Levelling and 911 - Peter Linebaugh ::x:: ----------- portland 20645 CHOMSKY IN THE OREGONIAN They hate our actions, not our freedoms 09/09/02 ----------- 202538 Israel and "Anti-Semitism" (english) Alexander Cockburn ---------- 202503 America Haters (english) David Horowitz ---------Brisbane 2157 Howard Zinn (excerpt) --------- ------ the only truthful item in a deluge of zionprop at cea-usa (everybody else left in disgust it seems) is about what happens when muslim disrespect for women and western licence collide: rape. ----------- zinn on chicago 13361 on Eugene Debs ------ The Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald reviewed at hermetic.???--------------  review from slash.autonomedia.org: Bob Black on 'errorism' ------------------ 202842  IMF extortion/ ARGENTINA UPDATE:Barter, Demos, Theatre, & A DICTIONARY OF CRISIS ----------- 202807 How prevalent is child molestation among homosexuals? --------------- 202756 The Genocide Continues at Oneida, New York ----------------- Afterword: Black Eagle Child Stella Young Bear Meskwaki Bandolier Bag Minneapolis Institute of Art ---------  --------- ---------- Levelling and 911 - Peter Linebaugh hydrarchist writes "The following article was originally published on Counterpunch on September 7th. Levelling and 9/11 On September 11, 1648, the Levellers submitted the Large Petition with 40,000 signatures to Parliament. The deed was decisive because it set in motion the terrible events that culminated four months later in the execution of Charles Stuart, King of England, and because the Levellers, the first popular democratic political party in European, if not world, history, announced their opposition to the enclosures of the commons, or the privatization of the English land. It seems to be a pure coincidence that the Large Petition and the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers took place on the same day and month, though the former was three and a half centuries earlier. The coincidence arises like magic from the dull miasma of created amnesia. We have forgotten the history of freedom and the commons. This is not accidental either: the ruling class dumbs us down, and the dumbing starts at the top. Ten days after the 9/11 attack President Bush addressed the nation, the Congress, and Tony Blair, prime minister of England. "America has no truer friend than Great Britain," he said. "Once again, we are joined together in a great cause," referring as he often would in the speech to Churchill and Roosevelt and the Anglo-American alliance of the Second World War. What was the cause? Here the amnesia sets in, and the tragedy becomes farce. The terrorists "hate us for our freedoms ­ our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech." This was the lie, because the cause which Churchill and Roosevelt expressed was fourfold, the Four Freedoms. Bush gets two right, the two "of" freedoms (speech, worship), but he gets two wrong, mendaciously omitting the two "from" freedoms, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. Freedom from want summarized social security, unemployment insurance, workers' comp, aid to families with dependent children. Freedom from fear summarized our legal protections against the midnight knock, the police state, and the 'strange fruit' of Southern trees. These were the freedoms of the poor, the powerless, the parents, the old, the sick, the injured. These were the four brass chords of mobilization trumpeted "everywhere in the world" (Atlantic Charter). Against them is Bush's squeaky baby fife, tweet, tweet. Despite his disgraceful omission the commentators oohed and ahhed. History was not being made; it was being re-written. We do not blame Bush's English history profs at Yale ­ I doubt he had any. Anyway, the problem is not confined to the Ivy League. After all Judge Rehnquist (Stanford, '48) gets the date wrong of the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. Remember Clinton, who eviscerated habeas corpus, cruised to power amid a fleet of Rhodes scholars. Against the contented smirk of self-loved ignorance of the President, or the haughty sneer of arrogant calculation of the Chief Justice, the Harvard English literature scholar, Steven Greenblatt, sighs that English history has disappeared from American education. This is true, true at the top. The answer to amnesia from above is history from below. We have to learn about the Magna Carta from subcommandante Marcos. English history comes to us from indigenous movement; it was the liberation fighter of the Shawnee, Tecumseh, for example, who said, the Indians must reclaim the common, "Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?" he cried. The Irish adage, English history happens elsewhere, also applies. The alert Ms. Bridget Connelly, single parent and Toledo journalist, brought to my summer school class the Large Petition of the Levellers, not as coincidence, but asking its meaning. Its meaning is extraordinary because it deals directly with the two planetary discussions which were put an end to by the terror of 9/11, namely, the commons and reparations. In the summer of 2001 people from around the planet gathered in Italy and South Africa to discuss the issues of our time. In Genoa, answering Thatcher's vulgar determinism of TINA ('there is no alternative'), people affirmed that 'another world is possible' to the enclosures and privatization schemes of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, caused the young activist Carlo Giuliani to be run over, shot, and killed. Meanwhile, in Africa, home to homo sapiens or wo/man the wise, the UN conference on "racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance" raised reparations. On September 5, 2001 the African countries called for an apology for slavery, debt cancellation, the funding of health care, the return of plundered objects, and the acceleration of overseas aid. In response, the U.S. withdrew. A week later, terror on the Twin Towers, and Bush, the plutogogue, piped in the dystopia of oil and terror. The Large Petition was emulated across the length of England, from Tyneside to Somerset weavers, and in between, e.g. thousands of lead miners of Derby in the midst of industrial dispute. The principle behind it was an arrow shot by the Leveller, Richard Overton, "all men are equally and alike born to the like propriety, liberty and freedome" he wrote, specifically including cobblers, tinkers, chimneysweepers, and bellowesmenders. The Large Petition contains 27 demands. I'll discuss them under six heads. The first is popular sovereignty or "the supreme authority of the people" contrasting with the judicial sovereignty of Bush where Rehnquist designated him President despite the scandal of the Florida balloting. The Levellers called for annual elections, fixed times of meetings, and demanded "all persons alike liable to every law of the land so all persons even the highest might fear and stand in awe." "There is nothing more opposite to freedom," they said, than the "power of pressing and forcing any sort of men to serve in wars." Two years earlier and again a year later the Levellers mutinied against the invasion of Ireland, a signal instance of anti-imperialist solidarity recognized in the tradition that claims that the Irish color green originated in the colors of the Leveller soldier, Rainborough. The second group of demands pertain to freedom of worship and speech. They demanded the exemption of "matters of Religion and Gods worship from the compulsive or restrictive power of any authority upon earth." that people not be divided or affrighted from liberty, by superstitious laws concerning blasphemy, heresy, and the supernatural" because liberty is necessary to discover corruption and tyranny. They tolerated Catholicism and atheism, as well as Muslims and Jews, in advance of Milton and Locke. One of Bush's body guards in Detroit dirtied the walls of a suspect's home with "Islam is Evil" "Christ is King." The third heading refers specifically to reparations: "full and ample reparations to all persons that had been oppressed by sentences in High Commission, Star Chamber, and Counsel Board, or by any kind of Monopolizers or Projectors; and that out of the Estates of those that were Authors, Actors, or Promoters of so intolerable mischiefs...." These lines can apply today, when instead of royal courts, the court system of the U.S. by snitch evidence and racial bias sends the poor to prison. As for "Monopolizer or Projectors" the meaning of these words would be conveyed into today's terms as entrepreneur, and at the time in 1648 the first commercial English "triangular" traders set sail for slaves from West Africa. Intolerable mischiefs indeed! Lord Gifford summarized the issue in the House of Lords, "The underdevelopment and poverty which affect the majority of countries in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the ghetto conditions in which many black people live in the United States and elsewhere, are not, speaking in general terms, the result of laziness, incompetence, or corruption of African people or their governments. They are in a very large measure the consequence ­ the legacy ­ of one of the most massive and terrible criminal enterprises in recorded history, that is, the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery." The slave ship, the plantation, the ghetto are followed by the prison as the location for slaves and the descendants of slaves. Therefore, the fourth heading is more essential than ever. It concerns the elementary liberty and individual safeguards against the despotism of King or cop, judge or jackboot. The Levellers were led by John Lilburne, hero of habeas corpus, otherwise sullied by Clinton, mocked by Rehnquist. The Large Petition required that "all tryalls should be only by twelve sworn men." Plea bargaining was unacceptable. Walwyn the Leveller said, "take a Cobler from his seat, or a Butcher from his Shop and let him hear the case." "No conviction but upon two or more sufficient grown witnesses," thus removing the hidden mainspring of the American criminal justice machine, the snitch. Free all people "from being examined against themselves." Free people "from being punished for doing that against which no law hath been provided." The Levellers demanded the release of the thousands who are ruined "by perpetual imprisonment for debt." Victimless crimes and indeterminate sentences were thus proscribed. As a principle the Large Petition demanded that Parliament "proportion punishments more equal to offences." "Abbreviate the proceedings of the law." Congress passed the Patriot (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act of 342 pages. Its scandalous provisions (tracking telephone and internet communication, sneak and peek searches, mandatory unnamed, uncharged detention of 1,100) together with TIPS (Terrorism Information Prevention System) brings back everything but the King's Messengers, the branks and thumbscrews of Star Chamber. Our Bill of Rights, like our Declaration of Independence, owes an unacknowledged debt to the petition of 9/11/1648. It is time to acknowledge it, and no better time than 9/11. The fifth heading perhaps is the most interesting, pertinent, and needed, and for that reason it has been most arduously forgotten. It concerns subsistence. The petitioners told Parliament to "keep people from begging and beggary in so fruitful a Nation;" they instructed Parliament to "abolish excise and all kinds of taxes." Free "all trade and merchandising from all Monopolizing and Engrossing," they said in a direct reference to the pattern of customary consumer conditions known as the 'moral economy.' "Restore the Comunalty of London to their just Rights." Now we come to the C word that has caused a deal of trouble. The twelfth demand of the Large Petition commanded Parliament to "open all late Inclosures of Fens, and other Commons, or have enclosed them only or chiefly to the benefit of the poor" The fens drained, forests emparked, fielden and champion lands surveyed, fenced, and hedged, and wretched misery followed. Yet hunger will break through stone walls, and tears dissolve the foundation of country houses, said the Levellers. Subsistence depended on common right and common good. William Walwyn wished "with all his heart that there was neither Pale, Hedge nor Ditch in the whole Nation." Winstanley the Digger said "there is no reason that some should have so much and others so little." Women led a vigorous anti-enclosure movement. In addition to Captain Ludd and Captain Swing, the social imaginary of the English class struggle produced the terrific phantoms, Robin Hood and Skimmington. The debate was exceptionally rich in 1649. The inventor of the forceps, Peter Chamberlen, wrote, "Meum et tuum divide the world into factions, into atoms." An equality of goods and lands, an agrarian law with annual re-division, called for in August 1649, in a great pamphlet that George Orwell republished. Carrots, parsnips, and peas planted which as fodder could keep cattle alive through the winter. Then came the Rump, regicide, and the republic, and to these we could add the ranch, for cattle raising became the rule for rapacity. The Parliament of landlords which took over politics in 1640 was not interested in preserving a peasantry engaged in subsistence production. Winstanley's communist project dated four days before the execution of Charles I. Digging started two weeks before kingship was abolished on St Patrick's Day ( March 17). Two months later England was declared a commonwealth. Brailsford believed the real reason for the defeat of the Levellers was their failure to remedy the plight of the peasantry. 1656 was the last time Parliament tried to legislate against enclosures; for the subsequent three centuries Parliament enacted enclosures. The freedom from fear and the freedom from want are logically related. Losing the commons leads to the criminalization of the commoner. Hence, individual safeguards of liberty against tyranny of the courts and the police are necessary when the collective responsibility of the common welfare has been corrupted. The Leveller newspaper The Moderate on August 7, 1649 when some poor men were executed for stealing cattle said such crimes originated in private property. "We find some of these felons to be very civil men, and say, that if they could have had any reasonable subsistence by friends, or otherwise, they should never have taken such necessitous courses for support of their wives and families. they argue it with much confidence that property is the original cause of any sin between party and party after civil transactions. And that since the Tyrant is taken off, and their government altered in nomine, so it really to redound to the good of the people in specie." Laurence Clarkson took the argument a step further, "if the creature had brought this world into no propriety, as Mine and Thine, there had been no such title as theft, cheat, or a lie" Alongside the planetary discussions at Genoa and Durban, Al Haber and Staughton Lynd, veterans of SDS and SNCC, called a series of regional mid-western meetings. Our discussion foundered when we raised the issue of "the commons." The late Marty Glaberman (Buick worker, C.L.R. James' comrade, counselor to the Black revolutionary union movements of Detroit) opposed it altogether, finding it idealized. Staughton Lynd offered the experience of the legal suits based on eminent domain against U.S. Steel but he excluded the term 'the commons' saying it was particular to Britain without any meaning at all for Americans. One sees the point. On the one hand, those Founding Fathers repressed the term (Madsion was frightened of "levelling," and Jefferson quoted Levellers but refrained from identifying the party), because the Founders pretended to "find" the boreal forests of the Algonguians and the prairies, woods, and waterways of the Shawnee, the Pottawatomies, at the moment that the indigenous people were confederating on the basis precisely of the commons, or 'the dish with one spoon,' as Joseph Brant of the Iroquois put it. The Founders might accept Leveller formulations of liberty of individuals (Bill of Rights), but not against enclosure. On the other hand, the 20th century anthropologists approached 'the question of the commons' with a Victorian touch, as cabinet specimans ­ Icelandic fisheries, Botswana grazing, Bornean swamps. Thus, the narrative has been blocked. The Levellers, too, made an issue out of the commons. The 18th demand of the 9/11 petition specifically bound all "future Parliaments from abolishing propriety, levelling mens estates, or making all things common." They disclaimed the religious doctrine of communism which was rife indeed. Abiezer Coppe pointed out that true communion "is to have all things common." John Wycliffe, the first to translate the Bible in English, just after the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, translated the early Christians practice (Acts 2:44) to "hadden alle thingis comyn," a wording (but not a spelling) kept in subsequent renditions, though the practice was specifically prohibited by the Prayer Book of the State religion. The earlier Christians "had all things common as every man his need," a view that entered Marx's definition of communism, 'to each according to need.' In the tactical conjuncture in taking on Parliament, an assembly of landlords, this compromise was felt necessary, if they were to get the Roundheads to prosecute the King. They demanded the execution of "Justice upon the capital authors and promoters of the former and late wars" and they pressed for immediate trial of the king. The Levellers on 9/11/1648 believed they could obtain some redress by killing the King. However, capital punishment backfired, inciting a spirit of revenge and creating a Royalist party where there had never been one before. The parallel is to the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were no more merely symbols of finance capitalism or imperialism than Charles Stuart was actually a "Crown." To gain support for regicide, the Levellers compromised the universality of the commons. Yet, the repressed has returned. There is a deep historical practice, that is world-wide, and within memory: shared labor of cooperation, common uses of the product of labor, shared use of common pool resources (land, water, air, oil, electro-magnetic spectrum, bio-sphere), and in the event of disaster, scarcity, famine, common deprivation. With this practice there is also the historical experience of intentional transformations such as the Levellers and the Diggers (England) or Babeuf and the Equals (France), or Marx and Engels and the communists (Germany). From the Sem Terra movement of land occupation in Brazil ("seeds are the property of humankind") to the digital commons, or free software movement, of the hacker Richard Stallman, who created a "little puddle of freedom," from Papua to El Salvador, from Pakistan to Nigeria, from Chiapas to Amazonas, the migrants remember and must remind "Americans" that the story is only half told. The Greens have recalled the commons; let them recall the Levellers too, their color cognates. In the mid-west, the welfare of some commons is threatened by two forces ­ nuclear power (war) and genetic modification (plants). 25 miles from Toledo on Lake Erie squats the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant. The profits are private, but the cost is common. Boric acid has eaten away the reactor head. Only three-eighths of an inch of steel stands between us and a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. The NRC intervened ­ shockingly so, for it protected private profits, ignored t risks, and failed to shut it down. It is incapable of acting for the commons. The hole in the head has only grown. Readers all over the country this summer have been startled by the grave and tender warnings Barbara Kingsolver makes on behalf of bio-diversity. The genetic modification of corn is destroying the strains which were first brought to the Ohio country from meso-America a millenium ago by the Hopewell people. Once it is understood that the GM corn has contaminated the Mexican land-mass our anger must confront the genetic terror. The planetary germ-plasm is a commons befalling generation on generation, and it is at risk. Winstanley "For if ever the Creation be restored, this is the way, which lies in this twofold power. First, Community of Mankind. Second, Community of the Earth. These two communities, or rather, one in two branches, is that true Levelling." Naturally, John Evelyn, the royalist diarist, hated the Levellers and the Diggers, and yet he loved his fruits more than he hated the commons, and thus the aristocratic pomologist stated flatly, "We do seriously prefer a very wild orchard." Two towns have been named after the Lessing family in Nottinghamshire, a county where the Levellers had once been strong, and before them, Robin Hood. One is Lexington, Massachusetts, and the other is Laxton. In the former, the shot heard around the world was fired, in the latter, open field cooperation still prevailed at the time of the Atlantic Charter. Then, H.N. Brailsford, the historian of the Levellers, tramped about the muddy ploughed lands of the last open field agriculture of England, while in Placentia Bay FDR instructed Churchill as to the Four Freedoms. The seed-bed of 'the freedom from want' lies precisely and historically in the commons. That is English history from the ground. What was remarkable is that where Brailsford last heard of commoning practices, England apart, was among elder Pathans of Afghanistan, which the Americans are so intent now on destroying. An older school of historical materialists said the Levellers were ahead of their times. The only trouble with that is that they were ahead of ours as well. How can we catch up? The answer to this, as well as to Ms Bridget Connelly's question, is this: reparations for harm done cannot be re-paid by capital punishment of those on thrones or in Towers, and the commons must be advocated unequivocally "everywhere in the world." Parliament intended to pass an Act of Oblivion against the Levellers. On 9/11 the Levellers demanded instead "a most honourable Act of perpetual rememberance, to be as a pattern of publik vertue, fidelity, & resolution to all posterity." "The past is not dead. It is not even past," as William Faulkner said. No coincidences -------------  ------------ portland 20645 CHOMSKY IN THE OREGONIAN They hate our actions, not our freedoms 09/09/02 Noam Chomsky S ept. 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. From Our Advertiser Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good. It is also the merest sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms," as President Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons. The president is not the first to ask, "Why do they hate us?" In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the campaign of hatred against us (in the Arab world), not by the governments but by the people." His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: The United States supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region. Post-Sept. 11 surveys in the Arab world reveal that the same reasons hold today, compounded with resentment over specific policies. Strikingly, that is even true of privileged, Western-oriented sectors in the region. We do ourselves few favors by choosing to believe that "they hate us" and "hate our freedoms." On the contrary, these are attitudes of people who like Americans and admire much about the United States, including its freedoms. What they hate is official policies that deny them the freedoms to which they too aspire, such as in Pakistan, where the military regime has delayed the promise of democracy. For such reasons, the post-Sept. 11 rantings of Osama bin Laden -- for example, about U.S. support for corrupt and brutal regimes, or about the U.S. "invasion" of Saudi Arabia -- have a certain resonance, even among those who despise and fear him. From resentment, anger and frustration, terrorist bands hope to draw support and recruits. We should also be aware that much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the United States has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few, that meet official U.S. definitions of terrorism -- that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies. In the most sober establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999, "While the United States regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower . . . the single greatest external threat to their societies." Such perceptions are not changed by the fact that, on Sept. 11, for the first time, a Western country was subjected on home soil to a horrendous terrorist attack of a kind all too familiar to victims of Western power. The attack goes far beyond what's sometimes called the "retail terror" of the IRA, FLN or Red Brigade. The Sept. 11 terrorism elicited harsh condemnation throughout the world and an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims. But with qualifications. An international Gallup poll in late September found little support for "a military attack" by the United States in Afghanistan. In Latin America, the region with the most experience of U.S. intervention, support ranged from 2 percent in Mexico to 16 percent in Panama. The current "campaign of hatred" in the Arab world is, of course, also fueled by U.S. policies toward Israel-Palestine and Iraq. The United States has provided the crucial support for Israel's harsh military occupation, now in its 35th year. One way to lessen Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be to stop refusing to join the longstanding international consensus that calls for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live in peace and security, including a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories, perhaps with minor and mutual border adjustments. In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under U.S. pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -- perhaps more people "than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history," military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1999. Washington's present justifications to attack Iraq have far less credibility than when President Bush No. 1 was welcoming Saddam as an ally and a trading partner after he had committed his worst brutalities -- as in Halabja, where Iraq attacked Kurds with poison gas in 1988. At the time, the murderer Saddam was more dangerous than he is today. As for a U.S. attack against Iraq, no one, including Donald Rumsfeld, can realistically guess the possible costs and consequences. Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions. They presumably also welcome the "Bush doctrine" that proclaims the right of attack against potential threats, which are virtually limitless. The President has announced that "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." That's true. Threats are everywhere, even at home. The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organizations understand very well. Twenty years ago, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading Arabist, made a point that still holds true. "To offer an honorable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination: That is the solution of the problem of terrorism," he said. "When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitoes." At the time, Israel enjoyed the virtual immunity from retaliation within the occupied territories that lasted until very recently. But Harkabi's warning was apt, and the lesson applies more generally. Well before Sept. 11 it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil. If we insist on creating more swamps, there will be more mosquitoes, with awesome capacity for destruction. If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the "campaigns of hatred," we can not only reduce the threats we face but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously. Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book "9-11." ----------------------- 202538 Israel and "Anti-Semitism" (english) Alexander Cockburn 11:52am Tue Sep 10 '02 (Modified on 1:29pm Tue Sep 10 '02) article#Right in the wake of House Majority leader Dick Armey's explicit call for two million Palestinians to be booted out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza as well, came yet one more of those earnest articles accusing a vague entity called "the left" of anti-Semitism. May 16, 2002 American Journal This one was in Salon, by a man called Dennis Fox, identified as an associate professor of legal studies and psychology at the University of Illinois. Leaving nothing to chance, Salon titled Fox's contribution, "The shame of the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and anti-Semitism are undercutting the moral legitimacy of Israel's critics." Over the past 20 years I've learned there's a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing "the left" of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying strategies. Particularly intricate, though I think well-intentioned, was a recent column by Naomi Klein who wrote that "It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Sharon that the fight against it must be reclaimed." Is Klein saying the anti-globalization movement has forgotten how to be anti-anti-Semitic? I don't think it has. Are all denunciations of the government of Israel to be prefaced by strident assertions of pro-Semitism? If this is the case, can we not ask that those concerned about the supposed silence of the left regarding anti-Semitism demonstrate their own good faith by denouncing Israel's behavior towards Palestinians? Klein did, but most don't. In a recent piece in the New York Times Frank Rich managed to write an entire column puportedly about Jewish overreaction here to news reporting from Israel without even a fleeting reference to the fact that there might be some factual basis for reports presenting Israel and its leaders in a bad light, even though he found time for plenty of abuse for the "inexcusable" Arafat. Isn't Sharon "inexcusable" in Rich's book? So the left gets the rotten eggs and those tossing the eggs mostly don't feel it necessary to concede that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves and in all likelihood ultimately drive them into the sea or Lebanon or Jordan or Dearborn or the space in Dallas/Fort Worth airport between the third and fourth runways (the bold Armey plan). Here's how Fox begins his article for Salon: '"Let's move back," my wife insisted when she saw the nearby banner: "Israel Is a Terrorist State!" We were at the April 20 Boston march opposing Israel's incursion into the West Bank. So drop back we did, dragging our friends with us to wait for an empty space we could put between us and the anti-Israel sign.' Inference by Fox: the banner is grotesque, presumptively anti-Semitic. But there are plenty of sound arguments that from the Palestinian point of view Israel is indeed a terrorist state, and anyway, even if it wasn't, the description would not per se be evidence of anti-Semitism. Only if the banner read "All Jews are terrorists", would Fox have a point. Of course the rhetorical trick is to conflate "Israel" or "the State of Israel" with "Jews" and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo, to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic. Leave aside the fact that many of Israel's most articulate critics are Jews, honorably committed to the cause of justice for all in the Middle East. Many Jews just don't like hearing bad things said about Israel, same way they don't like reading articles about the Jewish lobby here. Mention the lobby and someone like Fox will rush into print denouncing those who "toy with the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the press." These days you can't even say that New York Times is owned by a Jewish family without risking charges that you stand in Goebbels' shoes. I even got accused of anti-Semitism the other day for mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood, which they most certainly did, as recounted in a funny and informative book published in 1988, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler. So cowed are commentators (which is of course the prime motive of those charges of anti-Semitism) that even after the US Congress recently voted full-throated endorsement of Sharon and Israel, with only two senators and 21 US reps (I exclude the chickenshit 28 who voted "present") voting against, you could scarcely find a mainstream paper prepared to analyze this astounding demonstration of the power of AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, plus the Christian Right and the military industrial complex which profits enormously from military aid to Israel since Congress put through a law concerning US overall aid to Israel, to the effect that 75 per cent of such supplies must be bought from US firms like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, lobbying for Israel. The encouraging fact is that despite the efforts of the Southern Povery Law Center to drum up funds by hollering that the Nazis are about to march down Main Street, there's remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US, and almost none that I've ever been able to detect on the American left, which is of course amply stocked with non-self-hating Jews. It's comical to find the left's assailants trudging all the way back to Leroi Jones and the 60s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic jibes. The less encouraging fact is that there's not nearly enough criticism of Israel's ghastly conduct towards Palestinians, which in its present phase is testing the waters for reaction here to a major ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, just as Armey called for. So why don't people like Fox write about Armey's appalling remarks, (which the White House declared he hadn't made,) instead of trying to change the subject with nonsense about anti-Semitism? It's not anti-Semitic to denounce ethnic cleansing, a strategy which according to recent polls, around half all Israeli Jews now heartily endorse. In this instance the left really has nothing to apologize for, but those who accuse of it of anti-Semitism certainly do. They're apologists for policies put into practice by racists, ethnic cleansers and in Sharon's case, an unquestioned war criminal who should be in the dock for his conduct. ------------ 202503 America Haters (english) David Horowitz 9:10am Tue Sep 10 '02 (Modified on 3:43pm Tue Sep 10 '02) article#202503 When your country is attacked there can be no such thing as an "anti-war" movement. Protesters against America's war on terror, are not peaceniks, they are America-haters and saboteurs, and they should be treated as such. "The flag has become a symbol of US aggression towards other countries," declared Jessica Quindel, president of the Graduate Assembly at UC Berkeley as she explained why she and her comrades tried to ban the red, white and blue for the university's 9/11 remembrance. Jessica Quindel is what I call a traitor of the heart, someone who shares with Osama Bin Laden the belief that America is the Great Satan and who would aid and abet any enemy, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein -- it really doesn't matter -- before she would embrace her own country and its defense. This is the creed of the sick Fifth Column in this country, whose base is the pc university and whose intellectual gurus are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. To call these wretched people Benedict Arnolds would be an insult to a man who did betray his country but did so, at least, in behalf of a tolerant democracy. These post-modern traitors do it in behalf of murderers and fanatics, do it in behalf of nothing more, really, than a blind, fanatical hate, which is really a self-hate. Let us respect their right to express themselves, but let us not make the mistake of respecting them. add your own comments ------------------- To fight for Peace in an oxymoron (english) Ron 9:24am Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202509 Fighting for Peace has never worked before. -------------------- SHUT THE FUCK UP (english) Mike 9:24am Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202510 First of i served 5 years in the Marines and I oppose the war because it is nothing more than the conquest for oil. The majority of those who support the war; 1. never served in the military 2. never fought in a war 3. WILL NOT take part in the war 4. their kids WILL NOT take part in the war SO unless u plan on fighting in the front lines; SHUT THE FUCK UP. ------------------------ To Mike (english) Tom Borkal 9:44am Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202513 First of all I doubt you served in the Marines as a Marine must have a High School diploma and know how to spell. Secondly, the concept that only those who serve in the military can express their feeling on US foreign policy or military deployment is absurd. Did you feel the same way about those who advocated placing US forces in Bosnia or Somalia? Thirdly, I am a Gulf War veteran. ------------------ more conservative irrationality (english) . 10:42am Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202526 "Jessica Quindel is what I call a traitor of the heart, someone who shares with Osama Bin Laden the belief that America is the Great Satan" This because Jessica admitted that the flag might represent US aggrssion to some. It doesn't follow. It is an illogical fallacy perpetuated by the paranoid who are leading their country into ruin by their refusal to look at the consequences of their countries policies and actions. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have condemned those who attacked the US as well as US attacks. To say that they are traitors on behalf of murders and fanatics ignores this fact. The author condemns them because they look at US actions as well as the actions of US enemies. It is illogical and irrational. It threatens the existence of the US by refusing to acknowledge any US responsibility for any suffering. Others will respond to the US until all enemies are destroyed, the US is destroyed, or the US takes responsibility for its actions and makes peace with its enemies. There will always be fanatics attacking western ways. How many followers could they get if the US takes some responsibility? Not enough to pose a serious threat to the existence of the US. Therefore those calling themselves patriots who condemn others for criticizing the US are leading the country to ruin. How patriotic is that? --------------------- Disagreement Is OK in America (english) Tom Pfotzer 11:00am Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202531 In fact, it's one of the few indicators that the Weapons Of Mental Destruction (that would be your TV) haven't done us in yet. We have two key points: one, that it's treason to object to our nation's foreign policy, and second, that the people who actually fight these wars might have more credibility than those who do the armchair quarterbacking. I think the first point is self-evidently ridiculous, and is a simple, and hopefully by this time pretty worn-out effort to prevent people from thinking for themselves. The second point...well, a lot of the people that served in Viet Nam would very much like to have a more clear-cut moral reason for their sacrifice. As it is, what they've got to go on is that they were loyal and obedient citizens, as contrasted with the people that fought in the second world war, who believed that they were obedient and loyal citizens who helped put down a monster. As we all contemplate this next war, it seems to me it's a lot more like Viet Nam than it is like WWII. I see an awful lot of oily influence, and some religious zealot influence, and the quite predictable war-industry influence, but not a whole lot else. If we're going to invest what's left of our national prestige in something, it ought to have a much more clear-cut benefit to our country. A war with Iraq will polarize a great deal of the world's governments against us, almost all the world's population against us, and will put a major strain on an already underperforming economy. Not to mention diverting scarce resources from the key problems we really *must* address. Like energy independence, and jobs, and schools, etc. ----------------- Can this "essay" be real? (english) redrum 3:43pm Tue Sep 10 '02 comment#202567 You've got to be kidding me Mr. Horowitz! You mean to tell me that because an individual is anti-war, then they must be anti-American, "America-haters"? One question Mr. Horowitz, who are the people who die during war? Well the answer my highly intellectual friend is military personnel and innocent civilians. That's right Mr. Horowitz, our boys. Americans are going to die and all those innocent third world villagers who we'll be dropping our bombs on, yup they're going to die too. "You mean those innocent villagers whose children have been dying en-masse from starvation and lack of adequate medical supply resulting from American sanctions on Iraq?" Yup, that's right! See the first time around, Operation Dessert Storm, for some peculiar reason, well the mission wasn't accomplished. And what exactly was the main mission of Operation Dessert Storm Mr. Horowitz? Well, we were told, to oust George Bush Sr.'s ex-friend/ally Sadam. Hmmnn, well we were told we won the Gulf War but for some strange reason Sadam is still in power in Iraq and here we go again, The Gulf War round II. Interesting isn't it!  How many lives need to be lost before we get it right Mr. Horowitz? I mean you seem to be suggesting that War is very American and if an American citizen opposes war then of course they are "America- haters"! I myself love my country but happen to hate war and please come and tell me to my face that I'm an "America-hater"! One more thing Mr. Horowitz, I am an ex Special Operations soldier from the U.S. Army and low and behold, I happened to be stationed and active in the Gulf during Operation Dessert Storm. Where were you my fine American patriotic friend? Oh and one more point, I witnessed so many things during Operation Dessert Storm that would support your argument that we should go to war and anyone who thinks otherwise are traitors. For instance, limbs of childeren strewn about rubble of a Patriot(smart bomb?) bombed village in Iraq, funny thing though somehow the innocent died but Sadam didn't! Yeah lets' go to war Mr. Horowitz, it's the American way ------------------------- Brisbane 2157 John Pilger The truth is that the Bush gang and its adjutants, Ariel Sharon and Blair (and the barely acknowledged, though keener-than-thou John Howard in Australia), are isolated. Television's age of passivity is passing. Public meetings draw thousands, mostly by word of mouth. In the US, the great resistance historian Howard Zinn watches his e-mail traffic as it records countless protests in small towns, defying the stereotype. Remembering 11 September merely as gruesome spectacle is an insult to the victims of that epic crime. However, remembering is important in order to make sense of it, and especially of what happened next. Most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a US protectorate. Saudi Arabia is the home of the Bin Laden family, who were clients of George Bush Sr in his capacity as consultant for the huge Carlyle Group, which has extensive oil interests. Oil and America's struggle to defeat the Soviet Union were at the heart of it. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were the bases of the CIA's Operation Cyclone, which, with a treasury of $4bn and the secret approval of the White House, effectively created the Islamicist war party that attacked America. This terrorist movement, the mujahedin, was the weapon America wielded against the Soviet Union; the Islamicist gene kept emerging and growing in direct proportion to the spread of American influence and pressure in the region. The rise of the Taliban was a direct result. Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's holiest place, became a vast American base during the assault on Iraq in 1990-91, which was represented to the west by President Bush Senior as "the greatest moral campaign since World War Two". The unadvertised goal of this "war" was the consolidation of American power in the oilfields and the "containment" of an Iraq whose cheap, high-quality oil posed a threat to the price of Saudi oil. The "greatest moral campaign" of liberating Kuwait had precious little to do with it. Al-Qaeda took root in Saudi Arabia among those of the ruling families who opposed the Fahd family's deals with the United States, which they saw as a Faustian pact. "The day the bubble burst" is how many in the Arab world who understood these tensions describe 11 September. Run by rich and powerful men, al-Qaeda drew on the Arab world's bitterness at America's underwriting of Israel; and this, in a broader sense, was shared across the world, in varying degrees, by those who had long felt the imperial boot of the west. In his 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon accurately predicted this reaping of a whirlwind sewn by colonialism. None of this lessened the shock of 11 September. The first response of people everywhere was a humane one; those in the twin towers were innocently going about mostly ordinary jobs. This almost universal sympathy was appropriated by Bush and Blair; the pursuit of justice was wrapped in the banner of a corrupt imperial power, whose subsequent actions ought to be as infamous as the crime itself. Although the scale of suffering is beyond comparison, there are similarities with the appropriation of the Holocaust as an enduring justification for the injustice and crimes committed in Palestine. It will be no less a profanity if "9/11" is awarded that currency in our consciousness. The combined forces of the supercult of Americanism - from the Washington fundamentalists themselves to the unctuous reporters standing in front of the White House - want us to believe that the events on that day "changed the world", providing an appendix to Francis Fukuyama's scam about the end of history. The world did not change. The thrust of American military and economic power merely accelerated, along with the assault on social democracy. And just as Fukuyama's nonsense has been discredited, so will 11 September as another "end of history". For what has happened in the past year is an awakening across the world to the true rapacity of dominant American power. It is the opposite of what the propagandists wish; or as John Berger once wrote: "Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one." The press windbags who call for the incineration of innocent people in Iraq (whom they smear, collectively, as Saddam Hussein) speak to each other as if from unattended platforms at Hyde Park Corner on a grim winter's day. Every indication is that the majority of people in this country and around the world are not listening, and are fed up with the American drumbeat. Edward Said once described the extraordinary power of Frantz Fanon's writing as "a surreptitious counter-narrative to the above-ground force of the colonial regime". That same extraordinary power is emerging in many countries, on every continent, not least those the western media has struck from the map. It is cause, I believe, for optimism. Bush's and Blair's reaction to 11 September was understood quickly. As far back as October, Gallup International reported that a majority in more than 30 countries opposed military solutions. Tony Blair had no mandate to send the marines on their vacuous expedition, chasing tribesmen in the manner of 150 years ago. Today, a clear majority of the British public oppose his unexplained plans to join an American invasion of Iraq, a country which American propagandists, without evidence, associate with the failed "war on terrorism". Add the proviso that uncertain numbers of Americans might be killed storming Baghdad, a slim majority of people in the United States are also against an invasion, which is both heartening and remarkable, given the festival of paranoia since 11 September. The truth is that the Bush gang and its adjutants, Ariel Sharon and Blair (and the barely acknowledged, though keener-than-thou John Howard in Australia), are isolated. Television's age of passivity is passing. Public meetings draw thousands, mostly by word of mouth. In the US, the great resistance historian Howard Zinn watches his e-mail traffic as it records countless protests in small towns, defying the stereotype. Perhaps what is stirring in America, beneath the weight of its myths of exceptionalism, moralism and what the cold war planner George Kennan cynically called its "Rotary Club idealism", is the faint beginning of a rejection, of the kind and magnitude that led to the great civil and human rights movements. Never have ordinary Americans seemed as cynical about the greed and corruption of their rulers. This must not be overstated, but under any regime and in any circumstances, and in spite of the propaganda of their accredited guardians, people are never still. The specious morality play spun by Blair has had the reverse effect. What mainstream commentators called "the public unease" can be traced to Blair's ringing call for Gladstonian and actual gunboats in tune with Bush's evocation of the American Wild West where, as D H Lawrence pointed out, the heroes were simply killers. A silence has broken since 11 September. International hostility to the Bush gang's violence (in Afghanistan, a University of New Hampshire study estimates, up to 5,000 people were bombed to death) probably would have happened anyway; but their abuse of the great tragedy of 11 September has been the marker. That is what has changed. In Britain, the media dam has sprung dangerous leaks. A popular tabloid, the Daily Mirror, has turned back to its serious, dissenting roots and caused such elitist fear and loathing that one of its American owners has made veiled threats, and that hagiographer of Washington, Whitehall and Murdoch, William Shawcross, has commanded a page in the Guardian from which to condemn the "infantile" Mirror and pretty well anybody else who dares question our government's obeisance to Bush's lawlessness. Washington's courtiers, or "Atlanticists", as they like to be known, are worried; the once reliable censorship-by-omission that allowed the British state to join America's imperial adventures, notably the one-sided slaughter in the Gulf in 1991, the most "covered" event in history and the least reported, is no longer fully operational. In the Mirror, on the Guardian's main opinion pages, in this journal, in the reporting of Robert Fisk in the Independent and here and there on radio, dissent - the lifeblood of any free society - has been heard. On the internet, there is now the equivalent of a robust samizdat: for example, the excellent www.medialens.org and www.zmag.org. Only television has been muted. The stamina of BBC mythology about its "objectivity" and devotion to "balance" ought not be underestimated. Much of the rest of humanity continues to be objectified in degrees of their value to the west and incorporation into western cultural slogans. As Fanon wrote more than 40 years ago: "For the native, objectivity is always directed against him." Thus, the BBC's Newsnight can "balance" justice and injustice, facts and vested lies, while reducing whole societies to the sum of their dictators' demonology. When will those charged with training future broadcasters begin to alert their young hopefuls to the sophistication of our own state propaganda? Making sense of 11 September is urgent. Another crime is imminent. In 1998, the Pentagon warned Bill Clinton that the "collateral damage" of an all-out invasion of Iraq could be as high as 10,000 civilians. How often, routinely, does humanity have to suffer this? That is the question many now ask. When the correspondent of the Washington Post, a famous liberal news-paper, can say on the BBC that the British are speaking out against the war party because they are jealous of America having "the sun around which the rest of the world revolves" (words to that effect) then you appreciate how the elite of great power thinks. The Romans and the imperial British would have thought like this. But the 21st century has arrived and the respectability that Nazism finally stripped from imperialism ought not to be allowed to return. pilger.carlton.com/ ------------------- Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. I suppose I ought to say "Lebanese-Australian" Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian. During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be "f---ed Leb style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian pig." But, inevitably, it's the heavy sentence that's "controversial." After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?" Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald: "As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions." Indeed. Many's the time, labouring under the burden of some or other ghastly Ottawa policy, I've thought of pinning some gal down and sodomizing her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for "root causes." Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few. Mr. Reimers, though, will be happy to know his view is echoed across the hemispheres. Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country's rapes were committed by "non-Western" immigrants -- a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands "rape is scarcely punished" because it is generally believed that "it is women who are responsible for rape." So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a little different in Scandinavia? Not at all! Rather, the professor insisted, "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Or to modify Queen Victoria's wedding-night advice to her daughter: Lie back and think of Yemen. France? Well, I can't bring you any ethnic rape statistics from the Fifth Republic because the authorities go to great lengths not to keep any. But, even though the phenomenon of immigrant gang rape does not exist, there's already a word for it: the "tournante" -- or "take your turn." Last year, 11 Muslim men were arrested for enjoying a grand old tournante with a 14-year old girl in a cellar. Denmark? "Three quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes," says Peter Skaarup, chairman of the People's Party, a member of the governing coalition. Well, you get the idea. Whether or not Muslim cultures are more prone to rape is a question we shall explore another day. What's interesting is how easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed within the usual pieties. Norwegian women must learn to be, in a very real sense, less "exclusionary." Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism. After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before. America was asking for it: like those Norwegian women, it was being "provocative." My friend thought the multiculti apologists were treating America as a metaphorical rape victim. But, even so, it comes as a surprise to realize they do exactly the same to actual rape victims. After the O.J. verdict, it was noted by some feminists that "race trumped gender." What we've seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the Western elites is unshakeable. Even President Bush, in the month after September 11th, felt obliged to line up a series of photo-ops so he could declare that "Islam is peace" while surrounded by representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization which objected, on the grounds of "ethnic and religious stereotyping," to the prosecution of two men in Chicago for the "honour killing" of their female cousin. On this "Islam is peace" business, Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Goettingen University in Germany, gave a helpful speech a few months back: "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them," he said. "The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought." Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or "House of Peace." On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. The "Muslim world" -- the arc stretching from North Africa through South Asia -- is economically, militarily, scientifically and artistically irrelevant. But, looked at through the prism of Norwegian rape or French crime, the idea of a Dar al-Islam doesn't sound so ridiculous. The "code of silence" that surrounds rape in tightly knit Muslim families is, so to speak, amplified by the broader "code of silence" surrounding multicultural issues in the West. If all cultures are of equal value, how do you point out any defects? As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and Britain get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combine with the worst attributes of Western culture -- licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class turns squeamishly away. Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we're no longer capable of being "judgmental" and "discriminating." We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it. As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, we're slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations. Islam For All reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years' time the majority of Holland's children (the population under 18) will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in western Europe since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now. Or as Charles Johnson, whose excellent "Little Green Footballs" Web site turns up dozens of fascinating Islamic tidbits every day, suggested: "Maybe we should start a betting pool: Which European country will be the first to institute shari'a?" ----------------------- zinn on chicago 13361 EUGENE DEBS, the leading U.S. socialist at the beginning of the last century, had a lot to say about this question of patriotism. Could you talk about his views of war and patriotism? DEBS WAS a leader in the protest against the First World War. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a decision that was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court led by the presumed liberal jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Debs was sentenced because in a speech in Canton, Ohio, he said that the master classes made the wars, and the working classes fought in them. He said: "Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages, when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth, they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war, any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street, go to war. "The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. "And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose -- especially their lives." Debs rightly saw war in class terms--as benefiting the rich, and killing the poor. www.socialistworker.org --------------------- In The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald advances a carefully researched but extremely controversial thesis: that certain 20th century intellectual movements - largely established and led by Jews - have changed European societies in fundamental ways and destroyed the confidence of Western man. He claims that these movements were designed, consciously or unconsciously, to advance Jewish interests even though they were presented to non-Jews as universalistic and even utopian. He concludes that the increasing dominance of these ideas has had profound political and social consequences that benefited Jews but caused great harm to gentile societies. This analysis, which he makes with considerable force, is an unusual indictment of a people generally thought to be more sinned against than sinning. The Culture of Critique is the final title in Prof. MacDonald's massive, three-volume study of Jews and their role in history. The two previous volumes are A People That Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and its Discontents, published by Praeger in 1994 and 1998. The series is written from a sociobiological perspective that views Judaism as a unique survival strategy that helps Jews compete with other ethnic groups. Prof. MacDonald, who is a psychologist at the University of California at Long Beach, explains this perspective in the first volume, which describes Jews as having a very powerful sense of uniqueness that has kept them socially and genetically separate from other peoples. The second volume traces the history of Jewish-gentile relations, and finds the causes of anti-Semitism primarily in the almost invariable commercial and intellectual dominance of gentile societies by Jews and in their refusal to assimilate. The Culture of Critique brings his analysis into the present century, with an account of the Jewish role in the radical critique of traditional culture. The intellectual movements Prof. MacDonald discusses in this volume are Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school of sociology, and Boasian anthropology. Perhaps most relevant from a racial perspective, he also traces the role of Jews in promoting multi-culturalism and Third World immigration. Throughout his analysis Prof. MacDonald reiterates his view that Jews have promoted these movements as Jews and in the interests of Jews, though they have often tried to give the impression that they had no distinctive interests of their own. Therefore Prof. MacDonald's most profound charge against Jews is not ethnocentrism but dishonesty - that while claiming to be working for the good of mankind they have often worked for their own good and to the detriment of others. While attempting to promote the brotherhood of man by dissolving the ethnic identification of gentiles, Jews have maintained precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others. Celebrating Diversity Prof. MacDonald claims that one of the most consistent ways in which Jews have advanced their interests has been to promote pluralism and diversity - but only for others. Ever since the 19th century, they have led movements that tried to discredit the traditional foundations of gentile society: patriotism, racial loyalty, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, and with regard to the state of Israel, they have often supported the very institutions they attack in gentile society. Why is this in the interests of Jews? Because the parochial group loyalty characteristic of Jews attracts far less attention in a society that does not have a cohesive racial and cultural core. The Jewish determination not to assimilate fully, which accounts for their survival as a people for thousands for years - even without a country - has invariably attracted unpleasant and even murderous scrutiny in nations with well -defined national identities. In Prof. MacDonald's view it is therefore in the interest of Jews to dilute and weaken the identity of any people among whom they live. Jewish identity can flower in safety only when gentile identity is weak. Prof. MacDonald quotes a remarkable passage from Charles Silberman: "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief - one firmly rooted in history - that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues." He is saying, in effect, that when Jews make the diversity-is-our-strength argument it is in support of their real goal of diluting a society's homogeneity so that Jews will feel safe. They are couching a Jewish agenda in terms they think gentiles will accept. Likewise, as the second part of the Silberman quotation suggests, Jews may support deviant movements, not because they think it is good for the country but because it is good for the Jews. Prof. Silberman also provides an illuminating quote from a Jewish economist who thought that republicans had more sensible economic policies but who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate anyway. His reason? "I'd rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than those I saw at the Republican convention." This man apparently distrusts white gentiles and voted for a racially mixed party even if its economic policies were wrong. What is good for Jews appears to come before what is good for the country. Earl Raab, former president of heavily Jewish Brandeis University makes the diversity argument in a slightly different way. Expressing his satisfaction with the prediction that by the middle of the next century whites will become a minority, he writes, "We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country." He is apparently prepared to displace the people and culture of the founding stock in order to prevent the theoretical rise of an anti-Jewish regime. Prof. Raab appears to see whites mainly as potential Nazis, and is willing to sacrifice their culture and national continuity in order to defuse an imagined threat to Jews. This passage takes for granted the continued future existence of Jews as a distinct community even as gentile whites decline in numbers and influence. In the same passage, Prof. Raab continues by noting that, "We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible..." - just as it tends to make the ultimate displacement of European culture also irreversible. Prof. MacDonald traces the development of this diversity strategy to several sources. It is widely recognized that the German-Jewish immigrant Franz Boas (1858-1942) almost single-handedly established the current contours of anthropology, ridding it of all biological explanations for differences in human culture or behavior. Prof. MacDonald reports that he and his followers - with the notable exceptions of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict - were all Jews with strong Jewish identities: "Jewish identification and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the 'invisible subject' of American anthropology." By 1915, Boas and his students controlled the American Anthropological Association and by 1926 they headed every major American university anthropology department. From this position of dominance they promoted the idea that race and biology are trivial matters, and that environment counts for everything. They completely recast anthropology so as to provide intellectual support for open immigration, integration, and miscegenation. They also laid the foundation for the idea that because all races have the same potential, the failures of non-whites must be blamed exclusively on white oppression. The ultimate conclusion of Boasian anthropology was that since environment accounts for all human differences, every inequality in achievement can be eliminated by changing the environment. This has been the justification for enormous and wasteful government intervention programs. The entire "civil rights" movement can be seen as a natural consequence of the triumph of Boasian thinking. Since all races were equivalent, separation was immoral. The color line also sharpened white self-consciousness in ways that might make whites more aware of Jewish parochialism. Thus it was, according to Prof. MacDonald, that Jews almost single-handedly launched the desegregation movement. Without the leadership of Jews, the NAACP might never have been established, and until 1975 every one of its presidents was a Jew. Prof. MacDonald reports that in 1917, when the black separatist Marcus Garvey visited NAACP headquarters, he saw so many white faces that he stormed out, complaining that it was a white organization. Prof. MacDonald concludes that the efforts of Jews were crucial to the "civil rights" transformation of America. He quotes a lawyer for the American Jewish Congress who claims that "many of these [civil rights] laws were actually written in the offices of Jewish agencies by Jewish staff people, introduced by Jewish legislators and pressured into being by Jewish voters." While the Boas school was promoting integration and racial equivalence, it was also critical of, in Prof. MacDonald's words, "American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, emotionally and aesthetically repressive (especially with regard to sexuality). Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic [Third-World] cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture." The role of the anthropologist became one of criticizing everything about Western society while glorifying everything primitive. Prof. MacDonald notes that Boasian portrayals of non-Western peoples deliberately ignored barbarism and cruelty or simply attributed it to contamination from the West. He sees this as a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence of Western societies and to make them permeable to Third World influences and people. Today, this view is enshrined in the dogma that America must remain open to immigration because immigrants bring spirit and energy that natives somehow lack. Authoritarian Personalities In order to open European-derived societies to the immigration that would transform them, it was necessary to discredit racial solidarity and commitment to tradition. Prof. MacDonald argues that this was the basic purpose of a group of intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School. What is properly known as the Institute of Social Research was founded in Frankfurt, Germany, during the Weimar period by a Jewish millionaire but was closed down by the Nazis shortly after they took power. Most of its staff emigrated to the United States and the institute reconstituted itself at UC Berkeley. The organization was headed by Max Horkheimer, and its most influential members were T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, all of whom had strong Jewish identities. Horkheimer made no secret of the partisan nature of the institute's activities: "Research would be able here to transform itself directly into propaganda," he wrote. (Italics in the original.) Prof. MacDonald devotes many pages to an analysis of The Authoritarian Personality, which was written by Adorno and appeared in 1950. It was part of a series called Studies in Prejudice, produced by the Frankfurt school, which included titles like Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder. The Authoritarian Personality was particularly influential because, according to Prof. MacDonald, the American Jewish Committee heavily funded its promotion and because Jewish academics took up its message so enthusiastically. The book's purpose is to make every group affiliation sound as if it were a sign of mental disorder. Everything from patriotism to religion to family - and race - loyalty are sign of a dangerous and defective "authoritarian personality." Because drawing distinctions between different groups is illegitimate, all group loyalties - even close family ties! - are "prejudice." As Christopher Lasch has written, the book leads to the conclusion that prejudice "could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy - by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum." But according to Prof. MacDonald it is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity that Horkheimer and Adorno described as mental illness in gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: Anyone whose political views were different from theirs was insane. As Prof. MacDonald explains, the Frankfurt school never criticized or even described Jewish group identity - only that of gentiles: "behavior that is critical to Judaism as a successful group evolutionary strategy is conceptualized as pathological in gentiles." For these Jewish intellectuals, anti-Semitism was also a sign of mental illness: They concluded that Christian self-denial and especially sexual repression caused hatred of Jews. The Frankfurt school was enthusiastic about psycho-analysis, according to which "Oedipal ambivalence toward the father and anal-sadistic relations in early childhood are the anti-Semite's irrevocable inheritance." In addition to ridiculing patriotism and racial identity, the Frankfurt school glorified promiscuity and Bohemian poverty. Prof. MacDonald sees the school as a seminal influence: "Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s countercultural revolution find expression in The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, the Christian religion, and patriotism." Of the interest here, however, is the movement's success in branding ancient loyalties to nation and race as mental illnesses. Although he came later, the French-Jewish "deconstructionist" Jacques Derrida was in the same tradition when he wrote: "The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue... The idea is to disarm the bombs... of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants..." As Prof. MacDonald puts it, "Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology." Needless to say, this project has been successful; anyone opposed to the displacement of whites is routinely treated as a mentally unhinged "hate-monger," and whenever whites defend their group interests they are described as psychologically inadequate. The irony has not escaped Prof. MacDonald: "The ideology that ethnocentrism was a form of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long history had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the world." Immigration Prof. MacDonald argues that it is entirely natural for Jews to promote open immigration. It brings about the "diversity" Jews find comforting and it keeps America open to persecuted co-religionists throughout the world. He says Jews are the only group that has always fought for mass immigration; a few European ethnic organizations have made sporadic efforts to make it easier for their own people to come, but only Jews have consistently promoted open borders for all comers. Moreover, whatever disagreements they may have had on other issues, Jews of every political persuasion have favored high immigration. This, too, goes back many years, and Prof. MacDonald traces in considerable detail the sustained Jewish pro-immigration effort. Israel Zangwill, author of the eponymous 1908 play The Melting Pot, was of the view that "there is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses..." He was nevertheless an ardent Zionist and disapproved of Jewish intermarriage. Although the statue of liberty, properly known as Liberty Enlightening the World, was a gift to the United States from France as a tribute to American political traditions, the sonnet by the Jewish Emma Lazarus helped change it into a symbol of immigration. Affixed to the base of the statue several decades after its construction, the poem welcomes to America "huddled masses yearning to breath free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Prof. MacDonald has discovered that implausible arguments about diversity being a quintessentially American strength have been made by Jews for a long time. He reports that in 1948 the American Jewish Committee was urging Congress to believe that "Americanism is the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of all races, all religions, all nationalities." Of course, there had never been such a tradition. In 1952, the American Jewish Congress argued in hearings on immigration that "our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples." This, too, was at a time when U.S. immigration law was still explicitly designed to maintain a white majority. It is often said that when the old immigration policy was scrapped in 1965, scarcely anyone knew, and no one predicted, that the new law would change the racial makeup of the country. Prof. MacDonald disputes this, arguing that this had been the objective of Jewish groups from the beginning. Prof. MacDonald finds that Jews have been the foremost advocates of immigration in England, France, and Canada, and that Jewish groups were the most vocal opponents of independence for Quebec. Australian Jews led the effort to dismantle the "white Australia" policy, one reason for which was cited in an editorial in the Australian Jewish Democrat: "The strengthening of multi-cultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti-Semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian." Like Earl Raab writing about the United States, this Australian Jew is prepared to sacrifice the traditional culture, people, and identity of Australia to specifically Jewish interests. It would not be surprising if such an openly expressed objective did not have the opposite effect from the intended, and increase anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews and the Left It is well known that Jews have been traditionally associated with the left, and Prof. MacDonald investigates this connection in some detail. Historically it was understandable that Jews should support movements that advocated overthrowing the existing order. After emancipation, Jews met resistance from gentile elites who did not want to lose ground to competitors, and outsiders easily become revolutionaries. However, in Prof. MacDonald's view, Jewish commitment to leftist causes has often been motivated by the hope that communism, especially, would be a tool for combating anti-Semitism, and by expectation that universalist social solutions would be yet another way to dissolve gentile loyalties that might exclude Jews. The appeal of univeralist ideologies is tied to the implicit understanding that Jewish particularism will be exempt: "At the extreme, acceptance of a universalist ideology by gentiles would result in gentiles not perceiving Jews as in a different social category at all, while nonetheless Jews would be able to maintain a strong personal identity as Jews." Prof. MacDonald argues that Jews had specifically Jewish reasons for supporting the Bolshevik revolution. Czarist Russia was notorious for its anti-Semitic policies and, during its early years, the Soviet Union seemed to be the promised land for Jews: it ended state anti-Semitism, tried to eradicate Christianity, opened opportunities to individual Jews, and preached a "classless" society in which Jewishness would presumably attract no negative attention. Moreover, since Marxism taught that all conflict was economic rather than ethnic, many Jews believed it heralded the end of anti-Semitism. Prof. MacDonald emphasizes that although Jewish Communists preached both atheism and the solidarity of the world's working people, they took pains to preserve a distinct, secular Jewish identity. He reports that Lenin himself (who had one Jewish grandparent) approved the continuation of an explicitly Jewish identity under Communism, and in 1946 the Communist Party of the United States voted a resolution also supporting Jewish peoplehood in Communist countries. Thus, although Communism was supposed to be without borders or religion, Jews were confident that it would make a place for their own group identity. He writes that despite the official view that all men were to be brothers, "very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire soviet era." Jewish Communists sometimes betrayed remarkable particularism. Prof. MacDonald quotes Charles Pappoport, the French Communist leader: "The Jewish people [are] the bearer of all the great ideas of unity and human community in history... The disappearance of the Jewish people would signify the death of humankind, the final transformation of man into a wild beast." This seems to attribute to Jews an elite position incompatible with "unity and human community." Prof. MacDonald argues that many Jews began to fall away from Communism only after Stalin showed himself to be anti-Semitic. And just as Jews had been the leading revolutionaries in anti-Semitic pre-Revolutionary Russia, Jews became the leading dissidents in an anti-Semitic Soviet Union. A similar pattern can be found in the imposed Communist governments of Eastern Europe, which were

largely dominated by Jews. The majority of the leaders of the Polish Communist Party, for example, spoke better Yiddish than Polish, and they too maintained a strong Jewish identity. After the fall of Communism many stopped being Polish and emigrated to Israel. Prof. MacDonald writes that in Bela Kun's short-lived 1919 Communist government of Hungary, 95 percent of the leaders were Jews, and that at the time of the 1956 uprising Communism was so closely associated with Jews that the rioting had almost the flavor of a pogrom. He argues that in the United States as well, the hard core among Communists and members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was mainly Jewish. Here, too, a revolutionary, atheist, and universalist world-view was fully compatible with strong identification as Jews. Prof. MacDonald quotes from a study of American leftists: "Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to someone Jewish for granted." Their commitment as Jews was even more fundamental and unexamined than their commitment to the left. Prof. MacDonald reports that many American Jews also abandoned Communism as it became increasingly anti-Semitic. For a large number, the Soviet Union's severing of diplomatic ties with Israel during the 1967 war was the last straw. A former SDS activist no doubt spoke for many when he explained, "If I must choose between the Jewish cause and a 'progressive' anti-Israel SDS, I shall choose the Jewish cause. If barricades are erected, I will fight as a Jew." According to Prof. MacDonald, American neoconservatism can also be described as a surface shift in external politics that leaves the more fundamental commitment to Jewish identity unchanged. Thus, former leftists abandoned an ideology that had turned against Israel and refashioned American conservatism into a different movement, the one unshakable theme of which was support for Israel. Neoconservatives also support high levels of immigration and were active in excluding white racial identification from the "respectable" right. Objections There are many possible objections to Prof. MacDonald's thesis. The first is that it is largely built on the assumption that Jews are dishonest. It is always risky to assume one understands the motives of others better than they do themselves. Jews have traditionally thought of themselves as a benevolent presence, even as a "light unto the nations" or a "chosen people." This is echoed today in the Jewish self image as champions of the excluded and the oppressed. Most of the time what passes for "social justice" has the effect of undermining the traditions and loyalties of gentile society, but are Jews deliberately undermining these things rather than righting what they perceive to be wrongs? Prof. MacDonald concedes that many Jews are sincere in their support for liberal causes, but then escalates his indictment by arguing that "the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves." In other words, many Jews who are actually working for Jewish interests have first convinced themselves otherwise. A Jew who mainly wants America to become less white may also have convinced himself that America benefits from a multitude of cultures. Having convinced himself he can more effectively convince others. Many Jews, Prof. MacDonald argues, are not even conscious of the extent to which their Jewishness is central to their identities or their political views. He quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel on his surprise at how passionately he embraced the Israeli side during the 1967 war: "I had not known how Jewish I was." This is an arresting statement from a man who was thought to be perhaps the greatest Jewish spiritual leader of his time. And whether or not it affects their politics, Jews certainly appear to have a very vivid sense of peoplehood. Prof. MacDonald quotes theologian Eugene Borowitz as saying,"most Jews claim to be equipped with an interpersonal friend-or-foe sensing device that enables them to detect the presence of another Jew, despite heavy camouflage." Always to think in terms of "friends or foe" is no insignificant matter. Prof. MacDonald is therefore skeptical of Jewish disavowals: "Surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading." He notes that Jewish publications write about the power and influence of American Jews in language Jews would immediately denounce as "anti-Semitic" if used by gentiles. He agrees with Joseph Sobran, who has said "they want to be Jews among themselves but resent being seen as Jews by Gentiles. They want to pursue their own distinct interests while pretending that they have no such interests..." Prof. MacDonald argues that the success of Jewish-led intellectual movements has been possible only because their Jewish character was hidden. If multi-culturalism or mass immigration or The Authoritarian Personality had been promoted by Orthodox Jews in black coats the Jewish element would have been clear. Prof. MacDonald writes that in fact, "the Jewish political agenda was not an aspect of the theory and the theories themselves had no overt Jewish content. Gentile intellectuals approaching these theories were therefore unlikely to view them as aspects of Jewish-gentile cultural competition or as an aspect of a specifically Jewish political agenda." Prof. MacDonald also claims that Jews have often tried to conceal the Jewish character of an intellectual movement by recruiting token gentiles for visible positions as spokesmen. He writes that this tactic was so common in the American Communist Party that gentiles often saw through it and resigned. But how can motives ever be completely known? Prof. MacDonald sets a difficult test: "The best evidence that individuals have really ceased to have a Jewish identity is if they choose a political option that they perceive as clearly not in the interest of Jews as a group. In the absence of a clearly perceived conflict with Jewish interests, it remains possible that different political choices among ethnic Jews are only differences in tactics for how best to achieve Jewish interests." This standard may seem unduly harsh - until it is applied to white gentiles. Third-World immigration, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, and forced integration are clearly not in the interests of whites, yet many whites embrace them, thus demonstrating how completely they have abandoned their racial identity. Finally, Prof. MacDonald raises the disturbing possibility that some Jews, because of centuries of conflict with gentiles, actively hate gentile society and consciously wish to destroy it: "a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the gentile-dominated power structure perceived as anti-Semitic." He describes the 19th century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine as "using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual confidence of the established order." In defense of this highly provocative view, Prof. MacDonald quotes Benjamin Disraeli on the effects of centuries of Jewish-gentile relations on Jews: "They may have become so odious and so hostile to mankind as to merit for their present conduct, no matter how occasioned, the obloquy and ill-treatment of the communities in which they dwell and with which they are scarcely permitted to mingle." Apart from any questions of motives, however, is the question of numbers. Jews are a tiny minority in the United States and within that minority there is disagreement even on matters that clearly affect Jews. How can Jews possibly be responsible for dramatic changes in the intellectual landscape? In Prof. MacDonald's view, the explanation lies in the intelligence, energy, dedication, and cohesiveness of Jews. He attributes a great deal to the average IQ of Jews - at 115, a full standard deviation above the white gentile average - and to "their hard work and dedication, their desire to make a mark on the world, and their desire to rise in the world, engage in personal promotion, and achieve public acclaim..." He also believes Jews have worked together unfailingly on any question they consider necessary for survival: "Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individual strategies." He notes that there has never been a time when large numbers of white Americans favored non-white immigration; it was a cohesive, determined minority that beat down the disorganized resistance of the majority. Prof. MacDonald believes that because of the effectiveness of some Jews, it was not even necessary that most Jews actively support anti-majoritarian movements, but that Jewish activity was still decisive. As he puts it, "Jewish-dominated intellectual movements were a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies." This, of course, can never be tested, but there can be no doubt that American Jews have had a disproportionate effect on the American intellect. Prof. MacDonald quotes Walter Kerr, writing in 1968, to the effect that "what has happened since World War II is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as it is anything else... The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly." Aside from the question of whether Prof. MacDonald is right is the further question of what difference it makes if he is right. If correct, his thesis certainly sheds light on the rapidity with which whites lost their will. Just a few decades ago whites were a confident race, proud of their achievements, convinced of their fitness to dominate the globe. Today they are a declining, apologetic people, ashamed of their history and not sure even of their claim to lands they have occupied for centuries. It is very rare for fundamental concepts to be stood on their heads in the course of just a generation or two, as has happened with thinking about race. Such speed suggests there has been something more than natural change. Originally appeared in American Renaissance, June 1999, issue 54 entitled 'Cherchez le Juif.' Stanley Hornbeck is the pen name of a Washington, DC area businessman. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Praeger (1998) $65.00, 379 pp -------------------------------------------------- - The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again By Caleb Carr (Random House, New York, NY, 2002) 274 pp. $19.95 hardcover. The ideas in this book the author first set forth (he says) in a 1996 article, but no one needs to guess why the book was rushed into print. (A list of seven errata has been put into the middle of the book, and it is incomplete.) He proposes to place contemporary terrorism in the context of military history stretching back as far as the Roman Republic. In a book of 256 pages, this necessarily implies a romp through history with only cursory analysis of examples taken out of their contexts. The author's purpose is avowedly didactic: Carr is literally teaching "the lessons of terror." It is his startling thesis that terrorism is a form of warfare, but "a form that has never succeeded." A further startling thesis is that "it has been one of the most ultimately self-defeating tactics in military history-indeed, it would be difficult to think of one more inimical to its various practitioners' causes." As this review is rather critical, I should like to identify, up front, the good things about the book. This will not take long. Most important is that Carr uses a reasonable definition of terrorism which does not beg too many questions: terrorism is "warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying either their will to support their leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable." Notably Carr does not deny by definition the reality of state terrorism, as many definitions of terrorism do, and in fact most of his examples are instances of state terrorism. He states early on that collateral damage is "quite distinct" from terrorism, rousing the suspicion that he is an apologist for America, but it turns out that he is a harsh critic of the prevalent US military philosophy of unlimited or total war, which invariably results in high civilian casualties, which is one of the worst features of terrorism too. Also, he contends that contemporary terrorism, at least, should be regarded as war, not crime. (The Cheney/Bush regime refuses to choose, denying captured Afghans either the rights of prisoners of war or the rights of accused criminals.) So much for the good things about the book. Right from the get-go, Carr bungles his first case study, the Roman conquest and destruction of Carthage. The Romans either slaughtered or enslaved all the Carthaginians. But, by Carr's definition, this was not terrorism. Terrorism is attacking civilians so as to influence their government. In conquering Carthage, the Romans eliminated its government, so there was no government to influence by attacks on civilians or in any other way. The massacre obviously served other purposes, such as pillage, and above all the utter extirpation of the only power which had ever posed a serious threat to Rome. An ugly business, to be sure, but not terrorism. Genocide is not terrorism. Carr's next case study is still more irrelevant. He discusses the annihilation of several Roman legions by Germans in 4 A.D. (Carr gives the incorrect date of 9 A.D.) He says nothing, however, to suggest that this was a reprisal for Roman terrorism against Germanic civilians. I have read all the primary and secondary sources (very few) which appear in his bibliography. None of them support this position. And I'd like to know where he got the extensive quotations-in suspiciously colloquial English-attributed to the German leader, Arminius (there are no footnotes in the book). Carr suggests that the Romans should have arranged for the assassination of Arminius. Incredibly, he is unaware that Arminius was assassinated, although nobody knows if the Romans instigated it or if it was just part of an internal power struggle. Carr claims that the fall of the Roman Empire is attributable to its terrorist policies. This will come as a surprise to all scholars in the field. Any number of theories have been produced, including the theory that holds that the Empire fell because of lead poisoning from the water system, but Carr's stands alone for its combination of intrinsic absurdity with zero supporting evidence. According to his argument, on the one hand, the Germanic invaders nurtured centuries of resentment of ancient Roman terrorism (for which there is no evidence-for either the terrorism or the resentment), and on the other, the best and the brightest Romans refused to defend the Empire from the apathy supposedly induced by the supposed chronic barbarian threat supposedly caused by Roman atrocities committed centuries earlier. Not only is there no evidence for either of these hypotheses, they are self-evidently ridiculous. And if Germans were seething with hatred of Rome why is it that for the next several centuries they enlisted in the Roman army in ever-increasing numbers? To a great extent, Carr's thesis is meaningless because it is not falsifiable. As he makes clear, almost every state has engaged in terrorism, and sooner or later, almost every state falls. Especially when the interval is measured in centuries, as with the supposed German revenge against Rome and there is no evidence for a connection, the mere sequence proves nothing. Thus Carr attributes the fall of the Ottoman Empire to terrorism against its Christian subjects in the 14th to 16th centuries. But the large Christian population of the empire was completely quiescent for 300 years, and in fact some Christians, especially Greeks, occupied prominent political positions, and were even installed as the ruling class of what is now Romania. And we all know the Ottoman state was not overthrown by rebellious Christian subjects-by then, almost its only Christian subjects were Armenians, and the Turks exterminated most of them-it collapsed in the wake of military defeat in World War I. Much the same might be said of another of Carr's snapshot examples, the Mughals. Carr states: "The range of tortures, slow deaths, and persecutions devised by the new guardians of Islam for many unbelievers, as well as for Muslims of rival factions, became widespread and infamous enough to ensure that both the Ottoman and the Mughal empires would be forever plagued by fractiousness and, occasionally, outright rebellion." All empires are plagued by fractiousness and occasionally outright rebellion, at least if they last for 400 or 500 years, like the Mughal empire. And "tortures, slow deaths, and persecutions" are not the same thing as terrorism, although they are among the possible methods of terrorism. It might be amusing-in fact, I' m sure it would be amusing-if Carr applied these notions to the Spanish Inquisition. If it was terrorist, then it is yet another example of terrorism as a resounding success, as it completely eliminated Protestants, heretics, crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims from Spain. For a military historian, Carr is remarkably ignorant of another of his topics, war in the Middle Ages. He erroneously ascribes the origins of nationalism to this period. His entire ignorance of social history accounts for such howlers as "the rural peasant [as opposed to, what-the urban peasant?] that the Church had always held up as the supreme example of the pastoral noncombatant," etc. Peasants raise crops; pastoralists herd animals. Pastoralists like the Turks and the Mongols have been extremely violent and aggressive. Since Carr adduces no examples of medieval terrorism (although there are some), you have to wonder why he doesn't just skip over the Middle Ages. It was routine practice then to devastate the lands and homes of the peasants who were paying rents to the enemy-as one English king put it, "Fire is to war as mustard is to sausage." The purpose was not to get the peasants to call for a change in government policy, because nobody cared what, if anything, peasants thought about policy. The purpose was to destroy the enemy's economic base. It wasn't terrorism, but that clarification would have made no difference to the afflicted peasants. The same objection applies to most of Carr's cases prior to the 20th century. He taxes Louis XIV as a terrorist, for instance, for creating a cordon sanitaire around the borders of France-buffer zones from which the foreign population was driven out. (Israel did something similar in Lebanon.) Obviously this was done for what we now call national security, not to influence foreign governments. Similarly, when 18th century armies lived off the land, i.e., satisfied some of their requirements for provisions by pillaging the peasants of the territory they were passing through, the purpose was not to demoralize the peasants or spur them to lobby their governments for policy changes, the purpose was simply to rip them off. It is 78 pages into the book before Carr produces an example of terrorism that may actually satisfy his own definition. That would be the routine practice of Americans, from colonial times till the end of the Indian wars, of devastating Indian settlements and crops, and not infrequently killing Indian noncombatants. Even there, though, the intention was not solely to demoralize Indian enemies and perhaps set an example to other Indians. The immediate purpose was to destroy the economic infrastructure of those Indians who were at war with the Americans. That was why General Sullivan destroyed most of the Iroquois towns during the American Revolution (grateful New Yorkers named a county after him, a county carved out of Iroquois territory). It was exactly the same thing as the US Air Force bombing Serbian bridges, factories, television stations, etc. Carr condemns those bombings, but he does not characterize them as terrorism. The American Indian example alone is enough to refute Carr's extreme thesis that terrorism is always self-defeating. After the Revolution, the Iroquois never again posed a military threat, not even when most of their land was extorted from them. When in 1636 the Puritans exterminated the Pequot noncombatants when the warriors were away, that was a complete success, and to the Puritans, further proof that God was on their side. By 1890 and Wounded Knee, American terrorism against Native Americans, if that's what it was, was a complete success, not self-defeating at all. Before resuming his cavalcade of history Carr, for no apparent reason, digresses to discuss Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, he relates, wrote Leviathan originally to justify Charles I's claim to absolute rule, but he disappointed Hobbes by not measuring up to the job, so Hobbes rewrote his book to argue a more abstract case. Wrong, all wrong. Hobbes was not "writing in England during that nation's civil war," he fled to France even before the outbreak of civil war in 1640. Charles was executed in 1649, Leviathan was published in 1651. Charles I never claimed to be by right an absolute monarch. Carr misunderstands Hobbes' famous reference to a way of life which is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Carr says that, for Hobbes, political power struggles "ensure that most people's lives" are like that. No way. Hobbes was positing an abstract state of nature as a philosophical ideal type or model, not making any empirical claim. Hobbes admitted, "It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, all over the world," although he thought it actually occurred at certain times and places. Just why is Carr mentioning Hobbes (whom he obviously knows only by reputation) at all? Because he thinks Hobbes provides support for his belief that well-trained, well-disciplined armies not only do not practice terrorism, they are the best means to defeat terrorism-a dubious proposition, but in any case one which finds no support in Hobbes, who wrote nothing about military training or discipline, and to whom the modern concept of terrorism would have meant nothing. According to Carr, the French (and the Indians) lost the French and Indian War because the French countenanced Indian terrorism. The reality is that, in its terrorist dimension, the Indians were very successful. They rolled back the line of American settlement in New York and Pennsylvania by several hundred miles. The war was not decided on the frontier, where the British and the Americans (such as George Washington) were always defeated. It was decided in Canada in conventional warfare between a professional French army and a professional British army. Even more curious, Carr explains the outcomes of both wars between Britain and America as the consequence of misguided terrorist tactics. The American Revolution was needlessly prolonged, he relates; by the Americans' "repeated" insistence on "unconditional surrender." You will not find this expression, or any other words with the same meaning, in any sources from the period. It is ridiculous to assert that the Americans demanded the "unconditional surrender" of Great Britain (presumably to be followed, as when Germany and Japan acceded to these harsh terms at the end of World War II, by American military occupation?) All the Americans wanted was British recognition of American independence. And even if Carr were right, it would be beside the point, because, as he himself "repeatedly" asserts, terrorism is not about military goals, it is about the means of accomplishing military goals. There was some American revolutionary terrorism, such as the aforementioned chastening of the Iroquois, and against Loyalists (3% of the population was driven out of the country), but again, it was a success. In the War of 1812, the British, claims Carr, engaged in much violence against civilians, although I do not recall that from what I have read about that war. His only specific example is the torching of the public buildings of Washington, DC in 1814. I fail to see why, in wartime, destroying public buildings in the enemy's capital is terrorist. The United States did the same thing in Libya, Iraq and Serbia, and undoubtedly in Afghanistan as well. Once again Carr is unable to distinguish terrorism (whose intended effect is indirect) from what the anarchists call direct action, that is, activity intended not to influence the enemy but to damage or destroy him. This is an aspect of war which should be familiar to any military historian, but which Carr ignores in his zeal to make a case for a specific policy prescription for the current American war against terrorism. As usual, Carr offers no evidence, and as usual, there is none, to suggest that British tactics were counterproductive. America didn't win this war, after all, it merely managed not to lose it because the British, having defeated Napoleon, lost interest in it. Although right at the beginning Carr announced that his topic is "international terrorism (as distinct from domestic terrorism, which falls outside the scope of this study)," he cannot resist an occasional foray into domestic terrorism when he thinks it supports his thesis. Sherman's March through Georgia, for instance, is a domestic example of state terrorism. Both Carr and General Sherman himself agree that most of the destruction wrought by Sherman's troops (Sherman's estimate was 80%) was of Confederate infrastructure, not terrorism. The other 20%, the seizure or destruction of civilian property ‡ la Gone With the Wind, may qualify as terrorism under Carr's definition, although even that is not quite clear, as it might just be another example of denying resources-any resources-to the enemy, rather than an attempt to exert political influence on enemy civilians. Carr attributes the failure of Reconstruction to Sherman's March through Georgia. It is charitable to consider this contention simplistic. The defeated South had other and stronger reasons to enact Black Codes and unleash the night-riders of the Ku Klux Klan. 25% of the Southern white male population perished in the Civil War. The abolition of slavery liquidated four billion dollars worth of human property, and a billion dollars bought a lot back then. The bestowal on the former slaves of citizenship by the 14th Amendment and voting rights by the 15th Amendment, especially at a time when many of the Confederate elite were disenfranchised for their involvement in the rebellion, overturned the traditional political order and gave blacks previously unimaginable political power. Surely white Southerners would have resisted Reconstruction even if Sherman had never marched through Georgia. Carr might have been prudent not to even mention the Ku Klux Klan, as it is an irrefutable counterexample to his notion that terrorism never works and is always counterproductive. Klan terrorism was completely successful. By 1876, all Southern state governments were, by force or fraud, back in the hands of white racist "Redeemers." I take personal offence at Carr's slovenly, defamatory treatment of the anarchists. There is a substantial body of respectable historical scholarship on anarchism, but the only source in Carr's bibliography is one book of sensationalizing pop-history trash. The anarchists of the 19th and early 20th centuries pursued a variety of tactics. Even in the brief heyday of the notorious bomb-throwing anarchists, most anarchists preferred propaganda, worker organizing, and occasionally direct action against capitalists or the state (which is not terrorism by Carr's definition). Whatever tactics they employed, the anarchists were always out to abolish the state, not to influence it. While it is no surprise to find a military historian committed to statism, this cannot excuse Carr's mindless reiteration of long-discredited myths. Sergei Necheyev, for instance, was not an anarchist, much less an anarchist theorist of the stature of Bakunin and Kropotkin, as Carr presents him. Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President McKinley, was not, as Carr implies, ever a member of any anarchist group. Alexander Berkman's assassination attempt on industrialist Henry Clay Frick, which Carr holds up as exemplary, was not terrorism by Carr's definition. Frick, a lieutenant of Andrew Carnegie, directed the bloody suppression of the Homestead strike. Berkman's attentat was retribution pure and simple. And even if Berkman was trying to influence anyone (his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist make clear that he was not), he could only have been trying to influence anti-labor industrialists, not the state. Since Carr's argument is passionately present-minded-he sincerely wants to influence current United States anti-terrorist policy-one might expect, or at least hope, that by the time he arrives at the 20th century, his examples might become more cogent. He might address terrorism in modern contexts which might possibly be relevant to the contemporary terrorist situation. But he doesn't. His 20th century examples are as defective, and in the same ways, as his earlier ones. There is the recurrent problem of militant groups which employed terrorism as only one of the tactics in their repertoire. Often these groups also engaged in direct armed struggle against the enemy state, including the targeting of the enemy military and the enemy's political officials, which Carr correctly says is not terrorism. Carr continues to use a nonfalsifiable and therefore meaningless argument. When terrorists lose, it must be because of their terrorism. When terrorists win, Carr always says that this was in spite of, not because of, their terrorism. Counterfactual historical arguments are always problematic, even when they are supported by substantial and specific evidence in every particular case. From Carr we get only self-serving conclusions. Actually, Carr does not identify any self-defeating, purely terrorist groups or states in the 20th century, although there were a few (such as the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose annihilation is, however, more plausibly assignable to the fact that they were only a handful of people). Instead he has to discuss successful groups with mixed tactics, like the original Irish Republican Army, or Zionist terrorists like the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Some such groups such as the Vietcong, or the "ters" who turned Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, he does not discuss seriously (the VC) or does not discuss at all (the ters). The Palestine Liberation Organization-a partial success (so far)-he discusses but only to exhibit it as a poster boy for his heads-I-win, tails-you-lose analysis of mixed-tactics groups. Among the most successful groups employing mixed tactics is the United States of America. The Indian wars, the suppression of the Filipino insurrection at the turn of the century; so-called strategic bombing in World War II; Operation Phoenix as well as less structured atrocities in Vietnam, the US-sponsored contras in Nicaragua, the embargo against Iraq which has killed over a million civilians-these are all American (and all-American) state terrorism, and Carr, to his credit, says so. But he cannot explain away why they were never, with the possible exception of Vietnam, self-defeating. They were often followed by victory. A practice cannot even be accused of being self-defeating unless its practitioner is defeated. Carr contends that the universal consequence of terrorism is, in his oft-repeated word, to "steel" the resistance of the terrorized. There is no denying that this happens. The airborne terror of the Germans against Britain and of the Allies against Germany by all accounts bolstered both civilian and military resolve. American terrorism in Vietnam had the same result. But this is not the inevitable consequence. Perhaps a theory could be constructed which explains when and why terrorism succeeds and when and why it fails. That would be of immense value not only as theory but as a guide to policy. But Carr cannot undertake this analysis, because he decided a priori that circumstances are irrelevant, which is tantamount to saying that history is irrelevant, for history is the science of the particular. Really all of Carr's shallow and tendentious historical excursions are window dressing. What really matters to him are his policy recommendations for the conduct of the post-9/11 jihad against international terrorism. There is here a journal article trapped in the body of a book. It is not so much state terrorism as it is the American state's persistent preference for total or unlimited war to which he objects. (And also to the covert operations of inept and irresponsible civilian CIA cowboys.) State terrorism is only one aspect, though an important aspect, of this historically rooted mindset. Carr is frustrated because the United States has usually won its wars by methods completely contrary to his counsel. Carr calls for professionally conducted wars emphasizing mobility and surprise and calculated to minimize civilian casualties. He thinks the wars waged by Frederick the Great and planned by Helmuth von Moltke confirm the viability of this strategy. Perhaps they do, but not as a strategy applicable to all times and places. This is a claim not easy to assess objectively by someone like myself who does not want the United States to win the wars against Islam of which Afghanistan is, we are told, only the first. A better course might be to satisfy the most serious and justified Muslim terrorist grievances-which are shared by most of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims-such as withdrawal of American troops from the sacred soil (or sand) of Saudi Arabia, where they serve no purpose, and above all, the termination of unconditional support of Israel. Except for the United States, all the world supports Palestinian statehood without supposed security guarantees for Israel which no other state has or needs and which would vitiate the sovereignty which is the definition of a truly independent state. It will happen sooner or later, and a change in American policy would make it happen sooner, and get it over with, and that single change (which costs us nothing) would do more to undercut international terrorism than any number of interventionist military rampages, whose charm will soon wear off for the American people as the bills and the body bags come in. Perhaps the decisive refutation of Carr's extreme thesis is the very prolixity of his examples. He claims that terrorism is never successful, it is always self-defeating, and that these truths have been obvious from the historical record for over 2,000 years. If so, why have states and oppositional movements regularly resorted to terrorism throughout history and right up to the present day? Is it likely that Carr is right and all of them are wrong? Carr's own evidence, such as it is, suggests a more modest thesis. Terrorism is one among several tactical modalities. It is neither a sure thing nor an always self-defeating blunder. States or groups contemplating a terrorist policy should consider that, on the one hand, terrorism is not necessarily a shortcut to their objectives, but on the other hand, it has often succeeded. They should not succumb to the romantic allure of some terrorism, but they should not rule out terrorism for moralistic reasons, or moralistic reasons dressed up as pseudo-historical reasons such as Carr advances. Carr says that the debate about what to do about contemporary terrorism is lacking in the perspectives provided by military history. It is surely lacking in more than that. But if Carr's book is military history, military history is to history as military music is to music. C.A.L. Press POB 1446 Columbia, MO 65205-1446 USA Anarchy magazine web site: http://www.anarchymag.org  --------------- 202842  IMF extortion/ ARGENTINA UPDATE:Barter, Demos, Theatre, & A DICTIONARY OF CRISIS Le Monde Diplomatique 6:45pm Wed Sep 11 '02 The Argentine government has acknowledged that it does not have the funds to do anything about a ruling of the country's supreme court that a 13% cut in state pensions and civil servants' salaries was unconstitutional. The people, angry and energised, are ready to continue fighting. BARTER, DEMOS, THEATRE AND A DICTIONARY OF CRISIS Argentina: life after bankruptcy ----- The Argentine government has acknowledged that it does not have the funds to do anything about a ruling of the country's supreme court that a 13% cut in state pensions and civil servants' salaries was unconstitutional. The people, angry and energised, are ready to continue fighting. by our special correspondent CLARA AUGÃ? * --------- THE Plaza de Mayo, in the heart of Buenos Aires, is now home to the piqueteros, a group of unemployed protesters who have spent another chilly night in tents (it is winter in the southern hemisphere). In an outlying district are more tents, belonging to the followers of San Cayetano, the patron saint of work and bread. Each year on his feast day of 7 August, the poorest of the poor pray to him for bread that nourishes and work that lends dignity. Men and women, often with children, roam the streets of the city by night, rummaging in rubbish bins with bare hands. They use makeshift carts to carry away paper and cardboard, which they sell for 42 centavos (12 cents) a kilo. They also gather up any other items of value that might find a buyer - plastic, metal, glass. Many lost their jobs and are now eking out an existence. Since last December the effects of the financial crisis - social spending cuts, reduced incomes and the corralito (a partial freeze on bank accounts to shore up the Argentine peso) - have worsened the country's serious social problems. Argentina's gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 13.5% between June 2001 and June 2002, with a record drop of 16.3% during the latter six months. This drastically affected employment and incomes and caused a dramatic rise in poverty. The United Nation's economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) has predicted a 13.5% drop in GDP for Argentina for the current year (1). The country has a population of 35m, of whom 19m were classified poor as of this June, with earnings of less than $190 a month; 8.4m were destitute, with monthly incomes below $83. Young people have been showing visible malnutrition for two years and the situation has worsened in recent months in secondary and primary schools. Hungry children are fainting; absenteeism at school is down since primary school children do not want to skip the food offered at school, which is often their only meal of the day (2). Sometimes mothers appear at schools with empty plates, demanding food for sick children at home. Earlier this year this was happening only in the most impoverished province of Tucumán; now it happens nationwide, including in Buenos Aires province, where for the first time 100 schools kept their cafeterias open over the winter holidays. In Buenos Aires people are still trying to understand what happened to their tattered country. Argentina is growing poorer by the day and its political class has lost all credibility. The decline is brutal, coming after a four-year-long recession th