Once Upon A Time In West Asia Cartoon Hero Land

Stop The Israeli War Machine

God Admits – Son Jesus Gay

Yahweh accepts what we all knew.

St. Paul

Dagon, Ishtar, and Tammuz

https://videopress.com/v/2Fvvkhi3?preloadContent=metadata

Medieval Style – Killer Queen – Mp3 Audio File

The Christ Myth – by Arthur Drews – 1909

The Christ myth : Drews, Arthur, 1865-1935 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

I can read it online. Or, buy a digital copy for $0.99 at Amazon for Kindle.

From Wikipedia

Drews emphatically argues that no independent evidence for the historical existence of Jesus has ever been found outside the New Testament writings. He denounces the Romanticism of the liberal cult of Jesus (Der liberale Jesuskultus) as a violation of historical method, and the naive sentimentalism of historical theology^[1] which attributes the formation of Christianity to Jesus’s “great personality”.

Syncretism

Drews uses the new findings of anthropology collected by James Frazer (1854–1941) with his descriptions of ancient pagan religions and the concept of dying-and-rising god. Drews also pays extreme attention to the social environment of religious movements, as he sees religion as the expression of the social soul.

Drews argues that the figure of Christ arose as a product of syncretism, a composite of mystical and apocalyptic ideas:

1. A Savior/Redeemer derived from the major prophets of the Old Testament and their images of:- the suffering Servant of God (in Isaiah 53),- the Suffering Victim (in Psalm 22),- and the personification of Wisdom (in Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach and Proverbs)

2. The concept of Messiah liberator freeing the Jews in Palestine from Roman occupation and taxation.

3. Mixed with the patterns of Persian and Greco-Roman dying-and-rising godmen — godly heroes, kings, and emperors, whose stories inspired the new anthropological concept of dying and rising gods popularized by Frazer – such as Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis, Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, Persephone, Inanna, also known as Ishtar, as well as Ra the Sun god, with its fusion with Osiris, Zalmoxis, Dionysus, and Odin, figuring in mystery cults of the Ancient Near East.

The Jesus Cult and the Mystery Cults

Drews points out the marked similarities of the early Christ cult to the existing and popular mystery cults – a theme already developed by W.B. Smith and J.M. Robertson, and later echoed by Maurice Goguel and reprised by the older brother of G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga^[5] and van Eysinga himself.^[6] The rapid diffusion of the Christ religion took place in a population already shaped by and conversant with the sacred features of the mystery cults.^[7]

Mithras

The Christ Myth is sprinkled with comparisons between the Mithraic mysteries and the cult of Jesus. Although the god Mithras was not exactly a dying-and-rising god, some similarities are meaningful. Especially the sacramental feast which allowed the initiated to experience a mystical union with the god.

Mithraism, imported from Persia to Rome, spread rapidly through the Roman Empire in the 1st century, and was considered a certain rival to early Christianity. The major images show the god being born from a rock. The central theme is the hunting and killing a bull with blood gushing out. The sun was portrayed as a friend of Mithras, and banquets with him on the hide of the bull. Females played no part in the images or the cult. The cult was popular among soldiers, and was likely spread by them.

Few initiates came from the social elite, until the revival in the mid-4th century (Emperor Julian). Drews claims that the figure of Jesus seemed more concrete, his story more moving, and it appealed more to women and the underdogs of society. The premature death of Emperor Julian was one of the causes of the Jesus mystery eventually winning over the Mithraic mysteries.

Christianity and the historical personality of Jesus

Drews asserted that everything about the story of Jesus had a mythical character, and that it was therefore not necessary to presuppose that a historical Jesus had ever existed. In fact, Christianity could have developed without Jesus, but not without Paul, and certainly not without Isaiah.^[8]

Drews concludes in the last chapter, “The Religious Problem of the Present”:

The Christ-faith arose quite independently of any historical personality known to us ;… Jesus was in this sense a product of the religious social soul and was made by Paul, with the required amount of reinterpretation and reconstruction, the chief interest of those communities founded by him. The historical Jesus is not earlier but later than Paul; and as such he has always existed merely as an idea, as a pious fiction in the minds of members of the community…the Gospels are the derivatives…for the propaganda of the Church, and being without any claim to historical significance…[Religion] is a group-religion…the connection of the religious community…[Our personal religion], a religion of the individual, a principle of personal salvation, would have been an offense and an absurdity to the whole of ancient Christendom. [emphasis added]

Christ Myth II – the witnesses to the historicity of Jesus (1912)

Critique of circular historical theology

Arthur Drews published a second part to his book, Die Christusmythe II: “Die Zeugnisse für die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu” (1911), to answer objections of scholars and critically examine the historical method of theologians. Joseph McCabe (1867–1955),^[9] who started life as a Roman Catholic priest, produced a translation of Christ Myth II as The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912), published both in London and Chicago.

Historicity of Jesus

The preface of this classic book states:^[10] “The question of the historicity of Jesus [die Frage nach der Historizität von Jesus Christus] is a purely historical question to be settled with the resources of historical research.”

In Ch. 3, “The Methods of Historical Criticism” of Part IV, “The Witness of the Gospels”, Drews denounces the unscientific methodology principles of theological history which have been used in Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the new theological vogue since David Strauss (1808–1874), and resulted in a long string of Lives of Jesus.^[11] Drews criticizes historical theology as not respecting the rules of non-Christian historical method, and giving way to “sentimental intuitions” and “basic circularity” of argumentation, where the existence of Jesus is presupposed, but not evidenced by outside sources. He takes as example the case of Johannes Weiss.

[C]ritics are convinced of the historicity of the gospels a priori, before investigating the subject…[They only have] to seek the “historical nucleus” in tradition…How is it that Weinel knows the [innermost nature] of Jesus so well before beginning his inquiry that he thinks he can determine by this test what is spurious in tradition and what is not?…The gospels, it seems, are to be understood from “the soul of Jesus”, not from the soul of their authors!..Johannes Weiss… acknowledges that in all his inquiries he starts with the assumption that the gospel story in general has an historical root, that it has grown out of the soil of the life of Jesus, goes back to eye-witnesses of his life, and comes so near to him that we may count upon historical reminiscences…There is a further principle, that all that seems possible… may at once be set down as actual… [This is how] all theological constructions of the life of Jesus are based… the historicity of which is supposed to have been proved by showing that they are possible… Johannes Weiss is a master in…[this] way of interpreting the miracles of Jesus… If any one ventures to differ from him, Weiss bitterly retorts: “Any man who says that these religious ideas and emotions are inconceivable had better keep his hand off matters of religious history; he has no equipment to deal with them” [A classical response of theologians to skeptics.]…[In] Weiss’s Das älteste Evangelium…he tries to prove that… Mark is merely incorporating an already existing tradition. “Not without certain assumptions”, he admits, “do we set about the inquiry…” [emphasis added]

Drews, like Schweitzer in his Quest, focuses mostly on German liberal theologians, while mentioning Ernest Renan (1823–1892) only en passant. He completely ignores Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), the first to publish a critical Life of Jesus, with his Ecce Homo! (Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou Analyse raisonnée des évangiles) (1770).^[12]

The Jewish witnesses

• Philo: a Jewish contemporary of Jesus, knew of the Essenes, but makes no mention of Jesus or Christians.^[14]
• Justus of Tiberias: Drews mentions the curious case of Photius, the 9th-century Patriarch of Constantinople, who became famous for his Bibliotheca or Myriobiblon, a collection of excerpts and summaries of some 280 classical volumes now mostly lost. Photius read through the Chronicle of Justus of Tiberias, a contemporary of Josephus, who went through the Jewish Wars and the destruction of Jerusalem. Justus wrote a book about the War, and a Chronicle of the Jewish people from Moses to Agrippa II (27-c. 94 AD). “Photius himself believed there ought to be some mention of Jesus [in Justus’s Chronicle], and was surprised to find none.” [emphasis added]^[14]
• Josephus: pros and cons of the Testimonium Flavanium, concluding it is most likely an interpolation or alteration.^[15][16]
• Talmud: offers no contemporary report on Jesus, only later fragments from the Gospel tradition.^[17]

The Roman witnesses

• Pliny the Younger (61-c. 112 AD): his letter to Trajan of c. 110 AD (X, 96) only mentions the existence of a cult of Christians with an innocent early-morning ritual. This letter has aroused the suspicion of Bruno Bauer and Edwin Johnson.^[18]
• Suetonius (69–122 AD): the expulsion of Jews, making trouble at the instigation of an enigmatic Chrestus (impulsore Chresto), not spelled Christus, under Emperor Claudius leaves uncertain who Chrestus was, and does not support the historicity of a Jesus.^[18]
• Tacitus (56–117 AD): Next to Josephus, is host to the second most important non-Christian passage in Annals, XV, 44 (c. 115 AD). Nero lays the blame for the 64 AD fire of Rome on Christianos, followers of Christus, whose death was ordered by Pontius Pilate in Judaea, who is mentioned as procurator instead of prefect. This passage has given rise to an intense examination of pros and cons.^[19] Jesus, as a name, is not mentioned; Christianos seems to be a correction of an original Chrestianos; the persecution of Christians by Nero is doubtful, mentioned only in Sulpicius Severus (c. 400), whose text could have been interpolated back into Tacitus; Tacitus’s source must have been, not the archives, but hearsay from Christians. The strange circumstances of the discovery of the manuscript in the 15th century also raised questions.^[20] A discussion on the authenticity of the Annals passage remains inconclusive.^[21]
• Lucus a non Lucendo, no evidence can be deduced from the destroyed pagan manuscripts.^[22]

The witness of Paul

The Epistles of Paul, and doubts about their authenticity: [The first ten epistles of Paul of Tarsus appeared around 140 AD, collected in Marcion‘s^[23] Apostolikon. Their lost text was reconstituted by Adolf von Harnack in Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, 1921]^[24][25]

The leader of the Tübingen School of theology, Ferdinand Christian (F.C.) Baur (1792–1860), in Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (1845), had established as genuine the four chief Pauline Epistles — Romans, Galatians, First Corinthians and Second Corinthians — and that Paul in the Acts was different from the Paul of the Epistles.

Drews stresses that in the Germany of the 1900s, the genuineness of those four chief “Paulinae” (i.e. Paul’s Epistles) “is so firmly held by [theologians] that any doubt about it is at once rejected by them as not to be taken seriously.” This fear didn’t stop from doubts the likes of:

• Bruno Bauer, the first to declare all Paul’s epistles to be 2nd-century forgeries;^[26]
• the English radicals Edwin Johnson, John M. Robertson, Thomas Whittaker;
• the Dutch radicals G.J.P.J. Bolland, Willem C. Van Manen^[27] (with two key articles in English on “Paul & Paulinism”^[28] and Romans,^[29][30] and G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, all belonging to the famous Dutch Radical School, whose specialty was radical criticism of the Paulinae^[31] and denial of their authenticity;^[32]
• and Albert Kalthoff who revived Bruno Bauer’s ideas and gave them a new shine.

Drews says it loud and clear: There’s a vicious circle of methodology in historical theologians, and if they find Jesus, it’s because they assume in advance he’s already in the stories.

“[I]nstead of doing so, [Paul] uses the most complicated arguments from the Scriptures and the most determined dialectic, when he might have acted so much more simply.” [Emphasis added.] Why not, for example, in Gal. 2:11–14 “in order to convince Peter that he is wrong in avoiding the tables of the Gentiles?”.

Theologians have a ready-made “psychological” excuse to explain Paul’s silence on Jesus’ life: The epistles are occasional papers that never have reason to speak expressly about Jesus, as if everything about Jesus had already been communicated orally, and did not need to be repeated in the letters. Even when “[t]hese letters, [are] swarming with dogmatic discussions of the most subtle character”, remarks Drews. It’s one more excuse that theologians invent to conceal a major difficulty. Paul’s Christ does not point to the Jesus of the Gospels.3. The question of genuineness^[35]Drews examines the question of the authenticity of the Epistles, and the Historicity of Paul and starts with a reminder:

The Pauline Christ is a metaphysical principle, and his incarnation only one in idea, an imaginary element of his religious system. The man Jesus is in Paul the idealised suffering servant of God of Isaiah and the just man of Wisdom an intermediate stage of metaphysical evolution, not an historical personality. [emphasis added]

Not a single trace of Paul has been found in the writings of Philo and Josephus. The Epistle of Clement is not reliable. There’s no proof of the existence of the Pauline epistles before Justin. Papias of Hierapolis was also silent about them.(a) Emotional arguments for the genuineness.The only tools for analyzing the epistles are internal evidence and philology. Theologians rely on aesthetics, since there’s no outside comparison to identify what they perceive as the distinctiveness of style. Theologians also resort to their “feeling” to detect the powerful personality of Paul, the uninventible originality of the epistles, they even claim they can sense his soul.(b) Arguments for genuineness from the times.Paul of Tarsus, apostle extraordinaire to the GentilesVan Manen showed that the communities visited by Paul were complex organizations, not newly founded and young. They point to the middle of the 2nd century rather than the middle of the 1st. The Gnostic influence is noticeable. Gift of tongues, circumcisions were still issues in the 2nd century. Justin’s Trypho showed that the two sides of established Jews versus sectarian Jewish-Christians (Nazarene) were still confronting each other as in Galatians.

Only after the destruction of Jerusalem did Jews and Christians split, turning to enmity and hatred. Later Christians took the side of Romans against the Jews (135). Christians felt they were the new chosen, with a new Covenant, and the Jews had become outcasts and damned. In Romans 9-11 the Jews are excluded from salvation.
Paulinism is very close to the Gnosticism of the 2nd century, Drews emphasizes:Bronzino‘s depiction of the Crucifixion with 3 nails, no ropes, and a hypopodium standing support, c. 1545.

In one case the connection between Gnosticism and Paul is so evident that it may be cited as a proof that Paul knew nothing of an historical Jesus; it is the passage in 1 Cor. 2:6, where the apostle speaks of the princes of this world, who knew not what they did when they crucified the Lord of glory. It was long ago recognised by van Manen and others that by these princes we must understand, not the Jewish or Roman authorities, nor any terrestrial powers whatever, but the enemies of this world, the demons higher powers, which do indeed rule the earth for a time, but will pass away before the coming triumph of the saviour-God. That is precisely the Gnostic idea of the death of the Redeemer, and it is here put forward by Paul; from that we may infer that he did not conceive the life of Jesus as an historical event, but a general metaphysical drama, in which heaven and earth struggle for the mastery. [emphasis added]^[29]

Paul does use a lot of Gnostic language, which was understandable in the 2nd century, but not around 50–60 AD, given as the spurious dating of the Epistles. Not enough time had passed to elaborate and deepen the new thoughts. The Damascus vision is not enough to explain in Paul such a quick turn-around conversion from zealot Jew to fanatic Christian.(c) The spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles.Paul’s Judaism is highly questionable. Consulted rabbis cannot recognize a student of Judaism in Paul.^[36][37] Paul is constantly referring only to the Septuagint, and there’s no clue that he knew any Hebrew. He thinks Greek, speaks Greek, eats Greek, uses Greek in everything. Paulinism is much closer to the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and Wisdom. Paul never shows any respect for the sacred texts, distorting or changing their meaning, as in Gal. 4:21. His mindset is unique, similar only to other 2nd-century writers, like Hebrews, Barnabas, Justin.

The Epistles and the Acts present two radically different stories (F.C. Baur). The Dutch Radical School (Rudolf Steck^[27] and Willem C. van Manen^[27]) has mostly denied the authenticity of the Epistles.^[31][32]The Epistles’ goal was to separate Christianity from Judaism. Many intriguing scenarios are possible about the character of Paul, a Jew who turned against the law and Judaism, to give freedom to the new cult: one writer, or many?^[38] But, for Drews’s Christ Myth, the historicity of Paul is secondary.

The witness of the Gospels

The Suffering Servant of God in Isaiah 53

Isaiah 53 in the Great Isaiah Scroll, found at Qumran and dated to the 2nd century BCE

The book emphasized the role played in the formation of the figure of Jesus by the Old Testament character of The Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, Jeremiah, Job, Zechariah, Ezechiel, etc. especially as presented in the Greek version of the Septuagint. Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12 ESV tells the story of the human scapegoat who, on God’s will, is turned into an innocent lamb offered for sacrifice:

3 He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;… 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7… yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter… 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; … stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked… although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him… when his soul makes an offering for guilt… 11…by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12…because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors. [emphasis added]

In ch. 7, “The Mythic-Symbolic Interpretation of the Gospels”, Drews writes:Psalm 22:1–8 in St. Albans Psalter – DS DS MS mean Deus, Deus meus, first words in Latin Vulgate

The mythic-symbolic interpretation of the gospels sees in Isaiah 53 the germ-cell of the story of Jesus, the starting-point of all that is related of him, the solid nucleus round which all the rest has crystallised. The prophet deals with the Servant of Jahveh, who voluntarily submits to suffering in order to expiate the sin and guilt of the people. [emphasis added]

The Suffering Victim of Psalm 22

Isaiah 53 is seconded by the Suffering Victim in crucial Psalm 22, especially its lines: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34); They hurl insults, shaking their heads. (Psalm 22:7; Mark 15:29); They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. (Psalm 22:18; Mark 15:24). Other psalms present passages supporting the figure of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh (Psalm 1, 8, 15, 23, 24, 34, 37, 43, 69, 103, 109, 110, 116, 118, 121, 128, etc.)

The righteous as personification of wisdom, his persecution and death[edit]

Drews also underlines the contribution of the character of the Just or the Righteous in the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.^[54]– In “Wisdom 7:15–29”, she is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.^[55]– In “Wisdom 2:10–19” the wicked are plotting against the righteous man: Let us oppress the righteous poor man,- and in “Wisdom 2:20” they decide Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.^[56]

Drews adds:

[Ch. 7, “The Mythic-Symbolic Interpretation of the Gospels”] According to Deuteronomy (21:23), there was no more shameful death than to hang on a tree (in Greek xylon and stauros, in Latin crux); so that this naturally occurred as the true manner of the just one’s death. Then the particular motive of the death was furnished by the passage in Wisdom and the idea of Plato. He died as a victim of the unjust, the godless.Job, by Bonnat

[Ch. 8, “Historians and the Gospels”] No one will question that the figure of Jesus in the gospels has a certain nucleus, about which all the rest has gradually crystallised. But that this nucleus is an historical personality, and not Isaiah’s Servant of God, the Just of Wisdom, and the Sufferer of the 22d Psalm, is merely to beg the question; and this is the less justified since all the really important features of the gospel life of Jesus owe their origin partly to the myth, partly to the expansion and application of certain passages in the prophets.

[Ch. 13, “The Historical Jesus and the Ideal Christ”]…There is not in the centre of Christianity one particular historical human being, but the idea of man, of the suffering, struggling, humiliated, but victoriously emerging from all his humiliations, servant of God, symbolically represented in the actions and experiences of a particular historical person. [emphasis added]

Features of dying-and-rising God

Icon of Jesus being led to Golgotha, 16th century, Theophanes the Cretan (StavronikitaMonastery, Mount Athos).Main article: Dying-and-rising god

In Chapter 13, Drews emphasizes the mystery cult character of early Christian ecstatic reverence:

Isaiah’s suffering servant of God, offering himself for the sins of men, the just of Wisdom in combination with the mythic ideas of a suffering, dying, and rising god-saviour of the nearer Asiatic religions — it was about these alone, as about a solid nucleus, that the contents of the new religion crystallised. The ideal Christ, not the historical Jesus of modern liberal theology, was the founder of the Christian movement… It is more probable that Jesus and Isaiah are one and the same person than that the Jesus of liberal theology brought Christianity into existence.
…that Christ became “the son of God” and descended upon the earth; that God divested himself of his divinity, took on human form, led a life of poverty with the poor, suffered, was crucified and buried, and rose again, and thus secured for men the power to rise again and to obtain forgiveness of sins and a blessed life with the heavenly father—that is the mystery of the figure of Christ; that is what the figure conveyed to the hearts of the faithful, and stirred them to an ecstatic reverence for this deepest revelation of God. [emphasis added]

Reception

Germany

Drews managed an intense advertising campaign in Germany with lectures, articles, interviews. It caused considerable controversy. His work proved popular enough that prominent theologians and historians addressed his arguments in several leading journals of religion.^[57] In response, Drews took part in a series of public debates, which often became emotionally charged.

Drews led a militant campaign for his book, supported by the National Association of Free Religion Societies, and The National Association of Monists. which organized a huge debate on Jan 31 and Feb 1, 1910 in the Berlin Zoological Garden between monists and liberal theologians including Baron von Soden of the Berlin University. Attended by 2,000 people, including the country’s most eminent theologians, the meetings went on until three in the morning. The New York Times called it “one of the most remarkable theological discussions” since the days of Martin Luther, reporting that Drews’s supporters caused a sensation by plastering the town’s billboards with posters asking, Did Jesus Christ ever live? According to the newspaper his arguments were so graphic that several women had to be carried from the hall screaming hysterically, while one woman stood on a chair and invited God to strike him down.^[58][59][60] On Feb 20, 1910, a counter confrontation took place in the Bush Circus. The following year, on March 12, 1911 another follow-up debate was organized.^[61] In 1912, S. J. Case noted that within the last decade, doubts about Jesus existence had been advanced in several quarters, but nowhere so insistently as in Germany where the skeptical movement had become a regular propaganda, “Its foremost champion is Arthur Drews, professor of philosophy in Karlsruhe Technical High School. Since the appearance of his Christusmythe in 1909 the subject has been kept before the public by means of debates held in various places, particularly at some important university centers such as Jena, Marburg, Giessen, Leipzig, Berlin.”^[62]

United States

Drews’s international popularity was confirmed by the New York Times’s critical review of his Christ Myth book on March 26, 1911, “A German’s Christ Myth: Prof. Arthur Drews Carries the Higher Criticism to the Point of Absurdity”. The anonymous reviewer recites the current objections addressed to Drews’s Christ Myth book. He lists the general criticisms addressed by theologians, denouncing

…the pseudo-scientific vagaries… in a style redolent of the professorial chair of a German pedant…[ Jesus’s] characteristics…are derived from Jewish ideals floating in the air at the time…This mythical personage was transformed into a demigod by St. Paul…virtually the creator of Christianity. His main grounds for disbelief in the existence of Jesus are the absence of any contemporary references to him except in the Gospels – a rather large exception, one would think. Passages of Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny are explained away as being late, or interpolated, or applying to the myth rather than to the person…

Dr. Drews proceeds ruthlessly to remove even this kernel [of a gracious life, with its marked individuality left by liberal theologians] and leaves virtually nothing in its place except a mass of floating ideas and ideals…concentrated around a non-existent personality…

[Prof. Drews] denies the originality of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and considers them tainted with other-worldliness…[his book] is an argument in favor of…Monism…known as Pantheism…It is, however, just the sort of presentment which attracts the half-baked mind that cannot judge of historic evidence. [emphasis added]^[63]

Russia

Drews’s Christ Myth was to find an unpredictable reception in Russia, as his ideas reached the new Soviet Union leadership at the end of a very circuitous route – as a distant repercussion of the philosophy of Hegel and the reactions of his students, notably the relationship between Bruno Bauer and his young student, Karl Marx.

At the end of World War I, back on the social front, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) had become the successor of Marx and Engels’ socialism/communism, formulating his own Russian version of Marxism-Leninism of communism and atheism. Once the Bolsheviks gained power in the Soviet Union, Marxist–Leninist atheism became de facto the official doctrine of the state, under the leadership of Lenin, the Soviet leader from 1917 until his death.

Lenin was particularly receptive to the ideas of Bruno Bauer, a former friend and ally of Karl Marx when both were Young Hegelians. According to Zvi Rosen, in Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx (1977), Lenin was eager to use Bruno Bauer’s attacks on Christianity as agitprop against the bourgeoisie, as updated by Arthur Drews. He accepted Drews’s thesis that Jesus had never existed as anti-Christian propaganda. Christianity has adapted to many ideas over the years and had become a ruling class ideology. Christianity can handle and adapt to any idea, except that Jesus never existed. So, the Communists used the ultimate truth to fight the feudal power of the Christian churches.

Lenin argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to adopt revolutionary ideas like those of Drews, and demolish the icons of bourgeois society.^[64][65] Several editions of Drews’s The Christ Myth were published in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s onwards, and his arguments were included in school and university textbooks.^[66] Public meetings debating Did Christ live? were organized, during which party operatives debated with clergymen.^[67]

However, this acceptance of his ideas in Moscow and the Soviet Union did not save Drews, a believer, from Lenin’s attacks, for being a “reactionary, openly helping the exploiters to replace old and rotten prejudices with new, still more disgusting and base prejudices”.^[65]

At home, the diffusion of his book in the USSR had no impact on Drews’s modest life as a teacher in Karlsruhe and were of no use to improving his social lot.

Influence on Couchoud and G.A. Wells

In a different development to the West, Arthur Drews became influential on the formation of the “Jesus existence denial” theories of Paul-Louis Couchoud and G. A. Wells. Fluent in German, they had followed the huge academic controversy over the Christ Myth, and were able to read all of Drews’s work in the original German. They both accepted and adapted Drews’s main ideas. Drews had finally found some followers abroad, both in France and England. Wells, for instance, saw Jesus as a personification of Wisdom, which had appeared on earth in some indefinite time past. William B. Smith in the US, who also could read German fluently, remained a very close ally and a kindred soul.

In the same manner that Schweitzer is a seminal reference for historicists, Drews is a basic reference for the denial of Jesus historicity. Arthur Drews left his mark on practically the whole development of the Christ Myth thesis, (so-called “mythicism”) which followed him.

Professional theologians

In Christ Myth II (1912), Drews describes the cultural commotion:

Now the whole Press is engaged against the disturber of the peace…Opposing lectures and Protestant meetings are organised, and J. Weiss publicly declares that the author of the book has no right to be taken seriously. But among his fellows, within the four walls of the lecture-hall, and in the printed version of his lectures, Weiss assures his readers that he has taken the matter ‘very seriously’, and speaks of the fateful hour through which our [theological] science is passing. [emphasis added]

Most significant theologian scholars immediately felt the need to take up the challenge and entered the debate sparked off by Drews’s Christ Myth about the Historicity of Jesus. Most of the responses world-wide by theologians were violently negative and critical.

But Drews had some quality supporters, like the famous Orientalist Peter Jensen. Coincidentally, M. M. Mangasarian also published in 1909 The Truth About Jesus, Is He A Myth?. In 1912, William Benjamin Smith published Ecce Deus: Studies of Primitive Christianity, (with an introduction by Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel (1912).

No, “Prince” Harry, The US 1st Amendment isn’t bonkers – by Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe) 28 May 2021

Dear Harry,

Do you mind if we go straight to a first-name basis? (Call me Jeff.) Though I’m not a Republican, I am a lifelong republican — small “r” — and the notion of royal families and ranks of nobility has always stuck in my craw. Not that I would press my aversion to the point of rudeness. If I were writing to your grandmother or your father, I would politely address them by their standard honorifics. But inasmuch as you have broken away from “the Firm” and now make your home in California, I hope you’ll agree that the labels “prince” and “duke” can be dispensed with, at least on this side of the pond.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533

©

Actually, anti-royalism is a fundamental element of the American way of life you are adapting to. Our Constitution expressly forbids both federal and state governments to grant titles of nobility. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, extolled that ban as the “cornerstone” of America’s republican system. Perhaps the one thing we Americans never argue about — and as you know, we are regularly at daggers drawn over just about everything — is whether we’d be better off with a monarch. When we turned our backs on royalty in 1776, it was for good.

You know what else is a cornerstone — indeed, a bearing wall — of America’s democratic republic? The First Amendment, about which you were rather disparaging in a recent interview.

Earlier this month, on the “Armchair Expert” podcast, you were bewailing the intrusiveness of the paparazzi and the brazenness with which they stalk celebrities. The interviewer noted that while the relentless photographers may be obnoxious, what they do is legal under the First Amendment, which protects the right of the press to gather and publish information.

“I don’t want to start sort of going down the First Amendment route, because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here for a short period of time,” you replied. “But you can find a loophole in anything.” You complained that even though “laws were created to protect people,” the media are allowed to disregard people’s privacy so that “they can make more money and they can capitalize on our pain, grief, and this general self-destructive mode.”

Then you added: “I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment, as I still don’t understand it. But it’s bonkers.”

No, Harry, the First Amendment isn’t bonkers. It is indispensable to America’s astounding history of achievement and to the way of life that has made this country an unprecedented haven for men and women who yearn to speak — or write, or learn, or teach, or report — with a freedom unknown in their native lands.

There is no First Amendment in Britain, where people can get arrested for “online crimes of speech” if their social media posts are too offensive. In the United States, by contrast, the government is commanded by the First Amendment to let people have their say, no matter how reprehensible. To be sure, there have always been efforts to get around that command, from the Alien and Sedition Acts in America’s early years to the atrocious speech codes on many modern college campuses. Freedom of speech and of the press always require vigilant defense. Fortunately, those who defend them have the First Amendment on their side.

There is no question that unbridled speech and irresponsible journalism can have terrible downsides. I can’t fault you for detesting the paparazzi who have no respect for the feelings of the celebrities they pursue. You were just a young boy when your mother lost her life in a car wreck while being chased through Paris by paparazzi. It’s understandable that you might think it bonkers for the First Amendment to enshrine a right to ferret out and publish information about people against their wishes.

It’s true: Freedom of speech and of the press have often led to embarrassment, annoyance, and unfair publicity. But far more often, they have been the spotlight that exposes truth, illuminates corruption, reveals misjudgment, publicizes problems, and uncovers remedies. What society gains from the First Amendment vastly outweighs the price it pays.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson complained bitterly about the way the “public papers” were “afflicting” John Jay, among the greatest statesmen of that generation. It was outrageous, he wrote, that a devoted public servant like Jay should “have his peace of mind so much disturbed by any individual who shall think proper to arraign him in a newspaper.” Nevertheless, Jefferson avowed, to stifle the press would be much worse: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. To the sacrifice of time, labor, fortune, a public servant must count upon adding that of peace of mind and even reputation.”

You told your podcast interviewer that “laws were created to protect people,” but the First Amendment was created to protect a certain kind of culture: one in which liberty is valued as both a means and an end. In which even powerful officials, famous celebrities, and wealthy titans can be questioned, rebutted, or denounced. In which sacred cows can be slaughtered and prevailing dogmas mocked.

In recent months, you have had plenty to say on topics ranging from your mental health to race and the royal family to your father’s shortcomings as a parent. Your views have provoked sympathy and admiration in some quarters, fury and contempt in others. Thanks to the First Amendment, your freedom to express those views is unassailable. So is everyone else’s freedom to say what they think about you. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is the best one ever devised for holding the mighty accountable and unshackling human minds. That isn’t bonkers — it’s a blessing. And as an American resident, you share in it too.

………………..

No, Prince Harry, the First Amendment isn’t bonkers (msn.com)

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit bitly.com/Arguable.

Godzilla Vs Kong 2021 – An Intersectional Deconstructivist Anti-Colonialist Review Video – by Shauna O’Dorothy

https://videopress.com/v/lEAw40k3?preloadContent=metadata

Godvilla vs Kong Review Audio Mp3

One Hour of Chinese Communist Music

One Hour of Chinese Communist Music Audio File

تسقُط كلُّ أشكال الحَجْر والأغلاق التام

يجب على الطبقة العاملة أن تدافع عن نفسهاقاطعو خونة العمال – من أجل أعادة تشكيل الأممية الرابعة

الرعاية الصحية البائسة، والإسكان المتهالك، والإنتاج من أجل الربح، والسيطرة الإمبريالية: هذه هي طبيعة نظام الحكم الرأسمالي التي تغذي الأزمة الاقتصادية والصحية التي تعصف بالعالم منذ ظهور وباء فيروز الكوفيد. لقد استجابت البرجوازية الطفيلية للوباء بالوسائل التي تخدم مصالحها على أفضل وجه، بحبس كل سكانها بالقوة في منازلهم، في انتظار التطعيم.

إن أشكال الحَجْر والأغلاق البرجوازية هي إجراءات صحية عمومية رجعية وعلى العمال أن يعارضوها. فبينما تؤدي عمليات الإغلاق إلى إبطاء انتشار العدوى بشكل مؤقت، فأنها تضعف القدرة القتالية للطبقة العاملة. فمن خلال إغلاق فروع كاملة من الصناعة والخدمات أدت سياسات الحجْر الى أزمة اِقتصادية وألقت بجماهير من الناس في براثن البطالة. كما أدى إغلاقُ المدارس ودور رعاية الأطفال إلى زيادة العبء القمعي على الأسرة. لقد ازداد قمع الدولة بشكل كبير حيث تعرضت الحقوق الديمقراطية وحقوق الطبقة العاملة للاعتداء كما عانت التجمعات والمظاهرات وحرية التنقل والإضرابات والتنظيم النقابي والأنشطة النقابية الأخرى من التقييد أو الحظر. تهدف عمليات الإغلاق إلى منع نضال الطبقة العاملة، وهو السبيل الوحيد الذي يمكن للعمال من خلاله حماية صحتهم بشكل حقيقي ومواجهة الأسباب الاجتماعية للأزمة.

بدعوى «التضحية المشتركة»، شن الرأسماليون حربا خاطفة ضد الطبقة العاملة وأصبح تحطيم النقابات والتسريح الجماعي للعمال، وخفض الأجور وزيادة وتائر العمل هي «الوضع الطبيعي الجديد». في مواجهة التهديد المزدوج من فيروس قاتل وهجوم رأسمالي، تقف الطبقة العاملة منزوعة السلاح. في جميع أنحاء العالم، تعاون القادة المؤيدون للرأسمالية في النقابات العمالية والأحزاب العمالية، بإخلاص مع الطبقة الحاكمة في هجومها. إنهم يخونون الطبقة العاملة باِسم الوحدة الوطنية والكفاح ضد الفيروس.

وسواءٌ تعلَّق الأمرُ بحزبي العمال البريطاني والأسترالي، أو الحزب الاجتماعي الديمقراطي أو «دي لينْك» في ألمانيا، أو الحزب الشيوعي في فرنسا، أو الحزب الشيوعي في جنوب إفريقيا، يلعب المضللون في قيادة الحركة العمالية دورًا رئيسيًا في فرض الإغلاق، على المستويين المَحلي والقومي وإقناع العمال والمُضطَهَدين بقبول ذلك. من نقابات « إ.أف. أل ـ سي.أي. أو» الأمريكية إلى النقابات العمالية المكسيكية والإيطالية إلى اتحادات رينغو وزينرورين وزينروكيو اليابانية، يحث قادة النقابات أعضاءهم على دعم تدابير البرجوازيين. وبمعنى آخر: اِبقوا في بيوتكم وأخسروا.

تفرض الحاجة الملحة للدفاع عن صحة الطبقة العاملة وسبل عيشها، وبشكل مباشر، مهمة صهر قيادة جديدة للحركة العمالية. وعلى النقابات أن تناضل ضد غلق الصناعات من طرف الدولة الرأسمالية ومن أجل ظروف عمل آمنة تماماً. إن البنية التحتية المتهالكة للرعاية الصحية والإسكان تحتاج إلى إعادة بناء وتوسيع نطاقها على الفور. إن مصادرة أفضل عقارات الرأسماليين إلى جانب برنامج مكثف للأشغال العامة أمر ضروري لتوفير ظروف معيشية لائقة للعمال.

إنَّ كلَّ المصالح الحيوية للعمال والمُضطَهَدين تتعارض مع ركائز حكم الطبقة الرأسمالية. وتطرح الأزمة الحالية بحدة الحاجة إلى تحرير المرأة من أغلال الأسرة، وإنهاء الاضطهاد العنصري والتحرر من الاستغلال الإمبريالي. ان السبيل الوحيد للمضي قدمًا للبشرية هو من خلال الثورات العمالية وإنشاء اقتصاد دولي اشتراكي مخطط.

في مواجهة الإفلاس التام لقادة الحركة العمالية الراسخين وأتباعهم الماركسيين الزائفين، فإن السؤال الحيوي الذي يطرح نفسه على البروليتاريين الواعين هو الحاجة إلى قيادة قائمة على البرنامج الثوري للتروتسكية، أي، الماركسية – اللينينية الأصيلة. إن الرابطة الشيوعية الدولية (الأممية الرابعة) تسعى إلى بناء حزب طليعي لينيني أممي، الأداة الأساسية لجلب الوعي الثوري للبروليتاريا وتحقيق سلطة العمال. لنعيد بناء الأممية الرابعة، الحزب العالمي للثورة الاِشتراكية.

يسقُط التعاون الطبقي والوحدة الوطنية

خلال العام الماضي كان موقفنا في الرابطة الشيوعية الدولية يَتمثل في قبول الحجْر والأغلاق كإجراءات ضرورية. إننا نرفض هذا الموقف. لقد كان ذلك الموقف استسلاماً لصرخة حشد «الوحدة الوطنية» التي تدعو لأنْ تُسانِد كلُّ الطبقات الحجْرَ الصِّحي لأنه ينقذ الأرواح.

ومن أجل هذه القضية التي يُدَّعى أنها عالمية، يُضَحي قادة العمال، طوعا، بمصالح البروليتاريا. ومثلما هو الحال مع كلِّ مسائل الصحة العامة، بشكل عام، فإن الكفاح ضد الوباء لا يقف فوق الصراعات الطبقية؛ فوراء اهتمام الرأسماليين بـ «إنقاذ الأرواح»، تتخفَّى مُواصَلتِهم الدفاع عن مصالح طبقتهم. إن الغرض من اهتمام البرجوازية بالصحة العامة هو الحفاظ على قوة عاملة ملائمة بما يكفي للاستغلال بأرخص تكلفة ممكنة، وفي نفس الوقت حماية صحة طبقتها. خلافا لهذا الهدف الرجعي، فإن للبروليتاريا مصلحة في تأمين أفضل الظروف المعيشية والرعاية الصحية للجميع. من الواضح أنه لا يمكن التوفيق بين هذه المصالح الطبقية المتعارضة، سواءٌ كان ذلك تحت ظروف الوباء أو غير ذلك. فقط من خلال التعبئة المستقلة ضد البرجوازية تستطيع الطبقة العاملة الدفاع عن صحتها وسلامتها

تبتز البرجوازية العمال زاعمه أن النضال من أجل مصالحهم يقود إلى انتشار المرض، وأن اجتماعات النقابات والاحتجاجات تهدد الصحة العامة؛ وتدعى البرجوازية أن عمال الرعاية الصحية يقتلون الناس حين يناضلوا من أجل ظروف عمل أفضل وأنه يجب إغلاق المدارس ومراكز الرعاية النهارية لحماية الأطفال. هذه كذبة كبرى! أن النضال ضد عمليات الإغلاق هو نقطة البداية الضرورية لمعالجة الأسباب الاجتماعية للكارثة الحالية. فاجتماعات النقابات ضرورية لتمكين العمال من الدفاع عن أنفسهم. كما أن النضال من قبل العاملين في مجال الرعاية الصحية هو الطريق إلى رعاية صحية أفضل. إن الكفاح ضد إغلاق المدارس ودور الرعاية هو شرط مسبق لتحسين المدارس ودور رعاية الأطفال كما انه يعزز النضال من أجل تحرير النساء.

في كتاب» اِحتضار الرأسمالية ومَهام الأممية الرابعة» الصادر في عام 1938 كتب القائد البلشفي ليون تروتسكي قائلا:

« في مجتمع مبني على الاِستغلال، تتمثل الأخلاق الأسمى في أخلاق الثورة الاشتراكية. وكل الأساليب والوسائل التي ترفع مستوى الوعي الطبقي للعمال، وثقتهم في قوتهم الذاتية واِستعدادهم للتضحية وإنكار الذات في وسط الكفاح، هي أساليب ووسائل صالحة. والأساليب غير المقبولة هي تلك التي تزرع الخوف والخنوع في نفوس المُضطَهِدين أمام مضطهديهم.»

تستعمل البورجوازية على الدوام دوافع أخلاقية عليا مِثل « إنقاذ حياة الناس» لتبرير جرائمها. ويستخدم الإمبرياليون الألمان والفرنسيون الإتحاد الأوروبي لاِمتصاص دماء البروليتاريا في جميع أنحاِء أوروبا باِسم « السِّلم» و «التقدم الاجتماعي». وقد دمرالاِمبرياليون الأمريكيون وحلفاؤهم في حلف شمال الأطلنطي ليبيا، والعراق، وأفغانستان وبلدان كثيرة أخرى، باِسم « الديمقراطية» و «الحريَّة». كما غزوا الصومال في عام 1992 من أجل « إغاثة الجائعين». فعندما تُصرِّح البورجوازية بشكل عاجل بأنه يجِب « إنقاذ حياة الناس»، فأن القصد من ذلك هو غرس الخضوع أمام الطبقة الحاكمة والتعبئة خلف شعار «الوحدة الوطنية» لخدمة مصالحها الخاصة.

من أجل الرقابة النقابية على الصحة والسَّلامة

الدولة الرأسمالية والتي تتكون بشكل أساسي مِن الشرطة والسجون والجيش والمَحاكِم، هي جهاز عنف منظم الهدف منه حماية هيمنة وأرباح الطبقة الحاكمة. وبينما يساند الماركسيون بعض إجراءات الصحة العامة التي تفرضها الدولة والتي تعود بالنفع على الطبقة العاملة، مثل التطعيم الإجباري، فأن الاِعتماد على الدولة لحماية الصحة والسلامة هو امر انتحاري.

لقد أصبح الستالينيون في الحزب الشيوعي اليوناني خبراء في تشويه القواعد الأبجدية للماركسية. فأحد المطالب الرئيسية التي يطرحونها في النقابات وفقا لصحيفة «ريزوسباتيس» الناطقة باسمهم، والصادرة بتاريخ الفاتح من أبريل عام 2021، هو: « المراقبة الصحية المُنظَّمة، تحت مسؤولية أجهزة الدولة لمَنْع اِنتشار الفيروس في ميناء « بيريه»، وفى شركة الشحن «كوسْكو»، وعلى السفن، وفي منطقة بناء وإصلاح السفن، وفي المصانع والوحدات الصناعية التي توظف آلاف العمال.»

إن هذا يعنى ربِط الطبقة العاملة بأغلال الدولة الرأسمالية وزرع الأوهام حول كرم وطيبة وكالات الدولة الصحية. إن على العمال الكفاح من أجل المراقبة النقابية لسلامة أماكن العمل. فالنقابات وليس الدولة الرأسمالية، هي التي تقرر الظروف الآمنة للعمل في ظلها.

تُمثِّل النقابات منظمات الدفاع الأولية للطبقة العاملة ويَكْمن دورها في حماية العمال في أماكن العمل وليس النضال من أجل ابقائهم في منازلهم. ولكن على العكس من ذلك ما قام به قادة نقابات المعلمين في العديد من البلدان حيث طالبوا بأن تظل المدارس مُغلقَة بقصْد «حماية» المُعلمين والأطفال. أن هذا رفض جبان للنضال من أجل مدارس آمنة. في مقابل سياسة البيروقراطيين النقابيين التي تدعو «للبقاء في البيوت والانتظار»، يجب بناء قيادة طبقية نضالية تعتمد على تعبئة قواعد النقابات والحركة العمالية بأكملها ضِدَّ الأغلاق ومن أجل مدارس أفضل وأماكن عمل أكثر أمنا.

إن هناك حاجة ملحة إلى شن حملات اِنخراط نقابي وسط العمال غير المنظمين لتقوية البروليتاريا وتوحيدها. أضافة ألي ذلك يحتاج العمال المؤقتون والمتعاقدون إلى الانضمام إلى النقابات بأجور ومزايا وفوائد نقابية كاملة. إن تنظيم الأجراء ذوي القوة الاجتماعية الضعيفة مثل موظفي قطاع البيع بالتجزئة والعاملين في الحانات والمطاعم وخدمات التوصيل على سبيل المثال، وانخراطهم في النقابات سيكفل لهم حماية الطبقة العاملة المُنظَّمة.

من أجل إعادة فتح الاقتصاد وللكفاح ضد البطالة

سائرة في خطى قادة الحركة العمالية الخَونَة خرت المنظمات التي تُدعي الاِنتماء للتروتسكية ساجدة أمام البورجوازية. فقد ساندت منظمات « لوت أوفريير» والتيار الماركسي العالمي (تي. أم، إ)، والـ « وورلد سوسياليست ويب سايت»، و «مجموعة إنترناسيوناليست»، والفصيل التروتسكي ـ الأممية الرابعة وشركاه، ساندوا جميعهم سياسات الحجْر والأغلاق، وخانوا البروليتاريا.

فعلى سبيل المثال، طالبت منظمة « تي. أم. إ» في موقع «مارْكسيسْت. أورغ» بتاريخ 20 مارس 2020 بأنه «يجِب وقْف كُلِّ أنتاج غير أساسي وإرسال العمال إلى منازلهم بأجر كامل طيلة المدة المطلوبة». إنَّ هذا المَطلب رجعي تماماً ولا يمكنه إلاَّ أنْ يؤدي إلى مزيد مِن تسريح العمال. وبرفع هذا المَطلب فإن منظمة «تي. أم. إ» تريد دفع قطاعات بأكملها من الطبقة العاملة إلى براثن البطالة والخدمات الاجتماعية.

إن الطبقة العاملة تستمِد قوَّتهَا الاِجتماعية من دورها في الإنتاج. ولهذا فعلى الحركة العمالية أنْ تُعارض تسريحَ العمال والبطالة الجزئية من خلال الكفاح من أجل وضع التوظيف والتدريب تحت أدارة النقابات، والمطالبة بأسبوع عمل أقصر دون خسارة في الأجور مما يتيح توزيع العمل لفائدة كل الأيادي. إن الأزمة الحالية تُبيِّن وبشكل صارخ ضرورة زيادة الإنتاج والخدمات ويشمل ذلك رعاية طبية أكثر وأفضل، وتوسعا مكثفا في مجال الأسكان العام، ومبانٍ فسيحة وجيدة التهوية للمدارس ودور رعاية الأطفال ووسائل نقل عمومي أفضل. إن إعادة فتح الاقتصاد وتوسيعه أمر ضروري لتلبية احتياجات العمال ومكافحة البطالة والفقر والأملاق.

من أجل رعاية صحية عالية الجودة، مجانًا، عند نقطة الخدمة

لا يمكن لنظام الإنتاج الموجه لتحقيق الربح أن يوفر رعاية صحية كافية. إن المطلوب هو مصادرة جميع المستشفيات الخاصة والدينية وشركات إنتاج الأدوية دون تعويض! ومطلوب أيضا برامج للتدريب الجماعي وتوظيف العاملين في المجال الطبي والمستشفيات تحت أدارة النقابات! ومطلوب أيضا إلغاء براءات الاِختراع بقصد إنتاج اللقاحات والأدوية بكميات كبيرة في مختلف أنحاء العالم.

في مواجهة الأنقاض المتداعية لأنظمة الرعاية الصحية، أثار الإصلاحيون من مختلف المشارب دعوات لتأميم المرافق الصحية. في هذا الصدد دعت منظمة « ليفت فُويْس»، الفرع الأمريكي للفصيل التروتسكي، بتاريخ 13 أبريل 2020، دعت ألي « تأميم جميع الصناعات المرتبطة بالصحة، ووضعها تحت سيطرة العمال». لا تنخدعوا بهذه الثرثرة اليسارية الزائفة لهؤلاء الاِجتماعيين الديمقراطيين؛ فمنظمة « ليفت فُويْس» في الواقع تدعو لتطبيق إجراءات إغلاق أكثر صرامة، مما سيُعيق، بشكل متزايد أي نوع من العمل الجماهيري للبروليتاريا ويجعل النضال من أجل رعاية صحية أفضل أمرا مستحيلا.

تقترح منظمة « ليفت فويس» النموذج التالي للسيطرة العمالية: « يُبيِّن العمال في الأرجنتين كيف يمكن تطبيق ذلك. ففي كل أنحاء البلاد، بدأت المصانع الخاضعة لسيطرة العمال في الإنتاج دون مراقبة أرباب العمل، بهدف تلبية الاحتياج بدلاً عن الجشع.» ما تتحدث عنه « ليفْت فُويْس » هو الاستيلاء على بعض المصانع الهامشية وتلك التي أعلنت حالة الإفلاس في الأرجنتين الرأسمالية. أن ذلك ليس نموذجا لما هو مطلوب. إنَّ منظور « ليفْت فُويْس » يتمثل في تسييرٌ العمال لنظم الرعاية الصحية المؤممة في إطار النظام الرأسمالي، أي التعاون الطبقي المؤسسي. أنَّ تحريرَ الرعاية الصحية من براثن الجشعين الرأسماليين لا يمكن تحقيقه إلا من خلال تحطيم الدولة البورجوازية واستبدالها بديكتاتورية البروليتاريا، وتجريد الطبقة الرأسمالية من أملاكها.

على الطبقة العاملة الدفاع عن كل المُضطَهَدين

تتعرَّض الشَّرائح الدُنيا من الطبقة المتوسطة للتدمير. إن الدعم الإجرامي لقادة العمال وكل اليسار الإصلاحي لعمليات الإغلاق قد أفسح المجال لليمين المتطرف، وسمح للرجعيين المشؤومين والفاشيين الصريحين بالظهور كمدافعين عن الحقوق الديمقراطية وكمناصرين للبرجوازية الصغيرة المدمرة. وفي هذا الصدد يتعيَّن على الحزب الثوري أن يعبئ الطبقة العاملة للدفاع عن كل المُضطَهَدين وحشدهم إلى جانب العمال في النضال ضد البورجوازية.

يعاني الملايين من الفلاحين الفقراء في آسيا، وأمريكا اللاتينية وإفريقيا، من الاستنزاف بواسطة الملاك العقاريين والبنوك بينما يعاني الباعة المتجولون من الجوع بسبب عمليات الإغلاق. وفي كل المناطق يعاني أصحاب المحلات الصغيرة والحانات والمطاعم وكذا الطلاب من الاِختناق من جراء الديون. أننا نطاب بإلغاءَ كل ديونهم.

لقد أُجبر الإغلاق ملايين العاملين ذوي الياقات البيضاء على العمل من منازلهم. إن العمل «عن بعد» وعبر الاَنترنيت يؤدي ألي تسريح العمال وألى العمل الإضافي غير المدفوع الأجر. وبالإضافة الى عزل وتفتيت القوة العاملة، يجعل العمل «من بعد» الهجمات المناهضة للنقابات أكثر سهولة في الوقت الذي أصبح فيه التنظيم والنشاط النقابي أمرا شبه مستحيل. إن نجاح أي أضراب في تحقيق مطالب ما لا يتم عن بعد عبر منصة « زومْ» وخطوط الإنترنيت ولكن على خطوط الإضراب أمام أماكن العمل. يجب على كل نقابة جديرة باسمها أن تعارض مخططات العمل «عن بُعد».

يشكل المهاجرون عنصرا رئيسيا وسط الطبقة العاملة ويتم توظيفهم بأجور زهيدة، وبشكل غير متناسب في قطاعات الخدمات التي كانت أكثر القطاعات تأثرا من جراء الوباء. لتوحيد صفوفها، على الطبقة العاملة أن تناضل من أجل حقوق المواطنة الكاملة لجميع المهاجرين!

من أجل إضفاء الطابع الاجتماعي على وظائف الأسرة

تحاول البرجوازية بكل قوتها إعادة عجلة التاريخ إلى الوراء. لقد أدت عمليات الإغلاق إلى إلقاء مسؤولية رعاية الأطفال والتعليم ورعاية المسنين بالكامل على عاتق الأسرة، وبشكل أساسي على أكتاف النساء. وهكذا تُجبَر النساء على العودة إلى البقاء في البيوت، حيث يفقدن وظائفهن بأعداد أكثر من الرجال، ويقعن ضحايا للارتفاع الحاد في حالات العنف المنزلي. وبينما يتم سجن الأطفال والمراهقين مع أوليائهم، يُترك كبار السن ليموتوا مُنعزلين في دور التقاعد ذات الرعاية السيئة.

وإذا أظهرت عمليات الإغلاق شيئًا واحدًا، فإنها تُبيِّن أن البرنامج النسوي لإعادة توزيع المهام المنزلية داخل الأسرة هو طريق مسدود. ما هو مطلوب في هذا الصدد هو إخراج الأعباء المنزلية من داخل إطار الأسرة وذلك من خلال توفير دور رعاية مجانية للأطفال، تعمل على مدار24 ساعة، ومطابخ ومطاعم ومغاسل جماعية، ومراكز تقاعد ذات خدمة ممتازة.

لقد عززت عمليات الإغلاق المؤسسات الأساسية التي يرتكز عليها النظام الرأسمالي والتي تتمثل في الدولة والكنيسة والأسرة. إنَّ تحرُّر النساء لا يُمكِن إنجازه إلاَّ في إطار تحوُّل اِشتراكي عالمي، حيث تصبح رعاية الأطفال والأعباء المنزلية مسؤولية جماعية بدلا عن الأسرة. من أجل تحرر النساء بواسطة الثورة الاشتراكية.

تسقُط الاِمبريالية

إن النظام الإمبريالي العالمي، حيث تتنافس قوى عظمى قليلة العدد على تقسيم العالم، مستغلة بلايين البشر، هو مصدر الأزمة العالمية الحالية. إن الوباء الحالي يستدعي وبشكل ملح استجابة دولية منسقة. لكن في نظام قائم على النزاعات بين القوى الإمبريالية والدول القومية المتنافسة، فإنه من المستحيل تحقيق ذلك. لقد سحقت الإمبريالية وأوقفت التطور الاقتصادي والاجتماعي والثقافي للعالم لخدمة مصالح بورصات وول ستريت وطوكيو ولندن وفرانكفورت وباريس. ويستخدم الاِمبرياليون هذه الأزمة لِتشديد القبضة الخانقة لرأس المال المالي الدولي على البلدان التابعة. يجب إلغاء الديون التي فرضها الاِمبرياليون. ِتسقُط منظمة الأمم المتحدة، وصندوق النقد الدولي، ومنظمة حلف شمال الأطلسي، ومعاهدة « نافتا 2.0» والاِتحاد الأوروبي.

دافعوا عن الصين! يضاعف الإمبرياليون من جهودهم لقلب مكاسب ثورة 1949 وفتح الدولة العمالية الصينية المشوهة للنهب الإمبريالي، عن طريق الثورة المضادة الرأسمالية. أن المطلوب هو ثورة سياسية عمالية تحل محل البيروقراطية الستالينية.

مِن أجل ثورات أكتوبر جديدة

تمتلئ الصحافة البرجوازية بجدل لا ينتهي حول أي بلد تمكن من تحقيق توازن أفضل بين الموت الجماعي والقمع الجماعي. هل هي كوريا الجنوبية أم السويد أم أستراليا؟ نحن الماركسيون لدينا نموذج مختلف تمامًا يتمثل في الثورة البلشفية عام 1917. من خلال كسر قيود الاستغلال الرأسمالي، حققت الطبقة العاملة تحت قيادة البلاشفة، على رأسهم لينين وتر وتسكي، خطوة عملاقة نحو التقدم البشري. لقد كان نظام الصحة العامة في الدولة العمالية السوفيتية أحد أعظم الإنجازات، على الرغم من تأسيسه في أتون بوتقة الحرب الأهلية والغزو الإمبريالي في إقليم دمرته الحرب العالمية بشكل شامل. في عام 1919 كتب نيكولاي سيماشكو، الرجل الذي قاد تأسيس ذلك النظام:

«لترحيل فقراء المدن من أقبية متعفنة إلى غرف فسيحة في منازل مبنية بشكل جيد، وللمقاومة الحقيقية للأمراض الاجتماعية، ولخلق ظروف عمل عادية للعامل -إن كل هذا بعيد المنال إذا اعتبرنا الملكية الخاصة شيئًا مقدسًا لا تنتهك حرمته. لقد تردد النظام الصحي القديم أمام ذلك كما هو الأمر أمام حاجز لا يُمكِن تخطيه. ولكنَّ السلطة السوفيتية أي السلطة الشيوعية، حطمت هذا الحاجز.»

مقتبس من: « مَهام الصِّحة العامة في روسيا السوفييتية» المنشور في «رؤى بلشفية: المرحلة الأولى من الثورة الثقافية في روسيا السوفيتية،» نصوص جمعها وليم ج. روزنبيرغ، (مطبعة جامعة ميشيغان، آن آربور، 1990)

اللجنة التنفيذية الدولية للرابطة الشيوعية الدولية (الأممية الرابعة)

19 أبريل 2021

تسقُط كلُّ أشكال الحَجْر والأغلاق التام (icl-fi.org)

Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity – by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay (Areo) 2017

This document is very long and detailed so a brief bulleted summary is provided below for those who don’t have the hour it takes for a careful read.

• Modernity, in terms of the views and values that have brought us out of the feudalism of the Medieval period and led us to the relative richness and comfort we enjoy today (and which are rapidly spreading around the world), is under threat from the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum.
• Modernity is worth fighting for if you enjoy and wish others to enjoy the benefits of a first-world existence in relative safety and with high degrees of individual liberty that can express itself in functional societies.
• Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.
• The enemies of Modernity now form two disagreeing factions — the postmoderns on the left and the premoderns on the right — and largely represent two ideological visions for rejecting Modernity and the good fruits of the Enlightenment, such as science, reason, republican democracy, rule of law, and the nearest thing we can claim to objective moral progress.
• Left-right partisanship is the tool by which they condemn Modernity and continually radicalize sympathizers to choose between the two warring factions of anti-modernism: postmodernism and premodernism.
• A “New Center” centrist position is well-intended, represents most people’s politics, and cannot hold. It is naturally unstable and reinforces the very thinking that perpetuates our current state of what we term existential polarization.
• Those who support Modernity should do so unabashedly and without reference to relatively minor partisan differences across the “liberal/conservative” split. The fight before us now is bigger than that, and the extremes at both ends are dominating the usual political spectrum to everybody’s loss.
• Modernity can be fought for, and it’s probably what you already want unless you’re on the lunatic fringe of the left or right.

***

“Modernity” is the name for the profound cultural transformation which saw the rise of representative democracy, the age of science, the supersedence of reason over superstition, and the establishment of individual liberties to live according to one’s own values. At its core, it values empowering the individual to think, believe, read, write, speak, doubt, question, argue, and refute any ideas at all in pursuit of truth. What is there in the society of today for someone who still believes in this? If we insist on continuing to think in purely political terms, there are two primary choices, and they’re both bad.

We find ourselves offered a left-hand path upon which progressive crusaders bill themselves as the righteous defenders of Social Justice and moral progress, and thus the true future of Modernity. Beside it, forking away, lies a right-hand path upon which conservative stalwarts position themselves as the last desperate defenders of the heart of the project of Modernity, the so-called “values of Western Civilization,” defending it from the potential failures of progressive social and economic experimentation. Upon which of these two paths can the hopeful believer in Modernity hope to find the cornerstone of the Modern project, which is an allegiance to seeking objective truth and erecting sufficiently strong institutions to secure the fruits of Modernity?

Neither.

The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity’s progress. The regressive right champions premodernism instead, which is little more than a grand delusion that the intricate complexities of Modern society can function without the elaborate infrastructure required to run a Modern society in the first place. Both are outright rejections of the Enlightenment’s commitment to truth.

If you value Modernity, much of political and cultural life of late therefore feels like standing at this dismal crossroads, not of truth, but of what Stephen Colbert famously called “truthiness,” that which feels true, though it isn’t — or, put more squarely, an intuition of moral or ideological “truth” which has little to do with any objective reality.

Take the leftward road, and you’ll find the objectionable notion that truth is “situated” in identity, which leads to the farcical belief that truth is relative to whatever one’s cultural background has traditionally held it to be — unless that culture is considered to have unfairly dominated in the past, in which case anything it holds to be true must be refuted on principle.

If this sounds confusing, you’re not to worry. Priestly representatives have appointed themselves along this path to divine who can’t say what to whom and under what circumstances. You need only to check your privileges in life, fall in line, become an “ally,” shut up, and listen to those deemed more oppressed than you are. The shutting up is particularly important. It’s almost impossible to avoid being “problematic” if speaking independently. You probably won’t like being told your existence is obsolete, but according to the rubric (about which you will be reminded at every opportunity) there are those less privileged in the world and they like their oppression even less.

Veer rightward instead, and you’ll be similarly disappointed. There, truth isn’t much different, although they wouldn’t call it “situated” (but it is). It is the kind of capital-T “Truth” that’s both “obvious” to everyone and too simplistic to be true, and it’s situated in the lived experience of the traditionally recognized everyman. This right-hand Truth often arrives as some amalgamation of divination upon the everyday experience of rubes and the locally agreed upon exegeses of God’s parochially preferred ancient manuscripts. A more capital-S Sophisticated Truth can also be found along the right-hand path, placed there by Nature Herself in the form of philosophically reasoned-out Natural Law, despite the demonstrated meaninglessness of this term and its distinctness from anything established by the natural sciences. Truth, on the right, is thus exactly the “plainly True” Common Sense everybody “knows” (except the elites and experts, who are deemed too educated and too out-of-touch with Real Life to see what’s plainly the case).

How can you know what’s “plainly True” along the rightward path, then? It is whatever seems immediately obvious, which “obviously” works good enough to be getting on with (so long as most complexities of systems and of human interaction are dropped), or it is that which accords with the views of the provincially correct religious or political deities or their self-appointed emissaries. If you’re concerned that Common Sense in its perfected capitalized-letters form isn’t actually terribly common, that self-styled Holy Rollers and fearmongers might not speak for you, and that simple heuristics often miss the point, the right-hand road is going to be a frustrating and painful choice. You’d be exactly right in believing that Modernity requires a bit more than plain sense and “Natural Law” to keep itself functioning and moving forward. Not only that, but down this way, if you’re concerned that what passes for capital-T Truth often tends to rationalize and exacerbate structural inequalities in society, your job is to deal with what’s True, suck it up, and keep your questions and interfering to yourself.

“Collectively, these two groups represent one overarching ethos. They are both anti-modernists…”

Neither road seems good. In reality, they’re both bad. You’ll not make it far down either path before observing that the chief commodities along both are hysterical moral panic and a corollary absolute intolerance of thinking differently — duly papered over with claims to appreciate the right kinds of (limited) diversity. So it is that with just a bit of patient observation, you’ll come to realize these premodernists and postmodernists, despite their distinct moral dialects and impossibly irreconcilable differences in every political mood, are almost indistinguishable. Both are bent toward authoritarianism and values at odds with Modernity. 

Collectively, these two groups represent one overarching ethos. They are both anti-modernists, and they are the enemies of Modernity. Treated as a single entity, they make up a relatively small, intrinsically divided, but alarmingly powerful minority. Separately, these two factions whirl in a centrifugal death spiral for society driven by a near-religious and redemptionless hatred for each other. They proceed as if by superpower, as they are nearly unrivaled at fomenting ideological divisiveness amongst the majority who believe in Modernity. They should be seen and resisted as a single dragon with two noxious heads that pose far more threat to everyone else than they do to each other. Regardless of the validity of any claim on which head is the nastier, the debate is a matter of much fruitless argument that feeds the dragon rather than slaying it.

Modernity

When we advocate a defense of Modernity, we are talking about the fruits of the Modern era; the positive developments of that period from the Renaissance to the present day. This period is distinguished from its predecessor, the Medieval period, by several important intellectual changes including the Enlightenment, the formation of free societies governed by representative democracy, and the Scientific Revolution. Over the last 500 years, Western society has seen a shift from a dominant epistemology based on religious faith to one based on reason and science, and from a social system based on collectives within a hierarchy, to a recognition of individual human worth and the need for individual freedom. If you believe in the legitimate progress of the last 500 years and wish to see it continue, and you support the moral and intellectual values that have led us here, then you believe in Modernity too.

Some will argue that to see Modernity in this way is to create false historical categories which ignore continuities and do so in order to romanticize a period which remained full of false belief and injustice. This is a fair assessment but misses the point. Our intention is not to claim that everything was terrible and then the Enlightenment happened and all was wonderful. The Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and liberal democracy are processes which began in this period and progressed gradually throughout it. Along the way, they encountered many stalls and setbacks and made missteps that are proportionally grand to their far-reaching vision. They were and continue to be part of ongoing projects subsumed under the umbrella of Modernity which may never be completed but which it is essential to the wellbeing of humanity to continue.

To be pro-Modernity is not to support everything that happened in the Modern period to the point of including war, genocide, imperialism, and slavery, or their negative impacts, but to value that intellectual shift which produced benefits that had not existed before or had been lost in the Medieval epoch. You are pro-Modernity if you believe in the scientific method, human rights, liberal democracy, individual liberty, and established epistemologies based on evidence and reason.

The pillars of Modernity are a set of values that served to lift us out of the Medieval period and into the dramatically improved world we mostly take for granted today. These defining values include

• A profound respect for the power of reason and the utility and strength of science;
• An unwavering commitment to the norms of secular democratic republics, including rule of law, and an abiding belief that they are the most beneficent political force the world has known;
• A keen understanding that, whatever and however group dynamics may influence human societies, the atomic unit of society to be defended and cherished is the individual;
• An earnest appreciation that the Good is best achieved through a balance between human cooperation and competition brokered and mediated through the interplay of institutions that work on behalf of public and private interests.

Despite being unbelievably popular, these pillars of Modernity are currently under threat.

The Broad Popularity of Modernity

The most bizarre thing about the current threat to Modernity is that it is taking place within a Western society that still overwhelmingly supports its values and recognizes its benefits. Committed opponents of science, democracy, liberty, human rights and reason are a small minority and are found merely on the noisy fringes of politics. Still, despite perhaps the broadest support for any project in human history, Modernity itself gets very little direct defense, quite possibly because defending Modernity and its benefits seems far too obvious to bother with. However, to fail to defend Modernity is to stand above a pit of darkness — one we clawed our way out of, mind you — and to cut off the very branch we all stand upon. But who would do such a thing?! Mostly people who believe they’re doing the opposite.

The noisy anti-modern fringes have each planted their flag in the soil of Modernity and set themselves up as the sole moral luminaries of the left and right; as the only True Scotsmen of Modernity’s diametrically opposed ideological visions: liberalism and conservatism. These moral luminaries demand we face a ludicrous choice between odious poppycock and loathsome codswallop: only by perfect radical left-thinking can the true Modern Utopia be achieved, and only by perfect radical right-thinking can we hope to regain Modernity’s lost Golden Era.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people on the left or the right believe in incremental progress and appeal first to the very principles and institutions of Modernity when criticizing the extremes of the other side. Those who claim that science and reason are a form of imperialism or an arrogant defiance of God are largely recognized as lunatics. Those who oppose democracy, liberty, and human rights in the name of any authoritarian vision are widely perceived as dangerous zealots. The respect for and desire to defend the fruits of Modernity is the mainstream view, and it transcends partisanship, and yet they are in danger of falling victim to the uncompromising machinations of the fringes.

The Enemies of Modernity

The philosophical underpinnings of these two types of anti-modernism are postmodernism (left) and premodernism (right).

The far-left manifests anti-modernism in postmodernism; a complex set of ideas rooted in the works of theorists including Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida, adapted and further politicized within the fields of intersectional feminism, critical race theory, post-colonialism, and queer theory and manifested to various degrees in left-wing policies and Social Justice activism. By its focus on justice for systemic harms in society, theoretical postmodern poppycock easily appeals to people with liberal moral leanings.

Underpinned by a belief in the power of language, specifically discourses — speech which assumes or promotes a certain view — postmodernism regards society, knowledge, truth, and even the individual in terms of cultural construction. Our values, our ethics, our institutions, and even our scientific knowledge and reasoning processes are held to have been constructed according to the biases of dominant groups in society and now need to be deconstructed to allow other values, knowledge and truths to emerge. Because Western societies have been dominant within the modern period, it is those societies and the knowledge, institutions, and values formed over that period which come under strongest attack.

Although the founding fathers of postmodernism claimed to be continuing the Modernity project by continuing to break downoppressive power structures and institutions in the same way as feudalism and patriarchy, many of those structures and institutions are, in fact, products of Modernity that the majority seeks to incrementally correct and ultimately protect. 

“Anti-modernists, in general, treat truth selectively as that portion of the whole truth which supports their moral ambitions.”

The far-right form of anti-modernism could be usefully thought of in terms of premodernism. Premodernists would reset society to an idyllic state that exists only in nostalgic memory and revisions of history, before the perceived corruptions of progressivism that accompanied later developments of Modernity. Premodern codswallop, through these values, often appeals to people with conservative or libertarian moral leanings.

Premodernism valorizes simplicity and purity that it imagines in terms of Natural roles, Laws, and Rights. It feels these have been subverted by the growth of institutions and complex social structures. It also deeply distrusts expertise for a wide variety of complicated reasons, including a certain self-assured and yet self-pitying resentment of sociocultural betterment, the undermining of “Natural” roles, the questioning and challenging of traditional values, and engineering in the social, cultural, and political spheres.

In the case of libertarians, particularly, a major influence is the political theory of Friedrich Hayek, who saw the increasing centralized regulation by government in the more recent Modern period as a gradual return to serfdom which threatens to bring about totalitarianism. In The Road to Serfdom, he argues, mirroring the postmodernists, that knowledge and truth is, in this way, inextricably linked to and constructed by power structures. Here and in The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek levied influential but profoundly dubious criticisms of rationalism in the forms of the expertise used in the planning and organization of socio-economic programs because, he argued, man’s knowledge is always limited. He warned that rationalism pushes a form of destructive perfectionism which disregards older traditions and values and restricts individual liberty. 

In its own way, premodernism also claims to uphold the values of Modernity — liberty, in particular — and believes itself defending the worldview that led Modernity (usually termed “Western Civilization”) into the world and has now gone astray. In service to this delusion, premodernism threatens the values of Modernity that bear the fruits the wide majority wish to keep — including individual liberty, which in large, complex societies requires being secured by effective, elite-run institutions.

Enemies of Science and Reason

Nowhere are the anti-modernists more damaging to Modernity than in their contemptuous relationship with truth. Anti-modernists, in general, treat truth selectively as that portion of the whole truth which supports their moral ambitions. In this more than any other way, they reveal themselves to be the enemies of Modernity.

The postmodern left is openly hostile to the concept of objective truth and even to science and reason. These it associates with abuses that have arisen from applying technological gains, and it uses this to claim that the very Enlightenment enterprise is impossibly fraught with biases. Over the last thirty years, in fact, contemporary postmodernism has gone so far as to claim that the empirical pursuit of objective truth is evil in its built-in oppression of groups historically oppressed by European exploits. Of course, they have something approaching a point, but merely having a point is, as always, beside the point. Their hostility against science is both unwarranted and dangerous.

There’s no philosophical redemption here. Postmodernists, as “theorists,” set themselves against empirical science from the very beginning. Their implicitly moralizing assault upon it followed from Lyotard’s general distrust of “metanarratives” in which he ranked Christianity, Marxism, and science as equivalently constructed cultural narratives. Postmodern relativism reduced science to but one “way of knowing,” which it deems to be situated against and unfairly devaluing alternative (read: poor) epistemologies that can be found in other less ignoble cultures. This, incredibly, they teach openly at nearly every university.

Furthermore, postmodernism inextricably linked science to oppressive institutional power. The scientific enterprise’s claims to be in the business of obtaining objective truth were presented as both false and, though irrelevant to their point, tarred by association with the moral failures that came with industrialism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This fashionable nonsense permeated the later developments in critical theory and Social Justice activism whose proponents, missing the irony in their entitlement, will preach it endlessly to you in insufferably repetitious messages concocted in bewildering jargon over mass-market gourmet lattes and sent angrily from their iPhones.

For the premodernist right, their opposition to science and reason is far older, challenging as it does the Christian beliefs held dear by many and offering suspicious and often counterintuitive findings regarded as an affront to plain Common Sense. Premodern opposition to scientific impertinence is, after all, the line of thought that justified Galileo’s house arrest and Giordano Bruno’s “all-stars” funeral pyre. Though the Inquisition ended centuries ago, premodern distrust for inconvenient science hasn’t abated. Biblical creationism versus evolution, for example, still rages as a pretend debate even now, more than a century after it was laid to rest by firm scientific consensus.

The premodern impulse against science arises mainly when scientific efforts, and the elites hedging to them, offer provisional truths that overturn Common Sense — traditional wisdom intrinsic to the dominant culture — or that which is parochially deemed both Good and Holy. On the occasions when these provisional findings turn out to be wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong, the anti-science impulse is intensified. This too is the result when well-intended elites utilize science to promulgate left-wing social or cultural initiatives for problems that “didn’t need fixin’.” In particular, premodernists greatly dislike meddlesome social science for reasons that range from legitimate critique of methods and ideological biases to inflamed concerns about social manipulation to paranoia about uncovering facts that threaten the status quo. These things, they, too, will readily tell you in extremely plain language from their beloved iPhones, usually in a politely stubborn tone that insists that expertise is but one opinion and that theirs runs otherwise.

For both postmodernists and premodernists, science and reason, as manifested in many forms of legal and professional expertise, are considered elitist and far removed from the lived experience of the non-expert, who, something akin to moral sorcery informs them, holds a deeper and truer form of intuitive knowledge than can be obtained in any university or elite institution. For the postmodernist on the left, the sacred non-expert groups may be minority, indigenous, or immigrant groups (or women) within society. For premodernists on the right, they are the salt-of-the-earth everyman (and his brother). In both cases, both the suspicion and rejection of expertise and the equivocating relativism about truth are the same, and the justifications are mere moral variations on a single tortured logic.

Opponents of Liberty and Individuality

Liberty and individuality are cornerstone values of Modernity. Unsurprisingly, both are trampled by anti-modernists of both stripes even while each earnestly professes to be the sole ideological defender of these most precious and delicate fruits of Modernity.

For the postmodernist left, liberty — primarily freedom of inquiry, belief, and expression — is often seen as an unearned privilege of the dominant majority. For this reason, in their view, liberty must be constrained for the safety and flourishing of the marginalized minority. Because discourses are understood to construct society, there can be no value and a great deal of harm in tolerating the expression of ideas, beliefs, and speech which question or contradict those which promote the postmodern conception of Social Justice.

Individuality to the postmodern is a myth because the individual is itself a construction of the dominant discourses in society and how these discourses position groups within society. This high-minded poppycock renders group identity paramount, and collective guilt or veneration is therefore both coherent and ethically mandated. All of this, of course, flies in the face of Modernity’s commitment to universal human rights and individual freedom under Enlightenment liberalism, and it is something the wide majority of Modern society strongly rejects.

Premodernists on the right have a more complicated relationship with liberty, not least because some of them openly profess to value it above nearly all else. Most liberty-loving premodernists rankle at individual liberty, however, when it is used unpatriotically (say, burning a flag), which they view as leading to a disintegration of culture in which people lose their sense of loyalty to their own people and fail to understand their place in society.

Further, for socially conservative premodernists, individual liberty has already gone too far in many social developments. They are especially unhappy about those which brought in a relaxed attitude toward some drug and alcohol use, gender equality, sexual liberation, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights. Gender equality and sexual liberation, in particular, are believed in the socially conservative premodern worldview to have encouraged a selfish (and often “immoral”) individualism in relation to sexual behavior and gender roles, which has led to an alleged destruction of the family and, in many ill-informed views, economic and social chaos.

This dim right-leaning view of individual liberty is paradoxically shared in considerable degree by the more culturally permissive premodern branch of anti-modern libertarians. Libertarians, particularly American ones, are distinguished by their insistences upon individual liberty being an unrivaled good. Yet theirs is a peculiar view of liberty that, despite being based in many of Modernity’s values, is overly narrow in its focus only upon restrictions of liberty issued by the state and thus rapidly ceases to be compatible with the institutions that enable Modernity. The oft-quoted epigram on the rattlesnake-bearing Gadsden Flag, “don’t tread on me,” is a good summary of their naively optimistic view of society: just leave them alone and everything will be fine. A similar mentality is found in the kind of Brexiter who focuses on the big themes of “independence” and “sovereignty” (going light on the details), whilst accusing everyone still unhappy about it of being undemocratic.

In reality, deeply interconnected societies like those that now define Modernity can’t just leave people alone — services are everywhere, and we’re (almost) all glad of it (just ask Colorado Springs). More worryingly, this narrow focus on opposing only overreaching governmental regulations fails to appreciate that powerful private-sector forces can tread on individual liberty at least as effectively. Because one can be and often is viciously trod upon by footwear other than that issued by the state, theirs is a recipe for another Gilded Era, which is hardly distinguishable from pre-Modern feudalism. It thus leaves us without sensible regulatory efforts that constrain Modernity’s project from poisoning itself. Only a minuscule fraction of people would embrace this vision of liberty were it allowed to yet again play out to its inevitable conclusion.

In terms of truth and knowledge, all anti-modernists are united in their suspicion of science, reason, liberty, and expertise, and they proceed defensively against perceived threats to what amounts to “folk wisdom” along with localized custom and tradition. They experience the benefits of Modernity in an entitled fashion and yet view them as counterintuitive and therefore a dangerous affront to “lived experience” or “Common Sense.” This is a superstitious, anti-intellectual mindset better representative of that period in human history before Modernity arose. For it to exist now is a rejection of Modernity. Thus, these two enemies are best understood as part of the same problem; the problem of anti-modernism.

What the Anti-Modernists Get Right (and What They Miss)

It does not do to dismiss the anti-modernists concerns with Modernity too easily. The very fact that they arose within ideological extremes so fundamentally opposed to each other indicates that they need examining. In this way Modernity can self-correct and improve.

Anti-modernism, is at its roots, a distrust that Modernity can successfully course-correct toward sustained societal improvements. While it is the premodernists who are usually seen as most opposed to social progress by advocating we put on the brakes and a return to simpler values and maintaining cultural integrity, this is also a feature of the postmodernists. Most famously, Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation described the postmodern society as one which has entirely lost touch with the real and authentic and become lost in a world of rapid technological advance, artificiality, and consumerism. Much of the focus of postmodern theory on foregrounding histories, narratives, and cultures of minority groups is rooted in this search for authenticity and purity of culture. It therefore rejects the roots of the seemingly overwhelming advance of science, technology, capitalism, and consumerism that outwardly characterizes Modernity. Of course, Hayek feared the same from advanced technocratic states.

That said, postmodernists are right to claim that the dominant group in a society sets its social norms and that this can produce unacknowledged biases that grievously impact minority groups. They are reasonable to argue that we should look at dominant discourses thoughtfully and challenge preconceived ideas. They are also right to note that bias can be desperately difficult to overcome. These concerns are not unwarranted, nor did they arise in a philosophical vacuum. Historically, within the Modern period, those espousing Modern values have also justified human rights abuses including slavery, workhouses, and colonialism.

On the other hand, premodernists are not wrong to say that conservative values possess stabilizing social value and are essential to the Modern project. Yet these, they recognize, are culturally stigmatized from the left, which holds sway over the most powerful of intellectual institutions, the university, and the most influential of cultural institutions, mass media. They are right to point out that the left-wing parties historically committed to defending working-class interests can abandon them entirely in pursuit of progressive aims which don’t include economic progress for the working-class majority. They also haven’t forgotten the horrendous leftist excesses that followed from attempted and forced applications of Marx.

Both groups can point to episodes within Modern history in which projects framed in terms of science and reason and a duty to share the benefits of Western civilization with less Enlightened people have done great harm, although they might not be thinking of the same affected groups. Working class people, women, LGBTs, enslaved and colonized people, ethnic and religious minorities, criminal offenders, and the mentally ill have been subjected to social engineering projects which read well on paper but were catastrophically damaging.

However, the fact that valid concerns can be raised about Modernity in relation to ruling elites, marginalized groups, the uncritical acceptance of expertise and dizzyingly fast progress does not mean that anti-modernist solutions are right. They are, in fact, dead wrong.

The postmodernists present us with a false dichotomy: keep your commitment to truth and your cherished institutions but with them will come stagnation, narrow-mindedness, catastrophic error, and oppression; or abandon them and have plurality, tolerance, progress, and Social Justice. The premodernists present us with a different one: keep your beloved modern institutions and along with them degeneration, chaos, elitism, and oppression; or abandon them and have Liberty, Morality, Common Sense, and Natural Order. These are both utterly false, overly reactive, and render no cultural bathwater safe for any Modern babies.

Still, anti-modernists lodge fair complaints, despite their overreactions. The Enlightenment project that swept in Modernity has been over-confident and taken too little care. In its search for objective truth and unified ethical and political systems of society, it has been simplistic, short-sighted, and far too sure of itself, and it has gotten things wrong, at times with tremendous consequences.

Projects do not need to be abandoned because they get things wrong, however, unless they are fundamentally irreparable and destined to continue getting things wrong. Modernity bears no such fatal flaw as it is rooted in self-correcting principles. The consensus is that democracy, liberty, human rights, science, and reason are fundamentally sound. They are, after all, how we know we got things wrong. When science makes mistakes, it is science that discovers them, and when failures of reasoning occur, it is better reasoning that reveals them. When liberties are curtailed, it is the liberty to say so and campaign for change that we need, and we are hopeless to address human rights abuses except by arguing for human rights. There has not yet been shown a better way for everyone to have a voice than liberal democracy.

No honest reading of history could conclude that society did better at minimizing the hegemony of ruling elites, protecting the rights of marginalized groups, obtaining knowledge to the benefit of humanity, and critically assessing expertise and truth claims before we had the institutions that define Modernity. For the doubters, there are unfortunately still countries which have not developed mature Modern institutions, and a quick glance (or short visit — but do be careful!) should convince you. It is merely true that the tools and technological advances of Modernity enabled grotesque abuses against it, as we saw in Sovietism, Maoism, Nazism, and fascism more generally. Abandoning the projects of Modernity would be nothing short of disastrous; a pointless mistake driven by nothing more than destructive ideological overreaction.

Progress of the kind sought by all, not merely postmodern progressives, comes by defending and building upon the fruits of Modernity. Given that so many of us favor this approach over the screeching of the anti-modernist fringes, why is Modernity under threat right now?

Partisanship Is Modernity’s Weakness

Anti-modernists should be easy to ignore but have come to the point of being able to threaten Modernity. How? By being very useful politically at driving in partisan wedges.

Postmodernists churned out decades worth of identity-driven scholarship that was manna to the post-Civil Rights Democratic Party in America, to postcolonial guilt-ridden British leftists, and to the Western liberal left more generally. Premodernists organized around moral causes mainly concerning a starkly “paleoconservative” view of rights, liberties, nationalism, and religion (and, increasingly, nativism, protectionism, isolationism, and boorish white and male identity politics) and proved an extraordinarily useful bloc for the Republican Party in America. In Europe, these same ideas fed into a very real (but not necessary realistic) sense of existential threat which accompanied the refugee crisis and spurred the rise of nationalist parties and groups. (Jonathan Haidt’s explanation of this is unsurpassed.)

As these extremists were put to use by the dominant political forces of our time, our opportunistic or otherwise blind leaders of state and media slowly raised the two-headed dragon we now face to maturity (and quickly lost control of it). Rampant partisanship has steadily made this problem worse, leading each side to focus upon purity by attacking those who can be pilloried as alleged moral traitors: “cucks” and “RINOs” by the right; “Nazi apologists” and, astonishingly, “liberals” by the left.

As a result, the premodern right now wishes little more than to “crush liberals,” and, in their case, voting Brexit or electing Trump is often motivated by nothing so much as showing us how committed to this vituperative project they are. Simultaneously, the postmodern left cannot abide “bigotry” and “hate,” which they deem literally synonymous with conservatism. Everything turns outsized and hyperbolic in this environment. By reporting endlessly on the other side’s most outrageous examples, our increasingly partisan and “analysis-driven” media environment has steadily worsened this problem.

“Thus, we see those leaning left largely internalizing the message of postmodernism and those leaning right widely embracing the message of premodernism.”

Partisanship — prejudice in favor of a cause — is part and parcel of democracy, however, and it is for all its trouble one of Modernity’s greatest gifts to politics, replacing the single-minded authority of monarchs, emperors, and the papacy. Under normal circumstances, reasonable degrees of partisanship engender debate, diversity of opinion, a mixture of perspectives, and a number of safeguards against the excesses of single-party systems of government. Partisan democracy is also slow. Decisions require extensive debate and compromise, and for a truth to be convincing in a bipartisan fashion, it must, at bare minimum, be very firmly established or have tremendous support. The slowness of partisan democracy is often taken as a weakness in times when decisiveness matters, but it is one of the safeguards developed by and in service to Modernity. Impulsiveness at the state level is almost always unstable (and something the right is right to fear).

Deeply polarized partisanship is another matter. Highly polarized partisanship, in which each side is deeply entrenched in itself and unwilling to compromise even upon routine matters, is a threat to Modernity. It enables either side (or both) to hold the entire system hostage if only it possesses the barest minimum degree of advantage in the balance of power or, at least, for the fear that this could happen to seem credible. This creates a unique set of circumstances in which political hardlining can easily be taken by the opposing side as an existential threat to Modernity and free democratic society.

Existential Polarization

Existential threats register at an irrational and emotional level and produce more extreme reactions than the ordinary machinations of politics and culture (again, see Haidt). Thus, when political hardlining is stubborn enough to overcome its usual weakness of self-limitation, under certain circumstances deep partisanship can become self-reinforcing. Our present condition is an advanced case of such a state. It is not one of mere partisanship but of existential polarization driven by two anti-modernist extremes. Under these conditions, actions by either side readily produce oppositional solidarity in the other, and a predictable result of such solidarity is increasing partisan sympathy to its own extreme views, if nothing else than as an ugly means to a necessary end.

When polarization is deep, the large and only slightly differentiated middle that normally has nothing to do with anti-modern extremists is repeatedly forced to take sides against whichever is, from their perch, easier to see as the greater existential threat. Thus, we see those leaning left largely internalizing the message of postmodernism and those leaning right widely embracing the message of premodernism. Everyone knows on some level that the anti-modernists are a threat to Modernity itself and thus the other side’s anti-modernists must be massively and directly resisted. This results in nearly everything becoming yet another political battleground, every election is an existential fight for the “soul” of the nation, and extremists on one’s own side are repeatedly excused and defended in the name of the Greater Good.

Motivated reasoning comes into play by allowing people who truly believe in Enlightenment values to rationalize or ignore abuses of them on their own side. Our lunatics, we’ll insist, are just going a bit too far in putting up the good fight, but their hearts are in the right place. Their lunatics, on the other hand, are malevolent and an immediate danger to all we hold dear. Alternatively, we might acknowledge the problem on our own side but minimize it to a few fringe lunatics no-one takes seriously whilst maximizing the anti-modernists on the other side and arguing them to be a majority presenting an immediate existential threat. 

Thus, the cycle continues to spin out of control. Under existential polarization, more and more everyday citizens are forced to side repeatedly with a team they deem to be the lesser of two evils and to galvanize themselves within their moral team against the perceived existential threat coming from the other side.

Right now, you might be feeling disgusted with what you see as false equivalence and want to point out the recent murderous violence coming from the far-right and ask how some silly postmodern ideas can compare with this. Alternatively, you might want to protest that a few very bad apples almost universally recognized as such cannot present a comparable cultural danger to that of the widespread respectability of postmodern ideas within the universities that are already turning out the leaders of our future. If so, you are still missing the point.

Even if we could calculate and compare the different kinds of harm being done on each side and prove one to be considerably more dangerous (and we have our own strong opinions on that which are being purposefully left out here to make a bigger point), this would not make joining the other side to oppose that one the right thing to do. The enemy is the lunatic fringe on both sides, seen as a single entity that interacts with itself in a toxic, accelerating way. This common, tribalistic error strengthens the uncompromising authoritarianism on “your” side (without reducing that on the other side a whit), and it makes recognizing the source of the problem — anti-modernism — even harder.

The cost of continuing this escalation of polarization is too high. Anti-modernist differences are superficial compared with their similarities. They are the two gruesome heads of the same anti-modernist Beast, and the only substantive difference they offer is whether to turn our back on Modernity and walk back into darkness in the name of “progress” or “tradition.”

The Center Cannot Hold

To counter existential polarization, a solution calling for a collaboration in the name of centrism has been held out. On the surface, this seems precisely the kind of compromise and rejection of extremism that is needed, inviting, as it does, the beleaguered majority to set aside its partisan differences and form a coalition called the “New Center.”

This project will fail.

The center, for the reasons described above, is unstable and cannot hold against existential polarization. While there may be some people sufficiently close to being true centrists to maintain it, it is unlikely that they are many, and it’s nearly certain that they are not a wide majority. Most centrists also lean one way or the other along our partisan spectrum, and this is where their values and their intuitions lie. Almost no-one is philosophically or intuitively committed to a position of “taking a middle ground” even though a majority is likely to find themselves somewhere near it in any political milieu.

A New Center is therefore the wrong way to bypass existential polarization. For most individuals on too many political choices, the stakes are just too high. As political events of 2016 showed, when forced to choose consequentially between representatives of two apparent existential threats, mostly everyone just loses their mind and digs in a little deeper.

There is a subtler reason to avoid pushing for a New Center. To push for a New Center is immediately to raise the question, “center of what?” The obvious answer is that the New Center is supposed to lie across the broad middle of the apparent left versus right dichotomy of Western politics. To think of the New Center, then, is to limit our thinking to the left-right spectrum all over again and legitimize the very conception that perpetuates our existential polarization calamity.

Ultimately, centrism and the spectrum itself are currently nearly irrelevant. Supporters of the fruits of the Enlightenment are a clear majority and those values are deeply ingrained. Thus, the problem is better summarized as society-level conflict between champions of Modernity and anti-modernists who would drag us away from it, maniacally calling out partisan hypocrisy every step of the way.   

Supporters of Modernity, whatever their political orientation, should therefore unite against the anti-modernists. In so doing, not only do they establish a clear and popular rallying point for a majority that already exists, they also undermine the false authority that the anti-modernists have laid claim to by dishonestly promoting themselves as the legitimate standard bearers of “left” and “right.”

You may now be feeling that if you abandon your primary identification with the left or the right, that you’ll be betraying your principles and your side, that you’ll be failing your team when it matters most, especially after the other side ignites outrage or commits political violence. This is a mistake. There is no need to lose any principles which align with those of liberalism or conservatism by recognizing that defending the currently besieged values of Modernity is paramount. In fact, by ceasing to rationalize or minimize those abuses of them on your own side, you can only strengthen it. Anti-modernism fails to represent liberalism and conservatism and represents only the gross distortions of their lunatic fringes.

Renew the Expectations of Modernity

Modernity is strong but not invincible. It requires certain expectations to persist. One of these is the expectation that we will be received well and listened to if we make sense and have evidence, but with embarrassment and ignored or ridiculed if we talk utter cobblers. In 1992, Jonathan Rauch, drawing on Karl Popper, argued in Kindly Inquisitors that this was the basis of what he called “liberal science,” by which he meant the system of free expression of ideas, both factual claims and ethical arguments, which could then be tested and rigorously critiqued, leading to the survival of those that had worth and the marginalization of those which had none. He feared it was being eroded. He was right and the last twenty-five years have confirmed his fears.

One of the major problems of approaching the issue of the anti-modern extremists in politically partisan and moralizing terms is that it obscures the fact that we are losing respect for objective truth and reason. We need to get back to that expectation that our ideas should be both well-evidenced and reasonable, and so long as we stand firm against political violence in the meantime, this expectation alone can renew Modernity. Commit yourself to it. Don’t talk utter cobblers, and don’t credit those who do.

The concept of “the marketplace of ideas” is a foundational one within the Enlightenment project and it underlies nearly all of the others. It is how we progress. It is the way bad ideas get routed out, how mistakes get spotted and injustices addressed. It is essential to defend the freedom to express ideas and to strongly oppose limiting them or punishing people for them. Politically correct postmodern zealots and patriotically correct premodern fools aren’t likely to learn this lesson easily, so it’s best to ignore their calls to action when they whinge against free expression of speech.

“The problem is better summarized as society-level conflict between champions of Modernity and anti-modernists who would drag us away from it.”

For your part, respond to ideas with agreement, disagreement, ridicule, criticism, or by ignoring them. Nobody wants to be fired from their job or subjected to a social media mob for voicing an opinion. Nobody wants to put their life in danger by participating in civic life by taking part in a protest or demonstration. If you agree that society should operate in a way that safeguards most citizens most of the time from these abuses, then you believe in Modernity and have a right to demand it from your leaders, no matter their party.

How to Renew Modernity

Modernity is under threat, and it has begun to slip. This forwards a question of tremendous importance: What should a renewer of Modernity do now?

On a personal level, immediately reflect upon the ways you assess opinions and think about the full extent of variation of opinion that you can tolerate. Attempt to expand it by asking the following question as an acid test when you think you cannot accept a view: Is this view compatible with the broader project of Modernity, even if it carries a short-term setback from some of my goals? Remember, Modernity is equipped with tools of self-correction. Bad legislation passing from either side of the political aisle can be overturned by better legislation later, and usually will be in the wake of its failure. If the short-term cost is genuinely low, let Modernity tinker. Pick your battles and pick them on the sides of science, universal human rights, free democracy, individual liberty, and an epistemology based on evidence and reason. 

Once you adopt this view, you will be able to achieve two things. First, by assessing your “opponents’” views from this perspective you will be able to find common ground and reduce your sense of existential panic. This promotes calmness, levelheadedness, kindness, and civility. It enables friendships, whilst our current level of polarization is destructive of them. Second, it will lead you to become more focused on what matters rather than blind party allegiance. Ally yourself with Modernity, make friends with other renewers of Modernity, and oppose anti-modernists even on your own side.

The simplest and most immediate things you can do on behalf of Modernity are probably the most efficacious and personally beneficial. Start engaging socially in ways that hold people in high esteem for standing for Modernity, especially when it takes going against their political tribe to do so. We who value Modernity should be proud of right-wing people who reject premodernism, and we should be proud of left-wing people who reject postmodernism. Supporting them is easy: just tell them so and do not be afraid of approving of their pro-Modernity messages on social media.

The idea that we should signal partisan tribal loyalty by never giving the “other side” credit for good ideas perpetuates the problem. Premodern and postmodern signaling, however, can be addressed calmly and reasonably for the purpose of drawing more people into conversation about the anti-modernist nature of their arguments. Avoid responding with outrage or condemnation of the other’s character which will only trigger the backfire effect and make watchers unsure that your view is the more reasonable. Ultimately, the aim is to marginalize these views out of the general conversation and into the fringes where they are seen as they are and dismissed, not to highlight them and further entrench polarization. Often, the best thing to do is ignore them.

More practically, become politically engaged, but not for any particular party. Get involved at the grassroots level as much as you can on both sides, left and right, and make your voice heard for Modernity’s values and vision. Analyze policies in terms of these values. Avoid partisan speaking points and caricature depictions of the other side. Don’t straight-ticket vote unless it makes the most sense for Modernity. Support candidates based upon their fundamental commitment to Modernity and shun anti-modernists of every stripe as effectively as you can.

“The idea that we should signal partisan tribal loyalty by never giving the ‘other side’ credit for good ideas perpetuates the problem.”

Therefore, if you are in America, demand viewpoint diversity within the major political parties. Conservatives, of late, are laying a moral claim to viewpoint diversity. Good. Put them to the test. If you’re a centrist on the left, become a liberal Republican. Show up at their primaries. Influence their thinking. If they won’t let you, let it be known that they’re enemies of viewpoint diversity and thus of Modernity. If the premodernists don’t like it, tough. They should be the ones to shape up their act or get out, not you.The same goes for conservative Democrats. There are many center-minded people out there who broadly agree with the Democratic platform, disagree with much of the Republican platform, and yet play politics (including voting) in close step with hardliner Republicans merely because they don’t want to feel pressured to conform with the postmodern left. Those people should join the Democratic Party, then, let their views influence and moderate Democratic thinking, and leave the postmodernists to go vote Green or for some whimsical unicorn party.

Similarly, in the UK, the anti-modern elements of the Tories or Labour can best be opposed by those defenders of Modernity who broadly agree with their ethos. Many of the harshest criticisms of both parties have been directed at their elements of anti-modernism whether it is a xenophobic form of nationalism and expertise-rejecting populism on the right or reality-denying, culturally relativist ethics on the left. Those whose values remain aligned with either party’s core aims would do well to stay put and try to affect change by specifically targeting those problems. Alternatively, those defenders of the values of Modernity who see strategic value in attempting to build support for the liberal Democrats as a strongly liberal center party should focus on this and hold the LibDems accountable for claims to be the party which best represents those values.

The skill with which the anti-modernists are able to conquer and co-opt political movements on their side is a huge contributor to the problem, so do what you can to stop it. Postmodern extremists like Linda Sarsour have co-opted the left-wing Women’s March, for example, and Pride UK is currently under great pressure from the same groups to ban criticism of Islamic homophobia. Premodernists like the religious right and the Tea Party have already deeply infiltrated the Republican Party, and populist support for the far-right UKIP within the UK was largely responsible for the pressure on the Conservative Party to put forward the Brexit referendum. If extremists cannot be excluded and successfully co-opt a project, withdraw your support for the initiative to let it die on the vine, then publicize that fact (which is easy to do because the other side’s media is always hungry for this kind of story). These are enemies of Modernity, and thus they are enemies of any pro-Modernity movement and should be excluded as non-representative, however much they scream about it. Enough is enough!

Conclusion: Stand for Modernity

Modernity is the period that brought us the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and Representative Democracy. It is the era which replaced faith-based thinking, divine authority, superstition, and folk wisdom with a respect for evidence, science, reason, and objective knowledge. It brought us out of a society formed of collectives and hierarchies and introduced us to our common humanity and our individuality. A requirement to think the right way, hold the right values, believe the right truth claims, and say the right things gave way to the freedom to ask questions, doubt received wisdom, investigate our world, our societies and ourselves, and seek factual and moral truth in new and productive ways. Systems, expectations, and institutions were set up to safeguard and utilize these new developments and society flourished because of them.

Modernity hasn’t been perfect. Bad ideas, epistemologies, and power structures weren’t overcome all at once. The Modernity project also made its own terrible mistakes, but the system worked to correct and learn from these. We are freer, better informed, more just, and less prejudiced than we have ever been. It is therefore essential that the Modernity project continue.

Fortunately, the vast majority of us want it to. Support for the scientific method, human rights, representative democracy, individual liberty, and epistemologies based on evidence and reason, as well as for the institutions which protect and develop them, is overwhelming. Promote these values explicitly and evaluate and engage with society and our current political situation in these terms. In this way, the defenders of Modernity can unite to help society climb down from its existential polarization, marginalize those anti-modernist fringes, and continue the project we all depend on.

A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity – Areo (areomagazine.com)

The Washington Post and the Lie of Uyghur Genocide – Islamic Pawns for Imperialism – by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

The Washington Post has been in the forefront of promoting the vilification of China as the US ramps up its confrontation with Beijing and preparations for war. This includes the lie that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is engaged in the genocide of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang in western China.

A Washington Post editorial on Sunday entitled “China’s repression of Uyghurs is not only cultural, but also physical, a new report shows” begins by selectively quoting the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. It cites the convention’s Article II (d) which declares that genocide including “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a population, then refers to two reports showing sharp falls in the birth rates among Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

The citation is deliberately misleading as the editorial fails to quote the opening of Article II which states: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Without this necessary context, any birth control program could be seized upon as evidence that the government involved is carrying out “genocide.”

A protester holds an anti-China placard during a protest in Istanbul, Thursday, March 25, against against the visit of China’s FM Wang Yi to Turkey. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

On this basis, China’s One-Child policy introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, as he was initiating the processes of capitalist restoration, could be construed as “genocide” as it was selectively applied to the urban population of the Han majority. National minorities, including the Uyghurs, were exempt from the policy and allowed to have two or even three children. Rural communities were also granted some exemptions.

It is, of course, absurd to label the One-Child policy, which was certainly a bureaucratic and repressive response to an expanding population, as “genocide” of the Chinese Han majority. But then it is just as absurd to label the current policies being carried out in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs as “genocide” on the basis of falling birth rates.

The Stalinist CCP regime is certainly carrying out repression against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as part of its domestic “war on terrorism” and the threat posed by Uyghur separatism—as it does against any threat to its rule, particularly from the working class.

The lack of independent information makes it impossible to gauge the extent of the police-state measures directed against the Uyghurs. On the one hand, the CCP denies its trampling on democratic rights and paints a rosy picture of life in Xinjiang. On the other, US imperialism and its allies are ratcheting up a filthy propaganda campaign based on misrepresentations and falsehoods to demonise China as it prepares for war.

The US has justified every one of its wars of aggression—itself a war crime in international law—over the past three decades on the basis of lies. Its campaigns on “human rights” are turned on and turned off to suit its strategic interests. The Biden administration, which condemns China for genocide, has given the green light for the Zionist state of Israel to wage its murderous “war on terrorism” against the Palestinians.

Indeed, as it was seeking support for its own criminal “war on terrorism” and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration backed China’s “war on terror” in Xinjiang. Now as US imperialism intensifies its war drive against Beijing, it no longer sanctions Uyghur separatists as “terrorists” and is marshalling its propaganda outlets to condemn China’s “genocide” of the Uyghurs. Xinjiang has become a particular focus for American misinformation as it is strategically located adjacent to Central Asia and is essential to the land routes to Europe envisaged in Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative to unify Eurasia and counter US encirclement.

The Washington Post is integrated into this campaign as have those responsible for the two reports referred to in its Sunday’s editorial. The first published last year by right-wing, anti-communist German academic Adrian Zenz pioneered the comparison of birth rates in predominantly Uyghur counties in Xinjiang to those of predominantly Han counties. Like all of Zenz’s “research,” including his widely-cited figures on the number of Uyghurs in detention centres, his methodology is riddled with flaws and his findings crafted to reach a predetermined conclusion. He is a born-again Christian who declares he has been “led by God” to his work on Chinese minorities.

The editorial is focused primarily on the stark figures in the second report produced this month by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)—a government-supported think tank that also receives funding from American sources. Citing the report, it declares that China has put in place “a more coercive and intrusive policing of reproduction processes” against the Uyghurs, with hefty fines, disciplinary punishment and extrajudicial internment or the threat of it for any “illegal births.” Birth rates for Uyghurs plunged by 43.7 percent between 2017 and 2018.

It is necessary to consider the context. In 2016, as it was moving to ease its One-Child policy for China as a whole, Beijing ended its comparatively liberal approach to national minorities in Xinjiang that not only allowed urban Uyghur women to have two children and rural Uyghur women up to three, but effectively turned a blind eye to larger families, especially in rural areas.

As part of its “war on terrorism,” Xinjiang authorities began applying similar “coercive and intrusive policing of reproduction processes”—including the insertion of IUDs and sterilisations—as had applied for decades to the majority Han population elsewhere in China. According to Wikipedia, between 1980 and 2014, 324 million Chinese women received IUDs and 108 million were sterilised. The insertion of an IUD was mandatory by law four months after the birth of the first child.

Of course, wealthier layers of the population able to pay the fine or the necessary bribes, were never limited to one child. Just as Zenz, ASPI and the Washington Post have nothing to say about the CCP’s anti-democratic measures against the Chinese working class, so they do not refer to the repressive One-Child policy that was directed above all against working-class women in urban centres.

Moreover, ASPI, like Zenz, in presenting its dramatic, if questionable, figures fails to take other factors into account, in particular the exodus of Uyghurs from Xinjiang, either as a consequence of the CCP’s oppressive measures or in search of better opportunities in coastal China. Many of those who left will have been young, including women of child-bearing age, which would also have skewed the Uyghur population and contributed to lower the birth rates. To what extent it is unknown. But neither ASPI nor Zenz bothered to consider, let alone investigate the issue, as it did not fit their pre-conceived conclusions.

As for the Washington Post, it seizes on the most dramatic declines in birth rates to insist that global corporations, such as Airbnb, Bridgestone, Intel, Coca-Cola, P&G, Samsung, Toyota, Visa, Panasonic and others, end their support for China’s 2022 Winter Olympics as a sign of protest.

“Either you believe in ‘never again,’ or you contribute to ‘once again,” the editorial concludes, deliberately drawing a connection to the Nazi murder of Jews that prompted the phrase “never again” and the 1948 Convention on Genocide. The comparison between the CCP’s policy of lowering Uyghur birthrates and the systematic extermination of Jews in Nazi gas chambers is not only false but also diminishes the monstrous crimes of the Nazis and devalues the meaning of term “genocide.”

The Washington Post and the lie of Uyghur genocide – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

White Privilege – Yet Another Leftist ‘Person of Color’ Lady Grievance Study Professor Is Exposed As White

From the New York Times:

The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t

More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?

By Sarah Viren
May 25, 2021

… J. Kehaulani Kauanui had just woken up. She was reading a story on her phone in bed, a confession written by a woman named Jessica Krug, when, quite suddenly, it yanked her into the past.

“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City,” wrote Krug, a history professor who had for years identified — and published — as a Black and Latina scholar. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years,” she continued, “but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.”

Krug was the Jewish but fake Puerto Rican professor of Grievance Studies who was really into salsa dancing and hoop earrings.

… But Kauanui wasn’t thinking about Krug; she was thinking about Andy.

Andy is Andrea Smith. She and Kauanui met almost 25 years earlier, when Kauanui was a 28-year-old graduate student in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The History of Consciousness department’s most famous professor is Angela Davis (say his name: Judge Harold Haley).

It’s most famous graduate was Huey Newton.

Here’s Professor Andrea Smith:

When she squinches up her eyes, she look like maybe she’s part American Indian, a little.

But when Smith opens her eyes, she looks all white:

, and Smith was a young divinity student who planned to go there for her Ph.D. Kauanui served on the department’s admissions committee that year, and she still vividly remembers Smith’s application: how passionately she wrote about gender politics but also how clearly she defined her ethnic identity. “She positioned herself as Cherokee,” she told me. “She had something in the application that talked about what it meant for urban Native Americans away from homeland.”

Kauanui is Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian. But she grew up in Southern California, and she knew what it felt like to belong ancestrally to one place but be raised somewhere else. Part of her eventual dissertation, in fact, would look at that question of identity within the context of Hawaii, specifically the state’s comparably strict rules regarding who counts as Native and who doesn’t.

Dr. Kauanui, who looks like my late Aunt Betty, complained in her book Hawaiian Blood that the blood quantum rules governing who gets the benefits of being a Native Hawaiian are much too strict.

A glance at her photo would suggest why she came to this scholarly conclusion.

But throughout this article Kauanui is treated as an unimpeachably authentic Person of Color, the Moral Voice of the Racially Marginalized.

The thought of having not just another Native student at Santa Cruz but a student who understood how complex and complicated Native identities can be was thrilling to Kauanui, and she pushed for Smith’s acceptance and reached out to her as soon as she got in.

I.e., hiring based on race.

By the way, the NYT uses artsy graphics to occlude what the professors look like and distract readers. Here’s their version of the lady who claims to be Native Hawaiian:

Over time, the two became good friends just as Kauanui had hoped, though she quickly realized that Smith didn’t want to talk about her family or her Native roots. For years, all she would tell Kauanui was that she was from Long Beach, Calif.; that her mother was Oklahoma Cherokee, as were her grandparents; and that her dad, though out of the picture, was Ojibwe.

… When Krug confessed last September, her admission prompted the outings of a series of white people who had been masquerading in their fields over the years as Black, Latino or Indigenous — six in academia alone by the year’s end. And yet, unlike Krug or the others who confessed and then disappeared from the public eye, Smith never explained herself or the lies she told. She has never really had to. …

Has Senator-Professor Elizabeth Warren?

A Harvard graduate with long brown hair and pale skin, Andrea Smith began to make a name for herself in the early 1990s when she and her younger sister, Justine, moved to Chicago and started a local chapter of Women of All Red Nations, an activist organization that grew out of the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. (Neither sister responded to multiple requests for comment for this article.) Although the sisters stayed in Chicago for only a few years, they made an impression: They helped organize a protest of the Columbus Day Parade and flew in Native activists to speak at community gatherings. And they also, says Katie Jones, a Cherokee woman who protested and organized alongside them, called out Native activists they thought weren’t “legit.”

“I watched them both go after this woman named Constance,” she told me. “Constance had showed up, she’d been living in Champaign and came to Chicago and tried to plug in with us, and they were like, ‘She is Portuguese, she is Black, but she’s not one of us; she’s lying, she’s a fake.’”

Although the United States has a long history of white people “playing Indian,” as the scholar Philip J. Deloria calls it in his book of the same name, the 1990s saw the beginning of what would eventually be significant pushback by Native Americans against so-called Pretendians or Pretend Indians, including the successful passage of a national law prohibiting non-Native people from marketing their art as “Indian.” Smith found her voice within that protest movement in 1991 when she published an essay in Ms. Magazine calling out white feminists and New Agers for co-opting Native identities.

“When white ‘feminists’ see how white people have historically oppressed others and how they are coming very close to destroying the earth, they often want to disassociate themselves from their whiteness,” Smith wrote. “They do this by opting to ‘become Indian.’ In this way, they can escape responsibility and accountability for white racism. Of course, white ‘feminists’ want to become only partly Indian. They do not want to be a part of our struggles for survival against genocide, and they do not want to fight for treaty rights or an end to substance abuse or sterilization abuse.”

… Simultaneously an “old guard Marxist,” a born-again Christian and an animal rights activist, Smith was the kind of person, Kauanui said, who once commented multiple times on the feelings of shellfish after someone ordered shrimp at lunch. But as the years passed, Smith mellowed. Kauanui thinks she realized that her dogma was off-putting. Easing up on her doctrinaire Marxism, she also developed a new fascination with celebrity gossip. “People in our program, they were doing cultural reads on Hollywood,” Kauanui said. “But to go from there to talking about which Hollywood star was bonking whom was totally another extreme. So she really went there and really committed. She knew about that stuff, and it was kind of her discussion fodder at conferences. And it made people laugh.”

It was in 2006, during their collaboration on a collection of essays by Native American women, that Kauanui first heard rumors about Smith’s identity. By then, the two had grown close, even as the trajectory of their careers had diverged. They had both graduated with doctoral degrees and landed jobs at well-regarded universities: Kauanui at Wesleyan University and Smith at the University of Michigan. But while Kauanui was developing a narrow expertise on Hawaiian indigeneity, Smith had become nothing less than “an icon of Native American feminism,” as the publication Colorlines later called her. She co-founded the national organization Incite! Women of Color Against Violence; was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy work; and aligned herself with prominent activists, including her dissertation adviser Angela Davis and Winona LaDuke, who later wrote the introduction for Smith’s first book.

Say his name: Harold Haley.

… But the next year, Kauanui was shown confidential emails that complicated the narrative. In early 2007, an official from the Cherokee Nation began emailing Smith, asking about her connections to the Cherokees given that she wasn’t enrolled — a word used for citizens in a tribal nation. Smith’s responses were evasive, and reading them, Kauanui couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just clarify who her relatives were. It was, she came to realize, the first moment she really doubted Smith. But as so many others would later do, she brushed her concerns aside.

… Being “enrolled” in an American Indian tribe essentially means being a legal citizen of that tribal nation. It’s a status that can be passed down by parents who are also enrolled but also one that can be claimed, depending on the citizenship rules of each tribe, if an individual can prove he or she is a child, grandchild or at times even great-grandchild of someone who was a tribal member.

Every tribe has different rules. To be a Cherokee you have to have had an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls of 1907. So, you don’t have to be very Native American to be a Cherokee. Here’s a photo from a recent Cherokee Youth Summit:

On the other hand, if you are descended from multiple members of various tribes that use a quarter blood quantum threshold for membership, you could be noticeably American Indian without qualifying for any tribe.

As the Cherokee genealogical researcher David Cornsilk would later tell me, Smith couldn’t even do that: She had known since the 1990s that her family had no identifiable Native American roots, because Smith had hired Cornsilk to look for them and he found nothing.

Although he can no longer recall the exact dates, Cornsilk says Smith first asked him to research her mother’s side of the family in the early 1990s, when she was working as a Native organizer in Chicago. Near the end of the decade, she hired him again to look into her father’s side — around the time she was starting graduate school at Santa Cruz and introducing herself as Cherokee and also after she accepted the first of two Ford Foundation fellowships then earmarked for underrepresented groups in academia.

It’s almost as during the Affirmative Action Age (6. 1969), it’s been worse for your career to be a white.

After researching both sides of Smith’s family tree, Cornsilk concluded that she had no identifiable Native American relatives, enrolled or unenrolled or even living near those who were once enrolled. He says he sent off his report to her both times and never heard back. “She never said anything,” he told me. …

In the months that followed, however, Kauanui’s doubt grew into something harder, something she might have eventually verbalized if in February 2008 Smith hadn’t found herself in the middle of another crisis. She learned that the University of Michigan had denied her tenure, a decision in academia that is akin to being fired. The reasons were not stated — tenure decisions are confidential, and no one I’ve talked to knows why — but Smith’s supporters were outraged. They organized a petition to overturn the decision and held a one-day conference in Ann Arbor, with Angela Davis as a guest speaker [say his name: Judge Harold Haley], to highlight the difficulties faced by female scholars of color. At that point, very few academics outside of Kauanui knew of the rumors about Smith’s identity, and a conference news release described her as “one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time.”

… If this were like the other cases of ethnic fraud in academia, Smith’s story would end at this point. These stories have become common enough now that we can predict their narrative arc: They begin with a confrontation that then leads to a revelation, followed by outrage and sometimes an apology before the guilty party slips into obscurity. But with Smith the story just keeps going. She was called out, yes. She retreated briefly and even told Kauanui that her new 10-year plan was to “live a private life and work church bake sales.” But then she came back.

By the fall of 2008, Smith had a new job as an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside …

After 2008, Smith no longer identified as Cherokee in her official bios, but she continued to identify as such for the panels, interviews and lectures she often spoke as a representative of Native American views and causes. At the same time, her younger sister, Justine, had begun building a career of her own in academia based, in part, on claiming a Cherokee identity. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin — where she received support from the McNair Program, which helps college students from underrepresented backgrounds — Justine began a doctorate in religion at Harvard University. In 2010, she was offered a visiting faculty position at the St. Paul School of Theology. A news release announcing the hire identified Justine as Cherokee and noted, “It is believed that she also will be the first full-time Native American woman to serve in any full-time faculty position in theological education in North America.”

The Cherokee Nation reached out to St. Paul after learning about Justine’s hire and discovered, according to an email I reviewed, that she had “obtained a Cherokee Nation citizenship card and had altered it.” St. Paul said that Justine was suspended after the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma raised concerns regarding her identity claims and was employed by the college for only three months. …

The University of California, Riverside, also issued a statement praising Smith as a “teacher and researcher of high merit,” noting that it could not, by law, consider ethnicity when making hiring or promotion decisions.

Of course, UCR violated Proposition 209 banning racial preferences when it hired Smith, but it could be dicey to fire Smith for not being the race she was hired to be.

When I began researching this article, I wanted to understand why stories like these seem to dominate one industry — my industry. As a white academic, I watched, aghast, as other white academics were outed for pretending to be scholars of color, both in real life and online. It seemed absurd to me at the time but also horrifying — in part because the outings coincided with a moment of national reckoning on questions of race and representation, and a number of universities, including mine, had recently committed to hiring more scholars of color. I kept wondering, as the former academic Ruby Zelzer posted on Twitter in September, “Academia, do we have a problem?” …

The fakes tend to be leftist women professors of Grievance Studies who got their jobs due to affirmative action and many also seem to have a fantasy that they are an Indian princess or a spicy salsa dancing queen or whatever.

All of this was a little bewildering to watch from the sidelines. Academia is an industry, like journalism, that defines itself in large part by its ethical standards; we’re supposed to educate people and produce knowledge. So what does it mean that we’re also a haven for fakes? Even more disturbing for me, as I began to learn about Smith’s story, was hearing similar stories that had gone untold — or, perhaps more accurately, unheard. Talking with Cornsilk, and with some of the Native scholars who signed the open letter, I learned about other academics falsely claiming to be Native American who came before or after Smith. It was the accumulation of such stories, not just Smith’s alone, that finally pushed many to speak out.

“There are so many fakes in academia,” said Kim TallBear, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta who said she was scared at first to sign the 2015 open letter. “It just felt like we needed to recognize the pervasiveness of the problem.”

… Of the 1,500 university educators listed as Native American at the time, said Bill Cross, who helped found the American Indian/Alaska Native Professors Association, “we’re looking realistically at one-third of those being Indians.” The most prominent example of this is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was listed as Native American by both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania Law School when she was on the faculty at those institutions and has since apologized for claiming that identity.

The Stanford geneticist Sen. Warren hired to analyze her DNA reported she was 1/256th American Indian, although Razib Khan says he was too conservative. Razib’s best guess is 1/64th.

… Figuring out Andrea Smith’s family history wasn’t easy, but halfway into my reporting I became determined to do that work …

Smith’s mother, Helen Jean Wilkinson, was born in a small town in Indiana to what appear to be middle-class parents: Her father was an engineer according to a death certificate, and her mother was at one point a trustee for Luce Township, a farming town of a little more than 2,000 on the Ohio River near Evansville. Their ancestors appear to have been mostly farmers and laborers in Kentucky and Indiana going back generations. … But neither Helen, nor her parents, nor her grandparents, nor her great-grandparents, nor her great-great-grandparents are listed in census records I found as anything other than white.

Helen went to Indiana University, where she worked on the yearbook staff and majored in business education. At some point after graduating, she moved to California, where she married a man named Donald R. Smith. They had two children, Andrea and then Justine, and divorced in 1968. Helen died in 2014 …

Donald R. Smith is alive, the woman confirmed, and he isn’t Ojibwe. He is a white man from Chicago who, like his daughters, is very smart. He was a nuclear physicist with the Pentagon before he retired, the relative told me. He has a degree from M.I.T.

One reason Smith’s career survived exposure of her affirmative action fraud is because she’s smarter than the average Grievance Studies prof. Another reason is because nobody in power wants to think about affirmative action fraud because nobody knows what the precise rules are. Finally people in power don’t want anybody to even think about affirmative action. They want to keep its existence on the public’s mental backburner.

His family are mostly of British ancestry, and no, he didn’t want to talk to me, but his relative wanted me to know that I was doing a good thing writing this article. “Honestly, integrity is everything in academics,” she said. “So let the truth out.”

… I found a cousin of Helen’s on her father’s side, a woman named Margaret Jane Wilkinson. She told me that Helen had never identified as Native American. But, she said, the family always claimed her grandfather on her mother’s side — the son of the police chief who shot a man in Owensboro — was American Indian.

That would be an Andrea Smith’s great-grandfather.

Eventually I found a woman named Barbara Smith, Helen’s cousin on her mother’s side, who remembered her grandfather — Mr. Pierce, as she called him. He wasn’t Native American, she said without hesitation, but there were rumors of Native ancestry in her family. She’d believed them, too, until she took a genetic test a couple years ago.

“We’re mostly Scandinavian,” she said.

The rumors could still be true if they go back to 18th Century America. With enough generations, randomness can just delete the DNA needed to prove even a valid genealogical family tree. But that’s a long way back.

When we hung up, I felt for a moment that I’d tracked down the truth about Smith. Yes, she had stories of Native American ancestors in her family, but like a lot of such stories, they weren’t based in fact.

… Even though most Native Studies scholars no longer work with Smith, she has begun publishing within adjacent fields, like ethnic studies, and has slowly built back a reputation.

It’s interesting what a large proportion of these Flight From White cases of whites pretending to be nonwhite (or vastly exaggerating their claim to be nonwhite), whether for the affirmative action benefits or for personal reasons, involve white leftist female academics, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Outside of that particular demographic, however, American whites have been strikingly honorable about not faking claims to be entitled to racial quotas.

Granted, a couple of generations ago, there was a case of two Boston brothers who scored on the fire department hiring test too low to be hired as white applicants. So the next year they took it and scored high enough to be hired as blacks. It became a big scandal and they were subsequently fired. But you don’t hear of many other cases of white men passing themselves off as nonwhite for the racial preference benefits in police and fire jobs.

In contrast, in Brazil, there are constant controversies over whether claimants racially deserve their affirmative action benefit.

But white Americans, other than leftist female academics, seem much more honorable about race.

From a comment:

Runs with scissors commented 2 hours ago

R

Runs with scissors
Los Angeles, CA 2h ago

Let’s recap: This is now 2021. By the early 1990s, Andrea Smith knew she was not Native after hiring tribal genealogist David Cornsilk, who comprehensively traced her lineage and told her what she didn’t want to hear: she had no Native descendants, much less Cherokee. Turns out her mom grew up in an educated, middle class family, and dad was a nuclear physicist for the Pentagon. In other words, Andrea Smith grew up with all of the comforts and advantages afforded to highly educated, economically prosperous whites. She then used those advantages to continue to pass as Native; aggressively diss others whom she deemed fake Indians; and secured $100,000s in fellowships and grants intended to assist disadvantaged students to earn her PhD and secure jobs while continuing to enjoy opportunities that she essentially stole from others. Those who have called her to accountability have suffered more for doing so, than Smith has suffered for lying and continuing to do so. The article does not mention it, but Smith also recently earned her JD from UC Irvine’s law school, where she gained admission and funding as a self-identified Native student–all while still earning a paycheck as a tenured professor at UC Riverside. Her enabling colleagues at UC Riverside continue to bury their heads in the sand. Once again it will fall to their students to read this piece, and others, to shed light on this now-decades-long case of academic fraud.

Washington DC: Trump Supporter Occupied Congress – Court Sketch

 George Pierre Tanios watches as a video of the January 6th US Capitol protest is shown during his hearing, in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on March 22, 2021, in this courtroom sketch from a video feed of the proceedings.

Medieval Style – Beatles ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – Peter Sellers 1965

https://videopress.com/v/l2Drf0Fm?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fxenagoguevicene.files.wordpress.com%2F2021%2F05%2Fpeter-sellers.jpg&preloadContent=metadata

Peter Sellers – Hard Day’s Night – Audio File

US: World ‘Socialist’ Web Site – Opposes All Labor Unions – Supports COVID Dictatorship (With Commentary) 25 May 2021

Hyperbolic COVID Derangement Syndrome

Abandonment of health measures threatens US COVID-19 resurgence

Andre Damon

On May 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed its guidance on mask-wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas.

[False: The CDC said people may stop wearing masks if they have been vaccinated. The tone of this article is set by this bizarre claim that they would ‘urge’ people to stop mask wearing. ]

The World Socialist Web Site, in line with the statements of leading epidemiologists, warned that these guidelines would trigger businesses, states and municipalities to remove all masking and social distancing requirements for vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike.

[Trigger? Perhaps it should be written “these guidelines would allow….”]

These warnings have been confirmed. Nearly every major retailer in the United States, including Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Walgreens, abandoned nationwide masking requirements within days of the CDC’s ruling, with no mechanism to verify whether those walking into their facilities are vaccinated or not.

National Guard members assisting with processing COVID-19 deaths and placing them into temporary storage at LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner Office in Los Angeles, Jan. 12, 2021. (LA County Dept. of Medical Examiner-Coroner via AP)

[Why aren’t these health workers wearing goggles? Perhaps they should wear helmets. ]

Epidemiologists and workplace safety experts have vocally condemned the CDC’s action. “It’s such a mess! So many of us are really upset. It is incredibly frustrating!” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told the World Socialist Web Site last week. “Inevitably, now state after state and business after business is saying you don’t need to wear your masks if you are vaccinated.”

[A lot of people around the world are frustrated by the government shutdowns and complications from this rarely lethal virus. Doctors and health workers don’t own the situation, even when they are doing heroic work. What is the vaccination for? Does being vaccinated protect a person from infection and getting COVID? If one is vaccinated, doesn’t that mean they can’t get COVID, and therefore won’t be spreading it? Isn’t that what vaccines do?]

From the beginning of the pandemic, workplaces have been a central source of transmission and broader outbreaks. The removal of any restrictions, under conditions in which nearly two-thirds of the population is not fully vaccinated, will lead to an increase in cases and deaths.

[The average age of death from COVID in the US is 78. These people are not getting sick at work. 95% of people claimed to have died from COVID had a comorbidity listed on their death certificate. A man shot to death was listed as dying from COVID. A motorcycle crash victim dies and tests positive for COVID. Cause of death COVID. Someone is very invested in inflating COVID numbers.]

Over 500 people continue to die every single day from the disease in the United States. This translates to a death rate of 15,000 every month, or 182,500 every year.

The fact that hundreds of people are dying every single day from a disease that could be stopped through aggressive public health measures is treated as a non-event in the media.

[What! The US media is like a non-stop COVID derangement syndrome show. Who can believe this? Yes, aggressive public health measures like the ones taken by China in early 2020 work. But the US doesn’t have a public health system, we have a health care industry. Profits first in the Capitalist Paradise.]

When the official US death toll crossed 600,000, the media simply ignored the milestone, just like it downplayed last week’s report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that the real death toll in the country is actually closer to one million.

[Do the people who write this and the readers who read it have access and time to look at US media. A 24/7 COVID show]

Globally, moreover, new cases remain at or near record highs, and epidemiologists are warning about the dangers posed by new variants of COVID-19 emerging as the pandemic surges throughout the world.

Every day, 600,000 people test positive for the disease, a figure that vastly underestimates its spread. Daily deaths are at more than 12,000.

[But, that’s not enough. The numbers are going down. Let’s conflate India with US numbers to pump up the volume.]

In India, the total death toll has surged past 300,000. While the country is recording more than 4,000 deaths per day, given the scale of undercounting, the actual figure could be in the tens of thousands. In Brazil, the official death toll is approaching half a million, and the 65,000 daily new cases are just shy of records set in March.

On Sunday, Germany banned travel from the UK as a new variant of COVID-19—termed the B.1617.2 or “Indian” variant—is spreading rapidly throughout the country.

Dr. Feigl-Ding warned of the significant dangers posed by the new variant of the disease. “Pay attention to rising #B16172 crisis in UK—crucial because [the] Indian variant affects us all,” Feigl-Ding wrote on Twitter. “It is now ~50% of all cases in England, surging fast, especially in kids. Hospital #COVID19 ward in Bolton filling up.”

[Get the feeling that these ‘experts’ love dreaming up new COVID sequels that are even more scary. They delight in the ‘disaster movie’ scenario and the Son of Godzilla style Son of COVID variants. They love being in control and having the secret knowledge and rituals to ward of the pervasive Evil manifested this time in COVID]

He noted that the new variant “is by leaps and bounds growing faster than any other variant. The previously fast #B117 is growing much much slower—5x slower than B16172.” He continued, “Reinfections with #B16172 is also approximately ~4x more with B16172 versus #B117 if we compare the rates of reinfections / variant cases found. 4x … is a lot.”

The rise of COVID-19 variants that are increasingly resistant to vaccines is reason for utmost vigilance. Government policy, however, is in exactly the opposite direction.

[I didn’t send in an application for medical school, and neither did most of the people who might read this. But, we might have vague memories and heard of past plagues that peter out. Usually a new infectious agent is strongest and most deadly at the beginning of a pandemic. The strongest strains kill their host and don’t spread as much as the weakest variants. So, the population of humans is exposed to the microbial agent and develops immunity. But, that is scientific history. Hollywood and cultists always want a sequel that tops the original. Millennial thinking from millennials. ]

The CDC’s mask reversal has created the conditions for an even more dangerous move. The ending of mask requirements in schools, placing the lives of unvaccinated students as well as teachers in danger.

[The writer, or the committee that wrote this, does not mention that COVID is not a children’s disease. Does that make them sad. Think of the children. More children have died in car accidents this year than from COVID. Should we ban cars? Yes, some teachers who are older, or have comorbidities are more at risk being around children and children without masks. Time to get all the young twenty something teachers into the schools and allow the older teachers who are afraid time at home to write that novel, or put all the great original ideas they are know for in concrete form. Time for a universal income in the US so all the over 50 people can stay home and self quarantine if they like.]

On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned mask mandates in public schools, declaring that “no student, teacher, parent or other staff member or visitor may be required to wear a face covering.” On Thursday, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds banned schools from requiring masks, and South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster followed suit.

[People can still wear masks, if they choose.]

These actions come despite extensive scientific evidence showing that masking significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Dr. Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore, condemned these moves, noting that “unvaccinated children need to stay masked around other unvaccinated people, including in schools. Nearly 1 in 4 new [COVID-19] infections are in kids. We need to help keep them safe.”

The reduction of COVID-19 cases in the United States is the outcome of mass vaccination that came about as a result of an unprecedented effort by scientists and academic institutions to create a whole new class of vaccines in record time.

[Operation Warp Speed, I forget who was the boss who kicked that off. Down the memory hole. ]

In a rational society, the reduction of COVID-19 cases would be used to strengthen protections ahead of what public health experts warn will be a new resurgence in the fall. But the Biden administration is squandering what health officials call a temporary reprieve to abandon measures to monitor and contain the disease.

On May 1, the CDC ended its monitoring of “breakthrough infections” of COVID-19 in people who are fully vaccinated, unless the disease leads to hospitalization or death.

[This is done to help make the vaccines look more effective than they are. ]

Like the withdrawal of masking recommendations, the move has drawn condemnation from epidemiologists, who warned that it would leave the US blind to the effect of new COVID-19 variants.

“By the CDC not doing this level of monitoring, it’s very reminiscent to me about how I felt in the Trump era: ‘You’re each on your own,’” Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post.

The Post paraphrased Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in San Diego, as saying that “the CDC should monitor those people, along with hospitalized and fatal cases, to determine whether and how virus variants might evade vaccine protection, help discover new variants and track how well certain vulnerable groups, such as the immunocompromised, are shielded by vaccines.”

The Biden White House, like the Trump White House before it, is seeking to convince the public to disregard the continued pandemic—in many cases leading by example.

[Biden walks around outside practically alone at walking to a podium with a mask. Vice President Harris ostentatiously wipes her hands after touching South Korea’s president]

The attitude inside the White House was summed up by a recent headline by NPR: “How the Biden White House Learned to Drop the Masks and Stop Worrying.”

“At the Biden White House,” wrote NPR, “it’s like 2019 all over again, with large and largely mask-free events in the East Room both Thursday and Friday.” Asked whether the White House was even tracking whether those in attendance were vaccinated or not, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told NPR bluntly, “That’s not the role we’re going to play.”

[Political polls seem to show that the people who love to be scared of COVID lately are Liberal Democrats especially the kind of people who might also like the zeitgeist of the Uber Liberal NPR. Kind of the same type who might wander into the World Socialist Web Site’s orbit. ]

As with similar displays under Trump, such callous disregard for public health and safety has the direct intent of sending a message: The pandemic is over. There can no longer be any obstacle—in the name of preserving public health—to the accumulation of private profit.

The stance of the Biden administration channels the demands of major corporations, which see efforts to save lives from COVID-19 as an unacceptable impingement on the extraction of profits from the working class.

[That is what capitalists do all the time. Joe Biden is a wealthy politician who became part of the capitalist class. The US government is a capitalist government. It has not been taken over or subverted by capitalists, it’s their government and always has been. What a surprise.]

If the response to the pandemic is left in the hands of this financial oligarchy, the disease that has already killed nearly a million people in US will take the lives of countless others. It is urgently necessary that workers take up the struggle against the pandemic into their own hands, both through the fight to create rank-and-file safety committees at workplaces and the political struggle against the capitalist system that subordinates human life to private profit.

[Don’t hold your breath waiting to see action from anti-labor union ‘rank-and-file’ World Socialist Web Site flavored committees. Although, it is not impossible. ]

Defend the Palestinians – Stop the Israeli War Machine!

Lego Torah Features Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah – Gay Pride In Bible History Set

Billund, Denmark: Hot on the heels of the company’s new “Everyone Is Awesome” playset and genderless blocks without male or female connectors, the LEGO group revealed its commemorative Biblical Pride Month playset: a new Sodom and Gomorah set.

The entirely flammable, destructible set includes dozens of pagan minifigs plus a bonus Lot and his wife, who is, of course, a pillar of salt. Children can press a button on the set and the whole thing explodes in flames, and they can even participate in the carnage using the included brimstone launcher.

“Hooray! The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the unrighteousness of men!” shouted one child in a new commercial for the set as he chucked some Lego brimstone at his village full of screaming minifigs. “Flee, fornicators, for the Lord’s anger is kindled against you! If you do not repent, He will whet His sword in vengeance! HAHAHA!”

“We’re excited to celebrate LGBTQ history with this iconic scene from the Bible!” said Lego spokesperson Yutte Hermsgervørdenbrøtbørda. “There is fantastic representation in this set, as it includes plenty of Middle Easterners, some angels of the Lord, LOTS of LGBTQ people, and one person of salt.”

Yahweh is, of course, invisible.

“You won’t find a more inclusive set anywhere!”

‘1619’ Critical Race Theory Deconstruction of Eternally Racist US – New York Times Style

“I mean, one reason we all signed off on the ‘1619 Project’ and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” New York Times Editor Dean Baquet

At an internal town hall meeting in 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told the newsroom that, going forward, their primary focus would be on “what it means to be an American in 2019,” which “requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years.” Race would be the new issue to enrapture the Times’ core audience of card-carrying members of the anti-Trump “Resistance.”

The pivot has literally been measurable. According to Tablet Magazine, the Times’ use of the terms “racist,” “racists,” and “racism” increased 700 percent between 2011 to 2019. Use of “whiteness” increased approximately 500 to 700 percent since 2015, while instances of “white privilege” and “racial privilege” leapt about 1,200 percent between 2013 and 2019.

That August, the New York Times Magazine unveiled the “1619 Project,” an ambitious series attempting to “reframe” American history with slavery as the foundation upon which our nation was based. According to the “Project,” 1619, the date when the first ship carrying African slaves arrived in the Virginia colony, was America’s true founding and its defining moment.

Radical as it may seem, “1619” wasn’t simply a vanity project for the Times. The Pulitzer Center quickly unveiled school curriculum based on the “Project,” which won a Pulitzer Prize and was named a “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by New York University’s journalism school.

The “1619” vision of America is diametrically opposed to Americans’ most fundamental collective beliefs about our origin and purpose. “In God We Trust,” E Pluribus Unum, and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness had all been overemphasized by educators over the last hundreds of years, and slavery had been underestimated, or so the Times would have you believe.

But historians, and even one of “1619’s” own fact-checkers, quickly challenged key portions of the “Project.” Shortly after it was published, a group of distinguished historians wrote a letter to the Times critiquing “1619” and accusing the Times of having an “opaque” fact-checking process for the “Project’s” many historical claims. Their main objection was that the “Project” contained “factual errors” which they argued went beyond mere “framing” or “interpretation” and were “matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism.” The historians also argued that these errors “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology” and that “[d]ismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”

That last criticism was aimed directly at the creator of the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, who had previously dismissed her detractors as “old, white male historians.”

Like much of “1619,” Hannah-Jones’ attack on her critics was bogus. For example, one such critic was Leslie M. Harris, a professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University who helped fact-check “1619.” She is neither old nor white nor male, and yet she claimed that her objections went unheard at the Times.

The Times itself, which has relentlessly stood by “1619,” made changes to key sections of the essay.

The original text of the “1619 Project” contained the following passage: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Since publication, the words “some of” were added before the words “the colonists.” The Times noted the update with an “Editor’s Note” insisting that this massively significant correction was not in fact a “correction.”

When historians requested corrections, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein rejected them.

Alarmingly, the original essay also contains the line “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” If Nikole Hannah-Jones truly believes this is true of America, then is it really a surprise that she would be willing to stretch and strain the truth to try to discredit the notion that we were founded in glory?

Hannah-Jones was hardly secretive about her agenda. In July 2020, she tweeted, “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

Brazen, radical, and instantly beloved by the establishment.

Baquet continued to laud the “1619 Project” a year later, stating, “1619 is one of the most important pieces of journalism The Times has produced under my tenure as executive editor. It changed the way the country talked about race and our history.”

This is the Times’ business model. Objectivity is not their objective. They want to “teach our readers to think” more like the Times on race. Dean Baquet said as much himself: “I mean, one reason we all signed off on the ‘1619 Project’ and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.”

This focus on race, and shaping readers’ views around it, has altered the Times’ basic standards. In 2020, the New York Times triumphantly announced it would start capitalizing the “B” in “black.” “It seems like such a minor change, black versus Black,” the Times’ national editor, Marc Lacey, explained “But for many people the capitalization of that one letter is the difference between a color and a culture.”

The Times has chosen, as of yet, not to capitalize the word “White.” (I’m capitalizing it here just this once.) Their explanation? “White doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups.”

This should be news to readers of “1619 Project,” who have been learning that our nation is rooted in white supremacy. It appears as though the New York Times only regards whiteness as a “shared culture and history” when they wish to attack white people as a group without getting blowback. Recall that criticism of the “1619 Project” by white historians was rejected specifically because of the critics’ race.

The Times, of course, has published other fake news, and they know it. But when the fake news doesn’t neatly fit the woke narrative, they seem to handle it quite a bit differently. For example, last year, the Times began reviewing Caliphate, a hit Times podcast, after Canadian authorities accused one of its central figures of lying about his involvement with ISIS. The credible challenge to one of Caliphate’s key stories was enough for the Times to trigger an internal review of the podcast, leading to a public and embarrassing retraction of one of its core claims.

There was a public reckoning.

Meanwhile, “1619,” subject to criticism no less damning, has been staunchly defended by the New York Times’ leadership and the media establishment in general.

Individual Rights – Universal Rights

Hollywood Jesus – “King of Kings” 1927 – Origins of Jewish Cultural Censorship – by Andrew Joyce

4,100 WORDS 

“My own suggestion would be … both in your interest and in the interest of the cause of the Jews of the world to strike out the words ‘Crucify Him’ entirely.”
Rabbi Edgar Magnin to Cecil B. DeMille, 1927.[1]

Initially established in 1913 to manage fallout from the conviction of Jewish murderer Leo Frank, the ADL’s first major effort to engage in cultural censorship began in the early 1920s in the form of a campaign against Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent essay series “The International Jew.” The campaign began with a cross-denominational conference in September 1920, during which Orthodox and Reform rabbis gathered in Chicago to develop a strategy that would suffocate Ford’s momentum and stifle growing American anti-Semitism.[2] The chosen approach was based on crypsis. The rabbis agreed that rather than condemn Ford themselves, they would draw up a statement condemning his writings as un-American and un-Christian and have it signed by prominent non-Jewish American luminaries. This crypto-Jewish manifesto was then signed by, among others, President Wilson and former President Taft, before being published to a gullible public.

The manifesto, however, was later deemed to have had only a minor effect in diminishing Ford’s momentum, so further, more direct, action was undertaken. Detroit’s Rabbi Leo Franklin was dispatched with instructions to personally influence Ford against further publishing against Jews. When Franklin failed to weaken Ford’s resolve, the ADL drafted “anti-discrimination bills” they hoped would preserve the image and status of American Jews, and mailed them to Jewish bodies across the country for lobbying purposes. Concurrently, the ADL initiated a boycotting campaign targeting the Dearborn Independent’s advertising revenue. Ford finally ceased discussing the topic when he was personally targeted in an individual libel lawsuit by Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro.

The episode demonstrated that, even in its nascent stages, Jewish censorship strategies were flexible and multifaceted, with efforts being undertaken in the social, political, economic, and legal arenas. In the following essay, I consider a less well-known, but equally important, instance of early Jewish cultural censorship — the ADL’s battle against Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 biblical epic King of Kings. The King of Kings case, it will be seen, provides considerable insight into Jewish approaches to (and fear of) Christianity, as well as pathological levels of Jewish anxiety about security, and the remarkable variety of Jewish tactical approaches to perceived anti-Semitism. Perhaps most crucial of all is the insight provided into the nature and direction of Jewish social and cultural control, especially the overwhelming need for control over what the majority population believes and perceives, or is allowed to believe and perceive. The story of the ADL and King of Kings is ultimately about the contest over ‘ways of seeing,’ a contest that prefigured very similar reactions to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and that remains at the heart of American life almost a century later.

The Uneasy Identity of Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959), regarded by many as one of the greatest filmmakers of his era, was in some ways an unlikely candidate for an ADL-designated public enemy. He was halachically Jewish via his mother Matilda Beatrice Samuel. He worked closely with Jewish producers Jesse Lasky and Schmuel Gelbfisz (later Samuel Goldwyn), and he enjoyed his greatest success in an industry dominated by Jews. His relationship to Jewishness, however, was complex. His mother disowned her family and Jewish roots when her parents objected to her intentions to marry a Christian, the Episcopalian businessman Henry Churchill de Mille. She later engaged in an apparently sincere conversion to de Mille’s religion. There were no trappings of Jewishness in DeMille’s childhood home, and both Cecil and his brother William were reported by friends and relatives to have held anti-Semitic views as adults. They are also said to possess a subtle resentment of their partial Jewish ancestry. Biographer Scott Eyman has argued that DeMille consistently emphasized only his Episcopalian background to the press during his early ascent in the movie industry, prompting “people who knew his mother in New York” to “assume a covert anti-Semitism, a stance that would only be strengthened by his future status as a pillar of California’s right wing.”[3] William DeMille’s daughter Agnes, a dancer, recalled her father at times railing against her “Broadway Jew manager,” and that her uncle Cecil once confided to her “I don’t like the Jewish people out here.” Cecil DeMille’s longtime screenwriter, Jesse Lasky Jr, commented after DeMille’s death: “He did not heavily identify himself with Jews.”[4]

Despite discomfort with his origins, DeMille was intelligent enough to use his Jewish ancestry, in the right company, to help him navigate a heavily Jewish industry. The Jewish Tribune pointed out in the late 1920s that DeMille “considers it of great commercial and strategic importance to boast of the Jewish blood in his veins.” And, as will be discussed below, in certain contexts, DeMille would often praise Jews and their characteristics. DeMille thus comes across as an opportunist, who identified with his own success more than any ethnic cause or group, and who could simultaneously hold deep ambivalence about his Jewish background while understanding that this uncomfortable fact would be useful for his career in an industry that operated like a Jewish cousinhood. Jesse Lasky Jr probably summed it up best when he argued that DeMille ultimately didn’t identify with anyone: “He had a suspicion that most people might not be worth identifying with anyway. He served his own Gods.”

King of Kings

By 1926, DeMille had made a personal fortune directing movies for Jewish producers. It seemed a logical next step that he should strike out on his own, and DeMille Pictures Corporation was born. His first two pictures, however, The Road to Yesterday and The Volga Boatman, were a flop and a hit respectively, thus cancelling each other out and placing the new production company, now bleeding capital, in significant peril. He needed a significant hit. In May 1926, Denison Clift, a DeMille studio contract writer, wrote a memo to DeMille:

Why skirt around the one great single subject of all time and all ages — the commanding, majestic, and most sublime thing that any man can ever put upon the screen: the Life, Trial, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ: in other words: the LIFE OF CHRIST, with its awe-inspiring power, its simplicity and its unutterable tragedy. … The title of the picture would be: THE KING OF KINGS.

DeMille threw himself into the project with intensity, working with screenwriter Jeanie MacPherson on a script that closely followed the Gospels with one exception. Reflecting his penchant for more seedy material, and the perennial notion that “sex sells,” DeMille personally held the belief that Judas had not betrayed Christ for money, but because Judas lusted for Mary Magdalene and had been frustrated by Christ’s conversion of her. DeMille expected that this change, even introduced subtly, would result in some minor complaints from Church authorities, but he was extremely pleased with a final script that ran to a mammoth 366 pages. In the end, DeMille had little to fear from the Church.

The Synagogue was a different matter. DeMille was aware, from the earliest stages of the project, of a need to manage Jewish sensibilities. On August 23, 1926, the day before production began, DeMille assembled all senior cast and crew for a six and a half hour meeting at his home. At one point, DeMille told those present:

We have to protect all classes of people, especially the Jew. The purpose is to treat all classes fairly and particularly the Jew, because the Jew is put in the most unfortunate place of any race in the Bible because it was not really a matter of the Jew having persecuted Jesus, it was Rome — Rome with her politics and graft. … The Jews are a very great race, a very sensitive race and we have no desire to hurt them, nor do we desire to hurt anyone.

DeMille also expressed the opinion during the early stages of filming that the movie would bear great responsibility not only in fixing in the public mind an image of Christ, but also an image of those responsible for his crucifixion. In addition to his own anxieties, at least one major film executive wrote to DeMille expressing the hope that DeMille would do all he could to “get around the Bible’s anti-Semitism,” mainly by opening the picture with a caption stressing Roman dominance in Judea and other rhetorical conceits intended to portray the Romans as the primary antagonists. Eyman argues that, throughout filming, DeMille “strove to ameliorate any charges of anti-Semitism.” DeMille completely removed Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us, and on our children”) and instead inserted a line for Caiaphas the High Priest during the earthquake the follows the Crucifixion: “Lord God Jehovah! Visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel — I alone am guilty.” The move was designed to completely side-step the issue of Jewish communal and generational guilt for the death of Christ.

Caiaphas (Rudolf Schildkraut) pays Judas (Joseph Schildkraut)

While showing tremendous sensitivity to Jewish interests in the text of the film, DeMille was stunningly unaware of the implications of his casting choices. Jesus and the Disciples were portrayed by young actors of northern European heritage, while DeMille insisted that the Jewish mob was played by extras culled from nearby Jewish quarters, along with Caiaphas and Judas, who were played by the Jewish father and son Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut.[5] This practice of ethnic casting alone was to prove infuriating to Jewish authorities across America, who insisted that, despite DeMille’s alterations to the Gospel, the film remained an anti-Semitic Blood Libel.

The Jewish Reaction

DeMille’s King of Kings was released to huge public acclaim on May 18, 1927, and was every bit the commercial and critical success that DeMille hoped it would be. In fact, the only negative reaction to the film came from the organized Jewish community, which reacted to King of Kings with what can only be described as extreme vitriol. In the words of Jenna Weissman, “Where Christian America showered the film with hosannas, Jewish America pummelled it with brickbats.”[6] The Jewish Tribune led the initial campaign against DeMille with some deeply personal comments concerning racial betrayal:

[DeMille] brooks no argument, no contradictions, no independence, no apologies reflecting upon him. … Cecil is the real son of his mother … an English Jewess who embraced the Christian faith early in her life. … Mrs. DeMille does not consider herself a Jewess, but Cecil even now likes to repeat to every handy listener how proud he is of having a Jewish mother. … It is as if he were naively, yet sincerely, saying to the Jewish press and pulpit which accuse him of the betrayal of the Jewish race, “Can a man who is proud of his Jewish origins betray the Jewish race?”

The article went on to state that DeMille was a new Henry Ford, with King of Kings likely to become the motion picture equivalent of The International Jew. The remarkable assertion was also made, despite all glaring evidence to the contrary, that the film was a flop, and had only been rescued by publicity surrounding its anti-Semitism. As DeMille biographer Scott Eyman points out, the Jewish Tribune, consumed with hysteria, had abandoned all logic:

The Jewish Tribune tried to have it both ways: castigating DeMille for freely acknowledging his Jewish heritage, when they would have undoubtedly castigated him even more had he avoided the matter, then bewailing the way the Jewish media had risen to take the director’s bait even as the article itself was part of the protests.

Prominent Zionist and Jewish activist Rabbi Stephen Wise entered the fray, saying the film would not have been made if a single Jew in Hollywood had acted “with the stature of a man.” Wise was the first major Jewish figure to call for the complete censorship of the film, telling one reporter, “I do not believe that the picture is curable. The only way to mend it is to end it. … The blood of Jews will be on the heads of the owners of this picture.”

Eyman writes that DeMille was “bewildered by this criticism,” having gone to great lengths to absolve Jews of any communal responsibility for Christ’s execution. Eyman suggests that DeMille probably reflected back on the September 1926 letter from an unnamed executive demanding that the movie place all blame for the crucifixion on the Romans. In DeMille’s opinion at the time, this would have represented too great a departure from the Bible, so he opted instead to attempt to place blame solely on Caiaphas. And DeMille had invested much in this attempt at pacification. Caiaphas is introduced in the film not as a Jewish High Priest, but as a “Roman appointee.” When Pilate asks the crowd, “Shall I crucify your king?,” it is not the entire collective of chief priests—as in John 19:15—but Caiaphas alone who responds “We have no king but caesar.” Throughout the film, Eyman stresses, DeMille reconfigures the blame solely upon this Romanized High Priest. It was now clear to DeMille, however, from the Jewish reaction to King of Kings, that any suggestion that Jesus was executed at the instigation of even a single Jew was more than the Jews of America would tolerate. They wanted nothing less than a rewrite of the Gospels.

DeMille was furious. During the latter stages of filming, he was often seen quietly staring at a portrait of Christ that he had placed on his desk, prompting at least one close associate to speculate that DeMille was beginning to become “deeply religious.” Jewish reactions to King of Kings certainly hit a strong nerve with DeMille, something indicated in a letter to a non-Jewish colleague:

I felt [the Jewish leaders] would greatly harm the Jewish race by bringing the matter to an open fight. … Someone in the Jewish race is trying to start trouble. This trouble should be stopped immediately for the good of all, as it could very easily lead to a situation that might be very destructive. Those Jews who are raising these rather violent objections would crucify Christ a second time if they had the opportunity, as they are so ready to crucify what, for want of a better term, I shall call His second coming upon the screen.[7]

Demands for changes to the film were formalized and broadened via the intervention of the ADL, with demands for substantial cuts and rewrites in return for a cessation of Jewish protests. The ADL contacted Los Angeles-based Rabbi Edgar Magnin, an associate of DeMille’s, and asked Magnin to persuade DeMille to acquiesce. The ADL projected power but was clearly only too aware of the popularity of the film and of DeMille, with the result that the ADL was as keen to see an end to the furor (though with its interests achieved) as DeMille. This tightrope situation was expressed succinctly by Magnin in a letter to DeMille dated September 28 1927:

An open rupture between [the Anti-Defamation League] and you could do absolutely no good to either and would likely result in harm to both. … Strike out the words ‘Crucify Him’ entirely. It would appear to me the action in itself is descriptive enough without the title. … Please give this your most careful and thoughtful consideration in the next few days, and if you can possibly do so, accede to the request of the League.

DeMille attempted to buy time by hastily preparing a memo describing actions he had taken to protect Jews during the making of the film, but the Jewish pressure continued. Resolutions condemning the film were passed by the United Synagogue of America, the Board of Rabbis of Northern California, and numerous similar groups across the country. Private detectives were hired to follow H. B. Warner, who played Jesus, in the hope that any discovered revelations about his private life (he did have a drinking problem) would help diminish ‘Jesus’ in the minds of the viewing public. The Schildkrauts, who played Caiaphas and Judas, were attacked as race traitors in Jewish editorials for allowing themselves to be cast in their villainous roles. DeMille later recalled, “Joseph was frightened. Joseph thought his career was through.” Felicia Herman writes that “the controversy over the film raged through November and December, receiving almost constant attention in Jewish newspapers through the nation.”[8] The ADL began making calls for the wholesale banning of the film, and then, in December, a three-page ADL ‘shopping list’ of proposed cuts and alterations arrived in DeMille’s office. Among the demands were:

• Eliminate all scenes of the lashing of Jesus barring the first.
• In the scene where a Jew, in answer to the question, ‘What evil has he done?’ shrugs his shoulders and jingles a coin, eliminate the jingling of the coin.
• In the scene where Pilate washes his hands and puts the responsibility for the crucifixion on Caiaphas, let Caiaphas say “I assume the responsibility …”
• Tone down the crucifixion.

The ADL also demanded that the film open with a foreword explaining that “the Jews were no longer an independent people,” and that all legal decisions at the time of Christ were ultimately the responsibility of the Romans. Coinciding with the arrival of the ADL “shopping list,” MGM announced that it would not release the film in eastern European countries “where it might inflame existing prejudices against the Jewish community.”[9]

DeMille’s will collapsed. In January 1928 a new version of the film was announced and released, incorporating the changes demanded by the ADL and others. By March 1929, DeMille was telling the Jewish Daily Bulletin that he regretted ever making the film. Even with the large number of changes, remarks Steven Carr, subsequent showings of the film

were subject to everything from accompanying benevolent ministerial statements to outright censorship. For example, in 1937 when the film was shown to churches in California, two entire reels were censored. The deleted scenes involved Judas accepting the bribe, the betrayal of Jesus, mob scenes, the activities of the high priest, and the Crucifixion itself. Before the film, a minister was to make a statement “completely exonerating the Jews” from any responsibility for the Crucifixion.[10]

The ADL used the battle over King of Kings to establish a permanent relationship with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Thereafter, the MPPDA (1915–1936) would facilitate an “official Jewish representative” appointed by the ADL who would liaise with the MPPDA and enable the ADL to screen any film for anti-Semitism before release to the public.

Legacy

One of the most remarkable features of the battle over King of Kings is the extent to which the entire affair was subject to the grossest of exaggerations. Even for its time, the film was remarkably tame, and of course it had been thoroughly sanitized by DeMille prior to release. The severity of Jewish reactions therefore suggests one of two possibilities, or perhaps a combination of both. In the first instance, it’s clear that Jews have a strong fear of the portrayal of Jews in the Gospel stories in their unadulterated form, a fear that resurfaced on the release of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. In my own personal interactions with Jews over the years, I’ve constantly observed a strong and deep-seated unease when Christianity is discussed. In the realm of scholarship, it’s commonplace in Jewish historiography to see anti-Semitism portrayed as fundamentally theological in origin, despite a wealth of evidence suggesting far greater socio-economic influence in the development of anti-Jewish attitudes. Many Jews, engaged in self-deception, probably do believe that the New Testament is the sole reason why they have experienced hostility. In the context of such anxieties, no matter how misplaced, it should come as little surprise that Jews would react with extreme horror towards any representation of the New Testament, and especially any representation of the trial and execution of Jesus.

On the other hand, much of the Jewish behavior surrounding this episode appears extremely calculated and well-organized. Relations between the MPPDA and the ADL were already embryonic prior to the filming of King of Kings, and there is some reason to suspect that the entire episode was exaggerated in order to manufacture a crisis that demanded a response (greater formal Jewish involvement in the censorship of mass media). There is of course a possibility that Jewish fear and Jewish ambition have merged in this instance.

Reading much of the material relating to the King of Kings controversy, I found myself quite disturbed on realizing that much of contemporary Christianity resembles DeMille’s butchered film. Almost everything that gave it some teeth in past centuries has been excised, leaving for the most part a rather toothless brute that is a tame lapdog scared of its own shadow. Yes, Christianity, excepting a few corners of resistance, has been censored. It’s been rendered safe. It’s been declared “Jew-friendly.” Most importantly, it looks nothing like its original form, its ‘Director’s Cut’ so to speak. The fact that Jews even feel secure enough to now demand that the New Testament should come printed with “anti-Semitism warnings” really says it all.

The King of Kings censorship campaign also highlights the unique relationship that Jews have with censorship. Cultural censorship, of course, is not limited to Jews, and calls to limit speech or expression have also been common among Jews and Christians. The difference is that Christians in the twentieth century were often most heavily involved in attempts to limit or remove obscenity in culture, whereas Jews were most often leading the battle to advance the same obscenity in the name of “free expression.” American Christians, and Catholics in particular via organizations like the National League of Decency, often campaigned for censorship on behalf of abstract moral values like decency and modesty rather than for themselves as a church or a people. Jewish involvement in censorship, on the other hand, is without exception always self-interested. As mentioned above, Jews are extremely liberal in their advocacy for the freedom to view or consume material regarded as morally destructive, but have been nothing less than relentless in their pursuit of legal methodologies and other forms of pressure designed to limit any speech or activity that would bring them into criticism or otherwise harm their interests as a group.

The episode has clear parallels with our contemporary situation. Many of the tactics pioneered in the Ford-DeMille years remain in place a century later. Blackmail, spying, boycotts, and behind the scenes pressure remain the mainstays of the ADL’s tactical bag of tricks. The old MPPDA-ADL partnership sees its postmodern equivalent in the form of Big Tech companies that allow the ethnically solipsistic fanatics of the ADL to declare what is or is not hateful content that should be censored from public view.

If I have a lasting frustration with the King of Kings story, it is that millions of Americans stood and watched as a tiny hostile minority—a minority that had not attained anywhere near the power they would achieve in later decades and had only recently lost their campaign against the 1924 immigration restriction law—dictated what they could and could not see on a subject no less than what is supposed to be, for most of them, their most sacred scriptures. This was at a time when the ADL’s power in relation to DeMille’s involved considerable bluffing, as they themselves conceded in some of the Jewish correspondence of the period. The sheer gutlessness of that generation which collapsed in the face of Jewish pressure left a heavier burden for the subsequent generation, and that burden has been getting heavier ever since. Censorship brings a multitude of victories for the censor. What is truth if it can’t be spoken?

Notes

[1] Cited in S. Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

[2] D. D. Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (New York: State University of New York Press, 1981), 115.

[3] Eyman, Empire of Dreams.

[4] Ibid.

[5] For an interesting perspective on the casting of the Schildkraut’s see A.K. Koslovic, “The Deep Focus Casting of Joseph Schildkraut as Judas Figure in Four DeMille Films,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 6 (2004).

[6] J. Weissman, Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments (Oxford University Press, 2017), 40.

[7] M. Bernstein (ed), Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Radio Era (Athlone, 2000), 80.

[8] F. Herman, Views of Jews: Antisemitism, Hollywood, and American Jews, 1913-1947 (Brandeis University Press, 2002).

[9] K.R. Phillips, Controversial Cinema: The Films That Outraged America (Praeger, 2008),139.

[10] S. A. Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.(Republished from The Occidental Observer

America’s Race To The Bottom – Rear End Fixation (The Spectator) 19 May 2021

The nation has an anal fixation

Written by:

Dominic Green

America has become a nation of butt fetishists. I’m not judging. I’m not calling for a moral crusade; it’s far too late for morality in America. I’m just observing the passing of one dispensation in manners and the establishment of another, like Talleyrand after the French Revolution.

The bottom is one of the few areas in which the US can claim to lead the world. California, with its porn and internet industries, saturates the global imagination with images of the callipygous American butt in action. Rap videos, a hybrid of music and porn, teach twerking to the innocents of Asia.

Anal sex has become so vogueish that Teen Vogue advises its readers on how to do it. This reflects the pornification of absolutely everything in the names of entertainment and personal freedom. Capitalism is polymorphously perverse because we are too: it is so efficient at ramming itself into every cranny of our lives because we want it, good and hard. Supply and demand: first the commodity fetish, then the anal fetish.

Of course, anal sex is older than Sodom. I exempt from these observations gay men, priests, convicts, sailors and Cambridge- educated spies; needs must, and all that. What interests me here is the change in the imagination and behavior of the majority, the straights and breeders in nontraditional America. Sex remains the central human activity, at least when your luck is in. So the adoption of a niche practice by the majority — ‘normalization’, as we now say — penetrates deeply into questions of what we value and who we are. Talleyrand would have recognized this: his contemporary, the Marquis de Sade, was both a prisoner in the Bastille, the first symbol of the old regime to fall in 1789, and the first modern advocate of the ass-jammin’ community.

We are witnessing a striking shift in what Hugh Hefner would have called the locus of desire. As recently as the Eighties, the US was the land of the breast. America’s sexual imagination was still in the vast shadows of Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Those midcentury sex-bombs symbolized the America of the atomic age: the America that was better because it was bigger, the America that could outproduce the world, the America that shipped its spare wheat to the sex-rationed Soviets, the America where even grown men drank a glass of milk with their steak. It had its knockers, but even they proved America’s vital strength, its surplus and fertility.

The decline of the American breast accompanied the decline of cigarette smoking and the rise of obesity. It also accompanied the shift from financial ethics whose capitalist spirit reflected the savings-based, retentive habits of what Max Weber called the ‘Protestant ethic’ to our current incontinence, which is characterized by impulsive, high-risk behavior, violations of traditional restraint, excessive displays of power and giving your credit card details to strangers on the internet.

Americans have passed from the oral stage of stuffing breast substitutes into the front end of the alimentary canal to the anal stage of stuffing all manner of objects into the back end. Freud, incidentally, thought this shift from orality to anality marked a progress from newborn infantilism to the phase of potty-training and eating Play-Doh (age 18 months to three years). The goal, he reckoned, was to shift the libido’s area of interest to the genitals in the ‘phallic stage’ (age three to six); thence to the ‘latency stage’ (age six to puberty), when sex is sublimated into acquiring social skills and playing Dungeons & Dragons; and then to the ‘genital stage’ that begins with adolescent experiment and ends shortly afterwards with heterosexual marriage. But that was in 1905.

Could there possibly be a connection between the seamy spread of anal sex and two other alarming phenomena, the decline in the birth rate and the decline in the libido of young Americans? The number of babies born in 2020 was the lowest since 1979 — even though the population was 225 million in 1979 and now stands at 328 million. The breeders aren’t breeding like they used to. The adults need jobs capable of covering the mortgages on their degrees and homes before they can shell out for kids. They also need to believe in a future — and the future, as we all know and prefer not to admit, is provisionally canceled in America these days.

Freud thought that the superego, the governing voice of conscience and manners, establishes itself in our minds after the anal stage. Children and adults alike revolt against that controlling, pleasure-denying voice.

The modern revolt against authority expressed itself first as the Protestant revolt against religious authority, and then, in the 18th century, as a revolt against the economic logic which was replacing religious ethics. If everything has a price, an individual is a unit of collective productivity and the aim is to produce surplus value — that is the logic of utilitarianism and its antithesis, socialism — then the free individual devotes himself to unproductive activities, doesn’t care about the cost — and fetishizes his waste of surplus.

Supply and demand: the revolt against tedium and the increasingly jaded demand for images that will tickle frazzled-out synapses summon the ever-increasing and ever-more exotic supply of transgressive images of unproductive acts. This is a doom loop, a desperate squeezing of interest and profit, a commerce and culture of narcissism, a society heading up its own backside. This is how a civilization dies: with both a whimper and a bang, recorded for posterity.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition.

US: Radical Liberal DSA Laughs At Stalin’s Assassination of Trotsky – Top Leadership Organize Anti-Trotskyist Campaign

An Open Letter to Maria Svart, National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America

David North@davidnorthwsws

22 May 2021

Maria Svart
National Director
Democratic Socialists of America

May 22, 2021

Dear Ms. Svart,

On May 17, the World Socialist Web Site reported that during the previous week members of the Democratic Socialists of America had used Twitter to post and disseminate statements and memes celebrating the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, the leader of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Fourth International.

As documented by the report, written by Eric London, those involved in these posts and retweets are not politically inexperienced members of the DSA. Rather, as London wrote:

“The DSA members celebrating Trotsky’s assassination include elected national office holders and leaders of its youth wing (YDSA), branch chairs, leaders of campus clubs and prominent DSA podcasters, as well as contributors to the Guardian and DSA-affiliated media outlets such as Jacobin magazine.”

Among these leading DSA members are:

1. Nickan Fayyazi, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the YDSA and co-chair of its UC Berkeley Chapter.

2. Jake Colosa, a member of the New York City DSA steering committee.

3. Alex Lawson, a Vermont DSA organizer.

4. Honda Wang, a DSA Organizing Committee member in lower Manhattan.

5. Kenzo Shibata, a prominent DSA member in Chicago.

6. Brandon Henriquez, co-chair of the DSA Silicon Valley branch.

7. Nate Knauf, a former member of the DSA National Electoral Committee.

8. Guy Brown, a DSA National Political Education Committee member and co-chair of the Charlotte, North Carolina DSA.

9. Blanca Estevez, a member of the DSA National Political Committee.

10. Nate Stewart, a member of the YDSA National Coordinating Committee.

11. Alexander Hernandez, co-chair of the DSA Immigration Rights Group.

12. Austin Binns, a member of the DSA National Electoral Committee.

13. Cole Schenley, co-chair of the DSA branch in Erie, Pennsylvania.

14. Kayleen Pena, a member of the DSA Organizing Committee in New York City.

15. Michael Lumpkin, a member of the DSA Los Angeles Labor Committee.

The involvement of leading members of the DSA in this anti-Trotsky campaign clearly indicates that it was a coordinated response to the WSWS’s criticism of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, which had been read by thousands of DSA members. Rather than attempting to reply to the WSWS with legitimate arguments, the DSA leaders descended to the level of political pornography. A tweet by Ben Davis, a prominent DSA member in Washington, D.C., featured a drawing of the assassin preparing to strike Trotsky from behind with an ice pick. Davis added the caption, “Clear out the wreckers” — thereby invoking the very words used by Stalin to sanction the murderous terror he unleashed in the Soviet Union in 1936.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of savage repression between 1936 and 1940 that targeted the socialist working class and intelligentsia. Within the Soviet Union, Stalin’s decision to eradicate socialist opposition to his regime resulted in approximately one million executions. The victims included not only the Trotskyist opposition, but all those who had played a significant role in the October Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Republic. The Stalinist terror claimed the lives of major Soviet writers, scientists, and artists.

Beyond the borders of the USSR, the GPU murder machine killed thousands of socialists in Spain, including the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin (who was tortured to death), and Trotsky’s secretary, Erwin Wolf. The ferocity of Stalinist repression of socialist opponents of the bourgeois Popular Front government is described in meticulous detail in Burnett Bolloten’s study of the Spanish Civil War, not to mention George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. In France, the GPU assassinated Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov and the secretary of the Fourth International, Rudolf Klement. The Stalinist killings extended even into the United States. Juliet Poyntz, a member of the American Communist Party who had expressed opposition to the Moscow Trials, was kidnapped in New York City in 1937 and never seen again. In 1943, Carlo Tresca, the famed Italian-American anarchist leader and opponent of Stalinism, was assassinated in New York City.

The DSA traces its history to the American Socialist Party. Notwithstanding their well-known and fundamental political differences with the Trotskyist movement, many of its most prominent leaders, including Norman Thomas, opposed the Moscow Trials. They supported the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry into the trials, chaired by the philosopher John Dewey. The Commission, after extensive hearings and investigation of all available evidence, declared Trotsky to be not guilty and denounced the Moscow Trials as a frame-up.

The stand of the Socialist Party was bitterly denounced by the Stalinists. Norman Thomas was among the principal targets of their attacks. In a speech delivered on March 18, 1938, Earl Browder, the Stalinist lickspittle who led the American Communist Party, declared that Thomas “capitulated to Hitler and joined with Trotsky. The Moscow trials have thrown a light upon all such problems, including the political degradation of Norman Thomas.”

The DSA has a serious political problem. Its leadership includes individuals who unabashedly declare their solidarity with the monstrous crimes committed by Stalin and his totalitarian bureaucratic regime. This cannot be explained simply as a matter of historical ignorance. The individuals who are actively promoting the anti-Trotsky campaign are not political novices.

In fact, as Eric London’s article documented, many of these individuals have connections to the Democratic Party, a bastion of American anti-communism and imperialism. Its political strategists view the Trotskyist movement — which seeks to establish the political independence of the working class from the pro-capitalist Democratic Party on the basis of a socialist program — as a formidable enemy. It fears the potential of the Trotskyist movement to attract workers and youth who are being radicalized by the intensifying social crisis. The broad-based response to the WSWS’s criticism of Ocasio-Cortez’ defense of the Biden administration was seen as a confirmation of this potential.

The essential political purpose of their campaign against Trotskyism is 1) to poison the political environment within the DSA with reactionary anti-Marxist filth appropriated from Stalinism, and 2) to attract to the DSA socially backward people who are drawn to the anti-communist, chauvinistic and — let’s not beat around the bush — anti-Semitic subtext of denunciations of Leon Trotsky. Judging from tweets that have been posted in support of the DSA leaders’ attacks on Trotsky, the campaign is drawing around your organization extremely reactionary elements who should have no place within a genuinely progressive, let alone socialist organization.

An organization that claims to espouse “democratic socialism” must make clear that it will not tolerate statements, in any form, that legitimize threats of violence against its political opponents on the left.

The Socialist Equality Party formally requests that the Democratic Socialists of America unequivocally denounce and repudiate the Twitter posts, and statements in any other media, that revive Stalinist lies and celebrate the assassination of Trotsky. The DSA must make clear that the propagation of Stalinist lies, thereby sanctioning not only past but also future attacks on the Trotskyist movement, will not be tolerated and is incompatible with membership in its organization.

In conclusion, allow me to point out that the Socialist Equality Party, notwithstanding its political differences with the DSA, has consistently defended your party and its members against attacks from the political right. Statements in defense of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez have been prominently posted in the World Socialist Web Site. In fact, we have applied this same policy toward members of the Democratic Party, such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when they have been threatened with violence from the extreme right.

I await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

David North
National Chairman
Socialist Equality Party (US)

Risk Assessment In The Rain, Rain, Rain

COVID Editorial Cartoons

Insert your own caption

Breatharian Militants Confront Vegan Protesters Blocking Pleasant Valley McDonald’s – “Eating is murder”

Pleasant Valley, Boson Massachusetts

Boson MA (AP) An animal rights organization known as Animal Rebels attempted to shut down McDonald’s in the Pleasant Valley neighborhood with bamboo structures, vans, and other obstacles, demanding that the company go completely vegan.

A half an hour into the protest a two carloads of Breatharian activist showed up to counter-protest. Breatharians maintain that humans can get all the nourishment they need from the air simply by breathing deeply and consciously. “People in India have been doing this for centuries,” Brad Cullen a Breatharian leader nick named “Comrade Air” said.

The Vegans had promised to block the McDonald’s drive through and continue to do so for at least 24 hours. But the plans fell apart as arguments broke out between activist on both sides shouted at each other.

“Sanctimonious screwballs,” one demonstrator shouted, though it was not clear which side he supported.

Videos show the activists hanging from bamboo structures in front of the gates as one woman issued the demand that McDonald’s “go plant-based immediately.” A McDonald’s sign and burger sculpture were also drenched in blood by the activists, while placards protested the fast food company’s use of both meat and dairy – signalling that a plant-based menu could not include burger staples like cheese.

Breatharians counter-proposals advocated that McDonald’s simply offer ‘breathing space’ for people at a modest price in a comfortable setting.

The Breatharians refused to wear masks since that would restrict their protein and nutrient intake. A police patrol car sat nearby with two officers eating a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder with fries.

Breatharian Militants Confront Vegans Protesters Blocking Pleasant Valley McDonald’s – “Eating is murder” : BosonMassachusetts (reddit.com)

COVID Derangement Syndrome

99.7% Survival Rate After Infection

95% of Dead had Comorbidity

78 Years the average Age of Death – AKA – Life Expectancy

Israeli scientists find natural food supplement that could treat anxiety caused by Israeli bombing of apartment buildings, schools, hospitals…

The Last Days of Maskachusetts

by Howie Carr

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

The retail worker in the AP sob story — and you’ll be reading local variations on this theme all week — is so deranged that he runs to his car to eat lunch in order to avoid any “science deniers” in his store.

“He gets stares from shoppers and co-workers … ‘I know for a fact people have a negative opinion of me. … It’s become a divisive issue in the workplace.’”

You don’t say, Karen? But when you were calling the shots, and screaming and yelling at anybody who’d figured out the grift, that wasn’t “divisive?”

Now, though, as reality is finally rearing its unmasked head, Karen gets the vapors that “we have customers who literally cuss at us.”

Unlike, say, the wrinkly unhinged former TV reporter chasing an unmasked family around Castle Island with a cell-phone summer last summer. Or the endless stares and glares at customers who had the temerity to go down the wrong way in a one-way supermarket aisle, or who observed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s three-foot social distancing guideline as opposed to its six-foot guideline?

Masks have become a mental illness, tolerated because it’s predominantly affecting the privileged, over-educated Trustafarian class in the suburbs. Those who believe in nothing will fall for anything.

Other countries were infected long before the U.S. — I mean by the mask insanity, not the virus.

As far back as 2009, the syndrome was identified in Japan as “mask dependency.”

According to a story I found on an Asian website, in Japan over 60% of the mask addicts are women, usually in their 30s or 40s. Just like here, in other words.

“It has reached a stage where they cannot go out without wearing a mask.”

Boy, has Karen got a surprise coming next Saturday, or even sooner, if she ever ventures outside the borders of Charlie Baker’s police state.

Charlie’s dead-enders are the same people who last summer told pollsters that the Panic had killed 30 million Americans. They’re CNN viewers, in other words.

Now, as the hours tick down to Armageddon next Saturday, Karen scours the internet, searching desperately for reassuring news, anything to halt the back-sliding. What about the New York Yankees who tested positive? And variants — oh my God, do the teachers’ unions love scare headlines about variants.

It’s their ticket to another year of paid vacation.

Sadly for Karen, even many Biden voters have figured out the grift. That’s why all the bust-out blue-state governors are trying to bribe their constituents to get a Fauci ouchie — with donuts, burgers, fries, beer, wine, scholarships, even cash lotteries.

If you have to pay people off to get the “life-saving” jabs, they must not be that worried. Or perhaps they’re more concerned about the vaccine than about the flu.

As one wag observed, “If I want to win a million bucks in a lottery, I’d rather buy a ticket than get my ticket punched.”

Look on the bright side, though, Karen. At least Maskachusetts will be the last state in New England to end the madness. Nothing much has really changed here since the Salem witch trials.

In the days of the old Washington Senators baseball team, there used to be a joke about Washington: “First in war, first in peace and last in the American League.”

As far as New England is concerned, it can likewise be said of Maskachusetts: “First in deaths, first in unemployment and last in ending the hoax.”

https://videopress.com/v/ng9EWuI8?preloadContent=metadata

New book ‘Cynical Theories’ finally takes woke warriors to task over crazy ideas such as ‘being fat is the same as being gay’ – by Damian Wilson – 22 May 2021

To combat woke culture, we must fight for the freedom to debate & resist critical theory, which anchors rubbish about biology, disability and even fatness. That’s the premise of a new book with a refreshing commonsense approach.

As it isn’t far from home, I feel an urge to visit the London suburb where a local council has permanently painted a pedestrian crossing blue, pink and white to mark the international day against homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. When I find the crossing, I’ll stand in the middle, ignore the busy traffic and wait for a lorry or dumptruck to put me out of my misery.

Then I will be free of this nonsense. The sort of loony, left-leaning liberal virtue-signalling that chooses to waste taxpayers’ money on cosying up to gender fascists. I’ll no longer be able to roll my eyeballs – they’ll be somewhere on the nearby pavement – at Google choosing to censor my docs (like the one I wrote this article on) by offering me pop-up messages suggesting I use the more ‘inclusive’ term of ‘chairperson’ should I ever type the word ‘chairman’. Chairman. Chairman. Chairper… See how it works?

I won’t have to stand by in despair as private members’ clubs, like the Marylebone Cricket Club at cricket’s spiritual home of Lord’s, in London, are backed into a corner by a shouty mob who have manufactured outrage over long-held rituals they now deem unacceptably sexist, leading them to call for a men’s match between Oxford and Cambridge to be cancelled unless a women’s game was included.

And I won’t have to put up with the gender gestapo at LGBTQ+-rights charity Stonewall, the self-appointed language gatekeepers, who bully universities that should know better about who can and cannot appear on their campuses to share their ideas.

In case, like me, you are wondering how we got to this point, where the way we talk, think or act is such a minefield, then please, take a look at the recently published latest edition of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody.

https://videopress.com/v/nmY4g5D6?preloadContent=metadata

Short Summary

It might not have the catchiest title, but authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay storm into the debate about modern critical theories with a patient, logical and measured approach that exposes the damage they do to healthy, public discourse. In tackling the presumptions and key ideas behind postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, gender studies, disability studies and fat studies, they provide a reality check and a grounded insistence that we don’t all have to agree with these views or with the wider system of knowledge they espouse.

They describe in some detail how the rise of academic activism within universities and colleges has moved away from teaching students how to think into teaching students what to think. Any student who questions or objects to their reasoning simply doesn’t understand. There is only one view – the view of the umbrella theory – and it is never wrong and cannot be questioned.

Because of that, the views of academic activists become totally illiberal, which would be a shock to these people, because they truly believe they are the archetypal liberals of our time. Pluckrose and Lindsay make the simple observation that true liberalism is not a closed shop. It doesn’t claim to know it all, and therefore the argument is open-ended. It holds that there are many sides to every argument, and they should all be heard. Some of those views might take permanent hold, others a temporary tenure, and more still can be discarded as just plain wrong. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be heard.

Within critical theory, however, the gatekeepers determine the terms of reference, who is permitted to engage in the discussion and what the result will be. Their decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. What is happening in our universities and colleges today is not the healthy liberalism – centred neither right nor left on the political spectrum – that many parents wish their offspring to experience in preparation for the adult world. 

The authors say that today’s students are being fed an endless diet of critical theories, which are indeed cynical, as the book’s title suggests, and going out into the world not as clear-minded critical thinkers looking at life through a lens of objectivity, but as devoted adherents to rigid ways of thinking. 

They are then left free to spread their views in the workplace, which may be an educational institution, where they disseminate their one-world view among malleable young minds. Or, a more recent phenomenon, they enter the public and private sectors, where suddenly everyone’s email signature starts trumpeting preferred pronouns – ‘kind regards Derek (he/him)’ – as employers compete for recognition as gender defenders or friends of fatties, as if that means anything at all.

The default logic is, of course, that, unless you can prove you agree wholeheartedly with this insistent bunch of ragtag theories, then you are inherently racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, colonialist, and ableist. You just never knew it.

OK, so your company doesn’t discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, ethnic minorities, the disabled or even the fat, but does anyone really need that virtue-signalled on the company letterhead? Isn’t equality a starting point, rather than something you subscribe to later on by ticking the boxes of various identities?

You have to wonder if those companies that seek endorsement from critical-theory activists really understand what they are signing up to. It takes a leap of faith to adhere to queer theory, which would have us believe there is no such thing as biological sex, and that, despite what the evidence of our own biology might tell us about ourselves, sex is all really just a social construct.

Pluckrose and Lindsay note that, in fat studies, it is held that “calling fat people ‘obese’ medicalises human diversity” and aligns obesity with homosexuality, “reasoning that just as homosexuality has been identified as a naturally occurring phenomenon that does not need a cure, so too must obesity be similarly recognised.” Er, really? Meanwhile, the theory of disability studies says it is wrong to undermine a person’s identity as “disabled” by suggesting they might like a cure, as that’s projecting “ableist norms” onto them. One academic is even quoted criticising disabled people for having “internalised ableism”, for wishing they weren’t disabled.

Some of this critical-theory nonsense is real laugh-out-loud stuff.

And while it has faced little serious challenge in recent years, and many in academia, the media and politics have just rolled over in the face of attack in the public realm and on social media, it is now time to reconsider all this.

There is no point in simply arguing the point. There is no victory to be had. Critical theorists have a fine grasp of social media and how to ‘win’ an argument by rousing the mob against dissenters, so taking them on in that sphere is often disappointingly unsuccessful. We must challenge how the arguments are made and assert our right to oppose them, not the people who make them, as it is too easy to be accused of one of the various ‘phobias’, which works like chum in the water to attract the sharks perpetually circling the debate.

Cynical Theories encourages principled opposition, and it’s a bold stand to take. For those who give a damn, there is something truly encouraging in realising there are genuine ‘liberals’ out there prepared to call out the totalitarianism of critical theory. And it’s about time.

…………………….

Damian Wilson is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – by Roger Ebert – March 1995

It’s been 26 years since I last reviewed a Russ Meyer movie (“Vixen“). In 1969, I wrote the screenplay for Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (“simultaneously the best and worst movie ever made” – Michael Dare, Film Threat magazine). In the years since, I have passed on reviewing other Meyer films; there was an obvious conflict of interest.

But now, with the re-release of Meyer’s “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (1965), perhaps the statute of limitations has expired.

https://videopress.com/v/ue7PaMxg?preloadContent=metadata

Besides, why not a review from someone who has a conflict of interest? Meyer’s fans are vociferously partisan, and here is the movie that director John Waters (“Hairspray”) called “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” Completing the circle, Stephen Holden, in his recent review in the New York Times, credited Meyer with having invented John Waters, not to mention Madonna.

What is it about Meyer that spurs critics to this hyperbole? I think it is an intensely personal reaction to the visceral power of Meyer’s unusual images. Take away all the jokes, the elaborate camera angles, the violence, the action and the sex, and what remains is the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women.

Meyer’s extraordinary women are of course fascinating to those with breast fetishes, but look a little longer and you will notice that the breasts are not always presented as centers of desire.

Instead, they’re weapons used to intimidate men. Tura Satana, who plays the lead in “Faster, Pussycat,” is extraordinary in appearance: Her makeup, with its slashes of Kabuki-style eyebrows, looks terrifying. Her black costume seems suited to a motorcycle gang. She never smiles. And her abundant cleavage seems as firmly locked in place as a Ninja Turtle’s breastplate. One cannot think of her as fondleable.

What deep recesses of the psyche do these images address? The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length on “Pussycat” in a recent Village Voice, said she dismissed “Pussycat” 20 years ago as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at New York’s Film Forum, she had a different reaction, viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of “empowerment” fascinating to her. Meyer, from the beginning of his career and almost without exception, has filmed only situations in which women wreak their will upon men.

He does so within a frenetic style of quick-cutting, exuberant action, pop and comic-book imagery, and dialogue that seems phoned in from another universe. Consider, for example, the dinner table scene in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” – the most bizarre meal I have ever seen on film, with the single exception of “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.” The events leading up to the meal: Tura Satana, as the black-clad dominatrix, is racing her Porsche in the desert against cars driven by her female lover (Haji) and another go-go dancer (Lori Williams). They kidnap a young girl (Susan Bernard), after Satana breaks the back of her boyfriend with one swift karate move.

They stop for gas. The talkative attendant (Mickey Foxx) chatters away about “seeing America first,” his eyes glued to Satana’s cleavage. “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!” she sneers. He tells them that an old man, who lives in the desert with his two sons, has a hoard of money hidden on his property. One of the sons, who is named Vegetable (Dennis Busch), is muscle-bound but dim-witted, and they see him carrying his father to their pickup truck.

Following the truck to an isolated desert shack, they concoct a story to explain their prisoner, and the lustful old coot (Stuart Lancaster) orders lots of fried chicken prepared. The coot and his sons sit down at dinner with the women (all dressed in bulging bikinis, halter tops, etc.), and when the go-go dancer says something Satana doesn’t like, the dominatrix simply stands up and belts her.

How does the father respond? With a tolerant chuckle: “Women! They let ’em vote, smoke and drive – even put ’em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!” Later, the coot orders his muscular son to assault Satana, who discourages him with her karate skills, and then tries to crush him against a wall with her Porsche. The victim uses his strength to hold off the car. Meyer uses quick cuts between the victim, the spinning wheels and a stiletto heel jamming down on the gas pedal. For him, Satana digging her car’s rear wheels into the sand is the female equivalent of impotence.

I remember seeing “Pussycat” in 1967. I was amazed. I had simply never seen characters like this before, in the movies or (needless to say) anywhere else. After inventing the skin flick with “The Immoral Mr. Teas” (1959), Meyer had, by the mid-1960s, moved beyond the nudie market. In films such as “Lorna,” “Mud Honey,” “Faster, Pussycat,” “Common Law Cabin” and “Good Morning . . . and Goodbye” branched out into the wider exploitation market dominated by American-International Pictures.

Of all his early films, “Faster, Pussycat” has found the widest audience. It has had huge grosses recently in Germany and France, has had a punk rock band named after it and is now in general re-release around America. What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course.

Roger EbertRoger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Corporate Media’s Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them – by Glenn Greenwald – 21 May 2021

My responses to The Washington Post’s article and Daily Beast’s questions about accusations from The Intercept that I have “endangered” their writers.

Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept’s live-blogging reporter Robert Mackey, narrating a 20-minute video maligning journalists Julio Rosas, Jorge Ventura, and other journalists who report on Antifa protests on the ground.

On Monday, The Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi contacted me to say that he had spoken with numerous editors and journalists at The Intercept, who voiced to him a wide range of personal and professional accusations about me. This was all in response to criticisms I had expressed about two recent Intercept stories. On Friday morning, The Post published Farhi’s article about their attacks on me.

Among other things, that Post article features The Intercept‘s ongoing attempt to depict me as mentally unwell in order to delegitimize my criticisms of their shabby journalism. It quotes the site’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, as saying I have “lost [my] moral compass and grip on reality,” echoing The Intercept’s prior claim that mounting anger at their organization is being fueled not by widespread revulsion over their increasingly unethical and politicized journalism but rather by my “unbalanced tweets.” The Post also quotes Reed as claiming that I have “done a good job of torching [my] journalistic reputation”: liberal journalists, who only speak to and for one another, always believe that the primary if not sole metric of journalistic credibility is how popular one is among other liberal journalists. “He’s a huge bully,” she added.

Betsy Reed

Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, rage-driven bullies, and shadows of their former selves, is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents from their in-group circles. A lengthy 2003 New Yorker smear job on Noam Chomsky headlined “The Devil’s Accountant” — at the time when he was a rare and vocal critic of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — described how Chomsky was once a credible voice but, sadly, has now “become increasingly alienated from the mainstream” because he “has no ideas to offer.” Chomsky’s “thinking has grown simplistic and rigid,” the author wrote. She quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that while he once admired Chomsky’s stable ideology and noble commitment to principle, he is now going basically insane, describing his views of the war in Afghanistan as “the gleam of utter lunacy piercing through.”

The article also claimed that while Chomsky’s criticisms of Israel have alienated his liberal following, it has caused him to become popular in far-right anti-Semitic circles. That article also described Chomsky as an angry bully, prone to outbursts of rage against female colleagues to the point of making them cry, being humorless, and in general just plagued by mental pathologies which accounts for his unwillingness to accept liberal pieties. Sound familiar?

In 2018, I compiled many of those personality-driven and mental health smears that had been weaponized back then against Chomsky because, at the time, other liberal outlets — such as The New Yorker and New York Magazine — were already using the same mental health and personality-based themes to expel me from the precincts of liberal decency due to my rejection of their Russiagate conspiracy theories, which had turned into a virtual religion, including at The Intercept. Both of those long profiles were devoted to a central theme: I refused to accept what everyone who is sane and mentally healthy could see — that Trump had colluded with Russia and Putin exercised some sort of clandestine control over Trump — because I had rage-based trauma from childhood that I never resolved.

In 2012 and in the years after I frequently described how the same mental health themes were weaponized by liberal establishmentarians against Julian Assange: an incessant focus on the WikiLeaks founder’s personality and alleged mental health pathologies to discredit his pioneering work. I’ve often noted that the reason the Nixon administration ordered a break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst as a response to his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers was because depicting someone as psychologically unwell is the preferred method of power centers to distract attention away from valid critiques and to expel dissidents from their salons. The script which The Intercept and their liberal allies are using against me is an old, stale, and trite one.

All of this, quite obviously, is an attempt to distract attention away from The Intercept’s serious journalistic sins. It is also designed to personalize the anger which their behavior validly provoked onto me, to conceal the fact that numerous journalists across the political spectrum — not just me — reacted with disgust at what they did and what they are still doing.

One of the Intercept stories to which I (and many others) objected involved a fund-raising email sent by The Intercept to the public on May 4, in which they proudly boasted that they had obtained the full archive of private data on all users of the social media platform Gab. The Intercept vowed that they would use the data archive to target ordinary citizens, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the election was defrauded. Based on that promise, the email solicited donations from the public (why an outlet lavishly funded by the world’s 73rd richest billionaire and which provides their largely unread writers and editors enormous, above-market salaries has to beg for donations from the public in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis is, as I understand it, the subject of an imminent investigative exposé on their finances). Because I am not on their email list, I became aware of that Gab email only when a former senior Intercept editor forwarded it to me, furious that The Intercept was now doing the work of the NSA and FBI by infringing privacy rights rather than protecting them: a core mission of the organization’s founding.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

This is repulsive. The Intercept was founded during the Snowden story to defend privacy rights & oppose the security state. Now, the liberal DNC hacks who “edit” it are boasting they got personal data from Gab users & are sorting through it, doing FBI’s work to find “extremists.” May 4th 20213,379 Retweets10,478 Likes

The other Intercept story I criticized was an expensive, highly produced 20-minute video, narrated by former New York Times live-blogging reporter Robert Mackey, designed to vilify numerous journalists with small right-leaning news outlets who do the work that The Intercept would never get near: namely, they report on what actually happens at Antifa protests. Why would a news outlet that has a $15 million/year budget, which works from a $3 million/year penthouse office on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue tower offering panoramic views of Manhattan, and which pays their senior employees annual salaries between $350,000 and $450,000, devote their vast resources to villainizing obscure, poorly paid video journalists who — unlike most Intercept reporters — do actually dangerous, on-the-ground reporting? Who is the “bully” in this situation?

The primary grievance which The Intercept is voicing in response to my criticisms of their work is the same one which liberal outlets now constantly try to weaponize in order to place themselves off-limits from criticism: namely, that by criticizing Intercept writers, I have “endangered” them — a dangerous and shabby standard which, like their liberal media brethren, they obviously do not apply to themselves. Why can The Intercept use a billionaire’s money to expose ordinary people’s Gab activities and produce a video smearing multiple journalists such as Townhall’s Julio Rosas and The Daily Caller‘s Jorge Ventura, but I and others cannot criticize them? Numerous other journalists and commentators, including Matt Taibbi and Jimmy Dore along with Fox News and the other news outlets whose journalists were smeared by The Intercept, along with the targeted journalists themselves, voiced the same criticisms I did.

Despite the widespread criticism The Intercept has been receiving, I was contacted on Wednesday by The Daily Beast’s media reporter Lloyd Grove, who asked me to respond to a long list of accusations, smears and other attacks furnished to him by various Intercept reporters and editors — in order, again, to pretend that I was their only critic, driven by mental problems. These accusations conveyed by Grove were similar to the ones they fed to The Post. Now that The Post article is published, and knowing that one’s own views are never fully represented in articles written by other journalists, I’m posting below the full written exchange I had with Grove: his questions based on The Intercept’s accusations, followed by my answers.

I do so not only to ensure that the full context of my answers is known, but also because this double standard which liberal outlets like The Intercept are trying to impose — they can attack, expose, smear or vilify anyone they want, but you can never criticize them without being accused of “endangering” their journalists — is an unsustainable and unethical double standard that is now pervasive in liberal journalism culture:

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

At some point, journalists are going to need consistent, universally applicable standards that answer this: Why is it OK to use a billionaire’s money to produce a video attacking reporters @Julio_Rosas11 & @VenturaReport, but it’s immoral to criticize NYT & Intercept writers?May 15th 2021429 Retweets2,249 Likes

As I told Grove, much of what is motivating The Intercept‘s rage is their institutional failures. They lost an enormous chunk of their membership base when I resigned last October, which they have not come close to replacing. They have repeatedly sent out emails pleading for donations on the ground that their fund-raising efforts are falling woefully short. And despite their enormous budget and exorbitant salaries, virtually nobody reads that site outside of a couple of writers:

The Intercept’s audience size is humiliatingly small. I’ll bet any amount of money that the Intercept spends more dollars per reader than any media outlet in the west. Outside of my articles and those of a couple others, their traffic is and always has been vanishingly small. They think they do such great journalism but nobody reads it, because it’s nothing more than the same partisan tripe one finds at the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC or any other liberal/DNC-loyal /AOC-loving outlet. . . .

The Intercept Brasil, which I founded in 2016, has 1/9 the budget that the Intercept US does and ⅛ the size of its staff, yet for many months, the Intercept Brasil produces more in raw traffic numbers than the entire Intercept US in raw numbers. That’s how few people read their work. It’s embarrassing.

Just to provide one illustrative example, the extremely expensive video they produced that attacked and endangered two working-class journalists of color who do the dangerous work of covering Antifa protests was one of their most-discussed pieces of journalism of the year, mostly due to how many people found it repellent. And yet even with that, the YouTube video — which has as many people who disliked it as liked it — did not even attract 10,000 views a full week after its initial publication. Most unpaid random YouTubers have a larger audience than that:

In sum, The Intercept is an outlet that is as lavishly funded as it is widely ignored. But their journalistic breaches still matter because of how much billionaire funding they receive and, more so, because the tactics they are using to render it inherently illegitimate to criticize them — lest you be accused of “endangering” them — have become commonplace among other liberal outlets. That is the tactic that merits the most attention.

---

Questions from The Daily Beast’s media reporter Lloyd Grove and my answers (links and tweets have been added and my answers were very lightly edited for clarity):

People at the Intercept are especially upset about your attacks on Micah Lee, which they say have resulted in doxxing and death threats on him and his wife. Here’s a quote from Micah: “Glenn and I have always disagreed on some things, but at least he used to have consistent principles and respect for basic facts. It’s disappointing and tragic that he’s gone so far off the deep end, from what seemed to be an honest and fearless journalist into a conspiracy-peddling pundit that spends all his time misleading people.”

Micah Lee

Precisely because of my long work relationship and friendship with Micah — which includes my reporting on the NSA archives, the Brazil archive and our work at the Freedom of the Press Foundation — I would never have criticized him personally or even by name under any circumstances. When I co-founded the Intercept back in 2013, Micah was one of the first if not the first people we hired. That’s why I was so disappointed when he decided to start publicly criticizing me by name. After having chosen to do that to great applause from his liberal following, he — like the Intercept generally — wants to play the victim and whine about how he’s being persecuted for something that he himself did. 

Why did you target Micah, who by most accounts has been essential in your journalistic success, especially your reporting on Snowden and Brazil corruption?

See the answer above. I will also add that my original criticisms about the Intercept’s abuse of the Gab archive to target private citizens were based on the Intercept’s own description of how they intended to use the archive, set forth in a fund-raising email they sent to their entire email list. Because I’m not on their email list, I did not see that email until a former highly respected Intercept editor forwarded it to me, indignant that the Intercept was doing the work of the NSA/FBI and infringing rather than protecting the digital privacy rights of ordinary people: one of our original missions.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

Since the Intercept is *still* whining about how journalists objected to their abuse of a huge archive of private data on Gab users they got — claiming we (and me) “lied” — here’s their own description, when begging for donations, of their intentions to target private people: May 17th 2021474 Retweets1,793 Likes

I adopt in full Matt Taibbi’s critique of their work on this Gab archive — which you should read. Taibbi’s article includes statements from at least one, perhaps two, former senior Intercept journalists harshly criticizing their work. 

The Intercept keeps trying to personalize these criticisms, pretending that I’m the only one voicing them so they can blame me for whatever repercussions come from it and delegitimize the criticisms as just my embittered feud with them. They’re lying. Many, many journalists and others across the political spectrum have voiced these same criticisms of the Intercept, including people — like Taibbi and Jimmy Dore — with platforms and audiences far larger than what the Intercept has.

When I first criticized the work the Intercept said in their fund-raising email that they wanted to do on the Gab archive — namely that they would use it to go after QAnon conspiracy believers and those who believe the 2020 election was stolen — several people at the Intercept tried to tell me privately that that email did not accurately reflect their intentions. I did not believe that: I know from experience that those fundraising emails originate in the newsroom and then pass through the hands of multiple editors, including its Editor in Chief Betsy Reed, before going out. But if that’s true — if that fundraising email inaccurately portrayed their intended uses of that Gab archive as they tried privately to convince me — why have they never said that publicly?

People say you must have known that it would prompt some of your social media fans to threaten him and make his family’s life difficult, including having to change phone numbers and hire security.

This reveals the abject hypocrisy of the Intercept. They produced a 20-minute video targeting two journalists who — unlike virtually everyone at the Intercept — do dangerous on-the-ground reporting. But then they turn around and claim that you cannot criticize Intercept journalists because doing so subjects them to harassment campaigns.

This is the question the Intercept (along with so many similar liberal media outlets) can never answer: why is it morally fine for the Intercept to use a billionaire’s money to produce a video targeting and attacking two journalists — Julio Rosas and Jorge Ventura — but it’s immoral and reckless to criticize Intercept writers such as Micah Lee and Robert Mackey? Why can the New York Times out Scott Alexander, but then turn around and insist that nobody can criticize their front-page reporter Taylor Lorenz because doing so subjects her to dangers?

Taylor Lorenz

Liberal outlets like the Intercept are trying to create a blatant double standard where they can smear anyone’s reputation they want and attack anyone they want, while demanding a shield of immunity from criticism by threatening to accuse anyone who criticizes them of “endangering” them. 

I get harassment and threats every time the Intercept and its staff lie about me — which is frequent — but I don’t go around whining about it because I’m someone who sought out a public platform and who does journalism, so I know I’m fair game for criticisms. The Intercept should grow up, stop whining, and apply the same standards to themselves that they apply to others. 

This liberal effort to delegitimize criticisms by pointing to what random people do in response is so dishonest and dangerous. If someone threatened one of their reporters, how do they know it’s someone inspired by me instead of countless other critics they have such as Taibbi, Dore, Fox News or Aaron Mate? 

Moreover, why aren’t these standards applied equally: if Rosas or Ventura are physically assaulted the next time they go to report on an Antifa protest, will The Intercept be to blame? The Intercept recklessly implied that Daily Caller reporter Ritchie McGinnis filmed the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting but criminally erased the video and lied about it to the U.S. Government — a disgusting lie based on nothing more than the “speculation” of a random Twitter user with 70 followers.

Richie🎥McG🍿 @RichieMcGinniss

RobertMackey states that there was “speculation” online that I was recording at the time of the shooting and was withholding evidence of a nationally prominent homicide The “speculation” that he links to is an absurd theory floated by a self-described satirist with 75 followers May 13th 202165 Retweets480 Likes

If McGinnis is threatened or physically assaulted, will this be the fault of The Intercept for inciting hatred against him? The deranged individual who tried to murder Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was an avid fan of Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow, from whom he constantly heard that Republicans are traitors and criminals (claims he repeated often on his Facebook page). Are Sanders and Maddow responsible for the bullets that almost killed Rep. Scalise because of their very harsh attacks on House Republicans?

The standard liberal outlets like The Intercept want to impose — you can’t criticize journalists because you might endanger us — is itself dangerous, because it renders all criticisms off-limits. But what makes it so much worse is that they do not subject themselves to their own standards: as their attacks on me show — and as their video attacking those reporters shows — they feel perfectly free to criticize whoever they want without any regard for the consequences of those criticisms.

Some of your former colleagues believe that you have traveled increasingly rightward , perhaps motivated in part by your dislike of the liberal establishment, and that their hatred for Trump has prompted you to defend him and, according to some of your ex-colleagues and ex-friends, embrace something akin to fascism. Your response?

Unlike the Intercept, I don’t think of myself as a soldier fighting for an ideological faction or political party — instead, I’m an independent journalist — so this label debate is irrelevant. But to the extent they want to have it, it’s The Intercept that has moved to the authoritarian right. They still have some good reporters whose work I respect, but they are largely a dumping ground for CIA and FBI talking points. They led the way publishing the CIA’s pre-election lies that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.” They brought on two former New York Times reporters — Mackey and Jim Risen — who ratified every last CIA/FBI claim about Russiagate and Trump. Anyone who launders CIA lies and does the work of the FBI — such as helping the FBI find “domestic extremists” by trolling through their personal data — has no business accusing others of having “moved to the right.”

Several people there, including Peter Maass and Roger Hodge, tell me you’re attacking them, including ad hominem attacks on Hodge  and Betsy Reed, in order to draw attention to your Substack project and gain subscribers. Here’s a quote from Hodge: “He needs subscribers and he’s giving people what they want, which is hatred and rage. He’s tapped into the rage machine. He understands that there’s no engagement like rage engagement—in the same way that Facebook understands this.” Your response?

Roger Hodge

This criticism is literally laughable. Unlike essentially everyone at The Intercept with maybe one or two exceptions — certainly excluding Roger Hodge and Peter Maas — I’ve always had a large and loyal readership that follows my work wherever it’s published. I don’t need to incite anger to attract subscriptions; in fact, I have so many paid subscribers that I’ve basically been able to hire a full-scale media outlet including editors, fact-checkers, a video team and now a freelance program that pays writers more than the stingy billionaire-funded Intercept freelance program provides. I did not even write about my criticisms of the Intercept on my Substack because I presumed that my readers don’t care enough about them to even want to read about them. 

The Intercept’s audience size is humiliatingly small. I’ll bet any amount of money that the Intercept spends more dollars per reader than any media outlet in the west. Outside of my articles and those of a couple others, their traffic is and always has been vanishingly small. They think they do such great journalism but nobody reads it, because it’s nothing more than the same partisan tripe one finds at the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC or any other liberal/DNC-loyal/AOC-loving outlet. Journalism that nobody reads cannot create any societal impact or political change, which in turn means that, by definition, it cannot be good journalism. It’s not art or poetry: the value of journalism is a direct function of how much impact it produces, which in turn requires finding ways to make the public care about what you are writing. The Intercept does not know how to attract readers and — because they have infinite funding from a billionaire — they do not even try. I do know how to do that. Contrary to their belief, having a large audience and having your journalism actually make an impact is a testament to one’s impact as a journalist, not a source of shame.

The Intercept Brasil, which I founded in 2016, has 1/9 the budget that the Intercept US does and ⅛ the size of its staff, yet for many months, the Intercept Brasil produces more in raw traffic numbers than the entire Intercept US in raw numbers. That’s how few people read their work. It’s embarrassing.

Peter Maas

The idea that I or anyone would try to generate subscriptions by criticizing The Intercept — an outlet very few people read or care about — is genuinely hilarious: as if the public is craving some kind of content about the charismatic and fascinating giants of journalism called Betsy Reed and Roger Hodge.

Nothing I’m doing now is different than what I did for seven years at The Intercept: not in tone, content or style. How come none of these people had the courage to voice these criticisms when I was there?

I’m told that when several of your colleagues objected to your frequent appearances on Fox News, Betsy defended them as your 1st Amendment right?

I wasn’t privy to those conversations because other than in the context of a private friendship with Jeremy Scahill — who is not really involved in the Intercept’s management — nobody at the Intercept ever voiced those objections about going on Fox to me. In response to anonymous sniping to other media outlets, I did make explicitly clear to Betsy at least once and probably more than once that I would speak to whatever media outlets I wanted and would never be told where I could and could not be interviewed. She never said I couldn’t. I don’t doubt that Betsy defended my right to go on Fox when others complained, but I just don’t know for a fact that she did so.

How is the Intercept doxxing the two “working class” Hispanic videographers, dragging them unwillingly into the spotlight, when they place themselves in public-facing roles, including in at least one case going on Laura Ingraham’s show?

This is the question for you to ask the Intercept. How am I endangering Micah Lee or Robert Mackey by criticizing them when they are not hiding but boasting about the work they are doing on the Gab archive and on these right-wing reporters? Both Mackey and Micah’s names and faces are on the articles and the Intercept website. Using this standard you just invoked, how is it rational to claim that I endangered them by criticizing their work?

Here again we have this same double standard of liberal media outlets generally: they think it’s fine for them to attack and malign two journalists who actually do dangerous on-the-ground reporting, but nobody is allowed to criticize Intercept writers without being accused of “endangering” them.

I don’t think that Julio Rosas and Jorge Ventura should be off-limits from criticism. But unlike the people the New York Times and The Intercept are constantly claiming are “endangered” because of criticisms — people like Robert Mackey and Taylor Lorenz — Rosas and Ventura actually do dangerous reporting on the ground. I do think the Intercept’s well-financed attacks on them and others who do that work endanger them even while I think the Intercept has the right to use its billionaire-provided budget to focus on two relatively obscure video journalists at poorly funded websites.

You criticize your ex colleagues for being disconnected from working class concerns like looting and rioting—because they earn high salaries and live in posh Brooklyn neighborhoods. But didn’t you earn more than $500K a year at the Intercept?

Unlike many of the people who work at the Intercept — who went to $60,000/year prep schools and who come from some of the richest families on the planet — I grew up in a working-class neighborhood raised by a single mother who worked hourly-wage jobs as a McDonald’s cashier and a defensive driving instructor. I went to public schools and only could go to college and law school because of a full-time scholarship from the debate team and student loans. That said — despite the work I do with Brazilian homeless people and the background of my husband’s family — I don’t pretend that my life is some avatar of working-class values. I do, though, think that’s true of Julio and Jorge.

And that’s why I find it so repellent to watch a bunch of coddled, highly paid editors and journalists using a billionaire’s money from their $3 million/year office on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue tower to target actual working-class journalists doing dangerous reporting about a violent group (Antifa) with which the Intercept ideologically identifies.

On a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, you claimed that the Huffington Post was doing police work for the FBI, which is pursuing and arresting the Jan. 6 folks for “thought crimes.” Aren’t they being prosecuted for violently breaching the Capitol Building, damaging parts of the building and injuring  police officers?

Many protesters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa also used property damage, violence and intimidation to advance their political goals. I personally know journalists who were assaulted or threatened by Antifa while reporting on them. Why isn’t the Huffington Post helping the police catch them? It’s obviously because most Huffington Post editors approve ideologically of those protesters but not those at the January 6 Capitol. I think it’s the work of the FBI and law enforcement agencies to hunt down suspected criminals, not the work of journalists.

Praising the crimes of Stalinism: The DSA and the assassination of Leon Trotsky – by Eric London (WSWS) 17 May 2021

During the past week, numerous prominent leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have posted tweets celebrating the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky and portraying the murderer, the Stalinist GPU agent Ramon Mercader, as a hero.

Many of the tweets by DSA leaders are illustrated with photos and memes of an alpenstock, the weapon used by Mercader to murder Trotsky. Nickan Fayyazi, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), presents one such photo with the caption “this might come in handy today.”

Asheville, North Carolina DSA member Dan Pozzie proposes erecting a memorial to Trotsky’s assassin, reading, “In memory of Ramon Mercader: He showed us the way.” A tweet by a recent DSA East Bay, California Steering Committee member reads, “Ice pick jokes will never not be funny,” and “we will all continue making ice pick jokes publicly + unapologetically.”

The tweets are part of a coordinated response by a substantial section of DSA officials to the growing readership of the World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, among rank-and-file members of the DSA.

In March and April, a World Socialist Web Site article exposing DSA member and Democratic Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statement denouncing criticism of the Biden administration as “bad faith” recorded over 100,000 distinct readers, including thousands of DSA members. Anxiety over the impact of the WSWS’s criticism of the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy was exacerbated by the failure of the AFL-CIO’s unionization drive at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama in April.

The DSA members celebrating Trotsky’s assassination include elected national office holders and leaders of its youth wing (YDSA), branch chairs, leaders of campus clubs and prominent DSA podcasters, as well as contributors to the Guardian and DSA-affiliated media outlets such as Jacobin magazine.

Those who are tweeting sick jokes about Trotsky’s murder are circulating the political equivalent of pornography. They are not only laughing about the murder of one of the towering figures in the history of twentieth century socialism, they are solidarizing themselves with the campaign of mass murder carried out by Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

The fact that such individuals hold leadership positions within the DSA should be taken as a serious warning by rank-and-file members and supporters of this organization. In politics, people are judged by what they do. Individuals who solidarize themselves with the crimes of Stalin have absolutely nothing to with genuine left-wing politics. The trajectory of their politics is not toward socialism, but toward supporting state repression against the socialist movement.

From the standpoint of the international class struggle and the fate of socialism, Trotsky’s assassination on August 20, 1940 was the most consequential political crime of the twentieth century. His murder deprived the international working class of the last surviving leader of the 1917 October Revolution and the greatest strategist of world socialist revolution. Trotsky played a monumental role in the struggle for world socialism, as a theoretician, orator, writer, organizer of the seizure of power by the working class, leader of the Red Army, implacable opponent of Stalinism, founder of the Fourth International, and socialist visionary of a world liberated from all forms of oppression. The study and assimilation of Trotsky’s vast legacy are essential for the preparation of the victory of socialism in the twenty-first century.

But Trotsky was not the only victim of Stalinism. His assassination was the culmination of a wave of Stalinist terror launched in 1936 with the first of three Moscow Trials. During the Great Terror of 1936-40, the Stalinist regime murdered an estimated one million revolutionary workers, intellectuals and artists. An entire generation of Marxists and socialists who had played a decisive role in the preparation, leadership and defense of the 1917 October Revolution—including virtually all of Lenin’s closest comrades—was murdered. The Great Terror, which precisely targeted those prominently identified as socialists for extermination, has been correctly described as politically directed genocide.

Leading participants in this right-wing campaign

What follows is a small sample of the scores of tweets by DSA members celebrating Trotsky’s murder. Those retweeting or “liking” these posts comprise a Rolodex of the DSA leadership.

The aforementioned post by Nickan Fayyazi, a member of the YDSA’s National Coordinating Committee leadership body and co-chair of the YDSA’s UC Berkeley chapter, presents a photo of an ice pick with the caption “this might come in handy today,” alongside other vulgar language. This was retweeted by Dary Rezvani, a prominent member of the Los Angeles DSA.

The tweet about the ice pick was “liked” by over 100 people, including many DSA members, as well as the following DSA leaders and prominent members:

• Jacobin contributor Gabriel Patrick
• New York City DSA Steering Committee member Jake Colosa
• University of Virginia DSA organizer Madison Perry
• Baltimore DSA labor organizer Ryan Kekeris
• Champlain Valley, Vermont DSA organizer Alex Lawson
• DSA Los Angeles Labor Committee member Michael Lumpkin
• Co-chair of the Knox College, Illinois YDSA Matt Milewski
• Lower Manhattan DSA Organizing Committee member Honda Wang
• Chicago DSA member and podcaster Kenzo Shibata
• Brandon Henriquez, co-chair of the DSA’s Silicon Valley branch

A separate post by Washington D.C. DSA member Ben Davis features a drawing of Mercader preparing to carry out his attack on Trotsky. It shows the assassin holding an ice pick above Trotsky’s head as the latter works at his desk. It bears the caption: “Clear out the wreckers.” Davis worked for Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2020 as a data analyst and has written for the British Guardian newspaper, which describes Davis as someone who “works in political data in Washington D.C.”

This post was also “liked” by a number of DSA members.

The term “wreckers,” drawn from the vocabulary of Stalinism, has distinct political implications. “Trotskyite wreckers” was a term employed by Stalin to justify the mass murder of Trotskyists and opponents of the Stalinist regime, based on the lying claim that they engaged in terrorism and sabotage. It featured prominently in the three Moscow frame-up trials and was used to justify the slander that Trotsky and his supporters were agents of fascism. On March 29, 1937, in the lead-up to the second Moscow Trial, Stalin gave a speech titled “Deficiencies in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyites.” In the course of the speech, Stalin employed the term “Trotskyite wreckers” 16 times.

Another tweet, by former DSA National Electoral Committee member Nate Knauf, includes the same drawing depicting Trotsky’s assassination, accompanied by the words, “That’s right!!!” This post was “liked” by Ben Davis, Knox College YDSA’s Matt Milewski, New York DSA’s Ganeev Chichagov, and YDSA Purdue Co-Chair Mason Wyss, among others.

An additional thread posted by a recent DSA East Bay Steering Committee member was “liked” by Guy Brown, a member of the DSA National Political Education Committee and co-chair of the Charlotte Metro DSA; Maura Quint, a DSA supporter and contributor at the New Yorker and the Hill; and an unidentified member of the Portland DSA’s steering committee.

In a separate post, Southwest Florida DSA and Florida Gulf Coast University YDSA member Morgan Kirk tweeted a meme about Trotsky’s death.

The following DSA leaders “liked” this post:

• DSA National Political Committee member Blanca Estevez
• YDSA National Coordinating Committee member Nate Stewart
• DSA Immigration Rights Group Co-Chair Alexander Hernandez
• DSA National Electoral Committee member Austin Binns
• University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana YDSA Co-Chair Niko Johnson-Fuller
• Co-chair of the DSA’s branch in Erie, Pennsylvania, Cole Schenley
• DSA New York City Organizing Committee member Kayleen Pena.

The role of Democratic Party operatives

Most of those posting, retweeting or “liking” these tweets are active members of the Democratic Party or officers of the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy. These include:

• YDSA leader Nickan Fayyazi, who is a legislative intern for Democratic Berkeley City Council member Kate Harrison and a student government representative.
• DSA Los Angeles member Dary Rezvani, who was a 2020 Democratic primary candidate for the 22nd Congressional District in California, and later that year was the Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for Community College District Trustee in Fresno, California. He lost both elections.
• NYC DSA member Andrey Ganeev Chichagov, whose LinkedIn profile states that he is a member of the New York City Democratic Party County Committee and was office manager for Democratic New York State Senator Julia Salazar.
• Ryan Kekeris, who is the communications director of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. In 2019, this trade union executive made $99,367, according to Labor Department filings.
• Prominent Chicago DSA podcaster Kenzo Shibata, who is a Chicago Teachers Union Executive Board member and was formerly the Illinois Federation of Teachers media director. Labor Department filings show he made $142,817 in 2017 as a union executive.
• YDSA leader Nate Stewart, who is an elected member of the Democratic Party Executive Committee in Dover, New Hampshire, and a delegate to the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
• Washington D.C. DSA’s Brad Chester, who was regional field director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in the Metropolitan D.C. area and is a longtime Democratic operative, working on the staff of the Virginia and Texas Democratic Parties and on various Democratic campaigns. He authored an essay titled “Breaking Bad: How Obsession with an Independent Workers’ Party Hurts the Socialist Electoral Project.”
• Joshua Armstead, who is vice president of the UNITE HERE Local 23 D.C. chapter.
• Tasneem Al-Michael, who is vice president of the College Democrats of America and national college caucus chair of the Young Democrats of America.

One DSA member who also “liked” such tweets is New York City DSA Organizing Committee member Honda Wang, a leading anti-Trotskyist within the DSA. Wang regularly posts attacks on the WSWS. The comments section of his TikTok videos attacking the WSWS are filled with commenters posting images of alpenstocks.

Wang’s politics and his past as a political consultant for Schoen Consulting give a sense of the type of right-wing Democratic Party operatives directing the DSA’s attacks on the WSWS.

On his LinkedIn profile, Wang explains that when working for Schoen, he “consulted on strategy and communications for political clients in both domestic and international markets,” and “advised corporate clients in a wide range of sectors.”

Wang does not list the governments, politicians, state agencies and corporations with which he has worked, but Schoen Consulting’s clients now include billionaire Michael Bloomberg and his Independence PAC, a private fund for buying political support, as well as Walmart.

A public report on Schoen Consulting explains that the clientele of its founder, Bill Clinton advisor Paul Schoen, includes:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY), New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, and Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, and his corporate clients have included Walmart, AOL Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. Internationally, he has worked for the heads of state of over 15 countries, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and three Israeli Prime Ministers. Schoen helped introduce Victor Pinchuk, Ukraine oligarch, financier, and former member of Parliament, to philanthropic and political groups that have made him an international figure who now serves on the boards of the Peterson Center for International Economics, the International Crisis Group and the Clinton Foundation.

Wang’s career as a Democratic Party operative shows that the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO apparatchiks who comprise the DSA leadership identify in Trotsky a threat to their own material position and to the capitalist system. Undoubtedly, there are other provocateurs not named here who are also motivating these attacks behind the scenes from within the Democratic Party.

Praising the crimes of Stalinism: The DSA and the assassination of Leon Trotsky – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

Book Review: The Tragedy of American Science, by Clifford D. Conner – by Olivia Wood (Left Voice)

Can science solve the world’s problems? Not as long as researchers are dependent on capitalist investment and access to new technology is limited to those who can pay for it. In his new book, Clifford D. Conner explains why.

• Olivia Wood
• April 25, 2021

Proponents of capitalism argue that without the profit motive, scientists and scientific companies will have no incentive to innovate. In The Tragedy of American Science, Clifford D. Conner shows how, in industry after industry, the opposite is true: capitalism is stifling the potential of science, corrupting its integrity, and turning research toward only what will be profitable, not what will help humanity.  The book is divided into four sections. In “The Corporatization of American Science,” Conner presents ten chapters, each charting the capitalist-fueled corruption of a different industry.

The second section, “The Militarization of American Science,” contains eight chapters, each about a different military technology and the political economy of its development. In the last two sections, “How We Got Into This Mess…” and “…And The Only Way Out,” Conner describes three periods of American scientific history, outlines his transitional demands for science, and includes one epilogue addressing Covid-19, which emerged during the late stages of the book’s publication cycle. Due to the big-picture nature of the book, Conner isn’t able to go into great detail in any given chapter, but each one is packed full of examples of how the noble ideals of science have been compromised from the very beginning in every single industry. And although he is writing during the Trump administration, which would have been easy pickings, Conner spares no one — not Obama, not even Bernie Sanders.

In fact, a recurring theme is that Bush did something bad, Obama made it worse under the cover of Democratic respectability, and Trump continued his work (without any respectability).  The two parts that I found most edifying were the section on how the U.S. economy cannot function without massive military spending, which I summarized in this article, and Conner’s brief overview of scientific development in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. He is careful to label each of these countries as “post-capitalist” rather than “socialist.” 

“The distinction is crucial,” he writes, “Fully developed socialism requires a high level of economic development and democratic control of production and political life. Both [the Soviet Union and China] started out ‘on the road to socialism’ but unfortunately got bogged down and eventually turned back.”  On the Soviet Union, he writes that while the Bolsheviks were very enthusiastic about scientific development, “Efforts to promote research were severely hampered not only by the war-ravaged country’s shortage of material resources but also by a deficiency of scientific talent.”

Many anti-Bolshevik scientists had left the country, while most of the rest were “unsympathetic to the Bolshevik regime” (p.270). Lenin thought it would be unwise to forcibly conscript them into working for the Bolsheviks, so he largely left them alone, and later Stalinist purges “paralyzed” scientific education and research in the country until Stalin was able to consolidate his power. Conner concludes: “In spite of [the Soviet Union’s] success in accomplishing impressive large-scale technological feats — hydroelectric power plants, nuclear weapons, earth-orbiting satellites, and the like — the achievements of the Soviet science establishment fell well short of its potential” (p.271) due to Stalinist censorship of findings that did not serve his regime and control over what research could be done in the first place.

In China, he explains, it was a similar story: the influence of the Soviet Union’s style of research plus pressure to try to keep up with the United States and the Soviets meant most research “focused on military and big industrial projects at the expense of research aimed at improving the lives of the billion-plus people of China” (p.272).  Conner also takes time to explain while the situation in Cuba developed differently, and it’s his discussion of Cuba’s medical industry that feels most relevant in the present moment. Cuba is likely to become the smallest and first Latin American country to develop its own Covid-19 vaccine.

As Left Voice’s own Scott Cooper explains, Cuba has one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world and regularly sends thousands of doctors overseas to assist in medical crises, such as the Chernobyl disaster, the Ebola epidemic, and the early outbreak of Covid-19 in Italy. It is anticipated that once Cuba has vaccinated its own population, they will likely sell their vaccine at cost to other less wealthy nations, which are struggling to get vaccines when wealthier countries are buying up all available doses. 

According to Conner, Cuba’s small population meant they could not hope to compete with larger countries on the military scene. After the Cuban Revolution, the newly formed workers’ state decided to invest in non-military scientific pursuits for the good of the people instead. Investing in scientific development meant investing in education, so a mass literacy campaign successfully brought Cuban national literacy rates up from about 60% in 1960 to to 99.8 percent, one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The United States’ embargo on Cuba forced the country to develop its own medicines and other technologies, and now Cuba “stands at the forefront of international biochemical and pharmacological research” (p.274).

Conner says Cuba is too small and its success too industry-specific to be able to extrapolate firm conclusions from its example, but “its achievements in the medical sciences certainly provide hope for the rest of the world.” Conner is clear that “electing politicians who call themselves socialists” is not enough, and he offers the following demands as “starters” for liberating science and paving the way toward “creating economic democracy, which will require a monumental struggle to abolish private ownership of the country’s industrial base and other productive resources” (p.277):

1. Nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry
2. Nationalizing the energy-production industries
3. Nationalizing the banks and insurance companies
4. Nationalizing the industries currently used to create military technologies and repurpose them toward activities that actually benefit humanity

Most crucial to achieving this, he says, is the resurrection of a powerful American labor movement that will unite the various protest movements and use their power as workers to demand the necessary changes.  The Tragedy of American Science has relatively little explicitly socialist content until the very end, but it’s a valuable and comprehensive resource for information about not only how capitalism has shaped the development of scientific inquiry in general but how this influence plays out specifically across several key industries. Technocratic utopian fantasies of solving the world’s problems with science are perhaps possible, but Conner makes a highly persuasive case for why they are not possible in a capitalist economy. 

• Book Review, Socialism, Technology

The Washington Post and the Lie Of Uyghur Genocide By China – by Peter Symonds (WSWS) 18 May 2021

Washington Post and the Lie Of Uyghur Genocide By China (8:47 min) Audio Mp3 18 May 2021

The Washington Post has been in the forefront of promoting the vilification of China as the US ramps up its confrontation with Beijing and preparations for war. This includes the lie that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is engaged in the genocide of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang in western China.

A Washington Post editorial on Sunday entitled “China’s repression of Uyghurs is not only cultural, but also physical, a new report shows” begins by selectively quoting the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. It cites the convention’s Article II (d) which declares that genocide including “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a population, then refers to two reports showing sharp falls in the birth rates among Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

The citation is deliberately misleading as the editorial fails to quote the opening of Article II which states: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Without this necessary context, any birth control program could be seized upon as evidence that the government involved is carrying out “genocide.”

A protester holds an anti-China placard during a protest in Istanbul, Thursday, March 25, against against the visit of China’s FM Wang Yi to Turkey. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

On this basis, China’s One-Child policy introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, as he was initiating the processes of capitalist restoration, could be construed as “genocide” as it was selectively applied to the urban population of the Han majority. National minorities, including the Uyghurs, were exempt from the policy and allowed to have two or even three children. Rural communities were also granted some exemptions.

It is, of course, absurd to label the One-Child policy, which was certainly a bureaucratic and repressive response to an expanding population, as “genocide” of the Chinese Han majority. But then it is just as absurd to label the current policies being carried out in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs as “genocide” on the basis of falling birth rates.

The Stalinist CCP regime is certainly carrying out repression against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as part of its domestic “war on terrorism” and the threat posed by Uyghur separatism—as it does against any threat to its rule, particularly from the working class.

The lack of independent information makes it impossible to gauge the extent of the police-state measures directed against the Uyghurs. On the one hand, the CCP denies its trampling on democratic rights and paints a rosy picture of life in Xinjiang. On the other, US imperialism and its allies are ratcheting up a filthy propaganda campaign based on misrepresentations and falsehoods to demonise China as it prepares for war.

The US has justified every one of its wars of aggression—itself a war crime in international law—over the past three decades on the basis of lies. Its campaigns on “human rights” are turned on and turned off to suit its strategic interests. The Biden administration, which condemns China for genocide, has given the green light for the Zionist state of Israel to wage its murderous “war on terrorism” against the Palestinians.

Indeed, as it was seeking support for its own criminal “war on terrorism” and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration backed China’s “war on terror” in Xinjiang. Now as US imperialism intensifies its war drive against Beijing, it no longer sanctions Uyghur separatists as “terrorists” and is marshalling its propaganda outlets to condemn China’s “genocide” of the Uyghurs. Xinjiang has become a particular focus for American misinformation as it is strategically located adjacent to Central Asia and is essential to the land routes to Europe envisaged in Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative to unify Eurasia and counter US encirclement.

The Washington Post is integrated into this campaign as have those responsible for the two reports referred to in its Sunday’s editorial. The first published last year by right-wing, anti-communist German academic Adrian Zenz pioneered the comparison of birth rates in predominantly Uyghur counties in Xinjiang to those of predominantly Han counties. Like all of Zenz’s “research,” including his widely-cited figures on the number of Uyghurs in detention centres, his methodology is riddled with flaws and his findings crafted to reach a predetermined conclusion. He is a born-again Christian who declares he has been “led by God” to his work on Chinese minorities.

The editorial is focused primarily on the stark figures in the second report produced this month by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)—a government-supported think tank that also receives funding from American sources. Citing the report, it declares that China has put in place “a more coercive and intrusive policing of reproduction processes” against the Uyghurs, with hefty fines, disciplinary punishment and extrajudicial internment or the threat of it for any “illegal births.” Birth rates for Uyghurs plunged by 43.7 percent between 2017 and 2018.

It is necessary to consider the context. In 2016, as it was moving to ease its One-Child policy for China as a whole, Beijing ended its comparatively liberal approach to national minorities in Xinjiang that not only allowed urban Uyghur women to have two children and rural Uyghur women up to three, but effectively turned a blind eye to larger families, especially in rural areas.

As part of its “war on terrorism,” Xinjiang authorities began applying similar “coercive and intrusive policing of reproduction processes”—including the insertion of IUDs and sterilisations—as had applied for decades to the majority Han population elsewhere in China. According to Wikipedia, between 1980 and 2014, 324 million Chinese women received IUDs and 108 million were sterilised. The insertion of an IUD was mandatory by law four months after the birth of the first child.

Of course, wealthier layers of the population able to pay the fine or the necessary bribes, were never limited to one child. Just as Zenz, ASPI and the Washington Post have nothing to say about the CCP’s anti-democratic measures against the Chinese working class, so they do not refer to the repressive One-Child policy that was directed above all against working-class women in urban centres.

Moreover, ASPI, like Zenz, in presenting its dramatic, if questionable, figures fails to take other factors into account, in particular the exodus of Uyghurs from Xinjiang, either as a consequence of the CCP’s oppressive measures or in search of better opportunities in coastal China. Many of those who left will have been young, including women of child-bearing age, which would also have skewed the Uyghur population and contributed to lower the birth rates. To what extent it is unknown. But neither ASPI nor Zenz bothered to consider, let alone investigate the issue, as it did not fit their pre-conceived conclusions.

As for the Washington Post, it seizes on the most dramatic declines in birth rates to insist that global corporations, such as Airbnb, Bridgestone, Intel, Coca-Cola, P&G, Samsung, Toyota, Visa, Panasonic and others, end their support for China’s 2022 Winter Olympics as a sign of protest.

“Either you believe in ‘never again,’ or you contribute to ‘once again,” the editorial concludes, deliberately drawing a connection to the Nazi murder of Jews that prompted the phrase “never again” and the 1948 Convention on Genocide. The comparison between the CCP’s policy of lowering Uyghur birthrates and the systematic extermination of Jews in Nazi gas chambers is not only false but also diminishes the monstrous crimes of the Nazis and devalues the meaning of term “genocide.”

Conspire Theory – US Lab Created COVID – 300 US Troops Visited Wuhan in Oct 2019 And Released Virus

In 1914 Jack London wrote a story about an invasion of China by Western powers with the only effective imperialist weapon against the vast Chinese population being infectious viruses launched on missiles into the country. I was reading some of Jack London’s works about two years ago and came across the story of the imaginary fictional 1976 war with China.

I took the short story and translated it into Chinese with an online translator. Perhaps some in China had never heard of this story.

A few people clicked on the translation on this blog.

无与伦比的入侵 – 杰克伦敦（1914）美国对中国科幻幻想生物战 – The Unparalleled Invasion – by Jack London (1914) US vs China Sci/Fi Fantasy of Biological Warfare

Of course the idea of fighting an opponent by launching infected animal carcases over a besieged city wall has been documented almost since cities have had walls and people could write down how the fighting went.

The US and other countries have a biological military section in their arsenal of tools to maintain power.

There are two main theories about the origin of COVID. Some claim that bats transferred the virus to another animal and it mutated enough to adapt to infecting humans. But, experts say the virus has some characteristics that seem to have been designed a so-called ‘gain of function.’

The US and China and Russia and others must still be doing the kinds of bacteriological experiments that have been reported for decades. Killing an opponent with a bullet, or a bomb, or a virus is effectively the same thing. One is not more ‘moral’ than the other.

If a set of actors in the US who oppose Communist China decided to set off an infection in China it would not take a large number of people. A blogger who worked for the US for years in bio-chemistry is retired and now blogs about such matters. A handful of people who were determined to knock out Communist China with a chronic low level infection would see themselves as heroes in the service of the future of humanity.

China had a virus in 2017 that hit their chickens.

China had a virus in 2018 that hit their pigs.

China had a virus in 2019 that hit people.

Notice a pattern? I’m sure someone in China also has.

In 2019 the US sent over 300 US troops to a military show in Wuhan, China. Only one or two troopers in that group would be needed to ‘seed’ a virus around the city of Wuhan to make the virus look as if it had come from the Chinese government lab and not from a deliberate US plant.

The U.S. Armed Forces Sports team marches during opening ceremonies for the 2019 CISM Military World Games in Wuhan, China Oct. 18, 2019. Teams from more than 100 countries will compete in dozens of sporting events through Oct. 28. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

Wuhan is a major city and transportation hub. The largest travel time of the year was coming, the Chinese Lunar New Year. The virus was not designed to kill the host off. This would help the COVID spread.

Someone in the US hoped to wound China.

When SARs and other viruses broke out in Asia in the early 2000’s the infections stayed in East Asia. So, if someone was infecting China they expected to sit back and watch comfortably from a distance.

Warnings of a virus in China was given to US military and spy agencies in November 2019. This was before China had more than a few serious cases. How did they know. An arsonist always knows when the latest fire he sets is burning.

Two years ago ‘experts’ rated the US and EU as ‘tops’ in the world for medical care. They spend so much, they must be the best. Both America and Europe were rated the best in preparation for a pandemic.

Ha.

Perhaps to the surprise of the COVID conspirators, China sprang into action. Stalinist/Maoists sit on top of a communist state run system that can work as intended by Marx and Lenin on occasion apparently.

As China was locking down the entire city of Wuhan and other parts of China another ‘enemy’ of US imperialism was suffering. Iran saw a great number of upper echelon leaders infected. 10% of the parliament was infected. Who targeted them?

I wondered if there was so much trade between China and Iran that the infection spread that way, but….

Then a jump to Italy, and Spain….

Out of control.

The US with Cadillac Capitalist Health Care Inc. seems to have the richest doctors and health care bosses in the world, but… they aren’t into ‘public’ health.

The COVID disaster in the US may well be the opening chapter in a century of decline.

US Imperialists may have shot themselves in the foot.

So… Look again at this picture of the US military in Wuhan, China. Did one of them, or a team, plant a few canisters with an aerosol timed dispersal unit to cripple China? Which ones?

What a smile. “I’ve got a secret.”

https://videopress.com/v/hMu9h8Ab?preloadContent=metadata

Read Aloud COVID Conspire

US – Center For Disease Control – Disease

Quintessential Feminist Boss – Don’t wear a mask. Wear a mask. In fact, wear two masks. Now take your masks off (once you get your shots). Keep the mask on, though, if you’re in stores — well, some of them. Rochelle Walensky CDC

Coast Guard Commencement Speech – Biden Quotes Chairman Mao – Again

President Joe Biden mangled a quote from Chinese Communist Stalinist Mao Zedong during his Coast Guard commencement speech Wednesday, 19 May 2021.

“There’s a saying, used in a different context, a Chinese saying that says, ‘Women hold up half the world,’ Biden said during his commencement speech.

“It’s an absolute stupid position not to make sure they represent at least half of what we do,” he continued.

Biden was referring to a quote from Chairman Mao who said that “women hold up half the sky.” The implication was that the order of society was maintained by the efforts of women, as well as men. Women should be equal to men, not the property of a father or husband, as had been a Chinese tradition for centuries.

Biden repeatedly quoted Mao during the 2020 campaign to explain his stance on women in the workforce.

“There’s an old expression attributed to the Chinese years ago. It said, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’ Guess what? The reason no country will be able to compete for world economic prominence unless they fully engage the women in their society.” Biden told a reporter in Arizona in October 2020.

Biden also used the quote in August 2020 to explain why he chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) to be his running mate. He also used the slogan during an August 2020 fundraiser, calling it an “old Chinese proverb.”

Somewhere along the line the phrase from the 1950’s Maoist movement in China and The Little Red Book entered Joseph Biden’s consciousness and stuck. But, J. Biden seems to think he is quoting the wisdom of Confucius, or the Way of the Tao.

Perhaps the Young Joe Biden went to some odd Maoist eatery where the ‘fortune cookies’ were all quotes from Chairman Mao.

Line Drawing – Toilets

Israel Accuses China of ‘Blatant anti-Semitism’ After State TV Says ‘Wealthy Jews’ Control U.S. Foreign Policy

AP Photo/Dan Balilty

The Israeli embassy in Beijing on Wednesday accused China of “blatant anti-Semitism” after a state TV report on U.S. foreign policy broached Jewish conspiracy theories to explain the ongoing Palestinian Hamas terrorist violence.

AFP reports the official CGTN broadcast questioned whether U.S. support for Israel came from shared democratic values, saying “some people believe that U.S. pro-Israeli policy is traceable to the influence of wealthy Jews in the U.S. and the Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy makers.”

“Jews dominate finance and and internet sectors,” host Zheng Junfeng says, speaking in English. “So do they have the powerful lobbies some say? Possible.”

Zheng then accused the U.S. — China’s top geopolitical rival — of using Israel as a “beachhead” in the Middle East and as a proxy in an undeclared war on pan-Arabism.

In a tweet, the embassy responded, saying “we have hoped that the times of the ‘Jew’s controlling the world’ conspiracy theories were over, unfortunately anti-Semitism has shown its ugly face again.”

“We are appalled to see blatant anti-Semitism expressed in an official Chinese media outlet,” the tweet said.

AP reports spokesperson Erez Katz Volovelsky said the embassy had nothing to add to its tweet and had so far received no reply from CGTN, which CCTV operates for foreign audiences, similar to Russia’s RT.

There was no immediate comment from CCTV and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said he was “not aware of the situation.“

China has criticised the United States for blocking a joint statement on the crisis at the U.N. Security Council as the Communist single-party state seeks to position itself as the most important world power in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stepping up to fill the leadership vacuum created by President Joe Biden at the United Nations.

To that end, Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called for an immediate ceasefire on both sides and for Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza as soon as possible.

He also offered to host Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in China for direct peace talks.

AFP, AP contributed to this story

UK Cultural Revolution

Birmingham Street names to be changed.

Wuhan, China: October 2019 – 300 US Troops Visit – Motive – Opportunity – Plausible Deniability – Unforeseen Blowback – Imperialists Crippled

The U.S. Armed Forces Sports team marches during opening ceremonies for the 2019 CISM Military World Games in Wuhan, China Oct. 18, 2019. Teams from more than 100 countries will compete in dozens of sporting events through Oct. 28. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

COVID – How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory* – by Donald McNeil – 17 May 2021

How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory*

Donald G. McNeil Jr.

19 min read

In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not a Lab Leak,’ Scientists Say.”

It never ran.

For two reasons.

The chief one was that inside the Times, we were sharply divided. My colleagues who cover national security were being assured by their Trump administration sources — albeit anonymously and with no hard evidence — that it was a lab leak and the Chinese were covering it up. We science reporters were hearing from virologists and zoologists — on the record and in great detail — that the odds were overwhelming that it was not a lab leak but an animal spillover.

Frankly, the scientists had more credibility.

The other reason my story never ran was that it was 4,000 words long and full of expressions like “polybasic cleavage site,” “RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene” and “O-linked glycan shields.” Editors would open it, their eyeballs would bleed, and they would close it and find something else to do.

(Back then, editors blanched even at “spike protein” and “receptor binding domain,” but we’ve all had a crash course in virology this year, haven’t we?)

Although it never ran, others like it did elsewhere. The experts all agreed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not a deliberate weaponization of a previously known virus and that it had no obvious signs of lab manipulation (more details below). They noted that blood sampling showed that brief “spillovers” of animal viruses into humans happen often without causing large outbreaks.

Therefore, they argued, the odds were that this was another virus that got lucky, like SARS and MERS and the 2009 pandemic flu: it had dwelled long enough inside a civet or camel or pig or something to infect human-like cells, and then had hit the big city.

For about a year, that was the general wisdom among science writers. The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.”

China retorting to Trump administration nonsense with nonsense of its own — such as suggesting that U.S. military officers planted the virus during a visit to Wuhan in October 2019 — did not help.

[See also: After One Million Americans Dead – Did US Create COVID To Target China? – by Ron Unz – After One Million Americans Dead – Did US Create COVID To Target China? – by Ron Unz | xenagoguevicene (wordpress.com) ]

The U.S. Armed Forces Sports team marches during opening ceremonies for the 2019 CISM Military World Games in Wuhan, China Oct. 18, 2019. Teams from more than 100 countries will compete in dozens of sporting events through Oct. 28. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

And now to the present day.

Two weeks ago, my former New York Times science news colleague Nicholas Wade wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (and on Medium) arguing that the lab-leak theory deserves a harder look.

It has since been sent to me a dozen times with notes asking “What do you think?”

My first reaction was dismissive, even though I very much respect Nick as a journalist. (Some of his work is controversial and he can be cranky, but who am I to criticize anyone on those grounds?) I covered the pandemic from its earliest days and I disagreed with his retelling of how the leak-vs.-spillover debate began.

Also, I was offended by some aspects, such as his attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, both of whom I have known for years; I know both are dedicated to saving lives, and they have always told me the truth — or what they honestly believed to be the truth at the time, because evidence sometimes changes. They are now both getting death threats, and that is repulsive.

The N.I.H.-funded EcoHealth Alliance does not do dangerous lab research; it doesn’t even have a lab. It hunts for dangerous viruses in the field; its zoologists teach people how to safely gather samples from bats, birds, chimpanzees and other creatures fortified with claws, teeth, beaks, muscles and pathogens.

That’s work I consider as essential as staffing the radar stations that watch for missiles coming over the North Pole. The Trump administration was insane to cut off funding for it. You need to know what’s coming at you. Actually cooking up novel threats is a different matter, of which more below.

I was also bothered by Nick quoting Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To my mind, after being warned about the virus by his Chinese counterpart in the first week of January, Dr. Redfield failed to shout from the rooftops and move mountains — and now 600,000 Americans are dead. He also raised the specter of a flu-Covid “twindemic” that turned out to be virological alarmism.

But…but…but…but…but…

The deeper I read into the papers and articles Nick cited, the clearer it became how much new information had trickled out in the last year. Not new to the most intense and well-educated followers of this topic, but new to the greater public debate. I include articles like this, this, this, this and this by Yuri Deigin, Rossana Segretto, Milton Leitenberg, Josh Rogin, Nicholson Baker and others.

And more and and more scientists feel misled.

I now agree with Nick’s central conclusion: We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.

And China’s lack of candor is disturbing. It denies access to the institute’s lab logs and whatever messages were swapped during its own investigations, took down 2018 statements critical of lab biosecurity protocols, retaliated against Australia for advocating an open investigation and sharply restricted the W.H.O. investigators.

Calls for a better probe are mounting. Last week, 18 biologists, including leading and outspoken experts on this pandemic like the Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, published a letter in Science calling for a new investigation and demanding that Chinese labs and public health agencies open their records to outside scrutiny.

To my mind, China could be forgiven for its standoffishness in early 2020. It was busy fighting its own pandemic. And if China had, say, arrogantly offered to teach the American C.D.C. how to investigate America’s killer hamburgers — the equivalent of the way the Trump administration spoke to China back then — we would have snubbed them too.

But now, 17 months later, China is persistently acting like a nation hiding something.

Also worrying: the hunt for the spillover theory’s smoking gun — a very closely related natural virus in a human or an animal — has gone on for over a year. Success would mean big prizes for the discoverer — especially from the Chinese government, which could say “See??”

And yet — zip. That doesn’t mean it won’t be found. But by now we might have expected at least some smoking shell casings.

I had been skeptical of the “lab leak” theory because animal spillover is such an obvious answer. Genetics has proven that almost every disease mankind has faced jumped from animals: bubonic plague from rodents, measles probably from cows, whooping cough maybe from dogs, and so on.

Also, the leak idea was just too conveniently conspiratorial.

I’ve covered several pandemics and studied others and one element is consistent: they start in utter confusion that defies any sense that an evil genius at work. Doctors know something’s wrong, but aren’t sure what. That was true when American veterans started dying of pneumonia after a 1976 convention (Legionnaire’s disease); when the Bronx Zoo’s birds started dropping dead in 1999 (West Nile virus); when young nurses fell ill in Mexico City in 2009 (swine flu); when camel butchers died in Saudi Arabia (MERS); and when Brazilian babies were born with shrunken heads (Zika).

This pandemic’s opening days were also shrouded in fog, and yes, there was a government coverup. But it was outed immediately and it didn’t emanate from Beijing.

In late December 2019, doctors at hospitals near the Huanan Seafood Market began seeing a strange viral pneumonia they couldn’t identify. On Dec. 30, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a warning.

It was quickly picked by disease-alert websites like FluTrackers and ProMED; the W.H.O. put out an alert the next day. The New York Times wrote its first article on January 6, from Beijing; I started helping my China colleagues soon after.

By that time, one coverup had been underway for a week. Wuhan’s politically ambitious mayor, Zhou Xianwang, was eager to protect the local party congress he had scheduled for January and the pot-luck dinner for 40,000 Wuhanese he hoped would get him into the Guinness Book of Records.

On January 1, his police silenced the nervous doctors. The Hainan Seafood Market was closed and hosed down.

That was the equivalent of trampling a crime scene. The market’s wild game sellers — who might have had the infected animal, if there was one — scattered. Any live animals or fresh meat probably went to other markets or into the trash. Customers disappeared. The chance to use the market as the hub of a good epidemiological investigation was lost.

At the same time, other events occurred that looked like coverups, but maybe weren’t. As soon as it was clear that the threat was a dangerous new coronavirus, the local health commission and then the national one ordered diagnostic and genetics labs to destroy their samples or surrender them to high-level biosecurity labs. Most labs chose incineration — another crime scene wrecked.

That smacked of coverup, and was treated as such by the Trump administration, but it’s actually standard safety procedure to prevent outbreaks. Our C.D.C. gave the same order in 2014 when it realized that hospital labs had samples from Ebola patients being treated in Dallas and Omaha. “We told the labs in Texas and Nebraska to destroy them or send them to Fort Detrick,” Dr. Pierre E. Rollin, who recently retired from the C.D.C after 26 years of fighting global outbreaks, told me. “You can call that a cover-up, but it was a public health decision.”

During those first days in Wuhan, a major misconception circulated — that the virus did not spread easily between people. The W.H.O. repeated it, so did we. But that was not necessarily deliberate misinformation. With the market closed, the epicenter had scattered a few dozen cases across a city of 11 million. Very few PCR tests existed, and it was the height of flu season. At such times, it’s hard to know who infected whom with what.

Also, I don’t believe the image of China as a Teflon pyramid with Xi Jinping at the apex, the evil emperor who sees every sparrow that falls. It’s like other big countries, even totalitarian ones: messy, with competing scientists and petty bureaucrats. Its flaws often become public despite Beijing’s rigid control of the internet.

Each day back then, the rumors got more bizarre. Some scientists claimed the virus had snake genes. Others said it was part H.I.V., triggering claims that it was a bio-weapon.

Some of that fog of war lifted after Beijing sent Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the country’s renowned epidemiologist, to Wuhan to demand the truth. On January 20th, Dr. Zhong warned on national TV that the virus was spreading rapidly and that outsiders should stay away. On January 23, Wuhan was cut off from the world, Mayor Xian apologized, and China launched its brutal but amazingly successful effort to crush its epidemic.

The first article I know of blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology ran on January 26 in the Washington Times, a conservative paper founded by the Unification Church. It seemed based on two elements — the lab was in the same city (albeit nine miles from the market), and a brief, speculative quote from an Israeli biowarfare expert, Dany Shoham.

“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” the paper quoted Dr. Shoham as saying. Any work on biological weapons would be “definitely covert,” he added.

When I reached Dr. Shoham by telephone later, he spoke very cautiously. He had not been misquoted, he said, but he emphasized that he had never said that deadly virus came from that lab. He had said only that it “was possible” that such a virus could have come from such a lab.

But the rumor was off and running.

Then, on February 3 — a week later — scientists from that Institute produced what smelled like a smoking gun.

They published an article on Nature’s open-access website saying one of the hundreds of coronaviruses gathered from bat caves that was in their freezers was a 96.2 percent match to SARS-CoV-2.

They called it RaTG13 (indicating a Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat captured in Tong Guan cave in Yunnan in 2013).

For conspiracy theorists, that was the clincher — if the lab had a 96 percent match, it must have leaked the killer.

But many of the world’s top virologists leapt to say “Not so fast.”

Coronaviruses mutate slowly, so a 4 percent mismatch in the 30,000 base pairs of the two viruses meant RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 had diverged maybe 40 years ago, evolutionary geneticists said.

On February 16, as rumors swirled, five of the world’s top virologists got together to publish a letter on virological.org explaining why animal origin was more likely.

The letter, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was later republished in the journal Nature.

Its basic argument was that any lab trying to make a super-dangerous virus would start with the backbone of one already known to be pretty dangerous, like 2002 SARS. This new virus was so different from SARS, especially in its receptor binding domain — the crucial bit where the spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on the surface of a human cell — that logically no one would have chosen it.

The binding domain was much closer to one that had been recently found in pangolin viruses, so it was likely the pandemic virus had jumped from bats to an animal — perhaps pangolins but not necessarily.

Also, the new virus had a cleavage site unlike those in related coronaviruses. (After binding to a cell, the spike has to “cleave” or split open, to meld with the surface and inject its RNA.) The new virus’s cleavage site was an unusual set of amino acids in an unusual spot on the genome. Such unexpected choices seemed more likely to happen during the constant random evolution that goes on in nature rather than the logic-driven “let’s try this next” methods of a lab.

Also the virus’s spikes had “glycans” which act as shields to protect them from antibodies. A virus sunbathing in a friendly lab cell culture wouldn’t need to evolve shields, while a virus constantly fighting off immune system attacks because it was evolving inside an animal would, they argued.

Therefore, they concluded, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The paper’s first author, Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, is still vigorously defending the paper’s basic premise — that an animal origin is by far the most likely.

But other eminent virologists, including at least one of his co-authors, are wavering.

During the uproar that ensued after the institute revealed that the RaTG13 strain was in its freezers, Dr. Daszak argued that merely having a virus in a frozen fecal pellet meant little. Infections take place only when viruses are warmed up and growing in cell cultures or animals.

Dr. Daszak had worked for years with Dr. Shi Zheng-li, the “Bat Woman” who now runs the Wuhan institute. His zoologists and field veterinarians had taught her bat-sampling — a dangerous practice even in caves with tourists in bathing suits wandering around.

Freezers contain hundreds of viruses. It is too expensive to fully sequence all of them and impossible to grow them all out in cell culture, he explained. So labs create a set of “bookmarks.” They sequence one short gene, called RdRP, that seldom mutates and keep a list of their RdRPs. Sometimes they post their lists to a public database like GISAID or Genbank.

Since the world had previously been looking only for relatives of the dangerous 2002 SARS or MERS, he said, labs would care only if a virus’ RdRP gene closely matched those.

“If it doesn’t, it’s of no interest, so you pop it back in the freezer,” he said.

Later, if a new dangerous virus turns up, labs can check their bookmarks for a match, thaw that one out and sequence all of it. That was why RaTG13 was found so quickly, he said. Ditto for pangolin virus sequences found in the freezers of the South China Agricultural University.

Because there were no viruses with closer RdRP matches either in public databanks or in a private Wuhan Institute list of 630 unposted RdRP genes he had seen, he said, the Wuhan lab presumably held nothing closer than a 40-year-distant relative of the killer virus.

“Believe me, if there had been, no one would have kept that a secret,” he said to me more than a year ago. “It would be a huge discovery. We’d be over the moon.”

Dr. Shi herself later told Scientific American that, when news of the new virus erupted, her first fear was that it had come from her institute. She did not sleep for days, she said, until she had finished checking her lab’s logs and assured herself that it had not.

Since then, though, more has come to light about the work done by Dr. Shi’s teams.

The most startling bit of information was that, rather than “finding” RaTG13 in her freezers in February, Dr. Shi had worked with it since at least 2016, but under a different name, RaBtCoV/4991.

RaBtCoV/4991 had not been gathered at random but from a mineshaft in which miners digging bat guano got pneumonia, some fatally. Dr. Shi’s lab sequenced enough of it to be able to say it was the most “SARS-like” of the viruses from that investigation.

There were arguments over whether the miners died of fungal pneumonia, viral pneumonia or both, but that link made it a likely suspect for any lab wanting to explore dangerous viruses. Not mentioning her previous work with it was troubling.

Also, Dr. Shi was trained by Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina in building “chimera” viruses — taking, for example, the spike protein from a new virus and splicing it to the backbone of a known one like SARS. He invented “no-see-um” techniques that left no trace of the splice.

(Interestingly, Dr. Baric is one of the signers of the letter to Science demanding a more thorough investigation of all Wuhan labs.)

Then, to see if the new chimeras could infect people, they were tested against human airway cells and “humanized” mice — mice bred to have human ACE-2 receptors on their organs.

There is debate over whether this is truly “gain of function” research. Some argue that gain of function strictly involves taking a virus already known to endanger humans and trying to make it more lethal or more transmissible.

So Dr. Fauci was answering truthfully in his bitter exchange with Senator Rand Paul on May 11.

But many other scientists feel this is a distinction without a difference. They feel that building any new virus from suspect parts and then seeing if it infects humans is just as risky.

Like nuclear bomb testing, the need for “gain of function” research is hotly contested.

Proponents argue that it is the only way to stay ahead of epidemics: in a world full of emerging diseases, if you can figure out which pathogens are only a few amino acids tweaks shy of disaster, you can develop and stockpile vaccines and antibodies against them.

Opponents say that, noble as that goal may be, it is inherently too dangerous to pursue by building Frankensteins and poking them to see how strong they are.

Despite constantly rising biosafety levels, viruses we already know to be lethal, from smallpox to SARS, have repeatedly broken loose by accident.

Most leaks infect or kill just a few people before they are stopped by isolation and/or vaccination. But not all: scientists now believe that the H1N1 seasonal flu that killed thousands every year from 1977 to 2009 was influenza research gone feral. The strain first appeared in eastern Russia in 1977 and its genes were initially identical to a 1950 strain; that could have happened only if it had been in a freezer for 27 years. It also initially behaved as if it had been deliberately attenuated, or weakened. So scientists suspect it was a Russian effort to make a vaccine against a possible return of the 1918 flu. And then, they theorize, the vaccine virus, insufficiently weakened, began spreading.

Also, Dr. Shi’s teams had done work on inserting cleavage sites into viruses and seeing if that enhanced their ability to infect human cells.

All this raises a disturbing possibility: What if some Wuhan scientist — someone in Dr. Shi’s lab or perhaps at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control right near the market, or possibly some military scientist she trained but could not control — did something like take the likely suspect virus RaBtCoV/4991 and use it as the “backbone” for a set of chimeras with different receptor binding domains? What if that scientist was trying in 2019 to attach binding domains from viruses recently found in dying pangolins seized from wildlife smugglers in southern China? What if someone got tempted to add a cleavage site to see if that supercharged it?

What if various such chimeras were passaged through cultures of human cells or humanized mice? Wouldn’t that speed up mutations into forms likely to infect humans even faster than nature can? Wouldn’t that mean that something that looked like the current pandemic strain could emerge, polybasic cleavage sites, O-linked glycans and all?

And what if someone doing that work in a less secure lab than should have been permitted got infected before catching the subway home?

It’s a lot of ifs, and it’s pure speculation, which has been going on since mid-last year.

Jon Cohen of Science magazine put essentially these very questions to Dr. Shi back in August, 2020.

She said no such work took place in her lab, and that the RaBtCoV/4991 virus had only been sequenced, not isolated or grown out as a virus before the sample was used up. Everyone in her lab had tested negative for antibodies to SARS-like coronaviruses so there was no evidence of an outbreak inside, she said. And she had been assured through regular conversations with other Wuhan labs that that they had no leaks either.

Doubts have been raised about that, including the question: since Covid-19 was racing through Wuhan in early 2020, how likely would it be that no one in her lab tested antibody-positive? Wouldn’t some have gotten infected outside?

Ultimately, much of the debate comes down to this: Is Dr. Shi telling the whole truth? And even if she is, are all her similarly skilled colleagues in Wuhan? Are they being allowed to do so by their government — which has a history of silencing scientists?

Chinese scientists were allowed to interact with W.H.O. investigators only in a very tightly controlled way and very little of the report was devoted to the lab leak theory, which it all but dismissed.

Opening up the 2019 logs of every lab in Wuhan and the 2019–2020 emails between scientists and health officials would go a long way to restoring trust.

And the failure to discover any wild viruses that look like evolutionary intermediate steps on the way to SARS-Cov-2 is troubling.

So virologists are feeling more doubts.

Nick Wade quoted David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work with viruses, as saying the specific amino acid sequences in the cleavage site made “a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin.” (This has prompted a complex debate among evolutionary geneticists over which specific rungs on the RNA-DNA ladder are statistically most likely to appear in a bat virus.)

I spoke about Nick’s article last week with Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the renowned Columbia University virus hunter who was one of the five co-authors on the seminal “proximal origin” paper.

He favored a natural origin theory, he said, in part because he had assumed that all the Wuhan Institute’s 2019 work with SARS-like viruses had been done in its top-level BSL-4 lab, which was cleared to operate in 2017. (State Department cables from 2018 raised questions about how well-run the lab was.)

But later he learned of studies with Dr. Shi’s name on them showing that work he considers dangerous had been done in level BSL-2 labs, which he considers highly porous to leaks, not just in 2016, but in 2020.

“That’s screwed up,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

That is still not, as he pointed out, direct evidence of a lab leak. There is no proof of a leak.

But the Occam’s Razor argument — what’s the likeliest explanation, animal or lab? — keeps shifting in the direction of the latter.

The hardest evidence that it was an animal is still what it was early last year: On January 1, right after the market was closed down, and then again on January 12, Huazhong Agricultural University and Dr. Shi’s Institute gathered almost 600 samples from the block-long warren of shuttered stalls.

Of those swabs, about six percent were positive for the virus, according to Xinhua, China’s state news agency. Most came from the western end, where the wildlife was sold. And most, Dr. Shi said, were from spots near or below floor level — the handles of roll down steel shutters and the drains over the floor gutters.

Finding virus in six percent of surface samples was more than might be expected even in a hospital during flu season, Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who does flu studies told me last year.

And the most logical explanation for finding that much virus on the floor and in the drains, he speculated, was not coughing humans. It was the blood of a butchered animal being sloshed around as the market was hosed out.

Yes, there were cases in early December with no connection to that market, but that’s not impossible. Livestock is shipped in batches, Wuhan has other live markets. Also, viruses are known to create “stuttering chains of transmission” as they become more transmissible. We’ve seen the rise of increasingly transmissible variants this year and we know this virus alternates between rare transmission and superspreading.

And the wildlife trade is not some dinky smuggling operation. As the W.H.O. report detailed, there are large farms in China raising civets, badgers and other formerly wild animals for food. A bat virus could have raced through them, adapting itself to more human-like animals, the same way the human virus raced through Dutch mink farms.

Also, farmers all over Asia enter caves to dig bat guano for garden fertilizer. A study Dr. Daszak’s alliance did on villagers living near caves found that three percent had antibodies to bat viruses. That translates to up 7 million inhabitants of rural southeast Asia potentially catching such viruses each year. There may be many small outbreaks that die out without spreading far. Ebola did that at least 19 times we know of between 1976 and 2014, the year the virus reached a big city for the first time.

So there we are. All we have so far is speculation, and all the explanations are unsatisfactory.

The whole thing may just be a cold case, and stay that way forever. But there are more embers left to sift. The whole world, China included, needs a hard answer, whoever is to blame — so we can prevent this from happening again.

*The title is from the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb,” which is about human lies and safety failures — and ends with clips of atomic weapons tests depicted as the real thing. Not that I think the pandemic is funny. But neither is nuclear war.

……………………

See Also: “The Truth” versus “The Whole Truth” About the Origins of COVID – by Ron Unz – 10 May 2021 | xenagoguevicene (wordpress.com)

The Stanger – by Albert Camus – Graphic Novel

https://videopress.com/v/pn1BpS3q?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

(I have to buy the rest of the text to find out what happens next, although, I did read a the work in French and English and listen to it on audio while under COVID lockdown. I like the realism of this comic book style rendering. I like reading graphic panels about someone who does not have superpowers.)

https://archive.ph/tBFys

Oddities of the Jewish Religion – by Ron Unz (Unz Review) 2018

American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion

RON UNZ 

• JULY 16, 2018 

• 7,800 WORDS 

About a decade ago, I happened to be talking with an eminent academic scholar who had become known for his sharp criticism of Israeli policies in the Middle East and America’s strong support for them. I mentioned that I myself had come to very similar conclusions some time before, and he asked when that had happened. I told him it had been in 1982, and I think he found my answer quite surprising. I got the sense that date was decades earlier than would have been given by almost anyone else he knew.

Sometimes it is quite difficult to pinpoint when one’s world view on a contentious topic undergoes sharp transformation, but at other times it is quite easy. My own perceptions of the Middle East conflict drastically shifted during Fall 1982, and they have subsequently changed only to a far smaller extent. As some might remember, that period marked the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and culminated in the notorious Sabra-Shatila Massacre during which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered in their refugee camps. But although those events were certainly major factors in my ideological realignment, the crucial trigger was actually a certain letter to the editor published around that same time.

A few years earlier, I had discovered The London Economist, as it was then called, and it had quickly become my favorite publication, which I religiously devoured cover-to-cover every week. And as I read the various articles about the Middle East conflict in that publication, or others such as the New York Times, the journalists occasionally included quotes from some particularly fanatic and irrational Israeli Communist named Israel Shahak, whose views seemed totally at odds with those of everyone else, and who was consequently treated as a fringe figure. Opinions that seem totally divorced from reality tend to stick in one’s mind, and it took only one or two appearances from that apparently die-hard and delusional Stalinist for me to guess that he would always take an entirely contrary position on every given issue.

In 1982 Israel Defense Minister Ariel Sharon launched his massive invasion of Lebanon using the pretext of the wounding of an Israeli diplomat in Europe at the hands of a Palestinian attacker, and the extreme nature of his action was widely condemned in the media outlets I read at the time. His motive was obviously to root out the PLO’s political and military infrastructure, which had taken hold in many of Lebanon’s large Palestinian refugee camps. But back in those days invasions of Middle Eastern countries on dubious prospects were much less common than they have subsequently become, after our recent American wars killed or displaced so many millions, and most observers were horrified by the utterly disproportionate nature of his attack and the severe destruction he was inflicting upon Israel’s neighbor, which he seemed eager to reduce to puppet status. From what I recall, he made several entirely false assurances to top Reagan officials about his invasion plans, such that they afterward called him the worst sort of liar, and he ended up besieging the Lebanese capital of Beirut even though he had originally promised to limit his assault to a mere border incursion.

The Israeli siege of the PLO-controlled areas of Beirut lasted some time, and negotiations eventually resulted in the departure of the Palestinian fighters to some other Arab country.

[Poster Note: The Palestinian fighters went to Tunisia. The ‘victory’ the Palestinians achieved was that the Palestinian fighters were allowed to withdraw with their weapons. At the dock the Palestinian fighters fired their guns in the air in celebration of their tactical retreat before they got on the evacuation boats. Palestinian women and children and old men and boys and unarmed men who were unarmed were left behind.]

PLO fighters Beirut, 1982

Shortly afterward, the Israelis declared that they were moving into West Beirut in order to better assure the safety of the Palestinian women and children left behind and protect them from any retribution at the hands of their Christian Falangist enemies. And around that same time, I noticed a long letter in The Economist by Shahak which seemed to me the final proof of his insanity. He claimed that it was obvious that Sharon had marched to Beirut with the intent of organizing a massacre of the Palestinians, and that this would shortly take place. When the slaughter indeed occurred not long afterward, apparently with heavy Israeli involvement and complicity, I concluded that if a crazy Communist fanatic like Shahak had been right, while apparently every mainstream journalist had been so completely wrong, my understanding of the world and the Middle East required total recalibration. Or at least that’s how I’ve always remembered those events from a distance of over thirty-five years.

During the years that followed, I still periodically saw Shahak’s statements quoted in my mainstream publications, which sometimes suggested that he was a Communist and sometimes not. Naturally enough, his ideological extremism made him a prominent opponent of the 1991 Oslo Peace Agreement between Israel and the occupied Palestinians, which was otherwise supported by every sensible person, though since Oslo ended up being entirely a failure, I couldn’t hold it too strongly against him. I stopped paying much attention to foreign policy issues during the 1990s, but I still read my New York Times every morning and would occasionally see his quotes, inevitably contrarian and irredentist.

Then the 9/11 attacks returned foreign policy and the Middle East to the absolute center of our national agenda, and I eventually read somewhere or other that Shahak had died at age 68 only a few months earlier, though I hadn’t noticed any obituary. Over the years, I’d seen some vague mention that during the previous decade he’d published a couple of stridently anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist books, just as might be expected from a hard-line Communist fanatic, and during the early 2000s I started seeing more and more references to these works, ironically coming from fringe sources of the anti-Semitic Far Right, thereby once again proving that extremists flock together. Finally, about a decade ago, my curiosity got the better of me and clicking a few buttons on Amazon.com, I ordered copies of his books, all of which were quite short.

My first surprise was that Shahak’s writings included introductions or glowing blurbs by some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said. Praise also came from quite respectable publications such as The London Review of Books, Middle East International, and Catholic New Times while Allan Brownfeld of The American Council for Judaism had published a very long and laudatory obituary. And I discovered that Shahak’s background was very different than I had always imagined. He had spent many years as an award-winning Chemistry professor at Hebrew University, and was actually anything but a Communist. Whereas for decades, Israel’s ruling political parties had been Socialist or Marxist, his personal doubts about Socialism had left him politically in the wilderness, while his relationship with Israel’s tiny Communist Party was solely because they were the only group willing to stand up for the basic human rights issues that were his own central focus. My casual assumptions about his views and background had been entirely in error.

Once I actually began reading his books, and considering his claims, my shock increased fifty-fold. Throughout my entire life, there have been very, very few times I have ever been so totally astonished as I was after I digested Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, whose text runs barely a hundred pages. In fact, despite his solid background in the academic sciences and the glowing endorsements provided by prominent figures, I found it quite difficult to accept the reality of what I was reading. As a consequence, I paid a considerable sum to a young graduate student I knew, tasking him to verify the claims in Shahak’s books, and as far as he could tell, all of the hundreds of references he checked seemed to be accurate or at least found in other sources.

Even with all of that due diligence, I must emphasize that I cannot directly vouch for Shahak’s claims about Judaism. My own knowledge of that religion is absolutely negligible, mostly being limited to my childhood, when my grandmother occasionally managed to drag me down to services at the local synagogue, where I was seated among a mass of elderly men praying and chanting in some strange language while wearing various ritualistic cloths and religious talismans, an experience that I always found much less enjoyable than my usual Saturday morning cartoons.

Although Shahak’s books are quite short, they contain such a density of astonishing material, it would take many, many thousands of words to begin to summarize them. Almost everything I had known—or thought I had known—about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong.

For example, traditionally religious Jews pay little attention to most of the Old Testament, and even very learned rabbis or students who have devoted many years to intensive study may remain largely ignorant of its contents. Instead, the center of their religious world view is the Talmud, an enormously large, complex, and somewhat contradictory mass of secondary writings and commentary built up over many centuries, which is why their religious doctrine is sometimes called “Talmudic Judaism.” Among large portions of the faithful, the Talmud is supplemented by the Kabala, another large collection of accumulated writings, mostly focused on mysticism and all sorts of magic. Since these commentaries and interpretations represent the core of the religion, much of what everyone takes for granted in the Bible is considered in a very different manner.

Given the nature of the Talmudic basis of traditional Judaism and my total previous ignorance of the subject, any attempt on my part of summarize some of the more surprising aspects of Shahak’s description may be partially garbled, and is certainly worthy of correction by someone better versed in that dogma. And since so many parts of the Talmud are highly contradictory and infused with complex mysticism, it would be impossible for someone like me to attempt to disentangle the seeming inconsistencies that I am merely repeating. I should note that although Shahak’s description of the beliefs and practices of Talmudic Judaism provoked a fire-storm of denunciations, few of those harsh critics seem to have denied his very specific claims, including the most astonishing ones, which would seem to strengthen his credibility.

On the most basic level, the religion of most traditional Jews is actually not at all monotheistic, but instead contains a wide variety of different male and female gods, having quite complex relations to each other, with these entities and their properties varying enormously among the numerous different Jewish sub-sects, depending upon which portions of the Talmud and the Kabala they place uppermost. For example, the traditional Jewish religious cry “The Lord Is One” has always been interpreted by most people to be an monotheistic affirmation, and indeed, many Jews take exactly this same view. But large numbers of other Jews believe this declaration instead refers to achievement of sexual union between the primary male and female divine entities. And most bizarrely, Jews having such radically different views see absolutely no difficulty in praying side by side, and merely interpreting their identical chants in very different fashion.

Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition. One point that Shahak repeatedly emphasizes is that in traditional Judaism the nature of the ritual itself is absolutely uppermost, while the interpretation of the ritual is rather secondary. So perhaps a Jew who washes his hands three times clockwise might be horrified by another who follows a counter-clockwise direction, but whether the hand-washing were meant to honor God or to honor Satan would be hardly be a matter of much consequence.

Strangely enough, many of the traditional rituals are explicitly intended to fool or trick God or His angels or sometimes Satan, much like the mortal heroes of some Greek legend might seek to trick Zeus or Aphrodite. For example, certain prayers must be uttered in Aramaic rather than Hebrew on the grounds that holy angels apparently don’t understand the former language, and their confusion allows those verses to slip by unimpeded and take effect without divine interference.

Furthermore, since the Talmud represents a massive accretion of published commentary built up over more than a millennium, even the most explicit mandates have sometimes been transformed into their opposites. As an example, Maimonides, one of the highest rabbinical authorities, absolutely prohibited rabbis from being paid for their religious teaching, declaring that any rabbi who received a salary was an evil robber condemned to everlasting torment; yet later rabbis eventually “reinterpreted” this statement to mean something entirely different, and today almost all rabbis collect salaries.

Another fascinating aspect is that up until very recent times, the lives of religious Jews were often dominated by all sorts of highly superstitious practices, including magical charms, potions, spells, incantations, hexes, curses, and sacred talismans, with rabbis often having an important secondary role as sorcerers, and this even remains entirely true today among the enormously influential rabbis of Israel and the New York City area. Shahak’s writings had not endeared him to many of these individuals, and for years they constantly attacked him with all sorts of spells and fearful curses aimed at achieving his death or illness. Many of these traditional Jewish practices seem not entirely dissimilar to those we typically associate with African witch-doctors or Voodoo priests, and indeed, the famous legend of the Golem of Prague described the successful use of rabbinical magic to animate a giant creature built of clay.

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethleham, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

For the last two thousand years, Jews have almost invariably existed as small, relatively weak minorities living in the lands of others, whether Christian or Muslim, so a religious doctrine so unswervingly hostile to outsiders has naturally presented considerable obstacles for peaceful co-existence. The solution to this dilemma has been based on the divine mandate to preserve Jewish life and well-being above all else, superseding almost all other religious considerations. Thus, if any of the behaviors discussed above are considered likely to stir up resentment from powerful Gentile groups and put Jews at risk, they must be avoided.

For example, the prohibition against Jewish physicians treating the illnesses of non-Jews is waived in the case of powerful non-Jews, especially national leaders, whose favor might provide benefits to the Jewish community. And even ordinary non-Jews may be aided unless some persuasive excuse can be found to explain such lack of assistance since otherwise the vengeful hostility of their friends and relatives might cause difficulties for other Jews. Similarly, it is permissible to exchange gifts with non-Jews but only if such behavior can be justified in strictly utilitarian terms, with any simple expression of friendship towards a non-Jew being a violation of holy principles.

If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility, especially including the mistranslation of sacred texts or the complete exclusion of crucial sections. Meanwhile, the traditional penalty for any Jew who “informs” to the authorities on any matter regarding the Jewish community has always been death, often preceded by hideous torture.

Much of this dishonesty obviously continues down to recent times since it seems very unlikely that Jewish rabbis, except perhaps for those of the most avant garde disposition, would remain totally unaware of the fundamental tenets of the religion that they claim to lead, and Shahak is scathing toward their apparent self-serving hypocrisy, especially those who publicly express strongly liberal views. For example, according to mainstream Talmudic doctrine, black Africans are traditionally placed somewhere between people and monkeys in their intrinsic nature, and surely all rabbis, even liberal ones, would be aware of this religious dogma. But Shahak notes that the numerous American rabbis who so eagerly worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black Civil Rights leaders during the 1950s and 1960s strictly concealed their religious beliefs while denouncing American society for its cruel racism, presumably seeking to achieve a political quid pro quo beneficial to Jewish interests with America’s substantial black population.

Shahak also emphasizes the utterly totalitarian nature of traditional Jewish society, in which rabbis held the power of life and death over their congregants, and often sought to punish ideological deviation or heresy using those means. They were often outraged that this became difficult as states grew stronger and increasingly prohibited such private executions. Liberalizing rabbis were sometimes murdered and Baruch Spinoza, the famous Jewish philosopher of the Age of Reason, only survived because the Dutch authorities refused to allow his fellow Jews to kill him.

Given the complexity and exceptionally controversial nature of this subject matter, I would urge readers who find this topic of interest to spend three or four hours reading Shahak’s very short book, and then decide for themselves whether his claims seem plausible and whether I may have inadvertently misunderstood them. Aside from the copies on Amazon, the work may also be found at Archive.org and a very convenient HTML copy is also freely available on the Internet.

My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

There may actually be a deeper historical truth behind that irony. I think I’ve read here and there that some scholars believe that Hitler may have modeled certain aspects of his racially-focused National Socialist doctrine upon the Jewish example, which really makes perfect sense. After all, he saw that despite their small numbers Jews had gained enormous power in the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and numerous other countries throughout Europe, partly due to their extremely strong ethnic cohesion, and he probably reasoned that his own Germanic people, being far greater in numbers and historical achievements could do even better if they adopted similar practices.

It’s also interesting to note that quite a number of the leading racialist pioneers of 19th century Europe came from a particular ethnic background. For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor.

Even as late as the 1930s and afterward, international Zionist groups closely cooperated with the Third Reich on their economic projects, and during the world war itself one of the smaller rightwing factions, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir, actually offered a military alliance to the Axis Powers, denouncing the decadent Western democracies and hoping to collaborate against their mutual British enemies. The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black, 51 Documents by Lenni Brenner, and other writings have documented all these facts in detail, though for obvious reasons they have generally been ignored or mischaracterized by most of our media outlets.

Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

Furthermore, Jewish hostility toward non-Jews may often have served the interests of others, and helped determine the economic role that the group filled, especially in European countries, with this factor having been obscured by widespread ignorance of the underlying religious tenets. As most of us know from our history books, political rulers with little sympathy for their subjects sometimes restrict military power to a relatively small group of well-rewarded mercenaries, often of foreign origins so that they will have little sympathy for the population they harshly repress. I strongly suspect that some of the most common traditional economic niches of European Jews, such as tax-farming and the arrenda estate-management system of Eastern Europe, should be best understood in a similar light, with Jews being more likely to extract every last penny of value from the peasants they controlled for the benefit of their local king or lords, and their notorious antipathy for all non-Jews ensuring that such behavior was minimally tempered by any human sympathy. Thus, we should not be surprised that Jews first entered England in the train of William the Conqueror, in order to help him and his victorious Norman lords effectively exploit the subjugated Anglo-Saxon population they now ruled.

But states in which the vast majority of the population is oppressed and dominated by a thin slice of rulers and their mercenary enforcers tend to be much weaker and more brittle than those in which rulers and ruled share common interests, and I believe this is just as true for economic enforcers as for military ones. In many cases, lands reliant upon Jewish economic intermediaries, notably Poland, never successfully developed a native middle class, and often later fared quite poorly against their nationally-unified competitors. Spain was actually one of the last countries in Europe to expel its Jews, and over the next century or two reached the peak of its military and political glory. Prof. Kevin MacDonald’s controversial books on Judaism have also extensively argued that rulers who seem to have been more concerned for the well-being of their subjects also tend to be the ones more likely to be labeled “anti-Semitic” in modern history books, and his volumes are now easily available in my selection of HTML Books:

• A People That Shall Dwell Alone
  Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy
  Kevin MacDonald • 1994 • 168,000 Words
• Separation and Its Discontents
  Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism
  Kevin MacDonald • 1998 • 168,000 Words

In 2009, Gene Expression blogger Razib Khan interviewed eminent evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson on the group selection ideas that have been his major focus. During this hour-long discussion, the theories of MacDonald became a major topic, with Wilson seeming to take them quite seriously, and pointing out that within the scientific framework “parasitism” has a simple technical definition, namely the exploitation of the large by the small. Unsurprisingly, the video record of such extremely touchy subject matter was quickly truncated to just the first 11 minutes, and eventually completely removed from both YouTube and BloggingHeadsTV. But it still at least partially survives in archived form:

In recent years, the history of Jewish expulsions from various European societies over the last thousand years has received considerable attention. The total number is somewhat disputed but almost certainly in excess of 100, with the 1930s policies of Hitler’s Germany being merely the most recent example, and Wired Magazine provided an interesting graphical presentation of this large dataset in 2013. Given these unfortunate facts, it may be difficult to point to any other group so consistently at bitter odds with its local neighbors, and the religious details provided by Shahak certainly make this remarkable historical pattern far less inexplicable.

A very even-handed but candid description of the behavior pattern of Jewish newcomers to America was provided in a chapter of a 1914 book on immigration groups by E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists. Ross had been one of the towering Progressive intellectuals of his era, widely quoted by Lothrop Stoddard on the Right while still so highly regarded by the Left that he was named to the Dewey Commission to adjudicate the conflicting accusations of Trotsky and Stalin and also received glowing praise in the pages of the Communist New Masses. His dismissal on political grounds from Stanford University led to the formation of the American Association of University Professors. Yet his name had so totally vanished from our history books I had never even encountered it until beginning work on my content-archiving project, and I would not be surprised if that single chapter from one of his many books played a major role in his disappearance.

• The Old World in the New
  The Eastern European Hebrews
  E.A. Ross • 1914 • 5,000 Words

Jews spent two thousand years living as a diaspora people, and their tightly-bound trans-national colonies provided them with a uniquely effective international trading network. Since their religious traditions regarded slavery as the natural and appropriate lot of all non-Jews, both ideological and practical factors combined to apparently make them some of the leading slave-traders of Medieval Europe, though this is hardly emphasized in our histories. Closer to home, in 1991 the Black Nationalists of The Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, which seemed to persuasively document the enormous role Jews had played in the American slave-trade. In 1994, Harold Brackman published a short attempted rebuttal entitled Ministry of Lies under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but I found his denials much less compelling. I very much doubt that most Americans are aware of these historical facts.

Throughout most of my life, Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn was generally regarded as the greatest Russian literary figure of our modern era, and after reading all of his works, including The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago, I certainly concurred with this assertion, and eagerly absorbed Michael Scammel’s brilliant thousand page biography. Although Russian himself, many of his closest friends were Jewish, but during the 1980s and 1990s, whispers of his supposed anti-Semitism began floating around, probably because he had sometimes hinted at the very prominent role of Jews in both financing and leading the Bolshevik Revolution, and afterward staffing the NKVD and administering the Gulag labor camps. Late in his life, he wrote a massive two-volume history of the tangled relationship between Jews and Russians under the title Two Hundred Years Together, and although that work soon appeared in Russian, French, and German, after nearly two decades, no English translation has ever been authorized. His literary star also seems to have greatly waned in America since that time, and these days I only very rarely see his name mentioned in any of my regular newspapers.

Samizdat versions of major sections of his final work may easily be located on the Internet, and a few years ago Amazon temporarily sold a 750 page hard copy edition, which I ordered and lightly skimmed. Everything seemed quite innocuous and factual, and nothing new jumped out at me, but perhaps the documentation of the very heavy Jewish role in Communism was considered inappropriate for American audiences, as was the discussion of the extremely exploitative relationship between Jews and Slavic peasants in pre-revolutionary times, based on liquor-dealing and money-lending, which the Czars had often sought to mitigate.

When a ruling elite only has a limited connection to the population it controls, benevolent behavior is far less likely to occur, and those problems are magnified when that elite has a long tradition of ruthlessly extractive behavior. Enormous numbers of Russians suffered and died in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and given the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the top leadership during much of that period, it is hardly surprising that “anti-Semitism” was deemed a capital offense. Kevin MacDonald may have been the one who coined the term “hostile elite,” and discussed the unfortunate consequences when a country comes under such control.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, reborn Russia soon fell under the overwhelming domination of a small group of Oligarchs, almost entirely of Jewish background, and a decade of total misery and impoverishment for the general Russian population soon followed. But once an actual Russian named Vladimir Putin regained control, these trends reversed and the lives of Russians have enormously improved since that time. America’s media organs were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia when it was under Jewish Oligarchic rule, while Putin has been demonized in the press more ferociously than any world leader since Hitler. Indeed, our media pundits regularly identify Putin as “the new Hitler” and I actually think the analogy might be a reasonable one, but just not in the way they intend.

Sometimes it is much easier to notice obvious patterns in a foreign country than in one’s own. In the early 2000s I read The Master Switch, a widely-praised history of modern communications technology by Columbia University professor Tim Wu, who has subsequently become a leading Internet-rights activist. I found the account fascinating, with so many stories never before known to me. However, I couldn’t help but notice that all the powerful mass-media technologies of our modern world–film, radio, and television–had been invented and pioneered by Gentiles, mostly of Anglo-Saxon origin, but in each case control was seized by ruthless Jewish businessmen, who sometimes destroyed the lives and careers of those creators. By the 1950s, nearly all of America’s leading concentrations of electronic media power—with the sole major exception of Disney Studios—were solidly in Jewish hands. In an open society such as ours, these are the central levers of political influence, and over the next generation or so, America’s long-dominant and heavily Anglo-Saxon ruling elite was replaced by a mostly Jewish one, a development I alluded to in my long Meritocracy article of a few years ago.

Critics today of all backgrounds bemoan the total impoverishment of so much of America’s once comfortably affluent middle class, noting that some sixty percent of the American population today possesses less than $500 in readily available savings. A younger generation has been reduced to permanent debt-servitude by ruinous student loans, while the the newspapers report that the opioid drug epidemic has claimed a dreadful toll in lives and family-breakdown even while Wall Street and other elite sectors of the financialized economy are richer than they have ever been before. There are certainly many different explanations for this sad economic trajectory, including technological change, growing international competition, and shifts of political power in the American system of government. But it does sometimes seem like a substantial fraction of our population has been reduced to a 21st century version of the drunken, ignorant, exploited, indebted, impoverished, and immiserated Slavic peasantry of the Jewish-dominated Pale of Settlement, and a striking graph produced by the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates that a very sharp economic inflection point occurred in the early 1970s, right around the time that the aforementioned ethnic transformation of our ruling elites was fully under way.

Contrary to widespread popular belief, it is not actually illegal to be a “Nazi” in America, nor are Nazis prohibited from owning property, even including media outlets. But suppose that the overwhelming majority of America’s major media concentrations were owned and controlled by Nazis of a particularly fanatical type. Surely that might have serious consequences for the course of our society, and especially that fraction of the population viewed with considerable disfavor under Nazi doctrine.

One important point to consider in the abbreviated history of Hitler’s Third Reich was that although the ruling Nazi elite was often quite harsh and extreme in its behavior, well over 98% of the population it ruled prior to the outbreak of war consisted of Germans, the particular group which that ruling elite most sought to benefit and uplift in all possible ways, and despite the obscuring cloud of retrospective propaganda, this goal seems to have largely been achieved. In 2004, Counterpunch published a column by the late Alexander Cockburn, its redoubtable editor, noting the tremendous success of Hitler’s peacetime economic policies, and in 2013 that same webzine carried a much longer column focused entirely on this same subject, citing the analysis of Henry C.K. Liu, whose Chinese background provided him greater critical distance. Indeed, during most of the 1930s Hitler received widespread international praise for the great success of his domestic economic and social achievements, making the cover of Time Magazine on numerous occasions and even being named its Man of the Year for 1938. By contrast, I suspect that a population that was some 98% non-German but ruled by those same fanatically pro-German leaders might have fared far worse.

Most of these disheartening facts that have so completely upended my understanding of reality over the last decade could not possibly have come to my attention until the rise of the Internet, which partially broke centralized control over the distribution of information. But many other people must surely have known large portions of this important story long before that, and recognized the very serious consequences these matters might have for the future of our society. Why has there been so little public discussion?

I believe one factor is that over the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.

I’ve also sometimes suggested to people that one under-emphasized aspect of a Jewish population, greatly magnifying its problematical character, is the existence of what might be considered a biological sub-morph of exceptionally fanatical individuals, always on hair-trigger alert to launch verbal and sometimes physical attacks of unprecedented fury against anyone they regard as insufficiently friendly towards Jewish interests. Every now and then, a particularly brave or foolhardy public figure challenges some off-limits topic and is almost always overwhelmed and destroyed by a veritable swarm of these fanatical Jewish attackers. Just as the painful stings of the self-sacrificing warrior caste of an ant colony can quickly teach large predators to go elsewhere, fears of provoking these “Jewish berserkers” can often severely intimidate writers or politicians, causing them to choose their words very carefully or even completely avoid discussing certain controversial subjects, thereby greatly benefiting Jewish interests as a whole. And the more such influential people are thus intimidated into avoiding a particular topic, the more that topic is perceived as strictly taboo, and avoided by everyone else as well.

For example, about a dozen years ago I was having lunch with an especially eminent Neoconservative scholar with whom I’d become a little friendly. We were bemoaning the overwhelmingly leftward skew among America’s intellectual elites, and I suggested it largely seemed a function of our most elite universities. Many of our brightest students from across the nation entered Harvard and the other Ivies holding a variety of different ideological perspectives, but after four years departed those halls of learning overwhelmingly in left-liberal lock-step. Although he agreed with my assessment, he felt I was missing something important. He nervously glanced to both sides, shifted his head downward, and lowered his voice. “It’s the Jews,” he said.

I do not doubt that much of the candid analysis provided above will be quite distressing to many individuals. Indeed, some may believe that such material far exceeds the boundaries of mere “anti-Semitism” and easily crosses the threshold into constituting an actual “blood libel” against the Jewish people. That extremely harsh accusation, widely used by stalwart defenders of Israeli behavior, refers to the notorious Christian superstition, prevalent throughout most of the Middle Ages and even into more modern times, that Jews sometimes kidnapped small Christian children in order to drain their blood for use in various magic rituals, especially in connection with the Purim religious holiday. One of my more shocking discoveries of the last dozen years is that there is a fairly strong likelihood that these seemingly impossible beliefs were actually true.

I personally have no professional expertise whatsoever in Jewish ritual traditions, nor the practices of Medieval Jewry. But one of the world’s foremost scholars in that field is Ariel Toaff, professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval Studies at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, and himself the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome.

In 2007, he published the Italian edition of his academic study Blood Passovers, based on many years of diligent research, assisted by his graduate students and guided by the suggestions of his various academic colleagues, with the initial print run of 1,000 copies selling out on the first day. Given Toaff’s international eminence and such enormous interest, further international distribution, including an English edition by a prestigious American academic press would normally have followed. But the ADL and various other Jewish-activist groups regarded such a possibility with extreme disfavor, and although these activists lacked any scholarly credentials, they apparently applied sufficient pressure to cancel all additional publication. Although Prof. Toaff initially attempted to stand his ground in stubborn fashion, he soon took the same course as Galileo, and his apologies naturally became the basis of the always-unreliable Wikipedia entry on the topic.

Eventually, an English translation of his text turned up on the Internet in a PDF format and was also placed for sale on Amazon.com, where I purchased a copy and eventually read it. Given those difficult circumstances, this work of 500 pages is hardly in ideal form, with most of the hundreds of footnotes disconnected from the text, but it still provides a reasonable means of evaluating Toaff’s controversial thesis, at least from a layman’s perspective. He certainly seems an extremely erudite scholar, drawing heavily upon the secondary literature in English, French, German, and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Indeed, despite the shocking nature of the subject matter, this scholarly work is actually rather dry and somewhat dull, with very long digressions regarding the particular intrigues of various obscure Medieval Jews. My own total lack of expertise in these areas must be emphasized, but overall I thought Toaff made a quite persuasive case.

It appears that a considerable number of Ashkenazi Jews traditionally regarded Christian blood as having powerful magical properties and considered it a very valuable component of certain important ritual observances at particular religious holidays. Obviously, obtaining such blood in large amounts was fraught with considerable risk, which greatly enhanced its monetary value, and the trade in the vials of that precious commodity seems to have been widely practiced. Toaff notes that since the detailed descriptions of the Jewish ritualistic murder practices are very similarly described in locations widely separated by geography, language, culture, and time period, they are almost certainly independent observations of the same rite. Furthermore, he notes that when accused Jews were caught and questioned, they often correctly described obscure religious rituals which could not possibly have been known to their Gentile interrogators, who often garbled minor details. Thus, these confessions were very unlikely to have been concocted by the authorities.

Furthermore, as extensively discussed by Shahak, the world-view of traditional Judaism did involve a very widespread emphasis on magical rituals, spells, charms, and similar things, providing a context in which ritualistic murder and human sacrifice would hardly be totally unexpected.

Obviously, the ritual murder of Christian children for their blood was viewed with enormous disfavor by the local Gentile population, and the widespread belief in its existence remained a source of bitter tension between the two communities, flaring up occasionally when a Christian child mysteriously disappeared at a particular time of year, or when a body was found that exhibited suspicious types of wounds or showed a strange loss of blood. Every now and then, a particular case would reach public prominence, often leading to a political test of strength between Jewish and anti-Jewish groups. During the mid-19th century, there was one such famous case in French-dominated Syria, and just before the outbreak of the First World War, Russia was wracked by a similar political conflict in the 1913 Beilis Affair in the Ukraine.

I first encountered these very surprising ideas almost a dozen years ago in a long article by Israel Shamir that was referenced in Counterpunch, and this would definitely be worth reading as an overall summary, together with a couple of his follow-up columns, while writer Andrew Hamilton offers the most recent 2012 overview of the controversy. Shamir also helpfully provides a free copy of the book in PDF form, an updated version with the footnotes properly noted in the text. Anyway, I lack the expertise to effectively judge the likelihood of the Toaff Hypothesis, so I would invite those interested to read Toaff’s book or better yet the related articles and decide for themselves.

The notion that the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine has often been misattributed to the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, and over the last fifteen-odd years I’ve sometimes begun to believe that the historical events of our own era could be considered in a similar light. I’ve also sometimes joked with my friends that when the true history of our last one hundred years is finally written and told—probably by a Chinese professor at a Chinese university—none of the students in his lecture hall will ever believe a word of it.

Related Readings:

• Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak
• The Old World in the New by E.A. Ross
• A People That Shall Dwell Alone by Kevin MacDonald
• Separation and Its Discontents by Kevin MacDonald
• Understanding Jewish Influence I: Background Traits for Jewish Activism by Kevin MacDonald
• The Bloody Passovers of Dr. Toaff by Israel Shamir

Sorry, Wrong Address – Radical Liberals Paint Blood Leave Severed Pig’s Head

Rowan Dalbey, 20, Kristen Aumoithe, 34, and Amber Lucas, 35

Rowan Dalbey, 20, Kristen Aumoithe, 34, and Amber Lucas, 35

3 Arrested in Vandalism of Chauvin Defense Witness’ Old Santa Rosa Home

Rowan Dalbey, 20, Kristen Aumoithe, 34, and Amber Lucas, 35, all of Santa Rosa, were arrested Tuesday on felony vandalism and conspiracy charges

By The Associated Press • Published May 12, 2021 • Updated on May 12, 2021 at 10:52 pm

Three women have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the one-time Northern California home of a former police officer who testified on behalf of the officer convicted of killing George Floyd by splashing pig blood on it and leaving a pig’s head near the front porch.

Rowan Dalbey, 20, Kristen Aumoithe, 34, and Amber Lucas, 35, all of Santa Rosa, were arrested Tuesday on felony vandalism and conspiracy charges. They were cited and released, Santa Rosa Police spokeswoman Lt. Jeneane Kucker said Wednesday.

Police say vandals threw blood and a pig’s head at a home once owned by retired Santa Rosa officer Barry Brodd, who recently testified in the Derek Chauvin trial.

After targeting home on April 17, the women also allegedly smeared pig blood on a large hand statue in Santa Rosa Plaza and left a picture of a pig reading “Oink Oink.” They have also been charged with that vandalism, Kucker said.

It wasn’t immediately known if the women have an attorney who can speak on their behalf.

Kucker said detectives believe there are additional possible suspects and are asking the community to help identify them.

The home in the city north of San Francisco once belonged to Barry Brodd, a retired police officer who was on the stand in the murder trial against former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

Brodd, a former Santa Rosa police officer, testified at the murder trial that he believes Chauvin’s restraint of Floyd was in keeping with proper police practice.

Chauvin was convicted last month of murder and manslaughter charges.Copyright AP – Associated Press

Россия: Парад в Москве, май 2019

https://videopress.com/v/NHSzGWGI?preloadContent=metadata

Jesus Is Painted Into A Corner of the Wall Around The Palestinians

Political and social mural painting and graffitis illustrating Jesus Christ on the Israeli West Bank barrier in Bethlehem on April 10, 2014

Italy: Dock Workers Refuse to Load Israeli Arms Shipment – Stop The Israeli War Machine (Left Voice) 14 May 2021

Italian Dockers Stop Arms Shipment to Israel in Solidarity with Palestine

Post on: May 14, 2021  Left Voice

After discovering that a shipment of arms destined for Israel was arriving in Italy’s ports, workers organized in one of Italy’s main unions, L’Unione Sindacale di Base, and other workers’ organizations refused to load the ship in support of the Palestinians fighting for their lives against Israeli occupation. Tweet

Asiatic Island sailing

This Friday the Asiatic Island arrived in the port of Livorno, Italy. Thanks to the report of the Autonomous Collective of Port Workers of Genoa and the WeaponWatch association, the port workers, organized in L’Unione Sindacale di Base, learned that the ship was filled with weapons and explosives bound for the Israeli dock of Ashdod. These weapons and explosives would be used to kill Palestinians, who have already been hit by a brutal Israeli military offensive that has murdered hundreds of victims, including many children. The union announced shortly after that it would not allow this or any other maritime shipments of armaments to set sail for Israel. 

The dockworkers’ unions in Italy are trying to gather more information about the shipments coming to their ports in order to prevent military supplies from arriving in Israel. Just yesterday they received a report about the presence of dozens of armored military vehicles ready to be loaded onto another ship, the Molo Italia.

This Saturday, the L’Unione Sindacale di Base will be in the streets of Livorno marching in solidarity with the Palestinian population to demand the immediate cessation of the bombing of Gaza and the evictions of Palestinians from their homes.

This example of workers’ solidarity, if multiplied and expanded internationally, could be powerful enough to stop the criminal attacks of the State of Israel against Palestine. 

In the United States, the labor movement must take this example into its own hands and actively mobilize against the Biden administration’s policy of “unwavering support” and military aid for Israel and boycott any U.S. shipments of weapons destined to be used against the people of Palestine. We must take up the example of sectors of the labor movement that in 2008 took action in the U.S. against the imperialist war against Iraq. The international solidarity actions with Palestine called for this Saturday in the United States and around the world could be the beginning of an anti-imperialist movement in the heart of the U.S. empire, one that takes up the cause of the Palestinian people as its own. Unions must move from declarations and words to deeds and mobilize to demand an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and the bloody occupation of Palestine.

Italian Dockers Stop Arms Shipment to Israel in Solidarity with Palestine | Left Voice

North Korea: Target Stalinist Leadership – CIA Backed Graphic Novel War Propaganda

Xenagogue

Vicene

The Warmth Of The Sun Comes To Massachusetts in May – Mona Lisa In Blue Sidewalk Chalk

The streets are one vast canvas…

Meet the Censored: C.J. Hopkins, Critic of the “New Normal” – by Matt Taibbi (Greyzone) 13 May 2021

Internet platforms have had a sense of humor failure about the Germany-based playwright, author, and satirist, one of many zapped for criticism of pandemic policies

Matt Taibbi

The arrival of Covid-19 has crashed America on a paradox that reads like the plot of a bad Star Trek episode. Half the country mistakes science for a set of inflexible decrees and demands it be worshipped as a religion. The other half believes the first group is always lying and defies even its sensible dictates, in its own theology of liberation. Science, a deliberative process, is collateral damage to the battle.

C.J. Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and columnist living in Berlin. His writing first came to my attention shortly after the election of Donald Trump, when he was one of the first American writers anywhere to peg Russiagate and the campaign against “fake news” as a targeting mechanism, for identifying dissident groups who now needed to be monitored and perhaps censored. He wrote this in late 2016:

Who’s behind this “fake news” menace? Well, Putin, naturally, but not just Putin. It appears to be the work of a vast conspiracy of virulent anti-establishment types, ultra-alt-rightists, ultra-leftists, libertarian retirees, armchair socialists, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, ontological terrorists, fascism normalizers, poorly educated anti-Globalism freaks, and just garden variety Clinton-haters.

Not long into the Trump presidency, when there began to be questions about factual errors popping up in sensational exposés about the Orange One, Hopkins wrote:

Absurd as it obviously is, millions of Americans are now rushing to defend the most fearsome propaganda machine in the history of fearsome propaganda machines from one inarticulate, populist boogeyman who can’t maintain his train of thought for more than fifteen or twenty seconds.

Hopkins was no Trump fan, but his writings from the Trump era became an often hilarious review of the catastrophizing that was the mandatory posture of op-ed pages during those years. He skewered hand-wringing pundits who beginning in late 2016 predicted the end of civilization in total seriousness, from the Guardian announcing the beginning of an “Age of Darkness” and the end of “civilized order,” to Paul Krugman’s prediction “a global recession with no end in sight,” to Jonathan Chait, “after heroically vowing not to flee the country with his terrified family,” guaranteeing Trump would “shake the republic to its foundations.”

His take on the pandemic began in a similar vein. Once again, he took aim at overwrought official rhetoric, interpreting a lot of the coronavirus response as an opportunistic, authoritarian power grab by the global neoliberal project. He was critical of Germany’s creepily-named Infection Protection Act, a law that took power from the country’s 16 states and allowed for the open-ended imposition of any measure the federal authorities deemed necessary, including lockdowns and overnight curfews. He blanched as the government’s response to protests against all of this grew increasingly ham-fisted:Consent Factory @consent_factoryThousands gathered outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the “New Normal” totalitarianism this morning, so the police declared the demonstration illegal and turned the water cannons on them … are you satisfied yet, totalitarians? November 18th 2020315 Retweets676 Likes

Most of all, Hopkins has been critical of the emotional tenor of propaganda around Covid-19, which treats the crisis not as a logistical problem to be solved but as a signal that people should fundamentally alter their expectations for life, lowering demands for political freedoms, making the terror of death a constant public relations fixation, and embracing a “new normal” of heightened surveillance and security rituals. “Society has been transformed into… an enormous hospital from which there is no escape,” he wrote, adding:

You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their ‘normal’ lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields. What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.

Not long ago, Hopkins shared on Facebook a picture of a tower in Dusseldorf on which was written the message, “Vaccination = Freedom.” He compared it to the infamous Auschwitz message Arbeit macht frei, i.e. “Work shall set you free.” Facebook said it violated community standards against “dangerous individuals,” and removed it to prevent “offline harm.” He soon found that friends and acquaintances were prevented from sharing this and other posts of his. A website where he publishes also appeared to be permanently slapped with warning labels, one fairly well-known — he tells the story below.

The political manias that have grown up around coronavirus want to sort people into groups that “believe” science and don’t, but the problem there is that much of the propaganda around coronavirus has intentionally blurred distinctions between scientific and political authority. A trend both in reporting and censorship involves describing any political opposition to pandemic policy as scientific denialism. People opposed to vaccine passports become “anti-vaxxers,” opponents of curfews or lockdowns become virus “deniers,” and so on. (Sometimes they are both things. But not always).

I’d be the last person to ever suggest an unvaccinated person go without a mask — I wore one everywhere since this thing started — but the symbolism of, say, a vaccinated Joe Biden still wearing a mask outdoors in defiance of CDC guidelines, or Kamala Harris releasing pictures of herself wearing a mask for a Zoom call, is increasingly obvious. For a politician, the mask is a symbol of the authority he or she has borrowed from science, and removing one is a symbol that the fear justifying emergency power has subsided. It’s hardly surprising to see a reluctance to take masks off, even when scientists say it’s fine to do so.

The German domestic intelligence service recently announced that it’s put “coronavirus deniers” under surveillance, because, as the New York Times explains, “they posed a risk of undermining the state.” Whether or not that will include someone like Hopkins is anyone’s guess, but it’s become clear in recent months and weeks that the standard for deleting or blocking coronavirus-related content is widening dramatically, to include everything from tasteless jokes to sarcastic complaints about health officials to the dreaded Questions About Wuhan.

A previous subject of this column, U.S. Right to Know, may have been dinged by Google for publishing public records about U.S.-funded collaboration with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology. Over the last year, scores of websites and Facebook accounts were either shut down or suspended for various speculations about the Wuhan Institute, but now that former CDC director Robert Redfield told Sanjay Gupta on CNN, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped,” once-prohibited views have had to be re-mainstreamed. This underscored what should have been an obvious problem with shutting down discussions at the outset of complex news events.

I talked about these and other questions with Hopkins, who on the page is fulminating, sarcastic, hyperbolic, funny, and opinionated. I don’t agree with him about some things — I’m not particularly not a capitalist, for instance — but I never thought agreement was a prerequisite for enjoying a writer, and Hopkins is a fun one. He is the kind of person who is frankly too blunt and too interesting to be employed at an American newspaper, which is great for his readers, but probably less of a gas for him, since his type tends to be the first sent off the plank in any censorship regime.

Incidentally, I’d be interested to hear any stories from any readers about having Covid-19 related content removed or deleted. Here is the account from Hopkins:

TK: What stories have you been prevented from sharing on the Internet?

Hopkins: Perhaps the most dramatic example was the censorship of a Facebook post featuring a photo of a “New Normal” art exhibit in Germany where the artist projected “Vaccination = Freedom” on one of those gigantic TV towers that we have here. Of course, that evoked the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the gates of Auschwitz, which I noted in my post (i.e., “Not quite ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ but close enough”). Facebook prevented people from sharing the post, and, when they inquired about why, sent them this warning: “Your post goes against our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organizations … we don’t allow symbols or support of dangerous individuals or organizations on Facebook. We define dangerous as things like terrorist activity, organized hate or violence, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, criminal or harmful activity.” Many people who tried to share the post had their accounts suspended or restricted. I covered this in detail in one of my Consent Factory columns, The New Normal “Reality” Police.

More recently, YouTube censored an interview (“Corona Kult”) I did with Gunnar Kaiser, an author and well-known YouTuber here in Germany, on the grounds that it “contains medical misinformation.” The interview contains no medical information at all. It’s just me and another author discussing our views of the Covid-19 restrictions, “New Normal” ideology, global capitalism, totalitarianism, my novel, and so on.

Those are the most notable examples, but I routinely hear from people on Facebook that they have been prevented from sharing my Consent Factory columns. I haven’t been censored by Twitter that I know of, but they have pretty much “unpersoned” OffGuardian, which has been actively and critically reporting on the Covid-19 story since the beginning, and which reposts most of my columns. When you click on any OffGuardian story on Twitter, you get a warning stating “this link may be unsafe.” Of course, there’s nothing unsafe about OffGuardian. The warning is simply a means of trying to scare people away from their website and content.

The censorship is clearly targeted at any content deviating from the official Covid-19/New Normal narrative. It has reached hysterical levels on Facebook, where any posts including the words “vaccine,” “Covid,” etc., are instantly festooned with an advisory warning about how “vaccines are tested for safety and effectiveness” or whatever.

TK: The tech platforms will tell me you’re spreading anti-vaxxer propaganda. What would be your response to that?

Hopkins: They’re half right. Almost everything I put out on social media is technically “propaganda,” i.e, “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or damage an opposing cause” (i.e., one of the Merriam-Webster definitions of the word). That said, most people think of propaganda as misleading, and I’m not trying to mislead anyone. I am trying to urge people to question the official propaganda that the corporate media and other “authoritative sources” inundate us with on a daily basis, much of which is, in fact, misleading.

As for the “anti-vaxxer” part, (a) I have no problem with vaccines that have been thoroughly tested and approved for public use, and which people aren’t being coerced into taking by the introduction of a medical segregation system, and (b) these derogatory labels, “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “Covid denier” are meaningless. They’re purely tactical terms, like the term “extremist.” Their only purpose is to demonize anyone who questions or challenges the official “New Normal” narrative.

Incidentally, “Covid denier,” the official demonization label in Germany, has a particularly horrible ring to it here, which is no accident. The government and media have intentionally equated anyone who questions or challenges the official “New Normal” narrative with anti-Semites and neo-Nazis for over a year. It’s the most effective and frightening demonization campaign I have ever witnessed, and I’ve witnessed a few.

TK: Is Facebook’s content moderation policy in Germany different from its U.S. policy? Is there a cultural difference in how Germans view content moderation, since they already had hate speech laws?

Hopkins: I’m sure German Facebook’s policy is different, but this censorship isn’t limited to Germany. It’s worldwide. As for the cultural difference, yes, there is one, but it’s mainly focused on anti-Semitism, and anything to do with the Nazis, which is why the official campaign to demonize those of us challenging or protesting against the “New Normal” as “anti-Semites” has been so effective here. Being accused of anti-Semitism is every prominent German’s worst nightmare.

TK: You were one of the first people to express skepticism about Russiagate. Do you see a connection between that story and this one?

Hopkins: Absolutely, same operation, different narrative. OK, I’ll try to boil all this down as much as I can, so bear with me. We have to go back to 2016 …

So, there global capitalism was, happily destabilizing, restructuring, privatizing, and debt-enslaving the entire planet, and cleaning up little pockets of resistance to global capitalist ideology, as it had been doing since the fall of the USSR, which is when global capitalism became the first unopposed globally-hegemonic ideological system in history. The War on Terror was still the primary official narrative. Then Brexit, Trump, and the whole populist backlash against globalization and wokeness that erupted in 2016. So global capitalism (or “GloboCap,” as I’ve taken to calling it) needed to adjust the official narrative to delegitimize Trump, who was (a) an unauthorized president and (b) a symbol of that populist backlash, basically, a big “fuck you” to the global capitalist establishment from the American people.

OK, GloboCap spends the next four years demonizing Trump as both a Russian intelligence asset and literally the Resurrection of Adolf Hitler, and everyone who voted for him (or who refused to vote for Clinton) as “fascists,” or “white-supremacist extremists,” or just “racists.” Russiagate fell apart in the Spring of 2019, but by that time GloboCap had already shifted to Hitlergate, and was whipping up mass hysteria over “literal fascism” and the coming frontal “attack on democracy” (and presumably the US military) that was going to be carried out by Trump’s underground militia of Alex-Jones-watching “white supremacists,” or whatever.

But Russiagate/Hitlergate was never about Trump, who was never a threat to GloboCap, and was always just a narcissistic ass clown. It was about reminding us who’s running things, and what happens if we start rebelling against the hegemony of global capitalism and electing unauthorized ass-clown presidents instead of the corporate puppets GloboCap has carefully vetted and presented to us to obediently vote for. What happens is, they make an example of the ass-clown president and demonize everyone who voted for him as “traitors” and “racists.” The narrative culminated in 2020 with the BLM protests/riots, the “Storming of the Capitol,” etc. Russian Hitler was vanquished. “Democracy” triumphed. So now it was time to “restore normality” … or, rather, “New Normality.”

Essentially, what the last 4-5 years have been about is crushing resistance to GloboCap’s hegemony and ideology throughout the West, as it crushed resistance to its hegemony and ideology in the Middle East during the War on Terror. What better way to crush a populist rebellion and remind us who is really in charge than to foment mass hysteria over a clearly non-apocalyptic virus, impose a bunch of unnecessary, totalitarian “emergency measures,” cancel our constitutional rights, censor and/or demonize dissent, and otherwise transform societies into pathologized-totalitarian police states?

The extreme totalitarian phase won’t last (we’re already shifting into Phase 2), but the “New Normal” is here to stay, or that’s the plan anyway. Which is not a surprise, or it shouldn’t be. GloboCap announced the transition to the “New Normal” very clearly, right at the outset, in March/April 2020, when they were still showing us fake photos of Chinese people dropping dead in the street, projecting a horrific 3.4% death rate (i.e., hundreds of millions of deaths), and otherwise carrying out the initial “Shock and Awe” phase.

OK, before somebody calls me a “conspiracy theorist,” GloboCap is not a bunch of guys in a room conspiring to do all this. Global capitalism is a system. Systems function according to their own structures and logic. What I’m talking about is not individual people conspiring (although individual people certainly do, and that is part of it). I’m talking about the logical evolution of a global-hegemonic ideological system, i.e., a system without external enemies, which has nothing left to do but consolidate power and eliminate internal resistance. If you understand the last 5-6 years (actually the last 30 years) that way, as I do, this shift to a less democratic, more ideologically monolithic, more totalitarian social structure (i.e., the “New Normal”) is not at all surprising. On the contrary, it is the next logical step.

The corrupt state of the corporate media that you and Glenn Greenwald have been writing about recently is also a part of this shift toward an ideologically monolithic global-capitalist societal structure, but I think I’ve rattled on here long enough, so let’s leave that for another time.

TK: Have you lost friends in the theater world because of this issue?

Hopkins: Yes, friends and colleagues. Questioning the official Covid narrative, or any aspect of the “New Normal,” is pretty much the third rail in the arts and entertainment business. You interviewed Mark Crispin Miller about what he’s has been going through defending himself from the “New Normal” fanatics at NYU. That kind of thing happens less formally in the arts. As Woody Allen famously put it, “it’s not dog-eat-dog … it’s more a dog-doesn’t-return-other-dog’s-phone-calls” type of business.

TK: Have you self-censored because of all this, and if so, in what way?

Hopkins: Does it sound like it? No, I think experiencing the roll-out of the “New Normal” for over a year, compiling stories of police goon squads raiding families in their homes because their neighbors reported them for “having friends over to dinner,” arresting old ladies for “strolling in the park without permission,” witnessing the media demonize Holocaust survivors as “anti-Semites” for protesting the Covid restrictions, reading ex-colleagues demanding that the government set up internment camps for those who refuse to be “vaccinated,” and all the rest of it, has only made me more outspoken, and, unfortunately, less funny.

US Labor Union Supporters Should ‘Look For the Union Label’ On Nonprofit Solicitations For Money – by Eric A. Gordon (People’s World) 13 May 2021

Do you ‘look for the union label’ on nonprofit solicitations?

May 13, 2021 11:01 AM CDT  BY ERIC A. GORDON

Images: ILGWU

“Look for the union label!” Remember that little ditty on TV that promoted consumption of union-made goods and products? It’s good advice, whether you’re purchasing a car or appliance, clothing, food or drinks. Consumers have tremendous power to affect the common good by focusing their buying habits on union-made, union-grown, union-marketed products. Employers will eventually become more favorable to unionization when they see their unionized competition is gaining on them owing to popular favor.

Maybe the same principle can be applied to organizations that solicit our financial support—healthcare institutions and advocacy groups, human rights, arts, environmental, religious, gun control, voting rights, etc.

If the United States did what no other country had ever managed to do—create a solidly middle-income society in the post-WWII decades (although with some major racial and regional gaps that cannot be ignored)—the explanation is inescapable: Unionization in major industries allowed a single earner to support a family, access a good healthcare plan for the whole family, purchase a home, take an annual vacation, send the kids to summer camp, set something aside for their music lessons and higher education, take in a movie and go out to a restaurant, celebrate a gift-filled Christmas, and count on a generous pension for their retirement years.

Every American knows this is very far from the reality of the present day, as union density has declined precipitously—one reason why so many women have entered or returned to the workforce (though I’m hardly advocating for a throwback to the male-dominated head of household days).

Yet if you look around the world, there are many countries that have retained most or all of these critical elements of a happy, healthy life. Those are still high-density union societies with strong labor and left parties ensconced in their social democratic governments. Though I’ve not conducted a deep study of this, I suspect that in such societies, where labor and human rights have a more secure foundation, where healthcare, education, and housing are guaranteed rights, where income is distributed more equitably, there is far less charitable solicitation, as social needs are generally already met.

In the U.S., Democratic Party candidates obey a rule (written or unwritten I have not been able to determine) that they must use union printers on their campaign literature. What would a Democratic campaign be, after all, if it did not have union members’ support?

The Biden-Harris administration’s explicit pro-union focus, support for a $15 minimum wage, and the president’s eagerness to sign the Protect the Right to Organize Act (the PRO Act) are all promising developments the labor movement is watching closely and encouraging. With the administration’s labor and family policies, child poverty could be slashed in half virtually overnight.

Charitable, religion-based, and non-profit organizations could be said to have a special interest in promoting union labor. Let’s take, for example, groups that focus on hunger, nutrition, diet, and food quality and access. If the United States were a more equitable society with at least the union density we had in the 1950s (about a third of all workers), more of our population would enjoy so-called “middle-class” wages and lifestyles—though I would prefer to call them decent working-class conditions, at least within a capitalist frame. Fewer schoolchildren would be hungry, people could be better educated as to food choices, workers on the job would have adequate, regularly scheduled lunch and snack breaks, and locally sourced food would be more the norm. There would be fewer homeless, hungry people on our streets if the economy were humming along more productively.

Extrapolate this scenario to health care, housing, education, racial justice, and the truth of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone’s saying comes into ever clearer view: “We all do better when we all do better.”

Cynical minds will wonder if such charitable organizations really do want to eradicate, or even lessen, the social problems they address—it might put them out of business! (Organized religion has shriveled in the “welfare state” societies as social needs are largely met by government.) But for the sake of this research, let’s pass on such speculations.

My questionnaire

I recently sent out a questionnaire to about 50 different organizations from whom I regular receive solicitations. “I am a donor to many non-profit and public-spirited organizations,” I wrote by way of introduction, “and I notice that some organizations make a point of using a union printer (and displaying the union bug) for their promotional materials, including return envelopes, and some do not.”

I had already collected samples of their return envelopes, so I pretty much knew in advance about their decision on union printers, but I wanted to hear their own voices. I asked about principle, frequency, reasons for their decision, and whether or not they receive feedback from their members and donors one way or another.

Many of the organizations not showing the union bug have strong liberal-progressive, even in some cases specifically Democratic Party or union affiliations, such as The Actors Fund of America, The Carter Center, City of Hope, Human Rights Campaign, The Metropolitan Opera, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Public Citizen, Smithsonian, Vote Smart. Apparently, in those groups that solicit our contributions, no one is wondering, “We’re asking working people to support us, but will they notice that from our printed materials it appears that we don’t support them?”

None of these jobs carry the union label.

I guess I was naïve: Of course I wouldn’t hear from the majority of my pool of sources, the non-union employers. Why would they make a public admission of it, especially to a journalist from People’s World? Although I did get a couple of interesting responses. From Everytown for Gun Safety: “Thank you for contacting us. Due to immense email volume we are unable to reply to all messages.” And from Debra at AARP: “Thank you for contacting AARP and for your interest in advertising with AARP.  I’m happy to help you with that.” My inquiry prompted inclusion on AARP’s new contact email list.

I did hear from another non-union employer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, though I suspect that Brenda Jones, Senior Director of Public Affairs, may not be that knowledgeable about the donation and membership appeals her group issues (that would be the “Creative Department,” from whom I have not heard). Nevertheless, Ms. Jones was personally friendly and supportive, and made some good observations about the current state of printing. “I very rarely use printers these days,” she replied, “but the union label is quite important to me. I think most people, especially young people, don’t realize the importance of unions and may not even check to see whether a printer is a part of the union or not. And increasingly more things are printed through online sources like Sezzle, Paperless Post and others. Most people would never think to ask whether those online companies like Amazon, American Greetings or ebook publishers use union printers.”

Finding the union bug

If many donors don’t notice whether or not their solicitations carry a union bug, it’s sort of understandable. It could be easy to miss unless you’ve trained your eye to spot it. It may be printed too tiny to read easily, and there’s usually a number to the right of the bug. That indicates which particular printshop unit produced the publication.

People’s World carries the union label of Chicago News Guild Local 34071.

The Printing, Publishing, and Media Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America and the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters make up the Allied Label. “Look and ask for the International Allied Printing Trades Council label – the familiar ‘bug’ – on all printed material,” says Allied Label. “It’s your assurance of quality and craftsmanship. The bug also guarantees that the men and women who work on your printed materials receive good wages and benefits in plants that practice responsible labor-management relations. When you patronize the union plants listed in this directory, you are helping to maintain the union advantage in the printing industry.” Go here for more information on where to find a union printshop near you. Most states have at least one, but with the advances in digital technology, in most cases the job can be done virtually without physically visiting the printshop offices.

None of these have a union label.

The Allied Label may not be the only official union bug you see on some printed materials, however. Some unions have their own print operations and put their own logos on their work, such as USW, UAW, and IWW.

Other adornments on the print job that could be confusing include the BBB (Better Business Bureau) logo as an “Accredited Charity,” the “Four Star Charity” logo of Charity Navigator, the recycling logo, and the legends “Printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks,” “printed with earth friendly water-based inks” (or “vegetable-based inks”), “printed on recyclable paper with environmentally friendly ink,” “100% recycled paper 30% post consumer” (or 10%), “Recycle please,” “Your stamp on this envelope is an additional contribution to our work. God bless you!” None of these are union labels—perhaps they even serve as something of a distraction from the non-employment of a union printer.

Union printers do not limit their services to the kinds of promotional literature we see in our mailboxes most days. They also produce promotional items and t-shirts, business stationery, web design and hosting, silk screen printing, lithographs, signs and posters, banners, graphic design, mailing and sorting, and much more.

Nor any of these.

Responses from pro-union employers

My survey did elicit some responses from pro-union employers. Veda Banerjee wrote to me from the California League of Conservation Voters: “We use Dakota Press for all our printing purposes. They are local to the Bay Area and our values align.” Dakota is a union printer and women’s business enterprise committed to minority suppliers and green business.

The most complete answers to my questionnaire came from Cathy Renna of the National LGBTQ Task Force, who wrote that her organization uses a union printer “most of the time. Miami is the only exception,” and that using one is a matter of “principle.” I asked my respondents to explain their choice. Renna said, “We are a union shop—our non-mgmt employees are members of SEIU. We are also a progressive organization that believes in unions.” She reports not receiving any feedback from members and donors on this issue.

Ari Boyajian of Image Cube, a union print house since 2016 in Los Angeles, enlightened me to something I hadn’t thought about before. Their website indicates they do a lot of campaign print work. I asked if Republicans use union printers. “No, they do not, they prefer not to. We do some printing for them, but very, very rare, but they ask that the union bug be removed.” Although he did tell me about a collector’s item on his wall, a campaign poster for Richard Nixon which sports a union bug.

And in some other cases, such as the printing he does for City of Hope, the huge medical research and treatment center in Duarte, Calif., where staff are organized into the National Nurses Union and SEIU, they don’t ask for the bug. “Most businesses don’t care for it,” Boyajian says, probably out of concern that some of their clients and donors may not appreciate unions or may feel their donor dollars are being unwisely spent on higher union printing. And yes, a union job can often be more expensive, because that contract includes a pay scale, vacations, sick and family leave, holidays, etc., that every worker should have but not all do.

Other causes I wrote to who do use union printing didn’t respond to my query, but I’d like to acknowledge them because I do appreciate their statement of principle: About Face, Bend the Arc, Common Cause, End Citizens United, Giffords PAC, Greenpeace, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Sierra Club California (but not the national Sierra Club), Union of Concerned Scientists, and Vote Vets. This is far from an exclusive list of pro-union charities.

I struggle with this issue. For me personally, it is not quite so open and shut as it might be for a Democratic Party candidate. These organizations that don’t use union printers do incredibly important work. Some of them are very close to my heart, like the ACLU or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, American Foundation for AIDS Research, American Humanist Association, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Brady Campaign, Drug Policy Alliance, Earthjustice, Ocean Conservancy, Population Connection, and others I could name. Do I withhold my dollars over this complaint? Am I going to be a “single-issue” donor focusing not on the mission but only on union printing?

Sometimes I’ll return a donation and write, “I sure wish you’d start using a union printer—we’re all in this together, you know,” but feel I am talking to the wind. How do we build a movement that truly plants in the public mind the connection between unionization—in all fields—with social betterment overall? Perhaps it could even be proven some day that the extra pennies spent on union printing pay off because pro-union donors will answer approvingly.

Still, I look for the union label because I know that “We all do better when we all do better.”

US Post Office Banking – We Had It Once – Bring It Back – End Payday Loan Sharking – by Brian Wakamo

BY BRIAN WAKAMO

Vintage mailbox hand drawing engraving style

At a recent press conference, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described a common scene at the check-cashing places that dot her Bronx neighborhood.

“Imagine showing up and having 10 to 20 percent of your check taken away from you,” she said. “That’s diapers, that’s baby formula, and that’s food that’s taken out of the hands of families just to cash a check.”

Ocasio-Cortez has long advocated for postal banking as an alternative to such predatory financial firms. She recently joined Representatives Marcy Kaptur and Bill Pascrell in drafting a letter signed by 33 members of the House of Representatives, calling for $6 million to be set aside in the federal budget for postal banking pilot programs.

Under their plan, USPS would experiment with offering expanding financial services, including surcharge-free ATMs, wire transfers, check cashing, and bill payment in five urban and five rural ZIP codes.

This would immediately benefit the pilot communities by giving them access to low-fee financial services. Nationwide, millions of people in America have to rely on predatory financial services. The problem is especially severe for people of color. According to an FDIC survey, 13.8 percent of Black and 12.2 percent of Latinx households lack a bank account.

High fees for financial services cost working class people thousands of dollars during their lives, and with big Wall Street banks removing branches fromcommunities of color, it will only become a bigger problem.

The ultimate goal of the pilot project initiative would be to offer such services nationwide. USPS is well-placed to handle this expansion. Postal employees already handle money orders and some other limited financial services, but there is tremendous untapped potential to utilize the 31,000 post officesaround the country to provide trusted and affordable financial services.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already has the authority to expand basic financial services, including check cashing services, and the idea of a pilot projects has been floating around for years. But in his recently released 10-year plan, DeJoy made no mention of this issue. A mandate from Congress would final get the ball rolling.

The timing couldn’t be more critical.

An expansion of postal financial services would help low—income Americans save money as they struggle to get back on their feet from the crisis. Research shows that the rate of people taking out payday loans has tripled during the Covid-19 pandemic, and as people continue to receive unemployment and stimulus checks, check cashing services are making a killing off of the needs of the people.

Wire transfers have also boomed during the pandemic with people providing remittances to overseas friends and families in need.

Postal banking could also be a boon for the bottom line of the Postal Service.

“One in four households in the U.S. doesn’t have access to affordable financial services…But everyone has a post office,” Porter McConnell from the Save the Post Office Coalition said. “Piloting non-bank financial services at the post office would save working families in these communities thousands of dollars and would ultimately bring in over a billion dollars in revenue for the Postal Service every year.”

Expanding postal services is a win-win for everyone — except the predatory financial firms.

“Enjoy Enjaami”— A song about the aspirations of a tea plantation worker in India

https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=eYq7WapuDLU

The recently-released Indie music video “Enjoy Enjaami” (Enjoy, My dear), a four-and-half minute song about the struggle and hopes of a tea plantation worker in Sri Lanka, has been an extraordinary hit.

Performed by South Indian playback singer Dhee and lyricist-rapper Arivu, the song was released on March 7 and quickly went viral on YouTube and other online media platforms. In the first week, it was watched by 20 million people and has now climbed to over 190 million, a first for a non-film Tamil song.

Enjoy Enjaami

“Enjoy Enjaami” is a rare phenomenon in contemporary popular music and is clearly resonating with global audiences. The song is drawn from real life and calls on humanity to conserve and live in harmony with nature.

The song’s richly-layered lyrics, which passionately call for the unity of all people across communal lines, are in stark contrast to the poisonous climate of nationalism, xenophobia and war being promoted by imperialist and capitalist governments everywhere.

Blessed to lead a good life,
Our ancestors have bequeathed us this soil,
Across the river banks, and on the fertile fields,
Our forefathers have sung through their life
The lakes and ponds belongs tothe dogs, foxes, and cats, too..

“Enjoy Enjaami” is the first music video release by Maajja, an independent music label initiated by A.R. Rahman, the Academy-award-winning Indian composer and musician. Rahman launched the label to promote and support independent artists in India and beyond.

The song, which is performed in a Tamil dialect mainly spoken by Sri Lankan plantation workers and in South India, was directed by Amith Krishnan and produced and composed by Santhosh Narayanan. Krishnan is best known for The Rice Mill Story, a deeply-moving short film about the tragic plight of a bonded labourer at a rice mill and the death of his baby daughter.

The highly symbolic visuals of “Enjoy Enjaami” switch back and forth between dark and lush green studio-staged scenes of a Sri Lankan plantation to brighter, warm orange-toned footage of barren, uncultivated land in South India.

The song is a blend of Tamil folklore and oppari—an ancient, traditional lament used in funeral ceremonies and processions—combined with musical elements from pop, rap and classical Indian genres. It begins with dynamic rhythms from the Parai family of drums, a ritualistic percussion instrument.

Parai drums are used in various ceremonies in Sri Lanka’s plantation areas. In the country’s north, and in South India, however, these instruments are only used during funerals because its players are ostracised by the upper castes. This has meant that these instruments were discriminated against and not used in any popular musical genres, let alone in mainstream music.

The song’s bridge, where Arivu continues and intensifies his falsetto singing into a soulful oppari, is riveting:

I planted five trees, nurtured a beautiful garden.
Though the garden flourished,
yet my throat remains dry.

The symbolic lyrics reference the agony of bygone generations of agricultural workers, sensitising listeners to the anarchic character of a social system, where the wealth of society, which is created by the working class is utilised to fulfil the interests of a handful—the capitalists.

The extraordinary popularity of “Enjoy Enjaami” is bound up with the historic experiences of Tamil plantation workers and the personal lives of the two singers involved, whose parents and grandparents were impacted by the tragic events that beset the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century.

Arivu in the video

Arivu, the song’s lyricist, was inspired by his grandmother’s stories about the exploitation and oppression of his forefathers as migrant and landless labourers under British colonial rule and during “post-independent” Indian and Sri Lankan bourgeois rule which continues today.

As Arivu explained in one interview, “This is not my song, this is her [his grandmother’s] song. I don’t own any of these lyrics. I am just pen and paper.”

During British colonial rule tens of thousands of mainly female and poverty-stricken landless labourers were shipped from South India to Ceylon during the mid-19th century to work in the then highly-profitable coffee plantations.

The Tamil labourers were used to overcome consistent labour shortages in the central highlands caused by harsh working conditions and fatal tropical illnesses prevalent in new agricultural land reclaimed from the jungle. Arivu’s forebears were among the many thousands.

When leaf disease and a stock market crash destroyed the Ceylonese coffee crops in the 1870s, it was replaced by tea—a new “black gold”—an even more profitable British colonial export crop.

Belated capitalist development in Sri Lanka—as in all the other industrially backward countries—raised a central political contradiction. On the one hand it produced a massive growth of the working class, especially in the plantation sector, and, on the other, it highlighted the political weakness and bankruptcy of the native bourgeoisie.

One of the very first moves of the Sri Lankan “independent” state in 1948 was to disenfranchise a million Tamil plantation workers and their family members. Communalism thus became a cornerstone of Sri Lankan bourgeois rule. State-sponsored Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism was systematically used to divide the highly politicised and diverse working class on the island to shore up and sustain bourgeois rule.

Only the Trotskyists in then Ceylon and India, under the banner of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) in 1942, fought for the unification of the working class on the basis of socialist internationalism in opposition to British colonialism and the native comprador bourgeoisie.

The descent into communalism in the second half of the 20th century was greatly accelerated by the mass confusion generated by the betrayal of socialist internationalism by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which claimed to be Trotskyist, and its participation in a coalition government with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1964. This political betrayal had devastating and tragic consequences in Sri Lanka and internationally.

Four and half months after the joining the SLFP coalition government and following six days of negotiations with the newly “independent” India under Congress rule, Colombo signed the notorious Sirima-Sashtri Pact. Under this infamous agreement, 525,000 plantation workers and families were forcibly deported back to India.

Arivu’s grandmother, Valiamma, who is mentioned in the song and appears in person at the end of the video in a silk sari, was among the thousands of workers deemed to be stateless, loaded onto ships and sent across the Palk Strait to India—cargoes of stranded, landless labourers. As Arivu recently noted, “My grandmother couldn’t even take leave of her sisters. To this day, we don’t know whether they are alive.”

While the British colonial rulers brought landless labourers to the central highland plantations, the Colombo bourgeoisie made their children and grand-children stateless.

Arivu’s grandmother fondly calls him enjaami in Tamil meaning “My dear” or “My lord,” thus the song’s title.

The song repeats Enjoy Enjaami closely followed by the lyrics “come together as one” in the chorus with a musical structure commonly used in pop songs.

This is coupled with a progression of minor chords, heavy bass and staccato chords, rounded out with an effective hook-and-call to attention—“Cuckoo, cuckoo.”

Dhee (Source: YouTube)

Playback singer Dhee, widely known for her distinctive alto voice, was born in 1998 to Sri Lankan Tamil parents in the midst of the country’s almost three-decade civil war. She belongs to a younger generation of Tamils who left the war-torn island and immigrated to Sydney, Australia. “Enjoy Enjaami,” in fact, was arranged and composed by her stepfather.

In another interview, Arivu explained, “I’m here not to comfort everyone, but to disturb everyone… I want to talk about tomorrow, definitely there’s going to be a good future, definitely there’s going to be an equal society. That’s why I wrote ‘Vango Onagi … meaning, come together as one!’”

Arivu’s optimism is encouraging. A society based on socialist equality is unrealisable in a system that is based on an irrational system based on the private ownership in the means of production and in a world divided by competing nation states.

The historical experience of the 20th century proves again and again that a society based on social equality that, in return, guarantees the preservation of nature can only be established by the unification of the international working class in the struggle for international socialism. Until then, “Throats are sure to remain dry.”

“Enjoy Enjaami,” is a timely call from socially sensitive and serious artists.

‘They’re surrounding you with ugliness because they want you nihilistic, atomized and demoralized’ – Paul Joseph Watson

https://videopress.com/v/MLGuf3XT?preloadContent=metadata

The Man From NATO

Christianity Can Handle Any Belief – Except That Jesus Never Existed – Like Kryptonite to Superman

The early Christians, like Saint Paul who really did exist, saw Jesus the Christ as a spirit who came down from Heaven and appeared to people in dreams or visions. For decades that was what Christianity was, a Jewish cult that envisioned a personal Messenger from God with Godly powers.

But, the Christians where starting to spread out and attract new members and too many people where having visions and claimed Jesus told them what everyone should do. So…. a very clever narrative was created of a Jesus who walked the earth forty years earlier. Now the Christian leaders did not have to change the rules every time someone had a vision of Jesus and got new messages.

They could fix the rules and create a hierarchy and stable organization. I listened to the audio book of the first gospel Mark the other day straight through. This is the earliest of the Jesus stories. So obviously a fictional story crafted with the tropes of novels of the time. It is also clearly clever enough to be recognized as an allegory for any literary and sophisticated person who might be attracted to Christianity.

One skeptic has claimed that Christianity has adapted and evolved over 2000 years and can handle anything, a Hippie Jesus, a Conservative Christ, a simple teacher et cetera … but they can not handle a Jesus Never Existed he is a fictional character belief. It is like kryptonite to Superman.

…….. . Gospel Of Mark – https://youtu.be/vQC-653OOmw

基督教可以处理任何信仰-除了耶稣从未存在过-像K石超人

早期的基督徒，如确实存在的圣保罗，将耶稣基督视为一种从天上降下来的灵，在梦中或异象中向人们显现。几十年来，这就是基督教的本质，这是一个犹太教徒，他设想从上帝那里以上帝的能力成为个人信使。

段落-

但是，基督徒开始散布并吸引新成员，而有太多异象的人则宣称耶稣告诉了他们每个人都应该做的事。所以……

创造了一个非常聪明的叙述，讲述了一个四十年前在地球上行走的耶稣。现在，基督徒领袖不必每次有人对耶稣有异象并得到新信息时都改变规则。

段落- ！

他们可以修改规则并创建层次结构和稳定的组织。前几天，我听了第一本福音书的有声读物。这是耶稣的故事最早的。显然，这是一个虚构的故事，是用当时小说的比喻来编造的。它显然也足够聪明，可以被认为是可能吸引基督教的任何文学和老练人物的寓言。

段落-

个持怀疑态度的人声称，基督教已经适应并发展了2000多年，可以处理任何事物，例如嬉皮耶稣，保守派基督，简单的老师等等……但是他们无法应对耶稣，他从不存在，他是虚构的性格信念。超人就像k石。！段落-

Boson Barnes & Noble Stops Selling Bibles – Are Talmuds Next?

 (Reuters) Bookseller Barnes & Noble in Boson’s Southern Shore Mall have announced that they will stop selling Bibles.

“We simply can not, in good conscience, continue to peddle a hateful book that endorses slavery, infanticide, denying women’s rights,” a store manager who wished to remain anonymous said in a Skype interview.  “Have you ever read this book?  I’m not talking about a children’s Bible where the stories are sugar coated and cleaned up as they are in most Hollywood movies.  Horrific!” 

“During the COVID-19 lockdown I had a lot of time on my hands to read.  I started going through the Bible my parents gave me for Easter when I graduated from grad school with a degree in Library Science.  Sure, I was familiar with many of the stories, but once a person gets into the actual text things are different.  Some have said that the ‘God’ of the Old Testament is the most brutal and evil character in all literature of any kind.” 

“Yahweh in Old Testament, or Torah in the Jewish tradition, is a psychopath.  Any honest person reading the book would say that.  He tells his followers to rip babies from pregnant women’s stomach because they are from another tribe that does not follow the tribal ‘God’ of Israel.” 

I went online and found a series of courses on Youtube from a professor at Yale University.  Again and again the prof has to warn the college students in her class to understand that the people at that time were Bronze Age slavers.  The Old Testament lays out some of the pathetic ‘commandments’ on how a slave master can rape his slaves, and who owns the children, and that you can whip slaves on the Sabbath, because that’s work.  Wait until Monday to beat your slaves if they are disobedient while being raped by the master.  What a book!”

(The Yale Course – Lecture One – Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145) with Prof Christine Hayes (45:45 min) 3 Dec 2012)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mo-YL-lv3RY?feature=player_embedded
He went on, “And the New Testament.  It was written in Greek and reads like a Greek novel of the time.  Crowds are characters in many of the stories.  Like a Greek drama.  A bunch of Hellenistic ideas are mixed in with Jewish ideas and secret society practices of the time, and voila – a new religion is created.  But, it is almost as screwy as the Old Testament, but Jesus is a little nicer than the Yahweh character of the Old Testament.”

“None of these ideas have a place in a modern tolerant society,” he finished.  “So we have decided to put the Bibles in stock under lock and key in a glass case.  People who ask will be shown  a Bible, but they will not be out for casual customers wandering the aisles.  We will also keep a record of anyone who buys this sick book.”

Barnes & Noble was not looted when other stores in the mall had windows smashed and grates broken by mostly peaceful looters.  No one has bothered to burn any bookstores in Boson.

Some are asking, “Are the Jewish holy books of the Talmud next?”

Popular Music Medieval Style –

https://videopress.com/v/goZFssyy?preloadContent=metadata

What’s Up – What’s Going On

https://videopress.com/v/tH90H2bA?preloadContent=metadata

500 Miles Audio

https://videopress.com/v/RYAzqRnH?preloadContent=metadata

Soviet Anthem 1944 – Russian Federation Anthem Currently

Ace of Base All That She Wants

Another One Bites The Dust

https://videopress.com/v/A2FiUuBH?preloadContent=metadata

Ballroom Blitz

Blackhole Sun

Kraftwerk

Carless Whisper

Cruel Summer

Carry On My Wayward Son

Dust In The Wind

Dancing In the Dark

Medieval Style CCCP Anthem

The Quest For The Historical Zeus – by Bert Ehrman

The quest for the historical Zeus consists of academic efforts to determine what words and actions, if any, may be attributed to Zeus, and to use the findings to provide portraits of Zeus.

Modern times saw the rebirth of efforts to understand Ancient Greek religious origins and practices along with the 19th century efforts to free Greece of Turkish Islamic domination and the suppression of ancient Pagan beliefs in Hellas.

Greece and the Turkish Ottoman Empire 1837

The legends of the Greek Gods had been reduced to children’s fairytales, but historians began to suspect there was a core of truth at the heart. Zeus could have been a person just like Julius Cesar, Spartacus, or Jesus Christ. Maybe he had a son Apollo who had a cart and a team of horses.

Three scholarly quests for the historical Zeus have taken place, each with distinct characteristics and based on different research criteria, which were often developed during each specific phase. 

These quests are distinguished from earlier approaches because they rely on the historical method to study ancient Greek texts of the Iliad and Odessey, the numerous Greek plays we have, and non-fiction from the time. narratives. While textual analysis of ancient sources had taken place for centuries, these quests introduced new methods and specific techniques to establish the historical validity of their conclusions.

The Greek government has periodically helped fund the research, despite the opposition of the powerful Greek Orthodox Church. The Pagans regard the Christians as ‘Yankiki Come Lately’ copy-cat religious plagiarists.

“God the Father is obviously just Zeus,” one clearly exasperated modern scholar said. “Any child will note that.”

The enthusiasm shown during the first quest diminished after Albert Schweitzer’s critique of 1906 in which he pointed out various shortcomings in the approaches used at the time when a stone hut with ancient construction techniques was found half way up the mountain by goatherds looking for a lost kid. The dwelling was not from some ancient ‘Zeus,’ but from a local hoaxer. The ancient leather skins with Zeus sayings turned out to be freshly killed skins, and full of misspellings and anachronistic Greek.

The second quest began in 1953 and introduced a number of new techniques, but reached a plateau in the 1970s. In the 1980s a number of scholars gradually began to introduce new research ideas, initiating a third quest characterized by the latest research approaches. Since the late 2000s, concerns have been growing about the usefulness of the criteria of authenticity.

While there is widespread scholarly agreement on the existence of Zeus and a basic consensus on the general outline of his life, the portraits of Zeus constructed in the quests have often differed from each other and from the image portrayed in the literary accounts. There are overlapping attributes among the portraits and, while pairs of scholars may agree on some attributes, those same scholars may differ on other attributes and there is no single portrait of the historical Zeus that satisfies most scholars.

………..

.

Bert Ehrman, Religiousity Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boson.

An Oresteia – Let’s Cut to The Wail – by Machael Wood (London Review of Books) 2009

Let’s Cut to the Wail

Michael Wood

3067 words

An Oresteia 
translated by Anne Carson.
Faber, 255 pp., $27, March 2009, 978 0 86547 902 9

Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought. These gods are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise name and must still name somehow.

Historians Doubt There Was A Historical Figure At The Beginning of The Zeus Myth

Do you belong to a group of persons like the old men left behind in Argos during the Trojan War, eager to believe in some sort of universal justice, however often it lies in abeyance?

Do you think the gods ignore a man who
steps on holy things?

Of course they don’t; or at least they shouldn’t: Zeus is the god who punishes excess and impiety. Are you anxious, as those same old men are, to assume that suffering brings wisdom? Then you will call on Zeus again, although perhaps not with all the confidence you would like.

Zeus! whoever Zeus is –
if he likes this name I’ll use it –
measuring everything that exists I can
compare with Zeus nothing
except Zeus.
May he take this weight from my heart …

Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom
when he laid down this law:
By suffering we learn …

‘Whoever Zeus is’; ‘I can/compare with Zeus nothing/except Zeus.’ Elsewhere the same chorus says, ‘Zeus acts as Zeus ordains,’ and these tautologies and open-ended provisions suggest that even for pious persons Zeus is the name for what order would look like if there was an order. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, in the notes to his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, says it is important for ancient Greek worshippers to get the name of the god right, ‘otherwise he may not hear or may not listen.’ And Lloyd-Jones’s phrasing – ‘if this name is pleasing to him’ – clearly strikes a less sceptical or less breezy note than Carson’s ‘if he likes this name I’ll use it.’ But Lloyd-Jones does recall in this context Heraclitus’ wonderfully cryptic ‘One thing, the only truly wise, does not and does consent to be called by the name of Zeus.’

These old men – they appear in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – think of justice as some sort of ultimate moral balance. But when other characters in the same play speak of justice they generally mean vengeance or retaliation or the satisfaction of old grudges. Klytaimestra (I’m going to follow Carson’s spelling) explicitly associates the term with what she calls her two other gods, Ruin and Revenge. No aspiration to order there. In her introduction Carson finely says: ‘Almost everyone in the play claims to know what justice is and to have it on their side … The many meanings of the word justice have shaped the history of the house of Atreus into a gigantic double bind.’ She even goes so far as to doubt whether Aeschylus ‘wants to clarify the concept of justice in any final way’. He may of course want to clarify the sheer difficulty of the notion.

If we turn to the other plays in the volume, we find that characters in Sophocles’ Elektra pray to Apollo as if he were the name of whatever there might be in the universe that could help them get their way; and in Euripides’ Orestes they wax openly sarcastic about the same god’s moral interests. ‘There ought to be a law against a mother like that,’ Elektra says of Klytaimestra. ‘Turns out there is: Apollo.’ When Apollo himself appears at the end of the play to sort everything out, the effect is frankly burlesque. Carson writes of ‘moments … where exasperation verges on farce’, and in Grief Lessons sees Euripides more generally as caught ‘between resignation and satire’. In her translation, Apollo and Orestes talk to each other as if they were a couple of good old boys rearranging the collateral damage from a wild night on the town. ‘I’ll fix up Orestes’ relations with Argos,’ Apollo says. ‘It was me made him murder his mother.’ Orestes is grateful but curiously unsurprised. ‘Apollo of oracles!’ he says. ‘So you were no false prophet!/But I admit I was getting nervous.’ ‘Getting nervous’: this is a man who in other plays is driven mad by the Furies, and even in this play has said: ‘My mind is gone.’

Of the goddess who dominates Euripides’ Hippolytos (one of the plays in Grief Lessons), Carson says: ‘Aphrodite is the name for all that Hippolytos wants to edit out of his view of reality.’ Edit out or edit in: there is always some sort of editorial action in relation to the gods. They are figures for what humans want or don’t want, and also of what is beyond their reach or control; images of agency scrawled on the face of chance. I don’t mean to blur the distinctions among the three dramatists, as if all three (and all Greeks) had the same view of the gods, and I don’t want to turn them all into atheists. I want only to suggest that there is plenty of room for scepticism even in the loftiest of these writers, and that the distance between those who believe there must be a divine order (because there absolutely must be) and those who believe there can’t be (because they see no evidence of one) is not as large as it may at first look, since it rests on a shared absence of hard knowledge and on a range of estimations of desire.

Carson says Euripides was interested in ‘what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake’. The terms are a little casual for the grandeur of the situations in Aeschylus and Sophocles but they are not inaccurate. It’s true that characters in Aeschylus inhabit their mistakes with tremendous horror or relish, while those in Euripides mainly contemplate the mess they have made or inherited. In Sophocles they cultivate their difficult obsessions and seek scraps of moral dignity in a context that hardly seems to have heard of the idea.

This is familiar ground, though, and Carson’s book suggests we go on to think about something rather different: the immense familiarity of the ancient Greek stories themselves, the sense of déjà vu haunting even the first performance of any of these great plays. Déjà vu and not quite déjà vu. Every story was known before its first telling – or if not literally before its first telling, before any particular recorded telling – and every telling was slightly different. It’s not just that all interpretations of a myth are instances of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said (Freud and Sophocles are both dramatists of the tale of Oedipus): it’s that all instances of the myth are interpretations of it, as if they were played from a musical score that everyone knows but no one possesses. It is in this sense that there can be such a thing as what Carson calls ‘an’ Oresteia.

The Oresteia, of course, is Aeschylus’ trilogy: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides. But once Carson has replaced, so to speak, the second play with Sophocles’ Elektra and the third with Euripides’ Orestes, we can dream of four other plays in two other trilogies and, more immediately, we can see what happens when different musicians play the same score. In any version, of course, certain things will happen. Before the play opens, in a previous generation, Atreus will have cooked and served his brother Thyestes’ children to him, sliced them into soup, as Carson has a character say in Orestes, although the reference in Agamemnon suggests something more like a stew. As if to generalise this story, or to make sure it never leaves our minds, other cooked children keep coming up in the allusions characters make in the plays: to Tantalos, who offered his son as a meal to the gods; to the nightingale who used to be Prokne before she fed her son to her rapist husband. Agamemnon will have sacrificed his and Klytaimestra’s daughter in return for a favourable wind on the way to Troy.

The Trojan War will have been fought. Then, within the performed sequence, Agamemnon will return from Troy, bringing with him Kassandra as his princess-slave. Klytaimestra will kill him, with or without the assistance of Aigisthos, Thyestes’ remaining son. Elektra, the child of Klytaimestra and Agamemnon, will mourn her father and keen for vengeance. Her brother Orestes will return to Argos and pretend to be dead. Then he will kill his mother and her lover. He will go mad after the event, and be pursued by the Furies, who in Aeschylus, with some reluctance, after Orestes’ acquittal by a divinely constituted human court in Athens, finally become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. In Euripides, as we shall see, something else happens, although Orestes is still absolved.

Even in this bald and compressed form the story can be seen as offering an extraordinary combination of hereditary curse and multiple motivation. Could anyone survive unharmed in a domain where all-out war seems to be the natural climate of both family and marriage? Does Klytaimestra kill Agamemnon as an act of long-planned revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter to his war aims? Or because she has taken her husband’s family enemy as her lover? Is this affair part of her revenge or just a sideline? Can Orestes not avenge the death of his father? Should he kill his mother? If he asks the advice of a god, what moral status does that advice have?

When he is acquitted in Aeschylus, it is because Apollo pleads for him and Athene decides the case, casting the deciding vote when the jury stalls at six voices for acquittal and six for condemnation. Zeus doesn’t appear, and Athene, curiously, makes her tie-breaking move before she knows there is a tie – that is, before the votes are counted. It’s true that any goddess, and many a human, can tell when a hung jury is in the offing, but the procedure is curious all the same. The ancient curse seems inescapable, but doesn’t relieve anyone from blame – or from the feeling or accusation of blame.

In this framework the variants on the story become inordinately interesting. They can’t change any major event or moral dilemma, but they can move events around, add or subtract them, and shift whole swathes of atmosphere. And since Carson starts with Aeschylus, whose other plays we have, we can watch the roads diverge. In The Libation Bearers, Orestes returns, meets up with Elektra, and the two spend a good portion of the play invoking the help of the powers of darkness in the killing they have to do. ‘Two murderous children,’ Carson says, ‘are (arguably) redeemed by mutual love’; and certainly their need of so much prayer makes them anything but unreflective killers. ‘You lords of the underworld,’ Orestes says (in Ted Hughes’s translation),

You crowned and enthroned curses,
Look at us.
The last shreds of the house of Atreus –
Bereft of all but bare life,
Benighted in this darkest pit of our fate –
Lead us. Guide us.

And a little later Elektra prays:

Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,
Direct our steps.

Then Orestes, having prayed for good measure to Hermes, ‘God of the dark pathways’, pretends to be a foreigner arriving with the news of Orestes’ death.

In Sophocles’ Elektra, Orestes’ pretence of death starts earlier, and is inflicted on Elektra too. Why does he do this? And why does he wait so long to relieve her of her pain? It is indeed ‘deeply odd’, as Carson says, ‘that Elektra’s profoundest emotional outpouring … should be evoked by a fake object’. She speaks one of the world’s great laments to an urn that does not contain the ashes of her brother. She asks to hold the object – ‘I have tears to keep,’ she says, ‘I have ashes to weep’ – and Orestes, still pretending to be a stranger, brutally says to his friend Pylades, who is carrying the thing: ‘Bring it here, give it to her, whoever she is.’ She says:

If this were all you were, Orestes,
how could your memory
fill my memory …
Look!
You are nothing at all.
Just a crack where the light slipped through …
Now our enemies rock with laughter.
And she runs mad for joy –
that creature
in the shape of your mother –
how often you said you would come
one secret evening and cut her throat!
But our luck cancelled that,
whatever luck is.
And instead my beloved,
luck sent you back to me
colder than ashes,
later than shadow.

This fake death is so real that it’s not at all clear Orestes can get over it, whatever he does. Earlier in the play, considering his stratagem (technically just a scheme to come close to Klytaimestra and Aigisthos without causing any suspicion), he says: ‘What harm can it do/to die in words?’ Presumably everyone who has ever watched or read this work has groaned at this moment, even without knowing how long he will keep up the act or with what results. There can scarcely have been a rhetorical question that was less rhetorical. The play ends as it has to, with corpses offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’.

David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that seems to be the poet’s free invention.’ An invention within the narrative limits I’ve sketched above, of course, but we scarcely feel any restriction as we read, and Carson wonders whether we can detect any purpose. The play ‘seems to unfold’, she says, ‘like a bolt of cloth falling down stairs, spilling itself, random’. She goes on to wonder whether randomness is not perhaps the play’s point, but her version of the text suggests the idea may take one more twist.

Here Orestes has not gone off to Delphi to throw himself on the mercy of the god whose advice he took: he is still in Argos, asleep, delirious, and then rather suddenly scheming again. He and Elektra are about to be condemned by the people of Argos to death by stoning. Helen is here to grieve for her sister Klytaimestra, and so are her prevaricating husband Menelaos, and her angry father Tyndareus: quite a gathering. Orestes hopes Menelaos will support him in the assembly, but there is no chance of that – it’s quite possible that Menelaos has a cautious eye on the throne and certainly knows there is no political mileage in supporting a matricide. Orestes and Elektra are about to give up the fight and accept their sentence – they will be allowed to kill themselves, it turns out, rather than have to submit to stoning – when Pylades has an idea: they could murder Helen; that would be popular.

They set out to do this, kidnapping Helen’s daughter Hermione on the way, but Apollo (or Euripides) has finally had enough. The god descends, whisks Helen away into some sort of transubstantiation (‘She will sit in the folds of the sky beside Kastor and Pollux’), marries Elektra to Pylades, tells Orestes to go to Athens and stand trial – to rejoin the plot of The Eumenides, in other words – and after that he can marry Hermione. Orestes accepts the deal, as Menelaos superfluously reminds him he must, and wryly says: ‘I make my peace with circumstances, Menelaos,/and also with your oracles, Apollo.’ Apollo says Peace is the ‘most beautiful of gods’, and they all live happily ever after.

We seem to have shifted into Shakespearean romance or even Hollywood screwball comedy. And in one sense we have. Carson reminds us that Aristotle thought that Euripides, ‘whatever the ineptitudes of his stagecraft’, was ‘the most tragic’ of the tragic poets. Here, I think, is where her idea that there is ‘something terrible in randomness’ is trumped by the dramatist himself. There is something even more terrible in the blatant, cynical, impossible taming of randomness, in the assertion of an order which even its architect does not believe in, and there are many milder works, including some fairy tales, where the happy ending can only be a desperate irony, precisely what’s available only in words, as Orestes might say.

I’m basing these suggestions on Anne Carson’s words rather than those of Euripides, which I can’t read – to be precise, I can read a few famous words, but not sentences or tone. And it’s important to understand what her consistent and at times apparently frivolous modernising (or Americanising) of idiom is doing. ‘So you got good news?’ people say. ‘You’re optimistic?’ And ‘I’ll be okay,’ and ‘Oh come on, relax your principles.’ They say ‘No kidding’ and ‘Let’s cut to the wail.’ Helen, the woman who in other translations is said to have killed off so many of the Achaeans, is called ‘that weapon of mass destruction’. At the end of Klytaimestra’s grand false welcome home speech, Agamemnon says (in Hughes’s translation), ‘Your eulogies are like my absence:/Too long, too much,’ and (in Lloyd-Jones’s version): ‘Your speech matches my absence;/for you have drawn it out at length.’ Carson has him say: ‘You have made a speech to match my absence –/ long.’ There is no great difference in meaning, but Agamemnon begins to sound like a comedian, and we haven’t even got to Euripides yet. However, Carson’s strategy is not, as it may seem, to bring these old Greeks up to date, to make them our contemporaries. It is to remind us that we are their contemporaries, that we have not left the violent domain they so fiercely drew for us. She makes us at home in their language so that we can more thoroughly understand their vision of how not at home in the world we are.

In search of the historical Zeus – From Charismatic Person to Divine – by Andrew Brown (Guardian) 2009

Was there a wise old man living on the side of a mountain who impressed local people down in the valley who told stories to their children?

What was it that the Greeks meant, or believed in, when they talked about the gods of Mount Olympus?

Andrew Brown

Tue 23 Jun 2009

One of the standard moves in arguments about god’s existence is to point out that no one now believes in Zeus, or Apollo; this is something on which GK Chesterton and any atheist would agree. No one now believes that on top of Mount Olympus is a place where the gods gather and from which they pop down to earth occasionally to impregnate a few women, rescue heroes, start wars and otherwise relieve the tedium of immortality. Such beings do not exist. They never did exist.

But a piece by the critic Michael Wood in a recent issue of the London Review of Books that just surfaced on my kitchen table made me wonder whether even the Greeks believed their gods existed in that sense.

“Greek gods” says Wood, “are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise name and must still name somehow.” And he goes on to elaborate this theory by examining Greek tragedies:

Do you belong to a group of persons like the old men left behind in Argos during the Trojan War, eager to believe … that suffering brings wisdom? Then you will call on Zeus again, although perhaps not with all the confidence you would like.

Zeus! whoever Zeus is –
if he likes this name I’ll use it –
measuring everything that exists I can
compare with Zeus nothing
except Zeus.
May he take this weight from my heart …
Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom
when he laid down this law:
By suffering we learn …

‘Whoever Zeus is’; ‘I can/compare with Zeus nothing/except Zeus.’ Elsewhere the same chorus says, ‘Zeus acts as Zeus ordains,’ and these tautologies and open-ended provisions suggest that even for pious persons Zeus is the name for what order would look like if there was an order.

It may be that Wood is projecting his own doubts, anachronistically, onto texts which had an entirely different resonance when first performed. But I don’t think so. We know the Athenians were smart enough to doubt the existence of the gods of celestial soap opera. But what Wood talks about is something different and more important – an intimation that there is something beyond existence which makes for justice. That is at the heart of almost all sincere religious feeling. The two kinds of religion shouldn’t be confused, even if both require us to talk about Zeus.

СССР Подпись Через муссон

https://videopress.com/v/8qyco420?preloadContent=metadata

Bombs for Peace

Sir Ha Ha

Harvard Classics – 71 Volumes – The Five Foot Shelf – Greatest Works of World Literature[Kindle Edition] – $1.99

The Complete Harvard Classics – ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature[Kindle Edition]

The online text is available to me for $1.99. I don’t know if I can download a copy as a PDF. I don’t know if I want to take up all that storage space on my computer hard drive. If the texts are available to me as long as I have electricity and a computer and a password and eyesight, why download. I note that the physical books can be bought at Amazon for $750.

My summer reading list….

Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, William Penn, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Thomas Browne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Saint Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes,

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Plutarch, Virgil, Miguel de Cervantes, John Bunyan, Izaak Walton, Aesop, Wilhelm Grimm, Jacob Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, John Dryden, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe,

Dante Alighieri, Alessandro Manzoni, Homer, Richard Henry Dana, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley,

Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray,

John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Alan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Michael Faraday, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, Simon Newcomb, Archibald Geikie, Benvenuto Cellini, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,

Ernest Renan, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, Herodotus, Tacitus, Francis Drake, Philip Nichols, Francis Pretty, Walter Bigges, Edward Haies, Walter Raleigh, René Descartes, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Froissart,

Thomas Malory, William Henry Harrison, Niccolo Machiavelli, William Roper, Thomas More, Martin Luther, John Locke, George Berkeley, Hippocrates, Ambroise Paré, William Harvey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, John Webster, Philip Massinger, Blaise Pascal, Charles W. Eliot, William A. Neilson, Henry Fielding,

Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Honoré Balzac, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Daudet, Gottfried Keller, Guy de Maupassant, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Juan Valera, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander L. Kielland

Wind Powered Car

One Hour of Malagasy Communist Music

https://videopress.com/v/ugo6tJBG?preloadContent=metadata

Queen of Backwards Ostentations Artless Clutter

Kitsch

‘The Big Sleep’ – Reading Raymond Chandler in the Age of #MeToo – by Megan Abbott (Slate) 2018

The Big Seep

Reading Raymond Chandler in the age of #MeToo.

BY MEGAN ABBOTT

JULY 09, 20185:55 AM

Raymond Chandler, Megan Abbott. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center, UT–Austin, Drew Reilly.

In April, the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman, writing about male authors who objectify or diminish women, marveled over the many women she knows who remain “open to verbal entrancement” by such men. As an example, she cited those who “sustain complicated and admiring relationships with lodestars like Raymond Chandler.”

Reading those words, I felt found out. Exposed.

My love for Chandler, the great noir novelist of the previous century, is as stubborn as it is foundational. It goes all the way back to my 10-year-old self stretched out on the TV room carpet, utterly in thrall to Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Later, I’d come to read all his novels and stories, falling in love with his tarnished knight hero, the sardonic and world-weary private detective Philip Marlowe. Eventually, I began what became my first novel in order to write myself into his world. My debt is incalculable.

But it’s more than a debt, one crime writer to one of her most starry forebears. This July marks the publication of the first-ever annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler’s first novel, with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem. I could hardly wait to get a copy. Turning its pages, I felt myself sinking into Chandler’s lushly rendered world of afternoon highballs, blackjacks hidden behind trenchcoats, and cunning women with teeth like knives. The world he paints—of longing and danger and melancholy—is the world my imagination moved into decades ago, and it’s the one I still inhabit today.I’m deep in the muck, but I’m looking.

But, like most women I know, I’ve been squinting hard at my attachment to certain male writers and artists, from Jim Thompson to Norman Mailer, with problematic or troubling views of women. The word complicity knocks around my brain when I think about the way I’ve savored—even evangelized for—Chandler’s novels.

It’s true, after all, that most of Chandler’s female characters are femme fatales or dead women, party girls or Venus’ flytraps. (Anne Riordan, Marlowe’s Girl Friday in Farewell, My Lovely, is a strong exception.) Wherever he goes, Marlowe appraises most women as if they were shiny objects under glass. Often, the appraisal is a tossed-off witticism. (“It was a blonde,” Marlowe says in one of Chandler’s most famous similes. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”) Other times, it feels spiked with venom, as in the gruesome taxonomy of blondes Waldman grimly highlights in her piece.

And yet, even reading Chandler’s harsher passages, I find myself not turning away but moving closer. Trying to understand something. Am I still entranced? Even as I resist the faintly gendered connotations of the term, its suggestion of female helplessness in the face of male potency, I still feel the pull. What fascinates and compels me most about Chandler in this #MeToo moment are the ways his novels speak to our current climate. Because if you want to understand toxic white masculinity, you could learn a lot by looking at noir.

Loosely defined, noir describes the flood of dark, fatalistic books and films that emerged before, during, and especially after World War II. As scholars like Janey Place have pointed out, this was an era when many white American men felt embattled. Their livelihoods had been taken away—first by the Depression, then by the war, and then by the women who replaced them while they were off fighting. Into this climate noir flowered: Tales of white, straight men—the detective, the cop, the sap—who feel toppled from their rightful seat of power and who feel deeply threatened by women, so threatened that they render them all-powerful and blame them for all the bad things these straight white men do. Kill a guy, rob a bank—the femme fatale made me do it. These novels simmer with resentment over perceived encroachment and a desire to contain female power.

As many scholars—foremost, historian Richard Slotkin—have noted, the noir detective descends from the long tradition of white American folk heroes: the pioneer, the frontiersman, the cowboy, and other loners journeying through the wilderness, fending off enemies infringing on their freedom—or their dominance. The noir detective’s wilderness is the city; his enemies, like the enemies of his progenitors, are the “other”—meaning those who aren’t straight, aren’t white, or aren’t male. And not just the femmes fatales, but women like the aforementioned Anne Riordan, the cop’s daughter who helps Marlowe break the case in Farewell, My Lovely. She’s smart, capable, trustworthy—and Marlowe rejects her romantic interest over and over again. “There’s a nice little girl,” he says to himself, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Visiting her apartment, he’s soothed by the care she takes for him, preparing eggs and toast for him, serving him coffee with brandy. But he makes no advances, and when he returns home, he expresses a visceral relief at having avoided any entrapment. Standing in his own doorway, he savors its “homely smell, a smell of dust and tobacco smoke, the smell of a world where men live, and keep on living.”

Marlowe’s rejection of Anne is typical for Chandler. If most noir novels foreground direct physical confrontations with the other—be it through sex or violence—Chandler’s exhibit a profound discomfort for body-to-body contact. Marlowe is nearly celibate, avoids carrying a gun, and only shoots a man once, in The Big Sleep. After the shooting, he’s so destabilized he “laughs like a loon.” His isolation from others is profound. Forever unattached and seemingly friendless, he feels increasingly out of place in a changing Los Angeles. By the later novels, he even relocates from downtown apartments to a rental home in the Hollywood Hills in classic white-flight fashion. Alone, he broods, his loneliness curdling into resentment, even rage. His disaffection puts him on a continuum with Travis Bickle and other more dangerous self-imagined knights in urban wildernesses.

Marlowe’s alienation is at a peak in the deeply melancholy The Long Goodbye (1953), to my mind Chandler’s greatest novel. Midway through, there is a telling scene in which the detective sits alone at a hotel bar and watches “carnally” through a plate-glass window a young woman in a white sharkskin bathing suit dive into the pool. After, she joins a man with a “tan so evenly dark that he couldn’t have been anything but the hired man.” When the man pats her thigh, Marlowe tells us, the woman “opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.”

It would be hard to find a more blatant vagina dentata image outside of a horror movie. But while its context doesn’t erase the misogyny, it does illuminate it. It’s Marlowe who’s behind the glass. He desires her, longs for her, but he’s trapped, impotent as his “rightful” place is taken by another man—a man who is suspiciously dark and explicitly jumping class lines. In this context, the description of the woman’s mouth is no longer merely an author’s casual misogyny. Instead, it’s a window into a culture writ large, the pulleys and levers behind the besieged white masculinity we’re now witnessing on the national stage every day. To paraphrase another noir icon, Dashiell Hammett, it’s like someone’s “taken the lid off” to “let us see the works.” Who are we not to look?

The writers we love speak to us on subterranean levels we seldom understand. They speak to conflicts within ourselves. And, in moments of reckoning like this one, they force us to look at ourselves. I know I’m looking. I’m deep in the muck, but I’m looking. Chandler is a mystery to solve, my mystery. The clues are there in the novels—the clues behind a pervasive and sometimes deadly masculinity—and my investigation is ongoing, on the page and elsewhere.

So I’m not giving up on Chandler. The fact is, I don’t want to. I’m drawn to him because the world he brings to life so vividly is a world I understand, especially now. It’s a world of peril, a troubled and troubling place where it feels harder and harder to make things right.

It’s fitting, then, that one of Chandler’s ongoing fixations, and one of the grand themes of noir, is reckoning with one’s own complicity. At the end of The Big Sleep, guns have been fired, lives lost, justice eluded. Marlowe has covered up crimes and committed a few of his own, including murder. Meanwhile, his client—the rich white tycoon who set all these crimes in motion—sleeps soundly in his canopied bed. High on the hill, his mouth “tight and bloodless,” he remains untouched by the carnage he’s wrought.

In the final paragraphs, Marlowe turns a hard gaze upon himself. All this ugliness happened on his watch. He let it happen. Sometimes he made it happen.

“Me,” he tells us, “I was part of the nastiness now.”

The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.

Raymond Chandler the Man Behind the Mask – Book Review – by Dennis Broe – 7 May 2021

New book on the many faces of crime writer Raymond Chandler

Lit REACTOR, fair use

Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett before him and Ross Macdonald after, effected a startling change in the crime novel. As Chandler put it, he took the novel away from those who commit murder with “hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish” and returned it to “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

This passage from Chandler’s essay explaining his technique in “The Simple Art of Murder” is dripping with sarcasm, contempt, and class analysis in its explanation of how the genre had been practiced by the upper-class detectives of the Sherlock Holmes/Agatha Christie school.

Chandler is at pains to argue that murder—and crime in general—is not done for specious reasons and in a way that creates a puzzle for the detectives or as a clever ruse, or, as is still practiced in much of the serial killer literature of today, as expression of aberrant psychology.

A new book by Ken Fuller, Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind the Mask, in its strongest moments concentrates on Chandler’s implied politics in his noir novels, in his focus on a generalized corruption in capitalist society and its particular manifestation in Southern California that with his other two compadres opened a space for crime novels to have a strong infusion of the social aspects of crime.

In Chandler’s rendering, crimes are committed for profit or out of class antipathy by those either as the way of establishing the fortune that then makes them respectable or to maintain their position on top. For my money, the best of Chandler’s L.A. novels, the most explicitly class conscious in this respect, is The High Window (sometimes called The Brasher Doubloon), which focuses most directly on great fortunes and great crimes. We’re reminded today of the Sackler Family who has paid almost no price for their role in the promoting of their drug oxycontin which led to the opioid crisis and thousands of deaths.

Fuller highlights a change in Chandler in the wake of the House Un-American Activity Committee and McCarthyite purges, in which he disavows progressive social content and dawdles for a period on “the non-communist left,” a movement and a moment that, as Fuller describes, was well funded by the CIA.

For Fuller, this turn in Chandler’s sympathies aligns both with his Eton-like elite education and professing to create “literature,” leading to his perpetual disappointment that his work was not accorded that status, and his secret homosexuality: His lead character, the hardcore private detective Philip Marlowe, was constantly projecting his anxiety around women.

Fuller has a reading of Chandler’s work, in the first half of the book, that sees his literary career as building to The Long Goodbye, for Fuller Chandler’s only real literary novel, and then suffering a precipitous decline. Here the book is on more tenuous grounds. Judging Chandler on the somewhat antiquated and elitist assumptions of whether or not his works are “literature”—which is admittedly somewhat how he judged himself—leads away from his actual literary contribution. Chandler unmoored Hammett’s often critical view of the detective as hired gun of the owner class and instead followed that other impulse in Hammett which allowed the detective, since he or she can go anywhere in search of the solution to the crime or to aid a client, to be a kind of interrogator of the class system itself, constantly and smirkingly questioning its assumptions.

This multilayered examination of a society fractured on class lines—and what manifestation of society is not more fractured than status-conscious Los Angeles?—is Chandler’s contribution to opening an entire literary genre to a wider, more encompassing view of the world.

Fuller’s way of illustrating Chandler’s literary failures, in ways that fill up too much of the book, takes the form of minutely pointing out plot inconsistencies, something which Chandler was well aware of and never overly concerned about. His famous quip about moving the story forward was along the lines of, “Whenever I am unsure what to do I have someone come into the room with a gun and start shooting.” It seems a bit of a timewaster to keep pointing out the ragged edges of Chandler’s plotting when he himself, and most readers, are not overly concerned with it, mostly because the themes and atmospherics are so strong.

The last aspect of Chandler’s work Fuller points to is how his repressed homosexuality plays out in his novels. Fuller does make a strong case in both examining the life and the novels for traces of this proclivity which Chandler may never have acted on and in that sense advances Chandler biographies. In fact, there is a whole range of criticism which sees noir, or tough-guy fiction, as driven by repressed and unfulfilled masculine relationships. The problem here though is the failure to link what may be an unconscious motivation with the main line of the novels. How does the repressed homosexuality affect Chandler’s views of society?

One of the better studies in this area, Robert Corber’s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America, describes the way Hitchcock presents a quasi-gay relationship which is then abandoned and normalized by its lead character, who takes refuge in political office and at the same time returns to a heterosexual relationship in Strangers on a Train, a screenplay that Chandler wrote. This reading then links the eventual repression in the film in 1951 to a wider repression or othering of all kinds of positions and behavior in the wake of the HUAC hearings. Fuller though simply stops with his seeming proof of Chandler’s repressed homosexuality.

The Man Behind the Mask is worth the read for its careful examination of Chandler’s overt politics and how this played out in his novels. The book fails, however, to credit Chandler significantly for not only advancing the class consciousness displayed in his predecessor Hammett but also in laying the groundwork for an even sharper class critique practiced by his successor Ross Macdonald, who explored all the dark nooks and crannies of the loathing and disgust generated over the failure of the capitalist delusion that Southern California was a new Eden and land of unlimited promise.

Ken Fuller
Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind The Mask
Independently published, 2020.
$15.99, 290 pp.
ISBN-13: 979-8699320196

The complete text of ‘The Lady in the Lake’ by Raymond Chandler on line from Canadian site Fadedpage.com at no cost.

The Lady in the Lake (fadedpage.com)

Trouble is My Business (fadedpage.com)

The Simple Art of Murder (fadedpage.com)

The Big Sleep (fadedpage.com)

Something More Than Night: Raymond Chandler, 50 Years Later…

3,114 views • Fri, 12 Mar 2010

(1:36:14 min)

Northern Ireland – Ulster – British soldiers shot unarmed protesters dead in 1971 incident – inquiry – by Clodagh Kilcoyne

BELFAST (Reuters) – British soldiers unjustifiably shot or used disproportionate force in the deaths of nine of the 10 innocent people killed in an 1971 incident in Belfast that sparked an upsurge of violence during Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, a judge-led inquiry found.

A Catholic priest and a mother of eight who served soldiers tea during the ‘Troubles’ were among the victims in an event Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney described on Tuesday as “one of the most tragic days” of Northern Ireland’s three decades of bloodshed.

© Reuters/CLODAGH KILCOYNE Publication of the report into 1971 Belfast shootings, in Belfast

Judge Siobhan Keegan delivered her findings to applause from families of the victims shortly after the British government announced it would introduce legislation to give greater protection to former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland, plans Dublin and many in Belfast fiercely oppose.© Reuters/CLODAGH KILCOYNE Publication of the report into 1971 Belfast shootings, in Belfast

“All of the deceased were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing on the day in question,” Keegan, the coroner for the case, concluded.

The deaths over a three-day period of disorder in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast – a sprawling housing estate of Catholics who opposed British rule – occurred in the days after the introduction of internment without trial for suspected militants triggered disorder on the streets.© Reuters/CLODAGH KILCOYNE Publication of the report into 1971 Belfast shootings, in Belfast

Father Hugh Mullan, the 38-year-old priest who died, was helping an injured man and waving a white object before he was shot twice in the back, the inquiry found.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533

There was not enough evidence to say whether the army were responsible for the death of one the victims, John James McKerr, who was indiscriminately shot going to and from work. However Judge Keegan said it was “shocking” that the state did not carry out a proper investigation into the killing.

Questions also remain unanswered about the identity of the soldiers who shot many of the victims, the judge added.

No one has been charged or convicted in connection with any of the killings. The inquest was a fact-finding exercise and not a criminal trial.

Some 3,600 people were killed in the sectarian confrontation between Irish nationalist militants, pro-British “loyalist” paramilitaries and British military that largely came to an end after a 1998 peace agreement.

(Writing by Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Editing by William Maclean)

British soldiers shot dead innocent Northern Irish people in 1971 incident – inquiry (msn.com)

‘Start’ – The Jam – 1981 (2:16 min) Audio Mp3

美国生物战瞄准了中国-但美国无法处理其制造的病毒

电脑翻译

1.）连续三年，中国一直受到神秘病毒的重创。 禽流感病毒在2018年严重破坏了其家禽业，第二年，猪流感病毒摧毁了40％以上的猪群（中国的主要肉源）。 第三年，Covid-19出现了。 如果最后一个只是随机实验室泄漏，肯定是可疑的模式。

（2）Covid-19爆发绝对是在中国最严重的时间和地点发生的。中国是武汉的主要交通枢纽，正好接近时机，以达到当地较高的感染水平，正值农历新年假期的旅行者将疾病传播到 该国所有其他地区，因此产生了不可阻挡的流行病。 实验室意外泄漏的时机显然是随机的。

（3）作为世界军事运动的一部分，300名美国军人刚刚访问了武汉，为释放病毒性生物武器提供了绝佳的机会。考虑一下美国人会怎么想，如果300名中国军官访问了芝加哥，此后立刻在那个城市突然爆发了一种神秘的，致命的病毒性疾病。美国军事访问和完全无关的意外实验室泄漏会在同一时间发生，这似乎很奇怪。

（4）Covid-19的特点，包括高交流性和低致死性，绝对是反经济生物武器的理想选择。随机的实验室泄漏会释放出一种设计得足以严重损害中国经济的病毒，这似乎很奇怪。

（5）从爆发爆发的那一刻起，美国的反华博客和美国资助的亚洲自由电台发起了针对中国的强大国际宣传攻势，称武汉爆发是由于来自武汉实验室的非法生物武器。这可能只是我们的宣传机构异常迅速但机会主义的反应，但它们似乎非常迅速地充分利用了完全出乎意料和神秘的发展，他们立即发现这是由于实验室泄漏造成的。

（6）到“ 11月的第二周”，我们的国防情报局已经开始准备秘密报告，警告武汉将发生“催化性”疾病暴发，尽管根据当时的标准时间表，可能只有几十人开始了活动。在一个有1100万人口的城市中经历过任何疾病症状。他们如何比中国政府或其他任何人早发现武汉发生的事情？

（7）此后几乎立即，伊朗的统治政治精英受到严重感染，其中许多人死亡。为什么意外的武汉实验室泄漏事件在如此之快的影响力蔓延到世界上几乎其他任何地方之前，便如此迅速地跳入了伊朗的政治精英。

显然，这种重构具有很大的推测性，但是我认为它最适合所有现有证据，而单个元素可以修改，删除或替换，而不必损害整体假设。

（1）我们大型国家安全机构中可能与“深州新保守派”有联系的流氓分子决定使用生物战对中国庞大的经济造成严重损害。该计划是用Covid-19病毒感染武汉的主要交通枢纽，以便在每年的农历新年旅行期间将这种疾病无形地传播到整个国家，并且他们利用武汉国际军事运动的掩护溜了几下。特工进入市区释放病毒。我的猜测是，只有很少一部分人参与到该情节中。

（2）他们释放的生物制剂主要被设计成一种反经济而非杀伤性武器。尽管Covid-19的病死率很低，但它具有极强的传染性，具有很长的症状前感染期，甚至可以通过无症状携带者传播，因此非常适合该目的。因此，一旦它在中国大部分地区建立起来，将很难根除，而由此而来的控制它的努力将对中国的经济和社会造成巨大的损害。

（3）作为次要行动，他们决定针对伊朗的政治精英，可能会部署一种更具致命性的病毒变种。由于政治精英一般都比较老，所以无论如何他们都会遭受更大的死亡。

（4）在东亚和近东发生的致命SARS和MERS疫情从未显着扩散回美国（或欧洲），因此，绘图员错误地认为Covid-19也是如此。无论如何，由于国际组织一直将美国和欧洲列为拥有与任何疾病流行作斗争的最佳和最有效的公共卫生系统，因此他们认为任何可能的反吹损害都是很小的。

（5）只有少数个人直接参与了这一阴谋，在该疾病在武汉成功获释后不久，他们决定通过向国防情报局警告有关部门，可能是通过编造一些人，来进一步维护美国自身利益。一种所谓的“智能泄漏”。基本上，他们安排DIA听到武汉显然正在遭受“催化性”疾病暴发，从而导致DIA准备并分发了一份秘密报告，警告我们自己的部队和盟国采取适当的预防措施。

（6）不幸的是，对于这些计划，中国政府以惊人的决心和效力做出了反应，并很快消灭了这种疾病。同时，缺乏狂妄和无能的美国政府在很大程度上忽视了这个问题，只是在意大利北部大规模爆发引起媒体关注之后才做出反应。由于CDC破坏了测试套件的生产，因此我们没有办法意识到这种疾病已经在我们的国家蔓延，结果对美国的经济和社会造成了巨大破坏。实际上，美国遭受了原本打算送给中国竞争对手的命运。

英文原件 – “The Truth” versus “The Whole Truth” About the Origins of COVID – by Ron Unz – 10 May 2021 | xenagoguevicene (wordpress.com)

Doxxing the Radical Liberal Upper Class Doxxers – Jared Lawrence Holt

Jared Lawrence Holt

Jared L. Holt is a media personality who targets right populist and conservative journalists. While he chafes at being linked to Antifa, he continues to invite the association by repeatedly working with notorious extremists like Conger and Emily Gorcenski [Behind The CJR’s Hit Job On A Researcher Exposing Antifa-Journalist Connections, by Emily Stolzfoos, Daily Caller, June 15, 2019].

Because Holt is from Bentonville, Arkansas, readers might think his roots are humble. In fact, he’s just another rich kid.

Holt’s father, Larry Allen Holt, is a recently retired corporate executive with J.B. Hunt, the trucking company. Compensation for a J.B. Hunt National Account Executive is estimated at $81,664 base pay with $34,568 in additional compensation: $116,232 per year [J.B. Hunt Transport National Account Executive Salaries, Glassdoor].

Holt’s stepmother, Lisa Hayward Wadlin, is Head of Tax, at Netflix, the single-highest paying job on this list. Compensation: About $350,000 [Netflix Senior Tax Manager Salaries, Glassdoor].

Salarywise, the Holts are in the top 2 percent of American workers, excluding investments and real property.

Upon leaving Arkansas for Washington D.C., Jared Holt immediately hooked up with George Soros’ Media Matters and People for the American Way, his LinkedIn page says.

He used the substantial resources at his disposal to target conservative journalists like Ashley Rae Goldenberg, a first-generation college graduate and daughter of two blue-collar parents. A slight, unassuming reporter with Capital Research Center before Holt’s attack, Goldenberg made the mistake of challenging liberal media hysterics about the “racist whites” who murder “unarmed” blacks [Capital Research Center Employee Favorite Source for White Nationalist Smear Campaign Against Ahmaud Arbery, by Jared Holt, Right Wing Watch, May 14, 2020].

In particular, Holt attacked her for highlighting inconvenient facts in cases the radical liberals favor.

Exoo promoted the hit piece and called Goldenberg a “Nazi.” She is Jewish.

But Goldenberg lost her job at CRC after Holt’s piece, which was preceded by months of attacks from Conservatism, Inc. [Jared Holt and ConInc Push Conservative Non Profit to Fire Ashley Rae Goldenberg, by Gabriel Keane, National File, May 26, 2020].

On another occasion, Holt stalked reporter Cassandra Fairbanks after Antifa street militants attacked her home. The stalkers shot guns and fireworks at her house and pounded on her windows, which forced Fairbanks and family, including a young daughter, to flee [‘Ridiculous lawlessness’: Journalist Cassandra Fairbanks says her home ATTACKED by rioting mob as 9-year-old daughter hid inside, RT, June 1, 2020].

https://archive.ph/0Hqnx

Doxxing the Doxxers – Madeleine Blair Conger – Molly Conger – Wealthy Upper Class Radical Liberal

Madeleine Blair “Molly” Conger

Molly Conger, who thinks her opponents are “Nazis,” leveraged the Unite the Right rally to increase her national profile. While Conger—Twitter handle, @socialistdogmom—is often seen wearing a red communist bandanna, she too comes from a privileged bourgeois background.

Her father is John Conger, an assistant program manager for a major defense contractor, who lives in Virginia Beach with Molly’s mother, Blair Ferguson Conger. She is a midwife with the Bon Secours DePaul Medical Center. Program managers of Conger’s type earn about $137,000 annually [Indeed.com]. The average salary for a midwife was $105,030 annually in 2019. High-end earners make $158,990 per year [Bureau of Labor Statistics].

Molly Conger graduated from the University of Virginia and was project manager at an education software company, as the Washington Post’s Klemko reported in its friendly profile above. In 2017, she founded Conger Consulting, LLC. Now that she rakes in thousands of dollars per month in Patreon donations, she’s a full-time social media activist.

Some highlights from her radical liberal career:

• In December 2017, she targeted a firefighter simply because he felt that Antifa shared some of the blame for violence at protests.

• In February 2019, she Doxed a man for posting a video on clashes at Charlottesville Unite The Right rally. The individual’s personal information remains at her Twitter feed.

She instigated a targeted harassment campaign to destroy his small business and taunted him about losing custody of his child in a divorce proceeding.

• In October 2019, Conger confronted Christians protesting the removal of a Confederate monument by ripping pages out of one of their Bibles and setting them on fire [Hundreds of protesters face off in Pittsboro over pro-Confederate monument, heritage gathering, WBTV, October 19, 2019].

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/gC9seBKwOaIU/

• In July 2019, Conger tweeted support for Antifa domestic militant Willem Van Spronsen, who bombed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

• In December 2020, Conger posted video of herself training for armed conflict on behalf of the Antifa ideology.

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/JubrF603a1sH/

• In December 2020, she gloated over police officers dying in the line of duty during the holiday season.

Conger is also another of the Leftist “activists” who doesn’t like her father. “I’m familiar with the wrongs my father did in service of this shitty country,” she tweeted.

https://archive.ph/1nFiE

US Workers – How We Lost it All – Labor Unions and The Taft-Hartley Anti-Union Laws of 1947 – by David Macaray

How We Lost It All: Labor Unions and Taft-Hartley

BY DAVID MACARAY

Photograph Source: Sarah Stierch – CC BY 2.0

It’s hard to know precisely what’s being asked of them, but opinion polls show that upwards of 50% of working people say they’d be interested in joining a labor union. That much seems to be true. Yet, only 10.8% of America’s workforce is unionized. Barely one in ten.

Even acknowledging that some of those expressing an interest were fooling themselves and misleading the pollster, there is still a huge number of working people out there who would like to become union members but either don’t quite know how to proceed or, frankly, are too frightened to make their feelings known, fearing management retaliation.

This discrepancy (between the number of those who’d like to join and actual membership) reflects brutal two truths: management has the statutory ability to limit organized labor’s power; and companies are still dedicated to the point of obsession to keeping non-union workers away from union organizers.

While insuring that the workforce remain unrepresented has always been a cat-and-mouse game, one which management has played well through the use of flattery, deceit, rewards and intimidation, the statutory limits on labor’s power are directly traceable to the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947. The Act was passed by a Republican congress, with the help of southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”), over the veto of President Truman.

Taft-Hartley not only amended or rescinded many of the bedrock components of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (commonly known as the “Wagner Act”), it more or less defanged the labor movement. It domesticated the movement. By adopting a set of “unfair labor practices” (ULPs) that applied to unions in the much the same way that the Wagner Act applied ULPs to management, Taft-Hartley effectively blunted labor’s ability to resort to “radical” action.

Taft-Hartley outlawed the closed shop, eliminated the sanctity of the union shop (allowing “right-to-work” states to exist), enacted a mandatory waiting period before calling a strike, made it illegal to engage in jurisdictional strikes, secondary strikes and boycotts, gave management the right to stall and impede a membership certification vote, and expanded the NLRB’s governing board from three to five members. In a word, Taft-Hartley made unions infinitely more “controllable.”

Right-to-work laws allow employees the privilege of choosing whether to join or not join a union. Prior to Taft-Hartley that right didn’t exist; if you hired into a facility that had a union you were required to join it, or you lost your job. Today there are 27 states with right-to-work laws on the books, mainly in the Deep South and Midwest, and four of them (Arkansas, Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma) include these right-to-work provisions in their state constitutions.

Supporters of right-to-work statutes tend to be anti-collectivist, libertarian wannabes who elevate personal choice to iconic status, and are willing to be paid less and accept substandard benefits in return for the right not to have to join a big, bad workers’ collective. When you consider the simple arithmetic involved, this antipathy to unions, this flat-out rejection of economic advancement via strength-in-numbers, isn’t merely irrational, it’s pitiful.

Then, of course, there’s the whole other matter of “free riders,” those workers who benefit from union wages and benefits by hiring into a union shop but who aren’t required to join the union. They’re able to maintain their ideological “amateur status” while simultaneously drawing a professional wage. Not too shabby.

Also, it’s no coincidence that the overwhelming majority of states with right-to-work laws have significantly poorer safety records than those without them. Say what you will about labor unions, their safety records have always been demonstrably superior to those of non-union facilities, and this has remained true even after passage (in 1970) of OSHA.

Since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act there have been a few half-hearted attempts at repealing all or parts of it, most recently under the Carter and Clinton administrations. Vehement Republican opposition and tepid Democratic support were responsible for the defeat of these attempts. There are simply too many lobbying groups opposed to it, too much money arrayed against it, to give anyone hope that the Act will ever be repealed.

But what would the country look like if that were to happen? How would repeal of Taft-Hartley affect organized labor?

In truth, it could be argued that too much has occurred in the intervening 75 years to result in the radicalization of the labor movement. The connection to labor’s revolutionary ideological roots has been severed. The face of the American worker isn’t what it was in 1947.

Yes, without Taft-Hartley there would be more national membership drives, more people being allowed to join unions, all of which would be a salutary, democratic effect of repeal, one that would benefit working people. But, arguably, the country is too “grown-up,” too cynical and world weary, to engage in radical industrial actions such as secondary strikes and boycotts, even if they were made legal.

With so many workers now invested in the stock market, and union expectations and identity having been profoundly warped over the last half-century, it would be hard to find a critical mass willing to engage in the more radical actions made available by repeal of Taft-Hartley. In any event, to get back anything close to the mindset labor once had would require a lengthy period of adjustment.

As for President Truman, let’s not pretend that he was terribly pro-union. The only reason Truman allowed Taft-Hartley to “pass” was because he’d already done the necessary arithmetic, and had been assured that the veto override was in the bag.

How do we know that? Because if he was truly on the side of unions—if he was as adamantly opposed to organized labor’s legislature as he claimed—Truman never would have invoked the Taft-Hartley Act a whopping twelve times.

David Macaray is a playwright and author. His newest book is How To Win Friends and Avoid Sacred Cows.  He can be reached at dmacaray@gmail.com

Radical Liberal Upper Class Elite Doxxer – Talia Brach Lavin

Talia Brach Lavin

Another member of Deplatform Hate is Talia Lavin, a Doxer from one of the most elite and privileged families on this list.

She’s known for spreading disinformation about Justin Gaertner, a computer forensics analyst with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gaertner is a wheelchair-bound Marine veteran who lost his legs serving in Afghanistan.

Lavin, a former “fact-checker” at The New Yorker, falsely accused Gaertner of being a “white supremacist” because of a “Titan 2” platoon tattoo on his elbow, which she confused with a Nazi symbol.

Unlike the working stiffs that Deplatform Hate attacks, after the magazine “cancelled” Lavin for smearing the Marine hero, she landed another high-profile job with Media Matters [Media Matters Hires Ex-New Yorker Fact Checker Who Falsely Said ICE Agent Had Nazi Tattoo, by Jon Levine, The Wrap, July 20, 2018]. And she still has a megaphone with the Leftist Regime Media: Boston Globe, Washington Post, Real Clear Politics and Business Insider [Muck Rack]. Less than a year later, The Wrap’s Levine reported, New York University’s journalism hired her to teach “reporting on the far right,” then canceled the class … but not because she smeared someone [NYU Cancels Former New Yorker Fact-Checker Talia Lavin’s Journalism Class, March 20, 2019]. The problem? Low enrollment!

Lavin’s mother, Gila Leiter, is a doctor and professor at Mt. Sinai Hospital. She is also president of the Medical Board of Mount Sinai Hospital and runs its Administrative Executive Committee.

Her father, James F. Lavin, his LinkedIn profile says, is the founder and CEO of Electron Storage, Inc., owner of Lavin Holdings, LLC, and a board member of Electrical Grid Monitoring, LTD.

James Lavin graduated from Harvard University with a biochemistry degree, and Talia freely admits that she was a “legacy kid” at Harvard. Daddy got her in, even though she’s only a B+ student. Another of Talia’s sisters was also admitted into Harvard as a “legacy” student, then went to Mount Sinai with her mother.

James Lavin and Gila Leiter own a $2.7 million condo in Manhattan.

The Lavins potentially control millions of dollars in assets, likely putting them in the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans.

Despite all the privilege and wealth, Lavin calls her father evil because he supported Donald Trump.

An irony of Lavin’s wealthy upbringing is how she routinely chides her victims with such terms as “middle-aged business owners” [Confronting white supremacy among our neighbors, our families — and ourselves, by Talia Lavin, Boston Globe, January 15, 2021]. She affects the air of a righteous, proletarian communist warrior despite her wealthy background, and punches down at the most stigmatized and vulnerable strata of society.

………………………..

https://archive.ph/3rMXs

Radical Liberal Upper Class Elite Doxxer – Abner Bashir Hauge

Abner Bashir Hauge

The Post and Rolling Stone also profiled Abner Hauge, who runs the Left Coast Right Watch website and Twitter feed and works with Exoo at Deplatform Hate.

Hauge purchased a gun to prepare for war with his rivals and has been photographed wearing clothing emblazoned with semi-automatic rifles over social justice slogans like “Defend Equality,” as the Post reported.

Hauge dresses down in a sort of crust-punk hobo chic, but like Exoo, he’s the scion of wealthy parents.

Pictured: Abner Hauge, with mother Robina and father Evan

Hauge’s mother, Robina Bhatti-Hauge, emigrated from Pakistan in the 1980s and is now a global studies professor at the California State University Monterey Bay. She collected a cool $156,776.27 in salary and benefits in 2019 [Source: Transparent California].

The father, Evan Palmer Hauge, lists his occupation as fine woodworker and home chef. But he partly owns Robina’s Organics, a sprawling multimillion dollar farm in Salinas, California. The farm, which includes a massive six-bedroom home, was valued at $2,603,261 in 2017.

A sister, Maheen Ruby Hauge, works in an architecture firm and runs an art gallery, another vocation of the wealthy and privileged.

While many of the Hauge family’s sources of income are unknown, the mother’s salary from CSU alone is 2.29 times the 2020 median household income.

Factoring in grants, farm income and the father’s income (unknown) as well as property assets, easily situates the Hauges in the Antifa’s dreaded top 1 percent.

https://archive.ph/brAqn

Doxxing The Upper Class Elitist Radical Liberal Doxxers – Christian Michael Exoo

It’s hardly news that the Media has a soft spot for the leaders of the Antifa street militant movement. Many political movements around the world have had a ‘legal’ above ground party and an illegal armed wing that carries out ‘actions’ that the legal wing does not want to be publicly responsible.

Nor is it surprising that the Lügenpresse has published several glowing profiles of Antifa’s leading Doxers (see below) without any concern, apparently, that these people openly harass, attack, defame, and seek to ruin financially and professionally ordinary people who have done little more than express a right populist opinion. Antifa even wants to “dehome” them and their families—a direct threat to the physical well-being of innocent family members and children. Make no mistake: Antifa is dangerous.

“We know where you sleep at night,” they chanted outside Tucker Carlson’s house in June 2019.

In August 2020, one of the more unhinged Antifa radicals murdered Trump supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland, and Antifa thugs also sent conservative journalist Andy Ngo to the hospital.

Despite all that, top Antifa leaders are hardly common criminals. They are the offspring of the wealthiest and most privileged members of society: doctors, lawyers, professors, and corporate executives. Several might be millionaires in their own right.

Christian Michael Exoo

Christian Exoo is the leader of “Deplatform Hate,” a cyberstalking campaign that seeks to force social media, fundraising sites, and email marketing services to deplatform patriot political dissidents.

Deplatform Hate advertises several more known Doxers: Abner Hauge, Talia Lavin, and Madeleine “Molly” Conger.

Conger a “senior researcher,” told the Post what she, Exoo and her pals want to do:

I’m interested in disincentivizing this behavior. I’m interested in raising the cost of being a white nationalist, raising the cost of being a Nazi, raising the cost of making these threats anonymously online, and making it clear that these people are not as hard to find as they think they are.

[A small group of sleuths had been identifying right-wing extremists long before the attack on the Capitol, by Robert Klemko, January 10, 2021].

In other words, they want to silence the opposition—just like the goons that showed up at Carlson’s house.

Exoo goes by several noms de guerre on Twitter, including Antifash Gordon and Dox Savage, which he uses to encourage his tens of thousands of followers to deluge businesses with requests to fire or evict working people [Meet the Undercover Anti-Fascists, by Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone, February 14, 2021].

Maybe that’s because the uber-privileged Exoo family never has to worry about unemployment or homelessness. They are cocooned in a web of wealth and nepotism at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

Attorney Diane Exoo and professor Calvin Exoo, Christian’s parents.

Christian Exoo’s father, Calvin Fred Exoo, is an emeritus professor at the university as well as a writer at Leftist outlets Salon, TruthOut and Huffington Post.

And where Daddy Exoo goes, Christian is not far behind.

Calvin Exoo teaches at St. Lawrence, so Christian gets a job in the library. Calvin writes for Salon, so Christian writes for the website, too.

And wouldn’t you know it, Christian’s Mommy, Diane Exoo, an attorney, is or was an assistant adjunct professor at St. Lawrence University.

Dreadlocked brother Josh is an associate professor at the university.

St. Lawrence doesn’t post faculty salaries online, but Glassdoor.com lists average base pay for a professor emeritus at $167,483 per year, excluding benefits.

Josh Exoo, of the ubiquitous Exoo brood

 For an attorney, average base pay is listed as $107, 549 per year.

This would place the Exoo family in the top 5 percent for household income in the United States; median household income in 2020 was $68,400.

No wonder Exoo feels entitled to dox the rabble, the Deplorables, the great unwashed: firefighters, nurses, mechanics, and teachers. Working stiffs. Even when none of them have been accused of violence, breaking the law, or even making a racially insensitive comment.

Thus Exoo has targeted a firefighter, not accused of unlawful conduct, and a public-school teacher who attended a protest of which he, Exoo, did not approve.

He’ll even attack a target’s innocent family members. In the case of a Florida nurse, Exoo promoted a campaign by “Panic in the Discord,” an Antifa Doxing collective, to target the victim’s wife and their newborn baby.

They publicized the baby’s gift registry and published photos of the infant.

Then they directed a mob to contact the family and their employers.

No one had accused the new parents of any wrongdoing. And even if they had done something “wrong,” that doesn’t make it right to dox a baby.

But Exoo doesn’t care, as Ngo’s Post Millennial reported:

“I don’t just stalk fascists. I also get them fired, de-homed, kicked out of school, etc.” He then incites violence against his victims, “It’s really satisfying to punch a racist. They bleed nice, too”.

[Notorious Doxing Activist Accused of Racism and Predatory Behavior, Post Millennial, January 6, 2020].

Exoo’s followers once included Dayton Antifa mass murderer Connor Betts. After Exoo posted a list of targets much like the ones in this article, Betts responded, “Know your enemies” [Dayton Shooter’s Now-Suspended Twitter Appears To Have Had Pro-Antifa, Pro-Gun Control Comments, by Shelby Talcott, The Daily Caller, August 5, 2019].

Betts murdered nine and injured 27 others.

Should we blame Christian Exoo?

https://archive.ph/2JGMq

Censored! Who needs a totalitarian state when zealous, woke workers ensure that books with ‘invalid opinions’ never get an airing? – by Frank Furedi

The publishing industry is encouraging grass roots censorship and increasingly giving in to employees who demand that certain views should never be able to be expressed – especially those involving trans issues.

It looks like publishing is fast becoming a career choice for ambitious would-be censors. The most aspiring and aggressive wing of the grass-roots censorship movement is the lobby policing publications dealing with trans-related issues. Recently a group of individuals from across the publishing industry associated with this lobby wrote a letter to The Bookseller demanding the censoring of books that it deems unfavourable to its cause.

The main point of the letter is to claim that trans culture cannot be a subject of debate and that publishers should prevent opinions that run counter to it from being published. It states:

“Transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry. Our industry excuses it, says that to view transgender individuals as having less than full human rights is OK and an opinion as valid as others. Our industry is still very comfortable about giving this form of prejudice a powerful platform. We need to step away from the paradigm that all opinions are equally valid.”

The demand to reject the paradigm that all opinions are valid is a roundabout way of saying that ‘invalid’ opinions can be legitimately censored and authors who hold such views should be cancelled and silenced.

Calls for censorship by freelance inquisitors working in publishing have also been busy in the United States. Employees at Simon & Schuster recently filed a petition insisting that the publisher sever its ties with writers associated with the Trump administration. The petition, signed by 216 employees, gained the support of over 3,500 external supporters, including well-known black writers such as the two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, Jesmyn Ward.

When well-known writers join the queue of enthusiastic censors, it becomes evident that American literary culture is in trouble. 

One of the targets of the Simon & Schuster inquisitors is a two-book deal that the company signed with former Vice-President Mike Pence. Since they believe that Pence’s opinions are not as valid as theirs, shutting down one of the leading voices of the Republican Party is a public service to society. 

One of the most disturbing features of the inquisitorial movement in the publishing industry is the casual manner with which it seeks to corrupt the ideals of tolerance and free speech. 

It is worth noting that the letter sent to The Bookseller is titled ‘The Paradox of Tolerance’. Since it rejects tolerance for views with which it disagrees – it states, “it is clearly not appropriate to say simply ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion’” – it should be titled ‘The Case for Intolerance’!

The hypocrisy of the supporters of censorship in publishing was highlighted in June 2020, by a group called Pride in Publishing. It wrote a circular, ‘Let’s clarify what free speech is and is not: An open letter to the industry from Pride in Publishing’. The aim of this letter was to support employees at Hachette Children’s Books who objected to working on JK Rowling’s latest book. Rowling – the author of the Harry Potter series – had in these employees’ opinion committed the unpardonable sin of refusing to accept the definition of sex and gender promoted by trans activists.

The letter stated: “Let’s clarify what free speech is and is not. Free speech does not entitle an author to a publishing contract. But it does protect the right of a worker to raise the alarm when they’re asked to participate in something that can cause them or someone else harm or trauma. Transphobic authors are not a protected group. Trans and non-binary people are.”

In British law, those using words that express hostility towards so-called protected groups with protected characteristics – such as race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status and disability – can be charged with a hate crime. The implication of Pride in Publishing’s statement is that the right to exercise free speech is qualified in circumstances when it is directed at a protected group. This letter also highlights what has become one of the most distinctive features of 21st century linguistic policing – the diseasing of free speech.

In effect, the implication of the Pride in Publishing statement is that Rowling’s book represents a threat to the safety and mental health of the trans and non-binary people working at Hachette. It states that “employees should never have to work on content which is detrimental to their mental health or which causes them unnecessary turmoil.” This sentiment echoes the widely held view which insists that verbal and published communications are a potential hazard to people’s well-being and therefore need to be regulated to protect certain groups from offense, psychological trauma, and mental health problems. 

This medicalisation of free speech, leading to its diseasing, has become one of the most effective arguments used for undermining freedom of expression.

Activists have, in effect, reinforced their call for censorship by claiming that the publication of invalid opinions by authors who offend them causes them psychological distress and trauma. 

The publishing industry has recognised that its new generation of employees do not expect to work with material that upsets them. David Shelley, the CEO of Hachette, and Clare Alexander, a literary agent, recently told a Lords Committee that new recruits into the publishing industry must be warned that they may have to work on books by people they don’t agree with!

That publishers need to warn employees that they may have to work with authors whose views they dislike highlights the precarious position of free expression and tolerance in this industry.

Once upon a time, publishers were worried about the threat posed by state censorship and feared provoking the wrath of authoritarian censors from above. Today the publishing industry has become complicit in acquiescing to cancel culture, and the pressure to police what the public gets to read comes from below, from a new generation of intolerant employees.

Who needs a totalitarian state when zealous, fragile, and woke workers are determined to ensure that ‘invalid opinions’ never get an airing?

………………….

Censored! Who needs a totalitarian state when zealous, woke workers ensure that books with ‘invalid opinions’ never get an airing? — RT Op-ed

Liberal Totalitarians

TV: In Praise of ‘Perry Mason’ 1955-1966

In a world that was grey scale and where everyone seemed to be smoking, or lighting up a cigarette, or asking if someone wanted ‘a drink’ I see a life from sixty years ago.

Two old television series in ‘black and white’ that I watch on occasion are ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Perry Mason.’

I remember so many episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ that I saw when I was about ten years old. I think the program was broadcast on television on Friday evening. I spent some Saturday’s with friends discussing the show we had seen the night before and what it revealed about the mysteries of the grown up world and reality and non-reality in general.

I don’t remember seeing any of the episodes of Perry Mason I watch now. I remember my father watching the program and the theme music. I seem to remember the frequent climax where some murderer would blurt out the truth. “Yeah, I killed him, but he was asking for it.”

A friend in law school told me that any competent judge would stop the trial immediately if someone stood up and confessed in open court while not on the witness stand.

But, Perry Mason is drama.

I began watching the program on daytime television at ten am every morning. Some auxiliary station had old programs and advertising aimed at ‘senior’ citizens. I started recording the program so I could watch later and skip the seemingly endless commercials for medical problems that old people get.

I looked online and saw the complete series for about $130. I noted the price and then saw the price of the set go up as there was some interest in Perry Mason because a new series was being created.

The price went up. I didn’t think I had enough spare cash for the set. Until, I did.

The set came in a box with three plastic cases and I don’t know how many DVD discs.

I watch about one program a day in the series. How nice to see the program without commercial breaks and reminders of human frailty and old age.

I saw that HBO was featuring a new version of the series.

“Of course Perry Mason has to be gay in the new version,” I predicted to a friend knowing absolutely nothing about the new series except the social milieu the writers and show runners come from.

Then I read that I was right. Not only is the Perry Mason character gay in the new iteration of the story, but his secretary Della Street is a Lesbian. Of course.

I have zero interest in watching the retread. I can watch the show as part of the HBO I am already paying for, but simply do not want to give any attention to the show, the creators, anyone. Perhaps I’ll read that the program is actually a good drama with insight into the human condition. But, I doubt that. The creators are on a mission, and the mission is not honest entertainment.

So, what about the old tv show.

There are some corny elements to the program. Perry Mason always wins. Every case on the program shows Perry Mason eventually winning. How can that be? I suppose one might speculate that Perry Mason loses cases that are not featured on the program. How could his usual opponent, District Attorney Hamilton Burger get elected if he loses every case? One might infer that Burger is winning other cases that are not featured in the program. Or, something.

So, where is the drama if Perry Mason is always going to win? In the details.

The details of the drama are deftly revealed. In a program that was on the air for an hour and had about eight minutes of commercials quick strokes of the narrative brush fill things in quickly.

The opening scene establishes the area of life that the events will happen in, one week it was a horse race, another fine art and gallery intrigue, I watched an episode yesterday that was about early 1960’s rocket launches that featured a lot of US military and air force images and was positive and respectful of the military. Almost a commercial built in for the recruiters in the military. I liked seeing the old propeller DC 9 style US Air Force aircraft.

I think major network television shows had twenty-six episodes. The show ran for nine seasons, I think. Sorry, but I almost don’t want to look up all the details or the show. I want to enjoy the world it presents on screen. That’s why people liked the series in the first place. The nine years with two dozen episodes provided a lot of space to visit different locations, and different occupations.

The setting was most frequently LA. I like looking at the cars on establishing shots of the ‘freeway’ or parked on the streets outside the courthouse exterior shown to set the stage for the trial during the last half of the show.

The dialogue and visuals quickly sketch a setting and implied narrative to the story in the opening minutes. In what seems to me to be relatively natural speaking patterns the story is set up. People don’t speak in the clipped ‘cop speak’ that all characters seemed to employ in ‘Dragnet’ a police drama running at the same time.

When Perry Mason opens someone is usually presented as some kind of an unpleasant jerk who has a number of enemies or a position of wealth or power that someone wants to counter. So a sharp eyed viewer can look to see who is going to be killed in the first fifteen minutes. A number of people will be featured who have a motive and perhaps opportunity to kill the ‘jerk.’

Anyone who is suspected of the murder can only be safe if they make it to Perry Mason’s office or speak to him. After that the suspect is essentially safe. So I root for characters I like to make it to Perry Mason’s office.

Once the name is shown on the door I breathe a sigh of relief if I like the suspect.

I have been called to jury duty, myself, time and time again, over the years. One difference I notice when compared to trials in Perry Mason, or any other drama, is the court room audience. In almost every trial I have seen there is no one in the gallery. Sometimes absolutely no one. Even victims of crimes will testify one day and not show up for the rest of the trial later in the week.

In Perry Mason everyone connected with the trial is in the audience. Again and again the camera focuses on a face to get a reaction, or lack of reaction, from a key character. Dramatic. Unrealistic.

But then, Alfred Hitchcock said, “movies are life with the boring parts taken out.”

So, the edited reality gets reactions all in one place, all in one hour.

I have binged on other series in the past. I had Netflix for a year after signing up for fast internet. About the only show I wanted to see on Netflix was ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation.’ I’d watch four episodes in a row on a snowy day. After a few hours I felt like I worked for Star Fleet. People asked me where I went to school, and I’d think immediately, “Star Fleet Academy.”

But Perry Mason is different. If I watch two episodes in a row I begin to get the cases mixed up. Talk about a ‘film noir’ world were no one can be trusted, I was seeing murderers in every character. Not the same as dealing with three hours of Commander Data. Since the actor who played Data was actually gay, maybe they can remake “Star Trek” and have a plot twist where everyone hates Data because he is not a gay male.

One of the things I really like about Perry Mason is that the audience knows nothing about Perry Mason’s personal life. Is he in a relationship with secretary Della Street. If you want them in a relationship, the narrative is set up so that is possible. Nothing is ever said about Perry Mason being married, having children, having parents or brothers or sisters.

The private investigator who works for Perry Mason is the male figure in the show who expresses interest in women and dares to call Della Street “beautiful.”

Since so much of the show is tightly connected to the plot I noted the frequent lighting of cigarettes and offer of smokes to people. Is that because smoking was so popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s? Or, was this ‘product placement’ to encourage the consumption of cigarettes? The use of the latest model cars is also featured as a kind of commercial in the middle of the drama. I’m outraged.

I think many of the first season or two had stories from the novels by Earl Stanley Gardner who created the character and wrote a number of books featuring the defense attorney. Earl Stanley Gardner was a lawyer so one might surmise that he knew something about what happened in California courts. Counselor Gardner was also a good story teller. The man created a character who is remembered sixty years later. That something.

I have been watching the series in order as I take it out of the plastic cases. I notice that Perry Mason seems to be more of a rogue who is skirting the law at times to collect evidence or get information from someone or simply trying to confuse a witness to cast doubt on their memory. As the years have gone by Attorney Mason seems to be more of an upright citizen and perhaps ready to become a wise and temperate judge himself. A kind of character arc left completely unmentioned in the series.

The series has no history in that one could watch any episode from any year and each one stands on its own and makes no reference to any past in another episode.

One frequently noted theme is people making business appointments at 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock at night. Did people do that in the 1950’s, or is the time set because murder is more dramatic at night?

Almost every day Perry Mason makes some wise observation about relations between people. Almost every episode I learn another point of law.

One recent episode had a rural sheriff say, “I’m too old to be certain of anything.”

Just one more nugget of wisdom.

I fear the day when I run out of episodes to watch.

But, all good things must come to an end.

Aristotle said every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Moscow, RU: Red Square – 9 May 2021

US Anti-Racist Messaging Is Failing With Voters. So Why Can’t Liberals Quit It? – by Zaid Jilani (Newsweek) 9 May 2021

If you’ve spent any time at all listening to progressive messaging lately, you’ve probably heard countless invocations of race and racism. Democratic elected officials have taken to framing virtually any policy goal they want through the lens of anti-racism.

Black Lives Matter activists stand with shields outside of the Columbus Police Headquarters in reaction to the police shooting of Makiyah Bryant on April 20, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio.

New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, for instance, sternly warned us that “standardized testing is a pillar of systemic racism.” Advocates for student debt relief like the ACLU want us to know that “student debt is a racial justice issue.” Climate activists, who historically have talked about their issues in universal terms, have increasingly described their movement through anti-racist language, arguing that it benefits minorities most to battle climate change.

Standardized testing is a pillar of systemic racism.— Jamaal Bowman (@JamaalBowmanNY) March 2, 2021

The logic behind this racialization of every debate is fairly straightforward: America is an increasingly diverse place and one where increasing numbers of people care deeply about racism and equal opportunity. So why not frame every issue through the lens of racial justice? What can be the harm in talking about how every universal policy especially benefits African Americans or Latinos?

That’s a question that Yale University researchers Josh Kalla and Micah English recently explored in a working paper that tested various types of messaging to promote progressive policies. “Political scientists have really been doing this type of research for decades and they’ve always shown that associating these policies with racial minorities makes people less likely to support them,” English told me in an interview. “But given the shift in racial attitudes in the past few years we thought that maybe the story would be different this time around.”

English and Kalla took six different policies—increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, upzoning housing, and decriminalizing marijuana and erasing prior convictions—and then asked people if they supported them. But they framed the issues differently to see which rationale was most compelling. To one group, they explicitly emphasized that the policy will benefit a specific racial group or promote racial equity (the “race” frame). To another they spoke about how a policy would promote economic justice or benefit a specific class group (the “class” frame). For a third group, they used both the race and class frame together. And for a final group, they used a neutral frame that explained the policy but made no mention of race or class.PauseCurrent Time 0:39/Duration 1:16Loaded: 86.38%Unmute0FullscreenColombia Protests In Photos: Violence And UnrestClick to expand

What they found is that the class frame was generally more effective than either the race frame or the race plus class frame. “Despite observed increases in support for racial justice and Democratic elites’ use of race and class plus race frames in their public messaging, we find no evidence that Americans are persuaded by these policy frames,” they conclude in their paper.

“After this summer, everyone wanted to believe that you know we had this great awakening that everyone now is aware of racial equity and we need to fix it, but I think our results suggest kind of the opposite,” English told me.

Part of the reason for this is likely because many voters don’t want to support policies that they perceive as benefiting some group other than themselves. As I reported in 2019, research has shown that implicit associations between racial groups and wealth can predict opposition towards helping the poor; if white people stereotype African Americans as poor, they will be more likely to oppose welfare spending because they will see it as benefiting African Americans over themselves.

In other words, it helps to tell voters what’s in it for them if you want them to support any particular policy.

But that’s not the whole story here. It wasn’t just that some white voters were turned off by race-oriented messaging. For African Americans, the only minority group surveyed in high enough numbers to draw a conclusion, the race frame seemed to have no advantage over the class frame.

“Something really important that we found is that the race appeal and the class appeal are about just as effective for Black voters,” English told me, speculating that these voters tend to be more pragmatic in their political approach.

Interestingly, English and Kalla did find one group that was slightly receptive to the race framing, but it might not be the one why you expect: It was white Democrats.

It’s worth wondering why progressives, particularly white progressives, have become so fixated on racial messaging if there’s so little evidence that it actually works to persuade voters to support their policies. Political parties spend mountains of money on survey and focus group work; English and Kalla’s paper may be the latest showing how ineffective racial messaging can be, but it certainly isn’t the first bit of research to demonstrate that finding.

My guess is that the progressive movement is simply captured by an upper-class elite for whom anti-racism is now an all-dominating philosophy. Sure, it may not persuade your average voter—white or Black or anyone else—to support your political party to frame every message in terms of race, but it probably does impress your social cohort. There’s a reason elite prep schools are now embracing critical race theory, while most working-class communities and public schools would find some of its tenets esoteric and unrelatable.

And what this latest study shows is that this elite cohort that runs everything from the major news media to the universities to America’s political parties is deeply out of touch, not only with average Americans but perhaps its own political interests. Self-defeating messaging is self-defeating, even if it makes you feel good and impresses people who already agree with you.

There was a time when progressives were not so enthralled by the whims of one social class. They aspired to talk like ordinary people and persuade the vast majority, not the elites who run our universities and corporate HR departments.

Anti-Racist Messaging Is Failing With Voters. So Why Can’t Liberals Quit It? | Opinion (msn.com)

Palestinians – World Wide Appeal For Old Vehicle Tires To Burn At Protests – Israel Blocks ‘Retread’ Flotilla

“We’ve got plenty of stones to throw during demonstrations, but we are running out of tires to burn.”

There is competition for the ‘old tire’ market. In nearby Lebanon to the north burning tires at protest is also seen as a way to show militancy and “resolve.”

A protester waves a Lebanese flag near burning tires set to block a main highway, during a protest in the town of Jal el-Dib, north of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, March 8, 2021. The dayslong protests intensified Monday amid a crash in the local currency, increase of consumer goods prices and political bickering between rival groups that has delayed the formation of a new government. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Donations pile up

Extra large tires could make an extra large political statement

Israel has blocked aide on the high seas in the past. The ‘blockade’ runner below offloads tires from a ‘mother ship’ offshore and evades Israel patrol boats to bring small loads to the shoreline.

The USS Liberty is a privateer with contractors helping Palestine Liberation

Michelin to ship tires to Palestinians on sail-powered cargo ships

14 February 2021

The Michelin Group recently signed a transport commitment with the French shipping line NEOLINE. NEOLINE’s decarbonized shipping service relies on wind energy as the main propulsion for its 136m cargo ships with 4200 m² of sails. After a call went out for tires to be sent to the Palestinians ‘green’ activist around the world wanted an ‘Earth Friendly’ way of shipping tires to the Middle East.

The transport commitment signed by Michelin concerns the transport of tires loaded in containers from Halifax (Canada) to Saint-Nazaire – Montoir de Bretagne (France) on the pilot line opened by NEOLINE, which will also serve the archipelago of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, as well as Baltimore. When fully loaded the cargo will be shipped straight to the Gaza Strip in Palestine, Israel.

NEOLINE plans to open its transatlantic line with a first operating vessel in 2023. With the arrival of a second vessel, scheduled a year later, the Michelin group will gradually entrust NEOLINE with at least 50% of the group’s containers transported on this line.

The NEOLINER will feature a hybrid auxilliary drive system comprising a controllable-pitch propeller with a 4000 kW main engine fueled by MGO Low Sulfur.

The ship is equipped with a duplex rigging and anti-drift fins, which favor regular and efficient navigation under sails. These elements are retractable to allow access to a majority of ports.

Equipped with 2 loading ramps, the NEOLINER can load cargo units of various sizes and types of packaging in 2 loading spaces, fully protected and secured in the event of rough conditions.

Using a set of mobile decks (car-decks), its transport capacities are optimized to load various types of freight, from light to heavy or oversized, up to 9.8m high and 200 tonnes, without any needs of lifting means.

In terms of volume, the NEOLINER’s carrying capacity is:

• Ro-ro: 1500 linear meters or 500 cars
• Containers: 280 TEU ( twenty-foot equivalent unit)
• Conventional: 5000 t

In the shipping industry, container ships can range from the very small (100-499 TEU) to the ultra-large (14,501 TEU and higher). The new Algeciras class ships, which entered service last year, have a maximum theoretical capacity of 23,964 TEU.

Da Vinci Drawing of Bear’s Head – One Wheelbarrow With $16,000,000

A drawing of a bear’s head by Leonardo da Vinci is seen fetching up to $16.7 million, potentially setting a record, when it heads to auction in July, Christie’s said on Saturday.

Measuring 7 cm (just under 3 inches) squared, “Head of a Bear” is a silverpoint drawing on a pink-beige paper. The auction house says it is “one of less than eight surviving drawings by Leonardo still in private hands outside of the British Royal Collection and the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth”.

It will lead Christie’s “Exceptional Sale” on July 8 in London with a price estimate of 8 million to 12 million pounds ($11.14 million – $16.71 million).

That could beat the 2001 sale for Da Vinci’s “Horse and Rider” for more than 8 million pounds, a record for a drawing by the Italian Renaissance master, according to Christie’s.

“I have every reason to believe we will achieve a new record in July for ‘Head of a Bear’, one of the last drawings by Leonardo that can be expected to come onto the market,” Stijn Alsteens, International Head of Department, Old Masters Group, Christie’s Paris, said in a statement.

The drawing’s ownership can be traced to British painter Thomas Lawrence and upon his death in 1830, it was passed to his dealer Samuel Woodburn. He sold it to Christie’s in 1860 for 2.50 pounds ($3.50), according to the auction house.

Its current owner has had it since 2008, it said.

“Head of a Bear” will go on display at Christie’s in New York on Saturday, then in Hong Kong later in the month before going on show in London in June. ($1 = 0.7182 pounds)

Da Vinci’s ‘Head of Bear’ drawing seen fetching up to $16 mln | Reuters

Berlin – 2 May 1945

What’s Wrong With ‘Conspiracy’ Theories – by Jim Fetzer

What’s Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?

 • 

What’s Wrong With ‘Conspiracy’ Theories – by Jim Fetzer (25:46 min) Audio Mp3

APRIL 17, 2021 • 

3,900 WORDS •

The public has been fed an endless stream of attacks upon conspiracy theories, which, we are told, are supposed to be very bad for human beings and other living things. But precisely why is almost never explained. And when you consider that our political parties and the mainstream media indulge themselves in conspiracy theories, such as the claim that Russia interfered with the 2016 election (otherwise Donald Trump could never have been elected) or, alternatively, that Dominion voting machines were used to steal the election of 2020 (and otherwise could not have been defeated) are, in the first instance, promoted by the media (in spite of virtually no evidence at all) and, in the second, denied thereby (in spite of massive supporting proof). Both are conspiracy theories, where one appears to be true and the other appears to be false.

Since at least some conspiracy theories thus appear to be true, we need to be able to tell the difference. Even university professors have shown a decided aversion to conspiracy theories, buying into the stereotypical conception that the key characteristic of conspiracy theories is that they are unfalsifiable. A “tip sheet” for one college, for example, makes the declaration that “The main problem with any particular conspiracy theory is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s inarguable; not that it’s false, but that it is unfalsifiable. Because it is unfalsifiable, a conspiracy theory is not provable or disprovable.” If that were true, it would certainly count against them, making them akin to theoretical affirmations about the existence of God (as a classic case) or the existence of a universal “Force” a la Star Wars (more contemporary). But is it actually true?

A study published in Frontiers of Psychology, “’What about Building 7?’ A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories” (8 July 2013), for example, suggests that those often characterized as “conspiracy theorists” are more skeptical of what they are told by the government (“official accounts”) than they are enamored of specific alternatives and are more open-minded in the interpretation of evidence. They are less inclined to defer to officials as authorities and more inclined to look at the evidence, which even hints that the study of alternative theories of events like 9/11 might be an effective method to teach critical thinking.

Since conspiracies only require two or more persons acting in concert to bring about an illegal end (and turns out to be the most widely prosecuted criminal offense in America), why should conspiracy theories be all-but-banned from public discourse? We know the criteria to employ in the evaluation of scientific theories, why should they not be evaluated by the same standards (or criteria of adequacy), which classically include:

• (CA-1) the clarity and precision of the language in which they are expressed;
• (CA-2) their scope of application for the purpose of explanation and prediction;
• (CA-3) their respective degrees of empirical support on the available evidence; or,
• (CA-4) the economy, elegance or simplicity with which they satisfy (CA-1) – (CA-3)?

Since conspiracy theories are theories, why should they not be evaluated by the same criteria, where the testability of a theory depends (right off the bat) on the specificity of its language?

When Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made the observation, “Some people did something” (in relation to 9/11), for example, her remark qualifies as true but trivial. It cannot satisfy (CA-1) or (CA-2), much less (CA-3) or (CA-4). When The 9/11 Commission, by contrast, concludes that 19 Islamic terrorists commandeered four commercial carriers and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, however, the content and thereby the testability of what has been asserted increases substantially. The government, however, has not been disposed to revise its “official narrative”, even though a half-dozen or more of the 19 “suicide hijackers” turned up alive and well the following day and made contact with media in the UK, as David Ray Griffin observes by making his first argument in his magisterial study, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2004). Even though we know the theory advanced by the commission therefore cannot be true, the government has remained unmoved.

And when consideration is given to Building 7 (WTC-7), for example–a 47-story building in the World Trade Center complex), which was not hit by any plane but came down in what has been characterized as a classic “controlled demolition”—it raises the specter of a “conspiracy theory”, even though its collapse has the characteristics of having been a controlled demolition—abrupt, complete, symmetrical collapse into its own footprint, leaving a debris pile equal to about 12% of the height of the original—where even the owner of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, confirmed to PBS that WTC-7 had been “pulled”. Nothing about this account violates any of (CA-1) – (CA-4).

There are many videos and expert studies of the collapse of WTC-7 available on-line, which means that the recorded sequence of events can be reviewed again and again. It leaves no doubt that, contrary to the NIST Final Report on WTC-7 (2008), which attributes its collapse to the modest fires in the building and the loss of a major support column, this was a controlled demolition that fits the pattern of controlled demolitions around the world. Indeed, on 9/11, as it took place, Dan Rather was (perfectly accurately) reporting it as reminiscent of pictures we’ve seen “where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down”

But if WTC-7, which was not hit by any airplane, was brought down by a controlled demolition, then what about WTC-1 and WTC-2, the North and South Twin Towers? According to The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), which is the official government account of 9/11, the World Trade Center was destroyed as part of an elaborate plot by 19 Islamic terrorists who commandeered 4 commercial carriers, which were used to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. But, since a conspiracy only requires two or more participants collaborating in the attempt to commit a crime, the “official account” of 9/11 itself obviously qualifies as a “conspiracy theory”. Once we look at the evidence, we find that we are confronted with alternative theories that differ in the causal mechanisms they posit, but where both alternatives qualify as “conspiracy theories”.

Comparing Conspiracy Theories

Once we acknowledge the obvious—that the “official account” of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory we are no long able to avoid dealing with conspiracy theories, unless we avoid 9/11 altogether. That, indeed, appears to be the attitude of most philosophers of my acquaintance, who have no interest in evaluating alternatives or in assessing the adequacy of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) itself. This stunning lack of intellectual curiosity might be rooted in the desire not to “fall down the rabbit hole”, since there are disconcerting revelations upon revelations, once you take the bait and begin to scrutinize what we have been told. One fascinating tidbit, for example, is that Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, had as his area of academic specialization, before entering government, the creation and maintenance of “public myths”.

Another reason the study of 9/11 turns out to be philosophically interesting is that so much of the official account entails violations of laws of physics, of engineering and of aerodynamics. At Shankesville, PA, for example, where Flight 93 is alleged to have crashed, there is a hole about 10’x20’ but no signs of any crash having taken place by a Boeing 757 weighing over 100 tons with a 125’ wingspan and tail standing 44’ above the ground. As both the reporters first on the scene observed, the eerie aspect of the crash site was that, unlike other crash sites, there were no signs that any plane had crashed there, which invites an inference to the best explanation: Which hypothesis is better supported: that a Boeing 757 really crashed there or that it did not?

The situation at the Pentagon is even more intriguing, since not only is there no massive pile of aluminum debris—no bodies, no luggage, no wings, no tail, not even the engines (which are practically indestructible) were recovered at the time—but the official trajectory (of a Boeing 757 traveling over 400 mph skimming the ground and taking out a series of lampposts) turns out to be aerodynamically impossible. Because of the phenomenon known as “downdraft” (or “ground effect”), such a plane at that speed could not have come closer than 60’ or even 80’ of the ground, which is higher than the Pentagon at 71’ is tall. Since violations of laws of nature are physically impossible, something must be wrong. How could the official account possibly be true?

Various accounts of scientific reasoning posit a series of stages of inquiry, beginning with one of Puzzlement (where something doesn’t fit into our background knowledge and invites attention), Speculation (during which alternative possible explanations are articulated for consideration), Adaptation (where the strength of the relationship between those hypotheses and the available evidence is evaluated) and Explanation (where, when the evidence has “settled down”, the best supported of the alternatives may be accepted, in the tentative and fallible fashion of science). It ought to be apparent already that the “official account” cannot be reconciled with available evidence, where serious thinkers, I surmise, can excuse themselves only by ignoring 9/11 entirely.

And here we have the key to why some prominent “conspiracy theorists” are relatively easy targets of public attack. Alex Jones, the paradigm of the category, often does excellent work in drawing attention to puzzling cases where what we are learning does not fit into our background knowledge and understanding. And he’s equally good at speculating about possible alternative explanations. But he does not have the aptitude or the ability to carry their investigation further, where sorting out the difference between authentic and fabricated evidence can play a crucial role. At the Pentagon, for example, a key piece of fuselage from a Boeing 757 (which the media has frequently cited) did not come from Fight 77 but from an earlier crash near Cali, Columbia, in 1995, where the salvage was done by an Israeli firm and then planted on the lawn that day as “proof” a plane had crashed there.

Are JFK conspiracy theories unfalsifiable?

Lest it be thought that 9/11 may be the exception, let’s consider another familiar case, that of the assassination of the 35^th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, as a second. If it turns out that conspiracy theories here are unfalsifiable, then perhaps the admonition against taking them seriously has some foundation, in fact. But that does not appear to be true here, either. In criminal investigations, homicide detectives apply multiple criteria of motive, means and opportunity to identify and narrow the list of suspects. Among the most familiar theories about the assassination of JFK, for example, are alternative hypotheses positing (h1) that it was done by Fidel Castro, (h2) that it was done by the Mafia, (h3) that it was done by the KGB; and (h4), alas, that it was done by the CIA. Are these theories testable? Are they unfalsifiable?

On the “official account”, Lee Oswald fired three “lucky shots” and killed JFK while wounding John Connally, the Governor of Texas. Suppose the alleged assassin had been an expert shot; the Mannlicher-Carcano he is said to have used was an appropriate choice for the purpose; the backyard photos showing Oswald holding a rifle wearing a belt and holster with the revolver with which he is said to have shot Officer J.D. Tippit (and holding two communist newspapers) was authentic—and the “lone assassin” theory just might have merit. In a single package, the version published on the cover of Life magazine subtly conveys that this guy had the motive (as a communist), the means (rifle and handgun) and (presumably) opportunity (by working in the Texas School Book Depository–and encountering Officer Tippit, while he made his escape).

But what if it turns out that Oswald was a mediocre shot; that the weapon he is alleged to have used was a World War II carbine known as “the humanitarian rifle” for never harming anyone on purpose; that there were four versions of the backyard photographs, where his face and expression remain exactly the same across different poses taken at different times; that the chin on the subject in the photos is a block chin, not Oswald’s tapered chin; that there is an insert line between the chin and the lower lip; that the fingers of his right hand are cut off and that the shell casings found at the site of the Tippit shooting by the first officer on the scene had been ejected from (one or more) automatics, not from a revolver, such as he possessed?

Although most philosophers might not know, Oswald was a mediocre shot; the weapon was a ridiculous choice for an assassination; the shell casings found at the scene by the first officer to arrive had been ejected by (one or more) automatics; and the backyard photos were staged, where experts even appear to have identified the stand-in for Oswald, who was Roscoe White, a Dallas Police Officer with ties to the CIA. One student, Jack White, used the newspapers in the photo, the dimensions of which are known, as an internal measure of the height of the man in the photos, who, it turns out, is either too short at 5’6” to be the 5’10” Oswald or, which is more likely, the photos were introduced a bit too large when the photos were manufactured.

The JFK Assassination Literature

From a philosophical point of view, the facts matter less than that the hypothesis that Oswald was framed as the “lone gunman” appears to be empirically testable. Indeed, recent research has confirmed the opinion of Harold Weisberg and of Jim Garrison that a figure in the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository was not his co-worker, Billy Lovelady, as the government proclaims, but Lee Oswald himself, just as he had explained to Will Fritz, the homicide detective who interrogated him, when asked where he had been during the shooting, namely: “out with Bill Shelley in front”, where Bill Shelley was one of his supervisors in the book depository. And this has been confirmed not only by studies of the height, weight, build and clothing of the two alternatives but by recent superposition of their images in the famous “Altgens6” photograph.

You do not have to be familiar with the extensive conspiracy literature by authors including (to cite only some of the most famous) Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (1966); Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), David S. Lifton, Best Evidence (1980), Jim Marrs, Crossfire (1989), Robert J. Groden, The Killing of a President (1994) and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald (1995), Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason (1997), and Douglas Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (5 volumes, 2009), on the conspiracy side of the ledger, and others, such as Vince Bugliosi, Reclaiming History (2007), which runs around 1500 pages in defending The Warren Commission Report (1964), which was said to have been supported by 26 volumes of evidence—until you take a closer look, as Sylvia Meager, Accessories after the Fact (1992), did, demonstrating that the contents of those 26 volumes contradicts the 888-page summary.

It turns out that conspiracy (to commit burglary, to commit fraud, to commit murder and so on) is the most widely prosecuted crime in the United States. Conspiracies only require two or more individuals to act in concert to commit a crime. Once you know that JFK was hit at least four times—once in the back from behind; once in the throat from in front; and at least twice in the head (from behind and from the right/front), after the driver, William Greer, had brought the limousine to a halt to make sure he would be killed—the case for conspiracy is beyond doubt. See, for example, the studies of the medical evidence by David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., who is board qualified in radiation oncology and discovered the autopsy X-rays were altered to patch a fist-sized blow out at the back of the head, which had been widely reported by the physicians at Parkland Hospital, where the body was taken, and the leading JFK medical expert in the world.

See David W. Mantik, John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis—and a New Analysis of the Harper Fragment (2015). Most philosophers are not even aware that, on the day of the assassination, two wounds were repeatedly reported over the national networks: a shot to the throat, which Malcolm Perry, M.D., explained to the press during a conference following the announcement of death, was a wound of entrance (where the bullet was coming at him), and a shot to the right temple, which blow out the back of his head, a report attributed to Admiral George G. Burkley, the president’s personal physician, and reported by Malcolm Kilduff, Acting Press Secretary, who said it was a simple matter of a bullet through the head while pointing to his right temple, while announcing the death. Indeed, Frank McGee, who was a keen analyst, that day on NBC, when reports that the shooter has been above and behind began to surface, astutely remarked, “This is incongruous. How can the man have been shot from in front from behind?”

Ramifications for Public Policy

That, of course, was the conundrum that the Warren Commission had to resolve: how to make the case for a lone assassin, when there was evidence in the public domain that JFK had been shot from several directions in a brief span of time. It was a gargantuan challenge, where they were not entirely successful, since wide swaths of the public to this day doubt that Lee Oswald acted alone. Many, myself among them, believe that distrust in the American government dates from the deception perpetrated on the American public about the assassination of JFK, where so many were listening to their radios and glued to their television and learned with their own ears and eyes that he had been shot in the throat from in front and that he had been shot in the right temple from the right/front. Frank McGee had it right: How can the man have been shot from in front from behind? Yet the government insists on “the lone gunman” to this day.

During the past two decades, the scientific studies of the assassination have been undertaken by experts in different fields, including a world authority on the human brain (who was also an expert on wound ballistics), several Ph.D.’s (one of whom is also an M.D.) and a physician who was present in Trauma Room #1 when JFK’s moribund body was brought to Parkland Hospital and who, two days later, was responsible for the care and treatment of his alleged assassin. Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000) and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), for example, have been described by Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History (2007), as the only “exclusively scientific” volumes ever published on the assassination, where Douglas Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (2005), extends that tradition with five more.

The discovery of more than 15 indications of Secret Service complicity in setting him up for the hit; that the body was altered and the autopsy X-rays were changed; and that the home movies of the assassination were massively edited to conceal the true causes of death provide evidence that falsifies (h1) that was done by Fidel Castro, (h2) that it was done by the Mafia and (h3) that it was done by the KGB. None of them could have exerted control over the Secret Service, the autopsy at Bethesda, or the home movies, including the Zapruder film, which was in the custody of the Secret Service. Which means not only are JFK conspiracy theories empirically testable but multiple among them have already been falsified. (h4), of course, remains under consideration in all of its manifestations, including the indispensable collusion of LBJ and the FBI.

What matters here, however, is not the specifics of “who dunnit” but that the situation with regard to conspiracy theories is not at all as popular belief would have it. Not only are they not unfalsifiable, but the application of scientific reasoning has produced significant results, which have led to the identification of the probable perps. Philosophy–though teaching logic, critical thinking and scientific reasoning–has much to contribute to the public good. There is nothing wrong with “conspiracy theories” that warrants their neglect by philosophers. On the contrary because most students have a keen interest in knowing the truth about JFK, 9/11 and a host of other politically significant but controversial events, there is a wealth of material to work with if faculty, philosophers, especially, would come down from their ivory tower and engage with real world events.

A striking illustration of the difference it makes for public affairs may be found in the attacks upon Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whom the Democrats (as the majority party) removed from her committee assignments because she was raising too many issues that they did not want to address (about Sandy Hook, Parkland, Las Vegas, CA wildfires and more). Having done research on all of these, I composed an assessment, where it turns out that, on every one of the issues about which she was being attacked, Marjorie Taylor Greene was either clearly in the right or supported by the weight of the evidence. Most of her assertions, of course, qualified (in the mind of her critics) as conspiracy theories; but if they paused to consider the evidence with regard to each of them, they would have been impressed provided only they had an open mind.

And there’s the rub. As James Files, who may or may not have been behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll informed me, “When the government commits a lie, it’s stuck with it!”, which of course resonates with the failure of the government to change its position (about the 19 Islamic hijackers on 9/11 or Lee Oswald as the lone, demented gunman on 22 November 1963). Which means, in turn, that the government is not operating on the basis of principles of science or of rationality, where the discovery of new evidence or alternative hypotheses may require that we reject hypotheses we previously accepted, accept hypotheses we previously rejected and leave others in suspense. The government operates as an authoritarian source of (politically infallible) knowledge, where to admit mistakes would weaken its grip on the body politic that it governs.

And, reflecting upon the treatment of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), it struck me like a silver bullet: Conspiracy theorists are investigating crimes: No wonder they want to silence us! The government was involved in the assassination of JFK; the government was involved in 9/11; the government was involved in Sandy Hook, Parkland and Las Vegas, too! Think of the genius of it all: the perps themselves are in the position of dictating to the public who is credible and who is not when it comes to investigating crimes in which the government itself is complicit! It turns out, therefore, the answer to the question we ask, What’s wrong with conspiracy theories? , could not be more obvious once they are properly understood. We should all be conspiracy theorists! The nation can only benefit from sorting out true conspiracy theories from false.

James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., a former Marine Corps officer and McKnight Professor Emeritus on the Duluth Campus of the University of Minnesota, has published 24+ academic books and 12+ in conspiracy research.

……………………..

https://archive.ph/ZoiSX

Minneapolis MN: Burning A Police Station As Police Retreated From Protesters Raised The Social Cost Of A Police Street Execution – by Ted Rall

Burning a Police Station Led to Justice

• MAY 7, 2021 • 700 WORDS •

As people of good will celebrate or merely breathe a sigh of relief in response to the conviction of Minneapolis former police officer Derek Chauvin for the videotaped murder of George Floyd, it is worth noting that this victory likely would never have occurred had it not been for a spectacular act of property destruction.

Yes, there was that damning video. True, the police chief testified for the prosecution. Those factors caused Chauvin’s rare conviction. But you can’t convict unless you indict first — and there was no move to indict Chauvin before city officials were scared into filing charges.

Floyd was killed May 25, 2020. Three days later, demonstrators burned down the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters, which had been abandoned by fleeing cops. On May 29, the next day after the conflagration, prosecutors announced charges against Chauvin.

In October 2020, a member of the right-wing “Bugaloo Bois” was charged with setting the building ablaze. But no one knew that right-wing infiltrators had been involved at the time of Chauvin’s arrest.

Throughout the modern history of the American left, there has been a raging debate between militant pacifists who believe violence has no place in the struggle for political emancipation, and revolutionaries who think powerful institutions and individuals will never relinquish control or allow the radical solutions we need to our worst problems unless they face violence or the credible threat thereof.

(Many on the left do not believe that destruction of property is a form of violence. Ignoring this question in this essay because it would be a distraction from the issue at hand, I use “violence” here as shorthand for any act of political resistance or protest that goes beyond physical passivity, including vandalism, arson, etc.)

From the 1980s until the current Black Lives Matter movement, the pacifists won the argument. Marches against Reagan’s budget cuts and globalization, LGBTQA demonstrations and antiwar protests were coordinated with local authorities to obtain parade permits and internally disciplined by the ironically violent “peace police,” who separated violent pro-“black bloc” marchers from the cops. When I raised the temperature of my speech to the Occupy rally in Washington, D.C., shouting pacifist organizers dressed me down afterward for what they believed to have been incitement.

No one sane is against nonviolence as a tactic against oppression, even the dominant tactic to be used against a system we primarily oppose precisely because of its violence at home and abroad. But no one intelligent, no one who studies history, can deny that revolutionary change — the sweeping transfer of power from one class to another — has never resulted from the victory of a purely nonviolent movement. Indeed, the past 40 years of leftist activism in America, a period 99% characterized by nonviolent protest, is a case study in failure. Reagan’s destruction of the post-New Deal social contract was thoroughly internalized by presidents of both parties, including Barack Obama. Outsourcing American jobs and crushing labor unions is standard practice. We fight one war after another, none justified, all of them doomed efforts, though we can’t admit it. We can’t even increase the minimum wage.

No one knows whether the conviction of Chauvin will set a precedent that holds cops accountable for killing unarmed suspects in their custody. Personally, I doubt it. Very few police killings play out on video over nine minutes; defense attorneys can create a bucketload of reasonable doubt among jurors who wonder what they would do in the course of a few confusing seconds. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pointed out before Chauvin was charged: “We are not talking about a split-second decision that was made incorrectly. … There’s somewhere around 300 seconds in those five minutes — every one of which that officer could have turned back, every second of which he could have removed his knee from George Floyd’s neck.” Frey called for Chauvin to be charged, but only after two days of rioting raised fears that the police had lost control of the city.

That’s when city officials decided to throw Chauvin to the wolves in a trial with a surprising feature: the police chief testifying against one of his own officers.

What we do know is that Chauvin’s conviction was a rare victory for a left unaccustomed to winning even when, as in the case of the brutal beating of Rodney King, the facts are not in question. We also know that that victory followed days of riots punctuated by a spectacular act of violence that terrified the powers that be into doing the right thing.

Biden Welcomes Political Refugees

Chinese Rocket Breaks Apart Revealing Inspirational Fortune Inside

Howard University students and educators protest elimination of classical studies department

Howard University in Washington D.C. has declared its intention to liquidate the university’s Department of Classics—the program dealing with the study of ancient Greco-Roman history, literature and philosophy—by the fall. Students, alumni and educators at the college have denounced the move, drawing widespread support from around the world.

The classics department at Howard University, established at the college’s founding in 1867, is the only classical studies program at a historically black college in the US. The department currently includes courses in Mythology, Latin, Love in Antiquity, and Ideas in Antiquity among others.

Last fall, the university board of trustees made the decision to dissolve the department. A few of the courses that are taught in the program are to be dispersed throughout other departments.

Howard University

University officials rationalize slashing the classics by citing low enrollment numbers, an alleged lack of student interest, and claims of financial scarcity, voiced in the lingo peculiar to the philistine college administrator. Provost Anthony K. Wutoh told the Washington Post, “We obviously believe that the content that we offer in classics is important, but we also must contemporize that teaching with practical application.” University spokeswoman Alonda Thomas told the Post that the move would “allow the university to function more effectively and efficiently.”

The announcement has provoked an outpouring of support for saving the Department of Classics from students and educators from all over the country and internationally. An online petition entitled Save HU Classics has garnered more than 5,000 signatures. The petition reads, in part: “Words in English, Latin, nor Ancient Greek cannot adequately express the impact the Classics Department and its professors have had on so many of our careers and lives, but we make this final plea in a hope of conveying just how passionately we disagree with the plans Howard University has set forth to dissolve the Classics Department.”

Student comments in the media have been hostile to the move to eliminate the classics. “We didn’t want the department to essentially fade away as though it had never been there,” Howard University student Alexandra Frank told the New York Times. “We wanted to put up at least some sort of rallying cries so that the provost knew that we cared deeply about this department, and we weren’t the only ones who did.”

Another student, 19-year-old Tiye Williamson, told the Times that she suspected the classics department would not be the last to go. “I feel like the classics department is just the beginning,” she said. “Other smaller departments could be on the chopping block next.”

The liquidation of the classics department would result in the termination of all staff in the program who are without tenure or contract, including four nontenured professors. One of them is Anika Prather, an adjunct professor of humanities. Speaking to the Post, Prather noted that abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read as a slave, had studied the classics. “He learned as an enslaved child through reading the speeches of Cicero and all the different dialogues and classic texts to practice rhetorical skills, so that he could know how to exercise his mind to use logic,” Prather said.

Frederick Douglass

The move has also been condemned by intellectuals, including Harvard University Professor Cornel West, who in an op-ed at the Washington Post denounced the destruction of the classics at Howard as a “spiritual catastrophe.” He also stressed the role the classics had played in the education not only of Douglass but of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture,” West said. “Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.”

Given the outcry raised by students and staff at Howard and beyond, the claims made by the university that there is a lack of interest do not hold water. As for the alleged lack of funds, this is patent nonsense and a deflection. Howard University has an endowment of more than $712 million. According to the Department of Education, the university received more than $221 million in federal funds in 2020. In addition, the university was granted $8.72 million in additional federal aid as part of the 2020 CARES Act. According to the website nonprofitlite, 13 administrators at Howard University pocket more than $200,000 annually. College President Wayne Frederick takes home more than $1 million.

The planned destruction of the classics department at Howard, though not unprecedented even at this university—the Anthropology Department was dissolved in 2013—is not taking place in a vacuum. It is an expression of an ongoing attack on the humanities, art and culture, taking place at educational institutions across the US. This, in turn, is a reflection of the deep and terminal crisis of capitalism, which manifests itself in the realm of education as a repudiation of everything that is progressive and enlightening in human history.

The study of classical antiquity was once a staple of higher education. In an earlier period, all learned individuals were expected as a matter of course to be familiar with ancient Greek or Roman literature and philosophy. While there was certainly an aspect of pretentiousness and elitism to this, it nevertheless reflected the ideal that the purpose of education was not merely to train the younger generation in their chosen field of expertise but to raise them as cultured individuals with a nuanced, critical understanding of the world.

More than that, as the references to Douglass and King make clear, access to the summits of human culture has always been a demand of the oppressed. In this vein, Howard University’s own history warrants mention. It was founded in 1867, two years after the Civil War by the anti-slavery Union General Oliver Otis Howard, after whom it is named. It contributed to the education of 150,000 former slaves by 1872. A document celebrating Howard’s founding, written in 1916, explained that the college founders aimed higher education for

those who had never had the privilege of getting any education, much less of getting higher education. They set about the task as if there could never be any question as to the right or expediency of the undertaking. They wished to provide for all men and women the privileges which they themselves had enjoyed. No institution was ever founded with purer, loftier motives.

Oliver Otis Howard, founder of Howard University

Among the privileges Howard offered was an education in the classics. The systematic devaluing of the humanities in favor of what Provost Wutoh, without a hint of shame, calls “practical applications” is an attack on the cultural heritage of the working class, aimed ultimately at stultifying the intellectual and spiritual growth of the population. The ruling class has little need for individuals who think critically about history and culture. It is in its interests to have a docile workforce, just capable enough to carry out their duties and keep the machines running, but not much more than that.

To this development must be added the noxious influence of reactionary ideologies such as critical race theory and intersectionality. From the perspective of the peddlers of this racialist poison, classical studies are worse than useless. They are actively harmful as expressions of “whiteness.” To the racialists, modern students, especially “students of color,” have nothing to learn from these “dead white men.” Such ignorant rhetoric was once the hallmark of the most right-wing black nationalists. But now it is a staple of American liberalism, and a major focus of the New York Times. Recently, the Times gave prominent voice to the demand that the study of classics be eliminated entirely .

The response of Howard students, which has won support throughout the world, indicates that the great majority of students and youth do not share this backward perspective. Whatever their present state of political confusion, they understand that there is something precious and invaluable contained in the study of classical antiquity, and moreover, that it applies to their present-day lives and should not be merely thrown into the garbage. The classics department at Howard must be defended as part of the broader fight of the working class to defend true culture and the best traditions of education.

Book World: In response to the Bailey–Roth controversy: New York Times columnist condemns biography’s “Man Problem”

On May 1, the New York Times carried an article by critic and biographer Ruth Franklin headlined “What We Lose When Only Men Write About Men” (in the print edition, “Literary Biography’s Man Problem”).

The article was provoked by the recent controversy surrounding the decision by publisher W.W. Norton, in response to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, to remove Blake Bailey’s biography of novelist Philip Roth from print, essentially to “pulp” the book.

Blake Bailey, 2011 (Photo- David Shankbone)

Far from protesting this egregious act of censorship, Franklin clearly solidarizes herself with it. She gives new and intensely vivid meaning to the phrase “to kick someone while he or she is down.” Moreover, appallingly, the Times editors have cynically provided Franklin the opportunity to revenge herself on Bailey, who wrote in 2016 a somewhat critical review in the Wall Street Journal of her biography of American writer Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life). Bailey, as we will discuss below, took the job seriously.

The Times’s action is staggeringly unethical. The editors have assigned Franklin to write a lengthy opinion piece about an individual who once raised issues about her work. She is not a disinterested party; she has no moral or intellectual right to be commenting on Bailey’s situation.

However, this is the underhanded, duplicitous manner in which the Times functions. One of the factors no doubt motivating Norton’s precipitous action was the implied threat that if the publisher did not fall into line with the destruction of Bailey, the newspaper would take it out on the firm’s authors and books. In other words, “Cross us, and you will pay a price.” Norton got the message.

Franklin, a former editor at the New Republic, comes out with a number of extraordinary statements in her column. She writes, for example: “There has been no investigation as yet into the allegations against Mr. Bailey. But if they prove to be true, they give readers reason to doubt Mr. Bailey’s ability to objectively evaluate materials relating to the women in Mr. Roth’s life.” This is an admission, to begin with, that Bailey’s book has been “disappeared” and its author turned into a “non-person” prior to any investigation of the facts, before anyone could determine if there were anything at all to the claims. Franklin is not perturbed by this in the least. Again, this is business as usual in #MeToo America.

And what does “if they prove true” actually mean? There is almost nothing to investigate. The unfortunate Bailey has been brought down by a series of scurrilous rumors and allegations, generated, as the Times has previously half-admitted, by the resentment of his accusers over the success of his Roth biography and its failure to be sufficiently “tough” on its subject’s supposed “misogyny.”

Franklin’s column also sheds light on one of the factors behind the attack on Bailey—the contentious issue as to who will have access to Roth’s papers, and those of other literary figures. “The question,” she writes, “of access—to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject—has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract.” Considerable sums of money are involved here.

Franklin is bitter that Roth gave Bailey exclusive access to his papers. She complains that “Mr. Bailey had in his possession ‘hundreds of manila folders stuffed with archival material,’” according to a journalist.

She then goes on to argue: “Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn.” Is that the case, that a biography is fictional like a novel? Didn’t Roth have the right to expect, in selecting his biographer, that the writer would produce a scholarly work, extracting the truth about his life, not “constructing” it…according to which preconception?

Of course, the work of the literary biographer is not a transparent sheet through which the facts of his or her subject stream with no distortion whatsoever. However, the important biographer more than makes up for any inevitable limitation by the insights derived from study and experience he or she brings. The primary goal remains fidelity to the reality of another life. Richard Ellmann, renowned for exhaustively researched studies of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, argued that the biography “cannot be so mobile” as the novel or the poem, “because it is associated with history,” with objective patterns and facts.

Ellmann acknowledged the impossibility of knowing “completely the intricacies with which any mind negotiates its surroundings to produce literature. The controlled seething out of which great works come is not likely to yield all its secrets.” Yet, he went on, at moments and “in glimpses, biographers seem to come close to it, and the effort to come close, to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of the experience.”

The worst passage in Franklin’s May 1 Times article comes later: “Just as female critics have noticed instances of misogyny in Mr. Bailey’s writing, a female biographer would likely have a more critical perspective on Mr. Roth’s relationships with women. A Black biographer or, for that matter, a Jewish one could have more to say about race in Mr. Roth’s fiction.”

The implications of Franklin’s argument are sinister. Whether she has thought it through or not hardly matters. This is an appeal for the “Balkanization” or “ethno-gender communalization” of literary criticism. Each major figure will need to pack his or her own sizable set of commentators: a Race biographer, a Gender biographer, a Sexual Orientation biographer, a National/Geographical biographer—and why not distinct critics who study the subject’s relation with or to Children, Nature, Animals, Food, Clothing and more?

In any case, turned around, this race-gender-ethnic argument can be used to encourage truly Nazi-like conclusions. How can a Jew possibly write with any degree of depth about Shakespeare, or Wagner? Of course, can any male write valuably about a female? Farewell Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest, among many others.

The unstated assumption of Franklin’s piece—and it is an assumption shared by a significant portion of academia and media—is that one of the most profound means (if not the most profound means) of knowing an artist, or of defining an artist’s relationship to the world, lies through gender, along with race. She advocates “improving representation,” meaning more women writing and more women written about, as though the addition of women in general or the treatment of women’s universal experiences as such would help matters. Why should that be the case? How would the inclusion, for example, of more critics with Franklin’s narrow, petty bourgeois standpoint advance the cultural situation?

Gender is hardly an incidental or unimportant matter. The serious obstacles confronting Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot in the 19th century, and even Shirley Jackson in the middle of the 20th, were very real. In so far as social pressures and maltreatment helped nourish the hostility of these writers toward oppression of every kind, they resulted in work that corresponded more closely to the general human situation, the need for liberation from the existing social and moral order.

But none of the great women writers of the past began from the position of self-pity and entitlement adopted by Franklin and the present-day association of affluent female professionals striving for more wealth and privileges. They kept their eyes on critical matters.

Along these lines, Franklin, in her informative but uninspired biography of Shirley Jackson (famed for her 1948 short story “The Lottery,” along with novels such as The Road Through the Wall, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle), placed too much emphasis on Jackson’s unhappiness and frustration with her role of housewife and the failings of her husband, critic-academic Stanley Hyman.

In his Wall Street Journal review of Franklin’s book, Blake Bailey took issue with the author’s characterization of Jackson “as a kind of feminist prophet who anticipated the findings of Betty Friedan—I lost count of how many times that name was invoked—by two decades [in fact, more than 10 times].” Franklin, as Bailey noted, asserted in her introduction that Jackson’s body of work “constitutes nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.”

Bailey added that “the story of a pioneering feminist needs a male heavy, and in this book the role falls hard on Stanley Hyman,” although Franklin had earlier indicated her husband’s role of “encouraging” his wife ‘to write more and to write better.’”

Bailey further pointed out that Jackson’s writings indicated that a “housewife’s life,” and specifically her life with Hyman and their four children in Vermont, was “a mixed blessing, to be sure, but a blessing nonetheless, at least for Jackson.”

Franklin now rewards Bailey in the Times for the sin of pointing out her ideological biases by observing that his review “was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist”—and therefore Bailey, presumably, is potentially guilty of rape!

The worst approach to biography is the one that begins with moralizing preconceptions. The task in every instance, even in a study of one of history’s genuinely monstrous figures, is to place the man or woman—with the necessary complexity!—in his or her era, as the product of objective processes, to mine the psychological and social reality from the hard rock of actual history, to explain how the given individual arrived at his or her social or intellectual destination.

Philip Roth–The Biography

In the case of an artist too, such as Philip Roth, there may be elements that people may not find pleasant, including perhaps his attitude toward women. He set out quite deliberately at times, for reasons that have personal and social roots, in his own phrase, to “let the repellent in.” But here again, the biographer’s task is to let the facts and documents speak for themselves, enabling the reader to render his or her own judgment.

Franklin proceeds differently. Her book contains few revelations in relation to Shirley Jackson’s artistic development, because the author set out with the notions that (a) the writer was a victim like every other American woman of her time of sexist limitations and stereotypes and (b) Jackson’s husband must have been to blame, in one fashion or another, for imposing those conditions on her—that he is, in the end, the villain of the piece.

Franklin proceeds backward from this vision to find confirmation for it, despite, as Bailey correctly notes, various contradictory facts about Jackson’s attitude toward her lot as a “housewife” and indications that Hyman was strongly encouraging of Jackson’s work and that, at the very least, his influence on her was contradictory. Ultimately, for ideological reasons, Franklin misrepresents the marital relationship.

An objective grasp of the social dynamics of the epoch would provide a better grasp of the dilemmas Jackson and Hyman confronted.

Hyman joined the Young Communist League while in university and vigorously pursued what he imagined to be Marxism for a number of years in the late 1930s. Although Jackson was more skeptical, perhaps to her credit, about the Stalinist regime in the USSR, she also followed events such as the Spanish Civil War with great interest. They belonged, as a New Yorker profile observed, to “a social set that included [poet] Howard Nemerov, [novelist] Ralph Ellison, [novelist] Bernard Malamud, and [blacklisted screenwriter] Walter Bernstein.”

In regard to the couple and their discontents, as we argued in a recent review of a film about Jackson, “one senses the disappointment, disillusionment and even depression that the Eisenhower years generated within a generation of left, bohemian intellectuals. They felt at odds with the American population, isolated from and betrayed by it.”

Jackson’s life and fate, in other words, were bound up with big historical processes and problems, “the Great Depression, the Second World War, Stalinism in the Soviet Union, fascism and anti-Semitism, the Cold War and McCarthyism, the climate of the 1950s.” No serious consideration of this is to be found in Franklin’s biography, which follows the current identity politics line of least resistance.

The Times, Norton, Franklin and company have ganged up on Bailey and his biography of Roth in an unprincipled and cowardly manner. They fully deserve the shame their actions will ultimately bring them.

US #1 Pop Songs 1954 – 1981 – Short Samples – Time Travel Special

COMBATTING VIOLENT CRIME IS RISKY BUSINESS IN THE AGE OF BLM (Powerline)

Last year, the homicide count in Washington, D.C. reached a 36-year high. So far this year, D.C. homicides are up 38 percent from the same time last year.

During the past weekend alone, at least 11 people were shot in D.C. Three of them died.

D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser says she will respond by pouring extra police officers into six historically crime-ridden neighborhoods. The idea is to head off violence.

This approach makes obvious sense, assuming (1) the city has enough officers to make it work and (2) officers will police the neighborhoods proactively. It remains to be seen whether these assumptions, especially the second, hold.

But even if they do, the approach is not without problems in our woke age. Flooding high-crime areas with cops will lead to more arrests in these neighborhood and, presumably, fewer arrests in neighborhoods from which the resources are pulled.

The high-crime neighborhoods have a higher proportion of minority group members, especially Blacks, than the low-crime neighborhoods. Therefore, the disparity between Black and White arrests in the city will increase.

Under BLM-equity theory, which is becoming mainstream liberal ideology, this will be evidence of increased racism. Indeed, even before the emergence of BLM, leftists complained, for example, that more Blacks are arrested for drug offenses to a disproportionate degree even though, allegedly, Whites use drugs as frequently as Blacks.

We should expect this “disproportionality” to increase when police officers pour into high-crime neighborhoods. That increase will be accompanied by shouts of racism and calls to defund the police.

Encounters between police officers and criminals will also increase, assuming the officers police actively. On this assumption, officers will attempt more arrests of career criminals, suspects high on drugs, suspects who hate the police, suspects with outstanding warrants who feel they can’t afford another arrest, and suspects who simply don’t want to be arrested.

The increase in these encounters in largely black neighborhoods will increase the incidence of cases where officers employ violence to capture and subdue black suspects. In a few cases, the violence may become excessive. But whether or not it does, the increase in encounters involving police violence creates a serious risk, in the current environment, of “viral” incidents and mass protests.

An increase in viral incidents of police violence creates the real risk that the Biden Justice Department will “investigate” the police department. Analysis shows that when viral incidents lead to DOJ involvement, crime increases significantly, presumably because some officers quit the force and many others police only passively.

How would the city, already plagued by a record wave of homicides, then respond to yet another surge of killings brought on by investigations of “racism” by officers? By pouring yet more officers into high-crime neighborhoods, thereby doubling down on perceived failure? Perhaps. But more likely by essentially giving up.

Washington DC: Who Shot Ashli Babbitt? Police Officer Shot Unarmed Rioter Dead – 6 Jan 2021

https://videopress.com/v/gZ88y2B0?preloadContent=metadata

Right Wing Populist Ashli Babbitt was at the 6 January 2021 protest against the declared election results from the presidential contest. She was an outspoken militant with US military training. Ashli Babbitt wrote online in social media sites of her passionate populist beliefs and or the threat she saw to America. But, she went to the protest unarmed. She did not hurt anyone. She was going through a broken window or door panel next to a doorway when she was shot dead by a police officer.

Did he feel threatened? Who knows? There is no official explanation of who shot Ashli Babbitt . As a Right Wing Populist Trump supporter she was an enemy of the state, apparently. This woman was in the US military for over a dozen years and was part of the US occupation forces in the Middle East. Yet, she comes home and is shot down dead with no questions asked. Sic temper tyrannis, indeed.

A

Covid Derangement Syndrome – Ward Off the ‘Evil Eye’

US Fines Honeywell $13 Million for Sharing Military Specs with China – 71 Drawings Cited – 6 May 2021

The U.S. State Department said this week it recently fined U.S. defense contractor Honeywell $13 million after the company was found to have “harmed national security” by sharing sensitive information about U.S. military aircraft with China and other countries.

The U.S. State Department said on May 3 it had reached a settlement with Honeywell on 34 charges related to 71 drawings it shared with China, Taiwan, Ireland, Canada, and Mexico from 2011-2015. Honeywell’s sharing of the documents violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Link

“The U.S. Government reviewed copies of the 71 drawings and determined that exports to and retransfers in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] of drawings for certain parts and components for the engine platforms for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, B-1B Lancer Long-Range Strategic Bomber, and the F-22 Fighter Aircraft harmed U.S. national security,” the charging document read.

The 71 drawings included “technical data that contained engineering prints showing dimensions, geometries, and layouts for manufacturing castings and finished parts for multiple aircraft, gas turbine engines, and military electronics,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Monday.

“Honeywell allegedly used a file-sharing platform to inappropriately transmit engineering prints … for manufacturing castings and finished parts for multiple aircraft, military electronics and gas turbine engines,” Defense News reported on May 4. The materials allegedly shared by Honeywell included details of the following U.S. military equipment, according to the news site:

[T]he F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the B-1B Lancer long-range strategic bomber, the F-22 fighter, the C-130 transport aircraft, the A-7H Corsair aircraft, the A-10 Warthog aircraft, the Apache Longbow helicopter, the M1A1 Abrams tank, the tactical Tomahawk missile; the F/A-18 Hornet fighter, and the F135, F414, T55 and CTS800 turboshaft engines.

The U.S. State Department said it will not debar Honeywell for its violations because the company “voluntarily disclosed” its sharing of the drawings with foreign countries to the U.S. government starting in 2015.

“Honeywell also acknowledged the serious nature of the alleged violations, cooperated with the Department’s review, and instituted a number of compliance program improvements during the course of the Department’s review,” the U.S. State Department said on May 3. “For these reasons, the Department has determined that it is not appropriate to administratively debar Honeywell at this time.”

Honeywell has significantly expanded its presence in China over the past two decades. It moved its Asia-Pacific headquarters from Singapore to Shanghai in 2003 and paid $100 million to secure the rights to the land on which the property was built in 2017, the South China Morning Post reported on May 5.

“In February, Honeywell was awarded a contract with Chinese firm Sepco Electric Power Construction Corp to supply telecommunications and security systems for the King Salman International Complex for Maritime Industries and Services, a shipyard in Saudi Arabia,” the Hong Kong-based newspaper noted.

US Air Force Scientist Spilled No Secrets. He Still Went to Prison. Technical Drawings of parts. – by Justin Rohrlich (Daily Beast) 28 May 2018

In his first interview since being released from prison, J. Reece Roth insists his fight was about academic freedom, and not about giving secrets to the Chinese.

Justin Rohrlich

Updated May. 28, 2018 10:29AM ET / Published May. 27, 2018 9:38PM ET 

It takes a good while for J. Reece Roth to answer the door at his home on the west side of Knoxville. A former electrical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he was also the director of the Plasma Sciences Laboratory, Roth will be 81 in September and has hip, knee, and heart problems, which have slowed him down quite a bit.

Of course, the four years he spent in prison for violating the Arms Export Control Act didn’t do him many favors, either.

Former students and contemporaries describe Roth as something of a pioneer in the field of plasma physics. When he was accused in 2006 of divulging sensitive technical data to two foreign nationals, Roth had been working on research for the U.S. Air Force, developing thrusters that used atmospheric plasma gas—something typically created only under highly controlled laboratory conditions—to improve the flight performance of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. It’s been almost 15 years, but Roth is still noticeably upset about the way things went down.

“I was handled by the government in such a way that has basically intimidated researchers all over the country as far as carrying forward applications [of my technology],” he says.

The twist is, none of what Roth revealed was classified. And the foreign nationals weren’t spies, they were grad students. But as is typical with sensitive DoD research, foreign citizens were explicitly forbidden from working on the project without a special license from the federal government. By allowing Ph.D. candidates Xin Dai, from China, and Sirous Nourgostar, from Iran, to participate, Roth violated a once-obscure corner of U.S. export law that considers describing, demonstrating, or explaining certain things to a foreign citizen, even one that’s standing next to you in Tennessee, to be an illegal “export.”

Another of Roth’s violations resulted from a trip he took to China with a laptop containing files from the Air Force project, even though forensic tests later showed those files were never opened while he was there. During that same trip, he asked a student to email him some files. Roth said he was having trouble connecting to the internet, and told the student to send them to the account of a Chinese professor at the university he was visiting.“Even a blank sheet of paper from that research was export-controlled.”

After six hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Roth on 18 out of 18 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, and exporting defense articles and services without a license. The two foreign graduate students were never accused of wrongdoing, nor were they ever suspected of any.

As a former associate of Roth’s told The Daily Beast: “It’s simple. Because this was a military contract, it was a contractual designation [to restrict participation to U.S. citizens only] and that’s what screwed everything into the ground. Because even a blank sheet of paper from that research was export-controlled.”

American counterintelligence officials have long warned about spies on campus, and according to recent congressional testimony by current and former U.S. counterintelligence officials, foreign intelligence services are more active than ever within the academic community. There is a “small but significant percentage” of international students and faculty sent to the U.S. to steal military and civilian research, as journalist and author Daniel Golden testified before the House Science Committee in April, citing a DoD finding that the use of academics by foreign intelligence agencies has tripled over the past two decades.

“Without going into details that I cannot divulge, I can reinforce the fact it is a longstanding issue,” retired CIA operations officer Charles Goslin told The Daily Beast. “Typically, universities get full compensation from the governments sending those students to the U.S. to study and then return with cutting edge research and IP. So, the incentive to keep the cash coming in outweighs the incentive to closely monitor the students from those countries.”

As the Trump administration threatens to impose what could turn out to be the most prohibitive restrictions on foreign students’ access to U.S. universities in modern history, exclusive new interviews with figures from the Roth case shed additional light on just how serious the government is about keeping American defense technology out of the wrong hands.

Roth was born in 1938 in Chartiers, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. He got his bachelor’s at MIT before going on to Cornell for his doctorate. Roth then worked at NASA until 1978, when he left to teach at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Formal and a bit stiff, yet quite friendly and accessible, Roth speaks in a rich baritone and chooses his words carefully.

Although he rarely gets away much anymore, Roth traveled to China extensively in years past. Two of his books had been translated into Chinese, and he always got a steady stream of applications from students there who were eager to study with him. Roth speaks extremely highly of the Chinese scientists he has met, and was made an honorary professor at the renowned University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University in 1992 and 2006.

China is as much of an espionage threat, if not even more so, than Russia, a former intelligence operative from a country in Eastern Europe told The Daily Beast.

“They are extremely effective in using their former citizens, or Americans with Chinese roots or relatives in China,” the ex-spy said. “They have no limits with money, and the Chinese government can guarantee resettlement to China and financial support if the person they recruited is captured or busted by local authorities. And of course, there is no extradition from China.”

The Chinese government has also established Confucius Institutes, which trace a direct link to China’s Communist Party, at more than 100 universities across the U.S. counterintelligence officials have warned that the Confucius Institutes can be used for espionage, and as former intelligence analyst Peter Mattis recently told The Washington Post, they are part and parcel of the Chinese Communist Party’s “united front” propaganda efforts against the party’s detractors.

In fact, Chinese influence is of such concern to U.S. counterintelligence officials, they reportedly warned Donald Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner last year that Wendi Deng Murdoch, ex-wife of News Corp CEO and founder Rupert Murdoch, could be working for China’s intelligence services.

Surely aware that Chinese espionage does exist, Roth insists the intentions of his Chinese counterparts, by and large, were pure.

“The contacts I had were normal scholarly contacts with colleagues at universities in other countries who simply wanted to exchange information,” Roth told The Daily Beast in his first interview since being released from prison in 2015. “With the possible exception of my trips to China, the information transfer was pretty much two-way and I don’t think it was motivated by any desire to spy on, or take, U.S. technology.”

Needless to say, people targeted by foreign intelligence sometimes don’t know that they’ve been compromised. And spies often don’t look like “spies.” In the post-Roth era at UT, the administration advises students and faculty working on export-controlled projects not to even send documents to campus copy centers where foreign nationals might be working.

Universities have a challenge in blending a culture of academic freedom with restrictions on intellectual property, said Will Mackie, one of the two government attorneys who prosecuted Roth. Mackie emphasizes the importance of academic research to the U.S. economy, and says export control laws are not meant to restrict research, but to protect it.

Roth’s situation “was totally preventable,” his onetime prosecutor explained. “He never stated that he was totally ignorant of the rules, so that was not a defense… The concept is that he thought that these rules were unnecessary and he also tried to say that he knew this technology better than the regulators and it was something that he didn’t think should be controlled.”

Roth had a way about him that didn’t make people want to go to bat for him when he was hauled into court, others said. Daniel Max Sherman, who studied under Roth before going on to work alongside him, recalled Roth’s tendency to take credit for everything developed in his lab whether it was his idea or not, generating “numerous instances, even legal consequences, over whether or not he owned a certain piece of intellectual property.”

“Roth had this attitude that basically he had created something special and great,” Sherman told The Daily Beast. “He would go to these national conferences and tell people they were stealing his ideas, or that he had already thought of it and if they’d just read Chapter 7, Section 2 of his book…”

In Roth’s case, authorities had been tracking at least one of his two foreign-born graduate assistants from virtually the moment he first set foot on American soil.

Born in Tehran in 1976, physicist Sirous Nourgostar had always admired Roth’s work from afar. A graduate of Tehran’s Alborz High School, which was founded by American missionaries in 1873, Nourgostar arrived in the United States in August 2005 to study under Roth’s tutelage. Ultra-hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had taken office a few days earlier, and U.S.-Iranian relations were particularly tense.

Nourgostar told The Daily Beast he was questioned and fingerprinted by immigration officials upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport. Although he had a valid F1 student visa, Nourgostar claims officers threatened to turn him away and send him back to Iran. For reasons he never makes fully clear, Nourgostar was eventually cleared for entry and made his way to Tennessee for the fall semester.

In the meantime, the FBI paid Roth a visit and asked about, among other things, the kinds of chemicals and instruments Nourgostar would have access to in his lab. A few days after Nourgostar got to town, he says he was also questioned by the FBI. Before they could get started, Nourgostar preemptively assured them that he wasn’t religious or observant. The agents cut him off right away, saying they weren’t allowed to talk about that sort of thing.“The head of the FBI team told me, ‘Look, I know who you are. All I can tell you at this moment is that this is not about you.’”— Sirous Nourgostar

Eight months later, while Roth was off lecturing in China, the FBI raided his lab. Nourgostar watched a team of armed agents label, photograph, and cart away everything from computers to lab notebooks as evidence. He says he had no idea why the FBI was there, and they wouldn’t give him any details.

“I thought maybe I did something wrong, I was very scared,” Nourgostar recalled. “Then the head of the FBI team told me, ‘Look, I know who you are. All I can tell you at this moment is that this is not about you.’”

When Roth flew back to the States from China a few days later, customs agents in Detroit pulled him out of line and copied the contents of his laptop’s hard drive. Nourgostar said Roth called him before catching his connecting flight home to Tennessee, explaining that he had been stopped and questioned. He asked how things were back at the lab, and Nourgostar broke the news to him that the FBI had confiscated most of its contents.

When Roth’s connecting flight landed in Knoxville, agents from the FBI, Customs & Border Protection, and the Department of Commerce seized the laptop itself and a thumb drive. After a two-hour interrogation, Roth said he was allowed to go home; he was not arrested at that time.

Months went by while the FBI interviewed everyone in Roth’s orbit. According to an as-yet unpublished memoir by Daniel Max Sherman, a friend of his who worked at the Pentagon sent an email encouraging him to try not to worry too much.

“It’s uncomfortable, but you did nothing wrong; Roth did… The authorities will figure it out. Unfortunately, it will cause you some distress for a period of time and your work will be on a watch list,” the friend wrote.

Roth wound down whatever research he had left, reviewing papers for scientific journals, and getting ready to retire. He vowed to fight and beat this thing. But Nourgostar had been called to testify before a grand jury and knew that Roth was actually in very deep shit.

“I wasn’t supposed to talk or give any feedback about participating in the grand jury, so I could not tell him anything,” Nourgostar said. “The way he was talking to us, that they don’t have anything, well, all of a sudden there was an indictment.”

Roth was given a time and date to turn himself at the FBI’s Knoxville Field Office to be formally arrested. Roth was handcuffed and fingerprinted; agents took a DNA sample.

“It was more like an office appointment with a physician than anything else,” Roth said. “I showed up at the stated place and time; there weren’t any sirens, I wasn’t dragged out of my house or anything like that.”

Nourgostar claims the FBI told him during questioning that they viewed this case as one that would send a “strong message to other universities that we are serious about this kind of thing.”“There are a few people willing to risk prison for their principles. He’s one of them.”— Thomas Dundon

The drone project “from the beginning had a component in it that I knew, something was not right,” Nourgostar said, “but at the time, I was a fresh student,” and felt that it would be better to not make any waves.

Nourgostar wound up taking the stand against Roth, calls his former mentor “an amazing professor I had in my life,” and described his short stint in Roth’s lab largely as “an extraordinary experience.”

“He was a true true teacher who wanted to have some sort of legacy left behind,” said Nourgostar. “I haven’t been able to find anyone else like that man.”

Nourgostar and others describe Roth as somewhat stunted emotionally, possessing almost childlike social skills.

He put himself at a disadvantage from the start, antagonizing the feds from the very beginning of the investigation, according to defense attorney Thomas Dundon, who represented Roth in court and received permission from Roth to speak openly to The Daily Beast about the case.

Immediately after he was stopped at the airport, but before he had hired Dundon, Roth began calling and emailing federal investigators to defend his position. That is, that academic researchers should be able to use the best and the brightest students as they wish, no matter where they’re from. The investigation would continue for the next three years.

“We started off with Dr. Roth having presented his perspective in the matter more than one time, and in writing on at least one occasion, to a variety of people,” said Dundon, explaining the enormity of the task he faced after Roth retained him. “I would not recommend any client do that.”

Roth, who said he had in fact submitted debriefing reports to the CIA after past trips to China, was personally outraged by the insinuation that he couldn’t be trusted to protect the integrity of his research, Dundon recalled. Using foreign nationals on a restricted military contract was bad, but Roth taking sensitive information on his laptop to China and having restricted material sent to him via email there was what really stuck in the government’s craw, said Dundon.

Roth lacked a full understanding of the internet, and didn’t appreciate the fact that his data could have been intercepted by the Chinese government, something we now know is standard operating procedure, Dundon said. Whether or not Chinese agents or any of Roth’s Chinese university colleagues actually got access to this material, Dundon doesn’t know.

“I don’t recall there being any proof, but I do recall that the government expressed concern about that,” he said.

“I admired Dr. Roth for being willing to stand up for his principles,” Dundon said. “I don’t see that very often in my business. A lot of people would perhaps say it was misplaced. Nevertheless, there are a few people willing to risk prison for their principles. He’s one of them.”

Daniel Max Sherman was a student of Roth’s at UT before going into business with him. Now 47 and living in Chattanooga, Sherman exudes an unmistakable cynicism about the world.

Born in rural Dayton, Tennessee, to a mom who had turned 18 only a few days earlier, Sherman never met his father. He got his contact info a while back, but never actually got in touch.

“I grew up with a long list of stepfathers, most of them with military backgrounds,” Sherman explained. “The first father I remember was a drill sergeant for the Army and he was not a nice man.”

Sherman, who is speaking publicly about the case for the first time, left home during his senior year of high school, primarily to escape his mother’s third husband, an alcoholic Marine Corps drill instructor. Sherman’s grandmother managed to cobble together enough money for him to attend UT, and one of his high school teachers gave him a few hundred bucks for textbooks.

F – 35

Sherman was the director of plasma sciences at a small, publicly traded company in Knoxville called Atmospheric Glow Technologies (AGT). Roth was a minority partner. Located in a commercial park 20 minutes west of downtown Knoxville, the offices are less than a 10-minute drive from Reece Roth’s home.

AGT was spun off from UT to develop commercial applications for Roth’s plasma actuator design. In fact, Sherman, who co-owns the patent, says the actuator “in this particular form was a design that resulted during my Master’s in 1995. At that time, Dr. Roth was my advisor.” Roth reportedly offered to let Sherman take full credit, but Sherman, Roth, and a third collaborator are listed as co-inventors.

AGT existed with two basic funding mechanisms, Sherman explained. One followed the traditional commercial model, raising money from outside investors. The other came from the federal government. Sherman was the one who wrote the bulk of those proposals, generating most of the initial ideas after which he said other people’s names would inevitably also be “slapped on.”“As one of [my former colleagues] at Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] explained to me, ‘Daniel, I can’t send this pen to Iran.’”— Daniel Max Sherman

Still, the question remains: Why would Roth risk his reputation, his career, and his freedom just to hire a couple of foreign graduate research assistants? Is it really that hard to find competent American Ph.D. candidates?

“Dr. Roth’s lab was constantly filled with foreign nationals,” said Sherman. “His book had been translated into foreign languages and they respected him and most Americans couldn’t stand working for him, he was such an ass.”

Dan Golden, author of Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities, was the first person to interview Roth when he went to prison in 2012 and has written about the case extensively.

“I think it flattered his vanity to have students who had admired him from afar and who could remind him about what a major figure he was in China, because he’s not a man without ego,” Golden told The Daily Beast. “So, that’s the specific reason. More broadly, there’s a plethora of foreign graduate students in American science departments.” (He also points out the ironic disconnect between UT’s vigilance in turning in Roth while at the same time seeming less alert to the myriad issues posed by hosting a Confucius Institute on campus.)

It was Sherman who ultimately acquiesced to Roth’s demand that Xin Dai, his Chinese student, be hired onto the drone project. However, he insisted that all restricted material be kept away from Dai and handled by an American student, Truman Bonds. A noble concept, but one that unfortunately did not work in practice, according to Sherman.

As Dai neared graduation and Roth announced that he wanted Nourgostar to take his place, Sherman finally put his foot down.

“It had been made clear to me that it really wouldn’t be a good idea,” said Sherman. “As one of [my former colleagues] at Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] explained to me, ‘Daniel, I can’t send this pen to Iran.’”

When Sherman told Roth he would do whatever it took to block the hire, Roth sought support from the university’s supervisor of faculty research contracts. She advised Roth to speak to the school’s newly-hired export control officer, who was more than a little alarmed not only by the notion of hiring an Iranian national for a project that was very obviously subject to serious regulations, but also that a Chinese national had already spent a year illegally working on the project without anyone knowing it. Roth left for China, the export control officer called authorities, and that’s when everything began to collapse.

According to most everyone involved, Roth ignored multiple warnings from various people about his hiring of foreign students, insisting all the while that the university’s non-discrimination policy overrode federal export law.

During the trial, Roth flatly refused to consider negotiating a plea bargain, insisting he had done nothing wrong. The jury obviously thought otherwise, finding that Roth acted with the requisite intent.“The greatest damage, my friends would say, is that by the time I left prison, I had turned my back on invention”— Daniel Max Sherman

Backed into a corner, Sherman agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act. The judge sentenced him to 14 months. He did his time as inmate #32207-074 at a federal prison camp in Florence, Colorado, alongside former Enron CFO Andy Fastow, who worked in the barbershop.

Sherman says he took the deal in hopes that he could “put this shitstorm behind me and try to eventually rebuild a life, which I haven’t.”

“What does a felon do when they get out of jail?” he says when asked if he still practices physics. “They do construction. I do remodeling and construction, that pays the majority of my bills.”

Xin Dai got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2006, and now works as a patent lawyer in Palo Alto. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Sirous Nourgostar is working as a researcher in the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering. Truman Bonds is the president of a firm in Knoxville, which is successfully commercializing a carbon fiber oxidation project Sherman says he started back at Atmospheric Glow. Reached by email, Bonds declined to comment.

Atmospheric Glow was charged as a company, and pleaded guilty to 10 counts of conspiracy. On April 1, 2008, the firm declared bankruptcy. A few months later, AGT’s assets were sold off to a Connecticut firm for $125,000 cash, plus $200,000 in stock.

In the end, Sherman fell just short of earning his doctorate. Once the federal investigation began, the Air Force stopped communicating with the AGT team. When the Ph.D. committee realized there would be no way for Sherman to publish his results, they told him it wasn’t worth going any further.

“The greatest damage, my friends would say, is that by the time I left prison, I had turned my back on invention,” Sherman said. “I found a wealthy philanthropist here in town who wanted me to take on a high-tech project kind of as a hobby, and I did that for a little while until he passed away, and I haven’t done science since.”

Both Sherman and Roth speak about their plasma research with noticeable pride, although they both say it has largely disappeared.

“I will tell you that all the inventions that we came up with, to this day are still not being discussed in the public literature,” said Sherman. “The technology could literally be 100 times more electrically efficient and 10 times stronger, but no one talks about it.”

“The technology in the U.S. has not advanced nearly as quickly and over as broad a range as I think it should have,” said Roth, who lists a number of civilian uses that haven’t yet been fully explored, including sterilization and decontamination in the medical and agricultural fields.

“At the time I was jailed, there were a bunch of tests showing that plasma actuators could reduce the drag on [wind turbine blades] up to 30 percent,” Roth explained. “In aerodynamic terms, that’s a big decrease in drag. Over the last 50 years, they’ve been spending millions to get the drag on airfoils down just a few percent at a time.”“If we can reduce the espionage and theft done by a small minority, we could get the benefit of the majority, who don’t.”— Daniel Golden

On the other hand, Tom McLaughlin of the Air Force Academy says Roth’s technology, which he describes not as a brand-new discovery, but a clever “tool” based on the dielectric barrier discharge plasma first reported by Ernst Werner von Siemens in 1857, had already reached what he considers to be its practical limits, at least for his purposes.

“It was difficult to make it work at aerodynamic speeds of interest to us,” McLaughlin told The Daily Beast. “It would at very low speeds but the faster you got, the less effective it became. I don’t think the case led to the demise of the technology, we played out the technology and found it wasn’t doing everything we thought it would.”

Dan Golden appreciates the fact that Dai and Nourgostar have stayed to make lives in America, saying that this is precisely the point that people often overlook when they talk about the danger of espionage at U.S. universities: The great majority of Chinese (and other) students who come to the States and earn their Ph.D.s stay for at least five years after getting their doctorate. Some stay a lot longer than that, said Golden, meaning their inventions stay here, too.

“If you cut off China, you lose the benefit of all the research they do when they’re here. If we can reduce the espionage and theft done by a small minority, we could get the benefit of the majority, who don’t.”

The experience has obviously left an indelible impression on Roth, whose wife Helen watches TV in the other room as he recounts events more than a decade in the past like they happened yesterday.

Today, Roth’s life tends toward the ludditistic. He has a cell phone, but if he wants to put something in writing, he sends a letter. He has refused to get online since leaving prison for fear of “the potential misrepresentation of any kind of message they happen to come up with through these dragnets that they perform on people’s correspondence.”

Roth views his case as having been “politically motivated,” and doesn’t think investigators had the necessary level of scientific sophistication to fully grasp the nuances involved. If they had, he doesn’t believe he ever would have been hauled into court in the first place.

“Some of those prosecutors were involved in pursuing people who were producing bootleg liquor and that was the kind of prosecution that they seemed to go after,” Roth says. “I think they attribute China’s technical success to their stealing our technology, when in fact the Chinese are perfectly capable of developing and originating their own.”

Air Force Scientist Spilled No Secrets. He Still Went to Prison. (thedailybeast.com)

Honeywell Admits Sending F-35, F-22 Part Drawings To China

May 03, 2021

21

Credit: Lockheed Martin

Honeywell has agreed to pay $13 million in fines and compliance costs after company officials sent multiple engineering and technical documents to China with details of multiple aircraft, including the Lockheed Martin F-35 and F-22, over a seven-year period, the U.S. State Department said May 3.

• The material wasn’t classified, it was export-controlled. Big difference in terms of charges.
• The disclosure was voluntarily admitted. Big difference in terms of penalties.
• This isn’t their first time getting popped for export violations, and at least one other time (exporting software to China) it seems clear to me that they were trying to make an end-run around export restrictions. Bad Honeywell, bad.

I used to be an ITAR Empowered Official. I’m not trying to make light of what they did, but it’s not on the order of disclosing, say, the manufacturing secrets behind a turbine blade or the surface coatings on the F-35.

CIA Replaces Waterboarding With 12-Hour Lectures On Intersectional Feminism

One Hour of Yugoslav Communist Music – Vojvodina

https://videopress.com/v/Z4shiua1?preloadContent=metadata

One Hour of Yugoslav Communist Music Slovenia

https://videopress.com/v/yugHvo9P?preloadContent=metadata

Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice – Book review with Bruce Levine – Video (45:00 min) March 2021

The ‘live’ feed begins at about 10:00 …..

One Hour of Yugoslav Communist Music Montenegro

https://videopress.com/v/F4x5PzHc?preloadContent=metadata

Thaddeus Stevens review: the Radical Republican America should remember – John S Gardner (Guardian) 28 Feb 2021

A half-length seated portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, 1863, held in the National Archives. 

There’s more to the 19th-century reformer than Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal for Spielberg. Bruce Levine’s book is a start

Tommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2012.

Thaddeus Stevens deserves to be better known. A leading radical Republican of the Reconstruction era, he is perhaps best known for Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. In his new biography, though, Bruce Levine dismisses the movie’s story of Stevens and his mixed-race housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith as lovers by writing that “no firm evidence substantiates it”. Similarly, Jones’s line “Trust? Gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that our chosen career is politics,” falls into the category of “too good to check”.The Rope review: Ida B Wells, the NAACP and a slim thread to a murderRead more

Until recently, history – or at least historiography – has not been kind to Stevens. His reputation fell as the national mood shifted. As Levine notes, even John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage praised Andrew Johnson while calling Stevens “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement”.

Owning an iron works and serving in the Pennsylvania legislature where he promoted common schools for all, Stevens later went to Congress to represent Lancaster, then as now a swing district in a swing state. Known for his “iron will and great courage” and “quick wit and sharp tongue”, he possessed a flinty, independent mind.

“He did not play the courtier,” as one congressman observed, and “he did not flatter the people; he was never a beggar for their votes.” He promoted economic development while opposing the “aristocracy of wealth and pride”. Like Abraham Lincoln, he spoke at Cooper Union in 1860, where he discussed “the long and persistent war between Liberty and Slavery, between Oppression and Freedom”, the theme that dominated his public life. By 1861, as the civil war began, Stevens was responsible for its financing as chairman of the committee on ways and means.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/from-tool/book/index.html?opinion-tint=false&is-extract=false&image=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.gutools.co.uk%2Fimages%2Fa42fae5ac3f4f5341f58e799d925ff6bb787d0ed%3Fcrop%3D0_0_331_499&title=Thaddeus%20Stevens%3A%20Civil%20War%20Revolutionary%2C%20Fighter%20For%20Racial%20Justice&author=Bruce%20Devine&publisher=Simon%20%26%20Schuster&link=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthaddeus-stevens-civil-war-revolutionary-fighter-for-racial-justice%2F9781476793375

He was an early and ardent supporter of abolition of slavery. But the Union moved slowly in that direction and, as Spielberg makes clear, some supported it only as a matter of military necessity. But events moved swiftly. Military defeats in 1862 hastened the end of slavery through the Second Confiscation Act; slaves who crossed to Union lines were “forever free of their servitude”. The Militia Act authorized Lincoln to raise Black troops with the promise of freedom.

On 31 January 1865, the House voted for abolition. Military necessity had joined with moral imperative. Levine notes that “the chamber’s floor and galleries erupted in cheers, tears and ecstatic shouts of celebration” but oddly omits the real drama of the moment, the absolute stillness immediately after the result was announced, in solemn recognition of what had been done, before the cheers and 100-gun salute.

As with slavery, so with Reconstruction. Stevens thought Lincoln too lenient, instead seeking to remove “every vestige of human bondage” and “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents”. He and other Radicals believed the rebellious states had actually left the Union, in contrast to Lincoln’s position that the Union remained intact. Stevens and the radicals wanted harsher conditions – in particular, regarding equal rights for the freed people, including voting for all adult males – before readmitting southern representatives to Congress. In contrast, Levine quotes a biography of the Maine senator William Pitt Fessenden, who “regarded Reconstruction as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be grasped”. On that difference hung the next hundred years of US history.

As the war raged, Stevens replied “I won’t” to a demand he give up the concept of racial equality before the law. With the Union victorious, his policies became increasingly radical, focusing on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, voting rights and land reform. He also supported the rights of Chinese immigrants in California.

This led to bitter debates with the Johnson administration and within Congress. Stevens worked hard to advance what became the 14th amendment with its guarantee of citizenship and “equal protection of the laws”. Johnson demanded, as Levine puts it, “to know why Stevens should not be hanged as a traitor” – the first but sadly not the last example of violent presidential rhetoric against opponents praising democracy.

Stevens promoted land reform as the key to Black economic independence: “Divide this land into convenient farms. Give, if you please, 40 acres to each adult male freedman” with $50 to build a house and farm buildings, then use the proceeds of other confiscated land sold at auction to pay off the national debt and pensions for Union soldiers.

For all this he was in some quarters calumnied as a Jacobin. Property rights concerns doomed his proposal even as he argued that “nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder”.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/V7Brh9iWajc?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedTommy Lee Jones plays Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2012.

Stevens pushed Johnson’s impeachment through his reconstruction committee. Then as now, drafting formal articles presented tricky questions. Stevens would have preferred broader articles on Johnson’s refusal to execute laws passed by Congress rather than a focus on the Tenure of Office Act. But his health was failing and moderates voted to acquit.

Stevens died that summer of 1868, two Black ministers attending his deathbed. Racially integrated pallbearers brought his body to the Capitol, where he lay guarded by Black soldiers before being buried at his request in the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, with the epitaph EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Had he lived, could America have avoided the painful end of Reconstruction? Land reform might not have prevented Jim Crow – racism was too deep – but Stevens was surely correct that land ownership would have ended the dominance of the planter class. Spike Lee, for one, named his production company “40 Acres and a Mule”.

Levine has produced a work of popular history. It takes pains to put Stevens’s actions in context and provides background on his early life and the road to civil war. The writing is occasionally clunky but the history is vital. In the end, Reconstruction remained a road not taken, even as Stevens drove the train as fast as he could.

Thaddeus Stevens review: the Radical Republican America should remember | History books | The Guardian

‘The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens’ – Book Review – by Matthew E. Stanley (Jacobin)

The Civil War and Reconstruction–era Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens understood far better than most of his contemporaries that fully uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights — first the right of some human beings to own others, but also beyond it.

………………………

Review of Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine (Simon & Schuster, 2021).

If French Jacobinism had a corollary during the Second American Revolution, it was embodied by Thaddeus Stevens. A leading abolitionist in the House of Representatives during the antebellum period, the man who came to be known as the Great Commoner emerged during the Civil War as de facto leader of the Radical Republicans and a standard-bearer for the causes of emancipation, the enlistment of black soldiers, African American suffrage, and land reform. Exploiting wartime conditions to pursue a radical revolution capped by a confiscation policy that would redistribute Confederate land to formerly enslaved people, Stevens understood as few others did that uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the South’s economic system and challenging property rights beyond property in human beings.

But as the most controversial statesmen of his era, Stevens’s popular reputation has fluctuated widely, falling and rising in inverse proportion to Jim Crow and the Lost Cause. He was for a century one of the most reviled figures in American history. Conversely, when civil rights and justice movements have surged, his popular reputation has consistently been rejuvenated.

In that sense, Bruce Levine’s Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice provides an anticipated and most welcome update of this anti-racist champion in the age of Black Lives Matter, falling Confederate monuments, and rising calls for transformational policy.

The Making of a Radical

Stevens’s path to wartime racial and economic justice pioneer was a lifetime in the making, and Levine diligently tracks his subject’s decades-long evolution, exploring key developments that other biographers have neglected. Born in 1792, Stevens acquired his progressive bent from his relatively poor upbringing in the small farm and mutual assistance culture of rural Vermont, where he was influenced by his Baptist faith, as well as early exposure to classics and Enlightenment readings. By the mid-1830s, and now representing his adopted state of Pennsylvania in the US House of Representatives, he had developed into a dyed-in-the-wool abolitionist.

As an activist Whig and gifted parliamentarian, Stevens was a tremendous advocate for universal public education and infrastructural improvements. His political record was not spotless, including support for voluntary colonization as an alternative to emancipation, a sojourn with nativists, and retaining personal doubts about universal suffrage. But Stevens’s early uncompromising approach toward the growing “Slave Power” — being far ahead of public opinion and his own party — established a pattern.

Stevens’s egalitarianism soon became inseparable from his understanding of free labor. Rather than counterposing Stevens’s economic position to his social idealism, as other biographers have, Levine reminds readers that free labor economics and social leveling were facets of a single worldview.

Unaware of the permanent industrial wage labor and corporate consolidation that would soon characterize the Gilded Age, free labor proponents viewed dependent labor as merely a stepping stone to small-scale proprietorship and self-ownership, the very social class that was underrepresented in slave societies. In this idealized form of capitalism — one free of class conflict — they sought to use economic activism, as well as continental imperialism under the guise of “progress” and “expansion,” to ensure that all had the opportunity to partake in a broad social prosperity. Inequality in a free labor system was accepted as the natural consequence of individual (not collective) failings, but not as the result of enforced servitude and an untitled aristocracy of slave owners.

Though free labor ideology understood oppression as primarily political rather than economic, in origin, it also held that political independence and good government — republicanism — were predicated on rough economic equality. This outlook would prove integral to Stevens’s vision of the postwar South.

As conflict over slavery intensified, Stevens doubled down on his radicalism. Despite having joined neither the Liberty nor Free Soil antislavery third-party movements, Stevens supported a strategy of denationalization, which hoped to legally and constitutionally marginalize slavery by blocking its expansion and political representation. By the mid-1850s, that strategy, dubbed by historian James Oakes as a “cordon of freedom,” found a mass political vehicle in the newly formed antislavery Republican Party.Whereas most Republicans sensed disunion and national restoration as problems to be solved, Stevens also grasped them as an opportunities to be seized.

As a member, Stevens continued to frame human bondage as a moral wrong rather than simply an affront to the opportunities of white laborers. He also publicly endorsed the rights of women to vote and hold public office. During the secession crisis, Stevens broke with the mainstream of his party by rejecting Thomas Corwin’s proposed amendment that would have constitutionally protected slavery from abolition or interference by Congress. A longtime opponent of any legislative concession or remodeling the Union to accommodate slaveholders, Stevens predicted correctly that secession would make moderate Northerners more, not less, antagonistic toward slavery. War, he predicted, would be long and costly, but it could also be slavery’s death knell. Whereas most Republicans sensed disunion and national restoration as problems to be solved, Stevens also grasped them as an opportunities to be seized.

And seize he did. Stevens used his power as chairman of the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee to launch a frontal attack against slavery through a popular revolution — one most of his Republican colleagues initially sought to avoid.

He was among the first in Congress to promote the confiscation of enslaved people, demand full legal freedom for the newly emancipated, and call for widening the scope of emancipation to include all enslaved persons. To the annoyance of the Lincoln administration, Stevens backed John C. Frémont, David Hunter, and other Union officers who went off script by issuing impromptu emancipation orders.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln and others, Stevens was adamant that the Confederate states had in fact left the Union. That secession was illegal, he maintained, did not mean that it had not occurred. Levine masterfully illustrates how Stevens used that fact to justify more sweeping war measures and, eventually, a transformation of Southern society. Because the property of traitors was no longer subject to strict constitutional protection, Congress was afforded the power to wage a revolutionary war against not only chattel bondage but the entirety of the plantation system, including the property of Southern elites.

Congressional colleagues largely followed his advance. As the extent and depth of rebellion became clear, Republicans increasingly realized the necessity of social revolution, endeavoring to dismantle slavery piece by piece and enlist black men as soldiers in that fight. While what Karl Marx described as the “revolutionary waging of war” boosted Union prospects on the battlefield, Stevens rejected Lincoln’s early Reconstruction policies as overly lenient. He even protested the less conciliatory Wade-Davis Bill, because its implication that the Confederate states had never left the Union would hinder the possibility of land seizure.

Stevens instead envisioned what he termed “perfected revolution” as an expanded emancipation. He aspired to use his party’s political momentum to free the nation “from every vestige of human oppression . . . of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich.” Postwar “Black Codes,” violence and coercion against freedpeople, and Andrew Johnson’s personal intransigence and conciliation of former rebels led moderates to adopt firmer measures and also bolstered the Radical ranks, leading to the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the Fourteenth Amendment.

But that leftward trajectory stopped short of Stevens’s final demand for the confiscation and redistribution of Confederate land. In fact, when Stevens died in August 1868, his influence was at low ebb. Spurious charges of corruption, black domination, and federal overreach were already beginning to turn cautious white Northerners against Radical Reconstruction and the Republican Party as a whole toward the conservative prioritization of business. Not surprisingly, the popular legacy of this spearheading radical — the man who nearly always outpaced both the nation and his reform-minded party on matters of race and democracy — would prove erratic, waxing and waning according to broader social and political forces.

The Afterlives of a Yankee Jacobin

Trailblazers in pursuit of justice — those Arthur Schlesinger Sr styled as “the shock troops of reform” — are always the most bloodied. That has certainly proven the case with Stevens. Denigrated by enemies North and South as an “American Robespierre,” he came to embody the specter of “Negro rule,” or the myth that African Americans, goaded by unscrupulous white carpetbaggers, had overtaken Southern state governments.

According to Eric Foner, Stevens more than any other figure of the era came to represent “Northern malice, revenge, and irrational hatred of the South.” The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a conservative culture of reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, and the white supremacist Dunning School of Reconstruction all helped to bury Stevens’s legacy by forwarding the idea that extending civil rights to formerly enslaved people had been an abject mistake.Trailblazers in pursuit of justice — those Arthur Schlesinger Sr styled as ‘the shock troops of reform’ — are always the most bloodied. That has certainly proven the case with Stevens.

The villain in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster motion picture, the Ku Klux Klan–glorifying The Birth of a Nation, was even modeled after Stevens. Exhibiting the stereotypes of a Yankee opportunist, the fictional congressman Austin Stoneman sports a black mistress, an unshapely wig, and Stevens’s characteristic limp, the result of being born with a club foot. Stevens (as Stoneman) presides over a violent mob of drunken and rape-obsessed freedmen, portrayed by white actors in blackface.

This carpetbagging caricature shaped and was shaped by academic orthodoxy. Writing in 1912, historian James Ford Rhodes deemed Stevens “a violent partisan.” The dean of Lincoln scholars, James G. Randall, saw in Stevens the personification of “vindictive ugliness.” James Truslow Adams’s 1931 The Epic of America, which birthed the phrase the “American Dream,” referenced the Pennsylvanian as “the most deplorable, malevolent, and morally deformed who has ever risen to high power in America.” Even John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage (1955) painted Stevens as a fanatic while praising Andrew Johnson’s “peaceable” approach toward his defeated countrymen.

Of course, the notion that the South’s experiment in interracial democracy was an abomination promulgated by “miscegenating Jacobins” proved incredibly useful to the region’s elites. Its effect, if not its stated purpose, was to stifle interracial labor and political organization by frightening Southern whites into remaining racially “solid” and unwilling to align with black people despite shared class status.

At the same time, Stevens remained a hero to African Americans, who celebrated him as the “Father of Reconstruction.” Black schools and civic groups adopted his name and likeness. Frederick Douglass hung Stevens’s portrait on his wall.

In the twentieth century, activists in liberal integrationist, Afro-socialist, and black nationalist camps across the African American freedom struggle also embraced Stevens. W. E. B. Du Bois called him a “leader of the common people,” a “seer of democracy,” and a believer that such democracy should be extended to both the political and industrial spheres. New York City councilman Ben Davis Jr lauded him as, alongside Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, one of the great democrats of the nineteenth century. Journalist Lerone Bennett Jr deemed Stevens one of his personal heroes.

As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, one biographer confidently asserted that, as far as white icons in the black community were concerned, Stevens stood second only to Lincoln. And for precisely the same reasons, to white Southerners he remained “the most hated statesman in American history.”

Thaddeus Stevens circa 1898. (Library of Congress)

Stevens also grew to be admired by the labor left, which increasingly realized that the destruction of the Lost Cause, and the popular rehabilitation of interracial champions, was critical to the dismantling of the color line and any hope of solidarity between white and black workers. Despite frequently venerating Lincoln and the dual outcomes of the Civil War (liberty and union), organized workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mostly reflected the anti-Reconstruction bent of mainstream American culture. But the revolutionary socialists came to revere Stevens as a property confiscator and anti-racist crusader.

His words and ideas were referenced in The Masses and The Liberator. Eugene Debs invoked the abolitionist as a hero during his 1918 trial. Elizabeth Lawson’s 1941 pamphlet, Thaddeus Stevens: Militant Democrat and Fighter for Negro Rights, published by the Communist Party to shape popular opinion in the South amid drives to organize sharecroppers and industrial workers in Alabama, exalted Stevens as a “crusader for democracy” whose attempts at land reform had pushed bourgeois revolution to its limits.

The Daily Worker, which proclaimed Stevens “the people’s orator,” even launched a formal protest movement against MGM for the studio’s vilification of Stevens and glorification of Andrew Johnson in the film Tennessee Johnson (1942), which editors dismissed as “history turned upside down.” More than any other national leader, the publication explained, Stevens “realized the whole revolutionary content of the period and led the forces that eventually seized the reins of the revolution.”

Mid-century historians, too, gradually moved away from portraying Stevens as a wild-eyed assailant of the innocent white South. Reflecting the resurgence of interracial populist and mass democratic politics during the New Deal era, Thomas F. Woodley’s laudatory Great Leveler: The Life of Thaddeus Stevens (1937) and Alphonse B. Miller’s Thaddeus Stevens(1939) attacked the pro-slavery interpretations of the Dunning School. Yet leading historians continued to downplay the sincerity and efficacy of Stevens’s anti-racism, skirting the matter of ideology.

The subtitle of Richard N. Current’s highly influential Old Thad Stevens: A Story of Political Ambition (1942) clearly states the book’s thesis. In the economic (but non-Marxist) mold of historians Charles A. and Mary Beard and Howard K. Beale, Current portrayed Stevens as a self-interested representative of Northeastern industrial interests and an unwitting agent of inequality.Stevens’s ability to stake out an advanced position and push his party in that direction was not a weakness but an incredible strength — a strength that materialized in the civil rights gains of Reconstruction.

The age of civil rights engendered a scholarly turn. Though overly psychoanalytical, Fawn M. Brodie’s 1959 biography exposed the “racist fictions” upholding the anti-Reconstruction narrative and praised its subject for the necessary task of “helping purge the nation of what was essentially a remnant of feudalism.” Inspired by the African American freedom movement and the New Left, revisionist historians and so-called neo-abolitionists, including Stevens biographers Ralph Korngold (1955), Milton Meltzer (1967), and Hans Trefousse (1969), furthered this historiographical revitalization by emphasizing ideology and Stevens’s sense of justice. Each defended Stevens’s Reconstruction record, depicting their subject as a champion of the underprivileged and one of the great purveyors of democracy in American history.

This profile of Stevens’s noble egalitarianism has since infiltrated popular culture, leading to a new interpretive problem as the notion of Stevens as an ineffective purist threatens to replace one stereotype with another. Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Lincoln (2012) renders Stevens less a prophet of emancipation and Reconstruction — one of the first Republican leaders to anticipate a protracted war that would demand revolutionary measures against slavery and in favor of black rights — than a liability that Lincoln must tame in order to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. Freedpeople, black abolitionists, and non-congressional activists are absent from the film; Stevens, Ben Wade, and James Ashley (played as weak-kneed by David Costabile) symbolize the whole of the abolitionist cause.

Tommy Lee Jones’s acclaimed performance captures Stevens’s moral righteousness and acerbic wit, to be sure. But the movie, based on Tony Kushner’s screenplay, illustrates Stevens’s convictions clouding political realism, a concept associated with the allegedly more foresighted Lincoln. To Spielberg and Kushner, Stevens’s greatness lay not in his principles but in his willingness (only after being conditioned by Lincoln) to finally get in line and compromise those principles.

The problem with this pragmatism-fetishizing interpretation is obvious: there would have been no antislavery movement, no expanded war against slavery, and no Thirteenth Amendment without sustained pressure from firebrands like Stevens. In effect, the film celebrates a radical achievement without giving due credit — indeed, while frowning on — the very type of radicalism that made that achievement conceivable.

Levine contests the Spielberg-Kushner thesis. Far from a doctrinaire stargazer, Stevens did exhibit intellectual flexibility and a remarkable knack for reevaluating old assumptions and sensing when to press new initiatives. From the Confiscation Acts, which he believed should include the seizure of rebel lands, to the Fourteenth Amendment, which he hoped would include black enfranchisement, Stevens’s support for transformational wartime measures were compromise positions. And Stevens’s ability to stake out an advanced position and push his party in that direction was not a weakness but an incredible strength — a strength that materialized in the civil rights gains of Reconstruction.

In its many comparisons of Lincoln and Stevens, Levine’s reading paints the latter as possessing greater farsightedness and, at times, stronger political instincts, his very different political role notwithstanding. Stevens was exceptional in his capacity to identify and act on the long-term threats to emancipation. Reducing those politics to impractical idealism obscures the profound — and soberingly realistic — connections between Reconstruction and economics.

A Revolution Against Property

The notion of Stevens as a revolutionary figure operating in revolutionary times is central to Levine’s argument. Citing the contemporary observations of Karl Marx, Georges Clemenceau, and others, he views the Civil War and Reconstruction as a social revolution, though his analysis (perhaps wisely) evades the thorny question of whether, and the degree to which, they constituted a “bourgeois” transformation. If emancipation and the transition to free labor was indeed a revolution, then Stevens was among the most radical of its leadership. As one British observer put it, the Pennsylvanian was “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one.”

Levine makes clear that Stevens conveyed these Jacobin instincts most directly through his attitudes toward property. Stevens’s willingness to challenge the most sanctified component of capitalist relations included not only ownership in humans (slaves) but also ownership in land. From the outset, he realized that Union victory would require freeing and arming enslaved people and expropriating rebel property. Following the lead of freedpeople, who immediately linked farm ownership to their conceptions of emancipation and what it meant to be free, Stevens and his allies fought as early as 1862 to expand the Confiscation Acts to permit the permanent seizure of Confederate land. Although both William T. Sherman’s famous “40 Acres and a Mule” order and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill of 1865 assigned abandoned parcels to a relative handful of former slaves, such measures did not grant them legal title and their homesteads were reclaimed by order of Andrew Johnson.

Whereas other Radicals viewed African American voting as the culmination of Reconstruction, Stevens recognized that only a foundation of economic power could establish the legal and material conditions to make black enfranchisement meaningful and permanent. In the postwar South, that meant the ownership of arable land. As such, Stevens proposed the creation of an executive department mechanism to seize all estates over two hundred acres — which constituted roughly 2 percent of the Southern families — and to partition that land into forty-acre farmsteads. Poor and middling whites, he reassured, would not be affected.Stevens’s free labor ethos, which precluded the existence of a landed elite or a landless class, emboldened him to defy individual property rights.

Once divided among former slaves, the government would then sell the remaining acreage to pay down war debt and provide pensions for Union veterans. Over time, and now with the support of the Union Leagues and black convention delegates in the South, Stevens argued that land redistribution would destroy the concentrated power of the planter class, slowly transform the region into a yeoman republic, and expand the base of the Republican Party.

Stevens’s free labor ethos, which precluded the existence of a landed elite or a landless class, emboldened him to defy individual property rights. In fact, the logic of confiscation was rooted in longstanding Republican critiques of the South, and the idea that slavery and land monopoly had created a dangerously hierarchical and antidemocratic society.

Along with a handful of abolitionists and Radicals, including Wendell Phillips and George W. Julian, Stevens also viewed land as a matter of basic justice. After all, enslaved black people, not white landowners, had provided the human labor that created the plantation system and its immense profits. In other words, these “confiscation radicals” viewed land reform as a basic means of restitution — a precursor to the modern concept of reparations. When leading Senate Republican William P. Fessenden complained to Charles Sumner that Stevens’s land reform bill was “more than we do for white people,” Sumner responded that “white men have never been in slavery.”

But the notion of permanently breaking up mega plantations — even in the service of protecting freedpeople and destroying the political power of Southern elites — proved a tough sell to white Northerners. Democrats denounced Stevens’s “Reign of Terror” and insisted that land confiscation would parrot the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Meanwhile, the Republican Party free labor ideal was predicated on upward mobility and the “right to rise” through a program of public education, infrastructural improvements, and the redistribution of public land in the form of homesteads.

Private landed property was a different matter. In his brilliant 1974 essay “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” Eric Foner explained this small capitalist utopianism as it related to private land: “To a party which believed that a free laborer, once accorded equality of opportunity, would rise or fall in the social scale on the strength of his own diligence, frugality, and hard work, confiscation seemed an unwarranted interference with the rights of property.”

Confiscation was also anathema to the interests of capital. Although Beardian and some Marxist historians have depicted Stevens as an agent of the “money power,” commercial elites tended to view him not as an ally but as a mortal threat. Both Southern landholders and Northeastern textile manufacturers feared that independent black farmers would refuse to grow cotton, which they designated the “slave crop.” Moreover, industrialists recognized that the logic of workers controlling the means of production — the difference between former slaves seizing the plantations and industrial laborers seizing the factories — was only a matter of degree.

In other words, as Levine contends, the distribution of private land to freedpeople failed because it was antithetical to deeply held — and, for the few, fabulously profitable — understandings of private property. Republican losses in the state elections of 1867 effectively killed the issue and helped turn the party away from war-era idealism and toward conservatism, political expediency, and accommodation toward big business. The abandonment of confiscation signaled the larger abandonment of Reconstruction.

Levine’s synopsis of the rise and fall of the land question is tragic and compelling. But his argument would benefit from a clearer indication that Americans were not inimical to land redistribution per se. Rather, its logic had always been raced, with land commonly redistributed from red or brown people to white people, as well as classed, with choice tracts allotted to speculators and corporate firms.

As historian Richard White has recently argued, postwar redistribution concerned “whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.” They could not. And the land reform bill that ultimately passed, the Southern Homestead Act, was a categorical failure. Rather than taking arable land from planters and transferring legal title to former slaves, it offered freedpeople and poor whites the opportunity to purchase much inferior public land. Lacking money, only four thousand African American families bought in, and many subsequently lost their land because it was not cultivable.Levine paints Stevens less as a dreamer or utopian than a realist who was clear-eyed about the social and political costs required to achieve any semblance of racial equality.

Despite its ultimate miscarriage, Levine refuses to view land redistribution as a fool’s errand or a distraction from practical politics. In fact, from his opposition to the involuntary colonization of former slaves abroad as neither moral not feasible, to his recognition that political rights could not be protected without landed proprietorship, Levine paints Stevens less as a dreamer or utopian than a realist who was clear-eyed about the social and political costs required to achieve any semblance of racial equality.

This position sets Levine apart from even sympathetic liberal biographers who have criticized Stevens’s so-called empty wishes, particularly his focus on land redistribution. With faint remnants of the Dunning School, Fawn Brodie argued that Stevens’s lofty confiscation aims grew out of an eagerness to punish white Southerners. She believed that Radicals should have devoted the whole of their energies to smaller, ostensibly more attainable goals, such as government loans or a land purchase system.

Hans Trefousse also maintained that land confiscation had no chance to succeed. “The loss of some $4 billion in slave property constituted the largest amount ever expropriated in an English-speaking country,” he reminded, “and there was no chance that any more could be extracted.” Some scholars allege that, sooner or later, black land would have ended up in the hands of white bankers and speculators. Others suggest that, without adequate federal protection, black landholdings, like the black franchise, would have simply been retaken through coercion and violence.

Conversely, Levine’s defense of Stevens’s approach to land reform places him squarely within the long civil rights and labor left interpretive tradition. Professional agitator Wendell Phillips, who proclaimed that the primary problem of racial inequality was that “the black man has no capital,” urged the government to “plant a hundred thousand negro farmers and by their side a hundred thousand white soldiers.”

As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his magisterial 1935 analysis of political economy, Black Reconstruction in America, freedpeople, too, had grasped that “beneath all theoretical freedom and political right must lie the economic foundation.” “Economic emancipation” through land constituted “the absolutely fundamental and essential thing to any real emancipation of the slaves.” For freedom to be realized, the scale of economic transformation had to be radical.

In other words, Levine asserts, as Stevens did, that Reconstruction represented a genuinely revolutionary situation. And in a revolutionary situation in which so many formerly impossible outcomes — property confiscation, uncompensated emancipation, former slaves enlisted as soldiers — had already come to pass, sweeping land reform was unquestionably an aim worth pursuing.

This justification for skillful crusading as a political strategy — for the role of the radical in history — speaks to a theme running through Levine’s book: the relativity of radicalism, or the idea that countless political goals are deemed unreachable until the moment they are, in fact, reached.

It is easy — and far too simple — for backward-gazing critics to characterize political efforts toward large-scale land redistribution as a foolhardy venture because their ends were not accomplished. Confiscation was very much a live issue in 1866 and 1867. And Stevens — the man Republican colleagues celebrated for his remarkable ability to “create public opinion and mold public sentiment” — understood that parliamentary politics should involve more than legislators permitting demands from below. Radical appeals on the part of a leadership vanguard — one intent on pushing the revolution forward — also had the potential to broaden the horizons of political attainability.

Transformed by the interracial demands of working people on the ground, the popular image of Stevens has done a volte-face since the nadir of Jim Crow. Levine’s excellent biography is both the product and culmination of that labor.

But the demonization or dismissal of revolutionary politics has hardly dissipated. Many who now extol the Great Commoner for being at the fore of racial and economic justice during the 1860s rebuff the Stevenses of today for precisely the same reason.

The reactionary notion of Stevens as a broker of anarchy reverberates in both conservative and liberal efforts to mediate mass protests against police violence. From the alt-right to the neoliberal center, we likewise see opponents of universal redistributive programs traffic in claims of impracticality and fears of radicalism and un-Americanism to halt more expansive definitions of freedom and attempt to circumscribe the parameters of what is politically possible.

Stevens’s political struggle — and Levine’s exquisite portrait of that life — expose whose interests those bogeymen ultimately serve.

The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens (jacobinmag.com)

“The Danton, Robespierre, and Marat of America, all rolled into one”: A new biography of antislavery leader Thaddeus Stevens – Book Review

Bruce Levine, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2020

The name of Thaddeus Stevens is too little known today. Bruce Levine, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, has provided a political biography of the leader of the Radical Republicans in Congress during the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction that should help to bring this revolutionary figure broader recognition.

It is fitting that President Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the leader of the Second American Revolution that put an end to chattel slavery. But it was Stevens who, along with Frederick Douglass, best personified the uncompromising abolitionist struggle against slavery in the Civil War era, including the early years of Reconstruction after the defeat of the Confederacy.

What distinguished Stevens from his contemporaries was his implacable opposition to slavery and racism, and his fervent advocacy of the democratic principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. He was certainly among the most significant figures within the Radical Republicans—who constituted the left wing of American politics in the 1860s—and, within the framework of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, perhaps the staunchest advocate of egalitarianism.

Levine quotes Douglass’ assessment of Stevens: “There was in him the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of knowledge, and the power of conscious ability,” qualities that “at last made him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined.” Like Douglass, Stevens prodded President Lincoln to take more decisive action, even as Lincoln masterfully assessed the political situation, responded to demands from Stevens and others, but waited until he judged the time ripe.

Stevens refused to be bound by what was considered realistic or widely acceptable. He “created public opinion and molded public sentiment,” according to one political associate. As chairman of the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee, Stevens played a critical role in the financing of the war. At the same time, he fought to articulate the political goals of the war and pointed the way forward to victory. Stevens was among the very first political figures to call for recruiting Southern slaves into the Union Army, and as early as 1863 he was demanding the measure that would follow two years later—the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, not only emancipating slaves in rebel territory, but outlawing slavery forever within the United States.

Stevens’s intransigence won him many enemies, and not only within the Confederacy. “On the subject of Reconstruction,” the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Stevens must be considered the Evil Genius of the Republican Party.” The New York Herald added, in 1868, that Stevens could be compared to the leaders of the French Revolution, displaying “the boldness of Danton, the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre.” The newspaper did not intend a compliment. A British journalist concurred, calling Stevens “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one.”

Stevens was born in 1792 in Vermont, a separate “independent republic” for more than a decade, before it became the 14th state of the Union in 1791. The young man was shaped by a spirit of agrarian radicalism, the struggles and sometimes violent battles of small farmers. He graduated from Dartmouth College, next door in New Hampshire, and soon moved to Pennsylvania, his home state for the rest of his life.

Portrait of Stevens by Jacob Eichholtz, 1842

This future leader of the Radical Republicans began his political career in the 1820s in Pennsylvania. He was active for several years in the Anti-Masonic Party, but by the mid-to-late 1830s had aligned himself with the newly formed Whigs, which became one of the two major political parties on a national level in the US until the early 1850s. The Whigs were bitterly divided on numerous issues, on none more irreconcilably than the burning question of slavery and its expansion.

Throughout his long career, Stevens was among the foremost champions of public education, or the “common schools” as they were called. Stevens’s hatred of aristocracy linked his advocacy for the right of education to his fight against slavery. In 1835, Stevens fought off an attempt to repeal legislation for public education in Pennsylvania. He said that any such effort should rightfully be called “An act for branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich and the proud.” Stevens went on:

When I reflect how apt hereditary wealth, hereditary influence, and perhaps as a consequence, hereditary pride, are to close the avenues and steel the heart against the wants and rights of the poor, I am induced to thank my Creator for having, from early life, bestowed upon me the blessing of poverty.

It was as a Whig that Stevens first went to Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, elected in 1848. Militant in his anti-slavery stance, he clashed with pro-slavery Whigs, as well as party leader Henry Clay, the key force behind the Compromise of 1850. Increasingly under fire from those who sought to conciliate the southern slaveholding aristocracy, he chose not to run for reelection to the House in 1852.

The Whigs collapsed over the slavery issue by 1854. Stevens briefly associated himself with the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, apparently willing to overlook its reactionary views in his search for a political home that could challenge the hegemony of the pro-slavery Democratic Party. In 1855, however, he finally found this home when he joined the newly formed Republicans, the party whose presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would triumph only five years later.

As Levine writes, “History seemed to speed up after the 1856 election.” The irrepressible conflict over slavery was approaching, but few would then have predicted the bloody Civil War that would take the lives of roughly 750,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. Stevens, however, had long been preparing for a mortal struggle with slavery. He understood the significance of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the US Supreme Court ruled essentially that Congress never had a right to limit slavery’s expansion. “By that standard,” as Levine writes, “the Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, the 1820 Missouri Compromise, and all territorial laws outlawing slavery had always been null and void.”

John Brown

Two years later came John Brown’s famous raid at Harper’s Ferry. Stevens, who had been reelected to the House in 1858, now as a Republican, denounced the act of revolutionary terror, through which Brown hoped to spark a slave rebellion, but only on the grounds that it was doomed to failure. He called Brown “a hopeless fool,” but a week after Brown was sentenced to death, “Stevens was pressing for publication in booklet form of that man’s powerful last letters, statements, and interviews.” Stevens’s words on the subject of John Brown led his pro-slavery opponents to physically threaten him on the House floor.

The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was soon followed by the secession of the slave states of the Deep South. When the Civil War began in April 1861, Stevens was almost 70 years old, a generation older than Frederick Douglass, and at least a decade older than all of the prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Harriet Tubman and others.

But Stevens displayed the energy and determination of a much younger man. Levine quotes a Republican Congressional colleague of Stevens: “To most men there comes, sooner or later, a period of inaction, inability for further progress. This is the period of conservatism, and usually comes with gray hairs and failing eye-sight. It converses with the past and distrusts the future. Its look is backward and not forward.” The congressman continued, “This period Mr. Stevens never reached. The slaveholders’ rebellion seemed to rejuvenate him and inspire him with superhuman strength.”

Stevens predicted a long and bloody war. His views became more and more radical. Twenty-five years earlier, he was, as the author notes, “[A] firm believer in the North’s free-labor capitalist society … who opposed the stoking of hostilities among its social classes as unjustified and dangerous to prosperity, social order, and republican government.”

Stevens in the 1860s at the height of his power, photographed by Matthew Brady

Stevens certainly remained a defender of capitalism and of the system of wage labor in opposition to slavery. His years of struggle had made him more sensitive to the struggle against inequality, however, and he revised his earlier hostility to the French Revolution. In 1862, writes Levine, “Stevens wished aloud that ‘the ardor which inspired the French revolution’ might find its like in the United States. The revolutionaries of France, like others elsewhere, he recalled with admiration, were ‘possessed and impelled by the glorious principles of freedom.’” This was required “to carry out to final perfection the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”

Stevens’s willingness to challenge the status quo of racism and oppression was demonstrated in other ways. In the 1860 election campaign, both Democratic and Republican Congressmen had called for stepped-up attacks on Native Americans near the Texas and New Mexico borders. Stevens declared in response that he “wish[ed] the Indians had newspapers of their own,” because “if they had, you would have horrible pictures of the cold-blooded murders of inoffensive Indians. You would have more terrible pictures than we have now revealed to us [of white casualties], and, I have no doubt, we would have the real reasons for these Indian troubles.”

When Republicans in California enacted measures against the Chinese immigrant population, Stevens denounced them and said the treatment had “disgraced the State of California.” “He reminded the House that ‘China has been much oppressed of late by the European nations,’ which had recently made war upon China because it refused ‘to consent to the importation of poisonous drugs that demoralize its society and destroy its people.’” He insisted on the rights of the Chinese migrants, adding, in words that are indeed appropriate today, long after the United States has become the leading world imperialist power, that the anti-Chinese legislation is “…a mockery of the boast that this land is the asylum of the oppressed of all climes.”

As noted above, Stevens fought for the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army, tirelessly insisting that the logic of the conflict required the mobilization of the freed and escaped slaves in the fight for their freedom, the policy eventually adopted by the president. Stevens went on to fight for the necessary two-thirds majority in the House for the 13th Amendment, achieved on January 31, 1865, after the first vote had fallen just short of that margin. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) focused in part on the bargaining and political horse-trading that preceded this vote, but Levine explains that the Republican victory in the 1864 elections and the work of Stevens and his Radical Republican colleagues were also crucial to the victory.

Levine relates an anecdote that summarizes Stevens’s forthright defense of revolution. When an Ohio Democrat taunted the Republicans, demanding that they admit they were a revolutionary party, Stevens praised the “purifying fires of this revolution” and proudly acknowledged, “revolution it is.”

After the assassination of Lincoln, just days after the surrender at Appomattox that ended the war, Stevens forged ahead, now leading the struggle in the early years of Reconstruction. He secured the necessary approval for the 14th Amendment in 1866, although it fell well short of his original proposals, including full voting rights for the former slaves. He also fought for civil rights legislation in answer to the notorious Black Codes and horrific attacks on freed slaves in Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere. The 1866 civil rights bill and the 1867 Reconstruction Act were enacted after Congress overrode vetoes by President Andrew Johnson, who had quickly revealed himself as a racist sympathizer of the defeated slaveholders.

Another indication of Stevens’s radicalism in the early days of Reconstruction was his proposal to transfer land confiscated from the ex-Confederate aristocracy into the hands of the former slaves. This ambitious land reform proposal was resisted by the majority of his Republican colleagues. As the author points out, “Republicans also wondered nervously where—if they began redistributing landed property to exploited and impoverished people—that road would lead.” The New York Times, once again the rigid defender of the ruling elite, warned, “It is a question … of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.” Levine continues, quoting Boston’s Daily Advertiser: “… there are socialists who hold that any aristocracy is anathema.”

Harper’s Weekly woodcut of Stevens making final argument to the House in Johnson impeachment

Stevens led the impeachment of Johnson in 1868, voted for overwhelmingly by the House. The president was acquitted by the Senate by a margin of only one vote. However, in May of that year. Stevens was already gravely ill, and he died on August 11, 1868, at the age of 76. Five thousand mourners, both black and white, came to pay their respects in the Capitol Rotunda. A crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000, also completely integrated, attended his funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following Stevens’s death, Ulysses S. Grant was the successful Republican candidate for president, and Reconstruction continued under the protection of the federal authorities. By the early 1870s, however, the top leaders of the Republican Party, representing increasingly powerful Northern industrial capitalism, were already preparing a retreat. The stage was set for the 1877 Compromise that resolved the bitterly disputed presidential election of the previous November by installing Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, while at the same time withdrawing federal troops from the South. This in turn set the stage for the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation, along with lynch mob terror and the political disenfranchisement of the black population that continued for almost a century.

At this point, posed with the need for an explanation of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, a serious weakness in Levine’s approach becomes clear. He laments that “the Second American Revolution was left unfinished”—in other words, that it did not complete its historical tasks.

What Levine has in mind is that the Civil War, despite its achievements, did not realize the world of racial equality that its most radical figures, including Stevens, envisioned. But this is to ask more of the past than was possible. Each one of the democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries was “unfinished,” including the most progressive and liberating, such as the Great French Revolution and the Civil War. Their incapacity to fulfill the egalitarian promises on which they mobilized masses was a result of their class nature. The development of capitalism, which emerged out of these revolutions, could do no other than put on history’s agenda a new class struggle, between capitalists and workers. And in that, the most fundamental sense, the Second American Revolution was completed. Destroying the economic system based on chattel slavery, it cleared the path for the development of capitalism.

Stevens’ casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. It is guarded by black soldiers.

Levine underlines his own confusion over Reconstruction when he states that the basic cause for the retreat from the goals of racial equality was the fact that “the Northern public, never firmly devoted to racial equality, tired of the seemingly endless struggle in the South.”

The “public,” however, is divided into classes. It was the ruling capitalist class, the commercial, manufacturing and financial interests, which turned away from the struggle. It had achieved its main aim of unifying the country on the basis of a free-labor economic system. The Northern victory gave a mighty impulse to the development of industrial capitalism. But with that came a new and existential challenge to bourgeois rule—the working class.

Maryland National Guard fighting workers in Baltimore, Maryland, July 20th, 1877

In this new context the Northern industrial bourgeoisie, including its most radical wing, quickly retreated from its headier egalitarian promises, including its commitment to voting rights and equal protection under the law for the freed slaves. Stevens did not live to see the full scope of this retreat, which eroded support within the Republican Party leadership for Grant and Reconstruction, culminating in the election Compromise of 1877 and the restoration of the southern Bourbons—not incidentally, the same year as the Great Uprising of American rail workers. The enemy, in other words, was no longer the former slaveholders, but the militant working class. The author’s reference to the “public” obscures this class reality.

Levine’s “unfinished revolution” thesis, which was first developed by historian Eric Foner, suggests that the great task of progressive forces in the US today is to complete it. It assumes that a more egalitarian society must be created under capitalism before there can be any talk of workers taking power. The task, however, is not to “perfect” capitalism, but to destroy it. Only this will end social inequality and all the ideologies, such as racism, that have always been used to justify it.

In any case, capitalist reaction was not confined to the South, precisely because the ruling class was faced with the need to divide and weaken the growing working class. Although taking a different form in the rest of the country, discrimination and second-class citizenship replaced the progress that had been made in the Civil War and Reconstruction. This project was facilitated by the historical falsification of Stevens, who became the object of decades of calumny. As Levine points out, when the notoriously racist D.W. Griffith’s epic motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, appeared in 1915, Stevens was depicted in obvious caricature as a monstrous villain.

Stevens was depicted as the monster Austin Stoneman in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

The shift was reflected in Civil War historiography. W.E.B. Dubois, the author of Black Reconstruction in America, which was published in 1935, praised Stevens for his “grim and awful courage,” but his account of this period was overwhelmed by vicious attacks on Reconstruction, which predominated in official histories from the turn of the 20th century onwards. Professor William Dunning of Columbia University, who called Stevens “vindictive, truculent and cynical,” was instrumental in propagating the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy as a struggle for states’ rights

As late as 1955, future president John F. Kennedy could write, in his Profiles in Courage, in an assessment that reveals the racist pedigree of the Democratic Party, that Stevens was “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement.” It was not until the 1960s, amid the mass civil rights movement and broader struggles of the working class, that historians such as James McPherson began to correct the record on the role of Stevens and his co-thinkers. It was precisely the growth and the increasing integration of the working class, especially in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, the great labor struggles of the 1930s, and the experiences of World War II, that made possible the heroic struggles for racial equality in the post-World War II period.

Stevens and the Radical Republicans still make the ruling class nervous today, for fundamentally the same reasons as 150 years ago. Some have found a different way of minimizing Stevens, of even ignoring his role entirely, or defaming him. The advocates of “critical race theory,” now increasingly dominant in the elite universities of the US, were promoted by the New York Times and its 1619 Project, which insisted that all American history must be seen as a racial conflict and as the manifestation of white supremacy, against which blacks fought back alone.

The life and struggle of Thaddeus Stevens are an irrefutable answer to this reactionary falsification of history. It is one more reason to welcome this new biography, despite its failure to fully explain the end of Reconstruction.

Speaking at the time of the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, Stevens said, “I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: ‘Here lies one who never rose to any eminence’” and who harbored only “‘the low ambition to have it said that he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.’”

Stevens’s legacy— a program of common struggle of the oppressed “of every race and language and color”—should be studied by all who seek to understand the past in preparation for new revolutionary struggles.

Writers, biographers protest publisher W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print (WSWS) 4 May 2021

On April 27, publisher W.W. Norton announced it was “permanently” removing Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape. None of them have come forward with any evidence to back up the claims.

Blake Bailey, 2011 (Photo: David Shankbone)

We argued on the WSWS that this was “a major act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights. … The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner.”

Bailey’s book, likely to be the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come, has been “pulped” and its author turned overnight into a “non-person.” There is no precedent for this in recent times.

Bailey has labeled the allegations “categorically false and libelous.” His lawyer condemned the publisher’s “drastic, unilateral decision … based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr. Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.”

As we have noted, no one claims that Philip Roth: The Biography contains errors or falsehoods, or that the author is guilty of plagiarism. Bailey has fallen foul of a dubious “morals charge.”

Philip Roth: The Biography

Who is safe from such accusations? Any person can come forward and accuse a writer, musician, artist or political figure of “sex crimes” and the media will instantly and obediently paint the individual as an evildoer and help banish the accused from public life. It has already happened over and over again, with no elementary legal rights respected, including the presumption of innocence, or even considered, and no recourse. This is McCarthyism of an especially pernicious character.

The WSWS contacted a number of writers, biographers and scholars about the Bailey-Roth issue, asking for comments and protests. We post the replies below.

We encourage others to send in their comments.

* * * * *

Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison:

Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault, but it has resulted in something like the opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moralist shaming, and public burning, based on floating accusations in media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.

James Morrison is the author of a memoir, Broken Fever (2001), a novel, The Lost Girl (2007), and a collection of short stories, Said and Done (2009), as well as several nonfiction books on film and numerous short stories and essays in literary quarterlies such as Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Raritan and Michigan Quarterly Review. He lives in southern California, where he currently teaches film, literature and creative writing at Claremont McKenna College.

Max Alvarez (Photo: Bryan Goldberg)

Author and film historian Max Alvarez:

This brazen act of censorship on behalf of W.W. Norton, coupled with the professional ruination of a biographer based on anonymous accusations, reads like a crude satire not only of Philip Roth but of Franz Kafka. That our so-called “intelligentsia” (who never tire of exhibiting their complete lack of intelligence) would support such fascistic repression of art and culture, and at the expense of our alleged “democratic process,” would be hilarious were it not so horrifying. Even Philip Roth might have rejected this chilling narrative as being too exaggerated for one of his tales.

As an author, educator and historian, I condemn the right-wing actions of W.W. Norton as well as corporate media compliance in the defamation of Blake Bailey. I have had the great privilege of lecturing on Roth and the films adapted from his novels, and I have no intention of banishing the novelist from my repertoire of speaking topics. I also eagerly look forward to reading Bailey’s acclaimed Roth biography in defiance of the sickening actions by his disgraceful publisher.

Max Alvarez is an author, film historian, and public speaker who has been lecturing on world cinema culture for over two decades. A former visiting scholar and guest lecturer for The Smithsonian Institution and film curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., Alvarez’s latest book, The Cinéphile’s Guide to the Great Age of Cinema, is scheduled for publication this summer. He has also written The Crime Films of Anthony Mann for University Press of Mississippi and was a major contributor to the Northwestern University Press anthology, Thornton Wilder/New Perspectives.

Fantasy and science fiction author Steven Brust:

In 1995, Rob Reiner directed a minor but entertaining film, written by Aaron Sorkin, called The American President. At its climax, the President, delightfully played by Michael Douglas, delivers a speech in which he says, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”

It was a fantasy of a President who expressed the wishes of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party in the mid-90s.

How things have changed! To these same forces in 2021, the question is no longer, “How are we to be sure that everyone, even those we hate, but especially the most oppressed voices, can be heard?” Now it is, “How can we find ways to stifle the expression of those we disagree with, and if that means the most oppressed are also silenced, well, no problem.” And, worst of all, it often has nothing to do with disagreement; rather, it is frequently nothing more than the basest career advancement, with simplistic moralistic phrases thrown out as a smokescreen.

Sometimes, in the interaction between the political and the artistic, things get complicated. Other times, they’re pretty simple.

When a publisher pulps a book—that is, not only stops printing it, but destroys existing copies—because of unproven allegations about the writer’s character, because of the results of a trial taking place in the media, a trial in which the defendant is not permitted to cross-examine witnesses, a trial in which the defendant is not permitted to confront his accuser, a trial in which the defendant is not permitted to even mount a defense, it’s not complicated. We have nothing here that is in the least progressive. Any artist who does not feel threatened by this, is an artist who has no intention of ever challenging the status quo politically, socially or artistically.

Mob justice is not justice. Trial by media is not justice. These are tools of oppression. And to censor a work, not even because one is frightened of its ideas, but because of the character of the artist, is vile and works against the free exchange of ideas that is a weapon in the hand of the most oppressed layers of society. And when even that, even the character of the artist, is based on unproven allegations, it becomes utterly wretched.

To use fear of reprisal to silence artists is the method of the extreme right. To passively accept it is craven.

Steven Brust is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his series of novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a disdained minority group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. His recent novels also include The Incrementalists (2013) and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands (2017), with coauthor Skyler White.

Film historian, professor and author Tony Williams:

This latest incident of #Me-Too political correctness resembles a nightmare version of a 21st century Gothic dualistic fantasy where progressives duplicate actions of 20th century Nazis in a hideous culture war. However, what makes this more serious are echoes of the burning of the Alexandria library by rabid Christians who murdered head librarian Hypatia, the lack of due process and the McCarthyite fear it will instill in those who will now fear “rocking the boat” and attempting to combat the dumbing down of “popular consciousness and awareness,” as the WSWS notes.

Tony Williams is professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Educated at Manchester and Warwick Universities, his research interests include representations of Viet Nam in literature and cinema, film and literature, classical Hollywood cinema, the writings of Jack London, film genres, and naturalism and cinema.

Recent publications include The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2015); James Jones: The Limits of Eternity (2016), Editor of Postcolonialsim, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan (2015), and co-editor of Hong Kong Neo Noir (2016).

Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro:

Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not by the artist as an artist.

Judging the value of art—whether a film or a novel or a biography—on the basis of the author’s good or bad character is an error. Therefore, censoring a work of art on that basis is also an error.

Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, as well as Roth’s own vast output of fiction and nonfiction, deserve positive or negative judgment on their own merits.

At the same time, talent or genius does not excuse or extenuate bad or criminal behavior and cannot serve as a defense.

People confuse judging the author/creator with judging the creative work all the time, but this sort of thinking is poor.

Aesthetic judgments have nothing to do with the moral character of artists, nor does artistic genius excuse bad behavior or crimes. One is a misapplied moral judgment; the other is a misapplied aesthetic judgment. The realms are separate and should not be confused.

Kathleen Spaltro is the author The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor and Restoring the American Promise: John Peter Altgeld and Eugene V. Debs, coauthor of Royals of England: A Guide for Readers, Travelers, and Genealogists and editor of Genealogy and Indexing.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Joseph McBride

Film historian, biographer, screenwriter, author and educator Joseph McBride:

When I once asked the formerly blacklisted writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky how he thought liberals behaved during the (previous) Hollywood blacklist, he said, “The liberals were the worst.” Many liberals and even such liberal organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action cooperated with the Witch Hunt; some of these liberals purged and otherwise betrayed their former friends and colleagues. It is dismaying during this current blacklist period to see that so many of the people supporting the new witch hunt again are (faux) liberals. Their latest target is Blake Bailey, the authorized biographer of Philip Roth. The accusations against Bailey led to the withdrawal of his already published book Philip Roth: The Biography and his 2014 memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, by his publisher, W. W. Norton, without giving him due process under the law.

In defiance of our Constitution, due process is largely a thing of the past in this country when it comes to allegations of serious sexual misconduct. When people are charged with crimes, the media generally find them guilty in trial-by-media. I first noticed this kind of thing happening when I was sixteen years old and saw Lee Harvey Oswald calling out vainly on national television, “I do request someone to come forward to give me legal assistance.” Oswald was never even arraigned on the charge of assassinating President Kennedy but was tried and found guilty by the media and executed by lynching on live TV in the basement of the Dallas police station while surrounded by about sixty policemen and many members of the media.

Woody Allen’s autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, was dropped by the Hachette Book Group in 2020 for reasons of allegations of serious personal misconduct, like Bailey, even though in Allen’s case extensive investigations by two states, Connecticut and New York, have cleared him of the accusations made by his former partner Mia Farrow, and he has never been charged with a crime or even sued by the Farrows. The American news and entertainment media, including in a 2021 HBO documentary, nevertheless largely have decided that Allen is guilty of the heinous crime of molesting a child. His films are blacklisted in this country, and Amazon dropped a filmmaking contract with him (later they reached a settlement). Hachette, Ronan Farrow’s publisher, bowed to demands made during a walkout by some of its own staff members to drop Allen’s book, setting a terrible precedent (Allen’s book was later picked up by Arcade and has been widely published abroad as well). Similarly, pressure has been applied on Simon & Schuster by more than 200 of its employees and 3,500 outside supporters, including some of its own authors, to drop its deal with former Vice President Mike Pence, who has contracts for two books with the publisher. That publisher already canceled a book deal with Senator Josh Hawley, a supporter of President Trump’s attempted coup, but it continues to have a book deal with former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway.

The issue is not whether one agrees or disagrees with these authors’ political views or approves of their behavior or with the sometimes questionable decisions by the publishers to sign books by controversial authors to often lucrative contracts in the first place. To borrow what Cary Grant says to his aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, when a publisher breaks a book contract if charges are made against an author without due process, “it’s not only against the law, it’s wrong!” The issue is freedom of speech and freedom of the press for authors, regardless of ideology or personal history. In addition to my adherence to the Constitution, I take this all personally because I have had a similar experience with a leading American publisher. I recently wrote a book, Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra (Hightower Press, Berkeley, 2019), about the four-year legal battle I fought with my publisher (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) and Capra’s archivist (Jeanine Basinger of Wesleyan University) who tried to kill a book under contract, my biography Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. I eventually prevailed but had to take the book to another publisher (Simon & Schuster) and cut and/or summarize unpublished material by Capra that I was not given permission to quote, despite previous promises by Wesleyan.

All writers and readers are threatened when books are threatened in these ways. The fire chief in François Truffaut’s film version of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 makes a memorable speech giving voice to what is now called “political correctness” by declaring that because various groups find various books objectionable, all books should be burnt, ranging from Othello, Robinson Crusoe, and Madame Bovary and Nietzsche and Mein Kampf. The ironic parallels of this movement with Nazi book burning are obvious. We are in danger of a comparable widespread conflagration if this madness does not stop. This is a fundamentally anti-art movement, for art inherently is disturbing. “You see,” says the fire chief, “. .. we’ve all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal.” Liberals and/or leftists should be in the vanguard of opposition to such censorship rather than lending support to it. But everyone of every political stripe should be alarmed. It could happen to any author.

Joseph McBride is the author of biographies of film directors Frank Capra, John Ford and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and the forthcoming critical study Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge (Columbia University Press). Many of his books have been published in foreign editions; the French edition of his work on Ford, A la recherche de John Ford, won an award in 2008 from the French film critics’ association as Best Foreign Film Book of the Year. McBride was a reporter, reviewer, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood for many years. He is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, where he has taught since 2002.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2013 (Photo: Kevin B. Lee and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky)

Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum:

Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practiced by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a prominent film critic for decades. He was the head critic for The Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. His most recent book is a two-volume work, with the overall title of Cinematic Encounters, published by the University of Illinois Press. His other books include Moving Places: A Life in the Movies (1980/1995); Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983); Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995); Movies as Politics (1997); Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films You See (2000); Discovering Orson Welles (2007) and Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010).

Poet and professor Randy Prus:

Logically, the attack on Blake Bailey’s book is an “ad hominem” attack, which any student of logic and rhetoric would recognize. But the logic of late capitalism both assumes and yet resists logic, to form its own. If, in Marx and Engels’ early critique of capitalism, that the bourgeoisie control the means of production, and that the liberating response would be democracy, who, then, controls democracy in late capital? The voice of resistance, the “Me Too” has, itself, been thoroughly commodified, not as a critique, but, as capital itself, a need to be circulated. Capital is about both accumulation and circulation. The bitcoin phrase, “Me Too,” is now accepted by most major “credit” cards. It will get you into most publications of your choice.

As far as eliminating Roth from the canon, we would need to indite and question an American literary line. Roth’s own autobiography in his fiction re-creates himself as a “clown prince” of his own invention. Should we then question Franklin, Whitman, Twain, Ginsberg, Kerouac and others? The myth of America is the myth of the invention of the self. Should we eliminate a Jersey-born (Newark, NJ), American Jew from participating in this tradition? Historically, capitalism has always rested on the figure of the Jew (and Black, and Indian, etc.). But I don’t mean to make this the issue. Nor do I want to diminish the “Me Too” movement. This is about Power. As Frederick Douglass understood, power is about both oppression and resistance, and somewhere between lies the respect, and a recognition of, and for, the dignity of others.

Randy Prus is a professor of English and Humanities at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where he also chairs the Department of English, Humanities, and Languages. He is the author of On the Cusp Of Memory and Ice, collections of poems.

Book Review: Summary and commentary on David Harvey’s “A Brief History Of Neoliberalism” – by Nicholas Stix – 4 May 2021

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
Summary and commentary on David Harvey’s “A Brief History Of Neoliberalism”
May 4

I.
Around 1970, something went wrong. The global economy, after twenty-five years of good post-war growth, suddenly blipped.

The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world – the world of “embedded liberalism” – was a pleasant place. There were corporations, but they didn’t do anything garish like compete with each other. Executive pay was taxed so heavily that nobody had much incentive to try to increase their profit margin; workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees. As long as companies followed the script, the government embraced and protected them. Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired. The government wasn’t exactly socialist per se, but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and every night you went to sleep knowing there would be probably be another uncontroversial, mostly-successful government welfare program tomorrow.

Then the global economic system blipped. As usual, economists will debate the exact causes forever. But the basic story is: after World War II, the great powers came together at Bretton Woods to design a new financial system. The US, as leader of the free world, dictated the terms: all global currencies would be pegged to the dollar, which in turn would be pegged to gold. This heavily favored the US, and the US pressed its advantage to get two decades of stellar growth and fund all those government programs and concessions to public sector unions. But the harder the US pressed, the more stress it placed on Bretton Woods, until finally in 1971 it collapsed under the strain and the global economy flailed around, confused.

Status 451 had a great post about the 1970s as lacuna in cultural memory – we don’t remember how bad it was. Their focus was violence and terrorism – “people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States”, including attacks on the Capitol and Pentagon. “A Puerto Rican group bombed two theaters in the Bronx, injuring eleven, in 1970; NYT gave it 6 paragraphs”.

Reading A Brief History Of Neoliberalism, I got the impression that our economic amnesia about the 1970s is no less striking. There was no 1929-style thunderclap market crash, just one damn thing after another. I read the book close enough to Passover that the Ten Plagues came to mind. The dollar glut (spills drop of wine). The Nixon Shock (spills another drop).

The Economic Stabilization Act of 1970. The fall of the gold standard. The 1970s Steel Crisis. The 1973 Oil Crisis. Stagflation. The Winter of Discontent. The 1979 Energy Crisis. And the Angel of Death was the Volcker Shock of 1980, when unemployment crossed 10% and people mailed the Federal Reserve coffins and unused two-by-fours in protest.

It was bad. New York City came one day away from declaring bankruptcy in 1975 (other sources say it was technically bankrupt, but avoided getting called on it) and got taken over by state government for a few years until it got back on track. The stories from Britain were even worse:

[Government] supporters were in open revolt, and public sector workers initiated a series of crippling strikes in the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978. Hospital workers went out, and medical care had to be severely rationed. Striking gravediggers refused to bury the dead. The truck drivers were on strike too. Only shop stewards had the right to let trucks bearing “essential supplies” cross picket lines. British rail put out a terse notice “There are no trains today”…striking unions seemed about the bring the whole nation to a halt.

Mexico declared bankruptcy in 1982; by the time the smoke cleared, average Mexican wages had fallen 40%. The rest of Latin America did little better. Communists suggested that the inevitable fall of capitalism was finally at hand.

But we know how this ended. The US got Reagan. Britain got Thatcher. A tide of free-market sentiment, later termed “neoliberalism”, swept over the world. Governments confronted public sector unions and left them shells of their former selves; a series of regulatory changes let companies do the same with their own workforces. Top tax rates went down; newly money-hungry executives launched an orgy of mergers and buyouts.
Entrepreneurs founded new companies and forced the old dinosaurs to compete on an equal footing; the dinosaurs responded by downsizing and offshoring their employees. Employment went from a lifetime guarantee to a bullet point you put on your resume when applying to the next place. By 1990-2000, most of this had settled down, and for better or worse we had a stable new system.

II.
Sound straightforward? Not if you read about it in David Harvey’s A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. This treatment is almost the opposite of the way ABHoN describes events. Telling the story this way makes me feel like Jacques Derrida deconstructing some text to undermine the author and prove that they were arguing against themselves all along.

Harvey is an extreme conflict theorist. The story he wants to tell is the story of bad people destroying the paradise of embedded liberalism in order to line their own pockets and crush their opponents. At his best, he treats this as a thesis to be defended: embedded liberalism switched to neoliberalism not primarily because of sound economic policy, but because rich people forced the switch to “reassert class power”.

At his worst, he forgets to argue the point, feeling it so deeply in his bones that it’s hard for him to believe anyone could really disagree. When he’s like this, he doesn’t analyze any of the economics too deeply; sure, rich people said something something economics, to justify their plot to immiserate the working classes, but we don’t believe them and we’re under no obligation to tease apart exactly what economic stuff they were talking about.

In these parts, ABHoN’s modus operandi is to give a vague summary of what happened, then overload it with emotional language. Nobody in ABHoN ever cuts a budget, they savagely slash the budget, or cruelly decimate the budget, or otherwise [dramatic adverb] [dramatic adjective] it. Nobody is ever against neoliberal reform – they bravely stand up to neoliberal reform, or valiantly resist neoliberal reform, or whatever.

Nobody ever “makes” money, they “extract” it. So you read a superficial narrative of some historical event, with all the adverbs changed to more dramatic adverbs, and then a not-very-convincing discussion of why this was all about re-establishing plutocratic power at the end of it. This is basically an entire literary genre by now, and ABHoN fits squarely within it.

Harvey’s theses, framed uncharitably, are:

1. Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable. The global economic system collapsing in 1971 was probably just coincidence or something, and has no relevance to any debate about the relative merit of different economic paradigms.
2. Sure, some people say that the endless recession/stagflation/unemployment/bankruptcy/strikes of the 1970s were bad, but those people are would-be plutocrats trying to seize power and destroy the working class.
3. When cities, countries, etc, ran huge deficits and then couldn’t pay any of the money back, sometimes the banks that loaned them that money were against this. Sometimes they even asked those places to stop running huge deficits as a precondition for getting bailed out. This proves that bankers were plotting against the public and trying to form a dystopian plutocracy.
4. Since we have proven that neoliberalism is a sham with no advantages, we should switch back to embedded liberalism.
   Let’s go through these one by one and see whether I’m being unfair.

The first thesis is mostly implicit. ABHoN doesn’t give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods and the 1970s economic crisis. It mostly takes it as a given, interesting only insofar as plutocrats used it as an excuse for pushing neoliberal policies. It never explicitly denies that it happened, it just thinks that it happened in the same sense that the sinking of the Maine happened – less interesting in and of itself than the fact that sinister forces were able to leverage it for their sinister ends.

Which brings us to the second thesis. How do we know that the neoliberal reformers – the people saying “given that the economy is in shambles, maybe we should reform it” – were sinister, rather than genuinely motivated by the extremely real economic shambles all around them? Harvey’s argument is complex.

One part of it is “because there was organized lobbying for it”. He ably charts the existence of various neoliberal lobbying groups, explains how corporate funding flowed into think tanks, and quotes important business figures saying that neoliberal reform would help their bottom lines. For example:

In the US case I begin with a confidential memo sent by Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. Powell, about to be elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, argued that criticism of and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that ‘the time had come—indeed it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it’. Powell argued that individual action was insufficient. ‘Strength’, he wrote, ‘lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations’.

The National Chamber of Commerce, he argued, should lead an assault upon the major institutions—universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts—in order to change how individuals think ‘about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual’. US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort, particularly when pooled.”

How directly influential this appeal to engage in class war was, is hard to tell. But we do know that the American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research.

The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs ‘committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation’, was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action. The corporations involved accounted for ‘about one half of the GNP of the United States’ during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters.

Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies. Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list.

Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’) and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values.
A TV version of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. ‘Business was’, Blyth concludes, ‘learning to spend as a class.’

This seems like a kind of conspiratorial take on “businesses did not like anti-business policies, and lobbied to change them”. Also, I wonder if any movement could survive this level of critique. Some progressives formed anti-inequality think tanks after the Great Recession? Guess progressivism is a sham astroturf movement that merely used the Great Recession as an excuse to push their class war agenda!

Harvey’s other argument here is that neoliberalism is ideologically incoherent in ways that don’t match its supposed commitment to freedom, but do make sense as a Trojan horse for plutocratic interests.

The two economic engines that have powered the world through the global recession that set in after 2001 have been the United States and China. The irony is that both have been behaving like Keynesian states in a world supposedly governed by neoliberal rules. The US has resorted to massive deficit-financing of its militarism and its consumerism, while China has debt-financed with non-performing bank loans massive infrastructural and fixed-capital investments. True blue neoliberals will doubtless claim that the recession

[SA: I think he means the dot-com crash recession of the early 2000s, but it’s not clear even in the book] is a sign of insufficient or imperfect neoliberalization, and they could well point to the operations of the IMF and the army of well-paid lobbyists in Washington that regularly pervert the US budgetary process for their special-interest ends as evidence for their case.

But their claims are impossible to verify, and, in making them, they merely follow in the footsteps of a long line of eminent economic theorists who argue that all would be well with the world if only everyone behaved according to the precepts of their textbooks.

But there is a more sinister interpretation of this paradox. If we lay aside, as I believe we must, the claim that neoliberalization is merely an example of erroneous theory gone wild (pace the economist Stiglitz) or a case of senseless pursuit of a false utopia (pace the conservative political philosopher John Gray), then we are left with a tension between sustaining capitalism, on the one hand, and the restoration/reconstitution of ruling class power on the other. If we are at a point of outright contradiction between these two objectives, then there can be no doubt as to which side the current Bush administration is leaning, given its avid pursuit of tax cuts for the corporations and the rich. Furthermore, a global financial crisis in part provoked by its own reckless economic policies would permit the US government to finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens except for the ratcheting up of that military and police power that might be needed to quell social unrest and compel global discipline.

I’m not super sure what Harvey means by saying that the Bush tax cuts are antithetical to true free market ideology. But apparently he thinks this is true, and a sign that the government is trying to provoke a global financial crisis in order to “finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens”.
There were some other supposed examples of neoliberal practice contradicting liberal ideology – although I can’t find easily quotable bits, I think he’s thinking of the Iraq War and various bailouts (though not the 2008 bailouts, since this book was written in the early 2000s). I agree that the government has not been a perfect ideological neoliberal at all times, but this impresses me less than it seemingly impresses David Harvey. Again, I think this critique is strong enough to apply to any ideology – what government has ever perfectly followed the diktats of socialism, or conservatism, or theocracy? The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent.

The third thesis, the one about debts and bankers, starts in the book’s fascinating narrative of the 1975 NYC near-bankruptcy. Here’s a (long) excerpt:

The New York City fiscal crisis was an iconic case. Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization had for several years been eroding the economic base of the city, and rapid suburbanization had left much of the central city impoverished. The result was explosive social unrest on the part of marginalized populations during the 1960s, defining what came to be known as ‘the urban crisis’ (similar problems emerged in many US cities).

The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution. But, faced with fiscal difficulties, President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over in the early 1970s. While this was news to many city dwellers, it signalled diminished federal aid. As the recession gathered pace, the gap between revenues and outlays in the New York City budget (already large because of profligate borrowing over many years) increased. At first financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but in 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget. They had first claim on city tax revenues in order to first pay off bondholders: whatever was left went for essential services. The effect was to curb the aspirations of the city’s powerful municipal unions, to implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision (education, public health, transport services), and to impose user fees (tuition was introduced into the CUNY university system for the first time).

The final indignity was the requirement that municipal unions should invest their pension funds in city bonds. Unions then either moderated their demands or faced the prospect of losing their pension funds through city bankruptcy.

This amounted to a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City, and it was every bit as effective as the military coup that had earlier occurred in Chile. Wealth was redistributed to the upper classes in the midst of a fiscal crisis. The New York crisis was, Zevin argues, symptomatic of ‘an emerging strategy of disinflation coupled with a regressive redistribution of income, wealth and power’. It was ‘an early, perhaps decisive battle in a new war’, the purpose of which was ‘to show others that what is happening to New York could and in some cases will happen to them’.8

Whether everyone involved in negotiating this fiscal compromise understood it as a strategy to restore class power is an open question. The need to maintain fiscal discipline is a matter of concern in its own right and does not, like monetarism more generally, necessarily entail regressive redistributions. It is unlikely, for example, that Felix Rohatyn, the merchant banker who brokered the deal between the city, the state, and the financial institutions, had the restoration of class power in mind. The only way he could ‘save’ the city was by satisfying the investment bankers while diminishing the standard of living of most New Yorkers. But the restoration of class power was almost certainly what investment bankers like Walter Wriston had in mind. He had, after all, equated all forms of government intervention in the US and Britain with communism. And it was almost certainly the aim of Ford’s Secretary of the Treasury William Simon (later to become head of the ultra-conservative Olin Foundation). Watching the progress of events in Chile with approval, he strongly advised President Ford to refuse aid to the city (‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ ran the headline in the New York Daily News). The terms of any bail-out, he said, should be ‘so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road’.
While resistance to the austerity measures was widespread, it could only, according to Freeman, slow ‘the counterrevolution from above, it could not stop it. Within a few years, many of the historic achievements of working class New York were undone’. Much of the social infrastructure of the city was diminished and the physical infrastructure (for example the subway system) deteriorated markedly for lack of investment or even maintenance. Daily life in New York ‘became gruelling and the civic atmosphere turned mean’. The city government, the municipal labour movement, and working-class New Yorkers were effectively stripped ‘of much of the power they had accumulated over the previous three decades’. Demoralized, working-class New Yorkers reluctantly assented to the new realities.

But the New York investment bankers did not walk away from the city. They seized the opportunity to restructure it in ways that suited their agenda. The creation of a ‘good business climate’ was a priority. This meant using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business (particularly in telecommunications) coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises. Corporate welfare substituted for people welfare. The city’s elite institutions were mobilized to sell the image of the city as a cultural centre and tourist destination (inventing the famous logo ‘I Love New York’). The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’s memorable phrase) erased the collective memory of democratic New York. The city’s elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production).

New York became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation. Meanwhile the investment bankers reconstructed the city economy around financial activities, ancillary services such as legal services and the media (much revived by the financialization then occurring), and diversified consumerism (gentrification and neighbourhood ‘restoration’ playing a prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more construed as an entrepreneurial rather than a social democratic or even managerial entity. Inter-urban competition for investment capital transformed government into urban governance through public–private partnerships. City business was increasingly conducted behind closed doors, and the democratic and representational content of local governance diminished.

Working-class and ethnic-immigrant New York was thrust back into the shadows, to be ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic of epic proportions in the 1980s that left many young people either dead, incarcerated, or homeless, only to be bludgeoned again by the AIDS epidemic that carried over into the 1990s. Redistribution through criminal violence became one of the few serious options for the poor, and the authorities responded by criminalizing whole communities of impoverished and marginalized populations. The victims were blamed, and Giuliani was to claim fame by taking revenge on behalf of an increasingly affluent Manhattan bourgeoisie tired of having to confront the effects of such devastation on their own doorsteps.

If you’re like me, you read all of this about “the counterrevolution from above”, “the final indignity” and “narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity” (does he mean gay people?) and after a while you want some numbers or at least some background. Like – how did New York get this far in debt? Were its creditors unreasonable (by the standards of the time) in asking them to pay it back, or was this accepted practice? How does Harvey believe that governments and banks should handle a situation where someone takes out a loan and can’t pay it back? We get none of this, Harvey doesn’t even seem to understand it’s a potential question, and instead there’s page after page about how greedy bankers destroyed New York.

Also, I think at least some of those pages are false: Wikipedia says that “the city [had] gained notoriety for high rates of crime and other social disorders” by 1970, five years before any of this happened. Also, here’s some more of the relevant article:

The Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) led by Mike Quill shut down the city with a complete halt of subway and bus service on mayor John Lindsay’s first day of office. As New Yorkers endured the transit strike, Lindsay remarked, “I still think it’s a fun city,” and walked four miles (6 km) from his hotel room to City Hall in a gesture to show it. Dick Schaap, then a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, coined and popularized the sarcastic term in an article titled Fun City. In the article, Schaap sardonically pointed out that it was not.

The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968 the teachers’ union (the United Federation of Teachers, or the UFT) went on strike over the firings of several teachers in a school in Ocean Hill and Brownsville.

That same year, 1968, also saw a nine-day sanitation strike. Quality of life in New York reached a nadir during this strike, as mounds of garbage caught fire, and strong winds whirled the filth through the streets. With the schools shut down, the police engaged in a slowdown, firefighters threatening job actions, the city awash in garbage, and racial and religious tensions breaking to the surface, Lindsay later called the last six months of 1968 “the worst of my public life.”

So Harvey’s picture of an idyllic New York getting hit with a financial crisis for no reason, being betrayed by greedy bankers, and then turning gritty and mean doesn’t really seem to check out.
Harvey comes across a little better when talking about debt crises in Mexico, Latin America, and beyond. My understanding here is something like: the Volcker Shock caused a sharp increase in the price of the US dollar. Latin American countries had taken out a lot of dollar-denominated debt, which (as the dollar rose) suddenly became much bigger. They had been prepared to pay off their old debts, but not their new, much-bigger debts, so they had to cut deals with their creditors. These were mostly American banks, and the American government was backing them. The banks and government, negotiating partly through the IMF, weren’t really willing to compromise and demanded quite a lot of the money back. But also, as a condition for what compromises they did make, they demanded these countries neoliberalize. The banks/US/IMF said this was so that they could break their addiction to debt and overspending, have functional economies, and be able to pay off what they owed eventually. Obviously Harvey isn’t buying it, and says it was a plot for the American rich to enhance their power, plus crushing all fair and decent systems that might have provided an alternative to the dystopia they were planning at home.

What the Mexico case demonstrated, however, was a key difference between liberal and neoliberal practice: under the former, lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions, while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and international powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population. If this required the surrender of assets toforeign companies at fire-sale prices, then so be it. This, it turnsout, is not consistent with neoliberal theory. One effect, as Duménil and Lévy show, was to permit US owners of capital to extract high rates of return from the rest of the world during the 1980s and 1990s (Figures 1.8 and 1.9). The restoration of power to an economic elite or upper class in the US and elsewhere in the advanced capitalist countries drew heavily on surpluses extracted from the rest of the world through international flows and structural adjustment practices.

I am not sure what Harvey means here about how under (non-neo) liberal practices lenders take the losses. In the 1960s, would bankers have loaned to Mexico and then, when Mexico couldn’t pay it back, just said “okay, whatever, keep the extra”? Maybe they would have! I don’t know! I would like to learn more about this! But Harvey doesn’t tell me. He leaves the minds, actions, systems, and norms of bankers as a black box, except for the part where they are trying to crush others and “reestablish class power”.
There’s an interesting section on how countries that followed IMF recommendations tended to do badly, and those that spurned the IMF tended to recover and go on to even greater heights. I suspect something like this is true, and am trying to read some other books to understand it better. But ABHoN, despite its chapter on this, is of little help.

The fourth thesis is that we should return to embedded liberalism. The exact details of how to do this are left to the reader, but I imagine it would involve pro-union regulation, higher taxes on the rich, and instituting some sort of cradle-to-grave welfare heavily tied up with employment. Most of us should want this (says the book) because it means people other than plutocrats can lead decent lives. But even the plutocrats should be a little in favor:
Previous phases of capitalist history—one thinks of 1873 or the 1920s—when a similarly stark choice arose, do not augur well. The upper classes, insisting on the sacrosanct nature of their property rights, preferred to crash the system rather than surrender any of their privileges and power. In so doing they were not oblivious of their own interest, for if they position themselves aright they can, like good bankruptcy lawyers, profit from a collapse while the rest of us are caught most horribly in the deluge.

A few of them may get caught and end up jumping out of Wall Street windows, but that is not the norm. The only fear they have is of political movements that threaten them with expropriation or revolutionary violence. While they can hope that the sophisticated military apparatus they now possess (thanks to the military industrial complex) will protect their wealth and power, the failure of that apparatus to easily pacify Iraq on the ground should give them pause. But ruling classes rarely, if ever, voluntarily surrender any of their power and I see no reason to believe they will do so this time. Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself. While this may sound a counter-revolutionary conclusion to those on the far left, it is not without a strong element of self-interest either, because it is ordinary people who suffer, starve, and even die in the course of capitalist crises (examine Indonesia or Argentina) rather than the upper classes. If the preferred policy of ruling elites is après moi le déluge, then the deluge largely engulfs the powerless and the unsuspecting while elites have well-prepared arks in which they can, at least for a time, survive quite well.

III.
Here’s a more positive take on ABHoN: despite all of that, it manages to be a good read anyway. It talks about under-explored topics in an engaging way. Although I was unsatisfied with Harvey’s explanation of some issues, this is a 200 page book, he can’t explain everything in depth, and he got me reading papers and Wikipedia articles on things I wouldn’t have read about otherwise. Although the book has too many loose ends and apparent mistakes that for me to trust everything it says, some of the things it says would be fascinating if true, and I plan to follow up on them and try to see if they are.

And although I think I’m fair in characterizing Harvey as far left, he has some unique and original views that I found surprising and challenging. These were most apparent when he was condemning things I thought of as pretty left-wing/progressive as symptoms of neoliberalism. For example, NGOs:

It should not be surprising that the primary collective means of action under neoliberalism are then defined and articulated through non-elected (and in many instances elite-led) advocacy groups for various kinds of rights. In some instances, such as consumer protections, civil rights, or the rights of handicapped persons, substantive gains have been achieved by such means. Non-governmental and grassroots organizations (NGOs and GROs) have also grown and proliferated remarkably under neoliberalism, giving rise to the belief that opposition mobilized outside the state apparatus and within some separate entity called ‘civil society’ is the powerhouse of oppositional politics and social transformation. The period in which the neoliberal state has become hegemonic has also been the period in which the concept of civil society—often cast as an entity in opposition to state power—has become central to the formulation of oppositional politics. The Gramscian idea of the state as a unity of political and civil society gives way to the idea of civil society as a centre of opposition, if not an alternative, to the state.

Or human rights:

Neoliberalization has spawned within itself an extensive oppositional culture. The opposition tends, however, to accept many of the basic propositions of neoliberalism. It focuses on internal contradictions. It takes questions of individual rights and freedoms seriously, for example, and opposes them to the authoritarianism and frequent arbitrariness of political, economic, and class power. It takes the neoliberal rhetoric of improving the welfare of all and condemns neoliberalization for failing in its own terms. […]

The rise of opposition cast in terms of rights violations has been spectacular since 1980. Before then, Chandler reports, a prominent journal such as Foreign Affairs carried not a single article on human rights. Human rights issues came to prominence after 1980 and positively boomed after the events in Tiananmen Square and the end of the Cold War in 1989. This corresponds exactly with the trajectory of neoliberalization, and the two movements are deeply implicated in each other. Undoubtedly, the neoliberal insistence upon the individual as the foundational element in political-economic life opens the door to individual rights activism. But by focusing on those rights rather than on the creation or recreation of substantive and open democratic governance structures, the opposition cultivates methods that cannot escape the neoliberal frame. Neoliberal concern for the individual trumps any social democratic concern for equality, democracy, and social solidarities. The frequent appeal to legal action, furthermore, accepts the neoliberal preference for appeal to judicial and executive rather than parliamentary powers […]

This appeal to the universalism of rights is a double-edged sword. It may and can be used with progressive aims in mind. The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and others cannot be dismissed as a mere adjunct of neoliberal thinking. The whole history of humanism (both of the Western—classically liberal—and various non-Western versions) is too complicated for that. But the limited objectives of many rights discourses (in Amnesty’s case the exclusive focus, until recently, on civil and political as opposed to economic rights) makes it all too easy to absorb them within the neoliberal frame. Universalism seems to work particularly well with global issues such as climate change, the ozone hole, loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction, and the like.

But its results in the human rights field are more problematic, given the diversity of political-economic circumstances and cultural practices to be found in the world. Furthermore, it has been all too easy to co-opt human rights issues as ‘swords of empire’ (to use Bartholomew and Breakspear’s trenchant characterization). So-called ‘liberal hawks’ in the US, for example, have appealed to them to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, and, above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.

More broadly, it is hard not to conclude with Chandler that ‘the roots of today’s human rights-based humanitarianism lie in the growing consensus of support for Western involvement in the internal affairs of the developing world since the 1970s’. The key argument is that ‘international institutions, international and domestic courts, NGOs or ethics committees are better representatives of the people’s needs than are elected governments. Governments and elected representatives are seen as suspect precisely because they are held to account by their constituencies and, therefore, are perceived to have “particular” interest, as opposed to acting on ethical principle’. Domestically, the effects are no less insidious.

The effect is to narrow ‘public political debate through legitimizing the developing decision-making role for the judiciary and unelected task forces and ethics committees’. The political effects can be debilitating. ‘Far from challenging the individual isolation and passivity of our atomised societies, human rights regulation can only institutionalise these divisions.’ Even worse, ‘the degraded vision of the social world provided by the ethical discourse of human rights serves, like any elite theory, to sustain the self-belief of the governing class’.

I’m not sure I would have thought of human rights as a symptom of neoliberalism before. But as a neoliberal, I am happy to accept the blame!

IV.
One more great thing about David Harvey: he makes specific predictions. And since it’s been 16 years since he wrote ABHoN, we can check how he did. In order to avoid debate over which things I count as predictions, I’ll only be looking over the middle of his last chapter, Freedom’s Prospect, which deals with the future. You can follow along here and make sure I’m representing him honestly.
Harvey says that US spending is growing out of control. The Bush administration’s wars and tax cuts for the rich create an unsustainable situation. Foreign countries are currently funding this by buying US debt, but the interest will soon spiral out of control. Americans will get increasingly angry as foreigners own more and more of the country, America will have less and less ability to service its debts, and “it is unthinkable but not impossible that the US will become like Argentina in 2001 overnight”.

For example:

Already nearly one-third of stock assets on Wall Street and nearly half of US Treasury bonds are owned by foreigners, and the dividends and interest flowing out to foreign owners are now roughly equivalent to, if not more than, the tribute that US corporations and financial operations are extracting from abroad (Figure 7.1). This balance of benefits will turn more strongly negative the more the US borrows, and it is now borrowing from abroad at a rate approaching $2 billion per day. Furthermore, if US interest rates rise (as at some point they must) then what happened to Mexico after the Volcker interest rate increase in 1979 starts to loom as a real problem. The US will soon be paying out far more to service its debt to the rest of the world than it brings in. This extraction of wealth from the US will not be welcome domestically. The perpetual increases in debt-financed consumerism that have been the foundation of social peace in the US since 1945 would have to stop.

The imbalances seem not to trouble the Bush administration, judging by cavalier statements to the effect that the current account deficit, if it is a problem, can easily be dealt with by people buying US-made goods (as if such goods are readily available and cheap enough and as if nominally US-made goods do not have a high foreign-input component). If this really happened then Wal-Mart would be put out of business. The budget deficit, Bush says, can easily be dealt with without raising taxes by curbing domestic programmes (as if there are any large discretionary programmes left to dismantle). Vice-President Cheney’s remark that ‘Reagan taught us that budget deficits do not matter’ is alarming, because what Reagan also taught is that running up deficits is a way to force retrenchment in public expenditures and that attacking the standard of living of the mass of the population while feathering the nests of the rich can best be accomplished in the midst of financial turmoil and crisis. If, furthermore, we ask the general question, ‘Who has actually benefited from the numerous financial crises that have cascaded from one country to another in wave after wave of catastrophic deflations, inflations, capital flights and structural adjustments since the late 1970s?’, the weak commitment of the current US administration to fending off a fiscal crisis in spite of all the warning signs becomes more readily understandable. In the wake of a financial crash, the ruling elite may hope to emerge even more empowered than before.

As far as I know, nothing at all like this happened. We kept spending money, interest rates stayed low, foreigners didn’t get too much of our debt, nobody protested foreigners having too much debt, and nowadays economists (including the most left-leaning ones) are telling the government it should be less concerned about debt, not more.

Harvey gets some credit for predicting a financial crisis, which in fact happened in 2008, three years after he published. But he seems to have gotten all of the specifics wrong, and it’s not clear how much credit he gets. There will always be a next recession, so predicting “recession coming!” without a time scale will always sound good later. I don’t know enough about different kinds of recessions to know whether saying “fiscal crisis” and “financial crash” made this extra-prescient.

During/after the crisis, Harvey predicts the US’ only options will be hyperinflation, or prolonged Japan-style deflation, and goes into detail about which one we might choose (neither happened in 2008). He doesn’t think either of these will go very well, and thinks neoliberalism will need a new trick in order to survive.
That trick will be neoconservatism. In several places throughout the book, but most emphatically in Chapter 7, Harvey predicts that the neoconservatism of the Bush years is the beginning of the next phase of neoliberalism.

For example:
Though it has been effectively disguised, we have lived through a whole generation of sophisticated strategizing on the part of ruling elites to restore, enhance, or, as in China and Russia, to construct an overwhelming class power. The further turn to neoconservatism is illustrative of the lengths to which economic elites will go and the authoritarian strategies they are prepared to deploy in order to sustain their power.

And:
Neoconservatism, I argued in Chapter 3, sustains the neoliberal drive towards the construction of asymmetric market freedoms but makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order. In The New Imperialism I explored Hannah Arendt’s thesis that militarization abroad and at home inevitably go hand in hand, and concluded that the international adventurism of the neoconservatives, long planned and legitimized after the 9/11 attacks, had as much to do with asserting domestic control over a fractious and much-divided body politic in the US as it did with a geopolitical strategy of maintaining global hegemony through control over oil resources.

As far as I can tell, neoconservatism reached its apex during the Bush administration, and since then everyone has backed away from it. It was not an inevitable next phase of capitalism. The US is now less militarily entangled than it was for most of the 20th century including the embedded liberalism period, and capitalism has done just fine.

But:
Traditional worker-based movements are by no means dead even in the advanced capitalist countries where they have been much weakened by the neoliberal onslaught on their power. In South Korea and South Africa vigorous labour movements arose during the 1980s and in much of Latin America working-class parties are flourishing if not in power. In Indonesia a fledgling labour movement of great potential importance is struggling to be heard.

The potential for labour unrest in China is immense though unpredictable. And it is not clear either that the mass of the working people in the US, who have over this last generation often willingly voted against their own material interests for reasons of cultural nationalism, religion, and moral values, will for ever stay locked into such a politics by the machinations of Republicans and Democrats alike. Given the volatility, there is no reason to rule out the resurgence of popular social democratic or even populist anti-neoliberal politics within the US in future years.

Wrong about China – but right about the US! Harvey goes on to predict that these may not happen within traditional political parties, but instead be more amorphous movements like the Zapatistas in Mexico. I’m not sure how to judge this – my guess is there’s a Revolt Of The Public argument that he’s right, and I’m too stuck in modernity to notice.

Overall it looks like Harvey was wrong about all of his specific beliefs, but right that increasingly many people would agree with him. This is probably a metaphor for life. Read A Brief History Of Neoliberalism to figure out what all the fuss is about, I guess.

https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2021/05/book-review-brief-history-of.html

US Presidents – Line Drawings – Video Slide Show (16:00 min)

North Korea: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – 15 January 2021

https://videopress.com/v/y8OzT9oG?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

May Day – Workers Unite! – Chicago 1886 Story – Haymarket Massacre

1886 engraving of the Haymarket massacre. It shows Methodist pastor Samuel Fielden speaking, the bomb exploding, and the riot beginning simultaneously; in reality, Fielden had finished speaking before the explosion. | Chicago Historical Society

CHICAGO—On the morning of Oct. 6, 1886, Albert Parsons, native of Alabama, whose brother was a general in the Civil War, rose in a Chicago courtroom to make the last speech of his life.

He was facing his doom as one of the convicted co-called “anarchists,” one of the “detested aliens” who had been seized in the police frame-up following an explosion on Chicago’s Haymarket Square during a workers’ demonstration on May 4.

Parsons spoke long and well. He was going back over his life, telling the remarkable story of how the boy who ran with the Texas trappers and Native American traders as a kid grew up to become a leader of industrial strikes and an agitator for a new social system.

“The charge is made that we are ‘foreigners,’ as though it were a crime to be born in some other country,” he said. “My ancestors had a hand in drawing up the Declaration of Independence. My great great grand-uncle lost a hand at the Battle of Bunker Hill.” His speech then took an edge of defiant bitterness. “But I have been here long enough, I think, to have the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of my country.”

Ringing up to the ceiling of the room which was to be his death chamber, the voice of this man, a printer in the shop of the Chicago Tribune and a labor organizer after the early days of the frontier, became deep with exaltation:

“I am also an internationalist. My patriotism covers more than the boundary lines of a single state; the world is my country, and all mankind my countrymen.” Parsons was speaking against a force, a conspiracy that was determined to throttle him, and he knew it. But why was the state determined to see him dead?

The 8-hour day

The demand for an 8-hour workday was sweeping over America at that time as workers demanded relief from the 12-, 14-, or even 16-hour days that were the norm. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers launched a general strike—the first in the history of the United States—which saw demonstrations in all the big cities greater than anything America had ever seen.

Albert Parsons | Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

But it was in Chicago where the movement reached its height. There, a small core of class-conscious organizers and agitators helped rouse a militant spirit not previously seen. 70,000 workers shut down the plants of that roaring city. At the head of the band of leaders stood the wiry and eloquent Parsons.

The campaign dragged on for several days. On May 3, there was a bloody attack by the police against strikers at the McCormack Reaper plant. Six workers had been shot in the back, with at least one killed. A mass protest meeting was called to take place the next day at the Haymarket Square.

A peaceful rally took place that evening, with speeches from Parsons and other labor leaders condemning what had happened the night before. A light rain began to fall as the meeting neared its end, and most people began to head home. Without warning, a force of some 200 police officers charged the square. A fight broke out between the cops and the crowd, and then, suddenly, a bomb was thrown. A number of police officers were killed by the explosion. Volleys of police bullets then plowed through the terrified and fleeing audience, killing at least four workers and wounding scores.

Flyer calling for a rally in the Haymarket on May 4, 1886. | Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

No one knew who threw the bomb (and historians have never discovered to this day), but it didn’t matter. The news media of the entire country raged in a red-baiting pogrom which has hardly ever been paralleled. Working-class leaders and trade unions everywhere were targeted. The strategy was to smear the 8-hour movement with the fearful stigma of “alien anarchism” and to kill it. One prominent economist, with characteristic servility, declared the idea that workers should only be on the job for eight hours to be an “irresponsible demand of lunatics aimed at the basis of civilization.” The stage was set for the Haymarket frame-up.

Parsons, along with several fellow organizers, were rounded up and charged with being an “accessory to murder.” Prosecutors eagerly followed advice given by the New York Times to “pick out the leaders and make such an example of them as would scare others into submission.” A Chicago newspaper was even more blunt, with editors writing, “The labor question has reached a point where blood-letting has become necessary.”

The trial was a classic case of intimidation, perjury, and forgery. The prosecution quickly gave up any attempt to prove that the men charged had thrown any bombs. No, the defendants were guilty of a far greater crime. They had inculcated among workers a theory of social change and spread in America the fearful idea of class consciousness.

Socialism on trial

As he faced the gallows, Parsons told the world that it was not just himself and the other defendants who were on trial, but rather the ideas of socialism and workers’ power. He declared to the judge, “Socialism is simple justice, because wealth is a social, not an individual product, and its appropriation by a few members of a society creates a privileged class, a class who monopolizes all the benefits of society by enslaving the producing class.”

Knowing history would absolve the leaders at Haymarket, Parsons spoke his last solemn words to the court: “They lie about us in order to deceive the people, but the people will not be deceived much longer. No, they will not.”

The Haymarket Memorial, a statue by Chicago sculptor Mary Brogger, remains a pilgrimage site for workers from around the world. Here, it is officially unveiled on Sept. 15, 2004, in Chicago. | Chuck Berman / AP

A carefully picked businessmen’s jury sealed their doom and garnered offers of a reward of $100,000 from a grateful “Citizens Committee” of big capitalists. On Nov. 11, 1886, Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel (the latter two weren’t even present at the rally) were hanged at the Cook County Jail, victims of a cold-blooded frame-up. Over 100,000 people followed the bier to their graves at Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery.

When the Second International, a global organization of socialist and labor parties, was founded three years later in 1889, it declared that May 1st would permanently be known as International Workers Day, in honor of the Haymarket struggle. Thus was born May Day—a global day of struggle and celebration—right here in the U.S.A.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared as “Haymarket Hangings Vain Effort to Halt American Labor,” in the Nov. 12, 1937 edition of the Stalinist run Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker.

May Day: Made in the U.S.A. – People’s World (peoplesworld.org)