Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Forbidden Identity

I met Jared Taylor again recently at the National Policy Institute’s 2011 conference in Washington D.C., where we were both speakers.
We then coincided at a brunch that was held the morning after the event. As I was to take a flight back to the United Kingdom in the afternoon, and as his base is on the way to the airport, he suggested I take an early cab and stop by for a visit later in the day.
I accepted his invitation, and ordered a cab to collect me from the hotel at the appointed time.
The cab driver was a 46-year-old immigrant from Egypt, tall, slender, dark, with a lightbulb head. He had been in the United States for 16 years, during which time he had become a citizen, having previously worked for a five-star hotel in Saudi Arabia. From what he told me, he had been involved in the services industry all or most his working life, first in the hospitality business, and later in his present occupation, transporting live humans.
He told me that he had moved to the United States in order to rake in the cash, that he had sent his wife and children back to Egypt in order to spare them the West’s corrupting influence, that he intended to bring them over to America once they completed their secondary education, that he would put them through university there, and that he intended them to remain in America, where they would become citizens, so that they too could rake in the cash. As to himself, he would eventually return to Egypt and start a business there. He added that although living in the United States had transformed his life for the better, his heart was and would always be in Egypt. He put his palm over his cardiac muscle and looked to the sky as he thought of his homeland.
In due course this amiable conversation turned to more pressing matters, as the cab driver got lost. Without a satnav, and relying on a printout from Google Maps, he drove us in the wrong direction for lightyears, perplexed by Google’s elliptical instructions, before finally turning around and stopping at a petrol station to ask for directions. (While I waited, I noticed prognathous Hispanics, shod in rubber flipflops, idling in the parking bays immediately in front of the shop, joking casually and munching snacks; they only moved when the cab driver shoved them aside with his Lincoln.)
Armed with new instructions, my Egyptian driver headed towards Jared’s green and pleasant woodland suburb. There, however, he got lost again, and he drove us up and down a main road four times, forsaken by Google, until he telephoned my host to get further instructions. The situation became comical, since poor Jared, otherwise an accomplished linguist and polyglot, could barely understand the driver, who butchered every street name in his heavily accented English.
‘Menrod. Am in menrod,’ he said.
The Egyptian had to repeat himself twelve times before his pronunciation could be decyphred.
But, eventually, we made it.
I asked for a discount to my fare, which was granted—I think the driver was about to offer it anyway. I caught a crease on his brown forehead as he turned to leave, shaking his head, annoyed with himself.
‘I thought a lot about you on the way here,’ I told Jared. Indeed, the incident seemed an oddly appropriate staging for White Identity, the Virginian’s most recent book, which I obtained during my visit.
White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century is a sequel of its author’s earlier book, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America.
The book is everything I expected it to be: elegant, measured, well argued, accessible, and vacuum-packed with information.
The latter is, without a doubt, the tome’s most salient feature, for the author backs up his theses with such a profusion of examples that it becomes impossible not to see it as missionary zeal, despite the sober prose. The examples range from the infuriating to the grotesque, and in some cases the situations or incidents described are so ridiculous that they would be risible, were they not so tragic.
White Identity contains little about White racial identity. This is because these days there is generally no such thing. There is plenty, however, about Black and Hispanic identity in it, which the author argues is normal, natural, and good—except, of course, for Whites in the United States. Because said Whites have unilaterally disarmed themselves while simultaneously arming their competition out of fondness for universalist abstractions.
The main argument of White Identity is that in a world where everyone else thinks in terms of race and pursues their racial interests, Whites will need to rediscover theirs if they are to avoid being eaten alive by racially conscious groups.
In turn, the main assumption behind the book is that it will be read by Whites and that enough of them will be persuaded by its contents to reassess the value of an egalitarian diversity ideology. This assumption belies a secondary one: that anger at and frustration with the negative effects of diversity will eventually cause Whites to develop racial consciousness. The more fundamental assumption, therefore, is that humans think and act rationally.
But of course, this is not the case, as otherwise there would not have been any need to write White Identity.
Consequently, there is a depressing contradiction between the book’s cause and its intended effect. This broken causality chain means that, for all its merits, the book will fail to achieve its objectives: it will be read by those already favourably predisposed to its author or his worldview, by the author’s existing fans, and by ideological enemies seeking to scare people away from identifying with its theses; and readers outside these categories will, if they are ever allowed to catch a glimpse of the book, content themselves with imagining what it says based on what they know or think they know about the author.
The lack of a way forward has already been noted by another reviewer, and results from an ultimate belief in the rationality of man.
That aside, White Identity makes two valuable contributions.
Firstly, and as has already been noted, it collates in a convenient, single volume a wealth of data from innumerable news and scientific sources. It is, in fact, fully comprehensive on diversity as a weakness. This makes it a powerful armamentarium for anyone desiring to impress debating this issue. It is very much its author’s brainchild, as Jared Taylor’s effectiveness in debate results from, besides his polish and intelligence, his ability endlessly to back up his arguments with precise data.
Secondly, it implicitly articulates the notion that Enlightenment ideals are only viable in homogeneous societies composed of White Westerners. This was not the author’s intention, but follows from his historical overview of White racial consciousness in the United States.
For the author, two centuries of coexistence between White racial consciousness and the Enlightenment ideals of the U.S. constitution rules out fundamental contradictions between them, and in quoting statements by the country’s founders he seeks to illustrate that they never intended to create a universal proposition nation, as Marxist revisionists and forgers pretend. Jared Taylor’s point is that they were racially conscious as Whites and that this consciousness was normal and natural up until fifty years ago.
Yet, it is clear from their statements that the founders did not think their Enlightenment project was compatible with a racially heterogeneous society, for they generally advocated either segregation or shipping the Black labourers back to Africa. They were enlightened in that they knew humans are different and are best in free societies that reflect their innate temperament and abilities because they are governed by people who are similar.
And it was not simply that the country’s founders thought genetically distant peoples could not be assimilated into a White European society, but also that their Enlightenment values were dangerous in the presence of Blacks, for, as some noted, Blacks did not internalise these values and only took advantage of the Whites who lived by them.
Thus, while White Identity does not directly address the question of why Whites lost their racial identity, it does glimpse an answer supplementary to those presented by Pat Buchanan in The Death of the West and Kevin MacDonald in the Culture of Critique. The latter author, particularly, stresses how enlightened rhetoric was hijacked by ethnic activists on the radical Left.
The problem lies not so much in ideological enemies or racial competition, for these are facts of life that will never go away. The problem lies with the Enlightenment values themselves, for their inbuilt universalist logic, irrespective of how they were interpreted in the past by Whites who had racial consciousness, in time inescapably leads to borderless, multiracial proposition societies. And this, in a world of instant mass communication, rapid motorised transport, globalised electronic commerce, exploding Third World populations, and ever more intense competition for resources, is a mechanism for self-destruction.
This is perhaps why White Identity cannot, rather than simply does not, show a way forward: it is ultimately predicated on Enlightenment values, while the way forward would necessitate abandoning those values, which in the United States would mean also abrogating the country’s constitution and rethinking it all from zero—inconceivable without secession or a total systemic meltdown.
What to do, then?
Some Americans have proposed secession and founding a White ethnostate. But this is only applicable in the United States and seems unlikely without Whites regaining their racial consciousness, followed by another civil war. And Whites will not regain any racial consciousness so long as it remains socially unacceptable for them.
Others, both in America and Europe, have pursued identity politics. This, however, is unlikely to prosper since politics makes possible only what is already widely accepted within the culture—it does not change the culture on its own.
In all cases, these proposals are flawed because they seek to change outward forms before changing inner substance.
Before White identity can be revived and political solutions can grow, it will be necessary to seed the culture with a different set of concepts, principles, and ideals, and to fertilise it with the right combination of emotional triggers: creative movements, intellectual currents, organising strategies, alternative self-reinforcing networks and status systems, and so on.
It is worth noting that if völkisch politics were successful (if flawed) in the past, it was only after dozens of artists, novelists, musicians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and mystics, not to mention a plethora of study groups, societies, clubs, and other organisations, along with publishers and publicists, had spent a century laying the groundwork. It was a slow, organic process that built an alternative society from the bottom up—an alternative society that was technologically advanced, but with long roots in ancient tradition.
Of course, we do not have the luxury of a hundred years, as they did, or as did the Left, who had no demographic sunset to contend with, but we do have the technological means to do the good work within a shorter timeframe. In a technologically advanced society, history is constantly accelerating. It will, nevertheless, take time to develop the synergies.
As the Enlightenment project, deformed as it is, continues to rush towards its logical extreme, the means will have to be found to retard its progress, for only when the cultural ground has been made viable for any kind of White identity will such an identity be viable enough to become a political force.

The Occidental Quarterly-Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

By Brenton Sanderson

Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

The Occidental Quarterly

Editor’s Note:
The essay below, from the Fall 2011 issue of The Occidental Quarterly, is one that every High School and College student should read. It is short, concise, scholarly and has exceptional explanatory value!

The political philosophy of libertarianism has recently attracted a wave of support in the United States among the mainly White Tea Party movement, and the supporters of Ron and Rand Paul. The catalyst has been the perceived failings of the Obama administration’s response to the global financial crisis and subsequent recession: a response characterized by an ideologically-driven expansion of government ownership, spending, and regulation of the US economy, with a corresponding decline in individual liberty. To espouse free market libertarianism in this context seems a rational corrective to Obama’s neo-Marxist agenda, given the libertarian commitment to the maximization of individual liberty and minimisation of the state – at a time when a bloated dysfunctional state seems to lie at the heart of the problems facing White people.

While there is a spectrum of libertarianism that straddles the left-right binary of contemporary politics, in today’s world, libertarianism is primarily associated with the commitment to market liberalism that was the hallmark of the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics. A watershed moment in the history of post-war libertarianism was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to the libertarian theorist Friedrich von Hayek in 1974. For the preceding thirty years the economic theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes held sway throughout the West. Keynesianism, involving state intervention in the economy through deficit spending to stimulate output and employment, is based on the idea that governments can and should act to eliminate the worst vicissitudes of the business cycle. Through manipulation of the federal budget a government can, theoretically, engineer economic outcomes.

Keynesianism emerged as a midway position between free-market libertarianism and socialist state-planning. However, the stagflation crisis that emerged with the OPEC oil crisis of the early seventies threw the post-war Keynesian consensus into turmoil. It set the scene for the re-emergence of political support for free-market libertarianism, and ultimately for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US — and, subsequently, their legions of political imitators throughout the world. At the forefront of this renaissance of libertarian thought, alongside Hayek, was a group of Jewish intellectuals whose ideas and advocacy were key to this achievement, and to libertarianism’s subsequent and enduring appeal. The most prominent and influential of these figures were Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of political history in the past century that Jews have been prominent as theorists and activists for ostensibly opposing ideological forces: socialist collectivism on the one hand, and free-market libertarianism (and neoconservatism) on the other. However, this paradox begins to fade when viewed through the lens of Professor Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. According to this theory, Judaism emerged historically as a strategy to promote the economic welfare and reproductive success of Jews as a genetically distinct population. In Culture of Critique MacDonald examines a range of twentieth-century intellectual movements that had a decisive Jewish involvement and concludes that they share a common tacit agenda in promoting the group evolutionary interests of Jews — often at the expense of non-Jews. Accordingly, they can be accurately regarded as Jewish intellectual movements that are, in reality, post-Enlightenment manifestations of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A major focus in Culture of Critique is on the role of Jews in the formulation and advocacy of Marxist and cultural-Marxist ideologies, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
My purpose here is not to determine whether libertarianism is, like the Frankfurt School, a Jewish intellectual movement. This requires more extensive treatment than can be given here. Here I will examine, firstly, why free-market libertarian ideas have held a strong attraction to a prominent subset of Jewish intellectuals; and secondly, I will discuss the practical effect of libertarian economic and social policies on European-derived populations.

JEWS AND LIBERTARIANISM

In a speech to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1972 entitled Capitalism and the Jews, Milton Friedman, perhaps the pivotal figure in the history of modern libertarianism after Hayek, explored the seeming paradox that, despite the Jews having thrived under capitalism, they had played a central role in the formulation and advocacy of leftist political ideologies. He observed that, despite the Jews as a people having done very well under capitalist societies,

“for the past century, the Jews have been a stronghold of anti-capitalist sentiment. From Karl Marx through Leon Trotsky to Herbert Marcuse, a sizable fraction of the revolutionary anti-capitalist literature has been authored by Jews. Communist parties in all countries, including the party that achieved revolution in Russia but also present-day Communist parties in Western countries, and especially in the U.S., have been run and manned to a disproportionate extent by Jews—though I hasten to add that only a tiny fraction of Jews have ever been members of the Communist party. Jews have been equally active in the less revolutionary socialist movements in all countries, as intellectuals generating socialist literature, as active participants in leadership, and as members.”

Friedman finds this somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that “the Jews owe an enormous debt to capitalism.” It is obvious that, as an intelligent and capable people, the Jews are always likely to thrive in the competitive context of the unfettered market. Accordingly, it seems apparent to Friedman that the real enemy to Jewish interests (and the interests of other able minority groups) are the barriers to entry and anti-competitive practices that, in various historical instances, have restricted their full participation in the economic affairs of a nation. For Friedman, it is axiomatic that

“the feature of capitalism that has benefited the Jews has, of course, been competition. Wherever there is a monopoly, whether it be private or governmental, there is room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly—whether these criteria be color of skin, religion, national origin or what not. Where there is free competition, only performance counts. The market is color blind. No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or atheist; by Whites or blacks. Any miller who wishes to express his personal prejudices by buying only from preferred groups is at a competitive disadvantage, since he is keeping himself from buying from the cheapest source. He can express his prejudice, but he will have to do so at his own expense, accepting a lower monetary income than he could otherwise earn.”

Friedman was influenced by Ludwig von Mises, who expressed a similar view in 1944. Identifying why free market capitalism is good for Jews and other minorities he writes:

“In an unhampered market society there is no legal discrimination against anybody. Everyone has the right to obtain the place within the social system in which he can successfully work and make a living. The consumer is free to discriminate, provided that he is ready to pay the cost. A Czech or a Pole may prefer to buy at higher cost in a shop owned by a Slav instead of buying cheaper and better in a shop owned by a German. An anti-Semite may forego being cured of an ugly disease by the employment of the ‘Jewish’ drug Salvarsan and have recourse to a less efficacious remedy. In this arbitrary power consists what economists call consumer’s sovereignty.”

Another celebrated Jewish libertarian, who nevertheless rejected the label, was Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum). While Rand and her theory of Objectivism have never been widely respected in academia she has exerted an enormous popular influence through her writings. In her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) she also made the link between the extent of free markets and the relative absence of discrimination against minorities in a society. She writes that

“no political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany — and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

The foregoing statements, each framed in the language of ethical universalism, clearly disclose the chief attraction of free-market libertarianism to Jews like Friedman, von Mises and Rand. Free markets, they affirm, advance the interests of Jews through imposing an impersonal economic discipline on non-Jews through which their ethnocentricity and anti-Semitic prejudice can be circumvented. That this proposition contains a great deal of truth is confirmed, I would contend, by the historical record: Jews have indeed prospered under the conditions of free market capitalism among often hostile majority European-derived populations.
It may have occurred to the reader, however, that while Friedman, von Mises and Rand opposed the existence of monopolies that provided “room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly,” the reality is that Jews, even in the freest of markets, are notorious for developing and using ethnic monopolies in precisely this fashion. Indeed this is a major theme of MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone where he observes that from “the standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the resource flow from the non-Jewish community to the Jewish community, rather than to allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish community.”

The massive extent of Jewish nepotism in their business dealings is so exhaustively documented (very frequently by Jews themselves) as to be beyond dispute. Such is the rarity of instances where Jews use other Jews in a purely instrumental manner that they are cause for great shock and trauma within the Jewish community (witness the Madoff affair). Given this, it seems to me that while, as Friedman, von Mises and Rand assert, the free market may work efficiently to hinder ethnocentric discrimination among Whites (a group that MacDonald characterizes as, owing to their evolutionary history, strongly predisposed to individualism), the hyper-ethnocentrism of the Jews (and the Chinese) predispose them to transcend this “rational” discipline im- posed by the free market. MacDonald makes the point that the propensity of these groups to engage in “tribal economics” involving high levels of within-group economic cooperation and patronage confers on these groups “an extraordinarily powerful competitive advantage against individual strategies.”
Accordingly, the free-market libertarian agenda, when promoted in the context of a society that is multi-racial, and where some racial groups exceed Whites in the degree of their ethnocentricity, may not promote the group evolutionary interests of Whites in enhancing their access to resources and reproductive success. The truth of this proposition is confirmed, I would submit, by the tendency of European governments through history to impose laws barring Jews from many industries and professions. That such laws were so widespread, and deemed so necessary, is surely indicative of an awareness, borne of experience, of the tendency of Jews to adopt a racial collectivist strategy in competition to the individualistic strategies of the majority Europeans — and that this would invariably result in Jewish market dominance, and concomitant outbreaks of anti-Semitism. That such restrictions were rendered less effective by their inconsistent application across the political patchwork of European jurisdictions through history was regarded by Friedman as a saving grace for Jewish populations. He noted that

“Throughout the nearly two thousand years of the Diaspora, Jews were repeatedly discriminated against, restricted in the activities they could undertake, on occasion expelled en masse, as in 1492 from Spain, and often the object of the extreme hostility of the peoples among whom they lived. They were able nonetheless to exist because of the absence of a totalitarian state, so that there were always some market elements, some activities open to them to enter. In particular, the fragmented political structure and the numerous separate sovereignties meant that international trade and finance in particular escaped close control, which is why Jews were so prominent in this area.
It is no accident that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the two most totalitarian societies in the past two thousand years (modern China perhaps excepted), also offer the most extreme examples of official and effective anti-Semitism…If we come to more recent time, Jews have flourished most in those countries in which competitive capitalism had the greatest scope: Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — a case that is particularly pertinent when that period is compared with the Hitler period.”

Agreeing with the thesis that free markets have been good for Jews, Jerry Muller, in his recently published Capitalism and the Jews (2010) observes that when Jews have been allowed to compete with Non-Jews on equal terms, they have always done disproportionately well. Nevertheless, this economic success has been cause for both pride and embarrassment to Jews. It has prompted some anti-Semites to (erroneously) condemn capitalism as inherently Jewish. For the left, meanwhile, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal (and assumed biological) equality is an embarrassment and a disgrace. The left have learned to hide their embarrassment under the intellectual fig leaf of “White racism.”

WHITES AND LIBERTARIANISM

It seems evident from the foregoing that, the only time that Whites will be acting in their own evolutionary self-interest in embracing the free-market libertarian agenda will be when they either live in a racially homogeneous society where their group interests are not imperilled by the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals; or in a multi-racial society where competing racial groups do not exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, or exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism but lack the native endowment of intellect to capitalize on this by effectively employing altruistic group strategies in competition with individualistic Whites.

The consequence of this, I would argue, is that the realization of the free-market libertarian agenda is likely to disadvantage Whites in a society with significant Ashkenazi Jewish and East-Asian populations. Such societies certainly include the contemporary United States and most other Western nations. In contrast, experience has shown that other racial groups, with their relatively lower mean IQs, despite their comparatively higher levels of ethnocentrism, are unlikely to out-compete Whites in the context of a free market economy. These groups, however, present an evolutionary threat to Whites of an entirely different order: with their comparatively high birth rates, crime rates, and levels of welfare-dependency involving the large-scale transfer of resources away from White communities.
If White ethnocentrism could be enhanced sufficiently to prompt Whites to adopt cohesive group strategies on a large scale (i.e., strategies that involve some controls on individual behavior—a form of altruism), then the economic playing field could be leveled sufficiently to allow more effective competition with Jews. However, given that Ashkenazi Jews have significantly higher mean IQs than Whites (particularly with regard to verbal IQ, which is a strong predictor of commercial aptitude); they are probably still likely to generally out-compete Whites in such a hypothetical conflict of racial group altruistic strategies. Nevertheless, the large-scale adoption of altruistic group strategies, even if offering only a partial improvement in the relative economic welfare of Whites compared to other racial groups, would be worthwhile.

However, a major barrier to Whites adopting altruistic group strategies are the ideologies that dominate the climate of opinion (especially in education) in Western nations today, some of which are explored by MacDonald in Culture of Critique, and which are calculated to thwart the emergence of manifestations of White ethnocentrism. MacDonald observes that a century ago the social sciences were effectively divorced from the biological sciences. While a reconciliation of sorts began in the 1970s, the humanities and large sections of anthropology continue to remain virtual intellectual closed shops, estranged from the contradictory findings of the biological sciences. Indeed given the leftist monopolization of these fields, resulting in the doctrinaire rejection of inconvenient scholarship and biology, it is hardly surprising that utopian socialism of the most naive variety routinely emanates from the academy.
It has undoubtedly been one of the chief attractions of leftist collectivism for Jews that free-market libertarianism — through the theoretical removal of the possibility of state coercion of individuals — effectively protects non-Jews in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behaviour. Friedman concedes the point, noting that

“competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense. But the other side of that coin is that it protects anti-Semites from having other people’s values imposed on them. It protects them in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behavior so long as they do it at their own expense. Competitive capitalism has therefore not eliminated social anti-Semitism. The free competition of ideas that is the natural companion of competitive capitalism might in time lead to a change in tastes and values that would eliminate social anti-Semitism but there is no assurance that it will. As the New Testament put it, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’”

Implied in the above is that anti-Semitism is essentially irrational, and that Jews, while able to avoid economic manifestations of anti-Semitism through the operation of the free market, will have to wait for non-Jews to become more enlightened for social anti-Semitism to disappear. Likewise, for von Mises: “the truth is that while the Jews are the objects of anti-Semitism, their conduct and qualities did not play a decisive role in inciting and spreading its modern version.” Therefore, consistent with Jewish intellectual movements like Freudian psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, anti-Semitism is characterised by these leading theorists of free-market libertarianism as being symptomatic of delusion or of the psychopathology of non-Jews, rather than a mostly rational and predictable response to a threat to the group evolutionary interests of non-Jews.
It would seem that libertarian ideas are particularly hazardous to the collective interests of White people because we are naturally attracted to them. As MacDonald notes, our evolutionary history makes us prone to individualism in the first place. You then get a negative feedback loop where libertarian ideology intensifies this innate individualism to encourage ever greater individualism among Whites, and an ever greater aversion to manifestations of White ethnocentrism. Thus, where the spirit of free market libertarian individualism reigns, Whites willingly maximize their individual self-interest at the expense of the group evolutionary interests of the White community — with disastrous long-term consequences.

MULTICULTURALISM, IMMIGRATION, AND LIBERTARIANISM

It is clear that many of the political stances adopted by White libertarian individualists neatly dovetail with many of the doctrines of the anti-White left — multiculturalism being the prime example. The pro-market individualism of Western nations has, as a by-product, led to the embrace of a profoundly shallow concept of culture. Many Westerners now see cultural differences as if they were merely differences in consumer tastes and preferences. In a consumerist society, diversity is celebrated — as diversity is the basis for consumer choice. The consumer is king, and he demands that his own personal and individual preferences be satisfied.

Multiculturalism is, therefore, the natural anthropology of a consumer-friendly economy. Because our own lives are filled with personalized choices, each made according to our unique tastes, we have come to approach culture in the same spirit. For many Whites, a culture is like an individual choice of a consumer product. Accordingly, the naive White multiculturalist treats differences in human cultures as if they were analogous to a preference for Coca-Cola over Pepsi — that is, mainly a difference in consumer tastes — consumer sovereignty at work. This view, however, is radically different from the view implicit in less tolerant traditions like Judaism and Islam that regard cultures as weapons in the struggle for survival and supremacy of those who carry on those traditions. It is not surprising that, in an intellectual climate of almost limitless White libertarian tolerance for cultural diversity, non-White immigrant communities feel free to openly express disdain for European-derived peoples, disparaging their culture and their central place in the historical development of the world.
A large majority of Jews have historically been strongly in favor of a libertarian immigration policy for the White-majority countries in which they choose to reside. That this attitude is generally not extend- ed to the state of Israel is, naturally enough, a source of consternation and ridicule among White nationalists. MacDonald has examined this phenomenon extensively, regarding it as a foundational tenet of almost all Jewish intellectual movements that have historically emerged from Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Interestingly, this rampant hypocrisy extends to the likes of Friedman and Rand. For instance Friedman’s position with regard to immigration to the US was that, providing that immigrants (from whatever racial or cultural source) are entering the nation to take up employment, as opposed to state welfare, there is no rational reason to oppose that immigration. With reference to the large scale immigration into the US in the late nineteenth century he opined that:

“You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’ What’s the difference? How can people be so in- consistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today?

Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

So if there is a job waiting for an individual — regardless of their race — then it would be irrational to exclude that person. However, the apparent attraction of non-discriminatory immigration for Friedman did not extend to the state of Israel. While Friedman frequently railed against the socialist tendencies of various Israeli governments, he was a strong supporter of the ethno-state of Israel, and there is no record of him ever noticing Israel’s racially-restrictive immigration policy — much less decrying it. This surely demonstrates that in such matters the ingroup moral criterion of whether it was “good for the Jews” surpassed his universal libertarian commitment to the supposed benefits of a free and open immigration policy.
Ayn Rand demonstrated an even greater capacity for hypocrisy with her attitude toward respective manifestations of White and Jewish ethnocentrism. She declared that “there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement” and espoused the moral superiority of her type of individualism which “regards man — every man — as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” For Rand, however, “every man” ostensibly did not include the Arabs in their conflict with Israel. Instead she regarded the fight between Israel and the Arabs as fight between civilized men and savages. Appearing on Donahue in 1979 she declared that: “If you mean whose side should you be on — Israel or the Arabs? I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry and intelligence and modern technology into their stagnation.”

So to what extent does the libertarian immigration agenda, advocated with such patent inconsistency by the like of Friedman and Rand, serve the interests of Whites in terms of immigration policy? White racial nationalists generally do not have a problem with immigration per se, but rather with non-White immigration that shifts the demographic balance of power away from European-derived populations. Because of their strict individualism, libertarians dismiss the importance of race in human affairs. This is reflected in the fact that many of the most prominent libertarian theorists, endorse a policy of non-discrimination with regard to immigration — although this principal is rarely extended by Jewish libertarians to the state of Israel.
The anthropological reality is, as Frank Salter observes, the precise opposite of the individualist fantasy propagated by libertarianism: that, until recent decades, almost all human societies have sought, like Israel, to prevent permanent mass migration in their own group evolutionary interests. Western societies since about 1965 have been the rare exceptions. Salter observes that:

“Hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, farmers and herders have all laid claim to a territory and fiercely defended it. Marriage partners have been found almost exclusively within the ethnic group, encompassing the local dialect. The psychological motivations for this are well established in such predispositions as social identity mechanisms, collectivism, assortment by similarity, innate cognition of human kinds, and rational choice. Evolutionary origins of territoriality and ethnocentrism are indicated by their being human universals as well as being found in apes. And from the evolutionary perspective, which acknowledges the limited carrying capacity of all territories and of the world itself, it is maladaptive to allow one’s lineage — family, clan or ethnic group — to be replaced by others.

The vital interest all societies have in controlling a territory also falsified the assertion that national security consists solely of defending individual citizens from attack, for example by vetting immigrants for terrorist connections, as is already the practice with tourists. Unlike tourists, immigrants affect the receiving country’s numbers, identity and cohesion. Societies thus have a corporate interest in retaining national sovereignty, which entails control of a territory. This helps to explain the historical pattern of corporate liberty being put before citizens’ rights. Inviting the world to a country as prosperous as Australia would result in the displacement of the Australian people inside their historical homeland. This is an outcome even more maladaptive than enslavement because it would be permanent.”

The question then arises as to why European-derived people in Western nations would, through accepting large-scale non-White immigration, act in a way that is entirely contrary to their group evolutionary interests. Part of the problem, discussed at length by MacDonald, is that Northern Europeans are, as a product of their evolutionary development, inherently more individualistic and less ethnocentric than other racial groups. This makes them predisposed to the type of individualism that has been at the core of Western market capitalism for centuries — an individualism that originally was a source of strength, and that has only become problematic in the context of the establishment of large non-White communities within formerly homogenous White nations.
While individual Whites may benefit from non-White immigration (such as a business proprietor or a leftist political candidate), in terms of their evolutionary interests as a distinct genetic community, non-White immigration is a huge negative. MacDonald has pointed out that more ethnocentric and less individualistic groups (most prominently Jews) have exploited this tendency of Europeans to lobby for changes to immigration policies to serve their own group interests. I think it is quite clear that the libertarianism of Friedman, von Mises and Rand, whether intentionally or not, has aided and abetted the cultural Marxists in serving Jewish group interests with regard to its influence on immigration policies in Western nations.

Thus, it is this very libertarian individualist agenda favoring the free global movement of people, in conjunction with the openly anti-White and anti-Western agendas of the cultural Marxists that have facilitated the demographic transformation of Western nations in the past few decades. Because of their denial of the significance of race, libertarians are never going to be allies in the fight to save White populations from demographic and political eclipse. The growth in popularity of libertarian ideas among Whites is as likely to undermine White racial solidarity as effectively as any of the more openly anti-White nostrums of the left. As White racial nationalists and activists we urgently need to convey to patriotic White libertarians that racial collectivism is the only effective means to promote our group interests now and into the future. It is lesson that was learned many centuries ago by those that have worked tirelessly to promote their own group evolutionary interests at our expense — with Judaism being the classic example.
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Russian High-Ranking Official Claims He Was Abducted by Aliens

Ο κ. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov με τον κ. Πούτιν

The West was shocked by the statement from a high-ranking Russian politician, which he released on Russian Channel One, the country’s main TV channel.

On April 26, 2010, Channel One host Vladimir Pozner asked Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the President of the Kalmykia Republic, the following question:

“I’ve never met a person who would claim he was on an interplanetary alien aircraft. Has it really happened?“

“Seriously, it has happened,” the Kalmykia leader answered and told his outstanding story about his only encounter with extraterrestrials in his Moscow apartment.

“Was it the only encounter?” Pozner clarified.

“Yes, the only one,” Ilyumzhinov confirmed.

The aliens turned up in his Moscow apartment on Sept 18, 1997. He said as he was falling asleep he heard someone calling from the balcony. When he got up to check, he saw a "semi-transparent half-tube". He said he entered the tube and came across human-like aliens attired in yellow space suits. The Kalmyk leader took a flight with them on their alien spaceship.

It took some days before Pozner’s show with sensational story by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov shocked the civilized society. It happened when LDPR member Andrei Levedev drew attention to it by wrriting to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressing his concern that the Kalmyk leader, as a carrier of confidential information, could divulge state secrets to the aliens.

After that, the western media exploded. Hundreds of world newspapers assessed the sensation and acknowledged the uniqueness of the situation. Yet, no one understood why he chose to talk about it. There will be people in Russia who would think it was a bizarre behavior for a leader of a subject of federation.

“Pozner asked me, and I answered,” Ilyumzhinov explained.

Those mingling in ufological circles know that it was not the first time the Kalmyk leader told his story about his encounter with the aliens. They are no longer exuberant because there were no new details reported.
Pozner also knew the story since he asked about it.

Not everyone knows that Ilyumzhinov first openly told the story on July 22, 2002 at radio Svoboda, while no one was making him speak. Speaking about the future of chess, he mentioned Ostap Bender’s dream to conduct an intergalactic chess match. He then said he had no time to go to space and added he’d been there once before. He explained that he travelled with aliens who once took him to space.

“Who took you?” the host clarified.

“Aliens on a spaceship. They came, took me, and I spent 24 hours with them in the space,“ Ilyumzhinov explained. At the moment of the confession he was an acting President of Kalmykia with the next election in a year. He has been the President of FIDE for six years and is not eager to get anywhere else. This means that the surprising and strange confession is not PR, it’s an obsession.

Answering the question about the appearance of the aliens Ilyumzhinov, sensing doubts from the host, said that they looked like humans.

“Were they big, about 6 feet tall? The way they are often described?”

“Not really. Don't treat me like a schizophrenic. I’m just saying that I saw them. Just the way I am talking to you, I saw them just like that.”

Even then, nine years prior to Levedev’s letter to the Russian President, radio Svoboda tried to elicit the details of the contact.

“Did they give you any directions? Did they program you for the future?” they asked, as if trying to find out if he was converted.

“No,” Ilyumzhinov answered. "Nothing … I did not understand anything. Several days after I was thinking “Why did they take me?” And berated myself for not asking questions. But maybe it is not time yet for the extraterrestrial civilizations to meet. I don’t think we need to. We are morally not at the stage yet when we can meet other civilizations, aliens."

Angels in space "nothing but" top secret hallucinations

UFOs, angels and other supernatural phenomena, which people may encounter in their lives, can only be a result of hallucinations, NASA specialists said. However, stories about such encounters, told by pilots, cosmonauts and astronauts, become classified immediately.

In 1985, there were six crewmembers on board the Soviet Salyut-7 space station. They were cosmonauts Leonid Kizim, Oleg Atkov, Vladimir Solovyov, Svetlana Savitskaya, Igor Volk and Vladimir Jannibekov. That day, the cosmonauts were doing their routine work connected with laboratory experiments. All of a sudden, a cloud of strange orange gas enveloped the station. A flash of bright light blinded all the cosmonauts on board for a while. As soon as they could see again, the cosmonauts saw silhouettes of seven figures outside the station. The aliens looked like humans, but were of higher stature. They also had large wings behind their backs and luminous halos above their heads. The creatures looked like angels.

The crew reported the bizarre sight to the Earth. The document was classified as top secret immediately. All members of the crew were subsequently subjected to psychological and medical tests, which found no abnormalities at all.

It was not the only encounter with angels which took place in space. Not so long ago, the Western media published sensational photos made by Hubble telescope. The photos depicted strange images including human-like winged silhouettes.

Researchers were especially interested in a series of photos made on Earth's orbit. One could see seven luminous objects on them. John Pratchett, an engineer of Hubble project, said that he had seen those creatures himself. According to him, they were live objects up to 20 meters tall, and their wing spread could be comparable to the length of a modern jetliner.

It was also said that US astronauts on board NASA's space shuttles also encountered angel-like creatures.

On December 26, 1994, Hubble telescope transmitted hundreds of photos depicting a large white city floating in space. US authorities did not expose the photos to the general public, of course, although it was rumored that US officials treated NASA's report very seriously.

A Russian cosmonaut who spent six months living and working on board the Mir space station, said that he and his partner had had fantastic visions from time to time. It seemed to the men that they were turning into other creatures - other people, or animals, or even humanoids of extraterrestrial origin.

Similar stories may often be told by aircraft pilots. In this case, it may frequently go about the so-called phenomenon of giant hand. As a rule, the phenomenon occurs during long-lasting flights. When it happens, a pilot feels that the control wheel is being grasped by someone's invisible hand. Researchers from the US Air Force concluded that nearly 15 percent of pilots have experienced the effect during their work. It is not ruled out that the giant hand phenomenon is behind many air crashes.

NASA psychologists say that the majority of the above-mentioned phenomena are of psychic nature [αρα, εχει και το Hubble ψυχη!!!--"ΑΥΤΟ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΕΙΔΗΣΗ"!!!]. They may occur as a result of such factors as pressure and temperature fluctuations, shortage of oxygen, etc.

Margarita Troitsyna

The Dalnegorsk UFO Crash: Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union

This internationally famous UFO incident took place in 1986, on January 29, at 7:55 p.m. Some have called it the Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union. The information concerning this incident was sent to us by a number of Russian ufologists.

Dalnegorsk is a small mining town in the Far East of Russia. That cold January day a reddish sphere flew into this town from the southeastern direction, crossed part of Dalnegorsk, and crashed at the Izvestkovaya Mountain (also known as Height or Hill 611, because of its size). The object flew noiselessly, and parallel to the ground; it was approximately three meters in diameter, of a near-perfect round shape, with no projections or cavities, its colour similar to that of burning stainless steel. One eyewitness, V. Kandakov, said that the speed of the UFO was close to 15 meters per hour. The object slowly ascended and descended, and its glow would heat up every time it rose up. On its approach to Hill 611 the object "jerked", and fell down like a rock.

All witnesses reported that the object “jerked” or “jumped”. Most of them recall two “jumps”. Two girls remember that the object actually “jumped” four times. The witnesses heard a weak, muted thump. It burned intensively at the cliff's edge for an hour. A geological expedition to the site, led by V. Skavinsky of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1988), had confirmed the object's movements through a series of chemical and physical tests of the rocks collected from the site. Valeri Dvuzhilni, head of the Far Eastern Committee for Anomalous Phenomena, was the first to investigate the crash. With the help of our colleagues in Russia this is the most accurate account of the incident to date.

Dr. Dvuzhilni arrived at the site two days after the crash. Deep snow was covered the area at the time. The site of the crash, located on a rocky ledge, was devoid of snow. All around the site remnants of silica splintered rocks were found: (due to exposure to high temperatures), and "smoky" looking. Many pieces, and a nearby rock, contained particles of silvery metal, some "sprayed"-like, some in the form of solidified balls. At the edge of the site a tree-stump was found. It was burnt and emitted a chemical smell. The objects collected at the site were later dubbed as "tiny nets", "little balls", "lead balls", "and glass pieces" (that is what each resembled).

Closer examination revealed very unusual properties. One of the "tiny nets" contained torn and very thin (17 micrometers) threads. Each of the threads consisted of even thinner fibers, tied up in plaits. Intertwined with the fibers were very thin gold wires. Soviet scientists, at such facilities as the Omsk branch of the Academy of Sciences, analyzed all collected pieces. Without going into specific details suffice it to say that the technology to produce such materials was not yet available on Earth...except for one disturbing account.

To give an idea of the complexity of the composition of the pieces, let us look at the "iron balls". Each of them had its own chemical composition: iron, and a large mixture of aluminum, manganese, nickel, chromium, tungsten, and cobalt.

Such differences indicate that the object was not just a piece of lead and iron, but some heterogeneous construction made from heterogeneous alloys with definite significance. When melted in a vacuum, some pieces would spread over a base, while at another base they would form into balls. Half of the balls were covered with convex glass-like structures. Neither the physicists nor physical metallurgists can say what these structures are, what their composition is. The "tiny nets" (or "mesh") have confused many researchers. It is impossible to understand their structure and nature of the formation.

A. Kulikov, an expert on carbon at the Chemistry Institute of the Far Eastern Department of the Academy of Sciences, USSR, wrote that it was not possible to get an idea what the "mesh" is. It resembles glass carbon, but conditions leading to such formation are unknown. Definitely a common fire could not produce such glass carbon. The most mysterious aspect of the collected items was the disappearance, after vacuum melting, of gold, silver, and nickel, and the appearance-from nowhere-of molybdenum, that was not in the chamber to begin with.

The only thing that could be more or less easily explained was the ash found on site. Something biological was burned during the crash. A flock of birds, perhaps, or a stray dog; or someone who was inside the crashed object?

Dr. Dvuzhilni’s article was published in a Soviet (Uzbekistan) Magazine NLO: Chto, Gde, Kogda? (Issue 1, 1990, reprint of an article in FENOMEN Magazine, March 23, 1990). In his article Dalnegorski Phenomen V. Dvuzhilni provides details unavailable elsewhere.

The southwesterly trajectory of the object just about coincides with the Xichang Cosmodrome of People’s Republic of China, where satellites are launched into geo synchronous orbit with the help of the Great March-2 carrier rockets. There is no data of any rocket launches in the PRC at the end of January. At the same time, Sinxua Agency reported on January 25, 1988, that there was a sighting of a glowing red sphere not far from the Cosmodrome, where it hovered for 30 minutes. Possibly, UFOs had shown interest toward the Chinese Cosmodrome in the years 1989 and 1988.

There is another curious detail: at the site of the Height 611 small pieces of light gray color were discovered, but only in the area of the contact. These specimens did not match any of the local varieties of soil. What is amazing, the spectroscopic analysis of the specimens matched them to the Yaroslavl tuffs of the polymetalic deposits (i.e. the specimens possessed some characteristic elements of the Yaroslavl, but not the Dalnegorsk, tuffs). There is a possibility that the object obtain pieces of tuff in the Yaroslavl area. Tuffs experience metamorphosis under the effect of high temperatures .

The site of the crash itself was something like an anomalous zone. It was "active" for three years after the crash. Insects avoid the place. The zone affects mechanical and electronic equipment. Some people, including a local chemist, actually got very sick.

This Hill 611 is located in the area of numerous anomalies; according to an article in the Soviet digest Tainy XX Veka (Moscow, 1990, CP Vsya Moskva Publishing House). Even photos taken at the site, when developed, failed to show the hill, but did clearly show other locations. Members of an expedition to the site reported later that their flashlights stopped working at the same time. They checked the flashlights upon returning home, and discovered burned wires.

Eight days after the UFO crash at Hill 611, on February 8, 1986, at 8:30 p.m., two more yellowish spheres flew from the north, in the southward direction. Reaching the site of the crash, they circled it four times, then turned back to the north and flew away. Then on November 28, 1987 (Saturday night, 11:24 p.m.), 32 flying objects had appeared from nowhere. There were hundreds of witnesses, including the military and civilians.

The objects flew over 12 different settlements, and 13 of them flew to Dalnegorsk and the site. Three of the UFOs hovered over the settlement, and five of them illuminated the nearby mountain. The objects moved noiselessly, at an altitude between 150 to 800 meters. None of the eyewitnesses actually thoughts they were UFOs. Those who observed the objects assumed they were aircraft involved in some disaster, or falling meteorites. As the objects flew over houses, they created interference (television, telegraph functions).

The Ministry of Internal Affairs officers, who were present, testified later that they observed the objects from a street, at 23:30 (precise time). They saw a fiery object, flying in from the direction of Gorely settlement. In front of the fiery “flame” was a lusterless sphere, and in the middle of the object was a red sphere. Another group of eyewitnesses included workers from the Bor quarry. They observed an object at 11:00 pm. A giant cylindrical object was flying straight at the quarry. Its size was like that of a five-story building, its length around 200 or 300 hundred meters. The front part of the object was lit up, like a burning metal. The workers were afraid that the object would crash on them. One of the managers of the quarry observed an object at 11:30 pm.

The object was slowly moving at an altitude of 300 meters. It was huge, and cigar-shaped. The manager, whose last name was Levakov, stated that he was well acquainted with aerodynamics, knew theory and practice of flight, but never knew that a body could fly noiselessly without any wings or engines. Another eyewitness, a kindergarten teacher, saw something else. It was a bright, blinding sphere at an altitude of a nine-story building. It moved noiselessly. In front of the sphere Ms. Markina observed a dark, metallic-looking elongated object of about 10 to 12 meters long. It hovered over a school. There the object emitted a ray (its diameter about half a meter). The colour of the ray was violet-bluish. The ground below illuminated, but there were no shadows from objects below. Then the object in the sky approached a mountain and hovered over it. It illuminated the mountain, emitted a reddish projector-like light, as if searching for something, and then departed, flying over the mountain.

No rocket launches took place at any of the Soviet cosmodromes either on January 29, 1986, or November 28, 1987.

Dr. Dvuzhilni's conclusion is that it was a malfunctioning alien space probe that crashed into the Hill 611. Another hypothesis has it that the object managed to ascend, and escape (almost in one piece) in the north-easterly direction and probably crashed in the dense taiga.

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An Ongoing Nakba: The Plight of Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

by Tom Charles

Image from Tom Charles

February 6, 2012

In September 2011, the month that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud 'Abbas submitted Palestine’s statehood bid at the United Nations, Qusai Abdul-Raouf of the Lebanon-based Palestinian Human Rights Foundation was undertaking the task of documenting the increasing number of attacks against Palestinians in the Al Baladiyyat neighbourhood of Baghdad. As he toured the neighborhood three gunmen, reportedly wearing Interior Ministry uniforms, abducted him. No one has seen him since.
Palestinians in Iraq had numbered approximately thirty five thousand (although some estimates run as high as ninety thousand) before the 2003 US/UK invasion. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) only thirteen thousand remained in 2009. This figure now stands at approximately seven thousand. The threat to Palestinians in Iraq has grown to the extent that their continued presence in the country is now under serious threat. Palestinian refugees in Iraq are stateless, vulnerable and forgotten. They are a small segment of the three quarters of the global population of eleven million Palestinians, who are denied their right of return.

The word nakba, literally translated as catastrophe, commonly refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. But for Palestinians, the nakba never ended and their dispossession continues. Palestinian refugees are scattered around the world, but eighty-eight percent remain close to their land in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Many of them live in abject conditions with little sign of an end to their suffering. This perpetual crisis, despite its scale and its significant impact on international relations, is heavily marginalized in Western news consumption and parliamentary debate.Central to Palestinian life is the refugees’ right to return to their homes, enshrined in international law and codified in UN resolutions. For Palestinian refugees this right of return is systematically denied, alongside their rights to safety, freedom of movement, work, shelter and food which are routinely violated. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has described the plight of the Palestinian refugees more generally as "by far the most protracted and largest of all refugee problems in the world today." This is the broader context of the Palestinian refugee situation in Iraq.
Nakba phase one: 1948 and 1967
Palestinians went to Iraq in several waves, each time fleeing war. The first group were from Haifa and surrounding villages in what is now Israel. They resisted initial Zionist attacks on their villages during the 1948 War, but later fled to Jenin where the Iraqi army was situated. Under the protection of Iraqi forces, women and children were evacuated to Iraq and the men were incorporated into a special unit of the Iraqi army, the Karmel Brigade. When the Iraqi Army left Palestine in 1949, these villagers (numbering approximately four thousand) retreated with it. After the 1967 war, a second major wave of Palestinians arrived in Iraq. A third influx entered in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when most Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and many, particularly those from the Gaza Strip, had nowhere else to go.

Unlike Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, those who lived in Iraq did not fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Iraq refused UNRWA permission to operate on its territory when it was initially established in the late 1940s. Palestinians in Iraq were issued special travel documents, had the right to work and had full access to health care, education, and other governmental services. They also lived in government-owned housing or paid subsidized rent in privately-owned houses. This was certainly better than the appalling living conditions in camps, but the refugees were not offered citizenship, nor were they allowed to own houses or land. They became a source of simmering resentment in the 1980s and 1990s for sections of Iraq’s population, who believed that Palestinians were getting preferential treatment. This ill feeling further escalated with the Iraqi regime’s policy, particularly after the start of the second intifada in 2000, of sending money to families of martyrs in Palestine, despite Iraq’s economic hardship.
Palestinians in Iraq, like the rest of Iraqi society, were then subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions regime in history. Introduced by the UN in August 1990, the sanctions were described by the former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday in 2000 as "genocide." They also suffered alongside the Iraqis as the United States continued to bomb the country throughout the period from the end of the first Gulf war to the start of the 2003 invasion.
The ongoing nakba: 2003
The precariousness of the Palestinian refugees’ situation was exposed after the US-led invasion in 2003. As Iraqi society suffered under the weight of decades of war, sanctions, and their own conditions of internal displacement, resentment at Palestinians’ perceived preferential treatment made them targets for reprisals. The Palestinian community was extremely vulnerable, with no armed group to protect them, and unlike Iraqi citizens, Palestinians bearing Iraqi travel documents were generally unable to seek refuge neighboring countries. As a result thousands fled to inhospitable camps in the border areas with Jordan, where they had the choice of remaining under Jordanian police guard in fenced off camps, or returning to persecution in Baghdad. Some Palestinians with family connections in Jordan were allowed to enter the country, but were barred from working. The Palestinian Authority repeatedly stated its willingness to accommodate the Palestinians fleeing Iraq in the Gaza Strip, but Israel was able to block this due to its control of Gaza’s borders.
In the Al-Hol, Al-Tanaf, Al-Ruweished, and Al-Waleed refugee camps in the scorpion-infested desert, refugee health deteriorated due to a lack of access to medical services. José Riera and Andrew Harper of UNHCR reported in 2007: "They have fled death threats and the murder of family members only to face a deadly environment of searing heat and regular sandstorms." The Palestinians of Iraq had gone full circle, living in tents, just as they did after the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

Syria eventually accepted hundreds of the displaced under the auspices of UNRWA. Jordan accepted a small number able to demonstrate a link to the country, such as through marriage to a Jordanian citizen, but a greater number were only allowed them to stay in the border desert in "internment like conditions." Many of the families eventually resettled as far away as Brazil, Canada, India and New Zealand.
The remaining Palestinians live in the At-Tweija, Al Za’faraniyya, Al Doura, and Al Hurriyya neighbourhoods of Baghdad. According to the Palestinian Ambassador in Iraq Daleel Al Qassous they are "living in extreme poverty due to high living costs and the lack of work. The UN provides some services to them but their situation is very miserable."
After the overthrow of the Baathist regime, landlords were no longer obliged to grant Palestinians subsidized housing in return for a small government payment as they had been under Saddam Hussein’s rule. These landlords evicted hundreds of Palestinian families. Palestinians in Iraq then had to endure hostile bureaucracy as the Ministry of the Interior chose to treat them as non-resident foreigners rather than as recognized refugees, which was the situation under Saddam Hussein’s regime. As a result Palestinians are required to obtain short-term residency permits of one to two months. Most Palestinian refugees in Iraq were born in the country and had lived their entire lives there, yet had to regularly apply for residency without guarantee of receiving it. A lack of valid residency documents in today’s Iraq puts refugees at risk of arrest at checkpoints. Since Palestinians’ status has changed after the invasion (with such shifts as having to regularly renew their residency), they have become increasingly vulnerable and subject to harassment and humiliation.
As the political situation in Iraq deteriorated under occupation, Palestinians have increasingly been harassed and threatened by armed militias who see them as remnants of the Baathist regime. And as the Sunni insurrection grew, sections of the Iraqi media attempted to connect Palestinians to bombings. They were an easy target for those looking for a "foreign" element to blame.
Scores of Palestinians in Iraq have been murdered, tortured, taken as hostages and imprisoned by mainly Shia militant groups. Many were expelled from their homes and initially took shelter in tents in the Haifa stadium in Baghdad. For those remaining in their homes, their situation has become desperately insecure following the spike in Iraqi security forces’ attacks in 2011.
In September 2011, while international attention focused on 'Abbas’s manoeuvring at the United Nations, attacks by unknown militants and interior ministry officers against Palestinians increased. The violence was such that many were desperate enough to attempt to flee to an already unsafe country: Syria. In coordination with the United Nations’ refugee agencies the Syrian government agreed to provide temporary shelter to Palestinian refugees at its Al-Hol camp in early 2010 while the UNHCR worked to arrange more suitable relocations in other countries.
The principal invaders of Iraq; the United States and United Kingdom, have failed to uphold basic democratic principles and defend Palestinians. Security for Palestinians in Iraq has been progressively getting worse, even after the installment of a new government, further disclosing the flimsiness of US-UK claims of "democracy promotion" in justifying their invasion and subsequent destruction of Iraqi society.
There have been attempts to reduce the suffering of the refugees, as different elements of Iraqi society and religious leaders from the Shiite and Sunni communities have met with Ambassador Al Qassous to try and find a solution. These leaders included Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest ranking Shiite religious reference in Iraq.
Despite such goodwill gestures, the fact remains that Palestinian refugees in Iraq are extremely vulnerable. They, like all Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, have no voice in the policies and decisions of the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian leaders have been more than willing to abandon the right of return, save for a symbolic number. Such weakness will always be taken advantage of by stronger parties looking for political gain. With no voice and no economic power, refugees will not assume their rightful place in the media or on political agendas in the West unless serious steps are taken, from grassroots to government levels, to highlight their plight and comprehend the importance of delivering justice.
In Iraq, like in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the wider diaspora, the nakba is not a historic event, but a daily and ongoing reality. Starting with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1940s Palestinian refugees have been trapped in a vicious cycle. Violence and intimidation lead to expulsion and temporary resettlement. This is followed by yet more insecurity and more violence with no resolution in sight. This pattern can only end through the implementation of the right of return. Following this logical path would lead to the simultaneous ending of the Zionist dream of a solely Jewish state in historic Palestine. This is an inconvenient reality for many. Yet any attempt to solve the Middle East conflict that does not tackle this reality head on, outlining a clear strategy for the refugees’ enfranchisement and return to their land, is doomed to fail.

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down

By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

February 6, 2012

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

From Bad to Abysmal

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

"What are your normal procedures in situations like these?" I asked. "Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?"

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

"No! We don’t go after them," he said. "That would be dangerous!"

According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, "How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?"

One of the senior enlisted leaders added, "Guys are saying, 'I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or 'I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: 'Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is."

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:

Davis: "Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?"

Adviser: "No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

"Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.

"Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.

"And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere."

That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

Credibility Gap

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.

A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were "sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] 'strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here."

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

"Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively 'spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead," Cordesman wrote. "They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to 'spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control."

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level "experiment" that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a "digital division" with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s "results," Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.

A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.

A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

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Labels

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Occidental Quarterly-The Forbidden Identity

The Forbidden Identity

The Occidental Quarterly-Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

By Brenton Sanderson

Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

Russian High-Ranking Official Claims He Was Abducted by Aliens

Russian High-Ranking Official Claims He Was Abducted by Aliens

Angels in space "nothing but" top secret hallucinations

Angels in space "nothing but" top secret hallucinations

The Dalnegorsk UFO Crash: Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union

The Dalnegorsk UFO Crash: Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union

An Ongoing Nakba: The Plight of Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

An Ongoing Nakba: The Plight of Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

by Tom Charles

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down

By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

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Labels

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Forbidden Identity

By Brenton Sanderson

Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

Russian High-Ranking Official Claims He Was Abducted by Aliens

Angels in space "nothing but" top secret hallucinations

The Dalnegorsk UFO Crash: Roswell Incident of the Soviet Union

An Ongoing Nakba: The Plight of Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

by Tom Charles

Truth, lies and Afghanistan How military leaders have let us down

By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down