Multiculturalism 

         Is A Globalis Scam 

        To Enslave Mankind

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.

"Various types of belief can be implanted in many people after brain function has been deliberately disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of "herd instinct" , and appear most spectacularly in war time, during severe epidemics, and in all  similar periods of common, which increase anxiety and so individual or mass suggestibility."  Dr William Sargant, a psychiatrist at the Tavistock Institute, in his 1957 book, Battle For The Mind.

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Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite

THE OJ MURDERS - FIVE YEARS LATER  by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

FREE MUMIA? By Paul Mulshine  HETERODOXY MAGAZINE August 1995

Life Styles: Native and Imposed 'The Blame of Those Ye Better'

The Challenge of "Multiculturalism" 

In How Americans View the Past and the Future

Of all the ways in which a nation defines itself, few are more important than what it teaches its children about itself. In the history classes of its public schools, a nation retells its own story and instills a national identity in the minds of young citizens. In today's America, where competing racial, cultural and linguistic claims now make it nearly impossible even to speak of national identity, questions about history have become a struggle for the possession of America's past.

The multicultural, multi-perspective history that has arisen from this struggle is not merely a departure from the history America has always taught its children. It may be the first time that a nation has abandoned the single identity of its origins and set out deliberately to adopt multiple national identities.

Significantly, the understanding by many non-whites of multicultural history is entirely different from that of whites. For whites, the central concepts are "inclusion" and "pluralism." American history is to be rewritten so that racial and cultural perspectives that were once "ignored" or "neglected" will get equal treatment. For many non-whites, however, multicultural history is merely a step on the way to an explicitly racial, Afrocentric or Hispanic history. Their goal is separation rather than inclusion.

The "conservative" view is that explicitly racial histories are illegitimate. America, it is argued, must be united by a common history, and exclusionist histories will disunite us. This position is logically correct; exclusionist histories are divisive. But as we shall see, the "conservative" position is wrong -- practically, emotionally, and even morally. America is already disunited by race, and no approach to history can change that. Just as it would be impossible to use the same history book in both France and England, it is impossible to write a single American history that satisfies, white, black, Indian, Hispanic, and Asian.

Schooling as Assimilation

The purpose of American public education has never been simply to impart knowledge. One of its central goals has been to make children into Americans. American schools fly the American flag and students pledge allegiance to it. The central events of history are from the American past. The most glorious achievements are American achievements. There is nothing odd about that. Every nation gives its children a national education.

Nevertheless, American schools have had an even more explicitly nation-building purpose than others because of the need to assimilate immigrants. John Quincy Adams wrote that immigrants "must cast off their European skin, never to resume it." Horace Mann argued that "a foreign people -- cannot be transformed into the full stature of American citizens merely by a voyage across the Atlantic." One of the strongest motives for building public schools was, therefore, the need to make Americans out of Europeans.

Europeans weren't going to be made into Americans by teaching them about the contributions of Africans, Mexicans and Indians. The old, standard history united Americans because it has a coherent purpose and a single voice. It emphasized one point of view and ignored others. To put it bluntly, it was history about white people for white people.

This history served the country well, so long as the population was overwhelmingly white, and the two traditional minorities - blacks and Indians -- did not have voices. All this changed, beginning in the 1960s. The civil rights movement gave voices to blacks and Indians, and changes in immigration laws brought a massive influx of non-whites. It was the end of a certain kind of America.

Non-whites began to complain about a version of history that left them out. The nation-building history that has bound Europeans into a single people had not bound whites and non-whites into a single people. "Multicultural" history was therefore to be a broader, more inclusive history that would give every American his rightful share of America's past. At the same time, "culturally relevant" history would keep blacks and Hispanics in school and stop them from dropping out at ever-increasing rates.

Squaring the Circle

Something that well-meaning whites did not understand is that an "inclusive" history -- one that would be all things to all people -- is impossible. History has winners and losers, and they see the same events with different eyes. At the same time, virtually every non-white group sees the conflicts of the past as struggles with whites, so multicultural history becomes a collection of perspectives that are often not merely non-white but anti-white.

How, for example, is a multicultural history to treat the discovery and settlement of North America by Europeans? The old history called it a triumphant advance for civilization. But for Indians, the same historical events are an unending sequence of defeats and disaster. Does a multicultural textbook call this a triumph or a disaster or both or neither?

What about the Mexican-American War [1846-1848]? At the time, it was thought a glorious success because it added huge chunks to the American West. But was it, instead, an imperialist atrocity? Are today's school children to rejoice that California is part of America or are they to weep over the stolen birthright of their Hispanic brothers?

Slavery poses a similar riddle. Blacks want to make it the centerpiece of their history, and in many ways it is. For nearly 300 years, most American blacks were slaves, and virtually everything that blacks did or thought was circumscribed by slavery. Today, it is still the centerpiece of black history, because it excuses failure and can be used to extract benefits from whites.

For whites, though, slavery is a minor historical event. Except for the Civil War (which was set in motion and fought by whites) the course of the nation's history would hardly have been different if there had been no slavery. To give it a prominent place in white history is a transparent effort to manipulate the way that whites think about the present.

Once slavery is promoted to the status of unparalleled evil, much of the past becomes incomprehensible. Is George Washington both the Father of his Country and a wicked man because he owned slaves? Is Abraham Lincoln the storied savior of the Union or is he a fiend because he thought blacks were inferior and should be sent back to Africa?

Those of us who went to school when American history still had coherence are likely to learn about the new, multicultural history only by accident. One such accident is that this year is the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. A typical multicultural problem has thus spilled out of the classroom and gotten wider notice: Was Columbus a great explorer or was he a genocidal tyrant? Are we to celebrate half a millennium of European America or are we to hang our heads in shame? Or are we to do both?

Problems and Uncertainties

Multicultural histories, by their very nature, cannot answer these questions. And because they cannot, they present American history as a bundle of uncertainties, as a series of unsolved "problems." Unlike the old history, which viewed the past with pride and the future with confidence, multicultural histories are diffident and perplexed. Unlike the old history, which at least gave white children a firm foundation for national identity, multicultural history says, in effect, that America has no identity. The only thing left to unite a multicultural America is geography.

One way to understand the impossible task that multicultural history has set itself is to imagine how one would write a school history book to be used in both France and Britain. How would it treat Napoleon? The very geography of London -- Waterloo Station, Trafalger Square -- is a monument to Englishmen who killed Frenchmen. Napoleon's tomb, Austerlitz station, and street names like Jena and Ulm all mark the pride the French take in their ancestors' readiness to slaughter foreigners. A "multicultural" history book of the Napoleonic wars would be an absurdity, and everyone knows it. And yet, it would be no more absurd than the history books American children use today.

Non-whites have a much keener sense of their group interests than whites. They see very clearly that the future will have its winners and losers, just as history has had them. Thus, while virtually every school district with a white majority is trying to square the circle by teaching a history that is everything to everyone, school districts with black majorities are beginning to replace the old "Euro-centric" curriculum with one that is openly "Afro-centric." They are not interested in supplementing the traditional history with different points of view. They want a single, African point of view.

In Atlanta, where 92 percent of the public school students are black, history and social studies courses have been rewritten from an "African-American" perspective. New York's public schools recently authorized a curriculum revision based on an openly anti-white position paper drafted, in part, by the black-supremacist professor, Leonard Jeffries. In California, school districts in heavily-black Oakland and East Palo Alto started the 1991/1992 school year without social studies textbooks. They decided to develop their own black-centered materials because they could find nothing suitable.

Private black schools have gone the farthest. Some reject America, and teach their pupils that they are the African diaspora. Many teach patent nonsense, claiming that the ancient Egyptians and even King Solomon were black. Nevertheless, even if some of their material is ridiculous, Afro-centric teachers have recognized something that white teachers have forgotten: History has a point of view; it cannot be all things to all people.

Building a Nation

Blacks, then, are learning the kind of history that whites once learned -- a history that builds identity and certitude. White children are learning that every interpretation is valid, that nothing is certain, that their nation's past is all paradoxes and unsolved problems. Patriotism will not grow in the heart of a child who cannot look back with pride upon his nation's past. We have come a long way from schooling that made Europeans into Americans. We now make Americans into nothing at all.

Multicultural history is like Affirmative Action. Just as whites are to step aside to give hiring preferences to minorities, whites are to set aside their own point of view and study those of others. Non-whites, on the other hand, are free to promote their own interests and exclusionist histories.

Like Affirmative Action, multicultural history is possible only because the majority has abandoned its position at the center. If whites insisted on their own history as strongly as non-whites insist on theirs, the inevitability of separate histories would have been recognized long ago. Nor will whites be willing to forego their own history forever. They will eventually realize that only they are studying a past with no answers and no certainties. They will eventually see that there cannot be one history that satisfies all. And they will begin to wonder whether there can be one nation that satisfies all.

History for Everyone and No One

Five years ago, the California Board of Education adopted guidelines for a new history curriculum that would "accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society." Several book companies proposed texts to meet that requirement, and last year, Houghton Mifflin won approval for its series for grades one through eight.

The title of the fifth-grade text tells the whole story. It is a line from a poem by the black writer, Langston Hughes: America Will Be. It is hard to imagine any other country publishing a history book that puts the nation in the future tense. Most nations want their children to look back on their people's history with pride. This book seems to suggest that the real, multicultural America is yet to come.

Of course, as the texts go to great pains to explain, America was always multicultural. A typical section is entitled, "A Nation of Many Peoples," and this does not mean Englishmen, Swedes, and Germans. One gets the impression that Europeans were a furtive side-show in a vast history that began with Indians and ends with Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, West Indians, and Native Americans.

Among the "moments in time" that the books illustrate with full-page portraits of people typical of a period, is a lasso-whirling, bronco-busting, Mexican lady-cowboy, or vaquera. Such an apparition would probably have astonished the longhorns as much as this "moment in time" astonished anyone over the age of twenty. In the 50 pages that one text devotes to the horrors of Negro slavery, there is a full-page portrait, not of a working slave but of an escaping slave.

This was not enough for the racial activists, for what they want is their own, exclusionist history. Houghton Mifflin officials, who expected praise and gratitude for their painstakingly "inclusive" history, were astonished by the accusations hurled at them. They did not realize that, for the most part, it is only whites who want a multi-perspective history.

The overall director of the series, Professor Gary Nash, is a well-known leftist and a leading proponent of multiculturalism. He, too, was shocked by critics who called him a racist and a white supremacist. "If I'm the bad guy," he wanted to know, "who are your allies?"

Several majority-black school districts rejected the texts outright. In San Francisco, where 82 percent of the public school children are non-white, the school board reluctantly accepted the books, but added a supplemental reading list with titles like Black Heroes of the Wild West, Chinese Americans, Past and Present, and Gays in America. (Homosexuals were angry that these grade school texts said nothing about their contributions to America.)

The battle over text books was especially bruising in California because, by 1995, a majority of its public school students will be non-white. Nevertheless, the white decline is rapidly moving East. The struggle for America's past is only warming up.

Some battles have already been lost. A 1983 study by Nathan Glazer and Reed Ueda of six leading history texts found that blacks and Hispanics got at least four times as much coverage as European immigrant groups, and even trivial non-white successes were paraded as brilliant achievements.

The multi-culturalists have already come a long way. More American 17-year-olds can now tell you who Harriet Tubman was than know who Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin were. They are more likely to know about her than to know that Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation or that George Washington commanded the American revolutionary army.

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 159-165.

Life Styles: Native and Imposed

'The Blame of Those Ye Better'

Kevin Beary

For decades now, African American leaders have been calling for a formal United States apology for the American role in the slave trade, with some even demanding reparations. Indian tribes proclaim their tax-exempt status as something they are owed for a legacy of persecution by the United States. Mexican Americans in the southwest United States seek to incorporate this region, including California, into Mexico, or even to set up an independent nation, Aztlan, that will recreate the glories of the Aztec empire, destroyed centuries ago by the imperialistic Spaniards.

That we live in an age of grievance and victimhood is not news. But did these peoples -- these Mexican-Americans, these Native Americans, these African-Americans -- really lose more than they gained in their confrontation with the West? Were they robbed of nobility, and coarsened? Or did White subjugation force them to shed savagery and barbarousness, and bring them, however unwillingly, into civilized humanity?

Today our children our being taught that the people who lived in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere were not "merciless Indian savages" (as Jefferson calls them in the Declaration of Independence), many of whom delighted in torture and cannibalism, but rather spiritually enlightened "native Americans" whose wise and peaceful nobility was rudely destroyed by invading European barbarians; that the Aztecs were not practitioners of human sacrifice and cannibalism on a scale so vast that the mind of the 20th-century American can hardly comprehend it, but rather defenders of an advanced civilization that was destroyed by brutal Spanish conquistadores; and that Africans were not uncultured slave traders and cannibals, but unappreciated builders of great empires.

But just how did these peoples live before they came into contact with Europeans? Although historical myth is ever more rapidly replacing factual history, not only in popular culture but also in our schools and universities, we may still find accurate historical accounts buried in larger libraries or in used book stores.

Aztec Civilization

In his famous work, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz del Castillo describes the march on Mexico with his captain, Hernan Cortés, in 1519. The Spanish forces set out from the Gulf of Mexico, and one of the first towns they visited was Cempoala, situated near the coast, where Cortés told the chiefs that "they would have to abandon their idols which they mistakenly believed in and worshipped, and sacrifice no more souls to them." As Diaz relates:

Every day they sacrificed before our eyes three, four, or five Indians, whose hearts were offered to those idols, and whose blood was plastered on the walls. The feet, arms, and legs of their victims were cut off and eaten, just as we eat beef from the butcher's in our country. I even believe that they sold it in the tianguez or markets.

Of their stay in Tenochtitlan, the present-day Mexico City and the heart of the Aztec empire, Diaz writes that Emperor Montezuma's servants prepared for their master

more than thirty dishes cooked in their native style ... I have heard that they used to cook him the flesh of young boys. But as he had such a variety of dishes, made of so many different ingredients, we could not tell whether a dish was of human flesh or anything else ... I know for certain, however, that after our Captain spoke against the sacrifice of human beings and the eating of their flesh, Montezuma ordered that it should no longer be served to him.

In renouncing cannibalism, was Montezuma cooperating in the destruction of his Aztec "cultural roots," or was he aiding a victory of civilized custom over barbaric?

A few pages later, Diaz provides a detailed description of

the manner of their [that is, the Aztecs'] sacrifices. They strike open the wretched Indian's chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey.

Diaz also describes the great market of Tenochtitlan, and its

dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones, feather, cloaks, and embroidered goods, and male and female slaves who are also sold there. They bring as many slaves to be sold in that market as the Portuguese bring Negroes from Guinea. Some are brought there attached to long poles by means of collars round their necks to prevent them from escaping, but others are left loose.

Plainly it was the Spanish who stamped out human sacrifice and cannibalism among the people of pre-Cortesian Mexico. As for slavery, it is as obvious that the Europeans did not introduce it to the New World as it is that they eradicated it, albeit not immediately. Moreover, the moral impulse to end slavery came from the West, specifically out of England. Had the Aztecs, Indians, and Africans been left to their own devices, slavery might well have endured in North and South America, as it does in parts of present-day Africa.

North American Natives

In his epic work France and England in North America, the great American historian Francis Parkman describes the early 17th-century recreational and culinary habits of the Iroquois Indians (also known as the Five Nations, from whom, some will have it, the United States derived elements of its Constitution). He tells that the Iroquois, along with other tribes of northeastern United States and Canada, "were undergoing that process of extermination, absorption, or expatriation, which, as there is reason to believe, had for many generations formed the gloomy and meaningless history of the greater part of this continent." Parkman describes an attack by the Iroquois on an Algonquin hunting party, late in the autumn of 1641, and the Iroquois' treatment of their prisoners and victims:

They bound the prisoners hand and foot, rekindled the fire, slung the kettles, cut the bodies of the slain to pieces, and boiled and devoured them before the eyes of the wretched survivors. "In a word," says the narrator [that is, the Algonquin woman who escaped to tell the tale], "they ate men with as much appetite and more pleasure than hunters eat a boar or a stag ..."

The conquerors feasted in the lodge till nearly daybreak ... then began their march homeward with their prisoners. Among these were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter ...

The Iroquois arrived at their village with their prisoners, whose torture was

designed to cause all possible suffering without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers with clam-shells, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescribable torments. The women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd ...

On the following morning, they were placed on a large scaffold, in sight of the whole population. It was a gala-day. Young and old were gathered from far and near. Some mounted the scaffold, and scorched them with torches and firebrands; while the children, standing beneath the bark platform, applied fire to the feet of the prisoners between the crevices ... The stoicism of one of the warriors enraged his captors beyond measure ... they fell upon him with redoubled fury, till their knives and firebrands left in him no semblance of humanity. He was defiant to the last, and when death came to his relief, they tore out his heart and devoured it; then hacked him in pieces, and made their feast of triumph on his mangled limbs.

All the men and all the old women of the party were put to death in a similar manner, though but few displayed the same amazing fortitude. The younger women, of whom there were about thirty, after passing their ordeal of torture, were permitted to live; and, disfigured as they were, were distributed among the several villages, as concubines or slaves to the Iroquois warriors. Of this number were the narrator and her companion, who ... escaped at night into the forest ...

Of the above account, Parkman writes: "Revolting as it is, it is necessary to recount it. Suffice it to say, that it is sustained by the whole body of contemporary evidence in regard to the practices of the Iroquois and some of the neighboring tribes."

The "large scaffold" on which the prisoners were placed, is elsewhere in his narrative referred to by Parkman as the Indians' "torture-scaffolds of bark," the Indian equivalent of the European theatrical stage, while the tortures performed by the Indians on their neighbors -- and on the odd missionary who happened to fall their way -- were the noble savages' equivalent of the European stage play.

If the descendants of the New England tribes now devote their time to selling tax-free cigarettes, running roulette wheels or dealing out black jack hands, rather than to the capture, torture, and consumption of their neighboring tribesmen, should we not give thanks to those brave Jesuits who sacrificed all to redeem these "native Americans"?

Native Africans

What kind of life did the African live in his native land, before he was brought to America and introduced to Western civilization? That slavery was widely practiced in Africa before the coming of the white man is beyond dispute. But what sort of indigenous civilization did the African enjoy?

In A Slaver's Log Book, which chronicles the author's experiences in Africa during the 1820s and 1830s, Captain Theophilus Conneau (or Canot) describes a tribal victory celebration in a town he visited after an attack by a neighboring tribe:

On invading the town, some of the warriors had found in the Chief's house several jars of rum, and now the bottle went round with astonishing rapidity. The ferocious and savage dance was then suggested. The war bells and horns had sounded the arrival of the female warriors, who on the storming of a town generally make their entry in time to participate in the division of the human flesh; and as the dead and wounded were ready for the knife, in they came like furies and in the obscene perfect state of nakedness, performed the victorious dance which for its cruelties and barbarities has no parallel.

Some twenty-five in number made their appearance with their faces and naked bodies besmeared with chalk and red paint. Each one bore a trophy of their cannibal nature. The matron or leader ... bore an infant babe newly torn from its mother's womb and which she tossed high in the air, receiving it on the point of her knife. Other Medeas followed, all bearing some mutilated member of the human frame.

Rum, powder, and blood, a mixture drunk with avidity by these Bacchantes, had rendered them drunk, and the brutal dance had intoxicated them to madness. Each was armed also with some tormenting instrument, and not content with the butchering outside of the town of the fugitive women, they now surrounded the pile of the wounded prisoners, long kept in suspense for the coup de grâce. A ring was formed by the two-legged tigresses, and accompanied by hideous yells and encouraging cry of the men, the round dance began. The velocity of the whirling soon broke the hideous circle, when each one fell on his victims and the massacre began. Men and women fell to dispatching the groaning wounded with the most disgusting cruelties.

I have seen the tiger pounce on the inoffensive gazelle and in its natural propensity of love of blood, strangle its victim, satiate its thirst, and often abandon the dead animal. But not so with these female cannibals. The living and dying had to endure a tormenting and barbarous mutilation, the women showing more cannibal nature in the dissection of the dead than the stronger sex. The coup de grâce was given by the men, but in one instance the victim survived a few minutes when one of those female furies tormented the agony of the dying man by prostrating herself on his body and there acting the beast of double backs.

The matron, commander of these anthrophagies, with her fifty years and corpulous body, led the cruelties on by her example. The unborn babe had been put aside for a bonne bouche, and now adorned with a string of men's genital parts, she was collecting into a gourd the brains of the decapitated bodies. While the disgusting operating went on, the men carved the solid flesh from the limbs of the dead, throwing the entrails aside.

About noon the butchering was at an end, and a general barbecuing took place. The smell of human flesh, so disgusting to civilized man, was to them the pleasing odor so peculiarly agreeable to a gastronomer ...

The barbecuing over, an anthrophagous repast took place, when the superabundant preserved flesh was packed up in plantain leaves to be sent into the Interior for the warriors' friends. I am silent on the further cruelties that were practiced this day on the unfortunate infirm and wounded that the different scouting parties brought in during the day, supposing the reader to be sick enough at heart at the above representation.

Vanishing History

This is the history that has been handed down to us by men who either were present when the recorded events took place -- that is, Diaz and Conneau -- or who had access to period documents -- that is, Parkman. But this factual history has suffered greatly at the hands of politically correct myth-mongers. The books themselves are disappearing from the shelves: Conneau's book has been out of print for nearly a generation; perhaps Diaz's and Parkman's will follow in the next 20 years. In its place, the most absurd historical fantasies are substituted. As the seemingly inexorable forces of political correctness grind on, we may be left with as much knowledge of our true history as Orwell's Winston Smith had of his.

Were it not for their subjugation by Europeans, Mexicans would perhaps have continued to practice the Aztec traditions of slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism; many American Indians would probably still be living their sad and perilous life of nomadism, subsistence farming, and warfare; and Africans would likely be expiring in even greater numbers on the fields of mayhem and slaughter (as the world has noted to its horror in Rwanda, Liberia and Congo), when not being bought and sold as slaves (as still is done in Sudan and Mauritania).

In his 1965 work, The Course of Empire: The Arabs and their Successors, the sagacious Glubb Pasha wrote in defense of Western colonialism:

Foreign military conquest has not only enabled backward people to acquire the skills and the culture of the conquerors, but it has often administered a salutary shock to the lethargic mentality of the inhabitants, among whom the desire to rise to equality with the foreigners has roused a new spirit of energy ... Britain has permeated Asia and Africa with her ideas of government, of law and of ordered civilization. The men of races who less than a hundred years ago were naked are now lawyers, doctors and statesmen on the stage of the world.

But if the present trend of denigrating the West's mission civilisatrice continues, the achievements of that great civilizing venture might well be squandered and lost forever. If we permit inhumane customs and mores to reassert themselves, the ultimate dissolution of the West itself is not an impossibility. In his famous poem "White Man's Burden," Rudyard Kipling eloquently spelled out the fate of a culture that loses faith in itself and its mission:

And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Turn all your hope to naught.

About the author:

Kevin Beary is a teacher who writes from his home in New York.

  Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite

by Daniel Brandt From NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993

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.

Anyone who follows today's academic debates on multiculturalism, and by happenstance is also familiar with the power-structure research that engaged students in the sixties and early seventies, is struck by that old truism: the only thing history teaches us is that no one learns from history. By now it's even embarrassing, perhaps because of our soundbite culture. Not only must each generation painstakingly relearn, by trial and error, everything learned by the previous generation, but it's beginning to appear that we have to relearn ourselves that which we knew a scant twenty years earlier. The debate over diversity is one example of this.

Researchers in the sixties discovered that the ruling elites of the West mastered the techniques of multiculturalism at the onset of the Cold War, and employed them time and again to counter the perceived threat from communism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was funded first by the CIA and then, after this was exposed in 1967, by the Ford Foundation. CCF created magazines, published books, and conducted conferences throughout the world, in an effort to wean intellectuals to democratic liberalism.[1]

The CIA was also busy in Africa. In an article titled "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer" that first appeared in 1969 in Ramparts and was reprinted in the Black Panther newspaper and elsewhere, members from the Africa Research Group presented convincing evidence that "the CIA has promoted black cultural nationalism to reinforce neo-colonialism in Africa." In their introduction they added that "activists in the black colony within the United States can easily see the relevance to their own situation; in many cases the same techniques and occasionally the same individuals are used to control the political implications of Afro-American culture."[2]

But this is lost history, found today only on dusty library shelves or buried in obscure databases. None of it is mentioned in the current debate over diversity, not even in one of the most lucid essays, an opinion piece by David Rieff that appeared in a recent Harper's.[3] Rieff paints a picture of multiculturalism and shows, in broad strokes, how multiculturalism serves capitalism. To appreciate the significance of multiculturalism we must, as Rieff does, look at the academic arguments from someplace in the real world, or at least from off campus. But we must also be aware of our own historical legacy: psychological warfare and the secret state, the mass media and the culture of spectacle, the role of foundations, and above all, the interests and techniques of the elite globalists who won the Cold War.

From the time that this war began in 1947, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, in cooperation with the CIA, began funding programs at major U.S. universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Columbia. They began with an emphasis on Russian studies, but by the mid-1960s these three foundations and the CIA had a near-monopoly on all international studies in the U.S.[4] This phenomenon, a big-money, top-down affair born out of strategic considerations, is the precursor of today's academic multiculturalism.

Some defenders of academic diversity pretend that the elitist shoe is on the other foot, and note that their critics are funded by certain conservative foundations. Sara Diamond tracks the Olin Foundation and Smith-Richardson money behind Dinesh D'Souza and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), two of the more vocal critics of multiculturalism.[5] Diamond points out that the Smith-Richardson Foundation has its own CIA connections, even though they pale in significance alongside the Carnegie - Ford - Rockefeller nexus. But Diamond's major error is in framing her arguments in terms of right and left. This allows the real dynamics to escape her radar.

The ruling elite that finds diversity useful is an elite operating at a level which transcends right and left. While there is an ideological right that is battling the left, and while they do enjoy funding from other conservatives, these folks are not the problem because they do not have substantial power. Nothing shows this better than the fact that this ideological right has always been as concerned as the left over the real source of power, the elite globalists. This began with the Reece Committee on the role of foundations in 1954, continued through the 1960s with the John Birch Society's attacks on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and later on the Trilateral Commission, and continues today with Pat Robertson,[6] Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Spotlight, and others. It's not a right-left problem, but rather a top-bottom problem.[7]

Secondly, whatever the funding enjoyed by D'Souza and NAS, one must recognize that the ideological right has long been motivated by a Constitutionally-based, protectionist patriotism that hates big government. Too often the patriotic component has devolved into what can only be described as racism and imperialism. But in 1993 they are once again isolationist, at a time when louder mainstream voices want to assume the role of the world's policeman. And today the populist, ideological right (as opposed to the corporate, Republican, elitist right found on the CFR roster) is also opposed to NAFTA, every bit as firmly as the trade-union Democrats. The ideological right, in other words, takes ideas seriously -- a characteristic of those who lack power. It's just possible that diversity for its own sake deserves to be criticized because it replaces the search for truth with a situationist relativism based on personal experience. This too is a consideration that defies simplistic left-right categories.

For those who feel that the forces behind the debate are instructive, it's worthwhile noting that the Ford Foundation began supporting feminist groups and women's studies programs in the early 1970s. Just ten years earlier they were busy training Indonesian elites (using Berkeley professors as instructors) to take over from Sukarno,[8] which occurred soon after a CIA-sponsored coup in 1965 that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Did the folks at Ford Foundation have a bleeding change of heart, or are they continuing the same battle on another front? It would appear to be the latter. David R. Hunter, considered the "godfather of progressive philanthropy" by hip heirs such as George Pillsbury,[9] began his new career co-opting the next generation after spending four years at the Ford Foundation.[10] The ruling elite knows exactly what it's doing, and they are remarkably consistent.

When Ramparts blew the whistle on the CIA's domestic cultural activities in 1967, President Johnson appointed a committee consisting of elitists Nicholas Katzenbach (Rhodes scholar and former Ford Foundation fellow), OSS old-boy John Gardner (Carnegie Corporation president, 1955-1965), and CIA director Richard Helms to study the problem. The Katzenbach Committee reported that they expected private foundations, which had grown from 2,200 in 1955 to 18,000 in 1967, to take over the CIA's funding of international organizations, and recommended a "public-private mechanism" to give grants openly. Sixteen years later a Democratic Congress adopted this recommendation by establishing the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). By now it requires a leap of good faith to draw distinctions among complicated overlapping networks of CIA funding, NED funding, and funding by foundations such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller. The same people are behind all three, and they seem to be getting richer every day. They promote the two-party system because it keeps the rest of us off track.

Consider the issue of women in the workplace. Everyone agrees that increased opportunities for women are wonderful, but what effect has this had on family income? Here's the sobering answer, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, no less:

The average weekly take home pay of a worker who entered the workforce in 1989 is $5.68 less today than thirty years ago. This is also reflected in hourly wages. Compared to 1959, there has been a slight increase, 60 cents an hour. But hourly wages are down from their peak in 1973. The 1950s were our boom time. In that one decade hourly wages grew by 83 cents. It took the following three decades to add a mere 60 cents. Families made do by doubling up in the workforce. Between 1955 and 1989 female participation in the work force rose from 35.7 percent to 57.4 percent. Even so, family income stayed flat. Median family income in 1973 was $32,109. Half a generation later in 1988 it was, in constant 1988 dollars, $32,191, a gain of $82. We also started the 1980s as the largest creditor nation in history. We are now the largest debtor.... As a debtor nation, we must expect that the people we owe money to will be better off than we are.[11]

Consider, too, the situation of African-Americans. As soon as the ghettos erupted in the mid-1960s, Johnson's war on poverty began pouring funds on the flames. This was followed with Nixon's "black capitalism," and by the early 1970s affirmative action was institutionalized by edict from above in both the public sector and in major private corporations that held government contracts. But twenty years later only the politicians, pundits, and movie stars pretend that any of this is significant; it's the Jesse Jacksons and black personalities on television who justify what they've got by emphasizing how far we've come thanks to the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile the young in the ghettos, and increasingly even on campuses, know that these front-office PR slots were filled long ago. It's not a problem of inequality; for the next generation there's already a rough equality in anticipated misery. The big problem is that opportunities are vanishing altogether, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation.

What's left of the left has yet to even acknowledge this, which makes the proponents of diversity seem irrelevant and even a bit suspicious. It's as if the multiculturalists are protesting too much. Trapped by the cognitive dissonance engendered by hard evidence and common sense, their words lash out reactively in an effort to justify themselves. What else can they do? As David Rieff notes, their relationship to the real world is peripheral:

For all their writings on power, hegemony, and oppression, the campus multiculturalists seem indifferent to the question of where they fit into the material scheme of things. Perhaps it's tenure, with its way of shielding the senior staff from the rigors of someone else's bottom-line thinking. Working for an institution in which neither pay nor promotion is connected to performance, job security is guaranteed (after tenure is attained), and pension arrangements are probably the finest in any industry in the country -- no wonder a poststructuralist can easily believe that words are deeds. She or he can afford to.[13]

In real terms, however, the battle over multiculturalism is a battle over scarce resources and shrinking opportunities. To recognize this much does not deny the related battle over national identity, but does caution us to take the more extreme pronouncements pro and con with a grain of salt.[14]

For young white males without exceptional advantages, it's closer to a glass floor. Math doesn't play language games: if you quota something in you also quota something out. Someone must pay for the sins of the elite. When the diversity-mongers target white males, at best they are almost half correct -- many (not all) older white males have enjoyed advantages. But then when they make someone pay, they are all wrong: it's always the young and innocent who bear the brunt of their policies. It would make as much sense for U.S. institutions to impose sanctions on young women today, simply because historically they have enjoyed exemption from the military draft.

The fact that affirmative action appeared so rapidly over twenty years ago, without opposition from entrenched interests, should have provided a clue. It may have been designed to defuse civil unrest, but this remedy was forced from above, not from below. In a poll commissioned by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which plans to organize minorities in support of traditional family values, only 36.6 percent of Hispanics, 37.6 percent of blacks, and 10 percent of whites agreed with the statement that "African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities should received special preference in hiring to make up for past inequalities."[15] The agenda of victimology, defined by George Will as "the proliferation of groups nursing grievances and demanding entitlements,"[16] is not an agenda shared widely off campus.

It appears that those who are most vocal in support of affirmative action are those, reasonably enough, who are most dependent on it to maintain their advantage. The ruling elite are experts at manipulating their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why they continue to rule. As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those who are less equal begin to see society in terms of "us" and "them." The dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to emphasize our differences at every opportunity. Conventional wisdom becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged.

The objective is to define "us" and "them" in ways that do not threaten the established order. Today everyone can see that there is more Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when affirmative action began over twenty years ago. And for twenty years now one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one's race on an application form in the 1960s). We are not fighting the system anymore, we're fighting each other.

Multiculturalism fails to challenge the underlying assumption of all affirmative action rationales, namely that opportunities are scarce and there's not enough for everyone. There is much evidence to substantiate this, particularly as the U.S. tries to remain competitive in a new global economy. Perhaps we should take the global perspective seriously and hunker down for hard times. It's just poor business sense to build a factory in the U.S. if you can build it in Mexico (2000 have moved already). In 1983 the cost of an hour's labor time here was $12.26. The hourly savings for using foreign labor that year amounted to $10.81 in Mexico, $10.09 in Singapore, $6.06 in Japan, and $10.97 in Korea.[17]

Perhaps America's only potential advantage is the technical lead we enjoy in certain areas. If we can play this card well, it might partially compensate for a declining industrial base. Here, too, affirmative action has it all backwards. A huge pool of talent -- the ones, incidentally, who have most of the skills needed in a society that wants to emphasize technical innovation, merit, and quality -- are underemployed and demoralized by affirmative action policies.

Recent literacy tests by the Education Department, the most comprehensive in two decades, show that American adults aged 21 to 25 scored significantly lower than eight years ago, and that about 40 million American adults of all ages have difficulty reading a simple sentence. Men outscored women in document and quantitative literacy, and white adults scored significantly higher than any of the other nine racial and ethnic groups surveyed.[18] Over half of all minorities admitted to college under affirmative action programs drop out before graduating; 30 percent before the end of their freshman year.[19] America does not have the time or resources to bring everyone up to the same level, so instead it appears to be "dumbing down" our culture by denying opportunities and challenges to our most capable young people. This attempt at social leveling is a poor second choice.

None of these dire trends are of any concern to the ruling elites who have the power to address them. They are citizens of the world, and no one -- now not even the Soviet bloc -- stands in their way. They have no need for borders; free trade is what they want and what they will eventually get. Many on Wall Street prefer unrestricted immigration, which would drive down wages and fold up our few remaining unions. For ruling elites, private security provides insulation and "social decay" is just an irrelevant phrase. A massive amount of money, some $1 trillion, is traded every day on currency exchanges around the world. On those rare occasions when money laundering is discovered, the tax man gets too greedy, or regulators become pesky, one nation can be played off against another. And there is disturbing evidence that even the CIA operates at the level of offshore banking and drug-running, presumably after they determine that their already-bloated budgets, picked from our pockets, simply don't meet their needs.

The owners of corporate America have the resources to move offshore or south of the border, while the rest of us are here for the duration. If we were all tightening our belts together, there might be some basis for programs designed to redistribute opportunities. But the rich are getting richer at the same time that they institute policies such as affirmative action and NAFTA. It doesn't pass the smell test. The campus left speaks of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic and class distinctions. This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists should no longer be considered "leftists." As long as they claim this description, some of us -- those who still feel that elites ought to be accountable -- are beginning to feel more comfortable as "populists."

Back on campus, the debate rages over the quality of politically- correct (PC) courses and the propriety of speech codes designed to penalize so-called "hate" speech. Multiculturalism is pervasive throughout the humanities, but English and art classes seem to attract most of the PC professors. At the University of Maryland, Josephine Withers taught "Contemporary Issues in Feminist Art" in 1993. Nine of her students, in an effort to propagate the awareness of rape as a feminist issue, tacked up hundreds of fliers bearing the heading "Notice: These Men Are Potential Rapists." The names underneath were chosen arbitrarily from the student directory. Some of those named were not amused. This is not "hate speech," because in this case the perpetrators -- the nine women -- are victims of a "male-identified" culture, and are simply expressing sensitivity to their own oppression.[20]

For an example of actionable hate speech, we go to the University of Pennsylvania. The theft of 14,000 copies of the student newspaper by black students unhappy with a white columnist went unpunished at Penn. But a white male freshman was hauled before the school's judicial board after yelling "water buffalo" at a group of black sorority sisters creating a disturbance under his dormitory window.[21]

Some of the steam has gone out of campus speech codes because of recent court decisions that have declared them unconstitutional. But political correctness and multiculturalism is still rampant inside some classrooms. Scholars from NAS have expressed concern over standards of scholarship and rising campus tensions.[22] Thoughtful progressives like Barbara Epstein worry that "a politics that is organized around defending identities ... forces people's experience into categories that are too narrow."[23] Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s student leader who now teaches at Berkeley, echoes similar sentiments:

The academic left has degenerated into a loose aggregation of margins -- often cannibalistic, romancing the varieties of otherness, speaking in tongues. In this new interest-group pluralism, the shopping center of identity politics makes a fetish of the virtues of the minority, which, in the end, is not only intellectually stultifying but also politically suicidal.... Authentic liberals have good reason to worry that the elevation of "difference" to a first principle is undermining everyone's capacity to see, or change, the world as a whole.[24]

The critics of course content object to some of the sensitivity training programs and techniques that are in vogue on the multicultural campus. Many universities now require PC sensitivity exposure of some sort for incoming freshmen. The NAS worries that such programs are making the situation on campus worse, not better:

"Sensitivity training" programs designed to cultivate "correct thought" about complicated normative, social, and political issues do not teach tolerance but impose orthodoxy. And when these programs favor manipulative psychological techniques over honest discussion, they also undermine the intellectual purposes of higher education and anger those subjected to them. If entire programs of study or required courses relentlessly pursue issues of "race, gender, and class" in preference to all other approaches to assessing the human condition, one can expect the increasing division of the campus along similar lines.[27]

Ethical questions should be raised when such techniques are applied with a political agenda. In the late 1960s in California, a group with liberal Protestant connections calling itself the "Urban Plunge" organized sensitivity immersions for white liberals from the suburbs. After several days or more of intensive ghetto exposure organized by charismatic Plunge staffers, interspersed with group "attack therapy" sessions, many participants were duly impressed. I attended two or three "Plunges" in 1967-1968 in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In early 1970, when I believed in pacifism and was appealing a conviction for draft resistance, the Los Angeles "Plunge" invited me to speak to the weekend participants. I arrived at the scheduled time and discovered that new techniques were being used: everyone had been deprived of sleep and food for two days in an effort to sensitize them to the Third World. Tempers were understandably short. As I walked in, fists were flying between a staffer and participant. Disgusted with the whole scene, I immediately walked back out.

In 1968, despite all the mistakes and stupidity of that era, victimology as self-justification was not yet in vogue. Poverty program militants acted more like kings on their own turf than like victims; they even seemed to enjoy themselves. Women didn't start complaining until a year or two later. Hispanics were only recently recognized on a par with blacks, even in the huge barrios of Los Angeles. Draft resisters risked prison in an effort to stop the machine, and many who served in Vietnam felt an obligation to society and risked everything. In this social stew there were many demands for justice but few self-serving claims to entitlements. Today, however, Lehrman discovers that victimology is all the rage:

Terms like sexism, racism, and homophobia have bloated beyond all recognition, and the more politicized the campus, the more frequently they're thrown around.... [T]hose with the most oppressed identities are the most respected.... The irony is not only that these students (who, at the schools I visited at least, were overwhelmingly white and upper-middle class) probably have not come into contact with much oppression, but that they are the first generation of women who have grown up with so many options open to them.[28]

For such multiculturalists ... what is or is not desirable is, therefore, entirely a matter of taste (about which there should be no disputing), not a matter of truth that can be disputed in terms of empirical evidence and reasons. We are left with a question that should be embarrassing to the multiculturalists, though they are not likely to feel its pinch. When they proclaim the desirability of the multicultural, they dispute about matters that should not be disputed. What, then, can possibly be their grounds of preference? Since in their terms it cannot appeal to any relevant body of truth, what they demand in the name of multiculturalism must arise from a wish for power or self-esteem.[30]

But perhaps learning has always occurred more frequently outside of the classroom. In 1968 I noticed from a puff piece in our campus yearbook that a university trustee, John McCone, was a former CIA director. In the library there was exactly one book to be found that was critical of the CIA (The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, published in 1964) and it included some material on McCone. Then I began looking at the other University of Southern California trustees, and discovered some of the people behind Governor Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

No one ever assigned me readings on power-structure research; the established order never encourages anyone to research or expose its inner workings. I became interested on my own, with help from soon-defunct magazines like Ramparts. (Years later a former postal worker told me that at his post office, the feds collected lists of Ramparts subscribers.) When it comes to naming and describing the ruling elite, the facts are inconvenient for those who are nursing careers. Students at Columbia published impressive research on the trustees at their university in 1968, but not a hint of this made it into the major media. It was reported as long-haired, pot-smoking draft dodgers who spontaneously decided to take over the campus for no reason at all. Film at eleven.

Professors know little about ruling elites because they do know how to recognize a career-stopper when they see one. The fact that administrators are actively promoting multiculturalism should have set off alarm bells for class-conscious leftists who haven't yet deluded themselves about the role of the university. This support by the administration ought to clearly suggest that multiculturalism is endorsed by the ruling elite because they find it useful.

Donna Shalala, now secretary of Health and Human Services, once remarked:

The university is institutionally racist. American society is racist and sexist. Covert racism is just as bad today as overt racism was thirty years ago. In the 1960s we were frustrated about all this. But now, we are in a position to do something about it.[31]

1. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), 333 pages.

2. Dan Schechter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney, "The CIA as an Equal Opportunity Employer," Ramparts, June 1969, pp. 25-33. Reprinted with an introduction in Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl van Meter, and Louis Wolf, eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa (Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1979), pp. 50-69.

3. David Rieff, "Multiculturalism's Silent Partner: It's the newly globalized consumer economy, stupid." Harper's, August 1993, pp. 62-72.

4. Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 371 pages; David Horowitz, "Sinews of Empire," Ramparts, October 1969, pp. 32-42.

5. Sara Diamond, "The Funding of the NAS." In Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1992), pp. 89-96. This essay first appeared in Z Magazine, February 1991.

6. Compare Sigmund Diamond's discussion of the Reece Committee in Compromised Campus and Pat Robertson's discussion of same in The New World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991).

7. I'm indebted to Ace Hayes for this sentence.

8. David Ransom, "Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia." In Steve Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1975), pp. 93-116.

9. Kathleen Teltsch, "Adviser Helping the Rich Discover Worthy Causes," New York Times, 14 October 1984, p. 50.

10. Who's Who in America, 1984-1985 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1984).

11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Deficit by Default" (14th edition of an annual series beginning with Fiscal Year 1976), July 31, 1990, pp. xiv - xvii.

12. Rieff, p. 63.

13. Ibid., p. 66.

14. Pat Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul MN: Graywolf Press, 1992), p. 232.

15. Ralph Z. Hallow, "Christian Coalition to Court Minorities: Blacks, Hispanics Back Key Stands," Washington Times, 10 September 1993, p. A5.

16. George F. Will, "Literary Politics." In Aufderheide, ed., p. 24.

17. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington: 1985), p. 435, Table 132.

18. Carol Innerst, "America's Illiterates Increasing: Survey Disputes U.S. Self-Image," Washington Times, 9 September 1993, p. A1, A10.

19. C. Vann Woodward, "Freedom and the Universities." In Aufderheide, ed., p. 32.

20. Janet Naylor, "'Potential Rapists' Flier Stirs UMd. Flap," Washington Times, 7 May 1993, p. A1, A7.

21. Carol Innerst, "The Hackney Hubbub: PC Debate at Penn Trails Clinton's Pick for NEH," Washington Times, 14 June 1993, p. D1, D2.

22. National Association of Scholars, "The Wrong Way to Reduce Campus Tensions." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 7-10.

23. Barbara Epstein, "Political Correctness and Identity Politics." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 148-54.

24. Todd Gitlin, "On the Virtues of a Loose Canon." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 185-90.

25. Karen Lehrman, "Off Course," Mother Jones, September-October 1993, pp. 45-51, 64, 66, 68.

26. Shalala is quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 13.

27. National Association of Scholars, p. 9.

28. Lehrman, pp. 64, 66, 68.

29. Ibid., p. 66.

30. Mortimer J. Adler, "Multiculturalism, Transculturalism, and the Great Books." In Aufderheide, ed., pp. 59-64.

31. Shalala is quoted in D'Souza, p. 16

Racial egalitarianism has failed to produce the "fair and just" society promised by social engineers. At the same time, there has been a marked reawakening of racial and ethnic identity in the post-Cold War world. In response, the left has adopted a new strategy: Deny the very existence of race! This is why we so frequently hear that "race is a social construct, with no biological validity" and that "science proves we are all the same." Ironically, it is in connection with progress in understanding the human genome-progress in the very field that will definitively prove the biological reality of race-that we most often hear that race is nothing more than "superficial" surface characteristics.

Against this view, there are first of all the obvious physical differences between human population groups that everyone recognizes. There is also genetic evidence that can be used independently of traditional methods to classify different human populations into racial groups that are virtually identical to those based on the allegedly "superficial" traits studied by traditional physical anthropology. As Professor Glayde Whitney has written in these pages:

"These data are therefore a virtually irrefutable demonstration of the reality of race-a purely statistical analysis of allele frequencies [genetic differences from one group to another] gives results that are essentially identical to the racial groupings established by traditional anthropology."

An honest evaluation of the data confirms the reality of race. But let us look at the arguments on the other side.

"We are 99.9 percent (or some other number) genetically identical; so there can be no race differences and no races."

Although it is true that human populations share roughly 99.9 percent of their genes, it is also true that humans share over 98 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, and a very high amount with animals like mice and dogs. Many of these genes produce basic body structures all mammals have in common; differences between organisms are caused by very small genetic differences.

Current evidence suggests that all the sex differences between men and women are the result of just one genetic difference-one gene (the Testes Determining Factor) out of an estimated 50,000-100,000! This would mean men and women are 99.998 to 99.999 percent genetically identical, yet no one suggests that sex is a mere "social construct." In like manner, the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees, which no one denies, can be described as 12 to 20 times the genetic differences between racial groups.

Tiny genetic differences can have huge phenotypic consequences because genes are ordered in a hierarchical fashion. Some genes are "master genes," and control the expression of a number of other genes, each of which may further control several other genes. Also, the expression of each gene is controlled by regions called "promoters" and "enhancers," usually located in front of the functional part of the gene. A small change in the promoter region of gene "X" can alter its expression. X may control genes A, B, C, D, E, F. Gene A in turn may control its own set of genes. Even if all of the genes other than "X" are identical between two groups, the one difference in "X" would be sufficient to produce large group differences.

It is not the quantity of genetic difference that is important, but the nature of the differences: which genes are different, in what ways they differ, and the consequences of these differences. Breeds of dogs are analogous to human races. It is likely that different breeds are as close genetically as different races of humans, but there is no doubt that these subtle variations result in significant differences in appearance, intelligence, and behavior.

It is also worth considering that a butterfly and the caterpillar from which it developed are 100 percent genetically identical! The genes do not change; the enormous differences between caterpillar and butterfly result from the activation of different genes at different times. This should give some pause to those who think a 0.1 percent difference in tens of thousands of human genes "makes no difference."

"There is more genetic variation within human groups than between groups; therefore, group differences are invalid."

This is another very popular argument that, although true, does not at all mean that race is of no significance. The flaw in this argument is the same as in the "99.9 percent argument," in that it stresses quantity-genetic "bean counting"-rather than the importance of genetic differences and their consequences. Indeed, there is more genetic variation within groups than between groups, but if this variation does not influence the expression of important genes, it is not of much consequence. There is considerable genetic variation between siblings and between parents and children, but this does not alter the fact that they are more closely related to each other than to strangers.

Once again Prof. Whitney has demonstrated the absurdity of the "variation" argument. He points out that one could take the total genetic diversity contained within the population of Belfast and a troop of macaque monkeys and give it an index of 100 percent. Surprising as it may seem, more than half of that diversity will be found both in the population of Belfast and in the monkey troop. There is great genetic diversity even between two individuals who are very similar to each other. This does not, of course, mean that Irishmen are more like macaques than they are like their neighbors, though this is precisely the way the there-are-no-races advocates use the argument when they apply it to humans.

Prof. Whitney explains that just as in the case of the genetic differences between men and women, "the meaningful question about racial differences is not the percentage of total diversity, but rather how the diversity is distributed among the races, what traits it influences, and how it is patterned." Small genetic differences can translate into important physical and behavioral differences.

"Population variation is continuous and human traits vary across a spectrum, so discrete racial entities do not exist."

This is a scientific way of saying that since hybrids (racially or ethnically mixed populations) exist, no single race exists. This is an amazingly popular argument, even though it is easily refuted. No one has ever thought the existence of hybrid populations of animals means these animals cannot be classified into distinct groups. This is self-evident. Your dog may be a mix of German Shepherd and Great Dane, but this does not mean there are no German Shepherds or Great Danes. The existence of dog hybrids means only that different breeds of dog can mate and produce offspring. Dogs and wolves-separate species-can mate and produce offspring but it is still easy to tell a dog from a wolf.

There are certainly places in which there has been much human mixing and where there are racial gradients-Central Asia, Latin America, North Africa. The existence of hybrid populations in these areas in no way disproves the existence of other populations that are genetically more differentiated-in Europe, the Far East, and sub-Saharan Africa.

This "continuous variation" argument is so illogical it is a wonder anyone takes it seriously. The existence of mixtures does not invalidate the existence of the original components of mixtures. The fact that red and yellow can be mixed to produce orange hardly means that red and yellow are illusions or do not exist. Although racial gradation is far from being a perfect and continuous gradient, even those variations in nature that do lie along such a gradient can be classified into distinct groups. The continuous variation of light frequencies in the rainbow, for example, are easily grouped into the distinct colors that virtually all people recognize.

"All human populations are mongrels, there is no such thing as a pure race; thus, there is no such thing as race."

This argument is related to the previous one, except that it says we are all hybrids, so there is no such thing as race. First, no scientists talk about "pure" races. What does racial "purity" mean, anyway? It is true that certain populations are more genetically differentiated and distinct than are other more hybridized groups. If we consider Englishmen, Central Asians, and Koreans, we can make the relative statement that Koreans and Englishmen are more genetically (and phenotypically) distinct and differentiated than Central Asians, who are in some respects intermediate between East Asians and Europeans.

This does not imply that either Koreans or Englishmen are "pure," which would presumably mean they can all trace their ancestries to a single population at a certain time. The English, for example, are a predominantly Nordic population made up of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Normans/Vikings, Romans, and possibly early Mediterraneans. Many European groups are similarly composed of multiple related strains; if having an ancestry of different but relatively similar European groups makes someone a "mongrel," then indeed we are all mongrels. But this does not invalidate in any way the concept of race, or the fact that the various "mongrel" populations are still genetically and phenotypically distinct from each other and thus are separate races. Both genetically and physically, Englishmen clearly belong in the European group and Koreans in the Northeast Asian group.

The "we are all mongrels" arguments fails in two ways. First, the various stocks that have gone into producing many of today's ethnic groups were relatively similar to each other, so it stretches the definition of the word to call them "mongrels." How different were the Anglo-Saxons from the Celts? Likewise, would a person of mixed English and German ancestry be considered a "mongrel?" French-Italian? Do we call the millions of white Americans of mixed European stock "mongrels?"

Second, mixtures of related stocks can stabilize over time, and form a new, unique, and separate ethnic group, race, or breed. Such is the case with the various European ethnic groups, formed by mixtures of related ethnic strains. Europeans could be bred for hundreds-perhaps thousands-of generations without producing offspring that look like Africans or Asians. The reverse is also true. Even if today's races are the result of ancient mixtures the mixtures are distinct and extremely stable.

"Population differences are superficial and only skin-deep."

This is simply not true. Many consistent group differences have been found in intelligence, behavior, brain size, resistance to disease, twinning rates, speed of maturation, etc. Prof. Arthur Jensen has gathered irrefutable proof of racial differences in average intelligence. In Race, Evolution and Behavior Prof. Philippe Rushton has not only documented the large number of other racial differences but shown how they fit the varying reproduction strategies followed by different racial groups. Sometimes the race-does-not-exist argument appears to be a desperate attempt to shut down the argument about racial differences that the left has clearly lost. Since egalitarians have nothing to say in the face of mountains of evidence for racial differences, they have suddenly shifted their ground and try to pretend that race itself does not exist.

Even the most anti-racist medical doctors recognize that transplant donors and recipients often have to be matched not just on the basis of race but on close ethnicity within race, because inter-racial transplants are likely to be rejected. They also know that people of different races react differently do the same drugs and suffer from different diseases. To say these differences are only "skin-deep" is completely at odds with reality.

"There has not been enough time for racial differences to have evolved."

This is an odd argument because there has clearly been enough time for physical differences to evolve. Pygmies and Norwegians presumably once had a common ancestor but are now so different from each other a biologist from another planet might well think them different species. This argument therefore is an attempt to deny differences in average intelligence or other mental traits. In Why Race Matters Professor Michael Levin shows that the IQ difference between Europeans and black Africans has had more than enough time to develop during the estimated 4,400 generations since the two groups split from a common ancestor. According to his calculation, it would have required a rate of selection per generation of 0.000106 against recessive genes, a very small rate of genetic change that is the equivalent to a change in 11 individuals per 100,000 per generation. In nature this is an extremely slow rate of evolutionary change.

"The white race-like all the others-is a social construct."

Here we begin to see the motivation behind all of the "there is no such thing as race" nonsense. If people of European descent can be convinced that race does not exist, in particular that their race does not really exist, there will be no resistance to the displacement of whites by the forces currently at work in America, Europe, and elsewhere. People will not defend something they have been convinced is not real.

If-against their own instincts and the clear evidence of their senses-whites can be made to think race is an illusion they can have no reason to oppose across-the-board integration, miscegenation, and massive non-white immigration. If whites are mixing with and being displaced by people who are really no different from themselves nothing is being lost.

The irony, of course, is that when it comes to "affirmative action"-policies that penalize whites-the very people who say race is a social construct insist that it is a valid basis for preferential treatment. People who say race is not biological somehow have no difficulty claiming to be "black" or "Asian" or "American Indian" if there is an advantage in doing so.

Nor in the vast majority of cases is there the slightest disagreement about who belongs in which race. Children can distinguish race unerringly by the age of two or three. Nature is parsimonious and does not often endow its creatures with senses to distinguish things that do not matter. An inborn ability, acquired at a very early age, of who are "our people" and who are not is essential to group survival. Any attempt to override or downplay that ability is a direct attack on the group itself.

Needless to say, it is only whites who parrot obviously absurd notions about race and who pretend that indifference or even disloyalty to race is a virtue. Non-whites have a healthy consciousness of race and know that it is a fundamental part of individual and group identity. They must be hugely amused by the potentially suicidal silliness they hear whites urging each other to believe.

The claims of certain demagogues notwithstanding, Europeans are both a cultural and a biological reality. Like all racial and ethnic groups they have the right to preserve that reality and to resist efforts to obfuscate science in an attempt to eliminate races in fact, as well as name.

Michael Rienzi is a biological scientist who lives in the Northeast of the United States.
This article appeared originally in the Dec. 2000 issue of American Renaissance.

Reproduced From  American Renaissance

Lawrence Auster, a New York City freelance writer, has written what may well be the best book now available on America's immigration policy. The Path to National Suicide is an articulate, undeceived, and utterly compelling appraisal of a national policy that is quietly, relentlessly changing the very character of our nation.

Mr. Auster's vision is never clouded by dogmatic multi-culturalism and he is not afraid to pursue his analysis well into the thickets of the politically incorrect. It is clear that he has written this book for one reason alone: He cares very deeply about the future of the United States.

Mr. Auster's central message could not be clearer. If Americans of European descent fail to act in their own defense, burgeoning Third-World immigration and spreading multi-culturalism will quickly reduce them to a numerical and cultural minority. This would be nothing less than the end of the nation as we now know it.

Mr. Auster does not believe that, as he puts it, "the American people want to change their historic European-rooted civilization into a Latin-Caribbean-Asian `multi-culture'."That, however, is the destiny that awaits them if policies remain unchanged. Most Americans see only dimly the future that awaits them, since it is so rarely described in Mr. Auster's unblinking terms. If they saw more clearly, they would surely act to preserve their culture.

According to Mr. Auster, America's character is being transformed by two different forces, both of which nourish the other. The first is the brute fact of massive non-white immigration, which is a complete departure from the pattern that prevailed from colonial times until the mid-1960s. The second is the rise of "multi-cultural"thinking, the abandonment of any conviction that America has the right to preserve its racial and cultural heritage.

The Origins of Collapse

Mr. Auster traces the beginnings of this dual phenomenon back to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which was itself a product of the everybody's-equal mentality of the Civil Rights movement. According to the wisdom of the day, if it was wrong to discriminate against citizens on the basis of race, it must be equally wrong to consider race in the formulation of immigration policy.

In fact, pre-1965 immigration policy did not discriminate by race, but by professional qualifications and country of origin. Immigrants were to come from the same original homelands as current citizens, and since nearly 90 percent of mid-1960s Americans were white, the immigrant stream was also overwhelmingly white. An immigration policy that had served the nation for half a century was suddenly found to be an impermissible offense against the doctrine of non-discrimination.

The result was something Mr. Auster calls "a Civil Rights bill applied to the world at large,"and just as "civil rights"laws were written in the name of equality but used to promote racial preference, the new immigration law did precisely what its supporters promised it would not do. In the debate that led to passage of the bill, not one politician so much as hinted that a change in America's racial composition was desirable or likely. Even Sen. Edward Kennedy insisted that "the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset." Just how anyone could think that eliminating "discrimination"by country of origin would not lead to a change of ethnic mix Mr. Auster does not say.

Under the new law, preference went to relatives of recent immigrants, and professional qualifications were virtually done away with. The result was what Mr. Auster calls "a senseless type of discrimination favoring extended families from Third-World countries." To suggest that such a policy is a disservice to the nation is now considered an act of bigotry. Not only does the United States accept non-white immigration on such massive terms that the white majority is threatened, whites are expected to celebrate their own dispossession by "embracing diversity."Today, no politician who likes his job would dare point out that Sen. Kennedy was wrong, and that the nation's ethnic mix is being upset.

How Did it Happen?

Much of Mr. Auster's book is an attempt to understand this radical departure from America's earlier sense of nationhood. Why has America lost the will to survive as a white, Anglo-European nation? Mr. Auster believes that American attitudes toward immigration changed simply as a result of the facts of immigration. Faced with a sudden influx of non-whites--which was no more than the unintended consequence of muddled legislation--Americans casually readjusted their thinking.

That is to say, an utterly revolutionary view of how the nation was to be built grew out of nothing more intellectually rigorous than the observation that most of the new-comers were no longer white. As Mr. Auster puts it, "faced with the seemingly irreversible fact of multiracial change, we gave ourselves a new national myth of diversity to accommodate ourselves to that fact."

This is probably true for some academics, clergymen, and journalists. However, it is certainly not true for many ordinary, middle-class Americans, who are baffled by the new national myths and angry at the penalties imposed on anyone who questions them.

The new myths were the very opposite of the old. If America was now committed to "multi-culturalism," that must always have been its true goal. If non-whites were so clearly part of America's future, a prominent place had to be found for them in America's past. Schools, churches, the media, and government all began to reinterpret the present and revise the past in light of an expected future.

Schools that once promoted the assimilationist standard have thrown out the concept of standards. The very notion of Americanism--an elitist artifact of discriminatory thinking--was tossed aside in the name of "cultural pluralism." The American character has been dismantled to the point where, in Mr. Auster's words, "there is no remaining criterion of American identity other than the physical fact of one's being here. "By this measure, any person of any race, religion, language or nationality, from anywhere in the world, has as great a claim to be "American" as the descendants of the men who fought the red coats.

"Multiculturalism" as a national goal thus fed upon the flow of incoming non-whites, even as it arose as a force to stifle all attempts to staunch or even criticize that flow. A confused legislative outgrowth of the Civil Rights era has thus unleashed a movement whose stated aim is the transformation of a nation.

The Role of Race

The question of race is, of course, central to the entire problem of immigration and national identity. Today, all one need do in order to be branded a "racist"is to wish that immigrants would speak English. Anyone who actually opposes the transformation of his Anglo-European homeland into a polyglot brew is thought hopelessly racist.

To his credit, Mr. Auster tries to cut through some of the double-speak and outright lies that characterize the notion of "racism." As he points out, since 1965, Americans have tied themselves into knots in "the political attempt to reach that chimerical promised land where there is no `racism'." To do this, they have launched "the ultimate totalitarian project: to change human nature by force."

This is a promising beginning, but Mr. Auster's treatment of race ends on an unsure note. He refers often to the sheer weight of numbers, always arguing that "a certain number"of non-whites can be assimilated to European patterns. This is true, but according to this logic, immigration policy need be nothing more than a numbers game. America's task is to determine the right mix of non-whites who can be admitted without diluting the national character.

But if a few can be assimilated, why not all? And if dilution, as Mr. Auster fears, is well under way, why risk further damage? Why not restrict immigration--if there is to be immigration at all--to those who clearly bear the qualities Mr. Auster wishes to preserve? What is the purpose of admitting any non-whites other than as a sop to the very notion of "multi-racialism" that he so ably discredits?

If Mr. Auster recognizes that the preservation of cultural heritage and national coherence are vital goals, why should immigration policy not recognize that the cultural heritage Mr. Auster so clearly loves is the creation of a particular race? He refuses to answer the question his own logic must pose: What are the necessary qualities and qualifications for becoming the sort of American he wants for fellow citizens? 

Mr. Auster argues passionately and eloquently that the United States has every right to preserve its national character and that a multi-racial, multi-cultural America would not be merely different but, for an heir to the European tradition, inferior. Nevertheless, in making the case for a clear national identity, he writes, "the paramount moral issue the United States faces is not racial superiority but self-preservation." To be sure, the paramount issue is self-preservation, but the alternative is not racial superiority.

It is a pity that a writer as sensitive to distinctions as Mr. Auster writes as if there is no difference between notions of supremacy and the natural preference for one's own kind. Indeed, he writes elsewhere that it is a commonplace to note that people seek the company of people like themselves. Is this "supremacy?"

Mr. Auster ardently wishes to keep the United States within the European tradition. Men who love the music, the literature, the civility, the demeanor of that great tradition long for a nation of men and women who share that love. Mr. Auster must recognize that the Mexicans, Vietnamese, Koreans and Philippinos now pouring into America do not share that love, and that it would be foolish to expect them to share it. What he seems reluctant to acknowledge is that, with only the rarest exceptions, those who share that love can only be the descendants of the people who first created that civilization.

Of course, in today's America, this is perhaps the most difficult break from orthodoxy that an author can make, and that he has not made it is hardly a fatal flaw in the excellent book that Mr. Auster has given us. The Path to National Suicide is both a source of fresh insight for those who see the inevitable consequences of non-white immigration and a finely argued introduction for those who do not.

The Path to National Suicide is available from the American Immigration Control Foundation, Box 525, Monterey, VA 24465. The price for a single copy is $3.00. For multiple orders, the price is $2.00 per copy.

Lynn Richards has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Michigan. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington

Reproduced From  American Renaissance

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Why are black leaders silent on black hate crimes?

Their failure to denounce violence against whites, like the suburban Pittsburgh killings,
cedes the moral high ground to white supremacists.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Note: The following article appeared on Salon.com on March 6. 

March 6, 2000 In the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg, Joseph Kroll, a middle-aged maintenance man, was busily going about his repair duties in the apartment building where he worked. Joseph Healey, an elderly former Catholic priest, was enjoying a bite to eat at a nearby Burger King restaurant. Emil Sanitelevici, a physics student at the University of Pittsburgh, and two other men were eating at a nearby McDonald's restaurant.

Then, in a moment of rage, Ronald Taylor gunned down Healey, Kroll and Sanitelevici and seriously wounded the other two men. These heinous killings almost certainly were racially motivated: Taylor is black; the three men killed and the two men wounded were white.

But unlike after other hate crimes, no black leader or organization immediately rushed forth to vigorously denounce the shootings. There was no expression of outrage from black communities, and there was no demand that Taylor be harshly prosecuted under the federal civil rights hate crimes act if he shot the men because they were white. Worse, some blacks quietly shrugged off the killings with the bitter remark that whites have been killing blacks for years and getting away with it, and that there has been no massive explosion of white outrage at the lax treatment of white killers.

The deafening silence by blacks on this apparent racial outrage against whites instantly drew shouts from some whites that blacks are hypocrites and have a double standard when victims are whites. They're not totally wrong. Black leaders and organizations should have quickly condemned the shootings. The victims of Taylor's rampage were innocents who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were shot because they were white.

Blacks must mourn these murders as passionately as they do those of black victims of white attacks and just as passionately call for the harshest punishment of the killer(s). The great strength of the civil rights movement was that it seized and maintained the moral high ground by never stooping to ape the violence of white racists.

But the Taylor shooting spree is deeply troubling for another reason. While it is a grotesque and extreme example of racial violence, it is hardly an aberration. More whites than ever are the targets of racially motivated attacks by blacks. True, some of the attacks against whites by blacks are for their money and valuables. Others are revenge assaults by blacks for real or imagined racial insults. It is equally true that the vast majority of violent crimes against whites are committed by other whites, while the vast majority of violent crimes against blacks are committed by other blacks.

Yet even after discounting crimes that are hastily and erroneously tagged as racially motivated, many blacks do attack whites because they are white. A Justice Department study in 1998 confirmed that nearly 20 percent of the hate crimes examined were committed against whites by black attackers. And the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted that black-on-white violence soared during the 1990s.

A motley collection of white supremacists and rightist extremist groups has eagerly made black-on-white violence a wedge issue in their crusade to paint blacks as the prime racial hatemongers in America. Avowed white supremacist David Duke instantly screamed that Taylor's carnage proves that whites are under assault from lawless blacks and that the federal government won't protect them.

The New Century Foundation, an ultraconservative think tank, has launched a full-blown national campaign to alert whites to the danger of hate crimes committed by blacks. It uses the issue of black hate crimes to rationalize and bankroll its research into alleged genetic defects among blacks. These groups and individuals relentlessly magnify black hate crimes to oppose affirmative action programs, stronger hate crime laws and various social programs; to downplay or justify the proliferation of white-supremacist-tinged paramilitary groups, police violence and racial profiling; and to lobby strenuously for more prisons and police and tougher laws. Black-on-white violence also reinforces whites' fears of blacks as the ultimate menace to society.

The Taylor onslaught claimed innocent lives and caused monumental pain and suffering to the victims' families and friends. It dangerously heightens racial distrust and poisons racial attitudes. When blacks say or do nothing about these attacks, it is taken by some as a tacit signal that blacks put less value on white lives than on black lives -- a terrible price to pay for black silence on black hate crimes.

Reprinted from Salon.com
3/6/00

Our Response to Salon

by Jared Taylor

I am the president of New Century Foundation, which Mr. Hutchinson says is behind "a full-blown national campaign to alert whites to the danger of hate crimes committed by blacks." In fact, we are interested in inter-racial crime of all kinds, of which officially-classified "hate crimes" are an insignificant percentage.

Among the findings we have reported but that the media are deeply reluctant to publicize:

* Blacks commit 90 percent Of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence that occur in the United States every year, and are more than 50 times more likely to commit violence against whites than vice versa. In the case of robbery, or "mugging," blacks are more than 200 times more likely to attack whites than vice versa.

* There is actually more black-on-white than black-on-black violence. When blacks commit violent crime they target whites just over half the time. When whites commit violent crime, only two to three percent of their victims are black.

* High rates of anti-white violence cannot be explained by arguing that blacks are victimizing the people they think more likely to have money. Only 15 percent of black-on-white violent crimes are robberies, which have an obvious monetary motive. The rest are simple and aggravated assaults, rapes, and murders--few of which are likely to have a monetary motive.

* Blacks are twice as likely as whites to commit what are officially classified as hate crimes. The "white" rate is actually inflated by a misleading classification system in which Hispanics are a victim category but not a perpetrator category. The same Mexican who is a "Hispanic" victim of a hate crime becomes "white" if he is a perpetrator.

* Blacks are as much more likely than whites to commit violent crime as men are more likely than women--which, of course, is why there is racial profiling by the police (and by everyone else, for that matter).

These findings and many more are explained in meticulously documented detail in our recent report, The Color of Crime. Ordering information is on our web page, www.AmRen.com .

We think it is important to understand the extent and nature of inter-racial crime, not for the reasons Mr. Hutchinson attributes to us but because policy should be based on knowledge rather than ignorance.

Jared Taylor, President New Century Foundation Oakton, VA 703 716-0900 JarTaylor@aol.com

From the Jewish World Review

3/10/00

THE DOUBLE STANDARD slaps you in the face.

Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Ronald Taylor, a black man, allegedly guns down five whites, killing three. What followed became a textbook case on how contemporary American journalism deals with race.

The suspect's motive could not have been more clear. A black neighbor quoted Taylor as saying, "I'm gonna kill all white people."

A white maintenance man described Taylor as disruptive ever since he moved into the apartment building, "Whenever he saw me, he'd call me a racist pig, or white trash, or he'd make a point of walking past me and brushing up against me. He just didn't like me."

Yet the media leaned over backward to avoid any appearance of racism. News anchors cautioned that we don't know whether Taylor's alleged hatred against whites was the "primary" or "sole" reason for the shootings. Pardon me. When did they add that requirement?

The Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act defines hate crime as: "Crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person." No mention of hatred as a "sole" or "primary" motive.

Even the police issued mild, tentative statements about whether they considered Taylor's actions a hate crime. "There's a lot of hostility in this individual," said Wilkinsburg Police Chief Gerald Brewer, "so I think it's a little premature to simply define this as a racist event." A little premature?

In August 1999, white supremacist Buford Furrow gunned down several people at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, and shot and killed a Filipino letter carrier. In the three days following the shooting, over 150 newspapers wrote nearly 200 articles about the slaughter.

On Nov. 11, 1999, in Kansas City, an Ethiopian man shot and killed two co-workers and wounded a third person. All the victims were white. The Ethiopian shooter, who also shot and killed himself, left a letter referring to "bloodsucker" whites. To date, how many newspapers carried a story about this apparent race-based shooting? Eleven.

The killing of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shephard brought screaming headlines and around-the-clock coverage. So did the dragging and killing of black Texan James Byrd.

Jesse Jackson parachutes into Decatur, Ill., turning the expulsion of seven high school kids into a referendum on race. Meanwhile, in Missouri, a carjacker steals a car. He tries to push out a seat belt-strapped child, and drives at high speeds, with the boy bouncing to his death along the highway.

In Michigan, a 6-year-old girl is shot and killed by a 6-year-old boy. In these cases, the media informs us much, much later that the bad guys are black. Were it the other way around, how long before Al Sharpton holds a press conference, with a somber Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP by his side?

Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker shoots his mouth off to Sports Illustrated, and everyone from Jesse Jackson to Jesse James piles on. But the same gang seemed strangely AWOL in the case of Wilkinsburg, Penn.

Where's the somber gathering of the "black leadership" demanding that Congress pass enhanced hate crime legislation? Where's the speech by President Clinton asking some blacks to cope with their pronounced and mostly unwarranted anti-white bias?

The double standard simply astonishes. George W. Bush must apologize for speaking at Bob Jones University, given the institution's anti-Catholic statements and policy against interracial dating. And on the question of the Confederate flag, the media filed story after story on the Republicans' response.

Yet the media allows Al Gore's black female campaign manager, Donna Brazile, to derisively refer to the Republicans as the "party of the white boys," while suggesting black Republicans J.C. Watts and Colin Powell are Uncle Toms.

The media sits as both Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton trek to Harlem and kiss the ring of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a David Duke in blackface.

Nevermind that Sharpton falsely accused a prosecutor of rape. Nevermind that Sharpton turned a dispute between a black tenant and a Jewish landlord into a racial riff. Stirred up by Sharpton's rantings, a black man set fire to the building in dispute, and then, shot and killed several minorities before turning the gun on himself. Nice work, Reverend.

Sooner or later, the mainstream media and the white-man-done-me-wrong black leadership must face the facts. Black/white interracial crime is almost entirely committed by blacks against whites. By ignoring this, and holding black criminals to a different standard, the media heightens tension and divisiveness.

The president's traveling Advisory Board on Race urged Americans to be candid with one another on race. Somebody tell the media.

by Paul Sheehan
from the Sydney Morning Herald May 20, 1995

The longest war America has ever fought is the Dirty War, and it is not over. It has lasted 30 years so far and claimed more than 25 million victims. It has cost almost as many lives as the Vietnam War. It determined the result of last year’s congressional election. Yet the American news media do not want to talk about the Dirty War, which remains between the lines and unreported. In fact, to even suggest that the war exists is to be discredited. So let’s start suggesting, immediately.

No matter how the crime figures are massaged by those who want to acknowledge or dispute the existence of a Dirty War, there is nothing ambiguous about what the official statistics portray: for the past 30 years a large segment of black America has waged a war of violent retribution against white America. And the problem is getting worse, not better. In the past 20 years, violent crime has increased more than four times faster than the population. Young blacks (under 18) are more violent than previous generations and are 12 times more likely to be arrested for murder than young whites. Nearly all the following figures, which speak for themselves, have not been reported in America:

* According to the latest US Department of Justice survey of crime victims, more than 6.6 million violent crimes (murder, rape, assault and robbery) are committed in the US each year, of which about 20 per cent, or 1.3 million, are inter-racial crimes.

* Most victims of race crime - about 90 per cent - are white, according to the survey "Highlights from 20 Years of Surveying Crime Victims", published in 1993.

* Almost 1 million white Americans were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by black Americans in 1992, compared with about 132,000 blacks who were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by whites, according to the same survey.

* Blacks thus committed 7.5 times more violent inter-racial crimes than whites even though the black population is only one-seventh the size of the white population. When these figures are adjusted on a per capita basis, they reveal an extraordinary disparity: blacks are committing more than 50 times the number of violent racial crimes of whites.

* According to the latest annual report on murder by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, most inter-racial murders involve black assailants and white victims, with blacks murdering whites at 18 times the rate that whites murder blacks.

These breathtaking disparities began to emerge in the mid-1960’s, when there was a sharp increase in black crime against whites, an upsurge which, not coincidentally, corresponds exactly with the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Over time, the cumulative effect has been staggering. Justice Department and FBI statistics indicate that between 1964 and 1994 more than 25 million violent inter-racial crimes were committed, overwhelmingly involving black offenders and white victims, and more than 45,000 people were killed in inter-racial murders. By comparisons 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and 34,000 were killed in the Korean war. When non-violent crimes (burglary, larceny, car theft and personal theft) are included, the cumulative totals become prodigious. The Bureau of Justice Statistics says 27 million non-violent crimes were committed in the US in 1992, and the survey found that 31 per cent of the robberies involved black offenders and white victims (while only 2 per cent in the reverse).

When all the crime figures are calculated, it appears that black Americans have committed at least 170 million crimes against white Americans in the past 30 years. It is the great defining disaster of American life and American ideals since World War II. All these are facts, yet by simply writing this story, by assembling the facts in this way, I would be deemed a racist by the American news media. It prefers to maintain a paternalistic double-standard in its coverage of black America, a lower standard.

From the Journal Sentinel

Last Updated: April 21, 2001

TAKES FIVE

Earth Day founder sees some progress

But in this country, it's phony to say "I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration."

(STYL)note,l Gaylord Nelson, 84, now counselor to the Wilderness Society, soaked up a love for the outdoors "by osmosis," as a kid growing up in Clear Lake, Wis. His zest for conservation propelled him from a seat in the Wisconsin Senate into the governorship in 1958, the first Democrat to occupy the office in 25 years. By 1962, he had broadened his environmental horizons, winning election to the U.S. Senate, where he served until swept from office by incoming Reagan Republicans in 1980. By then, he was better known nationally and internationally as the founder of Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a kind of coast-to-coast teach-in that involved 20 million people. At a conference of grass roots environmental groups in Oshkosh this weekend sponsored by the River Alliance and the Gathering Waters Conservancy, Nelson responded to these questions from Journal Sentinel environmental reporter Jo Sandin:

Q. Considering our refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty, does the United States have any credibility in making environmental demands on other nations?

A. I think it's a disaster to pick up your marbles or your bat and ball and go home, as the United States has done in conferences on global warming. We're the biggest consumer. We're the biggest polluter in the world. We ought to be in a leadership position on these matters.

Q. Over the last 30 years, we have seen an increasing number of corporations making high-profile efforts to show environmental concern. Were we seeing the greening or the greenwashing of corporate America?

A. You've got to consider how far we've come. In 1970 there wasn't any head of any corporation nurtured to think there was any such thing as an environmental problem. Nor was anybody else prepared to think that way. . . . Now you have heads of corporations who were raised after the environment became a popular concern. Many of them are very good environmentalists. I suppose one of the items that excites and irritates college students is greenwashing, people who aren't green trying to appear green.

Q. What is the number one environmental problem facing the earth today?

A. If you had to choose just one, it would have to be population. . . . The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become. . . . We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say "I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration." It's just a fact that we can't take all the people who want to come here. And you don't have to be a racist to realize that. However, the subject has been driven out of public discussion because everybody is afraid of being called racist if they say they want any limits on immigration.

Q. What is the most important achievement of the environmental movement?

A. I'm not sure about that. Two things occur to me. One is the increasingly dramatic sensitivity of the general public to the issue of the status of our environment. Number two is environmental education. There was no environmental education in 1970. Now there are thousands of schools which offer good environmental education. The impressive thing to me as I go around speaking to groups is that grade schoolers today are asking me far more intelligent questions about the environment than I used to get from college seniors.

Q. Is the absence of a conservation ethic still our major problem? What must we do to begin to approach a conservation ethic?

A. It's evolving. We are making incremental progress. Let me give you an example. I was speaking recently to 700 third and fourth graders in Georgia. I spoke only about three minutes and then opened it up to questions. One little girl had, not a question, but a story. She said that she came home a week ago and went through the kitchen and saw her mother's groceries on the table. Among them, she saw there was a can of tuna without a dolphin symbol. She said, "I made my mother drive back to the store and turn in that tuna for a can with a dolphin on it." This little kid understood "dolphin safe" (tuna caught with methods that don't trap and kill dolphins in the tuna nets). That is part of the evolution of an ethic. . . . What's is the real wealth of a country? The real wealth is air, water, soil, forests, minerals, scenic beauty, oceans, wildlife habitat, biodiversity. Take that away and you've got a wasteland.

                                                               THE OJ MURDERS—FIVE YEARS LATER

The Race Card Heterodoxy | October, 1995

by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

WHEN IT WAS REVEALED that Lionel Cryer, the male juror who flashed O. J. Simpson a black-power salute right after the verdict in the criminal trial, was once a member of the Black Panther Party, the Simpson case finally found its context. That black fist called up a host of Sixties memories, among them the ghostly voice of criminal-hero Eldridge Cleaver, who taunted the white world in his autobiography, Soul on Ice: "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist. . . . My answer to all such things lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts." By the same corrupt reasoning, it is not hard to imagine O.J., his consciousness now raised to new heights by his new political advisers, thinking, if not saying, that Mark Fuhrman has paid off all his. In the complex background of the Simpson criminal trial stands, in addition to Cleaver's hallucinatory voice and the gestural politics it spoke for, another trial that took place nearly thirty years ago and troubled the American criminal-justice system even more profoundly—and permanently—than O.J.'s did. The defendant then was Cleaver's co-conspirator, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, charged with murdering a white policeman in Oakland. There was no question that Newton had been present at the scene or that he had threatened to kill a policeman in the past. There was a compelling timeline, a wealth of physical and forensic evidence, and even a black eyewitness to the crime. But as framed by Newton's attorney, Charles Garry, the issue was not whether Newton did it, but whether "the system" had conspired to put yet another proud black male in jeopardy. In putting the system on trial instead of the defendant, Garry joined up with the zeitgeist and invented the wheel that would be rolled adroitly by a generation of legal demagogues from William Kunstler to Leonard Weinglass. Garry's innovation and the radical racial themes he imported into the criminal-justice system were part of an inheritance that ultimately passed also to Johnnie Cochran.

A young attorney with wide-lapel, lime-green suits, and a luxuriant Afro, Johnnie Cochran was a sometime prosecutor, political fixer, and aspiring member of the Tom Bradley machine in Los Angeles during the seventies, By his own testimony, one event changed him forever—his decision to take on the case of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a black Vietnam vet who returned home from the war with a knowledge of munitions and explosives and became the head of the Black Panther Party's underground "army."

In a case that would have almost eerie resonance with the Simpson affair twenty-six years later, Pratt apparently murdered a white couple in 1968 on a Los Angeles tennis court. Cochran entered the case and offered a defense based on the assertion that his client had been set up by FBI agents who had maliciously corrupted evidence and suborned witnesses. The theory did not play as well as it would one generation later when racial paranoia was more widespread and Cochran had a richer, more mediagenic client and a more immediately vulnerable enemy in the Los Angeles Police Department. Pratt was convicted, but the experience stayed with Cochran. He says that shortly after joining the defense team, he told O.J. about what had happened to Geronimo and pledged, "I will not let this happen to you."

Cochran could say this with some confidence because his own "life experience" (a term he told Oprah Winfrey he preferred to race) told him how deeply the radical thinking of the Sixties had penetrated Southern California's black community, where racism—as his own meteoric career attests—is less onerous than at any other time in American history but is nonetheless an explanation invoked with an almost addictive fervor for any adverse behavior or social outcome affecting black people. A beneficiary of the changes of the last thirty years, Cochran saw how they could be used in the O.J. defense in a way that was not possible when he took the case of Geronimo Pratt.

Cochran learned, for instance, from Huey Newton, who had always insisted on white attorneys and juries. Newton knew that he could impress whites by his self-constructed political myth of the outlaw rebel, a man in "primitive revolt" against the social oppression exemplified by the guardians of that injustice, the racist police. This tactic was very successful. But he feared a jury of his black peers because he knew they would recognize him for the street hustler he was. Johnnie Cochran did not want O.J. to have a jury of his peers either. Brentwood millionaires would not buy the defense he planned to use to get his client off He needed a panel representative of the black community, which he felt was now ready to believe the myth he planned to create—the myth of his client as a crossover artist who had taken his act into the white world but who had ultimately been rejected there, for all his charisma, because when push came to shove race overwhelmed even the power that comes from wealth and celebrity. Cochran was betting on the polarization and radicalization that had overtaken the black community in the last thirty years and so destroyed its center of gravity that it believed without question the notion that racism in America was worse than ever.

The system bad been put on trial continually since 1967, most recently in the riot following the Rodney King verdict, and Cochran saw that it could be put on trial again in what, on the surface, was a less promising case even than Geronimo Pratt's. He knew the race card would trump the prosecution's full house of evidence. "Send a message," he urged the jury by the time he came to his summation—not "Seek the truth" or "Make justice prevail," but do the right thing and "send a message" to the system and to the LAPD, which is the system's most visible and most disgusting symbol. And Lionel Cryer's black-power salute showed that the message—"It's payback time"—had gotten through. That this message hit home outside the courtroom could be seen in the representative reaction of Benny Davis, a black store owner in Los Angeles, who said after the verdict was announced, "Yeah, he did it. About time a brother got away with something around here."

If it is true, as Robert Shapiro says, that the race card was dealt from the bottom of the deck all during the proceedings that freed his client, it is also clear that the race card was played long before the trial began and Mark Fuhrman became the shadow defendant. From the outset, white officials in the Los Angeles County district attorney's office behaved like the character in The Manchurian Candidate who enters a state of mesmerized suggestibility whenever a Soviet control agent gets out a deck of cards. In the movie it was the Queen of Hearts that triggers this response, but in the Simpson trial it was the race card.

It was the threat of black riots like those that followed the Simi Valley trial of the policemen who beat Rodney King that caused District Attorney Gil Carcetti to file the Simpson case downtown—a world apart from Brentwood and O.J.'s life. This fateful decision, which more than anything else determined the outcome of the case, was followed by Garcetti's capitulation to a pretrial delegation of black leaders (including Johnnie Cochran) that demanded that the death penalty, itself a presumed symbol of institutional racism, not be invoked.

The race card was on the table in the District Attorney's office when the prosecution left ten of its peremptory challenges unused and impaneled a jury with members who had been revealed during voir dire to be clearly sympathetic to Simpson. It is not hard to imagine what race cards were played when eleven jurors of color in the deliberation room finally confronted a sixty-one-year-old white woman who was a potential holdout.

This woman's daughter said afterward that her mother tearfully told her she thought O.J. was guilty and then added, "But Fuhrman!" And indeed Mark Fuhrman was like Voltaire's God: If he hadn't existed, Johnnie Cochran would have had to create him. If it is true that Fuhrman is a despicable racist with violent intentions, these intentions are probably no more violent than those expressed by O.J. in his repeated assaults against his ex-wife Nicole. The infamous tapes suggest how Fuhrman would deal with gangsters, crackheads, and lowlifes in South Central Los Angeles, but they do not predict very well how he would deal with a well-connected black millionaire sports legend in Brentwood. And in fact, when Fuhrman showed up at the Rockingham estate during one of O.J.'s earlier rampages against Nicole, he cut Simpson slack instead of taking him in, as he should have. Thus, for all the soundbites and fury about Fuhrman's racism, one might say that so far the only proven victim of his less than admirable behavior as a cop has been Nicole Brown Simpson.

Fuhrman's kid-glove treatment of O.J. was a preview of the red carpet initially rolled out for him by the LAPD itself after the murders. At a time when it was supposed to be planning a strategy to "get" him, the police failed to identify Simpson as an immediate suspect and then left him free and unwatched—after notifying him of his arrest!—so that he could attempt an escape. Fuhrman might indeed bum all blacks if given half a chance. But the idea that he and his pals could have conceived an on-the-spot conspiracy to frame Simpson—a plot then ratified by the highest levels of the LAPD in the few minutes allotted—is about as credible as the notion that AIDS is a white plot against black Americans, that the government has a secret program that intentionally funnels crack into the ghetto, or any of the other lurid conspiracy theories that spread like a plague in the radicalized black subculture.

Johnnie Cochran's playing of the race card in O. J. Simpson's criminal trial helped accentuate the condescension and double standards that have come to distinguish discussions of race in America. Fuhrman's romance with the word "nigger" was treated as if it were the worst thing that had ever been said in contemporary American history. In point of fact, of course, slurs exist across the racial board While Fuhrman's use of the N-word has stigmatized him and made him a hunted as well as a haunted man, for instance, the Reverend Jesse Jackson used the H-word (hymie, as in Jew, which is a word Jackson has occasionally uttered in public discourse in such a way as to make it clear he is forcing himself to omit the modifying adjective dirty), and yet he remains covered with honors, perhaps the most respected figure in the African-American community.

There was also something fishy about the way the Los Angeles police were stigmatized in this trial. By the time the verdict was delivered, they were being routinely discussed as if they were the Gestapo, not only by the defense, but also by the media and the man in the street. In fact, far from being an Aryan monolith capable of implementing genocidal conspiracies on a moment's notice, the LAPD is 43 percent nonwhite, with a black chief and a black commissioner. In 1994, the LAPD took one million calls, gave out 400,000 traffic tickets, and made 150,000 arrests. All this activity generated 139 complaints of "officer discourtesy" and 168 complaints of "excessive force"; of these, only 22 and 8, respectively, were found upon examination to have merit.

Johnnie Cochran's fantasies of living in a police state obscured the fact that in Los Angeles and other major cities in America, the issue is not lawless white cops but remorseless black criminals. It is not racism that has trapped one out of three young black men in the criminal-justice system. It is not racism that makes black males, about six percent of the population, commit almost 50 percent of all violent crimes. If racism were to blame, blacks would not be the chief victims of black criminality, three times as likely to be robbed as whites, and seven times as likely to be murdered, In Los Angeles County there are 1,142 street gangs, which account for much of the city's violence. There are many poor whites in Southern California. But of these gangs, 1,132—99 percent—are nonwhite. These young men of color control South Central like homicidal warlords, murdering people because they come from the wrong block, wear the wrong colors, or, like the three-year-old white girl whose family made a wrong turn in their car, are the wrong color.

At schools like the University of California at Los Angeles scrawling an obscenity on the door of a student of color is routinely denounced as a "hate crime." The measurable and open hostility of black criminals to whites is the dirty little secret rarely discussed, but registered strongly in this chilling statistic: In 1994 there were 100 black females raped by white men, but 20,000 white females raped by black men, according to Dinesh D'Souza in his book The End of Racism.

Domestic violence, rape's distant cousin, is an important issue in this country—some 50 percent of female homicide victims are killed by past or present husbands and boyfriends. But it was apparently not an issue for the Simpson jurors, one of whom, the egregious Brenda Moran, played a subtle race card of her own in a post-trial news conference when she contemptuously dismissed as "a waste of time" the prosecution's effort to show that O.J.'s battering of Nicole provided a motive for the murder.

This statement and the visceral disgust with which it was delivered were so extreme as to invite speculation. Was this a black woman's rage at those iconic blonde goddesses like Nicole who are said to steal away black men like Simpson and Johnnie Cochran? Or was it the scorn of an African-American woman who comes from a community where domestic violence is both routine and truly violent and who knows, therefore, what real battering is all about?

The Simpson affair has been treated as a great celebrity case in the tradition of the trials of Dr. Sam Shepard and Bruno Hauptmann, who was convicted of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. This it certainly was. But it was far more a political trial whose antecedents are Charles Garry's defense of Huey Newton and William Kunstler's defense of Larry Davis, the drug king who shot nine policemen attempting to arrest him but was acquitted because Kunstler convinced the jury that the police had been out to "get" yet another black man who was only acting in "self-defense."

The real story in the Simpson case was not the defendant or even the defense attorney, but the jury itself. What were regarded as extremist slogans in the sixties (All black males are victims! All prisoners are political prisoners!) became the jury's key intellectual assumptions. The jury closest in spirit to the one that decided the O.J. case was the one that judged Lemrick Nelson, a black man who murdered a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights in 1992. In this case, Yankel Rosenbaum was run down by a crowd of blacks chanting "Kill the Jew!" The killer was caught with the murder weapon and the blood of Rosenbaum on his person; he was identified by the dying man and confessed to his captors in jail. But taking the Garry–Kunsfler–Cochran line of defense, his lawyers argued that Lemrick Nelson was the victim of a police conspiracy and frame-up. A jury of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted him. Afterward, in their version of Lionel Cryer's black-power salute, the jurors gave a party for the murderer to celebrate his release.

The Simpson jury could be sequestered from the public, but not from the resentment and blame that have spread through the black community like addictive substances in recent years. Nor could it be sequestered from the developing phenomenon of black racism, which feeds off paranoia and irrationality. It was no accident that the Los Angeles courtroom was filled with subliminal reminders of the tension between black radicals and the Jews who were their strongest allies in the heyday of the civil-rights movement. Reminders of that inflamed relationship, which has come to be a barometer measuring the decline of race relations in America, were present in the appearance of anti-Semitic Fruit of Islam soldiers who functioned as Cochran's praetorian guard; in the fact that a Jew was one of the victims, and that the verdict was read on the eve of Yom Kippur; in the bizarre neologism genocidal racist Cochran used to describe Fuhrman; and in Cochran's cynical comparison of Fuhrman and Hitler, which took Holocaust revisionism to a new low.

By the time the verdict was read, Louis Farrakhan had become a ghostly presence in this trial. Initially, Farrakhan had scornfully dismissed O.J. as one of those black men who become trivial and inauthentic in their lapdog attempts to be accepted by the white world. (The buffoonish Simpson had once joked weakly that he could never embrace Islam because he liked bacon too much.) Yet, by the end of the trial, Farrakhan, acting through Johnnie Cochran, had in effect offered the defendant a safety net and a place to go when the white world of celebrity rejected him.

Transfigured by the racial solidarity that is now the highest good in the black community, the presumably sadder but wiser Simpson will now realize where he truly belongs. He will become a brother returned to the fold, a civil-rights martyr, someone who might well show up as a celebrity figure at some future event like the Million Man March held in 1995.

And indeed, like the Simpson verdict itself, Farrakhan's march provides the mirror for a civil-rights establishment so debased by radical strategies, double standards, and shameless appeals to white guilt that it has become an exercise in self-parody. (When Johnnie Cochran appeared before the Congressional Black Caucus and compared the Simpson trial to the Dred Scott case and the Brown v. Board of Education decision, there was not even a murmur of dissent.) Over the last three decades the moral voices of the black community were first muted and then drowned out, as dissent from the desperate search for psychological and fiscal entitlements that is now euphemistically referred to as the "civil-rights agenda" was ruthlessly crushed. In the wake of the trial, writer Richard Rodriguez commented sadly that the two hundred years of moral capital stored up by the civil-rights movement had been squandered to acquit O.J. He is only partially correct. That capital has actually been wasted incrementally all along the long march down the mountain—from the summit Martin Luther King Jr. achieved into the fever swamps of today—as racial hate-mongers like Farrakhan and charlatans like Al Sharpton have replaced King and Medgar Evers; as lying delinquents like Tawana Brawley (who falsely claimed to have been abducted and abused by whites) have replaced true victims like Emmett Till (a black teenager brutally murdered in Mississippi in the fifties by whites who believed be had whistled at a white woman); as figures like the ever corrupt Marion Barry, the felon Rodney King, the thug Damian Williams, the cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and now O. J. Simpson himself have all been embraced as heroes of the struggle as worthy of admiration as Rosa Parks. This inability to discriminate right from wrong and heroes from perpetrators suggests that what now calls itself the civil-rights movement has not only lost its moorings and its morality, but in some sense has lost its mind as well.

The system that Huey Newton put on trial nearly three decades ago has been attacked so often in the intervening years that its immunity has been destroyed and it is now prey to every exotic racial agenda that comes along. In the case of O. J. Simpson, black radicals got the payback they've been asking for since the days of Huey Newton. But its cost will continue to be paid—by all of us-in the years ahead. All during the year before the verdict, black leaders kept saying that O.J. couldn't get a fair trial. The tragedy of the outcome is that they were right.

© 1995 Center for the Study of Popular Culture

Reproduced From: 

HETERODOXY MAGAZINE Free Mumia?

 by Paul Mulshine

Heterodoxy | August 1995

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE MURDER of her husband, Maureen Faulkner moved to Southern California. It was as complete a change as she could imagine, from the confined rowhouse neighborhoods of Philadelphia to the wide-open beaches of the Pacific. She wanted to get away from it all, but the horror of his death has followed her. "I had a very interesting experience the other day," she told me. "I was pumping gas and I saw this guy get out of his car and he had on a 'Free Mumia' T-shirt. I went over to him and I said, 'Excuse me. Where did you get that shirt?'

" 'At a rally at UCLA,' he said.

" 'Tell me about the case,' I said.

" 'It's about a Black Panther and the police framed him,' he said.

"I said, 'Who do you really think shot the cop?'

" 'Some other guy did it and ran away,' he said.

"I said, 'You better get your facts straight, because the next time you walk around wearing a shirt like that the widow of the officer may come up to you.'

"He said, You mean you're the widow?'

"I said, 'If you give me your name and address, I'll send you the facts of the case!’

"He said, 'No, thanks.’ "

Maureen Faulkner wasn't surprised by this response. Those who worship in the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal are allergic to the facts. In fact, ignorance is a precondition for the religious experience. Far better to restrict oneself to the experience of Jamal's cuddly image as an existential dreadlocked intellectual and of his voice, a wonderful, mellifluous instrument familiar to listeners of National Public Radio's All Things Considered. In a gesture reminiscent of the Ayatollah's communiqués from Paris during the years of his exile, Jamal regularly sends out from death row cassettes that teach the hands of the faithful in faraway places.

In Pennsylvania, where people know about him, Jamal is a nonentity, but in California he's a star. TV actors like Ed Asner and Mike Farrell preach his gospel, And college students in Los Angeles wear T-shirts emblazoned with his image and reject any invitation to learn the facts about his case.

The University of California has done some amazing things over the years, but perhaps its most remarkable accomplishment has been to make available to the masses the sort of high-minded ignorance that used to be the sole province of Ivy League alumni. It produces an amazing type of person, superficially educated yet totally devoid of the type of intellectual curiosity that the university education is supposed to engender.

When I covered the wars in Central America in the 1980s, I was amazed at the number of University of California students I'd run into in places like Nicaragua and Guatemala. I'd hear these people making huge, sweeping statements about local politics that had absolutely no basis in fact. I'd offer to show them some writings and documents that might alter their views, but they—like the guy Maureen Faulkner met in the gas station—would decline. Thought to them was not a matter of dry facts and boring theories; it was a question of consciousness. Once one's consciousness was raised about a given question, that was that.

Though I grew up and live in the East, I attended the University of California in the 1960s, so I'm not unaware of the roots of this phenomenon. It's what could be called the California Fallacy: that high moral authority derives from living in a beautiful place. When you're up in the eucalyptus groves above Berkeley, gazing at a panorama of the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond, it's easy to believe that your thoughts are as wonderful as the view. This isn't true, but it has one major advantage from my point of view: Practitioners of the California Fallacy rarely show up where I live, just outside Philadelphia.

So it was a bit of a shock when, upon emerging from the dingy, gray Philadelphia courtroom in which the case of Mumia Abu Jamal was being argued, I found myself surrounded by a handful of University of California types who had caravanned east to chant on behalf of their favorite political prisoner. It was only a little more shocking when—fifteen minutes later—I was being assaulted by two of them on the street in broad daylight.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was at the hearing in August 1995 because I was trying to discover just what it is about Jamal that has made him into an international celebrity. His fame is certainly a mystery to the working journalists of Philadelphia who have covered his case since the beginning. The evidence against Jamal at his trial was so conclusive that no one, not even those who are Philadelphia's politically liberal equivalent of the conservative, wealthy Main Line residents, doubts that Jamal shot police officer Daniel Faulkner.

One of the journalists who knows the case best is David Holmberg, who covered it for the Philadelphia Daily News. At the time of the trial in 1982, he was a committed liberal who was very skeptical of the Philadelphia police. He was prepared to give Jamal the benefit of the doubt. "It was just one of those things where the whole tone was, hey, this is a black guy. This is the Philadelphia police. If you were there at the time, your first inclination was to identify with Jamal," says Holmberg. "But the evidence was just so overwhelming. The testimony was so convincing."

Not only that, but Jamal also sabotaged his own defense by demanding to act as his own attorney. The crusty old judge, Albert Sabo, granted that request but refused to grant a further request that Jamal be aided in his defense by John Africa, leader of a weird back-to-nature cult called MOVE that Jamal had embraced. Mumia's ties with the cult had become so strong, in fact, that he had left his part-time job as a correspondent for public radio. Although in late 198 1, the time of the killing, Jamal was the head of the local chapter of the National Association of Black journalists, by then he had only a tenuous connection to the journalism profession. He made his living by driving a cab.

When Judge Sabo refused to permit John Africa to join the defense team, Jamal responded by disrupting the trial and playing to the audience, which was composed largely of MOVE members. A pattern developed. After warning him several times to cease disrupting the proceedings, Sabo would have Jamal removed from the courtroom and let his backup attorney, Anthony Jackson, handle the defense. Then Jamal would return for a while, until his next disruption.

After the jury returned a guilty verdict on first-degree murder, Jamal sealed his fate by choosing to address the jury during the penalty phase. He began a long political harangue during which he openly insulted the jurors, two of whom were black. They responded by sentencing him to death. Jamal's behavior was so bizarre that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter speculated in print that the defendant was suicidal.

David Holmberg, now with a Florida newspaper, says he can't understand how the pathetic character on display at the trial metamorphosed into the cult hero of an international movement. "It's amazing the way these people come out of the woodwork for Mumia," he says.

That's what I figured and that's why I was in the courtroom when Jamal was brought into Philadelphia for hearings on the appeal of his death sentence. I wanted to find out just who was behind the Mumia phenomenon. One day, after the hearing ended, I went into the plaza to interview the demonstrators who'd been showing up faithfully for several weeks. A rather pleasant looking young woman handed me a "Free Mumia" pamphlet. I asked if I could interview her. It began well enough. She gave her name as Karla and her age as twenty-three. A graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was looking for something to do during the summer, so she joined a six-car "caravan for justice" that began in Santa Cruz and eventually brought twenty-seven people to Philadelphia. She was a very nice, very sincere person who—in the great University of California tradition—was innocent of any knowledge of the case that she had traveled three thousand miles to protest.

I knew a lot more about the case than she did, and not simply because I'm a journalist. By pure coincidence I happened to be what might be called an "earwitness" to the crime. On December 9, 1981, 1 was living just two blocks from 13th and Locust streets in Philadelphia. I was up late that night writing. I was still awake when, just before 4:00 A.M., I heard a quick burst of what sounded like gunfire. I heard five or six shots, and it was over almost as soon as it began. Then I heard sirens.

The next morning, the newspapers said that a twenty-five-year-old cop by the name of Daniel Faulkner had been shot to death. Jamal was also shot, apparently by the cop. The facts were not controversial. Faulkner had stopped Jamal's brother, William Cook, for a traffic violation. Jamal happened, by what appears to have been pure coincidence, to have been driving a cab nearby. He observed Faulkner and Cook struggling. He ran across the street toward them and shot Faulkner in the back, according to the police account. Faulkner got off one shot and hit Jamal in the chest. Jamal then stood over the fallen officer and fired four more shots. When police arrived on the scene they found Faulkner dying from a bullet between the eyes and Jamal sitting on a curb nearby. A .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver registered to Jamal was at his feet with five spent cartridges in it. Jamal was wearing a holster.

I asked Karla to explain to me how Jamal could possibly have been innocent. Why was he wearing a holster? What happened to Jamal's five bullets? Had he, in a burst of compassion, fired them into the air while some Good Samaritan came to his aid and shot the officer?

"I don't know," Karla said. "There's a big possibility that another person shot him."

"Give me a scenario," I said. "Just one."

At this point she became a bit confused. She fetched another Mumiaite. He gave his name as Dan.

.Did you graduate from UCSC?" I asked.

"I went there," he said.

"Give me a scenario."

"There's a lot of scenarios" he said. "There were 125 eyewitnesses who claim they saw what happened, and the defense didn't get a chance to question them."

"Wait a minute," I said. "One hundred and twenty-five eyewitnesses at Broad and Locust at 4:00 A.M. on a December night? Have you ever been to Broad and Locust?"

Dan admitted he hadn't. I pointed out to him that, having traveled three thousand miles, he might want to walk three blocks to visit the murder scene. This might aid him in realizing that the intersection of Broad and Locust was certainly not the type of place where hundreds of people congregate at 4:00 A.M.

He backpedaled: "I'm not saying 125 people saw who did what."

"What are you saying? You mean you came all this distance and you've never even thought of a scenario by which your man could possibly be innocent?"

At this point Dan and Karla seemed to realize that, unlike most of the out-of-town journalists who had descended on Philadelphia for the Jamal hearings, I was not a fan.

"I don't want you to quote me," said Karla. "I want my quotes back."

"I'll consider it," I said.

"Me too," said Dan. "I don't want you to quote me."

I began to walk away. The City Hall courtyard was filled with Mumiaites, and I didn't want to attract a crowd of them. They were the usual collection of clueless Quakers, burned-out sixties radical women, and rasta-dressed middle-class black people. They'd been having their little party out there for days, and it was a pathetic sight. A woman who identified herself as the Socialist candidate for New York City Council took the megaphone to praise Cuba as "the only revolutionary free nation on the earth." At another point, a young black man who might have been a college student actually smashed a black-and-white TV with a crowbar to show his contempt for the media. I hadn't the heart to tell him that that particular piece of guerrilla theater had become a cliché before he was born.

No, I didn't want to get mau-maued by that crew. So I tucked my notebook in my back pocket and melted into the midday crowd. It was when I was a block away from City Hall that it happened. I felt a tug. I turned and saw Karla trying to escape with my notebook. I grabbed it back. Karla, to give credit where it's due, had a hell of a strong grip. Before I could work my notebook free, I felt someone grabbing me from behind. It was a tall Jamal supporter whom I'd seen back at City Hall. "Call the police!" I began to yell at bystanders.

The thought of an imminent arrest by the Philadelphia police instantly inspired a burst of rationality in the Mumiaites. The tall guy let go, and Karla surrendered the notebook. I stuck my finger in the tall guy's chest. "Listen, bozo, I could have you arrested for assault!"

"I am not a bozo!" he replied.

"Can't we compromise?" said Karla. "Those are my quotes. I don't want them used."

"Well, if you don't want your quotes used, don't talk to journalists," I told her. "This is the East. We play for keeps."

I went looking for a pay phone to dial 911 and have the two arrested. But by the time I found one, I began to appreciate the humor in the incident. "I am not a bozo!"—they should print that up on the back of all those T-shirts that say "Free Mumia!" in front.

The next night I attended a panel discussion on the Jamal case. By coincidence, the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists was in town. Security was heavy. The Mumiaites were out in force, picketing at the entrance to the hotel where the convention was being held. The panel featured attorneys on opposite sides of the case. For Jamal, there was Leonard Weinglass, the leftwing lawyer who has represented everyone from the Chicago Seven to the men who bombed the World Trade Center. The anti-Jamal side was represented by Joseph McGill, who had prosecuted Jamal in the original trial in 1982. McGill had since left the district attorney's office and gone into private practice, but he retained an interest in the Jamal case. He was fond of telling the media that the case was a prosecutor's dream, with every base covered—from motive to physical evidence to eyewitness testimony.

The panel discussion promised great drama, tremendous tension. The room was packed with the cream of the nation's black journalists, hundreds of reporters and editors from all over the country who were eager to examine the racially charged case of a black journalist on death row for killing a white policeman in a city that had had a history of bad relations between the races. As it began, the principals fiddled with their microphones and talked nervously.

Then an amazing thing happened—nothing. Weinglass got a bit of a charge out of the audience by bringing up every possible racial aspect of the case. He hit hard on the idea that the Philadelphia police were out to get Jamal because he had been a Black Panther in his youth. But McGill pointed out the simple facts of the case. Even if the police had been out to get Jamal, there is no way they could have arranged for him to show up at that particular intersection, armed, at the exact moment his brother was being arrested.

"It is almost beyond belief to imagine a conspiracy so wide and so deep as to get all this evidence together:' McGill said. He pointed out that the defense had failed to come up with any challenge to the fact that Jamal's gun was found at his feet with five spent casings in it.

As for Jamal's political involvement, it was more likely to prove his guilt than his innocence, McGill argued. Jamal's obsession with the MOVE cult had led him to grow dreadlocks and become an advocate of the group, if not a member. Shortly before the Faulkner shooting, Jamal had covered a trial at which MOVE members were convicted of killing a white policeman during a siege at one of their fortified houses. "Abu-Jamal indicated he was just overwhelmed with anger in 1981 when the MOVE members were sentenced," said McGill.

Shortly after this statement I first noticed a curious phenomenon: The black journalists in the audience were filing out. Discreetly, in ones and twos, they began making their way to the back of the room. Elsewhere in the hotel were hospitality suites, recruiters from major newspapers, all kinds of attractions for the young, well-dressed, upwardly mobile cream of the African-American journalistic establishment. Inside was a debate between white people about what, when you got right down to it, was the sort of local crime story that most reporters have seen enough of.

The question-and-answer session began. A Jamal supporter, one of those aging-hippie types with long hair on the sides but none on top, began a tirade on the subject of how unfair it was to call Jamal a "convicted cop-killer." This characterized Jamal as someone who habitually killed police officers, when, in fact, he was accused of having done it only once. The moderator cut him off after a minute or so: "Do you have a question?"

"Yes," the man said. "Mr. McGill, how can you call Mumia Abu Jamal a cop-killer?"

"He killed a cop," McGill replied.

"That doesn't make him a cop-killer!" the guy yelled.

This dialogue caused the remaining black journalists to look at each other. The movement toward the doors became less discreet. There were still some unfortunates left, however, when Pam Africa got to the microphone. She had wild dreadlocks and a child, also in dreadlocks, on her hip. The assembled black journalists seemed appalled. Unlike us white male journalists, who generally dress only slightly better than carpenters, black journalists tend to have a sense of style. Pam Africa was a living stereotype of every upwardly mobile black professional's nightmare.

In a guttural voice, Ms. Africa began a tirade on the innocence of Jamal. The trickle to the exits became a flood. After the panel discussion ended, a few black journalists whom I knew came over and discussed the Jamal case with me. They knew I was covering the case, and they were being polite. But to them, it was a non-story.

And for good reason. Leonard Weinglass has done an admirable job of fooling the national media into thinking there is some doubt about who shot Faulkner. But he's up against a problem often cited by a football coach at my old high school: You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Jamal's decision to act as his own attorney at his 1982 trial left Weinglass with a trial record that is extremely damaging to his client. Weinglass can nibble at the edges of the evidence all he wants, but he can't get rid of that Charter Arms revolver found at Mumia Abu-Jamal's feet. Weinglass concedes there were five spent casings in the gun, but he criticizes the police for not testing the gun to see if it had been fired recently.

"How do you do that?" someone asked. Weinglass said, "You just smell it."

Wonderful: His client was literally caught with a smoking gun, so he criticizes the police for not smelling the smoke.

The other objections raised by Weinglass and the Jamal supporters have little coherence. The objections represent at least four separate and mutually exclusive theories of what happened that night. The theories get more and more fantastic as the case progresses. In this latest hearing, the defense one day produced a witness who said Faulkner was shot by a passenger in William Cook's car and on another day produced a witness who said Faulkner was shot by a guy with "Johnny Mathis hair" who drove up to the scene in the middle of the action and fired the coup de grace into Faulkner's face.

The press reported these scenarios as if they might have had validity. This is nonsense. The media have—amazingly—failed to report the most salient fact about the Jamal case: Jamal has never once said he didn't shoot Faulkner. A Time magazine article, for example, repeated the oft-stated contention that Jamal has denied shooting Faulkner. But in fact, he's never made such a statement. At his trial, he divided his time between political tirades about the MOVE organization and questioning that seemed to indicate a mild endorsement of the mystery-gunman theory. This strategy backfired when Jamal, acting as his own attorney, challenged the testimony of a prosecution witness, a cabdriver named Robert Chobert, who said, "I saw you, buddy. I saw you shoot him and I never took my eyes off you."

Jamal didn't take the stand at that trial to give his story. Nor did he call as a witness his brother, who presumably could have identified the mystery gunman. In all public statements since the trial, he has studiously avoided any discussion of the events of December 9, 1981. Reporters who get jailhouse interviews with him are told in advance they can't ask about the only moment in Jamal's life that is in any way newsworthy. All the various fantastic scenarios involving mystery gunmen come not from Jamal, but from his acolytes. What we have here is a first in history—a debate in which one of the participants holds up his end without talking.

Why the silence? On two separate occasions I asked Weinglass if he intends to stick to the mystery-gunman theory in the event Jamal wins a retrial. On both occasions he declined to comment. I upped the ante. "You're going to plead self-defense, right?" I asked. At this point he got a bit testy and called me a "prosecuting journalist."

The reason for his testiness is obvious. The search for a mystery gunman is a charade, a fund-raising stunt, a way of getting a new trial. In the event that he and his supporters outside the courtroom manage to win a retrial, Weinglass is likely to admit the obvious: that Jamal shot Faulkner. He could then claim that Jamal acted only to save his brother from a beating like that Rodney King received. (This isn't true—Cook sucker-punched Faulkner, eyewitnesses said.) He could stage a defense of the variety pioneered by Huey Newton in 1967—a political extravaganza of white guilt, inquiries into American racism, and cop-baiting. Putting the nation on trial, Weinglass might well create doubt about a few very hectic seconds of violence. The advantage to this strategy is that Weinglass doesn't have to win an acquittal. Under Pennsylvania law, any verdict below first-degree murder would permit Jamal to walk out of the courtroom the next day by virtue of time served.

This is the long-range strategy. For now, Mumia must remain silent. If he were to deny right now that he shot Faulkner, the political defense would be sidetracked because his statements could be used against him in a retrial. "You lied about shooting the officer," the prosecutor could ask. "What else are you lying about?"

Weinglass's plan may be a good one for his client, but it's an awful one for the United States. People around the world are being told that Jamal is a political prisoner who is on death row for a murder that someone else committed. It isn't true, but it's a compelling story, and he's a compelling character. On several occasions I've seen Mumia Abu-Jamal in the flesh, and he is—and this is a strange thing to say about a convicted murderer—cute. The dreadlocks, the granny glasses—he looks like a white hippie in racial drag. He reminds me not of any black person I've ever known but of my organic-farmer friend, George (who, coincidentally, is also a graduate of UCSC).

The Jamal people make a lot out of the racial nature of the case, but in fact few blacks in Philadelphia give a damn about Mumia. The MOVE group has zero popularity in the black community. The 1985 siege in which eleven MOVE members died was prompted because the neighbors of MOVE, virtually all of them black, demanded that the police do something about the noise and filth at the compound. Among the black journalists in Philadelphia, support tends to be limited to those who were friends of Jamal before the shooting. The crowds outside the courtroom are made up almost entirely of non-Philadelphians.

No, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal does not strike a chord with most black Americans. In fact, his support comes almost exclusively from white Americans who are stuck in the sixties. These people, like the Santa Cruz students, hate the idea that actions have consequences, that a man can, in a few seconds, embark on a path that will put a permanent stain on his life. The ethos of the sixties was "If it feels good, do it." And perhaps it felt good, that night, for Mumia Abu-Jamal to take out a gun and even the score for what he perceived to be three centuries of racism. In the minds of the Jamal supporters, a balance has been struck. The racism of the Philadelphia police cancels out whatever happened the night Daniel Faulkner was shot.

In the middle of researching the Jamal case and reading his book, Live from Death Row, I happened to come upon a book by another black journalist/convict. The title is Makes Me Wanna Holler, and the author is Nathan McCall, who now writes for the Washington Post. McCall describes a life growing up in a solid, lower-middle class family. In his early teens, he joined a gang. Soon he participated in the gang-rape of a scared young virgin. Then he graduated to burglaries, holdups, and gang fights; on several occasions, he shot a pistol at other teenagers who were unarmed. Eventually, his political consciousness was awakened by the Black Panthers. He drove to a suburb and walked up to the picture window of a home where a white family was watching TV. He aimed his sawed-off shotgun at the window, fired, and ran away. He never learned whether he hit anyone.

He tells these stories in a bragging tone, full of the hip slang of the black underculture. He gives the standard dissection of that underculture and shows why it was racism that caused him to commit his crimes. By the end of the book, when McCall is safely at the Washington Post, he clearly wants the reader to be impressed by his generosity in coming to forgive white people. He's still upset, though, by the way some white folks act. When he enters elevators alone with middle-aged white women, they shrink defensively into a corner.

This he ascribes to racism. Perhaps. But perhaps these women are just good judges of character. Perhaps they sense intuitively that they are in an extremely confined space with someone who has proven himself capable of gang-raping a child, shooting at a family, and robbing people at gunpoint. The progressive theory of criminal justice holds that the past can be eradicated. No act is irrevocable. Given enough time, evil acts stop being evil acts and become something else—material for a best-seller. Rape a child? Shoot a cop? Write a book.

The problem of Nathan McCall, and of Mumia Abu-Jamal, is the same problem Herman Melville delineated in Billy Budd—who was, however, a far more sympathetic character. Budd was by all accounts a wonderful fellow. Even the naval officers who sentenced him to death realized that he struck and killed a superior in a moment of inarticulate rage caused by that man's unfair harassment of him. Billy Budd apologized from the heart for his crime. But that didn't make the crime go away. His execution was necessary to maintain the ritual of order on a ship in wartime. "With mankind, forms, measured forms, are everything," says Captain Vere, who reluctantly orders the execution.

Melville was one of the first to be skeptical of the modem notion that human nature could be changed by the great burst of rationality that shaped the nineteenth century. You wonder what he would make of the example of novelist E. L. Doctorow. Doctorow has come to Jamal's defense not out of any understanding of the case, but out of an amorphous, damp feeling that the matter should be discussed into eternity. Doctorow wrote a piece in the New York Times based solely on the many distortions in Weinglass's petition for a new trial. In the piece, he refers to "Jamal's own account"—which does not exist—"that he was shot first by the officer as he approached." He concludes that a retrial should be granted.

There are several amazing things about Doctorow's piece. A man who has written extensively about crime, Doctorow didn't bother to call the Philadelphia district attorney's office and get the other side of the story. But even more amazing is that he seems to be building a theory that Jamal, having just been shot by a cop, somehow managed to get off five shots without hitting anyone while someone else came along in that same brief moment and shot the officer. Doctorow concludes, unctuously, "Will the pain of Faulkner's widow, who supports Jamal's execution, be resolved if it turns out that the wrong man has been executed and her husband's killer still walks the streets?"

If Doctorow were really concerned about "the pain of Faulkner's widow," he could simply call Maureen Faulkner and discuss it. Then he'd learn that this pain is greatly exacerbated by foolish people like him who take the side of her husband's killer without learning the facts. But few of the people who follow Mumia Abu-Jamal seem to want to think too much about the facts. They're happy with hints of a mystery gunman, and they'd like to leave it at that, floating in the air.

What they hate more than the police, more than racism, is the idea that some acts are irreversible, that a cute, reasonable-sounding guy like Mumia Abu-Jamal could have held a gun eighteen inches from the head of a man who was lying helpless on the sidewalk, pulled the trigger, and sent a hollow-point bullet into his brain, where it proceeded to expand to many times its original size. (The gun-shop owner who sold Jamal the hollow-point bullets testified at the trial as well.)

Well, tough luck, boys and girls. Jamal did it. Worse, he did it and he never once expressed any remorse, any sadness for anyone but himself Sorry, Karla, we can't compromise. Some things are irreversible—trivial things like quotes given to a reporter and big things like a bullet in the brain. Sorry E. L., this isn't one of those Random House novels where the identity of the mystery gunman is revealed at the end. This is real life in a bad part of town. If there's a better candidate for the death penalty than a man who kills in cold blood and shows not the slightest regret, we Philadelphians haven't heard of him.

The great irony here is that if Jamal had simply told the truth at his trial and let his lawyer do his job, he probably would have been convicted of manslaughter or third-degree murder. He would have served his time by now and been released. He appears to have learned his lesson. These days, he sits quietly in court while his defense team does the talking. He is evolving. "You wait," says Maureen Faulkner. "if he ever gets a retrial, you're gonna see Jamal in a buzz haircut and a suit."

A safe bet. But it’s also a safe bet Jamal will never get another trial. The rules for appeals call for the defendant to show not only that an issue was wrongly decided at trial, but also that if the decision had gone the other way, the verdict might have been reversed. In Jamal's case, that's a stiff burden. Throw out any one piece of evidence and there are still a dozen more. And the smoking gun simply won't go away.

As a radio journalist, Jamal was a failure. As a writer, he's a mediocrity. It is often said of bad writers, "He couldn't write a ransom note." That can't be said of Jamal. His entire book is a ransom note, a cleverly disguised plea to raise the ransom to get him off death row. So far it's brought in at least $800,000. But as literature, it's laughable.

In life, Mumia Abu-Jamal was little more than a sixties social experiment that failed. It's only in death that he will finally be able to do something for his fellow man. His departure, if it ever comes, will signal to all Americans-from the most august professor at the University of California to the lowliest TV star-that we human beings are irrevocably tied to our actions. It will mean that we are not condemned to frolic forever clueless among the redwoods, but that we do indeed have a civilization, and that civilization has certain rules that protect us from the whimsies of our barbaric nature.

MORE ON MUMIA ABU JAMAL:

International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal ABC News 20/20, "Hollywood’s Unlikely Hero" Justice for Daniel Faulkner FrontPage Black Panther archive © 1998 FrontPagemag.com

The Holocaust Museum's 'Black Liberators' Fraud

Those who promote what Jewish-American scholar Michael Goldberg calls "the Holocaust cult" (in his book Why Should Jews Survive?) have for decades sought to make the story more "relevant" and "meaningful" for non-Jewish Americans by appealing to patriotic sentiments. This has meant, for example, emphasizing the role of American troops as liberators of German concentration camps during the final weeks of the Second World War.

Adding to this, Holocaust campaigners have sought to appeal to the racial sensitivities of African-Americans by promoting the story that two all-black US army units -- the 761st Tank Battalion and the 183rd Combat Engineers Battalion -- liberated the infamous Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps in April 1945. In its issue of May 31, 1988, The New York Times reported, for the first time, that black GIs had liberated Dachau and Buchenwald. The paper cited African-American leader Jesse Jackson as the source.

This story was given much greater prominence in late 1992 with the release of Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, issued as a much-touted "documentary" film and as a lavishly-illustrated book. In the film, two black veterans of the 761st "recalled" their role in liberating Dachau, ramming their tanks against the camp gates and encountering enemy machine gun fire from a burning barn. Also in the film, two elderly Jews who had been inmates in Buchenwald "recounted" their liberation by black GIs.

The "highlight" of the film, reported the Newsletter of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, is a "deeply moving reunion" at Buchenwald of former inmate Benjamin Bender "with two of his liberators," E. G. McConnell and Leonard Smith. Actually, this "moving reunion" is a staged fraud. "It's a lie," confirmed McConnell in 1993. "We were nowhere near these camps when they were liberated ... I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS [television], not the 761st." No black troops participated in the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau.

All this has been known since 1993. The "black liberators" fable was dissected, for example, in a four-page report, "Multi-Media 'Liberators' Project Exposed as Fraud," published in the May-June 1993 Journal. But in spite of the 1993 revelations, the US Holocaust Museum -- a federal government center operated by the taxpayer-funded United States Holocaust Memorial Council -- has continued to propagate this fraud.

"The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, is perpetrating a falsehood; and, worst of all, it knows it," wrote Mark Schulte recently in The Weekly Standard (August 10-17, 1998, p. 20), an influential "neo-conservative" magazine. On the second floor of the Museum's permanent exhibition, visitors can view a ten-minute movie. "Spliced into footage of Dachau's liberation on April 29, 1945," The Weekly Standard report goes on, "are several photographs of Buchenwald [showing black GIs] taken five days after the camp's liberation, when a small contingent from the 183rd Combat Engineers delivered water purification equipment."

Similarly, two books published with the cooperation and approval of the US Holocaust Museum also perpetrate the "black liberators" story. In a lavishly illustrated 1993 guide book, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, author (and Museum official) Michael Berenbaum includes a large photograph (page 188) showing black GIs, identified as "American liberators," in the Buchenwald camp on "April 11, 1945." In fact, this photograph was taken five days after the camp's liberation. This same photo, with a similarly deceitful caption, is also published in Liberation 1945, another work produced in cooperation with the Holocaust Museum.

At the time of the Museum's opening in 1993, Jewish writer Melvin Jules Bukiet aptly noted: "It's not Jewish tragedy that's remembered on the Mall this week; it's Jewish power to which homage is paid." (The Washington Post, April 18, 1993, p. C3). Given the Museum's origins, and the character of those who run it, deceitful history -- of which the "black liberators" story is only one example -- is fully to be expected.

Reproduced From:  The Journal of Historical Review

Friday, Oct

Parks stands by World War II stories

By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff, 10/13/2000

Paul Parks is black, and has been telling us for years how he (and other black soldiers) liberated Dachau (pictures added by website; above). He has spoken to many holocaust and civil rights groups. He's getting an award in Berlin this month. He's a phony.

Parks stands by World War II stories

By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff, 10/13/2000

As military historians continued to dismiss his claim, Boston civil rights leader Paul Parks yesterday insisted that he helped free survivors of the Dachau death camp in 1945 and intends to collect an award in Germany for that historic duty.

"I was where I said I was," said Parks, the 77-year-old former Massachusetts education secretary. "I was at Normandy and I was at Dachau."

Washington-based B'nai B'rith International is questioning his selection after Dachau liberators said Parks was not among them when the concentration camp fell. The Globe disclosed the allegations in a story yesterday, which also raised questions about his claimed participation in the D-Day invasion at Normandy. As of yesterday, Parks was still scheduled to collect the Raoul Wallenberg award from the B'nai B'rith chapter in Berlin later this month. Some historians suggest that honor would be misplaced.

"There were no black units attached or assigned to any of the units credited with the liberation of Dachau," Mary Haynes, archivist and historian at the US Army Center of Military History, said yesterday. "It's not plausible on its face," added Raul Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont and author of "The Destruction of the European Jews."

But Parks said he does not expect the B'nai B'rith review of his award -- expected to take several days -- to lead to its revocation. "I'm not even going to deal with that," Parks said. "I'm going [to Germany]." Parks's refusal to back off his assertions, in the face of evidence that his accounts of his World War II Army service have been embellished, infuriated veterans of the liberation forces.

Felix Sparks's soldiers liberating Dachau. Surrendered German soldiers were stood against a wall and massacred.

They called Parks's claim that he was working mine detection duty on the day that US Army forces liberated the death camp "ludicrous." "He is a consummate liar, is all I can say," said retired Brigadier General Felix L. Sparks, who was a 27-year-old lieutenant colonel when he led the liberation of the main camp at Dachau. "The Germans never put out any mines in the last days of the war, because we were deep inside Germany at that time. They weren't laying any mines, and, if they did, I had my own people to take care of them."

Russel R. Weiskircher, who was with Sparks the day Dachau fell, said Parks wasn't in sight that day. "He has lived a lie which was accepted years ago and woven into the unofficial fabric called history," Weiskircher said. But some local black and Jewish leaders contacted yesterday said even if Parks's military claims prove to be a lie, that does not obscure his contributions to Massachusetts for a generation.

Parks, a former Boston School Committee chairman and vice president of the Boston branch of the NAACP during the 1960s, has been an important bridge builder across racial and religious lines, they said.

"He's been an extremely important spokesperson for the survivors as well as the victims of the Holocaust, and that is an important reality worthy of our appreciation," said Rabbi William G. Hamilton of Brookline's Congregation Kehillath Israel, who is chairman of the New England Holocaust Committee. Hamilton said he could not comment on the veracity of Parks's assertions, "but I can comment on the difference he's made in the past several decades of inspiring others to value the important relations between the African-American and Jewish communities and to honor the memories of those who were murdered in the Holocaust."

Royal Bolling Sr., a former state representative and state senator who served in the Army in Italy, said Parks should be judged for the life he has led since the war, not over details of his military service. "A story once told is like a fisherman's story," Bolling said. "The size of the fish increases with the telling. This may be a case like that."

Historians queried agree that if Parks was where he said he was in the spring of 1945, there is no documentation for it. "We're not aware of any African-American soldiers who were there on the day the proverbial gates fell," said a spokesman for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "For those people who were not there initially but claimed to see it at some point, we don't mind calling them witnesses," said Haynes, the Army military historian. "In [Parks's] case, it might be more judicious to call him a witness because nobody can argue with that point."

Parks's vivid and public claims about his role at Dachau have made him a featured speaker before Jewish groups, including Holocaust survivors. Journalist Jonathan Kaufman featured Parks in his 1988 book, "Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America." In it, Parks recalls rolling into the camp atop large bulldozers. Black GIs, Parks said, were hugged by Jews who looked like emaciated ghosts. The ovens were still warm, Parks said.

Kaufman, a former Globe reporter who now writes for the Wall Street Journal, said Parks told his moving story persuasively.

"If it turns out that the claims are false, I am one of a long line of people he apparently duped over all these years and I feel deceived by that," Kaufman said. "I have to say there was no whiff either in his telling of his story or the people I talked to about this story that he wasn't telling the truth."

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