Herzl on the “‘gentile’ question”

In Kevin Macdonald’s latest piece at The Occidental Observer, a review of Eric P. Kaufmann’s “The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,” he discusses a conspicuous double standard held by one of the most influential Jews of the last century, Israel Zangwill of ‘melting pot’ infamy: he was a proponent of ‘ethnic dissolution’ for non-Jewish peoples while simultaneously promoting the Zionist cause and generally defending the idea of Jewish group survival into the future.

Israel Zangwill, the other Jewish advocate of ethnic dissolution highlighted by Kaufmann, had a strong Jewish identity. Despite marrying a non-Jew and advocating the dissolution of all ethnic groups, Zangwill was a prominent advocate of a Jewish homeland and was active in Jewish politics throughout his life.

[…]
Although Kaufmann represents Zangwill as advocating the melting together of all racial groups, the reality is a bit more subtle. Zangwill’s views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist and an admirer of his father’s religious orthodoxy as a model for the preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism. Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their religion: “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion” (Zangwill, quoted in Israel Zangwill, by Joseph Leftowich, 1957, 161).

Kaufmann’s inability to recognise and acknowledge the glaring double standard is itself standard. In an age in which all Western leaders must declare commitment to the Jewish people via their ethnostate at the same time as they must declare willing to blend their own peoples out of existence via race-replacement migration it is not even necessary to question whether Kaufmann’s Jewishness is subconsciously influencing his work; an English or German scholar is just as likely to have avoided the problem.

Remarkably, this double standard was a recognised feature of Zionism from its earliest days and does not appear to have troubled its most influential early activist, Theodor Herzl. From his diary we learn that he considered support for the existence of a specifically Jewish state no moral obstacle to advocacy for the disintegration of all other peoples and their states. From Robert John, Behind the Balfour Declaration (IHR, 1988, p. 29):

In his diary Herzl describes submitting his draft proposals to the Rothschild Family Council, noting: “I bring to the Rothschilds and the big Jews their historical mission. I shall welcome all men of goodwill - we must be united - and crush all those of bad.”[1]

He read his manuscript “Addressed to the Rothschilds” to a friend, Meyer-Cohn, who said,

Up till now I have believed that we are not a nation - but more than a nation. I believed that we have the historic mission of being the exponents of universalism among the nations and therefore were more than a people identified with a specific land.

Herzl replied:

Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfill this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despite us. If, in our present circumstances, we wanted to bring about the unity of mankind independent of national boundaries, we would have to combat the ideal of patriotism. The latter, however, will prove stronger than we for innumerable years to come.[2]

1. Lowenthal, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.35
2. Ibid., p.63

Even Herzl, who clearly did not suffer any lack of ambition to remake the world, did not dare to dream that the ‘ideal of patriotism’ would so rapidly come to be seen as a psychological malady (and largely as a result of other influential Jews following his path of preaching one rule for them and quite another for us). How amazed he would be, then, to find that Britons of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been ruled by men who coupled ardent Zionism with a passionate rejection of their own people’s right to maintain or restore an ethnic nationalist equivalent.

No longer do our leaders hate and despise Jews (if they ever did), today they hate and despise us, or at least are compelled to act as though they do.

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Related post: http://songlight-for-dawn.blogspot.com/2009/07/they-need-us-to-be-bad.html

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I quoted from Robert John’s history of Zionism, ‘Behind the Balfour Declaration.’ At the Scribd link you can find the main body of the text, a speech given by John to an IHR conference. I own a copy of the book put out by the IHR which includes an introduction, a poem, and an afterword in addition to the text of the speech. Since the book is out of print and the main text is already available online I’ll put together a PDF which includes the supplementary material and post download info here.

Throw Nature out with a pitchfork, / And yet She will return.

Even Alexander the Great, labelled ‘the first globalist’ by one biographer, did not deny the deep-rooted attachments of ethnicity. In the confusion of loyalties of Alexander’s Greece this had tragic implications for the athlete, Dioxippos.

Diodorus Siculus 17.100-101
Circa. 30 B.C.

Alexander the Great held a huge banquet for his friends [325 B. C.]. During the drinking something occurred which is worth mention. Among the companions of the king was a Macedonian named Koragos who was very strong in body and who had distinguished himself frequently in battle. The drink made him pugnacious, and he challenged to a duel one Dioxippos of Athens, an athlete who had won several glorious victories [including one in the pankration at Olympia in 336 B.C.]. As might be expected of those in their cups, the guests egged them on and Dioxippos accepted the challenge. Alexander set the day for the battle, and when the time came for the duel thousands of men assembled for the spectacle. Because he was one of them, the Macedonians and Alexander rooted for Koragos, while the Greeks favored Dioxippos. Koragos came onto the field of honor clad in the finest armor, while the Athenian was naked with his body oiled and carrying a well-balanced club.

Both men were marvellous to see in their magnificent physical condition and their desire for the fight. The spectators anticipated a veritable battle of gods. The Macedonian looked like Ares as he inspired terror through his stature and the brilliance of his weapons; Dioxippos resembled Herakles in his strength and athletic training, and even more so because he carried a club.

As they approached each other, the Macedonian hurled his javelin from the proper distance, but Dioxippos bent his body slightly and avoided it. Then the Macedonian poised his long pike and charged, but when he came within reach, the Greek struck the pike with his club and splintered it. Now Koragos was reduced to fighting with his sword, but as he went to draw it, Dioxippos leaped upon him, grabbed his sword hand in his own left hand, and with his other hand he upset his opponent’s balance and knocked his feet from under him. As Koragos fell to the ground, Dioxippos placed his foot on the other’s neck and, holding his club in the air, looked to the crowd.

The spectators were in an uproar because of the man’s incredible skill and superiority. Alexander motioned for Koragos to be released, then broke up the gathering and left, clearly annoyed at the defeat of the Macedonian. Dioxippos released his fallen foe and left as winner of a resounding victory. His compatriots bedecked him with ribbons for the victory which he had won on behalf of all the Greeks. But Fortune did not permit him to boast of his victory for very long.

The king became increasingly antagonistic toward Dioxippos, and Alexander’s friends and indeed all the Macedonians about the court, envious of Dioxippos’s arête, persuaded one of the servants to hide a gold drinking cup under the pillow of his dining couch. During the next symposion they pretended to find the cup and accused him of theft. This placed Dioxippos in a shameful and disgraceful position. He understood that the Macedonians were in a conspiracy against him, and he got up and left the symposion. When he had returned to his own quarters, he wrote a note to Alexander about the trick which had been played on him, gave this to his servants for delivery to the king, and then committed suicide. He may have been ill-advised to accept the duel, but he was even more foolish to have done away with himself, for it gave his critics the chance to say that it was a real hardship to have great strength of body, but little of mind.

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Michael Bell at TOQ Online mentions the fight between Dioxippos and Koragos in his excellent post on the similarities between modern MMA and ancient Greek combat sports.

Greeks vs. Gurkhas

Our loyalties are easily manipulated by emotional narratives, but emotional narratives that would lead us astray are no rival to equally powerful calls imploring our allegiance to primary affiliations. Someone just has to make them.

Polybius 27.9.3-13
Circa 130 B.C.

In the gymnikoi agones when a humble and very inferior boxer is matched against a famous and unbeatable opponent, immediately the crowd splits off its support for the inferior man and they call out encouragement and bob and weave and punch together with him. And if he happens to land a punch on the other guy and marks his face, they jump up and down in their excitement. Sometimes they attack the other fellow with insults, not because they hate or scorn him, but becoming curiously sympathetic toward and naturally supportive of the underdog. But if someone gets their attention at the right time, they quickly change their position and resume their impartiality. They say that Kleitomachos did this, for he appeared to be unstoppable in the games, and his fame was worldwide. But King Ptolemy had ambitions of demolishing his fame, and he prepared and sent off with great pride the boxer Aristonikos, who seemed naturally adapted for this sport.

When Aristonikos arrived in Greece and was set up at the Olympic games against Kleitomachos [216 B.C.], the crowd came to be on Aristonikos’s side and cheered him, happy that someone had dared, even for a little, to stand up against Kleitomachos. When, as the bout proceeded, he appeared to be the equal of, and now and then wounded, Kleitomachos, there was applause and the crowd shared in his attacks and shouted out encouragement to Aristonikos. At that point they say that Kleitomachos, who was standing off and catching his breath, turned to the crowd to learn why they wanted to cheer Aristonikos and take his side as much as they could. Did they think that he was not following the rules of the games? Or did they not understand that he, Kleitomachos, was fighting right now for the fame of Greece, but that Aristonikos was fighting for the fame of King Ptolemy? Did they want to see an Egyptian win the crown at Olympia from the Greeks? Or did they prefer that a Theban and Boeotian be proclaimed as victor in boxing in the men’s category? When Kleitomachos had spoken in this way, they say that there was such a change in the crowd’s feelings that it rather than Kleitomachos finally beat Aristonikos.

The lessons of Lumley

Joanna Lumley’s ‘gift’ to the nation will be one that keeps on giving, and not just in terms of family unification migration and remittances. The multicult wastes nothing as it picks over the history books and the passing scene for examples - good and bad - to imprint onto young minds. I suspect many educators are already drawing up lesson plans for September that will include some reference to Lumley and the Gurkhas’ ‘victory.’ It is automatic, educators are selected in part, by systems designed by the likes of Chris Mullard, for their willingness and ability to promote the multicult, and once employed they operate in a system which rewards this ability and punishes its absence.

In ‘The Camp of the Saints’ Jean Raspail described how educators responded to a fictional equivalent to the Gurkha story, albeit on a larger scale:

At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really! And the dear little angel — all simple, childish soul and tender heart — will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers. That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes, because youngsters like this are never really bad, just different, that’s all, just untapped potential. Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions. And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say? … The mother will snivel in her handkerchief, eye moist with maternal affection rewarded...

Now, multiply that by a million mindless themes, applauded by a million milksop fathers, and you get some idea of the climate of total decay...

At the very same instant, some seven thousand two hundred and twelve lycée professors decided to begin their next day’s classes with a discussion of racism. It didn’t make the slightest difference what they taught: math, English, chemistry, geography, even Latin. After all, whatever his field, isn’t the professor’s role to develop his students’ minds and force them to think? And so, they would have them speak their piece. The subject was there, ideal, made to order, too good to pass up: the fleet and its mission to cleanse and redeem the capitalist West! A fine topic, politically charged, with something for everyone, a limitless script in that ongoing cinema of the masses, spontaneous and unrehearsed, whose feeble and trite ideas, hashed over again and again, swallowed up any sense of reality, any notion of personal obligation.

Nurses warned not to think...

Designed only to have a chilling effect on dissenting views:

The Royal College of Nursing is to issue guidance to its members on dealing with ‘contentious political parties’, such as the BNP.

The college will not bar members from joining extremist political parties, nor will it criticise any political party, but the RCN’s director of communications Amanda Callaghan said guidance would remind members of the College’s commitment to equality and diversity.

Ms Callaghan said the RCN’s charitable status prevented it from either supporting or ‘not supporting’ political parties, and as a trade union it could not align itself politically. ‘But if we don’t engage with the debate, there could be a perception that we don’t care, or even that there is tacit agreement’, she said.

Ms Callaghan said the increased number of political representatives from parties like the BNP on local authorities, and even the fact that BNP chairman Nick Griffin now sits on the public health committee of the European Parliament, meant nurses were more likely to encounter extremist political parties in their day-to-day work.

Debate? The BNP would welcome one. The RCN’s actions here are designed to forestall the need ever to debate the BNP’s ideas.

They need us to be bad...

Anti-nationalists need to believe we’re bad to justify their hatred of us.

In response to ‘Jew with a View’ - a redundancy there? - and her urging that the ‘mainstream,’ i.e. anti-British, parties should ‘act now on immigration’ to ensure the BNP (‘vile wannabe Hitlers’) don’t get into power and act on their ‘desperate’ desire to ‘cleanse Britain’ of ‘Jews and Asians and Muslims and Black people,’ I wrote:

The main reason people vote for the BNP is the belief that the native Britons have the right to control our own country. The ‘mainstream’ parties you would have us vote for all agree on the rights of non-European peoples to enjoy this advantage, and you will be aware that they are most vocal about this right when discussing your people and its state, the much promoted ‘right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state’. And the BNP agrees with ’em.

The difference between the BNP and the others is over the right of Euros to control our homelands, this means the BNP is exceptional because it is not anti-White, not because of its views about non-Whites.

Oh, and far from being anti-Semitic as you imply, the BNP agrees that Jews are entitled to their own country and so may reasonably pursue immigration policies which discriminate against all other peoples including the English, Welsh and Scots, but insists that the English, Welsh and Scots in our countries should not discriminate against Jews for the same purposes. This is a minor double standard telling in favour of Jews, thus making the BNP just a tad anti-British in relation to one particular people.


The comment stood for a short while at her blog before ‘Tabatha’ found my plea that she allow us something close to equality - not even equality! - too much ‘hate’ to handle and deleted it.

Confused, Darling?

Alistair Darling is feigning puzzlement at the reluctance of banks to lend to small business. He’d better hope that the sheep don’t watch Money Masters, they might realise they’re being fleeced:

[The Goldsmiths] also discovered that extra profits could be made by “rowing” the economy between easy money and tight money. When they made money easier to borrow, then the amount of money in circulation expanded. Money was plentiful. People took out more loans to expand their businesses. But then the goldsmiths would tighten the money supply. They would make loans more difficult to get.

What would happen? Just what happens today. A certain percentage of people could not repay their previous loans, and could not take out new loans to repay the old ones. Therefore they went bankrupt, and had to sell their assets to the goldsmiths or at auction for pennies on the dollar.

The same thing is still going on today, and today we call this rowing of the economy, up and down, the “Business Cycle,” or more recently in the stock markets, “corrections”.

You can’t blame Darling, though:

[T]he American people elected Republican James Garfield President. Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated. As a Congressman, he had been chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and was a member of the Banking and Currency Committee. After his inauguration, he slammed the Money Changers publically in 1881:

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

Garfield understood. Within a few weeks of making this statement, on July 2 of 1881, President Garfield was assassinated.

Watch the video here: Part One, Part Two

The ‘Goddess’ Lumley

The Joanna Lumley / Gurkha story offers a demonstration of how easily the public can be manipulated against its settled views and its best interests by mindless feel-good arguments. Nobody who’s thought about it for a second really believes that the Gurkhas ‘risked their lives for Britain,’ they were mercenary soldiers fighting for payment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all along an exercise in testing the media’s power to direct public opinion concerning a rapidly emerging political issue. Even the BNP felt it necessary to recognise the Gurkhas’ absurd claim, not a good sign for the future. Conclusion: there is no such thing as ‘Too much love, drooling like syrup from too many famous mouths!’ (The Camp of the Saints)

British Pakistan...

the coming thing, apparently....

BRITISH PAKISTAN SIDE SET TO DEBUT

Rugby League history will be made on Sunday (19th July) at the Grattan Stadium when the first British Pakistan XIII make their competitive bow against the Great Britain Under 18s Community Lions, in a curtain raiser to the Engage Super League clash between Bradford and Wigan.

The British Pakistan side has come about thanks to a unique collaborative venture between the Connecting Communities Project, Rugby League European Federation, Bradford City Council, Bradford College, Bradford University and Bradford Bulls.

The side will carry the logos of the RLEF, who have funded their distinctive green, red, white and blue kit because of the cultural ties between Pakistan and Europe and ‘Connecting Communities’ which is part of the Leeds Rugby Foundation.

The British Pakistan side is supported by BARA, the British Asian Rugby Association, whose Director Ikram Butt is also the Manager for the groundbreaking ‘Connecting Communities’ Project.

‘Connecting communities’ through ethnic separatism -- funny how that’s always the way except when we want to enjoy our own company.

Ikram Butt, the first Muslim rugby international, may be tempted to don his boots as part of the initial 22-man British Pakistan squad.

“The team comprises of players born in the UK and Ireland and aims to celebrate our geographical and cultural heritage, which are equally important to us” he commented.

Geographic heritage? Geographic conquest more like - that’s what Ikram and his pals are celebrating and who can blame ’em?

“We are also extremely grateful to Leeds Rhinos who have kindly allowed us to train at their first class facilities in Kirkstall for the past three weeks.”

“Our next venture will be to play against West Yorkshire Police in mid August.”

Do you imagine the Rhinos or the Police would be quite so friendly to a separatist grouping that happened to be White?

Media rejoice as White people lose out to ‘vibrant’ import…

In a post about British Telecom’s anti-White recruitment policies I commented on the familiar ritual of ‘progress’ being measured by the extent to which White people have been removed from power and generally displaced by non-Whites. The rather surprising victory of Rachel Christie in the Miss England beauty contest offered an excuse for media rejoicing about just such White displacement: Christie is Black.

I won Miss England to prove being black is NEVER an excuse for failure
First Black Miss England crowned
Victory for Linford Christie's niece as she becomes first black Miss England
100m star Christie's niece crowned first black Miss England
Linford Christie's niece is first black Miss England

ITN news reported the story like all others with the new Miss England’s race being the primary issue and the factor which made this an especially positive news story. Its reporter claimed that Christie’s non-Whiteness made her a ‘thoroughly modern beauty queen’ - non-Whiteness as contemporary value-in-itself, rarely is it stated so openly. The not-so subtle implication being that the White phenotype is passé and that Whites who would have the beautiful kids of the future should breed out.

[On a side note, the other prominent element in the coverage was Christie’s famous uncle, retired sprinter Linford Christie. Even though the retired sprinter is a disgraced drug cheat the media continue to speak of him respectfully and I take this to be related to race also. So few Blacks prove worthy of role-model status, and their ‘community’ is apparently so in need of the few positive role-models that exist that Christie manages to avoid the negative media treatment a White drugs cheat would deservedly receive.]

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Update: Hints of political motives behind Miss Christie’s otherwise baffling victory:

Organisers defend Miss England vote
(UKPA)

The organisers of the Miss England contest have defended the competition after it emerged that the winner, the niece of Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Linford Christie, won with only nine votes from the public.

Angie Beasley, director of Miss England, said the public played only a part in the contest, choosing one of the 15 top finalists with this vote amounting effectively to a seventh judge in the final selection.

She said Rachel Christie, 20, a heptathlete from London, was awarded first place by four of the six judges on the night - including the model Caprice - who assessed candidates on factors such as posture and confidence.

She said: "When it gets to the top 15, they are judged on their confidence and their posture on stage and they are judged on their beauty and their personality. When it gets to the top 15 you cannot have the public vote judging that, it has to be a professional panel."

The vote for Ms Christie comes after Zoiey Smale, Miss Oxfordshire, won the public vote with 2,013 votes. Ms Christie finished 49th out of the 54 original finalists.

Under the rules, eight of the final 15 are winners of categories such as Miss Public Vote - won by Ms Smale - with seven selected by contest judges.

Ms Christie, who hopes to compete in the 2012 Olympics, won the Helen E Cosmetic award to reach the final.

One contestant, quoted anonymously in The Sun newspaper, questioned the "odd" judges' decision. She said: "It seems very odd that the overall winner, chosen by the judges, won so few public votes. The competition is far more than just a beauty contest, but it looks like the judges were totally out of touch with the public."

White Slavery in Early America

In They were White and they were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, revisionist author Michael A. Hoffman II put together a remarkable record of White slavery in America from historical documents. What follows is only a small part of the evidence he presents.

White Slavery in Early America

David Brion Davis writing in the New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1990, p. 37 states:

“As late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing shipments of white slaves, some of them Christians, flowed from the booming slave markets on the northern Black Sea coast into Italy, Spain, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands... From Barbados to Virginia, colonists.., showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from that of chattel slaves... The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.”

L. Ruchames in “The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America,” states that “the slave trade worked in both directions, with white merchandise as well as black.” (Journal of Negro History, no. 52, pp. 251-273).

In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the New World. In the debate the Whites were referred to not as “indentured servants” but as “slaves” whose “enslavement” threatened the liberties of all Englishmen. (Thomas Burton, Parliamentary Diary: 1656-59, vol. 4, pp. 253-274).

Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America quotes an early document describing White children in colonial servitude as “crying and mourning for redemption from their slavery.”

Dr. Hilary McD. Beckles of the University of Hull, England, writes regarding White slave labor, “...indenture contracts were alienable... the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity... as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer.” Beckles refers to “indentured servitude” as “White proto-slavery” (The Americas, vol. 41, no. 2, p. 21).

In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West Indies of 1701, we read of a protest over the “encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and selling them for slaves, which hath been a practice very frequent and known by the name of kidnapping.” (Emphasis added). In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White.

(“Some Observations on the Island of Barbados,” Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, p. 528). It is worth noting that while White slaves were worked to death in Barbados, there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help propagate native foodstuffs who were well-treated and received as free persons by the wealthy planters.

Of the fact that the wealth of Barbados was founded on the backs of White slave labor there can be no doubt. White slave laborers from Britain and Ireland were the mainstay of the sugar colony. Until the mid-1640s there were few Blacks in Barbados. George Downing wrote to John Winthrop, the colonial governor of Massachusetts in 1645, that planters who wanted to make a fortune in the British West Indies must procure White slave labor “out of England” if they wanted to succeed. (Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, pp. 125-126).

“...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly like slaves...” (Morley Ayearst, The British West Indies, p. 19).

“The many gradations of unfreedom among Whites made it difficult to draw fast lines between any idealized free White worker and a pitied or scorned servile Black worker... in labor-short seventeenth and eighteenth-century America the work of slaves and that of White servants were virtually interchangeable in most areas.” (David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, p. 25).

In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find a 1638 description of a White man, one Gyles Player, as having been “delivered up for a slave.”

The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White slaves in America in the 1770s wrote, “Generally speaking, they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage” (Letters from America, London, 1792). Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters in their White slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a “Multitude of Cattle.”

The Quock Walker case in Massachusetts in 1783 which ruled that slavery was contrary to the state Constitution, was applied equally to Blacks and Whites in Massachusetts.

Patrick F. Moran in his Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland, refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the “slave-trade” (pp. 343-346).

The disciplinary and revenue laws of early Virginia (circa 1631-1645) did not discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in bondage. (William Hening [editor], Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. I, pp. 174, 198, 200, 243, 306. For records of wills in which “Lands, goods & chattels, cattle, moneys, ne-groes, English servants, horses, sheep and household stuff” were all sold together see the Lancaster County Records in Virginia Colonial Abstracts, Beverly Fleet, editor).

Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy (May 6, 1893): “Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware that between the years 1649-1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the plantations, as the colonies were then called, in politi-cal prisoners... where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves.”

Sir George Sandys’ 1618 plan for Virginia referred to bound Whites assigned to the treasurer’s of-fice to “belong to said office for ever.” The service of Whites bound to Berkeley’s Hundred was deemed “perpetual.” (Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. I, pp. 316, 318).

Certainly the enslaved Whites themselves recognized their condition with painful clarity. As one White man, named Abram, who was accused of trying to agitate a rebellion stated to his fellows, “Wherefore should wee stay here and be slaves?”

In a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London, Whites in bondage did not call themselves “indentured servants.” In their writing they referred to themselves as “England’s slaves” and England’s “merchandise.” (Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery, 1659).

Eyewitnesses like Pere Labat who visited the West Indian slave plantations of the 17th century which were built and manned by White slaves labeled them “White slaves” and nothing less (Memoirs of Pere Labat, 1693-1705, p. 125). Even Blacks referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as “white slaves.” (Colonial Office, Public Records Office, London, 1667, no. 170)

Sot-Weed Factor, or, a Voyage to Maryland, a pamphlet circulated in 1708, articulates the plight of tens of thousands of pathetic young White girls kidnapped from England and enslaved in colonial America, lamenting that:

In better Times e’er to this Land
I was unhappily Trepan’d;
Not then a slave...
But things are changed... Kidnap’d and Fool’d...

The height of academic and media fraud is revealed in the monopolistic trademark status the official controllers of education and mass communications have successfully established between the definition of the word “slave” and the negro, while labeling descriptions of the historic experience of Whites in slavery a fallacy. Yet the very word “slave,” which the establishment’s consensus school of history pretends cannot legitimately be applied to Whites, is derived from the word Slav. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word slave is another name for the White people of eastern Europe, the Slavs. (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,858).

In other words, slave has always been a term for and a definition of a servile condition of White people. Yet we are told by the professorcrats that it is not correct to refer to Whites as slaves but only as servants, even though the very root of the word is derived from the historical fact of White slavery.

Jewish ‘Radanite’ slave-traders of the Arab Empire

Jews in Poland: A Documentary History: The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1998)

By A.D. 500 the Babylonian Talmud was written determining the character of Judaism as a national religion. It became a code of religious and civil law observed by the vast majority of Jewish communities in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud emphasized that Jews were a chosen people and therefore superior to others. It helped to create Jewish charisma and served as the basic text of Judaism.

[...]

The Babylonian Talmud was the basis for the ethical and cultural development of the masses of Orthodox Jews in central and eastern Europe until the German genocide of the Jews in World War II. It has formed the mentality and specific way of thinking of Orthodox Jews. It inspired the development of modern Jewish nationalism. The Babylonian Talmud gave to Judaism the character of an exclusive national religion of the Jews in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

[p.256]

After completion of the Babylonian Talmud in Mesopotamia the next most important cultural center of Jewish Diaspora was established within the Arab Empire, in Arab Spain, the most civilized country in Europe in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries. Arab Spain was the scene of flourishing Jewish culture between the 8th and 15th centuries.

[...]

The situation of Jews within the Arab Empire was normalized in A.D. 637 by the decree of Omar I. Jews in Islam were recognized as “tolerated infidels.” Most medieval Jews resided in Spain. Jewish medieval merchants were known as “Radanites.” They included western European Jews from France and Germany, as well as those from Arab Spain.

The term “Radanites” was derived from the name of the Arab-Christian border along the river Rhone (in Latin Rodanus) because of an intense slave trade which was conducted across it. The slaves were castrated in Verdun, Venice, and Lyon and sold by Jewish Radanite slave-traders to the Arabs of Spain. This Jewish slave trade also included girls and small boys who were properly indoctrinated in order to be used later by Arab rulers as bodyguards, slave soldiers and bureaucrats.

An alternate origin of the name “Radanite” was a Persian word for those who “knew the way.” This explanation was related to the leading role of Jewish merchants in trade after the fall of the Roman Empire. From the 7th century to mid-10th century Radanites controlled the trade which encompassed Europe, North Africa, and southern Asia including China. It was a period when Hebrew was the only language of world trade.

[p.257]

Arab Spain was the main market for slaves (eunuchs, girls, and young boys). Some slaves were sold as far away as China, which also bought furs, beaver skins, silk, and weapons. Exports from China to Europe included cinnamon, spices, musk, and camphor. The capital of Khazaria, Itil, was an important Jewish trading center. Jewish merchants played an important role in international trade after the fall of the Roman Empire. For two centuries they made Hebrew the only language of world commerce. Slavery, which was the foundation of the Roman economy, was important in the Arab Empire in which the Jews became the main merchants, trading with the infidels and bringing European slaves to Islam.

[p.259]

Jews in service of Boleslaus the Great minted his coins and inscribed on them the name of the Polish sovereign with Hebrew letters. Besides such highly valued craftsmen there were active in Poland Jewish slave-traders. Ever since the time when the economy of Rome was based on slavery the slave trade has continued. In the 11th century the main slave market was in Arab Spain, then the most civilized country in Europe. The Catholic Church fought against slavery and this fight is documented in the treatise “Infelix Aurum” by the first patron saint of Poland, and since A.D. 997 the first bishop of Gdansk, Adalbert or Wojciech (voy-chekh). In the struggle against the slave trade the family of St. Adalbert lost the Czech throne in Prague to their opponents supported by Jewish slave traders. One of 18 sculptures on the 1170 bronze door made for the cathedral of Gniezno depicted the scene of redeeming manacled Christian slaves by a Polish bishop from Jewish merchants in the presence of the son of King Boleslaus the Great, the second formally crowned King of Poland, Mieszko II (990-1034).

The oldest Jewish community in Poland existed in Przemysl. It was apparently composed of Jews from the Khazar kingdom which was conquered in A.D. 965 by the Kievian Rus. The Turkmen Khazar state was located between the Black and Caspian Seas. The first Jewish colonies in southern Poland were apparently organized to exchange forest products, horses, hides, furs, swords, and slaves of both sexes from the west for luxury goods from the east. The Jews generally used Arab money mostly from Spain and their main operation was in the Czech capital of Prague where Boleslaus the Great ruled in 1003-1004, when Bohemia was a part of his empire.

[p.266]

White slaves in America

From the introductory chapter to Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York University Press, New York, 2008):

In the summer of 2003, archaeologists excavated a seventeenth century site outside Annapolis, Maryland, and discovered the skeleton of a teenage boy. Examination showed the boy to have died sometime in the 1660s. He was about sixteen years old and had tuberculosis. His skull showed evidence of a fearful mouth infection, and herniated discs and other injuries to his back were synonymous with years of hard toil.

The youth was neither African nor Native American. He was northern European, probably English. His remains were found in what had been the cellar of a seventeenth-century house, in a hole under a pile of household waste. It was as if the boy was of so little account that after he died he was thrown out with the rubbish.

Forensic anthropologists believe the youth was probably an indentured servant – the deceptively mild label commonly used to describe hundreds of thousands of men, women and children shipped from Britain to America and the Caribbean in the 150 years before the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Most of these servants paid their passage to the Americas by selling the rights to their labour for a number of years. Others were forcibly exiled and sold in the colonies as servants for up to fourteen years. Many were effectively enslaved.

While the Spanish slaughtered in America for gold, the English in America had to plant for their wealth. Failing to find the expected mineral riches along the eastern seaboard, they turned to farming, hoping to make gold from tobacco. They needed a compliant, subservient, preferably free labour force and since the indigenous peoples of America were difficult to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported Britons deemed to be ‘surplus’ people – the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the dissident – and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from three years to life.

This book tells the story of these victims of empire. They were all supposed to gain their freedom eventually. For many, it didn’t work out that way. In the early decades, half of them died in bondage. This book tracks the evolution of the system in which tens of thousands of whites were held as chattels, marketed like cattle, punished brutally and in some cases literally worked to death. For decades, this underclass was treated just as savagely as black slaves and, indeed, toiled, suffered and rebelled alongside them. Eventually, a racial wedge was thrust between white and black,
leaving blacks officially enslaved and whites apparently upgraded but in reality just as enslaved as they were before. According to contemporaries, some whites were treated with less humanity than the blacks working alongside them.

Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums and, ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. England’s richest man was behind this mass expulsion. It was presented as an act of charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who imported four ‘Irish boys’ into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not brought ‘some cradles to have rocked them in’ as they were ‘so little’.

A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those, such as vagrants and petty criminals, whom England’s rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued for England’s gaols to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000 convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados and England’s other American possessions before 1776. All manner of others considered undesirable by the British Crown were also dispatched across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. They ranged from beggars to prostitutes, Quakers to Cavaliers.

A third group were the Irish. For centuries, Ireland had been something of a special case in English colonial history. From the Anglo-Normans onwards, the Irish were dehumanised, described as savages, so making their murder and displacement appear all the more justified. The colonisation of Ireland provided experience and drive for experiments further afield, not to mention large numbers of workers, coerced, transported or persuaded. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies. And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation continued as a fact of life in Ireland.

The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped. Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside by gangs of kidnappers or ‘spirits’ working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based at every sizeable port in the British Isles, spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto ships bound for America. London’s most active kidnap gang discussed their targets at a daily meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral. They were reportedly paid £2 by planters’ agents for every athletic-looking young man they brought aboard. According to a contemporary who campaigned against the black slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an average of around 10,000 whites a year – doubtless an exaggeration but one that indicates a problem serious enough to create its own grip on the popular mind.

Along with the vast numbers ejected from Britain and forced to slave in the colonies were the still greater multitudes who went of their own free will: those who became indentured servants in the Americas in return for free passage and perhaps the promise of a plot of land. Between 1620 and 1775, these volunteer servants, some 300,000, accounted for two out of three migrants from the British Isles.4 Typically, these ‘free-willers’, as they came to be called, were the poor and the hopeful who agreed to sacrifice their personal liberty for a period of years in the eventual hope of a better life. On arrival, they found that they had the status of chattels, objects of personal property, with few effective rights. But there was no going back. They were stuck like the tar on the keels of the ships that brought them. Some, of course, were bought by humane, even generous, masters and survived their years of bondage quite happily to emerge from servitude to build a prosperous future. But some of the most abused servants were from among the freewillers.

It invites uproar to describe as slaves any of these hapless whites who were abused, beaten and sometimes killed by their masters or their masters’ overseers. To do so is thought to detract from the enormity of black suffering after racial slavery developed. However, black slavery emerged out of white servitude and was based upon it. As the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr has observed:

When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.

It has been argued that white servants could not have been truly enslaved because there was generally a time limit to their enforced labour, whereas black slavery was for life. However, slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of its subject. To be the chattel of another, to be required by law to give absolute obedience in everything and to be subject to whippings, brandings and chaining for any show of defiance, to be these things, as were many whites, was to be enslaved. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 1700s, described indentured servants as ‘more properly called slaves’. Taking his cue, we should call a slave a slave.

The Oxford Dictionary defines as slaves persons who are the legal property of another or others and bound to absolute obedience: in short, ‘human chattels’. By this definition white servants were the first slaves in America and it is upon their labour, and later that of African-American slaves, that the nation was initially built. Today, tens of millions of white Americans are descended from such chattels. It is a shame that few in America claim these largely forgotten men and women of the early frontier as their own.

White slavery as one form of jihad

From Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa:

The Tripolitan ambassador in London had explained to Thomas Jefferson years earlier that the Barbary states’ policy toward the Christian world “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” This duty to war on the infidels was called jihad. The Barbary corsairs’ jihad was not based on xenophobia, nihilism, or religious fundamentalism, although the deys varied in their religious fervor and asceticism. Rather, it was the Barbary way of life, a state of perpetual, organized, state-regulated maritime violence and kidnapping, sanctioned by time and the Islamic sense of superiority over Christians. Although their jihad did not have an explicit political goal, as restoring the caliphate (the furthest geographical advance of Islam into southern Europe) is to twenty-first century militant Islam, slave-taking was jihad, and the tactics employed by the corsairs were a form of terrorism, a method of seaborne violence meant to intimidate the peoples of Europe. [pp.17-18]

BT and AA

June 2009

Working with recruitment agencies to make requirements clear has been the key to creating a racially diverse workforce at BT, according to the telecoms firm.

This week BT came top of the Race for Opportunity index, which uses survey data to benchmark the most race-friendly employers in the country. The research looked at the policies and practices used by organisations in attraction and recruitment, talent progression, measurement of diversity, and engaging with customers, suppliers and the wider community.

Becky Mason, people and policy manager, BT Group, highlighted work with suppliers as a key factor in the firm’s success. ‘The work we have been doing with recruitment agencies - our suppliers of people - is crucial. We demonstrate our policies to them and ask them to tell us what their policy is. It’s quite clear, stating the standards that we expect, that we expect to be sent a diverse mix of candidates and for agencies to set in place statistical monitoring of their processes statistics to ensure that is the case.’

BT reviews its preferred suppliers every 2-3 years and HR works with procurement colleagues to ensure that diversity is a factor in these decisions, added Mason.

BT currently has 10.8 per cent BME staff, which is in excess of the proportion in the population overall of around 8 per cent. Mason also pointed out that, with three people from a BME background on BT’s board, there was no doubt that minorities were able to progress in the organisation.

‘If initiatives such as BT’s encouraging of its suppliers to sign-up to minimum standards on race diversity were to become common practice, I am confident that the UK could make real progress on tackling the gross under-representation of ethnic minorities,’ said Sandra Kerr, national campaign director for Race for Opportunity.

July 2009

BT is asking its staff to take a 75% pay cut in return for long-term holidays to help the company ride-out the recession. British Telecom is offering workers the chance to take a year off if they accept a fraction of their salary as an upfront payment. It is part of a raft of measures being introduced by BT to cut costs until the economy improves without having to resort to further redundancies.

The former state telecom company, which employs more the 100,000 people, posted £1.3billion losses for the first quarter of this year. BT cut 15,000 jobs this year, mostly in the UK, and claims these ‘extremely progressive’ measures are necessary to save further losses. A spokesman said: “BT is known for it’s progressive human resources policies with flexible working.”

****

The familiar ritual, emphasised in the first link, of measuring progress by the extent to which White people have been dislodged from power and representation by other races really ought to be met with fury from White people.

Of course it would be simplistic to claim a direct cause and effect relationship between BT’s anti-White discrimination and its poor results, but only as simplistic as an assumption that anti-White discrimination would lead to good results. The difference is, anyone so stupid as to make the first claim would not be allowed to run employment policy for a major PLC. BT’s staff are entitled to ask what other idiotic ideas the management have wasted time and money on, and to insist the company discontinue this one.

Buchanan on the navy whose ‘number one priority is diversity’

Pat Buchanan comments on the claim that the US Naval Academy sets lower admission standards for non-White candidates than for White ones. It is not surprising, of course - as Buchanan points out that kind of anti-White discrimination is widespread - but he draws attention to the critical difference between gormless supermarket managers and senior military officers who ‘struggle to master basic concepts’:

these students will be operating the most sophisticated and complex weapons systems ever built -- aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers, nuclear submarines.

This sums up the problem of developed liberalism: even in the midst of war the principle of ‘equality’ must over-ride everything even to the peril of national security (and of global security if we are to believe the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’). Ultimately it must prove suicidal.

More Barbary Terror

From Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa:

... historically, the major point of contact between the Barbary regencies and Europe was slavery: corsair ships sailing out of the Maghreb seized European merchant ships and sold their crews and passengers into captivity.

For centuries, the Barbary states had run a lucrative racket of enslaving Christians. Algiers, which Mordecai Noah, later the American consul to Tunis, called “the sink of iniquity and curse of humanity,” was the “great depot” of Christian slaves. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Algiers alone was said to have held thirty thousand captives—in the 1620s, more British subjects lived as slaves in Islamic North Africa than as freemen in the colonies of North America. At the height of the corsairs’ activity, their audacity shocked Europe. In 1631, corsairs descended on the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, and seized the entire population, carrying them back to slavery in Algiers. Algerine corsairs raided villages as far away as Cornwall and Devon in England for men, women, and children. Of course, the coastal areas of Tuscany, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Greek isles were closer to the North African ports from which the corsairs sailed, and easier and more constant targets, since they did not have a coast guard or military force sufficient to stop or deter hit-and-run raids.

By 1800, the racket was simple and time-tested. Ships of all the mercantile nations wanted to trade throughout the Mediterranean. Barbary mariners have loosely come down through history as “pirates,” but in fact the corsairs were state-owned or state-syndicated, and their practices were not outlawed under the slowly evolving notions of the law of nations. Indeed, under Islamic law, the seizures of ships from Christian countries were an article of faith, part of the jihad against nonbelievers. Armed Barbary ships darted out from a dozen ports to seize European ships and their cargoes, which, upon their return to port, Barbary courts condemned as lawful prizes, with the result that the European seamen and passengers carried back to Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli, were enslaved.

White slavery on the Barbary coast was essentially a system of regulated commercial kidnapping, the Christians seized from Europe or America in the first instance with the notion of being trading back for cash. In fact, the entire Barbary enterprise was regulated by foreign nations. For generation upon generation, European kingdoms entered into treaties with each of the Barbary regencies, paying an annual bribe called “tribute” as protection money against the seizure of any of their subjects for the duration of the treaty. From time to time, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, and Britain sent naval squadrons to deter or punish the Barbary corsairs—or at least to try to force upon the Barbary rulers a new treaty reducing the amount of tribute exacted. But for the most part, the European nations were willing to pay cash, or tribute in the form of naval stores, gunpowder, or ships, for the privilege of having their ships and mariners remain unmolested. That paying tribute was a protection racket was widely understood, but paying the Barbary rulers a “license” for trade was less expensive than constantly convoying ships or attacking the Barbary powers in their heavily fortified ports. Besides, wealthier kingdoms recognized that while they could afford to pay off the Barbary powers, other, poorer, European nations could not. With a wink and a nod, the payments by the wealthy kingdoms of northern Europe tacitly encouraged Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis to seize the ships of the poorer maritime nations of southern Europe, thereby disproportionately raising their costs of doing business. Based on that logic, in the 1780s, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the Barbary “Corsaires” might “be privately encouraged by the English to fall upon [American vessels], to prevent our Interference in the Carrying Trade; for I have in London heard it as a Maxim among the Merchants, that, if there were no Algiers, it would be worth England’s while to build one.” The poorer and smaller mercantile states that could not afford regular tribute suffered large losses of seafaring men—the bagnio contained mostly Portuguese, Neapolitans, Sardinians, Sicilians, and Greeks—which helped preserve the mercantile dominance of Britain, Sweden, and Denmark.

After British Admiral Lord Nelson’s triumph at the battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, the Royal Navy was able to establish an effective blockade of French-controlled Mediterranean ports, which ranged from Spain through the Adriatic. The British naval ascendancy in the Mediterranean meant that the Barbary corsairs had fewer targets, and the Barbary regencies were forced to promote legitimate trade and to downplay slave taking. While the Barbary regencies were increasingly integrated into Europe by virtue of shipping goods during the Napoleonic Wars, it would be a mistake to think that the taking of Christian slaves was on the wane—particularly by Algiers. Taking and ransoming European slaves remained critical to the economies of Islamic North Africa, a foundation of their society and culture, and literally a life-and-death issue for the ruling dey, whose support among the janissaries required a constant refreshing of the number of slaves held captive. [pp.13-15]

G20 follow-up post

In a previous post I quoted CEEFAX and the BBC’s online news service:

‘police must modify their behaviour in an age where their actions were easily filmed by the public.’

I doubted the reporting thinking perhaps some journalist was being careless, but finally having found the time to check the HAC report myself I see the MPs are just as venal as claimed.

House of Commons, Home Affairs Committee, Policing of the G20 Protests
Page 8:

18. This was borne out in the footage of force used against, among others Nicola Fisher and tragically, Ian Tomlinson—this footage was almost instantly uploaded onto the internet and transmitted around the world. The police’s actions in each case may or may not be justifiable but they were certainly shocking. Actions which may appear justifiable in the cold light of day can be extremely troubling when relayed instantaneously around the globe. While these images provide only one, possibly misleading viewpoint, they undeniably have power to shake the public’s confidence in the police and negatively affect their perception of the performance of the police at the G20.

19. The police must be aware that, as a matter of course, their actions will be filmed whether or not journalists are present. They must amend their attitude and tactics accordingly. The police should be aware that in the modern world actions which may be justifiable under the rules may nonetheless be completely unacceptable.

[bolded emphasis in original]

Raul and Bernie II

There are two obvious reasons the establishment would prefer to keep the holocaust story simple and so attack someone like Ecclestone for offering a more nuanced take than the typical~ ‘Hitler was an evil anti-Semite who wanted to murder all of Europe’s Jews and settled on death camps with poison-gas chambers as the method to achieve this.’ The simple narrative lends itself to use for two programs central to the worldview of our elites, anti-nationalism for most of us, coupled with fierce nationalism for Jews.

But there’s a third explanation for the pitiless attack on Ecclestone and it may also explain why people that are surely aware of Hilberg’s research, work that seems to justify Ecclestone’s comments, are among his most vociferous critics.

Here, again, are Hilberg’s words:

1) “There was no pre-established guiding plan. As for the question of the decision, it is in part unsolvable: no order signed by Hitler has ever been found, doubtless because no such document ever existed. I am persuaded that the bureaucracies moved through a sort of latent structure: each decision brings on another, then another, and so forth, even if it isn’t possible to foresee exactly the next step.” (In Le Monde des Livres, October 26th, 2006)

2) “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.” (February 22nd, 1983 at an event arranged by the Holocaust Survivors Foundation, quoted in Newsday a day later)

‘Colin Laney’ in a comments thread at MajorityRights.com remarks on the implication of these statements if true:

[quote] It should be acknowledged that even Yad Vashem does not hold that there were death camps inside of Germany. This is very significant: every camp that might meet the conditions of the hypothetical death camps just happen to be those which were captured by the Red Army …

Since [the revisionist] case has taken the day with regards to all of the camps captured by the West, there is strong reason to believe that the case you make that begins with the officers in these camps intuiting and carrying out the wishes of their superiors is not sustainable. Part of your case is plausible, that officers in the field understand their broader mandate and pursued it under their individual initiative, but how on earth could the Nazis have known in advance to only kill Jews in only those camps that would later be captured by the Soviets, rather than the Americans or the British?

Perhaps the Nazis really did have the Spear of Destiny and could use it to tell the future? But even accepting this - as we now must - do we go on to suppose that the Ahnererbe was sharing occult information with officers in charge of the camps, even morale crushing information about their eventual loss of the war? [end quote]

Sowell on AA

From Richard Thompson Ford in Slate we read the usual guff about affirmative action (anti-White discrimination) being a part of the same fight for ‘equality’ as the Civil Rights struggle (against racial discrimination):

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There's a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination.

****

From Thomas Sowell’s ‘Affirmative Action Around the World,’ a passage that puts Ford's dissembling in its proper perspective:

When a serious political backlash against affirmative action began in the United States, many in the media were quick to characterize it dismissively as due to ‘‘angry white males,’’ resentful of the losses of various benefits to blacks and other minorities—in other words, just an emotional reaction by people irked at losing a few of their many advantages. But this resentment was by no means proportional to intergroup transfers of benefits or it would have been far greater against Asian Americans, who displaced more whites in prestigious universities and in many high-level professions, especially in science and technology. At many of the leading universities in the United States, whites ‘‘lost’’ more places to Asian Americans than to blacks, and yet there was seldom any backlash against Asian Americans. The outstanding academic and other achievements of Asian Americans were widely recognized and widely respected. It was not the intergroup transfer of benefits that was resented, but the basis for those transfers.

Among Americans especially, the idea that some are to be treated as ‘‘more equal than others’’ is galling. It was this feeling in the general population which leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s were able to mobilize behind their efforts to destroy the Jim Crow laws of the South, so that a majority of the members in both houses of Congress from both political parties voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was this same American resentment of special privilege which responded so strongly to the historic words of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, that his dream was of a country where people would be judged ‘‘not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’’

It was after the civil rights movement itself began to move away from this concept of equal treatment of all individuals and toward the concept of equalized outcomes for groups, that a backlash against affirmative action set in and grew over the years.

Raul and Bernie

Three quotes that question Hitler’s role in the holocaust and challenge the popular idea that the holocaust was a centrally planned deliberate genocide.

Quote 1: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was, in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done… In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn’t a dictator.”

Quote 2: “There was no pre-established guiding plan. As for the question of the decision, it is in part unsolvable: no order signed by Hitler has ever been found, doubtless because no such document ever existed. I am persuaded that the bureaucracies moved through a sort of latent structure: each decision brings on another, then another, and so forth, even if it isn’t possible to foresee exactly the next step.”

Quote 3: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

Quote one is from F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone and predictably he drew a lot of flak for those comments. World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder has called on Ecclestone to resign saying he is no longer fit to serve in his role; Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard says Ecclestone is “either an idiot or morally repulsive”; Denis MacShane MP, Chairman of an all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism, says “if Mr. Ecclestone seriously thinks Hitler had to be persuaded to kill six million Jews … then he knows neither history and shows a complete lack of judgment”; Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says “the comments themselves are totally idiotic and reveal a staggering ignorance of the events of World War II and the Holocaust”; and Yad Vashem spokeswoman Iris Rosenberg emailed this response to a journalist: “It is an unfortunate and lamentable statement, unworthy of comment.”

You might expect that the person behind quotes two and three, they being much more coherent and emphatic than Ecclestone’s comments, would draw even more opprobrium. But no. Instead, Raul Hilberg, for it is he who said these things about the holocaust, is described in ‘Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume I, The Meaning of Genocide,’ as ‘the outstanding expert on the apparatus of Holocaust.’ In ‘The Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust’ his ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’ is described as a ‘massive and meticulous treatise’ and ‘perhaps the most important single work ever written on the Holocaust.’ According to the same source his ‘explanation of the Nazi machinery of murder … in the destruction of the Jews is a masterpiece of historical research.’

Odd, ain’t it?

The Barbary terror

From the introduction to Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2006):

Almost everywhere in the eighteenth century, men were in chains…

In Russia, millions of serfs lived a brutish existence tied to the land and at the sufferance of their manorial lords until Tsar Alexander II freed them in 1861. In the Levant and Istanbul, the burgeoning population needed bread, leading the Tartar rulers of the Crimea to raid the Ukraine, Russia, and Caucuses for hundreds of thousands of white Christians to work as slaves growing wheat in the steppe.

[…] slavery had existed in Islamic North Africa, the so-called Barbary states, for centuries, and was a constant threat to Europe. From dozens of ports in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, Islamic corsairs darted out in their row galleys, and later, in their sailing xebecs and feluccas, to seize European ships with their Christian crews and passengers (and cargoes). They boldly landed bands of armed pirates on the coasts of southern Europe and carted off peasant farmers and nobles, fishermen and goat herders, clerics and tradesmen, to slavery in Barbary. The corsairs sometimes seized the entire population of a village; coastal areas of Andalusia, Sicily, Calabria, Tuscany, and the Greek islands were depopulated by “manstealing” over the course of several hundred years.

Barbary slavery differed from slavery elsewhere both in the spirit in which the corsairs operated and the way Barbary societies used slaves. As historian Robert C. Davis notes in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, “in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad—for the wrongs of 1492 [when Ferdinand and Isabella finally expelled the Moors from Spain], for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim. . . .” But the Barbary slave trade was driven as much by economics as by religious ideology. The corsairs needed oarsmen for their row galleys, and the captives were even more valuable when traded for ransom. Factoring in losses from the plague, malnourishment, mistreatment, and periodic ransomings, Professor Davis estimates that in the 250 years of peak slave-taking by the Barbary corsairs, from 1530 to 1780, at least one million, and perhaps as many as one and one-quarter million, white Christians were enslaved in Islamic North Africa. Even in the eighteenth century, as the number of slaves the Barbary pirates needed dwindled because sailing ships had replaced galleys, approximately 175,000 white Christians were carried off into slavery.

[…] The governments of Europe either paid tribute to them to prevent their subjects from being enslaved, or were too poor to do so. For the United States, free trade was both a policy and a belief: trade would increase wealth even as it increased freedom. But with no navy and little money, the new republic’s merchant ships and crewmen were prime targets for capture and enslavement. The promises of free trade were imperiled.

John Foss, a seaman in the brig Polly out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which sailed from Baltimore bound to Cadiz, Spain, in September 1793, was one of those who became enslaved. Like many who experienced slavery in Algiers, Foss wrote a detailed account of his experience.

After being captured at sea, Foss and his fellow Americans were

taken to the palace of the ruler, the dey of Algiers, through a surging crowd which stunned them “with the shouts, clapping of hands and other exclamations of joy from the inhabitants; thanking God for their great success and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers. . . .” The dey greeted them with a speech declaring he would never make peace with their country, finishing, “now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.” The next morning, a heavy chain link was hammered around each man’s ankle, and Foss called the “dreadful clanking” sound of the iron chain each man had to carry “the most terrible noise I ever heard.” The captured men then began their work as slaves, mining rocks in the nearby mountains and hauling them by bodily force down to the port to repair or extend the seawall at the harbor, or working at the port carrying freight on their backs, goaded along by guards with pointed sticks, like cattle prods, with dreadful beatings or death never a distant possibility.

More from Bat Ye’or

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam (Associated University Presses, London, 1996)

On hostage taking:

Hostage-taking is a classic tactic of the jihad. At the theological-juridical level, it is legal and moral. The hostage - a harbi prisoner - represents a military asset for the exchange of prisoners or for obtaining a ransom to finance the war effort. In both cases, the harbi (American, European or any other), becomes a dehumanized object, deprived of the inalienable rights attached to any human being. This dehumanization is a fundamental aspect bound up with the concept of the harbi. A particular occasion can transform any harbi, no matter who, into a hostage. In the past, frontier raids and piracy at sea, particularly from the Maghreb, provided a considerable reserve of hostages destined for slavery, if they were not redeemed financially. Until 1815, Morocco and the Barbary Coast constituted veritable pirate states, growing rich on the human booty carried off from the dar al-harb. (p. 217-8)

****

On the remarkable assimilative capacity of Islam:

This stream of converts to Islam was swelled by the throng of freed men and captured slaves. Ibn Ishaq, biographer of the Prophet, was the grandson of a Christian captured in 633 by Khalid b. al-Walid at Ayn al-Tamar (Iraq). Abu Hanifa (d. 767), founder of the school of Hanafi law, was the son of a Zoroastrian slave; the Persian Ibrahim al-Mawsili (742-804), who composed classical Arabic music, had been taken captive as a child at Mosul; Jawhar al-Siqilli (the Sicilian), who conquered Egupt (969) for the Fatimid al-Mu'izz and founded al-Qahira (Cairo) and the al-Azhar mosque (972), was a Christian slave sold at Qairuan. (p.234)

****

On manageability of the Dhimmi:

Several factors help to prepare a situation propicious to the manipulation of communities or individuals. Among these, one could mention vulnerability, ideological conditioning, corruption, loss of identity, or historical amnesia.

Vulnerability is integrated into dhimmitude, since the dhimmi, conquered by war and defenseless, is reduced to perpetually repurchasing his life. In addition, the right claimed by the Muslim authority to ratify the appointment of the spiritual leader of the dhimmi community enabled it to interfere in this choice to its own best interests, impose its own candidate, and deepen the schisms of a venal nature which were corrupting the institutions. Thus the morality and cultural level of the communities declined, and this domestic discredit increased the contempt of the outside environment.

Ideological conditioning grafts itself onto vulnerability. The janissaries provide the most perfect example of this situation. Young Christian children abducted during razzias, allocated within the quint of war booty or by the devshirme, were reduced to slavery and converted to Islam. Subjected to an intense military and religious education, they constituted the Muslim power’s elite troops. Blind and fanatical tools of the sultan, they became the cruellest persecutors of Christianity, which was henceforth attacked by its own sons. The janissary incarnates the quintessence of dhimmitude, brought to its perfection. (p. 236-7)

Bat Ye’or, ‘Jihad on the Seas’

I’m doing some reading-up on White slavery at the moment, the Barbary corsairs and whatnot. The following is from one of Bat Ye’or’s books on Islam:

Rapidly exploiting sea-warfare techniques of the conquered Christian populations, the Arabs carried the jihad to the coasts of Europe. The populations of Cyprus (649) and the islands of Cos, Rhodes (672), and Crete (674) were slaughtered or enslaved. The Cyzicus peninsula was ravaged (670) and Paros was reduced to an uninhabited desert. The coasts of southern France and Italy were plundered.

After the forced Islamization of the Jewish and Christian Berber tribes of the Maghreb and the strengthening of Arab-Islamic power, Maghrebian pirates under the Aghlabid dynasty (800-909) undertook a number of expeditions along the European coasts in conjunction with Arabs from Spain. During the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, such razzias depopulated Sardinia, Sicily, the coasts of Italy and southern France and, in the eastern Mediterranean, the Cyclades, the regions of Athos, Euboea, and along the Greek coast.

Landing on Crete in 827 or 828, Arabs from Spain laid waste the island in the space of twelve days, enslaving the populations of twenty-nine towns and sparing one single site where Christians could retain their religion. Moving on to the island of Aegina (gulf of Corinth), they destroyed or deported all the inhabitants as slaves. After having subjugated Bari (842) in southern Italy, then Messina (843) and Modica (844) in Sicily, the Muslim armies set siege to Rome (846). During the 852-53 campaign against Castrogiovanni, Catania, Syracuse, Noto, and Ragusa in Sicily, the Tunisian al-Abbas “took booty in all these territories, ravaged, burned.” During the expedition to the island in summer 853-54, al-Abbas “destroyed the Christians’ harvests and sent expeditionary forces in all directions.” After a six-month siege, the inhabitants of Butira pledged to hand over to him six thousand prisoners, who were then led away. Every year, harvests were laid waste, villages burned and destroyed, towns conquered and reduced to ruins. In the course of the 857-58 campaign, the inhabitants of Cefalu (Sicily) obtained peace by promising to leave their town and abandon it to the Muslims, who then destroyed it. In 878 Syracuse fell after a nine-month siege: “Thousands of its inhabitants were killed and booty acquired, the like of which had never before been taken in any other town. A very small number of men were able to escape.” After pillaging the town, the invaders destroyed it. In 902, the inhabitants of Taormina were decimated by the sword.

This general picture of destruction, ruin, massacre, and deportation of urban and rural captive populations was common to all the conquered territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Well documented by contemporary Syriac, Greek, and Arabic chronicles, the few examples provided illustrate a general situation as it recurred regularly during the seasonal razzias, over the years, and for centuries. These chronicles, in great part translated and published, are well known to specialized historians and indicate clearly, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the rules of jihad concerning booty, the fifth part, the fay, levies on harvests, and the fate of populations (conversion, massacre, slavery, or tribute) were not just vague principles laid down by a theoretical treatise on warfare, construed by some obscure theologian. The Arabs, stirred by their profound belief and the conviction of belonging to an elite nation, superior to all others (Koran 3: 106), put them into practice, feeling that they were thereby fulfilling a religious duty and executing the will of Allah.

It must be stressed, however, that massacre or slavery of the vanquished peoples, burning, pillage, destruction, and the claiming of tribute were the common practices during the period under consideration of every army whether Greek, Latin, or Slav. Only the excess, the regular repetition and the systematization of the destruction, codified by theology, distinguishes the jihad from other wars of conquest or depredation.

Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam (Associated University Presses, London, 1996) p.50-51.

Racial cringe

‘Edward Gibbon’ at the Original Dissent forum discovered this terrifying example of racial cringe in Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel, p.100:

British Prime Ministers, soon after they come into office, customarily visit Washington and Moscow to get acquainted with American and Russian leaders. When Prime Minister James Callahan made his state visit to Moscow he had two amicable meetings with Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. At the end of the second day he remarked that he was happy to discover that there were no urgent problems threatening to bring the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union into conflict. Brezhnev then replied with some emphatic words in Russian. Callahan’s interpreter hesitated , and instead of translating Brezhnev’s remark asked him to repeat it. Brezhnev repeated it and the interpreter translated: “Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Callahan was so taken aback that he did not venture either to agree or disagree with this sentiment. He made his exit without further comment. What he had heard was a distant echo of the Mongol hoofbeat still reverberating in Russian memory.

And the rest. Presumably this meeting took place in 1976 or 1977. Brezhnev will surely have had contemporary British and American racial strife in mind at least as much as historic Mongol invasions of Russia. In avoiding such an obvious explanation for Brezhnev’s comments Dyson shows that he’s just as uncomfortable with racial issues as the pathetic fool Callaghan.

Amish self-reliance

I read this article several years ago and saved a copy. It doesn't appear to be free-to-read anywhere online at the moment so here it is:

Plain Independent: What the Amish Can Teach Other Americans about Reducing Reliance on Government

by Hannah Lapp; The American Enterprise, Vol. 8, November-December 1997

“I don't know what there is to talk about” said Lydia. “I can put it in five words: We don’t take government handouts.” Standing at the door of her kitchen in a calf-length blue dress and white apron, she studied my notebook uncomprehendingly.

I was visiting the home of the young Amish mother in hopes of gathering information on how the Amish people sustain themselves independent of government programs, even in times of crisis. While Lydia wasn’t averse to my visit, sitting down in the middle of the afternoon was obviously not her habit. “It doesn't seem I’ve done anything all day!” she exclaimed as she ushered me to a chair on the front porch. “I washed the laundry and sewed a few things. I canned some zucchini and string beans.”

Lydia’s mother, Mary Ann, and father, Jacob, had agreed to gather at her home in Clymer, New York, for my interview. Her small daughter Lena and son Myron rushed at their grandparents as they arrived and pounded on Jacob’s legs with shouts of “Grandpa, Grandpa!”

It was Jacob who was able to provide me with specifics on how the Amish have through three centuries managed their affairs from cradle to grave without making use of government aid programs. In between blowing up balloons for his grandchildren and listening to their breathless tales, the elderly Amishman described his people’s tradition of mutual aid.

Staunch self-sufficiency has been a way of life for the Old Order Amish since 1693, when Jacob Ammon founded the group as an offshoot of the Swiss Reformation movement. In those days Europe was dominated by church-state alliances intolerant of religious dissenters; so the Amish fled to North America during the 1700s, settling mostly in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Today, Amish congregations with a total population of about 150,000 are found in 22 states.

The Amish, who sometimes describe their way of life as “Plain,” have been remarkably successful at maintaining their religious and cultural identity inside America’s melting pot. The faster the world around them changes, the more strongly they seem to stand as a people apart. Amish religious ordinances which require, among many other things, plain, modest dress and reliance on manual labor and horsepower--have much to do with this. The most important distinctions in the Amish way of life--“earning our bread by the sweat of our brow” and “taking care of our own,” as one Amishman put it--capture individual initiative and harmonize it with community interests in a cycle that endlessly sustains both.

While the rest of the world haggles over capitalism versus socialism, Amish society simply turns its back on every welfare program in the book, from public education to Medicaid, and yet provides for its needy in a manner enviable anywhere. The Amish scorn modern thinking on topics like self-esteem and women’s liberation, yet turn out men, women, and children who possess the very sense of identity and purpose so wistfully sought by modern people. All this the Amish accomplish without compulsion and without a national leadership.

I can understand why it’s tempting for outsiders to view the Amish as mysterious, and to portray them as either leading idyllic lives or, on the other hand, laboring under deep, dark secrets. My own family associations with the Amish convince me there is nothing mystical about them. They contend with all the maladies common to human existence and in so doing have a great deal to teach the rest of us. But because propagating their beliefs abroad is not the Amish way, only through observation can we learn from them.

On the evening I visited Lydia’s home in Clymer, in the southwest corner of upstate New York, the family had just received word of the death of a well-known and loved elder in their church. Lydia’s husband, Andy, took a break from farm chores to gather on the front porch with his family and parents-in-law as they exchanged bits of news on how Manass Troyer had succumbed to brain cancer. Lydia and her mother, Mary Ann, reminisced on how well Manass had been just three and a half months earlier, working a sawmill job full-time at age 71. The illness struck suddenly, and by the time it was discovered was too far advanced to treat. Week after week, relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances had nursed the cancer patient in his own home and surrounded him with affection. Family members were getting worn out, Mary Ann admitted, so church friends, including herself and her husband Jacob, pitched in.

Mary Ann told me that just getting tests at the hospital had cost the Troyer family $18,000, and more medical bills followed. Their savings took care of only part of the expenses; fellow church members chipped in the rest. Since the Amish shun not only Medicare and Medicaid, but health insurance in general, medical expenses constitute the single greatest financial burden. Lydia’s family had its share as she grew up; Mary Ann needed gall bladder surgery, and Jacob was ill and off work at one time. Also, Lydia’s two youngest sisters are learning-impaired, one of them with Down’s Syndrome.
How, I asked, do other church members know when a family can’t handle its bills on its own? Do they go to the minister to ask for aid? And where does the money come from? “It’s very seldom that anyone has to ask,” Lydia replied. “Someone they know usually sees they have a hard time handling things and tells the deacon.”

Jacob explained that “there is no fund layin’ around doing nothing.” During their Sunday worship service, which is held in a member’s home and attended by the 25 to 35 families that make up a “church district,” the deacon stands to announce hardship cases. If there was a $30,000 hospital bill, for example, the cost would be divided up between a hundred districts. The deacon would then announce his church district’s share of $300, and each member would come forward with a donation fitting his financial ability. Jacob noted that the donations often add up to a little more than is needed.

“You never tell anyone else how much you gave,” Mary Ann added. “You just give what you can.” If the donations are anonymous, I challenged, how does the deacon know each member will give enough? The women didn’t see that as a problem. “You’d always rather give than be the one who needs it,” they answered in unison.

Reciprocal intergenerational bonds are in evidence whenever you visit Amish homes and communities. John A. Hostetler, a prominent author on Amish culture, notes that child nurture is considered the society’s most important adult activity. Children, in turn, are expected to nurture others as soon and as much as their capabilities allow. Practically as soon as he can walk and talk, the Amish child is helping with chores in the home, looking after younger siblings, and following older family members around to learn skills. Giving of oneself is so deeply associated with self-importance that Amish youth are strongly work-oriented and proficient in a vast array of jobs. As one Amishman told me, “By the time they are 14, 99 percent of our young people almost can’t wait to get out of school and get to work.”

Whether young, handicapped, or old, each Amish person seems to have something to contribute to the community. I asked Mary Ann about her youngest daughters, aged 28 and 26, who are disabled and still living at home. It wasn’t too hard raising them, she said; in many ways they were a help rather than a burden. Lydia chimed in that her youngest sister was a really good worker--Lydia had even had her over as a maid when Lydia’s baby was born.

Jacob cited his 86-year-old mother as an example of how their society provides for old age. The house that belonged to the old folks was bought by Jacob’s brother, who built an addition onto it for his widowed mother. “How do you decide which of the children or grandchildren is responsible for their parents’ care?” I asked. “I don’t know if anybody really decides,” said Jacob thoughtfully. “I took care of her for a while. Then my brother bought the house; so he was responsible.”

The Amish believe the elderly, when in decline, should remain among kin if at all possible, to reap the satisfaction due them for a lifetime of service, as well as to continue contributing to their families in ways they can, such as overseeing children. This experience implants in Amish children an acceptance of the path of aging and dying.

In an era of astronomical medical costs, dealing with extended illness without Social Security benefits can be a test of faith. The largest doctor bills require help from more than the usual hundred church districts, Jacob told me. Fund-raising campaigns--such as quilt sales, which can draw in contributions from the non-Amish--are sometimes organized. The Budget, a weekly newspaper published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and read in Plain communities across the nation, regularly advertises showers and benefit auctions for hardship cases.

With a circulation of 20,000, The Budget is an important link in an Amish-Mennonite network of self-help, education, and mutual aid. Most Mennonite groups share with the Amish a disdain for public assistance. Unlike the Amish, however, they actively engage in mission and charity projects beyond Plain circles. Page after page of The Budget lists first-person updates by Mennonites stationed in these projects, ranging from disaster recovery efforts in the U.S. to anti-poverty missions in South America and Romania. Amish readers thus garner information on affairs around the world. “Scribes,” as contributors are called, may simply wish to update their cousins on church news, births, deaths--every imaginable event. In the “Information Please” column, readers ask about things like locating lost poems or acquiring replacement parts for kerosene lamps. Tips are shared on topics ranging from food processing to home remedies to planting by the moon.

The Amish insistence on drawing from their own resources rather than outside institutions has been questioned in recent years by the media. In one instance, described as “the first documented murder by a person born and bred Amish,” a Pennsylvania father hacked his wife to death. The man, known to be mentally ill, was being cared for at home by his family.

In the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, an Amish family and state officials clashed in 1995 over treatment of a child with leukemia. The five-year-old girl was seized from her father’s arms by state troopers and child-protective case workers and placed in foster care so doctors could carry out chemotherapy against the parents’ wishes. The parents regarded chemotherapy as more threatening than the disease, and they had chosen a less invasive treatment from a Canadian doctor. The outcome was that the child was brutally traumatized by the state’s intervention and died, chemotherapy notwithstanding.

The Amish do not shun modern medicine as a whole. They often use chemotherapy, organ transplants, and life-support intervention when these do not simply prolong a vegetative or terminal condition. Many Amish donate blood to the Red Cross. In The Amish and the State, contributor Gertrude Huntington writes that most court cases involving Amish health care result from differing opinions about the best care for a sick child. The Amish believe parents and the church bear the first responsibility for child-rearing, and in a number of instances they have stood on these beliefs when challenged. “Neither state officials nor medical personnel take kindly to this apparent challenge to professional authority,” Huntington notes.

A recent ABC News “20/20” report, “The Secret Life of the Amish,” drew on the tales of disgruntled former members to sensationalize the “strict” and “isolated” aspect of Amish life. It claimed the “mysterious world” of the Amish hides untold stories of rigid control and abuse. Anchorwoman Deborah Roberts worried that Amish victims often did not have access to the “safety” of public social services.

Better-informed researchers report that while the Amish creed of independence, self-discipline, non-violence, and nurture is not foolproof, the Amish are remarkably little affected by our larger society’s most serious social ills. That drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, divorce, and juvenile crime scarcely exist in Amish circles speaks well for the quality of life enjoyed by Amish youth. When Amish teenagers do act out, it’s usually through rowdy socializing, going to movies, playing music, or similar forbidden activities. At worst, this leads to drinking and petty vandalism--or leaving the faith.

The Amish respect the larger society’s “powers that be” in functions such as controlling crime, but they refrain from litigation and political activities. When state powers intrude in ways their faith forbids, the Amish throughout their history in America have taken the position their forefathers did in Europe: Accept the consequences rather than yield. “We are taught to mind our own business and obey the government, but when the chips are down and the government interferes with our way of life, we can balk like a stubborn mule,” notes one Amishman.

A study of Amish history in the U.S. bears out the saying that freedom is never free. Individuals, from deacons to the lowliest housewife, have been tested in church-state confrontations on issues such as military conscription, Social Security taxation, and public education. The willingness of many individuals to face punishment rather than surrender their beliefs has helped secure for their people an enviable degree of autonomy. In the mid-1900s, a number of Amish parents went to jail rather than send their teenagers to public high schools. A decades-long trouble spot between the Amish and education officials was finally resolved in 1973 after an outsider took their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Amish won the right to educate their children largely according to church tradition rather than state mandates.

Jacob and Mary Ann have been asked by many people whether they pay taxes. “We pay all our taxes except Social Security taxes,” Jacob said, explaining that the Amish cannot conscientiously participate in a worldly insurance system like Social Security. If they receive income tax refunds after filing, Jacob said, they rip up the check and throw it away. He and Mary Ann have refused hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars because, in Jacob’s words, “We don't want government handouts.”

The Amish pay taxes for public education like anyone else, and then pay again to school their own children. In Pennsylvania, parents who do not use the public school system are now given a refund toward an approved choice for their children’s education. Jacob told me the Amish refused any efforts by the government to help their schools fearing they’d give officials reason to tell them how to run them.

Last year an Amish sawmill in Centerville, Pennsylvania, was raided by U.S. Labor Department officials and heavily fined for employing youths under 18. The owner, Bill Burkholder, was also the employer of Manass Troyer at the time he fell ill from cancer. When I visited the Burkholder home in early August, Bill and his wife, Mary, spoke of keeping tender company with Manass during his final days.

Bill wore all the appearance of the Amish working class--the highest class to which an Amishman aspires. His hair was plastered to his brow with sweat, and his homespun shirt and denim pants bore evidence of a day of hands-on labor. Beneath this humble appearance, however, I sensed a man of extraordinary intelligence and business acumen. He has twice built a prosperous lumber operation up from bare soil.

Three years ago the Burkholder family business, which includes two of his sons, lost everything to fire. The fire broke out on a Sunday afternoon. By Wednesday Bill had re-commenced sawing lumber with the help of his community, beginning with the boards they needed to construct a new mill. The sawmill grew to employ as many as 40 people, and the Labor Department’s crackdown on Bill’s young Amish workers struck Amish consciousness across the nation. If the state can remove the young from what the Amish view as constructive, educational job experience, how can they hold together their culture?

In January of this year, the Labor Department sent a representative to meet with Bill and a couple of other Amish businessmen about labor regulations. Arriving at the sawmill, the official was instead greeted by a throng of Amishmen, 500 strong, who had come to listen and express concern about the state’s encroachment upon their way of life. Such displays of fervent albeit non-violent solidarity often induce public officials to think twice before overstepping their bounds with the Amish. In the Burkholder case, the outcome is not yet known. Bill has appealed the fines, and Amish leaders nationwide are negotiating with lawmakers for tolerance.

In talking about the Amish practice of pulling together in crisis, Bill explained that every couple of years each Amish household evaluates all its belongings, from clothes to china cabinets to horses and buggies. The value of these possessions, combined with the assessed value of their property, creates a monetary figure from which one to three dollars per hundred is “taxed” whenever a fire occurs. Bill said the same figure is also used in calculating a fire’s property damage. Assessors from a number of neighboring church districts converge upon the scene quickly to view the damage and speak to the owner. A collection for relief is then launched, based on the figure arrived at by these assessors.

Though church positions such as deacon and preacher are entirely unpaid, Amish schoolteachers receive wages. Mary Burkholder, who had five years’ experience as a school teacher, told me teachers’ wages range from $20 to $30 a day, plus reimbursement if it’s necessary to hire a driver to get to school. Each family with children in the school pays an equal percentage of the teacher’s pay, whether the family has eight children in school or one. School materials, wood for its stove, and the cost of the building whenever a new one is needed come from a general school fund for which the whole district is responsible.

An Amish-elected school board oversees the school’s needs in everything from finances to teacher-parent tensions. By law, the Amish must adhere to certain rules, such as keeping attendance records and fulfilling the same number of days in school as other students. Otherwise, the state has little control over their education system. The Wisconsin v. Yoder ruling grants them the right to graduate their children from textbook to hands-on occupational education when they complete eighth grade.
The Amish peoples’ struggle to retain parental and church prerogatives in educating their children is a continual one. They are keenly aware, however, that no guarantees protect a minority group like theirs, which lacks political muscle. Societal attitudes or political tides can at any moment swing a public official’s pen against what they hold dear. It is here that their courage stands out--and their faith in themselves, in the goodness of God, and in the ability of human beings to resolve problems among themselves rather than depending on distant legal channels.

And it is here, perhaps, that the dominant American culture seems farthest from the Amish ideal. The very concept of a coercive universal tax for public welfare is built on the premise that each of us cannot be trusted to care about our neighbor’s needs. We have not realized how much this idea rends the thread of human-to-human reciprocation that weaves a community’s fabric. Indeed, we have yet to see the full outcome of the modern experiment of controlling deeds of charity from a pedestal of power rather than arousing each individual’s sense of duty.

The Amish do not claim to offer a blueprint for the welfare of our nation. They do, however, offer us a refreshing vision of what can be accomplished by the voluntary pooling of human resources. Their example challenges the idea of central planning and control as the answer to society’s ills. In observing them in their home, I could not help but see a link between independence from state controls and free-flowing human goodwill.