By Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer

The labor movement is beginning to stir after decades of setbacks and defeats. Having embraced the concept of a partnership with the employers, most labor officials renounced any recourse to strikes, the only effective weapon when properly employed, and proceeded to negotiate one concessionary contract after another for their membership. Meanwhile they attempted unsuccessfully to pursue their goals through their other “partner,” the Democratic Party.

But the current economic crisis has resulted in tremendous pressure on the labor officials from the rank and file, who are bearing the brunt of the crisis through massive job loss, health care termination, home foreclosures and evictions. And although much still needs to change, hopeful signs are sprouting up on the horizon.

For example, in the past several years, organized labor has been passing one antiwar resolution after another. This year the AFL-CIO called for “speedy withdrawal from Iraq.” The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has called for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The National Education Association, the Communication Workers of America, the American Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and United Electrical (UE) have all passed antiwar resolutions. Union officials have recognized that the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent on job creation programs, education, health care, and other social services. U.S. Labor Against War, a nationwide organization promoting antiwar positions in the labor movement, includes 184 affiliates, most of whom are local unions.

But the significance of these resolutions goes beyond a mere symbolic gesture. They represent a break with the official policies of the Democratic Party, since these wars are now Obama’s wars. By breaking with the Democratic Party on war, the labor movement is taking a step in the direction of independent political action. That is, rather than cementing itself entirely to the Democratic Party, which is controlled root and branch by corporate America and the rich, many labor officials are beginning to acknowledge that their interests might diverge. The partnership is beginning to fracture and crack.

Another important crack is also surfacing. Given the severe government budget deficits on the federal, state and local levels, which have resulted in massive layoffs and reduced public services across the country, unions are taking up the demand of taxing the corporations and the rich in order to raise revenue and save jobs. The Washington State Labor Council has produced a strong resolution calling for taxing the rich, as well as the San Francisco Labor Council, the California Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Teachers, the Illinois state convention of AFSCME, and numerous SEIU and AFSCME locals.

Taxing the corporations and the rich is a demand that Democratic Party functionaries like to say is “off the table.” That means one is not even allowed to discuss it, which is tantamount to denying it any reality. The reason for this stern rebuke is transparently clear: Democratic Party coffers are filled with billions of dollars donated by corporations and the rich. Their donations make those from organized labor pale in comparison.

A third crack in the relation of organized labor to the Democratic Party is breaking through. The Troy (New York) Labor Council has called on the AFL-CIO to organize a demonstration in Washington D.C. to demand job creation programs and peace, among other things. The Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC), an emerging grassroots, national organization, has been working with members of the San Francisco Labor Council who will introduce a similar resolution to the Council. If these resolutions result in a significant campaign advocating a truly massive Solidarity Day III demonstration called by the labor movement, then organized labor will again be acting independently of the Democrats, as labor will rally its own members and their allies, including community groups and Black and Latino organizations, to make demands on the Democratic-controlled government.

In fact, the AFL-CIO itself is already calling for a government-initiated jobs program. Its new president, Richard Trumka, recently observed: “Every day, it becomes more urgent that the federal government step up to the plate with bold actions to boost job creation. Such action should include urgently needed fiscal relief to state and local governments, community jobs programs, additional investments in infrastructure and green jobs and credit relief to small and medium-sized businesses. Failing to act puts us at very real risk of a lost generation of hard-working Americans who can’t put food on the table and bright young people who never realize their potential.”

As long as organized labor maintains any semblance of its partnership-with-the-employers approach, working people will be compelled to sacrifice for the “good” of the company. If the business moves to another country to take advantage of cheap labor, workers must passively accept their layoffs. If a company orders massive layoffs while requiring the remaining people to work twice as hard, workers will not be allowed to protest. And if wages and benefits are slashed to the core in order to raise profits, workers must submit in silence.

As the above cracks in the partnership testify, however, there is a growing recognition that the interests of workers and their employers do not always converge. And if these trends continue, they will culminate in the recognition that in fact the interests of workers and their employers stand diametrically opposed. First and foremost, businesses produce for a profit. On the other hand, people work simply in order to make a living. The higher the wages and benefits, then the higher is the standard of living. But the profits of the employer are proportionately lower. Therefore, any partnership with the employers will be forged at the expense of the workers. And there can be no doubt that the partnership philosophy has produced uninterrupted loses for the workers during the past four decades.

But if the interests of working people and their employers do not converge, it makes little sense for labor to operate within the Democratic Party, given that corporations and the rich control the Party. In the final analysis, in order for working people to effectively pursue their own interests, they will be compelled to organize their own party — a labor party — that can operate exclusively for them.

In order to encourage these developments further, we urge readers who are in unions to raise resolutions in their locals calling on the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to organize Solidarity Day III in the Spring 2010 in Washington, D.C. to demand jobs, housing, health care, full funding for public education and social services, and peace. In unity and solidarity there is strength; together we can win!

Below is a Sample Resolution:

Whereas — despite the so-called economic recovery — the economic crisis for working people has continued unabated with growing unemployment and rising home foreclosures and evictions,

And whereas this economic crisis has resulted in the underfunding and degrading of public education and social services,

And whereas the government has bestowed billions of dollars of bailout money on the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed created this economic crisis,

And whereas there is growing opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by a majority of the people here in the U.S., not to mention in Afghanistan and Iraq,

And whereas these wars are costing billions of dollars each month,

Therefore be it resolved that the San Francisco Labor Council call on the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to organize a Solidarity Day III march on Washington D.C. to demand jobs, housing, health care, full funding for public education and social services, and peace.

About the Authors: Ann Robertson is a teacher at San Francisco State University and a member the California Facutly Association. Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). Both are writers for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org) and may be reached at sanfrancisco@workerscompass.org.

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by Doug Page / November 10th, 2009

We are rapidly returning to the uncivilized Law of the Jungle. We will soon live in a world where brute force rules. It is not only the disabled, widows, children and orphans who are vulnerable to the cruelties of this jungle. We all are. We have been brainwashed with incessant slogans like “Get the government off your back,” and “Keep more of your own money… oppose all tax increases.” Our dominant, false ideology tells us that every function of government must be privatized, so that governmental functions can be performed with business-like efficiency. (We are not told that the real reason for privatizing is to give capitalists yet another opportunity for making short term profit.) The very concept that we humans might work and cooperate together to protect ourselves from Jungle dangers and to meet our common needs is shunned as “socialism,” as if that were something evil. The capitalists have brainwashed themselves, and they have brainwashed us. They along with the rest of us hope and assume that the common good will somehow automatically take care of itself, if they think about the common good at all. Each capitalist must be concerned only with his own private profit and cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit making opportunity. We are a nation of millions of brainwashed individualists, living, working, and acting under false perceptions of reality as if we were all “Manchurian Candidates.” We have forgotten that government is the only effective institution that we have to protect us from the brute force of the Law of the Jungle. If we do not very quickly awaken from our trance, and act together in a cooperative human community, millions of us will perish.

Ironically, most wealthy capitalists will themselves be destroyed in this looming Jungle.

Capitalists need government almost as badly as we do, but they will not admit it. As Adam Smith taught long ago, capitalism and capitalists can survive only with a rule of law controlling private property rights and business promises, a government to enforce those laws, and a certain level of morality. He cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit. Capitalist ideology thus prohibits capitalists from protecting their own common good. As we see from the daily news, no capitalist will speak out in support of regulation of Wall Street. Capitalists say that they will discipline themselves, but they have not, can not and do not.

We ordinary citizens and voters cling to an illusory idealistic assumption that we retain the right to govern ourselves, and that if we only work hard enough in the political process, we can change things through the ballot box. We cling to this false deadly assumption despite the vast accumulation of evidence that our political process is totally dominated and controlled by approximately 5000 very wealthy individuals acting through their ownership of their corporations and their mainstream advertising agencies, TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Thus in these desperate times, our government has given Trillions of our tax dollars to the big banks of the wealthy without any conditions, while our government has given little or nothing to create jobs for us. This money controlled government can afford to give Trillions to the wealthy, but this government cannot afford to provide VA hospitals and medical care for everybody. We citizens and voters are kept quiet and non-rebellious because of our own brainwashed state, fueled by our addiction to consumer goods, electronic gadgets, computers and TV.

Part of the trance and delusion is maintained by liberals. My definition of a “liberal” is one who vaguely wants a civilizing government and to make things right, but only if it does not deprive him of his standard of living. Thus a liberal will protest wealth inequality, the corruption of our elected leaders by money, imperialism, wars abroad, torture, rendition, and civilian collateral damage, but a liberal will not rebel, stop work, strike, picket, vigil or boycott. A liberal knows at some level that his material well being depends ultimately on these very evils that he protests against, specifically including torture. A liberal, like a conservative capitalist, cannot face the fact that he himself is in a dangerous suicidal trance. So he does not challenge the trance either.

Even under the best of circumstances, we have limited time and interest in governing ourselves. Our civic impulse is in very short supply. We see this in the low voter turnout and in the superficial slogans that lead many voters make up their minds. We see it also in political parties, local governments, charities, clubs and unions where aggressive individuals rise to power, and the ordinary person does not bother to attend meetings or to vote.

The blunt truth is that we are now ruthlessly governed by these few wealthy individuals who have accumulated their vast fortunes. One might almost say that we are “ungoverned,” but of course we are taxed to benefit these rulers, and to pay for their losses on their risky financial investments. The government is operated and controlled by and for these few wealthy individuals. For all practical purposes, it is if we are ruled by a selfish greedy king who rules us and taxes us for his own pleasure and his own benefit. This “king” has his royalist earls, dukes, nobles and toadies in the form of Presidents, Senators, elected officials, journalists, college professors and economists who fawn around him. These toadies tell the “king” what he wants to hear (however insane and stupid) hoping for his favor and crumbs from his table. President Obama himself is such a toady to the “king.” Obama’s economic advisors, former Harvard President Larry Summers and University of California Professor Christina Romer are perfect examples of such fawning advisors to the “king.” They study and report only what the “king” wants to hear.

The truth is that our capitalism and our self governing democracy are beyond repair or reform. Both are terminal, and dysfunctional. Our material well being is rapidly falling, and it will fall much further. Our trance prevents us from dealing with the death throes of capitalism, with the few wealthy individuals who control democracy with their wealth, with diminishing reserves of oil and gas, and with deadly global warming. This is not to say that we will find it easy to make changes even if we become aware of our trance. We will have to attend meetings and vote. We will have to accept a lower standard of living because of the depletion of oil and live like Cubans. Other civilizations in the past have fallen into dark ages because those in power did not recognize the falsity of their political-economic-cultural ideas, and did not take corrective action in time. Millions of us are destined to starve and those who do survive will be serfs allowed to grow a little food on the estates of the very rich. This is inevitable, unless we awaken and face the truth very soon.

Doug Page is a retired lawyer for unions, a former Democratic politician, and a life long observer of government, unions and business. He can be reached at: dougpage2@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Doug, or visit Doug’s website.

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It was some thirty years ago on the big screen that we watched Darth Vader kill a subordinate with sheer force of will. Displeased with the performance of Admiral Ozzel because he brought his ships out of hyperspace too soon, alerting the Rebels to their presence, Darth Vader held up his hand and pinched the air. Moviegoers will recall the hapless admiral choking for air and falling over dead. Darth Vader killed the admiral with a look, employing some unseen force of Mind.

It was pure science fiction. Or was it? At about this same time, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was felling goats in much the same manner. Now this story is coming to the big screen.

“The Men Who Stare At Goats” is a soon to be released major motion picture starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and Ewan McGregor. It is a lighthearted look at how the U.S. Army explored paranormal powers, “new age” parapsychology and psychic functioning in the late 1970’s and early 80s. The film portrays all of this in a whimsical and comical tone, but the real story is deadly serious.

The character portrayed by George Clooney is based on retired Special Forces Intel First Sergeant Glenn Wheaton. In real life Wheaton is a character far too complex to portray in a two-hour movie. In his Army career Wheaton was a stone cold killer, a Green Beret door-knocker as well as a remote viewer, a type of psychic spy who could readily displace his awareness to remote locations across space and time to bring back actual intelligence grade data using only his mind. He’s also a boy from the Louisiana Bayou, a southern gentleman, a kind and caring teacher.

The title of the upcoming movie, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is based on an incident in which a Green Beret instructor killed a goat by staring at it. Glenn Wheaton witnessed the event and recounted it to author Jon Ronson, who wrote about it in his book “The Crazy Rulers of the World.” Glenn Wheaton sat down and talked about the goat incident recently during an interview for a documentary planned for release in conjunction with the movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” His interview will also be included in the “Extras” in the home DVD version of the movie.

At the Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina they had what the Green Berets called “The Goat Lab.” Special Forces medics were required to learn how to treat gunshot wounds, trauma cases, broken bones, and other types of battlefield injuries. It may sound cruel to members of PETA, but they shot goats and subjected them to numerous traumatic injuries, and then tried to revive and stabilize them. Soldiers also slaughtered the goats, learning so they would be able to teach people in third world countries how to butcher and dress an animal and prepare it for food. So they brought in goats from Honduras, and at least one of the goats became a victim of a Darth Vader type mental energy killing.

“I was there the day the first goat died,” recalls Glenn Wheaton. He remembers it was in the dead of winter at Ft. Bragg. The Special Forces students had finished their usual ten to fifteen mile predawn run and headed to the woods for hand-to-hand combat training. At that time the 5th Special Forces Group hand-to-hand combat instructor was a martial arts expert named Mike Echanis.

“We got to the training area,” Wheaton says, “and there was a dagger stuck in a tree.” That meant Echanis was in the Bear Pit. The Bear Pit was hole in the sandy North Carolina soil, 8 to 10 feet deep and 60 to 80 feet wide. The instructor would wait in the pit. The students couldn’t see him. It wasn’t that he was actually invisible, but he could blend in, using both camouflage and mental trickery, that they couldn’t spot him. He was able to adapt and blend into the environment so well that those looking down into the pit just could not see him. A trainee would jump into the pit, and suddenly Echanis would come out of nowhere and be upon him, and the hand-to-hand combat would ensue. The students were certain to endure a severe beating.

On this particular day, Echanis had brought a goat with him down into the pit. As the soldiers fought the goat would scamper and jump about, trying to avoid the combatants being hurled around the pit.

At the completion of the class, Echanis challenged the soldiers: “Where is your mind?”

Then the demonstration none of them would ever forget. Wheaton recalls that the instructor “grabbed the goat by the horns. He dragged him to the middle of the pit, pushing a green stake to the bottom of the pit, attaching the goat to it. Then he asked us again ‘Where are your minds?’ Michael had recently completed a lot of training in Qigong, the force you couldn’t see that moves like a train.”

Glenn Wheaton witnessed the incredible feat. The instructor never touched the goat. “Michael focused on the goat pretty intensely,” he says. “It started to bray like a donkey or horse. It dropped down to its forelegs; blood began to drip from its nose. About 20 to 30 seconds later red suds began to froth from the goat’s mouth. The goat lost its equilibrium and passed away in a fit.”

There was nothing done physically to the goat. Wheaton says, “Michael never had to touch the goat, other than dragging him and sinking the anchor in the sand. A demonstration we required he repeat.”

They tested Echanis several times under less brutal circumstances. They filled balloons with ink and the balloons were suspended in an aquarium. “He was able to successfully break or rupture three balloons filled with ink suspended in an aquarium filled with water,” Wheaton recounts. “He was able to rupture each one of those balloons, causing the ink to contaminate the water.”

Wheaton says it was “a lot to think about.” And he goes on to say, “as an adaptation it has immediate applications. Could anyone do it, or could only Michael do it? That’s what we investigated after that.”

Wheaton does not talk about whether this technique was ever employed against humans, but he says Green Berets did study so called “paranormal powers” as part of a program called Project Jedi. What kind of techniques did they study in Project Jedi? Wheaton answers, “Can you be warm when everyone else around you is freezing cold? Can you regulate your respiration and heart rate so that when everyone else is huffing and puffing because you’re running up a really long hill, can you manage your own body? Can you keep going when everyone else will stop?

That’s what the empowerment portion of Project Jedi was for. You had to be perfectly able to control yourself, because if you couldn’t control yourself you couldn’t control anything else. So being able to control your blood pressure is a good thing. Being able to send heat to an exposed part of your body by will alone is a good thing. Being able to hear when there is only a cacophony of noise, a single thing. If I turned on a vacuum cleaner and gave a lecture that you couldn’t hear, after a while could you hear? You learn to filter your environment so that you can accomplish any mission.”

Glenn Wheaton is currently the president and chief instructor at the Hawaii Remote Viewers’ Guild. He has been teaching advanced communication skills and mental focus techniques to civilians, for free, for the past 12 years.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” currently in theaters. There will be a documentary released soon about the true story behind the movie, and the home DVD version will contain interviews with Glenn Wheaton and Jim Channon.

- Dick Allgire

allgired001@hawaii.rr.com

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The Anti-empire Report – 2009-11-04

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. [1]

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry”. [2] War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” [3]

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.” [4]

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq. [5]

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama. [6]

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.” [7] There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.” [8] And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless”. Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem”, the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.” [9]

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” [10] Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

Notes

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009 ↩
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009 ↩
3. Michael Herr, “Dispatches” (1991), p.71 ↩
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001 ↩
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.) ↩
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008 ↩
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009 ↩
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009 ↩
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742 ↩
10 Ibid., p.885 ↩
–

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

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By Greg Evensen

November 1, 2009

NewsWithViews.com

Most of us have been in this tragic position before. It feels something like that slow, heavy walk that we experience as we approach the front door of the funeral home. The anticipation of walking through that door into a room that reeks of death is a soul chilling moment that is never forgotten.

The statements, the warnings, the what if’s, and how can they do that situations are thousands upon thousands across America. The personal injuries heaped on the heads of true Americans at the border, in the city streets, by apostate church leaders, from judges at all levels, to the arrogant bureaucrats that run our lives and could fill the Library of Congress if printed, are ABSOLUTE proof that the Republic is dead.

There is no one left to turn to for relief from an onslaught that would have been a declared war had it come from another country. We as a nation of citizens, have been brutalized so badly by criminals inside the government, that we could have easily justified the use of deadly force to beat back the pillaging of our homes and communities. And diabolically, this has been done by the very people who were allowed a seat of power over us by our own vote.

The ongoing war for liberty is being waged on a thousand fronts. City and county governments have been persuaded by government agents to buy into Agenda 21 at all levels and adopt the radical environmentalist agenda. These local maniacs have done so eagerly. They revel in the appearance of solidarity both socially and politically with those who want to see swamp dwelling muskrats be able to retain attorneys should their habitat be threatened. Utterly blind deceit and a spirit of delusion reigns. Churches and cities have joined in efforts to provide illegal aliens (illegal here meaning ILLEGAL) “sanctuary” in direct and open violation of federal law. You know, the kind of federal law that says you can’t shoot FBI agents on sight or that you MUST pay a voluntary illegal federal income tax, or call a sodomite evil, to just name a few minor federal laws. But then, since when has consistency or lawful conduct ever meant anything to BATF, FBI, IRS, CIA, DEA or NTSB agents that were at Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, Flight 800, New York, the Pentagon, Dallas, etc., etc., etc…..We have been misled, lied to, confused, plotted against and abused by lawyers representing all of these entities so many times, that every last one of the perpetrators would have been hung in the public square 120 years ago.

Instead, patriots, citizens, civic groups and moms and pops have been the target of these same self-serving, power infested dirt bags simply because they wanted the truth and were not going to accept any other made up version of Washington’s idea of “truth.”

Many of these good people have been the victim of government abuse at the hands of federal prosecutors and judges who receive bonuses for successful prosecutions. Honest, God fearing and courageous individuals have been persecuted by the United State’s government for following the law, publishing the truth, and protesting the cowardly use of “Nazi” power that was allowed by federal judges bought and paid for by the Council on Foreign Relations or simply the so called “Justice Department.”

My dear God, how is it possible that the Attorney General’s office is staffed by radicals and rights robbers? How is it that Eric Holder, a radical political leftist shames us daily by walking into his office? Add to that a supremely incompetent Janet Napolitano, racist Planned Parenthood supporter Sebelius, bumbling Biden and on and on and on.

So instead of moral leadership in the states, we must endure examples of freedom’s guardians like the State of Missouri and the “bumper sticker” warriors with the Missouri State Highway Patrol. We watch helplessly as Arizona is set upon by jackals from Mexico and California slips into the ocean of poverty and liberalism run amok. All in the name of progressive socialism, or “do whatever you want and get someone else to pay for it” statism. The Republic died because we were not content with freedom in every corner of the land. No, we allowed our legislators at all levels to create “freedom” out of nonsense and liberty out of lawlessness. We shook our heads when the courts made law from guilt, incarcerated the innocent, and set the criminals free. We are living with Alice in the 180 degree world of Wonderland. Bad has become good, right has become wrong and gray the color of choice.

Now comes the hard part. There are no easy paths left for America or Americans. Any last second victory with a miracle field goal is just not there to be found. We left the playoffs in second place. Doesn’t matter that they cheated and the refs were bought off, it is in the books as a loss. Get that fact firmly planted in your minds. This game is OVER!

You may continue to live in your comfort zone and deny all truth. Some of you do and justify it because you don’t want to rock anybody’s boat. A few of you write to me, lie about the facts and tell me I am the nut job. Hear me well. I do not want to rock boats, I want to sink fleets!! That time is now. If they wanted me to go to Viet Nam and fight someone else’s civil war, then I am just as ready to fight one right here and right now. They have sent our military to prove freedom and “democracy” are worth fighting for. Well, how about doing the same in America? Let’s put those troops on our own borders, PLEASE!! Let’s sink the coastal pirates and the drug runner’s boats with chain guns and A-10’s. Throw some ordinance in those border tunnels. Yea, sure. But we WILL kill women and children at Waco and Ruby Ridge now won’t we, and call it righteous. Janet “the Bull” Reno embarrassed us all with her other worldly looks and actions in the name of the American people as another “hero” at Justice.

Let me cut to the chase. Some in America are quietly and to a very minor degree working to bring sanity back to our local, state and federal governments. It will not be enough and it will not turn the tide. I respect them for trying and know that many have believed they could effect real change (not the Obama type). Others have written off the government and agency goons at all levels and are gearing up for some monumental change. You know, the kind of change that will have authorities buying all the Depends they can find for the day of reckoning with American citizens.

In that regard, Americans from coast to coast have been calling and scheduling in-field training to be conducted within their local regions in anticipation of whatever is to come. They are ready, they are eager and they are committed to this effort. Our training team will be joining hundreds with the goal of amping up the training levels for many who have not even started a camp fire. This is exactly what is desired and precisely what is needed for those who have said, “we have nothing more to lose and we will defend what we have left.”

Like with the training sessions held this year across America, a DVD produced by our production crew was made to send to those who could not get to a seminar. The seminars are over and only field training is now being conducted. We have also produced a nearly six hour DVD outlining much of what is covered in the field and was actually taped at our inaugural two day camp this past July. Hundreds wanted to come, but could not make it that time. We will hold these camps next year beginning in April and those sites will be posted at our web-site. Nine have scheduled already. They are reserved on a first come basis. That information and the seminar or training DVD’s are available at www.theheartlandusa.com. There is a holiday special if you want both training aids. They are available NOW. If the national scene changes and we can’t make it to your area, then the DVD will give you more than you could get otherwise, short of the actual training itself.

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Dachau is a town in Upper Bavaria, in the southern part of Germany. Even “mainstream” historians and Holohoax propagandists now acknowledge that no mass exterminations took place at Dachau or in any of the German camps on German soil, and the fairy tales about “gas chambers” and “mass exterminations of jews” are now relegated mainly to the camps that were in occupied Poland. The vast majority of those who died at Dachau did so near the very end of the war due to typhus outbreaks. Two-thirds or more of the inmates at Dachua were non-jews, though in sad Hollywood Holohoax propaganda like Band of Brothers, virtually 100% of the inmates are portrayed as Jews. [more]

wikipedia’s kosher view:

“In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of whom two-thirds were political prisoners and nearly one-third were Jews.[5] 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps,[6] primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide. In early 1945, there was a typhus epidemic in the camp followed by an evacuation, in which large numbers of the weaker prisoners died.”[1]

Liberation of Dachau, 29 April 1945 – Does it appear these men are “malnurished”?

Holohoax Propagandists Admit No Homicidal Gassings Took Place At Dachau:

In 1960 Dr. Martin Broszat, who is now director of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, which is funded by the West German government to SUPPORT the Holocaust story, wrote a letter to the German weekly “Die Zeit” in which he stated categorically: “Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed.”(16) Professional Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in 1975 that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”(17) And Dachau “gas chamber” No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and grieving world as a weapon which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, is now described in the brochure issued to tourists at the modern Dachau “memorial site” in these words: “This gas chamber, camouflaged as a shower room, was not used.”(18) [2]

Yet, at Nuremberg faux “evidence” was presented by the Americans of “homicidal gas chambers” at Dachau. Former inmates testified that gassings took place and several commandants of these camps even signed “confessions”:

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal which prosecuted the German war criminals in Novemer 1945, three members of the American prosecution team provided sworn affidavits, testifying to the existence of lethal gas chambers at the Dachau concentration camp 3

The Psych warfare people with the US Army told the American public of the existence of “homicidal gas chambers” at Dachau, including famous video and photopraphs of the “homicidal gas chamber”:

After the Dachau camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, the American military compiled the Chavez Report which described the Dachau gas chamber.

On page 25, The Chavez Report stated the following:

The new building had a gas chamber for executions… the gas chamber was labeled “shower room” over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents.[3]

Door of disinfestation chamber at Dachau. The inscriptions on the door specify that the chamber was last used from 7:30 to 10 in the morning. The warning reads “Caution! Gas! Life danger! Do not open!” The U.S. Army caption for this photograph declares: “Gas chambers, conveniently located to the crematory, are examined by a soldier of the U.S. Seventh Army. These chambers were used by Nazi guards for killing prisoners of the infamous Dachau concentration camp.”

This photo was explicated for years to spread the gas chamber swindle. We are supposed to believe that the Germans did their best to fool their victims through the installation of shower heads, while the entry door to the gas chamber was marked with gassing times! For this reason the photo was later retouched to get rid of the inscription.[4]

“Door into homicidal gas chamber at Dachau, May 2001″ [5]. Notice that this is a different door to the one above.

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In the Shadow of Leviathan: Americas’ Arising Fear-Based Society

“Thought crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.  You might dodge successfully for awhile…but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”  George Orwell, 1984

“The fact is we are witnessing an all-out drive to impose thought control that seeks to ban the ability—the right—to think or speak for one’s self.  Thinking is becoming a crime.”    (Globally Acceptable Truth and the Crime of Thinking, Tom DeWeese,  Address to the 10th Annual  Freedom 21 Conference, 10/16/09)

In an article entitled “Dems Undermine Free Speech in Hate Crimes Ploy,” the Washington Examiner exposes the insidious machinations of House statists in their determination to impose totalitarian hate crime laws upon the American people. Hate crime laws do much more than undermine free speech however, for in that what one says is the result of what first takes place in the mind,  hate crime laws are mind-control devices.
( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2361178/posts)

Hate crime laws are not just alien to America’s traditional Christian-based worldview, but in violent opposition to it.  They are part of a program of psycho political terrorism utilized by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks after they seized control of Orthodox Christian Russia and put into practice long-term plans to abolish on a vast cultural scale every vestige of belief in the Biblical God, family, morality, private property, and other signs of “the capitalist petite Bourgeoisie.”  By way of various sadistically brutal forms of behavior modification, torture, psychotropic drug experimentation, re-education, and psychological terror tactics, Russians were terrorized into submission while Bolsheviks systematically stole their property, confiscated and perverted their children,  desecrated and blasphemed churches, crucified thousands of nuns and priests, and in general, committed monstrous crimes against humanity which took the lives of sixty-million men, women, and children. For example:

“About 200,000 clergy, many crucified, scalped and otherwise tortured, were killed during the approximately 60 years of communist rule in the former Soviet Union, a Russian commission reported this week. In addition, another 500,000 religious figures were persecuted and 40,000 churches destroyed in the period from 1922 to 1980, the report said. Half the country’s mosques and more than half the synagogues were also destroyed“Clergymen were crucified on churches’ holy gates, shot, scalped [and] strangled,”said Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of          the Victims of Political Repression. The commission prepared the report for Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter,” Yakovlev said. “It was total cruelty.” (http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left.html)

Former red-diaper baby David Horowitz observes that it is,

“not for nothing that George Orwell had to invent terms like ‘double-think’ and ‘double-speak’ to describe the universe totalitarians created.”

Though publicly they describe themselves as scientific, forward-thinking, enlightened, and progressive, they are in reality, notes Horowitz,

“…religious fanatics who regard their opponents as sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness…when they engage an opponent it is rarely to examine and refute  his argument but rather to destroy the bearer of the argument and remove him from the  plan of battle.” (The Surreal World of the Progressive Left, David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com, 1/25/2008)

Over the course of the twentieth century, progressive religious fanatics—or in Dostoevsky’s words, devilish Gnostic irreligionists—murdered anywhere between 100,000,000-200,000,000  “sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness.”

Totalitarian Bolshevism can be understood as an umbrella under which shelters Marxist-socialism, Darwinian scientism, progressivism, positivist materialism, sex-positivism, rationalism, idealism, feminism, atheism, occultism, empiricism, relativism, and nihilism.  These cancerous ideological ‘isms’ emerged mainly out of Enlightenment France and Germany, spawning both Marxist-socialism and Hitler’s National Socialism and today, continue to spread and secrete yet more toxic cells:  heterosexism, normativism, sexism, and ageism, among others.

Whereas twentieth century’s Big Brother touted himself as positivist, materialist, atheist, and  ‘red,’  today’s Big Brother is decidedly ‘green,’ says Steve Milloy in his book, “Green Hell.”  Yesterdays’  ‘isms’  have reshaped themselves into yet another apocalyptic, messianic, utopian- globalism, one that is blatantly spiritual and occult, pantheistic, politically correct, and in exclusive globalist salons, brazenly Luciferian.

“Without a doubt, President Obama is a true believer in the green cause.  Viewing our current living standards as excessive and immoral, he’s determined to downsize our lifestyles—for the good of the planet…If the greens succeed, we will see their vision for our future implemented with staggering speed.   By the time you finish this book you may well be appalled by that vision, but you may also find yourself in awe of the sheer totality of the green’s agenda and their single-minded determination to achieve it.“  (Green Hell, Steve Milloy, pp. 6-7)

As Fyodor Dostoevsky astutely observed, Progressive religious fanaticism is at bottom, the creature in rebellion against the Creator, His creation, immutable truths, and moral absolutes. Hence it is rebellion against the very idea of normal, says David Horowitz:

“the enemy is no longer a ruling class, a hegemonic race or even a dominant gender. Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself. Oppression lies in the very idea of the “normal,” the order that divides humanity into two sexes. Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender free world.” (quote from “Are Evangelical Churches Drifting Left?” Barbara Sowell, http://faultlineusa.blogspot.com/)

In sum, it is little ‘g’ godmen, their pride swollen to satanic proportions, usurping the throne of the Creator in order to correct His ‘mistakes.’

From Karl Marx, who declared that he would “walk triumphantly like a god” through the ruins of the old Christian-based order to today’s ‘elite’ insider transnational Progressive green-spiritual globalists, all have or are proclaiming their godhood, like Barbara Marx Hubbard for example:

“We are immortal…We can create new life forms and new worlds. We are gods!” a revelation channeled from her spirit guide ‘Christ’ to Barbara Marx Hubbard, influential transnational green Progressive, one of the directors of the World Future Society along with Robert McNamara and scholars from Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland.  (False Dawn, Lee Penn, pp. 316, 326)

Fueled by satanic pride, Bakunin—one of Karl Marx’s partners in the First International—described the emancipation of man and destruction of the old order in these words:

“The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognize each other by the words, “In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.” Satan (is) the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds (he) emancipates (and) stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty…in urging (man) to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify. The passion of destruction is a creative passion.”

Considered by many to be the 19th century’s greatest apocalyptic prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky defined the conjoined ‘isms’ and their ultimate program of the “destruction of everything” as the politics of apocalypse—in other words, the politics of catastrophic death and destruction. This is made clear by Karl Marx in his poem, Human Pride:

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet/ Full in the face of the world/ And see the collapse of this pygmy giant/ Whose fall will not stifle my ardour/ Then will I wander godlike and             victorious/ Through the ruins of the world/ And, giving my words an active voice/ I will feel equal to the Creator.”

In another piece Marx made his demonically-fueled hatred of the world and his death-wishing toward its’ people even more clear:

“A silent, unavoidable revolution is taking place in society, a revolution that cares as little about the human lives it destroys as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages. Classes and races that are too weak to dominate the new conditions of existence will be defeated.” (Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 42)

During his commencement address at Harvard in the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn raised the alarm when  he warned that America was already tilting towards evil. Americans—specifically the ruling class and intelligentsia— have forgotten God said Solzhenitsyn, and embraced instead, scientistic-socialism….the politics of destruction.   America is on the same highway to hell taken previously by the Russians, warned Solzhenitsyn.

Also raising the alarm is Natan Sharansky, a dissident in the former Marxist-socialist Soviet Union. Sharansky describes the Soviet Union as a tyranny where,

“there were no dissidents (because) they were simply killed immediately.” Under the terrorist-tactics of hate crime laws, speech codes, and other mind-control tactics, everyone became double thinkers. To outside observers notes Sharansky, double thinkers appear as true believers: “everybody says the same thing, everybody votes the same way, everybody speaks with passion.” But it is an illusion caused by fear of speaking the truth. These people, he noted, “live with self-censorship throughout their lives. Since the regime      demands loyalty right from childhood, many don’t even notice. They just automatically control how they express themselves.” But when a “fear society disappears or becomes      weak, people suddenly start saying what they feel,” Sharansky commented, and “It’s such a big relief.”

To determine if a society is fear-based, Sharansky applies what he defines as the “town square test.” In this test, if you,

“can go to the center of town and publicly express your views without being punished, you have a free society” even though that society may not be just. However, if you are “punished for your views you live in a fear society,”said Sharansky. “In such societies there are always three types of population: True believers, who accept the ideology…dissidents, who take risks to speak publicly; and double thinkers, who have doubts or disagreements about the official ideology but are afraid to express them publicly.” In conclusion, Sharansky comments that the level “of dissidence is always a function of how tough the regime is.” (The Power of Freedom, published in The      American Enterprise, Apr/May 2005, pp. 38-39)

Measured by Sharanskys’ town-square test we can see that America is quickly descending into a fear-based society. As her freedom-producing Christian-based worldview fades while simultaneously replaced by  green-progressive totalitarianism, the three types of population described by Sharansky come into focus.  In general, Progressive Liberals are the true believers. Rabid zealots, brazen liars, rebels against all authority, they freely destroy, transgress, scoff, demean, blaspheme, demonize, and otherwise psychologically terrorize the large body of fearful double thinkers.

More than fifty years ago, Conservative poet and journalist Anthony Harrigan foresaw the rise of this generations’ destructive true believers.  Observing that a ‘process of decay’ was being fostered by a modernist orthodoxy fueled by immorality, Harrigan presciently noted that:

“Modernists are determined to force acceptance of pornography as medical science, filth as artistic realism, and abnormality as a mere difference of opinion…Though the life of the country is basically decent, Americans are in the hands of a cultural ruling class, having led to destruction the humane elements in our civilization, is conducting us to ruin.”  For what cause?  To raise up a revolutionary army of “liberal-bred” barbarians “motivated by a destructive impulse” and unchecked by “traditional values and   restraints.”  (The Conservative Intellectual Movement of America, George H. Nash, p. 40)

With the ‘cultural ruling class’ seen as The Ministry of Truth, Orwell describes the diabolical ‘process of decay’ fostered by them:

“There was a whole chain of…departments dealing with proletarian literature….Here was produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, and films oozing with sex.  The rubbishy entertainment and spurious news…was referred to as prolefeed.” (1984)

Protecting and fomenting the destruction of America is a vast matrix of interconnected front groups, activist organizations, and phony civil rights defenders such as the ACLU, the most infamous terroristic enforcer of politically correct ‘true belief.’  (See matrix here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/)

All around the outside edges are the dissidents, for example, the Conservative blog-o-sphere, Tea Partiers, Minutemen, political leaders like Jim DeMint and Randy Forbes, and a variety of Conservative organizations and civil rights defenders such as the Alliance Defense Fund.

Supremely immoral, reeking of perversity, a  double-speaking transnational green-progressive  leviathan is moving with crushing force across our nation, fostering obscenity and blasphemy, instilling fear and confusion into the hearts of Americans and stifling individual liberty while it perverts Americas’ youth, imposes mind-control and relentlessly destroys the spiritual foundations of America’s traditional Christian-based order.  Its’ devilish tactics come into focus in the following examples:

1. Cultural Marxism: the politics of rebellion, perversity, and nihilism fueled by satanic pride.

2. Multiculturalism: the insidious destruction of America’s traditional culture by way of elevating all other cultures in the name of politically correct tolerance.

3. Political correctness, speech codes, and hate crime laws: a psychic-cage for the   soul/mind of traditional-values Americans.

4. ‘Gay rights/’gay’ marriage: rebellion against the idea of normal.

5. Sex education: called ’sex pol’ by Marxist-socialists, it’s purpose is the subversion and perversion of our youth, the awakening of the Devil, as Bakunin said. (Read: The Gay-Straight Alliance and the Quiet Revolution, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/The%20Gay%20Straight%20Alliance%20and%20the.html)

6. Social justice: the hammering down of everything good, everything excellent, everything normal, everything true into the perversely foul mud of demonic nothingness.

7. Critical theory: the mindless vomiting out of the acid of destructive criticism upon everything good, true, excellent, normal, and traditional.

8. Redistributive Justice: the evisceration of our standard of living and individual liberties in order to ’save the planet’—in other words, death and  slavery on behalf of Gaia.

9. Sustainability: Extreme population control and theft of private property to achieve the ‘new’ communism–communitarianism.

10. Religious Pluralism: the erasure of America’s founding Christian-based worldview by way of elevating Wicca, animism, Islam, New Age occult spirituality, Buddhism,   shamanism, and atheism in the name of politically correct tolerance and diversity.

Death of Freedom

In an article entitled, “American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper,” author Stanislav Mishin notes that, “on and off for the past century,” Americans have been stealthily prepared to accept totalitarianism, and with the election of Barack Obama,

“It must be said, that like the   breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple…”

“The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia,” notes Mishin, “and a bloody test it was.”

Who financed the bloody test?  “Wall Street,” says Mishin.

In his book “The Naked Capitalist,” W. Cleon Skousen exposes the unholy alliance of bankers and capitalists collectively defined as “Wall Street” by Mishin.  Skousen verifies his findings through the writings of Dr. Carroll Quigley, both a professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University and mentor to Bill Clinton. In his opus, “Tragedy and Hope,” Quigley deliberately reveals one of the worlds’ best kept secrets: the existence of a gigantic leviathan of political and economic power poised to seize control of the planet.

The gargantuan power complex says Quigley, has been–right from the start—controlling Marxist-Communist-Socialist groups,

“…the power that…Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or communist power but…the power of the international financial coterie.”  (p. 954, Tragedy and Hope)

Why did Quigley expose the existence of the global financial coterie?  Because he says, it is now too late for the little people to turn the tide.  He urges them to not fight the noose which is already around their necks, for they will only hang themselves.

“On the other hand, those who go along with the immense pressure which is beginning to   be felt by all humanity will eventually find themselves in a man-made millennium of peace and prosperity.”  (The Naked Capitalist, Skousen, pp. 4-6)  See funders here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?type=funder

‘Elite’ transnational progressive Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and former Chancellor of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica speaks of the fate that will befall the politically incorrect:

“…all those who hold contrary beliefs” to politically correct thought favored for the “next   phase of evolution” will “disappear.“  A hellish fate awaits all who resist political and spiritual globalization, “..those who criticize the UN are anti-evolutionary, blind, self-serving people.  Their souls will be parked in a special corral of the universe for having been retarding forces, true aberrations in the evolution and ascent of humanity.”  (False     Dawn, Lee Penn, p. 133)

In other words, the ‘chosen ones’ are evolving into gods and hell awaits all ‘selfish‘ ones who stand in the way!   ”….and you will be like God…” (Genesis 31-7)

The lessons learned from the Russian experiment says Mishin,

“were taken and used properly to prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.”

Among the lessons applied by The Ministry of Truth to Americans,

“First the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education…”  then, said Mishin, “their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of (them) were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more than happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the ‘winning’ side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another.”

In conclusion Mishin writes,

“The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is.  The world will only snicker.”  (American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper, Stanislav Mishin, Pravda.Ru)

Warnings from the Wise and the Valiant….

“… when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” –Samuel Adams, Founding Father
“It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.” – Patrick Henry, Founding Father

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.”  – Samuel F.B. Morse, the son of educator Jedediah Morse, known as “Father of American Geography.”

“…the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century…What emerges here is a process of universal significance.  And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century…I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.”  (Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Amerika: Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag, from Russia with Love, Joe Clarke, Jul. 8, 2009)

…the Self-Sacrificially Courageous

“Death is more eligible than slavery.  A free-born people are not required by the religion    of Jesus Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their liberties…”  The men of Marlborough, Massachusetts who took part in the Boston Tea Party

….and regarding the imposition of hate crime laws, the Prophetic

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”  —George Washington

copyright Linda Kimball 2009

Linda Kimball writes on culture, politics, and worldview

Additional Resources

Founders quotes: http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html

Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand

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By Shamus Cooke

A lot is happening in the tumultuous realm of global economics.  The “Great Recession” has caused tectonic shifts internationally, with outcomes that will dramatically change the lives of millions of people in the U.S. and beyond.   And while Obama is acknowledging this fact with repeated references to “a new world order,” he isn’t explaining how this adversely affects working-class Americans.  The truth would be far too “controversial.”

The first unmentionable fact is the inevitable, long-term decline of the dollar, a phenomenon that can now be considered government policy.  The business magazine Forbes comments:

“The Treasury Department would never admit this, but for the time being it’s in the country’s interest to keep its currency low because it stimulates exports for the economy’s manufacturing base and lowers the value of the debt that the Treasury is piling up.” (October 5, 2009)

These policies are essentially economic attacks on foreign corporations and governments, and U.S. workers.

A cheaper dollar means an off-shoring of America’s debt onto countries like China and Japan — and foreign corporations, who are large buyers of U.S. currency and/or debt.  These foreign entities have already issued public warnings about this dynamic, and will not sit forever as their investments turn to mush. Economic retaliation should be expected.

A cheaper dollar also antagonizes foreign corporations in another way. U.S. corporations benefit from dollar deflation because it lowers the price of their goods/exports on the global marketplace.  But foreign competitors can play this game too, and the result would be economic warfare.

Most importantly, a cheaper dollar lowers the living standards of U.S. workers, since the price of foreign goods will become inflated.   With a catastrophic U.S. debt, inflation will continue for years to come.  Obama’s silence on the issue equals a premeditated plan to pursue the above objectives.  Workers will thus be forced into demanding wage increases that match this new inflation.

Another big secret Obama is keeping from workers is also U.S. debt related (keep in mind much of U.S debt is the result of fighting foreign wars and bailing out banks).  Under Obama these policies will continue; “sacrifices” are going to be made in other areas.  Obama has already talked at length in favor of “reforming entitlement programs,” without mentioning loudly that these include Social Security, Medicare, and other much needed social programs.  The Democrats’ priorities are perverse; money for war and banks, but not for those who really need it.

Obama’s secrets were partially revealed at the recent G-20 summit.  There, Obama pushed a plan that aimed “to reform the global architecture to meet the needs of the 21st century.”  Part of the plan said that “G-20 members with sustained, significant external deficits [the U.S.] pledge to undertake policies to support private savings and undertake fiscal consolidation while maintaining open markets and strengthening export sectors.”

In plain English this means that the U.S. will reduce its debt by slashing domestic consumption and increasing exports.  Reducing “domestic consumption” is another often-used codeword for lowering the standard of living of U.S. workers through lower wages and the elimination of “entitlement programs.”  Once workers’ wages have been reduced low enough, U.S. corporations will be able to export more on the global marketplace, the other key to Obama’s G-20 plan.

These plans are not mere schemes for conspiracy theorists; they’re already being implemented.  Massive unemployment has a direct, negative impact on workers’ wages.  The Democrats know this and are using it as a tool to enforce the pro-corporate G -20 policy. What else explains the deafening quiet from Obama around unemployment — already a social catastrophe ruining the lives of millions of people?

Another way the G-20 plan is already being enforced is by the restriction of credit for workers and small businesses.  A recent Wall Street Journal article was titled, “The ‘Democratization of Credit’ Is Over — Now It’s Payback Time.” (October 10, 2009)  The “democratization of credit” simply means that workers and low-income people had access to credit if they needed it.  No more.  Credit that was once used to cover end-of-the-month expenses and emergencies will once again be a privilege of the highly paid and wealthy.

Workers must understand that the current effects of the Great Recession are to become the new rules of the “reformed” U.S. economy.  The living standards of the past are to stay in the past.  Before, U.S. workers took out enormous amounts of debt to maintain their standard of living, since wages and benefits were steadily shrinking.  The hope was that the economy would improve, and better times would return.  The reality is far different.

The U.S. economy is losing its place of total dominance in world affairs.  And instead of the U.S. government reacting to this by adding social programs, they are taking them away.  Government money will continue to bail out banks when needed while funding trillion-dollar wars.

Once the reality of the above situation can no longer be denied, and U.S. workers recognize these policies as a corporate and government attack on their collective standard of living, they can begin to act. Workers without unions will fight to organize them. Those organized workers will push their unions to fight back by building united coalitions — representing the majority of working people — to organize massive demonstrations, protests, and strikes to demand a recovery plan to benefit the working-class and unemployed.  The conditions that led to the large U.S. workers’ struggles of the 1930s and 40s are reappearing, and workers will act accordingly.

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palestinethinktankWhile preparing the insertion of the article by Nahida Izzat About anti-Semitism, as do all of her thoughtful and intense contributions, many segments caused me to reflect. Her analysis and especially her questions are so important and meaningful, that it would only be logical to address them bit by bit, and I would like to begin with a segment that I believe holds the core to so many of the difficulties of keeping the Palestinian Nakba on the table… it’s that presence in the room of the elephant of the Holocaust.

Incredible, it seems as though it is often the primary argument discussed. I don’t mean only by those who back Israel tooth and nail, but even by those who claim that Israel as a Jewish State must come to an end. Nahida’s first question:

Why is it that we Palestinians are constantly reminded of the horrors of the holocaust, when we had nothing to do with it?

Yes. Why? Why is it the argument in a UN General Assembly the week that the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War was released? Why is it that we have to bear yet again with the Israeli PM raging on about the Holocaust and about how Ahmadinejad denies it, so therefore, “all good people of the world, keep the light of the Holocaust burning bright and let’s keep the focus on Israeli victimhood, current vulnerability and the danger Iran poses” becomes the leitmotif of the day, week, month, year… It is permanent, fuelled constantly.

The Goldstone Report was no small feat of the UN to pull off, and some focus there would have been something close to a dream come true: it was the outcome of an official UN commission headed by a respected judge (a Jewish South African) which revealed that Israel engaged wilfully, deliberately and recklessly in war crimes against the people in Gaza… not in the 1940s, but just last winter.  So why did Netanyahu rant and moan? The response is simple: to shift focus with the justification for it that “Ahmadinejad is denying the Holocaust”. But the question begs… Did he?

Had he mentioned the Holocaust in the speech to the UN? I could find not one reference to the Holocaust, much less it’s being denied or not. It was not even mentioned. Yet, what does Netanyahu do? He brings the argument there, because it is beyond doubt that it is effective for Israel’s goal of achieving world sympathy as well as condemnation of Iran, which is a goal of a big part of the “International Community”, and for various nefarious reasons. It gets “sexed up” with the nuclear threat, as if this is indeed the major problem and issue regarding humankind, and we get more and more of these claims that are not really ever verified, “Iran’s got it,” “not yet but close,” “Iran could strike Israel very soon.” All of it backed a few days later by the most intense PR mistake that Iran could muster, long range missile tests. It doesn’t matter now what they do or say, we see the film of the missile set off in a loop for hours and hours on every news show or even commentary.

As I often do, I wonder who’s advising Ahmadinejad, because it sure works wonders for pushing the “Israelis in danger” narrative. Are nuclear weapons going to help bring down the Zionist regime? I really do doubt it, but they sure do a lot to gain them support from the wealthy international community and the political and public backing that would keep Israel’s survival (as a Jewish State) as the priority. I would say that on the face of it, it looks like backward logic.

While Netanyahu and the West rant and rage about the alleged sins of Iran’s President in order to help Israel stay on the top of the game, we see another really bizarre trend in this “constant reminder of the Holocaust”. Surprise surprise, it’s not only the main theme for those whose purpose for existing is to enable Israel who are keeping the “constant reminders of the Holocaust” in the place of prominence. It is also the committed anti-Zionists who like to keep this fil rouge of Ahmadi and the Holocaust running.

Gilad Atzmon, whose views about Zionism are almost always astute, makes the same mistake that Netanayahu does. In his recent paper about Ahmadinejad, Who is a Jew? just a few days after the UN brou-ha-ha he writes: “It is pretty much impossible to deny the fact that Ahmadinejad’s take on the holocaust and Israel is coherent, consistent and valid. He seems to have three main issues with the narrative…” and he elaborates on these elements which include numbers, the relevance of historical revision and on the Western responsibility for it.

In the past few years, and in quite a noticeable way, the references to the Holocaust have been decreasing. Did Ahmadinejad deliberately omit the issue of the Holocaust in his important UN speech (which obviously, and predictably, no one seems to know the content of or its theme?) Quite apparently this is the case, and it is indeed plausible that he did it because this was his intention. Nor was the Holocaust mentioned in his speech in Geneva at the International Conference on Racism.

In fact, there is deliberate omission of the matter, and if the translation is to be trusted, we see that he actually says what is not even his own theory, but rather something close to a fact, that is repeated as well by Netanyahu, that the establishment of Israel in Palestine was “in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe.” Following is the entire quote:

Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings. And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine… [Delegates walk out in protest. Applause] And in fact in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe… Okay, please. Thank you. And in fact in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in Palestine. [Applause]

One may ask themselves the classic questions: If we know that the Israelis are always up in arms about Ahmadinejad/Holocaust, and that they use this as justification for reinforcing their garrison mentality and use it effectively to get more money, arms and support, and then if Ahamdinejad has actually reduced this kind of intervention from his international speaking appearances – why is this focus constantly there even by those who are against the Zionist State and its garrison mentality as if he had indeed said what Netanyahu wants everyone to believe he said? If we are getting our information from Ynet and the Western mainstream media, of course we are using distortion as our resource. We have to be careful to avoid that error. When we are debating, discussing the Holocaust of the Second World War, an event that is over, finished and (as both Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad concur) compensated for at least for the Jews, what space does that leave us for debate, discussion and dissemination of information on TODAY’S Holocaust, the Nakba of the Palestinian people? Has a single Palestinian EVER been compensated for the losses which started at the beginning of the last century and are increasing in violence and frequency? No. Certainly not. Nor have the Lebanese been compensated for the losses they have suffered in the brutal war raged against them… no, not in the past century, but just three years ago.

Is it very productive to reiterate the same narrative of Netanyahu even when it’s an instrumental distortion of reality and the Palestinians are tired of it? Is it productive for the Palestinian people?

Another question by Nahida: Why is it that we Palestinians, are to suffer the same fate as the victims of the holocaust by the hands of those who brag worldwide to act for “never again”?

I would venture to guess, Nahida, that your situation is always pushed to the margins because it is simply not deemed as being interesting enough, and Jews and Israelis have been successful in rendering their own situations more appealing, even by way of deceit and distortion.

It seems obvious that while the Holocaust was indeed used as a pretext for the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, it had a lot more than that “going for it”. It was always used by the West to cover its own sins such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden occurring in the same years. It was used to have an “ultimate evil” to point to… in this way, there is no self-reflection that would lead to change, which is actually what political writing in the West often aims to do. Once you have an evil that is defined as something that will be unequalled, once you have established clearly that there is a group that is represented as being a victim more worthy of pity than any other victim (so that any other suffering is going to be relatively inferior), the mechanism of turning a blind eye to Palestinian and Arab suffering can become the norm. And, suffer they must, if there is to be a Jewish State in Palestine, which is simply a racist construct that dictates that Jews have rights that “non-Jews” (the negation terminology is interesting) shall never have. In fact, those who are non-Jews are also peddled as “enemies” even by the institutional peaceniks adored in the West and used for the Hasbara, such as David Grossman and Noa. When you have an enemy, naturally, the narrator is a good guy and almost “forced” into “defence”. It’s a great and handy little game for the Israelis, and the Palestinians have not yet been able to show the world the full extent of their situation. Part of that is because Palestinians are denied a voice and they are often told that it would be preferable for them to follow the arguments that those in Europe or North America are dictating. The very most they can do is to learn to be satisfied with assuming the passive victim role in some progressive sites.

I’ve been running Palestine sites for a long time, but before that, I’ve been reading these sites. It is quite interesting that aside from independent blogs, the Palestinian voice is the exception, not the rule,  in the progressive or pro-resistance media. I believe that Palestine Think Tank is a happy exception, because most of our contributors and editors are Palestinians, as well as the majority of our content being written by Palestinians. However, just a glance on almost any site about Palestine in English, you are going to find out quite soon that the Palestinian voice is nearly absent. You will see papers (mostly) by Jews and Israelis, articles taken from Haaretz, books by Americans and Britons, but the Palestinian voice is not given its due space.

It certainly is not because they do not have opinions and do not express them well. PTT alone is testament to the variety, vibrancy and originality of these writers.  Sometimes, it seems, there is a lot of gatekeeping surrounding what Palestinians say, and by those who make a point of defending freedom of speech for those whose main or sole argument is the Holocaust. I will enter into detail further in this article.

Self-criticism and self-analysis are the basis of any transformation, personal and national alike. Active transformation in the form of popular uprising, which by now a vast majority of Palestinians see as inevitable and necessary, given the failure of politics, also entails the awareness of the level of distress that is growing, distress that time is running out and that even the most basic Palestinian requirements and demands will not be met, as even the most steadfast resistance movements contemplate the realpolitik of recognition of Israel as a Jewish State. This would ratify an enormous injustice, and cancel forever the chance of return. It is necessary for Palestinians to voice all of their views and to act, as the feeling is strong that time is not on their side.

Revolutions imported from anywhere else but internally, among the people, are by necessity viewed with suspicion. The foundation of a popular revolt is always internal. It entails coming into consciousness of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the system or leaders, and thus instilling and encouraging the active, revolutionary spirit of resistance. It is an overthrowing of the mentality that “the people” are passive subjects who must be controlled and must surrender their consent, even against their better judgment. There is no ruling or governing body in the world that tolerates too much dissent.

Every Western country prides itself on claiming that it tolerates dissent. Whether they actually do or not is questionable, but this is at any rate one of the yardsticks to measure the level of democracy they have achieved. Within activism, the dissenting voice is indeed the dominant one. Thus, promotion and support of self-critical voices, whenever they have the freedom to arise, as this is always a risk, is a necessary basis for changing a negative status quo. Fighting gatekeeping within our ranks is a primary concern, and Palestine Think Tank has never backed off on fighting this unhealthy censorship mechanism. Especially vocal gatekeepers, as we know, are the Jewish activists, who always have been very effective in keeping their agendas as the dominant ones. They tend to impose focus on arguments that are more interesting to them, and ones they presumably feel are interesting to others. These arguments are invariably the “Jewish experience”, past, present and future. This naturally includes the two hot topics that always stir up attention, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. These issues are woven into every discourse, as we have seen, by Zionists and anti-Zionists alike, as if the Jewish experience is indeed the interesting one, and the Palestinians simply have to adjust to playing second fiddle, even at the cost of “constantly being reminded” of these issues, precisely the complaint that Nahida has made in her recent article. As both Meshaal and Nasrallah have said, with the blood of their people still fresh from Israeli aggression, “there is a real Holocaust going on today”, the Holocaust against the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

It is with the goal of keeping the Palestinian and Arab demands for freedom and the necessity of promoting their own voices, that this site has published hundreds of articles by Palestinians and Arabs which call for a more active involvement in building their own future, and refusal to negotiate away their rights, or allow anyone else to set their agenda. At the end of the day, they ought to know what is best for themselves more than a European, American, Israeli or Jew does. This was the spirit of the excellent article by Mohamed Khodr, An Embarassment of Riches and Riches of Embarassments where he pointed out the vast level of the failure of governments in Arab nations to be true to the principles of Islam, often at the expense of the Palestinians. Another important article that was similarly self-critical was by Sami Jamil Jadallah What is Wrong with the Palestinian People? It was his appraisal of the apparent Palestinian complacency in the face of betrayal of the Palestinian people at every level. Anyone who engages regularly with Palestinians knows that this is a big part of the content of their conversations. There was nothing really new or shocking in these positions, despite the enormous pain being expressed of being unable to get angry enough at this state of affairs. The apathy, caused by years of neglect of their cause and the extreme subservience they have in the global sphere, leads to a lack of hope and the feeling that there is no chance to control their own destiny. There is also a frequent tendency of activists who are neither Muslims nor Palestinians to be unaware of this condition of frustration, and they prefer as well to not “offend” Palestinians and insist upon viewing them exclusively in the prism as the “victim” who is waiting for rescue from afar.

Certainly, Palestinians and Muslims are the victims of the worst sort of oppression and war. Their ability to counter the multitude of factors keeping them defeated can’t be denied by anyone. However even “victims” have the capacity to rise up and contribute to the discourse in all of its dynamics. They have the right to mobilise themselves, to speak their minds against not only the Israelis, but also against the “House Arabs” who sell them out or bend to pragmatism when it will run counter to their fundamental demands.

The only effective resistance has only ever been when people stop waiting for approval from outside, when they stop hoping for reform or rescue and when they point their fingers at traitors and encourage healthy rage. Effective resistance has only been determination to not be subjects of someone else’s projects for them or to fit into a profile people have outfitted for them, but to see themselves as the creators of their own destinies. The case of Palestinians is more complicated than one might imagine. It seems as if new hurdles are set in front of them at every turn: they have been unfortunately abandoned by the world when they applied the democratic principles of elections and their situation is further complicated by their’s being a dynamic and complex society that is divided into factions and geographically separated. Acquisition of one’s own narrative, of one’s own power to dissent, being recognised as the protagonists and not the side issue, this is something Palestinians are attempting to gain and their efforts are necessary to enable their own resistance at all levels, and the unity they need to succeed. One is free to disagree with the content of their discourse, but one has the obligation to not discourage the necessary act of their right to free speech.

While circulating especially thought-provoking or controversial papers, as I do at times to a small mailing list of readers, I encouraged the reading of this bitter, painful but powerful essay that offered many points for discussion. I was included in a group mailing of some dozen or so people started by a Jewish activist primarily focused on the subject of the Holocaust who has written a half dozen or so essays, some of which I’ve published. The fact that I may not agree with everything he has written did not however prevent me from encouraging him to write more often so that his right to say unpopular things that could be discussed was safeguarded by me. This is what he wrote:

I don’t think this piece should have been written (certainly not in English) and should certainly not have been posted on your website.

I had to wonder if this the same person who wrote back in 2006, published on my previous site, Peacepalestine:

The last point on Ernst and Ingrid (Zundel) has become something of a mantra that I have had to recite so many times in the last year or so: Neither Ingrid nor Ernst has ever used violence, nor have they ever called on anyone else to use violence. Neither has ever discriminated against anyone on ethnic or religious grounds, nor have they called on anyone else to do so. Finally, and for me, most importantly, neither has ever suppressed anyone’s right to think, speak and write freely or called on anyone else to do so. Can the same be said for their opponents – particularly those anti-Zionist, and often Marxist Jews?

Whatever I say or write is always characterised by doubt and hesitation. Some have said that this is because I’m afraid of coming clean about my beliefs. But that’s not true. It’s simply that I am never so sure about anything, other than the value of keeping an open mind and tolerating other opinions.

Evidently, the value of keeping an open mind and tolerating other opinions, well, at least a Palestinian one, has been scrapped.

Besides the fact that the Palestinian author has a long track record for actively demanding redress from the Jews without renouncing the Palestinian right of return, calls for justice, truth and comprehensive archives of all the appropriations of Palestinian property and of all crimes committed against his own people, something hindered time and again by the PLO, calling for his silencing or censorship of him on a Palestinian site is quite inappropriate.

Is tolerance of others’ opinions only a value if those opinions coincide with one’s own or if they are being expressed by a Westerner, Israeli or Jew? Wouldn’t it be more constructive, rather than suppressing someone else’s right to think, speak or write freely or telling an editor they should certainly not have published work one disapproves of, to debate the author? To understand his views? To challenge his claims that one disagrees with and ask him to substantiate them?

Well, my contact in the mailing group didn’t only ignore that invitation to him to do so, something I’ve always encouraged all to do with his own writing, he also chose to not participate in the lively debate between the author and many other people, most of them Palestinians. It seems as though the issue was of great interest and relevancy to quite a few people. Well, that’s his loss, because others have gained by the experience. Someone who is by and large considered to be the maximum expert on and opponent of the Israeli and Jewish lobby, Jeff Blankfort, had this to say in the comments:

Sami, your opening piece on this thread has really made me look at the reality with new eyes. The time has indeed come to put away the bombast, romanticism, and delusions that have contributed to the current situation and not wait for another generation yet to be born to liberate the land.

As an editor and translator of activists for a decade, particularly for writers whose focus is the occupation of Palestine, quite a few of them Palestinians, in fact, I have seen and edited and published every type of argumentation: obviously, this fact would prevent me from agreeing with all of the content, but it is not my duty to censor, but to facilitate discourse. The arguments are so varied in their dominating theme, be it religious, secular, socialist, revolutionary, feminist, Arab Nationalist, pragmatic, strategic, focused on sensitising Westerners, aimed at an Arab public, even satirical pieces that refer to themes that are quite particular. For many of these writers, getting their issues to a broad public is an infrequent event. Although the material is extremely enlightening, the lack of exposure of their voices keeps their issues in the margins. Just the idea that Arab Nationalism as a means of gaining Palestinian liberation, a major item of discourse in the Middle East, is all but unheard of in many progressive sites should not be surprising. These sites are busy (still) thinking about the Holocaust rather than issues that interest Palestinians and are part of a strategic paradigm. As a Palestinian person once wrote in comments on the site, “If I convert to Judaism, I think I will all of a sudden start becoming interesting to people. Should I do it?”

So, with all of this in mind, I have a few modest proposals to make for those who are involved in any way in the Palestinian issue:

1)      Freedom of speech should be the right of everyone. This would include the right and duty to critique people’s arguments as well as criticise across the board, “House Arabs”, “censors and gatekeepers”. They aren’t really serving the Palestinian cause, are they? If they are, we need to know how.

2)      Demand broader dissemination of the Palestinian and Arab voice. They alone are the victims of Western, Imperialist and Zionist domination, and indeed, they are the last victims of the Holocaust. Anyone who can, should encourage their right to dissent, just like Westerners expect for themselves.

3)      To get the Holocaust issue once and for all in its perspective and not as the core issue of international policy and the consequential activist focus. Just like 9/11 has shown us, focus on one single dramatic event, even when all the facts will never be made available, serves as a pretext to legitimise things such as the Global War on Terror and the actual wars against nations that are the consequence of this. New wars are being planned and justifications made for them in the same moment that old wars are still producing their scores of victims. This precaution should be heeded since it is proven again and again that this is the modus operandi. If focus on Holocaust we must, let us focus on the Holocaust of epic proportions going on in Gaza right now.

4)      Ahmadinejad is not Iran. He is the President who governs in a situation of major internal dissent on the verge of further popular explosions. He should not be used as a convenient instrument to attack the sovereign nation of Iran. His words about the world situation may be sincere, but he must be judged (primarily by his own people) by his actions, not all of which do gain popular support and some of which feed the Israeli paranoia. But, his words MUST actually be the ones he is using, not some narrative of him that can be pulled out as an instrument for any cause, be it Zionist or anti-Zionist.

The active choice for those who seek true and complete Palestinian liberation has to be openness to the voices that do not accept compromise or surrender of their rights. Support of people who will not betray the Palestinian and Arab search for freedom. We have to have faith in the power of the Word, in the power of popular uprising, and continue to have faith in the future of the Arab populations who WILL set their own agendas and speak their own minds without waiting for anyone’s permission or approval. Like all of us, they are seeking solutions to their problems and analysing their own reality, putting it in the spotlight, where it belongs. They are tired of being “constantly reminded of the Holocaust”, and who can blame them?

The diversity of their voices is an asset that needs to be consolidated, not a liability to eliminate. Different thoughts contribute to growth, and the more we hear, the more we learn. Variety, diversity, space for participation and discussion of the issues that Palestinians find important is the key to keeping their agenda on the table and raising the consciousness that is at the basis of all resistance. Free Minds for a Free Palestine is not just the motto of our site. This IS a THINK tank, after all!

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October 8, 2009 by smokingmirrors

Listen up Howdy Doody; you’re a waste of carbon, oxygen and water, not to mention space. You’re a low-down, snake-eyed liar and a paid political whore for the nastiest psychopaths on the planet. I understand you wouldn’t be president otherwise but that doesn’t justify it. I remember little things that clued me early on. I remember Warren Buffet being in your corner and then I remembered Warren Buffet and Jacob Rothschild meeting with Schwarzenegger. I remember little things and vague associations across time. I also remember the things people say because I actually listen to them.

As soon as I saw you, my first thought was, “there goes a cool cucumber of a long tall drink of water from the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, minus the Lincoln”. You reminded me of one of those Chicago Pimps without the leopard skin coat. Politics is a world of strange contradictions. That’s how you can be both a pimp and a whore at the same time and have it make perfect sense.

I know there are those who will say it’s a big job being president of, the soon to no longer be, the most powerful nation on Earth. Maybe that’s why people can imagine that a lot of what gets done there isn’t your decision. However, I know the impact the president can have on policy and I also know that even with powerful opposition, the president can stand for the right thing.

You were elected on the platform of ‘hope and change’. Hope’s a hard thing to kill because it will remain as long as fools can dream. The only change I’ve seen is that you’ve expanded the theater of the conflicts you swore to end. I’m especially intrigued about your hypocrisy over the Guantanamo detainees. Any one who wants to, knows that most of those people were kidnapped and sold by opportunistic warlords and, since 9/11 was done by the former administration, in tandem with Israel, there are no other 9/11 terrorists.

Hi-ranking members of the CIA have gone on record that there is no Al Qaeda. That’s what makes hiring Blackwater to kill Al Qaeda operatives so damned ironic. If there’s no

Al Qaeda, and there is no Al Qaeda, then it must mean that someone other than Al Qaeda is being killed all along. Since Bin Laden’s been dead for years, the constant mention of his name every time you need to scare the public is also pretty low down. I realize that it is the Israeli controlled press that is responsible for this, just as I am certain that Israel controls everything you say and do. It’s got to be a hard thing for the black people to have come so far from slavery only to have one of their own become president and then sell his ass to the descendents of those who operated many of the slave ships AND the slum housing AND the pawn shops AND the liquor stores AND the film industry that portrayed them as Stepin Fetchits and google-eyed retards for such a long time. That’s pretty cold, Mr. President. That’s pretty cold.

Let’s be perfectly clear here, all the evidence points to 9/11 being an inside job that was accomplished by elements in the American and Israeli governments. The beneficiaries of the attack have been fascist elements of the American government and Israel. All the conflicts that followed were orchestrated by dual national Zio-cons in key positions in government and the corporate and media realms. The looming assault on Iran is being drummed up by the same elements. Israel, who does possess nuclear weapons, is in violation of all the things they are demanding from Iran. Iran is not in violation of all the things that Israel and the Israeli-occupied American governments are demanding from them.

So, consider this Mr. President, if your Zionist occupied government in tandem with Israel, carried out the 9/11 attacks; then for what reason have millions been murdered and displaced in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan? For what reason are all these people dying? If they have no association with 9/11 and the only acts they are committing are in defense of their nation against a pernicious invader then they are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters.

If the Taliban successfully stopped the opium production in Afghanistan why is it now more abundant than at any time in history? Why is this now being blamed on the Taliban who stopped it in the first place?

Now your government is pulling out all the stops to sink the Goldstone Report. Who owns your ass Mr. President?

You’re pounding the pavement for a comprehensive American health plan. Behind the scenes you are cutting deals with the pharmaceutical industry and the rest of the vultures that have keep affordable health care out of America all these years while most every other country has one. I realize the title of this post is misleading by omission. You’re not just a liar as we can see.

Your country’s economy is crashing around your ears. Madness is already surfacing on your streets. As the winter of American discontent comes lurching through the mist of global cooling, accelerating heating costs and the impact on every other area of the American economy is going to ignite the public rage and… perhaps that will keep them warm, Mr. President?

You gave all their money to the bankers who caused the problems in the first place. One of the things that amaze me is the resilience of the hope so many of your people have placed in you. It appears they are a nation of confused children and I suppose that makes you Gary Glitter.

During the rule of your predecessor, FEMA concentration camps were built across the nation and constitutional rights were dismantled and done away with. Gratuitous wars based on transparent lies were initiated in foreign lands and then you were elected to put things right …and you have allowed all of these things to continue …and then some. So why are you here really? You’re here to take it to the next step. You’re here to set the forces in motion that make the next step necessary. You and your policies and sycophants, at the behest of the psychopaths who own you, are here to instigate the conditions which make that next step unavoidable.

It’s not going to fly Mr. President. All across the course of history, one demagogue and madman after another has attempted to rule the world and they never pulled it off. You won’t either. What we are witnessing is not the final stages of a long sought after fait accompli. What we are witnessing is a cosmic, moral play with you and your associates as the object lessons.

What is it that causes such large numbers of people to follow so many bad leaders into the desert in search of water? What power closes their eyes to the obvious lies and crimes visited upon them? What has made them so dependent and apathetic that they indulge every injury directed at them? Is it materialism and convenience that weakened their spine?  Are there hidden technical or magical forces being directed at them? Is it some combination of many things, or is it just human nature? I don’t know. I see what I see and one of the things I see is you. I see right through you because you aren’t even there. You are composed of colorful smoke that dances before the terrible image of the beast that squats behind you.

Listen up; you would be prison warders of the planet entire. Your house of cards is set to tumble. The dominoes tremble as the Earth moves beneath them. I won’t ask you to see the light and change your ways. This is not something you are inclined or prepared to do. I will say only this to you, watch and see the fearsome destiny that awaits the perennial scoundrels who prey upon their fellows. Watch and see.

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It’s Labor Day, but there’s nothing to celebrate.

On July 24 this year, the government raised the minimum wage to $7.25, which is another way of saying that unemployment is mandatory for anyone who is otherwise willing to work for less. You have no freedom to negotiate or lower the price for your service. You are either already valuable at this rate or you are out of the game.

Here is how it works. I’ve never been good at shaping pizza dough by hand, throwing it up in the air the way those guys do, so it would certainly cost more for any pizza joint to hire me at that high rate than I could bring them in revenue. I would be a sure money loser. As a result, the government has made it effectively illegal for me to attempt this kind of work.

This is done to help me, so they say.

This predicament is no longer isolated to a small sliver of the population that no one cares about, namely people who dabble in second careers (such as the pizza example) and the poorest of the poor. Now the problem is culture wide, so perhaps someone will start to get interested in its causes and consequences.

August data show that more than a quarter of teenagers looking for work cannot find employment at the existing wage floor. Many have just stopped trying. The teen unemployment rate is nearly three times the national rate and it is four times the rate of skilled and experienced workers over the age of 55.

This is the highest rate ever recorded in the United States. The data have only been kept since 1948, but we can be quite sure that never in US history have so many teens been so alienated from gainful employment and work experience.

These are the years in which young people learn valuable skills and ethics that they will carry with them until they die. At work, they meet a great variety of people and have to learn to deal cooperatively with different temperaments and personalities. They learn how to do things they do not really want to do and they also discover the relationship between work and reward. They gain their first experience with independent use of money — acquiring and spending — and how to calibrate the relationship between the two.

These are skills people draw on forever. They are far more important to their future than is the main activity taking up their time: sitting at school desks.

This portends terrible things for the future of the American workforce. People dumped on the labor market after college will be even more worthless than they are already.

And when I read that the “stimulus package” includes funding for job training for teens as a way of addressing this problem, I couldn’t stop laughing: government-funded job training has a long record of being a full-employment program for tax-funded job trainers but otherwise amounting to a big nothing.

Interestingly, there is a corresponding trend affecting those who are getting their first jobs out of college. It turns out that half of college graduates under the age of 25 are working in jobs that require no college education at all. Think of Starbucks, the Gap, Target, and the like. Not that there is anything wrong with these jobs. But here’s the thing: these positions used to be held by young people before they finished college (which is in turn devoting itself to remedial education on the basics).

Do you see what is happening here? The minimum wage, subsidized college loans, child work laws, and other interventions are conspiring to prolong adolescence as long as possible — to the point that these young adults are seeing as much as a full decade of life experience pretty well stolen from them.

And there are no signs that this will change once the recession ends; after the last recession, youth unemployment never recovered its losses.

Why are we not seeing the Million Teen March on Washington? Not everyone understands what is happening or why. I doubt that 1 in 100 teens would consider that the minimum wage is what is keeping them unemployed. And the college grads themselves are pretty well befuddled as to why the great promise of future riches if they “stay in school” is not panning out. Rather than be angry at government, most of these kids are merely cynical and dependent on periodic parental bailouts.

College students themselves lack work experience so they don’t have a realistic understanding of what the work world requires of them. They major in “management” and imagine that, with this fabulous degree, they will possess the right to earn big bucks by bossing people around. A degree in “communications” will get them on Fox News. An “urban planning” degree will provide the opportunity — nay, the right — to build cities and highway systems.

Then the day of graduation comes and reality hits hard. There is no one who wants what they know, and, in fact, they know very little that makes them useful. Their resumes are barren, without a single professional reference or anything that is connected to the real world. All they really know is how to vegetate in class and socialize with peers on nights and weekends.

For example, I’ve been personally shocked at the lack of basic software skills that college grads have. There is hardly any professional position anywhere that doesn’t require some facility with software and technology. Is this not common knowledge? I guess not: people are continuing to graduate today with no more technical skills than it takes to manage a Facebook page.

As for work ethics and the ability to add value to an enterprise (versus merely serving their own interests), forget it: generation sloth knows nothing about this.

It’s probably not their fault.

Aside from the economic costs, the biggest cost is to the human character. It encourages the worst possible value system during the critical years in which character is shaped. Our country is caging people up for a quarter of their lives in government holding tanks and then dumping them on a cold, cruel world for which they are not prepared.

$30 $15

The famed voice of Jeff Riggenbach reads the great novel of capitalist fortune…

(Sample Sound Clip)

It’s true that this trend began back in the 1930s, when FDR decided that he could help the unemployment problem by making it illegal for young teens to work (unless, of course, they are child actors like Shirley Temple). That’s like losing weight by rigging the scale to lie to you. Ever since, federal law has tightened and tightened to the point that nearly the entire teenage population is being barred from the division of labor and otherwise told nothing about what it requires to be part of it down the line.

I end on an optimistic note and not merely because it is customary. The digital age is providing ever more opportunities for people to make their own way in this world, outside the old definition of formalized work. The government closes doors. The market, incredibly and fortuitously, keeps opening them.

Jeffrey Tucker is the editor of Mises.org. Send him mail. See Jeffrey A. Tucker’s article archives. Comment on the blog.

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