Dissident Veteran For Peace

In "Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland" I wrote about how European settler-colonialism, particularly by the English, was first inflicted upon other European peoples in Europe well before it was exported to other continents. This should be obvious to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of European history. Alas, it appears this is not the case.

Below is an interesting quote that speaks once more to this subject. Of course, I do not endorse Leyburn's lessons allegedly "learned from hard experience".

This use of the Scots-Irish as shock troops in the New World was quite similar to how the English government had used Scots settlers in Ulster against the Irish:

They lived on land in both regions that had often been forcibly taken from the natives. ... When the natives, whether Irish or Indian, refused to accept either the legality or the settlement, preferring rather to fight back by whatever means they could devise, the settlers fought equally hard to retain the homes and farms they had made by their own labor. They learned from hard experience that one must fight for what one has; that turning the other cheek does not guarantee property rights; in short, that might makes right, at least in the matter of life and land ownership.

Source: Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Greenwood, 1999) pp. 30-31 quoting James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 147-148.

Labels: Empire, history, identity, Indians, Ireland, quotations, United States, White folks

Here are few excerpts from Katie Halper's and Matt Taibbi's recent interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.:

Reed: Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality ... even those inequalities that appear or ... manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism … It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

Matt Taibbi: There's a line in her [i.e. Robin DiAngelo's] book that I missed originally: "I believe that white progressives caused the most daily damage to people of color." ...

Reed: ... the other thing I thought was just in listening to her was that an image that came to my mind was Viola Liuzzo, right? The wife of a postal worker, from Detroit, who went down to Selma in 1965 to participate in the voting rights March and to participate in organizing the voting rights March. And she got herself killed by the Klan. In the context of that, with DiAngelo, I thought, "Oh, so that's what she was doing, she was just trying to out-woke the black people." I don't even know what to say to shit like that, I really don't. It's pretty repugnant.

... I've been puzzling with addressing the question of why so much anti-racist discourse now depends on analogy with slavery and Jim Crow. And that's ultimately because ... Well, to be honest, because the political as well as the intellectual concern of the people making these arguments is exactly the same as the political and intellectual concerns of the defeated Confederates who established and propagated lost-cause ideology, the myth of the Solid South, and put all those Confederate monuments up because they were committed to a racialist understanding of the world for the purpose of undermining any possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class, basically.

That's the same reason that people making the race-reductionist arguments today can't really move without drawing links between this moment and slavery and Jim Crow. Just as the 19th century former Confederates were committed to a white supremacist narrative, these people are also committed to a white supremacist/anti-white-supremacist narrative for the same reasons: to keep political economy off the table, and to advance their particular class program, just as the planter class was in the 19th century.

... so my tank is basically full now from white people in particular telling me that I don't understand the depth and intensity of racism, and its effects and this and the other, not because they're violating a normative or an epistemic principle of mine, but because they're violating theirs, by the shit that they argue. They technically don't have the right to say shit to me. So why is it I'm the only POC that you can tell that he's got it wrong?

See also:"Why Black Lives Matter Can’t be Co-opted" by Adolph Reed, Jr.

Labels: Adolph Reed Jr., class, history, politics, quotations, race

U.S. support for partition of Palestine ... can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN's own charter.

Source: A "top-secret memorandum under date of October 15" [1947], by Gordon Merriam, Chief of the US State Department's Division of Near Eastern Affairs, as quoted in Evan M. Wilson, Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel (Hoover Inst. Pr. 1979), p. 99.

Labels: history, Israel, law, Palestine, quotations

'You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD. - Leviticus 19:28 (NASB)

From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus. -Galatians 6:17 (NASB)

In the Septuagint (Vetus Testementum Graece LXX Tischendorf 1856), the phrase "tattoo marks" in Lev. 19:28 above appears as γράμματα στικτὰ, which is transliterated as grammata stikta. Liddell and Scott indicate tattoo is indeed the correct translation.

In the Greek New Testament (Novum Testamentum Graece Nestle-Aland 28th ed. 2012), the phrase "the brand-marks" in Gal. 6:17 above appears as στίγματα. It is transliterated as stigmata and, according to Danker's The Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (UChicago Pr., 2009), is defined as an "indelible graphic mark made on the body".

Lucian of Samosata's (born 120 A.D.) De Dea Syria is another ancient Greek text that mentions tattooing. Section 59 of that work says: "στίζονται δὲ πάντες, οἱ μὲν ἐς καρπούς, οἱ δὲ ἐς αὐχένας: καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦδε ἅπαντες Ἀσσύριοι στιγματηφορέουσιν". Strong translates this passage as: "They all tattoo [στίζονται] themselves—some on the hands and some on the neck—and so it comes that all the Assyrians bear stigmata [στιγματηφορέουσιν]."

The Coptic church of Egypt is believed to have been established around 50 A.D. Copts have long used tattoos with distinctive Christian motifs, sometimes to their peril. According to Carswell, as quoted in Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt by Febe Armanios (Oxford UP, 2011; p. 208, n. 145) Syrian, Armenian, and Ethiopian Christians also followed this practice.

Coptic tattoo design print from John Carswell's Coptic Tattoo Designs, 2nd ed. (American Univ. of Beirut, 1958) via http://www.crosscrucifix.com/glossaryhome.htm

Labels: art and literature, Christianity, culture, history

In the current American context reparations refers to the idea of forcing people who never owned slaves to pay compensation for slavery to people who never were slaves. Newsweek recently reported the estimated cost of reparations, according to one 2020 study, was "$6.2 quadrillion as of 2018" which "divided by 40,909,233 Black non-Hispanic descendants of the enslaved, could result in a total reparations payment per descendant of $151.63 million."

And don't get any ideas about a discount if one of your ancestors died fighting against slavery during the Civil War. The study's authors have that covered, too: 

... some reparations opponents point to the federal government's expenditures in blood and treasure to end slavery through the Civil War as a form of reparations already rendered. This argument suffers from two major problems. First, ending an injustice is not the same as making reparations for its enduring effects. Second, more than 200,000 Black soldiers, including slaves and free, fought and died disproportionately to earn the freedom of the enslaved. The moral credit for this self-liberation goes to them, not to the federal government that had permitted their enslavement for so long.

With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris poised to possibly begin relocating to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and 1 Observatory Circle, respectively, next January it's worth thinking a bit more about reparations.

Apparently, Biden's chronologically impaired thinking has, shall we say, quickly evolved on the issue. He reportedly said in 1975: "I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 [sic] years ago."

In a 2019 presidential debate Biden gave a muddled response when asked: "What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?" However, by February of this year Biden was on board with a proposal by Cory Booker (he of not inconsiderable, say 45%, European ancestry) "to study reparations and make a judgment whether or not what they should be and what they should do". Then Biden publicly stated about two months ago that he is in favor of "slavery reparations".

Kamala Harris, the privileged daughter of not one but two PhD possessing immigrant parents, co-sponsored Booker's legislation. She also reportedly supports reparations when she's not hiding in the "study it" column.

It's worth pointing out that the idea of slavery reparations is not new. I do not intend here to go all the way back to 1865 and Special Field Orders, No. 15. Given its limited scope and purpose, it is debatable that the order was intended as reparations for slavery. No, my goal is much more modest and I wish only to go back about five decades.

In 1969, James Forman of the Black Economic Development Conference (and formerly of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) "interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries." These demands were in accord with the BEDC's "Black Manifesto".

As Jason L. Riley put it:

Civil-rights organizations rejected the idea, which the NAACP's assistant director called "an illogical, diversionary and paltry way out for guilt-ridden whites." Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington and was one of Martin Luther King's closest advisers, was another vocal skeptic of blacks cashing in on the tribulations of long-gone forebears. "The idea of reparations is a ridiculous idea," Rustin said. "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."

Rustin, profiled in this blog in 2006, called the demand for reparations "preposterous" and accused Forman of "hustling, begging." Rustin continued: "Furthermore, I don't believe that any black man in this country wants to be given a thing—just the opportunity to work, to work and take care of his family." Times have changed, Bayard.

Labels: Bayard Rustin, Biden, Black America, class, economics, history, Obama, politics, race, slavery, White folks

Roughly translated the text on the image above says: "100 Years" and "Fight with the Comintern for the rebuilding of the Bavarian Soviet! Long live the 100th anniversary of the Bavarian Soviet Republic April 13, 1919 - April 13, 2019". The sign identifies the marchers as members of the Neuhausen—a borough of Munich—section of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

One of the best books on the American labor movement I've ever read is the late Robert Fitch's 2006 Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise. Following Fitch's lead, a reviewer for The Nation aptly compared the book to Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.

Unfortunately, Fitch's constructive criticism of American unions was not generally well-received. It was mostly ignored.

However, the impetus for this post was not Solidarity for Sale but, rather, a bit in a fascinating 2006 book review by Fitch of separate works by Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis. I won't comment on those books or Fitch's review except to say I am on the same side of the fence as Fitch (but for somewhat different reasons) and he was out of his hermeneutical depth.

What I want to focus on here is his striking reference to the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic. In "Vetting God's Politics" Fitch writes:

Lerner's account of the Nazi rise to power leaves out some critical material and political factors — like the Great Depression and the suicidal division of the Left between Social Democrats and Communists. But even more significantly, Lerner blots out the not inconsiderable role of the communitarian Jewish Left in producing the convulsive reaction that Hitler exploited.

At a certain point in the upheaval that followed the German defeat by the Allies, members of [Martin] Buber's Neue Gemeinschaft group — like Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam — were high-level participants in the regime which seized power in Bavaria.  To understand the terrible repercussion of the 1919 anarchist coup, imagine if Vietnam not only won the war but invaded the U.S. in the 60s and, in the chaos that followed, a handful of long-bearded Jewish radicals from Berkeley seized power in California and declared the state a Republic.  Then, although a tiny anarchist minority of a left revolutionary minority, the government proceeded to decree a new social order; handing out a worthless currency as free money; establishing agrarian communes; and declaring war on Mexico.  (Bavaria declared war on Switzerland after its refusal to lend the new government 60 locomotives.)  It's likely that California would have experienced a reaction far worse than the election of Ronald Reagan.

In speaking this not-so-speakable (see note below) history Fitch exhibits the kind of intellectual integrity that helped unfairly doom him to a relative obscurity in academic and activist circles. There's a reason why Lerner's account left this information out and it is directly related to why Lerner's star rose much higher than Fitch's in elite circles.

That said, Fitch's characterization of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (BSR) as an "anarchist coup" is a bit puzzling. Apparently, some of the leading figures in the BSR, such as Landauer and Mühsam were self-described anarchists. However, the seizure of state power in a coup is inimical to anarchism as I understand it.

Moreover, in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (UChicago Pr., 1993) Benjamin Ginsberg more aptly writes:

Jews were also among the leaders of the Communist government that the KPD briefly established in Bavaria after the murder of Kurt Eisner. Eugene Levine was head of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, Gustav Landauer was its commissar for propaganda and cultural affairs, and Ernst Toller commanded its "red army."

Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller were members of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Founded in 1917, the USPD joined the Communist International in 1920, leading to a split with the majority of party members going into the KPD. (The USPD is not to be confused with the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) but often referred to simply as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The USPD was the result of a split within the SPD/MSPD, a self-proclaimed Marxist party. Many founders of the Spartacist League-KPD, such as the Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, also started out in the SPD.)

This is a complicated period in Bavarian history. As best I can tell, the sequence of events is as follows:

November 8, 1918: Eisner (a USPD communist) proclaims the People's State of Bavaria (Volksstaat Bayern; VSB) in Munich. Johannes Hoffmann, a Social Democrat (MSPD) and not a Jew, becomes the VSB's minister of education or culture (sources vary). Some sources say Landauer and Mühsam had formal positions in Eisner's government, most say their positions were supportive but informal.

November 21: 29-year-old Adolph Hitler arrives at an army garrison in Munich after being discharged from the hospital where he was recovering from war injuries. The following month he is transferred to Traunstein (about 100 km/62 mi from Munich) only to return to Munich in January or February (In Mein Kampf Hitler says it was March).

January 5, 1919: A general strike, led by the Spartacist League (renamed as/absorbed into the KPD in the preceding month) and the Independent Socialists, begins in Berlin. It will last about one week and in the ensuing violence 150 - 200 people will die before it is violently suppressed by Freikorps.

January 12: In parliamentary elections Eisner's party, the USPD, gets only 2.5% of the vote, entitling them to 3 seats. By contrast, the MSPD wins 31 seats.

February 21: Eisner is assassinated by a 22-year-old army officer, Count Arco-Valley (described as "a young Jew" by British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his book, The Occult Roots of Nazism). Some sources claim Hitler is photographed in uniform at Eisner's funeral five days later. The VSB falls into disarray and Toller soon takes over Eisner's position as leader of the Bavarian branch of the USPD.

March 17:  Hoffmann is elected by the VSB's parliament as the VSB's new minister-president.

April 3: Hitler is elected liaison of his demobilization battalion to the Hoffmann government.

April 6-7: A coup is undertaken following which the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Räterepublik Baiern; RRB) is proclaimed under the leadership of Toller, along with Landauer and Mühsam as cabinet ministers. Hoffmann and others flee Munich to Bamberg. It was during this period that the RRB, under Toller, declared war on Switzerland. Hitler stays put.

April 13: Hoffmann's forces attempt to forcibly re-establish control in Munich but fail. That same day a Jewish KPD member, Eugen Leviné stages a coup against Toller and seizes power. According to Richard J. Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich, the Russian-born Leviné is acting on his own, not the KPD's, initiative. He takes directions from V. I. Lenin (also of Jewish ancestry) to, among other things, arrest large numbers of so-called class enemies, seize privately owned weapons under penalty of death, and organize a 20,000 strong "Red Army" to "spearhead the Bolshevization of Europe". The ousted Toller, an avowed pacifist, takes a position in the new regime as commander of the Red Army. Landauer is also prepared to stay in the new regime but when his cultural program is rejected he quits.

April 15: Hitler is elected liaison of his demobilization battalion to the Leviné government. Leviné's repressive policies and inept leadership along with outside pressure quickly bring about chaos in Munich.

May 1: The siege of Munich is broken by an alliance between Hoffmann's forces and Freikorps under Lt. General Burghard von Oven. Shortly afterwards, Hitler comes out in open opposition to the recently deposed revolutionary government(s) and in what he will describe in Mein Kampf as his "first more or less purely political activity" Hitler joins a commission "investigating the behaviour of his regiment's soldiers during the two soviet republics."

Note
As another example of the not-so-speakable consider that on the popular, if generally unreliable, web site Wikipedia there is a category of articles on "Christian communists" (not to mention "Christian communism") and a category of "African-American communists‎". There are also 151 categories of "Communists by nationality". There's a category of "Jewish socialists" but you will not find a category of articles on Jewish communists. That category was repeatedly created and deleted in the span of about two weeks in 2007.

Thus, for instance, Karl Marx is not categorized in Wikipedia as a "Jewish communist". Bear in mind that the Communist Manifesto's primary author had maternal and paternal grandfathers who were rabbis and his mother converted from Judaism to Christianity years after Karl's birth. FWIW, Marx is also not categorized with "Christian communists", "German Christians", or "German Lutherans" (although his father is). 

To the extent that Jews constitute an ethnicity or nationality, Karl Marx was Jewish. Although he was baptized as a child (so was the execrable Abe Foxman), Marx was nevertheless Jewish under Judaic religious law, i.e. halakha. As one Orthodox rabbi notes: "... in Jewish law there is no true notion of converting out of the faith. Once a person is born Jewish, that is his lifelong status, whether he is observant or not ... past baptism and conversion never [change] that."

There is also no apparent evidence that Marx ever participated in the Lutheran rite of confirmation or that he ever professed faith in Christ as a child or an adult. Marx did profess atheism but that is not necessarily a halakhic disqualifier.

Now consider the case of Benedict Spinoza. Amsterdam's rabbis formally branded Spinoza a heretic and expelled him from the community in 1656. In 2012, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam's Sephardic Jews was asked to rescind the writ of cherem; he refused. Yet, Spinoza's biographical article is included in the following Wikipedia categories: 17th-century Jewish theologians, 17th-century Sephardi Jews, Dutch Jews, Jewish biblical scholars, Jewish philosophers, Jewish skeptics, Jewish translators of the Bible, and 17th-century Jewish biblical scholars.

The single, Wikipedia categorical reference to Marx's Jewishness is "German people of Dutch-Jewish descent". The point is not that Karl Marx was an observant, professing adherent of Judaism; he, apparently, was not. The point is that, unlike virtually every other group of communists, Jewish communists such as Eisner, Toller, Luxemburg, and Leviné are not allowed to be seen and considered in their collective in Wikipedia. Why is that?

Labels: Abraham Foxman, anarchism, communism, history, Jews, labor, Lenin, Lerner, Ronald Reagan, Wikipedia

Below is a selection from "When Jews Praised Mussolini and Supported Nazis: Meet Israel's First Fascists" by Dan Tamir and published by Haaretz on July 20, 2019. Tamir is the author of Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922-1942 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Eighty years later, what remains of Hebrew fascism in present-day Israeli politics? A number of the attributes of fascism noted above are clearly discernible in the rhetoric of today's right wing. Many Israelis believe in the supremacy of the nation's needs over every right of the individual and in the individual's subordination to the nation: from worshipping the totem of military service and the rabbinical establishment's responsibility for dealing with marital matters, to contempt for those who choose to emigrate. Similarly, it is not difficult to detect the unwavering belief that "the Jews" are a victim of other groups: from the instrumental use of the murder of the millions in Europe in World War II, to the "few vs. many" paradigm here in Israel (with respect, for instance, to the wars it's fought over the years and the two intifadas) – if to note only two widespread excuses made for the State of Israel's inordinate use of military force.

Fear that the "nation's values" will be eroded by universal liberal tenets or by "foreign" influences is also part and parcel of the approach of many on the Israeli right, whether in the passive form of apprehension of groups like the New Israel Fund, "foreign governments" and "international organizations," or actively, in projects to "strengthen Jewish identity" among the population.

The belief in the need for creation of a "purer" community is also very familiar: from the thugs of the anti-assimilationist Lehava organization and open enmity toward asylum seekers, to the branding of the "leftist" not as a political rival, but as an alien element to be uprooted. And finally, the belief in the right of the Chosen People to rule others indefinitely has been evident every day for more than half a century in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Tamir begins the article by discussing an actual, non-satirical political campaign advertisement from last spring for and featuring Israel's then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. The ad is so bizarre (or is it telling?) that I've decided to append it to the bottom of this post.

Labels: history, Israel, Jews, politics, Zionism

It's 1987 and Rep. Brooks (D-TX), during the Iran-Contra hearings, asks Lt. Col. Oliver North about Garden Plot, REX 84, etc. and, boy, is Ollie miffed. Sen. Inouye (D-HI) stops that line of questioning and the mainstream media, for the most part, dutifully ignore the story. And the American public, for the most part, dutifully stay asleep. As far as I can tell Brooks never again bucked the powers that be on the subject.

See also:

• “Look It Up, Check It Out”: REX 84 and the History of an American Conspiracy by Michael Grasso
• "Church and Pike Committees Post-mortem" by VFPD
• Operation Northwoods on the National Security Archive site

Labels: civil liberties, conspiracy, history, media, politics, repression, United States

I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) every day, not because it's so great but because it's the least bad of all the alternative news sources I am aware of. Every day there emanates from NPR a steady stream of distortions, half-truths, plain old falsehoods, and/or blind ignorance.

You can call it "fake news". Here are two examples from yesterday that came just minutes apart.

On the Media

First, at the beginning of On The Media co-host Brooke Gladstone ends a 12-minute baldly partisan rant on the Kavanaugh nomination with an actor quoting Founding Father John Adams on democracy from his December 17, 1814, letter to John Taylor. The quoted portion says:

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty ... Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.

Gladstone then chimes in, "Democracy can't protect us, we have to protect it. You know what to do." The misleading implication being that Adams was warning of us the fragility of our democracy. In fact, he was likening democracy to that other form of government he rejected—aristocracy or monarchy.

Later in the Taylor letter Adams discusses the French Revolution asserting, "Democracy is chargeable with all the blood that has been spilled for five and twenty years." As is clear from the Taylor letter, when read in context, Adams was no fan of democracy.

He was an advocate of the alternative, republican form of government founded under the United States Constitution. In the chapter "Republican Government" in Adams' Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States he wrote:

Others, again, more rationally, define a republic to signify only a government, in which all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws. This, indeed, appears to be the true and only true definition of a republic. 

Adams even contrasted this against:

a peculiar sense in which the words republic, commonwealth, popular state, are used by English and French writers; who mean by them a democracy, or rather a representative democracy; a "government in one centre, and that centre the nation;" that is to say, that centre a single assembly, chosen at stated periods by the people, and invested with the whole sovereignty; the whole legislative, executive, and judicial power, to be exercised in a body, or by committees, as they shall think proper. 

Just a little over a year before the Taylor letter Adams hyperbolically wrote to Jefferson that "Our pure, virtuous, public Spirited federative Republic will last for ever, govern the Globe and introduce the perfection of Man, his perfectability being already proved by Price Priestly, Condorcet Rousseau Diderot and Godwin."

In short, Gladstone dishonestly hitches John Adams to her anti-Trump, anti-Kavanaugh wagon. Adams was no advocate of the democracy that Gladstone implies is under threat and in need of protection.

KUOW

The second example of fake news on NPR I want to mention may be peculiar to KUOW, based in Seattle. They have been recently running a series of fund-raising pitches featuring national NPR personalities, such as Ailsa Chang and Kai Ryssdal, reading from the same script.

The script asserts: "It's easy to see that Seattle loves public radio". The evidence, we are to believe, is that 92% of the funding for KUOW comes from community-based individuals and businesses and 87% of these donations are less than $100. You don't have to be statistician to realize that this is grossly dishonest.

The reported statistics cited support only the proposition that ~80% of the funding for KUOW comes from individual and business donations of less than $100. Evidence for the claim "Seattle loves public radio" could come from market research but I suspect that the execs at KUOW rejected this because the relevant figures just don't support their claim.

For example, the Neilsen ratings from August 2018 show that while KUOW is tied with KIRO-FM for second place in the Seattle-Tacoma radio market, its audience share is only 5.9%. Second place at 5.9% is a respectable audience share in a competitive market but it doesn't have quite the same zing as the misleading stats KUOW used regarding Seattle's alleged love of public radio. Such narrative-driven dishonesty is, unfortunately, par for the course for KUOW and National Public Radio.

Labels: history, John Adams, media, National Public Radio, politics, Thomas Jefferson, Trump, US Constitution, US Founding Fathers

On October 7, 1973, the day after Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War against Israel, J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, appeared on the television program Face the Nation. Fulbright biographer Woods states:

He called for the United Nations to intervene, militarily if necessary, to end the bloodshed and impose a peace settlement. "They should take action, they should meet the legitimate security requirements of Israel — and at the same time approach as closely as possible the principles of the resolution of '67," he told George Herman. Asked by Peter Lisagor if it would not be best if the United States and the Soviet Union simply agreed to stop supplying their client states in the Middle East, Fulbright assented but declared that that would never happen "because the Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate."[1][2]

As if to prove Fulbright's point, the Israel Lobby mobilized to replace him for publicly highlighting their political power: "Following Fulbright's October appearance on Face the Nation ... American Jewish leaders had begun actively soliciting candidates, Democratic or Republican, to oppose their nemesis in the 1974 election ... American Zionists ... pinned their hope on Dale Bumpers."[3]

The Lobby relies on more than mere "hope".

Fulbright's positions on the Middle East have not endeared him to American Zionists who have, according to Fulbright money raisers, declined to contribute "a single dime" to his campaign.

But a Bumpers' lieutenant, whipping his gray Lincoln down Highway. 40, confided to a reporter that he had many offers of donations from American Jews who would like to see the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee unseated.

"I could have bought the central part of Arkansas with it [offers of money from the Jewish community]. But I politely explained that the surest way to beat Bumpers would be to have him tagged a Jewish candidate. But the Jews are obviously very unhappy with Fulbright, starting with Golda Meir."

"The offers of assistance," he said, "came from people in New York and California who have raised a lot of money in the Jewish community for political purposes." He declined to name them.[4]

The Lobby's efforts paid off when Bumpers defeated Fulbright in the 1974 Democratic primary and proceeded to handily win the general election.

Notes
1. Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 648 citing Face the Nation, Oct. 7, 1973, Series 48:15, Box 41:1, SPF.
2. Smith puts a finer point on Fulbright's remarks, paraphrasing from the transcript, he writes: "Fulbright accused the Israeli lobby of having the ear of up to eighty United States senators, as well as a large percentage of the House of Representatives. Because of the power and influence of the lobby, Israel enjoyed unparalleled and unquestioned American military and economic aid." Mitchell Smith, "Woes of the Arkansas Internationalist: J. William Fulbright, the Middle East, and the Death of American Liberalism" (2013), Theses and Dissertations, 773. p. 61.
3. Woods, p. 659 citing inter alia "Jewish Leaders Seek '74 Opponents for Fulbright, " Arkansas Democrat, Oct. 19, 1973.
4. Harry Kelly, "Arkansas race: Running hard, but Fulbright looks like loser", Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1974, sect. 2, p. 1. See also Woods, p. 661, 665, and Smith, ch. 3.

Labels: history, Israel, Israel Lobby, J. William Fulbright, politics

In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the infamous majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which gave the US Supreme Court's imprimatur to compulsory eugenic sterilization. While reading about Holmes in Adam Cohen's less-than-groundbreaking Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin Pr., 2016) I was surprised to learn about Holmes' ties to prominent American Zionists.

Holmes' Zionist coterie included Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, both of whom eventually became US Supreme Court Justices. According to Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of how the United States was used to Create Israel (CreateSpace, 2014), quoting Peter Grose, Brandeis and Frankfurter were both members of "an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for 'Pharisees' and 'separate,' which grew out of Harvard's Menorah Society." Also according to Weir, quoting Sarah Schmidt, membership in the Parushim required candidates to give "specific assurances regarding devotion and resolution to the Zionist cause ..."

According to Cohen (p. 228), it was Brandeis who raised the money to fund Holmes' law professorship at the Harvard Law School in 1882. Cohen also reports (p. 238) that Frankfurter and Walter Lippman, co-founder of the New Republic, formed the core of "the House of Truth", an "influential group" that "adopted Holmes" as their "progressive champion" on the Supreme Court. Once so adopted, "the pages of the New Republic and the Harvard Law Review began to fill up with accolades" for Holmes.

According to American Zionism: Missions and Politics by Jeffrey Gurock, ed., (Routledge, 1998, 2013) Lippmann was among those "co-opted to leadership or special assignments for the regular and emergency Zionist organizations" Brandeis "controlled" (p. 25). When Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann became embroiled in dispute following an international Zionist leadership conference in London in 1920, Lippmann tried to mediate (p. 66, n. 110).

Lippmann was also a key member of Col. House's "Inquiry," an unofficial post-war foreign policy planning group created to bypass the State Department. The secretive Inquiry was the brainchild of Felix Frankfurter (Godfrey Hodgson. Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House (Yale UP, 2006) p. 158).

When a journalist publicly revealed the existence of the Inquiry "A furious Wilson suspected Frankfurter" and although Lippmann tried to provide cover for Frankfurter, "Colonel House was not dissuaded. 'The Jews from every tribe have descended in force, they seem determined to break in with a jimmy if they are not let in,' House complained to the President" (Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. (Transaction Publishers, 2008) pp. 129-130).

One of the most important things that came out of the Inquiry was Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which Frankfurter claimed was "drafted more or less" by Lippmann (Howard Grief. The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel Under International Law (Mazo Publishers, 2008) p. 297). Instead of promoting Arab self-determination, the twelfth point help lay the basis for the permanent dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the splitting off of Palestine, under a pro-Zionist British mandate, from Syria, under a French mandate.

Cohen describes Zionist Harold Laski as a mere "friend" of Holmes (pp. 245, 282). Laski was, in point of fact, Holmes' close confidant. When the extensive correspondence of the two men was published in 1953 (Harvard UP) as the Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence Of Mr. Justice Holmes And Harold J Laski, 1916-1935, it contained a foreword by Felix Frankfurter.

It appears from Cohen's book that none of the Zionist members Holmes' "progressive claque" ever publicly criticized Buck v. Bell although Lippmann had written a series critiquing intelligence testing in 1922. Judging from their published letters, Laski apparently said nothing privately either even though Holmes referred to the case in three letters in 1927.

For his part Brandeis voted with Holmes in the majority to allow the State of Virginia to surgically sterilize Carrie Buck against her will. About a year later, Brandeis would cite Buck v. Bell affirmatively in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States. Brandeis cited the case in support of an argument for expansive state power, asserting the "general limitations on the powers of Government, like those embodied in the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, do not forbid the United States or the States from meeting modern conditions by regulations which, 'a century ago, or even half a century ago, probably would have been rejected as arbitrary and oppressive.' "

Buck v. Bell would later be cited affirmatively in Nuremberg, Germany:

Karl Brandt was the chief Nazi medical officer; he was also Adolf Hitler's personal physician. Brandt's attorney introduced documents quoting extensively from the eugenics literature. He cited Harry Laughlin's 1914 proposal calling for the sterilization of fifteen million Americans, and also quoted a translation of the Buck opinion from a German text on eugenics. Other Nuremberg defendants also cited Buck, and a translation of the Holmes opinion appeared again as a defense example in the exhibit "Race Protection Laws of Other Countries."

See also:

• "Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough" on the Popehat blog regarding Holmes' majority opinion in Schenck vs. United States.
• A collection of primary source material for Buck v. Bell can be found here
• "Israel's Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering" by Seth J. Frantzman in the Forward
• "History, Eugenics, And The Jews" by John Glad in the Jewish Press

Labels: eugenics, history, law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Zionism

The above advertisement was published in the American Rifleman in November 1940.

Labels: guns, history

Labels: history, Mexico, military, politics, quotations, United States, War

A standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People. Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens. They have their Arms always in their hands. Their Rules and their Discipline is severe. They soon become attachd to their officers and disposd to yield implicit Obedience to their Commands. Such a Power should be watchd with a jealous Eye ... Men who have been long subject to military Laws and inured to military Customs and Habits, may lose the Spirit and Feeling of Citizens. And even Citizens, having been used to admire the Heroism which the Commanders of their own Army have displayd, and to look up to them as their Saviors may be prevaild upon to surrender to them those Rights for the protection of which against Invaders they had employd and paid them. We have seen too much of this Disposition among some of our Countrymen.

Source: Samuel Adams, "Founding Father" and American revolutionary, in his letter to James Warren (January 7, 1776) in the Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, Vol. 1, 1743-1777, (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917) pp. 197-198.


Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded ... War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Source: James Madison, "Father of the US Constitution" and 4th US President, from his pamphlet entitled Political Observations (April 20, 1795) in the Selected Writings of James Madison (Hackett, 2006) p. 236.

See also:  "John Adams on the Military Threat"

Labels: freedom, history, James Madison, militarism, military, quotations, United States, US Founding Fathers, War

Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

Source: Thucydides, Greek historian (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC) in his History of the Peloponnesian War, Rex Warner, trans., (Penguin Classics, 1972), book 1, chapter 1.

Labels: critical thinking, history, quotations, War

[The] Qin [dynasty] had arguably developed the first secular state ideology but Shang [Yang] separated religion from politics, not because of its inherent violence but because religion was implacably humane. Religious sentiment would make a ruler too benign, which ran counter to the state's best interests. "A State that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and be destroyed," Shang insisted.

Source: Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014) pp. 96-97.

Labels: government, history, Karen Armstrong, quotations, religion

Labels: Christianity, film & television, history, philosophy, religion and science

In the 1920s, the Cristero War took the lives of an estimated 250,000 Mexicans. When I learned this I was shocked that I had never heard of the war until I watched this remarkable film.

Labels: Christianity, film & television, history, Mexico, War

Ignorance of French national character was for Scharnhorst the major reason for the Allied defeat [in the War of the First Coalition]. He found it inconceivable that the princes accepted without any verification the false reports of French opinion by the Émigrés ... "It seems at first sight incredible that such a great and important enterprise could be launched on the basis of such partisan witnesses as were the Émigrés."

Source: Charles E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 61.

One wonders if Scharnhorst ever considered the possibility that "the princes" knew the reports of the Émigrés were bogus, it seems so. The case of Ahmed Chalabi and his sham Iraqi National Congress come to mind. Chalabi has been characterized as "the powerful source who ... succeeded in persuading the Pentagon that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Shiites would welcome the American forces with flowers and rice, and that in a twinkling the Iraqis would manage their country without Saddam and would free the U.S. armed forces from their commitment."

However, I think it would be far more accurate to characterize Chalabi as a willing partner in the deliberately trumped-up 2003 war for Israel. The neoconservatives leading the Pentagon in the Bush administration were not deceived by Chalabi and they needed no persuasion to invade Iraq, they needed plausible cover and that was what he provided.


The belief that in war forces must be kept together, that it is a principle of the art of war not to disperse, is therefore false. On the contrary, it is a general rule—but only to the skillful—to disperse with caution and to force the enemy to do likewise, and then to fall concentrated on a single part.

Source: Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, "Ueber die Schlacht bei Marnego," Proceedings, 1:54-55 as quoted in White, op. cit., p. 71.

See also: "Wrong Tzu"

Labels: Europe, history, Iraq, military, Neoconservatives, quotations, Scharnhorst, War

... our modern Western conception of "religion" is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien ... In the West we see "religion" as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all "secular" activities. But words in other languages that we translate as "religion" almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing. The Arabic din signifies an entire way of life. The Sanskrit dharma is also "a 'total' concept, untranslatable, which covers law, justice, morals, and social life." The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: "No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English 'religion' or 'religious.' " The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.

Source: Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014) p. 4.

Every polity—even our secular nation-state—relies on a mythology that defines its special character and mission. The word myth has lost its force in modern times and tends to mean something that is not true, that never happened. But in the premodern world, mythology expressed a timeless rather than a historical reality and provided a blueprint for action in the present.

Source: Armstrong, p. 24.

Labels: history, Karen Armstrong, quotations, religion