A national pissing contest

Crazies of the left have caused no end of chaos and destruction in cities all over America, every day and every night, for more than three months.

And the crazy right?

What, a day and a night at Charlottesville?

Who is the grave threat to the republic, to democracy, to the rule of law, to domestic tranquility and ordered liberty?

Trump, too stupid, ignorant, and incompetent for the the role, and anyway with no institutional support to speak of, awaits his cue to step forward as . . . Pinochet? Fujimori? Franco?

What would that be like?

The second time as farce?

Or the third?

Whatever.

A bit late for pro-Soviet propaganda, isn't it?

Europeans and Russians should remember what bound them together: anti-fascism

Apparently not.

Did the Nazis get these ideas from us to begin with?

That was alleged by a Nazi child killer in episode 3 of The World on Fire, America's umpteen thousandth TV show about young people in love facing the wicked Nazis and World War Two.

And we do seem to have an endless supply of ordinary Americans who buy in.

OK, it's from Britain. Still.

California City Official Ousted After Saying Old, Sick And Homeless Should Die In Pandemic

A city official in Northern California has been booted from his post after suggesting that old, sick and homeless people should be left to die during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ken Turnage II, chairman of the city planning commission of Antioch, located 35 miles east of Oakland, said in a Facebook post last month that “the sick, the old, the injured” should be left during the pandemic to meet their “natural course in nature,” The Associated Press reported.

“The World has been introduced to a new phrase Herd Immunity which is a good one,” he wrote in the since-deleted post. 

“In my opinion we need to adapt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers it ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.”

Turnage added that “homeless and other people who just defile themselves by either choice or mental issues” should also be allowed to perish as this “would fix what is a significant burden on our Society and resources that can be used.”

"Mississippi Burning"

Watched it for the nth time on Amazon streaming video last night.

The same battle being fought then against white supremacist, nationalist, racist terrorists who enjoyed widespread community support and political cover is still with us, today.

Even down to the denunciations of the press for printing lies, distortions, and "fake news" about the poor maligned South, Southerners, and especially organized racist killers and their official enablers and collaborators.

All of those almost-Nazi bastards ("almost" because the Klan and its sympathizers were never officially sympathetic, much less than committed, to the fascist theory of government or the tenet of government the Germans called the Führerprinzip) were soi-disant defenders of traditional white Christian Protestant Anglo-Saxon civilization against nonwhites, papists, and Jews, especially alarmed and angered by the prospect of mongrelization and pollution of the white race through miscegenation.

The Duce notably defended the white anti-American racists at Charlottesville as "good people".

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.

Revolutionary what?

Capitalists and their allies support coups or revolutions against regimes of representative government only if they fear someone else will do it first and use power against them.

Anti-capitalists do it because they cannot prevail, ever, without fanatical totalitarian dictatorship.

And anarchists? Well .  .  .  .

Chile alone could be offered as a counter-example.

A highly questionable one.

But, anyway, one could ask whether it always works out for the best for the generality of people.

Because of the Nazis, mostly.

But not only.

Still, looking at Russia, China, Cambodia, and the rest, the horrible regimes the capitalists have accepted seem much less bad.

Nazis, maybe, excepted.

How do we account for the key fact of our age?

That the worst and least qualified among us think they are entitled to rule everything?

And that so many others encourage this belief.

This is the real Revolt of the Masses.

It is what democracy as a cultural as well as political obsession corrupts into.

This shows how much Republicans care about what socialism actually is, and what "socialism" actually means

Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks reads from Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' while bashing Democrats, media

About as little as Bernie Sanders and the Democrats on MSNBC who, just for him during the primaries of 2016, helpfully and mendaciously defined the word as "public ownership of any means of production".

Well, any organization devoted to the production of any good or service.

Like schools, fire departments, or the Tennessee Valley Authority.

As for the GOP, part of their warfare against the Dems for 2020 is, thanks to Bernie's personal and apparently entirely sincere and almost lifelong embrace of socialism and Bernie and AOC's embrace of "socialism", to paste that label to the Democratic Party and especially the Bernie/AOC agenda on the one side and onto various political boogey-men on the other.

You know.

Stalin, sure.

But the massively incompetent and idiotic Maduro in Venezuela.

And now that famous national socialist, Adolf Hitler.

Is this Kosher?

The fight over Rep. Ilhan Omar exposed deep divisions in the Democratic caucus

In a society in which nobody is afraid to complain about and denounce white nationalism how is it out of bounds for people to denounce Zionism, commitment to Israel as an expressly Jewish state?

Ethnic, "blood and soil" nationalism is the belief that some or all ethnic groups (aka nations or nationalities) are entitled to live in sovereign and independent states inhabited and ruled chiefly if not exclusively by their own members.

Zionism, commitment to Israel as a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, is exactly that kind of nationalism.

White nationalism in the United States is a broader form of ethnic nationalism that partly reflects the success of the melting pot, but also reflects the continuing influence of racism, in making all our tribes of whites see themselves as one tribe, the white tribe.

Such nationalism does not entail or require any degree of belief in the biologically intrinsic and inherited superiority or inferiority of any ethnic group or race; nor does it exclude such belief.

Nor does it entail or require political domination of any nation over any other nation; nor does it exclude such domination.

European nationalism in most of the 19th Century favored and partly drove the revolt against the ancien regime and the rise of representative government.

But at every point in the 20th Century it drove the rise of such horrific phenomena as fascism and nazism, the most devastating wars in European history, ethnic cleansing, and mass genocides.

As a result, ethnonationalism especially, though also increasingly any form of nationalism, is now often looked upon as an absurd and dangerous political commitment capable of causing the most extravagant harm and no good.

So how is it out of bounds to denounce Jews and Christians who are Zionists?

Support for the existence and defense of Israel as a Jewish state is being made mandatory and criticism of it is being smeared as anti-Semitism.

You are not allowed to reject the right to exist of Israel as an expressly Jewish state without being denounced and perhaps punished as an anti-Semite.

And that is altogether deplorable, however true it is that almost all Muslim hostility to Israel is clearly and viciously anti-Semitic and does not seek to make Israel over into a non-ethnic and secular state in which Jews and Muslims live together in bonds of citizenship and equality but to utterly destroy Israel.

As for me, I support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

When two or more ethnic groups living in the same state cannot get along peacefully with each other partition may be the best solution, allowing each to live in a state of its own.

For that matter, partition may be the only way to safety even when the warring groups are one by blood, language, and culture in general but differ in religion, as Serbs differ from Croats.

And since we already know that things would go very badly, indeed, in Israel, if it were not on the whole an overwhelmingly Jewish state, we may on that good ground concede its right to be a Jewish state, despite people like Ms. Omar who think otherwise.

To be clear, I oppose denying Ms. Omar any of her committee assignments over this.

No, hers was not some sort of Steve King moment.

Sometimes it just seems right

Guilt by association, I mean.

Odds are, if you speak at a conference of this sort, you aren't there as an undercover FBI guy gathering info on people potentially linked to domestic terrorism.

Or a sane journo looking for an exclusive exposé.

This guy, of course, was neither.

Who is Darren Beattie? Donald Trump speechwriter fired over white nationalist conference ties.

MSNBC reported he was a close associate of Stephen Miller, who was himself a KA of Steve Bannon.

No surprise to find someone of this sort working for Steve Miller in Donald Trump's White House.

A Donald Trump speechwriter has been fired following the discovery that he appeared at a conference frequently attended by white nationalists.

The White House confirmed that Darren Beattie’s contract had been terminated after he was found to have spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference alongside anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow.

“Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” spokesman Hogan Gidley told The Washington Post. 

“We don’t comment on personnel matters.”

The H.L Mencken Club describes itself as an “organization for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right.”

It started in 2008 and was named after the American journalist who once described Jews as “plausibly…the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” and an educated black person as being a “low-caste man” who will “remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

. . . .

Beattie confirmed his dismissal when approached by The Washington Post. 

“In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he said in a statement.

“It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment.”

Beattie, who worked as a professor of political science at Duke University, openly supported Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. 

Speaking to the Chronicle, a Duke newspaper, Beattie said that Trump’s hard-line immigration policies were the main reason he backed him.

His Ph.D. thesis was based on the teachings of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who was also a member of the Nazi party, reported Forward.

Heidegger's work is regularly taught in courses on Phenomenological Existentialism, and grad students in philosophy not uncommonly write about Sein und Zeit and others of his major works.

But a political scientist would be focused precisely on his association with the Nazi Party and his relationship with his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl.

Globalism or America First?

This is a piece by an academic who wrote a book about FDR getting us into the war in Europe.

Republican leaders need to remember what happened the last time America chose to be isolated

She quotes Henry Luce's The American Century in opposition to Trump's America First policy and his hammer blows against American globalism.

Luce published his famous article, "The American Century," in February 1941, seven months after all the European democracies -- except Great Britain -- had surrendered to Hitler's ruthless armies. 

Luce traced this catastrophe to the end of World War I when the Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the United States began its retreat from world affairs.

In the 1920s and '30s, Americans embraced "the moral and practical bankruptcy" of isolationism, Luce wrote, and "failed to play their part as a world power." 

That unwillingness to confront Hitler's aggression in the 1930s, he underscored, brought "disastrous consequences" to "all mankind."

All the same, the idea that we should or had to eventually enter the war to keep Hitler from conquering the world is exactly the sort of childish twaddle that it appears, and Luce himself said just that in this very piece.

Even the British, whose regime and empire Hitler vastly admired, could probably have negotiated a separate peace without accepting any degree of nazification.

And Luce in this piece concedes that an American defense of North America against all enemies, if that was what Americans wanted, could well have worked.

Anyway, there was no convincing argument against that notion.

For Luce, the question whether America should send armies to fight in Europe to stop Hitler depended on what Americans wanted to do.

Defend only their own democracy in their own country, or defend and advance "so-called democratic principles" and government throughout the world?

Isolationism or engagement?

In the latter part of his piece, Luce presents a brilliant and sweeping picture of what American internationalism could and should be.

It is, today, a stirring and powerful defense of the kind of international liberal order built up after the Second World War.

But what it really comes down to, today, is whether we continue our engagements in NATO, in the Far East, in Oceania, and elsewhere, along with participation in global institutions like the UN and the WTO and support for pan-European institutions like the EU.

All for the encouragement, construction, and consolidation of a civilization of global democratic capitalism.

Or instead let it - or even make it - all fall apart.

And risk enemies rising up everywhere, surrounding fortress North America and forcing us to risk fighting a war to save ourselves right here in our home turf, rather than far lesser wars, often proxy wars, at a very great distance from ourselves.

PS. Luce in this piece suggests America commit itself to feeding everyone in the world who would otherwise go without, at taxpayer expense, with food produced by American agriculture.

But we have not done it and are very unlikely to.

We won't even feed all our own.

Good Obit.

Claude Lanzmann, intellectual vagabond who captured horror of Holocaust, dies at 92

Claude Lanzmann, the French director of the searing, nine-hour-long Holocaust documentary “Shoah”, whose extraordinary life reads like a history of the 20th century, has died in Paris aged 92.

I remember seeing Shoah over three days at a downtown Pittsburgh theater that showed Michael Moore's early work.

They'll be back

Charlottesville rally organizer gets approval for 'anniversary' event

The organizer of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left a woman dead last summer, has been granted permission to hold an “anniversary” event in Washington in August.

Jason Kessler, who was behind the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 where white nationalists held a torchlight rally, clashed with protesters and caused a political furore when Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence, filed an application with the National Park Service (NPS) to hold a “white civil rights rally” outside the White House.

Kessler had received initial approval from the NPS to hold the rally on Saturday 11 August and Sunday 12 August, the Washington Post reported. 

The weekend marks the anniversary of the Unite the the Right rally in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr, a self-described Nazi, drove his car into a crowd of protesters.

In Kessler’s application for a 2018 rally permit he said the purpose of the event was: “Protesting civil rights abuse in Charlottesville, VA/white civil rights rally.”

He asked for permission to hold a rally at Lafayette Park, located in front of the White House, for 400 people. 

In a section of the form asking if the applicant believed anyone might “seek to disrupt the activity”, Kessler wrote: “Members of antifa affiliated groups will try to disrupt.”

Poland

Not everybody sees Poland's recent acts regarding the Holocaust as mere pushback against German efforts to deflect the blame onto others.

It is well known and beyond doubt that in Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Nazi-conquered Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism rife for centuries led to widespread, though of course far from universal, and enthusiastic popular collaboration with the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

But those recent acts reject and even criminalize accusations that the Polish state itself collaborated in the Shoah.

And having been destroyed by the Nazis in September, 1939, it truly did not.

However, they also criminalize accusations against "the Polish nation."

And that could perhaps be read by a prosecutor or a court as criminalizing even the truth that collaboration with the Nazi assault on the Jews was widespread among Poles - and sympathy for it even more popular.

Poland Digs Itself a Memory Hole

But the broader target of this piece is Poland's descent into nationalist, racist authoritarianism.

About that it is very good.

And about links with The Duce, himself, and our American white nationalism, Nativism, and approval of Bozo's thuggish authoritarianism.

Poland’s Nationalism Threatens Europe’s Values, and Cohesion

The EU has already bitten off more than it can chew, allowing membership to Eastern European states far more sympathetic to nationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-liberal authoritarianism than to the somewhat post-nationalist, multiculturalist and secular order, built by the West, that underpins and finds expression in the legal order of the EU.

Imagine if it surrendered to Erdogan's demands and let Turkey join!

Awaken, Poland, Before It’s Too Late

A good piece by Roger Cohen.

No wonder it looks so good

And those nightclub scenes are amazing.

Germany's 'Babylon Berlin' Crime Series Is Like 'Cabaret' On Cocaine

So much of the best stuff on Netflix is in some other language with English subtitles.

Wikipedia says this show cost $ 40 million.

Philip Kerr fans must love it, and if the novels it's based on are not available in English somebody's missing out on a good investment.

[Update: It looks like the first two of a Gereon Rath series are in English. The others not, or not yet.]

Says NPR,

German television is coming into its own.

After the recent stateside success of shows like Dark and Deutschland 83, the latest subtitled offering is a crime series set in 1920s Berlin.

Launching Tuesday on Netflix, Babylon Berlin (based on the crime novels of German writer Volker Kutscher) explores the Weimar era's raging nightlife, flourishing cabaret scene and brutal criminal underbelly.

In 1929, the capital of the Weimar Republic was a hedonistic city of extremes.

True to the party drug of the era, you could say this new series is Cabaret on cocaine.

The first season depicts a city on the edge of an abyss.

It's set before the rise of fascism, and a few months before the American stock market crash.

The political angle is fascinating, too.

Weimar died for the same reason the Spanish Republic did.

Far too much of the public, including all classes, the military, and government officials, was split between extremes of left and right committed to its destruction.

It did not die of sex and sinfulness.

The gays and the whores didn't bring Germany down.

Or Spain, for that matter.

Or Italy.

That is not how democracies perish.

Imagine a story about the serial killer next door.

Actually, there have been stories like that.

In The Times.

A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. 

He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. 

Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. 

But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” 

He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. 

He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

. . . .

In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. 

The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

. . . .

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

. . . .

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”


In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

. . . .

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. 

He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. 

He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). 

He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

. . . .

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

And that, of course, was not remotely fascist.

But it was white supremacist to the point of accepting slavery as the proper place for black people in society.

Or anyway in its constitution.

Thing is, they really did crazy, evil stuff

Your government and mine, I mean.

For the greater good, you know.

But, hey, no worse than Hitler, or his goon Mengele.

Stranger Things.

Such things are a standing refutation of utilitarianism.

Speaking of that "blood and soil" thing

Florida governor declares state of emergency before white nationalist's speech

Governor Rick Scott of Florida has declared a state of emergency ahead of a speech by a white nationalist leader this week at the University of Florida, in order to free up resources to prepare for possible violence.

Richard Spencer’s speech on Thursday in Gainesville is part of a national campaign to use outrage over racist events on university campuses to draw attention to white nationalist ideas. 

The tour is also designed keep fringe provocateurs like Spencer in the media spotlight.

Spencer has advocated for a “white ethno-state” in North America that would be achieved through “peaceful ethnic cleansing”.

He is most famous for shouting “Hail Trump!” at a white nationalist conference after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January, a cry some supporters greeted with Nazi salutes.

He is a mini George Lincoln Rockwell.

Gingrich: The Duce can do no wrong

Gingrich embraces the Führerprinzip to defend Trump.

Despite Clinton impeachment vote, Gingrich says President 'cannot obstruct justice'

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday that it's impossible for President Donald Trump to obstruct justice because of the fact that he's president.

"Technically, the President of the United States cannot obstruct justice," Gingrich said at the National Press Club in an event to promote his new book, "Understanding Trump."

"The President of the United States is the chief executive officer of the United States. If he wants to fire the FBI director, all he's got to do is fire him."

However, Gingrich himself has in the past voted to impeach a president over such charges.

While speaker of the House, Gingrich voted in 1998 to impeach President Bill Clinton on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.

Told you he's a lying sack of shit.

He's also a preposterous sack of shit.

He was never the smartest man in the room, though in his heyday his media whores notoriously (especially in the WSJ) used to insist he always was.

He was just the most brazen.

And now he is exceeding his past achievements, becoming a genuinely toxic, though buffoonish, threat to the constitution and the Republic.

The perfect stooge for Bozo the Duce, Duce Fyodor, himself the greatest threat to both since the Civil War.

By the way, Clinton was a cheap political opportunist, a selfish pig, and a horn dog who couldn't keep it zippered who should have resigned.

And he was guilty of perjury, for which he was disbarred upon leaving office.

Update.

"If the president does it that means it's not illegal."

Who first floated that idea in those very, selfsame words?

Hitler rises

In his A Man Without Breath, Philip Kerr writes that Hitler secured the office of Chancellor by bribing Hindenberg, and during the war secured the loyalty of some generals by bribery.

True history?

Any credible sources?