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.

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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)

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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)

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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.

Englishmen banned in Bradford

I googled the phrase "I am an Englishman" on a Bradford City Council library computer with this result:



[Access has been blocked because ... Page content filters applied:- banned keyword]

Just about sums it up.

CEEFAX/BBC inadvertently tells truth

Reported on CEEFAX news this morning: MPs on the Commons Home Affairs Committee investigating police brutality at the G20 conference said ‘police must modify their behaviour in an age where their actions were easily filmed by the public.’

Now, this may be a loose bit of reporting by CEEFAX or some very unfortunate phrasing by an MP, but it does reveal more truth than is convenient, I think.



Oh, the same phrase is used at the BBC's News website:

One man's death after contact with police is being probed and there have been a series of protester complaints. The MPs said police must modify their behaviour in an age where their actions were easily filmed by the public.

Reasons for treasons

It has been apparent for years that the more hostile and problematic immigrant groups gain official and NGO support in their efforts to immigrate and remain here while the most affinitive have obstacles put in their way. The perverse bias persists despite near unanimous public opposition and politicians’ oft-stated ‘outrage’ at the situation. Two cases in the media this weekend demonstrate the problem:

Ahmed Daq must be given bail because the Home Office has taken too long to deport him and his continued detention is now unlawful, the court said...It is another blow to the Home Office, which has already lost a series of human rights battles over illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers... Addicted to alcohol and drugs, Daq committed 18 offences between 1998 and 2004, using 13 aliases... They included robbery, theft, two assaults occasioning actual bodily harm, possession of an offensive weapon - an axe - in a public place without reasonable excuse, using threatening words and behaviour, and seven burglaries... Mr Howell, sitting in London, added: "This case is a sad reminder of the continuing difficulties in securing the removal of foreign nationals who commit criminal offences in this country which make their continued presence here undesirable."

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A doting dad with an 11-month-old daughter faces the heart-breaking prospect of having his family torn apart after his Canadian wife was refused permission to remain in the UK... Her application to extend her UK visa has been refused on the grounds that her circumstances are “not compassionate or compelling enough” for the Secretary of State to exercise his discretion in her favour... Mr Harper, a self-employed gardener who would be unable to leave his business to travel with them to Canada, said: “We are very upset.If she goes back to Canada, it’s going to take at least three months and it’s just not right that I can’t see my wife and baby for that time... “It seems wrong that all these people come into the UK illegally and are then granted the right to stay and a genuine case where a family wants to stay together is refused... “She has come here and taken nothing from the state. She has not drained the country at all because I have supported her since her arrival”.

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It is axiomatic that governments usually act in such a way as to increase their powers, and this is the most parsimonious explanation for the systematic discrimination in favour of the hostile, criminal and least assimilable. The more havoc the likes of Ahmed Daq create, the more public support is gained for legislative and social controls that would otherwise be opposed on civil liberties grounds. Immigration by the likes of Deanna Harper is discouraged because it dilutes the toxic effect of immigration generally, and because the life she will make for herself here would present such an obvious contrast to the government's favoured immigrant cohorts.

Wacko Morley, Uncle Tom Sawyer

Every time I caught a few seconds of TV ‘news’ yesterday they were discussing the death of a former pop star so I thought it highly amusing that the first words I heard on the Newsnight special devoted to the story were bemoaning the fact that many people would focus on the ‘celebrity’ part of the singer’s life rather than the ‘important stuff.’

Before I had stopped laughing the same contributor, drawing us back to the important stuff, said that what had saddened him most about the life of the singer was his cosmetic journey from looking African to looking Caucasian (this talking head was Black). He went on to say that he had liked the early artist for specifically representing Blackness and was disappointed when the mature artist sought to represent all humanity. Miranda Sawyer and Paul Morley, two impeccably liberal Whites sympathised with the gentleman about the singer having ‘betrayed his race’ (these were Sawyer’s - or perhaps Morley’s - exact words).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more rapid deployment of the MSM’s culture war for race-replacement arsenal. In a few short minutes it was all there. Avoid serious news and analysis; load us up on celeb gossip and other trivial diversions; present a never-ending stream of non-Whites making extreme race-based claims; and for balance present a never-ending stream of role-model raceless-Whites eager to agree to those claims (and who will, when called upon, turn savagely on any White who dares make ANY claim on behalf of his race).

(Click on the link and ffw to the last five minutes to see what I mean).

Mindsets

Philadelphia fitness expert, David Sylvester, joins 39 other professional and amateur bikers for Tour d’Afrique, a 100-day cycling event beginning in Cairo, Egypt, and ending in Cape Town, South Africa. Sylvester rides to raise money for a scholarship honoring his dear friend and fellow African American Kevin Bowser, who died in the 9/11 tragedy. Near the end of the trip he arrives in Lilongwe, Malawi, where he discovers a hip-hop clothing store called “Niggers.” Thinking at first “this is a very bad joke,” Sylvester investigates further. After talking with the two attending salesmen, Sylvester concludes, “This is no joke. . . . The bottom line is this: I rode over 12,000 miles on two continents through 15 states and 13 countries and broke two bikes in the process, to get to a store in Africa called Niggers.”

He feels guilty for his role in the vulgar ritual grammar that has grown to infect the continent he calls the motherland. “I am willing to step [up] and admit my part in the havoc that we have wrought on our mindset,” he writes in an email now posted on his website, “but I think that we all are to blame.”

Quote from article ‘The Not-So-Harmless Social Function of a Word that Wounds,’ Debra Walker King in The Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations

Concern with his race’s ‘mindset,’ racial identification with the homeland, sensitivity to verbal slights against the race; Mr Sylvester is a better man than most Whites. But he has no idea how good Blacks have it. European man’s mindset either denies his race exists or says it does not matter; his mindset determines that his race should welcome being displaced by other races in his homeland; and how wonderful it would be if our fortunes and self-confidence had turned around to such extent that we could ironically embrace other races’ slurs against us.

Still, I did laugh.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s planned pro-war propaganda

In a 1943 memo to Leon Lewis, the Los Angeles lawyer of the Institute of Social Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described their ideas for a film which they hoped to interest Hollywood in making:

Since it is the general idea underlying this plan to counteract the apathy of a large part of the population, it might be advisable to take this very apathy as the point of departure. While it must be made plain that no average American wants to have anything to do with Nazism or Fascism, their aversion to “atrocity propaganda” should be made equally clear. Some of the deeper psychological mechanisms underlying their attitudes should be brought to the fore, e.g., the reasoning: “these things are so horrible that one cannot believe them, and therefore they are untrue” (self protection), or: “people who have been treated this way must have brought it on themselves.”

These snatches of conversation finally reach some very prominent Americans who believe in probing things to the quick. They should be public figures whose reputation is unimpeachable like outstanding Congressmen, representatives of commerce and industry. They should not be played by actors but the personalities themselves should appear in the motion picture. They decide that people should learn the full, unbiased truth about what Nazism means to its victims and what it would mean to Americans in the case of a Hitler victory… The skeptics shown at the beginning are present making embarrassing remarks, when they interrupt the narrators they should be answered quietly and firmly. The climax is reached when one of the hecklers asks: “Where are your eyewitnesses?” The answer is: “there are none.” Then a cemetery with a fresh Massengrab (mass-grave) flashes on the screen. We see how the skeptics of the beginning eventually are brought to the conviction: “Those devils must pay.” They are shown, their numbers increasing, finally merging with a symbolic picture of the whole American nation, marching united against the Axis.

Memorandum on a motion picture project, April 27, 1943, Max Horkheimer-Archiv, II, 10, 397

The Destabilisation of Iran

James Corbett has an excellent new article up about the evolution over recent decades of destabilisation techniques employed against target-states by Western powers, state and commercial combined: Soros, the CIA, Mossad and the new media destabilization of Iran

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Bill Van Auken at WSWS points out that the lack of objectivity in establishment media’s reporting on Iran today is conspicuously similar to its Venezuelan coverage in 2002 during the period the CIA was helping foster a coup, and exposes one establishment journo’s readiness either to lie or conceal vital information from his readers.

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Jeff Stein at CQPolitics has some quotes from Bob Baer and Admiral James Lyons testifying to role of the American government’s new best friend Mir-Hossein Mousavi in terrorist outrages that killed more than 200 Americans in the 1980s; but also to the fact that members of Reagan’s cabinet prevented Lyons from striking back at the sitting duck terrorists. Just like they kept on letting the Al-Qaeda leadership get away in the 2000s.

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Paul Craig Roberts has posted several good articles on the subject in recent days:

Are the Iranian Election Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?
Iran Falling to US PSYOPS?
Ignorance is Strength

Obama on sovereignty

When you hear Obama say he respects the sovereignty of Iran - when clearly he doesn’t respect the sovereignty even of the USA - you know he’s lying, but to what end? Well, the more frequently Obama says he respects Iran’s sovereignty pre-terrorist outrage and subsequent war the more credible will be the later claims that, in an age of terrorists and rogue states with global reach, state sovereignty is an out-dated ideal. He will thus be better placed to wage war on all of Israel’s potential enemies and on the American people by transferring powers to the UN.

The diversity-double-whammy

In the Encyclopaedia of World Cultures, Vol.4, p.196:

Although it may be true that modern literature notes several cases of “counterfeit Egyptians,” that is, people of the so-called “dangerous classes” joining bands of Gypsies or passing themselves off as Gypsies, it is equally true that foreign peripatetics often kept their identity distinct from that of the local ones.

I was puzzled by this idea that native itinerants would sometimes try to pass themselves off as Gypsies; why on earth would anyone pretend to be a Gypsy given that they were rightly despised and subject to being deported.

I think the answer can be found in John Melton’s Astrologaster written in 1620. He reports that ‘Figure casters’ (fortune tellers)

would appear in the villages in the likeness of Gypsies … and that they might be thought to come of the issue of that sun-burnt generation, they with herbs and plants … (would) discolour their faces, and then for bread, beere, bacon, cheese, but especially for money, would undertake to tell poore maid-servants their fortunes.

So the Gypsy presence contributed not only the predictable problem of petty frauds committed by that sun-burnt generation itself, it also multiplied the variety of criminal opportunity for native villains. I’d like to think that the pretend-Gypsies were dealt with as ruthlessly as the real ones and faced imprisonment or execution if they refused to leave Britain.

Walker Connor on the appeal of nationalism

Extended quotations from Walker Connor, Ethno-nationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton University Press, 1994), 196-8, 202-6:

For the sake of clarity, we begin by noting that nationalism and patriotism refer to two quite distinct loyalties: the former to one’s national group; the latter to one’s state (country) and its institutions. For people, such as the Japanese, who possess their own ethnically homogeneous nation-state and for staatvolk, such as the French, who are culturally and politically preeminent in a state, even though other groups are present in significant numbers, the fact that nationalism and patriotism are two different phenomena is usually of little consequence. For such people, the two loyalties tend to blur into a seamless whole. But in a world containing thousands of ethnonational groups and less than two hundred states, it is evident that for most people the sense of loyalty to one’s nation and to one’s state do not coincide. And they often compete for the allegiance of the individual.

[…]

We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict - that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them - nationalism customarily proves the more potent. You have been privileged in your lifetime to witness one of history’s most vivid illustrations of the relative strength of these two loyalties: the very recent case of the Soviet Union, wherein a beleaguered Soviet President Gorbachev only belatedly discovered that a sense of loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (what, for seventy years had been termed Soviet patriotism) was no match for the sense of nationalism demonstrated by nearly all of the peoples of the Soviet Union, including even the Russian nation. And obviously, events within what, until recently, was known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia certify that Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovene nationalism has each proven itself far more potent than a Yugoslav patriotism.

To understand why nationalism customarily proves to be a far more powerful force than patriotism, it is necessary to take a closer look at national consciousness and national sentiment. What, for example, is the nature of the bond that both unites all Poles and differentiates them from the remainder of humanity? Until quite recently it was the vogue among prominent writers on nationalism to stress the tangible characteristics of a nation. The nation was defined as a community of people characterized by a common language, territory, religion, and the like. Probing the nation would be a far easier task if it could be explained in terms of such tangible criteria. How much simpler it would be if adopting the Polish language; living within Poland, and adhering to Catholicism were sufficient to define membership in the Polish nation were sufficient to make one a Pole. But there are Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians who meet these criteria but who do not consider themselves Polish and are not considered Polish by their Polish fellow citizens.

Objective criteria, in and by themselves, are therefore insufficient to determine whether or not a group constitutes a nation. The essence of the nation is a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all nonmembers in a most vital way.

With but very few exceptions, authorities have shied from describing the nation as a kinship group and have usually explicitly denied any kinship basis to it. These denials are customarily supported by data showing that most nations do in fact contain several genetic strains. But this line of reasoning ignores the dictum that it is not what is but what people perceive as is which influences attitudes and behavior. And a subconscious belief in the group’s separate origin and evolution is an important ingredient of national psychology.

In ignoring or denying the sense of kinship that infuses the nation, scholars have been blind to that which has been thoroughly apparent to nationalist leaders. In sharpest contrast with most academic analysts of nationalism, those who have successfully mobilized nations have understood that at the core of ethnopsychology is the sense of shared blood, and they have not hesitated to appeal to it. Consequently, nationalistic speeches and proclamations tend to be more fruitful areas for research into the emotional/psychological nature of nationalism than are scholarly works. Too often such speeches and proclamations have been precipitously dismissed as propaganda in which the leadership did not truly believe. But nationalism is a mass phenomenon, and the degree to which its inciters are true believers does not affect its reality. The question is not the sincerity of the propagandist, but the nature of the mass instinct to which he or she appeals.

[ ... ]

Unlike most writers on nationalism, then, political leaders of the most diverse ideological strains have been mindful of the common blood component of ethnonational psychology and have not hesitated to appeal to it when seeking popular support. Both the frequency and the record of success of such appeals attest to the fact that nations are indeed characterized by a sense - a feeling - of consanguinity.

Our answer, then, to that often asked question, ‘What is a nation?’ is that it is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group that can command a person’s loyalty because of felt kinship ties; it is, from this perspective, the fully extended family.

The core of the nation has been reached and triggered through the use of familial metaphors which can magically transform the mundanely tangible into emotion-laden phantasma: which can, for example, mystically convert what the outsider sees as merely the territory populated by a nation into a motherland or fatherland, the ancestral land, land of our fathers, this sacred soil, land where our fathers died, the native land, the cradle of the nation, and, most commonly, the home - the homeland of our particular people - a ‘Mother Russia,’ an Armenia, a Deutschland, an England (Engla land: land of the Angles), or a Kurdistan (literally, land of the Kurds). Here is an Uzbek poet referring to Uzbekistan:

So that my generation would comprehend the Homeland’s worth,
Men were always transformed to dust, it seems.
The Homeland is the remains of our forefathers
Who turned into dust for this precious soil

A spiritual bond between nation and territory is thus touched. As concisely stated in the nineteenth-century German couplet, ‘Blut und Boden,’ blood and soil become mixed in national perceptions.

It is, then, the character of appeals made through and to the senses, not through and to reason, which permit us some knowledge of the subconscious convictions that people tend to harbor concerning their nation. The near universality with which certain images and phrases appear - blood, family, brothers, sisters, mother, forefathers, ancestors, home - and the proven success of such invocations in eliciting massive, popular responses tell us much about the nature of national identity.

Enriched by waves of racist invaders?

So, just as some nationalists have said, the right word for gypsy ingress into Northern Ireland is ‘invasion’:

In addition to the continual presence of these [native itinerant] groups of presumably autochthonous origin, medieval Europe would seem to be scoured now and then by foreign groups: “Egyptian” acrobats visit Greece, Macedonia, and Spain, while an “Ethiopian” group given to magic artistry visits Italy, Spain, France, and England during the thirteenth century. However, undoubtedly at the start of the fifteenth century Western exotic nomads began to invade western Europe. Their presence in the Balkans had already been noted during the previous two centuries. Although Europeans used many names to describe these foreigners, two are by far the most common: “Egyptians” in the Atlantic regions, which was to become “Gitanos” in Spanish, “Gitans” in French, “Gypsies” in English, etc.; and “Cigani” (a term whose etymon is dubious - perhaps from the Greek word “Atsinganoi”) used in central-eastern Europe with several variants: “Zigeuner” in German, “Zingari” in Italian, “Cingani” in modern Latin, etc. The two terms overlap in many regions.

From the Encyclopaedia of World Cultures prepared under the auspices of Yale’s Human Relations Area Files (Volume 4, p.196).

In a surprisingly bold blog at the Telegraph, James Delingpole suggested that the ethnic-specific behaviour of the Gypsies may have provoked the Belfast uprising. This is quite possible, Gypsies self-define in part by their ways of earning a living and by how they relate to other communities; a Gypsy who does not conform to group norms risks being ostracised. And, however impolitic it may be to say so, Gypsy group norms are generally hostile to their host communities’ interests - and remarkably stable through time and across location. This is well-known as regards their ways of making money and showing disrespect for the property rights of others, but not so well-known are their defining cultural attitudes toward “Gorgios,” i.e., foreigners.

A Rominche is considered as such by reference to parentage - that is, at least one parent must be Rominche. “Didikois” is the usual term applied to “half-breeds,” while non-Rominche are called “Gorgios.” … There are prohibitions against marriage to a Gorgio … Violations of these prohibitions do occur, however. In the case of marriage to a Gorgio, the status of the “outsider” spouse will always be ambiguous - acceptance is never complete… Rominche culture is in many ways influenced by their opposition to Gorgios. Pollution beliefs are a strong example of this: food is “dirty” or “polluted” if even the shadow of a Gorgio falls upon it. (Ibid., pp. 216-7)

Are the ‘anti-racists’ fighting the wrong foe, I wonder?

Waugh on Slavery

Was He Right to Free the Slaves?

by Evelyn Waugh

Published in the Daily Express, 15 July 1933

The celebrations now being organized for the centenary of William Wilberforce are likely to command very tepid enthusiasm in the countries principally affected by the philanthropist’s work. On the one hand, the present generation of negroes would sooner not be reminded of their antecedents, while the few responsible whites are well aware that the emancipation of the slaves created a series of economic, social and political problems that are no nearer solution now than they were a hundred years ago.

If William Wilberforce could return to public life today and see the effects of his work, the speeches shortly to be made in his honour would ring in his ears with peculiar irony. None of the great movements of the nineteenth century is more typical of its age than that for the freeing of the slaves. It depended on all those fallacies that are being abandoned today: the idea of a perfectible evolutionary man, of a responsible democratic voter, of the beneficial effect of mechanization, and, above all, on sentimental belief in the basic sweetness of human nature.

There are always honourable exceptions in any general racial condemnation, and, heaven knows, the white people of the north have not made such a success of their own civilization that they can afford any extravagance of phrase. But it is not too much to say that in general character the descendants of the Negro slaves in the British Empire are a thriftless and dissolute lot. It is an unexpected development from the simple, woolly-headed, golden-hearted Bible-reading old darky that was held up as an example to European subscribers - the good old Uncle Tom who was to grow in the air of freedom in to an educated, prudent and pious family man and citizen. The sugar plantations have been ruined or mechanized, and the Negroes, instead of following the example of the indentured coolies and becoming small proprietors, working long hours in the country, drift to the intermittent employment of the towns. They have proved quite unfit for retail trade: they are clumsy mechanics, a superstitious and excitable riff-raff hanging round the rum shops and staring listlessly at the Chinese, Madeiran and East Indian immigrants, who outstrip them in every branch of life.

In Liberia, where they have been put in political power, they have erected a rigid racial bar between the immigrant and the aboriginal Negroes, and have introduced a system of forced labour more onerous than the slavery from which they were themselves freed. It was interesting, when the report on conditions in Liberia was published, to notice the concern that it aroused. The greater part of the British public had no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world. We had so often been told in school that the British people had stamped out slavery that we had come to look on it as something wholly obsolete - as until a few weeks back we imagined the persecution of Jews was obsolete. I have no first-hand experience of Liberia, but from all accounts I should say that slavery there exists in a far more offensive form than anywhere else, for it is the process of degrading a free people in their own country.

It is not the state of slavery so much as the process of enslavement that is intolerable: and it is worth noting that the European slave trade was principally for the transport of people already enslaved. That is to say, the traders purchased captives from the warrior tribes. Undoubtedly the trade stimulated the raiding, but free blacks first captured other free blacks and then sold them to the whites.

I have seen slave-owning communities in Abyssinia and Arabia and got the impression that the slaves are far better off than wage-earners in those countries. For one thing, there is no unemployment. In a country which is not socially organized on an industrial basis - that is to say, with old-age pensions, free hospitals, unemployment relief, etc. - the employer of free labour uses his workers on a subsistence wage for the best years of their life, and then turns them off without further obligation. In the houses I visited in Abyssinia the courtyards were full of decrepit old men and women, long past any useful service, who were fed regularly and sufficiently, and had no other duties than to prostrate themselves once or twice a day when their master went in or out. It is a matter of prestige to support a large household. In the old days of West Indian slavery the charge of ill-treating his slaves was one of the most odious that could be brought against a planter, and in many islands was tantamount to a challenge to a duel.

William Wilberforce was inflated by the true nineteenth-century arrogance of thinking a little local uplift could reverse the development of centuries. Slave raiding has from remotest times been the hobby of the warrior tribes of Africa: slave ownership has been one of the postulates of every civilization. British wealth and British sentiment were strong enough to upset a system which, like any other, had abuses but also many redeeming virtues, but British intelligence was not up to anticipating the problem it created.

The sunbeam said, ‘Be happy.’ (updated)

Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, 2009









pics found at bbc news online

Is it just me? Or...

Clarke on work

He that would thrive
Must rise at five;
He that hath thriven
May lie till seven.

John Clarke, Paraemiologia Anglo-Latina

Schumacher on work

I’ve lately been reading a lot of Distributist works and somewhat in line with that study I’ve just begun reading a little book, ‘Good Work’ by E.F. Schumacher, author of ‘Small is Beautiful’. It consists of the texts of several talks he gave in America in the mid seventies about the role of work in our lives.

In the prologue he makes the striking point that despite the centrality of work in our lives few politics, sociology or even economics textbooks include a theory of work as one of their basic elements. This certainly is a curious omission, and I think the “system’s” givens are often the things we should most urgently examine, generally they turn out to serve a few people’s interests at the expense of the many.

Schumacher goes on to provide his own theory of work, it’s much like the Distributists’ and it’s one with which I agree. He identifies three purposes to human work: to produce necessary and useful goods and services; to enable us to use and develop our skills and interests; and to serve and collaborate with other people so as to find community and fellowship. Very few are lucky enough to be able to tick all three boxes, sadly.

A Great day in Belfast!

In most of the coverage of the Belfast uprising the word ‘racist’ crops up several times, but however the Romanians were treated they were not subjected to racism. The evictions were not racist because men can not be racist in their own country. Whatever a man thinks of foreigners is fine and dandy as long as he thinks it on his turf not the foreigners’. In fact the attempt to make a thought crime of a native group’s attitude to foreigners (which clearly is hostile and oppressive), because by definition it is ethnically focused, is itself racist.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in exile in Switzerland, the editor of a Zurich newspaper took him to a local election meeting to observe ‘Western democracy’ in action. When some of the speakers argued against granting voting rights to guest-workers the editor was horrified and apologised to Solzhenitsyn for the ‘intolerance’ of the speakers. But Solzhenitsyn saw nothing wrong. If those people wanted to keep their country for themselves who could object? It was their country, wasn’t it? It was the editor who was intolerant; intolerant of a people’s wish to remain distinct from others. Now that’s racism, and no greater racism exists, surely?

The zero-tolerance policy of the rebels of Belfast toward that form of racism should be emulated by all peoples.

Age of Treason

A society in which the basic principle of loyalty to members over non-members does not obtain, especially among the policy makers, doesn’t have much future; such a society is by definition no society at all. Yet Boris Johnson’s disloyalty to the British and support for illegal aliens is the norm among our elites. And illegal aliens are not just some random class of foreigner, they are known to have already aggressed against our society and shown contempt for civilised norms generally.

Boffins believe we have evolved a brain to deal with Gemeinschaft-type groups of several hundred kinfolk. Pierre L. van den Berghe writes that,

Beyond that kind and size of group, the strain of having to deal with people we do not know well enough, and therefore cannot trust, is of such a nature as to alter radically the very nature of the interaction. In the larger world, we expect ruthless self-interest and cheating to be rampant and to be constrained principally by the coercive power of the state.

But in this age of treason the state is an instrument of the criminal conspiracy between power-seeking elites and benefit-seeking aliens. As civil strife continues to increase as a result of state malfeasance, many millions of Brits will unwittingly turn to their tormentor for relief, giving the hostile state even more power to exploit and oppress us.

Young, gifted and White? No... but one out of three ain't too bad.

By chance I caught a snatch of the Radio 2 documentary last night about the anti-Thatcher protest music of the eighties. I really only heard presenter Jeremy Vine say that next week’s episode will feature music by artists who supported Thatcher(ism); balance you see. Giving equal air time to pro- and anti-Thatcher pop musicians despite the antis outnumbering the pros by, what? 100 to 1? will seem to many listeners to be proof of the BBC’s integrity and cause for celebration. In fact the stretch reveals something else: the beeb’s determination to present a seemingly comprehensive survey of political ideas while never venturing outside the establishment-safe right- and left-liberal options, all the while encouraging us to pick a side with which to stand, to get involved in the charade.

Half of the beeb’s job is to appear to the public as having no party loyalties and no political prejudices of its own; the other half is to systematically promote the establishment parties and the supposed conflict between them while excluding independent parties and genuinely alternative ideas. When they give equal air time to both sides of a scene so massively one-sided and unbalanced it only shows how mechanically the beeb’s commitment to herding us into left and right factions pre-ordains the content of its programming. In truth individual BBC producers are no more independent of the two-party system than they permit us to be, they just sit higher up the food chain. Like camp capos or Uncle Toms.

****

To English nationalists and others with an interest in racial issues the idea of BBC balance or producer/presenter independence is just comical, of course. I exchanged a few emails with Radio 2 DJ Alex Lester last year, his attitude demonstrates that point. The influence of the guys at Resisting Defamation can be seen:

(Lester's replies in bold)

Sent: 26 November 2008 04:37 To: Alex Lester Subject: Young, gifted and black...

Please don’t keep playing this song. I can accept the age-ism, this is after all pop music, designed to create cultural discordance between generations... but the racism? I can’t do that! You wouldn’t play a song that claimed "to be white is where it’s at" -- and you’d lose your job if you did. I get a little tired of these racist double standards.

---

> Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:41:07 +0000
> From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

It was a huge hit and a lot of people like it. What you are advocating is censorship. It is a song “of its time”.

---

Sent: 26 November 2008 04:49 To: Alex Lester Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...

I am advocating a consistent non-racism, the only non-racism that isn’t racist.

Censorship would be to prevent the playing of certain records altogether, I can’t do that and wouldn’t, I simply appeal to you to stop going along with racist double standards on your show.

---

Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:03:16 +0000
From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

So depriving people who actually like the song of the chance to hear it! There is a formal complaints procedure at the foot of this email if you want to go that route.


---

Sent: 26 November 2008 05:14 To: Alex Lester Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...

People who like the song would not be ‘deprived’ of it should the BBC become consistent on non-racism and cease playing it - ever heard of record stores? - but non-Black listeners would not needlessly be slurred.

The BBC is the censor, the gatekeeper; more than any other organisation it is responsible for generating the racist double standards you submit to, and complaining to the racist about racism seems pointless. I appeal to your conscience, Mr Lester: you would not play records saying the positive measure of a person is how white he is - we both know this - so why forget your moral standards and play “Young, gifted and black”?

---

> Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:20:07 +0000
> From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

To me it is just a song and of its time. It is in our central core of music. I will cease playing it if instructed by the BBC.

Thomas Carlyle has a dig at Boris Johnson

Boris outpaces Labour's Phil Woolas in the race to make England un-English.

"So, far from a financial burden, as some suggest, this new research has found an amnesty could be worth up to £3bn a year to the country's economy."

Mr Carlyle reminds the Mayor:

"Political Philosophy should be a scientific revelation of the whole secret mechanism whereby men cohere together in society; should tell us what is meant by 'country' (patria), by what causes men are happy, moral . . . instead of all which, it tells us how 'flannel jackets' are exchanged for 'pork hams.'"

(Two Notebooks of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Grolier, 1898) p.144)

Blissing out

I mean those very rare moments when suddenly a calm and peace wash over you and you feel totally, totally at one with the universe.

I enjoyed a minute or so of it this morning sitting on the patio alone.

***

Man is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it. Centre coincides with centre.
~ Plotinus, Enneads, 6, 9, 10 (3rd century)

***

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come: it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.
~ Richard Jefferies, The Story of my Heart (1883)

A Glossary

A useful glossary compiled by Walker Connor in his paper ‘The timelessness of nations’. Most active nationalists have a fairly clear understanding of these terms obviously, but it’s surprising how many people are clueless. I have heard it said that the English, the Scots and the Maoris are a single ethnic group because they all speak English, for example. Then there are the ‘English nationalists’ of the Witanagemot club for whom the English nation is made up of members of ethnic groups without limit - just so long as their individuals live in England.

The glossary:

Ethnic – derived from ethnos, the ancient Greek word for a nation in the latter’s pristine sense of a group characterized by common descent; the prefix ethno therefore means national.

Ethnonationalism – a redundancy, coined in response to the general tendency to misuse the word nationalism to convey loyalty to the state rather than to one’s national group; it is designed to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that the author is discussing loyalty to the nation.

Ethnocracy – an ethnically homogeneous political unit; it can vary in size from a small village to a modern state.

Gemeinschaft – an association resting upon a sense of kinship, real or imagined; gemeinshaft groupings include the family, band, tribe, and nation.

Gessellschaft – an association of individuals resting upon the conviction that their personal self-interest can be best promoted through membership in the group; whereas a gemeinschaft society is based upon sentiment, the gessellschaft society is in large part a product of rational self-interest (in political philosophy, the case for the political legitimacy of the gessellschaft state has been closely tied to the notion of the social contract).

Nation – a group of people sharing a myth of common ancestry; it is the largest grouping that can be mobilized by appeals to common blood (nation is often improperly employed as a synonym for state, as in the League of Nations or the United Nations, or as a synonym for the citizenry of a state regardless of its ethnic complexity, as in references to ‘the American nation’).

Nationalism – identity with and loyalty to one’s nation in the pristine sense of that word (see above); nationalism is often incorrectly used to refer to loyalty to the state.

Nation-state – that relatively rare situation in which the borders of a state and a nation closely coincide; a state with an ethnically homogeneous population.

Patriotism – devotion to one’s state and its institutions (civic nationalism is the currently fashionable, but confusing, substitute for patriotism; civic loyalty or civic identity would better convey this type of devotion, without misrepresenting it as a form of nationalism).

State – the major political unit in world politics; country.

Kenneth Clark on the fall of Rome

From Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (BBC and John Murray: London, 1971), the book of the glorious TV series:

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan't embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear - fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees, or even planting next year's crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren't question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed - it would have been better than nothing. Of course civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence - confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations - or civilising epochs - have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results or civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

So if one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted. And the first invaders of the Roman Empire became exhausted too. As so often happens, they seem to have succumbed to the same weaknesses as the people they conquered. It's misleading to call them barbarians. They don't seem to have been particularly destructive - in fact, they made some quite impressive constructions, like the Mausoleum of Theodoric: a bit heavy and megalithic compared to the little Greek temple at Nimes - the shallow dome is a single piece of stone - but at least built with an eye to the future. These early invaders have been aptly compared to the English in India in the eighteenth century - there for what they could get out of it, taking part in the administration if it paid them, contemptuous of the traditional culture, except insofar as it provided precious metals. But unlike the Anglo-Indians, they created chaos; and into that chaos came real barbarians like the Huns, who were totally illiterate and destructively hostile to what they couldn't understand. I don't suppose they bothered to destroy the great buildings that were scattered all over the Roman world. But the idea of keeping them up never entered their heads. They preferred to live in pre-fabs and let the old places fall down. Of course, life must have gone on in an apparently normal way for much longer than one would expect. It always does. Gladiators would have continued to fight each other in the amphitheatre of Arles; plays would still have been performed in the theatre of Orange. And as late as the year 383 a distinguished administrator like Ausonius could retire peacefully to his estate near Bordeaux to cultivate his vineyard (still known as Chateau Ausone) and write great poetry, like a Chinese gentleman of the Tang dynasty.

Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time, but in the middle of the seventh century there appeared a new force, with faith, energy, a will to conquer and an alternative culture: Islam. The strength of Islam was its simplicity. The early Christian Church had dissipated its strength by theological controversies, carried on for three centuries with incredible violence and ingenuity. But Mahomet, the prophet of Islam, preached the simplest doctrine that has ever gained acceptance; and it gave to his followers the invincible solidarity that had once directed the Roman legions. In a miraculously short time - about fifty years - the classical world was overrun. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky.

More on Mullard

In my last post I quoted Professor Chris Mullard, then a radical Black activist now a radical Black activist member of the establishment, on what would happen should White Britain not cede power to people like himself:

The battle will be a bloody one. Black and White will have no choice. The liberals… will be caught in the middle. In the end they too will have no choice - they will have to side with black or white…

Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment, which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street-fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting. Critics will argue smugly that this cannot possibly happen here. Most of them will be white, blind to what is already happening, wrapped in cocoons of isolation and utopian dreams of multi-racialism, confident that white is might.

To these I say ‘Watch out Whitey, nigger goin’ to get you!’

***

Here is another statement by Mullard:

‘...we … reject the white myths about ourselves - we are not lazy; we do not live off the dole; we do not breed like rabbits; we are not the cause of this country’s social and political problems; we do not smell; we do not bring down house values; we are not maladjusted; we are not educationally sub-normal; and emphatically we are not inferior or ugly.

‘Our habits, customs and values are just as civilised as anybody else is. We are beautiful. We are just as intelligent as others. We are industrious. We possess a sense of morality. The work we do is of vital importance to society. We are proud.’

***

If you have trouble reconciling aspects of the two quotes, perhaps this passage from Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’ will help:

“Monsieur … Madame … We’ve come to help you. Since midnight, you can see the handwriting on the wall. No more of those special rights you’ve always enjoyed. Or, at least, you’re going to have to share them. First, with the Third World workers, and later, with anyone else who decides to join their cause. The streets are full. They’ve already taken over. Who knows? In a few minutes whole families may show up at your door. And, like it or not, you’ll have to make room. They’ll pitch camp in your parlor. Of course, we don’t begrudge our poor, desperate brothers. The ones who break their backs working for you folks, the ones you couldn’t live without. But the rest of us (students, princes, professors, diplomats, intellectuals, artists, trainees in this or that or nothing—take your pick) “…the rest of us are men of taste, steeped in your culture, your style, your way of life. Naturally, we want to preserve that elegance and refinement that we feel we owe so much.” (Clever argument, that. It usually got them.) “Now, the best thing would be if we moved in here with you. Two or three of us, that’s all. Better to share with us—thinking alike, the way we do—than to be invaded by a bunch of poor, ignorant beggars, who don’t mean any harm, Heaven knows, but who just won’t respect things, if you see what we mean. Madame … Monsieur … It’s getting late. When the others come and ring your bell, you’ll really be much better off if they see a black face or two at the door. Come, let us take care of it. You go hide, and leave everything to us …”

Royal Agricultural College: Make us more like Brixton Poly

At the website of the Royal Agricultural College, a profile of Visiting Professor Chris Mullard:

The pathways of Chris’s career to date have produced considerable experience at a high level of management, organisation and the development, modernisation and multiculturalisation of national and international agencies.

His academic career (principally in the political sociology of race relations, education and development) reached its peak in the late eighties/early nineties when he held the Royal Chair in Ethnic Studies and Education at the University of Amsterdam. Since the publication of ‘Black Britain’ (Allen & U 1973) and ‘Race, Power and Resistance’ (Routledge 1985) he has been published extensively and provided keynote speeches at national and international gatherings.

But perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Chris’s passion, drive and ability can be found within Focus Consultancy, which he co-founded in 1986 as a multiracial agency, specialising in the provision of research, development, social marketing and other key consultancy services in the field of the social management of change within global and multicultural contexts.

Chris received his CBE in 2004 for services to race relations from the 1960s when he was Secretary of CARD (the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination). He recently resigned as Chair of London Notting Hill Carnival after a tenure of six years and he is currently Honorary Consul for South Africa for the South West of England and a Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Wiltshire.

He is a keen golfer and his other hobbies include gardening, travel and theatre.

****

It seems unlikely that anybody at the Royal Agricultural College really thinks the countryside needs the blessings of diversity that our cities have ‘enjoyed’ or wants our village fetes to more resemble the Notting Hill Carnival. Yet none can say so. Every organisation must act as though diversity is beneficial even though most of its staff know full well that it’s a nuisance at best. I wouldn’t be surprised if his colleagues and students quietly despise Professor Mullard; no-one ever comes out of a pro-diversity lecture thanking God for diversity, it’s all about making it plain to the White folks that they better just shut up and take what’s coming. That’s what is meant by ‘the social management of change’ and on occasion Mullard has spelt that out all too clearly.

In the early 1980s he was Director of the Race Relations Policy and Practice Unit at the London University of Education, the country’s largest teacher-training college. In that role he wrote about what would happen if institutions and businesses, public and private, did not institutionalise anti-White attitudes and put people like him in charge of race policy:

The battle will be a bloody one. Black and White will have no choice. The liberals… will be caught in the middle. In the end they too will have no choice - they will have to side with black or white…

Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment, which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street-fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting. Critics will argue smugly that this cannot possibly happen here. Most of them will be white, blind to what is already happening, wrapped in cocoons of isolation and utopian dreams of multi-racialism, confident that white is might.

To these I say ‘Watch out Whitey, nigger goin’ to get you!’

(quoted in Anti-Racism, an Assault on Education and Value, ed. Frank Palmer, Sherwood Press, 1986).