Multiculturalism
Globalist Scam
To
Enslave Mankind
Page III
Opportunity is rapidly
vanishing, poorly masked by an institutionalized preference for diversity.
Leftist academics in ivory towers are hooked on designer victimology but fail
to notice the real victims -- the entire next generation. Meanwhile the rich
get richer. Have a nice New World Order.
The last time
your correspondent was in Ogden, just under two years ago, Olympic fever was in
the air. Many there were who expected the Winter Olympics to raise their real
estate prices and generally float their boat. Had I wished to pick a fight with
these folks, I suppose I could have mentioned how Atlantans felt after the games
there, but I saw no reason to break their balloon.
No, that
deflation will likely take care of itself, and the wisdom of Denver, which
rejected the Winter Olympics some years ago, may soon be held up for admiration.
The games were wanted, one guesses, for the usual local mercantilist reasons.
Spend some of the taxpayers’ money to make the games possible – I leave the
whole bribery scandal to one side – and, lo! and behold, "they will
come." Everyone will be happier and wealthier, except for those who
aren’t.
Now with the
mountain passes occupied by more federales than were on hand in 1858 and
with the high-toned gentry of the press expressing their shock that Utah is in
fact Utah, I certainly am regretting the whole thing. I’ll have to ask some of
the cousins how they like it – the games, I mean, not Utah. The unpleasantries
of 1857-1858 are referred to as "the Utah War" (more popularly
"the Mormon War"), which may illustrate the point that if Uncle Sam
makes war on you, he will be enough of a gentleman to name the war after you (or
is that just his way of handing out blame?).
Political
geographer Wilbur Zelinsky once wrote that only two regions of the U.S.
continental empire have ever been sufficiently disaffected to undertake
separatist projects – the South and Utah. Separatist movements do not
necessarily have much in common and seldom see one another as being on the same
side of history. Thus General Albert Sidney Johnston presided over the Mormon
War but within a couple of years he was doing useful work for the cause of
Southern independence.
The redoubtable
Noah Smithwick, Texas pioneer and Unionist, claimed in his memoirs that Mormons
he met on their way through Texas were all for the useful precedent which
Southern secession appeared to be setting. Be that as it may, up in Utah,
Brigham Young had to steer clear of other people’s secessionist projects,
however much he cherished his own, because he had to allow for possible Northern
victory. No point in making things worse for Deseret.
Anyway, despite
certain longstanding differences between Utah and other states, which ought to
have been well known, the historically ignorant "with-its" of the mass
media have been finding the whole thing – Utah – very unsettling indeed. Not
for them the old saying, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Well what the Hell
did they expect?
The whole thing
reminds me of an old joke (too long to summarize here), the punch-line of which
is "If it makes you sick, why do it?" If the worthy dames and gents of
the press didn’t want to be in Utah, they could have delegated their Olympic
reporting chores to the locals. I’m sure the latter could handle it. As for
the national press corps, sadder but wise, they can lobby to keep the games from
ever unfolding in Utah again.
I make these
proposals in lieu of another one – truly an impossible dream – namely that
the press come to Utah and display good manners toward their hosts. Since the
big-hearted journalists embody U.S. official ideology and follow all its twists
and turns, no one could rightly expect them to tolerate the locals’
intolerance even – or especially – on the locals’ own turf. After all,
tolerance and diversity themselves are at stake.
For two or
three weeks before the start of the games, the press was swamped with
goggle-eyed stories of the "Mormons Discovered in Utah!" and the
"How Can They Possibly Be Like That?" varieties. I began to dread the
games. The opening ceremonies did not disappoint. Leaving to one side official
U.S. seizure of the occasion to promote an international agenda, there was much
to reflect on. The commentary informed us in English and French that Utah owes
much to its diverse history. Canadian trappers and Mexicans were
mentioned a few times. Five resident Indian tribes put on a show of some kind.
There were vague allusions to rather unspecified "pioneers," which
seemed to serve only as an introduction to the Dixie Chicks.
Mitt Romney,
looking somewhat like a sacrificial lamb, failed to clarify much for the
international audience. The closest the unspecified "pioneers" came to
being acknowledged was when the ****** Tabernacle Choir was introduced. Unless I
missed something, the systematic suppression of the salient facts of Utah
history was almost as perfect as the suppression of pictures of the (then)
Georgia flag at the Atlanta follies.
I am grateful,
however, that a handful of Canadian trappers, some Mexicans, and local Indian
peoples built the cities, created the irrigation systems, and undertook the
farming and industrial projects that made civilized life in Utah possible.
The opening
ceremonies, in their obsessive flight from actual history, were a worthy
complement to the weeks old press campaign. For the press, Utah is too boring,
too white, too conservative; or, alternatively, not "diverse" enough,
not gay enough, not liberal enough. Case closed. In short, Utah is just another
of those evil backwaters which sit, with malice aforethought, athwart the
progressive path of the Locomotive of History. It is surprising that Utah has
not been included on the shortlist with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
The pity of it
is that the poor Utahns probably support the present pseudo-Texan administration
of Bush II which, like its evil twin The Other Party, entirely embraces the
progressive program of crushing out all that is authentic and local. In this,
they are as misled any yellow-dog-Democrat-turned-yellow-dog-Republican to be
found in the South. It is the great paradox of U.S. history: the localists ought
to get together to stop the political center, but in the very act of getting
together they (or at least their leaders) cease to be localists.
But to return
to the heroic free press for a moment. Some fellow at the Denver Post
tells us that Salt Lake is forever discredited in winter sporting circles and
that Denver, rah, rah, rah, shall inherit all. Well, he is a sports
writer and has a license to be childish. But, alas, the fellow is of the new
breed – a PC sports writer – and the failures of infrastructure and support
(if such there are) are not his main interest.
His main theme,
throughout the piece in question, is that Utah has those terrible Mormons in it
and, being the majority, they give the place its awful tone. (I guess majority
rule is only a good idea when the majority agree with PC sports writers.) The
horror: people are "forced" and "coerced" into hearing about
religion by vicious bigots, who eat Jell-O, have funny alcohol laws, and
aren’t non-white enough or gay enough. The Mormon Church, he assures us, was
everywhere "on display" – what a persecution! – but how, one might
ask, can that be helped? I mean, the LDS church is based there and I
doubt that the Twelve could really be expected to hide in the genealogical
archives for the duration, just to make outside agitators feel better.
I don’t think
the entire church membership would fit into the genealogical basement and,
anyway, who would then wait on the gracious members of the press?
The Denver
postman goes on: The Salt Lake Olympics are as bad as the Atlanta games, which
were in turn as bad as the 1936 games, hosted by – you guessed it – HITLER.
This means, apparently, that Salt Lake = Atlanta = Nazism; or something like
that.
The tone in
other papers has hardly been better. There is the usual uninformed obsession
with polygamy, an obsession the outside press shares with Utah’s government
and the Salt Lake Tribune, each for its own historically specific
reasons. Then comes the notion that people are deprived of all their cherished
vices in the Beehive State. It is true of course that hard liquor is under
cumbersome restrictions, but the same is true in Ontario, South Carolina, and
some other places. The situation with regard to wine is probably no worse than
in Ontario, and you can get beer just about anywhere.
I grant there
may be a class issue here, since one could not without great injustice reduce
the lords of the press to drinking something as proletarian as beer.
Then there was
the great Olympic condom flap. Apparently, some in Utah took it amiss that the
Olympic Committee supplies its own brand, and this gave rise to great hilarity
in the outside world. Okay, fine. But can’t the athletes and the visitors
afford their own damned rubbers?
Now we come to
the proselytizing. People the world over know that if you see two guys with ties
riding bicycles, they will try to engage you in religious dialogue. Is it
especially shocking that something similar might happen on these missionaries’
home ground? Short of outlawing religious belief, I can’t see much that could
be done about this.
Of course this
brings us very near the underlying complaints of the media, in their capacity as
popularizers of federal ideology. It bothers these folks that somewhere within
the very clutches of Uncle’s self-awarded universal sovereignty, there remain
cohesive religious communities that do not feel especially guilty or defensive
for believing things now considered quite odd. Many of these things were
"normal" scarcely thirty or forty years; hence the constant refrain
that living in Utah is like living in the fifties. Why life in the fifties
should sum up all social evil short of Hitler is left unanswered, but I must
leave that to one side.
The great evil
of Utah is that there you have people who believe in marriage, in having
children, in not killing their unborn children at the first inconvenience, in
patriotism of an older kind, in local self-government, and the like. Utah has
the only Caucasian population in the world that is reproducing itself at above
replacement levels – indeed well above them. White people without a
demographic death-wish! This might account for some of the hate directed at Utah
in recent weeks. Send for the cruise missiles!
So we hear,
endlessly, that Utah is not diverse enough, and the official classes in Utah
itself help carry the tune. Yet Utah has descendants of Anglo-Americans, English
immigrants, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and more, which seems fairly diverse to
me. I guess there’s diversity and then there’s real diversity.
Who else
made that particular desert bloom?
As a colleague
of mine put it the other day, over beers, the diversity gang hate nothing in the
world so much as a genuine case of difference. Still, it’s odd, the press
being so shocked and all about Mormons in Utah. Why there are Mormons in Utah,
and what that might teach us about geography, empire, immigration, etc., must be
put off to another essay.
So what can we
learn from the present scandal? Perhaps the following: No points are granted for
having a working democracy if the majority itself is just plain bad. No points
are given for making the desert bloom, if the resulting blooms are in the wrong
desert. Points are taken away for the least appearance of theocracy, unless the
theocracy is in the correct desert.
I am almost
sorry it fell to me to make these observations, but if the eternally adversary
Salt Lake Tribune, the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and even the Deseret
News can’t be bothered, someone should say it. It isn’t a matter of
"Utah, love it or leave it." It’s much, much simpler: No one
forces people to go to Utah, especially people who honestly think that they
won’t like it there. Nobody in Utah will miss them if they don’t move there.
As for
self-actualizing Utah-haters who went there only because of the games, they
might at least shut up while they are there. This isn’t about the First
Amendment. It is about basic manners. Anyway, such tender folk can write all the
anti-Utah tracts and books they wish after they have kicked the salty dust from
their Eye-talian shoes.
Between Dialogue,
Sunstone, Mormons, Jack Mormons, and non-Mormons, Utah already has just
about as much internal debate as it is likely to need. If Uncle Sam’s program
of universal world salvation requires spokesmen in Utah, it already has them in
the form of Utah public TV, sundry state bureaucracies, and the leadership of
the two barely distinguishable political parties which, unfortunately, are found
in all fifty of the empire’s satrapies.
Compared to the
last bunch, I think it might well be argued that Brigham Young – even if every
last charge ever made against him were true – would still look like a
constructive statesman of epic proportions – albeit in the wrong desert in the
wrong century.
NewsMax Wires
Special Offer For decades the "Reverend" Jesse Jackson has been an
icon for the liberal media. Nary a word of media criticism about him has hit the
papers.
CNN even gave him his own TV
program and paid him a fortune for it.
But Jackson's days of being
"untouchable" will soon be over!
That's because an
earth-shattering book about Jackson will be hitting bookstores soon.
NewsMax.com will be
getting some of the first copies of this book: "Shakedown: The Life &
Lies of the Reverend Jesse Jackson" by author Ken Timmerman.
This blockbuster book is
published by the same publishing firm that came out with the best-selling books:
"Bias" and "Final Days."
BUT THE
JACKSON BOOK HAS EVEN MORE BOMBSHELLS THAN THESE GREAT BOOKS!
In "Shakedown,"
you will find out about the REAL Jesse Jackson - the one the media will never
report on, including:
How Jackson personally
profited from "non-profit" groups whose funds were intended to help
poor minorities and civil rights
How Jackson used his
"public service" image to live the lifestyle of Donald Trump: jets,
top class hotels, million dollar homes - the best of everything - you name it!
How Jackson earned the name
"Action Jackson" because of his voracious appetite for women
How Jackson used his
complaints of racism against major corporations as a method of out-and-out
extortion and blackmail in order to reap millions for himself and his
organizations
The special relationship
Jackson formed with Bill Clinton during the Monica affair and how Jackson got
millions in taxpayer funds for being a Democratic Party mouthpiece
"Shakedown" will knock your socks off! There are so many more shocking
revelations we have to tell you about Jackson -- but in keeping with good taste,
we won't print them here.
In fact, you'll find out
that almost everything you knew about Jackson is a lie:
Jackson was NOT anointed by
Martin Luther King to be his heir.
Jackson was NEVER even an
ordained a minister.
Jackson was NEVER poor or
victimized by racism, as he has alleged. But it gets worse.
"Shakedown" reveals that Jackson acts more like a mobster than a civil
rights leader.
"Shakedown"
reports on Jackson's ties to the Chicago mob and his "ruthless"
methods: "Beatings, death threats, career destruction and verbal assaults
that border on incitement to murder are all staples of the Jackson
Treatment."
If you are tired of Jesse
Jackson and fed up with the media cover-up of his outrageous behavior, you need
to get "Shakedown."
Send a message to the big
media -- buy more than one copy and share it with friends.
This book could lead to a
full Justice Dept. investigation of Jackson, his cronies and his shakedown
business activities.
To help make this happen,
let's put "Shakedown" on all the best-seller lists.
Let's put it right up there
so every book store in America and every library carries this book on the front
shelves!
Let's force the media, once
and for all, to cover the REAL Jesse Jackson.
And let's make sure Jackson
is held accountable before our system of justice.
You can get some of the
first copies of "Shakedown" from NewsMax as soon as it is off the
presses,
Los Angeles, Alta California
- 3/6/2002 - (ACN) A group of conservative Jewish/White students have made
unsubstantiated accusations against the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan
(MEChA) at the University of California at Berkeley. A few members of the racist
and ultra right wing publication called the Patriot have accused MEChA of being
common "bandidos" in a case where supposedly 3,000 copies of their
recent edition disappeared overnight from their offices on campus. An
independent preliminary investigation into the case by La Voz de Aztlan has
provided indications that the theft may have been an inside job. It appears that
the purported 3,000 copies were actually never printed and that someone within
the Patriot may have pocketed the money.
This is not the first time
that MEChA has been the victim of false, racist and bigoted accusations as well
as physical attacks by KKK and Hillel type students on campuses. On the weekend
of October 25th, 2000 the MEChA office at the University of Texas at El Paso was
vandalized by racist students. The bigots involved smashed computers and left
racist anti-Mexican slurs written on the walls of the office. Just last month,
the conservative Jewish/White Cornell Review launched an unconscionable racist
diatribe against a young female student of Mexican descent that was chased
around campus by 7 white baseball bat wielding thugs. It is believed that the
white thugs at Cornell are members of the same group of students that run the
Patriot at U.C. Berkeley. There is a definite connection between both groups and
other racist groups on campuses through out the country that are increasingly
acting out against students of Mexican descent, Muslim students and certain
Afro-American students who believe that Jews were actively involved in the slave
trade.
Robert M. Berdahl, the
Chancellor at U.C. Berkeley, recently defended a racist anti-Muslim political
cartoon that was published in the campus student newspaper The Daily
Californian. He reasoning was "freedom of the press". He also stated
that the purported theft of the 3,000 copies of the Patriot was an assault on
freedom of the press. La Voz de Aztlan believes that Jewish Chancellor Berdhal
is being hypocritical. There is no freedom of the press at U.C. Berkeley when
the printing presses are made available only to Jewish/White students. If
Chancellor Berdhal was serious about freedom of the press he would make sure
that Latino, Muslim and other ethnic and racial groups had their own University
funded student newspaper. The Daily Californian has an extreme anti-Mexican and
anti-Muslim bias that is run by mostly Jewish/White students. There is no
newspaper on campus that serves as a "voice" for minority students at
the University.
The situation within the
University of California and State College System is becoming critical as the
state's student population of Mexican descent is increasing exponentially. The
representation of faculty, students, staff and administrators of Mexican descent
is extremely dismal at the state's tax supported colleges and universities. This
is in a state where the population of Mexican descent is now over one third of
the total. The attacks against MEChA and other Latino groups on California
campuses is designed to maintain the status quo. The Mexican-American community
is fed up with the situation and is ready to take action. There is presently an
opportunity to replace outgoing Jewish UCR Chancellor Raymond O. Orbach with a
Latino. Dr. Armando Navarro of UCR is coordinating an effort to have a Latino
appointed to the position through a statewide coalition of Latino groups. There
have been a number of strategy meetings that have taken place and on March
12-14, 2002, the coalition will be taking their case to the University of
California Board of Regents. The Board will be meeting at the Laurel Heights
campus of UC San Francisco, 3333 California Street, San Francisco. Latino
students and members of the community are invited to participate in
demonstrations that will take place inside and outside the Board meeting room.
The final decision on the next Chancellor for U.C. Riverside will be made by the
President of the University system Richard C. Atkinson. Atkinson is also Jewish
and there is a strong possibility that he will replace Orbach with another of
their own. Jews make only about 2% of the state's population yet they dominate
the state's academic institutions. Also, the two U.S. Senators of California are
ladies of Jewish descent.
As the largest segment of
the Alta California population, we are not going to stand by while our
university and colleges students are unjustly attacked by Jewish/White racist
students. We will hold campus administrators ultimately responsible. Our
collective community consisting of countless Mexican-American educators and
families have worked very hard, starting at kindergarten, to open the doors of
the institutions of higher learning. We will not allow a small group of morons
and bigots at our universities to deny equal educational opportunity for our
students.
Media
Murder:
The
Case of Jack Perdue and Randolph Community College
Are today’s
media, in some sense, evil? No doubt this is a rather general question, but Death
by Journalism? One Teacher’s Fateful Encounter With Political Correctness
definitely leaves that kind of impression. Not only does this book pick up where
Bernard Goldberg’s Bias left off, it shows that biased reporting and
blatant disregard for the truth are hardly limited to highly visible media
outlets in New York and Washington, DC.
Rhonda Winters,
director of Randolph Community College’s Archdale branch campus not far from
Greensboro, had obtained approval for an adult-education, community outreach
course on North Carolina’s role in the War Between the States. When she went
in search of a qualified instructor, her attention soon focused on a 60-year-old
Guilford County native named Jack Perdue. Perdue already had a track record at
the college from having taught classes in real estate appraisal. Although real
estate was his livelihood, history was his passion. Jack Perdue was in fact a
living, breathing treasure chest of regional history. A historical
preservationist and genealogist, he had written monographs on local historic
sites and brochures on how people could trace their ancestry to find out if they
had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. This and his preservation work
had drawn him into the local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in 1992, where he
eventually became an officer. Because regional history was a calling, his
integrity as a historian was extremely important to him.
The course
entitled "North Carolina History: Our Role in the War for Southern
Independence" would meet every Thursday for two and a half hours per
session for ten weeks, and be co-sponsored by the local SCV. The $40-per-student
cost would pay for the course; no "public" money would be involved.
Perdue accepted the offer and went to work with great enthusiasm. He involved a
number of other historians including other SCV members who would guest-lecture
on aspects of a very broad subject ranging from the weaponry employed by
Confederate soldiers to the dresses worn by women of the period to the hardships
they faced in the war’s aftermath. Everything presented in class would be
referenced, preferably with original written sources from the period. No one was
to express personal views or get into politics. This was the way Jack Perdue
wanted it. There was the standard publicity, including an entirely neutral
article in the High Point Enterprise. Eleven students signed up. As the
course began, there was nothing to indicate that on the eve of its completion, a
controversy would erupt that would nearly tear the rural community college apart
and destroy Jack Perdue’s life.
Enter young
reporter Ethan Feinsilver, stage left. Feinsilver worked for the
Greensboro-based News & Record, covering Randolph County south of
Greensboro. He entered the room late and remained, taking notes and later
requesting course materials despite not having signed up and paid to take the
course or obtaining permission to sit in (something Jack Perdue would likely
have granted, had Feinsilver bothered to ask). It is clear from ensuing events
that Feinsilver was on the prowl for a controversy, and if he couldn’t find
one he was going to create one.
Jerry Bledsoe
reports that during the break that first night, he was heard asking Jack Perdue,
"Why are you being allowed to teach such a controversial course?" Jack
was dumbfounded. There was no controversy here. Anyone who wanted information
about the course could readily obtain it. At first, Perdue had seemed pleased
that a reporter was present, thinking this might win favorable publicity for a
course he hoped would become a permanent offering at RCC. Feinsilver did not
return the following week. But during that session which featured Confederate
re-enactors, a photographer appeared in his stead. The man’s manner made
Perdue uneasy. He was angling his photos to make the Confederate flags used by
the re-enactors as prominent as possible.
Feinsilver kept
reappearing, and began to badger students in the course with leading questions
designed to provoke a response. Eventually several complained. Feinsilver phoned
guest lecturer Herman White at his home. White had dealt with slavery in the
fifth session and provided written evidence that at least some North Carolina
slaveowners had been kind to their slaves instead of brutalizing them, as the
stereotype maintains. He reported how investigation into his own family history
turned up documentation showing how the wife of one of his ancestors had taught
the family’s slaves to read and write – even though this was against the law
– as if preparing them for freedom.
Many North
Carolinians of the period opposed slavery, after all, and were convinced it was
doomed whatever happened between North and South. Moreover, there were many free
blacks in the South, relations between them and whites were better here than in
the North, and some – no one knew for sure how many – joined the Confederate
Army when the war broke out. Be this as it may, the lecture was over, and
Feinsilver had missed it. White grew impatient, telling Feinsilver that he
wasn’t about to repeat the entire thing over the phone, had no fax machine to
send him materials, and that he should have signed up for the course.
The next event
was the appearance of a county NAACP representative, obviously at Feinsilver’s
instigation, at the planned second to last session of the course. Although
suspicious of a set-up, Jack Perdue welcomed the man. The NAACP representative
would say afterwards – at first, anyway – that he’d been treated with
respect and had heard nothing racially offensive. But Feinsilver wasn’t
through. Not by a long shot. He was a man with a mission.
That Sunday,
November 15, 1998, a scathing article appeared in the Greensboro News &
Record with the title, "Course reopens war’s old wounds." It was
about Jack Perdue’s course, and its author was none other than Ethan
Feinsilver. A lengthy subhead referred to the course’s "pro-Confederate
slant," stated that it had "anger[ed] black leaders" and was part
of the "larger clash between Southern heritage and civil rights
groups." Feinsilver focused on the one session that had dealt with slavery.
White’s report that at least some slaves had been treated with kindness and
that some free blacks had joined the Confederate Army was transformed into the
very different claim that "most black people were happy under slavery and
that tens of thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy because they
believed in the Southern cause."
Feinsilver
invoked unnamed "Southern history experts" denouncing the course as
"pseudo-history" and "pro-Confederate propaganda." The
article went on to claim that the state NAACP and the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights were considering lodging a formal complaint against Randolph Community
College. Feinsilver left the insinuation that Jack Perdue’s course was a part
of the regular curriculum and paid for with state money, as opposed to what it
was: a community-outreach course, self-supported and paid for solely by its
participants.
Had anyone
said, at any time, that most black people were happy under slavery? There was no
evidence anything of the sort was said. The course sessions had been videotaped,
and the videotapes should have proved this. Herman White had said some things
likely to raise the brows of today’s academic historians who insist that the
sole cause of the War for Southern Independence was slavery, but that slaves
were happy under slavery was not one of them.
Jack Perdue,
moreover, had insisted that there was no documentation about specific numbers of
blacks fighting for the Confederacy. He had been very explicit about this.
Finally, Ethan Feinsilver had not even attended the session that covered slavery
and the role of blacks in the war. This did not keep him from writing an article
suggesting otherwise; it did not keep his editors at the News & Record
from backing him publicly and defending the story’s accuracy; and it did not
keep Associated Press from picking up the story and distributing it all over the
world.
In other words,
within 24 hours Jack Perdue and his course, along with Randolph Community
College, were thrust into a national and even international spotlight. The
thought police descended on these unsuspecting people like packs of wolves, and
their wrath even spilled onto other students who innocently said how much they
enjoyed the course and how much they were getting out of it. With further
articles by Feinsilver referring to the "firestorm of media
attention," Randolph Community College faced a public relations nightmare.
College officials struggled with damage control, particularly with national
civil rights groups breathing down their throats and allegations of a course
about "happy slaves" taught by SCV members at RCC appearing in
newspapers all over the country. Under enormous pressure, caught in the middle,
and with his own career in jeopardy, RCC’s president Larry Linker finally
cancelled the last session of the course.
None of this
could compare to what Jack Perdue was going through – especially given the
personality that emerges from Bledsoe’s narrative. Apparently Perdue, somewhat
shy by nature, was one of those people who bottled up negative emotions. He had
sought only to teach the history he cared about. He was not a celebrity, and had
not sought publicity. This very public assault on his integrity was unlike
anything in his worst imaginings. Virtually every news media outlet was
accepting the validity of the Feinsilver article; follow-up op-eds by nationally
syndicated columnists such as Leonard Pitts (of the Miami Herald) were
appearing and taking Feinsilver’s version of events for granted.
Pitts, a
first-rate writer capable of using words like rapier-thrusts, wrote of the
course’s "offensive thesis: that the overwhelming majority of blacks were
happy in slavery." Pitts went on (I recall the column): "you look at
the people pushing a fraudulent, morally bankrupt version of those horrific days
and you wonder about them. Are they evil? Are they stupid? Or are they, like the
slaveholders of old, merely embracing a delusion they must believe in order to
continue believing in themselves?" Jack Perdue found himself publicly
denounced, demonized, branded a pseudo-historian and a pro-Confederate
propagandist, called names ("crank," "cracker," etc.),
accused of romanticizing slavery, of teaching lies and "morally
bankrupt" history, of espousing hatred towards blacks, "Yankees,"
Indians and Jews (Feinsilver was Jewish), and even compared to neo-Nazis saying
the Holocaust didn’t happen. Even other students in the course were being
attacked as closet racists.
Through it all,
Perdue mostly held his temper and maintained his dignity. He refused to
participate in the media circus. This was used against him. He must be hiding
something, the Ethan Feinsilvers of the newspaper world reasoned – even though
he was cooperating fully with the college by sharing whatever documentation was
asked for and preparing public statements describing what his course had been
about. He and others at the college outlined, point by point, specific
falsehoods in Feinsilver’s article ranging from relatively trivial ones (e.g.,
he reported the course as lasting nine weeks instead of ten weeks) to the really
damaging ones about happy slaves. He had put words in people’s mouths,
attributing to both the course’s students and RCC administrators things they
had never said. This was all ignored by the press.
Defenses of
Jack Perdue’s integrity by his students and others who knew him were also
ignored. He was helpless before media supremacy. Eventually the toll on his
health began to show. It is generally accepted that extreme, chronic stress can
kill you. Perdue spent weeks that winter with what seemed to be a bad cold.
Finally, on the morning of February 10, 1999, at around 5 a.m., Jack Perdue had
a fatal heart attack – on his and his wife Annie Laura’s 37th
wedding anniversary. She and other family members who had suffered through his
ordeal with him, the students who had taken his course, and others who had known
Jack Perdue all their lives, were convinced that the events beginning with Ethan
Feinsilver’s article were responsible for his death. This was, in other words,
literally a death by journalism. To insult his memory further, his death
was not reported except as a paid-for obituary. The News & Record
editors did not consider it sufficiently newsworthy.
Jerry Bledsoe
reports that Feinsilver repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book (as
did his editors at the News & Record). That leaves us largely in the
dark as to his real motives. We can’t say for a fact that Feinsilver himself
believed what he had written. He’d seen that a rural, community college was
offering a history course that was vulnerable to being portrayed as representing
a "Confederate point of view." Members of the SCV were co-sponsoring;
Confederate battle flags had been photographed. These days it is easy to speak
of "pro-Confederate hate groups" without bothering to investigate them
or getting to know the people in them. Perhaps Feinsilver just smelled the
possibility of writing the kind of article that establishes careers, given the
brand of attack-dog journalism that began to thrive in the politically correct
1990s. We just don’t know.
What do we
know? We know that based on other articles Feinsilver wrote and from reports by
others in the Greensboro News & Record newsroom, he apparently
regarded Randolph County, North Carolina, as a "redneck backwater." He
had already alienated the people of Asheboro with hostile, negative reporting
about their community. We know that there was no controversy surrounding Jack
Pardue’s course until Feinsilver put it there. Not even the county NAACP had
batted an eyelash. If anyone needs to see a textbook case of media creating
"news" instead of reporting it, look no further. We also know that
despite his editors’ continued public statements supporting the accuracy of
the November 15 article, Feinsilver was put on six-months probation following
the explosion he had created. And finally, we know that at the end of that
six-month period, Feinsilver left the News & Record. It is easy to
infer, with Bledsoe, that he was offered a choice between resigning and being
fired and chose to resign, after which he left journalism. Even after moving to
Chapel Hill and enrolling in its education school, Feinsilver still declined the
opportunity to tell Bledsoe his side of the story – if he had one.
The News
& Record never issued any public retraction or correction of any kind.
Nor did any other paper that had uncritically repeated and even amplified
Feinsilver’s charges. Jack Perdue, in one of his rare displays of anger, had
emailed a letter to the editor of the neighboring Winston-Salem Journal
following a particularly scurrilous editorial (the one comparing him to a
Holocaust-denier). He called the paper’s statements "potentially
libelous." His letter was refused publication and referred to the paper’s
legal department (no action was ever taken). Of course, suing a newspaper for
libel is very, very hard, even in a case like this; the large media corporations
that now own most city newspapers have huge resources and the capacity to drag
out such litigation for years, causing even more damage in the long run. This is
why the media’s responsibility to reportthe truth and not
inventthings that never happened is so important. Almost to this
day, statements are appearing that take the Feinsilver story at face value.
Sometimes they amplify it with things not even Feinsilver said, e.g., a history
professor at Columbia University commenting that a history course was offered at
Randolph Community College in North Carolina depicting slaves as "smiling,
singing Sambos."
If you believe
all the talk about political correctness is just paranoia or "right
wing" backlash, read Death by Journalism? Those who know better will
find their worst fears about today’s news media confirmed. But don’t read
this book before you go to bed at night, and I don’t recommend it to anyone
with high blood pressure! My initial question was, Are today’s media in
some sense evil? I closed Death by Journalism? with a sense of having
encountered something malevolent. One irresponsible and inflammatory article by
one reporter set off a chain of events that destroyed a man’s life. Newspaper
editors backed the story, publicly at least. Associated Press just passed it on,
without anyone bothering to check its accuracy. Other newspapers reprinted and
even embellished the allegations. Nationally syndicated columnists and
professional agitators uncritically held up Jack Pardue’s course as
"evidence" of the hotbed of "racism" they want us to believe
still permeates rural, mostly conservative regions – especially in the South!
Today’s
cultural climate set the conditions for this journalistic train wreck. Political
correctness has clearly grown more dangerous than communism ever was, and might
yet be this society’s downfall. It nearly controls our most important
disseminators of what is supposed to be truthful information: higher education
and the news media. Seeing truth as a matter of consensus, leftist intellectuals
in universities, cynical ladder-climbers in newsrooms and on editorial boards,
and NAACP agitators with the media at their beck and call, all see themselves as
"ministers of truth" empowered by warped visions of
"morality" and "social justice" to dictate such things as
how history should be taught. In the process, they rewrite history to further
their own power-hungry agendas. Those who control the past, so to speak, can
control the present.
Without a
truthful account of where we came from, we don’t know where we should go, and
we are vulnerable to those taking us where they want us to go. Jerry
Bledsoe tells us, in the press release that accompanied my copy of this book,
how Death by Journalism? is connected to his true crime sagas. This book
is "about crimes, too. Just crimes that can’t be prosecuted…. An
honorable and innocent man … had his good reputation destroyed, and many
people close to him believe the stress from that killed him. He certainly
thought that a crime had been committed against him, and death left him no
recourse to it." That explains why Bledsoe wrote this book: "Truth
matters. This book shows just how much it does matter. Alter truth even
slightly, and it can have drastic effect. In this case, truth was savaged.
Journalism isn’t supposed to be about lying. It isn’t supposed to be about
destroying innocent people. It isn’t supposed to be about depriving people of
basic constitutional rights. All of that happened in this story, and I realized
that if I didn’t tell it, nobody would. The lie would live. I felt a deep
obligation to my county, as well as to my profession, to see that didn’t
happen."
March 16,
2002
Steven
Yates is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises
Institute. He has a PhD in philosophy, and is the author of
Civil
Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action(ICS Press, 1994),
and dozens of articles in both academic and nonacademic periodicals.
Reverse
Hate Crime in South Carolina – One Year After
by Steven
Yates
On a November
night a little over a year ago, Columbia, S.C. resident Bill Calliham was
driving home from a local Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting when he noticed
the very bright headlights of a car following him. The car continued
following him through the twists and turns of his neighborhood all the way to
his house, blocking his driveway. When he inquired politely if the person,
who happened to be black, was lost and needed directions, the man set upon him
and sent him to the nearest emergency room.
Bill Calliham
had a South Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans license plate on his vehicle
along with two square Confederate flag emblems on either side. Local media
as well as the leftist NAACP had been waging war against Confederate symbols for
years; this war culminated in the removal of the Confederate flag from atop
South Carolina’s State House (a square version now stands on a 30-foot pole
behind the Confederate Soldier Monument). Calliham attributes the attack
to these symbols having been clearly visible to whoever got behind him in
traffic. Nothing else seemed to explain why a total stranger of another
race would follow him home and beat him up on his own property.
Not a single
local media outlet covered the story: not Columbia’s daily newspaper, not
any television station, not any radio broadcast. This was familiar to those
of us who had been following reverse hate crimes – blacks attacking whites,
whether because the latter display Confederate symbols or for no discernable
reason whatsoever. When it became evident that no one else would cover the
story, I did. To my knowledge, my article
was the only public coverage the incident received. The reason: because
it was black-on-white, the police refused to treat it as a hate crime. Therefore
it was not news. Bill Calliham told me how he had confronted a reporter
shortly after he learned that local media had withdrawn their initial decision
to cover the event. “I’m the wrong color,” he had told her. “If
I was black, every radio station, TV station and Rainbow Coalition member would
be in my front yard.” The reporter, of course, was not to blame. She
was no doubt ordered by her superiors not to publicize the story.
Media blackouts
on black-on-white hate crimes are the norm. A white person has to be
incapacitated or killed before such cases even become local news. This was
the pattern when Troy Knapp was beaten unconscious by a mob of black teenagers
wielding metal trash cans while bicycling through a North Charleston, S.C.
neighborhood the previous year. Knapp sustained severe head injuries, and
languishes in a Charleston-area nursing home with permanent brain damage.
The incident
was not reported by major media outside the Charleston area.
And then there
was the incident some have called the Wichita horror that happened in Kansas a
year ago yesterday. In that case, five close friends, all young
professionals in their 20s (three men and two women), were robbed at gunpoint by
two black men, then taken to a deserted soccer field. The two women were
stripped naked, raped, then forced to perform lewd sex acts on their attackers
and on each other while the three men had to watch. Finally all five had
to kneel, and were then shot, execution style. Miraculously, one of the
women survived. She staggered naked and bloody through ice and snow in
sub-freezing temperatures for more than a mile and was finally able to obtain
help.
Again, the
story was local news only. Were it not for the Internet, most of us would
not even know about it. Yet anyone with functioning brain cells knows that
if the races had been reversed, the national coverage would have been
relentless. It would no doubt accompanied by appearances by Jesse Jackson
(or Al Sharpton) and possibly even a new (and very well funded) study of “hate
crimes” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The dominant
media refuse to report such incidents because they go against one of the central
dogmas of our politically correct time: blacks as a group are victims
first of the legacy of slavery and then of discrimination and hate. Whites
as a group are their victimizers. So if blacks display anger, they have
reason; when they get violent, their violence can be excused. The term black
rage has been used. In truth, the federal government’s own crime
statistics reveal that 90 percent of all violent interracial crimes are
committed by blacks on whites, not the reverse. Given that blacks only
constitute about 13 percent of the population, a black person is 50 times more
likely than a white person to commit a violent interracial crime. Many
such crimes do not appear to have an economic motive, such as robbery. In
cases such as the Wichita horror, the utter viciousness of the perpetrators
rules out economics as the sole motive even though there was a robbery.
During the
events last April in Cincinnati, it was the same story. The scale of
events was too large for the media to muzzle altogether, however, so the
Cincinnati riot became national news. The media, however, could not bring
themselves to call it a “riot,” even when marauding blacks were heaving
bricks through windows of cars driven by whites and setting fires to their
businesses. The media (with the leftist New York Times leading the
way) chose to use sanitized phrases like sporadic protests and vandalism.
The Cincinnati
riot was an attack on white people. This was clear, because an assault on
an albino black woman driver stopped at once when one of the aggressors shouted,
“She’s black!”
Again, you read
about it on the Internet if you read about it at all. Apparently not all
the news is fit to print if it goes against the grain of political correctness,
with the Internet being the largest medium not subject to political control.
With the utter
lack of media coverage, there were no means of following ensuing events in the
Calliham case here – especially since Bill Calliham’s injuries were much
less severe than in the above cases. So I never learned whether police
caught and arrested someone for the crime. I knew I wouldn’t hear
anything from local media, so I recently decided to touch base and do the
follow-up myself – for the same reason I wrote the original article: if
I didn’t, then who would?
In fact, the
Callihams had been able to identify the perpetrator – through his car, a black
Lexus with four large headlights, which almost by chance they spotted in a
garage not far from where the Callihams lived. Having done the detective
work themselves, they were able to inform the police where to find Bill
Calliham’s attacker. One day they actually sighted the person outside in
his driveway washing the car, utterly unconcerned that he might be recognized.
They turned the license plate number over to the police. Finally, with
four months now having gone by, the person was questioned.
He admitted
that there had been a violent altercation, but blamed Calliham for it. In
fact, the person presented a scenario that was almost the reverse of Bill
Calliham’s original story. He contended that Calliham had followed him.
He claimed that his “fight” with Calliham had been in self-defense, that
Calliham had made “racial slurs” and then “sucker-punched” him.
Why, then,
hadn’t he been the one to call the police, and not Bill Calliham?
Because, the
answer goes, he “was too embarrassed.”
Calliham may
not have been injured as severely as was Troy Knapp, but his health problems
have increased since the incident. He suffers occasional attacks of
dizziness and confusion. He has experienced being out driving and suddenly
losing track of where he was or where he had been going. He has been to
the hospital to have this looked into, but so far no one has been able to
explain it. Both he and his wife have reported sleeplessness and extreme
apprehension.
This was a man
who served this country for 27 years in the Army. He was far from a
stranger to potentially dangerous situations, therefore, also having worked for
both the Columbia Housing Authority and the South Carolina Department of Social
Services. He was able to state the philosophy that had guided his actions
back then in a single sentence: “If you treat everybody nicely, you’ll
get the same respect back.”
That philosophy
might have worked before the political correctness era. Then began a
period of leftist professors, media pundits and unscrupulous lawyers of the
Johnnie Cochran persuasion “playing the race card” at every opportunity,
shouting from the rooftops about how blacks were still suffering from this
country’s legacy of slavery, how whites owe “reparations,” etc.
The Richland
County Sheriff’s Department declined to prosecute the Calliham case, claiming
to have two different versions of events neither of which could be corroborated.
The police closed the case without even issuing a warrant for simple battery (a
misdemeanor). Bill Calliham, having had no luck with either the police or
criminal prosecutors, has been forced to hire his own attorney and pursue that
matter in civil court. Just finding an attorney was not an easy matter,
despite a substantial file folder of evidence: the original police report,
pictures of his face following the attack, hospital bills, results of cat-scans,
his wife’s testimony and the testimony of a neighbor, as well as that of other
character witnesses. “We’re going to court to see if justice will be
done,” he told me. “So far we haven’t seen justice. The RCSD
wouldn’t do anything. The solicitors wouldn’t do anything. The
magistrates wouldn’t do anything. Two lawyers wouldn’t take the case.
But I’m still trying to get this solved through the courts.”
It has now been
over a year. We’re waiting.
December
17, 2001
Steven
Yates has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is the author of Civil
Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action(ICS Press, 1994). He is
a professional writer at work on a number of projects including a work of
political philosophy, The Paradox of Liberty. He also writes for theEdgefield
Journal, and is available for lectures. He has set up a small freelance
writing business, Millennium 3 Communications. Currently living in Columbia,
South Carolina, he will join the Mises Institute early next year as a Rowley
Fellow.
The Internet
makes available extraordinary materials for learning something of the mind-set,
to use that contemporary term, of those who find themselves directing the
affairs of nations.
A
website published an interview conducted in 1998 by
Le Nouvel Observateur.
The site had evidently posted it (in translation by Bill Blum) after the Sept.
11 attack on New York and Washington. I downloaded it on October 8. The site’s
title for the interview was "Afghan Islamism Was Made in Washington."
(The link seems to be no longer active.)
The main burden
of the interview, as demonstrated by the remarks of interviewee Zbignew
Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, was that Osama
bin Laden was our construct, a genuine US baby. He got his training under our
CIA when they were conducting covert operations against the USSR via the
Mujahadeen of Afghanistan.
This was fairly
old news even as soon as October 8, since it was repeatedly referred to in
various background stories that appeared on the net following the attack; but
that is not why I am bringing up the interview here.
My reason has
to do with a paragraph in which Brzezinski answers a challenge given by the
interviewer, who asked if he (Brzezinski) did not now regret having supported
Islamic fundamentalism and given arms and advice to future terrorists. (Keep in
mind that this was more than two years before the Sept. 11 attacks). The quote
is now featured in any number of stories that come up on Google when you search
"Zbignew Brzezinski."
Brzezinski
answered, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had
the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to
regret it? The day the Soviets crossed the border [into Afghanistan] I wrote to
President Carter: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam War.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war
unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."
The interviewer
responded: "And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic
fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski:
"What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Interviewer:
"Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic
fundamentalism represents a world menace today."
Brzezinski:
"Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam.
That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner
and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with
1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian
fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or
Central Asian centralism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian
countries."
I am inclined
to say that there speaks a breathtakingly arrogant and morally obtuse man, but
at the very least you have to see that his crystal ball was clouded. He rushes
to take credit for a program which, he thinks, brought down the Soviet Union
but, as of 1998, he wasn’t in the least concerned there might be
"unintended consequences," such as the murderous Islamic terrorism
that brought down the World Trade towers.
He blithely
takes full credit for toppling the USSR, a self-aggrandizing opinion that leaves
people like Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II out in the cold, and he takes no
cognizance of the internal economic contradictions that led Misesians in
general, and Murray Rothbard in particular, to view the Soviet Union, for
decades before the end, as a balloon ready to pop.
But set that
aside. Brzezinski (let’s go to "B" for short) gives us a superb
portrait of our contemptuous, presumptuous power elite, ever convinced they know
better and willing to play God all over the place, never thinking what their
machinations may produce when the real and very just universe gets through
dealing with their hubris. No one can foresee the results that are yet to come
from the chain of causation set off by the meddling of our "global
thinkers".
Can we not
somehow induce these inflated egomaniacs to leave the scene before they do more
harm? Oh, how one yearns for them to GO, to pack their Vuitton bags, Armani
suits, and Gucci loafers, and go – go anywhere, but just leave here, vamoose,
pronto, cop-chop; and this means the lot of them, all the war planners,
geopolitical experts, warmongering pundits, media moguls and their lackeys, all
the empty-headed, opinionated celebrities; all of you, go, please go NOW. And
don’t look back, who knows what may be gaining on you.
(I know; it
won’t happen, but it should.)
Incidentally,
notice in Brother B’s remarks, the contempt for Christians as well as Muslims.
Muslims aren’t "global, "they are just a bunch of squabblers of no
account; Christians ditto.
It, as they
say, gives one pause to realize that this man of high position is such a creep
and arrogant bully. He is, in addition, a toady of the Rockefellers and was at
one time chairman of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, that
mysterious High Council that never has its meetings reported in the press, even
though some of the biggest media people attend it. Plain people need not
apply and needn’t be nosey. It gives this plain person a deep chill to think
of a mind like B’s influencing deliberations by the mighty on the fate of the
world.
There is a
reality that our marvelous "leaders" are still struggling not to face
six months after the hideous attack on New York and Washington. (C.S. Lewis
wrote once that we ought to stop the ridiculous pretense of calling these
toplofty politicians our "leaders"; they are in fact our rulers.)
I submit that our rulers have yet to realize that we indeed have met the enemy,
and the enemy, as Pogo pointed out years ago and many others have said since, is
us. Or, more precisely, them.
Our rulers are
now telling us, in what seems to me a truly insane development, that they have
in view the possibility of a worldwide war – World War IV – perhaps even
nuclear war, between the Muslims, who are increasingly unified, and the formerly
Christian nations, now called "the West" and now ruled (bullied,
rather) by the United States.
Meanwhile our
rulers, acting against the known sentiment of the people, go on pretending that
they can continue their "multiculturalism" and anything-goes
immigration policies. Their notion is that everybody coming here really wants to
be an "American," even though more and more of those who get here
cluster together, set up their own counter-nations, and demand to hear the
rulers’ orders and receive their government hand-outs in their own languages.
I remember an
old priest telling me back in the early 1940s that he believed Al Smith was
right when he said, in effect, this country would never be ruined or captured by
a foreign nation but it might be torn apart in a contest of organized minorities
within. Not bad as crystal balls go.
Whatever we get
now really isn’t going to be a world war of Christian and Muslim, because
there are no Christians as such willing to take arms, and there certainly is no
Christian "crusade." On one side there is a gaggle of nations (the
2001 World Almanac says there are 189 in the UN), virtually all of them without
love for us (I speak as gently as I know how). I realize many of them say they
are with is, but I believe it is out of dread, not love. On the other side there
is ourselves, a secular, officially godless nation with an enormously powerful,
evidently invincible military force.
The U.S. now
rather resembles the Carthage that Flaubert brought to life in his Salammbo:
we are luxurious, soft, rich, proud, cruel, and utterly devoted to Baal, the god
who required the sacrifice of newborns (in our case pre-borns) in his greedy
furnace. Rome was the sworn enemy of Carthage, and Rome was then a younger, more
vigorous and martial nation determined to do Carthage in. Cartago delenda est,
Cato said. Osama bin Laden & Co. simply substituted "America" for
"Carthage" in the formula.
The vaunted
power of America, which derives from its eminence in capitalist wealth creation
over more than two centuries, has now been perverted to the cause of empire. We
are destined to be confronted by who knows which of that gaggle of 189 nations
or in what combinations. To name nuclear powers which clearly dread us and are
preparing for us to do our worst: China, Russia, Pakistan, India, and even
Israel. That amorphous and negligible Islam that B. so despises presumably has
but one nuclear power among its group, but that, plus some ambitious arms
suppliers among the other non-Islamic powers, may prove quite enough for nuclear
night.
The crystal
ball again: in the future, if there is to be a future, one sees that people like
George W. Bush will no longer come to the presidency, instead we shall have
"maximum leaders" of the primped-up caudillo type, appealing (as even
poor Dubya is doing already) to a heavily Latino population for whom the names
Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and even Roosevelt are empty or inimical. Sound
and true American patriots will be fewer and farther between in politics than
they are now. The Council of Foreign Relations will be recruiting like mad among
the "leaders" of the "minority nations" in America, but by
then the good old CFR will probably be operating out of Brussels and be staffed
by Muslims.
"It is past time to say
it: we want a country of our own."
"Take Aztlan. Break off
the southeast and take it, too, as well as New England. Take as much of the
interior as is necessary to satisfy you."
"Give us the worst
parts of America and leave us alone. Allow us to live our lives without
interference. Allow us to be different from you. Stop taxing us to advance your
agenda, which has nothing to do with our best interests and which seeks our
destruction."
Unlikely. They have the vast
majority of us enslaved to hatred of ourselves and they thereby control the
military and their bed-warmers that were once our daughters.
The best peaceful solution
we can hope for is an explicit agreement to pay them higher rates of taxation in
exchange for being left alone, and even that they will not honor so there is
little point to the agreements we might reach with them.
Speaking as one who has seen
Federal reform legislation from idea through to public law -- public law meant
to limit the reach of the occupying government, let me assure you:
Laws mean nothing to them.
Treaties mean nothing to them. Even the planet's ecology means nothing to them
and therefore not even their own survival holds any true meaning for them.
Only the onward march of
genetic dominance over recessive populations -- by whatever means necessary --
is of any relevance.
Technological civilization
has been hijacked by those who know only how to dominate -- not how to build --
and their values and foresight in the operation of that civilization are quite
predictable.
If they cannot control it
ALL they will take everything, from technological civilization to the most
primitive species, back to dust for the simple reason that they know if even a
1% of us are able to pursue our own lives our own way in the resourceless,
inhospitable lands they might allow us, paying confiscatory taxes to them
instead of, as Israel does, receiving billions in annual taxes from us -- the
resulting economic "miracle" emerging from that 1% will destroy the
illusions that Jews and their opportunistic genetic dominants have labored so
single-mindedly to create in our minds -- illusions with which they turn us
against ourselves in mind-numbing zombie-producing indoctrination-founded
slavery upon which all their rapacious rent-seeking.
PS: Indulgence in the
intergeneration blame game is exactly the sort of thing the enemy promotes
within us. We failed our ancestors to the precise degree that they failed to
protect us from outside influences -- and that, my friend, goes back to the
origins of empires and their rule although it holds most intensely for the GI
generation's abrogation to mass-media and academia in the rearing of the boomers
by urban ethnics such as Jews -- and then the participation in the economic
profits -- primarily in real estate but also in rent-seeking via government such
as Social Security -- won at the expense of fetuses being pumped into the
garbage bins behind government-funded clinics and their children being pumped
full of STDs not to mention psychopathologies as a result of being blamed for
their plight at the same time as they accept, as fungible, all manner of
counterfeit guilt assigned to them for the crimes, imagined and real, of their
ancestors.
Strangers in
a Strange Land
January 18,
2002.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote his
classic (early sixties) scifi novel, "Stranger in a Strange Land,"
about a man raised by Martians, whose first contact with other humans and with
Earth takes place after he is fully grown. Biologically human, but socially and
environmentally a Martian, he saw the world differently, to say the least.
There is a distinct minority
of people in America today that is biologically American but socially and
environmentally different from most of those living here. Strangers in a strange
land. We used to be the majority. Our forebears founded America. We are mostly
older, though some in the younger generations have awakened to the problems we
face. We are overwhelmingly Christian, white and of European extraction. We grew
up in a far different country. We silently stood by while America was reshaped,
thinking it would endure, as it seemingly always has. We were wrong.
We have suffered affirmative
action and all that it meant, due to a false sense of guilt engendered in us by
others about the treatment of blacks that we never knew by whites with whom we
have nothing in common except skin color. We didn't realize that we were merely
trading places with those that had been discriminated against in the past.
We have endured the
spectacle of renaming all the schools in cities like New Orleans after blacks,
both notable and immemorable, thereby erasing the memory of our founding
fathers. We have allowed streets, buildings and all manner of public property to
be renamed, taking off "Washington," "Jefferson" and the
like, to be replaced with "Martin Luther King, Jr." and others whose
primary contribution to American society has been their skin color.
Not a single one of the
founding fathers has a holiday named solely for himself. Martin Luther King,
Jr., has one, though. We know why.
We suffered the removal of
the Confederate flag from public venues. Now we see the American flag become a
mark of "oppression," as evidenced by black Florida firefighters
recently refusing to ride on fire trucks bearing the stars-and-stripes, and for
that reason alone.
We witness the spectacle of
a statue of modern American heroes, three firefighters captured forever in a
photograph raising the American flag over the WTC ruins, mongrelized in the name
of diversity, whereby two of the three white figures are displaced by a black
and a latino, respectively. We know the truth.
Schools teach to the bottom
of the classes and we pretend to wonder why we have to keep lowering the
standards so that students appear to be as smart as ever. We know why. We know
different. Nobody left behind means nobody out in front, of course. We have
sacrificed our children to a false sense of guilt, in pursuit of intellectual
parity that can never be achieved without genetic restructuring.
We suffer massive levels of
crime that did not exist even thirty years ago, overwhelmingly at the hands of
"people of color." Though our media and government do everything they
can to skew the statistics, we know who is to blame.
School shootings. We know
why.
Victim mentality. We are
tired of the whining.
Massive immigration but no
assimilation. No longer the melting pot, but now the potluck free lunch, and we
know whose pot is being provided.
We are witness to a massive
movement by Mexicans, called "La Reconquista," the objective of which
is the secession of southwest America, to be rejoined to Mexico or established
as a country in its own right. They even have a name for it already: Aztlan. We
have all but given it to them, but now they pursue us to the poor and
inhospitable locales of America to which we have retreated and demand a share of
those, as well.
"Americanism is a
matter of the spirit, and of the soul...The one absolutely certain way of
bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to
be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling
nationalities...each preserving its separate nationality.... The men who do not
become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans.... There is no such
thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American." ----- Theodore
Roosevelt, 1900
Welfare, food stamps, school
and free medical care for illegals, primarily paid for by us, though many of us
can no longer afford to feed our own kids properly.
Some of us haven't seen
doctors in years because we haven't the money.
Some of us qualify for
welfare, but we are too proud.
We can't afford to send our
kids to college, the same college that provides free tuition and living expenses
to those whose primary qualification consists of skin color.
Yet our government lobs
million-dollar missiles at empty caves and camel dung in places we don't care
about. And sends billions in foreign aid to countries that hate us and actively
work to subvert our dominance in world affairs. Afghanistan just announced that
we owe it $15 billion to rebuild it, after spending about that much wrecking it
in pursuit of a guy we can't find. Our government will give it, too. We know
why.
We see political correctness
run amuck. We can't read newspapers or magazines without having "hate
whitey" - er, diversity - thrown in our faces on every page. That's why
readership is declining. That, plus the general rise in illiteracy engendered by
the failing social experiment that America has become. Even the advertisements
now have massive overrepresentation of blacks and latinos, depicted in unlikely
poses and occupations.
We endure the dismantling of
Christianity and its removal from every public edifice. We see our pastors stand
by idly, often lending a hand to those who seek to replace Christianity with
other religions. We prohibit discussion of Christ in schools, yet California
requires the teaching of Islam to seventh graders.
Movies and TV depict an
America that doesn't exist...that never existed except in the wishful thinking
of warped leftists, sexual deviants, cultural communists, globalists and other
assorted control freaks.
Terrorist attacks and more
to come, because we pretend not to know why. Because we continue to be the
world's bully. Because we allow our government to do the bidding of others.
We have betrayed our
grandparents and theirs. We have squandered our birthright and our heritage. We
sacrifice our children upon the altar of political correctness.
This is not the country in
which we grew up. Not the society that formed us. Not the future we were
promised. This isn't working for us. Strangers in a strange land.
There is no place left in
America for us. Every place has to be the same now, as dictated by those who
would be our masters. Life comes in one size these days, dispensed through the
TV set.
We deserve better. We demand
better.
It is past time to say it:
we want a country of our own.
Take Aztlan. Break off the
southeast and take it, too, as well as New England. Take as much of the interior
as is necessary to satisfy you.
Give us the worst parts of
America and leave us alone. Allow us to live our lives without interference.
Allow us to be different from you. Stop taxing us to advance your agenda, which
has nothing to do with our best interests and which seeks our destruction.
Let us establish a New
America, and give us the Constitution to guide it, since you aren't using it,
anyway.
It is time to stop being
strangers in our own land, an increasingly strange land.
New America. An idea whose
time has come.
-ed Forward as you wish.
Permission is granted to publish freely.
Copyright 2002, Edgar J.
Steele
"I didn't say it would
be easy. I just said it would be the truth." - Morpheus
ON first impressions the
ideal of "multi-culturalism" was thriving in central Copenhagen this
week. At the Norre Alle ethnic minority community centre a small group of
middle-aged, fair-skinned Danish ladies linked arms with immigrant friends and
danced to a rusty recording of Greek folk music.
In the rapidly-filling hall
men born in Somalia, Gambia, Jordan, Algeria and Turkey chatted over cups of
subsidised coffee. This, after all, is Denmark, Europe's shining light of
liberal values, as famous for its "open door" policy towards asylum
seekers and refugees as it is for being first to legalise gay marriages and
hard-core pornography.
At least "liberal"
was how Denmark used to be described. Now, according to Bashy Quraishy, the
Pakistan-born president of the European Network Against Racism who has lived in
Demark for 32 years, the beacon of tolerance has turned "racist".
Since September 11
everything has changed, he says. "Since then we have seen that Danes are as
racist as anybody."
The real reason why the
centre was packed on Wednesday night was that Copenhagen's large immigrant
community had summoned a crisis meeting.
The topic was a
controversial law on immigration that is now passing through parliament with the
backing of 60 per cent of the Danish people. The legislation, introduced by the
new centre-Right government that won power last November, will be on the statute
book by mid-summer.
Its aim is to do something
very "unDanish" - shut down national borders to more foreigners and
slash their welfare payments, in some cases by over 30 per cent.
Requirements for asylum are
being tightened, funding to ethnic minority organisations withdrawn, the waiting
period for permanent residency extended from three to seven years, rights to
family reunion curtailed, and rules put in place banning marriage by Danes to
foreigners until the age of 24.
The laws - justified by the
government on the grounds that Denmark has been too liberal and generous for too
long - are causing inevitable resentment and confusion among its 300,000-strong
immigrant community, 70 per cent of whom are Muslims.
"This is our
home," said Ousman Sawaneh, a Somali with Danish citizenship. "But
they are doing their level best to get us out."
Voices on the Danish Left
are outraged by what they believe is a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has
spun out of control, but they are outnumbered. "People still have a
perception that Denmark is a country that respects human rights," said
Kamal Qureshi, an MP from the Socialist People's Party. "It is simply
incredible that the international community has not noticed what is going on.
Here in Denmark we are passing extreme legislation that Jorg Haider [Austria's
far-Right populist] couldn't even dream of."
Mr Quraishy says the
terrorist attacks on America last September changed the entire political debate.
In one fell swoop the rhetoric about immigrants and immigration changed.
"It was like a
fuse," he said. "Much of the racist feeling was always there beneath
the surface in the land of Vikings. But September 11 set it off. The whole
atmosphere has been poisoned."
Memories are fresh of how
the Right-wing populist People's Party, under its blonde leader Pia Kjaersgaard,
campaigned with a poster showing a Danish girl next to a slogan saying:
"When she retires Denmark will have a Muslim majority." It doubled its
vote to 12 per cent.
The party's deputy chairman,
Peter Skaarup, told The Telegraph that it was right to link immigration directly
to crime. "It is very hard not to do so," he said. "Three
quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes . . . We want to preserve Denmark
as a non-immigrant country."
What is now beginning to
worry immigrants' organisations, and some Left-of-centre European governments,
is that what is happening in Denmark is occurring elsewhere. The success of the
People's Party is mirrored by the rise of similar parties in Portugal, Belgium,
the Netherlands and Germany. Austria has had Mr Haider for many years.
Last month, the liberal
world of Dutch politics was turned upside down when a shaven-headed homosexual,
Pim Fortuyn, who has described Islam as a "backward culture" and has
called for an end to all immigration and asylum in his country, won 35 per cent
of the votes in Rotterdam for his Livable Netherlands party.
Almost half of 18 to
30-year-old Dutch people now say they want zero Muslim immigration and that they
will vote for Mr Fortuyn in May's general election.
In Hamburg, Germany, where
some of the September 11 hijackers lived, the Party for a Law and Order
Offensive run by Judge Ronald Schill won more than 20 per cent of the vote in
local elections.
Judge Schill has said he
wants to deport "black African drug dealers and the knife-stabbing
Turks".
In Italy, prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi's government is tightening up rules to penalise illegal
immigrants. A new centre-Right Portuguese government came into power last month.
However, it is not only on
the Right that the rhetoric about immigration is changing. Last weekend, the
grand old man of European Social Democracy, the former German Chancellor, Helmut
Schmidt, caused astonishment by saying that Germany - which has seven million
immigrants - had invited far too many foreigners in after 1945.
This was a great mistake, he
believed, because Germans were and still are instinctively racist and do not
want to assimilate other cultures. "Now we find ourselves in a
multi-cultural society and cannot cope with it. We Germans are unable to
assimilate all seven million. The Germans do not want this. They are to a large
extent xenophobic." Suddenly it had become acceptable to question multi-culturalism
from the Left.
At the end of June Denmark
takes on the European Union presidency and there are signs that this will spur
the whole issue of immigration and asylum to be debated anew. Yesterday the
governments of France, Belgium and Sweden called for talks on the issue with
Copenhagen.
Mr Quraishy says the time
has come for the EU to decide a policy for its 20 million immigrants.
"Europe has got to come to terms with the fact that it is not all white and
Christian. It has to look at itself and ask what it wants because there is no
going back."
View other
ancient sites near Hamilton. A note about the caves.
Revisit
Ancient Celtic / Viking New Zealand (?).
Investigate the
controversial subject of anomalies in New Zealand . New Zealand has a
deliberately suppressed pre-Maori, pre-Taupo eruption history. Authorities have
jealously hidden our pre-history. Evidence that contradicts conventional
historical attitudes which are essentially that NZ has no pre-Maori human
history is deliberately hidden, ignored or destroyed.
Maori secrecy aided by DOC
and our National Archivists confound, obstruct and generally set about to
prevent investigation. Maori spiritualist values, tapu, secret folk lore and
general obstructions under the guise of cultural sensitivity are used to prevent
investigations on land and in national archives.
More recent, unsavoury Maori
history is being swept aside and forced into oblivion by socially engineered
pro-Maori historical cleansing. Take the history of the Mori-ori. A pre-Maori
people butchered and eaten into near extinction, as well as through forced
integration by such means as rape and slavery. Oh yes didn't you realise, Maoris
had slaves, yet were never themselves enslaved by the European. Maori slaves
also provided meat and sustenance and they didn't necessarily have to die or be
cooked prior to being consumed! Yes it did happen. Recalling such events it puts
Maori history in a distinctly invidious position, but it is merely past history
now. Anyway history is being cleansed by reclassifying Mori-ori as just another
Maori tribe. Still a pacifist race was harried and eaten out of existence,
however you look at it.
As of Late August 2000.
Maori are now claiming, even in parliament, that they are suffering from
"post-colonisation trauma" and this is the justifiable reason that
they bash their children to death! Can you believe it? Let's briefly mention
something far more problematic. And for relevance read the books mentioned in
one of the link options at the foot of this page. The Treaty of Waitangi was
signed in 1840 at the request of Maori chiefs and Europeans who feared for the
continued existence of the tribes, sub-tribes, extended and immediate families (iwi,
hapu and whanau) in the face of the Maori cannibal raiding parties, (and also
from the growing interest of the French), to provide just cause for the British
Crown to take control of a serious problem facing everyone in NZ. Maori warriors
had been rampaging through the country armed with muskets and were destroying
communities and forcing tribes to resettle in other areas of the country. This
was displacement of Maori by Maori, not at this stage of Maori by the British -
this did happen in time but there were huge differences. Land confiscation is
totally different to stealing land from people you conquer and eat!
The Maori warriors not only
displaced other tribal communities, they enslaved them. This enslavement was
even more grotesque than whatever the American Negro slaves had to endure. Do
you ever recall reading where American cotton growers forced their negro slaves
to do a full days work, and then sat down to consume their slaves as the main
menu item for the evening meal. and make the others slaves watch as they worked
their way through them. This is exactly what the Maori did to slaves and
prisoners. The Maori warriors went on to murder and consume thousands of their
own folk, sometimes even kinfolk! and often any Europeans caught up in their way
as well. You can be assured this is no exaggeration. Often the victims were not
dead before being carved up and consumed. Imagine rolling around on the ground
in agony with one buttock, or maybe the muscles of your arm sliced off, and
seeing someone eating it in front of you. That's right they didn't necessarily
bother to wait and cook it. Don't think they used a nice sharp knife either. A
piece of half blunt sea shell was quite adequate, or a flake of obsidian if you
were more fortunate.
A major consideration is
that the Maori problem today is not at all related to the European colonisation
but to the gross excesses of their own actions prior to European colonisation.
We are only just entering the seventh generation of Maori since their
appallingly and disgusting cannibalistic excesses. It takes generations for the
curses and taint of such to be worked out of the soul of the people. Curiously
one particularly vocal anti-European Maori belongs to one tribal group who
perpetrated the heinous cannibalistic excursion to the Chatham Islands. Is this
a case of trying to pass on the cannibal curses to the innocent European settler
descendants? It doesn't work that way.
The cannibal descendants
need to claim forgiveness of their kind and change their total attitudes to life
and living, and join the modern world as working contributors. They need to
accept what happened was in the past and to throw aside all the Maoritanga
associated with revenge and counter settlement. Europeans are not to blame for
Maori's self imposed predicament. Besides most of the Maori are only people who
think they are Maori and are using that status in a totally racist and biased
manner. There are many Maori who have already moved on and become part of modern
society very successfully - they are now New Zealanders and in many cases even
Australians.
In the 1950's a Maori guide
at the Tarawera buried village, (buried by the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tarawera)
used to tell of how parents had to watch out for young toddlers around the pa
(village) lest they stray too close to the whare (hut) of an old cannibal
warrior and be killed and cooked in the umu (oven), before anyone could stop it.
Maori also practised infanticide*, and the young were exceptional tender
morsels. Terrible, but read the old European folk tales. - Jack and the Bean
Stalk, and Hansel and Gretel among others. Ours is not to condem the Maori (or
should this be the part-Maori who now masquerade as Maori). None of us even
countenanced these aspects of Maori life as affecting us, anymore than the
characters of the European folk tales just mentioned. But the darkness is upon
the Maori. New Zealanders need to pray for their release from the curses and
bondages of Maoritanga and cannibalism because indirectly it is starting
affecting our whole nation as the acursed endeavour to make others pay for their
affliction. *Infanticide is the killing of an unwanted baby. Is bashing a child
to death simply another form of infanticide?
Maori are not the only
peoples to have been cannibals, or to have decimated earlier peoples settled in
a conquered land. The Maori of today are really NOT the race of Maori that were
here at the time the modern Celtic/European arrived. Their genes have changed
for all time due to intermarriage and significant assimilation within the modern
New Zealand population mix.
One way to counter the
modern political bias for the subjugation of our current Celtic, Viking and
European New Zealand heritage, is to have an open, impartial, honest and total
examination of ALL historical artifacts without imposing obstructionist
pre-conceptions and mythologies. The current official attitudes are as bad as
those held in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Is that the aim of the
resurgent Maori New Zealand? The Treaty of Waitangi, the national art museum Te
Papa, the special committees set up to promote Maori with public funding. the
list can go on and on.
We already have redefinition
and renaming of features, regions and social customs with substantial funding
stolen from our own pockets. What has happened to the thousands being spent by
NZ Post* to rename all towns, streets etc with Maori names under the guise of
equal opportunity and total bi-lingualism? While there is nothing wrong with
Maori names for Maori communities and places, the prima face reason has been the
assumption all features only ever had Maori names. Now there are real grounds
for doubt about this. In a truly bi-cultural nation Mt Egmont would be equally
able to be referred to by it's European name or it's Maori name, Taranaki. Not
so in modern NZ. Use of the term Mt Egmont is considered culturally insensitive.
Only Taranaki is permitted when referring to it. People are too scared (or
complacent) to question this for fear of being insensitive or racist. Which is
the racist attitude? What was it called by the pre-Maori populations and
explorers? The term "Tara" also has celtic roots. Perhaps Taranaki is
not originally a Maori name afterall? (*NZ Post is apparently no longer doing
this, it may have been taken over by another agency).
To provoke further thought
about NZ's pre-history.. and remember when students at school were once told NZ
had no dinosaur history. Now there are books written about NZ's own dinosaurs.
Delve into anything that may indicate or increase recognition of NZ's pre-Maori
human settlement. Record it, write about it, photograph it, survey it (as in
making written recorded land surveys/maps). Disperse this knowledge widely
BEFORE official Government departments and DOC, Environment or Culture
ministries can subvert such knowledge and destroy, obscure, reclassify or hide
the evidence.
You don't believe this
happens?! Check out ...Taylor's embargo
Go to the web-site......
Ancient Celtic New Zealand
Then when you are walking,
tramping, talking, or listening, keep an eye on or an ear out for the unusual,
the taken for granted. Think about objects in and on the land with a new
perspective. Learn more about the cultures here to-day, the cultures of recent
history and those of long ago. The world is a big place. Man has always wandered
over mountain and glen, moor and plain, hill and valley, river, ocean and sea,
island and continent. We have always used the resources available to us within
the means of our current technologies and we has always pushed the edge of
understanding, endeavour, and investigation to the limit. It is NATURAL to do
so, and we were made able to do so by design. Some people become enslaved by
custom and superstition, by a lack of learning and education, inquisitiveness
and loss of perception so that they reject open learning and truth and honesty.
Their culture stagnates in rigid unremitting tradition. Fear, secrecy, deceit,
deception and untruths multiply and gain control. In simple terms they go to the
Devil, where darkness, lies, fear and retribution and apathy reign supreme.
Question: Are we headed into another Dark Age? Or would it be preferable to have
open knowldege of what we find out, about NZ's past?
Once
again, a person of presumed victimization reminds us white guys that we just
don't have natural rhythm. This does seem to be our burden in life: to live on
the sidelines of toe-tapping civilization, stealing occasional musical crumbs
from blacks and calling them our own. Helen Kolawole, a former music editor of a
magazine called Pride, informs us of the following:
As
another celebration of a dead white hero winds up, in this hallowed Week of
Elvis, shouldn't the entertainment industry hold its own truth and
reconciliation commission? It needn't be a vehicle for retribution, just
somewhere where tales of white appropriation of black culture, not to
mention outright theft, can finally be laid to rest. Following Michael
Jackson's recent outburst accusing Sony chief, Tony Mottola, of racism,
perhaps he could officiate and champion all black musicians who have been
ripped off by nasty white music business CEOs. . . .
Putting
Parsons's vision into practice, let's imagine that instead of Elvis mania, Big
Mama Thornton – author of Hound Dog – reigns supreme with her ode to
no-good men. Big Mama's cultural conquest gives birth to a radical white teen
culture and a complete and lasting overhaul of America's putrid racial
politics. White teens frighten their parents silly with their extreme bids not
to become Elvis's pale imitation of the black performers he witnessed, but the
very image of Big Mama. Sounds outlandish? Any more audacious than stubbornly
maintaining that this talented – but more importantly white – man deserves
to be king of a genre created by black people?
Well,
I guess that puts us in our place, as usual, except for one seemingly
inconvenient fact: "Hound Dog" was written Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was recorded by Big Mama in 1953. Lieber and
Stoller were a couple of Jewish boys, both born in 1933. They were 20 years old
when they wrote "Hound Dog."
Lieber
attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. In my day (1955-59), Fairfax High,
which I did not attend, was the only high school in southern California to close
on Yom Kippur. Maybe eight people would have showed up if it had stayed open,
half of them physical education teachers. I have no reason to believe that this
wasn't also the case in Lieber's day.
So,
what we have here is a premier black entertainer, Big Mama Thornton, one of the
unsung founders of early rock and roll, who made her big entry with a song
written by a couple of white guys.
She
wasn't the only one. Lieber and Stoller wrote the following: "Love Potion
#9" (The Clovers), "Kansas City" (Wilbert Harrison), "On
Broadway" (The Drifters), "Stand by Me" (Ben E. King). And then
the all-time jackpot, a string of hits recorded by the hippest, funniest group
of the 'fifties, The
Coasters: "Searchin'," "Young Blood," "Along Came
Jones," "Charlie Brown," "Yakety Yak (Don't Talk
Back)," "Poison Ivy." They also wrote, "I'm a Hog for You,
Baby," so I guess they weren't Orthodox Jews. This had to be the greatest
string of hit rock & roll songs written by non-performing song writers
during the 'fifties, and I would contend, ever.
In
1957, they wrote "Jailhouse
Rock" for Elvis as the title song for his movie. Then the started their
own music company. They produced records for black performers.
As
music journalist Robert Palmer has noted, "They didn't just perform
songs for these artists; they arranged the songs, picked the backing
musicians, supervised the recording sessions." The pair added, "We
didn't write songs, we wrote records." And they yet again unwittingly
furthering the evolution of rock by taking under their wings a young
producer, Phil Spector, attracted by this sort of acoustic innovation.
They
were inducted into the Rock and Toll Hall of Fame in 1987.
But
I'm supposed to feel guilty for being an accomplice of a white heist of black
culture.
Victimization
is in high gear these days.
'TIS
PASSING STRANGE
It
is worth mentioning that Big Mama Thornton was discovered
by Johnny Otis, the blues and rock band leader in Los Angeles. So was Etta
James. He was a pioneer in rhythm & blues. In 1950, he had 10 songs that
made the Top-10 in Billboard's Rhythm & Blues list. He has been
described as the Godfather of rhythm and blues. What none of us knew until more
than four decades later was that Johnny Otis was "passing" – a Greek
guy who decided to become an honorary black. He did it really well. An Otis
Web site says:
Johnny
Otis discovered many legendary Rhythm and Blues singers such as Esther
Phillips, Willie Mae "Big Momma" Thornton, Etta James, and the
Robins (who later evolved into the Coasters), all of whom were at one time
featured vocalists in his band. He also discovered Sugar Pie DeSanto, Hank
Ballard and the Midnighters, Jackie Wilson, and Little Willie John. He
produced, and with his band played on the original recording of "Hound
Dog" with "Big Momma" Thornton. He produced and played on
Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love", and produced some of Little
Richard's earliest recordings. On his own Blues Spectrum lable, Johnny has
recorded and played with Rhythm & Blues pioneers such as Big Joe Turner,
Gatemouth Moore, Amos Milburne, Richard Berry, Joe Liggins, Roy Milton,
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Charles Brown, and Louis Jordan. Johnny
played the drums on Charles Brown's first major hit "Driftin'
Blues" in 1946. He also recorded with Illinois Jacquet, and Lester
Young. One of the many highlights of his long career was when he performed
as a drummer with the great Count Basie Orchestra.
In
the 1960's Johnny served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Mervin Dymally [black],
whose career he followed from the State Assembly, State Senate, Lieutenant
Governorship of California, to the U.S. Congress. His first book
"Listen To The Lambs", which addressed the 1965 race riots was
published in 1968. His next book, "Upside Your Head! Rhythm & Blues
on Central Avenue" was published in 1993. Many of his paintings,
sculptures, and wood carvings are displayed in "Colors and Chords –
The Art of Johnny Otis" which was published in 1995. His most recent
book, "Johnny Otis – Red Beans & Rice and Other Rock 'n' Roll
Recipes" was published in 1997.
Johnny
Otis's song writing credits include "Every Beat of My Heart", (a
song he wrote originally for Jackie Wilson, but was made a hit by Gladys
Knight and the Pips), "Roll With Me Henry", (also known as
"The Wallflower"), "So Fine", "Willie and the Hand
Jive" (which sold over 1.5 million copies), and many, many others.
Johnny
has been inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame, and into the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame. The Archives of African American Music and Culture at
the University of Indiana has cataloged hundreds of hours of his past radio
shows for his interviews, comments, insights, and historical significance.
Today he teaches a course for the University of California at Berkeley
exploring the history of African American music titled "Jazz, Blues,
& Popular Music in American Culture".
If
you would like to read about his cooking, and get his recipe for Greek egg-lemon
soup, click
here.
I
am not sure how guilty I should feel about all this. I used to watch Johnny's
local TV show in Los Angeles. "Johnny Otis, Johnny Otis . . . boom, boom .
. . Johnny Otis, Johnny Otis!" Was I an accomplice of an unconscionable
white guy who stole black culture and delivered it to us white guys? Or was I an
accomplice to a Greek bearing gifts to black performers who needed radio and TV
exposure? I'm not sure. But I know I'm supposed to feel guilty. As Ms. Kolawole
says:
But
the reality is, black music never stays underground. White people always
seek it out, dilute it and eventually claim it as their own.
In
Johnny's case, blacks claimed him as their own, and more than a few of them
prayed for some air time on his TV show.
BLUEGRASS
ISN'T BLACK
Elvis
recorded Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" for his first single.
It wasn't clear whether this song or the flip side, "That's All Right
(Mama)," would be the hit. His band was called The
Blue Moon Boys, which is understandable. He would not have done nearly so
well as part of the All Right Mamas.
Bill
Monroe invented bluegrass. His group was called The
Bluegrass Boys. I am unaware of anyone who has argued that Bill Monroe was
an offshoot of black American culture. A band that toured in suits and cowboy
hats was not in big demand in any of America's ghettos – at least not black
ones.
When
he added banjo picker Earl Scruggs to his band in 1946, what is known as
bluegrass music came into being. It was Scruggs' staccato three-finger picking
style that was henceforth to identify the music as a separate category. Monroe's
group's name stuck to it. Rare is the bluegrass band, such as Nickel Creek, that
has no banjo.
You
could argue that the banjo was a black instrument. Blacks could not afford to
buy guitars. The nineteenth-century minstrel shows featured banjos. But the
blues is a guitar-based music form. Dixieland jazz sometimes uses a four-string
banjo, but the five-string has been a white Southern mountain instrument for
over a century. If anything, a cultural exchange was made a century ago: blacks
got the guitar, and whites got the banjo.
Blacks
added the bottleneck to establish a brief cultural monopoly, but after the
Dopera brothers – Slovakian immigrants – invented the dobro
guitar in 1926 or 1927, whites regained access to the steel bar's wailing
sound. The compromise: blacks play it vertically; whites play it horizontally.
If you want to see the difference, see how the white Canadian bluesman – yes,
Virginia, there is a white Canadian bluesman – Colin
Linden, plays it vertically, while Jerry Douglas plays it horizontally: "Down
from the Mountain."
Such
is the stuff of cultural exchange.
CONCLUSION
Helen
Kolawole made a factual mistake. She forgot to look up who wrote "Hound
Dog." She also did not know about Johnny Otis' role in launching Big Mama's
career. Big Mama had a lot of help from a couple of Jews and a Greek. This makes
Ms. Kolawole's tirade look silly. This can happen to anyone who invokes some
fact as a symbol of an all-important cultural movement, and the fact turns out
to be wrong. But what about her main point? What about the aleged theft of black
culture by crackers like Elvis?
First,
the story of Elvis' roots in black music is as familiar as his legendary pelvis.
Second, he really did have natural rhythm – again, the pelvis. What is the
problem here? The fact that Little Richard never made the transition to ballads,
or that Chuck Berry never ate grilled preanut butter and banana sandwiches? Are
reparation royalty payments next?
Bill
Monroe's version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" is not much like Elvis'
version. There is no doubt that rock-a-billy has a lot of black in it. When
Elvis was interviewed for the first time on radio by the Memphis disk jockey who
had launched his career by playing his record over and over, DJ Dewey Phillips
(no relation to Sam) kept mentioning Elvis' high school, which was a white
school. Phillips wanted no confusion on that score.
Jerry
Lee Lewis' initial piano style was influenced by the black boogie-woogie
piano style. His cousins, Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley, were not equally
influenced. But to argue that Lewis was not initially part of the white gospel
piano tradition would be ridiculous. In his later
career, the white country music tradition became dominant.
Music
is a universal language, like mathematics and money. It knows few borders. (OK,
maybe Chinese music does. I hope so, anyway.) Jazz began in the return of black
bands from graveyard internments in New Orleans. But the bands played white
hymns out to the above-ground graves.
Black
guilt masters are everywhere. Some of them are doing their best to claim that
their people invented the dominant popular music forms. I will let them retain
title to rap. But as for other imports into and out of the world of the ghetto,
let us say that royalties have been paid both ways.
Opinion The
Life and Death of Patrick Chavis A Fresh Perspective by Michelle Malkin
Aug 7, 2002
Dr. Patrick Chavis is dead. Will the liberal
politicians and gullible media who made him a poster boy for government-imposed
affirmative action shed a single tear, or will they continue to ignore what a
shameful tragedy his life became?
According to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's detective I spoke with last week,
Chavis was murdered on the night of July 23 in Hawthorne, an economically
depressed neighborhood on the southern edge of Los Angeles. Three unknown
assailants shot him during an alleged robbery at a Foster's Freeze. They remain
on the loose. The news has yet to be reported anywhere else, but sources told me
it was the buzz of the Los Angeles medical community last week.
Seven years ago, Chavis became the toast of the media elite and the racial
preference crowd when he was profiled lavishly by New York Times magazine writer
Nicholas Lemann. Chavis, who made the cover of the magazine, was a black
physician admitted to the University of California-Davis medical school under a
special racial-preference quota. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court later struck
down the program after a landmark challenge by white applicant Allan Bakke.
Lemann contrasted what he considered Bakke's unremarkable career following the
lawsuit with Chavis' noble and booming ob-gyn practice in the ghetto of Compton.
Three months later, Jane Fonda's ex-husband, left-wing California politico Tom
Hayden, heaped praise on Chavis in defense of affirmative action. "Bakke's
scores were higher," Hayden wrote in an article for The Nation, "but
who made the most of his medical school education? From whom did California
taxpayers benefit more?" Sen. Ted Kennedy picked up the banner a year
later, calling Chavis "a perfect example" of the need for lowering
admissions standards in the name of racial diversity. The doctor, Kennedy
crowed, was "making a difference in the lives of scores of poor
families."
What The New York Times never got around to reporting, as Boston Globe columnist
Jeff Jacoby first noted and journalist William McGowan later chronicled in his
award-winning book "Coloring the News," is that the
"difference" Chavis made in the lives of several young black women
involved gruesome pain -- and death -- as a result of botched "body
sculpting" operations at his clinic.
An administrative law judge found Chavis guilty of gross negligence and
incompetence in the treatment of three patients. Yolanda Mukhalian lost 70
percent of her blood after Chavis hid her in his home for 40 hours following a
bungled liposuction; she miraculously survived. The other survivor, Valerie
Lawrence, also experienced severe bleeding following the surgery; after
Lawrence's sister took her to a hospital emergency room, Chavis barged in and
discharged his suffering patient -- still hooked up to her IV and catheter --
and also stashed her in his home.
Tammaria Cotton bled to death and suffered full cardiac arrest after Chavis
performed fly-by-night liposuction on her and then disappeared.
In 1997, the Medical Board of California suspended Chavis' license, warning of
his "inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a
physician." In a statement filed by a psychiatrist, the state demonstrated
Chavis' "poor impulse control and insensitivity to patients' pain." A
tape recording of "horrific screaming" by patients in Chavis' office
revealed the doctor responding callously: "Don't talk to the doctor while
he is working" and "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
If Allan Bakke, the white doctor, had engaged in such disgraceful behavior and
met such an ignominious end, you can bet the Left would never let us forget it.
But Ted Kennedy and Tom Hayden, who spoke so voluminously about the poor black
patients who supposedly benefited from medical affirmative action, had nothing
to say about the poor black women who were brutally victimized by the
incompetent Chavis. As for The New York Times, Bill McGowan wrote: They
"ran nothing to amend their false portrait of an affirmative action hero,
or question the legitimacy of the race-conscious social policy that had made him
a doctor. A riveting, nationally newsworthy story central to the country's
discussion of racial preferences somehow ended up completely falling through the
cracks."
Will the Times editors bother to run an obituary about their fallen affirmative
action hero? Will Ted Kennedy send his condolences?
Don't hold your breath.
Malkin's work has been cited in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today,
Reader's Digest and U.S. News and World Report. Michelle Malkin's can be reached
at
malkin@comcast.net.
Thought
Reform 101 The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation
By Alan Charles
Kors
At Wake Forest University last
fall, one of the few events designated as "mandatory" for freshman
orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in
which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity
so that they can identify with "a person of color for a day." In
Swarthmore College's dormitories, in the fall of 1998, first-year students were
asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward
and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at
almost all of our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has
been built into freshman orientation and residential programming. These
exercises have become so commonplace that most students do not even think of the
issues of privacy, rights, and dignity involved.
A central goal of these programs
is to uproot "internalized oppression," a crucial concept in the
diversity education planning documents of most universities. Like the Leninists'
notion of "false consciousness," from which it ultimately is derived,
it identifies as a major barrier to progressive change the fact that the victims
of oppression have internalized the very values and ways of thinking by which
society oppresses them. What could workers possibly know, compared to
intellectuals, about what workers truly should want? What could students
possibly know, compared to those creating programs for offices of student life
and residence, about what students truly should feel? Any desire for
assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white America's
strategy for racial hegemony.
In 1991 and 1992 both The New York
Times and The Wall Street Journal published surveys of freshman orientations.
The Times observed that "orientation has evolved into an intense
...initiation" that involves "delicate subjects like...date rape [and]
race relations, and how freshmen, some from small towns and tiny high schools,
are supposed to deal with them." In recent years, public ridicule of
"political correctness" has made academic administrators more
circumspect about speaking their true minds, so one should listen carefully to
the claims made for these programs before colleges began to spin their
politically correct agendas.
Tony Tillman, in charge of a
mandatory "Social Issues" orientation at Dartmouth, explained in the
Journal that students needed to address "the various forms of `isms':
sexism, racism, classism," all of which were interrelated. Oberlin
"educated" its freshmen about "differences in race, ethnicity,
sexuality, gender, and culture," with separate orientations for blacks,
Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and Americans of Asian descent. Columbia
University sought to give its incoming students the chance "to reevaluate
[and] learn things," so that they could rid themselves of "their own
social and personal beliefs that foster inequality." Katherine Balmer,
assistant dean for freshmen at Columbia, explained to the Times that "you
can't bring all these people together...without some sort of training."
Greg Ricks, multicultural educator
at Stanford (after similar stints at Dartmouth and Harvard), was frank about his
agenda: "White students need help to understand what it means to be white
in a multicultural community....For the white heterosexual male who feels
disconnected and marginalized by multiculturalism, we've got to do a lot of work
here." Planning for New Student Week at Northwestern University, a member
of the Cultural Diversity Project Committee explained to the Weekly Northwestern
Review in 1989 that the committee's goal was "changing the world, or at
least the way [undergraduates] perceive it." In 1993, Ana Maria Garcia,
assistant dean of Haverford College, proudly told the Philadelphia Inquirer of
official freshman dormitory programs there, which divided students into two
groups: happy, unselfish Alphas and grim, acquisitive Betas. For Garcia, the
exercise was wonderfully successful: "Students in both groups said the game
made them feel excluded, confused, awkward, and foolish," which, for
Garcia, accomplished the purpose of Haverford's program: "to raise student
awareness of racial and ethnic diversity."
In the early 1990s, Bryn Mawr
College shared its mandatory "Building Pluralism" program with any
school that requested it. Bryn Mawr probed the most private experiences of every
first-year student: difference and discomfort; racial, ethnic, and class
experiences; sexual orientation; religious beliefs. By the end of this
"orientation," students were devising "individual and collective
action plans" for "breaking free" of "the cycle of
oppression" and for achieving "new meaning" as "change
agents." Although the public relations savvy of universities has changed
since the early 1990s, these programs proliferate apace.
The darkest nightmare of the
literature on power is George Orwell's 1984, where there is not even an interior
space of privacy and self. Winston Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic
of the argument that everything is political, and he can only dream of "a
time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a
family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."
Orwell did not know that as he
wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university students to "thought
reform," known also as "re-education," that was not complete
until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and
emerged as "progressive" in a manner satisfactory to their trainers.
In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in academic
"sensitivity training," a white student in his third day of a
"facilitated" retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his
college and hometown identified, confesses his family's inertial Southern racism
and, catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students
who will see this film on their own campuses), "It's a tough choice,
choosing what's right and choosing your family."
Political correctness is not the
end of human liberty, because political correctness does not have power
commensurate with its aspirations. It is essential, however, to understand those
totalizing ambitions for what they are. O'Brien's re-education of Winston in
1984 went to the heart of such invasiveness. "We are not content with
negative obedience.... When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own
free will." The Party wanted not to destroy the heretic but to
"capture his inner mind." Where others were content to command
"Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt," O'Brien explains,
"Our command is `Thou art.'" To reach that end requires
"learning... understanding [and] acceptance," and the realization that
one has no control even over one's inner soul. In Blue Eyed, the facilitator,
Jane Elliott, says of those under her authority for the day, "A new reality
is going to be created for these people." She informs everyone of the rules
of the event: "You have no power, absolutely no power." By the end,
broken and in tears, they see their own racist evil, and they love Big Sister.
The people devoted to remolding
the inner lives of undergraduates are mostly kind and often charming
individuals. At the Fourth Annual National Conference on People of Color in
Predominantly White Institutions, held at and sponsored by the University of
Nebraska last October, faculty and middle-level administrators of student life
from around the country complained and joked about their low budgets, inadequate
influence, and herculean tasks.
Their papers and interviews reveal
an ideologically and humanly diverse crowd, but they share certain assumptions
and beliefs, most of which are reasonable subjects for debate, but none of which
should provide campuses with freshman agendas: America is an unjust society.
Drop-out rates for students of color reflect a hostile environment and a lack of
institutional understanding of identity and culture. What happens in the
classroom is inadequate preparation for thinking correctly about justice and
oppression.
They also share views that place
us directly on the path of thought reform: White students desperately need
formal "training" in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of
such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism. The
university must become a therapeutic and political agent of progressive change.
Handouts at the Nebraska conclave
illustrated this agenda. Irma Amirall-Padamsee, the associate dean of student
relations and the director of multicultural affairs at Syracuse University,
distributed the Office of Multicultural Affairs' brochure. Its
"philosophy" presupposes that students live "in a world impacted
by various oppression issues," including "racism." "OMA's
role," it announced, "is to provide the...leadership needed to
encourage our students...to grow into individuals willing to take a proactive
stance against oppression in all its shapes."
Molly Tovar, who has done this
sort of work both at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma State
University, passed out a 22-page guide she co-authored, "How to Build and
Implement a Comprehensive Diversity Plan." The guide explains the three
"kinds of attitudes" that agents of cultural change will face:
"The Believers," who are "cooperative; excited; participative;
contributive"; "The Fence Straddlers," who are "suspicious;
observers; cautious; potentially open-minded"; and "The
Skeptics," who are "critical; passive aggressive; isolated;
traditional."
Ronnie Wooten, of Northern
Illinois University, distributed a handout, "Inclusive Classroom
Matters." It adapts a variety of common academic sources on
multiculturalism, including a set of "guidelines" on how to
"facilitate learning about those who are different from you." The
students in this "inclusive classroom" would have to abandon what
might be their sincere inner beliefs, replacing them with such professions of
faith as "We will assume that people (both the groups we study and the
members of the class) always do the best that they can." The guidelines
make it clear that one may not restrict one's changes to the intellectual:
"We will address the emotional as well as the cognitive content of the
course material. We will work to break down the fears that prohibit
communication."
Sharon Ulmar, assistant to the
chancellor for diversity and equal opportunity at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha, handed out a flyer titled "Can [A] Diversity Program Create Behavior
Changes?" Her program's mode of self-evaluation was to measure "the
number of participants that took action based upon the awareness they learned
from [the] program." Among the units of "awareness" successfully
acquired were the following (some of which surely might strike one as more
problematic than others): "gays and lesbians no different than [sic]
others"; "handicap accessibility is for those who are handicaped
[sic]"; "difficult to make a decision about own beliefs when others
are watching"; "module allowed participant to witness subtle behaviors
instead of hearing about it"; and the ineffably tautological
"understanding commonalities of each individual may be similar to
yours."
Denise Bynes, program coordinator
for Adelphi University's Center for African-American Studies Programs,
distributed a "Conflict Resolution Styles Questionnaire" for students,
all of whom are to be categorized at the end as one of the following:
"competing, avoiding, accommodating, compromising, and collaborating."
The handout also presents the "basic values" of each American ethnic
group. For white Americans, these are "Freedom/liberty/privacy;
equality/fairness; achievement/success; individualism/self-interest; economical
use of time; comfort." For African-Americans, "Ethnic pride, heritage,
history; kinship bonds/family/motherhood; equality/fairness; achievement;
respect; religion/spirituality." For Asian-Americans, "Reciprocal
social duties; self-control/courtesy/dignity; devotion to parents; tradition
(family, culture, the past); duty/hard work/diligence." Each group also has
its own particular "overview" of nature, logic, time, society, and
interpersonal relationships. Whites wish to "control" nature, for
example; Hispanics, to live in "harmony" with it; blacks, to
"overcome" it; and Asians, to "be adjusted to" and
"accept" it. Whites are "rational, logical, analytical";
Hispanics, "rational, ethical"; blacks, "allegorical and
synthetical"; and Asians, "intuitive, holistic, tolerate
inconsistencies."
According to a formal presentation
by Bynes and her colleague at Adelphi, Hinda Adele Barlaz, all of these
materials were acquired during "training" by the U.S. Department of
Justice Community Relations Service, a program so effective that "it was
very hard to get any of the other white members of the committee [Barlaz was
white] to go for the training that the Department of Justice provided free of
charge. The white members of the [Adelphi Prejudice Reduction] Committee had
been so alienated by the training that they didn't want to go back."
What do these presenters in
Nebraska, typical of those now governing offices of student life and residence,
believe about the re-education of our college students? The keynote speaker at
the conference was Carlos Muñoz, professor of ethnic studies at the University
of California at Berkeley. He explains in an interview that to create an
appropriate environment on campus, one has "to do as much outreach as
possible away from the classroom, into the dorms, into the places where students
live." Such work should begin during freshman orientation, continue
throughout a college experience, and be mandatory.
Amirall-Padamsee from Syracuse
argues that "students of color need to be nurtured as insightful leaders of
our community" and that "they must be formally trained in
anti-oppression theory and related skill building." "White
students," in turn, "have to be trained as allies in change."
(Ally is a code word in sensitivity training circles. As the "diversity
facilitator" Hugh Vasquez of the Todos Institute explains in a widely used
manual, an "ally" is someone from "the dominant group" who
is aware of and articulates his unmerited privilege and who intervenes on behalf
of mistreated groups.)
The goal of such training,
according to Amirall-Padamsee, is "to produce graduates who are individuals
committed to educational and social justice, and not just a tolerance of, but a
validating of difference." To accomplish that she says, "we need to
define and implement ways to translate education to behavioral change." In
addition, she boasts, she has access to federal work-study funds, and she uses
that position--and her capacity to dismiss people-- "to try to make a
positive change in the way that the student is thinking."
Tovar, formerly of Oklahoma State
University and now at the University of Oklahoma, declares in an interview at
the conference that "at OSU we have all kinds of sensitivity
training." She describes an incident involving fraternity brothers who had
been disrespectful of Native American culture: They ended up "incredibly
emotional....These fraternity kids broke down." OSU also has mandatory
multicultural freshman orientation sessions.
Bynes, also the co-chairman of the
Prejudice Reduction Committee at Adelphi University, says the committee's
emphasis is on training individuals how to interact "with a diverse student
body," with "separate training for students...[and] special sessions
on student leadership training." This "cultural and racial awareness
training would benefit all members of the Adelphi community, both in their
university and personal lives." The committee would get people to talk
about "`what I like about being so-and-so,' `what I dislike about being
so-and-so,' and `the first time I encountered prejudice,'" all exercises
that the facilitators had been shown and had experienced in their own
"training" by the Justice Department.
Bynes is a kind, accomplished,
candid, and well-meaning woman. As she explains, "White people must
have...sensitivity training...so that they can become aware of white
privilege." Mandatory sensitivity training ideally should include both
students and faculty, but "there are things that we can't dictate to the
faculty because of the fact that they have a union."
There are painful ironies in these
attempts at thought reform. Individual identity lies at the heart of both
dignity and the flourishing of an ethnically heterogeneous society. Black
students on American campuses rightly decry any tendency of university police to
stop students based on race. Their objections are not statistical but moral: One
is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on
individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws,
of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when
undertaken by "diversity educators."
From the Inquisition to the
political use of Soviet psychiatry, history has taught us to recoil morally from
the violation of the ultimate refuges of self-consciousness, conscience, and
private beliefs. The song of the "peat bog soldiers," sent by the
Nazis to work until they died, was "Die Gedanken sind frei,"
"Thoughts Are Free," for that truly is the final atom of human
liberty. No decent society or person should pursue another human being there.
Our colleges and universities do so routinely.
The desire to "train"
individuals on issues of race and diversity has spawned a new industry of moral
re-education. Colleges and universities have been hiring diversity
"trainers" or "facilitators" for 15 years, and the most
famous of them can command $35,000 for "cultural audits," $5,000 for
sensitivity workshop training, and a sliding scale of honoraria, some for not
less than $3,000 per hour, for lectures.
This growing industry has its
mountebanks, its careerists, its well-meaning zealots, and its sadists. The
categories often blur. Three of the most celebrated facilitators at the moment
are Edwin J. Nichols, of Nichols and Associates in Washington, D.C.; Hugh
Vasquez, of the Todos Institute in Oakland, California; and Jane Elliott, the
Torquemada of thought reform. To examine their work is to see into the heart of
American re-education.
Nichols first came to the
attention of critics of intrusive political correctness in 1990, when he led an
infamous "racial sensitivity" session at the University College of the
University of Cincinnati. According to witnesses, his exercise culminated in the
humiliation of a blond, blue-eyed, young female professor, whom he ridiculed as
a "perfect" member of "the privileged white elite" who not
only would win "a beauty contest" but even "wore her string of
pearls." The woman, according to these accounts, sat and sobbed. These
contemporaneous revelations did not harm Nichols' career.
According to the curriculum vitae
sent by his firm, Nichols studied at Eberhardt-Karls Universität in Tubingen,
Germany, and at Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, "where
he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and Psychiatry, cum
laude" (a rare degree). In some publicity material, he states that he
founded a school of child psychology in Africa; at other times, he modestly
withholds that accomplishment.
Nichols' schedule of fees is
almost as impressive as his schedule of thought reform. He charges $3,500 for a
three-hour "Basic Cultural Awareness Seminar," plus travel and per
diem. For a plain old "Workshop," he gets $4,000-$5,000 plus expenses.
This makes his staple offering--a "Full Day Session (Awareness Seminar and
Workshop)"--a bargain at $5,000 plus expenses. For a "Cultural
Audit," he gets $20,000-$35,000 (he recently did one of these for the
University of Michigan School of Medicine). The Bureau of Labor Statistics at
the Department of Labor paid him $15,000 for diversity training; the
Environmental Protection Agency got him cheaply at $12,000.
Business is booming. Nichols has
brought awareness to the employees of six cabinet departments, three branches of
the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Aviation
Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI; the Goddard Space
Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA;
the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the
Social Security Administration. He has enlightened city and county governments,
whole school systems, various state government departments, labor unions,
several prestigious law firms, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore. His clients
include "Fortune 500 Corporations, foreign governments, parastatals,
associations, health and mental health systems," and he has been a
consultant to offices of "The British Commonwealth of Nations" and
"organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Latin
America...Singapore, Malaysia, and China." He has a very long list of
academic clients, and he was a centerpiece of Johns Hopkins' 1999 freshman
orientation.
What does Nichols believe? He
believes that culture is genetically determined, and that blacks, Hispanics, and
descendants of non-Jewish Middle-Eastern tribes place their "highest
value" on "interpersonal relationships." In Africa, women are the
equal of men. Whites were altered permanently by the Ice Age. They value objects
highly, not people. That is why white men commit suicide so frequently when they
are downsized.
Nichols calls his science of value
systems "axiology," and he believes that if managers and
administrators understand these cultural differences, they can manage more
effectively, understanding why, according to him, blacks attach no importance to
being on time, while whites are compulsive about it. Whites are logical; blacks
are intuitive and empathetic. Whites are frigid; blacks are warm and
spontaneous. Whites are relentlessly acquisitive; nonwhites are in harmony with
nature. White engineers, for example, care about their part of something; Asian
engineers, managers should know, care about the whole. Whites are linear;
nonwhites have a spiral conception of time. Nichols has a handout that he
frequently uses. Whites, it explains, "know through counting and
measuring"; Native Americans learn through "oneness"; Hispanics
and Arabs "know through symbolic and imagery [sic]"; Asians "know
through striving toward the transcendence [sic]." Asking nonwhites to act
white in the workplace is fatal to organizational harmony. Understanding
cultural axiology is essential to management for the 21st century. Now, reread
his list of clients.
Two diversity training films
widely used at major universities reveal the techniques and the characters of
two other leading thought reformers. Skin Deep, the 1996 film funded by the Ford
Foundation, records an encounter at a retreat between college students from
around the country. The facilitators are not active in the film, but the
published guide tells you what they do and identifies their leader as Hugh
Vasquez.
Skin Deep begins with ominous news
clips from the major networks about "racial violence,"
"racism," "slurs," and "racist jokes" on campus.
It announces that "at these training grounds for our future leaders,
intolerance has once again become a way of life." We meet white, Hispanic,
black, and Asian-American students from the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, the University of California at Berkeley, and Texas A&M. The whites
have terrible stories to tell: They have grown up in white neighborhoods; their
families have prejudices; and they feel rejected by people of color. The people
of color have terrible stories to tell: They suffer frequent abuse in white
America, and they are sick of it.
Neither group is typical of a
college population. The whites, we gradually learn, have been members of
organizations working for racial understanding. The students of color all use
terms like "allies," suggesting that they've been through sessions
like this before. There is a Jewish woman who objects to being thrown into the
nightly "white caucus," where she doesn't really belong. She also
anguishes over whether all of the things she has been told at the encounter
about the Jewish role in the suffering of people of color are true. (Vasquez
responds candidly to an inquiry on this, revealing that some of those
allegations were outright anti-Semitic, and that the Jewish girl was looking for
"allies" who would not "scapegoat" Jews.) In short, the
white students talk about the stereotypes they have learned, and the students of
color reflect deeply on the cruelty of race in America.
When white students initially
suggest that they personally did not do terrible things, the students of color
fire back with both barrels. A first reply goes immediately to the heart of the
matter: "One thing that you must definitely understand is that we're
discussing how this country was founded, and because you are a white male,
people are going to hate you." A black student explains, more patiently:
"Things are going on presently: the IMF, presently; the World Bank,
presently; NAFTA, presently; Time Warner, presently; the diamond factories,
presently; reservations, presently; ghettos, presently; barrios, presently.
Slavery still exists." (Diamond factories?) The Chicana, Judy, lets them
know that "I will not stop being angry, and I will not be less angry or
frustrated to accommodate anybody. You whites have to understand because we have
been oppressed for 2,000 years. And if you take offense, so?" (Two thousand
years?) And from Khanh, a bitter Vietnamese student: "White people need to
hear that white people are very affected by internalized racism....As a person
of color growing up in this society, I was taught to hate myself and I did hate
myself. If you're a white person, you were taught to love yourself....If you
don't know that you have shit in your head, you'll never deal with racism."
By the end, the students of color
have had the grace to state that if the white students become real
"allies," their victims can let go of their anger a bit. White
students have come to realize that the pieties their parents taught them, such
as an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, apply only to whites in
America.
In short, what moves the film (and
American thought reform) is a denial of individual identity and responsibility,
an insistence on group victimization and rights, and the belief that America is
an almost uniquely iniquitous place in the world, without opportunity, legal
equality, or justice. "I want you to know," an Hispanic male explains,
"that because of the system, my cousin was shot...and then another cousin
was shot." The tribalism of the exploited Third World expresses a core
truth: You are your blood and history. Let the children of the guilty denounce
their parents. Let the victims stake their claims. Let the cultural revolution
begin.
Vasquez is a frank and warm man by
e-mail. He explains that the filmmaker never showed the facilitators because she
wanted to focus solely on the students, but that "it took a great deal of
planning and structure and facilitation to make what happened happen." In
his own mind, he was devoted to eliminating "blame, ridicule, judgements,
guilt, and shame" among all of the students in the group, and he sounds
sincere when he writes that his goal is to eliminate "individual and
institutional mistreatment of any group or culture." But his effect,
whatever his intention, is frightening, atavistic, and irrational, and his means
are deeply intrusive.
Americans surely need to study,
discuss, and debate, frankly, matters of race and ethnicity. Reasonable people
disagree on profound questions. Some of the issues are empirical: Is aversion to
difference acquired above all from culture or evolution? Should we be more
startled by America's success in creating a nation of diverse backgrounds or by
the difficulties it has in doing so?
Some of the issues are moral and
political: Should we favor legal equality with differential outcomes or equality
of outcomes even at the price of legal inequality? Are today's whites
responsible for the crimes of 19th-century Southern slave owners? What are the
benefits and costs of a society based on individual responsibility? These are
not issues for indoctrination. Indeed, they do not even reflect everyone's
chosen intellectual or moral agenda, and free individuals choose such agendas
for themselves.
Vasquez's "Study Guide"
for Skin Deep explains that the final goal of using the film in "colleges,
high schools, corporations, and the workplace" is to produce "action
strategies and... networks for working against racism," for which there is
a page of strategy. The guide further explains the necessity of affirmative
action, the "myths" of reverse discrimination and balkanization, and
the reality of white privilege. It teaches the need for the privileged to become
"allies" of the oppressed, and it focuses on the nightmare of
"internalized oppression." The internalization of oppression manifests
itself in "self-doubt...fear of one's own power; an urgent pull to
assimilate; isolation from one's own group; self-blame for lack of success;
[and] fighting over the smallest slice of the economic pie."
The guide also has a rare explicit
endorsement of "political correctness," reminding facilitators that
"language was a prime factor" in the murder of 6 million Jews, that
language perpetuates racism, and that it is wrong to believe that "anything
people say should be left alone simply because we all have the right to free
speech....The challenges to political correctness tend to come from those who
want to be able to say anything without repercussions." (He did not have
Khanh in mind.)
Skin Deep is a kid's cartoon,
however, compared to Jane Elliott's Blue Eyed. Elliott has been lionized by the
American media, including Oprah Winfrey, and she is widely employed by a growing
number of universities. Disney plans to make a movie of her life.
Blue Eyed arose from Elliott's
elementary school class in Riceville, Iowa, where, starting in 1968, she
inflicted upon her dyslexic students an experience in which they were loathed or
praised based upon their eye color. According to Elliott, she was ostracized for
this experiment, her own children were beaten and abused, and her parents (who
were racists, she informed a Dutch interviewer) were driven into isolation,
bankruptcy, and despair because they had raised "a nigger lover" (one
of her favorite terms).
In her modest explanation, once
news of her exercise with the children made it onto national television, the
people of Riceville feared that blacks across America would assume that everyone
there was like Elliott and would move to their town. To punish her for that,
they stopped buying from her father. Elliott also revealed to her Dutch
interviewer that she abandoned teaching school in 1984 to devote herself full
time to diversity education, for which she receives $6,000 per day from
"companies and governmental institutions."
In Blue Eyed, masochistic adults
accept Elliott's two-and-a-half-hour exercise in sadism (reduced to 90 minutes
of film), designed to make white people understand what it is to be "a
person of color" in America. To achieve this, she divides her group into
stupid, lazy, shiftless, incompetent, and psychologically brutalized "blue
eyes," on the one hand, and clever and empowered "brown eyes," on
the other. Some of the sadism is central to the "game," but much is
gratuitous, and it continues after the exercise has ended.
Elliott is unbearably tendentious
and ignorant. To teach what an IQ test truly is, she gives the brown eyes half
of the answers to an impossible test before the blue eyes enter the room,
explaining that, for people of color, the IQ exam is "a test about which
you know absolutely nothing." IQ tests only measure "white
culture." They are a means of "reinforcing our position of
power," and "we do this all the time in public, private, and parochial
schools," using "culturally biased tests, textbooks, and pictures on
the wall...for white people." (Fortunately for Elliott, it appears there
were no Asian-Americans or psychometricians in her group.)
Elliott often describes the 1990s
as if they were the 1920s; indeed, in her view, nothing has changed in America
since the collapse of Reconstruction. Every day in the United States, she
explains, white power keeps black males in their place by calling them
"boy" (two syllables, hissed), "and we do it to accomplished
black males over 70, and we get away with it." We tell blacks to
assimilate, which means merely to "act white," but when they try that,
we put them in their place and change the rules. For example (this in 1995),
whites now are building up Colin Powell, but as soon as they build "this
boy" up, they will kick him down. For Elliott, the Powell boom was a
conscious conspiracy to humiliate and disorient blacks.
She teaches her "blueys"
with relish that protest accomplishes nothing, because if blacks protest,
"we kill them." It is not smart to speak up or act clever, which is
why blacks appear passive and stupid. The lesson: "You have no power,
absolutely no power. ...Quit trying." Blacks might try to "win"
on the inside, but it is almost impossible to validate oneself when white
society puts you down "all day, every day."
Even if a "bluey"
understands the implications of the workshop, or even if a white woman
understands male prejudice, it bears no real relationship to the daily suffering
of every black: "You do not live in the same country as that [black] woman.
You live in the USA, but you do not live in the same country as she does."
Blacks such as Shelby Steele (singled out by name), who speak of transcending
race, delude themselves, because one might transcend one's skin color but never
society's behavior: "All you can do is sit there and take it." People
call the exercise cruel, Elliott explains, but "I'm only doing this for one
day to little white children. Society does this to children of color every
day." She stands over briefly assertive "blueys" and humiliates
them, explaining that if this makes you sick to your stomach for a few hours,
now you understand why blacks die younger.
In short, this is America, and
there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort.
Culture, society, and politics all are static. "White privilege"
controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means
that arise from these to render "people of color" psychologically
impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume
your guilt.
There is no redemption except
guilt, but there is a political moral. After "teaching" a "bluey"
to submit totally to her authority, she asks if that was a good lesson. The
workshop thinks it was. No, she says with venom, submission to tyranny is a
terrible lesson, but "what I just did to him today Newt Gingrich is doing
to you every day...and you are submitting to that, submitting to
oppression."
The facilitators' guide and
publicity for Blue Eyed states things honestly: Elliott "does not
intellectualize highly emotionally charged or challenging topics...she uses
participants' own emotions to make them feel discomfort, guilt, shame,
embarrassment, and humiliation." Facilitators are urged to use the raw
emotions of Blue Eyed (blueys do cry a lot) to tap the reactions of the viewers.
They should not expect black participants to "bleed on the floor for
whites," but they should get whites to "stretch" and "take
risks." The facilitators should be prepared for very strong and painful
emotions and memories from the participants. The ultimate goal of the film:
"It is not enough for white people to stop abusing people of color. All
U.S. people need a personal vision for ending racism and other oppressive
ideologies within themselves."
Elliott does mean everyone. In
1996, she told her audience at Kansas State University that all whites are
racists, whatever they believe about themselves: "If you want to see
another racist, turn to the person on your right. Now look at the person on your
left." She also believes that blacks were in America 600 years before
whites. She told the students at Kansas State that if they were angry at her,
they should write letters, but that they must do so without paper, alphabet, or
numbers, all of which were invented by people of color. Whites, in Elliott's
view, did have a certain creativity. Betraying a breathtaking ignorance of world
history, she told the Australian Internet magazine Webfronds in 1998 that
"white people invented racism." Other than that, however, whites were
quite parasitic.
"You're all sitting here
writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with," she
told the magazine. "You're all sitting here writing on paper that white
people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that
white people didn't come up with. We stole those ideas from other people. If
you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people
of color."
Jane Elliott has lived through
revolutionary cultural changes without taking note of any. She teaches only
helplessness and despair to blacks and only blood-guilt and self-contempt to
whites. She addresses no issue with intellectual seriousness or purpose. She
also is the reigning star in thought reform these days. On May 7, 1999, CBS News
ran a feature on her that declared: "For over 30 years, Jane Elliott has
waged a one-woman campaign against racism in America." CBS might want to
rethink the notion of "racism."
Even traditionalist campuses now
permit the ideologues in their offices of student life to pursue individuals
into the last inner refuge of free men and women and to turn students over to
trainers who want them to change "within themselves." This is a return
of in loco parentis, with a power unimagined in prior ages by the poor souls who
only tried to keep men and women from sleeping with each other overnight. It is
the university standing not simply in the place of parents but in the place of
private conscience, identity, and belief.
From the evidence, most students
tune it out, just as most students at most times generally have tuned out abuses
of power and diminutions of liberty. One should not take heart from that. Where
students react, it is generally with an anger that, ironically and sadly,
exacerbates the balkanization of our universities. The more social work we bring
to our colleges and universities, the more segregated they become, and in the
classifieds of The Chronicle of Higher Education during the last few years,
colleges and universities by the hundreds have advertised for individuals to
oversee "diversity education," "diversity training," and
"sensitivity training."
Orwell may have been profoundly
wrong about the totalitarian effects of high technology, but he understood full
well how the authoritarians of this century had moved from the desire for outer
control to the desire for inner control. He understood that the new age sought
to overcome what, in Julia's terms, was the ultimate source of freedom for human
beings: "They can't get inside you." Our colleges and universities
hire trainers to "get inside" American students.
Thought reform is making its way
inexorably to an office near you. If we let it occur at our universities and
accept it passively in our own domains, then a people who defeated totalitarians
abroad will surrender their dignity, privacy, and conscience to the
totalitarians within.
Alan Charles Kors (akors@sas.upenn.edu)
is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, co-author of The
Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses
(HarperCollins), and president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education. He is indebted to Thor Halvorssen, executive director of FIRE, for
the materials and interviews from the Nebraska conference.
South Africa: Stage 6 Genocide! Heretic Productions present: Adriana Stuijt, from
Aid Netherlands Essay
on the genocidal state of South Africa. http://www.nl-aid.org/domain/human-rights/south-africa-at-stage-six-genocide/ Genocide Watch:
South Africa and Zimbabwe Have Been Moved
to Stage 6 on the Countries at Risk Chart.
Joseph
R. Stromberg [
Once
again, a person of presumed victimization reminds us white guys that we just
don't have natural rhythm. This does seem to be our burden in life: to live on
the sidelines of toe-tapping civilization, stealing occasional musical crumbs
from blacks and calling them our own. Helen Kolawole, a former music editor of a
magazine called Pride, informs us of the following:
Lieber
attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. In my day (1955-59), Fairfax High,
which I did not attend, was the only high school in southern California to close
on Yom Kippur. Maybe eight people would have showed up if it had stayed open,
half of them physical education teachers. I have no reason to believe that this
wasn't also the case in Lieber's day.
Bill
Monroe invented bluegrass.
