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 that spared some sectors. Since last December's popular uprising, which led to the downfall of President Fernando de la Rua, many signs now indicate that Argentina, once a great power, is in economic mourning. Daily evidence of the country's downfall is overwhelming. So are the lines of would-be emigrants in front of the Spanish and Italian consulates. TRAPPED IN ARGENTINA Queuing to emigrate requires patience and determination; passports have not been issued since July because the government can no longer afford printing costs. Some people search for scrap metal, more lucrative than paper. They even steal copper cables from telephone lines or aluminium from the electronic circuitry of traffic lights. The memorial to Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires, a stone's throw from the presidential palace, was early to lose its bronze plaque. City officials are considering replacing bronze plaques with ceramic ones. Other traces of history have disappeared too, leaving monuments bereft. Economic crisis has put Buenos Aires' sense of its history at risk. In offices, the high price of printer cartridges makes them luxuries, so people refill their used cartridges, whatever the quality. Downtown pedestrian thoroughfares have become open-air markets where socks, cigarette lighters and pencils are sold from temporary stalls, quickly dismantled when the authorities appear. Stores have gone out of business and the new poor wander around cafés and restaurants, begging for spare change or food. Some establishments lock their doors and make prospective customers prove they are not vagrants before they let them in. In upmarket neighbourhoods women sit in front of supermarkets, begging for rice or mate tea. Buenos Aires is anxious, unstable and poor. This, compounded by soaring youth violence (up 142% over the last four years according to officials in Buenos Aires province), has made the capital discouraging. Until recently it was rightfully proud of its nightlife, and its restaurants, cinemas, cafés and theatres were jammed. But foreboding has changed people's habits. Fear, though common in neighbouring countries, is a new phenomenon in Buenos Aires, once Latin America's safest capital. Business is booming for firms that specialise in security systems, self-defence courses, guards, and armoured vehicles. "We're selling water in a desert," says a spokesman for a company that installs home alarms. Wealthy Argentines are selling their large cars to avoid being conspicuous targets for criminals who abduct. Kidnappers strike in rich and poor neighbourhoods, and hold their victims to ransom, demanding anything from $240 to $4,800 for their release. Children in the town of Quilmes, only 30 km from the capital, are reduced to eating fried toads or even rats. For those who manage to avoid that degradation, the banking freeze and increased unemployment have led to a burgeoning of swap clubs, where services and products are bartered (3). Other provinces have partially replaced Argentina's devalued peso with local bonds, some with humourous names. The fragile currency in the northern province of Chaco is named after one of the toughest woods in the world, quebracho ("axe-breaker") (4). Left bankrupt by their government, their bankers and the International Monetary Fund, Argentines have lost faith in their political leadership. Those from Buenos Aires province resorted to marches, blockades and demonstrations. Spurred on by the piqueteros, a large group of jobless and hungry people set up blockades in the south of the capital on 26 June. The police arrested 160 people, two piqueteros were killed and 90 people were injured. Since 19 December, when the government declared a state of siege, 35 Argentines have been killed in street demonstrations. So far the only response to these anti-government protests has been repression. Signs of hope There are some signs of hope. Buenos Aires, which only a decade ago was looking forward to a glorious future, has always been a vibrant cultural centre. Some feared that the combined effects of the devalued peso, reduced purchasing power and high anxiety and uncertainty would halt cultural activities. The opposite is true. True, foreign performers are no longer paid in dollars and theatres have turned to local companies. Books from Spain or Mexico are prohibitively expensive and higher paper prices have curtailed domestic publishing. Over the last 20 months 300 Argentine bookstores closed their doors. People now visit bookstores to read the books they would have bought a year ago. But despite the difficulties associated with the devalued peso (which lost 300% of its value against the dollar over six months), the culture makers are still demonstrating vitality, and the Argentine public supports them. Intellectuals and artists are organising to counter the feelings of loss and powerlessness. The Argentine cinema is enjoying a renaissance and theatres are offering high-quality productions. Some plays have addressed the crisis, to exorcise it or show its effects. At the magnificent Teatro Argentino de La Plata, when an actor recited a passage by the Spanish playwright, Federico García Lorca, the entire city could see itself in the author's words: "What shall I do with this new and coming hour, so unfamiliar to me?" A new venue on the Avenida Corrientes (the Broadway of Buenos Aires) charges no admittance: theatregoers can pay what they want. Other theatres are offering free productions and audiences are growing. Some ask audiences to donate food, toys and medicines, which go to groups to help the poor. In another positive development, many popular groups are springing up, including organisations representing the unemployed and the piqueteros, food banks and groups committed to finding alternative solutions. Social solidarity organisations are appearing, and they disavow the country that is becoming "a nightmare version of its former dream", in the words of a tango written by the Argentine poet, Enrique Santos Discépolo. Led by NGOs, associations and other institutions, including football clubs, social solidarity campaigns flourish. The Buenos Aires metro offered two subway tickets in return for food donations to day-care centres and food banks. The Argentine vitality also shines through in their humour (a father asks his son what he would like to be when he grows up; the boy says: "A foreigner"). By focusing on Argentina's plight, with its injustices and obstacles, comedians have converted the worse aspects of daily life into a vehicle for protest. One newspaper quoted the philosopher Alejandro Rozitchner: "It's wrong to say we don't produce anything. We produce crises and disasters." The Diccionario de la Crisis (dictionary of the crisis), hot off the press, has a glossary of terms for recent events (5). Homero Expósito wrote in an old tango: "With broken dreams we . . . float down the river of life as it drifts away." Broken dreams litter the pavements of Buenos Aires: a boy of 10 tries to catch a pigeon on Libertad Plaza in the business district. But he is no child at play. His siblings come to help him. They are looking for food. --- * Journalist based in Buenos Aires (1) Situación y perspectivas 2002. Estudio Económico de América Latina y el Caribe, 2001-2002, Eclac, 1 August 2002, Santiago, Chile. (2) According to the Argentine president's office for social programmes (Siempro), 70% of the country's children under the age of 18 live in poor or destitute households. See BBC World Service, London, 7 August 2002. (3) See Luis Bilbao, "Argentina: hello again" and Carlos Gabetta, "IMF show state revolts", Le Monde diplomatique English language edition, August 2001 and January 2002 respectively. (4) On 7 August 2002 President Eduardo Duhalde promised the visiting US Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, that he would eliminate the 15 provincial currencies used as local substitutes for the peso. (5) José Gobello and Marcelo Oliveri, Diccionario de la Crisis, Corregidor, Buenos. Translated by Luke Sandford http://mondediplo.com/2002/09/13argentina ---------------------------------- What is wrong with America's pro-Israel Chorus? (english) Stephen DeVoy 4:35pm Wed Sep 11 '02 (Modified on 5:02pm Wed Sep 11 '02) SRDeVoy@aol.com article#202810 An examination of the malice of America's pro-Israel chorus. What is wrong with America's pro-Israel Chorus? Author: Stephen DeVoy If this question were taken in the postive, specifically, if the question were "What is right with America's pro-Israel chorus," this article would have already been finished. However, we seek not the easy path. We will answer the question is the negative. No other sector of American society has shown itself to be less tolerant of political expression, freedom of thought, academic freedom, and the liberty of the individual than the pro-Israel community within the United States. Unfortunately, the problem is not only local. We have received emails from all reaches of our planet describing the vicious and illegal acts of those who support Israel. These reports have come from Russia, Australia, the United States and many places in between. The pro-Israel community seeks to silence any and all criticism of Israel. To reach this end they issue death threats, send computer viruses, contact employers, and even murder those who challenge the state of Israel. These Israel supporters are distinguishable from Germany's brown shirts only by their choice of symbols and their choice of victims. Our own website, Stop Fascism!, a web site dedicated to fighting ALL FORMS of fascism has been a target as well. We have endured months of death threats, defamation, libel, slander, invasion of privacy, loss of employment, and accusation of involvement in everything from the pipe bombings in the mid-west to being members of the White Aryan Resistance. Nothing could be more absurd. The editor of this site is married outside of his race. His child is the product of this union. He is multilingual and has been a strong opponent of all forms of racism and bigotry. Our criticism of Israel has absolutely nothing to do with the faith or ethnicity of Israelis. Our criticism of Israel comes from a profound disgust of oppression, fascism, terrorism, and violence. We will not stand down from our mission under the "fear" of being branded "anti-Semitic." We ask our readers to step back for a moment. Think about the following. Is there another government on our planet that you cannot criticize without receiving and endless stream of accusations of some form of bigotry, death threats, and cyber attacks? The answer to the question is a resounding NO. Only Israel sets itself apart as untouchable. Only Israel sees itself as so perfect that any and all criticism will be attributed to some evil or vile agenda. While news reports come in of American made jets, flow by Israelis, shooting rockets into the apartments of civilians, tanks crushing homes in the West Bank, children shot at in Gaza, and cyber attacks launched against Americans - we are all expected to turn a blind eye and join the chorus of "Israel is perfect and all who dissent are vile bigots." We reject this notion! Israel is a fascist state. Israel is as vile as Hitler's Germany and as racist as the former Apartheid Government of South Africa. The atrocities that the Israelis reign upon the people of Palestine are as bad as the genocide committed by Euro-Americans against Native Americans! Fascism is not the monopoly of any race or religion. The Zionist movement has protected itself from criticism by the false equation that all fascism is anti-Semitic and all anti-Semitism is fascist. This is simply untrue. It is a lie propagated to still the mind and give Israel the space it wants to butcher those whose land Israel covets. The State of Israel took advantage of 9/11. There is well founded speculation that the State of Israel actively sought to enable the attacks of 9/11. When the press and media witnessed 9/11, we were instructed us that things would never been the same again. The media paraded Israeli experts in airline security and anti-terrorism before our television screens. Israeli politicians were featured on our news networks instructing us to attack Iraq, even while news that al Qaeda was responsible emerged. America's pro-Israel politicians, such as Senator Lieberman, beat the drum of war with Iraq. 9/11 marked the determined and well orchestrated Israelification of American society and government. This process has not ended. This process is the root of American fascism. One cannot be like Israel without being fascist. Those who accuse our position of rising from the scum of anti-Semitism should go to the Jerusalem Post and join it's online forums. There you will see rabid racism as you have never seen it before. You will see anti-Islamic bigotry in its full form. You will see libelous statements about the Catholic Church and Christianity. You will observe exchanges of information about what Internet sites to attack because they dare question Israel. The racists are not those of us who stand up and speak against Israel. The racists are the Israelis and their supporters. We hold no hope that these fanatical fascist racists will be won over by our arguments. Fanaticism is the root of evil. Arguing with a pro-Israel fanatic is in no way different from arguing with a young Palestinian with bombs strapped to his waste. The instinct to terror has been programmed in both. The ethical root of Israeli and pro-Israel harassment, death threats, and cyber attacks is one and the same. It is what compelled Islamic pilots to crash commercial jets into American buildings on 9/11. The only difference rests in the relationship of the terrorists to power. While Israeli terrorists hold the reigns of political and corporate power, they need only pull the levers of their influence to ruin the lives of others. Powerless Islamic terrorists have no such levers. Their only means to evil deeds are to be found in crude violence. The difference is only one of access to resources and control. The Israeli terror pilot can sit comfortably in his American made jet and shoot rockets into sleeping children. The Palestinian terrorist must strap bombs to his waste and trade his life for his aim. At its source, it is all the same damned thing. If anything distinguishes the violence of the two, it is that Palestinians are unjustly oppressed and Israelis are unjustly empowered. If the world is to find peace and if Americans are to regain their own destiny, we must shake off the mental straight jacket that silences the mind and makes us sheep for the slaughter. American "friends of Israel" are no friends of the United States. Jewish Americans who are truly American must stand up and denounce the enemy within. Just as there were calls, after 9/11, for Muslims to denounce terror and violence, we demand the same from America's Jewish community. -------------------------  202807 How prevalent is child molestation among homosexuals?  Leon Carter 4:24pm Wed Sep 11 '02 (Modified on 7:44pm Wed Sep 11 '02) turingtest@iprimus.com.au The Gay Report revealed that 73 percent of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys. Although homosexuals account for less than two percent of the population. they constitute about a third of child molesters. Although most homosexual activists publicly deny that they want access to boys, many homosexual groups around the world are working aggressively to lower the age of sexual consent. Their cause is being aided by the professional psychiatric and psychological associations, which have moved n recent years toward normalizing pedophilia, much as they did with homosexuality in the early 1970s. Kevin Bishop, an admitted pederast (pedophile), is promoting the work of the North American /Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in South Africa. Bishop, who was molested at the age of six, is also an admitted homosexual who is blunt about the relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia. "Scratch the average homosexual and you will find a pedophile," said Bishop in an interview with the Electronic Mail & Guardian (June 30, 1997).1 (1. Angella Johnson, âÂ?Â?The man who loves to love boys,âÂ?Â� Electronic Mail & Guardian, June 30, 1997, http://www.mg.co.za/mg.) This pedophile/homosexual activist began studying pedophilia while a student at Rhodes University. He also discovered Karl Marx there, as well as other literature that helped form his worldview. His views are being echoed around the world by homosexual activists who are seeking what they call "sexual freedom" for children. Bishop is on a crusade in South Africa to have "age of sexual consent laws" abolished, and he is looking for help from NAMBLA to accomplish his goal. He says children must be empowered "by teaching them about loving relationships at an early age, and giving them the opportunity to make an informed decision about having [sex]." He also approves of incest, noting, "Two women psychologists in America say the healthiest introduction to sex for a child should be with their [sic] parents, because it is less threatening and the emotional intimacy more comfortable." 2 (2.Ibid) Bishop agrees with NAMBLA that the next social movement in Western politics will be an attack m "sexual ageism," which prohibits sexual contact based on age differences. The movement already is well under way in Europe and Canada. ---------- Homosexuals did not need scientific evidence, neither do paedophiles. The public approval of homosexuality and the idea of homosexuals "marrying" would have been unheard of thirty years ago. But the homosexual campaign's success did not depend on rightness or on scientific evidence - but in its image, and on the increasing permissiveness of society. Dr John Money of John HopKins University has urged paedophiles not to be discouraged by the lack of evidence backing up their cause. He says: "When the gay rights activists became politically active, there wasn't a sufficient body of scientific information tor them to base their gay aictivism on. So, you don't have to have a basic body of scientific information in order to decide to work actively for a particular ideolgy. As long as you're prepared to be put in Jail. Isn't that how social change has always taken place?" This quote comes from the "scholarly" Dutch journal, Paidika -A Journal of paedophilia. ( ) If homosexuality has been posed as healthy, good and nornal, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, so can paedophilia. Pro-paedophilic articles are making their way into academia. How prevalent is child molestation among homosexuals? The Gay Report, published by homosexual researchers Jay and Young in 1979, revealed that 73 percent of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger.5 (5. K. Jay and A. Young, The Gay Report (New York: Summit Books, 1979), p. 275. ) Although homosexuals account for less than two percent of the population. they constitute about a third of child molesters.6 (6. K. Freund and R.I. Watson, "The Proportions of Heterosexual and Homosexual Pedophiles Among Sex Offenders Against Children: An Exploratory Study," Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 18 (Spring 1992): 3443, cited in "The Problem of Pedophilia," op. cit. Also, K. Freund and R.I. Watson, "Pedophilia and Heterosexuality vs. Homosexuality," Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 10 (Fall 1984): 197, cited in NARTH Fact Sheet. ) Further, as noted by the Encino, Calif.-based National Association for research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), "since homosexual pedophiles victimize far more children than do heterosexual pedophiles, it is estimated that approximately 80 percent or pedophile victims are boys who have been molested by adultmales.7 (7. Thomas Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate (Downers Grove, IU.: Intervarsity Press), p. 114, cited in "The Problem of Pedophilia, op. cit., p. 2. ) A nationwide investigation of child molestation in the Boy Scouts from 1971 to 1991 revealed that more than 2,000 boys reported molestations by adult Scout leaders. (Note: The Scouts, who have 150,000 Scoutmasters and assistant Scoutmasters, ban hundreds of men each year from scouting out of concern that they might abuse boys.)8 (8. Patrick Boyle, Scout's Honor (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1994), p. 3l6. ) A study of Canadian pedophiles has shown that 30 percent of those studied admitted to having engaged In homosexual acts as adults, and 91 percent of the molesters of non-familial boys admitted to no lifetime sexual contact other than homosexual.9 (9. W. L. Marshall, et al., "Early onset and deviant sexuality in child molesters," Journal of interpersonal Violence 6 (1991): 323-336, cited in "Pedophilia: The Part of Homosexuality They Don't Want You to see," Colorado for Family Values Report, Vol. 14, March 1994. ) Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., and Charles B. Johnson, Ph.D., conducted a content study of the personal ads in the Advocate, the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine and discovered that "chickens," a common term for underage boys sought for sex, were widely solicited. Many of the advertisements in the magazine solicited boys and teens from within a larger pool of prostitution ads.10 (10. Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., "A Content Analysis of 'The Advocate,"' unpublished manuscript p. 18, quoted in "Pedophilia: The Part of Homosexuality They Don't WantYou to See," ibid. ) The authors also note a statement from a book review by homosexual activist Larry Kramer that the work, "like much canonized male homosexual literature, involves sexually predatory white men on the prowl for dark-skinned boys to gratify them.11 (11. From "Lany Kramer's Reading List," The Advocate, January 24, 1995, p. 99, cited in "Status Report," The Reisman & Johnson Report of Partner Solicitation Characteristics as a Reflection of More Sexual Orientation and the Threat to Children, First Principles Press, January l995. ) In a 1985 study of the rates of molestation among homosexual pederasts compared to heterosexu1 pedophiles, Dr. Paul Cameron found the following: 153 pederasts had sexually molested 22,981 boys over an average period of 22 years. 224 pedophiles had molested 4,435 girls over an average period of 18 years. The average pederast molested an average of 150 boys, and each heterosexual pedophile molested an average of 20 girls, a ratio of 7.5 to one. 12 (12. Dr. Paul Cameron, Homosexual Molestation of Children/Sexual Interaction of Teacher and Pupil, Psychological Reports 57 (1985): 1227-1236.) homosexualissues.com/ a ----------------- children need protection from MOLESTERS (english) jerry 4:45pm Wed Sep 11 '02 comment#202815 Whether or not they are homosexual or heterosexual doesn't matter to the child being abused. ------------- not to mention... (english) blitzen 5:03pm Wed Sep 11 '02 comment#202820 That this is a load of horse patootie. The vast majority of child molestors (which may or may not be the same thing as a pedophile in your book) identify as heterosexual, even those who molest small boys. There are virtually no instances of men who have relationships with other adult men and who molest boys. ------------ A sabo for your hate machine!! (english) Nazi Punks, Fuck Off! 5:24pm Wed Sep 11 '02 comment#202826 You left a couple of gaping holes that needed filling in order for you to float this piece of shit theory.. 1) Engaging in 'homosexaul acts' and being homosexual, are two different things 2) Just because a pedophile molests a boy does not mean that they are homosexual As you pointed out, pedophiles, like the sick bastard in South Africa are often 'damaged' individuals. If you dive a little deeper into the psychological literature on the subject, and not just stop shallow when you have everything 'you' need, you will see that, yes sexual confusion will sometimes play a part, but more so are mal-developed, childish attitudes towards adult sexuality, often the result of traumatic exposure during childhood. Yes there are homosexual pedophiles that attack boys, and if they are in fact the majority, a more likely reason for them to engage in such behaviour, rather than your 'THEY ARE EVIL INCARNATE!' theory, is that they are in fact driven to it by a culture that treats them as sub-human. These individuals are so repressed, the world around them so hostile, they have been led to believe that they are sick, immoral, damned by God and whatever other hateful BS you can think of, why is it a surprise that their population would produce disproportional abberrant behaviour!? For instance, The University of Minnesota in 1997 released a report stating that homosexual youth were 7 times more likely to kill themselves than their heterosexual peers. I agree with the previous responder .. it is disgusting that you would use the most vulnerable to help you in your 'special interests' campaign. Can you imagine if people in power took this false logic seriously and actually invested part of their limited resources in it? You would actually be increasing the risk to children!! Grow up, and open your eyes for 'Christ's' sake! ------- log rolling (english) bh 5:56pm Wed Sep 11 '02 comment#202834 I noticed that the author got most of his 'scientific material' from the Family Values group in Colorado. some years back, a similar group in Oregon was working to overturn a vote on non discrimination and they distributed pamphlets showing the scientific research conducted by doctor so and so (PHd of something or another) which proved that somewhere around two thirds of homosexual males practiced log rolling. According to this in depth scientific research this practice of the warp minded deviants involved shitting on a tile floor, rolling in the logs of shit, and then licking each others bodies clean. It was all backed up by scientific research and thus was okay. They also had lots of other research by people with phds showing equally bad conduct. at the time this 'research' came out I did my own study, conducting a survey and unfortunately did not find one single gay person who had a) ever log rolled before steamy perverted sex on a Saturday night, or b) had ever even heard of anyone who had log rolled. This should be in Ripleys believe it or not, because it did happen, and its hard to believe... There are two ways to do 'science' and one way, the Family values way, is to find anything that works for you, or to come to a conclusion before hand and then get a born again phd to do the research to prove the foregone conclusion, which is typical of these groups. You also ignore the inconvenient research and thus like the Colorado family values people you can can then publish reports crammed full of evidence that hopefully will sway someone like the poster above. Anyone who, like myself, has studied and monitored christian groups and television over the years knows that you can hunted by death squads, have your land taken, live on less than a dollar a day, and none of this inspires moral outrage, or even a single tv show or lobbying campaign, these religious people being to involved in promoting 'morals' after all, which means they will be closely monitoring illegal and criminally harmful orgasms which do so much damage to the world and our society, being the hurtful harmful things that they so obviously are... And by the way, since when is 18 or 19 a child? I guess it depends on how you want to define the terms for your study, but you know religious moral leaders definately want to stop all harmful orgasms among the 18 and 19 year old crowd, and given that they cannot roll back the immoral and harmful age of puberty, they will have to content themselves with promoting abstinence, the only non hurtful nonharmful option for the planet, and , when not funding 'science' against gay people, will also have to fund non masturbation drives and get lots of younger teens to promise to remain chaste and pure by not harming themselves for the rest of their lives by having orgasms. meanwhile the planet starves around them, crooks like Mobuto take a hundred billion dollars in theft and leave entire countries ruined not to mention in debt paying off the money that crook pocketed in loans, and Pat Robertson goes boating with Mobtuto on his Yacht (this happened years ago when mobuto was still alive). Only these anti orgasm zealots could possibly think of themselves as moral. Their weird obsession with peddling fig leaves in Eden is what is going to have to pass for morals in the church, since a lot of people there don't have any real morals to speak of as the record so clearly shows... How prevalent is incest? (english) Imagineallthepeoplelivinglifeinpeace 7:44pm Wed Sep 11 '02 comment#202853 How prevalent is child molestation (i.e., incest) by heterosexual parents? Very. Heterosexual parents perpetrate nearly all of the incest against children today. The commonality, even in the 21st century, of children being sexually abused by their own straight parents is what needs to be focused on, prosecuted criminally, and stopped. In comparison to heterosexual family incest (the majority of which is perpetrated by heterosexual men), child molestation by truly gay men or women is MINISCULE. In addition, anyone who still confuses pedophilia with homosexuality needs to go read a dictionary, and quickly. --------------------------------------  202756 The Genocide Continues at Oneida, New York (english) Sheldon Carnes 12:55pm Wed Sep 11 '02 sheldoncarnes@hotmail.comThe BIA has set up Ray Halbritter and his 80 member paramilitary police force to force Oneidas off their native lands. The Genocide Continues at Oneida, New York Article II, section C of the United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as, "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction in whole or in part." In 1993 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which in between 1970 and 1975 had authorized health clinics that sterilized tens of thousands of Native America women without their consent and often without their knowledge, found their perfect agent in Ray Halbritter for the continuing genocide of the Oneida people. Traditionally all the Oneida Nation's matters and the affairs of the people are conducted in monthly meetings with representatives of all three clans present, the Wolf, the Bear, and the Turtle. At the Nation's meetings, the clan spokespeople are the eyes and the ears of their nation and act only as the people's servants, carrying out their wishes. This form of government seems to be considered foreign and subversive by the United States where we elect leaders who carry out their own agendas and seldom, if ever, consult with the electorate. In the mid 1980s Ray Halbritter was installed as a temporary spokesperson for the Wolf clan, along with Richard Chrisjohn of the Bear clan, and Lymm Johns of the Turtle clan, at the Grand Council. In the late 1980s, when the spokespeople for the Bear clan and the Turtle clan had died, Halbritter hand picked and employed members of a men's council to validate all of Halbritter's decisions. Ray Halbritter then proclaimed himself CEO of all Oneida Nation enterprises. He has used this position to build his own financial empire. Because Halbritter was no longer a representative to his people, nor responsible nor accountable to the Oneida Nation, his clan mother gave Halbritter his first traditional warning in 1991, and finally had Halbritter disposed as clan representative in 1993. The BIA reinstated Halbritter, who has since then created his own eighty member non-native paramilitary tribal police force, outlawed meetings of more than five people on Oneida land, locked down the Long House, which is the center of Oneida culture -- the place of its religion, social events and ceremonies. Halbritter has banned all aspects of Oneida life, while creating a public smokescreen with his artificial "men's council" to show that everything is normal. All this has been backed up by the BIA, and Halbritter's paramilitary police force. Halbritter gives himself an annual salary of several million dollars. He lives in six large houses, takes 10% of profits of all businesses under the Oneida Nation name, and take 30% of the profits from any individual with their own business on Oneida land. He has mortgaged all of the Oneida lands and all future land claims against a 75 million dollar loan. If anyone opposes or questions Halbritter's authority, they will face loosing their job and being taken off the Nations rolls, which means the loss of all Nation benefits such as medical, financial, and the loss of voting privileges. The growing opposition to Halbritter's rule inspired a 1995 Peace March attended by more than two hundred Oneida people. A year later Halbritter began a campaign of evicting residents of Oneida land who would not accept Halbritter and his men's council as supreme authority over the Oneida Nation. With armed police escorts he carried out forced home inspections. If the homeowner's dwelling did not conform to Halbritter's personal housing code, the owners were evicted, and the homes demolished. So far every forced inspection has resulted in eviction, home demolishment, and displacement of Oneida families from off their territorial land. To date thirteen families have been displaced -- a clear act of genocide. All of this would have passed without notice if it were not for the fight of Danielle Schenandaoh-Patterson to save the home of her three children. Like Rosa Parks, Danielle refused to submit to injustice, and the world is changing. Patterson documented and video taped what was going on, and she brought the fight everywhere that there was a concerned ear to hear and a concerned eye to see. She brings this news to schools and colleges, Peace Marches and Peltier rallies, civic groups, activist collectives, and Native American organizations. The word has crossed the nation, and traveled to Germany, England, France, Japan, Australia, and Russia. Senator Hillery Clinton might investigate to situation if enough people contact her. Danielle Schenandaoh-Patterson has established a peace camp on her property and has invited supporters from many nations into her home to share community meals with her and her children. All are invited to camp out on her land; to bring tents, sleeping bags, and food. No alcohol, drugs, nor weapons allowed. Bring cameras, camcorders, audio recorders, musical instruments, and stories. We are all invited to be witnesses and peaceful resistors to ward off the injustices of a millionaire tyrant who will try to render homeless another family from the Oneida territory. In the process Halbritter is continuing the genocidal practices of the BIA. Only an united effort from concerned people everywhere can bring justice. Danielle's website is www.oneidasfordemocrary.org. Further information and possible transportation can be gotten from the Ironweed Collective at (518) 436-0929 The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton United States Senate 476 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 202-224-4451 fax 202-228-0282 www.clinton@senate.gov -------------------------- hanksville.org/storytellers/ youngbear/poems/Afterword.html Afterword: Black Eagle Child Stella Young Bear Meskwaki Bandolier Bag Minneapolis Institute of Art In the spring of 1970, during a smoggy, oily-aired evening in Southern California, I jotted down what was perhaps the first outline of this book. It was a simple one and in some respects no different from the drafts to poems I later published. The one aspect, however, which made this outline stand out for many years was the intriguing set of chapter titles and synopses. Today this outline and the accompanying notes are held permanently between the cold pages of a spiral-backed tablet in storage. They have always been a few feet away, but their sensitive memories have kept me at arm's length-until today. To have gently lifted these words from the light green pages by breathing a heart's pulse into them is a startling juxtaposition to the computer monitor which now records these final entries. The poetic journey in the making of Black Eagle Child has been a most comprehensive project in terms of message, content, and stylistic approach. There has also been divergence. Considering that the poetic forms I have adopted and adapted (from English, a second language) have little significance in the tribal realm, wordcollecting was met early on with varying degrees of apprehension. Whenever I entertained the prospect of sitting down at the desk, getting beyond serious, and holding these thoughts long enough to boldly arrange their sequences in order, I discovered forthright our shadows change imperceptibly in accordance with the sun's ascension and descension. As a result, there was work which never materialized. Because of the differences of the bilingual/bicultural worlds I live in, it sometimes seems as if what is actually published turns out to be a minute and insignificant fraction of one's perpetual metamorphosis. Putting stories to page has been a task and a half, for the characters and their situations are taken from both autobiographical experiences and imagination. In the delicate ritual of weighing what can and cannot be shared, a greater portion of my work is not based on spontaneity. And a large segment of what is presented for public dissemination is not so much an act of revealing elements that are close to me as it is an exercise in creative detachment. The most interesting facet in all of this has been the artistic interlacing of ethereality, past and present. As such there are considerations of visions, traditional healing, supernaturalism, and hallucinogen-based sacraments interposed with centuries-old philosophies and customs. Since these verities are still a prevalent part of modern tribal society, the divisions between dream and myth are never clear-cut. The creation of Black Eagle Child was equivalent to a collage done over a lifetime via the tedious layering upon layering of images by an artist who didn't believe in endings, for the sweeping visions he wanted to capture were constant and forever changing. It was therefore essential to depict these visuals in increments, to keep these enigmatic stories afloat in the dark until dust-filled veils of light inadvertently revealed their luminescent shapes. My literary perspectives were often subject to bouts of overconcern and grave underestimation of self. Given the number of season-long debates that were held to determine whether the material presented was unnecessary or sacrilegious, there's no doubt an entire book could have been written. One winter, with space becoming more precious, I was forced to incinerate boxes of reasons-pro and con. While I remained enamored with writing and the meticulous rituals one goes through in bringing thought to page, the relationship of the creator and the created worked best behind the iron borders of this word-collector consciousness. In most tightly knit societies, one must be keenly aware of social responsibility. For the Mesquakie-People of the Red Earth-it is no different. Circumspection is the paradigm of harmony. But as with everything modern and "civilized," there are often casualties among the ignorant, deprived, and unknowing. I, for one among many, plead guilty to the preceding statement. In extreme cases, one's forgetfulness and insincerity arc not effronteries; they are irreversible, unending truths which began in 1492. Long ago when I first started to publish my work locally, I was apprised by my grandmother to not ever be "dissuaded by anyone" and to continue with only good intentions in mind. While she obviously realized I was too young and naive to know of Importance, she nevertheless taught there were things I could not write about. For years I truly thought I possessed valuable knowledge. The fact was, I didn't know anything. Yes, I may have heard, seen, and experienced firsthand extraordinary occurrences of reality "gone astray," of steps taken into transmutable dimensions, but they could only be seen and understood from one angle: in retrospect. Reviewing my work with scrutiny and keeping distant from transgression of certain codes and precepts have become inherent parts of the storywriting regimen, the premise being that words have an innate sense of power. With early word-collectors (or informants) and their personal disasters as examples, my grandmother also forewarned commentary was destructive when untethered, for it had the capacity to either inflict or self-inflict harm. As much as has been permissible, I have attempted to hold on to this tenet. Remarkably, now that my destination is within sight, whatever energy I am able to conjure can only be a semblance of elation. For that I am grateful. There was a time when it could have been worse: I once read of an ancestor who was so exhausted from a military sponsored interview that he lay still for hours in his parents' lodge. For a person whose world had been mystically laid down by a Creator with a fundamental set of understandings and spiritual teachings, I imagine there had never been a structured and compartmentalized perception of Mesquakie ideology as that shown by the white-skinned people, wa be ski na me ska tti kit. Whether or not the account is authentic, I can commiserate with this exhausted character, for there have been occasions when I thought the best recourse was to reconsider direction, questioning what purpose the narratives served-until the state of vexation passed. The philosophy that espouses cosmic insignificance, a belief that humans are but a minute part of world order, has shaped my words. My expectations are simply to express myself as only an accomplished instrumentalist can, to arrange in melodic and tragic tones the common chords of one's abraded existence. Yet there exists a ceaseless feeling that more needs to be said than what was offered in the space and time given. >> << The Black Eagle Child Settlement is a fictitious counterpart of the central Iowa sanctuary where I am an enrolled, lifelong resident. The character Edgar Bearchild mirrors in part my own laborious Journey of Words. He finds himself in a unique but precarious "little earth" where writing becomes the sole means of salvation. Encouraged early on by close relatives, Bearchild accepts the medium but he is somewhat late in doing so. As a result, he wants to unfold the mysteries that transported him to the pinnacle of poetry writing. In the process he discovers concrete answers, like windfish, are elusive. Bearchild merely intends to finish out the whizzing star's cataclysmic course, to be (as Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout of England writes and sings) the "Fred Astaire of words." Ted Facepaint, on the other hand, is a composite of a dozen people met, known, and lost in the last forty years. He's a jigsaw puzzle, an imbrication of humanity, whose pieces belong to everyone. Despite Facepaint's gallant efforts to rid the future of physical and social impediments, there is never a guarantee the passage will go unhindered. His spiritual beliefs and convictions surpass most, but he alone does not think so, for he comes from an unfamiliar place where radiant people freely give away the gift of introspection. Meeting him along the way toward his sky-answering quest, people held out their cupped hands and saw vividly the cascading plainness of their lives. It frightened those who lacked the maturity to grasp the bitter world, while those experienced saw past the technological clutter, seeking signs of validation. Facepaint is a rare personality who is intrinsically attuned to the night sky, and he keeps an ever-present watch for any change, any subtle repositioning of the Orion constellation. Like nomads who surface and resurface in our lifetimes, there are unassuming and effusive characters like Rose and Brook Grassleggings, Claude Youthman, Patty Jo and her "Hyena," Junior Pipestar, and Pat "D." Red Hat who themselves are composites of other people. They would almost have to be, for the comic and tragic situations they experience border extraordinary and "non ordinary,' reality. There is, however, a deliberate intent to portray their situations as being no different from those faced by anyone else caught up in this diverse but prismatic sea of humanity. There are bound to be successes in the storm of adversity, just as there are disconcertion, loss, and resolve. And permeated throughout arc experiences endemic in tribal society. While a few possess an uncanny ability to detect watery voices rising from the lakes and rivers, the rest of us are convinced the sound is the garbled music of inexperienced vocalists pounding on a rusted truck hood upshore. While these few will always appear despondent and unpredictable, it is frequently their doting powers of healing that work and come through when modern medicines fail. Throughout the twenty years I have been involved with writing, I have attempted to maintain a delicate equilibrium with my tribal homeland's history and geographic surroundings and the world that changes its face along the borders. Represented in the whirlwind of mystical themes and modern symbols, of characters normal or bizarre and their eventual resolve, the word-collecting process is an admixture of time present and past, of direction found and then lost, of actuality and dream. Having had the good fortune to study, teach, and contribute to contemporary American Indian literature, I have taken this long awaited opportunity to capture personal and historical fragments of a midwestern tribal community called Black Eagle Child. The geographically and culturally isolated society consists of progressives and conservatives who revolve around the hierarchy of clan names. Historically, there was equality in the First-Named systems, but materialism and greed spawned novel methods by which to manipulate others. The day divine leadership was deemed unimportant was when the sacred myths began to crumble under the wheels of suzerainty. In the ancient bloodways there obviously remains what is perhaps a disjointed facet of the Mesquakie storytelling tradition, which has inevitably been infused with dynamic trends. Surprisingly, these voices and personas have been at odds more than they have been synchronous. Both, however, resound wholly with imagery, thought, and profound messages for humanity. This type of rendering has been an artistic process for me, the creative emulation of thought through extraordinary, tragic, and comedic stories of an imagined midwestern tribal existence. It has never sought to be more than that. -------------------------See also: - Studies In American Indian Literatures The Newsletter of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures Volume 6, No. 3, Summer 1982 Editor: Karl Kroeber, Columbia University Bibliographer: Lavonne Brown Ruoff, University of Illinois, Chicago Book Review Editor: Jarold Ramsey, University of Rochester Assistant to the Editor: Marietta Pino, Columbia University -----------