Trump: Thank Goodness General Milley Wasn’t In World War Two
Monthly Archives: September 2021
Australian Hospitals Over Capacity With People Beaten By Police For Not Wearing Masks
One Hour of Russian Post-Soviet Communist Music
NY Times Acknowledges US Failure In Russia – Adds More To What Caused It – by Moon of Alabama – 24 Sept 2021
The U.S. finally acknowledges the utter defeat of its major manipulation strategy in Russia.
The news comes in the form of a New York Times analysis of Russia’s recent Duma election.
The core sentence:
Dismal results for the opposition in an election last weekend that was not free or fair only drove home a mood of defeat. The election underscored the grim reality that Russia’s pro-Western and pro-democratic opposition, a focus of American and other Western countries’ policy toward Russia for years now, has no visible strategy to regain relevance.
All the millions of dollars invested and thousands of CIA framed ‘news’ reports about Russia’s opposition launched in ‘western’ outlets like the NY Times have been in vain.
One would think that the above insight would lead to some reflection about how or why the strategy has failed.
- Was it probably wrong to support ‘liberal’ clowns like Navalny who are actually too fascist to be acceptable to more than 2% of the Russian electorate?
- Was there a way to achieve a different outcome by looking at the real problems Russians have with Putin’s neo-liberal economic policies?
- Was is false to pay no attention to the real opposition in Russia, the one that gets real votes?
Unfortunately the rest of the piece shows that the NY Times author is unable to discuss or to even ask such questions. He instead continues with false claims about Russia’s democratic system:
The Central Election Commission reported — as usual after Russian elections — a landslide for parties and politicians loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin. The vote in parliamentary elections cleared a seemingly easy path for Mr. Putin to seek a fifth term as president in 2024.
There was no such landslide for parties and politicians loyal to Putin.
In fact Putin’s party, United Russia, only got 49% of the votes, a loss of 5 percentage points from the 2016 election. It also lost 19 of its seats in the parliament. The Communist Party was the winner in this election. It gained 6 percentage points from 13% in 2016 to 19% in 2021 and 15 new parliament seats. That significant move is not mentioned at all in the NYT writeup:
The pro-government party, United Russia, won just short of 50 percent of the national vote, and 198 out of 225 seats allocated in district-level elections. The Communist Party of Russia, which runs in elections as an opposition party but votes with United Russia once in Parliament, came in second place, with 19 percent. Three other parties, all seen as loyal to Mr. Putin, also won seats. No candidates in open opposition to Mr. Putin entered Parliament.
The claim that the Communist Party is voting with United Russia is outright false. It may have done so on some issues of national importance, like the return of Crimea to Russia, but surly votes against most other laws and the budget resolutions United Russia supports.
The other three parties are likewise opposed to Putin and most of his policies. They, like the Communists, would vote him out if they had the majority needed to do that.
It didn’t help that Google and Apple, under pressure from the Kremlin, removed an app promoting candidates Mr. Navalny had endorsed just before the vote.
A deeper analysis of the fate of the candidates Navalny’s ‘smart voting’ promoted would be of interest. But to go there the NY Times would have to tell you this:
I discuss Alexei Navalny’s ’smart voting’ scheme in the light of the list of preferred candidates for this week’s Russian parliamentary elections just issued by Navalny’s team. There are 225 single member constituencies up for grab. Team Navalny recommends one candidate per constituency and suggests voters cast their ballot for thar person, as the candidate most likely to beat the ruling United Russia party.
So who does Navalny recommend?
Communists mostly (61% of the total), plus some from the left nationalist Just Russia, and the occasional person from other parties. But only a handful of liberals.
In short, voting smart means voting Communist.
Now tell me, please, what’s so smart about that? As I argue in my article, precious little.
The NY Times author can not acknowledge those facts because he hates the communists even more than he hates United Russia:
With Russia’s pro-democracy groups now crushed, the center of gravity of the Russian political opposition may shift in other, unappealing directions, wrote Tatyana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Moscow Carnegie Center. The Communist Party, for example, has shifted toward open confrontation with the Kremlin with an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s.
Weren’t we just told above that the Communist Party ‘votes with United Russia once in Parliament’? Now it suddenly is in ‘open confrontation with the Kremlin’? How can both claims, just a few paragraphs apart, be true? Hint, the aren’t.
And the claim that the Communists have ‘an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s’ is just blatant nonsense.
Putin hates the Soviet ideology and openly rejects it. What he works on is a national revival of Russia by means of a neo-liberal economic policies. The Communist are opposed to that. They reject the neo-liberal economic system. They want to re-nationalize big companies and re-introduce an income distribution system that favors the working class over capital owners. Acknowledging those difference would actually help the NY Times reader to make sense of this paragraph:
But the disillusionment is economic. Most street protests in Russia in recent years have been provincial labor actions that gained little national notice, said Yekaterina Schulmann, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a trend the Communist Party is well positioned to exploit.
Those labor actions also gained no international notice. The NYT‘s Moscow bureau might by a reason why that is the case.
If the NY Times had reported on those labor actions, instead of the clownery around Navalny, it probably could have made a difference. If U.S. support over the last two decades would had gone to some nationalist minded social-democratic party in Russia, instead of the fake ‘liberals’, the election outcome this year would probably have been different.
But that would have required factual reporting from Russia and a non-ideological analysis of Russia’s political and economical system. Neither of which is available at the upper levels of the U.S. of A.
……………….
Resistance To COVID Dictatorship – The Spartacus Letter – Reproduced – Archived Link – Audio Mp3 (15:48 min)
Hello,
My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.
We have been forced to watch America and the Free World spin into inexorable decline due to a biowarfare attack. We, along with countless others, have been victimized and gaslit by propaganda and psychological warfare operations being conducted by an unelected, unaccountable Elite against the American people and our allies.
Our mental and physical health have suffered immensely over the course of the past year and a half. We have felt the sting of isolation, lockdown, masking, quarantines, and other completely nonsensical acts of healthcare theater that have done absolutely nothing to protect the health or wellbeing of the public from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, we are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight.
(cont. https://archive.ph/piTlD )
Review Doctor Zhivago – Meandering Book – Great Movie – by Trevor Lynch – 25 Sept 2021
2,200 WORDS •
David Lean’s epic anti-Communist romance Doctor Zhivago (1965) is a great and serious work of art. Doctor Zhivago was initially panned by the critics—probably not because it is a bad film, but because it was very bad for Communism. Nevertheless, it was immensely popular. It is still one of the highest grossing movies of all time, adjusted for inflation. It also won five Oscars—for Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Bolt), Best Original Score (Maurice Jarre), Best Cinematography (Freddie Young), Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. (It was nominated for five other Oscars, but The Sound of Music won four of them, including Best Picture and Best Director.) Over the years, critics have also warmed to Doctor Zhivago, routinely including it in their “best” lists.
If Doctor Zhivago had been the work of most directors, it would have been hailed as their greatest film. But Doctor Zhivago was directed by David Lean, who had just directed one of the greatest films of all time, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). So Doctor Zhivago was bound to suffer somewhat from the comparison. But what’s really remarkable about Doctor Zhivago is how little it disappoints.
The greatness of Lean’s film comes into even sharper focus when you read Boris Pasternak’s original novel. Pasternak was born in Imperial Russia in 1890 to a cultivated, upper-class Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a pianist. He achieved fame as a poet but fell out of favor with the Soviet Communist party, found publication blocked, and ended up supporting himself as a translator, writing during his off hours “for the drawer.”
Pasternak started Doctor Zhivago in the 1920s and finished it in 1956. It was smuggled out of the USSR by a dissident Italian Communist and published in 1957 in Italian translation. The first Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago was published in 1958 by the US Central Intelligence Agency, which sought to embarrass the Soviets by painting them as repressive cultural philistines who refused to publish one of those great Russian novels that few people manage to finish. Pasternak and Zhivago became a liberal cause célèbre. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he refused under duress from the Soviet government. He died in 1960.
As a lover of the film, I expected to like the novel. I wanted to like the novel. But I found it surprisingly boring: a sprawling, flaccid story cluttered with useless and forgettable characters and digressions. Everything goes on much too long. It also seems unstructured. Good stories are unified from end to end. They have spines. But Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is a spineless blob, held together with a tissue of increasingly unlikely accidents, as the main characters—in a Moscow of millions, in an empire of tens of millions—keep bumping into one another.
As a critique of Communism, Pasternak’s novel is unfocused and superficial. We gather that Communism created chaos and unleashed ugliness and nihilism. But we don’t really get a sense of why. Pasternak renders surfaces in a wordy, impressionistic blur. But when he tries to go deep, he comes out with lines like this: “art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.” It sounds profound, but it is verbose, woolly-minded, and just isn’t true.
Finally, the main character of Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, is not particularly likeable. Thus it comes as a shock when one learns that Zhivago was Pasternak himself in thin disguise. The man must have loathed himself.
But I can’t justly review Pasternak’s novel, because like many readers, I tapped out before the end. On second thought, that is my review.
A great deal of the credit for turning Pasternak’s mediocre novel into a great movie goes to screenwriter Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, as well as the stage play and screen adaptation of A Man for All Seasons. Bolt removes needless characters and digressions, giving the story more of a spine. He also renders the horrors of Communism more crisply, giving greater insight into why they happened—and what the alternative is. While some of the leftist characters are depicted as having some popular appeal before the 1917 Revolution, every Communist in the movie after that is played by a dour faced actor over the age of sixty, if not seventy. Tom Courtney plays a Trotsky figure who is shown to be motivated by personal psychological problems.
I will sketch out the film’s basic plot, but I will skip over most of the details, leaving much to first-time viewers to discover. Yuri Zhivago is an orphan raised in Moscow by his wealthy godparents, the Gromekos. He is a gifted poet who has chosen medicine as a career. Just before the First World War, Yuri marries Tonya, the Gromekos’ daughter, with whom he grew up. When the war begins, Yuri becomes a doctor at the front. After the Revolution, Yuri returns home to find the Gromekos living in one room of their mansion, the rest of which has been given over to seedy proletarians. Moscow is in the grip of the Red terror. Typhus and starvation are rampant.
Worse yet, Yuri is “not liked.” His attitudes “have been noticed.” His poetry has been deemed too “private” and “bourgeois.” He does not conform to the party line, which increasingly consists of managing Communism’s failures through lies, excuses, and scapegoating. Yuri’s half-brother, Yevgraf, is a Bolshevik secret policeman. He knows Yuri and his family will not survive what is coming (we are now around the winter of 1919) and arranges for them to leave Moscow for the Urals, where they live in a cottage on the Gromekos’ former estate.
While in the Urals, Tonya becomes pregnant with their second child, while Yuri begins an affair with Larissa (“Lara”) Antipova, a young woman he met in Moscow and again at the front. Yuri is then torn away from both women by a band of Red partisans, who need a doctor and simply kidnap him. Two years later, Yuri manages to return to find the Gromekos have left Russia. He is reunited with Lara briefly but separated again. Lara, it turns out, is carrying his child. Both die some years later without ever being reunited, just two of the many millions of lives blighted and destroyed by a monstrous ideological enthusiasm.
The cast of Doctor Zhivago is uniformly strong. Casting an Egyptian Arab, Omar Sharif, as a Russian poet seemed odd to some. He doesn’t look like Hollywood’s idea of a typical Russian. (Originally, the role was offered to Peter O’Toole.) But the character of Zhivago was based on Pasternak, who didn’t look typically Russian either.
The main problem bringing the character of Zhivago to the screen is conveying that he is a poet without actually including any of his poetry. Lean solved this problem brilliantly, perhaps by borrowing a bit from Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes where composer Julian Craster suddenly goes blank while we hear the music in his head. Lean asked Sharif to look as detached and absent-minded as possible—a pure spectator—while Maurice Jarre’s brilliant music (his greatest score) communicates his flights of poetic imagination.
Julie Christie as Lara is so beautiful I don’t think that the cast had to pretend to be in love with her, and her performance is excellent. Alec Guinness as Yevgraf, Tom Courtenay as Pasha, Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie’s daughter) as Tonya Gromeko, Ralph Richardson as her father Alexander, and Siobhán McKenna as her mother Anna all turn in strong performances. Klaus Kinsky has a memorable bit part as an anarchist turned into a slave laborer. But the most compelling performance is Rod Steiger as V. I. Komarovksy. He has many of the film’s best lines. I wouldn’t exactly call him a villain, although he’s far from pure. Let’s just say that he’s very much alive.
Even though Doctor Zhivago portrays ugliness and horror, it is still a David Lean film, which means that it is a feast for the eyes. Some images are simply unforgettable: a vast throng of workers emerging from a tunnel under a red star; a vase of sunflowers weeping; the Goyaesque horrors of the civil war; the ice palace of Varykino.
But what sets Doctor Zhivago apart from most cinema is its fusion of powerful images and emotions with a philosophically insightful critique of Communism.
Before the revolution, Doctor Zhivago is constructed out of brilliant contrasts: between the grand boulevards and dirty side streets of Moscow, between the glittering world of high society and the drabness and desperation of the common people, between the healthy, neatly-uniformed men heading toward the front and the starved and ragged deserters fleeing it.
But once the Revolution happens, these contrasts are leveled—downwards, of course—until everyone is cold, starving, dirty, and terrified. The Communist slogans promising freedom, bread, and brotherhood all turn out to be lies. Communism delivered famine, not food—slavery and terror, not freedom. Communism did not ennoble mankind. It empowered cynicism, envy, and pettiness.
But many things didn’t change. Russia was still governed by autocrats whom the masses feared. There were still haves and have nots. Both before and after the Revolution, one had to ask people “Can you read?” As the civil war ground on, the terrified populace caught in the middle could no longer tell Red from White.
But the Soviets recreated everything on a much lower level, in part due to the sheer chaos and cost of the Revolution, in part because the Bolsheviks being materialists were blind to the essence of the civilization they seized, so they were capable of recapitulating it only as a brute farce. It was the old despotism stripped of all aristocratic magnanimity and refinement.
Four main issues separate the Bolsheviks from the old order.
First, they reject private life. “The private life is dead in Russia. History has killed it,” says the Red commander Strelnikov. Private life is disdained as “bourgeois,” as if men had never sought their own homes, their own families, and their own happiness before capitalism came along.
The problem with killing private life is that most of life happens in private, which brings us to the second contrast between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. The Bolsheviks are idealists. So is Yuri, for that matter, whose priggishness has tragic consequences. But fastidious idealism conflicts with life itself, which is far messier.
When private life is suppressed, so are freedom of speech and truth-telling, which is the third gulf between Communism and the old order. Who are you to contradict the Party, which is the avatar of universal truth? And since truth is relative to history, and the party is the historical vanguard, truth becomes identical to whatever lie the party declares expedient. When the Party denies starvation and typhus are in Moscow, but Yuri sees them with his own eyes, he believes his eyes. That makes him a thought criminal.
The real center of the story is not Zhivago but Lara, who is loved by the three principal male characters: Zhivago, Pasha Antipov, and V. I. Komarovsky. But the affair between Zhivago and Lara only happens in the last half of the movie. To give the audience an idea of where the whole story was going, Bolt invented a frame for the story, set sometime in the 1940s, after the Second World War.
Yevgraf has come to a construction site. He is looking for his niece, Yuri and Lara’s daughter, who had been lost some time in the 1920s. He is convinced that one of the workers, Tanya Komarova, is the girl he seeks. Then he narrates the whole film. At the end, Tanya denies she is his niece. “Don’t you want to believe it?” he asks. This is the voice of the Party speaking, the party that set up wishful thinking as truth and coerced millions to go along with it. Tonya’s reply is: “Not if it isn’t true.” Yevgraf’s only comment is: “That’s inherited.”
This brings us to a fourth divide between Communism and the old order: hereditary gifts versus blank slate egalitarianism. At the beginning of Doctor Zhivago, we learn that Yuri’s dead mother had the “gift” of playing the balalaika. The Gromekos wonder if young Yuri has special gifts as well. At the end of the film, as Tanya walks away, Yevgraf learns she has a talent for the balalaika. “Who taught her?” he asks. “No one taught her,” comes the reply. “It’s a gift, then,” says Yevgraf. These are the final words of the movie. In a way, they are the epitaph of Communism.
Much of the best anti-Communist literature is actually Left-wing: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, for example. But a critique of Communism that spotlights hereditary inequality belongs objectively to the Right. I have to credit this to David Lean, whose instincts and convictions were Rightist, since there are only the barest traces of this theme in the novel, and Bolt was a card-carrying Communist.
I find the end of Doctor Zhivago deeply moving because it offers a ray of hope. Even though Communism can shatter families and whole civilizations, blood has won out in the end.
US: Using A Gun For Self Defense Is Far More Frequent Than Murder
While Americans know that guns take many innocent lives every year, many don’t know that firearms also save them.
On May 15, an attacker at an apartment complex in Fort Smith, Ark., fatally shot a woman and then fired 93 rounds at other people before a man killed him with a bolt-action rifle. Police said he “likely saved a number of lives in the process.”
On June 30, a 12-year-old Louisiana boy used a hunting rifle to stop an armed burglar who was threatening his mother’s life during a home invasion.
On July 4, a Chicago gunman shot into a crowd of people, killing one and wounding two others before a concealed handgun permit holder shot and wounded the attacker. Police praised him for stepping in.
These are just a few of the nearly 1,000 instances reported by the media so far this year in which gun owners have stopped mass shootings and other murderous acts, saving countless lives. And crime experts say such high-profile cases represent only a small fraction of the instances in which guns are used defensively. But the data are unclear, for a number of reasons, and this has political ramifications because it seems to undercut the claims of gun rights advocates that they need to possess firearms for personal protection — an issue now before the Supreme Court.
Americans who look only at the daily headlines would be surprised to learn that, according to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes, and far more frequent than the roughly 20,000 murders or fewer each year, with or without a gun. But even when they prevent mass public shootings, defensive uses rarely get national news coverage. Those living in major news markets such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are unlikely to hear of such stories.
As of Aug. 10, America’s five largest newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal — have published a combined total of 10 news stories this year reporting a civilian using a gun to successfully stop a crime, according to a search of the Nexis database of news stories. By contrast, those same newspapers had a total of 1,743 news stories containing the keywords “murder” or “murdered” or “murders” and “gunfire,” “shot,” or “shots.” Including articles with the word “wounded,” the total rises to 2,764.
“Nobody who has done their homework on defensive gun use could possibly believe reading news articles accurately captures anything but an infinitesimal share of defensive gun uses,” Tomislav Kovandzic, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told RealClearInvestigations. “The only way to measure defensive gun uses is with surveys. While there is no such thing as a perfect measure of anything, the fact that they consistently show large numbers of defensive gun uses can’t be ignored.”
The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that around 100,000 defensive gun uses occur each year — an estimate that, though it may seem like a lot, is actually much lower than 17 other surveys. They find between 760,000 defensive handgun uses and 3.6 million defensive uses of any type of gun per year, with an average of about 2 million.
The difference between these surveys arises from the screening questions. The National Crime Victimization Survey first asks a person if they have been a victim of a crime. Only respondents who answer “yes” are asked if they have ever used a gun defensively.
In contrast, the other surveys screen respondents by asking if they have been threatened with violence. That produces more self-acknowledged defensive gun users, since someone who successfully brandished a gun is less likely to self-characterize as a crime victim. Survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news, though a few do.
In March, a man police described as “armed and dangerous” attempted to rob a home in Smith County, Texas. The homeowner pulled a gun and the intruder “fled away on foot.” The criminal had shot a woman the night before and had previous “outstanding warrants for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and felon in possession of a firearm.”
Later that same month, in Joplin, Missouri, a husband choked his wife during an argument. The wife was able to grab a gun to protect herself. The man fled the house and drove away before cops caught up with him.
In May, in Ogden, Utah, a stranger grabbed an 11-year-old girl on a school playground. An armed teacher observed this from inside the school, ran outside and confronted the suspect, giving the girl the chance to pull away from the attacker. The teacher held the man at gunpoint until police were able to arrive.
Defensive gun uses don’t loom large as a public concern not only because they tend not to feature dead bodies or blood. They are also underplayed because of a distorting feedback loop involving news organizations. Many leading outfits use data from the Gun Violence Archive to track firearm use. The GVA, however, relies primarily on news reports, creating literally an unvirtuous circle. This media coverage focuses on the most extreme cases, which academic research suggests is actually a minority of gun uses.
“Media stories cannot be trusted to accurately reflect the number or type of defensive gun uses that actually occur,” Professor Gary Mauser of Canada’s Simon Fraser University told RCI. Mauser has conducted national surveys on defensive gun use. “National surveys find that firearms are rarely fired when used to stop a violent attack,” he said. “Such cases are unlikely to be reported to the police, and even less likely to found in media stories. Relying upon media stories would greatly underestimate the true number of defensive gun uses.”
Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, defends the reliance on media accounts and discounts the argument that media disproportionately cover the most violent cases. “I don’t think it is a newsworthy issue. … [T]oo many media really like the feel good stories of homeowner standing up to home invader,” Bryant wrote to RCI. “Even better if it was a granny doing it. They don’t just go with the ‘if it bleeds …’ newsworthiness.”
Others disagree. Experts say that killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.
RealClearInvestigations examined Gun Violence Archive data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85 percent involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% percent in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired.
Experts interviewed by RCI said this coverage makes defensive gun uses appear as if they end in fatalities or woundings at much higher rates than they actually do. (In addition, many major outlets focus on instances where defensive gun uses go wrong, which may discourage people from defending themselves.)
Compounding the challenge, most police departments do not compile data on defensive gun use. One exception is the Houston Police Department. Jodi Silva, a spokesperson for the department, told RCI it has a rule to release a press statement whenever someone has been killed or wounded in a shooting. No other department does that. This helps explain why two-thirds of defensive gun uses compiled by the GVA come from Houston, with the rest found in news stories from elsewhere.
Mauser notes another anomaly: Police departments are only reporting instances when shots are fired. “That means they are certainly missing most defensive gun use cases,” he says.
Texas has the most news stories on defensive gun uses, with over 14% of all the cases. That isn’t surprising given that it’s the most populous state with less restrictive concealed-carry laws. Just three states – Texas, Florida, and Ohio – accounted for over 26% of all the defensive gun use news stories.
There are still other problems with relying on news stories: They are typically written soon after the fact — before all the facts are clear. “Defensive gun uses in public usually result in an arrest, and rarely are the police certain enough about what happened,” Moody told RCI. “When police or courts later drop the charges, a follow-up news story or a report on the police blotter won’t cover those developments — so relying on news stories can get some genuine defensive gun uses classified as crimes.”
RCI found a number of cases that fit this pattern. On Sept. 9, a man was pulling into a Houston gas station when an armed robber stopped his car and demanded his belongings. The police arrested the driver while they were investigating the case, but they later found him blameless: “He is being very cooperative with the investigation and his story matches with witness statements.”
The Gun Violence Archive lists some incidents as purely criminal acts of violence when they really entailed defensive gun uses. Here are a few:
- West Palm Beach, Fla., Jan. 2, 2021: A concealed handgun permit holder found a burglar inside his vehicle and shot and wounded the man in self-defense.
- Lakehead, Calif., April 18, 2021: A man called two people racial slurs before pulling out a handgun and shooting both of them. But two men with guns apprehended him and held him until police arrived.
- Chicago, July 1: A man legally carrying a concealed handgun followed an SUV that left an accident. The SUV driver stopped, got out, and started firing at the legal gun owner. The permit holder returned fire, and the SUV drove away.
Many crimes also go unreported, so it is likely that many defensive gun uses are never known to the police and thus unknown to the media. Numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that less than half of violent crime victims report violent crime to police.
But even dramatic cases that get local news coverage — cases in which mass public shootings were prevented — don’t receive national news coverage. Consider a few compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center over the last year, involving people legally carrying concealed handguns:
- A man upset because of a medical condition walked into a Weslaco, Texas, Walmart, last fall with an AK-47 bent on shooting people. A legal gun owner intervened and, according to the local TV station, “his actions led to the man putting down the gun.” As the “hero” recounted: “He was totally surprised. Got him to put the AK-47 down. He was very upset because I had destroyed his plans.”
- In Brownsburg, Ind., in July 2020, a man opened fire on workers at a cemetery and continued the attack on a nearby street. A concealed-carry permit holder fatally shot the attacker. “‘This tragic event could have been much more disastrous,” said police Capt. Jennifer Barrett.
- In Hummels Wharf, Pa., that same month, an attacker opened fire in restaurant parking lot, killing two people. A man in the restaurant with a permitted concealed handgun wounded the attacker. “Thankfully, he helped prevent further bloodshed,” the local prosecutor said.
- In Dallas, also in July 2020, a man “just started spraying” a sports bar with an “assault-style weapon” at full-capacity. But the shooter fled when he was “confronted by armed patrons” who shot back at him.
There are dozens of such cases from the last few years, but it is unlikely that many have heard of them since they attracted only local media coverage.
In extremely rare instances when national news media do cover a legal gun carrier’s prevention of a massacre, they can have a hard time getting the story straight.
Take the fatal shooting of two at the West Freeway Church of Christ near Fort Worth, Texas, in December 2019, for example. The media covered this attack, but repeatedly described the parishioners who stopped further bloodshed as “security guards.” “These were not security professionals, just members of the church designated as security personnel as a kind of honorary title,” Jack Wilson, the church member credited with stopping the attack, told RCI. Wilson said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed, but that neither he nor the church monitored who was carrying.
………………………….
Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author most recently of “Gun Control Myths.” Until January, Lott was the senior adviser for research and statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy.
This article originally ran on realclearinvestigations.com.
WW2 German Wehrmacht Murdered Millions of Soviet Prisoners of War – by Verna Nees (WSWS) 21 Sept 2021
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst is showing a small but significant open-air exhibition, “Dimensions of a Crime.” As the title suggests, the exhibition deals with the fate of Soviet prisoners of war during the Second World War. Due to the great interest, it is now being extended beyond the original date of October 3 to January 16, 2022.
At least 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in WWII. According to recent research in Russia the figure may be as high as 37 million. This includes 2.6 million of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and over 3 million of the total of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war. To this day, these victims are hardly remembered.
For a long time after WWII, the crimes of the SS and Gestapo were contrasted with the allegedly “clean Wehrmacht.” It was not until the Wehrmacht exhibitions of 1995 and 2001 that this myth was refuted and it was revealed how the German military leadership, many commanders and troop units participated in mass executions and other crimes. These revelations caused an outcry in right-wing and military circles at the time.
The current small travelling exhibition at the site of Nazi Germany’s surrender now sheds light on a particularly dark chapter of the Wehrmacht. It shows how the army high command, in collusion with the Nazi leadership, planned and implemented an unprecedentedly barbaric policy for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. Unlike prisoners of war from Western countries, Red Army prisoners were summarily shot en masse, starved to death and allowed to die miserably of epidemics.
(cont. https://archive.ph/r05qY )
……………….
A Specter is haunting…
Where is the party in opposition that has not denounced its opponents as Communists?
Marxist Revolutionary Integrationism vs. “Critical Race Theory” (6 September 2021)
Marxism & Education is publishing a slightly edited talk given to our New York City teachers study group in November 2019 by Charles Brover. It should be noted the talk was delivered before the caricature of CRT became the target of right-wing racists. For the last several years, the NYC Department of Education along with school administrations around the country has been aggressively pushing a bureaucratic shaming program that tries to get teachers to admit to implicit or “unconscious” racial bias. The theoretical underpinning of this crusade is “Critical Race Theory,” which explains racial oppression (and global history generally) as being the result of a system of white supremacy and “white skin privilege.” This doctrine diverts attention from struggle against the embedded structural racism that is endemic to capitalist society, and as shown below actually supports segregation. CRT is a program of defeat for black people. Marxists fight instead for the program of revolutionary integrationism through socialist revolution.
By Charles Brover
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has taken over like Kudzu in the groves of academe, and is now spreading to school systems around the country and the world. Along with feminism, CRT dominates what passes for theory in the liberal social sciences, particularly in the field of education. Although university-based it reflects and influences larger intellectual styles and moods.
This afternoon, I will try to briefly situate the origins of CRT historically and politically, then critically examine some of the main themes of the foundational document of CRT by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate, and then sketch out the outlines of a Marxist historical materialist response. While posing our class-based opposition to CRT, I want to consider what may be valuable for our anti-racist politics. And then let’s open a discussion of the ways in which CRT and its ideological framework of “white supremacy” affects your work as educators and activists. We have a report from a supporter of Class Struggle Education Workers that gets us off to an excellent start.
I am going to come at this from a somewhat roundabout direction. I will necessarily compress this presentation at the expense of depth and detail, but we can circle back to questions in the discussion period.
In the Beginning…
Class Struggle Education Workers, Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth continue to fight for integrated high quality schools. Outside elite Stuyvesant High School in NYC, May 2021. (Internationalist photo)
On origins: Critical Race Theory develops as a conflation of two influential and profoundly defeatist intellectual trends. First, the so-called linguistic turn in the study of humanities; and second, in the U.S., a woefully pessimistic response to the failure of the liberal civil rights movement to deliver on promises of racial equality – particularly in education.
Let’s begin with a cursory review of a trend in intellectual history, situating CRT as part of the late 20th-century linguistic turn, what Bryan Palmer has called the Descent into Discourse (1990) in his brilliant book of that name. (By the way, he has also written the best book on the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike.) I rely on Palmer’s analysis for much of what I will say about discourse theory. He begins his book with a quote from Trotsky’s 1924 polemic against the Russian formalists in Literature and Revolution:
“The formalists show a fast-ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ But we believe that in the beginning was the deed.”
That is how Palmer inscribes his critique of discourse theory by declaring bluntly that language is not life. For postmodernist discourse theory, language is understood not only as the medium of culture, but is reified – taken as concrete reality – beyond economic, social and political relations. They use the word “discourse” to signify a more fashionable academic sophistication. Discourse theory and post-structuralism/postmodernism, with its granting of a privileged status to language, failsto offer the interpretive clarity and revolutionary guidance of the historical materialist tradition rooted in the production/reproduction of social life.
Palmer traces the academic triumph of discourse theory from its idealist philosophical underpinnings in Nietzschean “aestheticism” and anti-rationalism through the discovery of formal linguistics with Ferdinand de Saussure, who said that language systems are governed by structures. In this “discourse,” words are signs composed of signifiers that may bear no relation to the denoted and signified connected to thought. As the signifiers floated free of their referents and material moorings, more inclusive interpretive methods became possible. Claude Levi-Strauss applied the idea of language structures to all human systems of communication, and the reification of language was more or less complete.
The post-structural moment was defined by pessimism and political retreat. It was centered mainly in France, where the events of May 1968 convinced student protestors that they could not contend for state power with the workers in the grip of a reformist Communist Party. Unable to break the structures of the state, many students backed off the streets, retreated into the classrooms and set out to break the structures of language. A number decided that most systematic thought was Stalinized and sought refuge away from what they called “totalizing narratives,” Marxism and Leninism chief among them. Academic research turned from such suspect “grand narratives” to the exegesis of particularities of custom and language.
By the 1970s and ’80s this fixation on the non-referential character and autonomy of language would produce a full-scale retreat from the living movement and a theoretical implosion with a variety of contending discourse theories. From Michel Foucault’s discourses on power (in Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] he couldn’t have been clearer: “There can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the referent”) to the psychoanalytic focus of the Jacques Lacan, to philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction that raised language to new peaks of instability. The text became the medium and the message. “There is nothing outside the text,” Derrida famously announced.
Palmer observes that there were however important critical voicesraised against this defeatist descent into discourse, notably Edward Said, whose groundbreaking political critique and study of racist Orientalism in language and culture was grounded in the material world. He connected the academic popularity of discourse theory in the U.S. to a general political retreat in the 1980s:
“It is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality … has coincided with the ascendency of Reaganism … a new cold war, increased militarism … and a massive turn to the right.”
Nevertheless, discourse theory conquered the ivory towers with its murky conceptions of sliding and unknowable meaning, faith in the autonomous determinative power of language, and the dismissal of Marxism – along with material social and economic life overall.
Separate is Not Equal
Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, originators of Critical Race Theory.
So now we come to the other defeatist trend that propelled Critical Race Theory to academic dominance. CRT does not originate in a theoretical vacuum. It was into this well-established academic language soup and word salad of discourse theory that CRT came to dine in the 1990s. If discourse theory represented the crossroads of political retreat and theoretical implosion, CRT mapped out its own defeatist path on matters of race. As the Ladson-Billings and Tate article[1] makes clear, Derrick Bell is the intellectual progenitor and godfather of CRT. Bell (who died in 2011) was the first African American tenured law professor at Harvard and an important and innovative legal scholar. In Michelle Alexander’s introduction to the 2018 republication of his Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), she notes the “contributions he made to the field of Critical Race Theory, a body of legal scholarship that revolutionized what was spoken, taught, and debated in classrooms nationwide.”
The trajectory of Bell’s career is important for understanding CRT. He began as a civil rights attorney trying cases for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. But in the 1970s he had an epiphany: gains could be wiped out and reversed. Looking squarely at the re-segregation of schools (particularly after the 2003 Orfield/Harvard study),[2] he decided that the historic Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 was a mistake, “as far as the law is concerned, truly dead and beyond resuscitation.” He reconsidered his work as a leading civil rights lawyer, and he assessed the lessons he learned:
“At that time, I believed that my work on school desegregation might prove to be the high point of my career. I was wrong. The implementation of the court orders that I helped obtain resulted in the closing of black schools and the dismissal of thousands of black teachers and administrators. … [B]lack children faced hostility…. Desegregated schools adopted tracking mechanisms that placed most blacks on non-academic tracks….”[3]
In his recognition of the failure of school desegregation Bell concludes this period of his career by shockingly opting for the 1896 “separate but equal doctrine” of the Jim Crow Plessy vs. Fergusson ruling:
“I have suggested, a Brown decision that mandated the full enforcement of the equal portion of the separate-but-equal doctrine rather than one striking that doctrine down, might have better advanced the education of black as well as white children…. [I]t would have led to a better outcome in the long run.”
We Marxists learned very different lessons from the same historical circumstances. We saw the failure of the Civil Rights Movement to fulfill its promises as the inevitable failure of a movement constrained by liberalism and trapped within the capitalist parameters of the Democratic Party. We posed instead a program of revolutionary integrationism looking to the power of the multiracial workers movement, and with a revolutionary multiracial workers party acting as a tribune of the people.[4] We struggle for school integration as a democratic right, with the understanding that in the U.S. separate can never be equal. Bell in contrast saw the hopelessness of racial integration itself.
For Bell and later law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and for CRT generally, their essential conviction is that racism in the U.S. is permanent and perpetually dominant. Therefore, in Bell’s second act on the legal front, he proposed his theory of “interest convergence.” That is, black people could only make temporary gains when it converged with the interests of white people. He saw Brown as:
“the definitive example that the interest of blacks in achieving racial justice is accommodated only when and for so long as policymakers find that the interest of blacks converges with the political and economic interests of whites.”
When he described interest convergence with regard to Brown it sounds somewhat like our own analysis of the political considerations on the minds of the rulers who accommodated partial gains of the civil rights legislation:
“[The] Brown decision advanced U.S. interests because racial segregation was hampering the United States in the Cold War with communist nations and undermining U.S. efforts to combat subversion at home….”
–“Free Market Racism: Segregated Schools, Gentrified Neighborhoods,” Marxism and Education No. 5, Summer 2018
But whereas Bell ascribed the benefits to white people generally, we understood that the beneficiaries of the liberal Civil Rights legislation were foremost the capitalist state and its imperialist interests and only secondarily black people in desegregating many areas of public accommodations.
In his last phase Bell takes his political pessimism to its logical conclusion that he calls, “racial realism”:
“Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.”
Bell’s most influential text of this period is Faces at the Bottom of the Well, a rich stew of stories, essays, pseudo-myths and Socratic dialogues that insist on the proposition that white Americans will always be racist, will always sacrifice potential black progress for their perceived advantage. With a nod to science fiction, the last chapter, “Space Traders,” is the most well-known chunk of the book and continues to be assigned in classes all over the country. The premise and plot of the story goes like this: Aliens arrive in the U.S. and offer a deal. They propose to fix all of the pressing problems of the country with enough gold to end the national debt, as well as creating permanent cheap energy resources, and so on. What they want in return is to take all the black people with them into outer space for an ominously unspecified purpose. The proposition, greeted at first with shock and dismay, is debated and the racist deal is finally struck.
The central point here is that Bell’s political pessimism is warranted and logical if one believes, as he does, that capitalism is the end of history. Indeed, it is not farfetched to assert that racism is a permanent feature of U.S. capitalism. As we have said, metaphorically speaking, racism is in the DNA of the capitalist system, but not literally and biologically that racism is in the DNA of white people.
Telling Stories
Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate. (Photos: University of Wisconsin; University of South Carolina)
So when we come to the Ladson-Billings/Tate foundational article, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” it is not surprising that its introductory quote is from Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well. The authors find the sources of CRT in the critical legal studies of Bell and Crenshaw that critique the liberal, legally based strategy for black equality. But while many of their criticisms of liberalism and their observations of pervasive racism in the schools are valid and often insightful, CRT does not advance the theoretical possibilities for black liberation and does much to obscure what is required to effectively fight racism. Indeed, they see racism as eternal and inevitable.
The first proposition of the Ladson-Billings/Tate article states that race “continues to be a significant factor in determining inequality in the United States” and has impact in people’s daily lives – certainly undeniable from a Marxist perspective. The authors acknowledge that Marxist formulations based in class and also gender-based analyses contribute to an understanding of inequality, but that these approaches fail to adequately address race. Arguing that such theories “naturalize whiteness,” they declare their mission is to theorize race – while being vague about what constitutes theory.
The argument that racism has deprived black Americans of the education they need and deserve is not new. The primacy of the educational color line was powerfully drawn by Carter Woodson in the Miseducation of the Negro (1933) and advanced by W.E.B. DuBois. What was new in CRT was its insistence on language analysis and its emphasis on counter-narratives. When the authors look back at Woodson and Dubois, they correctly assess the ways that racist education harms black children, but in doing so they shift from the idea that race is a significant factor to race as the “central construct” of inequality. And following a descent into discourse, they contend that this central construction is based in language.
This is the idealism at the heart of CRT, seen most clearly in its insistence on “voice” and counter-story as the central strategy of social survival and political transformation. What do they mean when they ask children to “name their own reality?” Notice this sharp descent into discourse: “For the critical race theorist social reality is constructed by the formulation and exchange of stories about individual situations.” Of course, social reality is constructed, but not simply just as we please by telling alternative stories. Culture is mediated by language, but in the last analysis social relations reflect the historical material conditions of economic and social life. However, if one believes that the social world is linguistically constructed by narratives and non-referential language, then counter-narratives must necessarily constitute the strategic oppositional practice.
Of course, we want all children and particularly the children of oppressed groups to be positively recognized in school as they tell their stories in their own way. (Sociolinguist James Gee studies how black kids tell stories differently.) And we want the education system and the curriculum to appreciate the validity of their experience and cultural interests. Telling stories can be a powerful antidote to internalized oppression. But we don’t want to dissolve material reality and the concrete struggles for educational equality in a sea of subjectivity.
One of the authors’ main ideas is that “U.S. society is based on property rights.” This rights talk is a cornerstone of the liberal legal framework. Private property rights developed with the state and are inherent in capitalism. The authors explain that they seek to “disentangle” democracy from capitalism, and they criticize traditional civil rights approaches that argue for democracy while “ignoring the structural inequality of capitalism.” They acknowledge that U.S. democracy was “built on capitalism.” And they explain that enslaved people were treated as property. So far, we agree. But just when logic would seem to require that they then call for a revolution to end capitalism as a condition of black equality and liberation, they dance away into a quasi-nationalist crouch about the benefits conferred on the owners of the property of ‘whiteness,’ never indicting the owners of the means of production as a class.
They expand this idea of property rights to explain inequalities in schooling as a difference in “intellectual property.” By the end of the article the authors have gone off the rails following the work of Cheryl Harris that argues that whiteness is property. Note this remarkable sentence: “But more pernicious and long lasting than the victimization of people of color is the construction of whiteness as the ultimate property.” They go on to claim that whites alone possess this valuable property and its privileged cultural practices. Therefore, black children are punished in school for not possessing it and failing to absorb “white norms.” They proclaim that “Legally whites can use and enjoy the privileges of whiteness.” This leads to the theme of “white privilege” that we will look at in more depth later.
At bottom, CRT is a species of black sectoralism. Ladson-Billings and Tate display their black nationalist core beliefs when they proclaim that as critical race theorists:
“We align our scholarship and activism with the philosophy of Marcus Garvey who believed that the black man was universally oppressed on racial grounds, and that any program of emancipation would have to be built around the question of race first.”
As is widely known, Marcus Garvey’s Afro-pessimism, relentless separatist ideology, and back-to-Africa movement led him into alignment with the Ku Klux Klan.
CRT’s adherence to “race first” is more than a claim for interpretive priority. It is also meant to signal a sequence of social transformation. For CRT the question of black equality must be solved before revolutionary transformation, and that implies accommodation with capitalism.
White Supremacy: A Question of Power
But it is not just that Marxism represents the only program for revolutionary class struggle to topple the capitalist state. It also embodies a theory and analytical tools radically superior to CRT for understanding racism. Marxism is able to explain the historical and contemporaneous interactions between race and capitalism – that is, Marxism is superior to CRT on the very intellectual terrain they claim. Take the cornerstone concepts of CRT: the framework of white supremacy and white skin privilege.
Sometimes when people talk about “white supremacy” they simply mean racist practices, and they want to indicate a more systematic understanding of those practices. Black feminist Bell Hooks, for instance, said she decided to use the term “white supremacy” rather than racism because only white supremacy captures the more comprehensive and subtle forms of race politics. Or “white supremacist” is used to refer to the racist terrorists who yearn for the return of the slave Confederacy, as well as the dangerous throwbacks to Jim Crow segregation in our midst today. For critical race theorists, however, with their black nationalist core beliefs, something quite different is intended. For CRT, white supremacy is seen as a political system of global social history. Typical of this view is Jamaican CRT philosopher Charles Mills:
“Global white supremacy … is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal and informal rule, socio-economic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.”
Mills even writes about a white supremacist state.
For CRT white supremacy is a global system where white people hold the power and resources. For Marxists in contrast, power is held by the ruling class, since it is the capitalists who own the means of production and extract surplus value from workers. The working class lacks power because workers are forced to sell their labor power to survive. This is the fundamental relationship hidden by CRT and its claim that power is in the hands of white people. Understanding this is key to formulating a program to root out inequality and the racism which reflects the capitalist reality.
The framework of white supremacy treats all white people as a self-interested monolithic group although it is clear that they are class-divided. Some CRT advocates acknowledge that not all whites are better off than all non-whites; they point to the statistical average, but this directs attention away from the all the ways millions of working-class people are exploited and many driven into poverty. Thus the effects of class exploitation are masked by CRT’s blanket assertions of white supremacy and white privilege. Nor can the framework of white supremacy deal with the racist demonization of groups that are not necessarily skin-color-identified – Muslims and wearers of the hijab, refugees, immigrants and asylum-seekers displaced by capitalism, Roma and Travelers, and most historically breathtaking, Jews.
Far from capturing the decisive forms of racism, the white supremacy framework deflects attention away from the history of social relations that are part of the mode of production. CRT theorists document endless years of continuity of racist language and cultural practice, but they de-contextualize those practices from historical materialist conditions that gave rise to those practices. Unlike CRT, Marxism situates racism in its historical and contemporaneous interconnections with capitalism. Racism is a reflection of, and dialectically interacts with, racial oppression.
So the best studies of racism rely on Marxist categories and the articulation of the history of those interconnections between race and the mode of production and reproduction. The work of C.L.R. James for instance, or the pioneering Slavery and Capitalism by Eric Williams. Williams was one of the first to document how the triangular slave trade and the large-scale production, largely of sugar, in the slave plantation system was decisive in the primitive accumulation of capital to power the industrial revolution and capitalist empire. He showed how all components of the English establishment – church, state and aristocracy – promoted and sustained the trade and grew rich off it.
Peter Fryer in his masterful and horrifying account of British racism, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984), distinguishes between racial prejudice on one hand –largely the ignorant and irrational fear of “the other” that predates capitalism – and, on the other hand, the racism that is the ideological handmaiden and justification of economic profit: slavery, the slave trade and then imperialist empire. It is that racism – embedded and structural – that we live with today.
Fryer documents how racism was mobilized in the 18th century to defend the British economy utterly dependent on the slave trade; how the economy was reinforced with a scramble of racist stereotypes inherited from folklore, pseudo-science and crazy conjecture. The form of racism that coalesced in Europe and in the U.S. arose from the political battles fought over the slave trade and slavery, during the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th. The men who set out to enshrine and protect slavery assembled a vast arsenal of new claims and old ideas about black people and Africans, which they then codified, refined and disseminated through books, pamphlets, cartoons and speeches. The defense of the most brutal racist practices was promoted by the most respectable and cultured people in the 18th and 19th centuries (Thomas Carlyle, Dickens, Trollope, Matthew Arnold.)
High-ranking scientists such as the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus as well as the influential racist propagandist Edward Long marketed the most extreme pseudo-scientific racism at home and in the Americas. In the midst of the flowering of the Enlightenment with its theories of natural rights, the defenders of slavery argued that Africans were a sub-human species. And that list includes Thomas Jefferson in his hideously racist Notes on Virginia. Of the first dozen U.S. presidents, only the ones named Adams were not slave holders.
All of that newly congealed racism justified the enormous profits of the West Indian and U.S forced labor camps for the plantocracy. The ideas about the nature and character of enslaved peoples from Africa that had been marshalled by the pro-slavery lobby took root and lived on, n notably the grotesque stereotype of “lazy black people” used to justify racist discrimination and terror, when all of the backbreaking labor was performed by black slaves. Many, in more subtle forms, are still with us today.
Reactionary Skin Game
The framework of white supremacy becomes a particularly reactionary disorganizer of solidarity in struggle as it expresses its logical correlation of “white skin privilege.” These so-called privileges are usually thought of as the everyday currency paid to the depository of white supremacy. The Ladson-Billings article as well as many other CRT critics refer to the 1988 article by Wellesley professor Peggy McIntosh, where she writes about her “invisible backpack” that contains her stash of white privileges, and she itemizes some 50 or so privileges. Some of these include:
“I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives.
“Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.
“If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
“I can be reasonably sure that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race.”
There are plenty more of these “privileges” stashed in her “invisible back pack.”
While much of the discussion of white skin privilege focuses on daily outrages, critical race theorists have bigger fish to fry. Let’s see how one of our CUNY colleagues and my friend John Garvey, who despite our disagreements is an important anti-racist thinker, along with Noel Ignatiev (who recently died) set up the bigger problem in their journal Race Traitor:
“The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it….
“The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive…. Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”
Notice the word, “until.” Again, the idea of “race first” is meant not only to indicate interpretive primacy, but is understood as a necessary stage in social transformation. And such statements suggesting the abolition of “whiteness” areopen to misinterpretation when white people are seen as the toxic carriers of white supremacy and privilege.
As an analytical tool the concept of “white skin privilege” stands racism on its head seeing it as a beneficial system for all white people rather than an effective disorganizer of unified class struggle, including struggle against racism. The idea of white skin privilege echoes the implicit ruling class pitch to white workers and the poor: You may be miserable and exploited, but at least you benefit from not being black. The idea is that whites will accept large disparities in economic and social opportunity so long as they hold perceived advantage over blacks. So long as they can look down on the black faces at the bottom of the well. CRT advocates argue that white workers identify with their rulers on the basis of race but fail to acknowledge how their own promotion of white skin privilege aids the rulers’ anti-working class and racist campaigns.
This white skin privilege game has been going on for a long time, but has reached a fever pitch now in colleges and schools. In the spirit of this ethos of “wokeness,” young people are supposed to check their age privilege; however, in my dotage I supposedly have “experience privilege.” So let me take you back some decades to when this “theory” was in its infancy. At its 1969 National Convention in Chicago, Students for a Democratic Society split into three factions. The New Left Weatherman faction was an ardent advocate and practitioner of the idea of “checking” white skin privilege. The members – almost all white and pretty wealthy—conducted guilt-ridden confessional sessions about their white privileges in the self-criticism style of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Cultural Revolution.” The working-class side of the split was made up of a number of tendencies including Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League.
It also contained a small group called the Labor Committee that was led by a former Socialist Workers Party member Lyn Marcus, soon to be known as Lyndon Larouche as the group went bat-shit crazy into the neo-fascist right-wing swamp. But for a brief moment in 1969, the Labor Committee was sort of Luxemburgist politically and lined up on the working-class side in the split. They distributed to the convention a leaflet that I still remember 50 years later. (And I have forgotten quite a few leaflets in that time.) It was a Swiftian proposal directed against the Weathermen (whose name was taken from the Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”) The heading of the Labor Committee leaflet was: “You don’t need a thermometer to know who’s an asshole.” The leaflet began by providing data on the differential of black and white life expectancy and then proposed to address the “white skin privilege” of white workers by having them line up at their respective workplaces to kill themselves when they reached the average age of black life expectancy.
Revolutionary Program vs. No Program
So how do we Marxists respond to this “race first” ideology? First of all, we do not concede the field of anti-racism to anybody. Our program holds the promise of black liberation through socialist revolution. And we seek in the here-and-now to mobilize the power of the multi-racial working class to fight racism in all of its expressions – overt and subtle – and to defend black rights wherever they are threatened, including the right to integrated quality education. Because the international proletariat as a social class historically and objectively developed with capitalist industrialization – as Marx said, capitalism creates its own grave diggers – we can mount a revolutionary program for a workers government building towards an egalitarian socialist society. Not so for CRT or feminists, they have no such revolutionary program.
Ladson-Billings and Tate wrestle with the possibility that class may also be a determining factor in the structure of educational inequalities; however, they settle on race first.
“Although both class and gender can and do intersect race, as stand-alone variables they do not explain all of the educational achievement differences between whites and students of color.”
But Marxists never treat class as a discrete “stand-alone variable.” Failing to acknowledge the historically developed, objective and unique character of social class, the authors reduce a dynamic historical materialist programmatic approach to racial and gender oppression to one of a number of “stand-alone variables.”
To deal with the programmatic dead-end of feminism and black sectoralism, they invented intersectionality. Whereas CRT contends that race is the primary contradiction in society and the primary source of oppression, Marxist analysis explains how class is at the root of all manner of social oppression. Intersectionality in its postmodern approach drifts to the idea that there is no primary contradiction, just a lot of interconnected sources of oppression. This view – now the default position in academia – is just a theoretically souped-up version of identity politics. People have many and shifting identities that intersect – race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Of course, there are many sources of oppression. The Internationalist article on the myth of the white working class[5] projected a New York City subway worker who may identify as a woman, an African American, a labor activist, and gay. On any given day she may personally experience oppression most acutely on the basis of any one of these. But it is only with her class position mobilized into collective action that as a worker she can exert power to transform the economic basis of society that underlies the many forms of oppression.
While critical race theorists along with most modern academics have generally dismissed Marxism as old hat, those in the Marxist tradition have not launched much of a direct counter-attack against CRT. One exception is Mike Cole, whose book, Critical Race Theory and Education: A Marxist Response (2017), claims the mantle of orthodox Marxism. Cole, a professor at East London University along with Glenn Rikowski, Dave Hill, and a U.S. advocate of Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of liberation,” Peter McLaren, see themselves as “independent” Marxist scholars and educators in battle against anti-Marxist postmodernists.
In his book, Cole offers a number of rejoinders to CRT about the objective character of class and why Marxists don’t adopt the historical framework of “white supremacy,” making many of the points I made earlier. He acknowledges the contradiction between CRT and Marxism, but hopes fondly for a possible alignment of CRT and Marxism; he uses the term “racialized capitalism” to try to fudge the differences. Yet a non-racist capitalism is impossible. Finally, he exposes the anti-Marxist side of his politics with homage to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela as a “beacon of [educational] enlightenment” with “the potential for twenty-first century socialism.” Chávez’ regime is a left-nationalist brand of bourgeois populism, not proletarian socialism.
Critical race theorists as well as feminist critics falsely accuse Marxists of working within a “grand narrative” that suppresses the importance of race and gender. Marxism is regularly faulted for an assumed narrow mechanical economism, a charge made often on the basis of a Stalinized caricature of dialectical materialism. For critical race theorists it amounts to a charge that we Marxists ignore race in favor of class. Crenshaw for instance says, “The typical Marxist error is subsuming race under class.” For Mills it is that what he calls “White Marxism [that] fails to recognize the import and social reality of race.” They charge that Marxists see history as colorless classes in struggle. Race is just tacked on.
Despite the accusations of CRT and feminist discourse theorists, Marx and Engels were not mechanical and economist in their understanding of the way superstructure and economic base interact. Marxists do not think that economic conditions are the only active causes and all other phenomena are just passive effects.
In the U.S. with its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, every struggle for democratic rights is based on fighting the embedded racist ideology that justifies the segregation of black people at the bottom of the socio-economic order. (Internationalist photo)
Yes, we hold that we live in class society and that class is objectively defined by relations to the means of production. Furthermore, we understand that a physically coercive state and legal system preserves capitalism and its property forms. But we are also part of a dynamic interpretive tradition. We expose how language and culture are employed to naturalize, disguise, and render harmless the real relations of class domination and racism. Particularly in the U.S. with its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, every struggle for democratic rights is based on fighting against the embedded racist ideology that justifies the segregation of black people at the bottom of the socio-economic order. We actively engage in exposing the mask of bourgeois racist practice and ideology. In the U.S. it is inconceivable that a revolutionary struggle can occur in which Black people do not play a central role.
Contrary to the claims of CRT theorists, authentic Marxists are not “color-blind” like Bernie Sanders, the bourgeois Democratic presidential contender and pseudo-socialist hailed by many opportunist leftists. We agree with CRT about the pervasive existence of racism worldwide, but unlike proponents of identity politics, we put forward a revolutionary program of aggressive color-conscious efforts to address the, structural racism embedded in capitalism. We critically defend affirmative action, for instance, against racism disguised as “color-blind” neutrality. We welcome feminist literary studies, for instance, that have enriched the understanding of sexism and the constraints of language and custom, particularly in Shakespeare studies and Victorian literature. But we understand such valuable critical interpretations are not a positive program for the transformation of society and liberation of women.
Marxists are attentive to culture, language and human agency in history, including particularly the material forces of racism. As the opening of his pamphlet on The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx declares: “Men make history but they do not make it just as they please … but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” That includes the ideological and linguistic “dead hand of the past” that hampers human efforts at liberation. So while the conditions of production and the historical role of the proletariat within those conditions are objective, the consciousness of workers of their historical role is quite another matter. And a lot more complicated. As Marx makes clear in his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy:
“In considering such [revolutionary] transformations a distinction should always be made between the material economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”
An important part of that fight for consciousness is the organization of a vanguard party that leads the multi-racial working class in anti-racist struggle. Socialist revolution in the U.S. will happen only with vital black leadership. And even in its infancy that multi-racial leadership will embody the revolutionary content of Marxism against all forms of idealist sectoralism, including critical race theory. ■
See also: Mobilize to Fight Racist “Anti-CRT” Gag Laws!
The 1776 Report: Whitewashing U.S. History
The 1619 Project: Misidentifying the Roots of Racism
[1] Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” (1995).
[2] Erica Frankenberg, Chungmei Lee and Gary Orfield, “A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?” (The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, January 2003). The project is now located at the University of California at Los Angeles.
[3] Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
[4] See Richard S. Fraser, “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Struggle” (1955)
[5] “The Myth of a ‘White Working Class’,” The Internationalist No. 46, January-February 2017.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.Posted 3 weeks ago by CLASS STRUGGLE EDUCATION WORKERS
Are Morbidly Obese People Losing Their Heads? – Media Features Headless Fat People To Protect The Innocent
I started to notice the Headless Fatty phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the current wave of the War on Obesity (also known in the press as the Global Obesity Epidemic, the Obesity Crisis, etc) began to get coverage. Every hand-wringing article about the financial cost of obesity, and every speechifying press release about the ticking time bomb of obesity seemed to be accompanied by a photograph of a fat person, seemingly photographed unawares, with their head neatly cropped out of the picture.
Since then, the Headless Fatty has become a staple of news journalism. It’s quite bizarre, fat people are in the news all the time, almost constantly; “Obesity” returns more than twice as many Google News hits as “Madonna.” But we are presented as objects, as symbols, as a collective problem, as something to be talked about. Unless we play the game and parrot oppressive, self-hating, medicalised views about fat, fat people’s own voices, feelings, thoughts and opinions about what it is to be fat are entirely absent from the discourse. Because of this, we are currently unable to capitalise on the allure a fat body holds to viewers and readers, and this will probably continue as long as we are disenfranchised beings.
As Headless Fatties, the body becomes symbolic: we are there but we have no voice, not even a mouth in a head, no brain, no thoughts or opinions. Instead we are reduced and dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food. There’s a symbolism, too, in the way that the people in these photographs have been beheaded. It’s as though we have been punished for existing, our right to speak has been removed by a prurient gaze, our headless images accompany articles that assume a world without people like us would be a better world altogether.
Yet these are real people who look as though they’ve been photographed without their knowledge, consent, or payment of any kind, for commercial photographs that are then marketed and sold by photographers and agencies. I wonder what it must feel like to open the paper one morning, or click onto a news site, and see a headless version of yourself there, against a headline decrying people who look like you. I imagine that it would be hard for a person with high self-esteem to take, let alone some random fatty, who’s grown up with the depressingly familiar round of self-hatred, body-disgust and shame.
Headless Fatties are a version of fat people, a never-ending parade of us, taken from us and then sold back to us, hatefully and with ignorance. They reek of a surveillance culture with which fat people – whose bodies are policed by glares, and disapproving looks – are all too familiar. It really is true that you could be anywhere, walking down the street, on your way back from the shops, waiting for a bus, down at the gym, at the canteen, looking gorgeous or looking crappy, and an image of your disgustingness could be produced and reproduced outside of your control, perhaps without you ever knowing it. And you could be anyone: a man, a woman, a kid – a kid! – rich, poor and all places inbetween. There are photographers waiting for people like me, lurking, looking for the money shot: a cheaply-dressed, underclass fat woman tucking into some fast food on the street. I would suggest that fat people’s fear of fulfilling a stereotype might make this shot fairly elusive, it’s quite astonishing how food is largely absent from these images, and I draw the viewer’s attention to the image of the woman in a stripy top, who has made the mistake of standing close to a billboard of a sandwich, she’s not even eating, she is carrying a shopping bag from Evans, the fat lady clothes shop in the UK, yet the implication of what she does when she gets home is all too clear.
I found these images online by Googling the following words: words obese, obesity, obesity epidemic, obese man, obese woman, obese child, overweight, fat. Many of the images come from one of the world’s biggest photo agencies, which supplies businesses and media with images. I’ve included a couple of images in this list of people who haven’t been decapitated, although they remain faceless with the back of their heads to the camera. One memorable photograph has a series of fat women with their eyes blacked out, as though they are criminals. Perhaps to some people they are criminals.
If any of these photographs are of you, or of people you know, and were taken without your consent, I think it might be a good idea to get some legal advice. If I ever turn up in one of these photographs, I would like every picture editor on the planet to know that I will sue the arse off them for it. It might be a good idea to let picture agencies know that these images are dehumanising, or tell editors what you think about their use of Headless Fatties, maybe suggest that every picture of a headless fatty they publish should be balanced with an article by and about a vocal fat activist.
I see myself in these images, I look like a lot of the people in these photographs, and I’d like to suggest other ways of viewing them: challenge your disgust, see how people are dressed, what they are doing, think about how the picture was taken, what message it was used to convey, how that message relates to the person in the image, who got paid for the picture, and try to imagine who that Headless Fatty might be, try to get a hold of their humanity.
If you enjoyed this article, you will love Fat Activist Vernacular, a fat queer feminist glossary, which contains over 600 similar terms and definitions.
Lick It Up (KISS) Lexington Lab Band
Also From Lexington Lab Band – Hot Blooded – By Foreigner
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Life’s Been Good To Me So Far – Instrumental
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You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But, You Can Never Leave…
Hotel California
US Chief of Staff General Mark Milley – Revised Version Of ‘The Art Of War’
Joe Stalin Biden
‘Flame Purification?’ I Fear The Burning of Books In Canada – by Frank Furedi
The first step towards something sinister and evil
Movie Still ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (1966) Dir: François Truffaut
Books featuring so-called ‘outdated content’ are being burned as a goodwill gesture to Indigenous people in Ontario. This fills me with dread, as history has shown us that the torching of ideas usually has disastrous consequences.
First, a confession. I get really emotional and upset when I encounter ritual book-burning. So when I read that in Canada, more than 4,700 books have been removed from the library shelves of schools and burned, I cannot help but feel depressed.
The book burning ceremony organised by an Ontario francophone school board was promoted as a “gesture of reconciliation” to Indigenous peoples. This barbaric act against enlightened cultural norms was labelled as a “flame purification ceremony.”
In line with the current fashion for recycling, Lyne Cossette, a spokeswoman for the school board, indicated that “symbolically, some books were used as fertiliser.”
She stated that the ritual, titled ‘Redonnons à la terre’ – ‘give back to the earth’ – sought “to make a gesture of openness and reconciliation by replacing books in our libraries that had outdated content and carried negative stereotypes about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.”
The justification for the burning of books is that they contained “outdated content.” ‘Outdated’ is a favourite term of abuse hurled at opponents by zealous culture war activists. In their eyes, any publications – particularly history books – that promote the classical outlook of Western civilisation are ‘outdated’ and therefore convey views that constitute a form of secular blasphemy.
Now that the outdated books have turned to ash, the libraries can boast that the books on their shelves have “positive and inclusive messages about the diverse communities within our schools.”
It seems that the touchy-feely ethos of diversity and inclusiveness contains a brutal and authoritarian impulse towards cleansing the world of ideas with which it disagrees.
While doing research for my book, ‘The Power of Reading’, I was struck by the frequency with which morally insecure but zealous dogmatists have sought to rid the world of ideas they despised.
Ever since the invention of reading texts, those deemed to be subversive have been burnt or, in today’s language, put to the flame. In 411 BC, Athenians burnt the works of Pythagoras. The Roman Emperor Caligula decreed the burning of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’, and the poems of Virgil and Livy. Emperor Diocletian ordered all Christian books to be burnt in 303 AD – “so great was his fear of their challenge to his supremacy,” according to a ‘A History of Reading’ by Steve Roger Fischer. [In 300 AD / CE Christians in the Roman Empire were about 5% of the population. The Emperor Constantine decided to use the Christians to battle the Pagan institutions throughout the empire. When following emperors incorporated the Christian network into the government and made the religion the official religion many average people would have vaguely heard of the Christians. But to have a few decades pass and then it was the compulsory religion of the empire would be like someone in the US waking up and seeing that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had taken over the government and soon would ban all other religions. History seems to record a lot of Christian attacks on books, for example the great library at Alexandria. So… the challenge to the Roman world was great, and the empire adopted a kind of primitive Christian fascism. Christianity did not win by means of ideas in books; a Pretorian guard with swords and chains enforced the adoption of Christianity. ]
Frequently, the burning of books was portrayed as an act of purification not unlike the “flame purification ceremony” in Ontario. This motif was very much in evidence during the notorious book-burning ceremonies in Nazi Germany. Purifying German culture of poisonous Jewish and other forms of ‘offensive’ views was the justification for these ghastly rituals.
To get a flavour of how advocates of book burning understand their mission, it is worth looking at an article titled ‘The Moral Revolt of Germany’s Youth’ published in ‘Current History’ in 1922.
The author of the article, Lilian Eagle, was thoroughly enthusiastic about the “moral crusade undertaken by the youthful reformers,” the German Jugendbewegung. She wrote, ‘‘The great revolution that followed the World War, instead of proving a cleansing storm, has developed more and more into an economic struggle, and as there is no one to protect the young from post-war vices and evils they are determined to do it themselves. Smoking and drinking are tabooed. Shops with unclean postcards and books are boycotted. Flaming protests against immoral performances in the theatres and cinemas are posted in all public places by these doughty champions of public morality.”
The article is illustrated by a photo captioned: “Berlin police burning wagon loads of trashy juvenile fiction which school teachers have collected in an effort to suppress the evils of bad literature.”
The German school teachers, who were busy collecting “bad literature” were motivated by censorious motives, not unlike members of the book-burning school board in present-day Ontario. Tragically, before too long, many of these book-burners in 1920s Germany would bear witness to the burning of human flesh in the death camps designed to purify the world of people that were deemed as toxic.
The burning of books is a despicable crime because its aim is to destroy and eradicate views and ideas that are deemed heretical. As the radical poet John Milton so eloquently noted, ‘‘He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”
Watch out when book burning is associated with the ritual of purification. Ask yourself the question, “What will they cleanse next?” The history of book burning tells us that the burning of books is the first step towards the vilification and brutal punishment of those in the crosshairs of the book burners.
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Frank Furedi is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century. Follow him on Twitter @Furedibyte
US Marine Corps General – Diversity Is Imperative – White Nationalist Troops Can’t Fight China and Russia Effectively (Marine Corps Times) 10 Aug 2021
A diverse Corps is necessary to implement future force design, top official says, Marine Corps Times, August 10, 2021
The Marine Corps needs increased diversity to fully implement the force design changes required to face off against China, Russia or other potential threats, said Marine Brig. Gen. Ahmed T. Williamson director of manpower, plans and policy, in early August 2021.
“The commandant right now is focusing on force design … the Marine Corps is making a concerted effort right now in investing in several capabilities,” Williamson said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Apace 2021 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “But what the commandant has stated, and what we as Marines always know is, the primacy of that expeditionary force is the Marine.”
His remarks echo those made by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger in 2020 at the Women in Defense Virtual Leadership Symposium.
Some people “think that diversity — women, minorities — add” to the Corps’ success,” Berger said then. But it goes beyond that. “We can actually not do our mission in the Department of Defense, in the Marine Corps, without the dedication of women.”
Williamson laid out three reasons the Corps needs to be a diverse institution, which he termed the ethical, practical and operational imperatives.
“The American people need to know their military … reflects those they support and defend,” Williamson said, so the “ethical imperative” is simply to do the right thing in terms of inclusion and fairness.
The practical imperative, he said, refers to the Corps’ need to tap into a shrinking, but more diverse, pool of people in the country who qualify for the military.
“We don’t want to leave any talent on the table,,” the general said, “everyone is competing for the same talented pool of men and women. They are going to work somewhere.”
But, most important is the operational imperative, he said.
When looking at the complex battlefields of the future, “it is all about lethality and warfighting,” Williamson said.
“It’s challenging;, it is full of problem sets that one group — that one team — are not going to be able to solve alone,” he said. “We need to be able to open up the diversity of thought, of experience, of background, to try and attract people who are going to help us solve those very complex problems.”
Today, unconscious bias may play a role in unfairly forcing good Marines to leave the Corps or denying them opportunities to improve themselves, Williamson noted.
“If we see that a particular demographic or subgroup or element is not performing to standard or not performing as well as others, we ought to be intellectually curious enough to ask why, not just accept that and believe that that is going to fit a certain bias that we have,” he said.
Some biases are not only good, but necessary, for the Marine Corps to thrive, he said.
“We all are slanted or have certain perceptions,” he said. “In fact, in the Marine Corps, we expect Marines to have a bias towards action … we have a bias towards being disciplined… we are biased towards physical fitness.
“There are negative biases, or there are biases that are misguided, misinformed or just flat out wrong,” he added.
The Corps must identify how those negative biases affect the evaluations, promotions and opportunities given to Marines, to take the “emotion” out of those processes and give every Marine a fair chance to succeed.
‘Beau Geste’ – by P.C. Wren – 1924 Novel – French Foreign Legion Fighting Islamic Rebels in Africa
1939 radio drama hosted by Orson Welles and starring Sir Laurence Olivier.
Episode from the CBS radio anthology series ‘The Campbell Playhouse’.
Broadcast on 17 March 1939.
Cast: Orson Welles as Michael ‘Beau’ Geste
Laurence Olivier as John Geste
Noah Beery as Sergeant Lejaune
Naomi Campbell as Isobel
Isabel Elson as Lady Brandon
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Text of novel available online – Copyright Free Canada – https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140819
The Message Coming To My Eyes Says…
Do Masks Work? A Review of The Evidence – by Jeffrey H. Anderson – 11 Aug 2021
“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”
Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.
Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.
The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.
How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?
Since we are constantly told that the CDC and other public-health entities are basing their recommendations on science, it’s crucial to know what, specifically, has been found in various medical studies. Significant choices about how our republic should function cannot be made on the basis of science alone—they require judgment and the weighing of countless considerations—but they must be informed by knowledge of it.
In truth, the CDC’s, U.K.’s, and WHO’s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks’ effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans’ many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies—none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began. In general, observational studies are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find.
A particular favorite of the CDC’s, so much so that the agency put out a glowing press release on it and continues to give it pride of placement in its brief, is an observational (specifically, cohort) study focused on two Covid-positive hairstylists at a beauty salon in Missouri. The two stylists, who were masked, provided services for 139 people, who were mostly masked, for several days after developing Covid-19 symptoms. The 67 customers who subsequently chose to get tested for the coronavirus tested negative, and none of the 72 others reported symptoms.
This study has major limitations. For starters, any number of the 72 untested customers could have had Covid-19 but been asymptomatic, or else had symptoms that they chose not to report to the Greene County Health Department, the entity doing the asking. The apparent lack of spread of Covid-19 could have been a result of good ventilation, good hand hygiene, minimal coughing by the stylists, or the fact that stylists generally, as the researchers note, “cut hair while clients are facing away from them.” The researchers also observe that “viral shedding” of the coronavirus “is at its highest during the 2 to 3 days before symptom onset.” Yet no customers who saw the stylists when they were at their most contagious were tested for Covid-19 or asked about symptoms. Most importantly, this study does not have a control group. Nobody has any idea how many people, if any, would have been infected had no masks been worn in the salon. Late last year, at a gym in Virginia in which people apparently did not wear masks most of the time, a trainer tested positive for the coronavirus. As CNN reported, the gym contacted everyone whom the trainer had coached before getting sick—50 members in all—“but not one member developed symptoms.” Clearly, this doesn’t prove that not wearing masks prevents transmission.
Another CDC-highlighted study, by Rader et al., invited people across the country to answer a survey. The low (11 percent) response rate—including about twice as many women as men—indicated that the mix of respondents was hardly random. The study found that “a high percentage of self-reported face mask-wearing is associated with a higher probability of transmission control,” and “the highest percentage of reported mask wearers” are found, unsurprisingly, “along the coasts and southern border, and in large urban areas.” However, as the researchers note, “It is difficult to disentangle individuals’ engagement in mask-wearing from their adoption of other preventive hygiene practices, and mask-wearing might serve as a proxy for other risk avoidance behaviors not queried.” Moreover, achieving greater “transmission control” is not remotely the same thing as ensuring fewer deaths. For example, per capita, Utah is in the top ten in the nation in Covid-19 cases and the bottom ten in Covid-19 deaths, while Massachusetts is in the bottom half in cases and the top five in deaths.
An additional observational study, but one that the CDC does not reference in its brief, is a large, international Bayesian study by Leech, et al. It finds that mask-wearing by 100 percent of the population “corresponds to” a 24.6 percent reduction in transmission of the novel coronavirus. Mask mandates correspond to no decrease in transmission: “For mandates we see no reduction: 0.0 percent.” Like all observational studies, however, this study is ill-equipped to show causation, to separate out the effects of just one variable from among other, frequently related, ones.
Mask supporters often claim that we have no choice but to rely on observational studies instead of RCTs, because RCTs cannot tell us whether masks work or not. But what they really mean is that they don’t like what the RCTs show.
The randomized controlled trial dates, in a sense, to 1747, when Royal Navy surgeon James Lind divided seamen suffering from similar cases of scurvy into six pairs and tried different methods of treatment on each. Lind writes, “The consequence was, that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of oranges and lemons.”
The RCT eventually became firmly established as the most reliable way to test medical interventions. The following passage, from Abdelhamid Attia, an M.D. and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cairo University in Egypt, conveys its dominance:
The importance of RCTs for clinical practice can be illustrated by its impact on the shift of practice in hormone replacement therapy (HRT). For decades HRT was considered the standard care for all postmenopausal, symptomatic and asymptomatic women. Evidence for the effectiveness of HRT relied always on observational studies[,] mostly cohort studies. But a single RCT that was published in 2002 . . . has changed clinical practice all over the world from the liberal use of HRT to the conservative use in selected symptomatic cases and for the shortest period of time. In other words, one well conducted RCT has changed the practice that relied on tens, and probably hundreds, of observational studies for decades.
A randomized controlled trial divides participants into different groups on a randomized basis. At least one group receives an “intervention,” or treatment, that is generally tested against a control group not receiving the intervention. The twofold strength of an RCT is that it allows researchers to isolate one variable—to test whether a given intervention causes an intended effect—while at the same time making it very hard for researchers to produce their own preferred outcomes.
This is true at least so long as an RCT’s findings are based on “intention-to-treat” analysis, whereby all participants are kept in the treatment group to which they were originally assigned and none are excluded from the analysis, regardless of whether they actually received the intended treatment. Eric McCoy, an M.D. at the University of California, Irvine, explains that intention-to-treat analysis avoids bias and “preserves the benefits of randomization, which cannot be assumed when using other methods of analysis.”
Such other methods of analysis include subgroup, multivariable, and per-protocol analysis. Subgroup analysis is susceptible to “cherry-picking”—as researchers hunt for anything showing statistical significance—or to being swayed by random chance. In one famous example, aspirin was found to help prevent fatal heart attacks, but not in the subgroups where patients’ astrological signs were Gemini or Libra.
“Multivariable analysis,” writes Marlies Wakkee, an M.D. and Ph.D. at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, “only adjusts for measured confounding”—that which a researcher decides is worth examining. (Confounders are extra variables that affect the analysis; for example, eating ice cream may be found to correlate with sunburns, but heat is a confounding variable influencing both.) She adds, “This is a significant difference compared to randomized controlled trials, where the randomization process results in an equal distribution of all potential confounders, known and unknown.”
Per-protocol analysis departs from randomization by basically allowing participants to self-select into, or out of, an intervention group. McCoy writes, “Empirical evidence suggests that participants who adhere [to research protocols] tend to do better than those who do not adhere, regardless of assignment to active treatment or placebo.” In other words, per-protocol analysis is more likely to suggest that an intervention, even a fake one, worked. Of these three departures from intention-to-treat analysis, per-protocol analysis is perhaps the most extreme.
With these different methods of analysis in mind, it becomes easier to evaluate the 14 RCTs, conducted around the world, that have tested the effectiveness of masks in reducing the transmission of respiratory viruses. Of these 14, the two that have directly tested “source control”—the oft-repeated claim that wearing a mask benefits others—are a good place to start.
A 2016 study in Beijing by MacIntyre, et al. that claimed to find a possible benefit of masks did not prove very informative, as only one person in the control group—and one in the mask group—developed a laboratory-confirmed infection. Much more illuminating was a 2010 study in France by Canini, et al., which randomly placed sick people, or “index patients,” and their household contacts together into either a mask group or a no-mask control group. The authors “observed a good adherence to the intervention,” meaning that the index patients generally wore the furnished three-ply masks as intended. (No one else was asked to wear them.) Within a week, 15.8 percent of household contacts in the no-mask control group and 16.2 percent in the mask group developed an “influenza-like illness” (ILI). So, the two groups were essentially dead even, with the sliver of an advantage observed in the control group not being statistically significant. The authors write that the study “should be interpreted with caution since the lack of statistical power prevents us to draw formal conclusion regarding effectiveness of facemasks in the context of a seasonal epidemic.” However, they state unequivocally, “In various sensitivity analyses, we did not identify any trend in the results suggesting effectiveness of facemasks.”
With the two RCTs that directly tested source control providing essentially no support for the claim that wearing a mask benefits others, what about RCTs that test the combination of source control and wearer protection? By dividing participants into a hand-hygiene group, a hand-hygiene group that also wore masks, and a control group, three RCTs allow us to see whether the addition of masks (worn both by the sick person and others) provided any benefit over hand hygiene alone.
A 2010 study by Larson, et al. in New York found that those in the hand-hygiene group were less likely to develop any symptoms of an upper respiratory infection (42 percent experienced symptoms) than those in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (61 percent). This statistically significant finding suggests that wearing a mask actually undermines the benefits of hand hygiene.
A multivariable analysis of this same study found a significant difference in secondary attack rates (the rate of transmission to others) between the mask-plus-hands group and the control group. On this basis, the authors maintain that mask-wearing “should be encouraged during outbreak situations.” However, this multivariable analysis also found significantly lower rates in crowded homes—“i.e., more crowded households had less transmission”—which tested at a higher confidence level. Thus, to the extent that this multivariable analysis provided any support for masks, it provided at least as much support for crowding.
Two other studies found no statistically significant differences between their mask-plus-hands and hands-only groups. A 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. observed very similar results for both groups. A CDC-funded 2009 study in Hong Kong by Cowling, et al. observed that the hands-only group generally did better than the mask-plus-hands group, but not to a statistically significant degree. Subgroup analysis by Cowling, et al., limited to interventions started within 36 hours of the onset of symptoms, found that the mask-plus-hands group beat the control group to a statistically significant degree in one measure, while the hands-only group beat the control group to a statistically significant degree in two measures. Summarizing this study, Canini writes that “no additional benefit was observed when facemask [use] was added to hand hygiene by comparison with hand hygiene alone.”
So, if masks don’t improve on hand hygiene alone, what about masks versus nothing?
Various RCTs have studied this question, with evidence of masks’ effectiveness proving sparse at best. Aside from a 2009 study in Japan by Jacobs, et al.—which found that those in the mask group were significantly more likely to experience headaches and that “face mask use in health care workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit”—only two RCTs have produced statistically significant findings in intention-to-treat analysis, and one of those studies contradicted itself.
The previously mentioned 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. found that the secondary attack rate of ILI was twice as high in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (18 percent) as in the control group (9 percent), a statistically significant difference. (The ILI rate was 17 percent in the hand-hygiene-only group.) Finding essentially the same thing in multivariable analysis, the researchers wrote that, relative to the control group, the odds ratios for both the mask-plus-hands group and the hands-only group “were twofold in the opposite direction from the hypothesized protective effect.”
Subsequently, a small 2014 study—with 164 participants—by Barasheed, et al. of Australian pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, staying in close quarters in tents, found that significantly fewer people in the mask group developed an ILI than in the control group (31 percent to 53 percent). Unlike the exact fever specifications utilized in other RCTs, however, this study accepted self-reporting of “subjective” fever in determining whether someone had an ILI. Lab tests revealed opposite results, with twice as many participants having developed respiratory viruses in the mask group as in the control group. These lab-test findings were not statistically significant; still, the lab tests’ greater reliability makes it far from clear that the masks in this study provided any genuine benefit.
Other RCTs found no statistically significant benefit from masks in intention-to-treat analysis. A 2008 pilot study by Cowling et al. in Hong Kong observed that secondary attack rates, using the CDC’s definition of ILI, were twice as high in the mask group (8 percent) as in the hand hygiene (4 percent) or control (4 percent) groups, but these observed differences were not statistically significant.
Other methods of analysis, deviating from intention-to-treat analysis, found the following.
A per-protocol analysis of a 2009 study in Sydney by MacIntyre, et al. found a significant effect when combining the surgical-mask group with a group wearing N95 hospital respirators. However, the authors write, a “causal link cannot be demonstrated because adherence was not randomized.”
In subgroup analysis of 2010 and 2012 studies in Michigan by Aiello, et al., limited to the final several weeks of the respective studies, each study’s mask-plus-hands group had significantly lower rates of ILI than its control group, while its mask-only group did not. In 2010, the results for the mask-only group also hinted at a slight benefit, reducing ILI by an observed (but not statistically significant) 8 percent to 10 percent. In 2012, the authors concluded, “Masks alone did not provide a benefit.” They nevertheless recommended the combination of mask use and hand hygiene, despite not having tested whether that combination works better than hand hygiene alone.
A multivariable analysis of a smallish (218 participants) 2012 study in Germany by Suess, et al. found that combining the mask group and mask-plus-hands group, while limiting analysis to interventions begun within 48 hours, produced a finding of significantly lower levels of lab-confirmed influenza (but not of ILI) in that combined group (but not in either group separately). The authors, from Berlin, recommended masking and hand hygiene, while opining, “Concerns about acceptability and tolerability of the interventions should not be a reason against their recommendation.”
The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.
This study—the first RCT on Covid-19 transmission—apparently had difficulty getting published. After the study’s eventual publication, Vinay Prasad, an M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, described it as “thoughtful,” “useful,” and “well done,” but noted (with criticism), “Some have turned to social media to ask why a trial that may diminish enthusiasm for masks and may be misinterpreted was published in a top medical journal.”
Meanwhile, the CDC website portrays the Danish RCT (with its 4,800 participants) as being far less relevant or important than the observational study of Missouri hairdressers with no control group, dismissing the former as “inconclusive” and “too small” while praising the latter, amazingly, as “showing that wearing a mask prevented the spread of infection”—when it showed nothing of the sort.
Each of the RCTs discussed so far, 13 in all, examined the effectiveness of surgical masks, finding little to no evidence of their effectiveness and some evidence that they might actually increase viral transmission. None of these 13 RCTs examined the effectiveness of cloth masks. “Cloth face coverings,” according to former CDC director Robert Redfield, “are one of the most powerful weapons we have.”
One RCT tested these masks that so many high-profile public-health officials have touted. This “first RCT of cloth masks,” in the trial’s own words (it is apparently still the only one), was a 2015 study by MacIntyre, et al. in Hanoi, Vietnam. A relatively large study, with over 1,100 participants, it tested cloth masks against surgical masks and did not feature a no-mask control group. The trial tested the protection of health-care workers, instructing them to wear a two-layer cloth mask at all times on every shift (“except in the toilet or during tea or lunch breaks”) across four weeks.
The study found that those in the cloth-mask group were 13 times more likely (2.28 percent to 0.17 percent) to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical-mask group—a statistically significant difference. The trial also lab-tested penetration rates and found that while surgical masks were “poor” at preventing the penetration of particles—letting 44 percent through—cloth masks were “extremely poor,” letting 97 percent through. (N95 hospital respirators let 0.1 percent through.)
The authors write that wearing a cloth mask “may potentially increase the infection risk” for health-care workers. “The virus may survive on the surface of the facemasks,” they explain, while “a contaminated cloth mask may transfer pathogen from the mask to the bare hands of the wearer,” which could lead to hand hygiene being “compromised.” As for double-masking, the authors write, “Observations during SARS suggested double-masking . . . increased the risk of infection because of moisture, liquid diffusion and pathogen retention.” Absent further research, they conclude, “cloth masks should not be recommended.”
MacIntyre and several other authors of this study, perhaps under pressure from the CDC or other entities with similar agendas, released what the CDC calls a “follow up study,” in September 2020. This follow-up isn’t really a study at all, certainly not a new RCT, yet the CDC cites it favorably while disparaging the original study, which, the CDC asserts, “had a number of limitations.” This 2020 follow-up pretty much amounts to publishing the finding that when hospitals washed the cloth masks, health-care workers were only about half as likely to get infected as when they washed the cloth masks themselves. Still, the 2020 publication says, “We do not recommend cloth masks for health workers,” much as the 2015 one said.
Other reviews of the evidence have been mixed but generally have come to similar conclusions. Certain masking advocates admit that the RCT evidence is “inconclusive” but cite other forms of evidence that have held up poorly. A study for Cochrane Reviews by Jefferson, et al. that examines 13 of the 14 RCTs discussed herein (all but the Denmark Covid-19 study) notes “uncertainty about the effects of face masks” and writes that “the pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza.” Meantime, a study by Perski, et al., which performed a Bayesian analysis on 11 of the 14 RCTs discussed herein, concluded that when it comes to “the benefits or harms of wearing face masks . . . the scientific evidence should be considered equivocal.” They write, “Available evidence from RCTs is equivocal as to whether or not wearing face masks in community settings results in a reduction in clinically- or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections.”
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
Hiram Powers, the nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor, keenly observed, “The eye is the window to the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will, are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth.” The best available scientific evidence suggests that the American people, credulously trusting their public-health officials, have been blocking the door to the soul without blocking the transmission of the novel coronavirus.
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Jeffrey H. Anderson served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021, and is co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, part of college football’s Bowl Championship Series formula from 1998 to 2014.
The Covidian Cult (Part III) – by C. J. Hopkins – 2 Sept 2021
In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”
In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not obvious.
Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you are an unrivaled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”
Yes, I know, reality is reality … that’s why I’m putting all these terms in scare quotes, so, please, spare me the lengthy emails conclusively proving the reality of reality and try to understand how this works.
There is reality (whatever you believe it is), and there is “reality,” which dictates how our societies function. “Reality” is constructed (i.e., simulated), collectively, according to the ideology of whatever system controls society. In the past, “reality” was openly ideological, regardless of which “reality” you lived in, because there were other competing “realities” out there. There aren’t anymore. There is only the one “reality,” because the entire planet — yes, including China, Russia, North Korea, and wherever — is controlled by one globally hegemonic system.
A globally hegemonic system has no need for ideology, because it doesn’t have to compete with rival ideologies. So it erases ideology and replaces it with “reality.” Reality (whatever you personally believe it is, which of course is what it really is) is not actually erased. It just doesn’t matter, because you do not get to dictate “reality.” Global capitalism gets to dictate “reality,” or, more accurately, it simulates “reality,” and in so doing simulates the opposite of “reality,” which is equally if not more important.
This global-capitalist-manufactured “reality” is a depoliticized, ahistorical “reality,” which forms an invisible ideological boundary establishing the limits of what is “real.” In this way, global capitalism (a) conceals its ideological nature, and (b) renders any and all ideological opposition automatically illegitimate, or, more accurately, non-existent. Ideology as we knew it disappears. Political, ethical, and moral arguments are reduced to the question of what is “real” or “factual,” which the GloboCap “experts” and “fact checkers” dictate.
Also, because this “reality” is not a cohesive ideological system with fundamental values, core principles, and so on, it can be drastically revised or completely replaced more or less at a moment’s notice. Global capitalism has no fundamental values — other than exchange value, of course — and thus it is free to manufacture any kind of “reality” it wants, and replace one “reality” with a new “reality” any time that serves its purposes, like stagehands changing a theatrical set.
For example, the “Global War on Terror,” which was the official “reality” from 2001 until it was canceled in the Summer of 2016, when the “War on Populism” was officially launched. Or, now, the “New Normal,” which replaced the “War on Populism” in the Spring of 2020. Each of which new simulations of “reality” was rolled out abruptly, clumsily even, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of a Hate Week speech.
Seriously, think about where we are currently, 18 months into our new “reality,” then go back and review how GloboCap blatantly rolled out the New Normal in the Spring of 2020 … and the majority of the masses didn’t even blink. They seamlessly transitioned to the new “reality” in which a virus, rather than “white supremacists,” or “Russian agents,” or “Islamic terrorists,” had become the new official enemy. They put away the scripts they had been reciting verbatim from for the previous four years, and the scripts they had been reciting from for the previous 15 years before that, and started frantically jabbering Covid cult-speak like they were auditioning for an over-the-top Orwell parody.
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Which brings us to the problem of the Covidian cult … how to get through to them, which, make no mistake, we have to do, one way or another, or the New Normal will become our permanent “reality.”
I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic, an agent of demonic forces, an enemy of all that is “real” and “true.”
The Scientologists would label you a “suppressive person.” The New Normals call you a “conspiracy theorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “virus denier.” The specific epithets don’t really matter. They are just labels that cult members and totalitarians use to demonize those they perceive as “enemies” … anyone challenging the “reality” of the cult, or the “reality” of the totalitarian system.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can’t talk people out of a cult, and you can’t talk them out of totalitarianism. Usually, what you do, in the case of a cult, is, you get the person out of the cult. You kidnap them, take them to a safehouse or wherever, surround them with a lot of non-cult members, and deprogram them gradually over the course of several days. You do this because, while they are still inside the cult, you cannot get through to them. They cannot hear you. A cult is a collective, self-contained “reality.” Its power flows from the social organism composed of the cult leaders and the other cult members. You cannot “talk” this power away. You have to physically remove the person from it before you can begin to reason with them.
Unfortunately, we do not have this option. The New Normal is a global totalitarian system. There is no “outside” of the system to retreat to. We can’t kidnap everyone and take them to Sweden. As I noted in Part I of this series, the cult/society paradigm has been inverted. The cult has become the dominant society, and those of us who have not been converted have become a collection of isolated islands existing, not outside, but within the cult.
So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.
In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.
That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.
Stop arguing with them on their terms, and instead directly attack their “reality.” When they start jabbering about the virus, the variants, the “vaccines,” and all the other Covid cult-speak, do not get sucked into their narrative. Do not respond as if they were rational. Respond as if they were talking about “Xenu,” “body thetans,” “Helter Skelter,” or any other cultoid nonsense, because that it is exactly what it is. Same goes for their rules and restrictions, the “face coverings,” the “social distancing,” and so on. Stop arguing against them on the grounds that they don’t work. Of course they don’t work, but that is not the point (and arguing that way sucks you into their “reality”). Oppose them because of what they are, a collection of bizarre compliance rituals performed to cement allegiance to the cult and create a general atmosphere of “deadly pandemic.”
There are many ways to go about doing this, i.e., generating internal conflict. I have been doing it my way, others are doing it theirs. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not, start. Do it however and wherever you can. Make the New Normals face the monster, the monster they are feeding … the monster they have become.
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CJ Hopkins
September 2, 2021
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Joe Rogan Criticized As ‘Anti-Science’ For Surviving COVID – Took Ivermectin and Had One Bad Day – Liberals, Media Outraged
What if I was Romeo in black jeans? What if I was Heathcliff? It’s no myth…
Did ‘gender studies’ lose Afghanistan?
How Ivy League diplomats sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s imageAugust 19, 2021 | 5:35 am
(Getty Images)Written by:
Cockburn
Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is twenty years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different?On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels, and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking.Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities. Only after total victory is the process of remaking a society feasible.
But America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by “shortcut” Cockburn means “something that takes ten times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras.” America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry “colonialism,” but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan.
According to U.S. government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for “gender.” That makes sense, since the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard.
Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 per cent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in “democracy” created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a “National Masculinity Alliance”, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their “gender roles” and “examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.”Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis.
The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the “nation building” that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting.
To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.But instead of rattling off anecdotes, perhaps a single video clip will do the job. Dadaism and conceptual art are of dubious value even in the West, but at some point some person who is not in prison for fraud decided that Afghan women would be uplifted by teaching them about Marcel Duchamp:
https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=wdrvpSfJM1w
Classes on conceptual art for post-taliban Afghan women
Watch the video, and you can see the exact point (specifically, 31 seconds in) where the American mission in Afghanistan dies.
Biden invoking son Beau’s death – Life long pattern of fictionalized personal history – by Scott Ritter
Six years ago, Beau Biden died of brain cancer. In the intervening time, his honorable, but normal, service in the Delaware National Guard has been transformed by his dad into a myth insulting to real combat veterans.
One of the toughest jobs a president of the United States has is his role as commander-in-chief. Ordering the men and women who wear the uniform of the US military, and who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, into harm’s way is no small thing.
This task is only exceeded by the need to explain this decision to the people and, more importantly, to the families and loved ones, following the death of one or more service members while carrying out the president’s orders.
Joe Biden was called upon to carry out this daunting task when, on August 26, a suicide bomber took the lives of 13 US servicemembers while they were processing Afghan civilians as part of the evacuation out of Kabul, ordered by him on August 12. In a televised address to the nation, Biden praised the 13 fallen servicemembers as “heroes who have been engaged in a dangerous, selfless mission to save the lives of others.”
The president then invoked the memory of his dead son, Beau, without mentioning his name. “Being the father of an Army major,” Biden said, “who served for a year in Iraq and, before that, was in Kosovo as a US attorney for the better part of six months in the middle of a war… when he came home after a year in Iraq, he was diagnosed, like many, many coming home, with an aggressive and lethal cancer of the brain… who we lost.” Beau Biden served in the Delaware National Guard where, in 2008-2009, he deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer.
During his campaign for president in 2020, Biden often spoke of his son’s military service. One of the more memorable occasions came in September 2020, when The Atlantic published an explosive article accusing then-President Trump of calling fallen US servicemembers “losers and suckers” (many details of The Atlantic’s story have since been debunked.)
Joe Biden was quick to attack Trump, again using Beau’s service as a foil. “When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the attorney general and went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he wasn’t a sucker,” Joe Biden responded, adding: “The servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not ‘losers’.”
In an interview with ABC News that aired on August 20, Joe Biden again brought up Beau’s service. When asked why the US could not have withdrawn from Afghanistan with dignity, Biden invoked Beau’s service in a manner which sought to equate it with the present circumstances. “Look,” Biden said, “that’s like asking my deceased son Beau, who spent six months in Kosovo and a year in Iraq as a Navy captain and then major – I mean, as an Army major. And, you know, I’m sure he had regrets coming out of Afghanistan – I mean, out of Iraq. He had regrets to what’s, how, how it’s going. But the idea… what’s the alternative? The alternative is why are we staying in Afghanistan? Why are we there?”
This effort to portray Beau Biden’s service in Iraq as equivalent to what was transpiring in Afghanistan is not only factually flawed – when Beau returned home in 2009, he was not part of a defeated cohort returning from a lost war – but off-putting to many men and women who have served in Afghanistan. Many of them, together with their families, took umbrage at President Biden’s glorification of his son’s service at the expense of their own.
Mark Schmitz, the father of Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jared Schmidtz, one of 13 US servicemembers who died in the suicide bomb attack, noted that Joe Biden repeatedly brought up Beau during their meeting at Dover Air Force Base, where the remains of Jared and the other fallen had been returned to the United States. “When he just kept talking about his son so much it was just… my interest was lost in that. I was more focused on my own son than what happened with him and his son,” Schmitz said. “I’m not trying to insult the president, but it just didn’t seem that appropriate to spend that much time on his own son.”
Beau Biden was commissioned in the Delaware National Guard at the age of 34. As a lawyer, Beau received a direct commission into the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. The required training for this role amounts to around 18 weeks of training, most of which is academic, familiarising oneself with military law – although rudimentary military skills such as weapons handling, land navigation, and basic tactics are also covered. Beau successfully completed this training and was commissioned as a first lieutenant in 2003.
Beau was elected as Delaware’s Attorney General in 2006. In 2008 his National Guard unit, the 261st Signals Brigade, was mobilized for service in Iraq. The Brigade deployed 110 of its members to serve as the headquarters element of what was known as the 261st Theater Tactical Signal Brigade, which comprised National Guard soldiers from other states along with some active-duty Army personnel. Beau’s unit was based in Camp Victory, a sprawling compound that encompassed Saddam Hussein’s Al-Faw Palace building and grounds.
As an assistant staff judge advocate assigned to Headquarters and Services (H&S) Company, Beau Biden’s actual workload was primarily administrative in nature. The brigade was tasked with providing command and control to assigned and attached units through the supervision of the installation, operation, and maintenance for theater communications systems. Put simply, the 261st Theater Tactical Signal Brigade was not a frontline combat unit.
As a result, the brigade, and therefore Beau, did not experience direct combat; no members were killed or wounded during their Iraqi deployment – a good thing. In an award ceremony at Al-Faw Palace in August 2009, five senior members of the 261st Brigade were presented
with the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service. These included the brigade commander, Brigadier General Scott Chambers, a colonel, two lieutenant colonels, and the command sergeant major. “We have a lot of additional awards that will be presented at a later date to other members of the Task Force,” Chambers said at the time. One of those awards was a Bronze Star Medal presented to Beau Biden.
It is not uncommon for the Bronze Star Medal to be awarded for meritorious service in a combat zone. Indeed, of the 102,345 Bronze Star Medals awarded during Operation Iraqi Freedom, only 2,459 were for acts of heroism. The remaining 99,886 were awarded for meritorious achievement. What Beau Biden did in Iraq to warrant the awarding of a Bronze Star Medal is not yet public information. But the fact that Biden was a captain at the time, and was handed the same award as his commanding general, implies that whatever service he provided had to have been spectacularly above and beyond what would normally be expected of a junior officer serving in a largely administrative capacity. What is certain is that it was not an act of valor.
All this begs the question as to why Joe Biden would continuously exaggerate Beau’s Iraq service. Implying that the Bronze Star Medal was anything other than an inflated award for the normal performance of administrative duties given to the son of a sitting vice president is fanciful. Suggesting it could be linked to any action that resulted in anyone Beau served with in the brigade not coming home – 110 members of the 261st Brigade H&S Company deployed to Iraq in 2008, and 110 returned home in 2009 – is a fantasy.
The extent to which Beau Biden’s service as a National Guard lawyer has been turned into a near-mythical experience cannot be understated. After his death from brain cancer in 2015, Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno spoke at Beau’s funeral service. “Beau Biden possessed the traits I have witnessed in only the greatest leaders,” Odierno said. “Frankly, he was selfless to a fault. He had a natural charisma that few people possess.” That a staff judge advocate of a National Guard unit could be lionized in such terms goes beyond parody, touching on a level of sycophancy exceeded only by Odierno’s posthumous award of the Legion of Merit, an award normally reserved for general officers and colonels for exceptionally meritorious service.
The State of Delaware continued in this vein, awarding Beau the Delaware Distinguished Service Medal and the Conspicuous Service Cross, the highest honors the Delaware National Guard can present. Either Beau Biden was the military’s greatest lawyer, or these awards were given solely because of his last name. The hero worship continued with Governor Markell naming Delaware’s Armed Forces Reserved Center after the Delaware National Guard’s most accomplished lawyer.
Shortly before his death in 2015, Beau Biden announced his intent to run for governor of Delaware. There can be little doubt that his exaggerated exploits during Operation Iraqi Freedom would have factored prominently in his campaign. After Beau’s death, Joe Biden built on the legend he had created about Beau’s life and accomplishments as the centerpiece to a memoir entitled ‘Promise Me, Dad’, based upon a conversation between Joe and Beau that may or may not have occurred, given Joe Biden’s track record of imagined encounters.
This is the crux of the problem with Joe Biden’s Beau complex. Unable to find solace in the simple fact that his son volunteered to serve honorably in a war zone when so many other Americans did not, Joe Biden felt the need to create in Beau what he himself lacked – a persona of larger-than-life military-style leadership and courage. Biden is famous for padding his own resume. But for veterans and active duty servicemembers alike, the exaggeration of Beau Biden’s military accomplishments is a slap in the face for those who did put it all on the line in a capacity other than being the coddled son of a sitting vice president.
For those servicemen and women who stepped up to the line in a combatant capacity and met the enemy head-on, often paying the price with life and limb, to have a president burnish his own credentials on the strength of the pumped-up legacy of his deceased son goes beyond pathetic; it is insulting. The same holds for the families and friends of the fallen. As commander-in-chief, Joe Biden has a duty to honor those who fell carrying out orders he issued, and not use their sacrifice as another opportunity to promote the manufactured legend of a long-departed son.
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Last Plane Out – August in Kabul
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Instrumental
xenagoguevicene 
