Tusk: a National Bolshevik hero.

Eberhard Köbel was born in Stuttgart on 22 June 1907. From the age of 13, in 1920, Köbel was a member of the Wandervogel, a youth movement with an anti-bourgeois ethos that advocated shaking off the restrictions of society and getting back to nature and freedom. Köbel soon became a leader in the movement, inventing the Kothe, or German Scout Tent, a design that consists of several smaller canvas panels that are carried by individual scouts and then assembled when they reach the campsite.

In 1926 Köbel joined the German Freischar, a fusion of Wandervogel and Boy Scouts groups; a year later, under the pseudonym “tusk” he advocated the formation of a unified German youth association for boys. On November 1, 1929 Köbel established the “dj 1.11.” as a secret conspiracy to renew and mobilize the Wandervogel against the rising Hitler Youth movement. In the spring of 1932, hoping to make a more effective resistance to the Nazis, he resigned as head of “dj 1.11.” and joined the Young Communist League and the German Communist Party (KPD).

On January 18, 1934, about a year after Hitler's seizure of power, Köbel was arrested for trying to infiltrate the Hitler Youth. After being severely maltreated in custody several times, he was released from Columbia Haus Prison in Berlin at the end of February 1934, and banned from future youth work. During the Night of the Long Knives of June 30, 1934, when Hitler not only purged the Nazi Party of leftists but settled other scores as well, Köbel narrowly missed being murdered by fleeing via Sweden to London. In England, Köbel kept in contact with the Free German Movement as well as working closely with Otto Strasser's Black Front resistance organization. Köbel returned to Berlin in 1948 and worked as a youth leader in East Germany until his death on 31 August 1955.

Who is to the Right of the Right?

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1] What is to the left of left?

The other day, Pumpkin asked for my "left hand." When I held up the hand to the right, she rebuked me:

Pumpkin: That's your right hand!

Dutchman: I haven't got a right hand. This is my left hand.

Pumpkin: You've got two hands!

Dutchman: Indeed, I do!

Pumpkin: So, then what's the other one?

Dutchman: You mean — to the left of my left hand?

Pumpkin: Yeah, that one!

Dutchman: That's my Bolshevik hand!

Sure this is a joke, but there is a point. You see, though "right" and "left" have meaning, their meaning is both relative and dependent upon your point of view.

2] Paul Nitze — from the left.

The Strategic Bombing Survey was established by Secretary of War Stimson on 3 November 1944, pursuant to a Directive from President Roosevelt. Its mission was to conduct an impartial and expert study of the effects of American aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attack on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating the importance and potentialities of air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense. Several men of great future importance were to conduct this survey: George Ball, Robert Strange McNamara, Dr. Galbraith, and Paul Nitze.

In undertaking this survey, very quickly a divergence of views emerged from Dr. Galbraith, the economist and former head of the New Deal Office of Price Administration, and Nitze, former investment banker and protegé of another former investment banker, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. While Dr. Galbraith had actually talked to the German Minister of Armaments Production, Albert Speer, and had come to the conclusion that "area bombing" was largely ineffectual at reducing industrial production, Nitze had talked to the Generals at Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Forces and was of an opinion that the effect upon enemy morale was significant, perhaps decisively so. Despite the final SBS report expressing Dr. Galbraith's view, Nitze continued to believe in and proselytize for "area bombing" until the end of this career.
In the early post-war era, Nitze served in the Truman Administration as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department (1950-1953). He was also principal author in 1950 of a highly influential secret National Security Council document (NSC-68), which provided the strategic outline for increased U.S. expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament. It is this document, more than any other, that lays the foundation for what Gore Vidal has called the"National Security State," characterized by the demonization of an enemy, a permanent wartime economy, and sharply curtailed civil liberties at home.

When he was appointed to the Gaither Commission by President Eisenhower in 1956, Nitze broadened the scope of the investigation from the feasibility of nuclear defense (i.e. bomb shelters) to the whole issue of nuclear war. The Gaither Report,resented to President Eisenhower on November 7, 1957, recommended a significant strengthening of U.S. strategic offensive and defensive military capabilities.

Nitze served Senator Kennedy in advisory capacity throughout his presidential campaign in 1960 and formulated the idea of the "Missile Gap", the idea, later proved to be utterly specious, that the Soviets had established a commanding lead in ICBM's during the Eisenhower presidency. In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nitze sided with the hawks who wanted to invade Cuba despite the risk of thermonuclear Armageddon. His position being discredited by events, Kennedy took Nitze out of the nuclear loop by appointing him Secretary of the Navy in 1963.

Following his term as secretary of the Navy, Nitze served as deputy secretary of Defense (1967-1969), as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-1973), and assistant secretary of Defense for International Affairs (1973-1976). Later, fearing Soviet rearmament, he opposed the ratification of SALT II (1979).

Paul Nitze was a co-founder of Team B, a 1970s intelligence think tank that challenged the National Intelligence Estimates provided by George Bush's CIA. The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan. Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed new weapons of mass destruction and had aggressive strategies with regard to a potential nuclear war. Team B's analysis of Soviet weapon systems was later proven to be largely exaggerated.

Nitze was President Ronald Reagan's chief negotiator of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1981-1984). In 1984, Nitze was named special advisor to the president and secretary of State on Arms Control. Nitze died in Washington, D.C, aged 97 in October, 2004.

So — this guy's a cold warrior, right? A real saber rattler, gung-ho capitalist,"roll-back" kind of guy, right? Not an appeaser, is he? Able to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviets and not blink, right? Without a doubt, Nitze was responsible for at least two significant U.S. military build-ups as well as several failures to de-escalate.

In other words, from a leftist perspective: he's the problem!



3] Paul Nitze — from the right.

In 1969 one Francis X. Gannon published a "Biographical Dictionary of the Left." This was a hard-right tour d'horizon and denunciation of the left in this country. Gannon exposed and denounced the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. as "preaching anarchism and racism and — when it suits his purpose — the straight Communist line." He denounces Robert Kennedy for his "vendetta" against Jimmy Hoffa and the U.S. Constitution while he "whitewashes" the United Auto Workers. And he exposes Paul Nitze for the groveling appeaser that he is:

During the Eisenhower Administration, Nitze was on the Gaiter Committee which issued a scaremongering report on alleged military developments and progress of the Soviet Union, and the Gaither conclusion pointed toward the necessity of a peaceful accommodation with the Communists.

Catch that? Gannon thinks that the Gaither Report had nothing to do with the significant build-up of American forces following the launch of Sputnik in 1957. He goes on:

In the Eisenhower Administration, Nitze was named to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, but the appointment was rejected by the Senate. Nitze's reputation was enough to all arm anyone seriously concerned with national security.

A reputation to alarm anyone seriously concerned with national security? Give me a break! I think what this shows is that no matter how far to the right you are, there is always someone nuttier than you who is going to call you "soft," "pink," or an "appeaser" And the word we have for these people is "nut case."

4] So Just Who Is To The Right Of Nitze?

If you will recall, in 1963 Kennedy, because he wanted to kick him upstairs and put him in a postiion where he couldn't affect strategic decisions, nominated Nitze for Secretary of the Navy. Despite having such gilt-edge cold warrior credentials, he actually faced a challenge in the House of Representatives. A young, newly elected, representative attacked Nitze as being "soft on communism' and "an appeaser." Needless to say, these charges were not to be believed and Nitze was confirmed easily.

That new representative who attacked Nitze from the right was named Donald Rumsfeld.

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Breast-feeding: a National Bolshevik Perspective

“The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life.”
— Decline of the West, II : 362

In 1194, Henry VI, Emperor of the Germans, received word of a strange prophecy from a Cistercian monk. Blessed Joachim of Fiore, mystic, historian, and abbot, and not a friend to the Hohenstaufen dynasty, informed the Emperor that he was to expect the birth of a son. This was a wild prediction, for Henry’s wife, Constance of Hauteville was nearly forty and had yet to produce any children after ten years of marriage. Astoundingly, however, they mystic’s prophecy proved to be true!

[Full disclosure: Constance of Hauteville is my third cousin, twenty-six times removed.)

Constance was the last surviving child of Roger II, King of Sicily, Prince of Taranto, and duke of Apulia. When she had been betrothed to Henry, she was thirty and he only twenty-one, it looked as though she would bring nothing more to the marriage than an immense dowry (perhaps the greatest seen since Roman times) and a truce between the Normans and Hohenstaufen in the south of Italy. In the intervening years, however, first her brothers and then all the legitimate male heirs of the House of Hauteville had died off, and she was now the legitimate claimant to the Kingdom of Sicily (which was at that time perhaps only second to the Angevin domain in prosperity and culture). This inheritance had to be won, however, as her bastard nephew Tancred had usurped the kingdom upon the death of Roger’s grandson in 1189.

It was only when Henry had assembled a large contingent of German lords and begun marching down the length of Italy in the late summer of 1194 that his wife found out about her condition. Believing this to be her only chance for motherhood, Constance was to proceeded south carefully, sending Henry and his great host on ahead. She had already reached the town of Jesi in the Marches, near Ancona, when she received news of Henry’s successful capture of Palermo in November. Here she rested and waited for her time to come upon her.

Being of what today is rather late for a first birth and was in her day an inconceivably advanced age, Constance took precautions to insure that there would be questioning the maternity of her child. She caused a pavilion tent to be set up in the town square of Jesi and invited all the matrons of the town, and any bishop who wished, to see her delivered of her child. (Reports vary, but at least three and perhaps as many as seventeen bishops witnessed the birth.) The day after Christmas, 26 December 1192, she brought forth a son who was later baptized Frederick. Two days later, she ordered a Te Deum mass to be said at the cathedral of Ancona. She sat in the very front pew and nursed her child there for all to see. Her breasts were described as “fairly bursting with milk.”



I think of this historical incident, from the very springtime of our Western Culture, whenever I hear of one of our modern bourgeois women who claims she somehow “cannot” breast-feed. (Of course, if there actually were women who organically could not breast-feed, their race would have died out.) Constance was heroic in her motherhood. She knew that it was her duty to her child dispel any question of his legitimacy and she took every measure, forsook privacy, sacrificed her dignity to ensure this. She did this out of blood feeling, precisely that idea of motherhood as a vocation that modern woman lacks.

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning-point has come... When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself becomes questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius as the run of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point too, a man’s choice of the woman who is to be not mother to his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,” becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the “higher spiritual affinity” in which bath parties are “free” — free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself ...The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” ...

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements.
— Decline of the West, II : 10/

Which brings me to an absolutely emblematic incident. I was with my family at North Bridge just before Christmas to get a photo of the kids with Santa Claus. Waiting in line ahead of us was a very well dressed woman with large, sumptuous bosoms. She was thick-set, with shapeless legs and no buttocks to speak of. She had drab, lifeless, bleach-blond hair, frog-eyes, and a pronounced double-chin. In short, her only selling point were those fabulous titties. Perhaps she has a sparkling personality, or a rapier-like wit, or an acute intelligence — but I doubt it. I would wager any sum that the only reason her quite evidently prosperous husband married her was for those extravagant, ostentatious boobs. She had a newborn child in a stroller and she was discussing how they would pose the babe for a photograph of his first visit to Santa. It was at this juncture that the infant awoke, crying. With much fuss and agitation the new mother picked up the child, took him in her arms, and popped a bottle of formula into his mouth. Those spectacular mammaries, made by God to give sustenance to her whelp, were useless, reduced to being a consumer item, furnishing not milk, but mere licentious inspiration to her husband.

The fatal turning point has come and gone.

Smedley Butler: American Hero

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.


I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.