(Seattle Antifa)
I vividly recall staying up past 1 AM on election night 2016, watching CNN, as it became clear that Donald Trump had been elected the next President of the United States. News anchor Dana Bash was beside herself at the outcome, and at one point, in a fit of honesty, she exclaimed, "This means the end of identity politics." Well, yes, but a deep ideology like identity politics does not die a quiet and sober death. Last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, we saw identity politics playing out–violently. Whether it was the white protesters who formed part of the original crowd, or the black and "antifa" protesters who formed part of the counter-demonstration, we witnessed a clash of identities.
President Trump was not wrong when he said that there were violent protesters on both sides of the clash, and that many of the protesters were not there to show their racism, but to protest the tearing down of a statue of a figure in American history who cannot be airbrushed out of our nation's story. Is the next step to burn down the campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, because it was co-named after Robert E. Lee after the Civil War?
Watching the tirades on MSNBC and other news outlets over the past 48 hours, I can't help but lament how twisted our public discourse has become. Clearly some of the counter-demonstrators were part of the very same "antifa" apparatus that got very different news coverage when they torched and trashed Seattle a number of years back in protest at a WTO meeting. This time around, they were defended by the icons of media, who denounced any thought that there was "moral equivalence" between their violence and the violence of the hardcore white racists who made up part of the protesters on UVA campus.
There is a difference between legitimate civil rights struggles, which at times led to violence, and the reverse racism that I see and hear far too often out of the Black Lives Matter people. And there is the matter of George Soros spending millions of dollars to help launch that movement after Ferguson. Soros Money Matters too. He is not a benign figure but a promoter of division and discord. I sat in a room when he complained bitterly, with racist overtones, during a meeting of the Drug Policy Foundation years ago, that there were not black voices promoting the legalization of crack cocaine, part of his libertine agenda. Is he a friend of the black community? I don't think so.
Identity politics is a disease. It divides people and makes them into the sum of their self-defined attributes. Far from bringing about the end of identity politics, the Trump election has hardened the fault lines, whether on Capitol Hill or on the streets of American cities.
Brennan Gilmore, Tom Perrielo, Michael Signer, and other friends of Podesta arranged the Charlottesville violence. This isn’t just a bunch of college-age leftists getting excited about Derrida. The Charlottesville violence was the result of a conspiracy by well-connected insiders.
I quote the “Signs of the Times” website linked below:
The STOP KONY 2012 psyop was all about using the Joseph Kony boogieman to justify letting Barack Obama send Special Operations troops into Africa to run around and squash any and all resistance to our new imperialism campaign. It was a fraud. A show. And Brennan was part of it.
He was also part of the campaign of Tom Perriello’s in Virginia to become the next governor.
End quote.
“Signs of the Times” dot net has a story on this that I will link in the third field below.
https://www.sott.net/article/359361-Charlottesville-Brennan-Gilmore-and-the-STOP-KONY-2012-Psyop
gaikokumaniakku
I fear that we are approaching a season of disintegration. September 11 at Texas A&M and September 16 on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia will be indicators. pl
On June 6, 1944, a bunch of “protesters” attacked Nazis and did so violently. Was there a moral equivalency then too? You have to reach rather low to accept Nazis, et al, and try to deflect blame for what they stand for. What the defenders of the Confederacy has managed to do is to thoroughly discredit their cause by associating with these despicable groups. It is again a lost cause and again, they only have themselves to blame.
We may be watching the end of the Trump era come nearer. By association, he is rapidly losing the moral stature of the office that he holds. A lot of people near him are losing their reputations forever.
Lars
Of course Sweden did not fight the Nazis at all. Was there a moral equivalence there or was it just self-interest? In fact there were many Swedish volunteers in the 5th SS Panzer Division. What is the factual basis for saying that the people who would not have the statues moved are Nazi-associated or supporting? Do you think the UDC and SCV (of whom I am not qualified to be a member) are Nazi-associated? pl
Comparing a foreign country that declared war on the US, with a group of US citizens just trying to exercise their constitutional rights and being attacked for it is just fatuous.
The SCV has absolutely no connection to the events at Charlottesville.
I did not see many women on the protesters side, so I strongly suspect that the UDC had no connection either.
The main reason Sweden did not fight The Reich was because they were not invaded. There was plenty of resistance, mainly helping Norwegians and Danes, who were fighting the Nazis. There were very few Swedish volunteers in the SS and they had very little impact.
If you show up with the KKK and the Nazis, you are supporting them. This is a different country than in the 1920’s, when most of those statutes were put in place and now a lot of people want them gone.
As the old adage says: If you lay down with dogs, you end up with fleas. You may not like guilt by association, but it exists and is now in focus, due to Donald Trump. Many people are going to have to decide which side they are on. So far, it seems that there is a lot of rejection going on, including from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I’m with gaikokumaniakku on this one.
This whole thing smacks of a setup.
The media wants people to link Trump to the fringe element because they are afraid that the “America first” nationalists are gaining ground. They have identified the right-leaning nationalists as the defacto enemy of their globalist world order.
Just like the US has eliminated every strong, secular nationalist leader in the arab world, the deep state is now focused on annihilating or discrediting the patriot movement in the US.
I read somewhere that former Gov. Gilmore has called for an independent investigation of the security planning done by state and local police for the rally last Saturday. I haven’t been able to find a published source for this though.
I am somewhat taken aback by the attitude of many commenters here who don’t seem overly concerned if “Nazis” had the $hit beat out of them.
Would you feel the same if antifa did this to anti-abortion demonstrators? What about a rally that supports restrictions on immigration? Or more simply, a rally to protect significant historic monuments in the US?
Because you can bet that the BLM and antifa thugs would do to you exactly what they did to the Nazis, if you held such unpopular or retrograde opinions and they had the chance. Last week that chance was significantly enabled by local and state government officials.
The Virginia ACLU got this right. This is about core 1st Amendment rights. Without them, we as country are doomed, because we will have no non-violent way to resolve our differences.
Lars, my father was in the battle of the bulge and other battles against Germany, but he also realized one of our allies, the Soviets, were also a murderous regime.
You actually believe, then, that the demonstration would not have been attacked by the antifa thugs or condemned as deplorable racists unfit to be allowed to express their unfit opinions by all the usual suspects, if they’d diligently cleansed themselves of any real or supposed “Nazi” elements?
Laughable.
There were no “Nazis” at President Trump’s pre-election political gatherings, but the thugs attacked them nevertheless.
Time to admit that there is a basic problem with the political left in the US and in the UK, in that much of it believes it is justified in silencing, blacklisting, and in physically attacking those whose opinions it regards as unacceptable.
Sorry but you are just wrong. I know Mike Singer and one other of the member of the Charlottesville City Council well. They are honorable people. Sir you are deluded by false news and consipral theories. You need to climb back into you hole. I doubt if Pat will post this, but then again I hope he does.
pl,
The SCV made a point of distancing themselves from the “Unite the Right” crowd well before that rally took place. They wanted no part of it. They also have a long standing policy of staying away from the KKK. Their members are not allowed to join the KKK or any other bigoted, white supremacist group. The SCV leadership is well aware of the danger, almost inevitability, of being painted with the same brush as the various alt-right, nazi and white supremacist groups. Even with this policy in place, I would be surprised if there was not a substantial overlap in attitudes among a number of the members of all these groups.
Lars,
In May of 1945 a bunch of “protestors” attacked Nazis in Berlin and did so rather violently. Antifa in Berkley and Charlottlesville are just following the example of comrade Joe’s boys in brown using “peaceful means”; for now. That’s the alt-left for you.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/
pl,
I think both rallies were cancelled. I know the Richmond rally organizer pulled the request for that rally to avoid the possible violence. I do think the Virginia Flaggers and SCV are keeping an eye on various confederate statues.
I live in Oakland, California and am familiar with the violence that some anarchists have reigned on our city. So, I know some elements of the ‘deranged’ left are capable of that. But I have to say, I’m fairly scrupulous in looking for facts and not jumping to conclusions, and so here I’ve been looking for any evidence that the counter-protesters initiated any of the violence. I’ve not seen any. I’ve seen testimony from clergy thanking the anarchists and antifa for inserting themselves between the neo-Nazis and themselves to protect them. Scuffles did break out there, but i they were in self-defense. Again, I’ve seen no evidence that the anarchists initiated any violence. If you have some evidence, please provide it.
On a technical note Gentlemen, the scholarly definition of the Alt – Right, is not and cannot be identified with the terms “Nazis” or “Nazism” at all. Those are dog whistle terms of abuse used by the Left that immediately tarnish any arguments they may wish to make in accordance with Godwins Law. I thus know there is no point listening to any tirade.that calls the Alt Right “Nazis” since technically speaking they are not whatever the listener thinks.
Professor Robert Paxton observes that the Nazis were not an “ism” in the sense of Communism, Liberalism, Socialism, etc. for the simple fact that there were no “great books” of tightly organised. academic theory underpinning the Nazi ideology as there are for the other “isms” – Marx, Engels, etc., there were only the deranged rantings of Hitler.
As such the Nazis appropriated a stack of differing memes to suit their needs from time to time. These included agrarian socialism, nationalism, racism as required.
The Alt – Right does none of this as far as I can tell. They seem to me to be consistent in their respect and reverence to The Constitution and their abhorrence of big Government forcing social theory down their throats on a daily basis for example LBGT crap, extreme militant feminism and phony ‘diversity” memes.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2801%28199803%2970%3A1%3C1%3ATFSOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
Did United States (necessarily) fight the “Nazis” or “Germans” during World War 2?
I think this is an important distinction: we did not get into the habit of fighting amorphous monsters formed out of figments of (other) peoples’ imaginations until Cold War was well on its way. Yes, Germany was run by Nazis and its policies were guided by their odious ideology, but we fought a country, with a well-defined government that, if beaten via superior violence, could and did surrender to us to bring about the end of hostilities.
Isms don’t have governments. Isms don’t have physical return address.
Isms don’t surrender. They can only be made to disappear by being put in the dustbin of forgetfulness and irrelevance. Violence can’t achieve that.
Lars – In your post you talk about Nazis. Then you tell us that defenders of the Confederacy have associated themselves with Nazis. Then, by the flimsiest of pretexts, you move over to attacking Trump. This is a tour de force of damning by juxtaposition but for the life of me I can find no sense in it.
What we are seeing is usual when there’s an intractable political divide. The extremists on either side get something going and start to draw the moderates on either side in with them. Your hope is that the process will go far enough to get rid of your President but no further. It’s a discreditable hope and possibly a risky one.
“Identity politics is a disease. It divides people and makes them into the sum of their self-defined attributes.”
Identity politics is not Leftist indoctrination. It is reality. No, being otherkin is not a real identity. Being white and American is, however. Being white and Canadian is too. Individuated universalism is just a form of ethnic European identity politics, albeit a rather destructive and fantastical expression that posits we are avatars of a universal humanity.
I remain consistently amazed that this style of analysis retains currency in the current year. Identity is a dynamic exchange between the unique characteristics of the individual and the context in which he is born. Having seen multicultural state after multicultural state disintegrate (Yugoslavia), degenerate into civil war (Sudan), or stultify into permanently into frozen hostility (Lebanon); some STILL want to deny individuals will seek to preserve the context in which they realize themselves because its part of who they are. The only proven way to stop adversarial identity politics is to ensure homogeneous super-majorities reign supreme within discreet, geographically defined polities. America didn’t have an ‘identity politics’ problem after WWII because everybody was a regional variation of the same cultural page, and the arguments were over how best to distribute economic capital.
The division entailed by ‘identity politics’ is a defence mechanism against the forces of globalization which will erase the framework in which individuals realize themselves. This framework is an artifice that keeps the will to power at bay. People *want* to be divided. Why do we get this urge to enforce in-organic unity at precisely the same moment the centrifugal forces engendered by this procedure are destabilizing our countries?
Uniting people results in the abolition the contexts of self-realization, and thus amounts to the abolition of man. The result is a gray gloop of atomized, passive consumers whose stunted personalities will go ape whenever global capitalism enters a crisis and the bread and circuses spigot is turned off.
Between the left actively working to undermine the levees protecting the formation of a sociable body politic, and centrist/conservatives denying these levees are worth protecting or even exist, the resolution of our political crises will likely be ugly. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This secularized protestant ethos of moral posturing is how we all lose.
‘My team is on the right side of history’, said the increasingly desperate Swede.
Lars, what you have to understand is the application of the views you espouse are to blame for these admittedly rather goony convocations. The so called ‘fringes’ are starting to eat in toward the centre of the political spectrum because liberal ideology is destabilizing the national continuum. All the pejoratives and invective in the world won’t intimidate people who do not share your moral premises.
‘Nazis’ today are often nothing more than pre WWII social democrats who believed in representative elections, the common good, ethnically defined political entities, and the legitimacy of politics uniformly embodying the values of culture, race, ethnos, and language. If you suppress this perfectly legitimate impulse to self-determination enshrined in the UN charter, you will only succeed in in instigating a situation beyond the means of electoral democracy to resolve.
I would prefer reasonable people correct the error of diversity, mass immigration, and imposed pluralism through peaceful policy realignment. The alternative is the fringes eating in toward the centre of the political spectrum and doing so violently.
Some of those racist a$$hats at Cville were screaming against Trump for giving his daughter to a Jew. Why does he put up with that? And when are they going to go after the Catholics? Again I should have said, as I recall in the 60s and 70s seeing Klan billboards in and around Kinston NC demonizing Papists in addition to their black and Jewish targets. The billboards alongside US Route 70 were as full size as the ones advertising Coca-Cola and tobacco.
The overwhelming majority (99%+ I would say) of the people who do not want the statues moved are NOT Nazi or Klan associated or supporting. But those 99% were screwed over by the few that are, because statues and monuments are coming down or being vandalized everywhere today, even on private land. That is directly attributable to the white supremo wannabees at Cville.
People are going to identify with weapons more than political parties if the left keeps this up.
Really? Couldn’t get Adam Weishaupt, the Trilateral Commission, or the NWO in there, to name a few? Sigh.
To view this, and the underlying dynamic in either/or, black/white terms is to miss the point entirely, at least for those developmentally capable, but one wonders how the Abraham Lincoln Brigade would be viewed today, or “Inglorious Bastards” and, “…killing Nazis.”
I think Yeats had it right:
“…The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
There is an I-Ching hexagram that speaks to this but I am too lazy to look it up tonight.
As Kurt Vonnegut opined, “…and so it goes.”
We all wish it were not so…
But I am afraid that, in the current year, this piece is horse-hockey.
This is about power, and who rules.
Demographics is now driving ideology.
For white Americans to forego waging identity politics at this point is tantamount to unilateral disarmament. Putting some abstract 18th Century principle from the European Enlightenment above actually existing reality is suicide.
Consider:
“In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
Lee Kuan Yew was right, and the luxury of pretending otherwise will die with failed Boomer Conservatism.
And not a moment too soon.
Perhaps I did not see the entirety of Trump’s remarks, but I did not hear any “defense of white supremacists,” a charge that I have read and heard in more than one place. I did hear him accuse the left of being violent, and it seems to me that if nothing else their choice to engage in proximate confrontation was a move which incited violence regardless of who threw the first punch.
The removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee displays a degree of ignorance of history. Perhaps no one man did as much to bring the civil war to a close, rejecting the idea that the troops should take to the woods and continue guerrilla warfare after Appamattox, and commanding enough respect from his troops that they followed his orders.
You like to paint with broad brush don’t you and claim moral superiority while doing it?
And EVEN if someone is “a nazi” or has national socialism agenda/idea/whatever WTF are you to silence him as far as i know modern civilization (likes to pretend it is but i digress…) has something called basic human rights and liberties and one of them is voicing whatever opinion one might have. You’re free not to like it. I wonder if you’re so quick to discredit some other causes which “might be” corrupted by association with “other” despicable groups or individuals like one particular Hungarian (by origin so not to insult Hungarians) jew.
Trump is not loosing anything at least not in this case as what he told is utter and complete truth, only problem is that a minority (rather loud though and it appears as majority) of retards (who for themselves think they are progressives and “chosen ones”) aren’t able to comprehend English language anymore. Cognitive dissonance par excellence.
If there’s anything that makes me laugh, it’s Swedish lecturing about morality and racism. Remember the iron ore, too, and their abstention from NATO in the Cold War (although they kept their own credible armed forces).
I still don’t think the current period is as bad as 1968-74 in the USA and 1968-1977 in W. Europe. Assassinations, riots, Weathermen, RAF, Brigada Rossa, “Carlos.” For one thing, there are no Soviet armies in Germany and Czech.
I repeat my prediction Trump will be out before June 30, 2018. Mueller will dump on him, disgrace and discredit him. The system will purge him as a colon irritant is purged.
Many of the American troops going ashore on Normandy beaches were Southern troops who firmly believed in racial segregation. In fact, the American Army was segregated on racial lines at that time.
So I suppose, following the Iron Laws of Identity Politics, that nazis were in fact fighting nazis. On which side would an Identity Politics soldier have fought?
(As this is the Internet, I’d better point out I was being ironic in the statements above).
Identity policy is a Democratic project to keep the plebs away from thinking about alternatives to the neoliberal polices imposed on them.
Steven Bannon, Trumps “ideologue”, in a recent interview said this:
/quote/
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
/endquote/
http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant
Bannon is right. Still, the DNC, the Hillary “resistance” and the various Democratic Senators will stick to their program. They will blame Putin, the pope, or the stupid voters when they lose again.
We already know that multi ethnic societies are highly unstable, we are simply seeing the consequences of a shift from a 90% European society to a 60% European society. Throw in economic and social decay and it is surprising things have held together. Trump was right more jobs will help but that then leaves open the question of what next when the economy inevitably turns down. Of course if you want to encourage communal violence then a good approach is to destroy a community’s symbols etc., but I don’t think they have the self awareness to understand this.
The interesting added twist is the seeming use of elements the US has used in hybrid warfare to destabilise foreign countries like the Ukraine, no question the likes of Soros is very much involved. This is an attempted coordinated color revolution applied domestically. I recall that article I linked to recently that sanctimoniously lectured the Russians that you can only destablilise a country where a section of the populace is discontented with their government, sorry but the US looks like a prime candidate for this. Like Lebanon, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine etc. you guys look like, with the right push, ready to blow.
I dare not to say that these events are Fort Sumter, but I am almost sure that they equal Harper’s Ferry.
President Trump has method in his madness in that he is just doubling down every time his enemies try to take him down. So far no one has managed to call his bluff. His enemies hate him for this since he is merely using their tactics against them. For the left in the US, has no morality, no sense of limits, and no decency. Their method are like that of the Israeli troublemakers: create the maximal amount of chaos, since in their utter amorality, they aim to benefit from it. Trump knows their game, and he will play as long as he is at the table. For all Israeli-firsters, who we see coming out flailing, Trump for all the sweet noises he makes on Israel is a problem, since he will not stay on message and makes up his own mind. Anyone whom the Jewish lobby suspects of being wobbly over Israel is a target. This has been the story of American Presidencies as far back as I can remember. It does not matter how much Bible thumbing they do, how many yarmulkes they wear at the Wailing Wall, if he is not one hundred percent on board on ‘the greatest ally’ myth, he is a liability.
Balint Somkuti Ph.D
IMO “Kansas” is starting to bleed. pl
Doesn’t re-enacting the Nuremberg and Berlin torch rallies while chanting the same chants the Nazis chanted tell you who they are, or who they want to be? Shouldn’t they revery own actions be used to tell us who they support?
Steve
Carl Bernstein on Wednesday’s “AC360:” “I think there’s considerable evidence that there is a consensus developing in the military; at the highest levels in the intelligence community; among Republicans in Congress; including the leaders in the business community” that President Trump “is unfit to be the President of the United States.”
http://mailchi.mp/cnn/reliable-august-16-2017?e=68d83fdfcf
bks
I agree that he is unlikely to finish his term, but I think that event may well be the Ft. Sumter moment. pl
TTG
I am surprised that you would assert that the SCV membership shares common attitudes with the other groups. pl
Foresman
“I doubt if Pat will post this, but then again I hope he does.” It is typical of you to make a supercilious and gratuitous attempt at bullying of that sort. pl
I think it is safe to assume that there were people protesting the statues being removed who were not neo-Nazis or the KKK. But it is a fact that such protesters were ok with marching with such virulent scumbags in that they did indeed march with them. They may not agree with the neo-nazis or KK but there were willing to be part of a rally that prominently featured and were dominated by such an ilk. This is big statement for me and it makes me question the either the judgment or actual beliefs of people who were “just” protesting the removal of a statue of a confereate icon. I have been many protests where virulent protesters (like the Sparticus Youth League “SYL” in the 80’s) were separated from those of us who were peaceful. We went to great lengths to separate ourselves and in fact the police often created such barriers. Not any more for the police employing that tactic it seems…
lefty_blaker
Is there evidence that the SCV or UDC were represented in the demonstration? pl
Col, Not sure what’s up with the editor, if this is a dupe pls scrub.
Richmond will be telling. As long as he has been in Virginia, Levar has been profoundly conflict averse. He has not been advocating removal. It may be that as a black mayor he will have some maneuvering room, like Nixon going to China. Or, that may box him in.
C’ville is smelling more like a set up as more information dribbles out. A NYT article featuring pictures of antifa men and women armed with ‘assault rifles’ has not gotten much attention. The Times picture of antifa blocking Market street so people could not get to the rally at the park and causing a riot is very low profile too.
The police chief’s statement that his men were in regular uniforms so had to leave the riot to get their riot gear was jaw dropping. That conflict was apparently what inspired the cancellation of the park demonstration permit.
Later, failure to do crowd control around the Water St. parking lots where many on both sides left their cars is equally inexplicable. It set the stage for murder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/who-were-the-counterprotesters-in-charlottesville.html
“‘Nazis’ today are often nothing more than pre WWII social democrats who believed in representative elections, the common good, ethnically defined political entities, and the legitimacy of politics uniformly embodying the values of culture, race, ethnos, and language.”
Really!! Then why call themselves a “nazi”?!! Have you spent time hanging out with such Nazis or reading what they write? For many of us with Jewish heritage the fact that anyone would characterize themselves as a “nazi” says very much about their true horrific beliefs. One can believe in all the stuff that you refer to without calling themselves a nazi. You make lots of statement here that I disagree with but this one is frankly beyond the pale for someone like me who lost whatever remained at the time of my european family at the hands of the nazis.
Came to here to post that link myself. The other Bannon quote that stood out was:
We live in the most prosperous age of the freest, most prosperous nation in history, yet despite this, it’s undeniable that our youth are rapidly becoming a lost generation. Reality is, for them, an elusive thing. They play Call of Duty 40 hours/week, exchange e-mails and texts with fellow devotees, are are easily cultivated and organized into chanting mobs of torch-carrying stooges.
What do we really know about the people behind the Charlottesville rally? Well, it seems at least one, Jason Kessler, was a dedicated leftist (Occupy Wall Street, Obama supporter) as recently as NOV 2016. That’s rather curious timing, isn’t it? Perhaps his conversion was an earnest one. Perhaps it was something else. One thing we do know is that, shortly after the Reichstag Fire, the Comintern shifted its propagandistic focus from peace and pacifism to, you guessed it, anti-fascism. With it they caught a netful of Western intellectuals and infiltrated our governments and intelligence apparatus.
In any case, the rapidity with which the public was exhorted to both condemn the White Supremacists (no problem there) and acknowledge the legitimacy of Antifa (Whoa, Trigger) was a bit too convenient for this cynic’s taste.
Can anyone explain Steve Bannon’s interview with Kuttner?
http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant
Isn’t this exactly the sort of leak that Trump and Sessions pledged to stop just last week?
Col, Bowling has cancelled the 9/16 rally in Richmond. Looks like a good choice, but a loss for the 1st amendment.
http://www.richmond.com/news/local/city-of-richmond/organizer-of-proposed-sept-rally-at-lee-monument-in-richmond/article_f97dc37b-ecb9-5038-86cd-85571494abde.html
Pat Lang and other citizens of The Commonwealth,
I would ask, where are the Virginians as their history and heritage are being dismantled? Is there a groundswell of opinion opposed to turning R.E. Lee into a non-person? If there is, I’ve seen no evidence in the news.
WPFIII
Don’t surprised that when you call–by analogy–people “dogs”, they wind up biting you.
As to which side I am on…? I’m on the side of the Constitution. I’m on the side of laws that prohibit violence by ANY group.
We’ll have to politically identify now that the Clintonistas and media have forced the issue in Charlottsville with what I believe was a staged event with the “Unite the Right” organizer a likely Obama operative. In a way, it’s our own fault (I’m speaking for the “deplorables” here). Had we been there in great numbers to demand our history (good or bad) be preserved the nazis and kkk’ers would not be our “face” to the world. Now, no matter what, we’ll always be unjustly identified as racist, anti-semetic, facsist thugs so we might as well either get used to it or devise a way to change that horribly undeserved image. I believe the same tactics were employed in Germany in the 30s, namely the nazis needed the communists in order to succeed.
Cvillereader,
Yes, I view the “Antifa” as an incipient Red Guard, dedicated to enforcing their version of PC by whatever means they deem necessary.
Finally, buried inside of the first section of this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer, was a little article by one of their own staff writers (a rarity nowadays, as they have basically become a funnel for articles originating with the Washington Post, a/k/a Bezos’ Blog, or the AP) that reported that a number of the “Antifa” in attendance were found to be well-armed, apparently quite willing to ratchet things up; you know, by whatever means necessary to suppress the constitutional free speech rights of those there for the Unite the Right rally in defense of the value of remembering the WBS (with the full complicity of the mayor, his Black Panther deputy mayor, and the Governor, apparently). Of course, the majority of space on the 1st page as well as succeeding pages, and particularly in the sewer of the editorial page, devoted to shrieking unchallenged (because it’s unchallengable, don’t you know) extremist left identity politics with nary a sign of moderation or any genuine attempts to report the resistance to these views and policies.
But then, it has been pure agit prop in that paper since Donald Trump won the election.
I am afeared that Col. Lang’s apprehensions about what is next to come are going to be realized. As poster, plantman, has observed, it is Color Revolution time for the U.S., and from the same people who have ravaged nation after nation over the last decade (and more) applying this odious doctrine. So bring on the Red Guard.
English Outsider,
Lars is a Swede, and not even a U.S. citizen, which makes his tactic more dubious still. Donald Trump, and indeed our political disputes, are not his. Merely because his nation has gone further in embracing identity politics and the self-loathing of his culture for itself, he wants these conditions to apply to the U.S., its citizens, and our constitutional republic, rather as in the circles of Dante’s Inferno wherein the damned torment each other for committing the same sins that landed them there themselves. No thank you.
The left’s agenda (shouted out by Team Democrat-media) is better served by screaming “Nazi” at anyone to the right of the Washington Post.
“Facts, we don’t need no stinking facts.”
Lefty_Blaker,
Yes, and carrying that thought forward, it was highly suspicious that the police were apparently told to “stand down” just as things were coming to a boil. I should think rather that inserting themselves between those ready for a throwdown would have been a proper use of the police, but if the “stand down” was intended to facilitate low-level street fighting, then this illogical act makes way more sense.
I’m having great difficulty understanding some of the comments made here concerning the rights and wrongs of Charlottesville. I guess the reason is the fact that I am an internationalist. In my corporate career, I was responsible for setting up many of the foreign subsidiaries of Prudential.
To accomplish this properly I had to make a build or buy decision on entering the new market. To do this, I would move my family to the new location living there for at least a year to better understand the culture and economy. In those years I lived in Tel Aviv, Milan, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Bangalore, and a couple others. What I found is that people in these countries were not much different than my family – all of us G-d’s children much more alike than different.
Now that I am retired, my own family is scattered around the Globe. One son lives in Tokyo having married a woman from Mongolia. A daughter lives in Bangalore having married an Indian she met at London School of Economics. One son lives in Boston, to be closer to all his MIT buddies.
Family gatherings are fun with many multiple languages spoken with children running around trying to teach others new languages. For example, my son in Japan not only speaks fluent Japanese, but also Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, and Russian which is why he is responsible for the Asian market for his company. It’s dad, whose language skills have atrophied.
While I consider myself 100% American, born and raised in this country, I feel like I am 10 times better as a human being for having experienced other countries and peoples – some of the best and brightest people I’ve ever met in my life. This is part of the reason I have such difficulty with the concept of white supremacy.
Thanks for that link. Valuable. A must read.
The liberals want only condemnation of the neo-nazi KKK folks and they bristle that Trump also called out the leftist anarchists for engaging in violence.
While the neo-nazis and KKK deserve condemnation they are a fringe minority in our current society and their influence has waned. The mistake the liberals and the cultural marxists in particular are making is that by painting their opponents who don’t buy into their PC agenda as racists, they are inviting precisely that.
It is clear that there is a concerted effort to overturn the election result by disenfranchising the voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by claiming with no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election, by pushing the electoral college to change the election result, by screaming obstruction of justice and having a special counsel investigate, and the constant hysteria of the MSM dumping on Trump and pushing everyone in the political and business establishment to gang up in opposition to Trump. What the Borg, and I use this broadly to include the MSM and the political and corporate establishment and their political appointees in government are doing is attempting a color revolution here in the US similar to what we did in Ukraine and other places. Fomenting social discord through the use of fringe elements and violence and then amplifying that in the media through hysterics is a dangerous slope.
I’m willing to bet that if Trump is impeached that the future political environment will become hugely polarized and the political establishment will lose control. We’ll then likely get a Hitler as many should recall that the German political and business establishment supported Hitler with the thinking that he could be controlled. I know many non-Trump supporters even in my Democrat dominated state who are not overtly political, who object to this concerted campaign against a legitimately elected POTUS. The Borg should be careful!
Pj- you haven’t been looking very hard.
Go to Powerline and look at Hinderaker’s blog.
Or check the twitter feed for Cville weekly.
Try to keep an open mind.
William Fitzgerald – “I would ask, where are the Virginians as their history and heritage are being dismantled? ”
they were present and active earlier City Council meetings but the council ruled that because they were out of towners their vote did not count. The Charlottesville resident confederacy of carpetbaggers and deracinated half-fledged useful idiots had a more greater claim on the history of the place.
A correction: I have a certificate signed by George W. Bush that declares that I am an American citizen. Other than that, I suspect that you have very little knowledge about Sweden.
pl,
I think it is in the SCVs and UDCs best interest to push very hard and very visibly against any association with the alt-right white supremacist groups that rallied at Charlottesville. They’re in the same dilemma as the majority of American moslems who are called upon to vociferously denounce violent jihadists. It may be unfair to be put in that position, but the white supremacists have put everything the SCV stands for in jeopardy. The same thing happened after the Charleston massacre. The cause of Confederate heritage and historical preservation is being stolen and desecrated by the alt right and white supremacists.
JacK said “The Borg should be careful!”
It is we who should be careful. The media schismatics are chumming with wide screen high-definition iretic (ira = wrath) pornography. Somebody earlier posted the truth-in-jest: anger is the new sex. It is also one of the deadly sins. Now it is easier to see why.
Just for the hell of went to google images and looked up iconoclasm. I recommend it.
bks
This is no leak. Bannon had the courage to go on record and be named in the article, unlike many of the anonymous sources leaking national security secrets to discredit Trump that the Times and WaPo love.
If Bannon’s viewpoint as stated in the Kuttner article reflects Trump’s own views then this is gonna be a battle royale between the Borg and the Deplorables.
IMO this is exactly the fight we are seeing. The Borg is doing everything they can to re-assert their supremacy after losing spectacularly in the 2016 presidential election. They just can’t get over the fact that the “buffoon” defeated two Borg political dynasties by rallying the Deplorables.
curses! [edit] I recommend the image lookup and not the smashing of totems and the BBQ-ing of sacred cows.
“….that many of the protesters were not there to show their racism, but to protest the tearing down of a statue of a figure in American history who cannot be airbrushed out of our nation’s story.”
I am honestly curious as to who those protesters were, and if they could explain why they were willing to march alongside people spouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. I haven’t seen any interviews with such people.
Lee would be the first to remind us that the Confederacy lost and lost bigly and the country needed to move on. He would not want any image of himself used to divide people and foment hate. Now these guys have made him a symbol of hate in the eyes of many who will have no way of knowing better. I don’t think they did his memory any favors.
“..there is a consensus developing in the military; at the highest levels in the intelligence community; among Republicans in Congress; including the leaders in the business community” that President Trump “is unfit to be the President of the United States.”
consensus developing??
Carl Bernstein labeled what some here call the Borg. They have been out to discredit Trump since he won the GOP nomination and went into full panicked attack mode when to their big surprise he defeated the sure thing Borg Queen who even paid $15 million for fireworks celebrating her coronation. But…the voters in the Mid-West decided to give them a big fat finger!!
Lefty_Blaker,
Honestly, I think they identify with Nazis because, at least superficially, they perceive common cause with much of what the Nazis believed in; which includes a lot of racist ideology.
You have to stand in their shoes to appreciate the reason for perceiving common cause (btw, before I continue, as Col. Lang is wont to emphasize, analysis is not advocacy – this is going to be pretty raw).
1. These people see daily news about degenerate minority culture in inner cities. All the murders and drugs and welfare sucking. They know the statistics support their perception. More than half of violent crime is committed by a group that is 13% of the population. Another 25% is committed by other minority groups (some here illegally). They know about all of the single mothers popping more babies. They know what rap lyrics say.
2. They see daily news about these same minorities demanding more and blaming their situation on white people; often in hysterically angry tones. The minorities appear to not only be demanding some unearned equality, but also seeking revenge. That sounds very dangerous and threatening; especially coming from groups known for committing the bulk of violent crime.
3. They see minorities practicing overt racism against whites to include physical violence (what white person dares to walk through large sections of our inner cities at night?)
4. They see minorities condemning traditional American culture
5. They see illegal aliens – also minorities – being protected and given special treatment that they themselves don’t receive.
6. With regard to Jews specifically, they see that the media and entertainment industries, that deliver the message that traditional white culture is bad, are run and owned predominantly by Jews. They see that the banking system, which is also screwing a lot of them (as they perceive it) is largely Jewish owned and operated. they see a lot of the college professors that are advocating radicalism, are Jewish. Marx himself was a Jew. They wonder how such a small ethnic group has become so prominently ensconced in these key power sectors. It sure looks like a conspiracy. Isn’t that what Hitler was talking about?
7. They see a lot of double standards and reverse racism (e.g. There is a black entertainment channel on cable. Can you imagine if someone tried to start up a white entertainment channel?)
8. The more worldly aware sense that our military involvement in the MENA is for the benefit of Israel and not the US. They are aware of the cost in blood and treasure.
9. The above cannot be discussed without being shouted down by the clever rhetorical trick of invoking “anti-Semitism”, or, in the case of non-Jewish minorities, “racism” generally.
So there is a reaction. Some whites, without much to lose, just say “F’ it. If “they” are going to be clannish racists attacking me for my skin color and my way of life, I’ll fight back by embracing what is most abhorrent to them; Nazi ideology” because – in their minds – it sure looks like Hitler was on to something.
Ugly, but not without coherent internal logic
b:
You may be German, but you get it. Unlike most people here in the US of A who regularly vote for Democratic Party candidates. They still haven’t tumbled to the fact that the Democratic Leadership Council crowd that took over the party with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 began selling out what had been the Party’s base: the blue and white collared working classes, and the lower strata of the middle class. As more and more people in these latter groups have caught on to the scam, fewer and fewer of them show up to vote for Democrats any more.
To use the term “left” today in any sentence that also includes “Democratic Party” is an oxymoron unless it it preceded by the word “not.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
More like this:
http://www.hawkinscookers.com/1.6.pc_trial_run_pix/4.jpg
Note that there are small alt-left groups fighting against the Daeshi jihadists in Syria and Iraq. Or instead of fighting they went over there as combat medics and aid workers in IDP camps. There are both American and European. Some have been wounded or sent home in body bags.
Are there any kluxers or white supremo snowflakes over there? Maybe but I doubt it. They are too busy either whining about Ivanka Trump’s conversion to Judaism or planning their march-on-google. Or screaming blut und bloden while waving Nazi flags.
But I agree with someone here who said the media should stop highlighting these cretins. True, why give attention to their tantrums, which is exactly what they are craving.
Wow your family is even more diverse than ours. I agree with you it is a wonderful experience to travel and meet people from other countries, races and religions and discover that in many ways we are all so similar. I think white supremacists are just fearful.
jdledell,
What a wonderful life experience that is accorded to few on this Earth. Please tell me, what is the racial diversity profile of Tokyo? How about the rest of the country? Did your son and his wife become Japanese citizens or are they expatriates in residence? Can your daughter provide some insights on whether Indian nationals in Indian have ceased using caste as a form of discrimination? My Indian-American co-workers here in Dearborn laugh at that idea but perhaps things are different from when they left Indian decades ago.
Sir,
as a foreigner I was not aware of the Kansas Border War. In my opinion the moment citizen obligations are overridden by secondary identities is the ‘point of no return’ towards a full fledged civil war.
My apologies for my poor German language skills. Blut und Boden is what I should have typed, not bloden.
During my short stay in Heidelberg the only German I learned was “ein Brat mit Sauerkraut bitte”.
PA,
I guess if you’re going to start a fight, you’d best be prepared to finish it. Also, don’t bring a stick and pepper spray to a car fight.
Lemur:
“The division entailed by ‘identity politics’ is a defence mechanism against the forces of globalization which will erase the framework in which individuals realize themselves. This framework is an artifice that keeps the will to power at bay.”
Interesting thought. If we fast-forward to a semi-agreeable future where there are large blocs of well-integrated economic alliances, say, North America or Euro-Russia, do you think the will to power will be more difficult to achieve? I understand it as an individualistic exercise.
After all, at the turn of the last century immigrants managed to merge into mainstream society while working two jobs so their kids could have a better future. Will to power, shmill to shmower:) The story of mankind seems to be the merging of societies, often, if not usually, through war.
Strange, strange statement, Lefty_Blaker.
Nazis today? Simply a synonym for politics towards an “organically pure” social democratic society, put another way chosen by those standing up for “ethnically defined political entities” who then can declare who can be counted in and who out?
Nazis today: a neologism/subcategory semantic shift only? Once the bad but today the good? Or something like they started off quite well, did the right thing, but then overdid. Still good was the process of cleaning out all types of unwanted or non-organics, but their fantasy to rule from the World’s Capital Germania wasn’t?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania
The Democrats version of “identity politics” is to pay lip service to minorities while selling them and all other working people down the river. The real problem is both our major political parties, in exchange for campaign contributions, allowed Wall Street to ship our manufacturing base to third-world countries. The result is that a handfull of Americans got very wealthy while millions of Americans lost their well-paying jobs and thousands of communities all across this country were destroyed.
Trump and Sanders addressed this problem, which is why Trump won and both were strongly attacked by their respective party’s corrupt, insider hacks.
Bannon is right in that “identify politics” is a loser. Low minority turnout shows that most minorities don’t buy the Democrats’ lip service and it offers nothing to working class whites.
One thing we do know is that, shortly after the Reichstag Fire, the Comintern shifted its propagandistic focus from peace and pacifism to, you guessed it, anti-fascism.
Virgina Slim, that feels a bit misguided. I wonder what is on your mind. Let me give you a glimpse of what’s on mine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism
That said, I have to admit that I struggled heavily with the front man of what was called the Historian’s Dispute/Historikerstreit over here, Ernst Nolte, the late Ernst Nolte, I realize just now. But beneath the struggle some of his theses have sunk in, forget his more provocative statements. Let me give you a random quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism
Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism’s twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”. He suggests that if one wishes to understand the Holocaust, one should begin with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and then understand the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Looks, like I didn’t close the quote. I’ll do it now.
Identity politics is, among other things, the handmaiden of neoliberalism. The black teen without proper legal representation, the trans woman without medical insurance or a job, and the white man stocking shelves in Walmart all form a single social class of the disenfanchised. Encouraging them to identify according to individual, race or sexual identity instead of as economic victims, denies them a common voice. It divides people who otherwise might have solidarity with each other and prevents them from mobilizing across race, ethnic and gender lines to oppose the corporate abuses of the 1%. And as people further re-define according to more atomized identities, the force of divide and rule is constantly augmented by its own victims.
The left, in English-speaking countries, had moved from a focus on resolving economic disempowerment, to instead encourage people to self-identify strongly on ethnic lines, with the false belief that they have categorically different problems, categorically different experiences, incompatible or competing interests, and no common ground. Then, in a typical fashion, they proclaimed themselves the Left, as if all other countries does not exist or does not matter. They decided that they are… what’s the word… exceptional.
Now the majority of the people are offered 2 choices as the “only” viable ones: either having for CEOs white straight men belonging to the major Christian denomination or one-legged pansexual MtF member of this or that ethnic minority with the Asperger syndrome. Strangely enough, the second one is defined as the “leftist approach” in the Anglophonic countries. It is not. True left would have been fighting against having CEOs and multi-nats in the first place. Their slogan is no longer “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. This “new Left” has as its slogan: “From everyone… anything they like (irregardless of if they are capable or qualified), to everyone – in accordance to their political-correctness meter rating”. In short – they are for creation of the new aristocratic class. Or even castes.
How is this really “left”? It is a right wing ideology at its finest. It’s basically a movement by the middle class to divide the poor into factions that they can than dominate in order to climb the social ladder. Seriously. Take any modern “leftist” text about race or gender and substitute Jews into it. Just find and replace in notepad. 3 seconds tops. Instant Hitler speech. I am not even joking.
Telling economically disempowered whites (especially men) that they should view themselves as privileged oppressors, when they may be struggling to make ends meet on low wages, is supposed to achieve… what, exactly? Apart from pushing them to the right, and encouraging some of them to adopt a particularly nasty type of identity politics as well?
“[M]any of the protesters were not there to show their racism, but to protest the tearing down of a statue of a figure in American history who cannot be airbrushed out of our nation’s story. Is the next step to burn down the campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, because it was co-named after Robert E. Lee after the Civil War?”
If the US continues its trek down the Ukrainization road – then, yes, definitely yes.
It soon will be a week since the event, and… is it only me who is interested to find out answers on several questions? To put the whole event into the context, so to speak.
1) Who (and how) funded the organizations to which belonged both protesters and counter-protesters? Answer to that might be enlightening.
2) Who (and how) managed the logistics of both sides? This includes the Net-coordination and doxxxing efforts in the aftermath of the incident.
3) What was the ration of the “native” protesters belonging to one or another camp compared to the percentage of those who came elsewhere? As for those who came elsewhere – from where most?
4) Were the people involved in the acts of vandalism days after the clashes in Charlottesville persecuted for that? If, yes, they were charged with committing the crimes – who is providing the legal assistance to them?
5) The same about the people involved in the clashes themselves – are they persecuted in accordance to the Law and who is providing legal assistance to them?
jdledell – You mention having difficulty with the concept of white supremacy. I have no difficulty with that concept at all. I simply refuse to accept it as an ingredient in my political thinking. I suspect all on this site share that refusal.
What is truly at issue is whether those of European descent are to be permitted, as others are, to value their own culture and to wish their children to be brought up in that culture. You mention enjoying other cultures during your many stays abroad. That is good. You should also be given the chance to enjoy and value your own.
Col,
A plea about political descriptors & a warning from history.
The Democratic party in the US may be considered ‘left’, in the Washington context. But in global polysci speak, it’s a liberal party. Leaving aside social democrats (mostly pink liberals) who have sold out to neoliberalism all over the place. The real left (few in number) as represented by wsws.org (Trotskyists) & the ‘New Left Review’ (marxist) aren’t into identity politics & though they don’t use the descriptor ‘borg’, they have ID’ that group as wanting all the marbles plus world dom. The serious left has increasing positions that are common to ‘small c’ conservatives.
Nazism & the fascism of the 30’s won’t be back, it was a special conjunction of politics & economics. Lenni Brenner, author of ’51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis’ describes the idea that Hitler is coming back as ‘folk marxism’ for jewish grandmothers. Paxton is good on classical fascism too.
A few things are worth remembering: The Nazi party’s foot soldiers in the 30’s were largely middle class who had been ruined in the hyper inflation of the 20’s. Fascism has been described as ‘rabid nationalism’ & as ‘middle class radicalism’.
The Reichstag fire lives on as a dastardly nazi plot, esp on the left. I’ve studied it a bit & I think it was as presented; crazy, left wing kid uses lax security to start a fire in big wooden bldg. I always make the point though, that it doesn’t matter. The point was that Hitler & the Nazis were ready to use a security panic to seize total power. Hitler presided over a
minority government. With the Reichstag in ashes, Hitler clapped the communist deputies in prison & bamboozelled the liberals & conservatives into supporting the infamous ‘enabelling legislation’ which made Hitler a dictator. The few social democrats voted against the legislation; they were met at the exits by police, who escorted them to prison.
*I can’t point to a document but I take it as a given that every member of the Politbureau read ‘Mein Kampf’. When Hitler achieved dictator, the Soviets knew he would be coming for them.
I’ve stopped trying to figure out the mechanics of who, what when in Charlottesville. I’m looking for the bigger picture: Reuters headline of this morning “Allies dismayed at Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville”, Liberal type people falling over each other to decry ‘racism & fascism, it’s Trumps fault!
If this is a plot by Democratic Party operatives it’s a clever one. Playing with monuments has brought the nuts out of the woodwork. Trump is dammed if he does & damned if he doesn’t. The ‘touchy-feelies’ will come back into the Democratic fold. Someone out there has a spreadsheet, counting their way to 50% + 1.
Can someone teach Trump to say: ‘Apres moi; le deluge’!
Jony Canuck
Hell, in Canada they may be considered Conservatives. We don’t really care what they are called elsewhere. pl
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men—
Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2
Dear sir,
If you are acquainted with these honorable people, they would doubtless be grateful to you if you were to discuss the Podesta connection alleged by this chart:
http://imgur.com/a/ZRQk9
b,
Identity politics may well be the modern version of the opiate of the masses, to quote Marx. But, as Marx himself noticed, even as his contemporaries did not, to fixate on the symptoms.
Insecure, fearful people gravitate towards their tribal identity, and people are insecure and fearful for a mixture of economic, social, and cultural reasons. (with a significant contribution from economics–I don’t want to be too much of an economic determinist, but it is true that the gains from economic growth in the past few decades have been badly maldistributed, which feeds a lot of the fear and insecurity.) Some people may be wedded to the identity politics (and this applies to people of all tribes, on all sides) for reasons independent of their sense of security, but for most, give them security, security that they can actually believe in, and they’ll drop tribalism quickly. Give them chiding for being tribalists and take away even more of the little security that they have, they’ll turn even more tribal.
I hear that this is something that happened in various parts of the Balkans and the Middle East. United States is not that exceptional, if it fails to provide security for all.
Trump does not care about Confederate Statues or the Civil War. Whatever fire$ up his base is his single focus. The star of a 12 year Hollywood TV show starring a scripted, fictional character named “Donald Trump” molded him into a needy old man who needs the applause and has the White House to do his shtick from. He is the #kardashian of the #foxnews generation, and does not have an endgame except the brand #Trump.
“The main reason Sweden did not fight The Reich was because they were not invaded. There was plenty of resistance, mainly helping Norwegians and Danes, who were fighting the Nazis. There were very few Swedish volunteers in the SS and they had very little impact.”
Not quite true. This ignores the popularity of fascist and Nazi thought in the pre-War Sweden, or the fact that there existed their own national-socialist party Svensksocialiatisk Samling (SSS). Next – during Soviet-Finnish war 9000 Swedish volunteers participated in the war on the side on Finland. When in 1941 Finland joined Hitler and attacked the USSR these volunteers, now boosted to 12 000 participated in the War on the side of Finland. From Finnish army they often were transferred to already existing Swedish SS battalions (220 in total). There were Swedish nationals who served directly in Wehrmacht, .Luftwaffe and Krigsmarine (260 in total). The most famous and decorated of them was Oberleutnant Nils Thure Ivar Rosén, who served in the 3rd Panzerdivision and was awarded 2 Iron Crosses (of the 1st and 2nd Degree respectively). He fought against the Soviet Army in Poland, Hungary and Austria. He died peacefully in 1999 – in France.
22 June 1941 Swedish mainstream paper Aftonbladet ran an editorial, proclaiming Hitler’s attack on the USSR to be “A War for European Independence”. “Neutral” Sweden violated several articles of the Hague’s 1907 “Convention relative to the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in case of War on Land” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague05.asp). Namely:
Art. 2.
Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.
Art. 3.
Belligerents are likewise forbidden to:
(a) Erect on the territory of a neutral Power a wireless telegraphy station or other apparatus for the purpose of communicating with belligerent forces on land or sea;
(b) Use any installation of this kind established by them before the war on the territory of a neutral Power for purely military purposes, and which has not been opened for the service of public messages.
Art. 4.
Corps of combatants cannot be formed nor recruiting agencies opened on the territory of a neutral Power to assist the belligerents.
Art. 5.
A neutral Power must not allow any of the acts referred to in Articles 2 to 4 to occur on its territory.
It is not called upon to punish acts in violation of its neutrality unless the said acts have been committed on its own territory.
Art. 11.
A neutral Power which receives on its territory troops belonging to the belligerent armies shall intern them, as far as possible, at a distance from the theatre of war.
It may keep them in camps and even confine them in fortresses or in places set apart for this purpose.
It shall decide whether officers can be left at liberty on giving their parole not to leave the neutral territory without permission.
In 1941, Sweden allowed the transit of 163th Infantry Division in full force to Finland. Soldiers from the occupational force from Norway and Finland also traveled to Germany and back via Sweden. The HQ for the Svenska frivilligbataljonen opened in Stockholm on 27th of June 1941. On the 4th of July the Government of Swden approved it.
And, of course, Sweden got a hefty gesheft by trading with Germany. 58 million tons of iron ore, 60,000 tons of bearings, 7 million tons of pulp, 13 million cubic meters of timber, 70,000 tons of machinery and equipment. LKAB supplied the Nazis with iron and copper ore; SKF and VKF – with the bearings (VKF was a subsidiary of SKF in Germany); Asea, Atlas, Atlas Copco, Electrolux, Ericsson, Husqvarna, Sandvik, Volvo – with machinery and equipment; Bofors -with weapons and ammunition; SCA, Swedish Match – with pulp and paper products, tobacco products. 40% of Germany’s armored vehicles were made of Swedish steel.
So, yeah. “Neutral” Sweden was soooo “neutral”! Even Switzerland shot down several Nazi planes. Thush, Sweden must do what it sometimes demands from Russia – start paying and repent. Repent and pay. Goes nicely with the multi-kulti tolerastia therein.
“In May of 1945 a bunch of “protestors” attacked Nazis in Berlin and did so rather violently.”
You are actually against the storm of Berlin? Really?
Jdledell,
For some people, myself included, the story is the opposite. The most “real” people I met, I met in the rural South, people whose normal views might, if they are not careful, be mistaken for that of alleged “white supremacists.” (I think many people fall into this category–people who might have casually “racist” views, but are not careful with their words. It is tragic that such folks be mistaken for real racists.) On the other hand, the more “politically correct” folks always interact with people who they see as “minorities” with a veneer of phoniness that they may think as “culturally sensitive” but I consider insultingly condescending and presumptive.
Many of us don’t want to be put in boxes. You are Jewish, so surely it is not entirely alien a notion to you. Imagine people putting yellow stars of David on you in their mind because of what they see. Many Jews aren’t so easily identifiable by looks so this is not as common, perhaps. We East Asians don’t have that luxury. What’s worse, what Steinbeck said through one of his characters in East of Eden is still true, albeit in slightly different guise: we have to speak in pidgin just to be understood, even if the pidgin that they expect has changed.
William Faulkner: The past is not dead, in fact, it’s not even past.
This strums a chord with me. Life between the World Wars in Germany was worse than the depression era in the US, in no small part to the treaty of Versailles. Payback is a Beyotch. There it is!
Col,
Here in Canada the conservatives have gone full neocon. The Liberals have come to believe of themselves the sarcastic moniker of ‘natural governing party’. It’s all about being ‘top dead center’ because that gives them the best chance of being elected.
LeaNder,
That’s an excellent (and thought-provoking) quote. Thanks for sharing it. I’ll dig a little deeper when I have some more time.
Lars,
Who sez I have to decide which side of he mass hysteria I’m on? There is always the third side.
I still think that a few hundred out of little more than 6 million is “very few”. The decision to allow the German transit was very controversial at the time and that continued after the war. My father tried to join the fight in Finland, which was partly to fight communism and partly Scandinavian solidarity. Most of those volunteers returned to Sweden and again, a few joined German forces.
What you omitted is that Bofors supplied guns to the RAF too. They also smuggled a lot of Jews from both Norway and Denmark. Aftonbladet then and now is a tabloid.
“I still think that a few hundred out of little more than 6 million is “very few”.”
The fact that they together with Finns participated in the blockade of Leningrad is significant and important for me. And the fact that after 1944 they were not persecuted in Sweden, were allowed to retain their ranks and medals and “come back to normal life” is even more significant. You couvered your own basterds, who fought for the 3rd Reich. You have no high horse to pontificate here from.
“The decision to allow the German transit was very controversial at the time and that continued after the war.”
Spare me! your whitewashing! It was illegal under the Geneva Convention (V). Therefore, Sweden was partial to the Axis. Go one, Lars – pay and repent!
“Aftonbladet then and now is a tabloid.”
The reaction of the “reputable” media was no better. And what about Astrid Lindgren’s war diary? A peek into the mind of your typical Swede, who, most of all, wished Hitler success in his war with the Soviet Union.
I do not think Sweden or Spain or Switzerland need to apologize for not fighting in WWII.
“Nazi,” “Hitler,” “Swastika” are BRANDS; they have very little relationship to hard-heated critical analysis or historical understanding.
BRANDS, similar to hasbara, function by enflaming emotion, not by stimulating rational discussion.
I firmly believe that most of what most people think they know about “Nazi,” “Hitler,” “Swastika” is nonsense — emotionally-charged, but nonsense (it’s extremely difficult to use reason to re-educate a brain that has had its cortex overloaded with negative, emotional influences) ; most of what they think they know is derived from film and teevee, produced for entertainment value as well as outright propaganda purposes; and if they’re read books about the topics, the books are egregiously one-sided, and that by design:
To support the last point, that books about the stated topics are “egregiously one-sided BY DESIGN,”
1. comments and an essay by Stanley Fish https://www.c-span.org/video/?318476-1/free-speech-us : Freedom of Speech does NOT apply in the academy; there, deans & others with tenure control; a person my gain a place on the faculty and do research on holocaust, but if he/she attempts to publish anything other than the narrative approved by the dean, he will not advance and may lose his position. The ordained narrative proscribes holocaust denial [sic]. To maintain a different view of the holocaust narrative is akin to sanctioning Galileo for insisting that the earth revolves around the sun.
2. Several years ago David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt in British court for the defaming act of calling Irving a “holocaust denier.” Lipstadt won the suit: Irving was, the judge ruled, a ‘holocaust denier.’ Lipstadt published a book about the trial and her victory; C Span was invited to video graph Lipstadt discussing her book. In preparing for that event, C Span producer Connie Doebele extended an invitation to Irving to appear to tell his side of the story. Lipstadt went crazy, withdrew her agreement to appear, stated that Doebele/ C Span were “antisemitic,” engaged allies to write op eds denouncing Doebele.
Doebele (one of the classiest of the old-guard of class acts at C Span) was forced to say her mea culpas, almost literally at the knee of C Span manager Richard Weinstein.
Doebele left the network a few years later, after 25 years w/ the enterprise.
Lipstadt continues to call Irving and anyone who recites — shall we say alternative facts? — about holocaust ” Haters.”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?186164-1/lipstadtirving-libel-trial
Historian Thomas Fleming has written that it takes at least 50 years to even begin the hard work of writing objective history. Before that time, what passes for history is emotion-laden memory, not based on sound documentation, not tested for verifiability, not even meeting basic tests of context and chronology. While the WWII era is unique in all of history (as Shirer relates in the opening to “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”) in that tons of German documents were removed from Germany by Allies — many of them German Jews trained at Fort Ritchie in espionage, etc. — in most situations, it takes many, many years for documents to come to light: many archives of the era remain sealed: the information in those archives could change dramatically the perspective we have on “Nazi,” “Hitler,” “swastika,” etc.
The vehemence of efforts to “brand-spank” “Nazi,” “Hitler” “swastika” etc. , at this point in time, suggests to me that those who created and benefited from the brands are seeing their franchise slip away, as the methods Fleming suggests are taking place.
Inasmuch as policy is made based on ‘history’ (or, regrettably, ‘brands,’) impacting all of our futures, it seems to me the greatest act of patriotism one can perform is to insist on a full, objective, critical exploration of the history of that era, unhindered by the sanctions and chilling effect imposed on such research by folks like Stanley Fish & Deborah Lipstadt. Conversely, tactics such as theirs are acts of betrayal of the US people and system.
I cannot agree with this model that you propose; what on Earth could the term “insecure” mean?
For almost 300 years, the European people’s, mostly from Western part of Diocletian Line were the masters of the planet.
That got into their heads and by late 19th century they were all – ALL – unreconstructed racists.
Getting rid of the Jews was part and parcel of the same weltaschaung; shared by many without question.
The successes of Japan, China, and Korea has empirically disproved those racialist doctrines but that consciousness, evidently, has not sunken into the minds of the rank and file.
Personally I’d have preferred keeping the Confederate statues and changing the inscriptions. Alas, moderates have vanished from the discussion.
Terrible to say, but it looks like Trump will benefit from the Barcelona atrocity today. Distraction, and a effective one. The United States of Amnesia will return, per Gore Vidal.
Oh, and one more thing, Lars:
“My father tried to join the fight in Finland, which was partly to fight communism and partly Scandinavian solidarity.”
Should he succeed and keep fighting from 1941 onward would mean that your father was fighting on the side of Hitler. Where was your “Scandinavian solidarity” when Denmark, Norway AND Iceland were occupied?
As long as Sweden does not recognize their own citizens who fought on Hitler’s side as “okay-ish”, and treat them as “normal” people, you have absolutely NO moral right to pontificate about “right side of the history” and diss those who protested against the demolition of the Civil War monuments in the South. Should your father manage to join the “volunteers” and go fight in Finland, and then continue fighting, and then participating in the blockade of Leningrad – would you denounce him, Lars?
You write: “As the old adage says: If you lay down with dogs, you end up with fleas.”
Does this also apply to non-violent protesters against Confederate Statues who are protesting side by side with violent left-wing extremist Antifa?
Many people are going to have to decide which side they are on? What are you trying to argue for here? A new Civil War?
My guess is that the Puritans who burned witches at Salem were regarded as virtuous as well.
My take on the Charlottesville City Council is that they are very convinced that they have the inside line on virtue, and don’t tolerate people with opposing views very well. They assume people that disagree with them are either uneducated or evil.
But then Charlottesville has a very insular culture, and UVA even more so.
Completely agree with you.
Red Guard is an apt analogy.
I was thinking more of the French or Russian Revolutions…
Fred – As you are probably already aware, it’s next to impossible for a foreigner to gain Japanese citizenship. He is a U.S Citizen and proud of it although every April he has to pay in addition to Japanese taxes an extra $50,000 to $60,000 in U.S. Taxes for the privilege of citizenship. Japan is, as you know, culturally and ethnically homogeneous to an extreme. His attitude is to take the best of what Japan offers and then move on. He lived in Hong Kong for 3 years before moving to Tokyo – he’s thinking of Singapore next. He loves getting to know people with different experiences and perspectives. I think it was something he gained from getting carted off to different schools and countries because of Dad.
As to India, she lives in Bangalore which is India’s tech center. She and her husband feel like the caste system is non-existent, at least in that part of India. If you can code well, they don’t care if you are green or look like you came from Mars. In fact, most of the time the only language she has to use is English. Even Hindi holidays and celebrations are rarely followed in that part of India. Her husband’s family is what we would call completely secular and cosmopolitan. Maybe it’s due to being part of the Tech culture that the old ways no longer hold sway over the current crop of Indians.
Kao_hsien_chih – I understand what you are saying about easy identification. When my granddaughter visits us, she quite obviously has Asian physical characteristics because of her Mongolian mother. Kids she meets here are quick to ask her where she’s from because of her looks. When she tries to explain her Asian homes and background, kids look at her like she has 3 heads. It makes her uncomfortable. Back in Tokyo she attends the regular Japanese school system and because she is absolutely fluent in Japanese she feels more accepted.
As to my own background, I grew up in an Orthodox home which meant I wore a yarmulke 365 days a year. I was easily identifiable as Jewish, and was beat up and called names more times than I can count. The big game as a kid was to try to swipe my Yarmulke and make me try to get it back as kids tossed it back and forth over my head. Sometimes I would go home in tears worried about trying to explain the loss of my yarmulke. My grandfather who lived with us at the time would wipe away my tears and tell me not to worry. He would disappear into his room and come out holding a brand new yarmulke. I swear he must have had an extra 100 or 200 of them in there.
JerseyJeffersonian
Respectfully, Antifa appears to be what I term “preemptive reactionaries”. They only show up when and where they perceive fascism gaining a toe-hold. A broader-spectrum ADL, but not a much broader spectrum. If there aren’t any links between those two organizations there will all but certainly be some soon. They have much in common.
No apparent evidence they have aspirations of reforming all society, like the Marxists, militant Islamists…or indeed fascists. Anti-fascism is far too narrow for that role.
Slightly off-topic, but I must post a you-can’t-make-this-“stuff”-up Humor Alert:
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/346979-pro-trump-rally-set-to-take-place-the-same-day-as-juggalo-march-in-dc
Included due to a perceived need to apologize to our host. Next time someone tells me the US is becoming “something unrecognizable” I, for one, will no longer question their judgement on the matter.
KHC
I agree with you that some of the upper middle class coastal liberals are the biggest phonies. I know this type well. They live in places like Marin County, California. They are incredibly patronizing and condescending of the minorities they so claim to love. Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer epitomize this type. All living in their prestigious neighborhoods and gate-guarded communities.
I recall when George Lucas whose wife is black decided to build low-income housing on his ranch in Marin the brouhaha it caused and how much in arms these so-called minority loving liberals got and how they thronged the county council meetings to oppose the permits arguing about crime if the riff-raff would be allowed to become their neighbors.
Lefty,
Thanks for the link. I wonder if these four pretty “anti-fascists” are local. Must be easy to find out. The photo is in excellent focus for positive ID. They got their wish. Now they are famous.
Interesting kit they have. Probably 5.56s. Hope so. Too many innocent by-standers about.
Big clips too. These operatives must have been anticipating a protracted engagement. Wonder if the Mayor and City Council gave them a permit to parade w/ such kit. If so, they must have forgotten to inform the cops. No wonder C’ville’s Bravest surrendered the field to change into riot gear. Must have been scary, seeing these “assault weapons”. A mercy the holy folks in the second picture were not triggered. Possible they have a selector for their triggers?
Are there any photos of the other side with long guns? I mean the evil original protesters who wanted to keep the statue where it was, and had a permit to protest.
Yours in democracy,
Ishmael Zechariah
jdledell,
I am happy for your son and daughter’s successes. America was never culturally homogenous. It was, however, on a path to a uniquely American vision of an aspirational society. Thanks to decades of cultureal marxist agitation from the left it is moving in the direction of the LGBTQXYZ “new man” homogeneity; and fifty years after passage of the ethnic cleansing act of 1965 America is being over saturated with “extended stay” Americans who have no more loyalty to the constituional nature of American governance than your elite globe trotting son has loyalty to the culture of Japan or Hong Kong. The new “immigrant” Americans will dutifully vote for the politicians who promise them the most taxpayer paid ‘free’ stuff and cheerfully denounce that which they are told to denounce.
Trump is in office because a majority of Americans recognized what was being done to the Republic and its future. The professional left is in a terror that he may succeed in stemming the tide of the ethnic cleansing and may just expose enough of the “swamp” to make the largest voting block in the Democratic party – Black Americans – realize just how badly the policies of their beloved politicians have screwed them over.
Mark,
“pre-emptive” as in what was done at Berkeley? Why is that legal?
http://www.unz.com/isteve/berkeleys-anti-free-speech-movement/
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Berkeley-Braces-for-Latest-Face-Off-Between-Trump-Supporters-Detractors-419535563.html
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/05/26/eric-clanton-charged-four-counts-assault-deadly-weapon/
Portugal also! And even though the son nullified Iranian neutrality in late 43 after some extensive Russian/British arm twisting, did they ever join the fight?
Sir,
Apologies.
Permit me candid bluntness.
But it appears your offspring along with yourself are very well-educated and need not suffer the unhappiness others have to undergo sans the privileges or opportunities an ivy-league education garners.
(P’raps you are one of those who reside in ’em “gated communities” due to your success & wealth, that have not the misfortune to witness or suffer the conflicts that ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity’ bringeth.)
I myself have had the great misfortune in the past of slaving for arrogant & xenophobic greeks – “economic refugees” – whom tho married to chink wenches in singapore, have not respect for moi – a Chink from [“3rd-world”] malaysia.
In addition, I’ve had to suffer fools from nepal, philippines, as well as a local chink cur (singaporean) that has conveniently forgotten his ethnic roots from his marriage to a sand-nigga from the philippines.
If White supremacy appears to you (are you White?) “strange” or “alien”, may I suggest you study the Essays of this former Viet Nam veteran.
https://fredoneverything.org/compaction-pack-instinct-and-territoriality-some-aspects-of-irrationality/
https://www.unz.com/freed/diversity-a-civilizational-nightmare/
Lars ridiculously comparing D-Day with Antifa thugs has naturally drawn some ire. In WWII, Sweden tried to stay out of the war and help its neighbours. And for Sweden, Finland was always going to be most important. Although militarily weak, Sweden gave about one third of its equipment to Finland. The idea that Sweden should have fought Germany when Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union is ridiculous. In my view, Sweden’s ”sin” during WWII was not that we didn’t fight Germany. Our sin was rather that we did not enter the war on the side of Finland. Glory would have been eternal, the shame of 1809 eradicated. Unfortunately, Social Democrats were in charge of government at the time.
I lived in the US for two years in the mid nineties. There, I used to associate with people of a paleolibertarian bent. Although mostly Northerners, they had affinity to the Southern cause. People like Lee and Jackson were seen as symbols of liberty, rebels against the federal government. (This, by the way, I think is the true nature of American exceptionalism: the quintessentially American idea that one’s own federal government is the real enemy). One of my friends even named one of his sons Stonewall.
This statue business I think is serious. Trump’s base might be one of the last bastions of freedom. If the PC mafia can eradicate Confederate memorials without resistance from ordinary people, then there is trouble.
I’m sure there are plenty of places in the U.S you can move and enjoy “European white” neighbors. For example, move to Northern Minnesota and the nearest black might be 50 miles away. No one in America should have the right to “own” a town and prevent “other” American citizens from moving there potentially “spoiling” that culture. That is the nature of living in this great country.
rjj @61
Did that include residents of Albemarle County, as unqualified to raise voice their preference?
Does anyone know what percentage of current Charlottesville residents are native Virginians?
Harvard University was behind the effort to make rehabilitate Jews in US as “Whites”.
I have found the European peoples to be very race-conscious. I always found it puzzling.
I also am puzzled by the degree of their obsession with Jews over millennia: When Visigoths ruled Spain, their kings kept on passing edicts against Jews – trying to either get them to become Christians or to leave Spain.
Iran had declared herself neutral – but many in Iran wished Germany success since they opposed & resented the Russian and British machinations and humiliation against Iran.
In any case, UK invaded from the South and USSR from the North and occupied a declared neutral country; for their convenience. Later US came in and built a huge base in Northern Tehran – Amirabad – the remnants of which could still be found in 1980s.
World War II was not Iran (or Arabs’ or Turks’) war – it was yet another war among the Christian potentates to which had been grafted a war by the upstart Japanese.
And the Japanese also had imbibed the same racialist doctrines prevalent in Europe; expect that they thought: “the time of the White races is passed and it is the turn of the Oriental races…” to dominate this planet.
One does not know to whether laugh or cry at such widespread delusions.
Maybe these lords in Europe knew more than we apparently do to-day…
http://churchofnobody.blogspot.in/2010/11/david-sassoon-whitewashing-for-biggest.html
I wanted to add some perspective to the issue of Identity Politics. First of all I agree with Harper that we make too much of this issue, especially Democrats. But allow me to give my perspective of identity politics over time. As most of you know I grew up in Minnesota and am old enough to have witnessed how identity politics have evolved, at least in that state.
Between 1890 and 1930, there was a tremendous influx of immigrants to the state. It was mainly from Norway, Sweden and Germany and Ireland. The identity politics of the time centered mainly on religion. Lutherans congregated in Minneapolis and west and south and Catholics congregated in St. Paul and environs. I can remember as a kid seeing Norwegian Lutheran churches where only Norwegian was used and a similar thing in Swedish Lutheran churches. Germans had their own troubles as German Lutherans went to the Minneapolis side of the state while German Catholics went the St. Paul way of the Twin Cities.
Perhaps Lars would understand the playground fights I witnessed between Norwegians and Swedes. There was tremendous animosity between the two cultures. There was no way a Norwegian family would allow intermarriage with a Swede. As a youth that always struck me as odd because to my eyes Swedes and Norwegians were like two peas in a pod. Over time these two cultures melded into Scandinavians. One characteristic that always stood out with me is the stoic nature of especially the Norwegians. In a playground fight even if a Norwegian kid got the crap beaten out of him, there were no tears. They learned whatever life threw in your direction, you took it and went on.
Germans Lutherans would have nothing to do with German Catholics, yet over time these Germans collaborated to make the best damn beer in the state, especially down in New Ulm.
I still have many relatives in Minnesota and return often. From my youth to the present day all these old divisions have totally disappeared. In fact, the Sons of Norway Club in Minneapolis now allows Swedes to join. Now no one would ask another whether they come from Norwegian or Swedish stock but that used to be virtually the first question ever asked when meeting a new person. It’s amazing to me to go into a German home and being served Lefse – something that would never have happened 50 years ago.
This history lesson has given me hope that over time our present day identity politics will become vastly less important. It seems to me that G-d made this wonderful world full of different peoples and languages for a reason. Why not make the most out of this wonderful creation and use and enjoy ALL of it.
I had a strange moment of revelation when I read something written by Adolph Reed, and I have to paraphrase from memory. He was talking about his experience speaking with a student from a wealthy black family, and he asked her a rhetorical question, “so civil rights movement existed so that people like you (ie rich and privileged blacks) can go to Yale Law and become partners at Morgan Stanley more easily?” And he recalled that she looked at him as if that was self-evident truth.
This is hardly a new thing: something that struck me hard when I was reading about the officers of the Louisiana Native Guard, a paradoxical militia unit raised by secessionist government of Louisiana in 1861 from the state’s black population. Many of the officers were “legally black,” but hardly of typical blacks of the time (that they were free in the South made them atypical enough, I suppose): they included illegitimate sons of senators, judges, and other Southern elite, who, I wondered, felt that they belonged among the Southern elites as equals along with their (often literal) white brothers, and certainly, some of them expressed the desire that serving in the militia would give them such an opportunity. But this was hardly a sense of solidarity with other blacks. Perhaps I was seeing things, but this idea, where the elites of society were more interested in interelite equality across cultures while holding the “peons” in contempt–the “important people” of all cultures should be equal in their right to put down the riffraff of all cultures–is pervasive in many societies (British India, Poland-Lithuania of 18th century, etc.)
Well I will stick up for Lars, my Swedish grandparents, quite rightly, worried a lot more about the Soviet Union invading Sweden than Nazi Germany. Unlike Spain or Switzerland a Nazi invasion would have quick and resulted in few casualties given the limited nature of the Swedish armed forces and Sweden’s geography. Neutrality was the best bet and thankfully Sweden avoided the fate of other countries of being overrun by either side, especially the Soviets with the mass killings and rape that were often the immediate consequences.
For many the Soviet Union was the greater evil and Ernst Nolte isn’t wrong, it was the Bolsheviks who set off the madness.
Fred, Trump didn’t win a majority of voters, Clinton did. He won because of the electoral college. I am not saying he is not the legitimate president just that he did not win the popular vote.
“And for Sweden, Finland was always going to be most important.”
As a former colonial holding? No doubt. Just spare me this “Scandinavian Solidarity” demagoguery.
“The idea that Sweden should have fought Germany when Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union is ridiculous.”
I’m talking about Finland post June 1941. Sweden supplied and abetted known Nazi ally after Finland invaded Soviet territory. Which makes all pretense to be neutral bogus.
” Our sin was rather that we did not enter the war on the side of Finland.”
And get yourselves defeated – yeah!
So, basically, the Swedish logic here is: “There are different types of Nazis. We support some, we condemn some, and we feel absolutely superior to anyone around”.
He was not Iraqi – that appellation ” Sassoon” is a pronunciation of “Sassan” – of the Sassanian dynasty fame.
There are “Sassoons”, hailing from Sanadaj, in Iran – Muslims, to my knowledge.
Babak,
In every society, there were segments of population who are less secure than others. Even in Diocletian Europe, rules were enacted to protect the rights and “security” of the nobles, the clergy, and the townspeople, but rarely the peasants (or the denizens of towns who were not “citizens”). Much of the social struggles during and after the Middle Ages had been about extending the strata of the segments of population who had “rights” that granted them a measure of security, in economic, social, and political terms. (In a sense, this was not uniquely Western, although that built around “citizenship” probably was–while the millet system is associated with the Ottomans, it was (and still is, in a sense) the common mode of providing for “rights” in most of the non-West: the entire tribes were granted rights, not individual members. This was the case, incidentally, with the Jews in even in the West–if the Jews had any rights at all, it was the entire (tolerated) community of the Jews in a city or a country, not individual Jewish persons, or, in a sense, same with the Indians in US, well into 20th century, and perhaps even 21st–this is why there’s so much fight for determining who the “rightful” tribal members are, after all.
I think this is the real difference between the West and the East. An individual is not, inherently, secure because he or she is one against many. That security can only be maintained by a credible assurance that that individual will be dealt with within confines of “the law” which everyone agrees is reasonably “fair,” within a set of agreed upon logic, i.e. not used as an arbitrary hammer to “get at” someone just because they are on the wrong side. Without this assurance, the individual has no refuge except their “natural” tribal grouping, defined by blood or faith who would collectively provide a measure of protection. In other words, in order for a society to get past the tribal stage, you need a law whose “fairness” is accepted by all, more or less, both in principles and in its operations. The miracle of the West was that this assurance could be made for much broader segments of society than the East, I think, with exceptions, at different times and places, for Jews, different denominations of Christians, and other peoples who didn’t quite buy into the “universal principles” that the “law” was built around.
I don’t think things are really different here. The cosmopolitans (I don’t think they coincide exactly with the “left” although there is a huge overlap) have built a particular worldview that they think should be universal and are willing to impose it on everyone by law. Many people do not find its principles all that universal from their perspectives, but, with the cosmopolitans increasingly in control of “the law,” they find little protection from “the law.” So they are increasingly retreating into the protection of their tribes as the refuge. But since some tribes are not recognized by the principles that the cosmopolitans hold dear, the conflict is becoming more likely. This is the longwinded version of what I’m thinking anyways.
Jdledell,
There was another little episode in identity politics in northern MN in late 19th century. Apparently, a sizable community of Ruthenes settled there (although most Ruthene immigrants, as far as I know, settled in middle Pennsylvania–they were mostly miners from what is now Eastern Slovakia/Western Ukraine). Ruthenes are mostly Greek Catholics, part of the Catholic church, but with much different traditions and customs, and who were disliked by American Catholic Church hierarchy in 19th century because they were so different from “regular” Catholics and posed problems when the bishops had to deal with the Protestants who were not sympathetic to the Catholics generally. In 1889, a Ruthene priest named Alexis Toth came to a rural parish near St. Paul and immediately got into a fight with the local bishop. The bishop insulted the priest by claiming that he didn’t consider his people “real Catholics” and the priest, who was trained in canon law, compounded the problem by lecturing the bishop on all the rights that were granted to the Greek Catholics by Popes over centuries. But, at the end of the fight lasting more than a year, Toth wound up leading tens of thousands of Greek Catholic immigrants in United States to join the Orthodox Church whose environment they found more tolerant.
Nancy K
Once again, this is a federal republic and the popular vote is irrelevant. You actually don’t see that the left establishment as well as the antifa left are seeking to carry out a Great Cultural Revolution? That does not mean that I do not see the far right as a serious counter-revolutionary force. pl
Fred,
I’m not addressing the legality of their actions. I thought I hit reply to Jersey’s post quite some way up the thread but for whatever reason the post appeared at the end so context wasn’t readily apparent. Do you recall if you also hit the “reply” button under my post? This may be a bug.
” Unlike Spain or Switzerland a Nazi invasion would have quick and resulted in few casualties given the limited nature of the Swedish armed forces and Sweden’s geography.”
And there will be further lesser number of dead people during the occupation, because Swedes were Aryan enough not to warrant their eradication – as opposed to the policy conducted against occupied Slavic countries.
“Neutrality was the best bet and thankfully Sweden avoided the fate of other countries of being overrun by either side, especially the Soviets with the mass killings and rape that were often the immediate consequences.”
Ah, yes, of course! The myth about “Red horde”, that only murdered and raped it way to Berlin, as opposed to the “civilized” Anglo-Saxons! That’s a BS. Sweden violated its alleged neutrality and actually helped the Axis more than the Allies. This is a fact. They did nothing to their nationals who fought for the Axis – another fact. They have absolutely no right to feel smug and superior for their role in WW2 and teaching others how to deal “ethically” with this or that incident of NeoNazism.
“For many the Soviet Union was the greater evil and Ernst Nolte isn’t wrong, it was the Bolsheviks who set off the madness.”
I’m sorry, what madness you are talking about? Ever heard about Munich treaty, LondonBob? Oh, and I’m still waiting for you to support your claim of USSR and Nazi Germany being allies.
jdledell – I think you make some points there but I’m not sure why you make them in a reply to me. Either I have failed to express myself adequately or you have failed to read what I wrote. Whichever it is I am left mystified.
But whatever the bearing of your reply I think you are wrong switching from my term “European” when describing a particular overall culture or identity to your term “European white”. Skin colour or ethnic origin is not a fixed indicator of cultural, local or national identity in the West. The progressives are insisting on making it an unalterably fixed indicator but they’re doing a disservice to us all by that insistence.
I’ll illustrate that by taking a good example from one of your posts above. You describe how the Norwegians and the Swedes in your community were at daggers drawn in the past but over the years have melded together and are now friendly to each other. Say the politicians had deliberately played on those past animosities for electoral advantage. That would have widened the gap, not mended it, and you’d now have “Norwegian identitarians” fighting “Swedish identitarians”. Politicians messing around with identity politics in order to grab votes, particularly in a country such as yours where there are lots of identities jostling together, are a real hazard.
So are the progressives who are at present so frenetically supporting them. The progressives are all set to force everyone who doesn’t see eye to eye with them into a box labelled “white identitarians” so it’s more than likely that’s exactly what they’ll end up facing. It’s an odd game to see played out, in the American last chance saloon.
Lyttenburgh,
Nothing like taking things out of context. Did you not see that was in response to Lars? As in “Fred said in reply to Lars” in type at the top of the comment?
Nancy K,
” He won because of the electoral college.” Just like all other presidents before him.
jdledell,
So Lutherans moved into a state full of Americans who were made up mostly of multiple denominations of the Christian faith including Lutherans, but one type of the Lutherans wouldn’t let their kids marry the wrong kind of Lutheran? Glad that worked out over the decades. What kind of government required benefits did these Lutherans recieve from the state and local governments back then? Section 8 housing vouchers, SNAP benefits, special instructors fluent in their language as well as english in public schools for thier kids? Affirmative action employement priority in government positions like policing?
Here’s how it works. These Antifa thugs, and groups like them, see themselves as communist revolutionaries. Every fracas they create is supposed to kickstart or buildup towards the full blown revolution prophesied by their pseudo-intellectual hero Karl Marx. They want to use events like these in the hopes that it will snowball into a war, into their communist revolution. It’s what they live for.
Yes they’re violent. And yes they’re seething with hate. It’s why they burn the American flag. They hate America. And they’re progressives. Meaning today they will tear down monuments of Robert E. Lee and next they’ll progress to tearing down monuments of Thomas Jefferson.
Sir,
As much as I would like to agree with your librul Weltanschauung – where all of us join hands and sing ‘kumabaya’ in an atmosphere of “we are the world” joy & love, Reality outside of your democrat-leaning coastal states – in fact outside of America – is anything but pleasant…
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/231415
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/231367
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/16/sarah-champion-quits-jeremy-corbyns-shadow-cabinet-warning-pakistani/
Again, I apologize for my brusqueness.
I seem to forget – at least whilst online – that I am in the midst of polite company and not surrounded by all manner of buffoons or riff-raff.
LOL!
You’re a funny 老外…
What makes you assume I’m working for “the enemy”?
Just because of a couple links?
PT, thank you for the post, and thanks to all who commented. I like reading here rather than watching those young commentators on tee vee go on and on and on about it day and night saying the same things over and over. Here I got some reasoned and helpful ways to think about the event.
This current state of severe and personal reaction to events in another state of the union makes me so very nervous. It used to be that a person here in CO could read/hear/watch on T.V.a little about a riot in Chicago, for example, in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention and not have to feel personally involved somehow.
I didn’t like the tactics of the rioters then, though I wan’t at all sure that I liked the results of the convention. But I knew I didn’t like the idea of rioting when I didn’t get my way.
Then I could simply move on and not worry so much since it was, after all, an event that did not happen so near to me. And I still had confidence in our system of government.
Now, so many feel they have to have a personal opinion and act on it for every single event that hits the news. I’ve always felt it strange that the Confederate flag was still valued so much by Southerners, but I guessed the flag just helped them to identify themselves as people who were a little cranky or something.
My question is and has been for a long time: How now do I simply do as Voltaire recommended in Candide and be happy simply tending my own garden? To me, that is the real ideal of the Constitution. I feel that both sides of this mess were terribly wrong and that the entire county’s fascination with it is entirely juvenile. Let those who were involved go back to their “gardens” and search their consciences. That’s all I can do in regard to the event. And, I do agree with PT about Trump’s comments, and I have never been a person who felt Trump himself was the best person to carry the job of putting into place the agenda he outlined. I am an old-fashioned English teacher, and the thought of diagramming and making logical sense of some of his sentences when he talks and tweets puts me back into the time I had to read ninth grade papers and grade them. It was a very hard job, and it simply got worse over the decades as no one taught logic or “correct” sentence structure, much less rhetorical patterns of writing.
But now I worry that my “garden” needs to be surrounded by concrete barriers and twenty foot high razor wire so that no one can be offended by my lifestyle or judge me for my political leanings if they see me do something they interpret at not their way of thinking.
And I do believe we have reached a point where something very slight might put us over the edge into total chaos. And then, as usual, I do my “thy will be done on earth” recitation. That’s all I can do.
Thank you for your comments with which I have many quibbles.
I start by noting that there are multiple “East”s – there is Muslim East, and Orthodox East, an Indic East, a Sinic East, a Javanese East and so on and so forth.
What they are, in my opinion, is that they are not West – West of the Diocletian Line and to from which they receive their significance and their reference.
Having delineated this, I would like to proceed to state that in none of these “East”s Rule of Law, as understood in Rome or the West has ever obtained, even to this day.
My understanding has been that in those cultural basins and polities, Individuals did not rely for protection on the Law but rather on the Family (immediate and extended) and Clan. Only among Near Easterners (and among the non-Han Northern Barbarians) did tribes have any salience and then only among the new Arab and Turkic invaders into that geography.
One of the persistent demands of the reformers that preceded the Constitutional Revolution of Iran was the establishment of “House of Justice” – which became the first Majlis – and also found its way into the Baha’ai House of Justice. But the historical experience in Iran as well as in China and in Korea was that protection was not something to be taken for granted and basically impossible to obtain – one was left with regurgitating bitterness.
It is true that the Melliyat system made the Ottoman Empire governable and I agree that the Ottomans had no concept of Citizenship, in Law or in Custom. That concept, again, originated from the Romans and the Greeks – it never existed East of the Tigris River. But Italian city states had maintained a concept of citizenship; I think the process that you are referring to pertained to Northern Europe were the “Freedom” of cities went through a long process of gestation until it became a political and then legal fact.
But, again, no such things existed East of Tigris; there were no self-governing cities, there were no free people and every one was a subject of this or that King, local ruler, or emperor.
For these reasons I think that there are too many substantive and qualitative differences among the West and these multiplicity of “East”s that I enumerated earlier for me to be in agreement with your model.
In fact, from personal experience, I can tell you that these many “East”s have a lot more in common with one another than with the Western Diocletian Civilization; e.g. “Omiai” in Japan and “Khwastegari” in Iran – or malicious envy in Iran and in India.
I agree that the Western Civilization has a claim to universalism, just as Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism have had. But, just like those 3 religions, this one too has been refuted by the historical process in its claim. Unfortunately, the Western people, like their counterparts among the Western Asiatic religions, are wont to acknowledge that fact of failure.
Lastly, I think that there are people who are born “Cosmopolitan” and who can appreciate and thrive in those environments. Perhaps these people have expansive souls – itself something that the latest emanations of Western Intellect has designated to the category of Meaningless – or a generous natures – yet another Meaningless thing to the Western Empirical Sciences – but such people are almost certainly a minority of mankind. The rest is afflicted with a Fearful sort of Arrogance – or perhaps an Arrogant Fear, which shrivels and retracts whenever facing the new, the strange, the different.
What, I think, is urgently needed, is technological solution; something that was believably described in the science-fiction novel “Cities in Flight” by James Blish. That is, every nation, tribe, group, country could cheaply and inexpensively relocate to a suitable Earth-like planet. In this manner, the prejudiced, the fearful, the narrow-mined, the bigot – irrespective of their doctrines, can find refuge in a parochial existence to their liking any where in this universe.
The cosmopolitans, on the other hand, could go on to realize what the Star Trek fans recognize as “The Federation”.
In this manner, the Federation can go on its merry way and the parochial planets on theirs – and never the twain need meet.
Identity Politics has its modern roots in the work of the Frankfurt School, a collection of German Marxists who came to America and had an enormous influence on our politically correct, identity politics culture. My point in the original posting was to emphasize the divisiveness that has gripped our society, where things like Charlottesville could occur and cause deeper social divisions and finger pointing (and worse). No one has cared to dig deeper into the roots of the divisions that have been deepened in the past decades, even as there has been modest progress in some civil rights areas.
In reply to PA, the issue is not “victims” versus “tormenters”–and no one has made any posting suggesting that the initial protesters, who clearly included white supremacists, wanna-be Nazis and other angry fringe types (watch the YouTube footage of the march the night before), were being let off the hook. If you want to understand how these gang/countergang, divide and conquer methods have been used to manipulate people through their twisted senses of identity, study some of the classic counterinsurgency texts, including Brigadier Frank Kitson’s Gangs and Countergangs, about the Mau Mau uprising and how it was suppressed in Africa in the 1950s and 60s.
If you can’t see the bigger game, you will be stuck in it and think that you are “on the right side” when you are being played as a sucker. The would-be neo-Nazis and the Antifa Black Bloc types have a lot more in common than you may realize. Look at the history of the Strasserites within the Nazi Party in early 1930s Germany, or read The Green and the Brown, about how the Nazi Party recruited heavily from the ranks of the 1920s and 30s disenfranchised “greenies.”
I repeat: Identity Politics is a disease that has been spread deep in our population and, as some commenters noted, divides people who from any sane standpoint have common cause against the Borg elite who have manipulated and ripped off all of them. I hope that this discussion continues and helps free some people from the “us versus them” game that is so destructive. Col. Lang has warned that he sees the seeds of a new civil war in the United States as the result of these outbursts, fueled by 24/7 media coverage. BTW, MSNBC is making big gains in their ratings, passing Fox News this past week, because they have been stoking the idea that there is a Nazi insurgency on the loose in the country, and Donald Trump is the new Hitler.
Pacifica Advocate
“Good lord, where to begin: A) “Antifa” stands for “anti-Fascists.” The reason the term is used is because it’s a loose collection of groups who are opposed to fascism. While I find a lot of their privvy dialogue quite immature and misguided, I personally see nothing wrong at all in a collection of groups who are united in physical opposition to the rise of fascism.” I am not Harper but it seems evident to me that whoever it is who displeases you by “shorthanding” the broad spectrum of alt-left as communist is guilty of doing the same thing that you do when you shorthand your opponents on the right as fascists. And BTW, where is the evidence of growing “fascism” in the US? pl
Pacifica,
“Today’s progressives are concerned primarily with rapidly growing economic inequality and the manipulation–rigging–of our political and policing institutions…”
So progressives are concerned about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile rigging the Democratic Primary? I find that to ba a rather funny statement to make.
“Eminent Domain used to steal farmland away from small landholders who were standing in the way….”
Of Shennandoah National Park. That was the liberal FDR who did that Ethnic cleansing poor whites didn’t get much pushback from the “progressives” back then. TVA was another project doing essentially the same thing. Poor black familes were treated even worse than the poor white ones.
Pacifica,
I’ve been reminded by a few of my fellow Democrats, with tenure, that the behavior of HRC and the upper echelons of the Democratic party of course has “some” merit. and “The chicanery of Podesta et al goes back for generations and, arguably, captures the history of national political parties in general.” Then I’m promptly told to ignore all that because it is just dog whistle poltics. The real issue is Russia! Racism! Don’t forget the battles we fought – yeah with Donna Brazile and Debbie in leadership roles, and oh, vote democratic.
PA
My “friend?” TTG? I was in the clandestine HUMINT business both before and after the Church committee hearings as well as doing a lot of other things over a 40 year government career. The hearings were set off by a belief that the the IC was being made into a group that would oppress political dissent in the US and do other things that made Frank Church uncomfortable. There was some justice in that on the counter-intelligence side. COINTELPRO was a project in army counter-intelligence that a few fatheads wanted to start up because they were offended by people marching around in the street carrying the enemy’s flag. That project deserved to be squashed. To understand this you have to know that at least then the counter-intellignce people and the clandestine HUMINT people were different groups of people. CI people were generally thought of by the clan HUMINT people as just anther kind of cop whose business was to investigate soldiers who had violated some security regulation. The clan HUMINT people did not have badges and almost never carried a gun, relying instead on their wits to stay out of trouble overseas. Their mission was altogether to recruit foreign people to spy on their own governments. If you don’t like that, well, life is tough and everyone does it. froem the point of the clandestine guys the restrictions imposed by law and regulation after the Church hearings effectively banned recruiting as assets; Americans, clergy, academics and journalists. pl