Jeremayakovka

RARE Video Footage: Stanley Ann Dunham's Last Breakup Before She Met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.

Something is missing....

Socialism For The Rich

First, attempted regulation of the rich.

McCain proposed, Obama silent on, mortgage reform back in 2006:

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If that doesn't pass, then it's socialism for the rich.

Bill "Red-Star-Over-Chicago" Ayers and Daniel "Young America's Foundation" Flynn agree that the federal bailout of the home mortgage lending industry is class warfare. Depends on which side of the war you're on, that's all.

Ayers (Weather Underground/Annenberg Challenge), from his own blog:

If “government is the problem” and the genius of the “free market” the solution to everything from health care and education to national defense and public safety, why are the marketeers in line with their hands out?

Flynn, in this uncharacteristically long post:

Bush's bailout embraces a perverse form of socialism that turns Marx's theory of surplus value (the idea that profits are theft) on its head by viewing losses as a collective rather than an individual burden. Other ingredients in Bush's Marxist recipe for solvency include nationalizing the means of production (AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) and embarking upon a class war, albeit on the side of Marx's dreaded capitalists rather than his beloved workers. It is socialism for the rich, which isn't socialism's antithesis but its flipside. It still socializes, making the debts of financiers the debts of society.

A Lifetime of "Resistance" Taught Him This

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
-- Mahmoud Darwish (1941- August 9, 2008)

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Update (08/11) - Afterthoughts:

According to the translator's introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish was well aware that he had been regarded as a "resistance" poet. Its reductiveness had annoyed him.

Most of his output, which includes editorial work as well as several poetry volumes, is unavailable in English and likely to remain so for a long time. A precise estimation of him by those of us not proficient in Arabic is out of reach. Still, one can try to be fair.

As a young man Darwish studied (briefly) in the Soviet Union where he began an acquaintance with the poetics of their revolution. Sacrificing his Israeli citizenship to do so, he was on the way to becoming a leading Arab (and foremost Palestinian) man of letters among "non-aligned" and "anti-colonial" trends of the Cold War.

Certain lines from Mayakovsky's poem "Back Home!" recall the bit that I know of Darwish's committed but critical work. One portion I can press effortlessly into service as a farewell. Fittingly, Mayakovsky began the poem on board a ship at sea, in no country at all. Also fittingly (and sadly), these particular lines, the intended ending, were cut from the finished version in favor of a more "ideologically correct" stance:

I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood--
what then?
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.

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Update (08/12):

He ended his life as a sad person, because he felt that what the Palestinians had done to themselves was much worse than all the injustices and pain they had suffered at the hands of others.
-- Hanan Ashrawi (via BBC)

More Midcentury Virile Thinking - Romain Gary

This time, from Frenchman Romain Gary who in 1970 published a splendid, sardonic memoir about racism in America, White Dog (Chien Blanc). In the late 1960s he was married to American-born film star Jean Seberg and the two were living in the Hollywood Hills. She pursued her acting career while he served as French Consul in Los Angeles. Gary shows Seberg becoming radicalized and manipulated by the emerging Black Power movement (caught up in what later became known as "radical chic"), whereas he serves as a jaded witness to America's and Jean's upheavals.

In one of several instructive passages, Gary cuts to the quick about Islam's appeal to black militants -- how it provides, almost literally, a fantastic cover for their antisemitism, their racism, and their anti-intellectualism:

I find the idea of an antisemitic black very seductive. I'm inclined to observe that the blacks "need" Jews like everybody else does.

This antisemitism is due partly to the comedy of Arabism and Islamism which extremist blacks play out in search of a spiritual elsewhere. Ninety-nine point nine percent are completely unaware that that the Arab conquerors were their ancestors' unremitting slaughterers, destroyers of tradition and the true African religion which was animist. They don't know that the Arabs converted blacks to Islam by the power of the sword in the same name and at the same time that they transformed the least resilient into eunuchs and sold their human goods to Portuguese, British, or American slave traders...

It would be unfair and unworthy to bear a grudge against today's Arabs and to cause them grief for the crimes of their ancestors, which at the time weren't crimes. Nothing is more far-fetched than to want to judge past centuries through today's eyes. But to go from there to seeing in Islam the incarnation of the soul of Africa means covering quite a few light years. When Malcolm X writes about white people, "How could I love the man who raped my mother, killed my father, and reduced my ancestors to slavery?" that nevertheless is exactly what he did when he threw himself into the arms of the Prophet...

One Lifetime Feminist Writer To Another

I will honor and "hear" you even if -- especially if -- we disagree on particular subjects. You believe that Barack Obama can somehow save our country. You are moved by his oratory and character. I am bowed beneath the weight of tribal sorrows and fear for our country and our world no matter who becomes the next American President.

Read the rest of Phyllis Chesler's open letter to Alice Walker (where you can follow the links to Alice's original letter).

Nader '08: Obama Not Left Enough

The left has its complaints, too, against Barack Obama. in this clip (comparatively) late-entry candidate Nader accuses him of "self-censuring" and "protective imitation."

Count on leftists like Amy Goodman and Ralph Nader -- two of the cootiest "old coots" around -- to tug and even claw at Obama as he continues to vie for the presidency.

Australian Woman Asks Right Questions Re Bhutto Assassination - Plus, The Thot Plickens

* Update (01/03) *

A pathological and bizarre script, no? Or am I missing something here?;
Irshad Manji on the exceptional leader Bhutto wasn't.

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As a supplement to last week's visceral, visual, and musical reaction, here's Pamela Bone in The Australian of January 2:

If the fact that she was a Western-educated woman seeking power in lands they claim as their own was not reason enough, killing her meant they could disrupt the scheduled elections and maintain instability in Pakistan, which would allow them to continue using that country's territory to train the increasing numbers of willing martyrs, funded by trillions of dollars from opium sales.

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Fausta continues to round up probing links, video clips, including a link to the source of this image:

Lesbian Tammy Bruce Calls Today's Mainstream Media A "Gestapo"

Via HuffPo, Sean Penn Muses Execution of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Mistrusts Ms. Rodham Clinton's "Poisonous Ambition"

[E]xisting law provides that the likes of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice, if found guilty, could have hoods thrown over their heads, their hands bound, facing a 12-man rifle corps executing death by firing squad.

In the same post, Don't underestimate the damage [Ms. Rodham Clinton's] poisonous ambition can do to this country.

The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

** Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Political Party Poop readers. **
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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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"Because The Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution Needs A New York Chapter"

Earlier this year the anarcho-pacifist Living Theatre, led by its surviving founder Judith Malina and current co-director Hanon Reznikov, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Here's a public reading of a poem Reznikov wrote for the occasion (hardly a poem, more like some well-spun "free association"...) which he and Malina recited at a dingy basement gathering.

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Almost 20 years ago on 3rd & C in the East Village, in a cabaret-style, black box basement storefront, I caught the Living's exuberant production of Else Lasker-Schüler's anti-Nazi allegorical play I and I. It was a night to remember. A high school friend, back from his first semester at Harvard, sporting first-growth sideburns and smoking Marlboro reds, joined me again in our native Manhattan. I'd bused in from Berkeley (3 days nonstop by Greyhound), having recently bought a $99 black motorcycle jacket and sticking to a still-pending "not guilty" plea for a minor charge incurred some weeks previously for civil disobedience. For two untested liberal New York Jewish teenagers to whom anti-Nazism was still the lone inherited pose of anti-fascism, I and I was, or seemed, just what die Frau des Doktors ordered.

The Living had decided to stage Lasker-Schüler's work -- a refashioning of Goethe's Faust as a condemnation of the acquiescence to Nazism --  as a musical. The musicality (choral more than instrumental) drove the play's points home that much more deeply. One reviewer quipped that Mephistophiles, played by a black actor, looked like Rick James in dreads and drag. Calling to mind Lasker-Schüler's ultimate years as a destitute German-Jewish refugee in Mandate Palestine, Malina (whose parents had fled Germany in the 1930s, little Judith in tow) played the small but by no means minor part of a withered, old, homeless woman. Barrel-chested and tight-fisted, under a single spotlight she belted out a sotto voce exhortation that put the rest of us more supply formed types to shame. (And, this more supply shaped type, to wonder....) Like a beggar's blessing or a mute's moan, it was a fitting theatrical gesture for the reigning grande dame of American anarchism. Since that time no cultural production I've taken in, other than The Living's I and I, has instilled such visceral resistance against the indifference, lassitude, resignation -- and betrayal -- which fascism starkly and in a way seductively imposes. Alas! If only I knew then what I know now about Islamofascism. If only all of us knew then. If only all of us knew now.

The Living Theatre is that most rare of anarchist groupuscules: people who (on their good days) love life more than they hate "the System." While the Left -- both long before and ever since that mesmerizing production of I and I -- has done so much more to discredit than to honor itself, I, me & myself confess an undying, wide-eyed admiration for much of what The Living has undertaken -- that is, envisioned -- during its exceptionally long run. To be sure their "program" (to the extent they have one) is unworkable and in hindsight politically suicidal. They picketed, for example, to spare the lives of condemned, guilty Soviet-American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they were for nuclear disarmament from the get-go. Yet it would be disingenuous to act as if I don't know that their je ne sais quoi is a permanent gesture of earthy and even primal exhilaration delivered with bullish derring-do. With that The Living Theatre embraces the world, all of it -- the good & the bad, the beautiful & the ugly -- in an embrace as wide as it is firm. And also loose. To this day The Living Theatre remains, somehow like (and somewhere between) both desire and disease -- infectious.

Long live the spirit -- if not the letter -- of The Living Theatre!

Further reading:
* The Living Theatre's web site.
* Judith Malina's Diaries: 1947-57 and The Enormous Despair.
* About Else Lasker-Schüler.

Related (indirectly): "Arrividerci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well"

Leftist Fascism Awareness During Islamo Fascism Awareness Week - Proud Danish Activists Targeted

There's the Left for you.

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Read the account posted at Stop the Islamization of Europe.

Click here for more info on Islamo Fascism Awareness Week.

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Related: Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (click link to order), now available in English, beginning November 1. Review posted at Telos Press.

"They Are Ruining My Life"

Palestinian-born Nonie Darwish came to Berkeley, California to tell the truth about the blight of Islamofascism (click link for video). The only visual media organizations which covered her appearance were Incorrect University and Al-Jazeera.

Yet More Historical Footage of Attempted Left-Wing Intimidation of Right-Wing Speakers

From a talk delivered by Rabbi Meir Kahane in Minnesota in 1990 (less than a month before he was assassinated by a future al-Qaeda operative).

It's always a pleasure to see Arabs in Minnesota. And I want to tell you something, with G-d's help, we're going to give you a lot of your cousins to come here, too.

Bear in mind that when they clapped they were clapping for the murder of three Jews.

Previous: "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Rudy's Rumbles Felt On The Left

* Update *(10/19) * Daniel Pipes clarifies his departures from the Bush Administration's policies in "Giuliani's Fresh Start": I twice voted enthusiastically for George W. Bush, am proud to have been his nominee [to the United States Institute of Peace] in 2003, and predict historians will rate his presidency a success. But presenting Rudy Giuliani and his advisors as Bush administration clones is nonsense. News magazines might consider doing some research before spouting off.
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A prospective Giuliani nomination means a commitment to continue and refine the Bush Doctrine, to pursue a forward military and ideological strategy against Islamofascism. Unfortunately liberal opinion makers are viewing this with alarm. Scott Lemieux at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED quotes Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Michael Marshall, and Matthew Duss on the matter. In "STOP RUDY" Lemieux makes a hanky-grabbing point about the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue were he to succeed at being elected, a policy that would kill millions of people. Makes me want to grab a hanky all right, and wipe a nether region with it.

Remember Noam Chomsky's October 2001 slander that invading Afghanistan would lead to genocide? Chomsky, it says in that link (scroll down), warned that millions would die within the next couple of weeks. I recall Norman Finkelstein's radio remarks in March 2003 comparing the imminent invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Yet supposedly mainstream liberal pundits think this way -- their talking points derive from the extreme left (and the Jewish extreme left, at that). Lemieux goes on to finger Giuliani's brain trust as the culprit in the persons of Daniel Pipes, who braves implacable Islamic ideology (at home even more than abroad), and Norman Podhoretz, who consistently rectifies the errors of contemporary American liberalism, most recently in World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. (WWIV reviewed here: "a bracing read, and a necessary one.")

Lemieux also poo-poos Giuliani's lack of foreign policy experience. As if Ms. Rodham Clinton has a competitive resume to put forward in that department. And as if her brief and undistinguished Senate career weren't made possible, arguably, by the prostate cancer that forced Giuliani in 2000 to stand down from a head-to-head contest with her for the seat.

The left's stubborn refusal to concede hawkish Jewish-Americans a place at the table, to consider the grave process by which they (we) have arrived at our convictions, has been and stands to remain the death knell (morally, if not always electorally) of the Democratic Party. Just ask Joe Lieberman -- and Rudy Giuliani.

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Previous: "Giuliani In San Francisco And His 12 (13?) Commitments For America"

More Left-Wing Incitement To Assault Right-Wing Personalities

Web site not only urges, but offers $1,000 to anyone who assaults Ann Coulter.
Found via Kevin McCullough.

Previous: "A Pie For A Pie Only Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Being Larry Kramer, Self-Confessed Left-Wing Mass Murderer Of Gay Men

In between bitter complaints and sweeping denunciations of Republican victories in the 2004 elections, this lifetime gay radical admitted his role in what Michael Savage recently termed "the homosexual dance of death":
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Larry Kramer and Vladimir Lenin:
Separated at birth? Perhaps. Joined in death? Definitely.

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I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know.
-- gay novelist, activist, and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer
speaking November 7, 2004 in Greenwich Village
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the worst of the plague years....
Which years? Early 80s? Late 80s? 90s? Which years were "worst"? What made them "worst"? When gay men were dying at the highest rates (by which time, refraining from promiscuity would have been advisable)? Were there "better" years? Or "less worse"? What made them so?

I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred.
A couple hundred. And how many did they sleep with...?

Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick?
What he means is: Had they already been infected prior to his having sex with them? If so, then he would have an excuse to not feel as apprehensive, or (Heaven forbid!) as guilty for having less-than-loving encounters and/or ones that no doubt involved semen-t0-blood (or -mucous, or -saliva) transmission. Encounters that involved, with near-dead certainty, HIV-transmission.

It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself.
What took you so long, Larry? Has your "normal heart" undergone a change of heart? If so, How? What makes your declaration of such a change trustworthy? When was it ever possible? Elaborate, mein Freund. Bitte.

Have you ever wondered how many men you killed?
Me? No.

I know I murdered some of them. I just know.
You didn't say, "kill," as in, "infect unwittingly." You said "murder," which implies intention, knowledge, motive -- even hatred. Yet with malice aforeskin, even circumcision is no guarantee of circumspection. The whole thing reminds me of one of James Baldwin's more cutting observations,  A secret life is usually a secret only to the person who's living it.  Well, Larry, now you begin to know what some of us have always known.
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From the same speech:
I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do....
Oh really....
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Related: "The 20th Anniversary of an American Killing Fields"
(David Horowitz on the  "radical holocaust" of the AIDS epidemic):

You will read many stories about the heroic efforts of activists in the gay community, to lobby the government for more AIDS money, and to care for the sick and dying. None of these efforts should be confused with public health methods for combating epidemics, however. What you will not read is a single story about those methods, or how epidemics were combated – often successfully -- for a hundred years prior to 1981, before gay activists inserted themselves into the public health system. What you will not read is how the proven public health methods were opposed by AIDS activists, and how public health officials surrendered to the activists’ demands for veto-control over which methods were acceptable and which were not, or how they then colluded in subverting the system that had proved so successful in the past.

What you will not read is any evaluation of the AIDS campaigns – mainly "education" – that the activists demanded in place of the proven methods. Yet the harrowing figures released on this anniversary show these politically-correct, billion-dollar campaigns have failed miserably to contain the epidemic or to prevent it from spreading into other communities, particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities....

Cody's Books Shines Spotlight On Black Communist "Revolutionary" (i.e., Reactionary)

Cody's Books, which boasts of being the highest-profile and highest-quality bookstore in the City of Berkeley, reminds once more why that municipality is often referred to, by loyalists and defectors alike, as "The People's Republic of Berkeley." Whatever its offerings, Cody's is also, and always has been, a part-time intellectual rape room where genuine liberals are forced, willy-nilly, to copulate mentally with some of the most strident, most committed anti-American writers.

Fortunately, the changing nature of bookselling and Internet-era information distribution last year forced the original Cody's location -- a few blocks from the UC campus and, literally, a stone's throw from People's Park (right) -- to shut its doors for good after being in business for 50 years. I attended my share of left-wing author's events at the old Cody's, beginning with Rita Mae Brown in 1988 and ending, in 2006, with "Weatherson" Chavista, Chesa Boudin. (At the latter event I sat a just few feet away from Boudin's silver-spoon, earring-sporting, terrorist foster father, Bill Ayers.) Cody's has neither burned out nor faded away, however. In fact it has re-emerged in Berkeley's chic shopping center over on Fourth Street.

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This Saturday evening Cody's Fourth Street will host Nelson Peery (below), an otherwise obscure Black Communist who has a new memoir out. You probably have never heard of Nelson Peery, but that's no reason to continue to ignore him. For obscurity is no measure of the impact an individual or organization may have, not when the individual or organization, by definition, relies on stealth tactics to patiently and ruthlessly "bore from within." Then again, given that "these days being a conservative is cool," let's not hesitate to credit Communists like Peery with the other meaning of "bore"....
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With a CV that includes the following:

* Communist Party USA

* Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Revolutionary Party

* Communist League

* Communist Labor Party

* League of Revolutionaries for a New America
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Nelson Peery is a grizzled poster child for a public relations campaign on behalf of a Paul Robeson/Joseph Stalin-brand of American Communist Viagra. Or should I say on behalf of prostate ("pro-state") cancer...? For unlike other Communists from previous generations who were made the profitable career move to, as the postmodernists say, "work within structures," Peery has remained an unrepentant, itinerant radical.

And Cody's plays it to the hilt. From its email announcement:

"Why am I who never harmed anyone, mistreated, segregated, assigned an unequal place in a country that promises equality?” Nelson Peery asks this question upon returning home to Minneapolis from fighting in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II....

“As I learned the truth,” Peery realizes in the face of rising tides of racist violence, “I became a communist, for I could do nothing else.”
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. There you have it, straight from the Trojan horse's mouth: will-to-power, nihilism, and a bald-faced lie dressed in confessional clothing. If there truly was nothing else to do, how come the civil rights movement wasn't a Communist movement through and through? That's what its opponents -- Democrats, Republicans, and American Nazis alike -- alleged. Is Peery saying that those 60s reactionaries were right all along? That's his implication which, although absurd, is not without some basis in fact. For the complicated history of that era teaches that certain activists in the civil rights movement (although surpassed for the most part in influence by "anti-anti-Communist" New Left activists) either were Communists or had had tangental Communist ties -- including Rosa Parks.
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. Don't fall for it, Gentle Reader! That single sentence -- featured by Cody's Fourth Street to promote their anti-American author -- belies the pettiness, not greatness, of Peery's vision, and the stinginess, not generosity, of his spirit. We're all forged by the battles of our first adulthood, no matter what the battles and no matter what side we're on. Yet only certain of us re-temper ourselves by adding new elements to the alloy. Why does Peery advertise himself as if he's still living in 1946? Because he is. Committed to an antiquated, ideological segregation from the American mainstream, he understands reform only as a postponement of and, at the same time, a provocation for some dialectical advance toward "the Revolution." Peery can only spit in the face of the patriotic, liberal reforms -- hard-won by black and white alike -- of the post-war civil rights era. He can only spit in the face of the hard-fought reforms that remain to be won on the guilt-ridden, and unfinished, matter of race in America. Because Communists don't have dreams; instead they infiltrate other people's dreams, corrupting them so that they always end in nightmares.

In the post-civil rights, post-9/11 era, Free thinkers of the world, unite! -- unite against Nelson Peery and all other left-over, left-wing reactionaries.

A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb

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Well, at least it's a fruit pie.
-- Anita Bryant

This 1977 clip of two four gay activists hurling a cream pie in Anita Bryant's face is the earliest instance of which I am aware where a cream pie has been used (to attempt) to humiliate and silence a right-wing political personality and to quash free speech as we know it.

The "legend" lives on:

* Gay.com calls it "a historic document of political strategy." Riiight.
* "Fringe" theater show Pie Face melodramatizes it ad nauseam.
* "[I]n addition to pie parties throughout the gay neighborhoods of the city that evening, people took a moment of silence and bowed down and prayed to the new holy spot in the East, Des Moines, a new, gay Mecca."
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In the years leading up to the emergence, post-Stonewall, of radical gay activism, "anti-establishment" activists had innovated ways of using props for aggressive, agit-prop street theater. Father Philip Berrigan, apostle of the Catholic Left and convicted felon, protested American commitment to a free Vietnam by trespassing on private and government property and stealing and setting fire to draft records. Frequently he poured blood on his target of choice. (Left, Berrigan pours napalm on draft records, May 1968.) Whether it was human or animal blood, and how exactly the blood was obtained, I don't know.
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One of Abbie Hoffman's most noted stunts was to "nominate" a pig as for president outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. (Right, Abbie mugs your reality for the camera; below, the rather unimaginatively named "Pigasus.")

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In the Anita Bryant case, gay radicals perform street theater sleight of hand when they become ever more aggressive while at the same time seeming ever more harmless, even hilarious.  Their assault with a tasty weapon isn't just pushing on a door marked "open," it's ramming it -- left-wing radicals abusing Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by breaching all decorum and even commiting a crime. (Unfortunately neither Ms. Bryant nor her fellow spokesman pressed charges.) But there's neither redemption nor pride in the hilarity, only contempt and humiliation. It's yet another way the radical left tries to have its cake (or pie) and eat it too (or have you eat it).
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Left-wing pie-assaults of more recent note:

Coulter Horowitz (text only)

Fringe Left Filmmaker Makes Case for War With Iran

Left-wing "guerrilla filmmaker" Roger Greenwald, whom I first heard of when reading Byron York's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, has compiled a series of clips from Fox News Channel with all manner of talking heads warning of the threat Iran poses to the West and its regional neighbors. Greenwald's purpose is to mobilize the nutroots to pressure other MSM networks to slant their news coverage against any possibility of intervention against Iran. The funny thing is, he ends up of conveying a reasonable case for waking up to the dangers Iran poses.

Talk about a broken clock being right twice a day. Thanks, Roger.
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Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Comes to San Francisco

* Update (8/21) * What does BFW have to do with Glenn Reynolds and with 9/11? Veteran blogger Ed provides context and depth for an event that was years in the making.

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Yesterday evening the few, the proud right-leaning Bay Area bloggers (and those from a little beyond) responded to the call put out by Ed, Nina, and Cinn to meet and greet at Blog Fest West in "the Anbar Province of American politics," Nancy Pelosi's C.D. in San Francisco (CA-8). The last purely social event I'd attended there, a New Year's Eve party last December, had been less than meaningful: shortly before the stroke of midnight I asked fellow revellers for a moment of silence for recently deceased Gerald Ford, but ... strange to say ... everyone ignored it.... So this weekend I looked to Blog Fest West as a way to say goodbye, yet again, to all that liberal mojo.

The affable event afforded a few dozen of California's more linearly critical thinkers an occasion to match a face to a url, to swap stories old and new, and to float ideas and visions. The fleshy forms of over 20 web sites attended, with all told over 40 present. True to form, when bloggers gather in person, despite tasty food and tempting drink the appetite for conversation proves strongest. (Click here for a roll call, including links to other blogposts about BFW.)

It was fortifying personally to meet other survivors of 60s-derived radicalism; a true, NY metropolitan area post-9/11 patriot; a refugee from post-Soviet eastern Europe (who's a legal immigrant); and the LA-based brains behind Pajamas Media.

* * *

In one segment of Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore shows footage of a seemingly harmless little group plopped on couches and munching homemade cookies as they plan their next "antiwar" demonstration. With his snotty tenor voiceover Moore mocks legislation that empowers the feds to gather information on individuals and groups that have determined to try to reverse the American government's anti-terror policies.

To rip a page out of Moore's (or is it Karl Rove's?) playbook, Blog Fest West, by its mere existence, mocks the proposed reimposition of the "Fairness Doctrine" -- which would crush fruitful competition generated by the free marketplace of ideas in American media. Count me in, Mike, with these red meat wingnuts who are obviously (isn't it obvious?) the mainstream enablers of imminent Christian theocracy in America. IT can't happen here -- can it?
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(above, left) PJM CEO Roger Simon joins BFW impresarios Cinn, Nina, and Ed in indoctrinating attendees with blind hatred. Says Nina: If you can't stand the hate, get out of the blogosphere!

(above, right) Diversity of opinion über alles - Bwahahahaha!

(below, left) Grim, fanatic conspiracists swallow right-wing propaganda hook, line, and sinker: Cinnamon's evil clone monitors the scene; the tall guy is ready to rumble; Mickey Kaus breaks ranks to mug for the camera; and lookie there, Karl Rove did show up after all! [pic doctored to protect the guilty]

(below, right) The Fedora Has Landed: Cinnamon delights as Roger picks a raffle winner. Be afraid, be very afraid.
 

He Don't Fight For The Little Man, He Fights For Himself

Intellectual Punk Speaks Up For Subject of Hillary Rodham's Thesis

* Update (08/21) * Michelle Malkin plugs Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up

Regarding Hillary's thesis Nick Masesso, who wrote the deservedly obscure Walking the Midway In Purgatory (an incoherent, intellectually violent reminiscence of growing up in the 1960s), emails:

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We all started with Saul Alinsky. He and men like Studs Terkle [sic] taught us how to organize. Without them we'd have had no labor movement, no Teamsters and thus no middle class, ergo no america [sic]. Groking Saul doesent [sic] mean anything. There is only what we do.

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There is only what we do is a line Nick borrows from Aristotle on the formation of character, on excellence as habit. Yes, there is only what we do. Here There is only what we do is the amorality of those who have never given up on letting "the 60s" be their excuse for mediocrity perpetrated in the name of "protest" or "art" or "radicalism." For mediocrity can be a habit, moral equivalency can be a habit, evil can be a habit. In Nick's grubby hands the phrase becomes Nothing works so anything goes. It's what he had in mind last September when he equated me waving an American flag with shouting "Allahu akbar." That's neither a reasoning nor a reckoning with history or one's own life. It's a failure to reason and a failure to reckon (which may be my main complaint with the Clintons.)

Does Nick include Hillary Rodham in his pronoun We? Was she, is she, a "sister in struggle"? A struggle against what? and for what? Hillary Rodham was clearly fascinated American radicalism. The story of the rest of her career is the story of how, exactly, she has reasoned and reckoned with her fascination -- in her case, to what extent her manipulation of American radicalism has been her means to political power.

There is always more than There is only what we do.

Excerpts From Hillary's Wellesley Thesis, "THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT... An Analysis of the Alinsky Model"

If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory.
-- Hillary D. Rodham
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* Updates *

Welcome, Free Republic & Pajamas Media readers.
Read Dymphna's "Open Letter to Hillary Rodham": When you were writing your thesis, I was living within walking distance of your dorm....
View or download the entire thesis here. And for pete's sake, people, after you've decided you're going to comment on it, remember the difference between a push broom and a fine-toothed comb. (Use both, but remember the difference.)
  New analyses from Edward Cline and Andrew Waldman.
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If what I have received is a true and accurate copy, then here is one of the most anticipated revelations yet of the 2008 presidential election: Hillary Rodham's 1969 senior thesis at Wellesley College.

Back in 1993, shortly after she acceded to the role of First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband requested that Wellesley guard her thesis from public scrutiny -- a request to which the college administration assented. Since then efforts to gain access to "THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT" have proven less than successful. If what I have received is, however, a true and accurate copy, then public access to the Democratic presidential candidate's initial intellectual formation has finally arrived.
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The nearly 100-page inquiry into the thought and activism of radical leftwing organizer Saul Alinsky can be considered, until proven otherwise, young Ms. Rodham's first complete set of intellectual fingerprints -- her first carbon (her first carbon copy, that is) intellectual footprint. Depending on how capably readers evaluate the 1969 document and trace its influence, "THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT" might prove one of the most authoritative standards by which to  judge Hillary Rodham Clinton's subsequent record -- her professional, political, and even personal record.

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Below are some excerpts, Gentle Reader, so that you may begin to take a better measure of Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

Themes that emerge include:
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* a lifelong dedication to fashioning a new American radicalism by braiding together previous strains of political protest and philosophy in a bid to accumulate power (power -- which Alinsky terms the very essence of life) (pp. 4-7);

* cynically cloaking self-interest beneath an external show of morality, all the while expecting redemption through a radical faith in the eventual manifestation of the goodness of man (p. 10);

* conflation of the rule of American democracy with the realization of egalitarian -- even socialist and revolutionary -- agendas (pp. 10-11);

* a need for rethinking the idea of community* and devising new strategies to achieve democratic equality (p. 65); and

* commitment to the eradication of powerless poverty and the injection of meaning into affluence. [Alinsky's] new aspect, national planning, derives from the necessity of entrusting social change to institutions, specifically the United States Government (p. 73).

*: Communitarian theorist Amitai Etzioni, along with Bill Clinton the subject of that link, is referenced on p.65 of the thesis
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Related: Fausta's Blog's
"Hillary's Stripes On Parade Again - In the '60s, A Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out In Letters"

JMK's entire "Hillary Watch" category, including:
"Southpaw Hillary Throws A Sucker Punch" and
"C'mon, Hillary, It's ... Chinatown"

Also, please vote for Jeremayakovka for Best Political Blog. Thanks!

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"Acknowledgements":

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"Table of Contents":

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From "Chapter I" (9 images):

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From "Chapter IV" (2 images):

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From "Chapter V" (3 images):
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# # #

Lee Kaplan's Big Legal Victory

Earlier this week Cinnamon Stillwell kindly introduced me to Lee Kaplan (right). It was an honor to meet Lee who, as national Director of the pro-Israel non-profit DAFKA and a leading activist at Stop the ISM, is one of Israel's most intrepid defenders in America. He routinely attends and, as necessary, infiltrates the rallies and recruitment sessions of the most intransigent "pro-Palestinian" organizations on U.S. soil. (Click here for an extensive online bibliography of Lee's writing.) A significant number of these organization operate or are based on certain multicultural indoctrination facilities, also known as elite American college campuses.

In retaliation for his dedicated reportage, a little over a year ago he became the target of personal harassment and online libel by a UC Berkeley student apologist for Palestinian terror, Yaman Salahi. With the campus administration washing its hands of the affair, Lee pushed back using other levers of the system. Recently he was rewarded for his steadfast and dignified efforts with a court judgment against Salahi, one which includes monetary damages.

Here's an excerpt from Lee's own account of his ordeal, "My Day In Court":

The Cal student at Berkeley took great glee in what he had done. In detail, he explained on his site how he had gone about smearing my reputation, something that would later become evidence in court. He also began interlinking over with other web blogs set up by other students and other people active in the ISM and even began sending out whatever false accusations he could to web sources, citing himself anonymously as a viable news source. Incredibly, many of the other sites printed his calumny. Even worse, one of his affiliates began running pornographic images of homosexual and other sex scenes and cartoons with my head photoshopped onto the bodies. In one, I was a voyeur in a woman’s bathroom with an Israeli flag on the wall. In another, my head was blown off and death threats were included. (It should be noted these are people who declare themselves “peace activists” and lovers of humanity. Of course, such people are also frequent defenders of terrorists and totalitarians overseas.)

Mazal tov, Lee! Your victory is a victory for all of us who care about Israel and about journalistic and academic freedom. We are forever in your debt.

Please go read the whole account of this cutting-edge tale of where freedom-loving journalism confronts the Amerabian jihad.

Related: "My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf And A Mea Culpa"

Giuliani In San Francisco And His 12 (13?) Commitments For America

* Update (07/25) : Welcome, Pajamas Media readers. *

* Update: Giuliani and Dennis Prager discuss the Democrats' latest presidential debate *

Yesterday myself and some other "9/11 Neocons" attended Rudy Giuliani's appearance before 150 supporters in San Francisco. The SF Chronicle's coverage, despite the facts related, showed itself again as a rather obfuscating liberal media tool ("Giuliani, in S.F., blasts Democrats as 'defeatists'"; H/T Dave R.). Contrary to what the Chron grudgingly reported, Giuliani's address was genial, relaxed, and substantive. He peppered an at times technocratic talk on energy independence with all-American anecdotes and metaphors, striking a balance between the avuncular and the authoritative.

To start, Giuliani pulled out a card with his "12 Commitments" campaign theme printed on it. Affecting humility, he said that, not being as competent as God, he needed 12 (not 10) principles by which to govern. (He made only one other reference to God -- during his concluding statement about what a gift it is to live in America -- striking a moderate but clear tone on a vital subject.) For anyone who finds contemporary American culture "dysfunctional," this campaign theme recalls the self-reliant 12 steps of popular self-help programs. Simple and strategic.

The emphasis of Giuliani's talk was not to "blast" Democrats but to set in motion an incremental overhaul of American energy policy that does not toe the "global warming" political line and is integrated with a larger strategy to defeat totalitarian Muslims. He referred to a "tag team" of presidents, from Eisenhower through Nixon, who determined to and then delivered on their promise to put an American on the moon. He spoke in detail about the untapped possibilities of ethanol, coal, nuclear, and wind & solar energies, introducing terms like "carbon sequestration" and professing his readiness to extend federal subsidies to businesses that develop these resources. And Giuliani insisted that there can be no success without benchmarks, examples of which he suggested. This is the kind of constructive (not destructive) criticism for which during the '04 campaign I turned to the Democrats and came away largely disappointed.

Striving for Kennedyesque vision and Trumanesque humility, the ex-Democrat Giuliani appealed, first to Republicans, and -- if the MSM would permit it -- to voters of both parties to significantly alter the economic and environmental direction of the country. Just don't count on the Chron if you want to learn about this.
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Republicans are going to have to work very hard for recognition of their leadership on where environmental rubber meets the road to crushing Islamic totalitarianism. Earlier this month I attended a talk by Clint Wilder, co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution (as of today ranked #1661 on Amazon). During the Q&A I asked him to identify, in terms of his thesis, which presidential contenders were worth watching. John Edwards was the only name he put forward (without offering specifics). When phrasing my question I introduced that Newt Gingrich had a book due out soon, A Contract With The Earth. If Mr. Wilder had any knowledge of this, however, he sat on it. My guess is that this influential author is behind the curve on Republican environmental initiatives.

Another notable moment was when Giuliani insisted on the importance of calling Islamic terrorists "Islamic terrorists" -- and on calling out the Democratic contenders for ignoring our gravest reality. For this the hero of 9/11 is now being targeted, as Pamela blogs, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (Note the heated comments in Pamela's post, btw.) For my part, I was preparing to press Giuliani to make a similar "commitment" to set "benchmarks" regarding citizenship for immigrants -- in particular, Muslim immigrants -- but unfortunately the Q&A time ran out and my question remained unasked. This is a question that has to be put to the entire GOP field -- not just to Giuliani -- again and again until they start coming up with answers.

Certain Giuliani supporters, enthused to see Their Guy in person, prefaced their questions with, "When you're president..." or "President Giuliani...." Yet when shopping around for a presidential candidate we shouldn't look for one to come up with all the right answers, nor falsely praise one who might seem to do so. This temptation is real and ever-present. Instead what we should do is insist that our presidential candidates ask the right questions. Asking some of the right questions is what Giuliani has set out, at this still early stage of the campaign season, to do.

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From time to time my "9/11 Neocon" comrades and I checked over our shoulders in case any camouflaged Code Pinkos might pop up and pull any stunts. Turns out we weren't far off the mark: that day they were bare-breastedly besieging Hillary's brand new local headquarters.

Afterwards some of us went out for eats at The Sabra Grill, San Francisco's premier (probably only) glatt kosher downtown restaurant. Because we'd been spared the Code Pinko prank, our appetites fortunately were in good form.

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Before Joseph McCarthy, There Was Robert Stripling

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have.
-- blogger "Fjordman," posted at Gates of Vienna

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Before there was Joseph McCarthy there was Robert Stripling.

The chapter whose excerpts appear at the end of this post is found in Robert Stripling's The Red Plot Against America. The Red Plot was published in 1949, but has long been forgotten due to the liberal memory hole that dictates our popular recollections of that era. Having served ten years as Chief Investigator of the bipartisan House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Stripling provided a substantive primer on the precise nature of the Communist threat against the United States of America -- specifically, the threat from within the United States of America. The Red Plot narrates HUAC's meticulous work -- names and dates, details and wranglings  -- which had been underway since 1938 and in which Stripling had been a prime mover.

With America touched by the same totalitarian trends that had been blowing through Europe since the 1920s, HUAC was the premier governmental body to wage what I suggest we  regard as the "culture war" of what (perhaps too hastily) has since been lauded as "the Greatest Generation." More to the point, HUAC was the scene of that generation's most charged political theater. Congress had created the Committee in the 1930s to publicly gather information on, primarily, American Nazis, Klansmen, and other homegrown fascists. Only later, as Communism's wide scope and insidious nature became apparent, did HUAC set out to expose the vast leftwing conspiracy of its American operations, a conspiracy propagated by both card-carrying members and fellow-traveling sympathizers. (Above: Robert Stripling and HUAC member Richard Nixon examine subpoenaed documents)

Then -- as now -- moments of battlefield sacrifice and triumph could not, by themselves, efface grave civilizational uncertainties. On one hand, in 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech demarcating the line between the free and Communist worlds. Beginning in the summer of 1948 Whittaker Chambers had delivered ("more or less by chance," as Stripling relates) damning testimony about the Communist cell that had operated within successive Roosevelt Administrations and even in the newly-formed United Nations. On the other hand, that same fall breakaway Democrat Henry Wallace's presidential campaign with the "Progressive Party," which fronted for the American Communist Party, had received over 1.1 million votes (more than half, not surprisingly, coming from New York and California). Similar to today's neoconservative priorities -- of overhauling post-Cold War American attitudes to one-time geopolitical partners such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian Authority, and the Saudi royal family -- Stripling sensed, during his own era of unsettling realignments, a gap in our discourse vis-a-vis Communism. And he raced to fill it.

Note well that when The Red Plot was being written, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was still just a blip on the national radar. Goaded, perhaps, by the force of Stripling's argument -- which voiced frustration at the many obstacles placed in HUAC's way, including those from the Roosevelt White House -- McCarthy went on the offensive in the year following the book's publication, delivering his famous "Enemies Within" speech in February 1950.

Yet The Red Plot Against America contains nothing that is "McCarthyite" and everything that is "Striplingite." It is a substantive rendering in plain, everyday English of the hard, often thankless, often vilified investigation into the American social fabric when European civilization was collapsing for the second time in 30 years. This work was undertaken -- transparently and vigorously -- by a small group of freedom-loving Americans in Washington, DC in order to preserve the integrity, viability, and endurance of the land Lincoln described as "the last best hope of Earth."

Similarities to today's fight against Islamist infiltration and subversion of the West, a fight waged in large part on the Internet -- and just a portion of the Internet at that -- will, or should, be self-evident. (If not, then click through the links in the "Top Shelf Reads" category in the right column, including the brave, trail-blazing online work of Cinnamon Stillwell, Debbie Schlussel, Pamela Atlas and more.) A revival of HUAC in our time, in spirit and perhaps also in form, should be on the table. It's a matter of hard-nosed common sense and good governance. My principal concern, frankly, would be not for the mission of such a federal committee, but for the mettle of the members selected (or who would offer) to serve on it.

Lifetime conservatives (of which I'm not) typically trumpet America's Cold War victory against the Soviet Union, a victory won despite decades of liberal opposition. Such conservatives have bragging rights, I guess. Thus Ann Coulter can pose for a photo at Senator McCarthy's grave and suggest, as she did at CPAC 2007, that student Republicans form "Joe McCarthy clubs" on college campuses. But bragging rights bring with them even bigger responsibilities. During our post-Cold War era there are many parallels to be observed and lessons to be learned from the "culture war" that was underway before the Cold War had even begun.
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From "Conclusions," Chapter 13 of The Red Plot Against America
[emphases and links added to suggest comparisons with contemporary issues]:

In this concluding article of my series I'd like to get a few things off my chest, things I could not say while working for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I don't regret any of the years I spent with the Committee, though the work was neither easy nor rewarding. It was work that somebody had to do, and from its seed has sprung two tremendous Government programs, the $17,000,000 [1949 dollars] inquiry into the loyalty of Government employees and, directly or indirectly, the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan....

But the House Committee, pioneers and forerunners in this work, at a meager fraction of the cost of subsequent development, has never known a period when it was not under attack. Vilification from Communists is understandable, for the Committee wields a tremendous weapon against them: exposure. Criticism from honest liberals has hurt the Committee much more. I know the morale of my own staff reached an all-time low when, after we unearthed the "pumpkin papers" which conclusively corroborated the spy-ring testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, President Truman repeated his charge that it was all a red herring.

Yet Mr. Truman emphasized in his vigorous Inaugural Address the very differences between Communism and Democracy which the Committee had been revealing -- through the lips of willing or reluctant witnesses -- for more than ten years. Labor leaders who condemned us a decade ago for suggesting that their unions were being contaminated by Communism have since reluctantly conceded that we were correct.

President Roosevelt made at least two determined efforts to wipe out the Committee. Failing, for the simple reason the people want the Committee, he demanded of Martin Dies that the Committee thereafter confine its inquiries to Fascist activities. Committee members who tended to regard Communism with the same cold eye as they regarded Nazism were signaled out for especial scorn by pet columnists and commentators. The Committee was forbidden to reveal, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the scope of Japanese subversion in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast. It is unimportant but relevant that I, after being instrumental in exposing the fact that Joe Lash and other pro-Communist youth leaders were enjoying White House hospitality, was "railroaded" into the Army. I quote the word "railroaded" because it is not mine. It was said by two Army colonels in discussing with me the curious phases of my induction.

The legend has grown and has been carefully nurtured by clandestine and well-meaning interests, that the Committee has ignored Fascism to concentrate on Communism. That is a lie, as our records will prove. As the one more familiar with those records than anyone else, I know there are still many Fascists and fellow scum in the country, ready to pollute the American bloodstream. All they lack is a Fuehrer. Martin Dies fought the Ku Klux Klan in the face of six-shooters. My father campaigned against the Klan when it meant that he must face political ruin in his district and danger to himself and his family.

The Nazis lack a Fuehrer and a purpose. The Communists have both, and combine the fanaticism of Hitler's followers with remarkable guile. They are irrevocably charged with fighting almost every ideal which made this country great. In event of a war with Russia they will be infinitely more destructive saboteurs than were the comparatively clumsy Nazi subersives.

It is not easy to fight Communism. Communism, contrary to a popular phrase, IS something new under the sun. Its members and champions, many of them misguided liberals, can infiltrate, contaminate and dominate almost any field -- including the pulpit, though Communism is by rule a Godless calling. Graduates of Russian training schools are the world's leading authorities in the practices of disorder. It is incontrovertible that every key point, strategically, in the United States has been studied faithfully against the day when peaceful-looking American Reds will be called upon to come into the open and fight for Mother Russia. We have shown through testimony that they are past masters at working within the warp and woof of the United States Constitution. We have seen Henry Wallace, their befuddled sympathizer, come within a heartbeat of the Presidency [the Soviet dupe and "spiritual window-shopper" had served as vice president up until three months before FDR's death]. We know from the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley that many Communists and distinguished followers have risen high in Government circles.

We further know that between January 1, 1947 and December 16, 1948, 151 State Department people were removed from the Federal payroll, 91 of whose cases were classified as "of acute significance." And that is only one department. Coincidentally or not, it was State Department policy which abandoned China's 400,000,000 humans to the advances of Russian-controlled Chinese Red armies, and it is the considered opinion of men like Gens. Claire Lee Chennault [commander of the Flying Tigers, which included the author of God Is My Co-Pilot] and Patrick J. Hurley that we may one day be confronted by many of these millions, armed and thoroughly indoctrinated [one word: Korea]. Coincidentally or not, it was the State Department -- admittedly contaminated at that time -- which sold Poland, another ally, down the river.

One of the chief criticisms directed at the House Committee is that we have smeared the reputations of good citizens. As I said earlier, I am not the official apologist of the Committee. It has made its mistakes. But whenever I hear anyone use the word "smear" in connection with the Committee's efforts I must ask him to name those persons we have smeared (of the hundreds of witnesses we have heard and the thousands of names introduced).

The name of Dr. Edward U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards, usually is brought up. Beyond his name there is usually silence. As I have pointed out, I made an effort to have Condon called as a witness in answer to his request. That he wasn't called, however, is comprehensible. This friend of many pro-Communists, who was not cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission to share A-bomb secrets at the time he was in charge of the Bureau's atomic scientists, was not heard because the Committee could not obtain from the White House the letter which J. Edgar Hoover had written suggesting that Condon was a poor security risk. I hope the Committee eventually gets that letter. I hope it hears Condon.

If Americans believed all they have read in anti-Committee papers they must believe we used rubber hoses to extract testimony. The Committee is not a judicial body and never will be by law. It cannot operate under the rules of evidence, cannot issue indictments, cannot hand down verdicts. It was established solely to hear witnesses and, from their testimony, to recommend legislation.

The Committee absorbed considerable punishment during its investigation of Communism in Hollywood, where the ideology has taken such a foothold that there are figures to prove that Party collections from members and their followers amount to $32,000 a week [1949 dollars]. It was held in many quarters that we had no right to ask witnesses whether they were Communists. It was said that a man's politics are his own business, as indeed they are.

But we were not asking for information on a political affiliation. We simply asked these people, by asking them if they were Communists, whether they were members of a conspiracy determined to overthrow this form of Government. The fact that ten of them refused to answer on constitutional grounds, knowing, perhaps, that the Committee was in possession of 33 Communist Party cards of Hollywood celebrities, is, I will continue to believe, most significant.

It is equally significant that ten of the 40-odd witnesses we questioned in the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case stood on their constitutional tights, and that in his own testimony Hiss made 198 uses of the phrase "to the best of my recollection" or its qualifying counterparts.

The Committee hears, by and large, a type of witness completely foreign to other Congressional committees in search of information. More often than not it is faced with subversives and fellow travelers who are superbly well trained and well advised in the incitement of public sentiment. The reactions of some members to their type of testimony have been provoked very artfully.

What the Committee has revealed over the last ten years is hard for many Americans to believe. The average citizen cannot comprehend that one of the top officials of the super-important Board of Economic Warfare was a gamboling nudist whose literary output had to be confined to the pornographic division of the Library of Congress; that his successor was a kind of male strip-teaser dancer; that pressure enough was put on respectable authorities to cause the shipment out of this country of more than 1,300 pounds of uranium products at the time we were attempting to develop the A-bomb; that the chief Russian spy in the A-bomb espionage ring was impervious to arrest....

Ten years ago Joe Curran, of the Maritime Union, denounced the Committee vitriolically when we tried to bring out that his union was saturated by Communism. In 1946 he had to fight for his life against he Communists he had nurtured. We have seen the same things happen in many unions. But when one of our first witnesses warned against that peril, [HUAC member Martin] Dies was called to the White House and castigated by President Roosevelt for picking on the CIO on the eve of an election.

Leon Josephson, one of the few witnesses we've had who was prosecuted by the Justice Department and imprisoned for the contempt he displayed for Congress, once said to an American consular officer, "I consider the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party above the laws of the United States, and I would do anything short of murder to carry them out." Many others the Committee has heard might have been as frank.

The Committee, as constituted, is not equipped to deal with Communism. Communism has brought into being new techniques and tactics never envisioned by the founders of our Government. It may well be necessary to streamline even our judicial processes if we are going to cope with the menace. Gerhart Eisler's case is pertinent. He functioned for 20 years in this country, carrying out some of the most treasonable acts imaginable. The most closely organized group ever to appear on the American scene was at his command. He traveled back and forth to the U.S.S.R. on false passports; defied Congress. Yet he is still out of jail, and travels extensively over this country making speeches under the auspices of various front organizations whose leaders are dedicated to the destruction of this Government. [He would flee the U.S. clandestinely in 1950.]

Committee investigators were long encouraged by the White House to exterminate Nazis by exposing them, which we did to a great extent. But when two of our men raided Communist headquarters in Philadelphia and seized records of great concern to the interests of the people, they were arrested on the orders of a Federal judge and the Committee was ordered to return the files.

The F.B.I., if left alone, could clear up Communism in this country. I'd trust my life and the lives of my family in the hands of the F.B.I., if no political considerations were involved. It should be an independent bureau. Instead, it is hitched to the Department of Justice whose top men, politically appointed, are sometimes guided by political considerations. As extensive as are the files of the House Committee (files consulted by 20,000 accredited Government agents in the last decade) the F.B.I. files are of much greater magnitude. J. Edgar Hoover's men could round up at least 25,000 potential Communist saboteurs in short order, if war broke out with Russia. Some F.B.I. men, however, have discovered that their most comprehensive investigations of Communist subversives have been ignored when recommendations were urged for their prosecution. We know, for these men have come to us for support, and so have Civil Service Commission investigators, State Department men and others -- their morales cracked by frustration....

Personally, I seem to have committed the crime of attempting to expose people who seek to destroy our way of life. It is a job for which I was hired by chosen representatives of the people of the United States; a job to which I attended to the best of my ability. It is not a very good job, really, for the simple reason that it is now unfashionable, if that is the word, to be primarily interested in America and the preservation of its liberties. Apparently it is bad taste to expose the fact that Government documents of great importance are being stolen; that a President demanded the admission to this country of Mrs. Earl Browder [Earl Browder: socialist anti-draft agitator during World War I; Communist Party candidate for president of the United States, 1936 and 1940; imprisoned for passport violations, 1939; sentence commuted by FDR, 1942; died, 1973], over the protests of the State Department, because he did not want to be embarrassed by Joe Stalin's questions; that a number of Government officials, by their admission or refusal to answer, have been mixed up with a gang of cold-blooded subversives; that choice military secrets, including A-bomb data, have been passed on to the leaders of a country which since V-E day has overrun Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Albania and most of China.

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FTR, like almost every single book that has been decisive in my political maturation, no one and nothing in our contemporary American experience pointed me to The Red Plot Against America -- not one friend (many of whom are former friends), not one relative, not one teacher or college professor, nothing in popular or intellectual culture nor in the MSM -- nothing except my own disillusionment with leftwing politics, and my consequential efforts to come to terms with their legacy.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 7) - "San Francisco Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"

Dear Lawrence,
San Francisco is here. Wish you were beautiful.
love,
Jeremayakovka
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Like a war criminal "exposing" past infamies in the service of his horrid cause, long after the fact, long after remorse or retribution or even right recall are possible, mumbling bumbling memories to keep from nodding off, let alone for anyone else's enlightenment (or rather, entertainment) or like a soggy, sorry drunk kneeling in his puke on the stoop of a church basement as the town's last AA meeting of the evening is wrapping up, last month the last big Beatnik left standing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related:

Before things went bad [in the late 60s], everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer [of '67, the "Summer of Love"]. It's so long ago. I'm looking through the wrong end of telescope. It's hard to differentiate one year from another.
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Here's the most incriminating gem Ferlinghetti related:
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What if we're all wrong?

- Allen Ginsberg (below, left) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
at the Human Be-In, Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
Summer 1967
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"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

Correction: Horowitz Did Not Publish Guevara in Ramparts

A mass email I recently sent out led with a quote from Ernesto Guevara's Bolivian diaries. Unfortunately, I mistakenly attributed it to being published in Ramparts magazine when David Horowitz was its editor. Ramparts did originally publish Guevara's diaries in English; not, however, at a time when David was editor.

The quote struck me as so prophetically ironic, so appropriate to David's long road and my own, that it didn't occur to me to fact check his exact dates at the helm of the New Left's most influential subversive publication. The "rough" of finding the quote in an original paperback from that era (with an Introduction by Fidel Castro), and of finding the well-worn paperback in a bookstore in the Bay Area -- where so many radical antics and crimes have occurred -- made the single sentence seem that much more like a "diamond":

The most honest and combative men are with us, although some of them have occasional struggles with their consciences.
-- Ernesto Guevara

Cuba Commentary (Passover Sermon)

* Updated *

Following is a comment that I just added to the mix at Matt's recent blogpost on Cuba. For a guy who doesn't speak Spanish well and who's never been to Cuba, I didn't know I could get so worked up on the subject. Must be my happy childhood memories of "Guantanamera"! Don't neglect to read Matt's original post and the other comments, too. (What follows is edited slightly from its original form.) 
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Communist Cuba has been a pet cause of liberals and leftists for almost 50 years. It has hosted the Venceremos Brigade from the 1960s to the present day, harbors extremist fugitives from American justice (Black Panther Party honchos Huey Newton and Assata Shakur), and indulges mainstream fugitives from post-Soviet truth (Oliver Stone, Charlize Theron).

The New Left of the early 60s backed the revolution there from the get-go. Soft liberals -- as well as many Cuban Communists -- were taken in by Castro's pledge to institute democracy. Lee Oswald used the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" as a cover to pose as a wacky leftist in order to assassinate John Kennedy. (In the opinion of many Republicans Kennedy was the last remotely honorable Democratic president -- to whom Richard Nixon and the Republican Party prudently ceded the 1960 presidential election despite having sufficient reason to contest and/or remain bitter about the results.) Personally, I was raised on career Communist Kulturkampfer Pete Seeger's recordings of the Cuban nationalist tune "Guantanamera" -- a non-Communist, patriotic song long exploited in the service of la lucha. In fact I attended the same summer camp in the 1980s which Pete Seeger had attended in the 1930s -- something of which I used to be proud.

Communist Cuba has been an enemy of freedom as we know it on at least three continents: at the first opportunity it installed (presumably) nuclear missiles aimed at North America, and it exported war to Bolivia in the 1960s and to Angola in the 1970s.

When la dictadura falls, there will be a vacuum of political leadership that will need to be filled. Hopefully that need is being addressed already. Yet the "culture war" as it relates to Cuba is already being waged. That is a good thing.

When I think of the prison that is Cuba I think of the description in Armando Valladares's Against All Hope of political prisoners being drowned in a shit-saturated sewage ditch under a baking sun on that Caribbean gulag aka Isla de Pinos. By comparison Camp X-Ray is a Travelodge (with room service) and The Shawshank Redemption a children's bedtime story.

It's up to the American and Cuban (and Cuban-American) Right to set the tone for this culture war, because if we allow types like Reinaldo Arenas and Wim Wenders to control the debate, we'll betray the Cuban people yet again.

- Un hombre sincero

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Let's see, the subject of last year's Passover post was the Soviet Union. This year it's Cuba. Next year in Tehran!

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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* (Update 04/03) * My dear blogbuddy Fausta left a must-read comment about Reinaldo Arenas's work in the comments section. Please read it.

* Fausta, with whom I sometimes argue -- but always patiently, carefully, and constructively (and therefore, Gentle Reader, instructively) -- suggested in the comments that Arenas's life and work are a direct subversion of the Cuban regime. Indeed. When it comes to truth, Fausta and I are always on the same side of the debate. And we always root for each other, even when we're on opposing sides of the debate. It's just that here I'm keen to push the empirical and analytical envelopes in a certain way.

* My (first) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police, whom I expect to pound on my door because I mentioned Reinaldo Arenas as neither a hero nor a victim, although in many ways he was both (and both at the same time): My phrasing is deliberate, and I own it. I don't suggest banning from the cultural debate the import of Sr. Arenas's life and work and death (by suicide), nor diminishing their potential contributions to it. As if I'm capable (or desirous) of suppressing truth! All and everything I'm saying is that his life and work and death should not set the tone of the debate.

* My (second) preemptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Lest you accuse me of being barren of compassion for anyone who suffers and dies -- so wastingly and so wastefully -- from AIDS, or for anyone who lives on after loved ones have died from AIDS, you need to surrender the calculating portion of your intellect (if only for a moment) to my sonnet "When Late We Lie."

* My (third) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Now -- does "silence = death"? Or is silence golden? (Hint: that's a trick question.)

* My (fourth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I've always got one finger pointed in your general direction. You'll have to guess which one, though.

* My (fifth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I'm happy to debate any issue with anyone, it's just that -- by way of some kind of neoconservative "affirmative action" -- defectors from the PC Thought Police are encouraged to apply. (Need more encouragement? Go read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy.)

* My (sixth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: The blogosphere's on to your devilish masters!

* Found a suitable "Guantanamera" video!  After everything, este viejo's still got his moves. Just like the Cuban people. Take it away, papi!:

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True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

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Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
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The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
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It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
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Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

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Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
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Open Letter To Matt Sanchez

The following is a message of appreciation I recently sent to Matt Sanchez -- Marine reservist, Columbia University student, and recent CPAC honoree. In my opinion his conduct since last fall, when he first stepped into the public spotlight, is worthy of the admiration of all Americans. With Matt's permission I am openly posting my letter here.

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Hello Matt,

The first time I heard about you was two weeks ago when you were presented with the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award at CPAC 2007. Congratulations on the honor and thank you for your commitment to our country. Then those tabloid stories broke. While I'm sure you are intent on putting them behind you, I would like you to know that they bring to mind issues that are important to me and, I expect, to the broader conservative movement.

You see, 15 or more years ago, when I was a very young adult, I too attempted to live "the gay lifestyle." This took place at UC Berkeley and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the gay agenda figures especially prominently. Unlike you my prime motivation was not immoral and illicit sex but immoral and illicit politics -- a clear commitment to a vague concept of Marxist-Leninist revolution. Yet like you I "wasn't very good at being gay" either. More accurately, because my heterosexual tendency was never seriously in doubt, I wasn't very good at being bisexual.

An individual's motivations for entering into the gay scene can be complex. One of mine, certainly, was to earn the approval of my political "comrades," almost all of whom were significantly older than me and gay or lesbian. By campaigning in the Castro for gay and lesbian candidates, by marching in the Gay Pride Parade, and, yes, by pursuing and being pursued by other men, I was offering a certain solidarity. Yet -- and this is the kernel of virtue I extracted from that experience -- claiming "bisexual" status affirmed my intention to exercise an empirical, discriminating intellect within what, I was (and remain) concerned, was significantly a conformist, mind-numbing, and hazardous social scene.

Please don't be fooled because I might appear now, at age 37, to neatly summarize those ages, both formative and deformative, of 20, 21, and 22. That time in the gay scene was a time of trial and error, of heartache and heartbreak, of knowledge and even some wisdom. In hindsight, I could have parted ways from it at any number of moments; for example, when I fell deeply in love with a woman (which provoked mockery and resentment from my "comrades"). Since, however, I had entered into it as part of a broad political commitment -- a revolutionary commitment, a will to power -- it was only later, when resolving to disavow those politics, that I reckoned that my "lifestyle choice" had been part of a much graver error. When the vanity of revolutionary expectations vanished, so too did the vanity of bisexual pretensions.

Compared to such a colorful past, my recent interest in the conservative movement is rather plain. With the West embroiled in an all-too-real war of survival against a foreign (and increasingly domestic) enemy -- imperial Islam -- we have yet to find the national resolve that will guarantee that we prevail. Hence my interest in our nation's ongoing civil dispute, sometimes referred to as "the culture war." Having thought about it, core conservative values are, to me, our society's enduring, renewing, and winning values: those of initiative and responsibility, of law and life, of conviction and compassion. As I would point out to gay and lesbian Americans who are convinced that they have no choice but to be gay or lesbian, core conservative values offer an excellent choice as to how to be American.

Let me finish, Matt, by wishing you that the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award remain your defining moment of March 2007. I regret not making it to CPAC this year, but assure you that I was, and remain, there in spirit.

Sincerely,

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* Update * Welcome, Conservative Grapevine readers! And thank you to John Hawkins of Right Wing News (and of the Duncan Hunter for President campaign) for linking here. It's an honor to be listed alongside such proven talents as Michael Medved, Amanda Carpenter, and Rush Limbaugh. Don't be shy about visiting my entire "Gay/Lesbian" category, which includes takes on  Anita Bryant , Ann Coulter, and Larry Kramer.

Arab Feminist Soft Sell of Hezbollah

Found this Warholesque portrait of one of Israel's and America's sworn enemies, Hassan Nasrallah, at the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women (under "War and Dialogue").
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The introductory comment reads: [B]y painting him, perhaps I can break past the media pop star, and try to get to know the human being who has come to have such an overwhelming presence in my life.

He's not a pop star -- he's a rock star -- all over the Arab media. And now he's supposed to be some kind of art star in the Western media? Unh-uh. Overwhelming force -- cultural and, when necessary, military -- is the only way to deal with people for whom this "human being" is "an overwhelming presence."
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More about the New York- and Beirut-based painter here.

Related: "Lesbollah", "To Nasrallah, With Love"

The West On The Ropes

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have....
-- from Fjordman's "Political Correctness -- The Revenge of Marxism"

Dishonorable Mention

In a new feature at The Nation (online), here's a poll for best "progressive" film of 2006.

Bring the Candidates Home, Now!

Abe Miller laments the lose-at-all-costs liberalism that reigns in the (so-called) culture in "The Sacrifice in Iraq and its Betrayal":

As V.S. Naipaul once said: At Oxford, in his day, everyone knew that English literature was not a serious subject.

Today, however, he adds, it is not even a subject. And the list extends far beyond English literature. We are a corrupt society, a society without honor, but not because of those who project power to defend us on foreign soil or those who bear the burden of our defense, but because of those who would cynically manipulate such sacrifices for the pursuit of power.

Yes, there were numerous tactical and strategic errors made in Iraq. I could list them better than any critic of the war. After all, I spent three decades studying collective violence, insurgency and civil disorder. If you ceased, however, to prosecute a war because of errors, you’d never win one. [emphasis and links added]

Nader Surge?

Dick Morris speculates that if Hillary wraps up the Democratic nomination, a Ralph Nader candidacy could follow:

Hillary has rejected setting a timetable, saying that it undermines our mission and encourages the enemy to hang in there, and says she will vote against cutting off funds for our troops while they are in harm’s way. If she continues with these positions, she will become the right of the Democratic 2008 field....

[If Hillary] appeases the left enough to win the nomination, she may run smack into Ralph Nader as a professed, overt, and absolutely committed anti-war candidate. In a race of Rudy Giuliani vs. Hillary Clinton vs. Ralph Nader, a dedicated opponent of the war has only one possible vote: Nader.

The ranks of antiwar voters could swell Nader’s performance far above the dismal 1 percent he got in 2004 and even above the 3 percent he won in 2000. It is not inconceivable that Nader could pass 5-7 percent of the vote or go even higher if he is the only antiwar candidate in the field. [emphasis added]

Reuters: "Nader Leaves '08 Door Open, Slams Hillary"

Forget "The Arab Street" Over There, Focus On The Arab Mob Over Here

Daniel Pipes was shouted down the other day (temporarily) by fanatically anti-free-speech, anti-intellectual, anti-Zionist Arab students at the University of California at Irvine. Atlas blogs it here. An attendee blogs it here. Video of it here.

This is the exact same kind of mob tactic that has distinguished the University of California and other American campuses for years now, even decades. The other day I referred to one instance from the 2000 commencement ceremony at Berkeley when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- representing the Clinton, not Bush, Administration -- was shouted down during a mass action instigated by a Palestinian student. To this day the student, who also was delivering the valedictorian address, is featured glowingly on the university's web site with nary a mention of the disgrace she brought on herself, the secretary of state, and the university.

Intimidation. Antisemitism. A university's seal of approval -- that's Arab mob rule in America today.

The Vast Classically Liberal Consensus

On our good days we "neoconservative" pundits and bloggers are on the cutting edge of reclaiming, redefining, and occasionally dispensing with political categories. If you like to say what you mean and mean what you say, you might appreciate neo-neocon's post about "Outdated Political Definitions".

May it help you join what I like to think of as the "vast classically liberal consensus." For without such consensus, any label is little more than babel.

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Related: Workingclass Conservative on Whoopi A-lot-of-us-just-know-how-we-feel-about-things Goldberg.

Related: Newt Gingrich on Hannity and Colmes, January 31.

My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf and A Mea Culpa

* Update (2/18) * Welcome Israpundit readers! Thanks, Ted, for the mention. Your feedback on this, or any "Second Thoughts" post, is welcome.

Arriving in this morning's email from my friend, David Horowitz, was this ten-minute audiovisual primer on the Iranian and Palestinian Holocaust threat, The Islamic Mein Kampf.

I watched it. The didactic advantage of The Islamic Mein Kampf is that it boils down into words and images the precise, deadly, and implacable intentions of radical Islam -- issuing primarily from Iran and Palestine -- vis-à-vis Israel and the United States.

Simply put: They will come for you.

They will come for you.

They will come for you.
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This generation, it won't be a knock on the door or a round up at the train station. Instead it'll be a dirty nuke or a poisoned water supply or more hijacked airplanes or missiles over Tel Aviv.

Learn more about The Terrorism Awareness Project.

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It's been a long intellectual road over the past ten years, and doing my part to inform people about The Islamic Mein Kampf is the latest step in what hopefully will be a long road to come -- a long road in a different direction. Here are a few words that begin to tell how I got from there to here.

Through the 1990s I dragged with me the remnants of the radical fantasies I'd imbibed while suckling, as a political babe, on the sour milk of Marxism. I actually used to believe that the imposition of a "Palestine" over all the territory of what's now Israel and Judea and Samaria was not only possible but the most humane and egalitarian resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I projected my own, American creeds of fairness and republican egalitarianism onto Arabs (without ever travelling in Arab lands or undertaking to learn, seriously, its history and culture). I studied the die-hard American apologists for anti-Zionism of the 1980s and 1990s, Paul Findley and Noam Chomsky -- and of course Edward Said.

In addition I read very closely Jean Genet (left), the most celebrated French partisan of Arab "resistance" to Israel (and also a partisan of black American "resistance" to "Amerika"). In his last productive writing period he attempted to elevate the PLO to the status of ancient Greek warriors. I translated into English "Violence and Brutality," Genet's passionate but intellectually indefensible 1977 essay in which he gave his poetic blessing to terrorism. Not stopping there, I took this sentiment to its logical extreme by writing poetry modeled after Genet's -- and also East German Heiner Müller's (above, right) -- fascination with the subject, poetry that effectively endorsed the left-wing, pro-PLO terrorism of that era.

That was my "revolutionary" intellectual project: 1) enlist my native American progressive populism to building an intellectual bridge between European terrorism of the 1970s and Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s; and thus 2) making and penetrating a breach in liberal Western letters and forcing the reading public to accomodate itself to this new radical reality. I flattered myself that I would be the avant-garde in print while groups like Hamas would be the avant-garde on the ground.

How did I accommodate myself to the murder of Israeli innocents, you might ask? Simple. I would just mull an occasional phrase from Genet, Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man.... or from Müller, When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you'll know the truth.... Like some little intellectual lozenge, it would reduce the irritation. For a little while.

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So, what happened? Well, I didn't exactly "go native"; I didn't, for example, join the International Solidarity Movement or start a family with a Palestinian woman (although the opportunities presented themselves). More modestly, I became conversant in a fair amount of Arab literature and film. I subscribed to Al-Jadid magazine. I bought and read the Koran. More practically, I became acquainted with certain Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists here in America.

By coincidence (and later by cultivation) I became chummy with relatives of a former director of the Arab Film Festival, and frequently attended AFF programs. Through a mutual friend I met (and briefly worked for) the radical National Lawyers' Guild and American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee activist Nancy Hormachea. In her practice she often represents asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Iran and Pakistan, although in her political activism she's a staunch opponent of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. By coincidence I was a classmate of Fadia Issam Rafeedie, the author of "An 'Apologia of Radicalism'" who turned her 2000 UC Berkeley valedictorian speech into a most egregious breach of academic decorum when she served as the figurehead of a mass protest, speaking "from her heart" in defiance against the commencement speaker, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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In case you're wondering, there aren't any terribly racy tales of idealism and disillusionment to confess. I think I grew weary, then wary, then scared. I grew weary of hearing simplistic comparisons of the Israeli occupation to Nazism. Can't you do any better than that? I thought, eventually thinking, You know, you need to do better than that.... I grew wary when one of my Arab buddies "apologized" to me in the aftermath of a Hamas suicide (homicide) bombing. Do I really represent Jewry and Israel? For starters, I never, ever claimed to.... Does he represent Hamas(!)? He never claimed to, but -- beyond this being an obvious instance of a young man's conceit -- it seemed to reveal a continuity of opinion among Arabs. It seemed to reveal that possibly there was a divide (or at minimum, some vital difference) between me and them that I ought to not gloss over ... that I ought to work harder at figuring out ... that he also ought to work harder at figuring out....

Something else that added to my wariness was my attendance at a handful of sessions of a Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" that met in the Berkeley Hills. A derivative format of the feminist "consciousness-raising" group of the 1970s (which, as Andrea Dworkin states unapologetically in Heartbreak, was itself inspired by Communist China's Cultural Revolution) this "dialogue group" was overwhelmingly attended by Jews who endlessly professed their good intentions towards Palestinians. Typically a woman would make a somewhat strident speech about men being to blame for the escalation of violence (which, though partly true, is not the whole truth). One time a native-born Israeli woman tried to put into words her dread that Israel would no longer exist. One of the very few Palestinian attendees would affirm the need to understand how hard life under occupation was, and then make a pitch for the rest of us to purchase Palestinian olive oil. No one, however, (including me) dared ask perhaps the most pertinent question, How come so few Palestinians attended the "dialogue group"? The answer, as a Palestinian confidant told me, is that nearly all Palestinians she knew -- for the most part the secular Palestinian Left, the ostensible "partners in peace" -- nearly all of them despise such "dialogue groups." The "dialogue groups" don't accomplish anything. They're much ado about nothing. Or rather, they're very little ado about a whole hell of a lot.

What demonstrated definitively where my anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian sympathy was leading was a telephone conversation I had with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh (right). Shortly after he founded Al-Awda, "The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition," I contacted him to suggest offering some outside support to his effort to secure for the surviving Palestinian refugees of 1948 and all their living descendants the right to patriate within the State of Israel. After confiding to Qumsiyeh my idealistic hope for a "secular, democratic Palestine" he in turn confided that indeed this one-state, not a two-state, solution was his ultimate aim. Here was a meeting of minds I had long hoped for, but it also served as a real (albeit puny) "little drummer girl" moment. There, clear as a bell, was the looking glass. However, I decided not to go through it, and shied away from any further involvement or contact with Al-Awda.

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Most of what I just described happened before 9/11.

Precisely how that day added to the mix I'm not going to get into in this post. By way of beginning to build an intellectual bridge, however, from Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s to neoconservative counter-jihadism of the 21st Century, here are select readings that have made a difference.

In alphabetical order (and, for that matter, in no particular political order):

Berlinski, Claire. Menace In Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism.
Hanson, Victor. An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism.
Hitchens, Christopher. Love, Poverty, and War.
Horowitz, David. Unholy Alliance.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban.
Scheuer, Mark. Imperial Hubris.
Steyn, Mark. America Alone.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower.

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So here we are.

If you're already informed on the Iranian and Palestinian threat, then most of what's presented in The Islamic Mein Kampf will already be familiar. No sweat. Please then just take a minute and forward The Islamic Mein Kampf to all your contacts.

And if you believe that Iran, Palestine, and Islamic war against the West are not real, imminent threats, then I hope you watch The Islamic Mein Kampf. Watch it, consider it, and pursue its implications to their logical and moral ends.

May it bring you into a Vast, Classically Liberal Consensus -- which, by dispensing once and for all with left-wing apologies for terrorist tactics and terrorist ideologies -- is the only way the West will ever thwart Palestinian and, as Alexandra reminds, Iranian genocidal designs.

When Ronald Reagan quipped, "We begin bombing in five minutes," he was joking. Ahmedinejad, Nasrallah, Haniyeh -- they're not joking.

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Related: David Gartenstein-Ross's interview today in FrontPage Magazine, "My Year Inside Radical Islam."

A Fistful of Hollers: Early Praise for Nick Cohen's What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way

Hitchens reviews Cohen's What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way:

Cohen started out trying to defend the honour of the left, and attempting to appeal to its better traditions. He swiftly found that this made him the target of the most hysterical slander, from people whose hatred of liberal democracy has a long and sordid ancestry. He then lowered his head, clenched his teeth, steered into the storm and embarked on the toughest struggle an old leftist can ever undertake: a confrontation with former comrades who suspect him of “selling out”. What probably began as a long essay has now metamorphosed into a full-scale settling of accounts.
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Oliver Kamm's on board, too:

I've thought a lot about this subject too. One of the reasons I started this blog was to document the convergence of a type of left-wing thinking with traditional conservative isolationism and reaction. Having read a lot of this type of material, I draw two main conclusions: the phenomenon is not confined to the political fringes; and it refutes the charge made by Noam Chomsky (in Class Warfare, 1996, p. 30, among other places) that to charge someone with being anti-American "exhibits a totalitarian streak that's pretty dramatic".

When Sparks Fly

This post is a nod to at least one loyal JMK reader, D-----, who can't stand Ann Coulter's reputation. (She says she can't stand Ann Coulter, but admits she's never read her. Whatever.)

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One of JMK's favorite pundits, Chris Hitchens, lights into another of JMK's favorite pundits, Ann Coulter, in his review of her bestselling Godless (linked at the end of this post). I happily own and have gratefully studied several of her titles, Slander, Treason, and How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must), all of which I recommend. I'm not entirely down with Godless, though. I browsed it in the store, but passed, not being hungry for arguments in favor of Intelligent Design (or rather, arguments against arguments against I.D.). I enjoy the many thrilling mysteries that come with considering both the theory of evolution and the myth of creation, neither of which are fact and neither of which, imho, have to be accepted as fact.

Few can dish it out like Hitch, an atheist who has made a career as a free-swinging Trotskyist contrarian. "Trotskyist" is a term I use loosely; in his case, it's someone prepared to tell any Marxist-in-power to stuff it, as Hitch does in a 2005 debate with UK MP George Galloway. And few can take it like Ann, a conservative Christian commentator whose satirical style is simply shock and guffaw.

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Each has acres of turf to protect, but also common ground:

Try sipping this single sentence, Hitch writes, and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too.

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don’t understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler?....

and

If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite.
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Reader D---- might agree with Hitch, although at least in Hitch's case he has read what he's criticizing. So, D---- (and every Gentle Reader), put your safety goggles on and then click over to Hitch's review.

Remember Betty Van Patter

All committed ex-Marxists can point to a signal event (or series of events) which usher in the first of their second thoughts and hence the beginning of the end of their radical commitments. For Whittaker Chambers it was two things: politically, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and, spiritually, screams -- screams of the tortures inflicted on loyal Russian Communists during Stalin's purges in the late 1930s.

For David Horowitz, son of Communist Party activists and an intellectual father of the 60s New Left, who today is one of America's premier public intellectuals, that signal event (personally, at least) was the murder of his friend, Betty Van Patter, at the hands of the very Black Panther Party to which each had dedicated many of their best efforts in the early 1970s.

David has written at length of the terrible guilt her murder inflicted upon him, guilt which thrust him into a personal, political, and professional "freefall" (his word) that lasted for several years. Yet true to his neoconservative nerve, he revisits her case from time to time, with special and labored force. For example, eight years ago he published a "Letter to the Past" in which he pled for justice for Betty and in fact all those murdered by the Black Panther Party:

Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment including the First Lady [now, junior senator from New York] and the Deputy Attorney General in charge of civil rights for the Clinton Administration. Both Hillary Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the University and stop the trial of seven Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley. This silence is even more puzzling since, despite the blackout by the national media, the details of the story have managed to trickle out over the years.

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Over the recent Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend (appropriately) he was visited by a little bit of hope that at last those responsible for both the murder and its continuing cover-up in the mainstream media and in political circles will be called to account. Hope, that is, in the form of Betty's daughter who confronted a former Black Panther who currently is promoting a book about the Panthers' "revolutionary" criminal exploits -- and who also happens to be a prime suspect in her mother's murder. David blogs about it here.

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Related:
"When the Chickens Came Home to Roost - The Nation of Islam's Serial Murders in San Francisco"

Heather MacDonald: Empirical, Atheist Conservative

From a thought-provoking interview with Manhattan Institute fellow, the conservative atheist Heather MacDonald:

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What prompted you to "come out" as an atheist in The American Conservative earlier this year? A friend of mine suggested that you might have become frustrated with the lack of a "reality based" conservatism during this administration, in particular in its attitude toward immigration. Is he going down the right track?

[Conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law....
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How exactly did you find yourself on the political Right? I recall that you were a liberal while in college, what happened that resulted in your political shift? Was in a "Eureka!" moment, or a gradual affair?

First I realized that I had wasted my college education on the literary theory known as deconstruction, being as I was then too stupid to grasp that nearly everything deconstruction had to say about language was lunatic and fictional. When multiculturalism hit the academy (several years after I had graduated), I was appalled that barely literate students were allowed to trash the most astounding creations of Western civilization before which we should all be on our knees. I came to New York in 1987, in the midst of a particularly craven period of capitulation to racial extortionists. Taking up journalism in the early 1990s exposed me to the total disconnect between liberal dogma about the underclass poor and the reality of their self-defeating behavior. I still have no idea how New York Times reporters can visit the same homeless shelters and welfare offices that I have and remain confident that the "clients" of those facilities are the victims of racism, rather than their own bad decisions. So I would say that reporting on social problems provided the coup de grace for liberal pieties....
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You've covered many absurd fads and fashions, from the banalities of teacher's colleges to the rise of "relevant" hip-hop curriculum. Of the various topics is there one that has struck you as an exemplar of all that is wrong with our culture?

.... [T]he most idiotic practice that I have come across remains the entire foolishness of progressive pedagogy: the insanity of having students "teach" each other (translation: sit around in class talking about the latest sneakers while the teacher-oops, I mean, "facilitator"--looks on benignly); the dismissal of knowledge as an essential legacy that a teacher must convey to his students; and the rejection of memorization and drilling as necessary to learning....


Further reading:
Why I Turned Right (book)
Heather MacDonald interviewed by Luke Ford

The Sanity Squad on Saddam's Execution

Last week at Pajamas Media four mental health professionals (and bloggers) discussed Saddam Hussein's execution: Neo-neocon, Siggy, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped. (Click over for some feisty exchanges in the Comments section, too.)

Interestingly, while all four are opposed to the death penalty in criminal cases, they unanimously support death in the case of the deposed dictator, mass torturer and mass murderer.

Here are some excerpts (I hope I matched the following names to the voices correctly, and that I transcribed the comments verbatim -- or close to verbatim, anyway!):

Siggy:
It's just a fascinating thing, you have people outraged at the execution and oblivious to the evil.... I am opposed to the death penalty -- which may surprise a lot of people -- but I am not opposed to it in the case of evil.... Evil has to be excised.... There is not one single example of evil that has been talked into submission.... There's a little too much "love" [pretended love from the Left, love for ideas and for people] and not enough hate.... The issue is our [Western] society that supports tyrants and despots that have caused such failure.

Dr. Sanity:
What we see is kind of a continuous pattern of history in the last 50 years of the Left supporting evil. All these people who buy into this leftist/communist/socialist [view demonstrate] a sad case of envy and also a lust for power....They have a real empathy for tyrants like Saddam.... They constantly accuse everyone else of having darker motives that they themselves desperately deny. As you know, we have a term for that, that's called "projection."

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Previous:
"REVENGE IS JUSTICE"
"Which Side Are You On?"

A view from Europe:
Oliver Kamm champions the rule of law, though not much else about the execution:

I regret the sentence and am repelled by the pictures of Saddam with a noose around his neck; and I see nothing improper in saying so, even though I am not one of Saddam's many victims. But I laud the mechanism of justice, impartially administered, that has rightly convicted this monstrous figure of a few of his crimes.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 2) - "You think I sing..."

Neo-neocon is definitely chillin', not Trillin. She waltzes across JMK's stage today with verses from a recent post:
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You think I sing a repetitious dirge
“Iraq, Vietnam; please let the two diverge!”
But here’s some news: the Democrats they urge,
“Oh Mr. Bush, don’t recommend a surge!”

And why? They say we’re surely on the verge
Of failure. It’s inevitable. A scourge
Successor Pres (a Dem?) will have to purge
As copters on the roof, they re-emerge.

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Related: Bill Kristol, "There Is a Way Forward in Iraq"
Previous: "Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - 'Jews Item'"

One or Two Second Thoughts on Anti-Zionism

During JMK's communist and then fellow-travelling decade of the 1990s, one lingering and consoling idea I sustained was a misty-eyed view through rose-colored glasses that a (pardon the expression) "secular, democratic 'Palestine'" was possible. Possible and hence -- with an iron-clad sense that only a Marxist, or former Marxist, can appreciate -- necessary.

Some fanatic naifs get "into" Cuba; I got "into" "Palestine" (or rather, FiluhSTEEN). At least I never wore a keffiyeh! No, I retained a minimum discriminating morality to know that solidarity does not equal identity. I was more solidaire et solitaire. More second thoughts about anti-Zionism later.

In the meantime, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a recent, straight-shooting post by Canadian journalist, blogger, and Laval U. law student (Québec City - brrr!) Adam Daifallah about the need to support Israel:

First, Israel must be supported. I have no problem saying this as someone who is of partly Palestinian ancestry. Israel is a democratic, pluralistic western outpost in the middle of a cesspool of tyranny and despair. [emphasis added]

Please also check out Mr. Daifallah's site, including the book of which he his co-author, Rescuing Canada's Right. He and Ms. Kheiriddin could be voices of reason in the Canadian wilderness.

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Nice to discover ya, Adam! Ftr, JMK aime Québec!  Jogging along the Plains of Abraham, dancing Chez Dagobert, and dining at this tasty restaurant on Rue Ste. Foy, Café Mille Feuilles: mostly vegetarian cuisine à la française -- it's win-win and yum-yum.