Winning Elections the Soviet Way

Of course the Democrats think they are “saving Democracy”. In fact, Joe Biden says “Democracy is on the ballot!” As he tries to remove the #1 opposition to him from the ballot. Also, Democrats are trying more removals as well based on theories that the authors had zero intent for the use of:

….It’s only the latest effort targeting congressional candidates as Democrats seek to bar opponents as “insurrectionists” for questioning the election of President Biden.

We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice.

Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, who’s previously made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses, filed the challenge.

Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates like Perry is consistent with Stilp’s signature flag-burning stunts.

But what’s chilling is how many support such efforts, including Democratic officeholders from Maine’s Secretary of State to dozens of members of Congress.

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory for challenging the election before Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar legislation from Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres and “Squad” members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

When Maine’s secretary of state disqualified Trump, three in the state’s congressional delegation — Sens. Angus King (I) and Susan Collins (R) and Rep. Jared Golden (D) — condemned the decision. But others supported the antidemocratic action.

The grounds were virtually identical to those of Stilp. He accuses Perry of supporting challenges to Biden’s election and opposing its certification.

Of course, he ignores Democratic members who sought to block certification of Republican presidents under the very same law with no factual or legal basis.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the effort then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) organized to challenge the certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.

Jan. 6 committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) voted to challenge it in the House.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to block certification of the 2016 election result — particularly ironic since he’s a leading voice calling for Trump to be disqualified.

He insisted last week on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”

That is akin to treating every criminal charge as a consensual act of incarceration because the accused chose his path in life.

This is also being played out in state races.

The filing against Perry came the same day Pennsylvania Democratic state Sen. Art Haywood made public a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee against his Republican colleague Doug Mastriano accusing him of playing a role in the plot to overturn the election.

Notably, in his effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable,” Haywood admitted he relied on the same evidence from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that was used in the Colorado case.

“Insurrectionist” is the newest label to excuse any abuse.

During the McCarthy period, individuals were accused of being Communists or “fellow travelers.”

Now you have Stilp accusing Perry of being “supportive of insurrectionists.”

Democrats and pundits have claimed civil libertarians and journalists who have testified against the government’s growing censorship efforts are enablers of  insurrectionists and even “Putin lovers.”

These Democratic members and activists vividly demonstrated the dangerous implications of this unfounded theory.

Figures like Stilp are wrong on the law but right about one thing: There are few real limits once you embrace this theory.

[….]

With the support of elected officials across the country, they can then join Stilp in moving from burning flags to torching the Constitution in a fit of exhilarating rage.

(JONATHAN TURLEY | hat-tip to OFF THE PRESS)

Yep. 126… you read that right.

This is a radical, radical party. Turley’s title to the article above is:

  • “Ballot Cleansing: Democrats are Moving to Bar Republicans from Ballots Nationwide.”

It is ironic – almost – that the Democrat Party were trying to “cleanse” the voting rolls through the founding the KKK. They tried to cleanse the human race through eugenics. As well as their current goal of trying to cleanse thought through DEI.

In fact, Democrats as a whole are impartial to this ridding themselves of competition. You see it in business with “crony corporatism,” you see it in the electorate (as this post notes), and the like. In yesterdays post I noted a “slightly dated” article in the ATLANTIC (see more in my first post on this 14th Amendment “witch hunt”), where David Frum said this:

Consider the scenario in which Section 3 is invoked against Trump in 2024. Although he has won the Republican nomination, Democratic secretaries of state in key states refuse to place his name on their ballots, as a person who engaged in insurrection against the United States. With Trump’s name deleted from some swing-state ballots, President Joe Biden is easily reelected.

But only kind of reelected. How in the world are Republicans likely to react to such an outcome? Will any of them regard such a victory as legitimate? The rage and chaos that would follow are beyond imagining.

And then what? If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States. Didn’t progressive Representative Ilhan Omar once seemingly equate al-Qaeda with the U.S. military? Do we think that her political enemies will accept that she was making only a stupid rhetorical point? Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans tossed out of the legislature two Black Democrats for allegedly violating House rules. Might Tennessee Republicans next deem unruly Democrats “rebels” forbidden ever to run for office again?

What are red states doing in case of a successful removal of Trump from their ballots disenfranchising voters choice?

As I showed yesterday: States Starting To Move To Remove Biden from Ballot (Tit-4-Tat)

Where do the regular Democrat voter position themselves in all this? RED STATE has an article answering that:

Ever since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, Democrats have been shrieking about how he is a “danger to democracy” and how MAGA threatens the very foundations of our republic. Listen to President Joe Biden Friday angrily rail on about how Trump wants to destroy America as we know it.

But in the real world, it appears that most Democrats don’t truly believe in democracy, or at least how it’s actually supposed to work. A new CBS News/YouGov poll shows that an astonishing 81 percent of Dems think that Trump’s name should be removed from ballots this presidential election, presumably because they think he’s guilty of violating the 14th Amendment by inciting an insurrection on J6.

[…]

[…]

The former president has neither been charged with nor convicted of insurrection, so how could they possibly think that his name should be removed? Quite simply, they want to win, and win at any cost, and they don’t care about what damage it does to our system.

The Supreme Court will decide in short order on cases in Maine and Colorado about the efforts to remove Trump’s name from the GOP primary ballot.

[….]

However, one question I don’t see is, “Why do you consider our democracy to be threatened?” Since it’s a CBS poll, you can assume that they thought everyone who felt it was threatened thought Donald J. Trump was the reason behind their concern. But the reality is, a large number of that 70 percent is likely voters like me, who consider the tyrannical current president, his corrupt, weaponized Department of Justice, and people like the 81 percent who think a presidential candidate should be taken off ballots simply because they don’t like him represent the true threats to our republic.

Vince Ellison Builds Up Healthy Black America | Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson’s Episode 32 on X can be found HERE. This is how Tucker titled his episode:

  • You’ll be shocked to learn this, but it turns out the whole George Floyd story was a lie.

I would have titled it,

  • Vince Everett Ellison Builds Up Healthy Black America While Tearing Down the Perversion of It

 

MUST WATCH! Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund | Tucker Carlson

….This poll was before the former head of the Capitol Police spoke with Tucker Carlson and shared that Jan 6 was all a setup to get President Trump.

In May, a poll by Rasmussen Reports found that 62% of Americans believed that the 2020 Election was stolen. This number has grown over time….

(Two Thirds Of Americans Believe 2020 Election Was Rigged, The Feds Incited Jan 6, And The Bidens Are A Crime Family)

(DAILY CALLERFormer Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund gave his account of what happened during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, in an interview with Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson.

Sund, who was present at the Capitol riot, alleged that federal agencies withheld information and warning signs of potential dangers in the days leading up to the riot. His previous interview with Carlson on his former Fox show never aired……

Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted)

Indians vs. Settlers – Letter from a Concerned Parent

An in-class (6th-grade) supplement from the desk of SeanG

(Updated 6/2023 and 11/2015 | Published here 7/2010 | Originally published 4/2007 | Letter written to school in 2004)

First and foremost, the reason behind this paper is not, let me repeat, is not to incite parents to call the school and complain about what our kid’s are being taught. We must keep in mind that the teachers only teach what they are told to teach. The purpose of this paper is meant as a supplement for those who wish to deepen their conversation of history with their son or daughter that reveals both sides of the historical coin.[1] I do not wish this paper to be viewed as an apologetic[2] for the atrocities that some in the name of religion or greed inflicted on the New World. We hear of these all the time, however, this truth can be twisted and misrepresented in a way that is a tool for special interest groups as well as being a means towards a political goal, which, in California, is par for the course.

I was somewhat troubled when I was going over my child’s in class social studies notes and homework. His notes were gleaned from an in class video[3] and discussion (the social studies book[4] does a decent job at staying neutral on the subject, so this critique deals primarily with the in class discussion and video). Below (fig. 1) is an exact reproduction of my son’s notes (cannot reproduce for this posting).

At first glance, to some, this may sound standard, and some may even believe that the European man was this horrible, and that the Native-American is angelic and at “one with nature.” This assumption that one is indoctrinated with needs a critical look however. And afterwords, you, the parent, can decide what is relevant to discuss with your kids, as I have done.

The first two columns on the Native-American and Explorers side will take some time to deal with. The Native-American certainly did believe that the land was a gift from their Creator[5]; however, the litany of tribal elders in the video speaking of the land as not being “owned” is merely semantics. Most tribes did – I repeat – did fight for territorial rights and hunting grounds. Some tribes, after depleting an area of its natural resources[6] (dealt with more in-depth later) would pack up and move, only to battle for more resources elsewhere. They may not have set up picket fences, but they sure did act as if this land was theirs. The video also portrayed contradictory statements by the elders of the various tribes, in one quote it was said that the Native-American did not own the land, and in another, we are told that the Comanche owned 600 million acres.

This comparison of the Native-Americans respecting nature so much that they thought it immoral to “own land,” (column #2) compared with the column to its right mentioning that the explorers “own[ed] humans,” is another play on words. Not only a play on words, but devoid of important information that could balance the times in which these two peoples tried to co-exist. The video makes it seem like slavery was the invention of the European settler, and only he was vile enough to practice such. The video showcased Native-Americans expressing their distaste for the white-man[7] in a virulent manner. For example (and bear in mind this quote – directly from the video – can be applied to this entire thesis):

The white-man has always had the philosophy that they are thee dominant race. That it is their manifest destiny to take over the world, so to speak. Indians did not accept this idea. They were here as stewards of the land. They were here to take care of it while they were here, but they never owned it.”[8] (Emphasis added)

The video is conveniently silent on the matter of Native-Americans owning slaves, and not only that, but treating them horribly (e.g., separating other Native-American couples and forcefully taking the women as wives [rape], murder, etc). Choctaws, Chicasaws, Cherokee, Creeks and Seminoles[9] are just a few examples of tribes that owned slaves. To be fair, the social studies book did mention that the Aztecs, at least, owned slaves (p. 67).

There were, to be sure, peaceful tribes in the pre-Columbian America, like the Hopis of the Southwest and the Slaves (not to be confused with slaves) of sub-artic Canada. Most Native-American tribes, however, were familiar, long before Columbus, with the kinds of wickedness that had beclouded European (and the Asian and African continents) history for centuries: aggression, warfare, torture, persecution, bigotry, slavery, and tyranny,[10] just to name a few. This isn’t pointing fingers; it is merely a comment on the nature of man. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., comments,

“Cruelty and destruction are not the monopoly of any single continent or race or culture.”[11]

Not only did they own slaves prior to the European settlers coming to the New World, when West Africans were introduced to the Americas, the Native-Americans even took (acquired in raids, trading, or simply bought) them as slaves. Yes, you heard me; Native-Americans owned other Indians and Blacks as slaves, even some Whites after raids. The Seminoles were somewhat tolerant, and in the nineteenth century an Afro-Indian community, via intermarriage, in the state of Florida was generated (a gorgeous mix by the way, Seminole/African-American).

KEY: So we see that the Native-Americans, contrary to my child’s in-class video, did believe in “owning” people… pre-Columbus and post-Columbus. (Native Americans had enslaved each other for millennia!)

when the Europeans took over the American West just in time to save the Hopi Indians from genocide at the hands of the Navajo (a fact that explains why maps of Arizona show the Hopi reservation as a tiny dot in the middle of the vast Navajo reservation).

Wilfred Reilly, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2019), 35.

warfare that was common to kinship-based societies. Pueblo warfare was not, however, limited to blood feuds. Living in and near the densely populated but resource-poor Rio Grande valley, Pueblo tribes such as the Hopis, Zunis, Piros, and Tewas fought with one another to secure control of the region’s limited supply of arable land. Such economically and territorially motivated warfare led the Pueblo Indians to make their adobe towns—called pueblos—powerful defensive fortifications. They did so by building their settlements atop steep mesas, by constructing their multistory buildings around a central plaza to form sheer exterior walls, and by limiting access to the main square to a single, narrow, easily defended passageway. Navajo and Apache raiding parties consequently found the Pueblo Indians’ settlements to be tempting but formidable targets.

(ENCYCLOPEDIA.COM)

The significance of warfare varied tremendously among the hundreds of pre‐Columbian Native American societies, and its meanings and implications changed dramatically for all of them after European contact. Among the more densely populated Eastern Woodland cultures, warfare often served as a means of coping with grief and depopulation. Such conflict, commonly known as a “mourning war,” usually began at the behest of women who had lost a son or husband and desired the group’s male warriors to capture individuals from other groups who could replace those they had lost. Captives might help maintain a stable population or appease the grief of bereaved relatives: if the women of the tribe so demanded, captives would be ritually tortured, sometimes to death if the captive was deemed unfit for adoption into the tribe. Because the aim in warfare was to acquire captives, quick raids, as opposed to pitched battles, predominated. Warfare in Eastern Woodland cultures also allowed young males to acquire prestige or status through the demonstration of martial skill and courage. Conflicts among these groups thus stemmed as much from internal social reasons as from external relations with neighbors. Territory and commerce provided little impetus to fight.

[….]

On the Western Plains, pre‐Columbian warfare—before the introduction of horses and guns—pitted tribes against one another for control of territory and its resources, as well as for captives and honor. Indian forces marched on foot to attack rival tribes who sometimes resided in palisaded villages. Before the arrival of the horse and gun, battles could last days, and casualties could number in the hundreds; thereafter, both Plains Indian culture and the character and meaning of war changed dramatically. The horse facilitated quick, long‐distance raids to acquire goods. Warfare became more individualistic and less bloody: an opportunity for adolescent males to acquire prestige through demonstrations of courage. It became more honorable for a warrior to touch his enemy (to count “coup”) or steal his horse than to kill him.

Although the arrival of the horse may have moderated Plains warfare, its stakes remained high. Bands of Lakota Sioux moved westward from the Eastern Woodlands and waged war against Plains residents to secure access to buffalo for subsistence and trade with Euro‐Americans. Lakota Sioux populations, unlike most Indian groups, increased in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; this expansion required greater access to buffalo and thus more territory.

(OXFORD REFERENCE)

The column under that (#3a, and b) deals specifically with the Christian faith. Now, mind you, the video did mention that the explorers committed horrible acts against the Aztecs only after witnessing their ghastly sacrifices of other people (it didn’t mention that this included babies). After this the European explorers went about destroying those who wouldn’t become Christians – that is, rejecting their horrible religion that included human/baby sacrifice.

Although the video mentioned this in passing, it made the explorers seem worse than they were.[12] I am all for discussing the blight of Western-man and his religion, but in all fairness, this should slice both ways. From what I can tell from my child’s notes, and after viewing the video for myself, the in-class work chose “to focus on the Native Americans as the ‘victims’ because they lost their lives and culture as a result of European progress. In doing so… [it]… completely ignores a large portion of history in which both Native Americans and Europeans ‘matched atrocity for atrocity’.”[13] This is an important distinction that was made in my sons fifth-grade class, that is: a moral position was chosen and advanced, rather than history being taught as just that, history.

The last blurb in the “Explorers” side of the column (row 4, side b) reflects as well the videos hatred for the European settler, and again, the video is very sure in its quoting Native-Americans who are vehemently “anti-white-man.” We want to take over the world still, or so the video seems to say. What can you do? The last column (Row 5, side a) on the “Native-American” side mentions, “They were stewards of the land.” This is another long one, and mind you, I will list some web sites to visit for some short commentary as well.

This is similar to an old VHS video my son’s 5th grade class watched regarding American Indian and Settler relations. This video excerpt is from the video “American History for Children Video Series: Native American Life,” Narrated by Irene Bedard (Schlessinger Video Productions, 1996). Like I said, I viewed a similar VHS tape when I checked out the video in 2004 from my son’s elementary school.

We, of course, have all heard of the Native-Americans using every part of the buffalo, not wasting, caring for Mother Nature and the like. However, the whole story is conveniently left out.[14] The entire buffalo was only used in times of want. In times of plenty, some tribes would run entire herds of buffalo off of cliffs, killing hundreds to thousands at a time just for their tongues. Some tribes would burn entire forests killing many species and sometimes, entire herds of buffalo. A commentary[15] does well to expand on this theme:

From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.

In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.

Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]

Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20]Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.

In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”[21]

Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.

Another interesting item that came up in the video was that of the “white man” bringing his diseases, as mentioned above and in the video. However, little is ever said about the normal lifespan of the Native-American, which was around 35 at the time due to the already present poor health, disease, dysentery and hygiene, or, lack thereof. The photo’s we have all seen of the Native-Americans during Civil War times are older mainly due to the introduction of medicine and hygiene by the European settler. New information in a paper written by Richard Steckel, a professor of economics and anthropology at Ohio State University, and published in the journal Science, has shown that the health of the Native-American was in drastic decline prior to the settler coming to the New World.[23]


Footnotes


[1] There is some adult material herein (e.g., descriptions of violence and the like), so edit accordingly.

[2] apologetic: “defending by speech or writing.” (Definition #2) Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, CD-ROM (1999).

[3] Schlessinger Video Productions, Indians of North America, Video Collection II; Bala Cynwyd: PA (1995); in the school library.

[4] A New Nation: Adventures in Time and Place, National Geographic Society/McGraw Hill Pub; New York: NY (2000)

[5] The video was very religiously entwined; I only wish that such positive representations of other faiths were allowed equal time in the classroom. Say, like, Christianity.

[6] e.g., game (animals), wood, healthy top-soil, ran species into extinction (like certain sea turtles and the like), etc.

[7] The distasteful manner in which the video represents and uses the term “white-man” (a quote) is quite inappropriate.

[8] Veronica Valarde Tiller – a Jicarilla Apapche. Quote from the in-class video.

[9] Dinesh D’ Souza, The End of Racism, The Free Press; New York: N.Y. (1995), p. 75.

[10] Paul F. Boller, Jr., Not So! Popular Myths About America from Columbus to Clinton, Oxford Univ. Press; New York: NY (1995), p. 7. (This book is a fun, interestingly invigorating read! I highly recommend it)

[11] Ibid., p. 12. Quoted from: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Was America a Mistake?,”Atlantic Monthly (September 1992), p. 22.

[12] This is a side note for those who are of the Christian faith:

The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [“Christians”] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about 40,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana). A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no natural law is being violated in other words (as atheists reduce everything to natural law – materialism). However, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law.

[13] “Shades of Truth,” by Jeff Bricker, found at: http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~tengles/102m/bricker.html (I highly recommend this paper as it will add to the reasons and logic behind the different historical “takes” on this issue. UPDATE: (these links are since gone) I was contacted by the author who has become more left-leaning in his later days and he asked me to remove this portion as he has excised all his previous works. I refused on the grounds that he must prove to me that what he said is untrue, after which I would remove his older work. “A True Story,” by Katie Patel, found at: http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~tengles/102m/pa##l.html (another high recommend.) UPDATE: Another dead end – keep in mind when I wrote this my oldest son was in sixth-grade. He is now a Marine.

[14] “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History,” by Terry L. Anderson, from the Detroit News, reviewing a book of the same name by Shepard Krech III, October 4, 1999. Can be found at:

[15] Buffaloed: The Myth and Reality of Bison in America (12-01-2002) by Larry Schweikart:

[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.

[17] Ibid., p. 135.

[18] Ibid., p. 119.

[19] Ibid., p. 76.

[20] Ibid., p. 171.

[21] Ibid., p. 188.

[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York: NY (1977).

[23] “Health Of American Indians On Decline Before Columbus Arrived In New World,” This study involved 12,500 Indian skeletal remains from 65 different sites. Can be found at:

CHALLENGING THE “GENOCIDE” CHARGE

…and, THE “STOLEN LAND” CHARGE

Are Americans living on stolen land acquired by nefarious means? Jeff Fynn-Paul, professor of economic and social history at Leiden University and author of Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, dispels this misleading and destructive myth.

Socialism Has Never Been Tried (Mantra’s of the Left)

ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT 3, 2013 — JUST UPDATED “DEAD” MEDIA

I wish to post some ideas and thoughts by others here that will allow a framework to reply to such a challenge. Many professors will infect young minds with this idea, which is, “you cannot criticize Marxism, socialism, or the like because its ‘pure form[s]’ have never been implemented on earth.” To which I would reply to said professor that he then would not be able to criticize Christianity, Republicans, Capitalism, etc…. because the ideal they hold has never been purely implemented on earth. [In Christianity I would note that the faith was modeled perfectly in the man of Christ Jesus.]

So if you have a professor who is harping on Capitalism, Bush, Republicans, Reagan, Newt, Ted Cruz, whomever…, you just need to point out that since  FDR’s “New Deal” and Johnson’s “Great Societyall they are really criticizing is regulation and redistribution. Because we are far from a truly free-market.

So, what are some good resources to build a cumulative case or allow deeper — non-sophomoric thinking as the author of The Politically incorrect Guide would say — on this subject? While I responded to the person where I work with the quick answer of, “that is essentially copping out of dealing with what is produced by such beliefs,” my thinking on the matter goes beyond how I could or can express it in the work environment. This frustration of quick interactions has led me partly to blog on various topics so not only myself, but others can access this “nugget” if-you-will for both personal edification and learning or linking to friends, co-workers, and family that you discuss this issue with. Especially young people at university.

I do wish to note that just because I am posting items by others below, it does not imply I fully agree with their position stated or worldview. For instance I use Student of Objectivism’s (SO) video (spliced with a quick “baked in the cake” precursor), while I enjoy and agree with Ayn Rand on many points… on many others I disagree. I CAN recommend wholeheartedly — for the lover of theology that really wishes to understand the political divide — a book by Thomas Sowell entitled, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. While this is a must read for any political junkie, it is all the more powerful for one who believes in The Fall of mankind, objective grounding of ethics, man’s spark of life/creativity as well as mankind’s depravity. So to all the pastors and apologists that read this… add that book into your reading hopper.

Okay, I wanted to begin with this chapter, at least the opening pages of it, the chapter can be seen below.

In it the author notes that “baked into” socialism is serfdom… by violence if necessary. Scott Huber of Brightlight Books comments well on this idea and the book:


Williamson ended Chapter 1 (see that summary here) with the observation (from Hayek) that socialist planners always lead an economy on the “road to serfdom”. This is because socialist economic planning cannot work because the planners cannot have enough information or knowledge to make the proper economic decisions. So, in lieu of having enough knowledge to properly make economic decisions, they opt for varying and escalating levels of coercion to enforce their Plan.

In Chapter 2, he begins by refuting what he calls the high school debater’s trick of claiming that socialism in “theory” is great (and true and just and compassionate, etc.) but it just gets screwed up in practice.

Not so, he says:

In truth, the theory behind socialism is deeply flawed: it is intellectually narrow, inhumane, and deeply irrational in that it fails to account for the ways in which knowledge works in a society. Socialism in theory is every bit as bad as socialism in practice, once you understand the theory and stop mistaking it for the common and humane charitable impulse.

Here is a key question? How is economic value determined? Next, we can ask a slightly different set of questions: How should economic value be determined and, perhaps more importantly, by whom?

Williamson argues that on the issue of determining economic value Marx (and every socialist) is a moralist. How so?

Because for Marx, and every other socialist, the value of economic activity, which is to say the value of any product or service, is (or more precisely should) be objectively related to the labor of the worker who produces it. This contrasts with the subjective approach of the capitalist marketplace which basically says that the value of a product or a service is related to how people in the marketplace subjectively value it.

In other words, let’s say you spend a lot of time, human labor, and other resources to produce something. The socialist approach to value says that your product is, at least roughly, worth the sum of the costs required to produce it especially the labor costs. To price it higher or lower is an injustice.

Marx’s analysis is morally normative [i.e. what should be] in that he insists that, since labor is the measure of value, wages must equal the price of the product. The mere existence of profits – squeezing economic value out of a product beyond what workers are paid – for Marx was proof of capitalist’s exploitation of workers. It was indistinguishable from outright theft.

And, according to Williamson, it’s this moral (and moralizing) context that fuels Marxists’ and other socialists’ revolutionary fervor. Note Marx’s most famous quote: The point of philosophy is not merely to understand the world, but to change it. And at the point of a gun if necessary, which it usually is since free people do not readily cooperate with the revolution.


“Communism is a great idea, it just hasn’t been tried properly.” Leftist fellow travelers rush to embrace every Marxist experiment, champion the system and agitate for it to be copied in their own country. …and then walk away when it inevitably fails; searching once again for the next soon to fail utopia. Communism has been tried over 40 times in the last 100 years and has produced egregious results in every iteration. This video shows every application and deep dives into half a dozen examples, comparing before and after Communism was tried as well as comparing examples directly with free and mixed market neighbors.(Via VOTE NIXON)

And one should note that ALL of the above have a current application to what we are seeing the Democrats implementing. Socialized Medicine. And who better to explain this to us that the Gipper himself:

Walter Williams makes this real for us in a way that should perk the interest of those who love and cherish freedom:

Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn’t happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.”

Social Justice. This social justice always leads to repression, from the NAACP asking the rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask to be investigated, to, Dr. Benjamin Carson being audited after his prayer breakfast speech by the IRS. These are murmurings of the greater end that always ends in violent repression. From pro-lifers being threatened on university campuses, to suppression of free speech, to… eventualy, the outgrowth — naturally — to violent repression. The difference between Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and Fascism, is a matter of degrees, only:

A Marxist will scream at you, argue and fist-fight you down the road to his dream, as he carries your belongings and says, “They belong to the collective”.

A Socialist will grab you by the hand or the hair, and beat you on the head with a stick and drag you along, as they make you carry your own belongings and tell you they, “Belong to the collective”.

A Communist will get behind you and make you carry your own belongings to his dream, as he points a gun to the back of your head, and kicks you in the back and screams at you, “They belong to the State”… as in the collective.

A Fascist will will have your neighbor carry your belongings, and shoot you if you do not agree with his dream of “Centralized Authority, and it all belongs to the State”,… the collective”.

…a matter of degrees.

(I cry every time I watch the beginning of this.) This footage is a great example of how Democrats are joined at the hip with radicals. The example comes by way of the two radical Democrat women making my point:

Question is, which is our temperature to stop this from going further in our country?

And any person should acknowledge why someone should “fear” government more than business. In fact, I made this point on my FB outgrowth of this blog in talking to my liberal friend:

…the point was to show how the Obama admin is stacking the books with GM. You see, when the government chooses winners-and-losers instead of getting contracts with private companies (like Ford, GM, etc.), they are invested to [i.e., forced to] only choose a government run business and stock their fish (so-to-speak) with GM fleets… leaving the non-government company to flounder.

This next audio deals with the differences of the Koch brothers, in comparison to the Left’s version of them, Soros. There are many areas that one can discuss about the two… but let us focus in on the main/foundational difference. One wants a large government that is able to legislate more than just what kind of light-bulbs one can use in the privacy of their own home. Soros wants large government able to control a large portion of the economy (see link to chart below), and he has been very vocal on this goal. The other party always mentioned are the Koch brothers. These rich conservatives want a weak government. A government that cannot effect our daily lives nearly as much (personal, business, etc) as the Soros enterprise wants. And really, if you think about it, what business can really “harm” you, when people come to my door with pistols on their hip… are they a) more likely to be from GM, or, b) from the IRS?

The possibility of them being from the IRS is even more possible with the passing of Obama-Care [i.e., larger government]. So the “fear” (audio in next comment) I think the Left has of “Big-Business” is unfounded, and the problem comes when big-business gets in bed with big-government. Here I am thinking of (like with the penalties that were found to be Constitutional in the recent SCOTUS decision) a government that can penalize you if you do not buy a Chevy Volt, or some other green car in order to save the planet. When this happens, guys coming to my door because of unpaid (hypothetical… but historical examples abound of the tax history of our nation) “fines” are likely to be IRS agents because of a personal choice made in the “free-market.”

Appendix: If the above example didn’t inspire any liberal fear (forced to go green or be penalized), maybe this one will?

…First, the government needs to issue a mandate that all households must own at least one firearm. We will need a federal agency to ensure that people aren’t just buying cheap BB guns or .22 pistols, even though that may be all they need or want. It has to be 9mm or above, with .44 magnums getting a one-time tax credit on their own. Let’s pick an agency known for its aptitude on firearms and home protection to issue required annual certifications each year, without which the government will have to levy hefty fines. Which agency would do the best job? Hmmmm … I know! How about TSA? With their track record of excellence, we should have no problems implementing this mandate.

Don’t want to own a gun? Hey, no worries. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says citizens have the right to refuse to comply with mandates. The government will just seize some of your cash in fines, that’s all. Isn’t choice great? Those fines will go toward federal credits that will fund firearm purchases for the less well off, so that they can protect their homes as adequately as those who can afford guns on their own. Since they generally live in neighborhoods where police response is appreciably worse than their higher-earning fellow Americans, they need them more anyway. Besides — gun ownership is actually mentioned in the Constitution, unlike health care, which isn’t. Obviously, that means that the federal government should be funding gun ownership….

…read more…

(See More)

The Pilgrims could have benefited from sound theology which would have dissuaded their (and should ours) experiment with “communal” activities:


Many Americans believe socialism to be a form of social kindness by the government. But true socialism isn’t a social safety net. It is when the government controls most prices, businesses, property, and other aspects of economic life. The historical record of socialism has been wrecked or stagnating economies and flagrant human rights violations. The truth borne of a hundred years of hard experience is that people do not prosper in socialist countries.

A. PRIVATE PROPERTY

According to the teachings of the Bible, government should both document and protect the ownership of private property in a nation.

The Bible regularly assumes and reinforces a system in which property belongs to individuals, not to the government or to society as a whole.

We see this implied in the Ten Commandments, for example, because the eighth commandment, “You shall not steal” (Exod. 20:15), assumes that human beings will own property that belongs to them individually and not to other people. I should not steal my neighbor’s ox or donkey because it belongs to my neighbor, not to me and not to anyone else.

The tenth commandment makes this more explicit when it prohibits not just stealing but also desiring to steal what belongs to my neighbor:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exod. 20:17).

The reason I should not “covet” my neighbor’s house or anything else is that these things belong to my neighbor, not to me and not to the community or the nation.

This assumption of private ownership of property, found in this fundamental moral code of the Bible, puts the Bible in direct opposition to the communist system advocated by Karl Marx. Marx said:

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.

One reason why communism is so incredibly dehumanizing is that when private property is abolished, government controls all economic activity. And when government controls all economic activity, it controls what you can buy, where you will live, and what job you will have (and therefore what job you are allowed to train for, and where you go to school), and how much you will earn. It essentially controls all of life, and human liberty is destroyed. Communism enslaves people and destroys human freedom of choice. The entire nation becomes one huge prison. For this reason, it seems to me that communism is the most dehumanizing economic system ever invented by man.

Other passages of Scripture also support the idea that property should belong to individuals, not to “society” or to the government (except for certain property required for proper government purposes, such as government offices, military bases, and streets and highways). The Bible contains many laws concerning punishments for stealing and appropriate restitution for damage of another person’s farm animals or agricultural fields (for example, see Exod. 21:28-36; 22:1-15; Deut. 22:1-4; 23:24-25). Another com­mandment guaranteed that property boundaries would be protected: “You shall not move your neighbor’s landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess” (Deut. 19:14). To move the landmark was to move the boundaries of the land and thus to steal land that belonged to one’s neighbor (compare Prov. 22:28; 23:10).

Another guarantee of the ownership of private property was the fact that, even if property was sold to someone else, in the Year of Jubilee it had to return to the family that originally owned it:

It shall be a Jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan (Lev. 25:10).

This is why the land could not be sold forever: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev. 25:23).

This last verse emphasizes the fact that private property is never viewed in the Bible as an absolute right, because all that people have is ultimately given to them by God, and people are viewed as God’s “stewards” to manage what he has entrusted to their care.

The earth is the LORD’S and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein (Ps. 24:1; compare Ps. 50:10-12; Hag. 2:8).

Yet the fact remains that, under the overall sovereign lordship of God himself, property is regularly said to belong to individuals, not to the government and not to “society” or the nation as a whole.

When Samuel warned the people about the evils that would be imposed upon them by a king, he emphasized the fact that the monarch, with so much government power, would “take” and “take” and “take” from the people and confiscate things for his own use:

So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:10-18).

This prediction was tragically fulfilled in the story of the theft of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite by Ahab the wicked king and Jezebel, his even more wicked queen (see 1 Kings 21:1-29). The regular tendency of human governments is to seek to take control of more and more of the property of a nation that God intends to be owned and controlled by private individuals.

Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 261-263.

IATSE’s Distasteful and Historically Violent Revolutionary Fist

[wonderplugin_slider id=4]

Trade unions are a school of communism. — Vladimir Lenin

While I support the strike that may be hitting the movie industry — I myself am not in the union, nor, typically support unions — I can get behind this strike [if it happens]. Not only that, but, I fully understand what the union[s] are trying to say in their “solidarity.” THAT BEING SAID, I think that the union leaders using such a vile, disgusting communist/Marxist symbol is unfortunate.

(A side-note, many of the other stickers/graphics, especially the IATSE symbol, I find appealing)

Do they think that their members are stupid?

Not students of history?

I would say such a symbol divides rather than unites.

I bet a person responding to this post cannot find a single use of this symbol to represent a movement that does not have a direct connection to a Marxist, Communist, or Socialist.

Or violence.

In fact, the first time it was used in a revolution the guillotine was the end result. (More to come on more modern movements.)

This painting by Honoré Daumier of the French Revolution
of 1848 includes a possible early example of a “political
clenched fist,” according to curator Francesca Seravalle.

This battle is part of IATSE’s history, even if some try to deny it:

  • Bioff’s successor, Richard F. Walsh, who served as president of IATSE from 1941 to 1974 without ever being indicted, was overshadowed by Roy Brewer, the alpha personality who came to town in 1945 as IATSE’s international representative. He had two missions: to maintain IATSE’s hammerlock on Hollywood labor and to purge the union ranks of any communist influence. (source)

While this site and the IATSE site tries to downplay the Communist activity and Reagan’s knowledge of it, here is some history, which often times is a bitch!

In the early-morning hours, even before the sun peeked over the east hills, thousands of picketers showed up at Warner Brothers. They were vocal and angry. Hollywood had seen strikes before, but nothing quite like this.

The strike had been called by a ruddy-faced ex-boxer named Herb Sorrell, head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), who was prepared to get rough. “There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over, but we are in no mood to be pushed around anymore,” he warned. For good measure, he had brought dozens of tough guys (“sluggers,” he called them) in from San Francisco, just in case.

Herb Sorrell had come up the hard way, beginning work at the age of 12, laboring in an Oakland sewer-pipe factory for 11 hours a day. He had cut his teeth in the Bay Area labor movement under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the wiry leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Bridges, according to Soviet archives, was also a secret member of the Communist Party and a regular contact for Soviet intelligence.

Sorrell had joined the party in the 1930s, and under Bridges’ guidance he had led two violent strikes in the Bay Area. Both strikes, he later admitted, were secretly funded by the Communists, and this time he was secretly receiving money from the National Executive Council of the Communist Party. Sorrell was a member of more than 20 Communist Party front organizations and had pushed hard for the American Federation of Labor to affiliate with the Soviet-run World Federation of Trade Unions. (AFL leaders refused on the grounds that it was simply a front group.)

The studio strike Sorrell organized in 1946 was no ordinary labor action. It was ostensibly called because of worker concerns, but Sorrell saw it as an opportunity to gain control over all the major unions in Hollywood. As he bragged in the early days of the action, “When it ends up, there’ll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me!”

The stakes were high. If Sorrell succeeded, the Communists believed, they could run Hollywood. As the party newspaper the People’s Daily World put it candidly, “Hollywood is often called the land of Make-Believe, but there is nothing make-believe about the Battle of Hollywood being waged today. In the front lines of this battle, at the studio gates, stand the thousands of locked-out film workers; behind the studio gates sit the overlords of Hollywood, [who] refuse even to negotiate with the workers. … The prize will be the complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history.” To underscore the value of this victory, the paper quoted Lenin: “Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important.”

The Communist Party had been active in Hollywood since 1935, when a secret directive was issued by CPUSA (Communist Party of the U.S.A.) headquarters in New York calling for the infiltration of Hollywood’s labor unions. The party believed that by doing so they could influence the type of pictures being produced. The directive also instructed party members to take leadership positions in the so-called intellectual groups in Hollywood, which were composed of directors, writers and performers.

To carry out the plan, CPUSA sent party activist Stanley Lawrence, a tall, bespectacled ex-cabdriver. Quietly and methodically he began developing secret cells that included Hollywood performers, writers and technicians. His actions were handled with great sensitivity (source)

As an aside, two books I read many years ago which I recommend is titled,

  • The Secret World of American Communism;
  • and, The Soviet World of American Communism.

If someone is not familiar with the influence of communism of trade unions, you will when you finish these two books.

COMRADE BREAK

Stalin’s Hollywood Stooges

Few parts of history have been rewritten by liberals quite like the story of the communists who penetrated the American film industry. The latest research, particularly by Larry Ceplair, Steven Englund, and Allan Ryskind, shows that there were two to three hundred communists operating in Hol­lywood in the late 1940s, always under concealment. Indisputably guilty were the screenwriters who made up the so-called Hollywood Ten. They were all card-carrying members of the Communist Party.

These comrades literally swore themselves to Stalin’s Kremlin. Several of them followed Stalin even after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Thus Allan Ryskind, son of Morrie Ryskind, an anti-communist screenwriter of the era, calls these dutiful comrades “Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler.” Here are the Ten, along with the Communist Party card numbers of each:

John Howard Lawson: 47275.
Dalton Trumbo: 47187.
Albert Maltz: 47196.
Alvah Bessie: 47279.
Samuel Ornitz: 47181.
Herbert Biberman: 47267.
Edward Dmytryk: 46859. (He had two additional numbers on other cards.)
Adrian Scott: 47200. (He had an additional number.)
Ring Lardner Jr.: 47180.
Lester Cole: 47226.35

Communists knew that the film industry could be tremendously useful for propagating communist propaganda. Vladimir Lenin said that “of all the arts, for us the most important is cinema.” Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Soviet Comintern, ordered that motion pictures “must become a mighty weapon of communist propaganda and for the enlightening of the widest working masses.” In March 1928, the Soviets held their first Party Confer­ence on Cinema.36


35. Allan Ryskind, Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agenls of Stalin, Allies of Hitler (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
36. Anna M. Lawton, The Red Screen (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 58.


Paul Kengor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (The Politically Incorrect Guides) (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 77-78.

Some examples of this symbol used by radical organizations to follow shortly.

THE GUARDIAN has this interesting note regarding the “Clenched Fist”

The clenched fist was first used by the communists in the Spanish civil war, as a counterpoint to the open-palmed Roman salute adopted by the fascists.[END NOTE] The clenched fist symbolises strength and unity – fingers which are individually fragile can together make a powerful fist. It became a symbol of communism and was co-opted to many revolutionary causes, most potently the civil rights struggle in the US and opposition to colonialism in the third world. But it is now so freighted with historical associations – the murky faction fighting on the left in the Spanish civil war, the perversion of communism in the Soviet Union, the tyrannies that emerged in post-colonial Africa – that, according to the socialist historian Sheila Rowbotham, it has become a double-edged symbol. “Even in the 1960s,” she says, “my generation used it slightly self-consciously. It was connected to communism and post-’56, [when the Soviet army suppressed the Hungarian uprising] using it made you feel slightly uneasy.”

She also doubts whether anarchists and anti-globalisation protesters today would find its overtones of power and enclosedness attractive. “It symbolises power clenched within the group, and since the 1960s the left has felt ambiguous about the exercise of power.

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that when this symbol from Communist/Marxist global movements was adopted… Communism was just getting started in the killing of a good chunk of humanity.

  • “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels “Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 19, 1849 (RPT)

The Third Reich killed 12-million people, obviously no organization would use symbols tied to Hitler. But in 100-years, Communism in the name of Marxist Ideology and Dialectical Materialism killed at least 160-million people. So why on God’s Green Earth would anyone use it’s symbol?? They [Communists] killed more people in 100-years than all religions in all the centuries before it.

I.W.W.

The aim of the IWW was to unite in one body all skilled and unskilled workers for the purpose of overthrowing capitalism and rebuilding society on a socialistic basis. Its methods were direct action, propaganda, the boycott, and the strike; it was opposed to sabotage, to arbitration or collective bargaining, and to political affiliation and intervention. The organization spread to Canada and Australia and in a very small way to Europe, but its main activities were confined to the United States. It was especially strong in the lumber camps of the Northwest, among dockworkers in port cities, in the wheat fields of the central states, and in textile and mining areas. Of the 150 strikes conducted by the IWW, the most notable occurred at Goldfield, Nev. (miners, 1906–7); at Lawrence, Mass. (textile workers, 1912); at Paterson, N.J. (silk workers, 1913); in the Mesabi range, Minn. (iron miners, 1916); in the lumber camps of the Northwest (1917); at Seattle (general strike, 1919); and in Colorado (miners, 1927–28).

The WASHINGTON TIMES notes the change of the current ethos of unions being different than the Cold War:

labor leader Andy Stern has seen the future. There’s no freedom there, but he’s OK with that. Mr. Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), recently returned from a trip to China, where he had the opportunity to meet with “high-ranking” government officials, who outlined for the former labor leader the authoritarian regime’s long-term economic plan.

Mr. Stern was so enamored with what he saw in the Middle Kingdom that he praised the communist country’s state-planned economy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and urged the United States to embark on a similar path. Among the more revolting passages of Mr. Stern’s love letter to Leninism:

“The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model – so successful in the 20th century – is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA’s results – a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1 percent – are pathetic. This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism.”

That a labor leader would proclaim love for freedom an extreme view should come as no surprise – the history of labor unions has been intimately entwined with the history of global communism. As the influential Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek wrote in his 1908 treatise, “The Labor Movement and Socialism,” “The object of the labor movement is to increase the strength of the proletariat to the point at which it can conquer the organized force of the bourgeoisie and thus establish its own supremacy.”

[….]

The sad thing is, for a time in the 20th century, American unions turned from this seedy past to become defenders of economic freedom. As Ivan Osorio, labor expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes, “During the Cold War, the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and most major U.S. labor unions were staunchly anti-communist. In fact, the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland worked closely with the Reagan administration to aid the Solidarity movement in Poland.” Unfortunately, our 21st-century unions seem to be slipping back to their traditional socialist mores and tendencies as they decline in popularity. In 2010, the union membership rate was 11.9 percent, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unions today loathe freedom, as Andy Stern demonstrates in his Wall Street Journal column, because unions require unfree markets in order to thrive. They love big government because unions require the government to guarantee their monopolies on labor. And it is precisely those features of unions that have contributed to their increasing unpopularity in the United States, where citizens are becoming wise to the corrupt conspiracy between unions and government to extinguish their liberties.

In a February interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Mr. Stern lamented the decline of organized labor’s power and influence and waxed nostalgic about the movement’s early days: “We had to do sit-down strikes and various other things. We had socialist and communist tendencies. We grew up, to speak in Marxist terms, in a world with a lot more class struggle … but it’s not viewed through that light anymore.”

Yeah, poor unions. If we were all a little more Marxist, maybe they wouldn’t be having such a tough time of it.


Some Examples


SPANISH CIVIL WAR (WIKI HISTORY)

The origin of the raised fist as either a symbol or gesture is unclear. Its use in trade unionism, anarchism, and the labor movement had begun by the 1910s. William “Big Bill” Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, used the metaphor of a fist as something greater than the sum of its parts during a speech at the 1913 Paterson silk strike. Journalist and socialist activist John Reed described hearing a similar description from a participant in the strike A large raised fist rising from a crowd of striking workers was used to promote a mass strike in Budapest in 1912. In the United States, clenched fist was described by the magazine Mother Earth as “symbolical of the social revolution” in 1914.

The use of the fist as a salute by communists and antifascists is first evidenced in 1924, when it was adopted for the Communist Party of Germany’s Roter Frontkämpferbund (“Alliance of Red Front-Fighters”). In reaction, the Nazi Party adopted the well-known Roman salute two years later. The gesture of the raised fist was apparently known in the United States as well, and is seen in a photograph from a May Day march in New York City in 1936. It is perhaps best known in this era from its use during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, as a greeting by the Republican faction, and known as the “Popular Front salute” or the “anti-fascist salute”

Children preparing for evacuation during the Spanish Civil War (1930s), some giving the Republican salute. The Republicans showed a raised right fist whereas the Nationalists gave the Roman salute.

The graphic symbol was popularised in 1948 by Taller de Gráfica Popular, a print shop in Mexico that used art to advance revolutionary social causes. Its use spread through the United States in the 1960s after artist and activist Frank Cieciorka produced a simplified version for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: this version was subsequently used by Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Power movement.

The raised right fist was frequently used in posters produced during the May 1968 revolt in France, such as La Lutte continue, depicting a factory chimney topped with a clenched fist.

A raised right fist icon appears prominently as a feminist symbol on the covers of two major books by Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful, published in 1970, and Sisterhood Is Forever, in 2003. The symbol had been popularised in the feminist movement during the Miss America protest in 1968 which Morgan co-organised.

A raised fist incorporates the outline of the state of Wisconsin, as designed in 2011, for union protests against the state rescinding collective bargaining.

GEORGE ORWELL (SPANISH WAR CONNECTION)

The first printed versions came in the early 1900s, with cartoons like this one published in 1917 by the Industrial Workers of the World.

The symbol was soon picked up by violent communist factions as well, such as those in the Spanish Civil War.

One 1936 poster from the communist-aligned Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) depicts four fists raised in front of a Soviet flag.

Much of the fighting in the war involved leftist groups fighting each other.

George Orwell, then a young British socialist who traveled to Spain to fight against fascists, soon found that the communist PSUC, a group behind the poster, denounced his own group as “fascist.”

“When the Communists gained control … and began to hunt down [my socialist faction] … we were very lucky to get out of Spain alive,” Orwell reported.

Orwell credited his experience in Spain with helping inspire his classics “1984” and “Animal Farm,” which took aim at communist totalitarian propaganda for its hypocrisies and lies. (source)

FEMINISM

Robin Morgan organized the September 1968 protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, the first major public action of contemporary feminism. That year she co-founded W.I.T.C.H., a radical feminist group employing guerrilla-theater actions to call attention to sexism. Morgan designed the universal logo of the women’s movement, the woman’s symbol centered with a raised fist. [….] she Co-founder (with the late Simone de Beauvoir) and President of The Sisterhood Is Global Institute, the first international feminist think tank, and co-founder (with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem).

TO WIT…

ROBIN MORGAN

The true radicalism of the feminist movement, and its connection to those thinkers discussed above (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Marcuse), is evident in second-wave writings. Morgan describes the feminists as “revolutionaries.” Firestone explicitly cites Marx and Engels as important to the feminist project, claiming that “for feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution…. In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels.”

The ultimate goal is to instigate a social revolution analogous to the economic revolution articulated by Marx and Engels: “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization,” writes Firestone, “the biological family…the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” This connection between Marxist theory and social revolution continues in the thought of the American Left today. Recently The Nation ran an interview with feminist theorist Sophie Lewis on her new book. The title of the interview was “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.” (source)

GLORIA STEINEM

  • “Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole Fucking patriarchy” (Detroit Free Press, April 15, 1974)
  • In 1977, in Houston, Gloria Steinem said, “For the sake of those who wish to live in equal partnership, we have to abolish and reform the institution of legal marriage.”
  • “When I was in college it was the McCarthy era and that made me a Marxist. Nothing was more clear than if Joseph McCarthy was against Marxists then I should be a Marxist.” (Susan Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, Sydney, HarperCollins, 1997, p. 130)
  • Later, Gloria joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

JANE FONDA

Fonda was married to French director Roger Vadim from 1965 to 1973, and it was while living in France that she was introduced to French communists who would initiate her into political activism.  Together she and Vadim had a daughter, Vanessa, so named because Fonda admired actress Vanessa Redgrave’s radical politics. Fonda became pregnant by activist Tom Hayden in 1972, and the two were married in 1973 (they would divorce in 1990). Fonda and Hayden named their newborn son Troy (originally spelled “Troi”) after a Viet Cong hero, Nguyen Van Troi, who was executed by the South Vietnamese government after attempting to assassinate Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1963. (Fonda’s third marriage, to television mogul Ted Turner, would last from 1991 to 2001.)

Fonda’s affinity for communism served as a backdrop for her intense anti-Vietnam War activities. By 1970 she was telling American college students: “If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist…. I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.” The dual villains of Southeast Asian conflicts were, in her view, “U.S. imperialism” and “a white man’s racist aggression.”

In April 1970, Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland formed “FTA” (which meant, depending upon the source, either “Free the Army” or “F*ck the Army”), an anti-war, quasi-USO road show billed as “political vaudeville” that toured military towns along the West Coast and throughout the Pacific.

Fonda also worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), serving as Honorary National Coordinator for a 1970 rally which that group organized in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Vietnam veteran and future Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was also involved in organizing the rally (he and Fonda were photographed sitting near each other at the event).

On November 3, 1970 Fonda began a tour of college campuses to raise funds for VVAW. (On that same date, Fonda was arrested for allegedly kicking a U.S. Customs agent; charges were later dropped. In the police mug shot, her raised left hand is clenched in a “Black Power” or “Power to the People” salute). (source)

BLACK LIVES MATTER (BLM)

Not only is BLM a Marxist organization, who’s founders themselves are Marxists and carry water for the communist governments in China and Cuba, but their symbol is found splattered on many a Democrat’s car. Adding to the division even lately in the use of the symbol. After talking to many of the construction guys on the studio lots… many are Republicans as well, who I assume view the symbol with some ire.

The symbol of a clenched, raised fist is ascendant among Black Lives Matter protestersAntifa rioters and other political left-wingers. 

But critics of the symbol note its origin and long use with communist movements – a history so fraught that, until recently, many left-wing protesters hesitated to use the iconic image.

“It is a symbol used by movements that establish oppressive systems, as every system established along Marxist lines has been,” Murray Bessette, a former professor of government at Morehead State University and now with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told Fox News.

“The raised fist is primarily used by organizations and movements that are heavily influenced by Marxism broadly understood,” Bessette explained.

“The common thread is [an] understanding of all social, economic and political relations as a contestation for power between a class of oppressors (i.a., rich, White, heterosexual, male) and a class of oppressed,” he said…. (source)

The group was at the forefront of demonstrations against police actions across the country and became a national rallying cry. The organization’s radical politics, though, have been largely ignored, even though its leaders haven’t been afraid to voice them.

Cullors in particular was open about her political ideology, calling herself “a trained Marxist” in an interview with Democracy Now!

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” she said. “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”

What exactly does it mean to be a “trained Marxist?” For years, Cullors was mentored by Eric Mann, a member of the 1960s radical groups Students for a Democratic Society and its more violent splinter group The Weather Underground.

In 1969, the U.S. Government declared the Weather Underground a domestic terror organization after it declared “a state of war against the United States” and started launching “Days of Rage” riots and bombing attacks against the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the Pentagon a year later, and the State Department building in 1975.

Fortunately, no one was ever killed in any of the Underground’s attacks, but three members died when one of their explosives accidentally detonated in their hideout in New York.

Cullors said in her memoir, “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” that Mann taught her from an early age to use the organizing and protest tactics he honed during his time as a campus radical.

Using this teaching, her self-described “first political home” was the Labor/Community Strategy Center, whose organizing principles center “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.”

According to its website, the group is openly Marxist, as it appreciates the work of “Black communists” within the U.S. Communist Party as well as “the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s.”

Cullors’ Black Lives Matter co-founder, Opal Tometi, is similarly radical, as she has spent years championing the disastrous Socialist Revolution in Venzuela, writing of dictator Nicolas Maduro’s regime, “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”

This embrace of socialism is evident in the mission statement of Black Lives Matter, which explicitly states “We are a collective of liberators who believe in an inclusive and spacious movement. We also believe that in order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities.”

What does such “nationalism” encompass? Apparently the nuclear family, which Black Lives Matter aims to destroy.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the group says in a section of its website entitled “What We Believe.” (source)

BLM and it’s symbols have — at least in my mind — been connected with violent and downright racist calls to action:

BLACK PANTHERS

To this day, the Black Panther Party remains a controversial group. According to former Marxists radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their book DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION, the Black Panthers “engaged widely in drug dealing, pimping, extortion, theft, assault, and homicide”. In 1969 alone, the time period of this movie, 348 Black Panther members were arrested for murder, armed robbery, rape, and burglary (Peter Collier and David Horowitz, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION (Summit Books, 1989), page 164).

Hollywood is a business, and the people running Hollywood are in the business of selling things. At its best, Hollywood sells wholesome entertainment that the whole family can enjoy.

In World War II, Hollywood sold American, British and French patriotism as patriots from the United States, Great Britain and France fought together to defeat the terrible tyranny of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

With JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH, however, Netflix and the movie’s writer, director and producer, Shaka King, who studied under radical black filmmaker Spike Lee, are selling violent Marxist revolution. Of course, Netflix, King and their comrades in the mass media of entertainment, including the “news” media, would like to mute the violent, radical nature of movies like JUDAS AND THE BLACL MESSIAH and of Marxist groups like the Black Panther Party.

To its credit, the movie does show Fred Hampton saying violent things like his exhortation to the crowd to kill all police officers. However, at the end of the movie, viewers are apparently supposed to be outraged and shocked that local and state police officers deliberately assassinated this radical socialist who had been publicly advocating their murder. The fact that the Hollywood Reporter ad for the movie uses an innocuous quote from “Chairman” Hampton in the movie about the power of the people, instead of his quote from Mao that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” indicates just how deceitful the movie and the ad actually are…. (source)

I could go on, but the violent, radical use of the raised fist imagery angers [I imagine] many who love their union but hates the adopted use of such violent symbols. It causes in me a great hesitation to even speak highly of any cause — as good as it may be — when I see it used.


END NOTE


RPT CLIPS (source | source | source)

Both Fascism and Communisms are left-leaning ideologies. One is not “Right,” and one is not “Left.” The following graph includes all political models and better shows where the political beliefs lie e.g., left or right is the following (take note, this graph is from a book I do not support nor recommend… but these visual insights are very useful):

Let us look at what we are told is suppose to be the political landscape if it were to be put into a line graph.

Really this is misleading. For one, it doesn’t allow for anarchy, which is a form of governance (or lack thereof). Also, it places democracy in the center… as if this is what one should strive for, a sort of balance. (The most popular — college level graph — is wrong and misleading as well):

The following graph includes all political models and better shows where the political beliefs lie e.g., left or right is the following (take note, this graph is from a book I do not support nor recommend… but these visual insights are very useful):

In actuality, during WWII, fascism grew out of socialism, showing how close the ties were. I would argue that the New Left that comprises much of the Democratic Party today is fascistic, or, at least, of a closer stripe than any conservative could ever hope to be. I will end with a model comparing the two forms of governance that the two core values (conservatism/classical liberalism versus a socialist democracy) will produce. Before you view the below though, keep in mind that a few years back the ASA (American Socialist Association) on their own web site said that according to the voting record of United States Congressmen and Women, that 58 of them were social democrats. These are the same that put Hitler and Mussolini in power.

Which Do You Prefer?? Leftist Democrats want more government control, Conservative Republicans want less government control

Here is an extended quote from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, THE BIG LIE, detailing the easy switch from socialist leaders and unions to fascist — overnight:

on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called them­selves fascisti or fascists.

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marx­ists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratu­lations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolution­ary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow social­ists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.

Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marx­ist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.

Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its news­paper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.

Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.

From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the pro­gressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.

When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”

Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a social­ist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mus­solini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.

From Socialism to Fascism

So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”

I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regimeVacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.

The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympa­thizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin

In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fas­cism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agos­tino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “syn­thesis” between communism and fascism.

Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian coun­terparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from social­ism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embar­rassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.

Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a social­ist or a man of the Left.

But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx antic­ipated and hoped for.

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts some­times arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.

In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.

[….]

Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.

Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.

The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo 0. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writ­ers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.

Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.

Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mus­solini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nation­alists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.

The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without caus­ing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.

  • Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.

  • “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition….  If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity….  From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” [i.e., violence, ostracizing, and government coercion]

Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.

TO WIT…

Objectivity Is Impossible And It Is Also Undesirable — Zinn

CALIFORNIA POLICY and AMERICAN GREATNESS has this quote that I wish to add to my Howard Zinn vault:

…..The irony here is that the planned protests were hosted by the Zinn Education Project, whose approach to history is based on Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980, the book became extremely popular and still dominates our nation’s classrooms. Zinn maintained that teaching history “should serve society in some way” and that “Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” When called on the carpet for writing a history book that played very fast and loose with the facts, the author freely admitted it, saying that his hope in writing the book was to cause a revolution.

At least Zinn was honest enough to admit that he was a liar. There’s no indication that the union troofers will go that far. Or perhaps they really believe that their lies are the truth. Either way, the troofers’ actions are very much akin to those of the Big Bad Wolf, and the nation’s children are Little Red Riding Hoods. That story had a happy ending, but the current version has yet to reach its climax.

Democrats Slipping Toward Tyranny (Bonus: Australia)

JUMP TO AUSTRALIA – not by boat

UPDATED TODAY

RED STATE joined the “terror watch list” fray with some video as well. I guess according to Homeland Security, NBC, CNN, YAHOO NEWS, etc, I am on a terror watch list?

Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security just issued a terror threat advisory which is raising some eyebrows.

Listen, as Lester Holt and Pete Williams describe how the “terror threat advisory” isn’t based on any actual threats or plots, but just a lot of “anti-government rhetoric” that includes things like “opposition to COVID measures” like masks and vaccine measures.



From Yahoo News:

“Extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of Covid-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks,” the DHS advisory said, adding that “pandemic-related stressors… may contribute to more violence this year.”

So, if there aren’t any actual plots or threats, what they’re really doing is demonizing free speech, as Tim Young observes, or criticism of government action. That’s a dangerous route to go down. It also suggests that the DHS is surveilling people to some degree on this subject, another troubling thought, and definitely a slippery slope to go down.

They’re also continuing to demonize Trump supporters again, by including them in the advisory that isn’t based on any actual threats, with “claims of election fraud, belief Trump can be reinstated.”

Whether you agree or disagree with those thoughts on Trump or on COVID, you’re allowed those thoughts in our allegedly free society under our Constitution. Are they really classifying being critical of the government as a terrorist threat now? Is dissent now terrorism?

Notice in this CNN take that it isn’t criminal actions but “false narratives” that are mentioned as “dangerous.”

The bulletin is part of a concerted effort by DHS to address the issues that led up to January 6 and the beginning of an effort by the department to educate the public about how these false narratives and conspiracy theories “are not just confusing but dangerous,” according to a source familiar.

You’re not allowed to have those thoughts.

Then the NBC piece notes there are concerns about the 9/11 anniversary and “religious holidays,” without defining what “religious holidays” we’re talking about here. What they’re looking at here, without NBC saying it, I think, is radical Islamic terrorism. That’s what the Yahoo News article on the advisory suggests.

But NBC just didn’t want to put that in the graphic. So, it leaves you wondering: are religious holidays now considered a threat as well?………

ACE of SPADES has a post that got my attention. I will add more of the source as I see fit… but this is an amazing turn. And I doubt they mean the person[s] given awards in Obama’s church or celebrated on the front cover of his church’s magazine (that has a 20,000 person reach).

…..Interesting piece by Peter Wood from a couple of days ago: From 9/11 to 1/6:

As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.

That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.

This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.

The irony is that the Democrats’ relentless exaggeration of what happened on January 6, 2021 might succeed in giving us the breakthrough realization of what happened on September 11, 2001. We will see that our leftist elite hates America and fears and despises that broad swath of the American people who reject their betters.

THEN CAME THIS: (MORE ADDED AFTER AOS’S EXCERPT)

There are some details at the link above.

At least if you believe the government’s public statements, our intelligence agencies and military totally missed the Taliban’s plans to rapidly take over Afghanistan (along with all that sophisticated military equipment we failed to remove). But they are certainly right about the threats above, don’t you think?

Peter Wood doesn’t think so. He is writing a book.

Random Note:

It was apparently the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztecs yesterday. You may recall that the Ethnic Studies folks in California want to revive the Aztec gods to replace the white Christian God, but as woke gods – not as true Aztec gods.

Music

Don’t let them take over your life. Their ideology is not sustainable. 

[….]

Here is the important Tweets linked in the above by JAMES LINDSAY:

ENLARGED PORTIONS:

The POST MILLENNIAL notes a recent Joy Reid show, where, Republicans are referred to as terrorists:

In an interview on The Reidout with Joy Reid this week, author Malcom Nance warned that Q-Anon supporters have taken over the Republican Party and are “preparing for civil war.”

“On August 13th or 14th, just a few days from now, the Q-Anon believers, which is now a substantial portion of the Republican base, believe that Donald Trump will be reinstated as president through some magic that they only understand. When that doesn’t happen, then what?” Reid asked.

“Well, nothing is going to happen here in August,” replied Nance, adding that there is a substantial portion of the “gunslinging conservatives base” that does not support Q-Anon.

[….]

“The Republican Party, you know, I used to joke that they were vanilla ISIS, all of these militia men and everything out there. They were like ISIS, they were like Al Qaeda in the sense that they radicalized online. They would meet together in secret, and they did all of these activities, which were very much like a terrorist insurgency,” said Nance.

Nance continued by saying that the Republican Party “is more like Sinn Féin and the relationship between Sinn Féin, the Irish National Party, and the Irish Republican Army – Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorist group.”….


CANARY IN THE COAL MINE


The entire Paul Watson* video can be found at MOONBATTERY: “Australian Covid Dissident Locked in Lunatic Asylum” — also see MOONBAT’S other recent post: “Australia Degenerates Into Biosecurity Police State” FYI >>>

  • While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

* While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

 

Democrats Leaning Totalitarian More-and-More Every Day

What a great post by PJ-MEDIA!

The Left’s taste for totalitarianism is increasingly obvious. There have been calls from Leftists for the opponents of the still-unapproved vaccines to be shot (with a gun, not a hypodermic needle), or at the very least arrested and imprisoned, and on Thursday AP reported that Biden handlers had discussed “mandating vaccines for interstate travel,” but decided against doing so because “the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.” For the moment. That means we should watch for this particular trial balloon to be floated again after the establishment media has pounded the American people with fear propaganda for a few more months.

Even the fact that this idea has been broached should send chills down the spine of everyone who is aware of how totalitarian regimes work. Internal passports are one of their hallmarks, as they enable easy, centralized data collection about the population and its political leanings, along with ready knowledge of each individual’s whereabouts, which is always handy when the time comes for that knock on the door at 3 a.m. At a time when the Democratic leadership is doing everything it can to stir up hysteria about a fictional “insurrection” and talking about acting against a largely chimerical “white supremacist terrorism,” the idea of internal passports should be a matter of serious concern.

On December 27, 1932, the Soviet Union established the “Unified Passport System within the USSR,” severely restricting travel within the country and requiring Soviet citizens to carry passports for travel inside the workers’ paradise, so as to aid in “the removal of persons not engaged in industrial or other socially-useful work from towns and cleansing of towns from hiding kulaks, criminals and other antisocial elements.” “Kulaks” was the Stalin regime’s word for peasants they didn’t find sufficiently enthusiastic for the arrival of Communism; the internal passports were designed to aid in identifying and rooting out such undesirable elements and enemies of the regime.

Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that “once the delta variant arrived in force in early summer, earlier government assurances that the vaccinated were now free to resume a normal life lost credibility. Confused and mixed messages followed — simultaneously downplaying and exaggerating the efficacy of the vaccinations.” Yet in the face of this loss of credibility, Biden’s handlers have not eased off on their vaccination push, but have only intensified it. AP noted: “When the pace of vaccinations in the U.S. first began to slow, President Joe Biden backed incentives like million-dollar cash lotteries if that’s what it took to get shots in arms.” Yes, it’s a vaccine so safe, so effective, so widely trusted, that Biden’s handlers were willing to bribe Americans to get it.

The cash lotteries were the carrot; now comes the stick. “In just the past two weeks,” says AP: “Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements. He’s met with business leaders at the White House to press them to do the same.” And that’s not remotely all. Biden’s handlers have also “taken steps toward mandating shots for people traveling into the U.S. from overseas.” Much more is coming, “including potential support for school districts imposing rules to prevent spread of the virus over the objection of Republican leaders.”

Yet again employing the Leftist tactic of accusing his enemies of what he is guilty of, Old Joe on Thursday politicized his vaccine push while claiming his foes were the ones doing so: “To the mayors, school superintendents, educators, local leaders, who are standing up to the governors politicizing mask protection for our kids: thank you. Thank God that we have heroes like you, and I stand with you all, and America should as well.”

AP’s Zeke Miller then gives us a paragraph about Old Joe’s strict constitutionalism and magnanimity, saying that “he has refrained from using all his powers to pressure Americans to get vaccinated. He’s held off, for instance, on proposals to require vaccinations for all air travelers or, for that matter, the federal workforce. The result is a precarious balancing act as Biden works to make life more uncomfortable for the unvaccinated without spurring a backlash in a deeply polarized country that would only undermine his public health goals…. Still, while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.”

Wait a minute. He has “refrained from using all his powers”? What powers exactly has he declined to use? What section of the Constitution allows the president of the United States to require vaccinations for all air travelers or internal passports? What part of the Bill of Rights allows the president to take any measures whatsoever to “make life more uncomfortable for the unvaccinated”? If a pandemic justifies this level of federal overreach, what on earth would or could possibly prevent a tyrant from creating one in order to arrogate emergency powers to himself? Is the pandemic now the Left’s Reichstag fire excuse to destroy Americans’ freedom and crush dissent?……….

(READ IT ALL)

 

Majority of Democrats Are NOT Proud To Be Americans

(Originally Posted July 2018)

UPDATERepublicans, Holding the Patriotic Line!

Currently, 32% of Democrats — down from 43% in 2017 and 56% in 2013 — are extremely proud. The decline preceded the election of Donald Trump but has accelerated in the past year.

Less than half of independents, 42%, are also extremely proud. That is down slightly from 48% a year ago, and 50% in 2013.

As has typically been the case, Republicans are more inclined to say they are extremely proud to be Americans than are Democrats and independents. Seventy-four percent of Republicans are extremely proud, which is numerically the highest over the last five years….

(GALLUP)

This is the Democrat base… and influences Democratic politics. It boos God/Israel being in the Democrat platform. It tries to get rid of God from the pledge (“Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to think the phrase should be taken out”). It tries to force religious people to pay for abortions. Here is BREITBART:

This Fourth of July, according to a recent Pew survey, 60% of full-spectrum “Solid Liberals” are not proud to be Americans.

The Pew Research survey found that just 40% of so-called Solid Liberals “often feel proud to be American” while “60% say that characterization does not fit them.”

According to the comprehensive survey, 69% of Solid Liberals are white, and 41% are under 40 years of age. They make up 15% of the general public and 17% of registered voters. Almost unanimously they love President Barack Obama – 84% approve Obama’s job performance, “with 51% approving very strongly.”

Among all Americans, Obama is considered to be the worst president since World War II, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll (2014). 

In addition, 80% of this group believe that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many blacks can’t get ahead these days,” 87% think abortion should be legal in almost all circumstances, and 83% say “the government should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt.”

Pew also found that 52% of Solid Liberals “have college degrees and 21% have graduate degrees” while “45% say if they could live anywhere they wanted, they would live in a city.” While 93% of Solid Liberals believe that “stricter” environmental regulations are worth the cost, only “12% say the description ‘hunter, fisher or sportsman’ fits them well, the lowest share of any typology group.”

(Click Graph To Enlarge)

Conservatives are significantly prouder to be Americans.

Pew’s survey found that “81% of Business Conservatives and 72% of Steadfast Conservatives say the phrase ‘often feel proud to be American’ describes them well.” Pew also concluded that the “feelings of pride in being American – and a belief that honor and duty are core values – are much more widespread among the two conservative groups than the other typology groups.”

An excerpt from the book, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828 (found here), by Walter A. McDougall. (H/T Michael Medved)

The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years. If some ghostly ship, some Flying Dutchman, were transported in time from the year 1600 into the present, the crew would be amazed by our technology and the sheer numbers of people on the globe, but the array of civilizations would be recognizable.

There is today, as there was then: a huge Chinese Empire run by an authoritarian but beleaguered bureaucracy; a homogeneous, anxious, suspicious Japan; a teeming crazy-quilt of Hindus and Muslims in India attempting to make a state of themselves; an amorphous Russian empire pulsing outward or inward in proportion to Muscovy’s projection of force; a vast Islamic crescent hostile to infidels but beset by rival centers of power; a dynamic, more-or-less Christian civilization in Europe aspiring to unity but vexed by its dense congeries of nations and tongues; and finally an Iberian/Amerindian culture in South America marked by relative poverty and strategic impotence.

The only continent that would astound the Renaissance time-travelers would be North America, which was primitive and nearly vacant as late as 1607, but which today hosts the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth – a civilization, moreover, that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.

One might object that the most salient features of modern history have not been territorial and demographic, but intellectual and political: the invention and spread of enlightened ideas of human rights and democratic self-government on the one hand, and the scientific and technological explosions in human power on the other hand. That is so, but the rise of America goes far to explain the rapidity and scale of their triumphs