If Paul Kengor is correct about Frank Marshall Davis is it anything to worry about that the “mentor of the current president of the United States was a Communist — and not only a party member, but an actual propagandist for Stalin’s USSR”? From the PR point of view, probably not. For some reason no lasting stain attaches to those who have associated with one of the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century. If Frank Davis Marshall was a Nazi it would have been politically worrisome. That he was a Communist only makes him — in the view of the public — interesting.
There are two reasons for this benign view. First, the Communists won in their fight against the Nazis and victory brought with it immunity — even for the villains. The Communists entered the elite, and being on the side of the victors could not really be hindered from doing so. A Communist or ex-Communist in public life is so common that any serious attempt to exclude them would probably empty the university faculties and the newsrooms.
The second reason that nobody worries about Communists is that too few know anything about it personally. To most people, Communism is just a stupid, slightly malevolent ideology that foolish people like Bill Ayers, for example, subscribe to. But those who have really experienced the Party up close and personal will divide into two camps. Those who remain true believers will be delighted that Frank Marshall Davis mentored President Obama. On the other hand, those who have abandoned the Party will be utterly terrified by Kengor’s revelations. Both the true believers and the apostates understand all too well that Communists aren’t just funny people but Nazi-equivalents who knew how to win. They were more clever, better spoken than Hitler’s crude spokesmen, but they were every bit as cunning and ruthless as the minions of the Third Reich. Communism owns most of the major genocides of the 20th century. By comparison to Stalin — Frank Marshall Davis’s idol — Hitler was a low rent clown.
That doesn’t mean that President Obama is necessarily tainted by the same brush. I would be the first to claim that I probably know more Communists than he does and have a reasonable chance of being right. But it does point to the pervasiveness of a strand of evil that has descended, sanitized and unremarked, through the bloodstream of post-War Western culture. We are all of us to some extent, marred or inoculated by this dark meme. To some degree the current world crisis is at heart an immune reaction to themes which have so embedded in the Western society that they are almost unnoticed. Unnoticed that is, but for the fact that they are killing us, silently, secretly, springing almost from within. Self-hatred, casual abortion, the worship of the state, virulent atheism and sexual license: these are ideas which by their very success have become almost part of the mainstream. Like cigarettes, we are habituated to our poison to the point that our dooms gnaw at us unnoticed, venom in the guise of pleasure.
Maybe the problem isn’t that Barack Obama was once mentored by Frank Marshall Davis. The real difficulty is that in our own ways, all of us have sat at Communism’s feet.
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For some of us, knowing and observing a few real Communists quickly alerted us to all we needed to know about the flaws and dangers of the movement.
Obama, and many others, have not been as perceptive.
I found that all I had to do, in evaluating some breathlessly promoted Communist scheme, either existing or projected, was to look for the coercion which was either intended from the start or assumed to be the appropriate measure the minute ‘the people’ failed to respond in the way that was expected of them.
The coercion was always there. Communism is basically utopian dreaming plus (what comes in practice to be its core) a willingness to support the use of violence as soon as they feel a need for it. Communist revolutionaries encourage the first in order to harvest the second.
Isn’t the name Frank MARSHALL DAVIS?
Obama would have made a very charismatic preacher in some non denominational church of communist informed liberation theology-he has that gift of the gab.
He chose a minister–Rev Wright — who embodied those attributes,
Apart from that he is neither a competent administrator nor a leader.
He has never led a company and made a payroll, never run a law office, never led troops into battle.
Now his enforcer is running for Mayor of Chicago.
Obamas childhood is a mystery, abandoned by his father, step-father and mother before he was 10 years old he had to develop a secret life to survive—churning with rage on the inside – but charming, seductive and desperate for peoples approval and adulation on the outside.
He would never trust anyone again—just fake it very, very well.
His only faith would be narcissism and the drive for revenge–but against whom?
Hong Kong used to be part of ECHELON and the Anglosphere–obviously that is no longer the case— we need a replacement— I propose Republic of the Philippines–it needs some upgrading to its legal, government and financial sector of course but it has great institutions like the Asian Institute of Management
http://www.aim.edu/
Makati City is like Minneapolis with much better weather and it has a thriving tech center, that is the only city I have spent much time in there.
Singapore is another candidate.
Any other candidates for the Anglosphere?
Sarah,
Thanks for pointing out the error in the Davis’ name. Fixed.
The 10/10 video is an excellent example of the meme. Execute those who do not publicaly toe the line.
And yet your closing list wories me Richard. Communist regimes used or banned both sexual licence and casual abortion as and when it suited the regime.
Self hatred I am unsure about , but worship of the state is less common than contempt for the state and our society, which renders us unable to resist Islam and other destructive forces.
As for virulent atheism; it is a basis for the current fad of hatred of Catholics, but it brings no balance to a broader view of the world.
The reason for the “no lasting stain”for is simple: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If
you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no head.”
Which leaves two explanations: Too many of us are embarassed by our 20s, or too many of us have no heads.
ADE
#6 ADE
“Too many of us are embarassed by our 20s”
And rather than dealing with that embarrassment and moving on, they try to cover up or avoid it.
A recurring and common fault of leftists is the need to construct a narrative wherein they are perfect. Not “good” or “just” but perfect. This is one of the appeals of the leftist thing to a certain personality type. They can sign onto the movement, parrot the words (with or without understanding), and the left gives them permission to go through life thinking that they are perfect creatures.
This embarrassment you describe is not the ordinary variety, but is rather a desperate emperor-has-no-clothes type, where the entire worldview and memeset falls apart if even a single admission of the tiniest error occurs. Thus, despite all the facts and empirical data showing that leftist thought leads to great evil, the leftist must construct a narrative which never admits that they were wrong about anything, using whatever circular “logic” they must and cherry picking whichever factoids support the illusion while leaving out however many disprove it. No leftist, no leftist organization or project, is permitted to be perceived as having the slightest thing wrong with it.
This is why they think it’s OK to wear a Che t-shirt, but that a Hitler one is a great abomination. This is why the MSM and the educators in this country give a pass to a president who has not one but several staffers who praise Mao in a way which, if the praise were directed at Hitler or Pinochet, would (rightfully) get that staffer fired and result in months of attacks on the president himself. This is why public schools (populated by leftist educators and administrators and curriculum planners) in America teach extensively about the Nazi atrocities but never mention the numerically much larger ones done by communist regimes (and, recently, also ignore the Japanese atrocities relative to the German ones because the Germans were white, and no “people of color” are allowed to be seen as being as – or more – evil than white folks). It’s the explanation for why Wretchard’s words:
“Communism owns most of the major genocides of the 20th century. By comparison to Stalin — Frank Davis Marshall’s idol — Hitler was a low rent clown.”
aren’t a part of the consciousness of the left, especially educators. These words express a fact that essentially the entire education industry in the U.S. willfully ignores or actually tries to cover up.
The lie that leftists simply don’t commit evil must be maintained, propped up by whatever means are necessary, because if even that single myth is wrong, the entire remaining set of values and beliefs is shot down.
And they can’t have that.
JT2 #1
“The coercion was always there. Communism is basically utopian dreaming plus (what comes in practice to be its core) a willingness to support the use of violence as soon as they feel a need for it. Communist revolutionaries encourage the first in order to harvest the second.”
It occurs to me that the words “Islam” and “Islamicist” could be inserted in place of “Communism” and “Communist” and the above would still be true.
Picking up on the coercion theme, here’s a question you cannot get answered at any university, if Communist regimes are so good for the masses, how come nobody is ever allowed to leave? I mean you’d think it would be so good that nobody would want to, so why does it have a fence around it manned by guards?
Conversely, if the West in general and the US in particular are the oppressive legacy of slavery, Wounded Knee and the expoitation of labor, why is every plane, ship and train in the world filled with people trying to get here?
And why do Communist countries always have huge armies? All the lefties and Communist sympathisers I ever met here in the West profess to be “anti-war” to the point of Western unilateral disarmament and virtual if not actual surrender. Yet their model states are all aggressively militaristic.
Wretchard is right, the Communists were on the victorious side in WW2, and so they have avoided their reckoning at Nuremburg. It gives them undue legitimacy among people who fancy themselves intellectuals for ideas and policies which always seem to lead to widespread suffering, mass graves and gulags.
no mo uro @ #7.
“Not “good” or “just” but perfect.”
Spot on. Perfect for them, but worse, perfect for everybody else. Hence the desire for coercion. Some coerce Stalin-style, some Hitler-style, some Chavez-style, some do it legislation-style, eg ObamaCare.
But it’s the same motivation – “I’m perfect, and I’ll make you perfect too, whether you like it or not.”
I have three thoughts that I have run my life by:
(1) You must seriously believe
(2) You must seriously doubt
(3) We are all born with Original Sin (aka human imperfection), so favour point 2.
ADE
Nazism died but Communism lives on – both are built on Government as god – both require central collectivization of the “little people’s” labor and property – both require the individual to become identical molecules in Brownian motion – identical cogs in the State mechanism. Here is some essential reading on 21st Century Communism.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2125/print
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/socialism_the_new_feudalism.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/political_extremism_left_and_r.html
Grandpa wised up at the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
For my part, all I needed to know abut Communism I learned at the Berlin Wall, and especially the Checkpoint Charlie museum.
“A Communist or ex-Communist in public life is so common that any serious attempt to exclude them would probably empty the university faculties and the newsrooms.”
So? What’s the problem?
it is paul kengor not frank
And the American people have voted, again and again, for the slow transformation of a free society into a Communist one culminating (thus far) in Obama’s election. This tend will continue for the remainder of the century, at least.
#6 ADE
“Too many of us are embarassed by our 20s”
And no.7 No Mo
“And rather than dealing with that embarrassment and moving on, they try to cover up or avoid it.”
Or worse yet, go out and do the equivalent of buying that Corvette they wanted when they were 22, and thus vote for Obama, even as they realize now that Corvette would have killed them.
It is amazing how oftee the Soviets get credit for “winning WWII” and never have to be saddled with the blame for starting it in the first place. The German military trained secretly in the USSR – and Poland was invaded simultaneously by BOTH Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
A friend of mine was a Polish Army POW. He was wounded on the first day of the war and considered the Nazis to be simply terrible adversaries but the Russians to be far worse, as they invaded Poland on the pretense of helping them defend against the Germans and then said “Surprise!
O’s communist influences come not just Frank Marshall Davis, but also from William Ayers who ghosted his book and from Jeremiah Wright who’se black liberation theology was just a variant of liberation theology advocated by some catholic and protestant churches to disguise their communism.
Let’s also take notice of how Obama got into Harvard Law, with the assistance of Khalid al Mansour, Black Muslim radical, mentor to the original Black Panthers, and “adviser” to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcC0QAd0Ug
Obama’s father was also a communist.
Like the Devil, the Communists’ greatest trick has been to make people believe they don’t exist. If you tell someone that Obama was mentored by a Communist, you might just as well have said he was mentored by a Manticore. Both will be seen as vague, harmless creatures of long dead mythologies. Very few Americans realize the extent to which Communists infiltrated and influenced so many aspects of 20th century life, from labor unions to DC to the press to education to civil rights. Even much of the hideous modern art of the era was driven from Moscow, and designed to deliberately be alienating to the populace.
The fact that some people suspect Davis was also Obama’s biological father adds a bit of the kind of juice that the press generally likes. But since this is Obama we’re talking about, they will ignore that too (just imagine if there were a similar “mystery parent” story about Sarah Palin, or if Palin had grown up paling around with a member of the Klan or John Birch Society).
It has always seemed to me that the Bolsheviks didn’t start with the intention
to coerce the overall populace but mainly aimed at their obvious enemies in the
old regime and thought that, once these were eliminated, the general populace
would embrace the new communist order of things. But then reality set in as
they found that the factories went idle as people decided they didn’t want to
work for nothing (it being hard enough to work for real pay) and the cities
began to starve because the farmers, rather than happily turning over their
produce to the state for redistribution, held on to surpluses or didn’t bother
to produce any surplus at all. So Lenin came up with his New Economic Plan
which was to reinstiture the old economic plan except on much more savage scale
as the old bosses were replaced by commisars backed up by the gulag and firing
squads. The Bolsheviks held the peasantry in very low regard anyway and when
the ungrateful wretches refused to play along it was easy to apply the whip in
order to “encourge” them to get with the program.
I think that the Bolsheviks really thought their grand scheme would work and when
it so obviously failed they lashed out violently to force it to work. As pointed
out above they could never accept that their life’s devotion had been given to
a bogus cause whose failure was unavoidable because Marx and Lenin had no
understanding of human nature or of the reality of the systems they were so
eager to destroy. All failure was due to counter revolutionary forces and
traitors and had to be dealt with harshly – which is a belief and a policy
that carries forward with the left right up to the present day.
Wretchard: “For some reason no lasting stain attaches to those who have associated with one of the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century.”
In fact, having the stain guarantees your getting cushy, secure tenure in the prestigious universities, where you’re free to propagate it to your heart’s content. But why is anybody surprised about Obama? Americans voting for Obama’s “Hope and Change” was in ways similiar to Russians voting for Lenin’s “Bread and Peace.” And now we have a “red diaper baby” as president. So it’s little wonder that his thinking constrains itself to run along certain very predictable grooves.
Communism, it seems, runs in Buraq’s family. It appears that Buraq’s grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley, were following some sort of underground fellow traveler’s circuit. After Madelyn and Stanley secretly married before she graduated High School, in Kansas, the Dunhams traveled first to California where Madelyn attended the hot bed of Radicalism, UC Berkeley, then Texas and by 1955 they had gone to Seattle, where Stanley worked in a furniture store and Madelyn as an escrow officer. The next year, a radical new communist high school opened up on nearby Mercer Island, where the President of the School Board was investigated by HUAAC for his communist ties, and two prominent teachers with strong communist teachings promoted radical ideas in a high school spot dubbed “Anarchy Alley”. Of course, the Dunhams moved there, and Stanley Ann was promptly enrolled in Mercer Island High , where Stanley Ann eventually would become known to classmates as a “fellow traveler”. The Dunhams also joined the East Shore Unitarian Church, also known locally as “the little Red Church”.
Once Stanley Ann graduated from high school, the Dunhams moved to Honolulu, which was known for communist activities among the longshoremen at the docks. There the Dunhams quickly befriended Frank Marshall Davis who was a local columnist for the communist leaning “Honolulu Record”, and the rest is history.
Every time I see Obama he seems to carry a strange countenance, like he is furiously trying to hide something. When I compare photos of Frank Marshall Davis & Obama Sr. it patently obvious. Frank Marshall Davis was Obama’s biological father. That is why we have this “unexplicable” Stalin-like firewall surrounding President Davis’…er.. President Obamas’ past. A very strange President indeed.
A recurring and common fault of leftists is the need to construct a narrative wherein they are perfect.
I always notice this when Obama uses a particular verbal tic: “As I’ve always said…” See how many times he uses it; it’s omnipresent. The implication is that Obama has NEVER not known what was the right thing to do or think. He’s ALWAYS been as he is, correct and enlightened. He doesn’t have to muddle around uncertainly, he doesn’t experience doubt or question himself, he doesn’t head down one path only to discover it’s a dead end, and have to retrace his steps, chastened but wiser. No, no, he walks in the pure light of certainty, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Amen. All Leftists put on this pose of timeless righteousness, he’s just the most visible spokesman at the moment. But they all hang on to it and refuse to countenance any diversion because Leftism is their religion, and like any religion, it either is right all the time or it’s worthless.
W:
For old timers like me it was the constant “the sky is falling”, “the sky is falling”, “the sky is falling” of the John Birch Society. Since the sky can only fall so far and because no group on earth can be so highly organized that they are successfully responsible for every bad thing that happens, after a few years many of my generation just tuned out the one-track-minded Birchers. Oddly, history might yet show they were a little like McCarthy – or Dan Rather? – wrong with the salient facts but ultimately right with the narrative.
I, too, had some far left friends (and still do). The problem I had with Senator Obama as a candidate was that he could never explain what he learned from these associations that made him reject the belief system — how he had grown away from the far left. So I assumed he had not grown away.
People on the far left are loyal to the future they hope to bring about through “sweeping change,” and embrace a set of ideas as a kind of intellectual short cut for getting there. They closely identify with the movement to the point where it becomes a part of their identity. As individuals, they do not use “critical thinking” when dreaming of this new world. The thought that “it won’t work” must be kept suppressed lest they have to lop off, and dispose of, the part of themselves that makes them different from — and better than — most of their contemporaries (calling 70 percent of Americans bigots might be politically disadvantageous but psychologically essential). Also, any detailed discussion of the plans for the future will cause contention, argument, and the loss of allies in the struggle since everyone has a different vision for the future.
However, the critical faculties become hyperactive when the subject of the status quo comes up. So those on the left tend to disparage the present and despise the past that has led to the present. Even the past failures of the movement are viewed through this lens. In this way a truly useful “useful idiot” is born. So for them “dissent” against the present is patriotism because it shows loyalty to the future. Dissent against this future is a kind of treachery (especially if you are a “defined beneficiary”).
As part of the great society program in the mid 1960′s my home town was declared “a model city.” It then entered a period of rapid decline: Ker-plop. Does that mean the model city program was a failure? Not at all. The real model city was Washington D.C., where the “Great Society” was located. For the members of “The Great Society” in the area around the District of Columbia it’s been a smashing success (with most of the smashing happening elsewhere): Weeee! Weeeee! Weeeee! Weeeeeeee! Weeeeeee! say all the little porkers (who still haven’t reached home).
It is no wonder that passage of the recent legislative accomplishments of the Democrats — the multi-thousands page pieces of unread legislation — was a bit like buying “a pig in a poke.” But in this case it was pork and a poke. The cronies of the Democrats got the pork, and the American people got the poke.
Kegnor writes: “If you feel like you’ve been duped, or at least deprived of some significant background information about the man who is now the elected leader of the free world, you can thank our shameless, woefully biased media for failing to do its job.”
The Obama narrative appealed to Bob Dylan, who said it reminded him of fiction, but real. I think Bob felt it had to be fiction but really wanted to believe it because it tied in with his own fictionalizing:
“Bob Dylan, in an interview with the Times of London
Q: What struck you about him?
DYLAN: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage — cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0409/Dylan_on_Obama.html
wretchard
Americans have been softened up to believe that Communism is simply another version of benign collectivism. Hollywood has long had a romanticized painting of the Communist world, there are repeated flirtations with the high profile actor and Castro, Chavez…even the brutes in the old Soviet empire.
The far left media of the New York Times, Newsweek, and the like …have histories littered with folks like Duranty. Evan Thomas’ grandfather, Norman, ran for President repeatedly and openly on the Socialist ticket.
Red diaper babies were born as baby boomers to parent who flirted with all the romanticized notions of communism.
And, they drifted to academia, journalism, and entertainment where they had a safe haven and kindred spirits. What happened thereafter, is that they clogged those systems with their large numbers and then took a totalitarian stranglehold on them. No other voice could be heard. Principled dissent became a shunning trigger.
What we have now, is the blowback from allowing that to take place. The pressure valve for a strangled voice, is blowing off the old carburetor cap…and the white hot steam of anger and resentment is pouring out.
Young Barry Obama had a leftist childhood. He had a mom who would have been a hippie had she been born a few years later, but clearly was an alternative lifestyle woman of her times. His grandfather toted him around and tried to find him an alternative lifestyle black man to identify with young Barry. The CPUSA poet was the choice.
To suggest that young Barry was not influenced by the alternative lifestyle thinking of his mother and grandfather, or of angry radical “teachings” of Frank Marshall Davis, or the far left protest students at Occidental, or Edward Said at Columbia, or Rashid Khalidi, or Carl Davidson and Danny Davis, or Ali Abuminah, or William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright or the whole of the “community organizer” crowd in Chicago…is to deny a lifetime of swimming in radical waters and drinking from radical wells.
wretchard, I know those folks in Chicago. Personally. There is nothing “benign” about their brand of politics. The Pocket Media did not “unveil” the associations and dig into the beliefs, because those journalistas are part of the movement. And have been for some time. Radical extremism was dressed up to “soothe the fears” of the middle class. And, the reporting on it was a coverup.
Anybody recall Bush being called or compared to Stalin?
“A recurring and common fault of leftists is the need to construct a narrative wherein they are perfect.”
Perfection means religon – Marxism is a perfect substitute for religion. Again, the Soviet dissidents were paying attention:
“The religious aspects of socialism may explain the extraordinary attraction of socialist doctrines and their capacity to inflame individuals and to inspire popular movements. It is precisely these aspects of socialism which cannot be explained when socialism is regarded as a political or economic category. Socialism’s pretensions to be a universal world view comprising and explaining everything also make it akin to religion. A characteristic of religion is socialism’s view of history not as a chaotic phenomenon but as an entity that has a goal, a meaning and a justification. In other words, both socialism and religion view history teleologically… socialism’s hostility toward traditional religion hardly contradicts this judgment – it may simply be a matter of animosity between rival religions… It is certainly true that socialism is hostile to religion. But is it possible to understand it as a consequence of atheism? Hardly, at least if we understand atheism as it is usually defined: as the loss of religious feeling… socialism’s attitude toward religion does not at all resemble the indifferent and skeptical position of someone who has lost interest in religion. The term “atheism” is inappropriate for the description of people in the grip of socialist doctrines. It would be more correct to speak here not of “atheists” but of “God-haters,” not of “atheism” but of “theophobia.” Such, certainly, is the passionately hostile attitude of socialism toward religion. Thus, while socialism is certainly connected with the loss of religious feeling, it can hardly be reduced to it. The place formerly occupied by religion does not remain vacant; a new lodger appeared.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
The institution that rules America- the Democratic Party- was more or less formally allied with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, through the Popular Front. Informally, the CPSU has provided many ideas to the western left- the rhetoric of Stalinism most obviously, but many other ideas and positions. Some substantial portion of left ideology comes straight from KGB propaganda and disinformation.
More generally western leftists have always admired communism. While they did not think it necessary for developed countries, it’s regarded as the best path for the development of the right kind of government and society in the third world.
In the old days the vast majority of people found communism repulsive and evil, and wanted to remove its influence in the US. The left responded to McCarthy by framing membership, current or former, in a communist organization as a matter of idealism, a desire to make the world a better place, possibly misguided but nothing to reproach a person over. Simply the idea of reproaching a person for communist activities was framed, very successfully, as a terrible evil.
Richard, statistically very few people (even many who lived most of their lives in the SU – just visit Brooklyn if one need a proof) understand communism as well as you do. I love this site. Thanks.
There’s another reason Communists are not loathed by the general American populace as much as Nazis, though perhaps more a corollary to the Commies were Victors theme than its own standalone theme. After the war, Commies embarked on a counter-offensive against the anti-communists. The successful attacks against Tailgunner Joe (who helped by being such an easy and public target) and the caricature of anti-communists as mono-maniacal fools made it socially difficult to be stridently anti-communist. Commie agents couldn’t have done this if they hadn’t been on the winning side. Nazi agents, such as survived, were too busy hiding in South America to do much propagandizing.
Also the general impression most communist leaders gave of being dour, dim-bulb country-bumpkins made them less scary than the nattily dressed, evil super-genius vibe from Nazis. Of course, much of that was the result of popular culture, which had to make the villains of WWII out to be dangerous adversaries, and I think perhaps saw the Soviets as comic relief as much as anything else.
It’s a tactic the Left still uses – try to paint opponents as unreasonable and unhinged. Make it socially difficult for people to publically oppose you, make them worry they’ll be seen as unhinged, make them spend at least as much time defending their own stability as attacking your movement…
Like? If these two things share the same greatest trick, perhaps…. Hmmm, have you ever seen the Devil and Communism in the same place at the same time?
If you have, maybe it’s because you saw through the mask of communism to what was underneath.
According to some ambiguous accounts, Davis may have been a pedophile. If there’s any veracity to that, it would be another more intriguing tidbit as far as a large segment of the public is concerned as the rumors of Obama’s parentage.
Or not.
I do have to wonder sometime if it was just the MSM “coverups” that lulled a majority of Americans, especially independents, to vote Obama in. I imagine that there are too many Americans who just don’t care.
RWE @ 16…
Stalin WAS the man who started WWII via the August 23rd Pact.
All European diplomats had focused on containing Hitler as long as possible. That he was brutal and aggressive had been fulsomely established.
All other parties assumed, incorrectly, that Stalin’s enmity was in the bag.
The French and British further assumed that their ramped up defense spending would close the gap in air force power in the nick of time.
( The massive aircraft plants that supported WWII were already funded, and construction had begun.)
The West also assumed that Hitler would be constrained by oil shortages, rubber shortages, etc. very much in the manner of WWI. In fact, the West considered hostilities to proceed just like WWI at every level of analysis.
Stalin thought so, too. Hence the pact. Hence his opposition to ‘deep operations’ with his tank formations.
Stalin solved Hitler’s problems WRT resources — oil in particular.
The campaigns against Norway, Denmark and then France, Holland and Belgium were floated on SOVIET OIL.
The Battle of Britain was gassed up with SOVIET OIL.
The Blitz was sustained with SOVIET OIL.
Barbarossa was launched with SOVIET OIL. Come December, 1941 that stash of pre-invasion Soviet Oil had run out. The reason that Hitler pushed down south in 41 was an attempt to get to the oil fields even then.
Without Stalin’s oil, it is doubtful that the Fall of France would have ever occurred. The Luftwaffe simply could not have flown that many sorties without Soviet Oil. The Battle of Britain and thoughts of Sealion would have been logistically impossible.
After the Battle of Britain Hitler throttled back the Luftwaffe with the particular intent of building reserves for Barbarossa.
(One of the reasons his generals were terrified of invading Russia was the obvious loss of oil imports. Unless success came quick and sweet, Germany was destined to repeat her WWI resource problems.)
So Stalin not only launched WWII, he is directly responsible for all of Hitler’s early victories. During Fall Blau the tempo literally ran out of gas. Hence, the panzers never reached Baku. Oil scarcity made even planning for more mechanized formations a joke. After the Spring of 1943 Hitler’s panzer corps faced rationing. For the remainder of the war Hitler was rushing fuel to hot spots. By the end, draft animals were shifting panzers into static positions.
And yet, Stalin still gets a bye for his complicity.
Amazing.
I can only say that many of you would benefit from the works of Robert Conquest. “Harvest of Sorrow ” is outstanding for a perpective on the benevolence of communism and “Uncle Joe”
http://tinyurl.com/36thfpz
From Library Journal
Conquest has a terrible story to tell. He examines Stalin’s assault on the Soviet peasantry at the end of the 1920s and, in particular, his genocideno other word will doof the Ukrainian people in the human-made famine of 1932-33. His horrific details, drawn from Soviet as well as Western sources, lead Conquest to conclude that as many as 14.5 million died in the years 1930-37 as a result of Stalin’s terror against the peasantry: five million came from the Ukraine alone. These facts, and the ghastly details behind them, are not widely known in the West. In addition, they are officially denied by the Soviets to this day.
Communism is hedious and obama is a “fellow traveller” and subversive. Communism isn’t any better today than it was in the “30′s. We’ve (the general population) Has simply become dumber about it’s threat.
Read the reader review on Amazon.
Don…
Frank Marshall Davis wrote up his actual sexual activities under a pen name as ‘fiction.’
He was nailing white underage girls in sexual trysts with his spouse!
http://i481.photobucket.com/albums/rr173/palominopinto/Barry.jpg
The above link shows why so many believe that Stanley Ann hooked up with Frank.
You talk about emptying the universities and the press rooms as though that were a bad thing. Dump out all the commies and make room for all of the honest and well-informed conservatives who can’t get jobs under the current hard-left/pro-jihadi elite.
H/38–also Conquest’s The Great Terror; it’s one of the most chilling things I’ve ever read. Conquest was practically run out of town by right-thinking people . . . until it turned out he was right, of course.
Totalitarian ideologies llike communism and Islam are like catnip for crazies, and crack cocaine for haters. They give their adherents unlimited targets for their hatred, as well as fuel for ego-tripping. They do not require their followers to learn to control those emotions. Nazism did the same thing, but as you correctly pointed out, they lost.
I don’t know why you take on so
There’s nothing wrong with Uncle Joe
A killer, yes, that’s understood
But he killed for a greater good
A better life for all mankind
A death or two, no never mind
And what about our friend Pol Pot
And all the praiseful press he got
From fawning journalists who said
There’s none in killing fields who’s dead
Or Mao Tse Dung our Chinese friend
Who brought to an untimely end
Some sixty million Chinese lives
And each one greeted by high fives
By people such as O and Ayers
Who mention Mao in all their prayers
And lovingly at Christmas place
On Christmas tree Mao’s smiling face
Yes Joe and Pot and Mao Tse Dung
Have climbed the ladder rung by rung
A ladder O began to climb
Those slippery rungs just filled with slime
And now he’s at the very top
With none who have the means to stop
The killing that will surely come
When marching to the Marxist drum
What’s the difference between socialist nationalism and national socialism?
Blert,
A couple of years ago I read of passage of Davis diary that noted somewhere around 1960 he had a threesome with his wife and a teenage white chick named Ann. Hmmm.
The tryst occurred on election night November 8th,1960…
Nine months later…
Out comes baby Barry, August 4th, 1961.
As to why three totally politicized lovers would celebrate the defeat of tricky Dick, who can say?
For a red-diaper baby, these were heady times: the Berlin Wall started going up August 13, 1961 when Barry was only nine days old!
Some of those who now regret having voted for President Obama speak of being ‘deceived’. But the deception, if present, went far deeper than a misrepresentation of his campaign promises. Barack Obama represented the values people thought they wanted: ‘progress’, ‘choice’, ‘tolerance’, ‘fairness’, ‘hope’, ‘change’. The problem was that these words had been so altered over the decades they bore no resemblance to their original meanings. The socialist can of beans had stood so high on the shelf for so long and had been described in glowing terms for so long the public assumed it actually contained beans.
The disappointment the public experienced with President Obama is exactly the same feeling every population feels when it actually finds out what’s in the can. The Venezuelans, Cubans, Cambodians, Red Chinese, North Koreans: the idealistic Communist apostates who figured out the contents past the packaging — their feelings were identical. When George Orwell’s 1984 was finally sold openly in the former Eastern Bloc people asked, “how did he know?”.
It is a mistake to think the current troubles are due to some personal defect in the President’s character; that by un-electing this particular individual that all will be well. Hardly. President Obama is but the most perfectly developed example of the carnivorous flowers than have bloomed all around us; that cover every institution; run rampant through the corridors of organized religion; whose spores lie dormant — let us face it — even in ourselves. Like Nazism, Communism is as Western as pate de fois gras.
Ironically, we may ultimately find ourselves grateful to the President. He has allowed us that “package opening moment” in circumstances that still allow the population to reject the contents of the box, albeit with great difficulty. Had he been a better dissimulator or less able to control his inner feelings — the Great Salesman to Mao’s Great Helmsman — then we might have avoided looking at ourselves in the mirror a little longer. As it is, we already half-want what is on offer and may buy it yet.
Mao?
More Mao.
Egghead speaks of his fear of being sent to Coventry by the other Eggheads, aka “the global academic community,”.
…-
“Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent”
““If we don’t change our ways, we will be excluded from the global academic community,” said Zhang Ming, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.””
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?_r=3&hp
The radical ties are apparently more recent as well. From American Thinker,October 08, 2008:
Archives prove Obama was a New Party member (updated)
Thomas Lifson
“Another piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama has been revealed, greatly strengthening the picture of a man groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the land.
The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within. The party only lasted until 1998, when its strategy of “fusion” failed to withstand a Supreme Court ruling. But dissolving the party didn’t stop the membership, including Barack Obama, from continuing to move the Democrats leftward with spectacular success.”
Victor Davis Hanson wrote a nice article about how the Chosen One bungled his political majority, refer to:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/248962/anatomy-obama-meltdown-victor-davis-hanson
Here’s the main quote from Hanson’s article:
“As in all Greek tragedies, we the audience can see what might have happened had Obama avoided hubris and its attendant nemesis: If, from the get-go, he had focused on jobs; avoided talking about tax hikes; postponed health care; controlled spending; worried about rising deficits; avoided the “them vs. us” rhetoric; and stayed Olympian and aloof when polarizing local controversies grabbed the cable TV headlines.”
There it is: Had Obama not been seduced by his own Left Wing ideology and gone in slow, he could have achieved the liberal dream of remaking America into a European style socialist state. However Obama’s error was probably unavoidable. Obama is a moonbat so by definition he’s going to be stuck-on-stupid like a moonbat. Perhaps this is the root reason why eventually socialists always fail.
The most difficult thing, I think, is getting hold of the right understanding of Obama. Wretchard, in my view, takes a too ironic and benign view of Obama in this post. Here are some harder angles:
1. Obama is extremely dangerous. He is a revolutionary narcissist who sees people as statistics. People are an abstraction to him. Obama is far more dangerous to the United States than Hugo Chavez is to Venezuela, for instance. It’s as if we elected a perpetual radicalized university sophomore as President who harbors eliminationist fantasies similar to those of the Khmer Rouge.
2. He is deep enough into his revolutionary fantasy that up is down for him. He’s not worried, for instance, about economic recovery except in the sense that he is worried that the economy will recover. He has, at every opportunity, rushed to throw another cement overcoat onto the economy when it showed signs of real recovery. The stimulus was an urban looting, a scavenging of what meat remained on the bones, passed around to Party hacks, and could never have stimulated the economy. It was directed only at the most unproductive elements of society, where there was no chance new wealth and real private sector jobs would be created.
3. His clever sidestep away from Jeremiah Wright has not only allowed him to evade the fact that he belonged to a viciously racist and black supremacist church for most of his adult life, but has also concealed the fact that he is more, not less, radical than Wright. In many respects, Wright isn’t serious about James Cone. Wright is a vicious racist, for sure, but he’s also a clown. For Wright, the insane gibbering of Cone is just a suitable eternal goad aimed at whites. Obama is not only serious about Cone, he sees himself as a world historical black messiah. And the one person who really understands this is Wright, who I believe actually fears Obama.
4. Obama is not just an old-fashioned cornpone liar like Bill Clinton. Everything about him is a lie. He climbed onto the national stage, at the ’04 Democratic convention, with a lie. His ‘One America’ speech at that convention about racial reconciliation was followed by four more years in the pews of Trinity United. It was as if a Klansman spoke of love at the Saturday picnic and burned crosses at the Klan rally that night. Except that there were four years in which to disabuse the public of the lie Obama was establishing. No wonder he thinks of himself as untouchable.
5. Obama has unmitigated malevolence toward the United States as a political society and a culture. It is the Main Enemy. In other words, Obama is essentially a KGB laboratory experiment, a character out of a novel that Orwell did not live to write. Frank Marshall Davis was but one of the lab technicians who worked on the project.
OBAMA TO SIDESTEP THE NEW CONGRESS
Oh, goody, goody. According to the LAT (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-staff-strategy-20101007,0,6919242.story), Obama will defy Congress by using executive actions:
An excerpt:
As President Obama remakes his senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile Congress.
I can’t wait.
I agree that the culture of death movement is much larger than Obama and his personality and in fact Obamas narcissism, inner rage and drive for revenge may be his downfall and lead to the beginning of the unraveling of the socialist tapestry or just its renewal.
You see Obamas mask slipping more frequently as his narcissism is bruised by criticism from within his OWN party.
Even some members of the Hollywood propaganda machine are starting to distance themselves and making fun of him eg.–Jon Stewart.
The one thing a narcissist fears and hates most is parody and ridicule.
Now that his enforcer and attack dog is running for mayor of Chicago Obama is vulnerable.
The extent of indoctrination going on in our schools is alarming and it starts very young under the pseudo religion of AGW, Gore has fallen out of his pulpit but the middle and high school teachers still enforce the faith.
This continues at our universities in all but the engineering and pure science departments.
You simply have no chance of tenure at a school like Stanford unless you mouth the socialist mantra–it has even infect the business and medical schools.
It will take more than a generation to get rid of the current tenured faculty and more clones are in the pipeline–parents need to be made more aware of how their kids are being indoctrinated at their expense.
It is likely that Obama will collapse in a Girardian drama–
“The only way to resolve the conflict is to blame an outsider—a foreigner, a cripple, a king, a woman.
The mob unites against the scapegoat; the victim is sacrificed; harmony is restored.
To cover up its terrible deed, an exonerating mythology develops.
In archaic societies, the scapegoat may even be deified.
Hence, Oedipus is blamed for the plague in Thebes, persecuted, and glorified at Colonus”.
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/julaug/features/girard.html
But the scapegoating does not change the fundamental beliefs of the mob, it just strengthens them —- until the next time and the next candidate is taken out–unless there is an overwhelming crisis to change the patterns and beliefs.
That is my argument for not putting the blame or focus solely upon Obamas flawed personality—-there are many like him waiting in the wings, ready to come on stage and take his place in front of the polystyrene temple–and the opera continues.
“The one thing a narcissist fears and hates most is parody and ridicule.” Victor
“The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Thomas More
“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn” Martin Luther
“Power to the People” right? Wasn’t that one of the greatest Communist lessons of our day?
My generation is the most obsessed and spoiled bunch of cretins in the entire world. We live off of our parents. We smoke pot. We vote without any judgment. Wretchard is right. We have spent decades at it. Obama is richly deserved.
54.
Great quotes–that is his Achilles heel
However
“there are many like him waiting in the wings, ready to come on stage and take his place in front of the polystyrene temple–and the opera continues”.
“By comparison to Stalin — Frank Davis Marshall’s idol — Hitler was a low rent clown”? Why do you claim that Stalin was Davis’s idol? Do you have any empirical evidence to support your claim, or are you misrepresenting speculation as fact?
According to “The New Red Negro” (cited by AIM’s Cliff Kincaid in his masterpiece of deception, “Obama’s Communist Mentor”):
“Frank Marshall Davis wrote poetry attacking Stalin by name, which appeared in his collections “I Am The American Negro” (1937) and “47th Street Poems” (1948)” (see page 48 of “The New Red Negro” at
http://books.google.com/books?id=kt5LMD-OnxoC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22the+new+red+negro%22+communist+davis&source=web&ots=B-HaNJA9HW&sig=ZiOltjxuI1QwdjCAvvEC0f4NnGQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA48,M1)
Frank Marshall Davis rejected collectivism. He was a capitalist. He owned two paper companies, and sold advertising specialties, in Hawaii. He joined the CPUSA during WWII, just as the United States joined the Soviet Union during WWII, not because they shared the delusion of a communist utopia. Each was a marriage of convenience. He joined because membership had its privileges, such as professional and social opportunities. He considered membership in the CPUSA as a “vehicle and tool” because, according to “The New Red Negro” (cited by AIM’s Cliff Kincaid as a source):
“ONLY the Communist left had any significant institutional impact on African-American writing during the 1930s and 1940s. This support was crucial as the institutions that had maintained the New Negro Renaissance faded. And for better or for worse, the leading CPUSA functionaries involved in “Negro work” took a direct interest in African-American cultural production in a manner that was unusual, if not unique.”
Vilifying a writer for continuing to publish in CPUSA-supported publications, when they provided his only significant institutional support, is completely unfair. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Frank Marshall Davis all took advantage of this institutional support.
Further, as The New Red Negro makes clear, there was no monolithic Stalinist doctrine within the CPUSA: “This is not to say that the impact of the Communist Left on African-American writers in the 1930′s and 1940′s flowed from absolute unity of ideology and practical application of that ideology. As mentioned before, the CPUSA itself, despite the claims of both the party leadership and its most ardent detractors, contained various, often conflicting tendencies. This conflicts appeared within top leadership, where Earl Browder and William Z. Foster and their supporters were frequently at odds. They also surfaced in the regional leadership of important districts that were occasionally, and in the case of southern California frequently, in opposition to the national leadership. Finally, at the rank-and-file level, when leadership debates broke out into the open (as they did in 1929, 1956-1946, and 1956), the were replayed in almost every CPUSA unit, often serving as the vehicle for the expression of a wide range of “unorthodox” political beliefs (ranging from social democratic to anarcho-syndicalist.”
“A huge proportion of African-American poets (and writers and intellectuals generally) remained engaged with the Communist Left and cultural institutions from at least the early 1930′s until at least the early 1950′s. With the partial exception of the period from the German invasion of the Soviet Union to the end of the Second World War, the CPUSA placed the issue of race and the fight against Jim Crow near the center of all its work.”
The bottom line is that communist ties were common for African-American poets and civil right activists during that period. Such ties did not mean that they internalized Marxist values, much less Stalinist values, even if they were aware of the distinction. To them, the CPUSA provided safe harbor from the ravages of Jim Crow America.
For those who question whether anyone would join the CPUSA without internalizing collectivist values, examples abound in more recent developments. Russians and Chinese joined their respective Communist parties because membership was important to professional advancement. Mikhail Gorbachev rejected these values in dismantling the Soviet Union. Leaders of the PRC’s capitalist boom are nevertheless pro forma Party members. According to CNBC’s “The People’s Republic of Profit,” the PRC now has over 100 billionaires – second only to the United States. Some Communist Party members are VERY successful capitalists!
Even today people join some organizations, such as churches and the YMCA, without internalizing their core values because membership has its advantages. I believe everyone will agree that many so-called “Christians” have not internalized Christian values. Some could argue that Stalinism perverted the core values of Marxism, just as the Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests perverted the core values of Christianity.
Misrepresentation of the Davis-Obama relationship is common throughout the blogosphere. As a fair-minded thinker, you may be interested in this cordial exchange between myself and Max Friedman, Cliff Kincaid’s researcher: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/05/31/judge-sonia-sotomayor-and-singing-sensation-susan-boyle/#comment-13017. Only the last few comments pertain to this situation. Please note that Max agreed to follow through with Cliff Kincaid regarding the specific misrepresentation I had identified in June 2009. Not a peep was heard from him since then.
“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Here is an article I wrote with information that Barack Obama knew Bill Ayers as early as about 1985.
http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=1554023238¬es_tab=app_2347471856#!/note.php?note_id=396735778944
Anybody: when did O’s mother leave Indonesia and what happened to her after that? I think I’ve read that after O returned to Hawaii he did not see his mother again until he was an adult, in New York.
Kaleokualoha 57: “many so-called “Christians” have not internalized Christian values. Some could argue that Stalinism perverted the core values of Marxism, just as the Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests perverted the core values of Christianity.”
True, some Christians are CINO’s – Christians in name only – but American Judeo-Christian values are the opposite of Marxist values. American Christians of the Jude-Christian stripe, i.e.: those like our Founding Fathers, value the individual above the State – because the individual is made in the image of God and the State isn’t. Judeo-Christian values are best expressed by the American Declaration of Independence, and thus never fully articulated and accepted by European Christians – and certainly not by Marxists. Judeo-Christian values clothe all individuals equally with sacred unalienable rights to life, liberty and the fruit of labor in creative pursuit of happiness. Like Medieval Monarchy, Marxism clothes the god-like State with those rights – which enables Marxist government to dominate the individual – to confiscate the fruit of his/her labor. Once Marxist government gains possession of the individual’s property it is in control – property is power.
“In the general course of human nature, a power over man’s substance amounts to a power over his will.” Alexander Hamilton
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time… In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… The proletariat (lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled poor) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital (property) from the bourgeoisie (laboring, tax-paying middle class), to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state (self-serving, tax-eating Marxist Government)… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx – Communist Manifesto
Once the Marxist state is empowered by ownership or control of the nation’s property it can make the necessary adjustments to law which make it possible to destroy human liberty and life – “for the good of the people.” While the Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests represents a rejection of Judeo-Christian values; Stalin, far from rejecting the core values of Marxism, was himself the culmination of Marxist values.
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” Karl Marx – Communist Manifesto
“Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem.” Joseph Stalin
George Orwell saw through the lies and propaganda of Marxism – he said it best:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power… Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men. How does one man assert his power over another… by making him suffer… Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing… We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back… Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling; everything will be dead inside you… You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” George Orwell – 1984
From Kengor,
The New Red Negro takes a different view, which as described above regarded the CPUSA as a “sanctuary from Jim Crow”. Believe which scholar you like. As for myself, I recently came back from a road trip and happened to meet some guys from the old days. Inevitably the discussion turned to less happy subjects, such as the assassination by the Party of people we mutually knew, like David Balondo of Zone One Tondo.
After all these years, now that nobody cared one way or the other, the question was put to someone who might know: Who fingered him and why was he killed? ‘Well’, the story went, ‘it was a misunderstanding. He had once been in the military, you see. And anyway it wasn’t the Party’. It wasn’t the Party even though his wife, who saw him shot, recognized the shooter. Sure he had been in the military — as a guerrilla fighting the Japanese during the war — like my uncles and half that generation. But there’s no use arguing.
That’s one of the rules about the Old Times. There’s nothing you can settle by argument now that you couldn’t settle by argument then. Just pass the gin, now that the time for the rough stuff is over, and remember your exclusive membership in a club that can laugh even when they should cry. You can’t pretend the old conflicts didn’t exist. But however that may be, it’s too late now.
People can believe what they like about the Party. That’s it’s some kind of haven for literary mavericks hiding from Jim Crow. That the Party never got funds from the KGB. I won’t object if they want to believe that; not even argue the point. All one can say is open the can of beans and you will find out what it contains.
The problem isn’t Barack Obama, per se, though I have no illusions about him. But you have to politically punch through him at the rottenness beyond. And no you can’t convince people from books or argument. They have to find out for themselves.
Jack Cashill has suggested that Barack Obama’s biological father was his White grandfather Stanley Dunham, who impregnated a Black prostitute he met through Frank Marshall Davis. To cover up the scandal, Dunham’s daughter pretended that the White-Black child was her own.
http://www.cashill.com/intellect_fraud/another_look.htm
Contrary to the fraudulent memes circulated throughout the blogosphere regarding Davis, University of Kansas Professor Edgar Tidwell, cited by AIM’s Cliff Kincaid as an expert on the life and writings of Davis, explains that THESE were the “radical” goals of Frank Marshall Davis:
(1) integration of armed forces
(2) integration of AFL and CIO
(3) fair wages and other benefits for workers
(4) general dismantling of all laws supporting racial segregation
(5) end to laws supporting anti-Semitism
(6) end to atomic warfare
(7) rights for soldiers in combat zones to vote in national elections
(8) support for Fair Employment Practices Act
(9) support for a broad United Nations (not just US and Great Britain
forming a world power union)
(10) end to restrictive covenants in real estate
You will likely find that these have mostly been transformed from “radical” goals of the 1940s into mainstream 21st century standards. Frank Marshall Davis was not out of line. He was just ahead of his time.
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” – Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)
52. Don Rodrigo,
We “birthers” will get the last laugh. The Obominatioon gets too frisky with Congress and they send the FBI and a team of Forensic Documents Examiners off to Hawaii. Then we see if that Document in the vault is a Certificate of Live Birth or a Registration of Birth. One make’s him a “natural born citizen” and eligible for the Oval office. The other makes him a citizen and eligible for ANY office except POTUS.
If he is not a “natural born citizen”, he gets impeached and most likely convicted. Any Senator voting against convection is in serious trouble next election. And Biden would make a fine POTUS.
So I doubt that the Usurper will jack up Congress much. He has known all along that he was a one term President. Something VHD didn’t account for in his article.
If you know going in that you are a one term POTUS, you have to move faster and with less regard for the blowback.
How Obama Thinks
The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting:
“When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that
“I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.”
In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause.
He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.
Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine.
Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done.
America today is governed by a ghost.
—
D’Souza says his theory explains many things about Obama’s behavior, including his early decision to insist that a bust of Winston Churchill, which had been presented to the United States and placed in the Oval Office, be removed and returned to the United Kingdom. That move drew widespread attention from the British media.
D’Souza recounts that Winston Churchill was prime minister of Britain during the Mau-Mau Rebellion in Kenya, which was then called British East Africa, during which President Obama’s father and grandfather were imprisoned.
“In other words,” says D’Souza, “Churchill was, from the anti-colonial point of view, a villain, a champion of the empire. And this, of course, would in a minute completely, explain Obama’s relentless hostility not only to Churchill, but to the British more generally. He’s always insulting the British.”
#53 You see Obamas mask slipping more frequently
Mr. Cool is now threatening “hand-to-hand combat” if the GOP makes significant gains in the midterm elections:
“Speaking on Michael Baisden’s syndicated radio show, Obama also made a direct appeal to African Americans about the importance of the November vote, even though he’s not on the ballot himself. . . .
Obama said a big voter turnout was vital, both to counter millions of dollars being spent by outside groups and the enthusiasm Republicans have demonstrated.
‘They are fired up. They are mobilized. They see an opportunity to take back the House, maybe take back the Senate,’ he said. ‘If they’re successful in doing that, they’ve already said they’re going to go back to the same policies that were in place during the Bush administration. That means that we are going to have just hand-to-hand combat up here on Capitol Hill.’”
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-base-20101008,0,3160644.story
“That means that we are going to have just hand-to-hand combat up here on Capitol Hill.”
To think that was just taken out of the syllabus of Army Basic Training?
I speculate that there is a significant connection from the Stanley Dunham family to the time when Frank Marshall Davis lived in Chicago, before he moved to Hawaii. Here is a good article to start with:
http://investigatingobama.blogspot.com/2009/09/hard-evidence-proof-that-obamas-hawaii.html
The article links Davis to the family of Vernon Jarrett (father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett) in Chicago in the 1940s. Both men were on the Board of Directors of the Communist-dominated Citizen’s Committee to Aid Packing House Workers.
Several months ago, I started to write an article to develop this link, but then I got distracted by other interests. I don’t have “Dreams of My Father” with me right now, so I will have to recall some of this from memory.
When Stanley Anne Dunham (the President’s mother) was a high-school student in Seattle, she was accepted for enrollment in the University of Chicago. Her parents insisted, however, that she move with them to Hawaii and so her desire to move to Chicago and study there was frustrated.
Why did she want to attend the University of Chicago? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that during her high-school years she worked one summer as a nanny for a family in Chicago. Unfortunately, I cannot find that text (I think it’s somewhere in “Dreams of My Father”).
Much later, when Barack Obama was a boy in Hawaii, he went on a trip to the US Mainland with his mother and grandmother Dunham. I think this trip happened soon after Barack Obama Sr. visited the Dunham family for a few weeks. The boy Barack thought that the Kenyan Barack was his father. Soon after the Kenyan Barack left, the boy Barack found a box in a closet, and in the box was his birth certificate with his own birth certificate and a newspaper article from an old issue of the University of Hawaii’s student newspaper. The article featured an interview with the Kenyan Barack when he was a university student who was close to graduation. The boy Barack was astounded that the Kenyan Barack did not mention anywhere in the interview that he had a White wife and mixed-race child, even though the interviewer’s questions focused on the Kenyan Barack’s impressions about race relations in the USA and particularly in Hawaii.
Anyway, soon after that, the boy Barack and his mother and grandmother (Grandfather Dunham stayed in Hawaii) traveled to the USA Mainland. I don’t remember the itinerary except that, oddly, the ultimate destination of the trip seemed to be Chicago. I speculate that the purpose of this trip was to show the boy Barack, who had figured out that the Kenyan Barack was not his real father, where he had really been born and to reveal to him the identity of his real biological father.
The mulatto prostitute idea is weak, really, weak.
First, what professional can point to the father?
How often do pros shakedown the jon over an unplanned birth?
How does the pro have the birth and not get it recorded?
Then give it up some time later… and have the State of Hawaii faked out by months on the birth?
Too many holes.
“University of Kansas Professor Edgar Tidwell, cited by AIM’s Cliff Kincaid as an expert on the life and writings of Davis”
So who you gonna believe? Another “expert” or the FBI?
It is possible for an “expert” to be correct and hundreds of loyal, dedicated, professionals to be wrong. It is bound to have happened before. Warren commission? Flight 800(or was that 700? so many conspiracies, so many numbers). Wacco? Jonestown?
“Occam’s Razor” suggests that Obama’s Hawaii COLB correctly reflects his parentage.
“So who you gonna believe? Another “expert” or the FBI”?
Are they mutually exclusive? Where do they contradict each other? Professor Tidwell has been accepted by both AIM and the Davis family as an expert.
“The first duty of a man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth.”
– Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
The CPUSA was under the direct control of Moscow. And you didn’t get in the Party without a careful inspection of your commitment to all things Soviet. Minor disagreements about doctrine were allowed or even encouraged. Until they weren’t. If you were in the Party you were a serious Communist, and it was serious business, worth your life if you turned on it. Howard Zinn, author of “America With All The Good Parts Left Out,” was also a member of the CPUSA, according to his recently released FBI file.
Kaleokualoha writes . . . well, he actually doesn’t write anything of his own. He cuts and pastes approved language, just as Frank did for CPUSA.
Whenever I see a post such as K’s, I google a phrase. You can see his text spewed all over the web by many posters.
Journolist for lefty bloggers. Paid for by someone, I guess.
Occam’s razor, indeed. K. wields that razor poorly.
Who’s getting all nervous about the Frank Davis talk, so nervous that the shock bloggers are out on patrol?
Maybe the problem isn’t that Barack Obama was once mentored by Frank Marshall Davis. The real difficulty is that in our own ways, all of us have sat at Communism’s feet.
Have we now? So, anyone who thinks well of FDR, who thinks well of social security, who thinks well of America’s participation in WWII, are thereby tainted (in a bad way) by Communism? I dunno. I don’t really feel I suffer the agony of de feet.
ooooowwwwwww
… the point being that I don’t care to cede to Communism anything, especially having done some reading on its historical and philosophical predecessors. But that’s just me.
You will find, Aardvark, that I am the original source of virtually everything I post around the blogosphere, including my own blog. When I have copied someone else, I usually credit the source.
Please provide examples of MY posts that were written by someone else. In the absence of such evidence, your claim may be dismissed as just another delusion, similar to the initial falsehood that Stalin was Davis’s idol. The challenge is ON!
Josh 75,
Social Security is an un-Constitutional Ponzi scheme – there are no “accounts” with what should be the life savings of people who have labored and paid Social Security taxes their entire adult lives. Communism (Marxist Government) loves such a scheme because it robs the “bourgeois” laboring middle class of their property – to be used by collectivist (Marxist) government to line their own pockets. Social Security needs to be divided into 50 pieces – one piece for each State – with corresponding reductions and increases in Federal and State taxes – with State tax-breaks for private opt-outs. If a State A perpetuates the same Ponzi scheme while State B sets up real retirement accounts, one can move from State A to State B. The entire New Deal was a Marx-inspired un-Constitutional bad deal. I don’t think well of FDR because I believe he was either a Marxist or a tool for Marxists.
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them… For a significant illustration of what has happened to words, of the double meaning that inhabits them, put in contrast what the New Deal means when it speaks of preserving the American system of free private enterprise and what American business means when it speaks of defending it. To the New Deal these words, the American system of free private enterprise, stand for a conquered province. To the businessman the same words stand for a world that is in danger and may have to be defended….You do not defend a world that is already lost. When was it lost? That you cannot say precisely. It is a point for the revolutionary historian to ponder. We know only that it was surrendered peacefully, without a struggle, almost unawares. There was no day, no hour, no celebration of the event; and yet definitely, the ultimate power of initiative did pass from the hands of private enterprise to government. There it is and there it will remain until, if ever, it shall be reconquered. Certainly government will never surrender without a struggle.” Garet Garrett
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html
We prosecuted just war against the Nazis and Imperial Japanese (my dad was in the Pacific War), but the Soviet Union was an equal or greater force for liberty-destroying, mass-murdering totalitarian evil.
Also, if you were a member of the CPUSA while Stalin was alive you were ipso facto a Stalinist. Saying otherwise is like trying to insist that while you were a Nazi you were not a Hitlerist. Again, the CPUSA was directly controlled by Moscow.
Additionally, the CPUSA often promoted Communism as being “as American as apple pie,” and of course its members professed their love of country. What a wonderful sentiment, if only they hadn’t been effective Soviet agents.
Kaleokualoha 71: ““Occam’s Razor” suggests that Obama’s Hawaii COLB correctly reflects his parentage.”
Occam’s Razor: “When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”
http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/occam.html
Theory one is that Obama’s Hawaii COLB incorrectly relfects his parentage while theory two is that Obama’s Hawaii COLB correctly relfects his parentage – these are two competing theories that make opposite predictions. If two competing theories make opposite predictions Occam’s Razor cannot be truthfully and rationally invoked – only irrationally invoked.
Borrowing the title a previous thread–
As far as Obama is concerned–The Past is Prologue
I am concerned about that “can of beans”–lets open it up and show the presence of botulism in the can, the rotten core.
The scam is now embedded in K-12 and Universities–our kids are put through a less violent version of Maoist indoctrination camps -that was Ayers etc plan.
We need to immunize our kids, as the other side is trying to turn our kids against us through such propaganda.
Hollywood is part of the scam–remember the movie American Beauty ?– it was vicious attack on American values.
When I consulted to studio heads they told me how Hollywood is driven 80% by revenge and repeated the old observation that in Hollywood ” if you scratch the tinsel– you find the real tinsel underneath”
It is a profoundly cynical culture and it is framing ” the can of beans” as the shining city on a hill.
Blert @ 37 said:
“Stalin WAS the man who started WWII via the August 23rd Pact.”
I agree with your analysis that Stalin enabled Hitler’s invasion of Poland and subsequent invasion of Western Europe. I believe it was Stalin’s ultimate objective to have France, England and Germany bleed each other white and then the Soviet Union would waltz in and establish a communist empire encompassing both Europe and Asia. However Stalin did not anticipate that Hitler would turn his back on England and launch Operation Barbarossa. Not anticipating this was supremely stupid of Stalin since it was clear that Hitler hated communists almost as much as he hated the Jews. I disagree with the statement that “Stalin was the man who started WWII”. Obviously Hitler started WWII. Hitler’s whole political dynamic required that he initiate and continue with military aggression after he had reconstructed the German military machine. The moment Germany ceased to be on a military footing was when the German people would have realized their error with the Nazis and try to remove them from power. Hitler could remain in power only by presenting the German people with one military crisis followed by another. For this reason, Hitler was obligated to eventually attack the Soviet Union even though doing so was an act of national suicide. Again, Stalin was incredibly stupid not to have anticipated this and prepare for it. However Stalin’s stupidity paled in comparison to Hitler’s. Hitler actually turned his back on England which at the time was the world’s greatest naval power. Later Hitler declared war against the United States after we declared war against Japan. It amazes me that Hitler was so stupid.
Here we go, folks. Usually on the Internet what we’re used to dealing with is frothing trolls. Now we got us a real rare bird. Kale’s trending toward either an amazingly useful idiot or a quite formidable operator in deception. I suppose time will tell.
Frank Marshall Davis left for Hawaii under guidance from Paul Robeson, a Soviet agent and recipient of the STALIN Peace Prize. Davis winds up in Hawaii publishing under an umbrella of leftist groups controlled by the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). The ILWU, a part of the STALINist Perlo Group led by Victor Perlo. Perlo was a man who would later decry Mikael Gorbachev for betraying STALINism. The ILWU in Hawaii published writings of Perlo, Saul Alinsky, and Frank Marshall Davis among others. One of the first columns published by Davis was, in fact, entitled, “How to Become a Communist.”
Yet, Kale would have us believe that Davis was an accidental communist at best. Despite his proximity to STALIN Peace Prize winners and a slew of STALINist operatives pegged by the Verona project and verified by the KGB files which would become available after the USSR went Tango Uniform. No, Kale’s suggested that Davis was actually, get this, a capitalist!
Sorry, Kale, that dog don’t hunt. But, thank you for coming by and bothering to post. It’s not everyday that someone comes along and reminds me so thoroughly of the conditions I knew in the 1970′s!
“Stalinist: an advocate or supporter of Stalin or Stalinism” – http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stalinist
Frank Marshall Davis neither advocated nor supported Stalin or Stalinism. He never even advocated communism. On the contrary, he even criticized Stalin IN WRITING!! By your creative definition:
1. Would all CPUSA members have automatically become “Kruschevists” when Kruschev took over?
2. How about CPUSA members who followed Mao, not Stalin, in the late 1940′s? Were they still “Stalinists”?
3. How about avowed (not presumptive) Stalinists when Stalin died? Were they still “Stalinists”?
4. How about people who joined the CPUSA for other reasons, like people join churches for other reasons? Just as a church member who does not accept Christ as his savior is hardly a Christian, a CPUSA member who did not accept Stalin is hardly a Stalinist.
How about following the standardized definition of “Stalinist, rather than creating your own?
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” – Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)
Kaleokualoha:
Langston Hughes was published by Knopf as early as 1925. While his poem Let America be America Again was distributed by the Iternational Workers’ Order, a Communist Front organization, it was originally published in Esquire. Works by Richard Wright were first published by Harper in 1938.To the best of my knowledge, neither Harper nor Knopf nor Esquire were Communist organizations. To claim that black writers could obtain “significant institutional support” only in Communist publications- and being published is the best criteria for “significant institutional support” – is an outright canard.
Richard Wright recounted his experience with Communism in The God that Failed, one that does not agree with the above interpretation.
As the National Review article quotes Frank Marshall Davis writing pro-Communist propaganda in 1950, the above reason for joining the CPUSA doesn’t hold water. Only a true believer would be writing that stuff in 1950. It was no marriage of convenience if he were writing such junk in 1950.
As I grew up with people who had fled Communism, and could observe the trauma it had caused, I have no sympathy for those who had joined the Party, nor for supporters who hadn’t joined.
Storm-Rider wrote “Occam’s Razor: “When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”
I stand corrected. “The principle is popularly interpreted as “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” – Wikipedia
“Kaleokualoha” is an interesting phenomenon.
Believe what you like, but Barak Obama is an agent of a foreign power, witting or unwitting. Given the deception and manipulation of which Leninists are first and foremost masters, the latter (unwitting) is entirely plausible. What better plan than to have a sleeper who doesn’t realize he’s asleep, and so poses no risk that he will wake up? I cannot prove it to the standards of American jurisprudential evidentiary standards. But spend enough time in the defector literature, the congressional testimony since Elizabeth Bentley, FBI files of Ayers and whomever – you might ask yourself, when looking back over the list of known Obama patrons, gee: that’s an amazingly connected bunch of communists and an amazingly meteoric, convenient rise for Barry O! How’d that happen, now?
He will sleepwalk. The path shall be opened before him. He will dream. America will dream. America will sleepwalk.
Cowboy…
Mark Kaleokualoha Davis is Frank Marshall Davis’ son.
ie the Resident’s half-brother.
Cowboy wrote “Kale would have us believe that Davis was an accidental communist at best.”
Not really. He INTENTIONALLY associated with communists because of the support communists gave to the civil rights struggle. He said he would make a pact with the Devil himself if it would help fight Jim Crow!
Gringo: I interpret “institutional support” as being published in literary journals, which are published by “institutions.” I believe that mainstream literary journals of that period would not publish black authors, whereas CPUSA journals did. But I recommend you query the writer of “The New Red Negro” for clarification.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
Holy crap, Kale, are you really Frank Marshall Davis’ son?
We may never know who was Obamas father, unless he does a public DNA test—it really does not matter- except for him and his children–we DO know who his mother was however.
Obamas mother died in her very early 50s from an aggressive systemic cancer. 5 year Survival rates for that form of cancer have not improved in the last 20 years.
His claimed father died from alcoholism in his very early 50s.
Obama has been smoking heavily for 35 years—as is his right.
He must realize that time is running out for him- fast- with that genetic history.
Obama is largely irrelevant in the larger war against the culture of death.
Lets open that ” can of beans” in public–with hazmat suits.
There was no such thing as joining the CPUSA “for other reasons.” That’s codswallop. It wasn’t like going down to the Methodist Church and registering as a parishoner because you wanted to meet people or you were wanted to work at the local bank and the bank president was a Methodist.
If you joined the CPUSA you were going to work for the Soviets; your commitment to Soviet Communism had to be demonstrable. It wasn’t a social organization. People without the necessary commitment became fellow travelers or members of various front organizations. The Party apparatus was for the deadly serious.
If you were a member of the CPUSA while Stalin was alive you were a Stalinist and that means that the Party was his instrument. After he died you remained a Stalinist as long as Stalin remained the great light of Communism. When Stalin was denounced at a Party Congress in the mid-50s and some of his crimes were exposed it was a deep trauma for the true believers.
Also, you didn’t advocate anything that Moscow didn’t want you to advocate, and if you expressed a Maoist sentiment it was because you were allowed to express it. Party discipline was probably the single most important thing, and all doctrinal variations were allowances made by the Party, until they weren’t.
COWBOY WROTE: “Kale’s trending toward either an amazingly useful idiot or a quite formidable operator in deception. I suppose time will tell.”
RESPONSE: Why would I have to be one of your two choices? Why can’t you believe that I am honestly attempting to refute misrepresentation of my father? The previously posted dialogue with AIM researcher Max Friedman ( http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/05/31/judge-sonia-sotomayor-and-singing-sensation-susan-boyle/#comment-13017) demonstrates AIM’s inability to substantiate its claims against my father.
COWBOY WROTE: “One of the first columns published by Davis was, in fact, entitled, “How to Become a Communist.”
RESPONSE: This is what happens when you take things out of context (half-truth). What the title REALLY means (from his column):
“See how easy it is to become a Communist? The foolproof method for getting labeled is to ask for a bigger share in the good things, to put in a plea for a little meat instead of dry bones.”
Here is the start of the referenced column:
[QUOTE]
Apparently I have greater respect for the intelligence of the people of Hawaii than do certain local business interests I do not believe there are as many suckers in the Territory as the Hawaii Citizens’ Committee seems to think.
I refer specifically to the spot radio announcements on Communism, the glorified, super-duper Red-baiting that has been polluting the ether waves, the transcriptions based on the program “Communism USA” and on unsubstantiated reports made by the notorious Tenney committee of California.
This has occurred simply because the stevedores have dared to ask for an hourly wage just 10 cents below that paid by the same companies on the West Coast.
Even though the cost of living is at least 25 per cent higher here than in the major cities of the Mainland, the waterfront workers haven’t asked for 25 per cent more wages than are paid on the West Coast. They haven’t even asked for the same scale. They will settle for 10 cents an hour less and since the employers have said no, they’re willing to accept the decision of a board of arbitration.
But this simple and fundamental request for higher wages is looked upon with holy horror It is a “plot to wreck island economy.” It has come about “on orders from Moscow.” For this reasonable proposal of better pay, the leaders of the ILWU are “agents of a foreign power.” The stevedore, who wants enough money to eat regularly, have sufficient clothes and a decent roof above his head is a “dupe” who “has been tricked by the Communist leadership of the union.”
What the Hawaii Citizens’ Committee and its backers have said, in effect, is this.
“We don’t care if the cost of living is higher here than on the Mainland. We don’t care if arbitration is the accepted method of settling wage disputes elsewhere in America We don’t care that our wage offer would give the stevedores 30 cents, an hour less than we pay for the same kind of work on the West Coast.
“We want you to make only enough pay to keep working and reproduce others who will carry on as stevedores. If you want anything better, then you and your leaders are Communists and we shall use our rich resources to so inform the Territory and try to bust your union.”
See how easy it is to become a Communist? The foolproof method for getting labeled is to ask for a bigger share in the good things, to put in a plea for a little meat instead of dry bones.
[END QUOTE (See http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/HonoluluRecord1/frankblog1949.html)
In perspective, was the position taken by Davis (narrowing the stevadore wage disparity between local workers and those on the West Coast, when Hawaiian cost of living was 25% higher) unreasonable? This may epitomize Davis’s “radicalism”!
Thanks for pointing this out!
“The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
– H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
COWBOY: Yes, I am the son of Frank Marshall Davis. Please read my website blog, or google “Kaleokualoha.” But my identity does not affect the veracity of my remarks, only my motivation.
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
– Bible, John 8:32
American Marxists who broke with the Soviet line in the 1930s because of Stalin but who remained committed Marxists were denounced and marginalized as right-wingers. This was typical of the way that the CPUSA and all of the many Soviet front organizations treated any sort of unapproved dissent. The main group of intellectuals who became anti-Stalinists were essentially the Partisan Review crowd. There was brief consternation among some true believers during the era of the Nazi-Soviet pact, since “fascism” had become the main enemy of Communism, per Stalin, who correctly perceived Mussolini and Hitler as socialist competitors. But things snapped back to normal after the Nazis invaded the USSR. Fellow travelers and members of the front organizations were extensions of the network, but the muscle was in the CPUSA because it was the living hand of Moscow in the U.S.
Kaleokualoha:
Gringo: I interpret “institutional support” as being published in literary journals, which are published by “institutions.”
I would agree that a literary journal is an institution. Publishing houses such as Harper and Knopf are institutions of decidedly greater substance than some penny-ante literary journal. And most literary journals ARE penny-ante. In the following listing of leading literary journals,it appears that the one with greatest circulation is Granta, at 50,000-80,000. Most are around 10,000-15,000. Penny-ante. It’s of much greater import for an author to be published in a book than in an article in a literary journal Both Langston Hughes and Richard Wright had books to their credit, sans the Reds.
http://www.everywritersresource.com/topliterarymagazines.html
It’s interesting to note that the son of Alger Hiss still protests his father’s innocence in addition to protesting that he was not a Soviet agent, despite all the evidence. Hiss himself never admitted to it.
I forget whether the Rosenberg children still protest their parents’ innocence as well.
As for wanting to join with the Communists to fight for civil rights, that didn’t get you a ticket into the Party. If the Party set you up, as a member, on that front, then you were a Party man first. There were front organizations for people who just wanted to fight for some cause the Party wanted to meld with and control.
Kaleokualoha 92: “In perspective, was the position taken by Davis (narrowing the stevadore wage disparity between local workers and those on the West Coast, when Hawaiian cost of living was 25% higher) unreasonable?”
The position is more than unreasonable; it is immoral, because government-forced equal property outcome requires government to enforce unequal rights to property.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Thomas Jefferson
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0100.htm
Tyranny is obstructed action (suppression of liberty) according to someone else’s will within limits drawn around us by the unequal (superior) rights of others. Equal outcome requires the tyranny, for example, of forced suppression of property rights for some, and corresponding enhancement of property rights for others – through unequal tax law – in order to reduce the gap which naturally occurs – under equal rights – between rich and poor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw&feature=player_embedded
http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm
Government which forces equal property outcome must do so through “despotic inroads on the rights of property” – i.e.: government expropriation of middle class labored-for property which is “re-distributed” – first to themselves – and then to the so-called proletariat class in return for votes. Marxists call such economic social engineering “Social Equity” – Orwellian Newspeak for unequal property rights and unequal tax law – or it is called “Social Justice” – Orwellian Newspeak for the social injustice of unequal rights to labored-for property. Karl Marx understood that the tyranny of equal outcome required the tyranny of unequal rights – together the labor-challenged, tax-eating Marxist and proletariat classes have superior rights to property compared to the laboring, tax-paying middle class.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
“The proletariat [non-disabled poor] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist ruling class]…. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic [unequal] inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Thus, tyranny is obstructed action according to someone else’s will within limits drawn around us by the superior rights and equal outcome of others.
Kale, I asked if you were Frank Marshall Davis’ son not because I sought a way to question your veracity. I asked because if you really were his son it affects how I will deal with you. I will not deal with you regarding Frank Marshall Davis if you are his son. I’m not going to get in between that father-son dynamic. That’s a place I don’t belong, at all. I sincerely hope, and I have no reason to belive otherwise, that your father was a good dad who did you well. I hope that you love him and cherish his memory, and that he loved you as dearly as every father ought to love his son. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt on that point, too. It’s not easy being a father under any circumstances.
Peace be with you.
Kaleokualoha 92: “In perspective, was the position taken by Davis (narrowing the stevadore wage disparity between local workers and those on the West Coast, when Hawaiian cost of living was 25% higher) unreasonable?”
The position is more than unreasonable; it is immoral, because government-forced equal property outcome requires government to enforce unequal rights to property.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Thomas Jefferson
Tyranny is obstructed action (suppression of liberty) according to someone else’s will (Marxist Government) within limits drawn around us by the unequal (superior) rights of others. Equal outcome requires the tyranny, for example, of forced suppression of property rights for some, and corresponding enhancement of property rights for others – through unequal tax law – in order to reduce the gap which naturally occurs – under equal rights – between rich and poor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw&feature=player_embedded
http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm
Government which forces equal property outcome must do so through “despotic inroads on the rights of property” – i.e.: government expropriation of middle class labored-for property which is “re-distributed” – first to themselves – and then to the so-called proletariat class in return for votes. Marxists call such economic social engineering “Social Equity” – Orwellian Newspeak for unequal property rights and unequal tax law – or it is called “Social Justice” – Orwellian Newspeak for the social injustice of unequal rights to labored-for property. Karl Marx understood that the tyranny of equal outcome required the tyranny of unequal rights – together the labor-challenged, tax-eating Marxist and proletariat classes have superior rights to property compared to the laboring, tax-paying middle class.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
“The proletariat [non-disabled poor] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist ruling class]…. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic [unequal] inroads on the rights of property.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Thus, tyranny is obstructed action according to someone else’s will within limits drawn around us by the superior rights and equal outcome of others.
Thanks for the kind words, Cowboy. Namaste.
93. Kaleokualoha
How do you know that you are, in fact, Franks son?
In that milieu, at that time, in that place, paternity was like the accidental tourist.
You may be storming an empty castle.
The KGB had a very sophisticated plan to undermine Western Christian Civilization –through fear, greed, fame and power.
It was the best PSYWAR in history.
Even people like Chris Hitchens- who claim to have escaped from his 25yrs as a Trotskyist–still promotes the core values of the same movement.
The culture of death goes back a long way- visit the Aztec sites and their 20th century equivalents.
It is not PC to talk about evil these days–so we end up doing the devils work with best of intentions.
Friedrich August Hayek and Robert Conquest have documented the horror from personal experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
But the band plays on.
I’m going to start printing a T-shirt that has the classic headshots of Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Che. Picture a cover of a Beatles album. The shirts will be red and the slogan in yellow will say “RED = MILLIONS DEAD! WANT TO JOIN THE PARTY?”
I’m open for suggestion on the slogan
Lord, what a thankless task, being the son of a Communist and trying to scrub that mark every day of your life.
Further up the thread K-fresh posits a lits of “radical” goals of FM Davis. The quotes are his, as if these goals were not at all radical. Indeed, he calls them “mainstream.” A few have mellowed over the years, but they were all quite radical at the time, many are still, and most are directly in line with Soviet disinformation efforts.
(1) integration of armed forces — deliberate attempt to foment racial animosity. Classic Communist agitprop which continues to this day.
(2) integration of AFL and CIO — hotbeds of Communism.
(3) fair wages and other benefits for workers — standard ruse of Communists. Commie boilerplate.
(4) general dismantling of all laws supporting racial segregation — See #1. The Civil Rights movement was loaded with Communists.
(5) end to laws supporting anti-Semitism — An odd one in the scheme of things, but the relationships of Jews to Communism has long been weirdly troubled.
(6) end to atomic warfare — aka disarming the United States. Old Commie “peacenik” playbook. Blatant Commie tell, especially in the 40s and 50s.
(7) rights for soldiers in combat zones to vote in national elections — designed to help overthrow the ruling classes by allowing angry, disgruntled soliders to vote (stems from WW1 mentality)
(8) support for Fair Employment Practices Act — usual labor bilge. Commie boilerplate.
(9) support for a broad United Nations (not just US and Great Britain
forming a world power union) — blatant Commie tell.
(10) end to restrictive covenants in real estate — designed to destroy a significant legal limit on state power. Commie tell.
Yeah, he sure wasn’t a Communist based on THIS list.
James Edward Smethurst, author of “The New Red Negro,” cited above, is an associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In other words, he’s an English professor in a black studies department. And one thing we know about English professors is that they are never sympathetic to Left wing causes and would never dream of whitewashing someone’s Communist affiliations. Our universities, as we know, are models of even-handedness and probity.
/sarc off. My general view on things is that if an English professor says something related to politics, there’s a 98% chance it’s wrong.
76. Kaleokualoha writes: “You will find, Aardvark, that I am the original source of virtually everything I post around the blogosphere, including my own blog. When I have copied someone else, I usually credit the source.”
My apologies. You are correct. I googled but did not visit the sites; having sampled some of them, I acknowledge that your words are your own, posted in numerous places.
Eggplant…
You’ve raise some very interesting points.
My take is that Hitler had Germany in his hands as strongly as Kim runs his family shop.
Interestingly enough Hitler, as a despot, kept running for office. THAT was novel. Goebbels constantly surveyed the mood of the man on the street for him. While his popularity peaked in 1940, after the fall of France, Hitler maintained immense reservoirs of trust and faith even after astounding reverses. So, there was absolutely no prospect of the German nation ever turning against him.
Repeating my earlier comment that the players kept analyzing EVERYTHING in the memory of WWI…
Stalin’s opinion of the Tsar was that he had PROVOKED the Kaiser in 1914 by mobilizing. That aspect of WWI history is the orthodox view.
Hence, in 1941 Stalin forbid ANY action that, in his eyes, would inflame Hitler. By this time the whole world realized that the Wehrmacht was more than any one nation could handle. Hitler could now draw upon virtually the entire war product of the European West. Germany+ France+ Poland brought back ugly scary memories of Napoleon.
Further, Hitler engaged in a fantastically effective deception gambit. He held back his panzers until the last days, all the while feeding dis-information to Stavka: that his posturing at the frontier was SOLELY to extract a better negotiating position WRT trade. He wanted more oil, tungsten, nickel, etc.
Naturally enough, Hitler’s trade delegation made all of the right noises. Consequently, Stalin was shipping Hitler more oil in June 41 than at any other time. Trains were transferring bulk crude, with German and Russian working side by side even as the artillery opened up!
The Pact specified that Russia and Germany were BOTH to attack at the same time: September 1st. Clever Stalin delayed two weeks so that Germany did all of the work and took all of the blame. Stalin then lied to Hitler with a shtick about having difficulties mobilizing his armies. That particular BS was to cost Russia dearly in less than two years. Hitler, after looking at Finland and Poland definitely believed the Soviet Army was that screwed up. The first months of Barbarossa made his assumption look good to his generals, too.
Until Stalin gave him the green light, even Hitler was paralyzed. The memory of WWI was so strong it was Hitler who cautioned against a two front war – and that he’d have none of it!
After the Battle of Britain, Hitler concluded that Britain represented no front and no threat. Based upon RAF actions to date, who could dispute that? Her navy was useless against his budding empire. His Luftwaffe punished it any time it got close to land. That deep oceanic trade was lost to him was something he couldn’t affect. If Barbarossa panned out, Britain would have to cave. He’d have solved all of his resource needs without crossing any waves.
Hitler declared war on the US as a direct result of three nations running deception operations on him.
America deliberately leaked Rainbow 5, an extremely classified internal study detailing just how unprepared the nation was to enter the European conflict should the need arise. It also detailed how pessimistic the War Department and the Navy Department were WRT British prospects — hence the study. In Rainbow 5 the bleak situation of the USAAF was front and center, the lead held by the Luftwaffe considered chasmic. Taken all in all, America wouldn’t be able to respond effectively for a year and a half at best more likely three years. The leak was followed by an intense FBI hunt to find the traitor. Hoover wound down the search once he found the leaker: Hap Arnold’s personal aide! Obviously, the leaker was FDR, himself.
The wartime reality was that it took only FIVE MONTHS to reach the levels of war output that Rainbow 5 projected for eighteen months! And that time-line was considered wildly optimistic when the survey was taken.
As for Russia, Stalin delayed and delayed the Moscow counter-attack. Events forced his hand. It proved essential to begin selected counter-attacks before Japan struck. These counter-moves were limited to just holding the Germans in place and some minor push-back. Stalin, like FDR, was projecting weakness so that the egomaniac would over-commit: declare upon America after any Japanese success.
( The IJN was a week late because of slow code book distribution. She was to have really attacked November 30 Hawaiian time. The code change was supposed to have occurred from November 30 to December 1 Tokyo time.)
Britain was the third deceiver. Churchill did all that he could to bait the Japanese into attacking the US. Only much later did he find out that FDR and the USN were running the same game. ( This cross discovery became the basis for Echelon. See the defeat of the U-boat in Spring of 43 after Echelon scales up.) Britain also held off any meaningful RAF strikes against Germany. Churchill did everything in his power to convince Hitler that Britain was just twisting in the wind and that IF Hitler prevailed against Stalin then he’d be run from office and Britain would sue for terms. All of these teasers were fed via dis-information methods later used to blind Hitler to Overlord.
THAT’S how Hitler was teased into over estimating his hand. The minute he declared war against America — his only war declaration ever — Stalin ramped up the Moscow counter-attack to full power. OKH fell into despair. At a stroke, the entire war was lost. He’d misread everything.
Incredibly, considering our open society, the entire General Staff fantastically underestimated our industrial power and the significance of being the worlds largest oil producer, steel producer, automotive producer, food exporter, etc.
What a pack of fools.
Following up my #68
Barack Obama and his mother and grandmother traveled from Hawaii to the US Mainland in the summer of 1972, before his 11th birthday (before August 4, 1972). Grandfather Stanley Dunham stayed in Hawaii.
The Kenyan Barack Obama had visited the Dunham family in Hawaii during the previous winter.
The boy, mother and grandmother traveled by bus. The book Dreams From My Father names five stops on this trip — Seattle, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park and Chicago. The stop in Chicago lasted three days, in a motel in Chicago’s South Loop. Obama remembers that he saw some shrunken heads on display in Field Museum in Chicago.
During that summer, the mother Stanley Ann Dunham was 30 years old. She had been married to an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro since 1965 and had a daughter with him in August 1970. She took the daughter and left Soetoro in 1972, apparently right before this bus trip.
It seems odd that Stanley Ann Dunham would leave her two-year-old daughter in Hawaii (with the grandfather?) in order to take this long bus trip on the Mainland. For some reason, however, it was more important for her to go on this trip with her own mother and with her son.
For some reason, she was drawn to Chicago. When she had been a high-school student, she obtained an enrollment in the University of Chicago, and when her parents took her to Hawaii instead, she was very angry. There is some significant link connecting her and Chicago and her son that is mysterious.
Peterike @ 102
Hotspur is STILL trying to outlaw black powder. How’s that going?
A very well stated post, BTW.
I’m late to this party, but can’t think of a more apt place to put this.
It seems to me that Wretchard’s point of self deception in voting for Obama is an instance of what Lee Harris refers to as fantasy ideology (mentioned here recently when discussing Al Qaeda:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/09/29/all-tied-together/
and http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/06/30/in-thrall-to-the-bargain/), which Harris distinguishes from politics.
Harris says that politics can be about the other, and about achieving political ends, whereas fantasy ideology is about transformation of self–and when people, individuals, or groups participate in fantasy ideology in the political realm rather than participate in politics, they can often move against one’s own supposed political ends.
The en masse group delusion that took place to believe in Hope and Change was fantasy ideology–the voters wanted to transform who they saw themselves as, and ignored the realistic political consequences of that choice. Better to be the kind of person who was on this bandwagon–a post-racial post-national citizen of the world who counts one’s carbon credits and takes the organic milk carton to the redemption center.
Communists have understood fantasy ideology quite well for the last 90 years. They have understood how to use fantasy ideology in place of politics–how to get people to vote for fantasy ideologies that were in reality anathema to what they wanted. The communists have always understood how to create fantasy ideologies, how to feed them, how to serve them up to people to make people feel satisfied.
Those of us who worry about republics and democracy lost that forest for the trees, never really comprehending why people would make foolish *political choices* that were self defeating, because we didn’t accept the fantasy ideology.
The Communists have known for almost a century that you can’t fight fantasy ideology with politics, anymore than a person can convince their stalker that they don’t really love them as they stand their bickering with them. So, how can you fight a fantasy ideology? How do we inoculate against them?
The Conquest books are so important, and yet they show over and over again that no one WANTED to believe how evil it was–even when they weren’t True Believers! It was just a level of denial that it would happen to their family, their livelihood. No amount of dead would be enough truth to them.
Is this level of denial just in some of our genetic makeup? Has it just been selected for, over and over again, when the Communists murdered everyone who told the truth?
Are we really looking in the mirror now? If we glide past how Obama got elected and go straight to the Tea Party, we only hit the mark on the spending. But the culture of death is more than too high a credit limit.
The Conquest books are so important, and yet they show over and over again that no one WANTED to believe how evil it was–even when they weren’t True Believers! It was just a level of denial that it would happen to their family, their livelihood. No amount of dead would be enough truth to them.
It’s this inability to accept our part in the error — to accept the fact of the mistake — that has been the major stumbling block since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The words of the Act of Contrition start with the acceptance of error, with an act of honesty; not as a preliminary to witch-hunting — unless we are preparing to witch-hunt ourselves — but as a necessary part of healing.
As human beings, as people who have acted in history, we are incapable of perfection. All of us have believed foolish things; pursued empty causes; clung to noxious ideas. No one is exempt. But it will never do, even after the Gulags, the Year Zeros, the Road of Bones, the Ukranian Famine, Katyn Wood, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Proletarian Cultural revolutions, the Operation Garlics and the sundry hundred other lesser known purges and massacres to say, “the Communist Party of the USA was really a well meaning organization that just wanted to shelter writers from Jim Crow”. That would only repeat the lie, continue the falsehood, when it is precisely falsehood that we want to drive from our lives.
That is just like reading Robert Conquest’s book and saying, “Right. That was entertaining. Now off to the Party meeting. Off to convince yet another generation of kids to believe in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung thought because we are really noble, well meaning people.” If we are forgiven our historical trespasses we are also charged with the duty to learn from them. To err is human, but to make error a virtue is evil. Maybe everybody lies, but to lie about the lie, now there is the road to intellectual perdition.
To flannel the political positions of Frank Marshall Davis, to portray him as just another misunderstood person who might just as well have been a member of the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis has nothing to do with Davis. He’s dead and doesn’t care. He’s gone to his Maker and knows the long and the short of mercy. But if we the living are to make something of our lives then we have to start calling things by the right names. He was a Communist. And that if that was a nice thing to be then shout it from the housetops. If it wasn’t then there’s no use pretending that it was.
There really ought to be a secular equivalent of the act of contrition; something people who don’t necessarily believe in God, but who believe in truth can say. Maybe it should go something like this.
“Oh, myself, I am heartily sorry for having believed a lie. And I confess all these deceptions and errors to myself because I dread the loss of integrity and the pains of self-deception. But most of all because I offend myself and others, who are deserving of my human love. I firmly resolve, with the help of others, to confess my errors, never to willingly repeat a lie and to amend my life. Amen.”
” First, the Communists won in their fight against the Nazis and victory brought with it immunity — even for the villains. ”
Communism was already fashionable before WW2, ie our intellectuals and artists
some woke up when Stalin died, and that Krutchev unveiled the evilness of Stalin
But for an act of contrition to be meaningful, the sinner has to know that God’s forgiveness follows genuine contrition. If God responded to an act of contrition like a DA accepting a plea bargain, it wouldn’t be the same thing.
Confessing your errors to yourself is a great start, and being able to forgive yourself for them – contingent on an honest attempt to learn from them – is good. But the test comes when you must confess your mistakes to others, and eventually you will be called to take some sort of stand on your prior erroneous beliefs. At that point you have three choices. You can admit your mistakes and ask (perhaps implicity) for forgiveness; you can double down on your youthful foolishness and lie to yourself about being right all along; or you can tell a new lie and claim you never really believed what you believed back then.
The first choice is the most honorable, but it carries the risk that forgiveness will be withheld. To err is human and to forgive is devine, but you are confessing to fellow humans. Your confession might bring condemnation instead of forgiveness.
On the other hand, we do carry a spark of divinity within us. It’s harder for us to forgive because, unlike God, we don’t know if the other person’s contrition is genuine and we don’t wish to be fooled ourselves. But the more forgiving we can be, the more likely secular acts of contrition may happen.
(plus it probably helps if you think your lies will be exposed on some future day of judgment no matter how hard you try to conceal them…)
Ah, but fascism was
fascionablefashionable before WWII as well, at least among the western intellectual crowd. Mussolini was admired as a strong leader. Italy was thought to be a model for how other advanced countries should organize themselves. Heidegger was a darling of the intellectual set. Even Hitler had his admirers at first. It wasn’t until the fascists became open enemies that they became unfashionable.What it boils down to is that Leftists, especially the intellectual sort, fall head-over-heels in love with dictators. They lust after a man strong enough to impose his will on society, and the fools imagine that the strongman will of course agree with them, the superiority of their ideas is self-evident. They only come to dispise a dictator if the dictator shuns them. Then, well, a woman scorned has nothing on a Leftist scorned.
JMH
Fashism has very small audience in France, since our intellectuals volontaried for helping the Republicans in Spain, and that we had a signicant number of Italian regugiees from fashist Itly.
Germany, the French still had a repulsion sentiment against “the Boches”
There has never been any significant difference between Fascism and Marxism; both elevate government (a small group of people, i.e.: themselves) to the status of god; both demote individuals to the status of identical cogs in their State mechanism; both take forceful possession of the individual’s rights to life, liberty and property – usually in reverse order. Mass-Murder in a Nazi concentration camp is no different from mass-murder in a Communist gulag.
“Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property – so long as the state reserves to its self the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed… which conferred no rights on its holder. Under Communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.” Leonard Peikoff
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/review_rand.htm
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/chapter1.htm
“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.” Karl Marx
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community… The day of individual happiness has passed.” Adolph Hitler
The two brothers of socialism: Joe and Adolf.
The affinity of brothers: United in shooting the kulaks, etc., Adolf and Joe then fell upon each other as cannibals are wont to do.
…-
“The Forgotten Evil behind the Iron Curtain
Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, Oxford University Press, 2010
The Firm: This Inside Story of the Stasi by Gary Bruce, Oxford University Press, 2010
An entire American generation has come of age since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. The new threat is Islamic radicalism, and only North Korea, a nation that has developed a nuclear weapons program and missile delivery systems, which it sells to other rogue regimes, gets much attention as a holdover of the “second world” — the Communist nations that were for 45 years our enemy in the Cold War. China is now our manufacturer of choice, and the collector of American dollars and U.S. debt. An authoritarian government has opened up the economy but little else. Russia pines for its former role but no longer has the influence it once had in Europe or elsewhere.
Two books from Oxford University Press provide a reminder of just what life was like on the other side during the last sixty years of the 20th century. The books offer a look at two forms of repressive Communist societies.
One, and by far the more brutal, was the Soviet Gulag, a collection of hundreds of work camps where between 20 and 30 million Russians and others were sent after their arrest to help build the Soviet industrial state before, during, and after World War 2. Millions died in these camps — a full quarter of all prisoners every year during the horrific years of the Soviet war with Nazi Germany from 1941-1945. Prisoners were arrested for two primary reasons: concern that they were not loyal and, to a much larger extent, the need for bodies to work. The prisoners lived in inhuman conditions — bitter cold, flimsy sleeping quarters, minimal food and water, in unsanitary surroundings.
The Nazis plainly intended to murder their concentration camp victims. The Soviets, by and large, did not care what happened to most of their prisoners, expecting only that “the job got done.” But they killed an enormous number in any case. Deborah Kaple, the editor and translator of this rare memoir by a Gulag civilian employee (a “manager” of the prisoners), provides estimates of between 800,000 and 7 million executions in the Gulag or en route to the Gulag camps during the quarter-century from 1928 to 1953. She notes,
The Soviet Gulag surely ranks as one of the most evil political creations of the twentieth century, along with Hitler’s Holocaust in Europe, Pol Pot’s slaughter of millions in Cambodia, and Mao Zedong’s serial campaigns that killed millions of Chinese citizens. The Gulag stands alone as the longest running program of state sponsored killing in that very bloody century.
Many of those executed were deemed “counter-revolutionaries” and were political prisoners. These prisoners were treated far more harshly than the everyday rapists, murderers, and common criminals and thugs who were also sent to these camps. But millions of Soviet citizens, who were neither criminals nor political risks, were sent to the Gulag as well. This group included many farmers, labeled “Kulaks,” who were seen as a threat to the new Soviet collective farms, a transformation of a society so vast, rapid, and unsuccessful that millions of Russians died from starvation in the 1930s, many in areas like the Ukraine, in a deliberate attempt to punish a specific population.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/the_forgotten_evil_behind_the.html
More:
This book was cited by Whittaker Chambers in Witness.
Solzhenitsyn has said “the everyday rapists, murderers, and common criminals and thugs who were also sent to these camps.” were the “friendlies” of Stalin’s regime. See GULAG for their roles.
Vladimir V. Tchernavin, the author, was one of a handful, who escaped from Uncle Joe’s GULAG.
“I Speak For The Silent Prisoners Of The Soviets (1935)”
http://www.archive.org/details/ispeakforthesile013752mbp
Wow, I had a short while back an interaction with Kale on the “interpretation” of the charges that Frank Marshall Davis had a sexual interlude with a young teenager.
At the time, I had no idea of the relationship. I don’t believe I was unduly harsh or impolite, but had I known that Kale was his son, I would have been even more respectful. No matter the truth of the situation, it must be tremendously difficult to see your father’s lifetime being probed and poked in this way.
There is something tugging at my heart, watching his son protect and try to preserve the dignity of his father. I want to wish the son serenity and remove any pain, certainly any that my words may have caused. I intended none, but that doesn’t make me feel any better for some reason.
I do believe that Frank Marshall Davis held radical, even extreme beliefs, based upon the research I have been able to find. His advice to young Barry was angry, bitter, and demonizing of a whole race of people. My statements went to the question of how much of that anger, resentment, antipathy…stuck. I don’t consider those positive attributes to instill in a young man…whether merely as a mentor…or, unfortunately… as a father.
Whether Frank Marshall Davis internalized Stalin or flirted with radical extremism’s many faces, he certainly had attachments to the CPUSA. He “flocked together” with others who were tightly attached to communist front groups. His words of advice to young Barry were certainly filled with animus and a seething distrust of “the system” and “the man” and “the establishment”.
His pornographic writings and his admissions that they stemmed from personal experiences are of less import and are mostly prurient distractions from any salient issue, I believe. Obama has three main “father figures” or “mentors” in his life.
Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, and the absent Kenyan father.
Each, exhibits a bitter, angry, seething, antipathy against an identifiable broad base of people. Each has a strong attachment to Marxist entities, belief systems and exhibits it in their communications with others. Each has a profound influence in the current President’s life, shaping of his thoughts, ideas, notions, and beliefs.
Each has a rather oxymoronic interaction with the “white man’s world”…professing a seething distrust or even hatred of it, and alternately taking on white women as wives/lovers, building mansions in white enclaves, …at once bashing and lavishing in the object of their obsession.
Perhaps that explains Marbella and Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe it explains the Gates affair. The rage at Fox News. Why we are seen as “mean”. Obama is protecting and projecting as well. All the rage and retribution he can muster, on behalf of the Three Fathers he represents….and defends…against their sworn enemies. Us.
Storm Rider 116:
Quite right.
I wish I could point you to the article I read about 10 years ago that pointed out that we made the mistake long ago of accepting the Soviet definition of Fascism. And that definition amounted to, in the Soviet viewpoint, “Other totalitarian socialist regimes that are not us.”
Contrary to what some people say, the Soviets saw a clear and large distinction between the western-style democracies and the Fascists. All may have been planned to be their future victims, but they saw a huge difference between the two.
Wretchard said:
“That doesn’t mean that President Obama is necessarily tainted by the same brush. I would be the first to claim that I probably know more Communists than he does and have a reasonable chance of being right. ”
But Obama was most assuredly deeply influenced by the fact that his father and grandfather were arrested and locked up, and his grandfather tortured in an internment camp, as a result of Churchill’s response to the mau mau rebellion.
The anticolonial wars were not academic wars to Obama, they were real wars, and his anticolonialism runs deeper than his academic mentors.
D’Sousa calls this part of the furniture of his psyche, and why he cannot change.
Frank Davis also wrote much about the evils of colonialism, as did Edward Said, who taught “Anticolonial Studies,” Roberto Unger who was his mentor at Harvard, William Ayers, Rev Wright, et al.
(“I learned from Unger how to use legal structures to pull down the pillars of society”)
He maintained his ties with Said and Unger, Obama refering to all these folks as a series of surrogate dads. “They never measured up to my father.”
(sure he was an alcoholic, philandering wife beater and child abuser, who killed someone and finally himself in a car, but hey, mom said he was the greatest.)
A flawed man attached to a great idea, a representative of the great movement for freedom in Africa: Anticolonialism.
“All I knew about my father were the stories that my mother told me, fortunately, the stories that my mother told gave me a very positive image of my father, so I grew up with an image of a strong black man who was one of the smartest, and most charismatic, brightest, and honest people (sic) that you would ever care to meet. ”
Whenever young Barry would criticise his absent father, asking where is my dad? my mom would say,
“No! He’s the great man of Africa, you should be like him.”
When mom discovered Lolo Soetoro is more pro-western and anticommunist than she suspected, (he goes to work for an oil company, moves into a white neighborhood,) she begins to attack him, calling him a traitor(!) a sellout, Soetoro said he was just moving among the white people, these are your people.
Mom replies:
“These are NOT My People!”
Mom tells Barry: “Don’t pay attention to your stepfather, model yourself on your father, he was the true great man” and she packs him up and sends him back to Hawaii where he won’t be influenced by Soetoro, and will be formed in the image of his own father.
Obama vows to take his father’s dreams, and succeed where his father failed.
When Biden says if he goes into Afghanistan it will become his war, and he will feel pressure to win it, Obama replies that he does not define winning that way:
For the anticolonialist, winning is getting out!
His main goal is to reduce America’s position in the World, so we’re no longer the World’s superpower – to him that is kind of neocolonial, we’re standing on a pedestal, he wants to bring us off the pedestal, he wants us to just be another country, like Finland or Greece.
American exceptionalism?
We don’t need no stinking exceptionalism!
On his European apology tour he asked for help in putting a leash on America.
–There really ought to be a secular equivalent of the act of contrition; something people who don’t necessarily believe in God, but who believe in truth can say.
It is exactly this thought that led me to the Catholic Church.
I thought there could be truth without God. And I found, strangely, over and over again, that the Catholic Church was right about truth. Truth about the culture of death. Truth about abortion. Truth about sex as selfishness. Truth about marriage.
And eventually, it dawned on me: they were right about everything else, wouldn’t I consider the possibility they’d been right about Christ?
But to the point, no, there can be no contrition without God. We can start with the truth that we are fallible without belief in God, but we just end up at nihilism unless there is a God. Where is that truth that us sinning mortals can know without someone telling us it is all worthless? Why would the truth matter more than falsehood? It wouldn’t. That is why it is a dead end.
The walk may talk a while, but Like Peter, we are stuck–Lord, where would we go?
W: ” There really ought to be a secular equivalent of the act of contrition; something people who don’t necessarily believe in God, but who believe in truth can say.”
But that’s the real problem – they fly in the ointment – the totalitarian mind is unhinged from both God and the truth. Why should someone like that require forgiveness when there is no such thing as God, no such thing as self-evident truth, no such thing as right and wrong, no such thing as morality, no such thing as forgiveness? As George Orwell points out, individuals with totalitarian minds become gods themselves – walking among us – walking upon us – they become “Priests of Power.” It goes without saying that such human gods require others to obtain forgiveness from them.
“Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident… I tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else; not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth… The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power.” George Orwell – 1984
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Doug: Whether or not Barrack Sr was his biological father, Barrack Jr does has a special place in this heart or what’s left of his heart, for Barack Sr. D’sousa is right; Anticolonialism is Buraq’s passion. Buraq ‘s dancin shoes are always on for almost every other issue, but for anything dealing with Anticolonialism he is forthright and clear.
So Davis was never actually a “pedophile,” but a phoebophile, if the accounts of sexual encounters with teenage girls are true.
Phoebophiles prey on adolescents, not pre-pubescent children. And his phoebophilia was heterosexual, like Roman Polanski.
Just trying to get this straight, FWIW.
It has been awhile since I have had time for the internet. I’m only here because I twisted my ankle yesterday evening and am going to take a long weekend in the hopes it will be better in a few days.
My efforts locally to stop the parasites, the destroyers of America have kept me away from the internet and here at BC, but I’m elated to say that my one man effort has exploded into over a twenty man and woman platoon of American Patriots who are now on the front line with me.
Much to my relief and joy.
I could tell you of our efforts, I could tell you of our victories and our defeats…of our disappointments.
But I won’t because all of [my] our efforts must only concentrate on the next few days and then for the coming months and years that we must fight our enemies within.
I believe that average Americans love our Republic and are unique as a people in this world and I know they value their freedoms and will protect their families. But I also know that they are slow to anger and can be even slower to react to political and even mortal dangers for many reasons.
Dangers that our Forfathers knew and warned us against…that we have forgotten.
Well, we must wake Americans up. Starting with those around us. Starting with those who have been working hard and content to stay in their little bubbles, bubbles that everyone forms around their families, their lives and their fortunes.
The American population must be informed, convinced, shamed or fired up to get involved in what most of us detest – Politics.
We must all get involved in electing Americans who believe in America, believe in our Constitution and in personal responsibility and abhor the nanny state, the parasitic entitlement agenda and all who advocate it.
I want to leave two links. Please watch and listen to them and then ask yourself:
What can I do? How can I help? How can I make a difference not only for myself, my family but for the future generations of unborn Americans?
The Fight is Just Beginning!
“Thomas Sowell — Dismantling America”
AND-
“We The People”
Papa Ray
If, as Wretchard says, we are all tainted by the slow-acting poison of Communism fed to us through generations, then what is needed is a culture-wide equivalent of the deNazification that happened in Germany after WWII. DeCommunisation. And we have to face the fact that all sorts of nice people have these ugly skeletons in their closets, and that if we flinch and avert our eyes in embarrassment, the poison will never be stemmed. It’s no use backing down and getting embarrassed when people like Kale come around; as uncomfortable as it makes us feel, we have to say clearly, “Your father was a scoundrel.” Martin Bormann’s son is a very nice man, but we don’t “agree to disagree” on the subject of Nazism just to spare him pain and us embarrassment. If it were a discussion of what kind of a man he was at home, that would be different, but Kale didn’t come here to tell us that his father helped him every evening with his homework and stayed up all night with him when he had a fever; he came here explicitly to deny that Davis was what he was – a hanger-on and enabler of filthy murderers, thieves and sadists. That’s what a Communist is. That’s what EVERY Communist is, whether they’ll admit it or not. And they have to be treated the way we treated Nazis – instant rejection and dismissal from every argument and association. “Tell me a man’s a Communist and tell me no more,” is the only appropriate response. Their ideas are subhuman and without any merit or standing.
Blert,
The history of World War II is extremely interesting. In many ways it was the defining event of not only the 20th century but the modern age. I fear that given the problems of Peak Oil and the limitations of modern agriculture, we may look back at World War II and see it as the high point in human civilization much as the Second Punic War was the high point of the Roman Republic. Blert made many interesting comments:
“Interestingly enough Hitler, as a despot, kept running for office. THAT was novel. Goebbels constantly surveyed the mood of the man on the street for him. While his popularity peaked in 1940, after the fall of France, Hitler maintained immense reservoirs of trust and faith even after astounding reverses. So, there was absolutely no prospect of the German nation ever turning against him.”
This is an important aspect about Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany wore the veneer of being a democracy but as a single party state, the Nazis were actually a totalitarian power. Of course this method of totalitarian rule had previously existed for years in the Soviet Union. Nazis were always concerned about public opinion and Joseph Goebbels efforts at propaganda were considered to be of vital importance.
Blert said:
“Repeating my earlier comment that the players kept analyzing EVERYTHING in the memory of WWI…”
Most modern historians regard WW-II as merely a continuation of WW-I. The Europeans fought WW-I until they were utterly exhausted. There were some half-assed attempts to prevent WW-II such as forming the League of Nations and the Kellogg–Briand Pact but these efforts only provided cover for the Communists and Fascists as they prepared for the next war. As soon as the European economy had recovered from the Great Depression, WW-II was started.
Blert said:
“Stalin’s opinion of the Tsar was that he had PROVOKED the Kaiser in 1914 by mobilizing. That aspect of WWI history is the orthodox view.”
I believe this is correct. The different European states had interlocking mutual defense pacts. After one nation began military mobilization then all the others had to follow suit like a row of falling dominoes.
Blert said:
“Hence, in 1941 Stalin forbid ANY action that, in his eyes, would inflame Hitler. By this time the whole world realized that the Wehrmacht was more than any one nation could handle.”
This is an interesting analysis. To some extent it explains Stalin’s apparent stupidity.
Blert said:
“After the Battle of Britain, Hitler concluded that Britain represented no front and no threat. Based upon RAF actions to date, who could dispute that? Her navy was useless against his budding empire. His Luftwaffe punished it any time it got close to land. That deep oceanic trade was lost to him was something he couldn’t affect. If Barbarossa panned out, Britain would have to cave. He’d have solved all of his resource needs without crossing any waves.”
That was Hitler’s analysis but obviously it was a catastrophic blunder. Britain had the world’s largest navy but Britain also had the worlds largest existing empire. The British military had extensive combat experience. To have such contempt towards the English was an act of suicidal stupidity. However there is an ugly side to this. Supposedly there were many in England who were sympathetic towards the Nazis including many of the British nobility. It maybe a slander but it has been claimed that even the British king was sympathetic. One might suspect that Hitler turned his back on the British because he believed they would fall from within after being taken over by their own fascists. I suspect that Hitler simply did not understand British culture thinking it was a variation of German culture. To some extent Hitler was deceived by his own Aryan propaganda/mythology (the Nazis regarded the English as “Aryans”).
Blert said:
“Hitler declared war on the US as a direct result of three nations running deception operations on him. America deliberately leaked Rainbow 5, an extremely classified internal study detailing just how unprepared the nation was to enter the European conflict should the need arise.”
Don’t credit an action to cleverness when it can be fully explained as stupidity. Prior to Pearl Harbor, a few wise men in America could see WW-II coming but the nation as a whole was almost completely seduced by isolationism. Americans were simply not that sophisticated. The WW-II experience is what caused America to grow up and become a world power.
Dr. Mabuse #126
“If, as Wretchard says, we are all tainted by the slow-acting poison of Communism fed to us through generations, then what is needed is a culture-wide equivalent of the deNazification that happened in Germany after WWII. DeCommunisation.”
Give the good Dr. a cigar.
I’ve been saying for years that the singular greatest failure of daddy Bush wasn’t his poorly run campaign against Clinton or his broken antitax pledge.
It was, instead, his failure to grasp the moment of the falling of the Soviet empire and to use that plus the fall of the Berlin Wall as a rallying cry to decommunise the U.S. permanently. Using the model of Truman’s denazification, he could have defunded and demonized in official law every individual and organization and academic that espoused communism, and wwould have had enough popular support to get it through despite any rumblings from those he defunded. In the words of Gen. Patton, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time of history with exactly the right instrument to kill the beast forever.
Instead, he went all Marquise of Queensbury, and blew a golden opportunity we are all suffering for his lapse now.
Dr. Mabuse @ 126 said:
“If, as Wretchard says, we are all tainted by the slow-acting poison of Communism fed to us through generations, then what is needed is a culture-wide equivalent of the deNazification that happened in Germany after WWII. DeCommunisation. And we have to face the fact that all sorts of nice people have these ugly skeletons in their closets, and that if we flinch and avert our eyes in embarrassment, the poison will never be stemmed.”
A point that I keep harping on is the legacy of Gramscian agitprop. To understand Gramscian agitprop one must recognize that during the peak of the Cold War the United States had a nuclear weapons inventory of 31,225 warheads. It is my understanding that the United States had run out of reasonable target sites in the Soviet Union and was actually targeting empty fields based on the assumption that they would become refugee areas. Supposedly the Soviets had an even greater number of warheads in the mistaken notion that this gave them greater military power. Most of these strategic weapons were set on hair fine triggers ready to launch on warning if an enemy attack was detected. The time from launch to impact was about 20 minutes. The first, second and third strikes could all occur within one hour. We were in the situation were over 50,000 thermonuclear warheads could have detonated within one hour. The nuclear fallout would have surely sterilized most of the northern hemisphere. It’s quite literally a miracle that western civilization survived and vital that we never again base our national defense upon Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
By trying to impose communism on the rest of the human race, the Soviet Union had painted itself into a corner. Communist ideology required that the Soviet Union maintain an aggressive posture against the western world while at the same time MAD dictated that the Soviet Union never engage in a direct military assault against the United States. To escape this contraction the Soviet Union attempted to subvert the western world to its ideology through agitation and propaganda. One form of agitation and propaganda was Gramscian agitprop where the objective was the degradation of core social values. Some Soviet agitation and propaganda programs were on the verge of significant success. The “Green Movement” in Western Germany is arguably one of the Soviet’s most successful efforts at agitprop. AGW propaganda is an indirect legacy of Soviet agitprop. Likewise, “liberation theology” in the developing world was on the verge of handing much of the third world over to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for the Soviets, their efforts at agitprop were not successful prior to their own economic/political implosion. Now the world is left with this terrible legacy of Gramscian agitprop still ticking along mindlessly like so many wind up robots. These pathetic toys are still following their prime directive to bring down the western world but now for no real purpose since their robot master died twenty years ago.
I knew Communists, and not just the academic variety either, but the sorts who carried guns, took risks, left their homes and died for their cause. Many of them were better men than I, as human beings. But they were wrong. And many of them who lived long enough agreed with me.
There was SH, who died with his greasegun in Quezon; RR who went off to Mindoro in a motorized outrigger and who I later learned, was shot in the head by the Marcos intel agent who took him there; there was PP who was strangled by wire in her hospital bed. Then there were MY, CT who disappeared and are presumed dead. There was BB who took a 7.62 round through the armpit in Isabela.
And then there was RB, who was tortured to death — had his legs sliced off and his eyes gouged out, by Communist operatives in Mountain province. There were the hundreds killed for no reason whatsoever, except paranoia. Hey, some of those who ordered these deaths were guys I met, who I beat and who beat me at chess.
There were the guys who guarded the top echelons of the party. Personal bodyguards of the exalted who were and still are my friends. They can’t believe they believed that s**t. One of them in later days decided to see America, and not having any money, earned some by working odd jobs at a Times Square porno theater. One of his jobs was to put the gropers back in line. One time, a small fire broke out in the theater and he remembers how the patrons, if one may call them that, lined up for refunds.
There were creeps. But there were lots of funny guys in the vast zoo of the underground. Some were party members. Others were not party members. Some had death sentences on them for being renegades of the Party. They were hunted on both sides. It was a measure of the times that nobody seemed to mind. It was a game played with real money. You could die, or wind up in a torture cell. On which side, choose your poison. And it happened.
But when you come right down to it, some fought on the side of totalitarianism and others fought, as best they could, in the cause of freedom. What many who never there might not completely understand, is that it was to some extent a revolving door. Maybe it will help to say that the history of revolutions is the history of conversion, apostasy, recantation and implacable determination.
For one, I am prepared to say Communism was evil. For those who died in the forests, on some lonely beach, in a safehouse or in torment, I will leave their personal guilt and salvation to God. I can judge the cause, but not the man.
STORM-RIDER WROTE: “The position is more than unreasonable; it is immoral, because government-forced equal property outcome requires government to enforce unequal rights to property.”
RESPONSE: Sorry, I don’t understand. What do union wage demands have to do with “government-forced equal property outcomes”? The union wanted Hawaii employers to raise their pay to 90% of West Coast wages. This was a labor dispute, not a demand for government action.
VICTOR ASKED: “How do you know that you are, in fact, Franks son?”
RESPONSE: In the absence of DNA testing, few people are absolutely sure. However, the fact that he is listed as my father on my COLB (the computer generated form Hawaii distributes to locals for use in passport applications and other identification), the fact that we have physical similarities, and the fact that I lived with him until I joined the Air Force, provide empirical evidence beyond any reasonable doubt.
AARDVARK WROTE: “My apologies. You are correct. I googled but did not visit the sites; having sampled some of them, I acknowledge that your words are your own, posted in numerous places.”
RESPONSE: Thank you.
CFBLEACHERS WROTE: “Wow, I had a short while back an interaction with Kale on the “interpretation” of the charges that Frank Marshall Davis had a sexual interlude with a young teenager. At the time, I had no idea of the relationship. I don’t believe I was unduly harsh or impolite, but had I known that Kale was his son, I would have been even more respectful. No matter the truth of the situation, it must be tremendously difficult to see your father’s lifetime being probed and poked in this way.”
RESPONSE: Thank you for your understanding. When debating these points online, there are pros and cons to revealing my relationship. I prefer to debate the issues on their own merit, without any “quarter” given in consideration of my identify.
Without this disclosure, however, some debaters may feel that they have been virtually “sucker-punched.” My solution is to leave an obvious trail to my blog for those who wish to pursue the matter further.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
– Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)
The power of men who have ceased to think.
What, at the end of the day, is to be made of the concentration camp matron or the Communist revolutionary in the mountains, who both follow causes that are death?
Anyway, the essence of all informal fallacies (straw man, appeals to authority, bandwagon, et al.) is misdirection. Chronically, it is deception. When the deception becomes overwhelming, it is justified by its service to the cause. (Islam, coincidentally, also incorporates this anti-principle.)
And often that shows itself as just relentless blabbering, talking to no point. Just keep talking. The argument stopped at a rest station back down the road. Now it’s just talking. The point is to flood the arena and drive the thinking and the arguments out. And then hit the reset button, bring back the bad claims made for the cause, and hope that a new audience, or the next generation, has arrived. Maybe this time it will work.
Maybe the parallel lines will suddenly touch. Maybe the facts will get out of the way of the wish. Maybe socialism will work. See, it’s so reasonable.
My first direct adult exposure to the evil of Communism came when I was assigned to be the solicitor for United Way on my floor of our engineering office about 1980. We had just hired a few engineers from Romania who seemed to be mixing well. When I went up to one of them asking for a contribution, I saw him freeze with a look of terror in his eyes.
I immediately pickuped on something being amiss and explained in more detail the voluntary nature of donating to charity. It was just an American way of helping our neighbors. I later asked him about his initial reaction. He said that in Romania, the Communist Party would come around to people in their workplace just like I had done and also “ask” for donations to the Party. Bad things happened to those who declined. His first thought on my request was that I was essentially shaking him down like the Communists used to do. he was scared on me!
As to WWI and WWII, one theory is that WWI was a contest for world hegemony. Britain was weakening and Germany was growing stronger. The clash proved that neither had the wherewithall to decide the issue and suggested that the US would be hegemon, if they had the will.
Coming out of WWI, both Germany and England were too weakened. The UK was almost broke and Germany was pushing anarchy. Unfortunately, the US refused to take up the burdens of being hegemon, being accustomed to being a free rider on the international scene.
Without a clear world policeman during the 20s and 30s, Germany rebuilt and tried once again. America had to step up yet again during WWII but in the aftermath, realized that America HAD to be hegemon, if only for its own good.
Yes, many Americans would dearly love to be practical isolationists but most understand that the real world requires a world hegemon and if we don’t do it, some very unsavory characters would scramble for the opportunity and probably ending our isolationist peace yet again.
There will be yet another World War, probably in 10 to 20 years. looks like China is preparing themselves as the challenger. Hope I live long enough to see how that turns out.
“Coming out of WWI, both Germany and England were too weakened”
England had still its Empire and its fleet
From Frankblog linked by Kale:
“Being in the midst of a campaign for freedom and self government, Asiatic nations want no part of a political system that perpetuates hypocritical government As a result of this fiasco, the gulf between East and West has widened rather than become more narrow.
Already Communist leaders are capitalizing on this out-moded means of keeping the Negro in virtual serfdom Russia continues to point to the fact that discrimination and segregation based on race does not exist there With Chinese Communist armies on the verge of total victory there is a very real possibility that other nations of the East will come into the orbit of Communist domination.”
—
Communists brought freedom to the people?
Were the millions murdered and starved to death not “discriminated” against because Mao and Stalin had the same skin tone of those that were murdered?
Pointing out evil in the the US does not erase the greater evils perpetrated by communists.
—
—
Burr also notes that Paul Robeson will be given a “royal welcome” when he visits India later this year at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru who long sought to have Robeson come there. And then Burr adds.
‘Well known for his part in the struggle for human freedom and equality through the years, Robeson will perhaps receive the greatest ovation ever accorded an American. In the minds of many Indian leaders, the noted singer symbolizes the aspirations of oppressed peoples in all sections of the world.”
—
Whatever he symbolized at the time, time has shown to be a sham perpetrated by a shameful liar.
MC…
One of the shocking facts discovered by American industrialists as a consequence of our alliance with Britain and France in 1916 through 1918 was how far behind Britain was industrially. Her machine tools were commonly a full generation behind American practice. She was able to ‘cover’ for this weakness by virtue of her tariffs and trading bloc.
The flow of events moved industry from coal to oil, from Newcastle to Texas. The best Britain could do was Persian oil. You bet, she needed her battle fleet.
As for France, the lost manpower hollowed out decades of economic growth. This economic problem could not be solved by mercantilism or colonialism. Thankfully, WWII did not kill off millions of young Frenchmen. When coupled to the Marshall Plan/nee Truman Plan France revived after WWII. Her biggest chronic burdens ended up being colonial restructuring — the hard way.
Both nations now suffer from the same threats and same demographics. The latest news is that they’re in horrific financial difficulties because of largesse and rigid labor markets.
Being stuck with the Euro is going badly for Germany and France. Somehow France needs to return to the Franc. Otherwise Northern Europe is going to bankrupt its pensioners. As long as they support the never-ending party in Southern Europe the wastage won’t stop.
I think time has shown what the “Asiatic people” chose once they opened the can of beans. China has more or less rejected Communism. North Korea would if it could. Vietnam will find a way to cast off Communism too. In the Philippines the Communists tried twice times. First with the HUKs and the second time with the CPP. The first was defeated by counterinsurgency. The second was defeated by an internal political process which was in many ways miraculous.
Parenthetically, I would add that the septuagenarian leaders of the CPP have been looking for a way to strike a peace deal at this late date, more to snatch some vestige of victory from the jaws of utter defeat rather than to actually take power. History has passed them by, which is another way of saying it has judged them.
There should be no hard feelings for the dead. They believed what they believed. Some were sincere. Not a few were absolute SOBs. Some were certifiable maniacs. Sometimes the good guys in the revolution won. More often then not they died in anguish. My own rule of thumb is that anyone who makes a comfortable career out of being a Communist is suspect, because they know what’s in the can of beans and still they flog it on the unsuspecting. Those who left it, who left it when they smelled the stench from the bottom of the can, often to their cost, without cashing in — now those are the guys who had nothing to lose but the chains of lies. One of the things apostates of that sort lose is the expectation of earthly reward. It sounds too much like the Worker’s Paradise.
Truth is either embraced by those who have been betrayed by certainties for its own sake, without the slightest desire to hear anyone clap or in the rueful realization that if there’s any justice in this universe, it will not be completely found in the world of men. As for the experience of revolution, what remains are a few faded memories of loyalty and love; the only flowers which have lastingly bloomed in that graveyard of ambitions. “After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”
# 134 Marie Claude
Britain did end the war with most of its fleet of warships but a lot of its shipping had been lost. The Empire was restive and diverging. Austrialia resented its costs for Gallipoli and India wanted independence. South Africa was going its own way. The Washington Naval Treaty was an attempt to keep competitors down rather than to out-compete them.
Worst, their economy was coagulating and of declining competitiveness. The Bank of England’s attempt to return to the gold standard was a sign of weakness, not strength. Neville Chamberlain’s handling of the economy during Depression was much better than either Hoover’s or Roosevelt’s, I will grant.
Internally, Britain had lost its taste for empire. Who can forget the Oxford debates on pacifism or the terrible trouble Churchill had in speaking out about the dangers of Hitler. Ireland was long gone.
The signs of decline were all too clear for Britain following WWI.
It is disturbing to see ‘debate’ shows morph into yelling bombast.
For some crazy reason, media production managers figure that a balanced argument consists of polemics wailing their hearts out with feelings and class envy rants.
Fox uses this ‘structure’ all of the time.
Back in the day, it was popular with PBS’s McNeil-Lehrer. They reached such lows as to bring on a neo-Nazi to debate a Rabbi WRT the Shoah, did it occur or is it over-blown!
——-
The nature and style of disinformation, Communist style, needs to be put front and center.
At some point, official action must be taken to eject foreign influence operations.
Laking the ability to come at us in direct military action, our enemies are all driven to manipulation operations and information warfare.
We are in the middle of the First Financial World War wherein attacks are launched by economic simulation models made operant by high frequency trading and covert action.
Today we witness lock-limit up moves in cotton, corn, wheat, and soybeans!
This is a breakout signal for hyperinflation stage 2. The money men are racing away from the USD.
These price moves are NOT inflation. They are hyperinflation/ devaluation of the currency. They also represent a re-pricing of America — downward.
I rather expect that Japan is going to start counter-printing. That’s what game theory calls for.
China is in a lousy position: her policy mix virtually compels her to keep swallowing paper which is destined to have big negative returns. Revaluing her currency upward is a blood-bath for her central bank. Any revaluation causes her dollarized economy to get torn up by currency winners and losers.
What a train wreck!
And as for BB, he’s talked himself into a policy corner. All of our markets are so far away from free market norms that the transition must be chaotic, rather like a four-year old falling off his bike.
There is going to be a universal foreclosure halt lasting months as TPTB resolve the SNAFU created by Wall Street in mortgage trading. Put simply, Wall Street didn’t follow the laws or pay the fees required to transfer the titles as required by law. It is becoming rather clear that RICO scale fraud has been performed upon the nation by Wall Street, the mortgage service companies and the mega-banks.
We may be looking at a debt jubilee by the back-door!
Since the title companies are backing away from the foreclosure process just how is a buyer going to place a fresh mortgage on the property?
The markets want asset prices to rise, the economy requires them to fall. Since the pool of available buyers is shrinking fast ( falling FICO scores + demographic trends ) just how much exposure has BB taken on with his RMBS buy-in program?
It must be staggering.
And in other news, the Fed has already absorbed a staggering fraction of outstanding long term Treasury Bonds. On current trends, the Fed will need to get Congress to change the law — lifting the limit on Fed ownership per each CUSIP!
——
Normally any such massive financial restructuring will be laid on the backs of the retirees. The other injured class is the young — birth rates normally drop ( a lot ) during depressions.
On a positive note: a major war is not a prospect. No major power starts a war when the hegemon is hyper-dominant. Naturally, the Resident is doing all that is necessary to change that equation. He pines for the day when the Great Powers are all tomcats in bag, rolling down hill.
Interesting times — straight ahead.
Whitehall, London lost it’s practical monopoly on the ‘Trade Bills’ market due to the Treaty provisions: it basically ended self-liquidating credit bills of trade. Normally, the terms of such bills would stipulate that payment would be in gold specie. Going back to the gold standard was one essential provision for the ‘Bills Market.’
Shutting Germany — a dominant maker of bills — out of the market was a direct trigger for her hyperinflationary policy mix. Her other war allies experienced hyperinflation, too, because the treaty provisions covered them, too. (Austria, Hungary, etc.)
It’s hard to imagine now, but prior to 1914 London (The City) was the clearance house for essentially all global trade. All cable traffic made a pit stop there. She had the biggest empire. Since those days of August it’s been a rough ride down.
Blert @ 139 said:
“We are in the middle of the First Financial World War wherein attacks are launched by economic simulation models made operant by high frequency trading and covert action.”
That’s my own analysis. The markets are no long efficient and driven instead by cunning manipulation. Each major player is armed with thousand CPU Beowulf clusters running the latest macroeconomic model. Team A is using a fifth order model with parameters accurate to 8 significant digits and run by a crew of Harvard trained mathematicians. However Team B is using a sixth order model with parameters accurate to 9 significant digits and their mathematicians were trained at Stanford. Looks like the A team is in trouble but wait a minute…. There is Team C in full stealth mode running models accurate to 10th order with full 64 bit accuracy and their mathematicians came from MIT. This is not going to end well….
Kaleokualoha 131: “What do union wage demands have to do with “government-forced equal property outcomes”? The union wanted Hawaii employers to raise their pay to 90% of West Coast wages. This was a labor dispute, not a demand for government action.”
Unfortunately there is a convergence between Big Labor and Big Government – it can be viewed as an unholy coalition between the Proletariat Class and Marxist Government. No one explains the immoral relationship between corrupted labor unions and corrupted government that Barry Goldwater.
“Graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it. The cause is the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of union leaders. Such power hurts the nation’s economy by forcing on employers contract terms that encourage inefficiency, lower production and high prices – all of which result in a lower standard of living for the American people. It corrupts the nation’s political life by exerting undue influence on the selection of public officials. It gravely compromises the freedom of millions of individual workers who are able to register a dissent against the practice of union leaders only at risk of losing their jobs… Unions can be an instrument for achieving economic justice for the working man. Moreover, they are an alternative to, and thus discourage State Socialism. Most important of all, they are an expression of freedom. Trade unions properly conceived is an expression of man’s inalienable right to associate with other men… The natural function of a trade union and the one for which it was historically conceived is to represent those employees who want collective representation in bargaining with their employers over terms of employment. But note that this function is perverted the moment a union claims the right to represent employees who do not want representation, or conducts activities that have nothing to do with terms of employment (e.g. political activities), or tries to deal with an industry as a whole instead of with individual employers… As long as union leaders can force workers to join their organization, they have no incentive to act responsibly… It is in… these areas, that of political contributions, that labor unions seriously compromise American freedom. They do this by spending the money of union members with prior consultation for purposes the individual members may or may not approve of… In short, they perform all the functions of a regular party organization… Now the evil here is twofold. For one thing, the union’s decision whether to support candidate X or candidate Y – whether to help the Republican Party or the Democratic Party – is not reached by a poll of the union membership. It is made by a handful of top union officers. These few men are thus able to wield tremendous political power in virtue of their ability to spend other people’s money.” Barry Goldwater – The Conscience of a Conservative
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8388.html
Sorry, this should read:
“They do this by spending the money of union members without prior consultation for purposes the individual members may or may not approve of…”
The convergence between Big Labor and Big Government in Hawaii has led to many crony capitalist big-business monopolies, from shipping to sugar. No underpaid stevadores to be found.
…and of course the biggest and most corrupt institution of all: Unionized Monopoly “Education”/indoctrination.
—
Blert:
We ain’t seen nuthin yet!
Think what the balance sheets are gonna look like when interest rates are no longer at these nearly historic lows!
Sigintel@102:
“I’m going to start printing a T-shirt that has the classic headshots of Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Che. Picture a cover of a Beatles album. The shirts will be red and the slogan in yellow will say “RED = MILLIONS DEAD! WANT TO JOIN THE PARTY?”
I’m open for suggestion on the slogan”
“Getting Better All the Time?”
“I Don’t Want to Join the Party”
“Help!”
“You Say Yes, I Say HELL NO!”
“You Say You Want a Revolution?”
“PS, I Loathe You”
“Strawberry (killing) Fields Forever”
“They Want To Hold Your Hand”
“A Hard Day’s Blight”
“Nowhere Men”
“Rubber Souls”
“Run For Your Life”
“Here, There And Everywhere”
“Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Banned”
“With A Little Help From O’s Friends”
“All You Need Is Hope”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7miRCLeFSJo
Blert
One of the shocking facts discovered by American industrialists as a consequence of our alliance with Britain and France in 1916 through 1918 was how far behind Britain was industrially.
Britain was though the first industriallised nation in Europe (and probably in the world too), that started its industrial revolution in 18TH century, we had a certain delay due to our social Revolution.
I have noticed that nations which lived upon their empires tended to not develop industry (or improve their technics) as much, as labor force was cheaper, (UK, France, Spain), also because agricultural domains were what the rich expats were looking for.
As for France, the lost manpower hollowed out decades of economic growth. This economic problem could not be solved by mercantilism or colonialism. Thankfully, WWII did not kill off millions of young Frenchmen. When coupled to the Marshall Plan/nee Truman Plan France revived after WWII. Her biggest chronic burdens ended up being colonial restructuring — the hard way.
uh it’s french ingeneers that developped american manufactures for planes (fighters) in the US during WW1 ! Also it’s thanks to WW1 that you developped your navy.
Both nations now suffer from the same threats and same demographics. i>
uh, we still have the best birth rating of EU, 2,2 last year.
Being stuck with the Euro is going badly for Germany and France.
Somehow France needs to return to the Franc. Otherwise Northern Europe is going to bankrupt its pensioners. As long as they support the never-ending party in Southern Europe the wastage won’t stop.
It’s not going badly for Germany, the euro has been created as a DM imitation, with german rules. Their expensive and high tech industry production still find customers, whatever the prices. Different for us, as our production is in concurrence with others, that have currencies cheaper than the euro.
Yes we need to revert to the franc, or to devaluate the euro, (Germany will not consent) or that Germany gets out of the eurozone. That’s propably she’ll do, if she doesn’t want to bail out another PIGS nation.