Soviet Overseas Trading Company News

Our Rentier Economy

2012-01-10T12:14:00.001-06:00

Wish I'd said that ...

2011-12-15T23:56:00.003-06:00

“When capital and the ruling classes apologise for: Colonialism, the 14 hour day, class privilege, the 7 day working week, children in coalmines, the opium wars, the massacre of the Paris Commune, slavery, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, starvation, apartheid, anti-union laws, the First World War, Flanders, trench warfare, mustard gas, aerial bombing, the Soviet Intervention, the Armenian Genocide, chemical weapons, fascism, the Great Depression, hunger marches, Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, militarism, Asbestosis, radiation death, the Massacre of Nanking, the Second World War, Belsen, Dresden, Hiroshima, Racism, The Mafia, nuclear weapons, the Korean War, DDT, McCarthyism, production lines, blacklists, Thalidomide, the rape of the Third World, poverty, the arms race, plastic surgery, the electric chair, environmental degradation, the Vietnam War, the military suppression of Greece, India, Malaya, Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Turkey, the Gulf War, trade in human body parts, malnutrition, Exxon Valdez, deforestation, organized crime, the heroin and cocaine trade, tuberculosis, the destruction of the Ozone Layer, cancer, exploitation of labour and the deaths of 50,000,000 Communists and trade unionists in this century alone, then — and only then — will I consider apologising for the errors of socialism.”

— Communist Party of Australia.

Andy Thayer: Police Spy or Tiresome Crank?

2011-12-13T15:45:00.001-06:00

Let's Look at the Reccord

2011-10-30T11:43:00.002-05:00

Lighthearted Parody Department

2011-10-30T11:40:00.003-05:00

What is Fascism (part thirteen)

2011-09-02T12:52:00.001-05:00

"Fascism is middle-class socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse."

— Karl Radek, 1923

Total War is Shortest War

2011-08-05T13:55:00.003-05:00

Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:

If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.

It is also worth noting that Army Air Force General Curtis LeMay once remarked that had the U.S. lost the war, he fully expected to be tried for war crimes, and that Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz furnished an affidavit in support of the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare for the post-war trial of German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946, a practice that he himself had employed throughout the war in the Pacific. The simple fact is that Total War is an American invention, first used by Generals Sherman and Sheridan against the Southern Insurrection. It is a proven, effective method that consists primarily in destroying the capacity of the enemy to economically sustain a war, often involving genocide. It is naive, it is silly to expect to win a war by other methods in this day and age.

On the Nature of National Charachter

2011-07-27T23:46:00.004-05:00

"This, however, I know—that if every nation were to bring all its evil deeds to a given place, in order to make an exchange with some other nation, when they had all looked carefully at their neighbours’ faults, they would be truly glad to carry their own back again." — Herodotus, chapter 152

Is he saying then, that the sins of the nations are those which they are most prone to? That is, that strong nations think imperialism is a mere vice, while weak nations think of it as a grave injustice? Or that wealthy nations think environmental degradation is the worst of crimes, while starving nations do what they must to get by? And thus that each nation can live with its own sins, while abhorring those of others?

How a better Near East would look.

2011-07-19T15:43:00.003-05:00

Blood Borders by Ralph Peters, from Armed Forces Journal, June 2006.

This is a quite insightful article making plain the idiocy of present day geography in the Near East.

Click to enlarge.

International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia, but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosporus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected.

As for those who refuse to “think the unthinkable,” declaring that boundaries must not change and that’s that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).

Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.

Begin with the border issue most sensitive to American readers: For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders — with essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single overstudied issue and turn to those that are studiously ignored.

The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills and mountains where they’ve lived since Xenophon’s day.

The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice after Baghdad’s fall. A Frankenstein’s monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq’s Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi government — which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100 percent of Iraq’s Kurds would vote for independence.

As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to “mountain Turks” in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish plight at Ankara’s hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they could. The refusal by the world’s legitimate democracies to champion Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.

A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq’s three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.

A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal family’s treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With Islam’s holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the world’s most bigoted and oppressive regimes — a regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth — the Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.

While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the control of Islam’s holy cities, imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council representative of the world’s major Muslim schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred State — a sort of Muslim super-Vatican — where the future of a great faith might be debated rather than merely decreed. True justice — which we might not like — would also give Saudi Arabia’s coastal oil fields to the Shia Arabs who populate that subregion, while a southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.

Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today’s Afghanistan — a region with a historical and linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab Shia State.

What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining “natural” Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.

The city-states of the United Arab Emirates would have a mixed fate — as they probably will in reality. Some might be incorporated in the Arab Shia State ringing much of the Persian Gulf (a state more likely to evolve as a counterbalance to, rather than an ally of, Persian Iran). Since all puritanical cultures are hypocritical, Dubai, of necessity, would be allowed to retain its playground status for rich debauchees. Kuwait would remain within its current borders, as would Oman.

In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious communalism — in some cases, both. Of course, if we could wave a magic wand and amend the borders under discussion, we would certainly prefer to do so selectively. Yet, studying the revised map, in contrast to the map illustrating today’s boundaries, offers some sense of the great wrongs borders drawn by Frenchmen and Englishmen in the 20th century did to a region struggling to emerge from the humiliations and defeats of the 19th century.

Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may be impossible. For now. But given time — and the inevitable attendant bloodshed — new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more than once.

Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform will continue to fight for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself. The current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and Karachi, taken together with the region’s self-inflicted woes, form as perfect a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of blame and the recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design. Where men and women look ruefully at their borders, they look enthusiastically for enemies.

From the world’s oversupply of terrorists to its paucity of energy supplies, the current deformations of the Middle East promise a worsening, not an improving, situation. In a region where only the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold and where the most debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate a disappointed faith, the U.S., its allies and, above all, our armed forces can look for crises without end. While Iraq may provide a counterexample of hope — if we do not quit its soil prematurely — the rest of this vast region offers worsening problems on almost every front.

If the borders of the greater Middle East cannot be amended to reflect the natural ties of blood and faith, we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own.

Farrenkopf on the fragility of the Pax Americana

2011-07-04T14:32:00.002-05:00

Exactly ten years ago (and, it is worth noting, before the Outrage of 11 September 2001), John Farrenkopf wrote a lengthy analysis of the philosophy and works of Oswald Spengler, Prophet of Decline. I read it when it came out and was quite impressed however, picking it up again after the passage of a decade, I am pleased to see how well it has stood up. In commenting on Spengler's prediction of a twenty-first century Pax Americana, roughly synonymous with the Pax Romana of the first and second centuries AD. Farrenkopf uses his knowledge of current events and Spengler's method to produce this remarkably prescient prediction of what has actually happened in the last ten years:

The decline of American hegemonic power is inevitable as twilight begins to spread its shadows over the Pax Americana. The American neo-imperial world order will prove in the twenty-first century to be a transitory affair. In its home country the signs of sociological decay are already unmistakable in the break-down of the family structure and growing social pathologies, the spread of quasi- pacifism, and the unabashed excesses of our sensate culture. Despite the remarkable economic prosperity of the 1990’s, causes for anxiety abound. The fiscal burdens of the welfare state compounded by and aging society, the massive current-accounts deficits, frenzied speculation, and the recurrent instabilities of the global economy portend an eventual economic crisis for the United States. Effective governance already facesthe multiple challenges of interest groups subverting the public interest, plutocratic tendencies, the necessity of coping with unprecedented ethnic diversity, and growing political apathy, if not disgust. The erosion of America’s ability to exercise leadership in world affairs and manage world order is only a matter of time. The fragile Pax Americana will not have the impressive staying power of the Pax Romana.

Drat! Our plans are exposed!

2011-07-02T01:34:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge.

Stalin's Favorite Painting

2011-06-16T22:11:00.001-05:00

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks by Ilya Repin

Labor's Share of National Income is now at Historically Low Levels

2011-06-06T12:04:00.001-05:00

The Willie Sutton Tax Plan

2011-05-17T23:36:00.002-05:00

When a reporter asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he answered very matter of factly: "Because that's where the money is!"

So why don't we tax the rich? After all, that's where the money is. And it's primarily there because government has ceased to act as a counter-weight to private power. During the 1950's, when New Deal tax rates were still in effect, income over $100,000- was taxed at 90% and working class income doubled! Since the Kennedy tax cuts, and especially since the Regan/Bush/Bush tax cuts, wages have fallen, inequality has risen, and the government has become insolvent.

Why tax the rich?

Because that's where the money is!

Nice Chart

2011-04-25T13:06:00.003-05:00

MyType, a blog about personality, not politics, recently did an survey of the dichotomy within the Tea Party Movement between what they classify as "Religious Conservatives" and Libertarians. While there is nothing particularly new in this analysis, they did post a nice chart of the characteristics of the two different types.

This chart covers the differences between Conservatives (who want more social order) and Liberals (who want more personal freedom) within the Tea Party Movement, illustrating nicely by omission that the movement is united in being Right Wing (favoring the owning class) with no Left Wing (working class) component whatsoever.

Soviet Man?

2011-04-09T20:29:00.003-05:00

Chicago's Own Stasi Memorial

2011-04-09T18:28:00.004-05:00

So, this afternoon I was heading down to Hyde Park on my bike, making a delivery, enjoying the bucolic delights of the lakefront trail, when a fellow caught my eye and flagged me down. He was standing at what a quick Google search identifies as the "Gold Star Families Memorial" at 1420 S Museum Campus Drive. (That's right, things along the lakefront trail actually have street addresses!) The fellow was in his fifties, wearing a windbreaker, salt-and-ginger mustache, and he had a thick German accent. He asked me, "What is this memorial for?"

I'd never really looked closely at the stainless steel eye-sore he was pointing to, but I took it in immediately and explained, "Oh, that's the memorial for police officers who've died in the line of duty."

"Ja, ja, ach so ..." He nodded and pulled at his mustache, "And — where is the memorial for Fred Hampton?"

Well, now, wasn't this embarrassing. Last I heard, there wasn't even a plaque on the front of 2337 West Monroe Street. "I -uh- don't think there is one."

"Well, in my town there is a memorial to all the fellows who were killed trying to cross the wall ..."

"Really?"

"Ja, but we don't have any markers for the Stasi who killed them."

"Is that a fact?" I asked.

His smile was full of mischief, "Ja."

Didn't have the heart to point out to the fellow that from where we were standing, he could see the Balbo Monument, Mussolini's gift to the city.

RE: Wikileaks

2011-02-22T23:57:00.003-06:00

"Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is."

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Exile's Return

2010-12-27T14:31:00.003-06:00

The call for "female equality" is, ultimately, simply a marketing device used to double the consumption of products such as cigarettes, red whiskey, and denim trousers.
— Malcolm Cowley

Review of "Der Untergang der islamischen Welt: Eine Prognose"

2010-12-27T11:57:00.001-06:00

Der Untergang der islamischen Welt: Eine Prognose by Hamed Abdel-Samad
Reviewed by Wolfgang Günter Lerch, translated by JLH, and reprinted from the Gates of Vienna blog.

Where does the hate of the Islamic world for the West come from? Is it from the false policy of the Americans, the unfortunate Iraq war, the fighting in Afghanistan, or the unsolved Palestine problem?

The German political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad, himself a Muslim and from Egypt, has an answer which will not make most Muslims happy: In Islam, he sees a declining culture which is, so to speak, striking out blindly before it dies.

But how can you say that? Is Islam not the only religion that is growing, and not just because of demographic developments? For instance, does it not attract many in Africa who do not (any longer) practice other religions? Isn’t it Islam that gives an impression of aggressive strength which makes many people afraid?

In his book The Decline of the Islamic World: A Prognosis, the author comes to a completely different conclusion. The title was a conscious choice. When he first came to Germany, Abdel-Samad read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. At first, the opinions he had brought from home about the “decadent” West were confirmed in this classic of cultural philosophy. Spengler’s elitist, alabaster-like language was hard to understand, so he put the book aside. When he picked it up again later — intellectually better prepared for it — it became clear to him that Spengler’s analysis applied perfectly to the condition of his own Islamic culture.

Abdel-Samad is following a line of criticism of radical Islam already marked out by the Pakistani dissident Ibn Warraq, now living in the West, and/or Abdelwahhab Meddeb, the Tunisian-French author. All in all, though, he is milder than his predecessors, advocates for an Islam without sharia and jihad.

He sees the Islamic world as an uncreative culture which today does not offer humanity a single innovation. In contrast to the first three centuries of its history, when it enthusiastically absorbed everything foreign and created a society that was intellectually creative, and developed a religious pluralism that accepted individualistic, even hedonistic life styles, Islam is now in a state of cultural regression. Invocation of the golden age of Islam — strengthened by the consciousness of superiority that is inculcated in every Muslim — contrasts with the permanent sense of being offended, and with the collective complexes resulting from being outstripped by the West — the European-American culture. One of the outré chapter titles in his book is “I am Muslim, so I am offended.” According to Abdel-Samad, the radicalization that is called Islam today is not a new phenomenon, but a reappearance of constantly recurring waves of religious-theological rigidity which find fertile ground in an unenlightened, authoritarian image of God and an authoritarian exercise of power in religion and politics. Obedience, not individual thought, is the first duty of the faithful. For men as for women — but far more for women — sacrifice is the entire Islamic culture — petrified in intellectual barrenness.

The miseries of the present are lamented, but blamed on conspiracies of the West. Modernization means buying what the West has created, but rejecting the scientific, secular way of thinking that made it possible. Egyptian schoolbooks evaluated by the author speak volumes about the reflexive search for a scapegoat in the outside world. In justification for this attitude and in complete ignorance of the intellectual processes that have taken place in Europe since the Renaissance is the claim that Muslims are just taking back what they had once given to Western culture. The author does not deny the negative effects of Western (to be sure also Ottoman) imperialism on the Arabs, but notes that they are only too prone to self-exoneration.

Abdel-Samad’s prognosis is grim. If the Islamic world does not reform, it threatens to disintegrate, to do away with itself. After petroleum, no one will be interested in it anymore unless it finds its own way out of its self-inflicted weakness: which is the cult centering on authority and obedience, and rooted ultimately in an untouchable divine law. It extends from the concept of God, through the patriarchal family and the restrictive but mostly hypocritical sexual morality, all the way to the state and its leadership.

Critics will accuse this author of one-sidedness and generalizing. He polarizes, and that is intentional. In fact , he says nothing about the Islam of the Sufis, who shaped this culture over centuries, and little about the rationalistic traditions and reform movements. Then, too, the world of Islamic states, between Morocco, Turkey and Malaysia, should be differentially evaluated in many respects. But a sore point has been touched. It pains many Muslims and will make some indignant. And the West is on friendly terms with countries in which this “Islamic system” is carried out almost to perfection.

The Worst Tattoo EVER!

2010-12-13T12:29:00.001-06:00

The People vs. the Money Power

2010-12-11T23:02:00.002-06:00

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
— John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton,
1st Baron Acton

The best legal advice you will ever get.

2010-10-30T04:59:00.003-05:00

"...any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances."

– Supreme Court Justice,
Robert H. Jackson

Separated at Birth?

2010-09-03T16:56:00.005-05:00

Kelly cartoons in the Onion

Pauley the Patriot cartoons at Renew America

One More Reason to Close the Borders

2010-08-17T20:55:00.002-05:00

"It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state."

— Milton Friedman

Just As True Now As In 2004

2010-08-13T10:54:00.002-05:00

Grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated then ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
— Thomas Frank
"What's the Matter With Kansas"

What is Fascism (part twelve)

2010-05-11T17:14:00.001-05:00

"Fascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence”

— Roger Griffin, Nature of Fascism, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p. xi

Class War?

2010-04-13T21:20:00.003-05:00

Anytime someone mentions the unfairness of absolutely untrammeled capitalism, they are accused of class warfare. Well, these figures show that American wages are down about 10% since 1972, and the rest of the article shows that figures for net worth and family income are just as bad if not worse. So — if the working class has taken that bad a beating in the last third of a century, and worker productivity is up some 200% since 1980, then just who is fighting a class war?

Spengler's Civilization Model

2010-04-05T13:42:00.001-05:00

Nice chart of Spengler's civilization model adapted from Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

What is Fascism? (part eleven)

2010-03-31T23:19:00.005-05:00

In his book "The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism" (Princeton University Press, 1984) Hoover Institute fellow, John B. Dunlop, argues that contemporary Russian National Bolshevism (of the Limonov / Dugin variety) is actually a variety of fascism. Here then are his "eight distinguishing marks of National Bolshevism" presented not as a definition of National Bolshevism, but rather as a check-list of how these particular strains of National Bolshevism have perhaps veered off into fascism.

To summarize, the distinguishing marks of the National Bolshevik variant of contemporary Russian nationalism may be described as:
a neo-pagan, militaristic cult of strength and invincibility of the Russian people;
a militant and aggressive stance toward Russia's perceived internal an external enemies;
a strong anti-Western orientation, at times linked to a belief in a "Jewish-Masonic conspiracy";
an awareness of the country's serious demographic and social problems but a lack of angst concerning the future, a "can do mentality;
a tendency to advocate racial purity and to disapprove of marriages between Russians and representatives of other nationalities
adherence to a "single stream" view of Russian history
a non-religious but not anti-religious posture; and
a cult of discipline and of heroic vitalism.

I Reccomend This Film!

2010-03-22T10:55:00.001-05:00

Food Inc. clearly shows how government policies have turned our food supply over to a hand-full of agribusiness conglomerates, turned our yeoman farmers into serfs, destroyed the meat-packer's union, and made an un-healthy diet the norm.

This is one more example, of which there are many, of why this capitalist system has got to go!

What is Fascism? (part ten)

2010-03-20T01:54:00.004-05:00

Jonah Goldberg, in his book Liberal Fascism, offers this definition:

“Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.

It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.”

What is Fascism? (part nine)

2010-03-17T21:16:00.002-05:00

Leon Trotsky addressed the nature of fascism in a letter to an English comrade, November 15 1931, which was subsequently re-printed in The Militant, January 16, 1932:

What is fascism? The name originated in Italy. Were all the forms of counter-revolutionary dictatorship fascist or not (That is to say, prior to the advent of fascism in Italy)?

The former dictatorship in Spain of Primo de Rivera, 1923-30, is called a fascist dictatorship by the Comintern. Is this correct or not? We believe that it is incorrect.

The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a "self-made" man arising from this movement.

Primo de Rivera was an aristocrat. He occupied a high military and bureaucratic post and was chief governor of Catalonia. he accomplished his overthrow with the aid of state and military forces. The dictatorships of Spain and Italy are two totally different forms of dictatorship. It is necessary to distinguish between them. Mussolini had difficulty in reconciling many old military institutions with the fascist militia. This problem did not exist for Primo de Rivera.

The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement.

The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In italy, it has a very large base -- the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism....

It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., can constitute such a base. But this is a new question that must be analyzed....

In order to be capable of foreseeing anything with regard to fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is fascism? What are its base, its form, and its characteristics? How will its development take place? It is necessary to proceed in a scientific and Marxian manner.

What is Fascism? (part eight)

2010-03-11T17:29:00.002-06:00

John Thomas Flynn (1882–1964) was an outspoken critic of the Roosevelt administration's domestic and foreign policy decisions, opposing both the New Deal and the Second World War. The Ludwig von Mises Institute posted his definition of Fascism (taken from his book "As We Go Marching") on their web site. These are its chief points:

As we survey the whole scene in Italy, therefore, we may now name all the essential ingredients of fascism. It is a form of social organization

In which the government acknowledges no restraint upon its powers — totalitarianism
In which this unrestrained government is managed by a dictator — the leadership principle
In which the government is organized to operate the capitalist system and enable it to function — under an immense bureaucracy
In which the economic society is organized on the syndicalist model, that is by producing groups formed into craft and professional categories under supervision of the state
In which the government and the syndicalist organizations operate the capitalist society on the planned, autarchical principle
In which the government holds itself responsible to provide the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing
In which militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending, and
In which imperialism is included as a policy inevitably flowing from militarism as well as other elements of fascism.

Wherever you find a nation using all of these devices you will know that this is a fascist nation. In proportion as any nation uses most of them you may assume it is tending in the direction of fascism.

What is Fascism? (part seven)

2010-03-10T13:43:00.004-06:00

Ernst Nolte, in his seminal "Fascism In Its Epoch" (English version, "Three Faces of Fascism," Holt Rinehart and Winston, NY, 1965) opens with a "First Definition" of Fascism that he then spends the rest of the book refining and elaborating.

First Definition

Superficial though it may be, this survey of the phenomenon and its interpretations to date enables us to arrive at a preliminary definition which will serve as a guide and at the same time be subjected to study and demonstration within the analysis.

Neither anti-parliamentarianism nor anti-Semitism is a suitable criterion for the concept of fascism. It would be equally imprecise to define fascism as anti-communism, but it would be obviously misleading to use a definition which did not adequately stress, or even entirely omitted, this basic criterion. Nevertheless, the identifying conception must also be taken into account. Hence the following suggests itself:

Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy

[Footnote: In its isolated form the definition lays no claim to originality. The basic paradox is already contained in the term "conservative revolution." Gustav Adolf Rein, in Bonapartismus und Faschismus (Göttingen, 1960), describes fascism as counter-revolution on the soil of revolution. The definition comes to life only within the framework of the study as a whole.]

This definition implies that without Marxism there is no fascism, that fascism is at the same time closer to and further from communism than is liberal anti-communism, that it necessarily shows at least an inclination toward a radical ideology, that fascism should never be said to exist in the absence of at least the rudiments of an organization and propaganda compatible to those of Marxism. It enables us to understand the extent to which there can be stages of fascism: according to the evolution of the ideology and the predominance of one of its two chief components, the pseudo-socialist or the elite — that is, race — element; according to the degree of determination in, and the more or less universal nature of, the will to destruction; and according to the energy of execution. The decisive factors, however, are starting point and direction, for this concept is a "teleological" one, and even the most marked differentiation of stages does not do away with the unity of its essential nature.

Finally, this definition enables us to make concrete distinctions and identifications: neither the Pan-Germans nor Stoecker's Christian Socialists come under it; on the other hand, there is no reason to maintain that every opponent of Hitler in his party or in the other groups of the extreme Right was a non-fascist.

What is Fascism? (part six)

2010-03-09T20:24:00.005-06:00

R.L. Carsten, in his "The Rise of Fascism" (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971) ends his book with a discussion of what constituted Fascism. He writes:

The Fascist movements which arose in Europe during the 1920's and 1930's were very different in character, and they mirrored the entirely different national backgrounds of the countries in which they developed. Some were more conservative, and others more radical in their demands and their actions. Some were violently anti-Semitic, and others were not. Some took revolutionary action and staged armed revolts against the government, while others insisted on the legal way as the only possibility of attaining power. Some acquired a strong following among the lower classes, while others remained almost entirely middle and lower middle class. With so much variety, it might be asked what hey had in common, and with what justification we can speak of Fascism in the singular. The following pages are an attempt to discuss those common traits — the factors which distinguish Fascism from other contemporary movements, whether right-wing or left-wing.

The Fascist movements, as has been emphasized by other writers, had much in common in their ideology — so much that they were able to borrow from each other.

He then goes on to enumerate several points of commonality among the various Fascist movements:

Strongly nationalist
Violently anti-communist / anti-Marxist
Hatred of Liberalism, democracy, political parties
Favored an authoritarian / corporative state
Party élitism
Para-military character of party
Myth of nation / race
Program of territorial expansion
Glorification of nation's historical (or pseudo-historical) past
Myth of the "Leader"
Cult of violence and "action"
Myth of the "devilish propensities of the Jewish race"

He then makes the following observations:

Unlike most other parties, which are to some extent class based, Fascist parties usually appealed to all groups in society, though especially to the lower middle classes that feel most threatened by economic change.
Fascist movements could develop in countries with a very strong left-wing movement (e.g. Italy or Spain) but equally in countries where the opposite was the case (e.g. pre-industrial Romania, or in Germany where the working class movement was suppressed).
Fascist movements thrive during economic crisis
Fascist movements rarely come to power unless some element of the existing power structure (the monarch, the army, the big capitalists) support the movement.

What is Fascism? (Il Duce's version)

2010-03-09T16:46:00.004-06:00

In 1932 Mussolini wrote (with the help of Giovanni Gentile) and entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism:

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death....

...The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after...

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production.... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....

...Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress....

...given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority...a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State....

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

...For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century, and would oppose it by recalling the outworn ideology of the nineteenth century - repudiated wheresoever there has been the courage to undertake great experiments of social and political transformation; for never before has the nation stood more in need of authority, of direction and order. If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time. For if a doctrine must be a living thing, this is proved by the fact that Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it.

What is Fascism? (Official Comintern definition)

2010-03-09T01:28:00.004-06:00

In 1935, Georgi Dimitroff, the Bulgarian Communist, presented to the seventh World Congress of the Comintern, "The United Front Against Fascism", a report that became the official Communist approach to fascism. Dimitroff characterized fascism as having two major features: it employed a demagogic ideology which mobilized the petit bourgeoisie, peasants, and the unemployed; and it utilized terror. However, the fascist movement only became dangerous at the point when the capitalists, who in fear of their own expropriation turned to the fascists to destroy parliament and the independent institutions of the working class. In short, Dimitroff asserted that fascism was anti-Communism.

The official Comintern definition of "Fascism," as adopted by the 13h Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (December 1933) is as follows:

Fascism is the undisguised terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialistic elements of finance capital.

What is Fascism? (part three)

2010-03-09T01:07:00.006-06:00

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
By Umberto Eco
Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15.

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

* * *

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

* * *

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

What is Fascism? (part two)

2010-03-08T23:49:00.004-06:00

Fascism Anyone?
by Laurence W. Britt

The following article is from
Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist1 regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.

What is Fascism?

2010-03-08T21:09:00.002-06:00

What is Fascism?
by George Orwell (1944)
Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’

One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.

It is not easy, for instance, to fit Germany and Japan into the same framework, and it is even harder with some of the small states which are describable as Fascist. It is usually assumed, for instance, that Fascism is inherently warlike, that it thrives in an atmosphere of war hysteria and can only solve its economic problems by means of war preparation or foreign conquests. But clearly this is not true of, say, Portugal or the various South American dictatorships. Or again, antisemitism is supposed to be one of the distinguishing marks of Fascism; but some Fascist movements are not antisemitic. Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term ‘Fascist’. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words ‘Fascist in sympathy’, or ‘of Fascist tendency’, or just plain ‘Fascist’, applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:

Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. British rule in India and the Colonies is held to be indistinguishable from Nazism. Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or ‘Fascist-minded’. Examples are the Boy Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, M.I.5, the British Legion. Key phrase: ‘The public schools are breeding-grounds of Fascism’.

Socialists: Defenders of old-style capitalism (example, Sir Ernest Benn) maintain that Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. Some Catholic journalists maintain that Socialists have been the principal collaborators in the Nazi-occupied countries. The same accusation is made from a different angle by the Communist party during its ultra-Left phases. In the period 1930-35 the Daily Worker habitually referred to the Labour Party as the Labour Fascists. This is echoed by other Left extremists such as Anarchists. Some Indian Nationalists consider the British trade unions to be Fascist organizations.

Communists: A considerable school of thought (examples, Rauschning, Peter Drucker, James Burnham, F. A. Voigt) refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people. Leaders in The Times (pre-war) have referred to the U.S.S.R. as a ‘Fascist country’. Again from a different angle this is echoed by Anarchists and Trotskyists.

Trotskyists: Communists charge the Trotskyists proper, i.e. Trotsky's own organization, with being a crypto-Fascist organization in Nazi pay. This was widely believed on the Left during the Popular Front period. In their ultra-Right phases the Communists tend to apply the same accusation to all factions to the Left of themselves, e.g. Common Wealth or the I.L.P.

Catholics: Outside its own ranks, the Catholic Church is almost universally regarded as pro-Fascist, both objectively and subjectively;

War resisters: Pacifists and others who are anti-war are frequently accused not only of making things easier for the Axis, but of becoming tinged with pro-Fascist feeling.

Supporters of the war: War resisters usually base their case on the claim that British imperialism is worse than Nazism, and tend to apply the term ‘Fascist’ to anyone who wishes for a military victory. The supporters of the People's Convention came near to claiming that willingness to resist a Nazi invasion was a sign of Fascist sympathies. The Home Guard was denounced as a Fascist organization as soon as it appeared. In addition, the whole of the Left tends to equate militarism with Fascism. Politically conscious private soldiers nearly always refer to their officers as ‘Fascist-minded’ or ‘natural Fascists’. Battle-schools, spit and polish, saluting of officers are all considered conducive to Fascism. Before the war, joining the Territorials was regarded as a sign of Fascist tendencies. Conscription and a professional army are both denounced as Fascist phenomena.

Nationalists: Nationalism is universally regarded as inherently Fascist, but this is held only to apply to such national movements as the speaker happens to disapprove of. Arab nationalism, Polish nationalism, Finnish nationalism, the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League, Zionism, and the I.R.A. are all described as Fascist but not by the same people.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

The Meaning of the Hiss Case

2010-02-26T01:04:00.000-06:00

The conspicuous trait uniting Hiss's dogged ex-post-facto bloodhounds with his die-hard defenders is the need to be 100% right in order to vindicate not only their verdict on American history but the governmental policies they espouse today.

The right-wing line goes something like this: liberals were wrong about Stalinism in the thirties; wrong about the influence of domestic communists; wrong about the Vietnam War; and wrong, wrong, wrong about the strength of the Soviet threat. And so it stands to reason that liberals must be wrong today in their opposition to the war in Irak and the erosion of civil liberties associated with the war on terror. Once a naïve liberal, always a naïve liberal.

On the left, the reluctance to let go of the Hiss case also has a pedigree extending from the 1930's: the right was wrong about the threat of Nazism and dismissive of the role played by Soviet Russia in holing off the Germans until America entered the war; wrong about the righteousness of the hunt for domestic Communists in the late forties and fifties; wrong about Vietnam; wrong about Gorbachev's sincere desire for reform; and wrong about the staying power of both communist ideology and the Soviet empire. Finally, of course, liberals believe that the right is wrong about the Irak war and wrong in its willingness to sacrifice some of our own cherished civil liberties in order to fight terrorism.

For both groups, the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss remains today what it was in the fifties — a symbolic and real indicator of which side you were, and are, on.

— Susan Jacoby
Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

National Communist Party of Sweden

2010-02-04T17:22:00.003-06:00

An interesting statement of principles. One sees clearly that while they are loath to give up Marxist-Leninism, they are intuitively reacting against the cultureless secularism and internationalism of Marx. They realize that Liberalism is the enemy, yet they are not prepared to radicalize the conservative elements in society.

England is a Cesspit

2010-02-04T00:19:00.002-06:00

Nigerian Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, responds to the United States' listing of Nigeria on terrorism list by proposing that the United Kingdom be placed on the list instead:

That was an irrational, knee-jerk reaction by the Americans. The man did not get radicalized in Nigeria. It happened in England, where he went to university.
England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it.
This is part of the character of Great Britain. Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

This demonstrates, I believe, the ontological impossibility of declaring "war" on terrorism.

Why "Free Trade" is so Popular.

2010-01-29T02:46:00.001-06:00

"A misconception that has become conventional wisdom is never corrected. Opinions are transmitted hereditarily, ending up as accepted history."

— Remy de Gourmont

The Flitcraft Parable

2010-01-27T02:17:00.000-06:00

Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy about one of his cases:

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand ... Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles — that was his first name — Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season."

Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade's room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

"I got it all right," Spade told Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her--the way she looked at it--she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

"Here's what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up--just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had time scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger — well, affectionately — when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

"He went to Seattle that afternoon," Spade said, "and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

— Dashiell Hammett, "The Maltese Falcon" (1929)

Tiresome Nonsense

2009-12-31T17:51:00.001-06:00

There's a pretty good article on Ayn Rand and the moral bankruptcy of "Objectivism" in the 23 September 2009 issue of the New Republic.

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.
If one’s income reflects one’s contribution to society, then why has the distribution of income changed so radically over the last three decades?

It can't be repeated often enough.

2009-12-14T15:54:00.001-06:00

"America has arisen to a position where she is respected and admired by the entire world. She did it by minding her own business."
— Senator William Borah
1919 speech in Brooklyn

I Guess "Lick Dick" Had a Different Meaning in 1960 ...

2009-11-13T16:30:00.001-06:00

Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future

2009-11-04T23:03:00.000-06:00

"It is not enough to change a system, to replace one economic system by another— necessary above all is a CHANGE OF SPIRIT! The spirit which is to be overcome is the SPIRIT OF MATERIALISM! We must achieve an entirely new kind of economic thinking, a kind of thinking which frees itself from the present conceptions rooted in money, in property, in profit and false success ! It is an indication of the Marxist, the false Socialism, that its way of thinking is exactly that of capitalism. For this reason I have said for years that the two form a spiritual unity, only with reversed signals!"
— Gregor Strasser,
Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future,
15 June 1926

An Old Lesson, Seldom Learned

2009-11-04T23:01:00.001-06:00

"Making war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."
—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Nazbol Poster

2009-09-10T05:31:00.001-05:00

Ann Coulter vs. Joe Stalin

2009-09-03T22:44:00.003-05:00

Actual quotes.

I may be a Communist!

2009-08-22T02:00:00.001-05:00

Ernst Niekisch: National Bolshevik

2009-08-07T05:03:00.002-05:00

Ernst Niekisch (May 23, 1889 – May 27, 1967) was born in Trebnitz (Silesia), and brought up in Nördlingen, he became a school teacher by profession. He joined the SPD (socialist party) in 1917 and was instrumental in the setting up of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He left the SPD soon after and joined the USPD (leftist "Independent Socialists") for a time, before returning.

During the 1920s he stressed the importance of nationalism and attempted to turn the SPD in that direction. He was vehemently opposed to the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties and the general pacifism of the SPD, so much so that he was expelled from the party in 1926.

Upon his expulsion Niekisch joined and took control of the insignificant Old Socialist Party of Saxony which he converted to his own nationalist form of socialism, launching his own journal Widerstand (Resistance). Niekisch and his followers adopted the name of "National Bolsheviks" and looked to the Soviet Union as a continuation of both Russian nationalism and the old state of Prussia. The movement took the slogan of "Sparta-Potsdam-Moscow." He was a member of ARPLAN - the Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy - along with Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukacs, Karl Wittfogel and Friedrich Hielscher, under whose auspices he visited the Soviet Union in 1932. He reacted favorably to Jünger's publication Die Arbeiter which he saw as a blueprint for a National Bolshevik Germany.

When Niekisch’s circle gained new members from Beppo Römer’s nationalist paramilitary organization Bund Oberland around 1930, the “Widerstand movement” became more organized. It had contacts with Social Democrats, Communists, and trade unionists, but also to oppositional members of the military, police force and clergy. After the National Socialists took power, Widerstand became a magnet for national revolutionary opposition to Hitler, with Niekisch as its intellectual leader. An attempt to form a national revolutionary anti-Hitler front through contacts with Römer and the Reichswehr officer Scheringer, who had gone over to the KPD (German Communist Party), failed. Niekisch was arrested on 22 March 1937, because of his untiringly published observations on the “Third Reich.” He was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment by the People’s Court in January 1939, along with Joseph Drexel and Karl Tröger. Released from Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary in ill health in 1945, by which time he was blind.

Embittered against nationalism by his war-time experiences he turned to orthodox Marxism and lectured in sociology in Humboldt University in East Germany until 1953 when, disillusioned by the brutal suppression of the workers' uprising, he moved to West Berlin, where he later died.

Take the Class Consciousness Test!

2009-08-01T19:31:00.000-05:00

Are you a Class Conscious cadre, ready for the revolution? Or are you an oppressed mope, the hod-man of the bourgeoisie? Back when I was a communist we were often asked to analyze popular culture and give a Class Conscious interpretation. Here's a sample test. Just view the video, form an opinion, and check to see what the Party Line is!

Wow!

You could be a dedicated revolutionary
and not even know it!!!

Wow, that clever Jack Nicholson really put it to The Man there, didn't he? He's not bound by any bourgeois conventions, is he? He's no mindless conformist! The system wants to grind him down, but he was clever enough to get around their arbitrary rules, wasn't he? The fact that he didn't get his toast just shows you that, even if you play by the rules, The Man won't!

Well — wrong!

Here's some rich boy, who thinks his money entitles him to anything, crying like a baby the very first time his every whim cannot be satisfied. Instead of accepting the limited hospitality of the restaurant he throws a tantrum leaving a huge mess for the worker girl to clean up.

That's right — the proletarian waitress is the real hero of the scene! Pity the poor, overworked waitress, her options rigidly constrained by a system that tries to control her every action, facing a snotty wiseacre like Nicholson. Her bunions hurt, she's stuck in this dreadful job, she smells of grease when she gets home, and then she has to deal with shit-heels like him.

Let's stand in solidarity with the worker girl!

Andy Thayer: agent provocateur?

2009-08-01T19:04:00.001-05:00

“Is World Peace Possible?”

2009-08-01T12:35:00.001-05:00

A cabled reply to an American poll by Oswald Spengler, first published in Cosmopolitan, January, 1936

The question whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

Life is a struggle involving plants, animals, and humans. It is a struggle between individuals, social classes, peoples, and nations, and it can take the form of economic, social, political, and military competition. It is a struggle for the power to make one’s will prevail, to exploit one’s advantage, or to advance one’s opinion of what is just or expedient. When other means fail, recourse will be taken time and again to the ultimate means: violence. An individual who uses violence can be branded a criminal, a class can be called revolutionary or traitorous, a people bloodthirsty. But that does not alter the facts. Modern world-communism calls its wars “uprisings,” imperialist nations describe theirs as “pacification of foreign peoples.” And if the world existed as a unified state, wars would likewise be referred to as “uprisings.” The distinctions here are purely verbal.

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous colored races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is always negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a static, terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence.

As long as man continues to evolve there will be wars. Should the white peoples ever become so tired of war that their governments can no longer incite them to wage it, the earth will inevitably fall a victim to the colored men, just as the Roman Empire succumbed to the Teutons. Pacifism means yielding power to the inveterate nonpacifists. Among the latter there will always be white men — adventurers, conquerors, leader-types — whose following increases with every success. If a revolt against the whites were to occur today in Asia, countless whites would join the rebels simply because they are tired of peaceful living.

Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and be rulers of the world.

The End of Western Civilization

2009-07-30T17:54:00.004-05:00

This is a continuing effort to document the mile-posts along the way from civilization to utter dissolution:

January 2008: Sales of "lite" beer surpass those of actual beer.

March 2008: Over-the-counter "prozac treats" for dogs become available.

The unique Poyz Proprietary Blend is made up of all-natural herbs & ingredients to help calm and soothe your hyperactive dog safe [sic] and effectively. These herbs have traditionally been used to help reduce:
• Irritability
• Depression
• Nervous Exhaustion,
As well as help obsessive-compulsive behaviors, such as:
• Acral Lick Dermatitis
• Aggression
• Owner Separation

April 2008: Emergency vehicles now must be fitted out with special bariatric stretchers to accommodate the growing numbers of the morbidly obese.

September 2008: National Recovery Month is created to promote the societal benefits of alcohol and drug use disorder treatment, laud the contributions of treatment providers and promote the message that recovery from alcohol and drug disorders in all its forms is possible.

November 2008: Wal-Mart Employee Killed in Shopper Stampede

January 2009: When a 5-foot, 275-pound woman found out she had a tumor on her spine, she was told by her local hospital to go the Kansas City Zoo to have a MRI because a regular MRI machine could not hold her weight.

February 2009: Obese Americans, commonly defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or higher, now out-number over-weight Americans, those a BMI of 25-29.

4 March 2009: Mattel Introduces Totally Stylin Tattoo Barbie.
This is the second try for Mattel and the ‘Tattoo Barbie’ . They released “Butterfly Art Barbie” back in 1999. She also came with tattoos for children and had a large butterfly tattoo covering her belly area. She was pulled from shelves after four months of being on the market do to a large amount of complaints by parents.

30 July 2009 Spotted hanging from the back of a van on Franklin Street.

3 February 2010 Our technical expertise and innovation are applied to the ever-daunting problem of how to keep a beer between your titties.

A Mentor of Sorts

2009-07-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

Friday night, my son and I were hanging out at the monthly open house they have at the Fine Arts Building. After viewing all the galleries and studios, we ended up at Selected Works, a used bookstore, where there was something of a reunion going on. Ron, the proprietor of what had been the largest used bookstore on the Northside in the 70’s and 80’s, was there with one of his former employees, and they were reminiscing about the old days in the book trade with Keith, the owner of Selected Works. For a year or so, I had been in the book trade, working for Roe and Sons, and I also had friends who worked for Chandler, Bookman’s Alley, and Bookseller’s Row, so I immediately joined the discussion. Mostly it was gossip about who was working where these days, how the internet was a real opportunity for increased sales, but how it also drove down prices and made keeping a store-front ever more difficult. We each knew of three stores that had shut down in the last year, though all three proprietors were still selling on-line.

Though the others there were about ten years older than me, it turned out that, having grown up in Chicago, I had the longest memory of the book trade in this town.

None of us remember the the name of it, but we all remembered the first used book store on North Lincoln Avenue. I had been a patron in the early 1970’s, and the fellow that ran it (I never knew his name) was a real curiosity. He was working class, self-educated, very widely read, full of unpopular opinions and unorthodox views. My father used to say that he “epitomizes the genius and ignorance of the self-educated.” He was unlike anyone else I had ever met and most Saturday afternoons would find me hanging out at his bookstore. The fellow was always recommending things for me to read and, for about two years, he pretty much determined the books that shaped my world-view. He was full of advice, and these are the things I learned from him.

1] Read original sources. Studying the Second World War? Start with a good general history and then, once you have the lay of it in your head, go right to memoirs, journalism, and books by the participants. At the time I was interested in WW2, and the fellow steered me to memoirs by Speer, von Melenthin, and Saburō Sakai, a Japanese Zero pilot, he threw Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front” at me but advised that I avoid “Crusade in Europe.” He got me a copy of the Army Officer’s Manual from 1941 and a re-print of the last pre-war edition of Jane’s All the World's Fighting Ships. I didn’t just learn a lot about it, I learned how to research a subject.

2] Read the other guy’s stuff. You’re a communist? Go read Mein Kampf. Read National Review and Worker’s Vanguard. Read Marx and Hayek. Read Mill and Burke. Sure, some of it will turn out to be a lot of long-winded nonsense (e.g. Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind”) but some of it has insights that you will never get from the fellows on your own side (e.g. Burnham’s "Suicide of the West”). Read it all.

3] If you want to know what a fellow thinks, read his essays, if you want to know how he thinks, read his memoirs. Bill Buckley and Whitaker Chambers sound a lot alike in the pages of National Review, but “God & Man at Yale” shows Buckley to be a first class jerk, while “Witness” is actually rather touching.

4] Read books. Reading periodicals is like watching the second hand of a clock. Journalism is ephemeral, just has to make a single impression, but a book has to be though out, consistent, complete. You might pick up an idea or two from magazines or newspapers, but you really learn things from books.

5] Old men know a thing or two. Most things have been tried before and have failed, and old men have been around long enough to know what doesn’t work. The New Left was such an unmitigated catastrophe because everything the old men of the Left knew was lost and forgotten.

6] Don’t fall for false linkages. Everybody has an agenda and the best way of putting their agenda across is by linking something they want to something everybody wants, or linking something bad to the agenda of their opponents. Saying that only an anti-Semite would oppose the State of Israel is a false linkage. Saying that only a racist would oppose Affirmative Action is a false linkage. Calling gay marriage “marriage equality” is a false linkage.

I learned a lot from that guy but, as I say, I never knew his name. Imagine my surprise Friday when I found out that he was known in the book trade as “Bigot John.”

Patriot, Communist, Catholic

2009-07-03T04:29:00.004-05:00

In October, 1942, film star Cesar Romero voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard and served in the Pacific Theatre. He reported aboard the Coast Guard-manned assault transport USS Cavalier (APA-37) in November, 1943 and saw action at Tinian and Saipan. He preferred to be a regular part of the crew and was eventually promoted to the rank of chief Boatswain's Mate.

More Spengler

2009-07-03T03:48:00.000-05:00

Liberalism, in its German form, has always stood for mental sterility, for the ignorance and incomprehension of historical necessities. It has meant the inability to cooperate with others or to make sacrifices for others. Its position has always been one of entirely negative criticism, though not as an expression of an indomitable will to change society—as manifested by Bebel’s Socialists—but simply out of the desire to "be different." While our liberals have never been at a loss for "standpoints" to adopt, they have lacked the inner vitality and discipline, the confidence and purposeful vigor that are so characteristic of the English form of liberalism.

The meaning of socialism is that life is dominated not by the contrast of rich and poor but by rank as determined by achievement and ability. That is our kind of freedom: freedom from the economic capriciousness of the individual. My fervent hope is that no one will remain hidden who was born with the ability to command, and that no one is given the responsibility for commanding who lacks the inborn talent for doing so. Socialism means ability, not desire. Not the quality of intentions but the quality of accomplishments is decisive. I turn to our youth. I call upon all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves! Become men! We need no more ideologists, no more chatter about Bildung and cosmopolitanism and Germany’s intellectual mission. We need hardness, we need a courageous skepticism, we need a class of socialistic mastertypes. Once again: Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both groups determined to build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner; both forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make immense sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be without us. We are socialists. Let us hope that it will not have been in vain.

What must daily life under totalitarian rule have been like?

2009-04-27T22:22:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder what it must have been like to live in Fascist Italy, Maoist China, Falangist Spain, or even Oceania? I've read some histories, memoirs, seen films of the period, and I've got some notion.

For instance, the state would constantly be telling you what was best for you, where your interest lay, what you should support. There would always be the nagging notion in the back of your mind that something about the message was being left out, that there was an hidden agenda, that some other interest were being served.

The effort to control the thoughts of the people would have to be unceasing. Every medium would be used: radio, television, newspapers. Huge rallies would be held. The issue would never be discussed, only boosted. Film stars would stand next to leaders endorsing this benevolent program. Sports stars would make visits to schools to tell your children to support the measure. Businessmen would harangue you about how this or that measure was absolutely necessary for continued prosperity. Straw-man arguments would be set up and demolished in sham debates. Slogans would be repeated until they numbed the ears.

Posters would appear overnight in a coördinated campaign. A new symbol would suddenly be everywhere. On each street, on ever block, on each lamp-post.

There would simply be no getting away from it.

Mrs. Peabody: Always Correct

2009-02-27T23:10:00.001-06:00

On March 30, 1964, a mixed group of Whites and Negroes was arrested by Saint John County sheriff L.O. Davis at a sit-in demonstration at the Ponce De Leon Motel, in St. Augustine, Florida. When they were taken off for booking, the negro women looked to Catherine Twine, a postman's wife, for leadership, but she thought to defer to one of the Northern white women who had come down especially for the demonstration. She was quite impressed by one elderly woman, every inch the aristocrat in her sensible shoes and pale pink suit, and Mrs. Twine remarked, "My — but you look just like Mrs. Elanor Roosevelt."

Taking this as a complement, the woman nodded, "We're cousins."

The woman was Mary Parkman Peabody, wife of retired Episcopal Bishop of New York, the Rev. Malcolm Peabody, and 72-year old mother of Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody. Upon being arrested, she became an instant celebrity. When CBS offered to make her bail in order to get an exclusive interview with her, she refused, saying, "I'd rather stay in jail with my new friends."

Where are the aristocrats of today?

Better Days Ahead

2009-01-19T21:10:00.001-06:00

In 1940, in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America", which Guthrie considered unrealistic and complacent, Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land." At the time he, along with Lee Hays and Pete Seeger were with the Almanac Singers, a group of folk singers who sang peace songs wherever they could, from Greenwich Village cafes to Northwest logger's camps.

Hays and Seeger later went on to considerable success in the late forties with the Weavers, before being black-listed in the early 1950's. Guthrie, whose health began deteriorating in the late 1940's, never enjoyed anything like the fame or success of the Weavers.

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he recorded "This Land Is Your Land." It wasn't until the folk revival of the late 1950's however, that this recording gained any notice. Pretty soon the song became a standard with folk singers and was even put into music books for school children to sing. Hearing this on his death bed, in the mid-1960's, Guthrie told his son Arlo to make sure that all of the lyrics were sung, "even the Communist lyrics."

Here are the lyrics. The "Communist lyrics" are highlighted in red:

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
words and music by Woody Guthrie

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Chorus (2x)

When I was a child we sang this song in grade school. We didn't sing the Communist lyrics. (Though sometimes we did sing: "I saw baloney, a big salami …") I was in my early thirties before I even found out about the Communist lyrics.

On 18 January 2009 song was sung by Pete Seeger, and his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, at We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial.

The song was restored to the original lyrics for this performance at Pete Seeger's request.

A Willful Mis-Stating of the Issues

2008-12-12T15:28:00.001-06:00

A Washington Times article by Jeffrey T. Kuhner, "A socialist America?" was recently re-printed in the Wanderer. There were so many routine distortions that I thought it would be worthwhile to debunk a few of them, as I have often heard many of my Catholic friends buying into many of these deceptions.

• "An Obama presidency will [transform] our country into a socialist state."

This is just blather. I am a socialist, I know what socialism is, and a fundamentally bourgeois, corporate dominated state that throws a few meager benefits to the workers is not socialism! When most workers are unionized, when Social Security is turned into a genuinely equitable pension system, when great fortunes are not allowed to be passed down from generation to generation of rentier — then we might be close to socialism! Until then, speaking of “socialism” is just a lot of reactionary name-calling.

• "Mr. Obama will focus immediately on passing universal health care … [shifting] nearly 50 million Americans from private coverage to government-run care …"

No one is calling for “government-run care.” Under no plan that I have heard would the government own hospitals, run clinics, and be the sole employer of doctors. The proper analogy here is not to the government run Post Office, but to a simple government disbursement of funds to private providers. And government is good at that: the Social Security Administration, for instance, administers millions of individual accounts at a cost of less than 1% of the funds handled, far less than any investment firm charges.

• "The program's vast size and immense cost will lead to rising taxes …"

Okay, if we now pay about 16% of our GDP for health, and going to a single-payer system brings our costs in line with Europe, where they all have such systems and they cost about 8-10% of GDP, then we can expect to save about 6% of our GDP that is now wasted on health administration, legal fees, billing costs, etc,. That's right: the cost of health care will come down!

So, perhaps your taxes will go up somewhat, but your health care premiums would drop to nothing. Right now I pay about $600- a month to insure myself and my employees, and I probably pay half that much more on stuff that isn’t covered by my plan. You would have to more than double my income tax before single-payer insurance would cost me more.

• "The program's vast size and immense cost will lead to … the rationing of services.

Oh, and services aren’t rationed now?

When I had bronchitis last winter, I knew my health insurance wouldn’t cover it (deductible, you know), so I stayed away from the doctor for five months hoping it would clear up on its own. Tell me that isn’t rationing?

When my wisdom teeth began to ache from time-to-time in my mid-twenties I couldn’t afford to have them taken out. I had to wait until my mid-thirties, when they were fully impacted, and I needed surgery, which was covered, before they were taken out. Tell me that isn’t rationing?

Oh, we have rationing now, and, until we have an infinite supply of health care, we will continue to have rationing. The question is: will we have rationing by need or by wealth?

• " America's social programs will resemble those of statist Europe; we will also resemble the Continent's anemic growth rates, lower productivity and higher unemployment. America's culture of entrepreneurialism and technological dynamism will degenerate into one characterized by economic dependency and social stagnation."

Gee — Japan has had all of those polices for decades and that hasn’t stopped them from having a dynamic economy.

And how about this? Wages have gone down 30% in America since 1972, while in Europe they have about doubled in that time frame. All of our “dynamic growth” in that time has gone to make a few people ever more grotesquely rich which, when you think about it, really isn’t any kind of growth worth having.

• "[Mr. Obama] vows to lift or eliminate the cap on payroll taxes, which funds Social Security and Medicare. Hence, a tax designed to maintain a pension insurance system will be used for the redistribution of wealth."

I hate that phrase “redistribution of wealth." It implies that there was some sort of Divinely Ordained and infinitely just original distribution of wealth, instead of an inherently flawed and corrupt market system that routinely rewards speculators, pornographers, and marketers pandering to our worst desires, while neglecting teachers, farmers, and innumerable others who actually contribute to the well being of society.

But, just in case you still balk at any form of “redistribution of wealth,” check out what Pope Pius said in Quadragesimo Anno:

“[It is the] function of government to adjust ownership to meet the needs of the public good.”

• "… to forge a new Democratic majority, felons will be given the right to vote, and the District of Columbia will be granted congressional representation - meaning more Democratic seats."

As opposed to, say, the way the Republicans routinely disenfranchised Florida voters who merely had the same name as felons? Or the Republican gerrymandering in the Southern states that routinely denies representation to white Democrats? Or the Diebold voting machines that routinely throw out votes for the Democratic ticket?

Now, I don’t really don’t feel strongly about the issue, but the idea that once a man has paid his debt to society he ought to regain the full rights of a citizen doesn’t strike me as unreasonable. Nor does it strike me as particularly fair that the Republican stronghold of Wyoming should get two senators while the District of Columbia, with at least a hundred thousand more residents, should not.

• "The Obama-Pelosi-Reid unholy alliance will complete the revolutionary project of the 1960s: a society stripped from its traditional Christian moorings."

Okay, who’s the churchgoer: Obama or McCain? Obama is a different kind of Democrat precisely because he is a believing Christian. I get sick of reactionaries calling anyone to the left of Ronald Regan (who wasn’t religious at all, if you will remember) “anti-Christian,” as if Martin Luther King, Eugene McCarthy, and Dorothy Day had never existed.

Sure Pelosi and Reid are largely secular, but is the bad religion of George W. Bush better? Is religion used to justify imperialism, genocide, and an erosion of our civil rights real piety, or is it a fraud? Sure, a lot of people on the left are totally secular — about as secular as those godless Libertarians!

• "Finally, his administration will consolidate a liberal Supreme Court and thus advance the leftist social agenda of abortion on demand …"

Wait, wait, wait! It was a Republican dominated court that put through Roe v. Wade! Only two of the last nine Republican nominees to the court have opposed it! Saying that Republican court nominees would be better on the life issue is criminally naive.

• " … the decriminalization of prostitution, the legalization of marijuana and euthanasia."

Oh, cut it out! No one’s talking about anything like that. This is just scare mongering of the worst possible sort.

Let’s give this man a chance, huh? Things have gone terribly wrong under Bush. We are engaged in an immoral war of imperialism, the economy is deep in depression, the distribution of wealth is almost at third-world imbalances, working-class income has been stagnant for three decades, our infrastructure is crumbling, or foreign debt is crushing, and our prestige in the world is at an all time low. Barack Obama is a bright young man who is not tied to the old ideas of sixties liberalism. Have you been listening to what he has been saying about the recent financial crisis? The man is talking sense and I feel the quality of government is going to improve almost immediately.

Cosmic Soviet Baby

2008-12-10T15:26:00.003-06:00

On 8 June 1964 Valentina Tereshkova gave birth to a daughter, Elena Andrianovna Lenochka Nikolayeva-Tereshkova. Tereshkova, the first woman in space, was married to Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev. Their daughter Elena is, to date, the only child born to parents who have both been to space.

American Failure

2008-12-01T10:39:00.002-06:00

"In business, under the American system, each year the failures exceed the new successes by a very, very, very wide margin. In business, under the American system, hundreds of thousands more have failed, generation after generation, than the few who have succeeded. If we are to judge by the preponderance of individual successes over failures, or vice-versa, then the American system, business wise, is a record of steady, almost unrelieved failure. It has failure literally built into it."
— Ferdinand Lundberg,
"The Rich and the Super-Rich"

Make Your Plans on That Basis.

2008-12-01T10:21:00.002-06:00

On Wednesday 23 October 1929, Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, was lounging in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. A local bank president ran up to him, nearly hysterical, exclaiming, "Governor! Hell's broken loose! The biggest crash you've ever seen! It's going to be sixty days before this country will get back to normal."

Governor Long replied calmly, "I've been expecting this crash for three years. It's here for many, many years. It can't end until there's a redistribution of wealth. Make your plans on that basis."

An Italo-American Faust

2008-11-06T22:36:00.003-06:00

Born in New Jersey, Francis Sinatra had a formidable mother, active in Democratic city ward politics. He knew at first hand the politics of immigrant Italians, of the urban working class. He was one of them.

What interests me is the rise and fall of a political hero whose apothëosis, or, to be precise, hell, was to become a neutered creature of the American right wing, crooning in Nancy Reagan’s ear at the White House.

At the height of his popular fame as a singer, Frank Sinatra made a short documentary called The House I Live In. This was in 1947; he won an Academy Award for the song, whose lyrics — The people that I work with. The workers that I meet ... The right to speak my mind. That is America to me — were a straightforward pleas for tolerance that neither cloyed nor bored.

Sinatra then fell foul of the FBI, and the professional patriots, and the then powerful Hearst press. In the course of the next eight years, Congress's Un-American Activities Committee, in its Index "of Communists" named The House I Live In twelve times while the New York Times, forever up to no good, in its Index for 1949 published a cross-reference: "Sinatra, Frank: see U.S. — Espionage." That was all the news fit to print about our greatest popular singer.

To add to the demonization, one Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, and the FBI’s ineffable J. Edgar Hoover (who lived long enough to keep a file on the subversions and perversions of John Lennon), were out to get Sinatra not only as a crypto-Communist but as a mafioso. Since any nightclub singer must work in a nightclub or a casino and since the mob controlled these glittering venues, every entertainer was obliged to traffic with them.

In 1947 Sinatra was smeared as a mafioso by a right-wing Hearst columnist, Lee Mortimer. Sinatra, notoriously short-tempered and not unfamiliar with fiery waters, knocked Mortimer down in a nightclub. Press ink flowed like Niagara Falls. Sinatra was transformed by the right-wing press overnight from the crooning idol of bobby-soxers into violent, left-wing mafioso.

Catholic organs, respectful of their co-religionist’s fame, tried to downplay the attacks, maintaining that he was a mere “pawn.” But he wasn’t. Sinatra had indeed been active in left-wing (by American standards) activities. In 1946 he blasted Franco, a favorite of America’s High Command. That same year he became vice-president of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, along with many other stars and Thomas Mann.

In 1948 he supported Henry Wallace for President against the proto-McCarthyite Harry S. Truman. Undeterred by the harm to his career, Sinatra wrote an open letter to the then liberal New Republic imploring Henry Wallace, as heir to Roosevelt, “to take up the fight we like to think of as ours — the fight for tolerance, which is the basis of any fight for peace.” Three months later he was publicly branded a Communist and sacked from his radio show; by 1949 Columbia Records had broken with him and by 1950 MGM dismissed him from his film contract.

A has-been at thirty-four.

After a time of trouble with his wive, Ava Gardner, and the loss of his voice due to alcohol and stress, he made his astonishing come-back in the film From Here to Eternity, for which he was obliged to take a minimal salary. He also developed a brand-new voice, grace notes like Mabel Mercer.

By 1960 Sinatra was again political. He had been a playmate of Jack Kennedy in his senatorial days; he was also gung-ho to help out his conservative but attractive Catholic friend. But some Kennedy advisers thought the Red Mafioso should be avoided at all costs, others wanted to use him for a voter drive in Harlem “where he is recognized as a hero of the cause of the Negro,” something that Kennedy was not, to say the least.

Although, at times, Sinatra seemed to be ranging between megalomania and just plain hard drinking, he was still a major singer, also a movie star, famous for doing scenes in only one take — known in the trade as “walking through.” Kennedey’s candidacy revved him up. But for those who have wondered what dinner might have been like for Falstaff when Prince Hal — now King — snubbed him, I can report that after Kennedy was nominated in Los Angeles at the convention where I was a delegate, Tony Curtis and Janet Lee gave a movie-star party for the nominee. I was placed, along with Sinatra, at the table where Kennedy would sit. We waited. And Waited. Sinatra looked edgy; started to drink heavily. Diner began. Then one of the toothy sister of the nominee said, casually, “Oh, Jack’s sorry. He can’t come. He’s gone to the movies.” Opposite me, Falstaff deflated and spoke no more that evening.

Once Kennedy was elected, Sinatra organized the inaugural ball. But the President’s father and brother Robert said no more Sinatra and there was no more Sinatra.

When President Kennedy came to stay in Palm Springs, he stayed not with Sinatra, as announced, but with his rival Bing Crosby. Insult to injury. From then on, in public and private, he often behaved boorishly.

In due course, he was called before a Congressional committee on the Mafia. They got nowhere. Nowhere to go. Nowhere for him, either. He became a Reagan Republican. But then no Democratic President asked him to perform at the White House. It was sly old Nixon, whose House committee had smeared him, who asked Sinatra to sing The House I Live In.

At the end of the program, for the first time in his public career, Sinatra was in tears. It is not easy to be good, much less a tribune of the people, in the land of milk and money once your house is gone.

— Gore Vidal, 17 May 1998

Time to Face Facts in Afghanistan

2008-10-29T20:06:00.001-05:00

The current war in Afghanistan is not really about al-Qaida and `terrorism,’ but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin of Central Asia to the West. The US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are essentially pipeline protection troops fighting off the hostile natives..

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are wrong about Afghanistan. It is not a `good’ fight against `terrorism,’ but a classic, 19th century colonial war to advance western geopolitical power into resource-rich Central Asia. The Pashtun Afghans who live there are ready to fight for another 100 years. The western powers certainly are not.

— Eric Margolis

Full Map

Two Decent Men From Illinois.

2008-10-23T16:06:00.003-05:00

After Nine Years

2008-10-17T19:43:00.000-05:00

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was a key New Deal reform designed to prevent the kind of credit melt-down that took place from 1929-1933. It separated commercial banking from investment banking, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and included reforms designed to control speculation.

Provisions such as Regulation Q, which allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates in savings accounts, were repealed by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. This lead to the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980's, which cost taxpayers about $124.6, either directly or through charges on their savings and loan accounts and which contributed to the large budget deficits of the early 1990s. The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market was a primary cause of the 1990–1991 economic recession.

Provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed on November 12, 1999, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which passed in the Senate: 90-8-1 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

At the time one of the few senators to vote against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,Byron Dorgan, made the following prediction:

"I think we will look back in ten years' time and say we sould not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010."

By The Numbers

2008-10-10T01:39:00.000-05:00

Here is a chart of the composition of the Supreme Court by party affiliation since Roe v. Wade in 1973:

You will note that it was then, and has remained, overwhelmingly Republican. That's right — Roe v. Wade was put through by a court that was 2/3 Republican! Since then, the balance has gotten even more lop-sided, why, there was a period there when Byron White was the only Democrat on the court!

So — do you expect me to believe that one more Republican appointed justice might just tip the balance? That we have to vote Republican to keep the Supreme Court from "going Democratic?"

Let me assure you that, based on the record, we can count on Republican justices to:

• Not over-turn Roe v. Wade. (e.g. McCorvey v. Hill)

• Undermine the rights of citizens to sue corporations ( e.g. Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc.)

• Undermine our Bill of Rights (e.g. ACLU v. NSA)

• Steal elections from the people (e.g. Bush v. Gore)

Cool poster!

2008-10-02T15:41:00.001-05:00

Global Warming: predicted in 1931

2008-09-05T02:28:00.000-05:00

“The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered. In a few decades most of the great forests have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations.”
— Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (1931), pp. 93-94

Exactly Wrong

2008-08-21T23:10:00.000-05:00

This is nothing but wrong-headed horse shit!

We have the financial system of the 1920's since the repeal of all New Deal legislation that formerly protected us.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and included banking reforms which were designed to control speculation no longer stands. Some provisions such as Regulation Q that allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates in savings accounts were repealed by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Other provisions which prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 which prevented fraud and manipulation of our stock exchanges have largely been dismembered as well.

The Tsunami of financial disaster that is hitting us now would never have been permitted under New Deal legislation — the 1930's Financial System that is being so slanderously maligned here.

Is This the Most Inspiring Poster Ever?

2008-08-21T13:41:00.004-05:00

Let's build a fleet of air-ships in Lenin's name!

Wow! I want to start right away!!!

Air-ships + the Soviet = Utopia!

Aptly Put

2008-07-02T20:48:00.001-05:00

"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."

— John Adams

Yet another Proletarian Idea Coöpted by the Bourgeoisie.

2008-06-19T22:12:00.003-05:00

In his book,"The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," Malcolm Gladwell discusses what he calls, "tipping points" which are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term, "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe enormous and "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do."

Sound familiar? Try this on for size:

...at certain nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap; for example, the case of water which is heated or cooled, where boiling point and freezing point are the nodes at which -- under normal pressure -- the leap to a new aggregate state takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into quality.

Recognize it? It's from everybody favorite book by Frederick Engels, the "Anti-Dühring." (Or did you like "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844" better? No matter ...) Yes, the idea that change is dialectical, not gradual, is a communist idea, in fact, Marx called his system of philosophy Dialectical Materialism. Sociology is now obsessed with "tipping points," just as in biology the dialectical theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (which comes from Hegel, through the C.P.U.S.A., by way of Stephen Jay Gould) is replacing that of Phyletic Gradualism (which is irretrievably bourgeois, as it traces back to the anti-working class polemics of Parson Malthus). Yes, this is one more example, of which there are many, of why this capitalist system has got to go! Okay, we'd better wrap this up with a quote from Spengler:

“The money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons — whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes ...

... The task is set: it is imperative to free German Socialism from Marx.”

The Global Accounting Scam

2008-05-20T14:28:00.001-05:00

By Jonathan Rowe

The Gross Domestic Product, the fundamental basis for economic reckoning in this country, is destroying the environment and public health and calling it progress.

Several months ago a professor at the University of North Carolina published findings that turned beliefs about the economy upside down. Health improves, he said, as the economy goes down. When the economy declines, to a point at least, deaths, smoking, obesity, heavy drinking, heart disease and some kinds of back problems all decline as well.

"Sounds unlikely," said the New York Times. And indeed it is, by the standard reckonings at least. We all know that an expanding economy makes us better off -- or do we? Another study, this one in England, found that shopping, which is the drive train of the entire economy, and which is supposed to make people feel good, actually can make them depressed. "For significant numbers, dissatisfaction is now part of the shopping process," one of the authors said. (As though we needed a study to tell us that.)

What's going on here? How could we feel better when the experts say we should feel worse, and worse when they say we should feel better? Could it be that economists don't know up from down to begin with?

This is the nation's hidden accounting scandal, the one that neither government nor media will touch. It concerns the accounting for the entire economy, the way the government purports to determine whether things are getting better or worse. This accounting is called the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. It is central to the big policy debate in Washington, and is the template for the policies the United States projects upon the world. The media regard it with a reverence bordering on awe. The Wall Street Journal recently called the GDP the "world's most reliable economic indicator."

Yet like the books of Enron, Tyco et. al., the federal economic accounting is a sham. It portrays regress as progress and misery as economic advance. If you ever have wondered how you could feel so harried, stressed, maxed out and under siege, even when the government says the economy is doing well, the answer is here. If the president really is looking for chief executives who "cook the books," he might well take a look at the economic books over which he himself presides. They truly are a mess.

Adding It Up - and Adding, and Adding...

Imagine an accountant who can add but can't subtract, and who is so nearsighted he can't see past his nose. That is the mentality behind the GDP. The GDP simply adds up the money Americans spend and calls the result growth and good, regardless of where the money went and why.

By this reckoning, the more medical bills you incur, the more junk food your kids yammer for, the more you sit in traffic and the more your credit card company rips you off with hidden charges, the better the economy is doing and the more the politicians can brag about the nation's "growth."

At the same time the accounting ignores the implications of expenditures that on their face might suggest advance. Perhaps your neighbor loves her SUV. Perhaps she regards it as a step upward in her life. Still, when she drives the thing, she pours gunk into the air and adds to pressures to put oil derricks near coastal beaches. She takes up more space on the road, adding to traffic and causing everyone to burn more gas. Honest accounting would show such costs. The GDP ignores them.

Worse, the federal accounting actually shows such costs as economic gains. All the gas, the fender-benders, the medical bills arising from exposure to bad air get added to the GDP as evidence of the nation's growth. Americans spend over $5 billion on gas they burn while stuck in traffic, going nowhere. That's $5 billion more for the GDP. Cook the planet, cook the books and call the result "growth."

It's this kind of screwy accounting that enables the president to claim that action to address global warming would be bad for "the economy." Define regress as progress, and steps to take us forward look as though they would set us back. What's more, while counting bads as goods, the GDP totally ignores the genuine goods that don't cost money. The air we breathe, the care that parents and grandparents give their children, the games children play with one another, the quiet of the night -- these are invisible in the national accounts.

Only when the economy destroys them and forces us to buy substitutes do the federal accountants spring to life. Day care counts but mom-and-dad care doesn't. Driving a car counts but walking does not. The reason is not that government numbers-people are incompetent or ethically challenged. Actually they are top-notch. The problem is the antiquated system they are forced to use. It is so out of touch with reality it would be comic -- if the consequences weren't so grim.

Thriving on Absurdity

The absurdities of all this have not gone entirely unnoticed. Economists and the media reflect upon them from time to time in a feet-on-the-desk kind of way. But they continue to use the GDP anyway. Observe the news the next time the Commerce Department releases the quarterly GDP numbers. Does a single reporter or economist say, "Wait a minute. Does this accounting really say what people think it says?"
Not likely. And more, they never acknowledge how deep the phony accounting runs. They might remark on occasion upon the unfortunate side effects of consumption, what economists call "externalities," e.g. the way the SUV gunks up the air. But the consumption itself is always positive, another step up the Mountain of More. "A nation is by definition thriving if its major indices [e.g. the GDP] say people are making more things and spending more money on them," a writer in the New York Times opined not long ago. By definition, which means there's no need to observe actual experience and see if it is true.

Yet reporters are supposed to be observers, not theologians, and these talents are desperately needed with regard to the hoary postulates of economic thought. The problem today goes far deeper than externalities. Increasingly the problem is internalities, the supposed cornucopia itself. Is it really thriving when kids nag their parents for junk food, or when credit card companies rip off their customers with billions in hidden charges? Is it thriving when teen magazines induce a pathological body-consciousness in young girls, to the benefit of the cosmetic and plastic surgery industries?

According to a recent test, six of seven brands of SUVs are designed to incur major damage -- upwards of $1400 or more -- from a crash at just 5 miles per hour. That's GDP. But is it really "thriving"? When one actually looks at the economy, instead of thinking abstractly like an economist, one sees less a happy jaunt up the mountain than a slog through a swamp of the economy's own creating.

Integers of Acquisition

But let's face it. The problem is not just the economy. It's also ourselves.

In the belief system called economics, we all are shrewd little integers of acquisition, who go through life with an unfailing calculus of benefit and gain. Since we all are "rational," as economists use that term, the sum total of our buying must be the nation's prosperity and good. That's the belief embedded in the national accounting -- more buying equals more happiness and good.

Leave aside, for the moment, the buying the economy thrusts upon us. Leave aside too whether it is really so "rational" to be obsessed with shopping to begin with. If we simply observe the life around us, what we see is -- surprise -- a lot of bad choices. We see in fact a nation of people who seem in constant lament over the bad choices they have made.

The book stores are full of titles for such people. Support groups proliferate for those who can't stop eating, drinking, smoking, falling for the wrong people, spending money they don't have. The pharmaceutical industry is marketing drugs for people who can't stop shopping. (Some four million Americans are already addicted to prescription drugs.) Counselors are counseling them.

Yet somehow, when the accountants put all of these bad decisions together, the result is supposed to be prosperity and growth, by definition. And when people start to get control of their lives -- when they toss the gin down the toilet, put the credit cards in the freezer and timers on their telephones -- we hear dire warnings of a drop in "consumer confidence" and a "sluggish" GDP.

Rejecting the Hype

It does get a little weird. Yet politically it makes perfect sense. A McDonald's, an Exxon or a General Motors finds great comfort in the GDP. An accounting system that turns obesity and pollution into economic advance turns the perpetrators of these into the heroes of the script. Politicians like the accounting too. It enables them to say that in helping their campaign contributors they are actually helping humankind. Oil drilling in wilderness areas is not a plum for the oil industry, they say. Rather, it's a boost for the GDP.

For the media, meanwhile, the GDP provides a way to turn a complex story into a simple number, one that comes weighted with the combined authority of the federal government and economic expertise. It enables reporters to pontificate on the economies of entire countries without the need to leave their desks. That the GDP aligns economic reporting with the interests of advertisers doesn't hurt either.

These mental grooves are deep, and they are set in concrete. They are not likely to change any time soon. That does not mean we have to follow along, however. The first step to change is to withdraw our consent. The next time we hear Dan Rather, or Tom Lehrer, or the solemn voices on NPR intone about the GDP and "growth," we can just chuckle at how out of it they are. As the corporate corruption exposés have shown to the nation's great pain, phony accounting can't cover up reality forever.

Jonathan Rowe is director of the Tomales Bay Institute and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly magazine. An even better article about the GDP scam can be found in the June 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine.

National Bolshevik Principles: Autarchy!

2008-05-15T06:03:00.001-05:00

Autarchy means self-sufficiency and a rejection of internationalism. Today we are foolishly de-industrializing and sending economic production overseas while, at the same time, becoming ever more dependent upon imported resources. The inevitable corollary to our disastrous “free trade” policies is imperialism, the attempt to impose our economic order upon the rest of the world by coercion or force. America is abundantly blessed with resources of all kinds, with minerals, fertile land, ample fresh water, and we have need of importing only a very few resources to maintain our standard of living. “Globalization” does not serve the interests of any but the owning classes and leads to the destabilization of societies the world around, for money has no home and thus the Money Power cares nothing for the people. Autarchy, ultimately, is inseparable from socialism.

Lincoln understood this well: “I don’t know much about the tariff, but I know this much: when we buy manufactured good abroad, we get the goods and the foreigner gets the money. When we buy the manufactured goods at home, we get both the goods and the money.”

Autarchy means:

‡ Fair trade, not free trade; refusing to import goods made by laborers earning sweat-shop wages and support for companies paying decent wages in third world countries.

‡ A drastic curtailment of our dependence upon foreign oil by means of tax incentives, development of alternative power sources, and perhaps even rationing.

‡ Environmental policies that reflect the reality of finite resources that must be carefully husbanded for future generations.

‡ Closing our borders to economic refugees.

‡ An end to imperialist adventuring.

National Bolshevik Principles: Socialism!

2008-05-15T05:59:00.001-05:00

Socialism here is not meant only in the narrow economic sense, but rather in the sense of “social justice” encompassing not only a more equitable relationship of labor and capital, but of polices that engender the health of society. It is opposed not only to rapacious “market values” but also to socially destructive “liberalism.”

1] Economic Socialism!

Economic Socialism embraces the whole matrix of social policies beneficial to the working class. It means production for use, wherein the economy is made to serve the people not the Money Power. It means recognizing that consumerism is environmentally catastrophic. Credit, investment, the tax structure: all of these must be made to serve the national interest, not the Money Power. Socialism means a rejection of bourgeois liberalism, which values the rights of the individual over social order and family integrity, and a rejection of bourgeois materialism that exalts consumerism and measures everything in dollars.

A socialist program of economics would include:

‡ Nationalization of heath-care and pensions.

‡ Repeal of anti-labor legislation (e.g. “right to work” laws and the Taft Hartley law) and the mandatory unionization of all businesses employing more than 100 workers.

‡ A truly progressive tax upon incomes.

‡ Estate taxes high enough to prevent the development of an hereditary rentier class.

‡ The replacement of “welfare” with a program of full employment.

‡ An end to the subsidy to low-wage employers known as the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” and the setting of minimum wages at living wage levels.

2] Cultural Socialism!

Unlike Marxist socialism, National Bolshevism is not materialistic and embraces a cultural socialism as well. Spengler says that “all economic life is the expression of a soul-life.” Today the West is faced with a crisis of spirit, a loss of cultural self-assurance, a soul destroying materialism, that is known as “multi-culturalism” and must be rejected. A developed society can either embrace the culture upon which it is built, celebrate it and progress, or it can embrace cultural eclecticism, lose touch with the pulse of its own life-blood, become effete and dilettantish, and perish before other cultures that retain their self-confidence.

Cultural socialism means:

‡ Tax policies that promote family formation.

‡ The encouragement of fertility in educated women by forgiving the student loans for women who have at least two children.

‡ An “English only” policy in government and schools.

‡ An aggressive policy of cultural education in the schools with an emphasis upon classical music, western art and literature, and humanistic philosophical values.

‡ An end to the corruption of religious institutions through government grants and subsidies.

‡ A presumption on the part of government and educators that Western values of free enquiry, the sanctity of the individual conscience, limited government, and civic virtue are better than their non-Western alternatives.

3] Political Socialism! (Communitarianism)

Our present political system has degenerated into wild displays of demagoguery and petty factionalism in order to hide the reality of plutocratic control of all branches of government. Reform is imperative if the working classes are to achieve real representation in government.

Political socialism means:

‡ Genuine multi-party democracy through a system of proportional representation in all legislatures.

‡ Scrapping of the Electoral College and election of the president by a consensus style system (e.g. “instant run-off” voting).

‡ A break-up of the current media monopoly through anti-trust action and a requirement that the FCC give 2/3 of all broadcasting licences to local ownership.

Prophetic Words

2008-05-15T00:23:00.002-05:00

"The Strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations." — Adlai Stevenson, 1952

Consider, if you will, that this was said twenty-eight years before Reagan began to dismantle good government in this country, and almost half-a-century before Bush completed the job.

A Startling Admission

2008-05-13T15:39:00.001-05:00

David Ben-Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, once told Zionist official Nahum Goldmann, that if he were a Palestinian, he too would wage perpetual war with Israel:

"Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: We have come here and stolen their country."

Excursus: Could I make as much money as Bill Clinton if I started shitting out gold bricks?

2008-04-05T15:12:00.001-05:00

Upon reading that former President, Bill Clinton had personally made $81,430,000- since leaving the presidency, my son commented that no one was worth that kind of money, “…even if they were shitting out gold bricks!”

Now, that’s quite a statement, so I decided to do the math.

I have no idea of what Mr. Clinton’s fecal production might be (I checked his blog, but it concerns more trivial matters, like politix) so I arbitrarily took my own experience as being fairly typical. I estimate that I produce about a pound and a half of crap with each movement and, as last month’s average was 1.55 movements a day, this give a total of 37.2 ounces avoirdupois (avd) or 33.9 troy ounces, the weight at which gold is quoted. Gold, being at $913.29 per troy ounce, this means that I produce the fecal equivalent of $33,960.53 in gold bricks per day.

Clinton, on the other hand, made $31,870- per diem.

So the answer is yes, Clinton would be worth that much money if he could shit out gold bricks.

Political Topography of the NSDAP

2008-04-02T17:49:00.002-05:00

This is my latest attempt to create a topography of political factions within (and around) the NSDAP.

On the left we find three categories: National Bolsheviks who are too far left to remain within the NSDAP or ever to have joined, National Socialists who were the genuinely socialist faction within the party, and Left Opportunists who, while being socialist in outlook, ultimately subordinated this to other motivations. Thus National Bolshevik includes Nazi defectors (e.g. Stennis and Otto Strasser), disaffected Communists and Socialists who could not embrace the lingering petite-bourgeois character of the NSDAP (e.g. Radek, Niekish and Winnig), and characters who were simply too radically anti-bourgeois to fit anywhere else (e.g. Ernst Saloman, or von Stauffenberg). The Left Opportunists usually were careerists (e.g. Hans Fritzsche) who willingly subordinated any opinions to their personal interests, though there were many (e.g. Dr. Joseph Göbbels or Julius Streicher) who subordinated their socialist ideas to their racist mania, as well as those who, for whatever reason, failed to act upon their beliefs (such as the brain-damaged Dr. Ley).

In the Center, there are three Anti-Bourgeois Categories: The Left Anti-Bourgeois are the State Socialists, who think that socialism, by eliminating the class struggle, would ultimately strengthen the nation (e.g. Spengler, and the Tatkreis [“Action Circle”] faction). In the Center Anti-Bourgeois is something of a grab bag, including as it does out-and-out monarchists (e.g. Frick and von Epp), third way theorists (e.g. Möller van den Brucke), disaffected militarists (e.g. Doenitz or Steldte), and flaky race theorists (e.g. Dintner or Eckhardt). The Right Anti-Bourgeois are State Capitalists who, though accepting capitalism, wish to subordinate it to the nation. This eventually became the de facto Nazi ideology as this faction was heavily weighted with the sort of fanatical racists that Hitler favored. The Right Opportunists mirror their complement on the left and are designated opportunists for similar reasons (e.g. careerists like Speer, the racially obsessed like Himmler, or out-and-out opportunists like the amiable sociopath himself, Herman Göring).

On the far right we find the Reactionary Capitalists who are too far right to work with Hitler. They constitute a conventional hard right faction alienated from the “Weimar System” which they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as “socialist.”
The “Y-Axis” of this chart deals with the national/race issue. No one in the NSDAP is an internationalist or anything less than a German patriot, so we begin there with Völkish. The völkish believe Germany was cheated at Versailles, is the best of all possible nations, and perhaps they believe that neither Poles, Jews, nor Czechs living within the Reich can ever really be good Germans, yet they are not obsessed with the race issue, respect other nations, nor harbor real hatreds. Anti-Semitic encompasses those who see Jews as constituting an economic or cultural menace, see other nations as inferior, and are not adverse to a war of conquest. Racist defines those as favoring or willing to go along with genocide.
Hitler’s program was one of genocide and imperialism. He was thus fundamentally neither right nor left (though he ultimately allied himself with the right) but merely a racist. The proof of this is that no one supporting genocide was ever purged!

Wages down / profits up / workers screwed again

2008-03-31T20:12:00.002-05:00

Commerce Department data show that the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to 1929. The share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record.

• Some 51.6 percent of total national income went to wages and salaries in 2006. This is a lower share than in any of the 77 previous years for which these data are available.

• At this stage of the 1990s business cycle, wages and salaries made up about 53 percent of national income — about 1½ percentage points more than today Each percentage point of national income is now equivalent to $117 billion.

• Corporate profits captured 13.8 percent of national income in 2006, which is the largest share in any year on record. At this point in the business cycle of the 1990s, corporate profits were receiving less than 12 percent of national income.

"That's why we're Democrats!"

2008-03-25T17:00:00.002-05:00

Shortly after my parent's marriage in 1952, the newlyweds went to lunch at my mother's Aunt Orpha and Uncle Elmer's farmhouse. They were good, solid, Midwestern farm folk who had been born on the prairie, lived through two world wars, a depression, dust storms and Prohibition (which they probably didn't notice, since they were both tea totalers). They lived on the type of "family farm" that has long since passed from our landscape, not just a one-family operation growing crops, but a homestead that kept fruit trees, a vegetable garden, chickens and live-stock for their own consumption. When I was young, I don't remember ever seeing Orpha in anything but a gingham dress, nor Elmer wearing anything but overalls with a watch chain draping from the breast pocket.

Naturally, upon meeting these stolid folk, my father expected them to be the sort of farm-belt conservatives that turned out reliable Republican majorities in Nebraska and the other plains states.

My father's people were different. His father ran one of the largest insurance agencies in Omaha, wore a pin-stripe suit, lived in a fashionable section of town. He and my grandmother belonged to the Happy Hollow Country Club where they golfed several times a week, dined with friends every Saturday night, and where grandpa often took business associates. Grandpa was a past-president of the Chamber of Commerce, a Shriner, and a member of the prestigious Dundee Presbyterian Church.

Naturally, Orpha and Elmer expected my father to be the sort of business-oriented Republican that is to this day characterized by the epithet "country club Republican."

It came then, as a surprise to everyone, when the conversation at lunch that day turned to politics, to find out that they were all Democrats.

My father explained that, while his father was indeed a Republican, he had first become a Democrat after reading progressive thinkers in college. His Democratic bias was further strengthened during his stint in the Marine Corps where he lived with soldiers who had grown up poor during the Depression and regarded Roosevelt as something of a savior. Then he asked Orpha why she was a Democrat.

Rather than answer him directly, Orpha got up from the table and went over to a drawer. There, she pulled out a slip of paper and put it on the table in front of my parents. It read:

December 1932 / Corn @ 20¢ a bushel

"That's why we're Democrats!"

Is Andy Thayer a Police Spy?

2008-02-20T20:32:00.002-06:00

A.J. Muste: Apostle of Peace

2008-02-11T21:16:00.000-06:00

“There is no way to peace — peace is the way” — A.J. Muste

“We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.” — A.J. Muste

Market Manipulation by DeBeers

2008-02-06T14:53:00.000-06:00

From Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? by Edward Jay Epstein

The diamond invention - the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem - is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value - and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms....

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever - forever in the sense that they should never be resold.

This is one more example, of which there are many, of why this capitalist system has got to go!

Very Succinct Indeed

2008-01-21T22:03:00.000-06:00

"Let's be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror - at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East - we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?
— Andrew Sullivan

Words of Prophecy

2008-01-17T15:27:00.001-06:00

Prediction:

"Usury will destroy our society, but meanwhile there is no escape from it. We are coming near the end of its maleficient action, not through awakening to its evils but because it is reaching the end of its resources ... The modern world is organized on the principle that money of its nature breeds money. A sum of money lent has, according to our presnent scheme, a natural right to interest. That principle is false in economics as in morals, It ruined Rome, and it is bring us to our end."
— Hilaire Belloc, Usury, 1931

News Item:

Citigroup the nation’s largest bank, reported a staggering fourth-quarter loss of $9.83 billion on Tuesday and issued a sobering forecast that the housing market and the broader economy still had not bottomed out.

.

The Ant: Hero of Socialism! Live like him!

2007-12-06T16:08:00.000-06:00

The following modern fable is currently being widely circulated by reactionaries on blogs and through chain e-mails (Google gives 4,690 hits on this parable, virtually all of them from arch-conservative blogs):

Parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper

TRADITIONAL VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, "It's Not Easy Being Green." Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome." Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake. Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer! The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2008.

I like this parable because it teaches two clear lessons:

1] The "Modern Version" shows clearly the failure of Bourgeois Liberalism. Half measures, programs targeted towards "victim groups," and government hand-outs are plainly failed policies.

2] The "Traditional Version" shows the failure of Free Enterprise Capitalism. The individualist Grasshopper, a libertarian living only for himself, is devastated by economic realities. While the socialistic Ant, living as he does in a cooperative nest where all workers contribute to the well-being of the whole, prospers and survives.

The moral is clear: Fight for Socialism!

Spengler on Psychology

2007-11-30T23:50:00.000-06:00

“Why has psychology — meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life, but scientific psychology — always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of ‘experimental’ psychology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it — the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.”

— Decline of the West I : 299

Media Management

2007-11-10T23:20:00.001-06:00

Last Friday I was listening to the radio, when I heard an almost Euclidean proof of how the news is managed. On the NPR science show, they had a researcher on, Harold Salzman, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute. His basic thesis was that science education in the US was actually pretty good. Specifically, he made three points worth noting:

• For every three bachelor’s degrees awarded in science, there was only one job available. So there was, in fact no shortage of skilled technologists in America, and we did not need to issue work visas to foreign technical workers.

• Factoring out African-American students, American secondary students scored just as well on science tests as their peers in Europe and Asia.

• The failure of African-American students to do as well as others was not due to the schools, but due to other factors, like poverty, poor home life, and lack of ambition.

So far, so good. But then, to give “balance” to the show, two political partisans were brought in:

• Craig R. Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation, argued that these figures must be wrong “… since the State Department would not be issuing those visas if those workers were not necessary!”

• Shirley M. Malcom from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who was all upset about how the schools were “failing” African-Americans.

So here we have the perfect management of news. A scientist, with no agenda, backed with significant research, is up against two interested parties, a corporate executive who profits personally from the low cost of foreign technicians being imported, and a race hustler, who will do anything to divert the blame for the academic failure of African-Americans from the ghetto culture that plainly does not value education. It was a marvelous discussion, full of nit-picking and second guessing at the data, hoary truisms and generalizations trotted out as if they needed no proving, and fear-mongering about the “state of our schools.” Not once did anyone point up the fact that the scientist was the only one not personally invested in the outcome and thus the only one with even a chance of being unbiased.

Of course, the National Bolshevik take on this is clear: we need autarky!

• Foreign workers are brought in to undercut the wages of Americans: this is anti-working class!

• It is yet another form of imperialism to skim off the best minds from developing nations for our own benefit.

• The only way that the owing classes will ever be forced to bring African-Americans into full participation in the life of this country, is if they become economically necessary. By closing out borders to foreign workers, we are one step closer to realizing this goal.

The Wanderer into the Void

2007-11-02T17:31:00.000-05:00

This is a speech made by Karl Radek at a plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in June 1923, in a translation first published in the September 1923 issue of Labour Monthly. The “Schlageter speech”, as it became known, was published by the German Communist Party and widely circulated.

In the aftermath of the French occupation of the Ruhr, right wing nationalists in Germany had made some headway among the middle classes and to an extent the working class. Leo Schlageter, who had been shot by French troops while engaging in sabotage, became a national hero for his part in the resistance to foreign occupation. In his speech, which was directed at those influenced by German nationalism, Radek sought to address the reasons that had drawn a man like Schlageter to the nationalist right, arguing that the real defenders of the interests of the German people were the Communists.

The “Schlageter speech” represents both a seminal document in National Bolshevik history, and a great missed opportunity.

Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void

I CAN NEITHER supplement nor complete the comprehensive and deeply impressive report of our venerable leader, Comrade Zetkin, on International Fascism, that hammer meant to crush the head of the proletariat, but which will fall upon the petty bourgeois class, who are wielding it in the interests of large capital. I could not even follow it clearly, because there hovered before my eyes the corpse of the German Fascist, our class enemy, who was sentenced to death and shot by the hirelings of French imperialism, that powerful organisation of another section of our class enemy. Throughout the speech of Comrade Zetkin on the contradictions within Fascism, the name of Schlageter and his tragic fate was in my head. We ought to remember him here when we are defining our attitude towards Fascism. The story of this martyr of German nationalism should not be forgotten nor passed over with a mere phrase. It has much to tell us, and much to tell the German people.

We are not sentimental romanticists who forget friendship when its object is dead, nor are we diplomats who say: by the graveside say nothing but good, or remain silent. Schlageter, a courageous soldier of the counter-revolution, deserves to be sincerely honoured by us, the soldiers of the revolution. Freksa, who shared his views, published in 1920 a novel in which he described the life of an officer who fell in the fight against Spartacus. Freska named his novel The Wanderer into the Void.

If those German Fascisti, who honestly thought to serve the German people, failed to understand the significance of Schlageter’s fate, Schlageter died in vain, and on his tombstone should read: “The Wanderer into the Void”.

Germany lay crushed. Only fools believed that the victorious capitalist Entente would treat the German people differently from the way the victorious German capitalists treated the Russian and Romanian people. Only fools or cowards, who feared to face the truth, could believe in the promises of Wilson, in the declarations that the Kaiser and not the German people would have to pay the price of defeat. In the East a people was at war. Starving, freezing, it fought against the Entente on fourteen fronts. That was Soviet Russia. One of these fronts consisted of German officers and German soldiers. Schlageter fought in Medem’s Volunteer Corps, which stormed Riga. We do not know whether the young officer understood the significance of his acts. But the then German Commissar, the Social Democrat Winnig, and General Von der Golz, the Commander of the Baltic troops, knew what they were doing. They sought to gain the friendship of the Entente by performing the work of hirelings against the Russian people. In order that the German bourgeoisie should not pay the victors the indemnities of war, they hired young German blood, which had been spared the bullets of the Great War, to fight against the Russian people. We do not know what Schlageter thought at this period. His leader, Medem, later admitted that he marched through the Baltic into the void. Did all the German nationalists understand that?

At the funeral of Schlageter in Munich, General Ludendorff spoke, the same Ludendorff who even today is offering himself to England and to France as the leader of a crusade against Russia. Schlageter was mourned by the Stinnes press. Herr Stinnes was the colleague in the Alpina Montana of Schneider-Creusot the armourer, the assassin of Schlageter. Against whom did the German people wish to fight: against the Entente capitalists or against the Russian people? With whom did they wish to ally themselves: with the Russian workers and peasants in order to throw off the yoke of Entente capital for the enslavement of the German and Russian peoples?

Schlageter is dead. He cannot supply the answer. His comrades in arms swore at his graveside to carry on his fight. They must supply the answer: against whom and on whose side?

Schlageter went from the Baltic to the Ruhr, not in the year 1923 but in the year 1920. Do you know what that meant? He took part in the attack of German capital upon the Ruhr workers; he fought in the ranks of the troops whose task it was to bring the miners of the Ruhr under the heel of the iron and coal kings. The troops of Waters, in whose ranks he fought, fired the same leaden bullets with which General Degoutte quelled the Ruhr workers. We have no reason to believe that it was from selfish motives that Schlageter helped to subdue the starving miners.

The way in which he risked his life speaks on his behalf, and proves that he was convinced he was serving the German people. But Schlageter thought he was best serving the people by helping to restore the mastery of the class which had hitherto led the German people, and had brought such terrible misfortune upon them. Schlageter regarded the working class as the mob that must be governed. And in this he shared the view of Count Reventlow, who calmly declared that no war against the Entente was possible until the internal enemy had been overcome. The internal enemy for Schlageter was the revolutionary working class.

Schlageter could see with his own eyes the results of this policy when he returned to the Ruhr in 1923 during the occupation. He could see that even if the workers were united against French imperialism, no single people could fight alone. He could see the profound mistrust of the workers towards the German government and the German bourgeoisie. He could see how greatly the cleavage in the nation hampered its defensive power. He could see more. Those who share his views complained of the passivity of the German people. How can a defeated working class be active? How can a working class be active which has been disarmed, and from whom it is demanded that they shall allow themselves to be exploited by profiteers and speculators? Or could the activity of the German working masses be replaced by the activity of the German bourgeoisie?

Schlageter read in the newspapers how the very people who pretended to be the patrons of the German nationalist movement sent securities abroad so that they might be enriched and the country impoverished. Schlageter certainly could have no hope in these parasites. He was spared reading in the press how the representative of the German bourgeoisie, Dr Lutterbuck, turned to his executioners with the request that they should permit the iron and steel kings to shoot down sons of Germany, the men who were carrying out the resistance in the Ruhr, with machine guns.

Now that the German resistance, through the rascally trick of Dr Lutterbuck, and still more through the economic policy of the possessing classes, has turned into a farce, we ask the honest, patriotic masses who are anxious to fight against the French imperialist invasion: how will you fight, on whose support will you rely? The struggle against Entente imperialism is a war, even though the guns are silent. There can be no war at the front when there is unrest in the rear. A minority can be kept under in the rear, but not a majority. The majority of the German people are the working men, who must fight against the poverty and want which the German bourgeoisie is bringing upon them. If the patriotic circles of Germany do not make up their own minds to make the cause of the majority of the nation their own, and so create a front against both the Entente and German capital, then the path of Schlageter was the path into the void, and Germany, in the face of foreign invasion, and the perpetual menace of the victors, will be transformed into a field of bloody internal conflict, and it will be easy for the enemy to defeat her and destroy her.

When, after Jena, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst asked themselves how the German people were to be raised from their defeat, they replied: only by making the peasants free from their former submission and slavery. Only the free German peasantry can lay the foundations for the emancipation of Germany. What the German peasantry meant for the fate of the German nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German working class means at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only with it can Germany be freed from the fetters of slavery – not against it.

Schlageter’s comrades talked of war at his graveside. They swore to continue the fight. It had to be conducted against an enemy that was armed to the teeth, while Germany was unarmed and beaten. If the talk of war is not to remain an empty phrase, if it is not to consist of bombing columns that blow up bridges, but not the enemy; that derail trains, but cannot check the armoured trains of Entente capital, then a number of conditions must be fulfilled.

The German people must break with those who have not only led it into defeat, but who are perpetuating the defeat and the defencelessness of the German people by regarding the majority of the German people as the enemy. This demands a break with the peoples and parties whose faces act upon other peoples like a Medusa head, mobilising them against the German people. Only when the German cause becomes the cause of the German people, only when the German cause becomes the fight for the rights of the German people, will the German people win active friends. The powerful nation cannot endure without friends, all the more so a nation which is defeated and surrounded by enemies.

If Germany wants to be in the position to fight, it must create a united front of workers, and the brain workers must unite with the hand workers and form a solid phalanx. The condition of the brain workers cries out for this union. Only old prejudices stand in the way. United into a victorious working people, Germany will be able to draw upon great resources of resisting power which will be able to remove all obstacles. If the cause of the people is made the cause of the nation, then the cause of the nation will become the cause of the people. United into a fighting nation of workers, it will gain the assistance of other peoples who are also fighting for their existence. Whoever is not prepared to fight in this way is capable of deeds of desperation but not of a serious struggle.

That is what the German Communist Party and the Communist International have to say at Schlageter’s graveside. It has nothing to conceal, for only the complete truth can penetrate into the suffering, internally disintegrated masses of Germany. The German Communist Party must declare openly to the nationalist petty bourgeois masses: whoever is working in the service of the profiteers, the speculators, and the iron and coal magnates to enslave the German people and to drive them into desperate adventures will meet the resistance of the German Communist workers, who will oppose violence by violence. Whoever, from lack of comprehension, allies himself with the hirelings of capital we shall fight with every means in our power.

But we believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation.

This truth the Communist Party will declare to the great masses of the German people, for it is not a party fighting for a crust of bread on behalf of the industrial workers, but a party of the struggling proletariat fighting for its emancipation, an emancipation that is identical with the emancipation of the whole people, of all who toil and suffer in Germany. Schlageter himself cannot now hear this declaration, but we are convinced that there are hundreds of Schlageters who will hear it and understand it.

An Absolutely Stunning Admission

2007-09-29T14:04:00.001-05:00

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraqi war is largely about oil.

— Alan Greenspan

Vance Packard: critic of consumerism.

2007-09-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

"The fact that free enterprise still remains the most successful method of stimulating economic growth does not mean it requires a reward system that creates and sustains increasingly grotesque accumulations of family wealth. The accumulations are starting to have a negative influence on efficient operation of our economy. They have the potential of being hazardous politically. and in a democratic society they are becoming inexcusable socially."

— Vance Packard, "Ultra Rich: How Much Is Too Much?" (1989)