Charleston Voice

On Being a Good Neighbor

2005-06-07T13:51:00.000-04:00

by Charleston Voice

It gets old. I mean really old. And tiring, too. It wears you down. Now it's Eddie George, I think, the hotshot who calls the plays for the Bank of England who's calling for the IMF to sell of its supposedly "hoard" of gold to help the "poor" (read: governments) of Africa. It doesn't really matter if you get the names right, the central banks are all participants in the same scam. The custodians change over time, but the same lies and threats persist.

Pin down a 'gold bug' and you'll discover that his real passion is for what gold represents, not the gold itself, and that passion is for HONESTY. With more than half the world's known gold reserves in US Treasury vaults in 1950, and a dollar that was redeemable in gold to foreigners, America's foreign trade flourished. We were on top of the world. Our government could sell their bonds, notes and bills of debt, all redeemable in gold at $35 an ounce, to foreign central banks which redeemed their US$'s turned in by their own citizens from their trade with Americans. Receiving US gold from the dollar exchanges was held as monetary reserves by the foreign central banks for the issuance of their own domestic currencies. Life was good. The whole world loved us - for our honesty.

But, then the Great Betrayal took hold. You know what that was. Korea, Vietnam, The Great Society, guns and butter, UN, foreign aid, and welfare aid to just about any "cause" you can imagine. In effect, Americans permitted a transfer of its wealth from those who earned it to those interests that didn't. And, that is not HONEST. Governments do that sort of thing. Always. It was never the government's gold to begin with. The more Americans received as handouts from a beneficent government, the more they were re-elected. He who rewards a whining child with what he/she wants is a great Dad, isn't he? Hardly. Family heads ordinarily expect a child to "earn" a special reward. On the other hand, the family is perhaps the only socialist institution that we can tolerate. It's an institution whereby special privileges and awards are granted, seldom with the expectation that reciprocation is forthcoming from its children. A family is held together with love for one another. Only love is expected in return.

In the absence of "loving thy neighbor" we must expect some degree of honesty and accountability from him at the least. To say that the world is a "family" or a "village" of nations is absurd. They are our neighbors, not our lovers. To be a good neighbor, we pay them promptly upon mowing our lawn, or compensate them in some other way fairly for helping us construct our fence. It's what neighbors do. You tend his dog and feed his fish while he's away, and he'll lend you his trailer when you want to pick up some supplies from Home Depot. You don't have any sort of a 'mutual defense treaty', but an understanding that if one is threatened - outside of family matters - you would come to each other's aid. But - hear this - this understanding does not extend to the neighborhood across town. We would in no way commit to come to someone's aid for a purpose undefined. We want to retain our independence from harm for events that do not threaten our own well being. Life is really that simple. It's the reality that's complicated.

At Christmas time every year we give our mailman Morgan silver dollars. We don't know what he does with them. Probably sensing they are worth more than a dollar, he tosses them in his dresser drawer. I do know that I get exemplary service from him each year though. Why? Because he knows subconsciously that silver is honest money. He's not unlike a non-practicing Christian knowing that God exists, because his christian heritage roots run deep. My mailman has never lived when silver coin circulated as money, but because of America's long experiments with sound money, his heritage roots tells him to hold on to the Morgans.

All of this has led up to elucidate that honest Americans are living under a dishonest government. How can a people professing honesty live under a leadership that they elect, but rule dishonestly? The answer is, they can't.

This is why Americans, up until now regarded as the most 'honest' of neighbors, must demand a full and complete physical audit of US Treasury gold. It's not enough for our leaders to just utter a feeble "No!" when calls for selling off IMF gold to help anyone. We suspect that there is no real threat to the selling off "official" gold. The clamor is just a gong that the bankers bong once in a while as a threat and a reminder that they do, indeed, have gold. I say they don't have it! There are solid arguments to be made that the US Treasury gold has now all been transferred to the private Federal Reserve System to satisfy the debt obligations contracted with the US Government.

Gold bugs should be clamoring for a full and transparent physical audit for the world's "official" gold reserves, not pleading and whining "Oh, please Massa, don't sell off our gold, I be good and use your paper!"

We need an honest accounting of our money to restore genuine free trade, not regulated trade, with nations of our own choosing.

This is what good neighbors do.

- - CV

An Army of Slaves

2005-05-31T05:56:00.000-04:00

by William Norman Grigg

The theme of Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign was: "He kept us out of the war." Numerous historians, both partisans and detractors of the wretched Wilson, have documented that the slogan was a cynical lie. The same was true of Wilson’s repeated public statements in opposition to the restoration of the draft, which had been discontinued at the end of the War Between the States.

In his April 2, 1917 address to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson approached the subject of conscription from an oblique angle, stating that the war would "involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States … at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service…" (Emphasis added.)

Observes Thomas Fleming in his invaluable book Illusion of Victory: "These words were an uplifting way of saying conscription, a draft." Significantly, Wilson’s words were also a close paraphrase of a line from the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto dictating an "equal liability of all to labor" in tasks ordained by the state. This implicit kinship was made more overt in Wilson’s May 28 proclamation implementing the conscription law that had been passed by Congress ten days earlier.

"The nation needs all men," decreed Wilson, "but it needs each man not in the field that will most pleasure him, but in the endeavor that will best serve the common good…. To this end, Congress has provided that the nation shall be organized for war by selection; that each man shall be classified for service in the place to which it shall best serve the general good to call him."

"The significance of this cannot be overstated," continued Wilson. "It is a new thing in our history and a landmark in our progress." Although Wilson’s conscription measure did represent a landmark in America’s descent into militarist collectivism, it was hardly the "new thing" he claimed it to be. While the Constitution did not provide for federal conscription, both the Union and Confederacy implemented the draft during the War Between the States. And in both cases, the draft was the keystone in a system described by historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel as "war socialism."

Der Staat Über Alles

The fundamental premise of the draft is that people exist to serve and protect the State, and can be used as seen fit by those who control it. This was expressed with astonishing bluntness in a July 13, 1863 New York Times house editorial entitled "The Conscription a Great National Benefit."

"It is a national blessing that the Conscription has been imposed," declared this hymn to the almighty State. "It is a matter of prime concern that it should now be settled, once for all, whether this Government is or is not strong enough to compel military service in its defense." Up until then, continued the Times, "the popular mind had scarcely bethought itself for a moment that the power of an unlimited Conscription was … one of the living powers of the government in time of war. The general notion was that Conscription was a feature that belonged exclusively to despotic Governments…."

But such notions must now be suppressed, insisted the editorial, since "not only the property, but the personal military service of every ablebodied citizen is at the command of the national authorities, constitutionally exercised…. The Government is the people’s Government…. When it is once understood that our national authority has the right under the Constitution, to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection, and that the great people recognize and stand by that right, thenceforward, for all time to come, this Republic will command a respect, both at home and abroad, far beyond any ever accorded to it before." (Emphasis added.)

The Times published those words as New York City succumbed to four days of violent anti-draft riots – the worst civic disturbance in U.S. history to that point. In the aftermath, the London Times ran a house editorial about the draft riots in which that British periodical expressed a sounder grasp of American constitutional tradition than had our own "paper of record": "It would have been strange, indeed, if the American people had submitted to a measure which is a distinctive mark of the most despotic governments of the Continent."

In order to enforce the conscription law, the Lincoln regime emulated – and built upon – precedents set by despotic European governments. As documented by Mark Neely in The Fate of Liberty, his Pulitzer-winning 1991 account of civil liberties under Lincoln, the period following enactment of conscription in 1863 was "the lowest point for civil liberties in U.S. history to that time, and one of the lowest for civil liberties in all of American history." Enforcement of conscription led to nation-wide suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus, and East German-style efforts to seal the border to keep draft-age men from fleeing the country. Hundreds were imprisoned for either seeking to avoid the draft, or even for publicly condemning it.

While the draft was abolished at war’s end, the notion that the federal government had the right "to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection" was not. Journalist Joel Tyler Headley, in his 1873 account The Great Riots of New York 1712–1873, prefaced his treatment of the draft riots with a brief theodicy defending the almighty State’s use of the draft.

"[W]e do not believe there is a sounder principle, or one that every unbiased mind does not concede with readiness that it does an axiom, that, if necessary to protect and save itself, a government may not only order a draft, but call out every able-bodied man in the nation," lectured Headley. "If this right does not inhere in our government, it is built on a foundation of sand, and the sooner it is abandoned the better."

Unlike orthodox Communists, Headley defended the division of labor, at least as applied to the Civil War draft, in which wealthy draft-age men could hire a substitute.

"The objection that a rich man, if drafted, can buy a substitute, while the poor man, with a large family depending upon him, must go, if of any weight at all, lies against the whole structure of society, which gives the rich man at every step immunities over the poor man," wrote Headley. "When society gets in that happy state, that the rich man has no advantages over the poor, there will be no need either of drafting or volunteering. Yet, after all, it is not so unequal as it at first sight appears. War must have money as well as men, and the former the rich have to furnish; and if they do this, it is but fair that they should be allowed to furnish with it also the men to do their fighting. Besides, there must be some rule that would exempt the men that carry on the business of the country."

Headley’s perspective was warmly embraced roughly a century later by late-blooming war hawks like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and scores of others who avoided Vietnam in order to pursue (in Cheney’s words) "other priorities." In this, as in so much else, neo-con "chickenhawks" are guided by Lincoln’s example. Notes Michael Lind in his new book, What Lincoln Believed: "Lincoln, while sending the sons of other men to their deaths, ensured that his own adult son Robert would avoid combat, first as a student at Harvard College and then as a member of the staff of General Ulysses S. Grant."

Another notable figure of the era who avoided conscription – albeit in his native Prussia – was Simon Baruch, who enlisted in the Confederate military after settling in South Carolina. His son Bernard would become an immensely powerful financier and – more importantly – head of the War Industries Board under Wilson, which would implement the Wilson regime’s system of War Communism.

Wilson’s War Communism

When Wilson re-instated conscription in his May 28, 1917 decree, he described it as "a new manner of accepting and vitalizing our duty to give ourselves without thoughtful devotion to the common purpose of all. It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass. It is no more a choosing of those who shall march with the colors than it is a selection of those who shall serve an equally necessary and devoted purpose in the industries that lie behind the battle line."

All men between the ages of 21 and 30 were ordered to muster at local registration sites on June 5, a date Wilson described as "a great day of patriotic devotion and obligation" on which "the name of every male person of the designated ages is written on these lists of honor."

Despite Wilson’s resounding claim that the nation had "volunteered in mass" for the war, the public wasn’t noticeably eager to take the yoke of the warfare state. In a note to "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Wilson’s intimate confidant, Wilson’s secretary Joe Tumulty fretted that "the people’s ‘righteous wrath’ seems not to have been aroused."

To arouse the public, the administration turned to propagandist George Creel, head of the quasi-governmental Committee for Public Information. Creel deployed an army of orators called the "Four Minute Men," who bullied their way into local theaters, civic clubs, churches, chambers of commerce, and other public settings to deliver "patriotic" speeches extolling the administration’s war aims.

The purpose of this pestilential horde of herd-poisoners, Creel explained, was to build a "war will" in the American public. Between May 12 and 21, Creel’s cadres harangued the public on the subject, "Universal Service by Selective Draft." Writes Fleming: "As often as possible, the word ‘service’ was substituted for the harsher ‘conscription.’ It was a word that blended nicely with the ideals of progressive reform that had swept the nation in the decade before the war."

But the public still refused to embrace the war. "There is evidence that in many localities the people have only entered the war with reluctance and with a feeling of inevitability rather than with any enthusiasm," reported the British government’s American Press Resume on May 23. Thus the administration unsheathed what Fleming calls "the mailed fist" – targeted arrests of draft resisters and critics. Amid claims of a widespread conspiracy to "resist the draft by force," federal officials jailed anti-draft protesters and pamphleteers in Texas, California, Ohio, and New York. The dragnet against "violent" and "lawless" draft opponents snagged two Missouri men who sought a court order to prevent enforcement of the draft decree.

As counter-point to the crackdown, a May 25 Los Angeles Times headline warned: "Death for Treason Awaits Anti-Draft Plotters." A week later, the paper reported that the nation’s ports were being kept under surveillance to prevent draft-age men from fleeing the country. This "mixture of exhortation and intimidation" turned the tide in the PR battle, Fleming writes: "In most towns and cities, almost 10 million men registered without a murmur of protest." Many Americans embraced the idea that Universal Service would be a healthy thing for undisciplined youth and unruly elements. "I’d rather have my son go to heaven in France than to hell in America!" exclaimed one dutiful Texas father. The New York Times opined that "The Selective Service Draft gives a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain rather insolent foreign element in this nation."

Once it was widely accepted that the State could force men to take up arms in its defense (as opposed to volunteering to defend their homes and communities), it was relatively easy for the Wilson regime to regiment the industrial economy. That task was assigned to Bernard Baruch – the son, once again, of a man who had dodged the draft in Germany.

The concept of the "Nation in Arms," Baruch wrote in a post-war report, meant that "in war, her entire resources of men, money and things should suddenly become a compact instrument of destruction…. [T]he entire population must suddenly cease to be a congeries of individuals, each following a self-appointed course, and become a vast unitary mechanism."

Nor is it enough that government conscript industry and transmute the productive sector into an engine of mass destruction; it must also claim the power to set all prices by fiat – in order to "support the troops," of course. Baruch theatrically lamented the destruction of "domestic morale through a just and bitter resentment by soldiers, their families, and indeed all persons of fixed income, at the spectacle of grotesquely exaggerated profits and income to those engaged in trade or in services for sale in competitive markets and the constantly increasing burden of bare existence to all those who are not so engaged."

The "just and bitter resentment" of conscripts, Baruch continued, can be assuaged "by simple proclamation to decree that every price in the whole national pattern as of that determined date shall be the maximum that may thenceforth be charged for anything…. In modern war, administrative control must replace the law of supply and demand."

"Administrative control" of necessity meant State control over the labor market, as well as goods and services. This was accomplished, in part, through the "Work or Fight" directive, through which men qualifying for a draft deferment were required to labor at State-approved jobs or face military conscription. Explained Baruch: "The Work or Fight order merely said to these men: ‘No matter what the grounds for your deferment may be, unless you are faithfully, continuously and usefully employed in a capacity and for an enterprise determined by the Government to be essential to the prosecution of the war, your deferment will be cancelled and you will immediately be called for service with the colors.’"

And why wouldn’t this be the case, given that the draft is based on the assumption that the State has a right "to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection"?

Interestingly, while Baruch he stoutly defended the military draft, he opposed conscription of labor as a violation of the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on "involuntary servitude." Baruch, in a fashion typical of Communists of all varieties, believed the private sector alone could be guilty of that offense. From the Communist perspective, the earth is the State’s, and everything in it – so when the State imposes involuntary servitude on its subjects, it’s merely exercising its sovereign right.

"A soldier serves the nation directly," Baruch wrote, dishonestly treating the "nation" and the "State" as the same entity. "There is but one master in the case and that master is America. He serves to profit no one but the country as a whole…. His entry is not contractural. He is clothed, fed, housed, and attended." However, insisted Baruch, "Enforced and involuntary service for a private master is and has been clearly and repeatedly defined by our Supreme Court as slavery inhibited [actually, prohibited] by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States…. All this does not say, however, that men not under military discipline are free agents in war. The Government cannot say, ‘Work here. Work there,’ or ‘Work for Mr. A.’ But it can say – as it did say in 1918: ‘Work or Fight!’" (Emphasis added.)

All Good Things…

Writing in 1941, shortly after the FDR regime had re-instated conscription in preparation for U.S. entry into the Second World War, Baruch fondly remembered the success of the Wilson regime’s efforts to collectivize the country.

"As if by common consent," Baruch recalled, "every war administration adopted the policy of decentralization, reliance on unofficial civilian co-operation, public education as to necessity, and – to put it frankly – universal and highly organized propaganda. Thus the draft – instead of being enforced by soldiers carrying bayonets as in the Civil War – was turned over to small boards of local civilians who were given almost unlimited and final authority. Largely they served without compensation and at great sacrifice. Much was made of the service of these men and conscription took on the aspect of a great spontaneous levee en masse. But there was a provision in the Selective Service Act under which, if any member of these draft boards had refused that duty, he could have been sent to jail."

Among Baruch’s few regrets was the fact that the war had ended before the nation had been transformed into a collectivist utopia: "Had the war gone on another year, our whole civil population would have gradually emerged (as wardrobes and inventories became exhausted) in cheap but serviceable uniform. Types of shoes were to be reduced to two or three. The manufacture of pleasure automobiles was to cease. Flaps from pockets and unnecessary trim in clothing would have disappeared. Steel had already been taken out of women’s corsets."

Ah, well – other opportunities for remaking American through war would come, as even more ruthless ruling elites – such as those arising after WWI in Germany and Russia – seized on the Wilson regime’s example. Of Germany’s National Socialist regime, Baruch proudly observed in 1941: "German military experts have said, ‘Except for a few minor changes, the German economic mobilization system was conscientiously built in imitation of the similar American system." Which is to say that the Wilson/Baruch model for war mobilization was the first draft of Hitler’s warfare State.

General Hugh S. Johnson, who had commanded the Blue Eagle storm troopers during the early years of the New Deal, also took pride in the tribute paid to Wilson’s regime by German rulers. In mobilizing for the coming war, wrote Johnson in 1941, "we should merit for industrial America something of what Field Marshal von Hindenburg in his retrospect of the World War had to say of its efforts in 1918: ‘Her brilliant, if pitiless, war industry had entered the service of patriotism and had not failed it. Under the compulsion of military necessity a ruthless autocracy was at work and rightly, even in this land at the portals of which the Statue of Liberty flashes its blinding light across the seas. They understood war.’"

Those of us who love liberty and peace should also understand war: It is the State reduced to its essential functions – destruction, regimentation, pitiless violence. Similarly, we must understand that conscription indisputably rests on the assumption that each individual is the State’s property, to be sacrificed when those controlling the State deem it necessary for their protection.

The inimitable William Lind pointed to the recent spectacle of panic-crazed politicians and bureaucrats fleeing the Capitol when a Cessna strayed into "secure airspace" as an example of "the crisis of legitimacy of the State." "When the same people who have sent our kids to die in Iraq and left our borders wide open run in panic because of a Cessna, the American people get the message: Washington is ‘them,’ not ‘us,’" he pointed out.

Thousands of Americans, both young and not-so-young, have been left dead, limbless, sightless, or mindless because of the actions of soft-handed, soft-bellied servants of the State. That same ruling elite is quietly preparing to re-instate the draft, now that the pool of willing enlistees is drying up. Just as it happened almost a century ago, the drive to re-institute conscription – which is to say, War Communism – is shielded by a curtain of blasé assurances from the political class, and pseudo-populist rhetoric from George Creel’s contemporary disciples.

May 31, 2005

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] writes for The New American magazine.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

Uncle Sam Wants Addicts, Misfits

2005-05-30T11:41:00.000-04:00

Somehow, Military’s Recruitment Goals Will Be Met
by Mike Blair

The U.S. military is headed for drastic drops in the quality of its troops and morale if current trends continue. Due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the recruitment of young men and women for the military has dropped considerably, and recruiting officers are finding it more and more difficult to meet their quotas.

This has resulted in the recruiters relaxing,even falsifying, the requirements that should be met for enlistment in the military services.

This is just another indicator that ultimately the Pentagon will have to turn to a draft to fill its dwindling ranks. Local draft boards are currently being staffed to undertake drafting American youth for the military, despite claims by President George W. Bush and leaders of Congress that they have no plans for conscription to maintain military manpower.

According to reports that are beginning to appear in the establishment media, recruiters are bending or breaking rules to meet quotas.

A northern Ohio recruiter, as an example, has reported that he has been hiding police records and medical histories of potential recruits?deceptions, he says, that are condoned, even encouraged, by his superiors.

Several recruiters have admitted they have concealed mental health histories and police records of those they have recruited, and have even falsified documents, including high school diplomas. They have been providing potential recruits "cheat sheets," wallet-sized cards that are slipped to the applicants before they take the military's aptitude tests.

The breakdown in the recruiting system has even drawn the attention of the mainstream news, which as recently as May reported that a high school student near Denver revealed that two recruiters had advised him how to cheat.

The student, identified as David McSwane, indicated that one recruiter told him how to create a "high school diploma" from a nonexistent school, while the other helped him obtain a product that would cleanse traces of an illegal psychedelic drug from his bloodstream.

The Army's own admission indicates that there were 320 unsubstantiated cases of recruitment improprieties in 2004, up from 199 in 1999.

Recruiters have also been reportedly lying to applicants by making false promises that if they join up they will not be sent to Iraq.

In 2004, there were 1,118 cases of recruiter wrongdoing, which amounts to about one in five recruiters. Some senior Army officers have said that for at least every improper recruiting act discovered there are at least two more that are never discovered.

The seriousness of the recruiting scandal is illustrated by a 21-year-old Ohio applicant who was signed up by the Army just a week after he was released from a psychiatric ward.

"The fact that they would recruit someone straight out of a psychiatric hospital . . . is beyond my comprehension and appalling," the young man's father said.

One recruiter reported that one in three young men he signed up had a problem that "needed concealing."

"The only people who want to join the Army now have issues," he concluded. "They're troubled with health, police or drug problems."

Abandoned Gold Standard Guarantees Inflation

2005-05-28T08:11:00.000-04:00

by Bill Haynes

In recent weeks, as prices have surged higher, "revived" inflation has become the topic du jour among establishment writers. Unfortunately, these writers point to the usual suspects, i.e. higher energy costs, higher interest rates, etc. In fact, the cause of inflation is the United States’ abandonment of the gold standard.

The United States’ abandonment of gold as the foundation of its monetary system came in two steps. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ended Americans’ right to surrender paper dollars for gold and even to own gold bullion. Step two came in 1971 when President Richard Nixon "closed the gold window" and denied foreign governments the right to turn in paper dollars for gold.

Roosevelt’s move was a major step in shifting the world from the gold standard to the gold exchange standard. Under the gold standard, governments fixed the prices of their currencies in terms of a specified amount of gold and stood ready to convert their currencies into gold at the fixed prices.

Under the gold exchange standard, governments could hold U.S. dollars and British sterling as reserves because those currencies were "exchangeable for gold." The move to the gold exchange standard became official with the adoption of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. When Nixon closed the gold window, those nations counting paper dollars as reserves found themselves holding paper instead of gold.

Although in 1974 President Gerald Ford signed legislation that permitted Americans again to own gold bullion, that legislation did not put the United States back on the gold standard.

Under the gold standard, a government is limited – both legally and practically – as to how much paper money it can print. As recently as the Lyndon Johnson administration, the U.S. could print paper dollars equal only to four times the value of the nation’s gold reserves.

Under the gold standard, governments that print too much paper money risk runs on their gold reserves. Runs occur as holders of the paper seek to convert to gold before the vaults are empty. A run on the dollar is what happened in the late 1960s, which culminated in President Richard Nixon closing the gold window in 1971.

"Closing the gold window" is a euphemism for the U.S. defaulting on its promise to other countries to redeem dollars for gold. As an alternative, Nixon could have devalued the dollar and continued to redeem. In effect, he chose a one hundred percent devaluation, a de facto default on the promise to redeem.

In the 34 years before Nixon closed the gold window, the money supply in the U.S. grew less than two fold. In the 34 years after Nixon’s action, the money supply expanded 13 fold. The Fed’s massive inflation of the 1990s resulted in the greatest advance in stock market history. Continued inflation is now pushing housing prices to record levels. Automobiles now cost more than houses did only thirty years ago.

Despite establishment assertions that the dollar is "sound," investors should prepare for further declines in the value of the dollar and plan their investments accordingly. History shows that no government, after going on a fiat monetary system, ever reverses course until its paper currency is destroyed. There is no reason to believe this time will be any different.

May 28, 2005

Bill Haynes [send him mail] has been a precious metals dealer since 1973. Bill starts his day reading lewrockwell.com’s selected articles. His website can be seen at www.cmi-gold-silver.com.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

Defending Southern Heritage? Sober Up!!

2005-05-26T10:27:00.000-04:00

by Clyde Wilson

Many good people have been working in recent years to preserve public acknowledgment and celebration of our Confederate history. Our fights have been largely defensive reactions to the innumerable strokes of our enemies, and most of them have been defeats. Our enemies control most of the 'respectable' political, religious, educational, business and media institutions of American society, including nearly all 'Southern' institutions.

We have lost in part because many defenders of our symbols have not understood the nature of the battle.

Southerners are a conservative people. They prefer the traditional to the abstract and are slow to adopt new theories (one of the several characteristics that distinguish them from other inhabitants of the United States). This is a good and healthy virtue, but like all virtues it can, if we are not careful, become a self-defeating rigidity. The conservative philosopher Russell Kirk contrasted mere stand-patter conservatism of the dull-witted or poor in spirit who reject anything new with the true conservatism of an Edmund Burke or a John C. Calhoun who perceived that it was necessary to change in order to conserve because new conditions had created new threats to our patrimony.

Unfortunately, too many spokesmen in the fight for Southern heritage are stand-patters, i.e., dinosaurs on their way to extinction. They are trying to live in a world that they grew up in but which does not exist any more. The world that they grew up in accepted Southerners and Southern heritage as a positive part of America. That world began disappearing a half century ago and is almost gone.

After Reconstruction, which all sensible Northerners came to realize had been a grievous mistake, most Americans, North and South, took the Road to Reunion. Southerners had to agree that they were glad that the Union had been saved and a stronger America had emerged. (They were already genuinely glad of the end of slavery.) For the most part they did this with sincerity and enthusiasm (they had to if they had any hopes of personal success). Southerners became good and loyal members of the new America. They have lived up to that pledge every generation since, in fact have been the most loyal of all Americans and done more than their fair share in every war.

As their part of the bargain, Northerners acknowledged that Southerners had been brave and honourable in their war for independence, and their heroes, like Lee and Jackson, would be celebrated as AMERICAN heroes. (There were always a few old Yankees around who wanted to exterminate the rebels, and indeed there still are, but they were a minority.)

This is why The Birth of a Nation creation of D.W. Griffith, son of a Confederate soldier, could be regarded as a national epic at the beginning of the twentieth century. Will Rogers, another son of a Confederate soldier, was a national institution and he and Shirley Temple and many others portrayed very sympathetic Southern characters in the films of the 1920s and 1930s.

Gone With the Wind, book and movie, was an all-time best-seller in the North as well as the South. Every major male non-Southern Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s portrayed a heroic Confederate: Erroll Flynn, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Allan Ladd, Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Montgomery Clift, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Widmark, to name just a few. In all his best movies, John Wayne is a Confederate: Red River, The Searchers, and True Grit, the last two based on Southern novels.

Confederate flags were seen among American fighting men, in real life and film, during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Douglas Southall Freeman’s R.E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants were celebrated as accounts of AMERICAN military valour. When President Roosevelt inaugurated the first completed dam of the TVA, he did so on a platform that flew US and Confederate flags.

THAT WORLD DOES NOT EXIST ANY MORE! DEFENDERS OF SOUTHERN HERITAGE SHOULD STOP ACTING LIKE IT DOES. The people who want to do away with Confederate symbols are not people who will come around when you argue a little historical interpretation with them, or when you point out (as you know to be true) that your forebears were not fighting for slavery, or prove that you are a loyal American whose heart contains no hate and violence.

They do not care! They have no heritage of their own and do not know what a heritage is. They believe in their own self-interest and fashionable abstractions. We do not and will not in the foreseeable future live in a world where Southern heritage will be publicly honoured except by us. We live in a regime where Confederate symbols are scheduled for complete obliteration. At present, we can expect no help from our own institutions, the politics of Southern states being dominated primarily by Big Business. (A phone call from the president of NationsBank or the publisher of a big newspaper carries more weight with any politician than 20,000 Confederates at a rally, or any number of personal visits from earnest citizens. This is a fact.)

The Compromise is broken. Why this happened would take several books to explain. Northern society has periodically gone through fits of fanaticism which have focused upon us. When was the last time you thought about telling people in New York or Seattle what to do? Never, because it is not a part of our national character as Southerners. But hundreds of thousands of Northerners are thinking about you and about their right to suppress your evil ways. In their fantasy world, which is the only culture of any significance they have, YOU are the evil obstacle to making the world perfect. They have always been that way.

It has nothing to do with you. It is their problem. It has nothing to do with the South except that the South lies convenient for their aggressions. They cover up their emptiness, hatred, hypocricy, and insignificance by identifying you as the Enemy. This is the way Puritans behave when they lose their religion. Our forefathers saw this clearly. It was that kind of society and people that they fought to be free of !

Many of our official defenders have not figured out that the Compromise no longer exists. In a recent legislative election in South Carolina, the leftwing candidate brought out a bevy of veterans and SCV members to publicly condemn the conservative candidate because the conservative candidate was a Southern activist who allegedly would not repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.

It was as if the conservative candidate was one of the spoiled Yankee children who promoted treason in time of war in the 1960s. These good people are too blind to figure out that those 60s traitors are now in power in America and are the ones who are hellbent on using their power to destroy every last vestige of our Southern heritage and identity!

This unfortunately represents the attitude of too many flag defenders. One despairs at such blindness. The compatriots I am talking about, however, can be educated. I have seen it done. Democrats and Republicans both, of the ruling establishment, are relying on this kind of stupid 'patriotism' to kill off challenges to their power. Southern heritage is the first casualty of that power.

WAKE UP! It is not 1945 any more, or even 1975. You can either honour your Southern heritage and preserve your Southern identity, or you can give unthinking obedience to the America of today. You cannot do both without engaging in self-defeating contradiction.

HERE ARE A FEW SUGGESTIONS:

*Don’t compromise. Compromise is only a defeat and a springboard for another attack. Don’t think that being a good sport will make the other side good sports. Who follows an uncertain trumpet? You will probably lose. But a loss on principle preserves a rallying point. John C. Calhoun says: a defeat on principle is not an overthrow, while a victory by compromise is a defeat.

*Be worthy of your ancestors. Don’t be a goody goody 'American' humbly begging to be allowed to keep a shred of your heritage. You are a member of a great people under attack who have been betrayed by their leaders. It is needed to defend the Southern people here and now and not just the noble Confederate soldier.

*Think like a Southerner. Lay claim to all your heritage! We cannot defend only our Confederate forebears, as important as that is. They are but a part of Southern history. Lay claim to all of Southern history and culture, from Captain John Smith and Pocahontas to Dale Earnhardt. To concentrate on Confederate history alone is to concede to the enemy that the Confederacy can be segregated off as an evil episode of slavery and treason. It also plays into the North’s everlasting tendency to claim anything Southern that is good, as 'American,' that is, non-Southern. George Washington is just as Southern as Robert E. Lee. Thomas Jefferson is just as Southern as Jefferson Davis. Andrew Jackson is just as Southern as Bedford Forrest. Alvin York, and Audie Murphy, and the Alamo are just as Southern as Stonewall Jackson.

Avoid argument with the enemy and concentrate on educating yourself and members of our people, especially the young, not forgetting the many Yankees of good will. In Heritage-Haters you are dealing with people who send their children to private schools while busing yours and still think they are morally superior to you because they are in favour of busing and you are not. They are not interested in debate or evidence. Remember, they are not attacking your great-grandfather’s war: they are attacking you! And, as we learned in the flag fight in South Carolina, this goes double for the academic 'experts' in the war era, who are even less interested in evidence and perspective than the ordinary flag hater.

*Don’t be discouraged. So beautiful and powerful is our heritage that it has taken them decades to cut away as much as they have. It will take some time and hard work to recover lost ground.

*If you have to argue, turn the tables. There is little profit in talking about slavery in today’s climate. If you must discuss slavery call it 'domestic servitude,' which is what it was. Most importantly, point out that, sure, the South did not want outside interference with its domestic servitude, but the North was NOT fighting to end slavery! The significant factor is the North’s motives! They are the ones who invaded us, violating the fundamental American principle of the consent of the governed. Most people who think they are aggreived about slavery neither know nor care anything about history. They are really aggrieved about the segregation that marked more recent times.

If you must debate don’t make indefensible statements that will be laughed out of court, like 'the war was not about slavery', 'most Southerners did not own slaves', and an exagerated count of black soldiers in the Confederacy. Yes, the war was partly about slavery, though not on their side and not as centrally and in the way that they claim. By counting families, or households, approximately one-fourth of Southerners were owners of domestic servants, almost all of them of a few people (1-4) who lived and worked closely with the family. Yes, there were a great many black Confederates who helped sustain the armies and the home front, but not as enrolled soldiers.

*My standpatter compatriots, if you want to be a good American as defined by the ruling institutions today, forget about your Southern heritage. But most Southerners care for family, place, Christian social order, courage, loyalty, honour—all things besieged in America today. That is, after all, why we love our heritage.

*Stop supporting federal government wars out of unthinking loyalty. For a long time the US armed forces had a chilvalric Southern flavour. They now combine all the worst aspects of bureacracy, imperialism, graft, affirmative action, and Political Correctness, in an atmosphere of moral depravity.

*Cure yourself of Republican party thinking. What further proof is needed that the South and Southerners have nothing to expect from the Republican 'conservatives' except payoffs to individuals to betray their people? As the Rev Robert Lewis Dabney pointed out long ago, the Northern 'conservatives,' in the entire course of American history have never conserved anything. George W., though raised in Texas, suppressed innocuous Confederate plaques. McCain, though a descendant of Confederates, branded our flag as a hate symbol to be suppressed. The Republican governor of New York banished the Georgia flag. Shortly after their candidate was elected President, the Wall Street Journal and National Review published pieces ridiculing Southern conservatives. The message was clear: Give us your votes and shut up.

The worst thing that can happen to the South is to be turned into an appendage of the bland, principleless elements represented by the Republican party. Think like a Southerner, not like a knee-jerk 'conservative.' If Jesse Jackson causes a ruckus in Decatur, Illinois, applaud him. You can be sure that if he was making trouble in your town, Decatur, Illinois, would be cheering him on. They just don’t want him to bother them.

Dr Clyde Wilson is a published author, a professor at the University of South Carolina, and one of the founding members of the League of the South.

Devolution

2005-05-25T16:19:00.000-04:00

by Clyde Wilson

This is the preface to Mike Tuggle's Confederates in the Boardroom.

Equipped with an abundant knowledge of history, Michael Tuggle has cast a discerning eye on the trends of the present. Not the ‘trendy’ trends but the real ones, those which can guide our steps into the future (as far as the future can be known to us mortals). The trends suggest to him something very hopeful – the probability and suitability of a change in the principle by which human affairs are governed. We have been living for a long time by the organising principle of command from the top down – something the American Founding Fathers decried as ‘consolidation’– and the opposite of liberty.

Throughout most of the course of Western Civilisation, until a little over two centuries ago, centralised government was regarded as something bad and alien, characteristic of ‘Oriental despotism.’ The Greeks, for example, were divided into self-governing city-states. They were never united under one authority during the time when their excellence in knowledge, art, and government reached levels that still astonish the world. Herodotus, the first historian, ascribed the Greeks' defeat of the Persian Empire to the resilience flowing from their freedom from arbitrary control. In typical fashion, government-worshipping historians of the nineteenth century forward preached the contrary: that the decline of the ancient Greeks resulted from their lack of unity.

However, a more reasonable interpretation is that, although they were damaged by fighting among themselves, the Greeks met with irredeemable disaster only after Athens had centralised a dangerous power to dictate to the other city-states. Thus, the Greeks' liberties and creativity ended precisely when they were united under the Macedonian monarchy.

John C. Calhoun, one of the great anti-consolidationist thinkers of the nineteenth century, pointed out that the Romans achieved their greatest freedom and strength as a people when there existed two centres of power – the Senate and the Tribunes – each with an absolute veto over the other's actions. The workings of the state required co-ordination and agreement among the elements of society rather than dictation from above. Contrary to government-worshippers who complained that the lack of a commanding central authority made society helpless, Calhoun observed that an independent consensus of the parts led to actions that were highly effective and more satisfactory to the whole. No central authority could match the strength of free men who co-operated willingly. Mr. Tuggle enlightens us as to the current appropriateness of Calhoun's insight.

Even under the Roman Empire (while it was healthy), although policies were sent out from the centre, vast areas of initiative remained in the provinces and cities – in military affairs, taxation, local government, and religion.

The Middle Ages were par excellence the age of decentralisation; there was scarcely any real power that was not local. Kings and lesser lords essentially depended upon the voluntary co-operation of their vassals. The Church, at least in appearance, was centralised in its own affairs, but it preached the rightness of subsidiarity in government. Our modern thinkers who extol the necessity and glory of the nation-state consolidated under one supreme authority tell us that decentralisation was the cause of the ‘darkness’ of those times. Looked at another way, perhaps it was the creative force of many different points of light that illuminated the way of the West out of the darkness – a darkness brought on by the inevitable collapse of the muscle-bound inflexibility of the imperial government. Certainly, the lights came on earliest in the free and self-governing cities, while the Renaissance blazed most brightly in the free and independent cities of northern Italy – not in some centrally-managed society.

In the seventeenth century it was thought that the ‘Sun King’ of France, Louis XIV, had brought centralised government to the height of its possibilities. Louis could oppress individuals; however, he could not – except through the traditional hodgepodge of taxes – oppress entire classes. He could declare wars, but he could no more command all the manpower and resources of the kingdom for his wars than he could the rotation of the planets. It was his nationalist successors of the Revolution and the Empire who marshalled the ability of a centralised government to command a whole society. Their handiwork was copied all over the Western world. The consolidated nation-state became the material and psychological focus of entire peoples while the ensuing conflicts among such states became the prevailing pattern of history. The American Revolution – and the Articles of Confederation and Constitution which followed – preceded the triumph of the nation-state. During the long colonial period, Americans enjoyed the benign neglect of the British Crown. The thirteen colonies barely felt the hand of central government (their citizens scarcely feeling the controlling hand of any government). It was the British governments attempt to end this happy condition that brought them to declare that the thirteen ‘are and ought to be free and independent states.’

The American Founders intended to create a Union which would institutionalise bonds of co-operation among those states and among the new commonwealths that their descendants would create out of wilderness in the future. They did not intend to establish a central authority, such as the one they had just thrown off, from which there was no escape or appeal except by the sword. They dreaded the spectre of ‘consolidation’ which, if allowed, would bring an end to their individual freedom and the self-government of their natural communities. Human associations in community were distinct from and took precedence over governments. Good governments were the servants of society, not its master.

The forces that reshaped the States United into the United State in the middle of the nineteenth century did so only as the result of the destruction of the essential elements of self-government and a holocaust of American lives.

The supposed deep thinkers of the nineteenth century (especially in Germany and the United States) celebrated the brutality employed against their fellow countrymen that was necessary in order to establish the nation-states they desired. Each sang the praises of his own country's new ability to mobilise the property and allegiances of the masses to the ends of the central state. Nationalist mania stipulated that the centralised state was a prerequisite for the liberation and progress of humanity.

Lord Acton, an immensely learned historian of liberty, was, like Calhoun, a nay-sayer of the nineteenth century, bringing into common reference the phrase ‘Power corrupts.’ The progress of man depended upon ordered liberty; and liberty depended upon the restraint and dispersal of power. Acton demonstrated that freedom in the Western world was a product of restrictions on power that had been painfully accumulated bit by bit over the course of centuries. Taking the long view, Acton wrote, the crushing of the principle of states' rights in the American war of 1861–1865 was not a victory for liberty, but a defeat.

One wonders why in the twenty-first century anyone should continue to give devotion to the principle of consolidation. The postulate of the all-commanding central government has resulted, for the first time in mankind's long and painful existence, in what were literally World Wars. The central state has given rulers the power to murder the innocents of their own and other countries by the millions. Even at its least destructive, the central state inevitably, as Calhoun also observed, preys upon the people, or a part of them, for the benefit of those who hold power and their clients.

Surely the premier empirical truth that emerged from human affairs in the twentieth century is that free markets are better than central planning. At least better for society as a whole, aside from those who profit from the Plan. As Tuggle makes clear, confidence in the necessity of centralised power in industrial management, education, and the organisation of many other human affairs has proved to be a delusion over the past two centuries. The wisdom of experience and of insight into the real trends of the present which the author has brought to bear tells us that centralisation has not fulfilled the promises of its apologists. Command from the top down has proven itself to be not only arbitrary and inimical to freedom, but also inefficient and unable to adapt to changing circumstances.

The wave of the future, the cutting edge, the hope of efficiency, abundance, and freedom for societies is just what the Western tradition has always told us – devolution of power to competing and co-operating authorities. There is no lesson that it is more important to take to heart at this moment in time. It seems that John C. Calhoun was right after all.

October 24, 2003

Dr. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com

Mainstream Media vs. Upstream Media

2005-05-25T08:17:00.000-04:00

by Gary North

Recently, I was flipping through the local TV channels. I get four stations clearly, but none is worth watching more than once a week. I stopped briefly at an interview. Talking head #1 was a nationally known TV news teleprompter reader, also known as an anchorman. The other one was unfamiliar to me. He was a print media journalist – a reporter. The anchorman began his questioning of the journalist with this observation. "We’re both representatives of the MSM: mainstream media."

It hit me. The MSM is at long last visibly on the defensive. The moment you acknowledge that you are part of the mainstream media, you are necessarily also acknowledging the existence of another media, which I like to call the Upstream Media. It swims against the mainstream, which is flowing downstream. It’s easy to flow downstream. You just let nature take its course.

The trouble with downstream rafting is that eventually you either hit the rapids or go over the falls. In any movie about going over the falls, someone in the raft asks:

"What’s that noise?"

The optimists say that the river will carry them to the ocean. Fine. But if you don’t climb off the raft, you will drift out to sea and disappear. The point is, at some point you had better get off the raft. The mainstream will eventually kill you.

Today, because of the Internet, hundreds of millions of people are getting off the raft, all over the world. They grab a motorboat and head back upstream.

There are lots of tributaries heading back upstream. No single tributary that is feeding into the river is getting all of the traffic. But hundreds of millions of people are now headed in the opposite direction, at least with respect to some important issues. Other issues will follow. Issue by issue, readers are concluding, "We’ve been lied to." They are correct.

The Establishment at some point will face the implications of widespread disbelief in everything it says. At some point, people will not voluntarily do what they are told when they perceive their leaders as liars. When that day comes, political consensus will disintegrate. So will the mainstream Establishment’s control systems.

Upstream media were not readily accessible to most people as recently as a decade ago. The cost of locating alternative news sources was too high. The economists' rule held firm: "When price rises, less of the item is demanded." Now the same rule is being applied against the mainstream: "When price falls, more of the item will be demanded." The Internet has changed the relative pricing of media. This is a revolutionary turn of events.

The price of obtaining alternative views is falling fast. In fact, the main expense today is the value of our time. We have less and less time for the boring, superficial, and lying mainstream media. They know it. There is nothing they can do about it.

The monopoly that they have enjoyed for about 5,000 years is coming to an end. So is the free ride of political parties that rely on the mainstream media to keep the masses in line.

NEWSPAPERS ARE DYING

How much time do you spend each day reading newspapers? An hour? Probably not.

How much time do you read on-line? More than you spend with a newspaper.

Day by day, there are more people just like you.

A decade ago, I subscribed to three daily newspapers and about two dozen magazines. I also subscribed to a dozen investment newsletters. Since 2000, I have subscribed only to half a dozen paper-based newsletters. More and more newsletters are digital.

Instead of reading newspapers, I visit Websites. We all do. We are in news-overload mode. This is getting worse. Even with Google and similar search tools, we have too much on our plates. The allocation of our reading time has replaced the allocation of our subscription money as our most pressing reading problem.

Year after year, the network news departments of the three main TV networks are watching the Nielsen numbers fall. The same thing is happening to newspapers. They are declining in circulation. This is especially true of local newspapers. Readers are interested in national news, and they go to the Web for it.

This is creating a major problem for certain retail industries, most notably automobiles and furniture. Newspapers rely heavily on pages of full-page ads for local cars and furniture. As newspaper readers switch to on-line versions of local newspapers, as they are doing by the millions, the full-page ad’s pull per dollar is fading. There are little ads on-screen, which we have learned to ignore. There are even PRINT THIS buttons that strip out most of the ads. When I post a link to an article, I always link to the print-screen version.

Local car companies and furniture stores ought to have on-line sites that are kept up to date hourly. A car is sold. Its photo should immediately be taken off the Website. But retailers in these industries have not yet made the transition to the Web. They do not understand it. Web marketing is still in its shake-out period. Yet the Web is replacing newspapers today. The Web shake-out will not be over before hundreds of paper-based newspapers die. Subscriptions since 1990 have been steadily falling at 1% per year. This has now risen to over 5% in some cases.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, large-circulation urban newspapers shaped local public opinion in America. There were many papers, morning and evening, and each one represented one of the two major political parties. Then came radio and television, both regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which controlled frequencies and station broadcasting power. Now the Web and for-pay satellite TV and radio have unplugged power from the FCC. The FCC legally regulates the content of only the no-pay airwaves. It does not regulate the Web at all.

Politicians in the two parties have built their power base on the basis of controlling local media. Today, local media are dying: newspapers and local TV stations. Broadcasting is dying; narrowcasting is replacing it. This will force a re-structuring of American politics.

LOCALISM IS DYING

Two competing social forces are now moving in opposite directions. Retail outlets along the main drag in every city are going national: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Office Depot, etc. Locally owned retailers of physical stuff are disappearing. Price competition is killing them.

At the same time, information is decentralizing. Choices are decentralizing. These are aspects of the same trend: anti-localism. The decentralization of information is virtual, not geographical. It is the radical decentralization of the Drudge Report: straight into a guy’s apartment in Hollywood. It bypasses regions, states, and townships. His apartment could be located anywhere. When information can come from anywhere and be delivered to anywhere at the same monetary price – zero – geography ceases to matter. We live in an information-centered age. So, we no longer live in a geography-centered age. This has never happened before. We are entering uncharted social waters.

"What’s that noise?"

Localism is fading: local loyalties, local politics, local schools. Higher levels of government absorb our tax money. Textbooks are produced nationally. Local school boards are impotent. Local politics gets the leftovers.

When I want to buy a new product, I go onto the Web and read reviews. Then I use the Web to find the cheapest seller. For electronics, the seller is usually located in the northeast, probably in New York City, and is not open on Saturdays. (The seller is not a Seventh-Day Adventist.) What do I care? To save 20%, I’ll buy on Thursday. Besides, I can order on-line 24x7. The phrase "24x7" is a sign of the times. Locally owned stores are not open 24x7. Web-based digital shopping carts are.

Regionalism is also fading. People are mobile. They move every five years. They do not establish local loyalties, which are costly to break. The ties that bind no longer bind very efficiently – in housing, occupations, regions, or marriage.

Regional mobility has been going on in the United States ever since the earliest days. Free land meant the move west. The kids got in a wagon and moved away . . . forever. Opportunity in America has always trumped regional loyalty in the long run. Regional loyalties have faded with every reduction in transportation costs. U-Haul and Ryder have done their work well.

The South will not rise again. Similarly, the yankees of New England have not visibly run the country since Jack Kennedy died. They do it indirectly. After Lyndon Johnson, the Texas presidents have been ersatz: both Bushes are of Connecticut stock, by way of Yale University and Brown Brothers, Harriman, the investment banking firm. George W. Bush bought his Crawford, Texas ranch in 1999 in preparation for the 2000 Presidential campaign. I call it "Potemkin Ranch." Here is a man who could afford to buy 2.5 square miles of land 25 miles from Waco – not exactly prairie dog country. The mainstream media never bothered to point out these incongruities. That is why they are mainstream.

When I say that the South will not rise again, I don’t mean the old commitment of the South: resistance to centralized government. That idea is spreading as never before by means of the Web. It just isn’t associated with a region any longer.

This is not just an American phenomenon. It is becoming universal. The gatekeepers of every national government are on the defensive. The gates cannot easily keep out electronic digits. The gatekeepers have lost power ever since the invention of the printing press. They could exercise some control over printing presses, ink, and paper. They cannot control electronic digits.

Our political world will change, even as our retailing world has changed. When it becomes obvious to voters that Washington, without robbing us blind, can no longer supply the stolen money with which it has bribed us for 90 years, mainstream politics will suffer a blow comparable to what the mainstream media are suffering.

NEWSLETTERS ARE MORPHING INTO WEBSITES

I mentioned that by 2000, I had cancelled all paper-based communications except for newsletters. They, too, are changing. They are dying off along with their editors.

My favorite newsletter, Otto Scott’s Compass, ceased publication in January, 2005. Mr. Scott, now in his mid-eighties, could no longer write it. His daughters placed him in a rest home. My second favorite newsletter, Hilaire du Barrier’s report on European affairs, ceased publication a year ago when the editor, age 94, died. Neither man was famous. Both were lifelong journalists. Hilaire du Barrier was not a well-known journalist. Yet I honestly believe that any historian who tries to write about European affairs, 1945 to 2004, who does not have a set of Hilaire’s newsletters will not get the story right.

Hilaire was an upstream media man. He had been captured by the Japanese in 1941 in French Indo-China. He had been tortured for two weeks. He did not reveal anything about the network of French spies he knew about. After the war, they reciprocated. He had a network of informants like no other journalist I ever met. Yet he was always in the upstream. Almost no one knew about him.

A couple of years before he died, I persuaded a friend of his to put all of his reports on a CD-ROM. At some point, this CD-ROM will go on-line. Of this, I am sure. Then his life’s work will get the readers it always deserved. The story of the insider’s creation of the New Europe will then get the distribution it deserves.

The gatekeepers have a problem. The insiders have a problem. The story is getting out. As it gets out, political loyalties fade. The European Union was sold to the voters by Jean Monnet and his successors on the basis of greater economic opportunity, not the benefits of a new political loyalty. There is still little political grass-roots loyalty to the European Union. France will probably vote against the new 230-page EU constitution. Anyway, I hope so.

Websites are replacing paper-based newsletters. The flow of non-approved information is becoming a torrent. This undermines consensus. This process includes political consensus.

Think of what home schooling means for the intellectual consensus. Think of the threat to the Powers That Be. The cost of textbook production has kept upstream interpretations away from most students. But now home school curriculum developers can get new views to millions of students by way of CD-ROM and the Internet. Parents who are sufficiently upstream to have pulled their children out of America’s only established church – the public school system – are ready to consider new interpretations. This is driving the academic gatekeepers crazy. Their monopoly over the media is fading. Now their near-monopoly over tax-funded education is slipping.

CAMPUS FOLLIES

Today, American higher education absorbs something in the range of a third of a trillion dollars a year, and this is rising by about 7% a year – the sign of government-enforced monopoly. The government-supervised college accrediting system keeps out price competition. It also keeps upstream opinions out of most colleges. But this monopoly is producing the familiar result: falling standards and falling output.

The young wife of a college professor (engineering) I know told me that at the college, where she is finishing her bachelor’s degree in June, several of her professors in the social sciences will not accept as valid any citation from a Web site that does not end in .gov. These people are crazy leftists. I mean really crazy – over the top Democrats and statists who honestly believe that their students are being corrupted by non-.gov political Websites. They are trying to keep students away from non-government-approved digits. They really are crazy. They have lost touch with reality. They are tax-subsidized nut cases.

In January, I visited an old friend who teaches history at an obscure state university. He and I were teaching assistants in the Western civilization program at the University of California, Riverside, in the late 1960s. That was back when all college grads had to take a class in Western civilization: dreary, long-dead days indeed.

For 35 years, I have recalled that when he could not decide what grade to give a student exam, he would have me read it. This was always an A/B decision. Invariably, I could not help him. I always graded it the same way: right on the dividing line. Yet he was a New Deal Democrat, and I thought Reagan was a sell-out. (I voted for William Penn Patrick in the 1966 Republican gubernatorial primary.) We had the same sense of what constituted student competence. That world of semi-objective standards is gone – buried in waves of political correctness.

He told me that his students today are extremely well-versed in digital research. They have grown up with the Internet. But, he said, there are two major problems: (1) they cannot evaluate the truth of what they read; (2) they are prone to submitting term papers that they have bought on-line.

So, we are seeing the result the triumph of official relativism in academia: "There is no objective truth." The students have bought the academic party line. They respond accordingly: (1) "One opinion is as good as another." (2) "A purchased term paper may be worth the money and risk." The Web is filled with conflicting opinions and cheap term papers.

Problem: in engineering and architecture, this outlook can lead to collapsing structures.

THE POOL OF TALENT

Year by year, a third of the labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

There are teamwork issues here. There are also cultural mindsets. If I were an American manufacturer, I would rather employ a team of scientists and engineers that individually graduated from American colleges and whose members are entrepreneurial. Progress in commercial product development is not just a matter of individual competence in surviving formal education, based mainly on skill in mathematics. But as the comparative supply of such graduates shrinks in the United States, and as the American tradition of entrepreneurship invades Asia – as it is invading – there will come a time when wage competition from Asia will undermine the competitive advantage enjoyed today by teams of scientists in the United States. Even if companies develop products here, they will have them produced off shore. Only the most creative science grads will be amply rewarded here for product development. Civil engineers – road-builders – will have an advantage based on geography. Electrical engineers won’t.

Until the year 2001, Asia sent its best graduate students to study in the United States. The post 9/11 tightening of immigration standards (not on the border with Mexico, of course), coupled with the new prestige of Asian technical training, has reduced the percentage of foreign graduate students in American universities. This has never happened before in the post World War II era.

CONCLUSION

Mainstream media are losing to upstream media. This is eroding consensus among readers and TV viewers. Cable and satellite TV are undermining the networks. The Web is undermining the newspapers. Narrowcasting is undermining broadcasting. Home schools are undermining the tax-funded schools, though only at the fringes. Only the colleges seem immune, where government control is greatest. But they are becoming a laughingstock, even though parents still shell out far more than they need to (at least three times more) by sending their children off to college. Parents who know the system can get their kids through school for under $15,000 – maybe as little as $10,000 – which means that the kids can pay for their college educations by working part-time. The Establishment is on the defensive even in the halls of ivy.

This is becoming clear: price competition is now unstoppable. If you are not in a position to sell something cheaper, you are in big trouble. This fact is killing the mainstream media, which lost its ability to compete after 80 years of government regulation and protection. It is going to kill every other cozy little arrangement with the state.

Sell services, not stuff. Sell services locally, where Chinese college graduates cannot compete. Sell information, where Chinese college graduates cannot compete . . . and not many American college graduates can, either.

This is the era in which everything mainstream is hitting the rapids. The mainstreamers thought they were cruising up a lazy river. They weren’t.

"What’s that noise?"

May 25, 2005

Gary North

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

The “New European Soviet”

2005-05-24T19:13:00.000-04:00

The “New European Soviet”
By Vilius Brazenas
The New American, September 6, 2004

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The European Union is rapidly descending into totalitarianism. Under NAFTA and the proposed FTAA, U.S. policymakers have adopted the same socialist EU program.

I am going to tell you a story about Europe and America. It is a true story about tyranny and freedom, about hope, folly, deception and betrayal. It is also a warning about grave danger. Alarmed at the trends I see, I feel obliged to tell this story. Now in my 91st year, I am one of the few living souls who have experienced the major events of the last century. Being both European and American, I have witnessed and studied these events from opposite sides of the Atlantic.

I am Lithuanian by birth and saw my small country suffer under both Nazi and Communist brands of totalitarianism. My family was trapped in Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution brought the Communists to power. As a young boy in Moscow, in 1922, I was forced to march with my classmates in the Communist May Day parade in front of Vladimir Lenin himself.

Like much of Europe, Lithuania was overrun in the 1940s by the Soviet Red Army, then by the Nazis, and then again by the Soviets. In 1944, as the Soviet Red Army was reinvading Lithuania, and after facing Soviet tanks, I was able to escape with my wife and daughter. In 1949, we were able to come to America and, later, thank God, to become U.S. citizens.

In January 2003 I came back to live in Lithuania. As an author, speaker and newspaper columnist, I am attempting to use my talents and opportunities in the time that I have left to warn my countrymen — both American and Lithuanian — about the very real and present danger to freedom posed by the evolving European Union (EU) and the very similar project proposed for North and South America called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Most Americans have only a very hazy understanding about what the EU is and an even foggier notion of how it came about. Unfortunately, most Europeans also have a very poor understanding of these things. They have only recently begun to recognize how blind they have been to the very real threats that the growing centralization of power in the EU poses to their national independence and their freedoms.

However, it must be said that the main reason why Europeans and Americans both have such foggy notions about the EU is that the EU architects and promoters have purposely kept the real origins and objectives of the EU shrouded in deception. They had to do this, in order to foist this scheme on the peoples of Europe. If they had openly proclaimed their true objective — to end national sovereignty and create an unaccountable, socialist suprastate — the entire scheme would have been rejected overwhelmingly, right from the start.

When former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain in 2000, he accurately described the European Union as “the new European Soviet.” He said this with obvious approval, since he sees the evolving EU as fulfilling his vision of a “common European home” stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” as he described it in his 1987 book Perestroika. Mr. Gorbachev is a lifelong Communist overlord who has steadfastly refused to renounce Communism.

In fact, he defiantly remains a Communist. On December 23, 1989, Gorbachev declared to his fellow Soviets, “I am a communist. For some that may be a fantasy. But for me it is my main goal.” On February 26, 1991, Gorbachev said, “I am not ashamed to say that I am a communist and adhere to the communist idea, and with this I will leave for the other world.” He has repeated these sentiments many times. In his book he also stated: “I frankly admit that we are glad that the idea of a ‘common European home’ finds understanding among prominent political and public figures of not only Eastern, but also Western Europe....”

It is highly significant that a top-level Marxist-Leninist such as Mikhail Gorbachev could find such affinity with Western leaders about a “common European home” and then, 13 years later, approvingly note that that common home was moving ever closer to the Soviet model. After all, hadn’t the Soviet model collapsed and died? But Mr. Gorbachev was, at least in this instance, telling the truth; the EU has been, and is now, moving steadily toward Soviet-style tyranny.

The European Parliament, the European Commission and other EU institutions in Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and The Hague are dominated by radical socialists and dedicated one-worlders who are bent on smashing the individual, once-independent nation states of Europe into Soviet-style conformity with the oppressive dictates of the new EU Politburo.

A Revolutionary Coup d’Etat

In their powerful exposé, The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union (2003), British journalist Christopher Booker and Dr. Richard North, formerly a researcher inside the EU bureaucracy, aptly describe the EU as “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history.” In what remains of this article, I will attempt to explain why that description by Mr. Booker and Dr. North is no exaggeration and how this spectacular coup has come about. It is also my intent to show how the deceptive NAFTA-FTAA process is directly related to the EU and patterned after it to achieve the same kind of coup d’état in the Americas.

The “European project,” as the EU designers refer to their ongoing revolution, was launched with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Common Market was born the following December when Italy became the sixth nation to ratify the treaty (joining France, Belgium, West Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). It was sold to the peoples of Europe as a “free trade” agreement that would bring prosperity by removing barriers to the movement of people, goods, services and capital across borders.

In fact, it was a program for national suicide, for gradual, “slow-motion” political and economic merger of the member nations. Booker and North write that Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, known in Europe as “Mr. Socialist,” was responsible for convincing his fellow EU founding fathers that “the most effective way to disguise their project’s political purpose was to conceal it behind a pretense that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, based on dismantling trade barriers: a ‘common market.’”

The Treaty of Rome was, in truth, a constitution for a new government disguised as a treaty. Traditionally, a treaty is an agreement between sovereign states, concerning borders, military alliances, trade relations, extradition, etc. The parties to the treaty remain sovereign states; their form of government is not altered and their citizens are not directly bound with new laws or obligations. The Treaty of Rome, however, created a new, over-arching “community” independent of its member states and claiming the power to create laws that are binding not only on the member nations but on their individual citizens as well.

This was not noticed by the people at first, because the EU founders were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.

The original Treaty of Rome has been repeatedly modified by subsequent treaties and legislation, all of which have greatly enhanced the legislative, executive and judicial powers of the central EU government. The European Communities Act (1972), the Single European Act (1986), the Schengen Agreement (1990), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the Amsterdam Treaty (1998), and the Treaty of Nice (2000) are some of the most important benchmarks that have transferred vast powers piecemeal to Brussels, where the EU is headquartered.

The eurofederalists cloak this destructive, revolutionary process under such code words as “integration,” “harmonization,” and “convergence.” In 1991, the Single European Act was coming into force and beginning to show the very ugly teeth that had been built into it. At that time, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph, one of Britain’s major newspapers, expressed in a column the sense of betrayal and outrage felt by many in Europe. “Twenty years ago, when the process began,” he wrote, “there was no question of losing sovereignty. That was a lie, or at any rate, a dishonest obfuscation.”

It was actually a multitude of lies. The EU founders and their successors have been carrying forward nothing less than a brazen scheme of treason dressed up as economic trade policy. And treason is not too harsh a word, for many of the key leaders of this operation are government officials who are betraying a sacred trust and have been lying outright to their constituents. As Sir Worsthorne pointed out, for decades the EU advocates had explicitly lied, insisting that the developing EU would not affect national sovereignty, and that EU laws and regulations would not override national laws and constitutions. These were wild, paranoid fantasies, they said.

Warnings about the true nature of the EU were routinely smothered by the globalist controlled, pro-EU press — which includes nearly all the major media organs. Now that the project is entering its final stages, however, the eurofederalists are dropping all pretenses and admitting openly what they previously denied. They can hardly help it now, since the EU established a constitutional convention in 2002 to draw up a formal constitution for a United States of Europe. At nearly 300 pages, the document is an open-ended power grab, with none of the checks and balances and means of accountability that we enjoy in our U.S. Constitution.

Many Americans, no doubt, tend to consider the Common Market and the EU as positive steps toward greater freedom. After all, it certainly is more convenient to have only one currency, the euro, when touring the continent. But whatever conveniences it may offer are offset by far more important concerns. Consider:

• Regulatory nightmare. British grocers have been arrested and fined for continuing to sell bananas and other produce by the pound instead of by the EU’s newly mandated metric weights. Similarly, the EU dictates on the shape and size of cucumbers, the consistency of marmalade, the texture and taste of chocolate, and thousands of other consumer items.

• Acquis communautaire. The EU already operates under the doctrine of acquis communautaire, which holds that all members must adopt EU law in its entirety, and further, that once the EU usurps the right to legislate in a new area, its authority in that area is guaranteed in perpetuity. Thus, power is guaranteed to flow in one direction — from the member states to the central government.

• Corpus juris. The corpus juris is the new legal code initiated by the Amsterdam Treaty that will, among other things, set up a European Public Prosecutor with over-riding criminal law jurisdiction throughout Europe. Habeas corpus, trial by jury and other important protections will be swept away.

• Unlimited migration. Signatory countries of the EU Schengen Agreement have given up their right to police their borders, thus allowing illegal aliens — including terrorists — to travel freely between countries. With Russia and other former Soviet states, along with Turkey, scheduled for membership, we will soon have millions of new migrants, including many Communists and militant Muslims migrating at will throughout Europe — much like what could happen to the U.S. if the FTAA is implemented.

• Economic control. With the establishment of the euro currency and the European Central Bank, the EU countries have lost control of their fiscal and monetary policy as well as their currencies.

• Destroying agriculture. The EU’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) has taken control of nearly all agriculture and has nearly destroyed British agriculture.

• Power to tax. The EU already claims the authority to dictate indirect tax policies such as the VAT (value added tax) on clothes, food, public transport, fuel, construction, homes, etc. The Treaty of European Union declares that EU decisions to “impose pecuniary obligation on persons other than States shall be enforceable.” That means direct taxes on individuals.

• Coercive military and police power. If the Eurocrats have their way, they will soon have European military and police forces to enforce their increasingly dictatorial edicts.

The architects of NAFTA and the FTAA openly cite the EU as the model for their proposed regional “common market” for the Western Hemisphere. For example, Mexican President Vicente Fox acknowledged on May 16, 2002: “Eventually, our long-range objective is to establish … an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union.” At the time Fox was referring specifically to the three NAFTA countries (the U.S., Canada, and Mexico); the proposed FTAA would further develop the “ensemble of connections” while extending them throughout the Americas.

President Bush, President Fox and the “new world order” Power Elite at the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Council of the Americas have all adopted the deceptive terminology of the EU — “integration,” “harmonization,” “convergence” — to describe their “American project.” They have adopted an aggressive schedule, intending to do in a few years what it has taken the eurocrats decades to accomplish.

We can and must stop this treasonous plan — or Mr. Gorbachev and his ilk will soon be able to gloat about the “new American Soviet.”

Quartered in Hell

2005-05-21T15:40:00.000-04:00

Dollars to donuts only one out of 100 (most likely less) Americans know about American army troops being committed to conflict by President Woodrow Wilson under British commanders on Russian soil. For an online account, go to here. A great book with photos is "Quartered in Hell" by Dennis Gordon. Nearly all of the Americans killed were from Michigan.

Archangel
Sergeant Roger S. Clark
310th US Army Engineers
Archangel, Russia
Christmas, 1918

This poem was written by an Army buddy of Mariah's Grandfather William D. Mayo during WWI while stationed in Archangel, Russia. No offense meant to any Russians, remember it was written during a conflict, by someone a long way and a long time from home.

When the Lord was designing Creation,
and laying out oceans and lands,
with never an hour's relaxation,
nor a moment to spit on His hands,
as anyone will in a hurry,
He let things get by now and then
in all the excitement and worry
that He should have done over again.
So, rather than mess up the outfit,
He saved every blunder and blob,
and laid them aside in the corner
to use at the end of the job.
The sixth afternoon of the contract,
the bonus expiring that day,
He bailed out the dregs of Creation
and shoveled the litter away.
He scraped all the wreckage and tailings
and sewage and scum of the sump,
and made on the shores of the Arctic
a great international dump.
He rushed the thing through in a hurry,
and because of the rush He was in,
He named the locality Russia,
and Russia it has always been.

And then, feeling glum and sarcastic,
because it was Saturday night,
He spotted the nastiest corner
and called it "Archangel", for spite!
It is there they do everything backwards,
and mud doesn't dry between rains,
where money and sawdust are plenty,
and thievery is better than brains.
It's the home of the glop and the bo-hunk,
and herring, and mud-colored crows.
My strongest impression of Russia
gets into my head through my nose!
It's the land of the infernal odor,
the land of the national smell,
the average American soldier
would rather be quartered in Hell!
It's back to the states for "Yours Truly"
a sadder but wiser young chap,
The Lord played a joke on Creation,
when Russia was dumped on the map!