disintegrates, and with it the possibility of self-rule. No one knows who he is, so no one knows how to speak or act. Manners become careless and awkward, conversation is shot through with “likes” and “whatevers,” and standards of conduct (other than political correctness) become vague to the point of uselessness.

Normal spontaneous responses are silenced, because they involve prejudgment and prejudice. Spontaneity needs a background of normality, and the normal has been abolished. Pretense and moral posturing become the norm. If you want acceptance you have to pretend that your responses are other than they are and the world is something other than what it evidently is. The only escape from pretense is crude willfulness, and there’s plenty of that as well.

No one has an assured place, so there’s always something to prove. If you aren’t a psychopath able to invent a persona and impose it on others you are defined by your relation to a public order based on abstractions, formal institutions, and whim. You are your bank balance, job title, and consumption choices. Freedom becomes career, consumption, private indulgence, and public servitude. Ambition becomes unrewarding, but to give it up, in the absence of stable higher goals, is to sink into the stupor, self-indulgence, resentment, and brutality of a growing class of proles.

Intelligent public life disappears. The fluidity of relationships does away with common understandings and conventions based on extended common experience of life. There’s no answerability and no basis for loyalty. All is slogan, spin, propaganda and bullying, with certified experts trying to take charge in the name of their version of rationality. The outcome is suspicion, inefficiency, crime, corruption, and irrationality.

In response to the new public order, architecture becomes inhuman and disorienting. The arts disintegrate into commercial junk for the masses, official state-subsidized high culture for the classes, and various alternative expressions that show dissatisfaction with what’s on offer but lack a positive vision. All favor the regime, since that’s what there is, while pretending to a radically critical stance that in substance mostly consists of attacks on the regime’s opponents.

In the background, of course, life goes on. People have no principled way to oppose the regime but maintain an order to live by however they can. They still go to church and get married, do their best for their children, friends, and neighbors, and are often much better than their stated principles. If nothing else, they try to be “nice.” Even in the arts a great deal of good work goes on, springing out of a natural love for what’s good but deprived of recognition and theoretical justification. The good must be excused by its lack of authority, so minor forms provide shelter. Genre fiction, gardening, and cooking enjoy a comparative golden age.

Progress or decadence?

The established order reflects established beliefs, so it has its defenders, and they make some points that are hard to deny. If career and consumption are the ultimate human goods, then an overriding emphasis on how they are apportioned makes some sense. And if racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, simply as such, are ultimate moral horrors, then our public life today is decisively better than in the past, because it insists so strongly on suppressing them.

Are career and consumption really the best things though? And are traditional discriminations so very bad, or even–simply as such–bad at all? After all, they have always permeated normal social life, and not everyone wants to live with permanent radical revolution for the sake of an impossible egalitarian ideal.

People view such issues differently. Some find particular social institutions and the attitudes and standards that support them intolerably burdensome. Those who feel burdened may dream of getting rid of them, or at least radically changing them or depriving them of authority.

The point applies to all institutions, not just those targeted by inclusiveness. The standards that foster personal freedom and security also burden some more than others. There are some who would have been happier in Calvin’s Geneva, others who would have been happy as Vikings and are miserable today because of limited opportunities for pillage and plunder.

Nobody pays much attention to radical Calvinists or Viking wannabes, since the interests and institutions now dominant would be injured by the rule of the saints or unrestrained brigandage and piracy. In contrast, complaints about inherited arrangements that stand in the way of absolute rule by the institutions of liberal modernity are given privileged status. They trump the views of those attached to traditional institutions like family and religion that are at odds with what is now considered just, decent, and rational.

Burdens of judgment

It’s always possible to argue over facts and what they mean. If the liberal order makes us narcissistic, maybe that’s superior consciousness of our freedom and human worth. If it leads to broken homes, that could show it empowers us to bail out of bad relationships. Also, people at the top buy into the post-’60s moral order more consistently than others, and it hasn’t injured them as much. So maybe the solution is for everyone to get with the post-60s program and join in the yuppie lifestyle.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? It’s impossible to decide without adopting a view of human nature and flourishing. The difficulty is how to discuss something so basic. It’s hard to deal with fundamental issues in any event, and liberalism has a variety of ways to silence discussion and impose its own view by default. It couldn’t work otherwise, since it insists on getting particular results efficiently while claiming to make discussion sovereign and free.

Subjectivism helps square the circle. Modernity denies objective goods as well as human nature, except by defining man as he who creates himself and posits his own goods. That’s why racism, sexism, and homophobia are considered so horrible–they put us in set categories, with some more highly regarded than others. That’s also why it’s so hard to argue against liberal modernity. If we say it leads to bad things its defenders tell us it’s all a matter of taste and interpretation and therefore subjective. Since argument requires shared authoritative principles, there’s no way to continue the discussion.

Consensus might provide a guide, but which consensus? The consensus of the moment differs from consensus over time. The former is a matter of polling data, the latter of accumulated traditional understandings. Each has its weaknesses. Traditional understandings might be outdated and unjust, while modern methods of propaganda can make current opinion more an amplified echo of official views than a reality check.

In any event, contemporary liberals don’t really accept consensus as authoritative, since it can lead to results at odds with their views (as they say, to “a denial of human rights”). The best thing to do, then, is to adopt a system that gives equal play to every scheme of value and belief–in other words, to adopt liberalism–and let liberal functionaries administer social life in the name of freedom, equality, and neutral expertise. Staff the Supreme Court with graduates of Yale and Harvard Law School whose personal background distinguishes them from America’s white Protestant majority, staff the major media with their friends, and let them run everything.

The consensus liberals propose as authoritative is thus the expert liberal consensus. Unfortunately, the consensus of certified experts–academic thought–has the same problems as academic art. It’s hard to argue against, partly because its proponents refuse to recognize the legitimacy of outsiders’ criticisms, but it falls short because it leaves out whatever can’t be made explicit and reduced to the terms of current expert discussion.

In addition, experts have an interest in the abolition of traditional arrangements. Such arrangements enable people to run their own affairs by their own standards, so they’re at odds with the interests of the academic and professional classes. Asking experts about tradition is like asking auto manufacturers about public transportation alternatives. They undoubtedly know a great deal that’s relevant to the issue, but why trust their judgment?

Discerning benefits

On the whole, the dominance of liberalism rests largely on a general sense of the superiority of the present and those who dominate public life. People today are convinced they’re radically superior, morally and intellectually, to those of the past. They were bigots in the old days, and bigots are inferior, so why pay attention to what they thought?

On such a view, present-day thought has succeeded in extricating itself from inveterate error. We now see the obvious, so that any drug-addled rocker against racism is justified in looking down on former saints and sages. Our very self-centeredness has become a virtue, since it cuts the ties that lead people to prefer some to others. We have passed an irreversible historical turning point.

Still, that outlook might only show that our perspective is awry and we’ve lost our grip. It’s hazardous to assume that we’ve suddenly become smarter and better than anyone else who ever lived. Those who have seen the future and know it works have been wrong before. Pride goes before destruction, bubbles eventually burst, the dreams of youth dissipate, and the world seems very different the morning after.

Overall consequences may provide the only way to decide the issue. If people really know better today, their superior understanding should make itself felt throughout intellectual and practical life. The record is very mixed in that regard. The progress of modern natural science shows that our quantitative knowledge is more developed than in the past. With regard to quality, though, intangibles like artistic achievement suggest severe regression.

Quantity and quality

It’s evident that the most basic judgments are qualitative, since quantitative judgments require a system of standards already in place to tell us how to form, relate, and interpret them. How do we classify what we observe? What constitutes an explanation? Does a particular explanation make sense? What does it make sense for us to do? Such questions are much more qualitative than quantitative.

For that reason, the difficulty people have dealing with qualitative issues today suggests caution in accepting their judgments on basic matters. That’s all the more so, since inclusiveness and the cult of expertise distort and disrupt thought by forbidding us to think with our own minds and discuss with our own voices. They demand the abolition of common sense in favor of an artificial system of thought–backed by the power of government and all institutional authority–that excludes important aspects of reality and tells us a priori how the remainder has to be.

So what to do? In basic matters we can only be guided by our own reason, experience, and judgment. In a time when we’re told that common sense and past knowledge are misleading, so we should accept on faith what the experts tell us, each of us has to make his own survey of the situation and decide what–and who–to believe. In particular, we must each decide the effects of inclusiveness: whether it shows the way to a better world or a worse, and whether it will work or fall apart.

Modern failures

People claim that “affirmative action” and similar programs have noble motivations. Why believe it? They’re like any government program that advantages some at the expense of others. Some support is no doubt well-intentioned, but some comes from self-seeking and from dislike of ordinary white men on the part of minorities as well as whites who want to get a leg up at the expense of other whites.

In any event, motivation does not guarantee results. When we look at the situation candidly, it seems doubtful that many people gain overall from inclusiveness. People are in a better position than government to sort themselves out.

Inclusiveness creates losers no less than exclusion does. Affirmative action is institutionalized injustice, with a direct victim for each direct beneficiary. Frank Ricci is one of the few who successfully fought back, and he had to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Nor is it just those edged out by the less qualified who lose. Institutionalized lying and favoritism hurt everyone, especially when driven to ideological extremes. Who can doubt that medical school affirmative action kills patients? Who wants to fly on an airplane flown by an affirmative action pilot?

More generally, we all do better in an intelligently-guided society, and inclusiveness makes it impossible to discuss human affairs realistically. The most basic and obvious features of social life become unmentionable. Sample consequences include reckless mortgage lending, degradation of civil service tests, and Nidal Malik Hasan.

Beneficiaries injured

Even supposed beneficiaries suffer, and not only from general social inefficiency. Inclusiveness has deprived whole communities of a reality check. Is it good sense to live cocooned in patronizing lies that validate the prejudices they are intended to counteract?

Antidiscrimination rules make it risky to deal with those they’re intended to protect. Apparent qualifications become unreliable, firing becomes difficult if things don’t work out, and those protected can no longer make up for risks and uncertainties by offering to work for less even initially. As a purely rational matter it’s better to have nothing to do with them.

If you can’t avoid dealing with members of protected groups, you will try to play it safe. Like much protective legislation, antidiscrimination laws help those with special connections and qualifications, who seem safer to deal with, but hurt the less advantaged. They therefore increase the inequalities within less successful groups. It’s worth noting in that regard that only a third of the black students admitted to Harvard are American blacks: the rest (like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Colin Powell) are African, West Indian, or biracial in origin.

The civil rights revolution has led members of less successful groups to put their hopes in society in general–practically speaking, the government–rather than each other and their own efforts, institutions, and relationships. It has induced mainstream organizations to bribe talented minority group members away from their own communities, thus neutralizing minority leadership and turning it into a privileged self-seeking clique that uses minority problems to extract additional benefits for themselves from white institutions.

Such laws do not even satisfy their direct beneficiaries, since they induce them to build their careers on grievance and spend their lives working with people whom they suspect would rather work with someone else. What does it do to people to become part of such arrangements? If there were no antidiscrimination laws people who wanted to work together would find each other. In the long run that would bring a better way of life and more happiness than current arrangements.

Local social breakdown

Inclusiveness demands more than lies, regimentation, and stupid decisions. It demands that traditional moral standards applicable to private life be made strictly private and so deprived of any authority. The alternative would be lifestyle and cultural discrimination.

The result has been disruption of the traditional and informal institutions by which men live, liberation of destructive and self-destructive behavior, and frustration of the ends inclusiveness claims for itself. The weak and marginal have become weaker and more marginal, resulting in special injury for those without resources and dependent on their connections to others. Thus, the loosening of sex roles and sexual standards has separated men and women, and the result has been to feminize poverty and deprive children of fathers. The consequences have been especially bad among black people, where it has radicalized the battle of the sexes and made the men all but irrelevant.

More generally, the new order has turned millions of people into drug addicts, criminals, crime victims, divorced and unwed mothers, abused and neglected children, homosexuals dead of AIDS, and girls abused by their mothers’ boyfriends. Should those people–those who are still alive–be grateful to it?

Specific groups

Antidiscrimination laws and related changes in racial and cultural attitudes are thought especially necessary for black people, but to all appearances they’ve done little for them economically and injured other aspects of their lives. Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Oprah, and Condoleeza Rice don’t outweigh the general tale of unsuccess.

Loss of legitimate particularity hurts Hispanics as well. Social scientists have been puzzled by the “healthy immigrant paradox” that new immigrants are healthier than second and third generation U.S. residents from the same countries. The paradox of declining well-being in the land of wealth and opportunity applies to more than physical health. For example, Hispanic teenagers who usually speak English are twice as likely to be sexually active as those who usually speak Spanish.

Such puzzles become less puzzling if the situation is viewed from a human rather than technocratic point of view. The aspects of life that most affect well-being, like sexual conduct, depend on culture. Since culture is particular and depends on setting, large-scale migration into an alien environment disrupts it and degrades its ability to function.

The degradation increases as assimilation goes forward, and the more inclusive the society the greater the effect is likely to be. Immigration enthusiasts insist that assimilation works, since the children of Chinese immigrants pick up American pop culture. That is believable, but who wants the habits and attitudes unsupervised teenagers pick up from a commercialized and bureaucracy-ridden environment to become the basis of our common life?

The more diverse our society the more likely such a result becomes, and since we’re all living together it applies not only to immigrants but to the native population. Why would anyone choose such an outcome?

Legitimation of hatred

Antidiscrimination laws set people against each other by creating entitlements based on a few characteristics, principally race. The most basic task of their proponents is to raise consciousness: to use divisive rhetoric, propagate horror stories, violate the law to demonstrate contempt for an insufficiently reformed social order, and so on.

The result is universal resentment as governing elites respond to pressure by making the wickedness of white males an all-purpose explanation for everybody’s problems. Those targeted resent it, those benefited justify the system by keeping alive real or imagined grievances, and arbitrary interference in normal social functioning further increases ill-feeling.

The system has its rewards, and people become attached to it. The doctrine of majority bigotry justifies the efforts of our rulers to free themselves from majority control, and many of their hangers-on find that they enjoy the opportunities the system offers for licensed hatred and abuse of their fellow citizens.

Abusive conduct has its practical advantages. Words like “racist” resolve all issues against their targets by putting them outside the sphere of normal human relations. They serve the same function as “traitor” and “nigger.” Their use to shut down discussion is rising, even with regard to issues that have very little to do with race. President Bush said opposition to the Iraq war was racist, President Obama’s supporters say the same about opposition to their man or any of his policies.

The accusations are not purely cynical. People see hatred everywhere, if only because they see it in themselves. The abolition of positive principles of connection make enmity a natural assumption, and the abolition of culture gives prominence to the crudest connections and oppositions. Hence the paranoia about racism. And in any case social cohesion must have some basis. In the absence of a positive principle it must be based on opposition, so in the advanced liberal state it is based on hatred of the presumed enemies of the regime: the racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes.

Where will it go?

Inclusiveness is not a strength but a “challenge”–that is, a problem–and it’s one that liberal society can neither avoid or solve. It’s part of the general problem of advanced liberalism: the liberal ideal of a perfect system of perfect freedom leads in practice to a perpetual tug-of-war between ideological tyranny and unprincipled chaos.

Ideological tyranny seems invincible just now, but unprincipled chaos is likely to win in the end. In politics as in physics systems tend toward entropy. The tendency is strengthened by the tendency of a multicultural ruling apparatus toward inefficiency, corruption, and stupidity, and by its policy of concentrating power in its own hands by getting rid of implicit and informal principles of social order.

That policy is intrinsic to the regime. Liberalism is progressive, and it values clarity, logic, and explicit principles. For that reason it tends toward a continual self-purification. It trumps everything, demands perfection, and stands for principles that make normal social functioning impossible. It destroys standards of competence and the informal habits and understandings needed for formal institutions to function. It erodes public spirit and rectitude by sacrificing social ties to self-definition. And it makes it impossible to recognize obvious problems and solutions.

It therefore destroys the conditions of its own existence. Its bad effects can be masked to some degree by making it universally compulsory so they become part of the general conditions of life. They’re nonetheless real, and lead to increasingly radical dysfunction. There’s no limit in principle to the damage it can do. The real question is how destructive it becomes before it’s abandoned or falls apart.

How will it end?

The future is hard to predict, and liberalism is adaptable. From seeming death it has come back to life more than once. Still, nothing lasts forever, and a failing system can continue in form while disappearing in substance. That may be the most likely outcome of the current situation. If the inclusivist regime bogs down in its own inefficiency, corruption, and stupidity, as seems likely, that could slow down its self-destruction while turning it into something quite different from what was intended.

Corruption saved the Soviet system for a time by limiting the destructiveness of its principles and allowing illegal but useful arrangements to function. The same could happen with the current regime. Its inability to control social relations as it would like could help preserve it, at least in form. Economic and social life involve informal arrangements–family connections and other informal networks of trust–that are very difficult to suppress. Such arrangements are generally racist and sexist, since they’re based on common blood, sexual bonds, and common heritage, and in any case they’re indifferent to multicultural sensitivities. They get things done, though, and are very difficult to do away with.

Other important escapes from inclusiveness that may extend the life of the system at the expense of its integrity include homeschooling and communities centered around local churches. In an inclusivist society such arrangements, which after all involve self-segregation, should not exist at all. They can be awkward to do away with, however, if only because it would be difficult to suppress them without suppressing Jews and Muslims.

They are likely to survive in America, where they can appeal to ideals of freedom as well as diversity, if not elsewhere in the West. In the coming decades it will matter a great deal how much the state will allow such independent arrangements to thwart diversity and other schemes of social improvement. In principle it shouldn’t, but it may have little choice. To allow life to go on ideology often has to avert its gaze from what’s actually happening. Controlled economies lead to black markets that are troublesome to get rid of, and a similar principle may apply to controlled societies in general.

It’s likely that the current regime will become less effective while maintaining its official ideology, and tend toward a pattern common in ethnically divided regions of the Third World: a radically divided society with little public life, a government that combines weakness, corruption, hypocrisy, and tyranny, and crony capitalism combined with socialist rhetoric that no one believes. Officially liberal inclusiveness would reign, but below the surface the real life of the society would go on in ethnic, kinship, and religious networks.

The most obvious fate of the New World Order, then, can be seen in the radically diverse and cosmopolitan–and therefore radically particularist and inward turning–way of life that has long been established in the Cradle of Civilization. In America, we are already headed in that direction. Instead of bazaars, walled urban quarters, and Mamluks we have shopping malls, gated communities, and Elena Kagan, but how much difference does it make? At a time when we are trying to change the Middle East into Iowa through foreign policy and military intervention, our domestic and immigration policy is changing Iowa into the Middle East.

What next?

Every tomorrow has another tomorrow. Chaos doesn’t last forever because people can’t live that way. Some principle will eventually create or impose a new order. In the Middle East that principle was Islam. That result makes sense, since absence of intelligent public life should correspond to the dominance of an aggressive simple-minded religion. If the West becomes the Middle East, then, it will likely end up Muslim.

That result isn’t inevitable. Scientism, liberalism, and inclusiveness lead to a radically cosmopolitan form of society that becomes radically inward-turning, because otherwise it can’t function at all. The one extreme provokes the other. The great opponent of both is the Roman Church. Its doctrines of Creation and Incarnation and its hierarchical and sacramental structure make the Church local as well as universal by nature, and enable it to reconcile universality and public reason with necessary particularity.

That combination of qualities made Europe what it has been and enabled the Catholic West to turn the tide against Islam at Tours and later at Lepanto and Vienna and in Sicily, Crete, and Spain. Unity in diversity was our strength. On that view, the survival of the European form of society depends on Catholicism, and the issue for the future is whether the Church can pull itself together, revert to type, and revitalize the West.

That seems an unlikely prospect. Still, we live in an age of dissolution from which no one seems exempt. The EU and Islam have at least as many problems as the Church. There’s a race to the bottom, and we can’t all lose. In the end, whoever is best founded–whoever has the best account of life and the world and the most intelligent and flexible scheme of authority–will have the best shot at dealing effectively with whatever complications life throws up. Truth matters in the end, so how you think things will end up depends on what you think is so. We shall see.

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Article Info

Published in: Untimely Observations

Article topics:

• liberalism
• Diversity
• Culture
• inclusiveness
• Islam
• Decline and Fall
• Catholicism

James Kalb

James Kalb is a lawyer and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He recently came out with his first book, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command. His online home is jimkalb.com.

Arizona Ethnic Studies Exposed

Arizona Ethnic Studies Exposed

More news stories on Indoctrination

Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Academia, May 24, 2010

One of Bill Ayers’ courses at the University of Illinois includes Pedagogy of the Oppressed as required reading. Author Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist, declared:

“This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”

It turns out that the Freire book is required reading in “Raza Studies” or Mexican-American courses in the high schools in Tucson, Arizona, where students have been protesting Arizona’s new immigration law. Other required books are Occupied America by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor emeritus of Chicano studies at California State University in Northridge (CSUN), and Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist.

Occupied America, the fifth edition, {snip} refers to white people as “gringos” and actually includes a quotation on page 323 from Jose Angel Gutierrez of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), who was angry over the cancellation of a government program. He declared:

“We are fed up. We are going to move to do away with the injustice to the Chicano and if the ‘gringo’ doesn’t get out of our way, we will stampede over him.”

{snip}

The Arizona citizens upset about this kind of material said that they initiated an investigation into the problem back in 2007 and found it difficult to get access to the books. One activist said the concern began when parents came to be aware of violence in the schools directed against white and black children. “This investigation was undertaken to find the roots of this hate,” she told me. Another person, in turn, “told me the books in their Mexican-American classes are kept under ‘lock and key’ and the kids can’t even take them home. She said she asked to see them but they were very secretive about them and she was prohibited.”

{snip} Eventually, a list of books was produced, and a controversy ensued.

The footnotes for Pedagogy of the Oppressed tell us a lot about the nature of the book. Sources include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Mao, Herbert Marcuse, and Vladimir Lenin.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), which Bill Ayers serves as a vice-president, includes a “Paulo Freire Special Interest Group” in his honor. {snip}

More open than even Bill Ayers about the mission, Paula Allman wrote Critical Education Against Global Capitalism, incorporating the ideas of Marx, Freire and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist who emphasized the subversion of Western cultural institutions such as the educational system. Allman is in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Nottingham, England. The foreword to her book is by UCLA Professor Peter McLaren, one of those on Bill Ayers’ own “blog roll” of favorite websites, and an open advocate of “Revolution as education,” the subtitle of one of his books. Allman, he wrote, was “part of a bold new group of Marxist educationalists in Britain . . .”

{snip}

The “Oppressed” in America

In the hands of a skillful “educator,” and in the context of the reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Occupied America, the apparent aim is to convince the Mexican-American youth that they are the victims of the “oppressors”—white society. Occupied America opens with a map of “The Mexican Republic, 1821,” showing Mexico in control of the Southwest United States. The subtitle of Occupied America, “A History of Chicanos,” sets the tone. Freire promises them “liberation” from the gringos.

{snip}

In a lengthy analysis, Stern [Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute] notes that Pedagogy of the Oppressed “has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs” and that one study found that it was “one of the most frequently assigned texts” in the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country. “These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field,” he noted.

Original article

(Posted on May 25, 2010)

---

Comments

1 — Michael C. Scott wrote at 6:29 PM on May 25:

Liberation from the “Gringos” is very easily achieved: Stay in Mexico.

2 — Wild Eyed Charlie wrote at 6:29 PM on May 25:

“Occupied America, the fifth edition, {snip} refers to white people as “gringos” and actually includes a quotation on page 323 from Jose Angel Gutierrez of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), who was angry over the cancellation of a government program. He declared:

‘We are fed up. We are going to move to do away with the injustice to the Chicano and if the ‘gringo’ doesn’t get out of our way, we will stampede over him.’ “

Imperfect parasites kill their hosts, then, having nothing left to sustain them, move on.

3 — Tony Soprano wrote at 6:47 PM on May 25:

Heck I could write an encyclopedia about how whites are oppressed in america.I wish the Raza could all see the movie Apocalypto.

4 — Anonymous wrote at 6:51 PM on May 25:

Let’s hope this is the start of a national movement to stop teaching “white hate” in OUR schools. I don’t believe in book burning, but I would make an exception in this case.

5 — Anonymous wrote at 6:53 PM on May 25:

Professors like this (Professor Soto, PHD, University of Arizona) who used her commencement address to slam AB 1070 (she was booed)are why we should not have ethnic studies.

Here are here qualifications.
“Sandra K. Soto is Director of Graduate Studies, Co-coordinator of the Chicana/Latina Studies Concentration, and affiliate faculty of English, Mexican American Studies, and Latin American Studies. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin (with a focus in Ethnic and Third World Literature). Her interdisciplinary research agenda draws on Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, queer theory, and gender studies to offer innovative approaches to the overdetermined terrain of social relations, cultural representation, and knowledge production. Her book Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire (University of Texas Press, 2010), replaces the race-based oppositional paradigm of Chicano literary studies with a less didactic, more flexible, framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. She is currently working on her second book tentatively titled Feeling Greater Mexico, which pursues unlikely connections between critical transnational studies and U.S. ethnic studies and focuses on the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. Her teaching interests include Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, feminist theories, transnational feminisms, critical race studies, US Third World Feminism, and queer theory.”

Who wants their kids indoctrinated with “experts” like these? At least she is in higher education, but that kind of tripe is taught as social theory in public schools too.

6 — Anonymous wrote at 7:03 PM on May 25:

The truth is that Americans – both of Hispanic and European origin – fought at the Alamo, died at the Alamo, and women and children were slaughtered by raiding Mexican army units. The slaughter at the Alamo was the last straw and Americans – both Hispanic and European in origin – fought off the Mexicans and finally signed the treaty of Guadalupe in which Americans PAID Mexico for the territory. This was not simply hostile seizure. The Mexicans agreed to take money for the land. They did NOT have to do so. In truth the lands were NOT occupied by Mexicans as the stories are told in school, most of the settlers were European (that’s right not WHITE, EUROPEAN, now stop letting them discriminate against us by calling us white) Americans and some Hispanic Americans. The frontier was NOT settled by Mexico.

Their cries of “we didn’t move over the border the border moved over us” well if they want to be so patriotic to MEXICO what the heck are they doing HERE in AMERICA? GO BACK!

7 — HH wrote at 7:32 PM on May 25:

My God I am so sick to death of all this resentment, this “slave morality” as Nietzsche termed it! Have you “people of color” no natural shame or pride whatsoever? What manner of people go through their entire existance moaning and groaning about being “oppressed?” The persecution complex looms large over all non-whites(save perhaps certain Asians)it seems!

8 — Bobby wrote at 7:36 PM on May 25:

Jose Angel Gutierrez, whom Mr. Taylor debated brilliantly and was then threatened for his trouble, said in the above article, that if white people(he said Gringo, but meant white people) don’t get out of the way, we will stampede over him. You’ve got to love this guy, if nothing else, he’s intelligent enough to know that he can get away with this stuff. HATE CRIME!! HATE CRIME!!

Well, at least this comment shows a higher degree of intellectual style, for Gutierrez at least,compared to one of his other outrageous comments, if the worst comes to worst, we will have to kill the gringo( translation—whites)

Compared to the things whites are routinely and falsely accused of in the Main Stream Media, this stuff,that IS true,is never reported,or made a big deal of.

9 — Anonymous wrote at 8:09 PM on May 25:

“Paula Allman wrote Critical Education Against Global Capitalism, incorporating the ideas of Marx, Freire and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist who emphasized the subversion of Western cultural institutions such as the educational system”.

If the education system is subverted, does that mean all the ‘communists’ there will be looking for a new job? Liberals certainly have it both ways. Bravely ‘fighting the system against all odds’, while an educator (appearing here on AmRen yesteryday) offering an opposing view, is forced to publish his work under a pseudonym for fear of job loss.

10 — marblemason1 wrote at 8:29 PM on May 25:

It’s about time someone took on the ultra left race baiting rhetoric of these Ethnic Studies programs.

11 — Anonymous wrote at 10:33 PM on May 25:

“I am so sick to death of all this resentment, this “slave morality” as Nietzsche termed it!”

I always suspected Nietzsche was playing ‘devil’s advocate’. Whatever he was in his own time, a hundred years later, it turns out he was a prophet.

Predicting Worse Ahead from America’s Economic Crisis

Predicting Worse Ahead from America’s Economic Crisis

by Stephen Lendman on May 23, 2010 – 12:39pm

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973) said:

“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Under Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and successive US Treasury Secretaries, America chose the latter path and now faces the consequences of their reckless, criminal behavior.

In early 2009, economist Michael Hudson said:

“The (US) economy has reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase. We are not in a cycle but (at) the end of an era. The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored,” only delayed to postpone a painful day of reckoning.

Economist Hyman Minsky (1919 – 1996) described a “Ponzi finance” system during prolonged expansions and economic booms. Speculative excesses create bubbles, triggering structural instability, then asset valuation collapse that turns euphoria to revulsion and market crashes.

On December 29, 2008, the Wall Street Journal online headlined: “As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of US,” then continued:

“For a decade, Russian academic (and former KGB analyst) Igor Panarin has been predicting the US will fall apart in 2010″ to include an “economic and moral collapse, a civil war, and the eventual breakup of the country.” For years, no one took him seriously, but no longer. He’s invited to Kremlin receptions, gets interviewed twice a day, publishes books, is a frequent lecturer, and appears regularly in the media as an expert on US – Russia relations as well as the great interest in his predictions and new book titled, “The Crash of America.”

On March 25, 2009, RussiaToday.com headlined: “Is there anything Obama can do about the US Collapse?” No, according to Panarin, for these reasons:

– “the moral and psychological factor and the stress of the American population;”

– America’s deepening financial and economic crisis; and

– “the increase of anti-Americanism in the world,” the result of continued US belligerency.

Panarin sees America collapsing into six areas of foreign influence and perhaps disintegrating as a nation:

– depressed northern states close to Canada “in their mentality and economic development;”

- the Southwest “fuel and energy complex, the oil sector” close to Mexico;

– California and the Pacific Northwest falling under Chinese influence;

– the Northeast and Middle Atlantic regions under the EU;

– Alaska may be returned to Russia; and

– Hawaii may become a Japanese or Chinese protectorate.

Panarin sees 2010 as America’s tipping point and says no miracle rescues can save it. In addition, he cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd’s 1976 prediction of the Soviet Union’s dissolution that got him laughed at and scorned at the time but proved right.

Todd now predicts a similar fate for the US in his 2002 book, “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order.” He cites:

– unilateral militarism shows weakness, not strength;

– America is parasitic, relying on voluntary or extracted “tributes” from vassal states;

– global terrorism is a myth;

– many nations, including EU states, China and Russia, are beginning to resist US adventurism;

– terminal corruption and decay;

– economic weakness and decline;

– producing little, America’s “specialty is consumption (so) relies on foreign imports” to satisfy it;

– a declining middle class and growing poverty will curtail spending sharply;

– if capital inflows cease, the dollar will crash:

– a coming collapse of the stock market, financial institutions and the dollar;

– a ballooning trade deficit and shrinking manufacturing base;

– a predatory ruling class plundering the world with impunity, yet out of touch with its own people growing poorer, more desperate and angrier;

– America’s abandonment of universalism and egalitarianism;

– excess consumption trapping people in an ocean of debt and lowering their living standards;

– “the rest of the world….is on the verge of discovering that it can get along without America; America is realizing that it cannot get along without the rest of the world;”

– an emerging Eurasia will end US supremacy, then isolate and curtail its dominance; and

– “If America continues to endeavor to show its power, it will simply reveal (to) the world its impotence.”

For his part, Panarin compares America to the Titanic after hitting an iceberg when it was unclear whether the crew would try to save the ship or more importantly its passengers. Unfortunately, under Bush and Obama, they’re trying to save themselves at the expense of the ship and passengers.

After disintegration, Panarin sees three dominant influence areas emerging – the EU, Russia and China. After 11 years of monitoring US policies, he believes his prediction is largely confirmed and states the following:

America’s FY 2009 “budget deficit is 4.5 times the 2008 deficit, while firearms sales are up 40%. On October 1, the coupons that were given state workers are to be cashed out. When (they) realize that they are getting nothing for (them), they will take out their firearms and chaos will unfold.”

Lower Manhattan board mixed on planned mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero WTC site

THE 911 MOSQUE COMMUNITY BOARD MEETING TONIGHT

We want “mutual respect” and “mutual understanding.” The Muslim community must be sensitive to non-Muslim feelings.

Last week, the finance committee, composed of 12 people, voted unanimously in support of the mosque, after Imam Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, made a presentation. No one knew about it, no announcement was made. The matter will now go to the full committee (more than 40 people). The full committee will be meeting on May 25. WE NEED YOU ALL TO ATTEND TO VOICE YOUR OPPOSITION.

CB1 has no legal authority. Their “approval” or disapproval is in no way binding on the matter, but the media will be there, and we need to send a message to Rauf, Khan and Mayor Bloomberg: This is wrong.  This will do terrible harm to the 9/11 family community and non- Muslims around the world.

5/25    CB #1 Monthly Meeting – 6:00 PM

Location:      Three Legged Dog Art and Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street (at Rector Street)

Lower Manhattan board mixed on planned mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero WTC site New York Daily News

Community Board 1 will meet Tuesday to vote on the Cordoba House – a planned 13-story Islamic community center and prayer space near Ground Zero.

While approval from the 50-member board is not needed to build the center, the vote may indicate how residents of lower Manhattan feel about the idea.

“The community board is a good barometer of the sentiment of the people in that neighborhood,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

“Many of the people on the Community Board are people who stayed in the neighborhood after 9/11, who had to rebuild this area,” he said. “These are good people with good instincts.”

The board’s 12-member Financial District committee unanimously voted in favor of the project earlier this month. “From my perspective, there’s not a lot to dislike about the project,” said Ro Scheffe, 59, a member of the committee who runs a communications firm and lives three blocks from Wall St. Foes – including some members of the board – argue an Islamic community center so close to Ground Zero is insensitive to the families of people who died on 9/11.

Two board members who asked not to be identified told the Daily News that they’re against the project, but won’t come out against it publicly. Instead, they want to table the vote indefinitely.

“It’s not right to build it so close to Ground Zero, and it’s not right for this board to vote on a religious center,” one member said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/24/2010-05-24_lower_manhattan_board_mixed_on_planned_mosque_at_wtc_site.html#ixzz0otPXxo8M

AND JUNE 6TH D DAY IS OUR RALLYING CRY

Need a ride? Hook up HERE.

Zuccotti Park, formerly named and generally known as Liberty Plaza Park, is a 33,000-square-foot (3,100 m2) park in Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. It is located between Broadway and Church streets and Liberty and Cedar streets. Its northwest corner is across the street from the World Trade Center site.

Muslims at the Salute to Israel Day Parade

Annihilationists. Notice how this is becoming more common. More mainstream. Jihad and Islamic anti-semitism and kuffarphobia should relegated to the very fringes of society, as the KKK was in the early twentieth century, instead of the tacit approval being given to these barbarians and savages with silence and apology. This is the road to hell. We must change the culture, and fast.

Here is a passing glimpse of a sign held by Muslims at the salute to Israel day parade this past Sunday.

Videos here.

Socialism’s Downfall

Socialism’s Downfall

By Steve McCann

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it will continue to do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers in the Obama administration and the rest of the world. The most recent example of this failure: Euro-Socialism is presently bankrupting the countries that embraced it in Europe. This will result not only in more social and economic upheaval, but also the ultimate demise of the ill-conceived European Union.

The original and current proponents of socialism fail to take into account one very basic but immutable factor: the fundamental nature of the human race.

The most dominant trait mankind has, as do all living creatures, is an innate desire to survive and prosper.

While some may willingly choose to pursue subsistence on their own terms, to the vast majority of the human race, the path of least resistance is the most desired. Thus, mankind is susceptible to financial scams, gambling, crime, and resentment or violence towards those who may have more. But above all, people are very open to the concept of a central authority providing them with the means of livelihood.

A secondary characteristic of human race, again shared by other species, is the need by some within the group to conquer or maintain control over their fellow man. Thanks to modern technology and weaponry, gone are the days when a megalomaniac could by sheer force of determination and arms conquer and impose his will on others.

The mid-19^th century saw the Industrial Revolution and the rise in living standards and education for the populace in Europe. It was during this same period that the advent of socialist/Marxist theory occurred. Those that considered themselves superior to the masses, and in the past may have achieved ruling status through the power of intimidation over the illiterate and unwashed, now had to look to other means to achieve control of the levers of government.

The easiest course to assume this power was to promise, in return for the support of the people, that the state through a new ruling class would provide the citizenry cradle-to-grave economic security. Thus, a Faustian bargain encompassing the desire by the majority for ease of survival and others for the need to rule would be entered into. The populace, having committed itself to this compact, would expect never-ending freedom from adversity.

However, within this arrangement is the seed of its own destruction. For socialism to succeed, it must have an economic underpinning that can provide the foundation for massive social spending. The Soviet Union, as early as the 1920s and ’30s, proved that complete state control of the means of production was a colossal failure, as it could not produce sufficient wealth to support the population.

Therefore, only the capitalist economic system, which is anathema to a powerful central government and its attendant oligarchy, can produce sufficient wealth to underwrite a social safety net for the general public and finance the agenda of the governing class.

Capitalism, reflective of that portion of mankind choosing to seek subsistence on their own terms, does by its nature celebrate the success of the individual, not the collective. Individuals, separately or together, driven by the motive of self-enrichment, produce goods or services desired by others. In the process, jobs and wealth are created, thus benefiting society as a whole.

A massive tension exists between those who adhere to central government control and swear fealty to socialist/Marxist philosophy and those who produce the wealth of a nation. The state inherently has more power than the individual, and once the radical element of the ruling class assumes power, government begins an inexorable process of injecting itself into the affairs of the individual and producer class (which is always a minority in any society).

Those who believe they have a manifest destiny to rule and are faithful to socialist tenets have a predisposition to control the populace and economic activity through laws, regulations, taxes, and intimidation. Despite the lesson of the Soviet Union and its state control of the economy, every new generation of adherents to socialist ideology believe they can make this fallacious philosophy work and maintain their arrangement with the citizenry.

But the reality is that they cannot, as the economic engine of capitalism will not continue to produce wealth if it is increasingly put under the thumb of bureaucrats and central planners inevitably attempting not only to institute state control of the economy, but to also to regulate the day-to-day lives of all citizens.  The motivation of the producer class will be stifled and they will either drop out, join the dependent class or simply move on to other more hospitable countries.

Governments will, as history has shown (most recently in Europe), turn to excessive and unsustainable borrowings and inflation to finance their societal obligations. The contract between the statists and the citizens who were promised cradle-to-grave security cannot be maintained, as the economic underpinning of this arrangement will quickly erode.

Social and economic chaos resulting in dramatically lower standard of living must inevitably ensue, and in some cases, these conditions will lead to violence or revolution. No amount of promises, demonization of capitalism and seizure of the means of production, confiscatory taxes, or printing of money will reinstitute prosperity or security for the populace. This is the path on which President Obama and his fellow travelers have set the United States.

The founding fathers of the United States, one of the greatest confluences of brilliant minds in the history of mankind, understood the basic nature of human beings. They accordingly set forth a form of government and a written Constitution to greatly limit those who seek hegemony over the people, especially those seeking unlimited security from a central government. They recognized that only the individual free to pursue economic happiness would result in a society wherein all would benefit on a sustained basis.

The voters of the United States made a grave error in judgment in 2008; but unlike in many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, this mistake can be reversed, as the citizens of the United States do have the governmental structure to allow the country to step back from the precipice that this nation and many others are presently staring into. But will the general public understand that the socialist path the nation is on is preordained to fail? Will the citizenry change the government before it is too late?

50 Comments on “Socialism’s Downfall“

White Nationalism — The Only Realistic Solution

White Nationalism — The Only Realistic Solution

by League Staff | March 25th, 2010

by Gregory Hood | Newslink

The entire conservative and libertarian movements have mobilized everything they have against the passage of ObamaCare. At this time, it looks like the Democrats will still succeed. Even if, by some miracle, the bill is defeated, socialist health care in this country is an inevitability.

The Republicans are not even a useful opposition on issues of limited government; indeed, the most likely presidential nominee in 2012 passed some form of socialist health care in his own state. Republicans can also not be counted on to be of any use in the looming battle over amnesty, as many of the most “extreme” conservatives (Dick Armey, Grover Norquist, and Sarah Palin) are all on the other side.

Conservatism, as an electoral force, is finished. The constituency for it is disappearing and the social order it once exemplified has disintegrated. The battle to restrain the size of the state has failed massively, and as National Review columnist Mark Steyn notes in an excellent column, once an entitlement like health care is passed, there is no going back. Similarly, regardless of whether amnesty for illegal aliens is passed this session or in the future, the demographic battle has already been lost. California, the state that gave us Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, will never again elect anything resembling a conservative governor. Within fifteen years, Texas will be similarly lost to anything resembling conservatism.

There are essentially three responses about what to do with the large rump of white, conservative voters that will still be in an America that they no longer have any chance of governing through democratic means. The first is what the conservative movement will undoubtedly do, which is continue its program of foreign wars, cheap labor, deficit spending, and blaming the bigotry of its own supporters for its failure to win any minority votes. Conservatives are incapable of promoting white interests even for reasons of self preservation.

Hence, we get GOP head Ken Mehlman (Jew) apologizing for the “Southern Strategy,” which delivered innumerable victories to the Republican Party. We get Michael Steele (token Negro) installed as the new head of the Republican party, who promptly blows millions on a comically bad website filled with token minorities. He then manages to shovel money to failed candidates that endorse the Democrats and alternatively insults both the blacks he’s trying to recruit and the gullible whites that prop him up.

We get Mel Martinez, a Latino who attacked the GOP’s own base to try to win amnesty for illegal immigration.

We get silly buffoons like Dick Armey, leader of FreedomWorks and self appointed Tea Party pontiff who declares that his number one foreign policy priority is to protect Israel (not America) and who thinks that if all the anti-immigration members of the Republican Party are kicked out, socially conservative Hispanics (who for some reason have higher rates of out of wedlock birth, abortion, and crime) will vote for the party of tax cuts for millionaires. Not even the average Mexican illegal immigrant, who has less than a high school education, is as stupid as Dick Armey.

The second response is more interesting, and clearly the movement that is growing right now. This is the radically anti-state Right, exemplified by Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty and the less respectable elements such as the various constitutional militias and media figures such as Alex Jones. The problem with this movement is obvious.

For one, the culture of a “free state” would likely be even more degraded and degenerate than that farce of a culture that we have today, which is at least restrained by the timid remnants of a conservative, Christian, bourgeois society. However, even ignoring the question of culture altogether, libertarianism contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Libertarians refuse to recognize the existence of race, they are just as defensive and cowardly as the Republicans when it comes to issues of political correctness, and they simply do not have the constituency that can actually lead them to victory. Leftists are fundamentally correct when they note that the Constitution and the abstractions about “rights” that libertarians hold to be sacred are manifestations of white privilege. They are. They were created by white men for a white nationalist society. They do not work and do not apply in any other context.

In a libertarian society that has no recognition of race, a colored underclass would quickly develop as the facts of racial difference in intelligence manifest themselves in the economy. Many Whites, absent civil rights laws and the fist of the managerial state, will associate with themselves and exclude blacks, Hispanics and Asians from certain establishments. While race mixing and miscegenation would undoubtedly continue, it would be far less prevalent. Class divisions would be even more associated with racial divisions than today. The white working class that would exist would have little stake in preserving a system that offers no guarantees for unemployment, medical care, social security, poverty relief, food stamps, or other social services, that, for better or worse, workers have come to expect and which serve as a deterrent from socialist radicalism. Absent these services, left wing extremists would be far more able to co-opt the white working class.

Ultimately, the libertarian society would need an active domestic security force and a radically limited franchise in order to prevent the colored masses from either voting in socialism or overthrowing the system. To his credit, paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard (Jew) noted that the truth about racial differences should be shouted from the rooftops in order to preserve a libertarian society. He stated that “if you scratch an egalitarian, you will find a statist” and held that opposition to Martin Luther King Jr. was true mark of a libertarian. He even endorsed something approaching the ethnostate.

Unfortunately, this paleolibertarian movement that Rothbard exemplified is dead. As the leftward migration of LewRockwell.com shows, even the better libertarians feel the need to mouth politically correct platitudes about racial egalitarianism. Today, they overtly champion the Hispanic Conquest of the American Southwest and mass immigration. They deny racial differences because there are no races, only autonomous “individuals” that sprang fully formed from the ether.

(Racial identity for non whites, however, is ok.)

They champion Rothbard only so far as he remains within the boundaries of permissible debate. When challenged, they fall all over themselves in their willingness to prostrate themselves before the gods of egalitarianism.

It has been said that a capitalist will sell a rope to a Communist on Friday, even if he will be hanged with that rope on Sunday. Capitalists will always give in to their lust for cheap labor (read, colored labor) even if it dooms them in the long run. A society that has as its only standard of morality the profit motive will not be able to resist the profit motive. Any libertarian utopia that did exist would not last very long.

There is only one realistic alternative to the problems facing the white masses that built this country. That alternative is white nationalism. White nationalism is not racial realism, or conservatism, or immigration restriction. Realizing that race exists and that there are differences between them means that you have transcended ignorance, but does not make you a white nationalist.

White nationalism is far more radical. It is a political, cultural, and social movement that demands, as a matter of right and survival, an ethnostate that is explicitly designated for white people.

Despite this radicalism, it is far more practical and realistic to work for a white homeland than to be a moderate reformist. White victory will be difficult, and, frankly, our odds are not good. That said, a Southern homeland, or a Midwestern homeland, or even an Aryan empire in the Northwest led by Harold Covington will happen long before “true conservatives” do something like secure the border, or scrap the income tax, or even cut entitlements in the most trivial way. All the scribblers and self appointed philosophers simply are irrelevant. Conservatism, libertarianism, and the rest of these reformist approaches are not just immoral, they are fundamentally impractical. They have never worked, and they will never work. Conservatism and libertarianism were tried and they failed. They are only useful insofar as they serve as stepping stones to the white republic.

That is not just the Sorelian myth that we need. That is simply reality.

Occidental Dissent, March 17, 2010

Reading Is Fun

Reading Is Fun

Locust: they have not read it, because; if its good for whites, its bad for everyone else, liberal rule number one.

Secession Scenario: Here Is How To Secede From The Union

Secession Scenario: Here Is How To Secede From The Union

May 24, 2010

A reader recently pointed out to me that I’ve provided most of the possible reasons why any state should secede at DumpDC. But she said I haven’t given a step-by-step procedure on how secession should work. I started this process in my article entitled Secession The Hope For Humanity, but I’m fleshing it out here. This is not complete by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s a place to start a lively dialogue about the steps to secession.

You may think that this article is too simplistic, and omits important issues. Perhaps. But I submit that if secession is not made so simple that a child can understand it, it will not happen in your state. Its logic has to be made so unassailable that only a fool would resist it.

So, here it is, my friends:

How To Secede From The United States of America

1. Philosophy

Each individual must come to his or her own conclusion that secession is the only way to regain liberty, and each state must make its secession decision independent of any other state.

2. Initiation

Secession should be solemnly deliberated by the elected representatives and the state citizens. Secession should be initiated at the moment that any state reaches the point at which it will no longer accept the despotic tyranny and laws coming from the US Federal Government in Washington, DC. Or, secession should be initiated upon a collapse of the Dollar, or the imposition by Washington DC of martial law in the event of social upheaval.

There is no written, formal method for initiating and completing an act of secession. If history can be our guide, we see that the states of 1860 completed their secessions by specially-elected conventions or by referendum. But the secession could also be initiated by a Governor and the State Legislature in assembly.

It would be excellent if a seated Governor would lead his state into secession. The easiest way for a state to secede would be for the State Legislature, either unicameral or bicameral, to draft a Declaration of Secession document and an Ordinance of Secession document. Then the Legislature should take a roll call vote and pass a Joint Resolution of Secession in legislature assembled, and have the Governor sign the Resolution instantly upon its passage. This process should be done on live TV, with all proceedings televised and recorded. Allowing the world to view this process in non-edited real time would be one of the most exciting and historic TV broadcasts ever made. The eyes of the world would be fixed on the TV feed and little else would be reported or discussed on its programming. Hell, run commercials and make some money for the state. Why should the networks get this historic event for free?

If the Legislature and Governor refused to support secession, a petition initiative could garner enough signatures of registered voters to force a referendum. Each state has statutes about petition initiatives for referenda. The Texas Nationalist Movement is doing a petition initiative right now, with the intent of presenting the petitions to the Legislature on day one of the 2011 legislative session. Follow the law in your state.

If there was a statewide referendum on secession it could be a simply worded ballot question like: “Shall the citizens of the State of XXXX repeal the 1788 ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America by the State of XXXX, and shall the citizens of the State of XXXX resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution?” A simple “Yes” or “No” vote will suffice.

If that’s too flowery for you, here’s an even simpler question: “Shall the citizens of the State of XXXX secede from the United States of America?” A “Yes” or “No” vote will suffice.

A simple majority of votes would pass the referendum.

The referendum should only be done with paper ballots that will be counted by hand, no machines, no electronic voting. Further, the referendum should not be scheduled for only one single day, but over at least three days, preferably a weekend…to facilitate the greatest possible participation by registered voters. Finally, a photo ID should be required as verification of identity for eligibility to vote. This ain’t the American way of widespread voter fraud…this is the state’s rights secession way. It’s also my article, and I can write the rules any way I choose.

Another method of moving secession along in your state might be to organize on a county-by-county basis. The County Commission could either call for a countywide referendum on the question of secession, or could nominate a delegate to participate in a Secession Convention.

3. Secession Convention

Each state’s Secession Convention, formed to contemplate, design and complete the process of secession, should draft a Declaration of Secession.

Many of the seceding states of 1860 wrote and ratified a Declaration of Secession, also known as a “Declaration of Causes.” Each Declaration enumerated that particular state’s reasons for secession, in like manner to the 1776 Declaration of Independence sent to King George by the Colonists.

Once the Declaration of Secession is prepared, the Chair of the Secession Convention or the Governor should deliver signed original copies of the document to the President of the United States, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the President of the Senate (televised live of course).

4. Ordinance of Secession.

Then the seceding states must prepare an Ordinance of Secession. Here below is the simple, succinct wording of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession of 1860:

AN ORDINANCE to dissolve the union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled “The Constitution of the United States of America.”

We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the ordinance adopted by us in convention on the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the “United States of America,” is hereby dissolved.

Done at Charleston the twentieth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty.

That is the sum total of all the words necessary to complete the secession.

Once the Ordinance of Secession is prepared (televised live), the Chair of the Secession Convention or the Governor should deliver signed original copies of the document to the President of the United States, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the President of the Senate (also televised live).

That is the process of secession from the United States of America. That was the easy part. Then the REAL WORK begins.

The first thing the new sovereign state should do is to form a Constitutional Convention, and create a new government. See how I would do it at The New Corporate Model of Governance.

Questions? Do I see questions?

Question: What if Washington files a Federal lawsuit or injunction in Federal Court to stop the state from seceding?
Answer:Once the state formally secedes, it is no longer subject to US Federal Court jurisdiction, is it? Is it not a sovereign nation after secession, just like any other nation of the world? So, the seceding state could answer any legal maneuver by rejecting the jurisdiction of the US Federal Courts. Remember, Washington doesn’t OWN your state. Washington was formed by the states to be an errand-boy for the states. Who runs who?

Question: What if Washington invades our state with military forces?
Answer: That is the reason that your state needs a well-trained state militia. And when I say “well-trained,” I do not mean trained to fight on a 3rd Generation battlefield (like WWII or Vietnam). I mean a militia trained to fight with guerilla warfare (4th Generation) tactics, with a heavy emphasis on the tactics of General Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War.

Question: What will we do for money?
Answer: The state must make gold and silver the only legal tender in your state. See how I deal with this in Sound Money And Limited Government.

Secession is little more than breaking up with your girlfriend or divorcing your spouse. It’s a lot like being a card player in a big card game, then folding your cards, cashing in your chips and leaving the game.

Isn’t the process of secession much like writing this short note to end a relationship?

Dear Washington: It’s over. We’re leaving. We ain’t asking your permission to leave. We ain’t asking for a legal divorce. We’re just ending this relationship right here and now. We’re rescinding the authority we gave you in 1788. Leave us alone. Goodbye.

In conclusion, try to envision yourself and your family in a new nation created by secession. All the people you meet are excited and breathless in their anticipation of the future. The general opinion of the populace is pure unbridled optimism. The new nation’s economy is booming, the money is backed by gold and silver, and there is no inflation. “Now Hiring” signs are in all the shop windows. The newspaper’s “Help Wanted” ads are packed full. Prices for goods and services are low, and the stores are loaded with goods. Manufacturers are streaming into the new nation to take advantage of the rare pro-business atmosphere. Wages are climbing steadily in manufacturing jobs as companies compete for the best and brightest for their employees. New businesses are being created at a fever pace. Residential and commercial construction is at a high level to meet the demand of the new residents.

All because one state recognized this historic opportunity and realized the dream of liberty through the process of state secession.

Secession is the hope for humanity. Who will be first?

DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.

© Copyright 2010, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Lions & Lambs

Lions & Lambs

What Rand Paul Could Learn from Robin Hood

By Richard Spencer & Paul Smith

At one point in Western history, the “Robin Hood” of Anglo-Saxon legend became a socialist. When Hollywood got a hold him, he also became a charmer and prankster (as portrayed by Errol Flynn and animated by Disney), and later a mellow loner from Southern California in Kevin Costner’s godawful 1991 production. But mostly, Robin was a socialist, and a man defined by the imperative of  “stealing from the rich to give to the poor.” He became one of history’s few universally beloved Leftists, his name emblazoned on various pieces of uplifting legislation. Ayn Rand declared him the epitome of evil. 

Something must be rotten in Sherwood forest. For in Russell Crow and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010) only briefly does Robin actually don a hood and rob passers-by in the woods. (His victims in this case are leaders of the Roman church who had refused the starving population of Nottingham recourse to their grain.) Otherwise, the prince of theives is scandalously upright and law abiding. The New York Times‘s dissatisfaction with the film indicates that more than a century’s worth of wealth-redistribution metaphors have been put at risk. (Or as Steve Sailer puts it, “American audiences … have been puzzled (not without reason) over why Robin Hood doesn’t have much to do with, well, Robin Hood.”)

Uninterested in socialism and wary of taxation, if this new Robin has political ambition, it’s not as a socialist but as an Anglo-Saxon nationalist. Liberal commentators have suggested that the hero belongs to the Tea Parties, but such snark misses the larger point that the character Crow and Scott construct is representative of a tradition best termed liberty before liberalism.

Robin demands his rights as an Englishman — and specifically as an Englishman. This visceral sense of birthright liberty is not too distant from Thomas Jefferson’s conception of the “Rights of British America,” which he believed derived from liberties secured by the Anglo-Saxon followers of Hengist and Horsa.

A “parliament” of sorts is depicted in the film, and there Robin speaks forthrightly, but it is also a non-democratic body, and, much as with its 10^th-century Icelandic antecedent, the nobles in attendance come armed. Peers are to be respected — and feared. Lacking any inkling of “universal solidarity,” Robin, and the rest of the red-blooded British representatives talk of the French as vile foreign invaders, almost as another race.

It’s no coincidence that Ridley Scott casts the Frenchmen, including a court double-crosser, as olive-skinned, dark-haired, and quasi-Moorish. Even the insincere, shifty King John — a representative of the potential tyranny within every state — is noticeably swarthy. In Scott’s England, complexion reflects character.

With Gladiator, Scott’s first collaboration with Crow, he proved capable of making a film that criticizes American Empire from the right. “Rome,” much like fin-de-siècle America, was decadent and given to bread, circuses, and foreign wars. Similarly, in the world of Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart’s military campaigns to the Holy Land have led to the financial ruin of the realm. Robin has followed his king off on the Crusades, and he fights valiantly, but when allowed to voice his opinion, Robin makes it clear that endless warring leads only to inhumanity and penury. Richard rebukes him … but as “brave, honest and naïve.”

“Steal from the rich to give to the poor” is, thankfully, never uttered once in the film. Instead, Robin’s motto is “Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions,” which, we discover, was instilled in him by his long-lost father, a radical (though classical liberal) philosopher whose ideas anticipated the Magna Carta.

“Lions and Lambs” certainly has an egalitarian quality to it, as do the Biblical verses it’s drawn from, which describe the bliss on earth after the Second Coming. But Robin glosses the line as “Never give up.” And by the climax of the film, it comes to stand for all Englishmen uniting together against the foreign invader.

It’s also worth rejoicing at the total absence of political correctness in film. Well, almost total absence… In the climatic battle scene, Maid Marion enters the fray donning her late father’s chainmail (which would have weighed 60 to 75 pounds and likely grounded the fair maid!) But luckily, Marion’s foray into the man’s world is quasi farcical, and she ends up whimpering in Robin’s arms by the end, carried romantically along the beaches of Dover.

And despite her one assay at women’s lib, Cate Blanchett’s Marion is a loyal and feminine persona. Her relationship with Robin is, in turn, one of the most striking improvements over all previous versions. Robin enters her life as an impersonator of her late husband (a scheme devised by Marion’s father so that the land might be kept in the family.) The Robin Hood legend is thus combined with that of The Return of Martin Guerre, one of the great romantic folktales of the West — and a tale that’s only powerful when its audience takes for granted the traditional duties of husband and wife.

Equally refreshing is the fact that Sherwood Forest has been cleansed of all token minorities.  This is a notable change from the Robin Hoods of recent past. In Costner’s Prince of Thieves, for instance, Robin was accompanied by a wise, avuncular Muslim played by Morgan Freeman (who appeared in the film between stints portraying U.S. presidents, God, and other forms of omniscience.) “Azeem” (a candidate to be celebrated in Fictional Black History Month) was depicted as more technologically and socially advanced than the backward English dolts of Sherwood, and he’s given a rousing speech that inspires Robin’s merry band to storm the Nottingham castle and save the virginal Maid Marion from the ravages of the Sheriff. Azeem helped deliver a child, despite the protestations of Friar Tuck, and provided a chemical compound that turned out to be gunpowder. (It must be white racism that prevents Azeem’s descendents from achieving such wonders.)

In a recent BBC-produced a version of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck is actually played by a black actor. (One shouldn’t hold one’s breath for reciprocation and the casting of, say, Hugh Jackman in the role of Nelson Mandella in a future biopic.)

Robin Hood is so excellently un-PC — not to mention stirring and successful as a film — that one wonder whether rising anti-Establishment political candidates might tap it for inspiration…

Rand Paul recently won the Republican primary for the Senate seat in Kentucky and appears to be the front-runner against his Democratic opponent in the November election. In his acceptance speech, he claimed to bear a “message from the Tea Parties.”

Though the mainstream media had liked Rand for a spell, as a “civil libertarian,” once he became an actual threat, it was only a matter of time before they would work to destroy this “brave, honest and naïve” man. Over the past few days, they have been keying in on his views on the rights of private businesses owners that run counter to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rand has defended himself … tentatively … but in doing so, he’s evoked the name of the Patron Saint of multiculturalism and white guilt, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

Rand Paul: What I’ve always said is, I’m opposed to institutional racism, and I would have — if I was alive at the time, I think — had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.

National Public Radio: You would have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater?

Asserting the wonderfulness of MLK is the standard defense to any public charge of “racism,” much like the “march with MLK, vote for Goldwater” meme is paramount to arguing the libertarians want the same multicultural, egalitarian society as the Left — they just think the free-market is a better way of bringing it about.

What Paul and most libertarians fail to grasp is that, beyond criticism of the Civil Rights Act, any attempt to dismantle the Federal Government will be construed as “racist” by the Establishment and media for the simple reason that if Constitutional order were actually reinstated, millions upon millions of Black people safely ensconced in high-paying public sectors jobs would suddenly be forced to compete in the dreaded free market.

Limited government would sound the death knell of a black middle class built on cushy lifetime appointments at government bureaucracies. Black over-representation in nearly every agency is truly astonishing, and it ensures that African-Americans will fight tooth and nail against the Tea Party, Libertarians, Rand Paul, or anyone who even thinks about ending this good thing they’ve got going.

Libertarians aren’t up to the task of limiting government anyway, for quite unlike Robin, they lack any sense of community and birthright, and thus will only engage people in endless, abstract, braniac debates about how, say, the welfare state retards black entrepreneurship or how much minorities would benefit by the lowering of the minimum wage.

Reason magazine, the major organ sustaining Libertarian opinion — and a magazine that, one should remember, slandered Rand Paul’s father when he questioned egalitarianism — has come out in favor of the new Robin Hood film. But Robin has little in common with Reason. Men rise and fight against tyranny in defense of their people. No one has yet died for “free-markets,” not to mention the right to enjoy cannabis and sodomy at will.

Libertarians usually treat race and ethnicity as the ultimate “collectivist” evil; and in doing so, fail to grasp the role both have played in the defense of liberty. (Unlike the white editors of Reason, most people of other races intuitively grasp the importance of group cohesion and have little compunction in calling upon it for collective advantage and survival).

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood introduces a dangerous idea — that in the face of likely defeat, defiance and audacity are a people’s only option. Arizona has heard the call, and has been unwavering in defending itself against all foes. Rand Paul should learn that groveling is the first step towards defeat and subservience.

Speak your mind, Rand, and rise and rise again, until lambs becomes lions.

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Article Info

Published in: The Magazine

Article topics:

• Liberty

Richard Spencer & Paul Smith

Richard Spencer is Executive Editor of AlternativeRight.com. Paul Smith blogs on racial matters.

Tea Parties have Uncle Tom fever

Tea Parties have Uncle Tom fever

http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.org/jamesedwards/

Apprently conservative and Tea Partiers have given up all hope of ever getting past the white=racist meme. In Northern Alabama, Tea Partiers (and conservative bloggers all over the country) are rallying to support the congressional campaign of Les Philip, a black guy who says in the ad below that Alabama voters should send him to Washington because “they’re not gonna call ME a racist.”

No, but they’ll certainly call you an Uncle Tom.

Isn’t that a great campaign message? “You evil white people can’t oppose Obama because you’re white, and all white people are racists, so you need a house Negro like me to do the job.”

And conservatives are not only rallying around this guy, but celebrating the ad as brilliant?

Risk Necessary to Save Our People

Ethnopolitics

On our radio program, we often talk about the need to have heroes. Our people certainly have many heroes throughout our rich history, but it is also important that we all try to be heroes, in our own way, each and every day. We must set sterling examples for our kinsmen to follow.

The following activist certainly did his part on this day:

It was a sunny, breezy day last week, and the waters were rushing fast and cold along a North Jersey riverside following recent rains. Songbirds were tunefully cooing and singing, the mayflies hatching, vernal flowers blooming, and above all the trout were biting—it was the peak of the Spring season. After the action at the regular fishing hole began to subside, I decided to try my luck downstream. A river bank had been undermined by recent floods, exposing the eerie root architecture of a giant Sycamore tree. It somehow defied gravity, barely clinging to the bank; a deep dark hole and a conspicuous hiding place for the more savvy trout. Sure enough the first cast produced a lively strike on the glistening metal spoon! The hapless creature was well hooked but didn’t give up; desperately struggling, swimming downstream, and breaking the sparkling surface one last time before I reeled him in, scooping up the quivering spent creature with the landing net. There he was: the last gaze of a conquered rainbow trout. I placed him on the dangling metal stringer hitched to a snaggly root at the river bank.

The action attracted a well equipped, high-booted angler who had I had chatted with about wine making earlier that afternoon. He was a diminutive elderly gentleman of Italian ancestry. He stood near me on the tangled root maze casting and retrieving his silvery lure. Suddenly I heard a splash. It wasn’t a trophy trout at all, but the poor fellow was in the dark pool, sinking while being swept away by the current. I had to act fast! I jumped off the bank, stretching out I barely snatched his navy blue sweatshirt sleeve in time. He seemed to have given up. He was submerged—not even doggy paddling. I gained my footing on the gravelly bottom along the bank. The water there was five plus feet deep. Grabbing a root that resembled a bony finger as an anchor with one hand, I pulled what felt like a 100-lb sack of potatoes with all my might, trying to resist the mighty force of the raging current. My fishing companion joined the struggle. She managed to get hold of a fistful of sweatshirt, and in tandem we puffed and pulled, finally succeeding in bringing our comrade to the riverbank. Once out of the current’s harm’s way, he began desperately clambering up the root nest, clutching and clawing to get up the bank. With one great heave-ho, I launched him up the bank. My companion had to pull me up the steep bank as I was depleted. Coughing and spurting, finally catching his breath, he hugged me and graciously thanked me. I wanted to call for medical attention, but being of the old school when men were still made of iron, he persistently refused. His fishing buddy soon arrived and they both left, gesticulating and ambling up the hill excitedly exchanging supplications in their melodious Italian.

Our people are sinking into the dark hole of oblivion. Malignant currents are sweeping away the great Western Civilization that we created. We need to act quickly and take decisive measures toward ultimate Victory. Risks are unavoidable, and will need to be taken. Like the foregoing true story, without taking risk, one of our kinsmen would have been swept to a dark watery grave. Ultimately, after final Victory, we will not be remembered by how many SUVs, McMansions, or widescreen idiot boxes we owned, but by deeds heroically performed for our people.

This kind of heroism has always defined European Americans and we salute the young man in the story for doing his duty on behalf of his fellow man.

And while the sacrifices we make pale in comparison to the sacrifices of blood and bone that were offered by our ancestors who won for us this country, we ask that everyone reading this article be a hero today by donating to this radio program, or to whichever paleoconservative entity you deem most worthy.

Risk, indeed, will be necessary to save our people. Financial support isn’t much to ask. One day we might have to be willing to part with much more unless we start being a part of the solution now.

Special thanks to the League of American Patriots for bringing this story to my attention!