USA-Government OF the Top 1%, BY the Top 1%, For the Top 1%

Government OF the Top 1%, BY the Top 1%, For the Top 1% So Much For "Democracy" and The American Dream From Vanity Fair, August 7, 2011; By Joseph E. Stiglitz; Illustration by Stephen DoyleOriginal Article.

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in this "democracy", 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret. The Fat and the Furious The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided.

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow. Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin. Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this. First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy. Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead. None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes. Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent. But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest. When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement - we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s - a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint - the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work. America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment - things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care. Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”); given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation - voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

The Profound Institutional Crisis of the West

The Profound Institutional Crisis of the West Excess Liquidity, Criminal Bankers, Political Incompetence From: English Edition of Qiushi Journal; Vol.3 No.4 October1,2011 | Updated:2011-12-29; by Guo Ji Original Article. The world has been left stunned by a series of events that have recently unfolded in the West: the United States’ credit rating has been downgraded for the first time ever; the sovereign debt crisis in European countries has continued to worsen; scores of people were left dead or injured by the brutal shootings and bomb attack in Norway; and the United Kingdom has been hit by the worst street riots for decades. The emergence of various difficulties and chaotic occurrences serves to indicate that Western countries are currently in the midst of a profound institutional crisis, one that has been triggered by the heavy blow of the international financial crisis. The Persistence of Economic Woes

Occupy Wall Street protesters marching through New York’s financial district on September 29, 2011. / Photo by Xinhua/Reuters Three years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, Western economies aren’t only struggling to recover, but are also knee-deep in trouble. What’s worse is that no resolution or way out is currently in sight. The brunt of the impact has been the dire debt situation. In the wake of the financial crisis, the fiscal deficits and sovereign debts of developed countries rose to their highest levels since the Second World War, with the debt to GDP ratio shooting up almost 21 percentage points. According to research by ratings agency Moody’s, the balance of global public debt increased by about US$ 15.3 trillion between 2007 and 2010, with debt from the G7 accounting for 80% of this increase.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that levels of government debt in the developed countries of the G20 may be as high as 118% of GDP by the year 2014. The U.S. national debt hit the limit of 14.29 trillion dollars in May this year. The fiscal deficit of the U.S. currently totals 10% of the GDP, while the total national debt has reached 100% of the 2010 GDP. In a bid to ease short-term worries over a debt default, President Barack Obama has signed into effect a bill to increase the debt limit and cut the fiscal deficit, only to result in long-term worries in the market over whether the U.S. will actually be able to cut its deficit. More than half of U.S. states are in serious debt. Some are even teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and have been forced to rely on borrowing to get by. California, who is facing a dire financial situation, has been forced to release more than 40,000 prisoners in advance, while some cities in Michigan have laid off one third of police officers in a bid to cut expenditure. In the Euro area, the sovereign debt crisis is continuing to spread, with Italy and Spain, the third and fourth largest economies in Europe, joining Greece, Portugal and Ireland on the list of countries thought to be in danger of a debt default. The debt risk in France is also worrisome. According to projections by economists, developed countries will continue to face the risk of high debt for the next 20 years. In fact, the U.S. and Europe have long been deeply reliant on government borrowing as a means of promoting economic growth, and their only means of solving economic and fiscal problems is by incurring new debt to pay off the old debt. The U.S. has consistently relied on a monetary policy of quantitative easing as a means of addressing the debt crisis. This has resulted in a serious excess in global liquidity which has increased the risk of an asset bubble in emerging markets, something which is not conducive to the recovery of the world economy.

Police battle protestors in one of the many riots in the West; a deep sense of frustration and anger. The "jobless recovery" is an after-effect of the crisis which is being commonly experienced in Western countries. The U.S. GDP grew by just 1.3% in the second quarter of this year. Personal consumption expenditure decreased by 0.2% in June, while the increase in personal income dropped to 0.1%. Unemployment data for July was better than expected, but still remained high at 9.1%. Some scholars say that the rate of unemployment in the U.S. is actually higher than official figures, citing the irrational and impractical statistical model used by authorities as the reason. The rate of unemployment in Europe is still around 9.4%. Unemployment is at 7% in Germany, 21% in Spain and Portugal’s economy is still experiencing negative growth.

According to former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Europe and the U.S. will face enormous unemployment problems over the next decade. The economic recovery is failing to stimulate employment and consumption, and low consumption is holding back the economic recovery. Moreover, this vicious cycle has been worsened by the spending cuts that governments have adopted in order to overcome the crisis. This is the dire economic situation that Western countries are struggling to shake off. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, admitted that while the large banks and high income individuals have felt the effects of the "economic recovery," small and medium-sized enterprises and a large proportion of the work force in the real economy have been unable to break free of economic difficulty, and are continuing to struggle. In fact, the phenomenon referred to by Alan Greenspan actually reflects the nature of the economic system in Western countries. Political Deadlock It is a plain fact that levels of support for governments in almost all Western countries have dropped in recent years. The world was left shocked by the "pain, divisions, and the lack of coordination" exhibited by the Democrats and the Republicans in the debate over raising the debt ceiling. The subsequent downgrading of the United States’ credit rating has also sent shockwaves around the globe. President Obama said that there is nothing wrong with America, but there is something wrong with American politics. He has urged Congress to save the economy, and has called on political leaders to focus on the next generation, and not the next election. In a statement, Standard & Poor's cited increased uncertainty and declining confidence in U.S. decision making as the reason for its decision to downgrade the United States’ credit rating. CNN presenter Fareed Zakaria said that the capacity of the U.S. political system to solve problems has decreased significantly. There has also been a strong global reaction to the conduct of the Democrats and the Republicans, with public opinion regarding the events in Washington as a crisis as much political as it was economic. People also believe that the two major parties in the U.S. put partisan rivalry before the safety of the world economy and the interests of world nations, not only damaging America’s image, but also rattling world confidence in the U.S. political system. Commenting on the countermeasures taken in response to the crisis, a former high-ranking European official stated that European politics have been hijacked by electoral politics. Governments give far too much consideration to political and electoral factors in the formulation and implementation of policies, neglecting objective economic laws and the long-term needs of the country. The German media have also commented that government leaders regard "securing another term in office as being more important than their responsibilities." Prior to the debt crisis, European nations acted blindly to increase welfare and push up debt in a bid to win over voters. After the outbreak of the debt crisis, political conflicts within European countries and policy clashes between member states and the EU resulted in a slow response to the crisis and a lack of public trust in the current political structure and doubts over the efficiency of the political system. In Belgium, political deadlock rendered the country unable to form a new government for more than a year. An article by Time magazine entitled "Can democracy solve the West's economic problems?" made the following comments: "The core of the political problem on both sides of the Atlantic is the same – the demands of electoral politics in a modern democracy," "the politicians of the West are choosing the narrow interests of electoral victories over the greater, long-term good of their nations. Rather than focusing on closing deficits, improving economic competitiveness or forwarding the dream of European integration, they're looking no further than the next vote count." The following is another example from slightly further back: California’s deficit reached several dozen billion dollars in 2009. In a bid to ease the fiscal crisis faced by the state, California put a total of seven ballot propositions to the vote on May 19 of that year. Of these propositions, six involved tax increases, while the other involved suspending pay increases for public servants. In the end, the only proposition to be adopted was the one suspending pay increases for public servants." This begs the question: what can such a "democratic system" hope to solve? I hope that the U.S does not hold a referendum to decide whether or not to pay off its debts." Social Unrest Much as the U.S. government gets by on borrowing, the majority of U.S families have long been accustomed to spending on credit. Americans, who typically have little in the way of savings, are poorly equipped to endure an economic depression, and the onset of recession has quickly led to social dissatisfaction. With no end in sight to economic woes, 70% of Americans believe that their country is on the wrong track, and almost two thirds believe that America is on the decline.

Damage caused by rioters in one of dozens of protests in Western cities. New York Times columnist David Brooks says "Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive." In Europe, the combined effects of the financial crisis and spending cuts have intensified long-term problems over welfare, employment, and immigration. As people stream onto the streets in protest, Europe’s social stability and multicultural integration are coming under threat.

Governments in Europe have been under pressure to reform their welfare systems for years, and the added blow of the financial crisis has made the continuation of such welfare systems even more difficult. In response, various countries have taken measures to reduce welfare, but this move has resulted in a backlash of public dissatisfaction. A series of large-scale protests have taken place in Europe since 2010: in Greece, protests and disturbances erupted over government spending cuts; in France, hundreds of thousands of people marched to protest the raising of the retirement age, while a number of industries went on strike; in the UK, people took to the streets over a hike in tuition fees. In Spain, people have protested about the high rate of unemployment; and throughout Europe, large-scale demonstrations have been held in protest of welfare cuts. These protests are about more than just welfare cuts and falling standards of living; they are about opposition to social inequality, and opposition to "letting ordinary people foot the bill for the greed of capitalists and the incompetence of governments." Employment has always been a serious problem in Western society. A French scholar once affirmed that capitalism will collapse if a solution to the unemployment problem cannot be found. Tight fiscal policies have led to a major increase in unemployment, especially among the lower and middle classes and young people. According to reports in the German media, more than 5 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 were unemployed in the EU countries in June 2011, with the average rate of unemployment of young people being 20.5% while the figures in Spain and Greece being as high as 45.7% and 38.5% respectively. A large amount of young people are unable to find work. They are discontent with society, disappointed with their governments, and confused about the future, and this is something that can easily lead to social unrest. The large-scale disturbances that recently broke out across the United Kingdom have left Western society stunned. The problem of immigration has also been highlighted by the financial crisis and economic woes. European countries have long engaged in efforts to achieve social and cultural diversity in order to demonstrate the superiority and inclusiveness of the European social model. However, spiraling unemployment and the reduction of welfare have led to a general increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years. France has deported Roma in a high-key fashion, Belgium and other countries have passed laws prohibiting people from wearing Muslim veils in public, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that attempts to build a multi-cultural society in Germany have "utterly failed." The shootings and bomb attack in Norway have shown us how prominent social conflicts and the rise of radical and xenophobic sentiments in Western society are providing a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism. Increasing Pressure to Change In fact, the financial crisis has presented the Western world with more than just an economic problem. It has also raised issues pertaining to politics, society, and the direction of national development. The blow of the financial crisis has taken the shine of the Western model of economic, political, and social development, a model which Western countries pride themselves on and spare no effort in promoting to other countries. According to Western scholars and former high-ranking officials, the West is currently suffering from a lack of officials with strategic foresight, a lack of thinking and planning of a systematic and comprehensive nature, and a lack of major philosophical ideas, "all aspects of society are brimming with shortsightedness, utilitarianism, and superficiality." In fact, Western society is seriously confined by the shackles of its own ideology.

One of many tent cities in the US today. More than 3 million well-educated people who have lost their jobs and homes, are permanent tenants in these places. Few politicians and scholars are able to look at the problems of the Western institutions and systems with a relative degree of objectivity. Few are able to rationally analyze the situation that the West is currently in or consider what can be learned from other countries. And the "leaders are infatuated with their superficial edge in the balance of power, and do everything they can to cater to the self-conceit and fears of the Western public." Rigidity of the mind will inevitably lead to rigidity in systems. The current predicament of the West reflects a loss of vitality in its systems. The fact is the shortcomings of Western economic and political systems have been fully revealed by the financial crisis.

An increasing number of knowledgeable people have voiced the following opinions: the capitalist system has veered too far astray, resulting in a structural crisis. In turn, this will spread economic, political, social, and cultural chaos, spelling the end of the line for the current system; the financial crisis has ended the dominance of the "Washington Consensus" by highlighting the inherent instability of the capitalist system. American style capitalism has fallen out of grace; capitalism, which seeks to maximize profit through the accumulation of capital, has become stranded; the five "ways out," namely, neoliberalism, globalism, borrowing, fiscal deficits, and military expansion, have not only failed to bring about success, but have actually intensified conflicts. In some ways, capitalism has reached its limits. The hegemony of the Western political model and ideology has come to an end The rise of China and other emerging countries is about more than just the emergence of new economic and political powers. It also involves competition between ideas and models across international borders. It is undeniable that Western countries are coming under increasing pressure to change their systems.

The dark side of Winston Churchill

The dark side of Winston Churchill Not his finest hour From the Independent; 28 October 2010; By Johann Hari Original Article

Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office. George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire. Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain's smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately – and he should lead us, at last and at least, to a more mature conversation about our greatest national icon. Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was washing the map pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood red. Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples". In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill". He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three "savages". The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering". The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men". Later, he boasted of his experiences there: "That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about." Then as an MP he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph". There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the "natives". In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will "willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown". But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror." Of course, it's easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn't everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin." Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population. Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill's imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races. Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya's fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". He saw the local Kikuyu as "brutish children". When they rebelled under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed "Britain's gulag" by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects." Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured. Many of the wounds Churchill inflicted have still not healed: you can find them on the front pages any day of the week. He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as "barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung," while he was appalled that the Israelis "take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience". True, occasionally Churchill did become queasy about some of the most extreme acts of the Empire. He fretted at the slaughter of women and children, and cavilled at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Toye tries to present these doubts as evidence of moderation – yet they almost never seem to have led Churchill to change his actions. If you are determined to rule people by force against their will, you can hardly be surprised when atrocities occur. Rule Britannia would inexorably produce a Cruel Britannia. So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill's moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival? The US civil rights leader Richard B. Moore, quoted by Toye, said it was "a rare and fortunate coincidence" that at that moment "the vital interests of the British Empire [coincided] with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind". But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history. This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him. Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world. The fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu "savages" is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.

Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template

Coup d'État in Disguise Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template From an Article in Global Research.ca, by Jonathan Mowat; Original Article

US State Department and CIA organise and use the young people in various countries as pawns in their game to destabilise and overthrow legitimate governments. A documented article on how the US State Department and CIA organise and use the young people in various countries as pawns in their game to destabilise and overthrow legitimate governments, and to replace those with regimes they can control. The involvement and financing by the NED and George Soros. Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia, Kyrgistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others. The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004 article entitled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup: "With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev. [T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes.

Funded and organized by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organizations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections". Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly, what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House , now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED. Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power: The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change, " Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq--thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly." Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts in Washington D.C, of which former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall is President. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington D.C., which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports, through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

How our Understanding of History is Manipulated

How our Understanding of History is Manipulated Much of What Western Governments Tell Us is Fabricated March 07, 2012; By Andrew J. Fell Original Article

It's becoming increasingly apparent that in order for us, the general population, to understand the deeper issues of the current geopolitical situation, it is imperative for us to understand the relevant history.

This may sound somewhat obvious, but I would argue that this is a fundamental sticking-point when discussing such matters. It is difficult to link individuals to the antisocial and unethical actions they perpetrate [1:2] without a historically accurate point of reference. For example, when discussing matters such as the proposal that 9/11 may have been initiated by our 'leaders' [3], I find that people quite often respond with the simple question 'why?' It seems absurd to think that our 'leaders' would do something quite so inhuman and immoral for some sort of political gain.

I will not attempt here to go into what their motives were, but rather into why it is that we, the general public, rarely remember the lessons of the past and continue to be misled about the circumstances leading to each and every conflict. At this juncture I would suggest that the reader check out an article by John Pilger entitled 'Our children are learning lies' in which he clearly sets out several examples of how we are taught about an historic event at school and how this information will in turn have a direct effect on the formation of our future perceptions of the world [4] Unfortunately, this information can all too often bear little or no relation to the actual event (Pilger uses Vietnam as a prime illustration of this), because the language and information used to teach us essentially pre-programs our comprehension of future warfare, automatically predisposing us to whichever side has been identified as the 'goodies' while creating a vested dislike or even hatred of the 'baddies'. Perhaps 'baddie' should be rephrased in Orwellian terms as 'a figure of hate'. From what I remember of my own learning on Vietnam, I recall thinking that the Americans became involved in order to help protect the 'Democratic South' against the 'Communist North' - this is probably what most people believe. According to Pilger, this analysis of the Vietnam conflict is far from the truth; in fact, almost completely contrary to the reality of the situation. The excerpt below comes from his article referring to a school textbook written on the subject: It says that under the 1954 Geneva Accord: 'Vietnam was partitioned into communist north and democratic south.' In one sentence, truth is dispatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference divided Vietnam 'temporarily' until free national elections were held on 26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government. Certainly, President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. 'I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs,' he wrote, 'who did not agree that . . . 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.' Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the 'democratic' regime in the south was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be 'president' and a fake government was put in place. 'The CIA,' he wrote, 'was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media].' Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the west as 'free and fair', with American officials fabricating 'an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror'. The GCSE guide alludes to none of this, nor that 'the terrorists', whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq. What this essentially tells us is that, for all the democratic ideals that America and the West claims to espouse, as soon as someone who does not agree with their viewpoint is voted in they will do anything in their power to subvert and undermine them. This is rephrased and then becomes the 'official' history of events, finding its way into everything from textbooks to documentaries – George Orwell and 1984, eat your heart out! You don't have to look far to find similar examples of this subversive reinvention of recent history – simply look at how Hamas has been marginalized despite winning a clear majority in the Palestinian legislative election of 2006. [6] Hamas was not 'permitted' to govern, despite winning the overall support of the Palestinian people, due to their not having the same agenda as the policy makers in Washington. That is not to say that we should agree with all Hamas policies (or anyone else's, for that matter), but that we should at least respect the fact that the Palestinian people, through seemingly fair elections, have chosen their own government. The Americans evidently did not: they swiftly imposed sanctions and withheld aid from the Palestinian Authority in protest at the audacity of the Palestinians voting for an anti-American party [7]. The power sharing deal between Hamas and Fatah hammered out afterward under American influence is the equivalent of the Conservative Party in Britain winning over 50% of the seats in a general election and then being forced to govern in coalition with the previous losing Labour Administration - a ridiculous prospect but arguably a comparable scenario. [8] According to the words of former Republican Presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich, the Palestinians are an "invented people" and are merely part of the larger Arab community, despite the fact that each Middle Eastern country has its own form of Arabic language and customs [9]. It could be argued that these types of statement serve to de-legitimize any section of society. Looking at history, this stratagem has been used as an excuse for ethnic cleansing, whether it be the United States in their treatment of Native Americans in the 19th Century; or 1930s Germany rounding up of the mentally ill, homosexuals, Jews and any other so-called undesirables; or the genocides in Bosnia or Rwanda in the 1990s – all the way through to Australia's expunging of aboriginal culture during the first half of the 20th Century. To say that Palestinians are not a people is evidently to completely ignore the reality of their current political situation. Very few countries have the same boundaries as they did 200 years ago, so it can be reasonably argued that the Palestinians who reside in the "occupied territories” are on the land of their forefathers and have every right to be there. Claiming that they are part of the larger Arab community and not a people is to imply that no Arab country is sovereign unto itself; something that would certainly be disputed on talking to most Moroccans, Saudis or Jordanians. Let us not forget that although the Israeli nation is intrinsically a modern construct, this doesn't mean that the Israeli people don't have a sense of nationhood or national culture; they evidently do. Are Walloon-Belgians to be considered as 'French' simply because they have the same language as France? Is Scotland, Wales or the United States to be classified as 'English' simply because they share similar customs? Unfortunately, this type of rhetoric is all too often put forward; and even if the effect is not immediate, it is likely to influence the thinking of a significant number of people over time as the corporate media repeatedly relays these words to the wider population. For further examples of this duplicity, we could briefly consider the undermining of Daniel Ortega as leader of Nicaragua, and the deposition of Mohammad Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran. Ortega led a movement to oust the previous brutal U.S.-backed regime under Somoza and had put in place massive public programs to increase the living standards of his countrymen [10: 11]. Despite being lauded as the most free elections ever conducted in Nicaragua's history, the Western establishment media was falling over itself to imply they were in fact rigged. [12]. The illegal methods used by the U.S. and its agencies included the funding of an armed insurgency, later became known as the Iran-Contra affair – a huge topic in itself, well worth reading about as an illustration of the extent to which those in power will go in order to destabilize governments that do not agree with their policies. [13] Democratically elected Mosaddegh had instituted changes to transfer control of Iranian oil from Anglo-American interests to Iran. This resulted in a U.S.-sponsored regime change which saw the brutal Shah being imposed on Iran for the next 25 years, until his overthrow by the Islamic revolution of 1979 [14]. This fact is little known or cared about by Western observers, but it is widely known and taught throughout Iran. As Robert Fisk mentioned in a recent article in The Independent, 'It is a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits' [15] This is something worth thinking about when looking at current Western-Iranian relations. My point here is that these three events (and there are many more), although in the public domain are not widely known about or understood by the general population. Moreover, I would argue that discussion of these events is actively suppressed by the Western-controlled media, as this in itself would show the collusion of Western agencies in these events. However, it is my belief that the situation is more dangerous than this, as noted at the start of this article. It is precisely this lack of information that prevents the general public from making informed decisions on a whole range of current areas of controversy -- be it Iran, Syria, Libya or Sudan. We are presented with dubious information from a young age through to adulthood via the public-education system and the corporate-owned media, and it is hard to filter it out and be objective. Grant Allen may have been onto something when he wrote that "No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.” [16] There is much that could be said on this topic, but my main point is that it is absolutely vital for those who have an interest in these matters to critically appreciate and understand the history of how public opinion has been manipulated, how perceptions have been altered, and how half-truths have been purposely put forward by the media. It can be argued that in this way the media support the "Military Industrial Complex's" agenda [17]. George Santayana wrote 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' [18]. If it is true that we are being deliberately misinformed and poorly educated about still-relevant historical events, shouldn't we begin to at least question why this is the case? Might there be something more sinister at work in the world today? All the information is still freely available and out there on the Web or in books for anyone who cares to know. It's up to each one of us to find out everything we can so that we can understand the realities behind global and national policy making, thus enabling us to make informed and rational commentary and contributions to society. This is where a revolution in thinking should start. This is where the morally "repugnant" elite control structure should end. [19] End-notes and further reading: 1 - http://www.ponerology.com/ 2 - http://www.waking-you-up.com/articles-on-psychopaths-articles-on-cluster-B-Personalities-Articles-from-authors-on-psychopathy.html 3 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041221155307646 4 - http://www.johnpilger.com/archive-december/page0e77.html?partid=374 5 - http://www.johnpilger.com/archive-december/page0e77.html?partid=374 6 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_legislative_election,_2006 7 - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-02-09/news/0702090099_1_hamas-led-administration-mecca-agreement-rival-palestinian-groups-fatah 8 - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-02-09/news/0702090099_1_hamas-led-administration-mecca-agreement-rival-palestinian-groups-fatah 9 - http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-ignorant-racist-say-palestinians 10 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front 11 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua 12 - http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2479 13- http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-102-know-your-history-iran-contra/ 14 - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh 15 - http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-sanctions-are-only-a-small-part-of-the-history-that-makes-iranians-hate-the-uk-6269812.html 16 - Rosalba: the Story of Her Development by Olive Pratt Rayner /Grant Allen, published by Putnam's, 1899, pg 101 - http://www.archive.org/stream/rosalbastoryher00allegoog#page/n114/mode/2up/search/interfere Note: this quote (or variation of) is also sometimes attributed to Mark Twain [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/25/schooling-vs-education/] 17 - http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html 18 - The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana. Scribner's, 1905: 284 19 - Excerpt from President John F. Kennedy Secret Society Speech - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhZk8ronces Andrew Fell lives in the Czech Republic and is a lecturer of English at a Social Work College in Prague. He has a keen interest in geo-politics, ethics, history, cooking and playing music. He can usually be found armed with a smile, sipping a cup of tea at a čajovna in Prague.

Jessica Lynch - THE REAL STORY

Jessica Lynch

Jessica Lynch. Private First Class Jessica Lynch was a 19-year-old U.S. Army supply clerk with the 507th Maintenance Company based in Fort Bliss, Texas, and served in Iraq during the 2003 invasion by U.S. and allied forces. She was injured and captured by Iraqi forces but was recovered on April 1 by U.S. Special Operations Forces, with the incident subsequently receiving considerable news coverage. On March 23, 2003 the Humvee in which Lynch was riding apparently took a wrong turn and was ambushed, being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer. Lynch was seriously injured and some of her comrades were killed. But Jessica Lynch, being the full-blooded American soldier that she was, lay there in the ditch, fighting the pain from her broken bones, and firing her M-16 at the enemy until all her clips were empty and she finally passed into unconsciousness. She was captured and taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital where she was chained to a bed and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards who slapped her around, abused her, and possibly raped her. And later, she was rescued in one of the most daring and macho made-for-TV moments of the war, by elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow. Except that none of it ever really happened that way.

Jessca Lynch, heroine. Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war. An all-American heroine, the story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. It couldn't have happened at a more crucial moment, when the talk was of coalition forces bogged down, of a victory too slow in coming. Her rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars. Releasing its five-minute film to the networks, the Pentagon claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated. It was only thanks to a courageous Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, that she was saved. According to the Pentagon, Al-Rehaief risked his life to alert the Americans that Lynch was being held.

Just after midnight, Army Rangers and Navy Seals stormed the Nassiriya hospital. Their "daring" assault on enemy territory was captured by the military's night-vision camera. They were said to have come under fire, but they made it to Lynch and whisked her away by helicopter. That was the message beamed back to viewers within hours of the rescue. "It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, 'Go, go, go', with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show - an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors." All the time with the camera rolling. A military cameraman had shot footage of the rescue. It was a race against time for the video to be edited. The video presentation was ready a few hours after the first brief announcement. When it was shown, General Vincent Brooks, the US spokesman in Doha, declared: "Some brave souls put their lives on the line to make this happen, loyal to a creed that they know that they'll never leave a fallen comrade." That five-minute video of the rescue claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about and interrogated while on her hospital bed. And despite all the claims of the US government, the military and the Pentagon, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet America bought it, hook, line and sinker, because it was on TV. There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Al-Houssona had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance. "I told her I will try and help you escape to the American Army but I will do this very secretly because I could lose my life." He put her in an ambulance and instructed the driver to go to the American checkpoint. When he was approaching it, the Americans opened fire and the Iraqis fled back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch. None of the details that the doctors provided Correspondent with made it to the video or to any subsequent explanations or clarifications by US authorities. I asked the Pentagon spokesman in Washington, Bryan Whitman, to release the full tape of the rescue, rather than its edited version, to clear up any discrepancies. He declined. One witness account, claimed in an opinion article written by a correspondent within the BBC, included the opinion that the Special Operations Forces had foreknowledge that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they raided the hospital, and that the entire event was staged, even going so far as to use blanks in the Marine's guns to create the appearance that they were firing. The US government story was immediately disputed by doctors working at the hospital, who claim that Lynch was shielded and protected from Iraqi military personnel by hospital staff and was treated well throughout her stay at the hospital. Lynch's own story concurs with these accounts, claiming that she was treated humanely, with a nurse even singing to her. Iraqi doctors and nurses later interviewed, including Dr. Harith Al-Houssona, a doctor in the Nasirya hospital, described Lynch's injuries as "a broken arm, a broken thigh, and a dislocated ankle". According to Al-Houssona, there was no sign of gunshot or stab wounds, and Lynch's injuries were consistent with those that would be suffered in a car accident, which Lynch verified when she stated that she got hurt when her Humvee flipped and broke her leg. Al-Houssona's account of events was later confirmed in a U.S. Army report leaked on July 10, 2003. Dr Harith al-Houssona, who looked after her throughout her ordeal. "I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle. Then I did another examination. There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only RTA, road traffic accident," he recalled. "They want to distort the picture." Lynch, along with major media outlets, fault the U.S. government for fabricating the story as part of the Pentagon's war propaganda effort. On April 24, 2007 she testified in front of Congress that she had never fired her weapon; her M16 rifle jammed, as did all weapons systems assigned to her unit, and she had been knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed. In her testimony, Lynch said the Pentagon had erroneously portrayed her as a “Rambo from the hills of West Virginia” when, in fact, she never fired a shot after her truck was ambushed. She began her testimony by noting for the record that her appearance was not politically motivated. In a prepared statement, she said: "I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend. I believe this is not a time for finger pointing. It is time for the truth, the whole truth, versus hype and misinformation." Months after returning, Lynch's statements tended to be sharply critical of the original story that was reported by the Washington Post. When asked about her heroine status, "That wasn't me. I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do... I'm just a survivor." She denied the claims that she fought until being wounded, reporting that her weapon jammed immediately, and that she could not have done anything anyway. Interviewed by Diane Sawyer, Lynch claimed, concerning the Pentagon: "They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things." She also stated "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember." She reported being treated very well in Iraq, and that one person in the hospital even sang to her to help her feel at home. The authorized biography, I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg states that Lynch had been raped during her captivity, based on medical records and her pattern of injuries. Lynch denies any sexual assault and was "adamantly opposed to including the rape claim in the book", but that Bragg wore her down and told her that "people need to know that this is what can happen to women soldiers".

Military-embedded media and the Jessica Lynch phenomenon During the American invasion of Iraq there was an incident which failed to register as a milestone in the history of war reporting. From the Kaleej Times; 4 September 2010

Private Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, a member of the US Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Corps, was captured on 26 March 2003 when her company took a wrong turning just outside Nasiriya and was ambushed. Nine of her fellow soldiers were killed and Private Lynch was taken to the local hospital, which at the time was swarming with Iraqi soldiers. Eight days later US special forces team stormed the hospital, took Lynch from her bed and whisked her away by helicopter. The whole dramatic event was captured on video by a Pentagon team using night vision cameras. At Coalition headquarters in Qatar, the war correspondents corps was summoned from their beds in the early hours to hear the good news. They were given five minute-long video tapes of the rescue-green, grainy shots of crouching Navy Seals and Army Rangers, guns at the ready, taking over the hospital and carrying Private Jessica to safety in a stretcher. This was the story that, first the American public then the rest of the world, learnt that morning. The result was extraordinary. President Bush announced that he was “full of joy for Jessica Lynch”. Her rescue was hailed as a testament to a core American value—it took care of its people. Private Jessica Lynch became the first hero of the Second Iraq war, complete with “America Loves Jessica” fridge magnets, T-shirts, mugs, country songs, an NBC made-for-TV movie and a sign outside her town saying, “Home of Jessica Lynch ex-POW”. There is only one problem. It did not happen like that. Jessica Lynch was captured and she was in the hospital in Nassiriya and she was taken from there by US Special Forces. But the rest was all fiction, an audacious piece of Pentagon news management, which probably would not have been revealed if it had not been for a courageous BBC documentary called “War Spin”. In the documentary, the BBC presenter asked Bryan Whitman, the architect of the Pentagon’s whole media strategy for the war, if he would release the full videotape of the rescue rather than the edited version. Whitman said no, he would not. Jessica herself could have resolved all the conflicting information in one interview but the Pentagon would not allow it. It explained that she now had no memory of the incident and probably never would. But she did, and she had the courage to announce that the Pentagon’s video tape was almost entirely a fiction, that she had been well-treated by the Iraqi medical staff and that she was embarrassed by the fuss. The story died and the media moved on. But the affair had been noted by the British Ministry of Defence and its significance has only just emerged. The British Army has deployed its own embedded media squad, the Combat Camera team (CCT) in Afghanistan, a result of the MoD “identifying a need for managing the media during conflicts”. The CCT’s video, photos and reports are distributed to broadcast and print media and published on the army’s YouTube channel. In other words the traditional war correspondent has been completely by-passed and the news of what is happening in Afghanistan is being provided by the MoD itself. Obviously this cannot be objective. One CCT officer puts it; “Obviously, we are not looking to show the people we are with in a bad light—any Public Relations person doesn’t want to do that. But it you put out material that is overly biased it is never going to be used, so that would be counter-productive.” If Afghanistan were full of traditional war correspondents, the presence of CCT teams would be balanced by their activities. But according to an MoD spokesman, except for a documentary team, there are no embedded war correspondents in Afghanistan at the moment. So we have a situation where the news of what is happening there comes from the government department running the war. How can the public possibly know what is really going on as distinct from what the political/military class tells it is going on. The media should have seen it coming with the Jessica Lynch scandal. It did not and is paying the price.

Stalin's Jews

Stalin's Jews

It is a true - but seemingly well-suppressed - fact of history, that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jews. Our modern history seems to have missed the fact that many of the worst Communists, those associated with many of the worst atrocities, were of Jewish background. Lavrenti Beria brought about the infamous Katyn massacre and other atrocities. Lazar Kaganovich, who personally claimed to be responsible for 20 million killed, stood atop the rubble of a Christian church proclaiming, "Mother Russia has been cast down, we have torn away her skirts!" Genrikh Yagoda sent hundreds of thousands to work on the Baltic Sea canal project where countless numbers of Russians, Ukrainians, and Baltics perished.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, certainly one of Stalin's most vicious Jewish Lieutenants Natalfy Frenkel and Mathias Berman founded the infamous Gulag system, with camps commanded by figures such as Rappoport, Solz, and Spiegelglas, all of whom are mentioned at length in the work of Sozhenitzen. Ilya Ehrenburg, the World War II communist counterpart to Goebbels, incited Soviet troops to rape and maim German, Polish, and Czech women as a form of punishment. Then we have Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist. Almost 90 years ago, in December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka. Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

An old photo of one of Stalin's purges. Many Jews were involved in these atrocities. We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million. This includes victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags. Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists. It also included "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself. In his new, highly praised book, "The War of the World", Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution.

In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a Kosher certificate. All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past. But as for the Jews, an Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people.

A cast head of Joseph Stalin. Many, perhaps most, of his Communists were Jews, though this fact appears also to have disappeared from history. Stalin's Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf." Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women. Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of humankind, did not move Kaganovich. Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity.

One of the worst was perhaps Lavrenty Beria, who was born in Merkheuli, Russia, on 29th March, 1899. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was active in Georgia during the October Revolution. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was certainly one of the most vicious and mysterious figures of Stalin's era. Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant, Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published. Beria joined the Cheka and eventually became head of the NKVD in Georgia. He prospered under Stalin and he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In February, 1941, he became deputy prime minister and in 1946 joined the Politburo. After Stalin's death in 1953, Beria attempted to replace him as dictator of the Soviet Union. He was defeated by a group lead by Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov and Malenkov, and was later executed. In 1934, according to published statistics, about 40% of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. It would seem that when Jews become captivated by messianic ideology they can become among the greatest murderers in modern history. The Germans have been the only people to have directly faced their dark deeds. When will Britain, France, the USA, the other Imperial Nations - and the Jews - face theirs? A Dog That Bites, is Still a Dog "The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." The above quote is idiotic sophistry, deflecting blame on Jews for Jewish participation in Stalin's atrocities by using the devil's wordplay, telling us to imagine "they weren't acting as Jews; they were acting as Europeans". No blame there; let's move on.If this argument is true, then Germany shouldn't apologise or feel remorse about the "Jewish Holocaust", because after all, Hitler wasn't acting as a German, but as a "European" or a "Nazi". No blame there; let's move on. This is simply a lame attempt to tell us that Jews are "really Jews" only when they're good; when they're evil, their Jewishness is cast off and they assume some other identity. So Einstein is Jewish, but Yagoda and Beria are not? And Mordechai Vanunu? How does the world permit an argument that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered Jewish when he does amazingly despicable things? Jews are unwilling to confront the history of significant numbers of their own people committing savage atrocities, so they downplay their own origin, rewrite history, and forget it. Perhaps even more to the point, what about the savage genocide and inhuman and brutal treatment the Jews in Israel inflict on the Palestinian people? When they shoot children in the head, bomb the UN school to utter destruction, destroy the American School in Gaza with white phosphor, and burn children alive, are they acting as Jews? Surely they must be.

"The Jews cannot escape the Jewishness of their own hangmen, who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from the date of its establishment. Perhaps it's time for the world to remind the Jews of their own history." A Few Reader Comments I am from Russia, and everything he said is correct. I am surprised that some people do not know how bad were. In Israel you had criminals like Vilner; and even some in the Government. Look at your Roman Bronfman or Sarid or Beilin. Unfortunately it is true. And the hand that executed the Romanov royal family belonged to a person of Jewish origin too. Actually, it goes much deeper, as Jacob Schiff financed the Russian revolution. As a person of Russian extraction, I applaud Mr. Ploker's courage is saying out loud what most Russians and Russian Jews already know. The truth is never anti semitic. The only thing anti semitic is jews denying their own history. David Grier, New York, USA

Jews and Revolutions

Jews and Revolutions

This is a strange thing. It begins to appear that so much of the "history" we were taught in our schools, has not been so accurate after all, most particularly in that it seems to have omitted the racial identities of many of the instigators and main players. It is not apparently widely known that the European Communist movement consisted primarily of Jews and that all of these groups were seemingly bent on revolution througout Europe. We have not only Trotsky, Lenin, et al in Russia, but Bela Kun in Hungary, Rosa Luxembourg in Germany, Voitinsky in China, the Masonic and Jewish lodges in France, Bettelheim in Austria, and even a successful coup in Mongolia.

The World's Revolutions

Winston Churchill, Britain's future Prime Minister, rails against "the schemes of the International Jews" as follows: "This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire." "Let Them Eat Cake" - The French Revolution The French Revolution is a case in point. My recollection from High School of this part of history is that the peasants revolted against Royalty and the elite class, for various wrongs that included lack of food bordering on starvation - the most notable propaganda representing which, would be the above comment attributed to Marie Antoinette - and the callous lack of concern thereof. The above quote supposedly would reflect Queen Marie Antoinette's obliviousness to the condition of the people but, while it has been commonly attributed to her, there is no record of these words ever having been uttered by her. They appear in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography, whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age. (Rousseau was Jewish). It is worth noting that these words were never cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution, but seemed to acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper-classes at that time.

Artist's rendition of a scene from the French Revolution It doesn't require much cynicism to observe that this really seems, at least superficially, a case of blaming the victims for the crime. However, the French Revolution itself produces serious evidence of not having been a spontaneous event in any sense, but instead having been conspired, planned, and executed by various parties entirely for their own ends. There is now appearing a significant portion of history telling us that the Masonic Lodge and various Jewish groups - both international and in France - actively planned this revolution. It is apparently accurately reported that these Masonic lodges had grand plans for the assumption of power in France.

It is reported further that many of these lodges had strong Jewish representation and that France at the time had many Masonic Lodges that were exclusively Jewish, admitting no others as members. And that it was the members of all these lodges that engineered the French Revolution. Not only that, the food shortages in France at the time, if we can accept some of the emerging historical evidence, were intentionally created to trigger the Revolution. The claims are made, and they appear substantial, that grains and other food stocks were purchased by those with money and removed from the market - stored and hidden - to deliberately lead the population to the brink of starvation and thereby promoting a widespread revolt. As Henry Ford wrote in one of his articles: "For five generations the world has lived in a false light supposed to be shed by the French Revolution. It is now known that that revolution was not the Revolution of the French People, but the disorders of a minority who sought to impose upon the French People the very Plan which is now being considered. It was the French People who ultimately put down the so-called French Revolution. And France, as a result of that upheaval of a well-organized minority, has been bound by Jewish control ever since." The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia

A photo of part of the beginning of the Russian Revolution, in front of the palace. Once again, uncovered history sheds great light on this incredible tragic event. And again, if we can accept the emerging history - and there appears to be no reason we cannot - this entire event was planned and executed by International Jewry. It is no longer a secret that 80% or higher of all Communists at the time were Jews, and that the leaders of this astonishing crime against humanity were primarily Jews. In fact, it has been reported and is apparently true that Jewish organisations in the US sent around 350 Jews from the US to Russia to lead the Revolution and the new government. Trotsky was resident in the US at the time, and was apparently "sent" with an entire revolutionary crew to execute the plan and take over the country.

From "The Cause of World Unrest", by H. A. Gwynne, 1920. List of the top 50 executives in Russia's Bolshevik Revolution.

In the Japan-Russian War, the Japanese stunned the world with their victory over Russia. The key to Japan’s victory was its secret weapon of Jewish finance. Zionist Bankers such as America’s Jacob Schiff and the Rothschilds of Europe, provided massive amounts of easy financing for the Japanese military effort. The bankers used the Japanese in order to weaken Russia so that the Czar ould be overthrown by internal Jewish Communist subversives (also financed by Schiff & Rothschild). Schiff even arranged for Marxist reading materials to be given to 50,000 Russian Prisoners-of-War being held in Japan. Years later, many of these "re-educated" soldiers ould turn against the Czar. For his help in defeating Russia, Schiff is awarded a medal by the Japanese government. Their plan from the beginning was to develop Russia in such a way as to spread social revolution throughout Europe and eventually the world. This destruction of the social order, of morality and of religion, plays a consistent part in all these "Communist" revolutions. There is ample evidence that one end of the Bolsheviks in Russia was to destroy the social order, the foundations of society itself, and there appears to have been a particular hatred for Christianity as part of that foundation. Priests were killed in huge numbers, churches everywhere destroyed - while synagogues apparently remained untouched. Among other authors, Alexander Solzhenitsen, in his landmark book, "The Gulag Archipelago", recounts that the entire Soviet gulag system was conceived, planned and executed by Jews. This is discussed in more detail below, but suffice for now to point out that those in charge of this system were responsible for at least 20 million deaths and possibly much more. We may never know the entire toll. Through acts of “terrorism” and rebellion a small group of revolutionaries overthrew the Czars. Then Russia went into a stage of anarchy and turmoil, out of which the Bolshevik Party of Lenin emerged as the dominant political force. Lenin and many of the Bolsheviks were not in Russia at the time of the Revolution. Some of them were from Russia originally but had left, while some were not from Russia at all. They were all Marxists and socialist revolutionaries that had been living in Europe studying science, economics, sociology, history, etc. from a Marxist perspective.

Posters of the Russian Revolution period. Their plan from the beginning was to develop Russia in such a way as to spread social revolution throughout Europe and eventually the world. As in many countries in different times, there was resentment against the Jews, and there were recriminations and purges, but it is difficult to claim that these events were propagated because the Jews were Jews. Once again, the violence appears to have been directed at those same people who instigated a revolution and killed the king and his entire family. They also needlessly and mercilessly killed tens of millions of other people, to say nothing of the religious and other persecution against the Christians. The Bolsheviks were convinced that a world revolution was about to begin, first in Germany and then England and ultimately the United States.

Labor was compulsory and strikes were outlawed. The state organized a barter system which replaced the free market. Internal trade was made illegal -- only the government food commissary could buy and sell. Money disappeared as the state took over distribution and production. Church and state were separated by decree and judges were removed and replaced by members of the local soviets. Nine opposition parties were liquidated. Meanwhile, the government subjected the countryside to severe requisitioning. It mobilized the poorer peasants against the kulaks (wealthy peasants). Bitter class hatred resulted in the villages and stimulated a civil war in the countryside. His lieutenants set up the CHEKA and the gulag system. Hated and feared by almost everyone, the CHEKA was deplorable because it introduced the concept of killing people not because of what they had done, but because of who they were or who they knew. Information is that approximately 40% of this group's leaders were Jews. Upheavals in Germany The history books do tell us that there was a minor event in Germany where a "dissident group" took over the Reichstag, but it is not widely known that the persons involved, led by Rosa Luxembourg, were all Communist Jews.

Rosa Luxembourg - much nastier a Revolutionary than typically portrayed. It is true their coup was short-lived and they were evicted and killed after only a few days, but that may indicate only that they overestimated their strength and support and overplayed their hand. In any case, it would seem the Jewish Communists (and again, the vast majority of Communists were Jews) planned, initiated and executed, revolutions in several countries, and there is evidence these plans were meant to include all of Europe. This "revolution" - in reality, a Lenin-style coup d'etat - petered out fairly quickly, although about 1200 people died during a week of street fighting. Luxemburg and Liebknecht went into hiding with a third comrade, Wilhelm Pieck. It was not long before the army tracked them down. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed shortly thereafter - and almost immediately became the beloved martyrs of the German Communists. But Wilhelm Pieck managed to elude escape - rising to world prominence in 1949 when he became dictator of East Germany. Yet her portrayed has been done in a way to make the world remember Luxemburg as a truly democratic socialist, rather than the godmother of one of the world's ugliest Communist despotisms.

Communist risings in Germany did not go nearly as far as Kun's in Hungary. But it is important to keep in mind that in chaotic post-war conditions, tiny and seemingly impotent movements like Lenin's on occasion won out. Communist revolutions easily crushed in their infancy could nevertheless spark reasonable fear in millions of people for decades to come. With the end of World War I, Communist-inspired power seizures were seen all over Germany. Most significant of these were the Spartacist Berlin rising, and the establishment of a Soviet republic in Bavaria. The Bolsheviks were involved from the start. Lenin "dispatched a team of his most able revolutionaries to infiltrate Germany: Karl Radek, one of the most powerful men in the Comintern; Nikolai Bukharin, second-in-command of the Comintern; Christian Rakovsky, a Bulgarian who was a signatory at the founding of the Comintern; and a mysterious man called Ignatov, who probably was Alexander Shpigelglas, an official of the Cheka's Foreign Department who had a record of assassinations during the Terror.."

A photo from the Russian Revolution. Most historians have given Rosa Luxemburg inordinately favorable treatment, contrasting her love of democracy with Lenin's brutal dictatorship. Canonization is always easier for martyrs who die early in the crusade. But is Luxemburg's reputation deserved? Luxemburg attacked Lenin's authoritarianism in the early 1900's, but so did Trotsky - the future ideologist of the Red Terror. Moreover, when we look at Luxemburg's broader attack on Leninism, it becomes clear that her own dictatorial inclinations were quite pronounced. It was heresy to let the peasants keep private property in land, or to allow national minorities to secede.

If Luxemburg was unwilling to make even these concessions, the blood required by her revolution could have made Lenin's pale in comparison. A second Communist-inspired coup in Bavaria had far greater success. It began with the seizure of power by one Kurt Eisner. As usual, force was necessary: "a movement of war-tired and anti-Prussian peasant soldiers brought the local leader of the U.S.P., Kurt Eisner, into power" in November of 1918 (Franz Borkenau, World Communism). Elections held in January showed that Eisner's radical Independent had minimal popular support. Pressure was on Eisner to resign, and it appears that he would have done, were he not assassinated first. The Austrian Revolution

Archduke Ferdinand and his family in Austria. A Budapest lawyer, Ernst Bettelheim, had the approval and funding of the Comintern to set up an Austrian Communist Party. Bettelheim and his followers planned to seize control of the nerve centers of the government, while Kun sent the Red Hungarian army to the Austrian border (only two hours' march from Vienna), ready to invade to support their compatriots. The night before the planned rising, on June 14, 1919, however, the Austrian police arrested all of Austrian Communist leadership except for Bettelheim; a march of 4000 Communists to free them broke under police fire. The Austrian revolution had been decapitated, so Kun returned his focus to his internal problems in Hungary. Vienna’s Jews were at the forefront of the uprising in the earlier Austrian revolution of 1848, and it is claimed they appeared to cherish the freedoms of revolution which brought large changes to Austria and to the fortunes of the Jews resident there. In 1878, Theodor Herzl arrived in Austria from Budapest. This is the man who founded political Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state. His book Der Judenstaat (1896; The Jewish State) would later be crucial to the creation of Israel.

The Hungarian Revolution There is a part of Hungary's history that seems to receive little attention, and that is the takeover of the country by the Jewish Communists led by Bela Kun.

Bela Kun (carrrying papers) with some of his staff in Budapest. Hungary became involved in the First World War on the side of the Germans as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but by the autumn of 1918 the country was beaten and the war lost. In the Russian Civil War in 1918, Kun fought for the Jewish Bolsheviks while making detailed plans to export his brand of Communism to Hungary. In November 1918, Kun, with at least several hundred other Jewish Hungarian Communists, and with a lot of money given to him by the Jewish Bolsheviks, returned to Hungary and formed the Hungarian Communist Party. Kun got himself into power by feigning a coalition, but then immediately betrayed it and proclaimed a dictatorship of the proletariat with himself as dictator on March 21, 1919.

One of his first decrees was to nationalise almost all private property and to announce that private commerce would be punished with the death penalty. He immediately began by confiscating and nationalising all industry and land, and attacking religion while making great efforts to undermine and in fact to destroy all public morality as well as concepts of God and religion. After an anti-communist coup attempt in June, Kun organized a response in the form of a Red Terror, carried out by secret police and mostly Jewish irregular units. Red Tribunals condemn 600 prominent Hungarians to death. The Hungarian Jew Georg Lukacs wrote a "History and Class Consciousness" that had brought him recognition as a Marxist theorist to rival Marx himself. In his words, "I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution". "As Deputy commissar for culture in Bela Kun's regime, Lukacs put his self-described demonic ideas into action in what came to be known as cultural terrorism." As part of this terrorism, he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women too were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time by engaging in open promiscuity. Lucacs' purpose in promoting licentiousness among women and children was to destroy the family, the core institution of Christianity and western culture". These "Communists" knew if they could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals, they would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself - and that would appear to have been the definite aim. According to author and historian Brenton Sanderson, the Jews involved in these communist regimes were engaged in actions opposed to the traditional peoples and culture of these societies, while typically maintaining their own ethnic commitments." In other words, the destruction of society, morals and religion was reserved for the Gentiles while the Jews remained as before.

Bela Kun, certainly one of the more despicable "revolutionists" to have ever appeared.. Hungary continued to quarrel with her neighbours Czechoslovakia and Romania. The Communist regime lost all support when the Romanian army marched into Hungary and occupied Budapest. Kun's regime collapsed and is removed from power after an invasion by Romania. Kun and his Communist followers fled to Austria, then to Russia, looting numerous art treasures and the entire gold stocks of Hungary's National Bank when they left. The Communist party itself persisted, and the Stalinist purges continued into the 1950s. Among the Hungarian population, all these events led to a deep feeling of dislike against the Jews since most members of Kun's government were Jewish. There then followed a period of reprisals in which many Jewish Communists were executed. It would be easy, as I believe is too often done, to blame these reprisals on feelings of "anti-Semitism", but both evidence and logic would indicate the purges were directed against evil and savage oppressors rather than being based on race or religion.

I am unaware of evidence that the resentment was against the Jews for being Jews but rather against specific people for the attempted destruction of their country, society, morals and religion. The Little Engine That Couldn't - Emma Goldman and the Failed US Revolution Emma Goldman was a Jewish Russian anarchist born in what is Lithuania today. She was a political activist and played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York where she joined the anarchist movement and became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy and founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. For the sake of anarchist propaganda, she and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick. Frick survived the attempt on his life, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman escaped this time, but was imprisoned repeatedly in later years for inciting to riot and other revolutionary activities. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to induce persons not to register for the newly instated draft.

After their release from prison, they were arrested - along with hundreds of other Jewish anarchists - and deported to Russia. Jewish-controlled websites like Wikipedia speak of Goldman in rather glowing terms as a "free spirit", while her critics saw her, perhaps a little more clearly, as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures mirrored the same variety of issues that were used to destroy Russia, Hungary, and other European nations where the Jewish Communist revolutions took root. These include atheism, free love, militarism and capitalism (or socialism). The US was at the time panicking over the Russian and other European Revolutions and was not blind to the fact that so many Jewish Communists were migrating to the US - many under pressure from the Jewish lobby which was already powerful enough to demand that only the nationality of these immigrants be recorded and not the fact that they were either Jews or Communists. To our best knowledge, to this day, only the US Jewish associations, the New York kehilla for one, knows the number or identity of the Jews in the US, since this information is controlled by the "Jewish Government" resident in the USA. In fact, the US government, through the power of the Jewish lobby, has surrendered the right of racial identification - for this one race alone. The Jews claim to be a race, a nation of people, just as Russians or Italians do, but the US government is denied the right to identify them as such, only the country of birth being recorded. In any case, the fear of these communists was the starting point of McCarthyism in the US. It is true that McCarthy went too far, but America had very good reasons to have a dread fear of the Communists and their incipient domestic Communist Revolution. But the unforgivable deception was that all this fear and hatred of what were in fact Jewish Communists - mostly from Russia - was subverted and turned onto Russia itself and the USSR, instead of remaining with the primarily Jewish Communists who were responsible for the entire mess of upheavals in Europe for a period of 20 or 30 years. One article in this series, titled, "Fear of Dissent: The Case Against the "Reds", by the US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, clearly outlines the dangers being faced to society, morals and religion, seeking to replace them with the same perverted "values" as done by Bela Kun in Hungary. He states pointedly that "communism in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens who were direct allies of Trotzky", without mentioning that Trotsky was Jewish and that all these "direct allies" were also Jewish. In the end, everything was blamed on "Russia", although Russia as a country was rather innocent of the Bolshevik Revolution imposed upon it by Trotsky and his band of Jewish revolutionaries shipped there from the USA. The Spanish Civil War - 1936-1939 The Civil War pits Franco's Nationalists against the "Reds" and "Liberals". Nationalist General Francisco Franco leads a rebellion against what is now a democratic socialist government in Spain. The country is deeply divided, with Socialists, Communists, and liberals fighting for the government, and Nationalists, conservatives, and the Catholic Church favoring Franco. The war becomes a proxy war between Nationalism and Globalism. Germany, Portugal and Italy provide military aid to Franco while the Communist Soviets send arms to the Spanish government. The Comintern sends volunteers to fight for the Spanish regime. As usual, the Jewish Communist fighters carry out sickening atrocities against civilians, such as setting fire to the wives and children of Nationalist officers after dousing them with petrol. The The Communists (Reds) are determined to stamp out Christianity. They rape nuns, torture priests, and set fire to churches with the worshippers locked inside. The Spanish Civil War ends in victory for Franco's Nationalists, but the war between Jewish Communist Globalism and European Nationalism is only just beginning. The Mongolian Revolution Thus Leninist revolution failed in Hungary, Austria, and Germany. It also failed in parts of the former Russian Empire itself: in Finland and the Baltic countries, separatists defeated Communists and set up independent non-Communist governments. Communism seemed confined to a single country.

Mongolia and its landscape - and its revolutionaries - in 1920. But escaping world notice was the establishment of the world's second Communist dictatorship in the independent country of Mongolia. Unlike the haphazard power seizures in Europe, the imposition of Jewish Bolshevik power upon Mongolia was carefully planned. First, a small number of Mongols were trained in Communist theory and practice in Moscow and Irkutsk. These Communist Mongols set up the First Congress of the Mongolian People's Party in Kyakhta, just north of the Mongolian border, and proclaimed a Provisional Revolution Government. Then the Mongolian Communists formed a minuscule Mongolian army, and in 1921 this tiny force marched into Mongolia.

The Red Army followed close behind, which guaranteed victory to what would have otherwise been the movement of a few hundred malcontents. The Red Bolshevik Army was now in Mongolia, and used standard techniques to seize total power under the guise of national self-determination. The Mongolian People's Republic would be the first Soviet satellite state. It would not be the last. The incipient Chinese Communist Revolution The Russian Bolsheviks were intensely interested in China, and Lenin and Trotsky saw China as a place where they could inflict another blow as they had done to Mother Russia. In order to advance their interests, they sent Gregory Voitinsky to China to make contact with leftist intellectuals, especially Chen Duxiu.

Shanghai in 1920 - the "wide open and wicked city" - but not because of the Chinese. The actual process of forming the infant Communist Party can be mostly attributed to Voitinsky's influence. For various reasons, including the disintegration of the process in Russia, the process continued without the crippling devastation that the Bolsheviks inflicted on their mother Russia, and China survived. China did indeed have its own revolution, but in the end it was commanded by its own people who meant to save China rather than destroy it. And happily, they succeeded. One of the acts of that revolution was to expel all foreigners from China - something that can hardly be criticised when we consider the unconscionable damage and humiliation these same foreigners had inflicted on the Middle Kingdom.

Once again, some tens of thousands (at least) of the "foreigners" expelled were Jews, and once again it was unrelated to the fact that they were racially Jewish. Instead, it was primarily related to their devastation of China by their exclusive franchise for importing opium into China under the protection of the British military. And subsequently with their using their opium profits to buy up most of Shanghai and many other cities, as well as using those same profits to help finance the Japanese invasion of China. The Jews may no doubt have felt "persecuted", but that serves only to trivialise one of the greatest crimes against humanity every inflicted on a country - the persistent evisceration of the social fabric of an entire nation by the forced imposition of a deadly addictive drug - in this case virtually entirely by Jews. As a closing note on this point, many Jewish websites extol the wealth and virtues of the Sassoons, the Kadoories, the Hartungs and more, without caring to specify the criminally evil source of their great wealth.