Unqualified Reservations

The kiss: "Stalin was feeling extremely gay"

2012-01-22T23:37:00.000-08:00

Here at UR we absolutely adore simplicity. The truth is not always simple, it's true. But the lies are always complicated. And there are so many lies! Even in this historic golden age of bullshit, is it possible to oversimplify? To steal a line from Hunter Thompson, it's possible for a Hell's Angel to catch the clap, too. He doesn't waste much time worrying about it.

But America has so many problems! No, she doesn't. America has only one problem: America is a communist country.

And has been since before you were born. And probably before your mother was born. Earl Browder was right: communism is as American as apple pie. Russia didn't infect America. America infected Russia. After which the germ went back and forth a few times - as we'll see. It eventually died out in Russia, which is nice because that just leaves us. How simple!

Alas, this beautiful, simple, horrifying reality is simply too difficult for most Americans to grasp, let alone do something about. If you tell an American of any political persuasion that his is a communist country, the poor fscker will simply laugh in your face. Cancer, that's so funny. Of course I couldn't possibly have cancer. Yes, there's this thing - it's just a growth...

If you love your American, don't let him get away with it! Don't let him wallow in his denial! Hit him straight in the teeth with a fast overhand right. "Of course America is a communist country," you can say. "You just have to translate. For workers and peasants, read blacks and Hispanics."

Now this is a zinger, but it's just a zinger. One little zinger never cured anyone. It gives you something to work with, that's all. Your interlocutor, if there's any hope for him, may be a sharp fellow himself. He might punch back with a zinger of his own. For example, he could say: "oh, yeah? So tell me, smart guy, on what day did America become a communist country?"

Whereupon some might be stumped. But you, dear UR reader, have an answer. America became a communist country on December 20, 1933. Was there transmission of saliva? Oh, yes, there was transmission of saliva.

I say "at a bare minimum," because the published edition (1972) of William Bullitt's letters to FDR was edited by Bullitt's brother, Orville, with assistance from George Kennan. Orville's elisions (which I've marked OB) are frequent, especially at the juicy moments. Do they conceal even more... "intimate..." revelations? It's clear that nothing really juicy could remain, but even what's left is... remarkable. I've of course made my own cuts, which conceal nothing.

Personal and Confidential
On board steamship Washington - January 1, 1934

My dear Mr. President:

In addition to the report of my trip to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which I shall submit to the Secretary of State, I should like to set down for your own eye some of the more intimate episodes.
[...]
Berlin
[...]
I avoided seeing any officials of the German Government, but "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Hitler's intimate assistant, called on me and talked in his customary irrational manner, saying among other things, "Of course you and I know that the Jews make all wars and are the sole beneficiaries of all wars." I disagreed. The most fantastic thing which has happened in Germany lately is the christening of the new military academy "Ernst Roehm Kadetten Erziehungs Anstalt." In view of the revelations about Roehm, the English equivalent would be the renaming of Sandhurst "Oscar Wilde Institute."

U.S.S.R.
[...]
On Wednesday, December 13, at noon, I presented my credentials to Kalinin at the Kremlin.
[OB ...]
I had a delightful conversation with Kalinin after presenting my credentials. I had never met him and I had thought from all that I had read that he was a simple-minded old peasant, but he is far from simple-minded. He has a delightful shrewdness and sense of humor.

He asked me to say to you that he was following with the closest attention everything you were doing in America, and that he and everyone else in Russia considered you completely out of the class of the leaders of capitalist states; that it was clear to them all that you really cared about the welfare of the laboring men and the farmers and that you were not engaged in protecting the vested rights of property.
[...] [OB ...]
Even the party press of the Communist Party which hitherto has been uniformly hostile to Ambassadors unearthed various remarks of Lenin about me from his "Testament" and various speeches. Apparently he really liked me and expressed his liking many times. In view of Lenin's present position in Russia, which is not unlike that of Jesus Christ in the Christian church, this is a bit like having the personal endorsement of the Master recorded in St. Mark. Divilkovsky, for example, said to me, "You cannot understand it, but there is not one of us who would not gladly have his throat cut to have had such things said about him by Lenin."
[OB ...]
There was one [OB building site] which was not offered to us, but which we offered to ourselves: a bluff covered with beautiful woods containing a lake overlooking the river and the whole city of Moscow in the center of the great city park. It is a situation which suggests Monticello, and I can conceive of nothing more perfect for an American Embassy than a reproduction of Monticello in that setting with houses for the entire staff of both consulate and embassy arranged along the sides of the property. We were not modest in our demands, but asked for the entire bluff containing some fifteen acres of property. The Moscow Soviet continued to offer us other building sites, any one of which would be adequate but none of which compared in interest or beauty to this site.
[OB ...]
That night Litvinov, with whom I had previously had several meals in private, gave me a formal dinner to which nearly all the members of the Government were present. It was a superb banquet with food and wines of a quality that no one in America would dare to serve nowadays, and many toasts were drunk to you and to me and to the United States.
[OB ...] [...] [OB ...]
The men at the head of the Soviet Government today are really intelligent, sophisticated, vigorous human beings and they cannot be persuaded to waste their time with the ordinary conventional diplomatist. On the other hand, they are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan who went in with me.
[...]
Litvinov said to me as I looked over the room, "This is the whole 'gang' that really runs things -- the inside directorate." I was introduced to Stalin after I had shaken hands with Kalinin and Molotov, but made no effort to continue conversing with him before dinner, considering it best to let him come to me in his own good time. He drifted to one side of the room and I to the other.
[OB ...]
The first impression Stalin made was surprising. I had thought from his pictures that he was a very big man with a face of iron and a booming voice. On the contrary, he is rather short, the top of his head coming to about my eye level, and of ordinary physique, wiry rather than powerful. He was dressed in a common soldier's uniform, with boots, black trousers and a gray-green coat without marks or decorations of any kind. Before dinner he smoked a long underslung pipe, which he continued to hold in his left hand throughout dinner, putting it on the table only when he needed to use both knife and fork. His eyes are curious, giving the impression of a dark brown filmed with dark blue. They are small, intensely shrewd and continuously smiling. The impression of shrewd humor is increased by the fact that the "crow's feet" which run out from them do not branch up and down in the usual manner, but all curve upward in long crescents. His hand is rather small with short fingers, wiry rather than strong. His mustache covers his mouth so that it is difficult to see just what it is like, but when he laughs his lips curl in a curiously canine manner. The only other notable feature about his face is the length of his nostrils. They are unusually long. With Lenin one felt at once that one was in the presence of a great man; with Stalin I felt I was talking to a wiry Gipsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience.
[...]
As soon as we had settled ourselves at the table Stalin rose, lifted his glass and proposed a toast "To President Roosevelt, who in spite of the mute growls of the Fishes dared to recognize the Soviet Union." Everyone drained his glass to the bottom and sat down again with considerable laughter at Stalin's reference to Ham Fish. I then proposed the health of President Kalinin and thereupon a series of toasts was begun which continued throughout the entire meal. The next one was Molotov's to me in which he proposed "The health of one who comes to us as a new Ambassador but an old friend."

After the tenth toast or so, I began to consider it discreet to take merely a sip rather than drain my glass, but Litvinov, who was next to me, told me that the gentleman who proposed the toast would be insulted if I did not drink to the bottom and that I must do so, whereupon I continued to drink bottoms-up. There were perhaps fifty toasts and I have never before so thanked God for the possession of a head impervious to any quantity of liquor. Everyone at the table got into the mood of a college fraternity banquet, and discretion was conspicuous by its absence. Litvinov whispered to me: "You told me that you wouldn't stay here if you were going to be treated as an outsider. Do you realize that everyone at this table has completely forgotten that anyone is here except the members of the inner gang?" That certainly seemed to be the case.

Stalin proposed my health several times and I did his once and we had considerable conversation across Madame Voroshilov. Toward the end of the dinner Stalin rose and proposed the health and continued prosperity of the American Army, the American Navy and the whole United States. In return, I proposed a toast "To the memory of Lenin and the continued success of the Soviet Union."
[...]
After dinner we adjourned to an adjoining drawing room and Stalin seized Piatakov by the arm, marched him to the piano, sat him down on the stool and ordered him to play. Piatakov launched into a number of wild Russian dances, Stalin standing behind him and from time to time putting his arm around Piatakov's neck and squeezing him affectionately.

When Piatakov had finished playing, Stalin came over and sat down beside me and we talked for some time. He said he hoped that I would feel myself completely at home in the Soviet Union, that he and all the members of the Government had felt that I was a friend for so long, that they had such admiration for yourself and the things you were trying to do in America that they felt we could cooperate with the greatest intimacy. I told him that you sincerely hoped that war might be prevented in the Far East and that the Soviet Government might work out its great experiment in peace. He said, "I know that that is what President Roosevelt wants and I hope you will tell him from me that he is today, in spite of being the leader of a capitalist nation, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union."

Stalin was feeling extremely gay, as we all were, but he gave me the impression he was speaking honestly. He had by this time made the impression on me of a man not only of great shrewdness and inflexible will (Lenin, you know, said of him that he had enough will to equip the entire Communist Party), but also possessed of the quality of intuition in extraordinary measure. Moreover, like every real statesman I have known, he had the quality of being able to treat the most serious things with a joke and a twinkle in his eye. Lenin had that same quality. You have it.

As I got up to leave, Stalin said to me, "I want you to understand that if you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once." This was a most extraordinary gesture on his part as he has hitherto refused to see any Ambassador at any time.
[OB ...]
After I had said good-bye to Voroshilov and the others, Stalin went to the door of the apartment with me and said, "Is there anything at all in the Soviet Union that you want? Anything?" There was one thing I wanted, but I hesitated to ask for it, as Litvinov had told me that the Moscow Soviet had definitely decided it would not give us the building site in the center of the town's park, and that a map would be submitted to me showing that the new canal would run through the center of the property. Therefore I first said, "Everyone has been more than kind to me and I should hesitate to ask for anything in addition, except that the intimate relations we have begun tonight may continue."

Whereupon, Stalin said, "But I should really like to show you that we appreciate not only what the President has done, but also what you yourself have done. Please understand that we should have received politely any Ambassador that might have been sent us by the Government of the United States, but we should have received no one but yourself in this particular way." He seemed moved by a genuinely friendly emotion.

Therefore, I thanked him and said that there was one thing I should really like to have, that I could see in my mind's eye an American Embassy modeled on the home of the author of the Declaration of Independence on that particular bluff overlooking the Moscow River, and that I should be glad to know that that property might be given to the American Government as a site for an Embassy. Stalin replied, "You shall have it."

Thereupon, I held out my hand to shake hands with Stalin and, to my amazement, Stalin took my head in his two hands and gave me a large kiss! I swallowed my astonishment and, when he turned up his face for a return kiss, I delivered it.

This evening with Stalin and the inner circle of the Soviet Government seems almost unbelievable in retrospect, and I should have difficulty in convincing myself that it was a reality if I had not on returning to my hotel awakened my secretary and dictated the salient facts to him. Moreover, the next day shortly before my departure Litvinov told me that the property in the park should be ours if we wished to have it.

Alas, his astonishment wasn't the only thing Bullitt swallowed. When he kissed Stalin back, so did his boss. So did America. We've gotten over our Stalin crush - but not our FDR crush. What's one more degree of separation? To a virus? The virus is in us yet, albeit in its late, bureaucratic form.

No, America in 2012 is not crackling with revolutionary fire. Anything but! Neither was Russia in 1988, despite its rulers' best efforts. It's hard to start a fire when there's nothing left to burn. It's equally unfortunate that Monticello in Moscow was never built - it would have been the finest possible homage to America's founding Jacobin. Had enough revolution yet, America? Whose streets? Our streets!

But in some ways the worst part of the story is that the Bullitt letter records the highest level of "intimacy" ever achieved between US and USSR, and nor was it our choice to pull away. Au contraire! From day one, the Soviet tactic with their American patrons was like that of an alpha female with her hareem of beta males - constantly flirting but never actually putting out. The "inner gang" was quite conscious of their sovereignty and their need to retain it. They saw quite clearly that if they went down the Monticello in Moscow path, they would just be America's wife. America has never had any shortage of wives.

Naturally, each such rejection only stimulated the "wise men" of American diplomacy (all of whom spent the rest of the '30s pleading with Stalin to let them lick his balls again) to further efforts of contemptible affection. Only after WWII did it finally dawn on our best and brightest that no such marriage could ever never happen.

To our official historians, this breakup is called the "Cold War," and all those episodes of American progressivism serenading Russian progressivism with boombox held high are swept under the carpet as "naivete." (Or sometimes, with amusing consistency, as "realism.") Dear professors, the terms you're looking for are "Anglo-Soviet split" and "freshman homo crush."

Bullitt himself finally soured on Stalin's hawtness and, as a result, was pushed out of the New Deal's inner circle in the early '40s (but not before setting up World War II by, at least if we can believe Joe Kennedy, orchestrating the British guarantee to Poland). There was no shortage of Achesons, Hisses and Hopkinses to replace him. I have of course elided all the actual substantive details of Bullitt's intimate diplomacy with Stalin, which largely center around the New Dealers' desire to provide political, economic and military protection for their "Soviet experiment." This twisted, dysfunctional oyabun-kobun relationship did not begin in 1933, nor did it end in 1945. But I digress.

In any case, while no reminder should be necessary, I thought I'd pair the Bullitt letter with a story, probably but not certainly true, from the recently published memoir of one Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss - the title says it all:

The new boss was a lean man, somewhere around thirty years old, with combed-back light hair and energetic facial features. He had a long, skinny nose with a protuberance, and his thin lips were usually pursed together tightly. His movements were sharp, and his judgments were categorical.

His dugout was right next to mine, so there was nowhere to go to get away from him. And as soon as he began to drink, he would come to me, sit for hours and recount the details of how he had been sentenced to the death penalty. It almost drove me mad, but there was no way to get out of it. All around us, there was only the dark night and the tundra.

I would be glad to forget his stories, but you can't order away memories. Here are some of the things he told me.

To the question of how he had gotten himself into such unusual work, he told me that when he had been demobilized from the army, he had been given a security job at Butyrka prison in Moscow. One day, the prison's private vehicle arrived at the prison's courtyard with a contingent of arrested men. As it happened, the gates to the inner courtyard would not unlock, so they opened the doors of the vehicle in the outer courtyard and let the prisoners out. One of the prisoners noticed that the outer gates to the prison were still hanging open, and he took off running. As the security guard on duty, my unit boss at that moment had been standing next to the gates. When he saw what was happening, he did not hesitate. He drew out the sword that hung at his side and stabbed, right into the spine, the prisoner who was trying to escape.

The Butyrka guards who had carelessly left open the courtyard gates were punished. The security officer (our current unit boss) had prevented the prisoner's escape. For his decisive action, he was offered a transfer to a new job. At this new job, he would be carrying out "special commissions," that is, he would work as an executioner, shooting the enemies of Soviet power. He agreed to the transfer, and after some special training, he was sent with his new specialty to the ancient Russian city of Uglich.

For days at a time, he said, from mission to mission, he sat around doing nothing. He rested. Then, when the prison had accumulated a large number of condemned prisoners, the authorities would set an execution date. A specially trusted group from the security department of Uglich's prison was then sent out to carefully select a place in the woods and dig a pit. The pit was guarded until the executions took place. Starting at night and working until the morning, the prison officials would transport the condemned prisoners in a closed truck to this pit. Besides the security men and the person who would ensure that the executions took place, he said, there was always a doctor on hand. It was his duty to certify the death and write up the necessary documents.

One at a time, they led a condemned prisoner from the truck to the edge of the pit, and forced him to get on his knees with his face toward the pit. The executioner than shot him in the back of the head, and the dead man fell in. From the blow to the head, the executioner told me, the body would turn over facing up, and straighten up on the bottom of the pit. The doctor then went down into the pit and certified that the body was dead. Then they went to retrieve the next condemned prisoner.

He told me that from time to time, there was a prisoner who would not do what he was told and go submissively to the edge of the pit. In these cases, the security guys had to help out, and the job for the executioner would be more complicated.

When the mission was finished and the pit was filled, they covered it with soil and tried to make it look unobtrusive. After every mission, he told me, he got drunk and tried not to think about what he had done until the next time they called. For a long time, though, he was convinced that his job was important and honorable, because he was destroying the enemies of Soviet power. He believed that not everyone could be as trusted as he was with such a job.

But then one day, he had to shoot a fourteen-year-old girl. The executioner was told right before he had to kill her that not only was she the daughter of an "enemy of the people," she was also a "German spy." Suddenly and involuntarily, questions sprang to his mind. He was to kill a fourteen-year-old girl in an ancient Russian small town far from the front, in a place that had no classified establishments? Where had this adolescent girl done her spying, and for whom?

When they brought her to the execution place, she held herself up firmly and was silent. But when they led her to the pit, she spoke up. She said that she did not understand why they were depriving her of her life. "Even Stalin said that children do not answer for their parents, so why me?" she asked. She was unaware, he added, that she was also accused of being a "German spy."

In the words of my unit boss, after this execution he drank himself into a stupor so profound that he felt nothing. Soon he was sent to a hospital for crazy people.

National guilt - it's not just for Germans anymore.

Race relations in early New York

2012-01-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

The only way to visit 19th-century America is with a European traveler. There have always been Americans who wrote of America - sometimes their spelling and grammar is quite strong. Toward the end of the century, some are almost trustworthy. Even the staples of the high-school reader - Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and so on - are not at all to be sneered at. And then, of course, there are the Confederates. I don't think it's possible to call a man informed if he's never read a book by a Confederate.

But broadly speaking, receiving America from the American pen is like receiving, say, Turkey, from the Turkish pen. The Turkish Turkey is an amazing country which ought to exist. For the real Turkey, one is better off with Paul Theroux. I'm becoming increasingly respectful of these national fantasies and could easily be convinced that, in some ways, they are more important than reality. Indeed, since the world has become America, we can only receive America from the Americans. Everyone educated in 2012 is educated as an American. There is certainly no Europe to shed external light on our epistemic struggles. Hence the daily grapple with narrative's morass. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone!

But that is now and this was then. Though Mrs. Trollope has her fans, I don't think it's disputed by any serious reactionary that the our two best sources in the early 19th century are Captain Hall and Captain Hamilton (Navy and Army respectively). So far as I know, neither was Jane Austen's boyfriend, but both would have fit perfectly in her drawing-room. If the millions of ordinary Americans who lost their hearts to Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility knew what that society made of theirs (never mind what it would have made of ours), faint ripples of doubt might shimmer lightly across their television pictures.

As now, in the early 19th century thinking men came in two schools of thought: enlightened racists and ignorant communists. Did I say that? I meant, of course, ignorant racists and enlightened progressives. This is Dr. King's day, so I feel it would be inappropriate to excerpt Captain Hall - who, alas, is a bit of a racist. He didn't know any better. I'm sure Stephen Jay Gould could have set him straight.

But Captain Hamilton comes to America and finds... credible evidence of human neurological uniformity! Which claims him at once as a believer. And who doesn't want to believe? Hey, a neighbor's gotta have faith in something.

It's true that Captain Hamilton's terminology is a little out of date, but we can ascribe this failing to the absence of Dr. King's redemptive powers - like forgiving Plato for not being a Christian. It would be difficult to describe our author as a politically correct progressive in the 20th-century sense (ie, as a communist), but there is a definite and delightful odor of mild, pre-Reform Bill Whiggery in his advanced opinions.

But - I describe too much. We'll let the Captain take it away. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 1833:

It has often happened to me, since my arrival in this country, to hear it gravely maintained by men of education and intelligence, that the Negroes were an inferior race, a link as it were between man and the brutes. Having enjoyed few opportunities of observation on people of colour in my own country, I was now glad to be enabled to enlarge my knowledge on a subject so interesting.

I therefore requested the master to inform me whether the results of his experience had led to the inference, that the aptitude of the Negro children for acquiring knowledge was inferior to that of the whites. In reply, he assured me they had not done so; and, on the contrary, declared, that, in sagacity, perseverance, and capacity for the acquisition and retention of knowledge, his poor despised scholars were equal to any boys he had ever known.

"But, alas, sir!" said he, "to what end are these poor creatures taught acquirement, from the exercise of which they are destined to be debarred, by the prejudices of society? It is, surely, but a cruel mockery to cultivate talents, when, in the present state of public feeling, there is no field open for their useful employment. Be his acquirements what they may, a Negro is still a Negro, or, in other words, a creature marked out for degradation, and exclusion from those objects which stimulate the hopes and powers of other men."

I observed, in reply, that I was not aware that, in those States in which slavery had been abolished, any such barrier existed as that to which he alluded. "In the State of New York, for instance," I asked, "are not all offices and professions open to the man of colour as well as to the white?"

"I see, sir," replied he, "that you are not a native of this country, or you would not have asked such a question." He then went on to inform me, that the exclusion in question did not arise from any legislative enactment, but from the tyranny of that prejudice, which, regarding the poor black as a being of inferior order, works its own fulfilment in making him so. There was no answering this, for it accorded too well with my own observations in society, not to carry my implicit belief.

The master then proceeded to explain the system of education adopted in the school, and subsequently afforded many gratifying proofs of the proficiency of his scholars. One class was employed in navigation, and worked several complicated problems with great accuracy and rapidity. A large proportion was perfectly conversant with arithmetic, and not a few with the lower mathematics. A long and rigid examination took place in geography, in the course of which questions were answered with facility, which I confess would have puzzled me exceedingly had they been addressed to myself.

I had become so much interested in the little party-coloured crowd before me, that I recurred to our former discourse, and inquired of the master, what would probably become of his scholars on their being sent out into the world? Some trades, some description of labour of course were open to them, and I expressed my desire to know what these were. He told me they were few. The class studying navigation, were destined to be sailors; but let their talents be what they might, it was impossible they could rise to be officers of the paltriest merchantman that entered the waters of the United States. The office of cook or steward was indeed within the scope of their ambition; but it was just as feasible for the poor creatures to expect to become Chancellor of the State, as mate of a ship.

In other pursuits it was the same. Some would become stonemasons, or bricklayers, and to the extent of carrying a hod, or handling a trowel, the course was clear before them; but the office of master-bricklayer was open to them in precisely the same sense as the Professorship of Natural Philosophy No white artificer would serve under a coloured master. The most degraded Irish emigrant would scout the idea with indignation.

As carpenters, shoemakers, or tailors, they were still arrested by the same barrier. In either of the latter capacities indeed they might work for people of their own complexion, but no gentleman would ever think of ordering garments of any sort from a schneider of cuticle less white than his own. Grocers they might be, but then who could perceive the possibility of a respectable household matron purchasing tea or spiceries from a vile "Nigger?" As barbers, they were more fortunate, and in that capacity might even enjoy the privilege of taking the President of the United States by the nose. Throughout the Union, the department of domestic service particularly belongs to them, though recently they are beginning to find rivals in the Irish emigrants, who come annually in swarms like locusts.

On the whole, I cannot help considering it a mistake to suppose that slavery has been abolished in the Northern States of the Union. It is true, indeed, that in these States the power of compulsory labour no longer exists; and that one human being within their limits, can no longer claim property in the thews and sinews of another. But is this all that is implied in the boon of freedom? If the word mean any thing, it must mean the enjoyment of equal rights, and the unfettered exercise in each individual of such powers and faculties as God has given him. In this true meaning of the word, it may be safely asserted, that this poor degraded caste are still slaves. They are subjected to the most grinding and humiliating of all slaveries, that of universal and unconquerable prejudice. The whip, indeed has been removed from the back of the Negro, but the chains are still on his limbs, and he bears the brand of degradation on his forehead. What is it but the mere abuse of language to call him free, who is tyrannically deprived of all the motives to exertion which animate other men? The law, in truth, has left him in that most pitiable of all conditions, a masterless slave.

It cannot be denied that the Negro population are still compelled, as a class, to be the hewers of wood, and drawers of water, to their fellow-citizens. Citizens! there is, indeed, something ludicrous in the application of the word to these miserable Pariahs. What privileges do they enjoy as such? Are they admissible upon a jury? Can they enrol themselves in the militia? Will a white man eat with them, or extend to them the hand of fellowship? Alas if these men, so irresistibly manacled to degradation, are to be called free, tell us, at least, what stuff are slaves made of?

But on this subject, perhaps, another tone of expression -- of thought, there can be no other -- may be more judicious. I have already seen abundant proofs, that the prejudices against the coloured portion of the population prevailed to an extent, of which an Englishman could have formed no idea. But many enlightened men I am convinced are above them. To these I would appeal They have already begun the work of raising this unfortunate race from the almost brutal state to which tyranny and injustice had condemned it. But let them not content themselves with such delusive benefits as the extension of the right of suffrage recently conferred by the Legislature of New York.*

[* - The Legislature of New York in 1829 extended the right of suffrage to men of colour, possessed of a clear freehold estate without encumbrance of the value of 250 dollars. A very safe concession, no doubt, since to balance the black interest, the same right of suffrage was granted to every white male of twenty-one years, who has been one year in the State. It might be curious to know how many coloured voters became qualified by this enactment. They must, indeed, have been rari nantes in gurgite vasto of the election.]

The opposition to be overcome, is not that of law, but of opinion. If, in unison with the ministers of religion, they will set their shoulders to the wheel, and combat prejudice with reason ignorance with knowledge, and pharisaical assumption with the mild tenets of Christianity, they must succeed in infusing a better tone into the minds and hearts of their countrymen. It is true, indeed, the victory will not be achieved in a day, nor probably in an age, but assuredly it will come at last. In achieving it they will become the benefactors, not only of the Negro population, but of their fellow-citizens. They will give freedom to both; for the man is really not more free, whose mind is shackled by degrading prejudice, than he who is its victim.

As illustrative of the matter in hand, I am tempted here to relate an anecdote, though somewhat out of place, as it did not occur till my return to New York the following spring. Chancing one day at the Ordinary at Bunker's to sit next an English merchant from St. Domingo, in the course of conversation, he mentioned the following circumstances. The son of a Haytian general, high in the favour of Boyer, recently accompanied him to New York, which he came to visit for pleasure and instruction. This young man, though a mulatto, was pleasing in manner, and with more intelligence than is usually to be met with in a country in which education is so defective. At home, he had been accustomed to receive all the deference due to his rank, and when he arrived in New York, it was with high anticipations of the pleasure that awaited him in a city so opulent and enlightened.

On landing, he inquired for the best hotel, and directed his baggage to be conveyed there. He was rudely refused admittance, and tried several others with similar result. At length he was forced to take up his abode in a miserable lodging-house kept by a Negro woman. The pride of the young Haytian (who, sooth to say, was something of a dandy, and made imposing display of gold chains and brooches,) was sadly galled by this, and the experience of every hour tended farther to confirm the conviction, that, in this country, he was regarded as a degraded being, with whom the meanest white man would hold it disgraceful to associate. In the evening, he went to the theatre, and tendered his money to the box-keeper. It was tossed back to him, with a disdainful intimation, that the place for persons of his colour was the upper gallery.

On the following morning, my countryman, who had frequently been a guest at the table of his father, paid him a visit. He found the young Haytian in despair. All his dreams of pleasure were gone, and he returned to his native island by the first conveyance, to visit the United States no more.

This young man should have gone to Europe. Should he visit England, he may feel quite secure, that if he have money in his pocket, he will offer himself at no hotel, from Land's End to John O' Groat's house, where he will not meet with a very cordial reception. Churches, theatres, operas, concerts, coaches, chariots, cabs, vans, wagons, steam-boats, railway-carriages and air-balloons, will all be open to him as the daylight. He may repose on cushions of down or of air, he may charm his ear with music, and his palate with luxuries of all sorts. He may travel en prince, or en roturier, precisely as his fancy dictates, and may enjoy even the honours of a crowned head, if he will only pay like one. In short, so long, as he carries certain golden ballast about with him, all will go well.

But when that is done, his case is pitiable. He will then become familiar with the provisions of the vagrant act, and Mr Roe or Mr Ballantine will recommend exercise on the treadmill, for the benefit of his constitution. Let him but show his nose abroad, and a whole host of parish overseers will take alarm. The new police will bait him like a bull; and should he dare approach even the lowest eating-house, the master will shut the door in his face. If he ask charity, he will be told to work. If he beg work, he will be told to get about his business. If he steal, he will be found a free passage to Botany Bay, and be dressed gratis on his arrival, in an elegant suit of yellow. If he rob, he will be found a free passage to another world, in which, as there is no paying or receiving in payment, we may hope that his troubles will be at an end for ever.

Ah, England! You've come a long way, baby.

Three poems of Weldon Kees

2011-11-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

June 1940 (1943):

It is summer, and treachery blurs with the sounds of midnight,
The lights blink off at the closing of a door,
And I am alone in a warn-out time in wartime,
Thinking of those who were trapped by hysteria before.

Flaubert and Henry James and Owen,
Bourne with his crooked back, Rilke and Lawrence, Joyce --
Gun-shy, annoyers, sick of the kill, the watchers,
Suffered the same attack till it broke them or left its scars.

Now the heroes of March are the sorriest fools of April:
The beaters of drums, the flag-kissing men, whose eyes
Once saw the murder, are washing it clean, accusing:
"You are the cowards! All that we told you before was lies!"

It is summer again, the evening is warm and silent.
The windows are dark and the mountains are miles away.
And the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform.
An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.

Obituary (1943):

Boris is dead. The fatalist parrot
No longer screams warnings to Avenue A.
He died last week on a rainy day.
He is sadly missed. His spirit was rare.

The cage is empty. The unhooked chain,
His pitiful droppings, the sunflower seeds,
The brass sign, "Boris," are all that remain.
His irritable body is under the weeds.

Like Eliot's world, he went out with a whimper;
Silent for days, with his appetite gone,
He watched the traffic flow by, unheeding,
His universe crumbling, his heart a stone.

No longer will Boris cry, "Out, brief candle!"
Or "Down with tyranny, hate and war!"
To astonished churchgoers and businessmen.
Boris is dead. The porch is a tomb.
And a black wreath decorates the door.

The Bell From Europe (1947):

The tower bell in the Tenth Street Church
Rang out nostalgia for the refugee
Who knew the source of bells by sound.
We liked it, but in ignorance.
One meets authorities on bells infrequently.

Europe alone made bells with such a tone,
Herr Mannheim said. The bell
Struck midnight, and it shook the room.
He had heard bells in Leipzig, Chartres, and Berlin,
Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Rome.
He was a white-faced man with sad enormous eyes.

Reader, for me that bell marked nights
Of restless tossing in this narrow bed,
The quarrels, the slamming of a door,
The kind words, friends for drinks, the books we read,
Breakfasts with streets in rain.
It rang from Europe all the time.
That was what Mannheim said.

It is good to know, now that the bell strikes noon.
In this day's sun, the hedges are Episcopalian
As noon is marked by the twelve iron beats.
The rector moves ruminantly among the gravestones,
As the sound of a dead Europe hangs in the streets.

The Holocaust: a Nazi perspective

2011-10-26T02:30:00.000-07:00

["Your best title yet," a friend of mine declared. Well, certainly my most attention-getting. I'm afraid this post plays a peculiarly nasty Jedi mind trick on you, especially if you're a neo-Nazi or other Holocaust denier. But maybe not only if. In any case, my sensors detected a particularly strong uptick in Moldbug-hating among the "ethnic genetic interests" crowd, whose ire for my Semitic roots runs strong. Always trust content from nizkor.org! It's always easy to tell who's right on these controversial questions - you just have to look at who's frothing at the mouth.]

Western intellectuals spent two thousand years wondering what would have happened if Athens had won the Peloponnesian War. Might modern civilization, iPhones and all, have sprung directly from the society that created science, mathematics, literature and democracy? Was it the victory of the icy, militaristic Spartans over the cultured, humanistic Athenians that left the West waiting until the 1830s for its industrial revolution? If not for the Sicilian Expedition - would Caesar have had an iPhone?

Then we had the 20th century. And we found out what happens when Athens beats Sparta. Reader, you see it all around you. At a certain point the Thirty Tyrants don't seem so bad after all.

The truth, I think, is that by the time the European virtues split into the Athenian and Spartan virtues, the tragedy has already happened. Should we judge a society by the resolution on its iPhones? If so, the task is without interest. Like all reactionaries, I feel we should judge a society by the quality of its men and women - and better yet, its best men and women. Every few centuries in our history sees some new Rome, which always rises because of the virtue of its elite, and always collapses when that virtue is lost. And when we see Athenian virtues without Spartan, or Spartan without Athenian, we know that the two will fight and both are doomed.

The curious quality of the Anglo-German wars of the 20th century is that, while the democrats are clearly Athenian and the fascists clearly Spartan, the 20th-century Athenians are far more Spartan than their grandchildren, and the 20th-century Spartans far more Athenian than their own pathetic remnants. Hitler loved opera. Show me a neo-Nazi who loves opera - I'll show you a neo-Nazi in the AARP. And it goes without saying that Churchill is basically a fascist, at least as compared to David Cameron.

The point was driven home for me at Wilde Lake High School in 1988, where I found myself in an auditorium listening to a long, bathetic string of student awards. "Student-athlete of the year," as I recall, was a 300-pound all-state offensive lineman who'd racked up an incredible 1150 on his SATs. Why couldn't I be competing for this position? Being actually not bad at ping-pong, I was about as much of an athlete as he was a student.

Whereas in the 1500s we see men like the Admirable Crichton or the Earl of Oxford - both of whom are outliers, of course, but not exceptionally anomalous outliers. Both of whom are as Spartan as Otto Skorzeny and as Athenian as Leo Szilard. But, of course - no iPhones.

We still have Spartans. So did Honorius. If anything, it was his Athenians that sucked balls, and indeed you can't throw a stone these days without hitting some 21st-century Symmachus. Not a good omen. What would it take to heal this Athenian-Spartan divide? Can it even be done, or should we just consign tomorrow to God's mercy or the Huns'? No shortage of Huns, either.

But I digress. I was talking about Nazis. Since the Nazis were the Spartans, it's hard to find an eloquent Nazi. We want to know the Nazi mind, because nothing human is foreign to us. The communist mind, the democratic mind (but I repeat myself), springs out at us in great torrents of loquacity. Athens is never lacking in logos - the problem is filtering.

But the Spartan speaks only with his sword. Books cannot really capture him, yet we have nothing else. Still, since even the Third Reich is surprisingly Athenian when you get to know it, the problem is not unsolvable. Most 21st-century intellectuals have a favorite eloquent Nazi: Albert Speer.

There is much to be said for Speer's memoir, though it is not without its disingenuous moments, but the problem with it is that we never get to meet the Nazi Speer - the author, by the time he writes, has completely submitted (with or without internal reservation) to conquering liberalism. So what we read in Speer is a liberal perspective on the Third Reich. We can get this from many other places, even as a primary source, for despite the hard work of Judge Freisler our record is not short of July 20 memoirs - nor was Nazi Germany short of secret liberals. Indeed the Third Reich we know from secondary sources is largely rendered through their eyes.

And without German, I'm restricted to the very limited supply of Nazi writing translated into English. Reinhard Spitzy is certainly worth a look, but I have a new candidate for this position: Hans Fritzsche.

Unless someone else wrote his Sword in the Scales (English edition, 1953), Fritszche - a radio journalist and Goebbels protege, who sat in the dock with Goering and Hess, but was acquitted - is a real writer. He's also, as we'll see, a real Nazi. So I have nothing to do but step aside and let him speak. Chapter 13, "Can Such Things Be?" - complete:

To me the most tremendous point in the whole indictment lay in the massacre of the Jews. This was not a question of conflicting interpretation as was the subject of war-guilt, but of plain indisputable fact.

At first the evidence that several million Jews had been killed in Germany and German-occupied territory was submerged in the general flood of accusations about mass murders at hundreds of different places in which the total number of dead claimed by the Prosecution varied from five to eighteen million. Moreover, a number of the place-names mentioned by interrogators and prison officials as the scenes of these killings were soon shown to be incorrect; they spoke for instance of gas-chambers at Dachau, where, according to unimpeachable evidence, there had never been any. As a result of this sort of testimony a number of prisoners formed the impression that the whole charge was simply an exaggerated description of the pogroms which had been reported in 1941 from several places in German-occupied eastern Europe.

I myself called to mind the principle enunciated by enemy publicists even before 1939 as the essence of war propaganda: the enemy must be portrayed as a monster without relieving features. And I could not help thinking of the legend of children's severed hands in the first World War, while at the same time I remembered the replies given by the German information centres to whom I had submitted all current reports of atrocities, and who had disputed their accuracy in no uncertain fashion.

Were then the present apparently overwhelming charges of mass murder only a continuation of Allied propaganda? The detailed verbal statements by prosecuting counsel of alleged crimes, which often displayed a surprising ignorance of German conditions, were not convincing; and many of the documents produced in their support seemed equally without foundation. Such documents often showed little more than that the same facts can be very differently described, and the same words very differently interpreted.

Then suddenly, surprisingly, came a change of tactics. We found ourselves watching a documentary film.

The hall was darkened and a row of little lamps on the edge of the dock lit up our faces from below so that Dr. Gilbert, the psychologist, who had planted himself in front, was in a good position to watch our reactions. In the face of these preparations many of the prisoners deliberately assumed blank expressions; some turned their backs on the screen, and Dr. Schacht remarked that he himself had been in a concentration camp and needed no film to tell him what it was like. Others however never took their eyes off the ghastly scenes now displayed before us.

One and all we were at first profoundly sceptical as to the authenticity of the pictures, though the rows upon rows of pitiful living skeletons reminded me of my fellow sufferers in the Lubianka. The bales of human hair aroused immediate doubts in our minds as to their origin, and those of us who were watching gazed searchingly at the successive heaps of corpses in an endeavour to light on a clue as to when and where these camera shots could have been taken.

In the end, however, all our resolve to be coolly critical gave way to sheer elementary pity for these tortured creatures. No matter where the pictures had been made, no one could doubt that they were pictures of human beings, men, women, children, who had once lived and breathed, loved and hoped, and had been foully done to death. Did it matter what language those lips had spoken before they were silenced for ever, what thoughts were housed in that brain before it was crushed to pieces? The poor body, so soon to be reduced to ashes, had once lain beneath a mother's heart.

The majority of us, who had looked for some cunning ulterior motive behind this film display, were shaken to the depths. But out of our very emotion there arose once more the persistent question: might not this documentary show more than anything else simply be a new aspect of the blind murderous frenzy of war, of those horrors which in a single generation have grown from the soldiers who fell in Flanders to the women and children done to death in Dresden? Are not these frightful forms of death the work of primitive forces which man himself has unleashed and which have passed beyond his control? Or are they the outcome of individual cruelty and a deliberate will to destroy? The film showed the most hideous defilement of God's image; was that defilement due to some power outside man, or to a brutal and cynical human purpose? Sickened though we were, this question tormented us as we marched back to our cells.

Almost immediately two of the psychologists came in. I begged them to leave me alone; they went away and returned with a doctor who offered me sedatives to help me sleep; I refused them. Confronted with such problems as this day had brought forth, it would have been impossible to take refuge in unconsciousness; I had to face them and come to terms with them.

Some of us did so to the best of our ability. Having no written information at our disposal, we argued among ourselves, basing our discussions on personal observations, conjecture, and posterior inferences. Finally, as a result of these discussions, we came to the conclusion that these harrowing pictures would probably not bear minute investigation; too many extraneous scenes, too many coincidences, appeared to have been incorporated in them so as to enhance their general effect. Moreover, even if the film as a whole did present an alarming image of what had really happened, it still did not constitute proof of any one of the particular mass murders which the Prosecution declared had taken place.

But this proof was furnished verbally by two witnesses, Ohlendorf and Höss, before whose testimony our scepticism (already shaken) about the accuracy of this part of the indictment gave way completely. They established beyond doubt that a systematic campaign of murder had been launched against the Jews. Ohlendorf described how tens of thousands in East Germany -- men, women, and children -- had been shot, one by one, by specially detailed squads; while Höss admitted having studied the arrangements made by the German Commissioner Wirth at Treblinka (a camp in Poland) so as to be able to reproduce them on a larger scale at Birkenau near Auschwitz, where by means of a vast industrially-organized human slaughter-house the number of slain ran into hundreds of thousands. There was nothing to indicate that either of these witnesses was telling anything but the stark, hideous truth; nothing that I heard at any time was calculated to shake their evidence.

Their statements naturally produced a tremendous effect in the dock. Nobody questioned the honesty of their evidence, but some of the most important details were called into question, and there were heated arguments both about the instigators of the massacres and the various circumstances attendant on them.

The Prosecution now furnished us with stacks of documentary material and produced whole groups of witnesses. There was evidence of atrocities committed on non-Jewish civilians in concentration camps, many of which were conclusively proved to have been carried out on lines similar to those established for the murders of Jews. Many of the witnesses of these events were obviously given to exaggeration and generalization, but there were those whom it was impossible to doubt, and their testimony was entirely sufficient.

These were followed by charges in connection with the treatment of foreign workers in Germany concerning which, in my opinion, the Prosecution were under a complete misapprehension; a point of view which was later justified by Sauckel's examination.

Next came the problem of war-guilt, and I am bound to say that the material submitted by the Prosecution under this head made a deep impression on me, for it contradicted my earlier impression about the aims of the German Government. All the evidence submitted, however, disclosed only the merest fraction of the many-sided developments which led up to the second World War.

The documents furnished by the Allies were barely sufficient for the demands of political propaganda, let alone all the manifold requirements of a trial which was admittedly of supreme historical importance. The historian will have to seek further information, and at present it is only in America that the raw material is to be found for a really unbiased study of the origins of the First World War and the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty which did not satisfy the victor, and caused the masses of the vanquished to plunge from one radical extreme to another. Moreover, such an investigation would be an essential preliminary for any analysis of the unrest that permeated central Europe in the '20s and '30s, and culminated in the second great conflagration.

The contention that, after a certain date, Hitler was bent on war with Poland, struck us as forced; unquestionably he did not want a simultaneous conflict with the West. Whether he would have provoked such a conflict later, or whether he simply would have put forward claims to more territory and a suzerainty over the western powers, remained one of the most hotly disputed points in the whole of the trial. Certainly none of the evidence showed any conclusive proof that he even entertained a wish to attack the American hemisphere.

But Hitler's determination to smash the Soviet Union was proved. There is no doubt that he aimed at making the Russo-Ukrainian region a political province of a greater Reich; but, on the other hand, the supremely important question as to when, and for what reason, he made up his mind to launch the colossal attack at the moment he did remains open.

Any comments that I was able to make from my own knowledge on the evidence furnished by the Prosecution I wrote down afterwards in the quietness of my cell. These notes [published but only in German - MM] were made without the help of any written material, which was of course in one way a disadvantage, but on the other hand enhanced their value as an unprompted personal account, devoid of the distorting influence that other testimony, constantly referred to, often exerts on such documents. First my own conscience, and then the Prosecution and the Bench, submitted these notes to a very careful scrutiny.

When, after a year in Nuremberg prison, I came to testify in my own defence, and found the searchlight of public opinion focused on me, I was able because of this preparation to answer every question put to me without hesitation. Certain journalists, observing that I showed no signs of being at a loss for the right word (as was usually, and very naturally, the case with prisoners), accused me of lack of feeling, and reported that I had profited by the total breakdown of my former world to adopt a coldly intellectual position, and so build up the best possible personal defence of myself. The truth was that nothing the Prosecution could do in the matter of cross-examination could compare with the gruelling self-questioning which had preceded it. All that I produced in court were the burnt-out ashes of what had once been red-hot lava.

Do you find this treatment enlightening, or self-serving, or a bit of both? It is certainly historically accurate, so far as the facts go. A few pages later, Fritzsche writes:

The Prosecution at Nuremberg had submitted to Bach [Bach-Zelewski] an alleged confession of Peiper's, according to which Himmler -- in the presence of Peiper and others, including Bach -- had drawn up a plan by which, under cover of the military campaign, forty million Slavs were to be slaughtered. At this point Bach -- as he now averred -- turned indignantly to the Prosecution's interrogator and declared that Himmler had spoken of killing "only" thirty millions. In conclusion Bach told my informant that after this admission, he could no longer deny the fact of the proposal, and had to give his evidence accordingly.

Now, at last, we were getting near to the heart of the matter, and the former S.S. Leader from Himmler's staff was able to put the whole story together. He remembered indeed the very occurrence on which it was founded. One evening early in 1941 Himmler and some of his cronies were sitting round the fire in the Wewelsburg; in addition to Bach and Peiper there were present Heydrich, Daluege, Obergrüppenführer Wolff, and Rauter, one of the Gestapo chiefs in Holland. Himmler spoke of an impending war in the east, which, he said, was unavoidable, the only question being when it would start and who would fire the first shot. He warned the company of the difficulty of the coming conflict and said in effect: "Germany is technically, Russia numerically, superior. The Soviet has unlimited power over its citizens and will sacrifice them without compunction: should Germany allow herself to be similarly tempted she will incur instead of strategical victory biological defeat." Later in the evening, Himmler computed the possible casualties on both sides, and estimated that in view of their determination to resist, and taking into account epidemics and famine, the Russians' losses might total anything up to thirty million.

What a revelation! Himmler's calculations of the enormous losses caused by military action and the general results of war were of course something very different from a deliberate and diabolical campaign of murder. I was reminded of Clemenceau's "vingt millions de trop" -- an expression which had been exploited by our German propaganda. But surely we had never distorted that remark beyond the bounds of reason, as this not dissimilar calculation of Himmler's had been distorted! I could see at last how, in the hands of a determined Prosecution, Himmler's thirty million hypothetical casualties had become metamorphosed into thirty million victims of a premeditated murder.

Bach was not the type of man to avoid this kind of thing. His was the sort of mind peculiarly susceptible to the latest impressions it had received, and his outlook, formerly imbued with Nazi ideas, now bore the clear impress of Allied propaganda. This example of a particular piece of testimony, with its background and its sequel, might be cited as how it is possible to shift the emphasis of evidence from one point to another, and so alter its whole bearing and significance.

Sometimes, however, this "shifted emphasis" resulted quite simply from the overwhelming pressure of current public opinion; and for this I was to some degree prepared by my interviews with various leading figures in Berlin and Moscow, and later at Nuremberg, which had made me realise how much a human being's point of view depends on the political climate he finds himself in.

It seems to me as though people can only manage to see things at all clearly when some political wind or other is blowing from behind them; if they turn against it, it blows directly into their eyes, and they become blinded. My first reaction to this discovery was a feeling of profound contempt for my fellows; a feeling which, on closer examination, turned out to be quite unjustified.

For our views about the world we live in are in truth like so many flags, kept flying by the prevailing current of opinion. If the wind is strong enough, they will continue to display their colours in the same direction -- until the weather changes. In the dock I used often to discuss with Speer and Schirach the question of maintaining a happy medium between a too inflexible and a too impressionable political outlook; and we came to the opinion that many of the sufferings of our nation could be traced back to this one question, in which politics, morals, intellect and character all play their separate parts.

Fritzsche, though acquitted at Nuremberg, was retried by a West German court and released in 1950 only to die of cancer. A page translated from German notes:

To his own surprise, it did manage Fritzsche to portray themselves as insignificant before the Nuremberg Tribunal and subject to instructions. He could not repeat this success in the subsequent denazification procedures. The German justice saw him as a leading propagandists, who had hidden at his career's sake, the criminal side of National Socialism. Although Fritzsche was not a fanatical Nazi, but was a loud both staunch supporters of the Nazi party and more efficient. According to tribunal he was a "deceiver" responsible for the prolongation of the war and was therefore sentenced to nine years in labor camp in 1947. For this he was dismissed in 1950. Had he not died shortly afterwards, he could have taken a similar role as a witness, as later, Albert Speer. He "would have it, perhaps even leave a nice impression," said Bonacker.

Indeed. And in case we haven't heard enough Nazi perspectives on the Holocaust, Fritzsche also links us to the very interesting testimony of SS Judge George Konrad Morgen (who came out with a clean enough sheet to later practice law in West Germany):

Q. Will you state your full name, please?

A. Georg Konrad Morgen.

Q. Will you repeat this oath after me:

I swear by God, the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth and will withhold and add nothing.

(The witness repeated the oath.)

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY DR. PELCKMANN:

Q. Witness, because of the significance of your testimony, I will first ask you in detail about yourself. Were you an SS judge of the Reserve?

A. Yes.

Q. Please speak slowly and wait a little after every question.

What training did you have?

A. I studied law at the Universities of Frankfurt on the Main, Rome, Berlin f at the "Academie de Droit International" at the Hague and the "Institute for World Economy and Ocean Traffic" in Kiel. I passed the first, the senior law examination. Before the war I was a judge at the Landgericht in Stettin.

Q. Were you a specialist in criminology and in criminal law?

A. No, I had specialized in International Law, but later, during the war, when I had to deal with criminal matters and penal law, I did special work in that field.

Q. How did you come to the SS?

A. I was drafted compulsorily into the General SS. In 1933, I belonged to the Reich Board for Youth Training, whose group of students was taken over as a body. I was drafted at the beginning of the war into the Waffen SS.

Q. What rank did you have there?

A. In the General SS I was Staffelanwarter and SS Rottenfuehrer. In the Waffen SS I was latterly Sturmbannfuehrer of the Reserve.

Q. What example can you give that you did not believe you were joining conspiracy when you joined the SS. Very briefly, please.

A. In 1936 I published a book on War Propaganda and the Prevention of War. This book, at a time when war was threatening, showed ways and means to prevent war and the incitement of nation against nation. The book was examined by the Party and published. Therefore, I could not suppose that the SS and the policy of the Reich Government were directed towards war.

Q. How did you come to the investigations in the concentration camps?

A. At the order of the Reichsfuehrer SS, because of my special abilities in criminology, I was detailed by the SS Judicial Department to the Reich Criminal Police Office in Berlin, which was equivalent to a transfer. Shortly after I arrived there, I was given an assignment to investigate a case of corruption in Weimar. The accused was a member of the concentration camp of Weimar-Buchenwald. The investigations soon led to the person of the former commandant, Koch, and many of his subordinates, and in addition affected a number of other concentration camps. As those investigations became more extensive, I received full authority from the Reichsfuehrer SS to engage generally in such investigations in concentration camps.

Q. Why was a special power of attorney from the Reichsfuehrer necessary?

A. For the guards of the concentration camps, the SS and Police Courts were competent; that is, in each case the local Court in whose district the concentration camp was located. For that reason, because of the limited jurisdiction of its judge, the Court was not able to act outside its own district. In these investigations and their extensive ramifications it was important to be able to work in various districts. In addition, it was necessary to use specialists in criminal investigation, in other words, the criminal police. The criminal police, however, could not carry on any investigation directly among the troops, and only by combining juridical and criminal police activities was it possible to clear this up, and for this purpose I was given this special power of attorney by the Reichsfuehrer.

Q. Now, how extensive did these investigations become? You can be brief because the witness Reinecke answered this point in part.

A. I investigated Weimar-Buchenwald, Lublin, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Herzogenbosch, Cracow, Plaschow, Warsaw, and the concentration camp at Dachau. And others were investigated after my time.

Q. How many cases did you investigate? How many sentences were passed? How many death sentences?

A. I investigated about 800 cases, or rather, about 800 documents, and one document would affect several cases. About 200 were tried during my activity. Five concentration camp commandants were arrested by me personally. Two were shot after being tried.

Q. You caused them to be shot?

A. Yes. Apart from the commandants, there were numerous other death sentences against Fuehrers and Unterfuehrers.

Q. Did you have any opportunity of visiting and seeing for yourself the conditions inside concentration camps?

A. Yes, because I had authority to visit concentration camps myself. Only a very few persons had this permission. Before beginning an investigation, I examined the concentration camp in question in all its details, seeing especially those arrangements which seemed particularly important to me. I visited them repeatedly and thoroughly. I paid surprise visits. I was working mostly in Buchenwald itself for eight months. I lived there. I was in Dachau for one or two months.

Q. As so many visitors to concentration camps say they were deceived, do you consider it possible that you, too, were a victim of such deception?

A. As I have already pointed out, I was not a mere visitor to a concentration camp. I had settled down there for a long residence, I might almost say I established myself there. It is really impossible to be deceived for such a long time. In addition, the commissions from the Reich Department of Criminal Police worked under my instructions, and I placed them directly in the concentration camps themselves. I do not mean to say that, in spite of these very intensive efforts, I was able to learn of all the crimes, but I believe that there was no deception in regard to what I did learn.

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working -

THE PRESIDENT: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes - you may continue - please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy: of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

Q. What crimes did you learn about?

A. As I said before, the investigations were based on a suspicion of corrupt practices. In time, however, I was obliged to come to the conclusion that besides those crimes, killings had also occurred.

Q. How did you reach the suspicion that killings had occurred?

A. I learned that the starting-point was the assignment of Jews to the camps after "Action 38." I had to learn all possible facts about this action, and in doing so I was obliged to notice that the majority of prisoners of whom it could be assumed that they might know something about these cases, had died.

This peculiar frequency of killings was noticeable - I noticed it - because other prisoners who were not in any key positions remained in Buchenwald for years in the best of health, and were still there, so that it was rather remarkable that it was just certain prisoners who could have been witnesses who had died. I thereupon examined the files concerning these deceased prisoners.

The files themselves did not then give cause to suspect illegal killings. The dates of the deaths were years apart, and the different causes of death were always given. But I noticed that the majority of these deceased prisoners, shortly before their death, had been put into the camp hospital or were in the detention quarters.

This first aroused my suspicion that in these two places murders of prisoners might possibly have occurred. Thereupon I appointed a special official, whose sole task was to investigate the suspicious circumstances, and rumours which were circulating in the detention quarters, the so-called "Bunker," regarding the killing of prisoners. He was a very zealous and able criminal official, but he had to report again and again that he had not found the least confirmation of this suspicion of mine.

After two weeks of completely unsuccessful activity, the criminal official refused to continue his task and asked me ironically whether I myself believed that such, rumours of illegal killing of prisoners could be true. Only by accident, much later, was I put on the trail. I noticed that in the case of certain prisoners, in the books of the Kommandantur prison, and in the hospital books, they had been recorded in both books at the same time. In the prison book, for example, it said, "Date of release, 9th May, 12 o'clock." In the hospital register, "Patient died 9th May, 9.15 a.m."

I said to myself, this prisoner cannot be in the Kommandantur Prison and at the same time a patient in the hospital. False entries must have been made here. I therefore concentrated my efforts on this and I succeeded in finding out about this system, for it was a system under Kommandant Koch.

The prisoners were taken to a secret place and were killed there, mostly in a cell of the Kommandantur prison, and sick reports and death certificates were prepared for the files. They were made out so cleverly that any unsuspecting reader of the documents would get the impression that the prisoner concerned had actually been treated and had died of the serious illness which was indicated.

Q. Then what did you do after learning of these facts?

A. I found out that the medical officer at Buchenwald, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dr. Hoven, was principally responsible and I had him arrested. I informed my investigating commission of these cunning forgeries and directed their particular attention to investigate systematically the concentration camps which we visited and to ascertain whether such murders had also been committed in other concentration camps. We satisfied ourselves at the time of the investigation, and I am speaking of the second half of 1942, that in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau no such killings occurred, as far as it was humanly possible to judge. In the other concentration camps, however, such cases were found. The persons believed to be guilty were accused, arrested and charged.

Q. Why was this not done earlier?

A. I have already said that these deceptive measures were so cunningly contrived that it was not possible to discover them earlier. Above all, there, was no possibility of clearing up the matter, besides these things were always done without witnesses. These cases had to be investigated by the SS Courts and they were investigated, for every unnatural death of a prisoner was reported by teletype to the central agency. In addition, the specially sworn-in Court officer who was in the camp had to go immediately to the place of the occurrences to question the witnesses; sketches and photographs had to be made of the scene and it was a regulation that an autopsy had to take place in every such case of unnatural death.

Those reports of unnatural deaths, or of deaths suspected of being unnatural, were sent regularly to the SS and Police Court; but as I have already said, these reports were so cunningly contrived and the files were in such good order that even an expert could not have suspected an illegal killing. Of course, frequently proceedings were taken against members of the concentration camp, some followed by sentences, even death sentences. But these deaths appeared to occur at quite a normal rate.

If nothing at all had been reported to the SS Courts from the concentration camps, it would of course have seemed suspicious, just as it would also have been suspicious if too many such reports had been made to us. But it was a normal average and one could have no suspicion that the concentration camps were a hotbed of such dangerous crimes. It was through my investigation, which as I said was caused by accident, that we received our first insight into the true state of affairs.

Q. How did you come on to the track of mass killings? You have just spoken of individual killings.

A. I found traces of mass killings also by accident. At the end of 1943, I discovered two trails at the same time, one leading to Lublin and the other to Auschwitz.

Q. Please describe the Lublin trail first.

A. One day I received a report from the Commandant of the Security Police in Lublin. He reported that in a Jewish labour camp in his district a Jewish wedding had taken place. There had been 1,100 invited guests at this wedding.

As I said, 1,100 guests participated in this Jewish wedding. What followed was described as quite extraordinary owing to the gluttonous consumption of food and alcoholic drinks. With these Jews were members of the camp guard, that is to say some SS men or other, who took part in this function. This report only came into my hands in a roundabout way, some months later, as the Commandant of the Security Police suspected that the circumstances indicated that some criminal acts had occurred.

This was my impression as well, and I thought that this report would give me an indication of another big case of criminal corruption. With this intention, I went to Lublin and I went to the Security Police there, but all they would tell me was that the events were supposed to have happened at a camp of the "Deutsche Ausrustungswerke." But nothing was known there. I was told it might possibly be a rather peculiar and "opaque" (this was the actual term used) camp in the vicinity of Lublin. I found out the camp and the commandant, who was Kriminalkommissar Wirth.

I asked Wirth whether this report was true and what it meant. To my great astonishment, Wirth admitted it. I asked him why he permitted members of his command to do such things and Wirth then revealed to me that on the Fuehrer's order he had to carry out the extermination of Jews.

Q. Please go on, witness, with what you did.

A. I asked Wirth what this had to do with the Jewish wedding. Then, Wirth described the method by which he carried out the extermination of Jews and he said something like this: "One has to fight the Jews with their own weapons, and one has to cheat them."

Wirth built up an enormous deceptive manoeuvre. He first selected Jews who would, he thought, serve as column leaders, then these Jews brought along other Jews, who worked under them. With those smaller or medium-sized detachments of Jews, he began to build up the extermination camps. He extended this staff, and with them, Wirth himself carried out the extermination.

Wirth said that he had four extermination camps, and that about 5,000 Jews were working at the extermination of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property. In order to win Jews for this business of extermination and plundering of their brethren of race and creed, Wirth gave them every freedom and, so to speak, gave them a financial interest in the spoliation of the dead victims. As a result of this attitude, this extraordinary Jewish wedding had come about.

Then I asked Wirth how he killed Jews with these Jewish agents of his. Wirth described the whole procedure that went off like a film every time. The extermination camps were in the East of the Government General, in big forests or uninhabited waste lands. They were built up like a Potemkin village. The people arriving there had the impression of entering a city or a township. The train drove into what looked like a railroad station. The escorts and the train personnel then left the area. Then the cars were opened and the Jews got out.

They were surrounded by these Jewish labour detachments, and Kriminalkommissar Wirth or one of his representatives made a speech. He said: "Jews, you were brought here to be resettled, but before we organize this future Jewish State, you must of course learn how to work. You must learn a new occupation. You will be taught that here. Our routine here is, first, everyone must take off his clothes so that your clothing can be disinfected and you can have a bath so that no epidemics will be brought into the camp."

After he had found such calming words for his victims, they started on the road to death. Men and women were separated. At the first place, one had to give his hat; at the next one, his coat, collar, shirt, down to his shoes and socks. These places were set up like check-rooms, and the person was given a check at each one so that the people believed that they would get their things back. The other Jews had to receive the things and hurry up the new arrivals so that they would not have time to think. The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room.

As soon as death taken place in, the ventilators were started. When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel.

Q. Was Wirth a member of the SS?

A. No, he was a Kriminalkommissar in Stuttgart.

Q. Did you ask Wirth how he arrived at this devilish system?

A. When Wirth took over the extermination of the Jews, he was already specialist in mass destruction of human beings. He had previously carried out the task of getting rid of the incurably insane. On behalf of the Fuehrer himself, whose order was transmitted through the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, he had, at the beginning of the war, set up a detachment for this purpose, probably composed of a few officials of his, I believe, the remainder being agents and spies of the criminal police.

Wirth very vividly described how he went about carrying out this assignment. He received no aid, no instructions, but had to do it all by himself. He was only given an old, empty institution in Brandenburg. There he undertook his first experiments. After much consideration and many individual experiments, he evolved his later system, and then this system was used on a large scale to exterminate the insane.

A commission of doctors previously investigated the files, and those insane who were considered to be incurable were put on a separate list. Then the institution one day was told to send these patients to another institution. From this institution the patient was transferred again, often more than once. Finally he came to Wirth's institution. There he was killed by gas and cremated.

This system which deceived the institutions and made them unknowing accomplices, this system which enabled him with very few assistants to exterminate large numbers of people, this system Wirth now employed with a few alterations and improvements for the extermination of Jews. He was also given the assignment by the Fuehrer's Chancellery to exterminate the Jews.

Q. The statements which Wirth made to you must have surpassed human imagination. Did you immediately believe Wirth?

A. At first Wirth's description seemed completely fantastic to me, but in Lublin I saw one of his camps. It was a camp which collected the property or part of the property of his victims. From the quantity - there were an enormous number of watches piled up - I had to realize that something frightful was going on here. I was shown the valuables. I can say that I never saw so much money at one time, especially foreign money - all kinds of coins, from all over the world. In addition, there were a gold-smelting furnace and really prodigious bars of gold.

I also saw that the headquarters from which Wirth directed his operations was very small and inconspicuous. He had only three or four people working there for him. I spoke to them too.

I saw and watched his couriers arrive. They actually came from Berlin, Tiergarten Strasse, the Fuehrer's Chancellery, and went back there. I investigated Wirth's mail, and I found in it confirmation of all this.

Of course, I could not do or see all this on this first visit. I was there frequently. I pursued Wirth up to his death...

"Q: You caused them to be shot? A: Yes." I mean, the man is a playa. Who, in 2011, causes anyone to be shot? At best we execute them with a joystick. We came, we saw, he died!

It's really not entirely clear to me that the rest of human history will, like Judge Morgen, find the 20th century even credible. But this indeed is how it was. I hope I've done my part to make the Holocaust seem a little more like the real event it was, not the screenplay legend it's become. Perhaps the Elders of Zion will be pleased.

Personal cloud computing in 2020 (or not)

2011-10-12T02:30:00.000-07:00

I know it's rare that we have a technical discussion here at UR. But every once in a while the urge prevails. If nothing else, it attracts the right people to the rest of the cult.

(For readers of that Wolfram Alpha post, it seems almost superfluous to remotely diagnose today's tech-media darling, Siri, as yet another tragic case of the hubristic user interface (HUI). Then again, if anyone can pull off hubris and exceed the gods themselves... but in my much-refurbished crystal ball, here is what I see: Siri works beautifully 98% of the time. The other 2%, it screws up. Half of these screwups are hilarious. 1% of the hilarious screwups are blogged about. And that's enough bad PR, fairly or not, to restrict usage to a fringe. As with all previous attempts at voice-controlled computing. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

No tool can achieve the natural "bicycle for the mind" status of a mere mental peripheral, unless the mind has an internal model of it and knows when it will work and when it won't. This cannot be achieved unless either the mind is genuinely human and thus understood by empathy, or the actual algorithm inside the tool is so simple that the user can understand it as a predictable machine. Between these maxima lies the uncanny valley - in which multitudes perish.

The only exemption from this iron law of expensive failure, a voracious money-shark that has devoured billions of venture dollars in the last decade, is a set of devices best described, albeit pejoratively, as "toys" - applications such as search, whose output is inherently unpredictable. Ie, inherent in the concept of search is that your search results are generated by an insane robot. This is not inherent in the concept of a personal assistant, however. Also, while search results are inherently heuristic - search queries are inherently rigorous.)

In any case - computers. When I went to grad school to lurn computers, it was way back in 1992. I was pretty sure that, in the future, we would have cool shit. Instead, twenty years in the future, I find myself typing on... the same old shit. Yo! Yo nigga, this bullshit, yo.

It would be one thing if all the bullshit actually worked. Or at least if it didn't suck. At the very least, it would be better if our entire system software architecture - from the '70s database at the ass end of the server room, to the '90s Flash player playing ugly-ass Flash in your face - though it sucked giant tubes of ass like Hoover Dam in reverse, at least this was a secret. At least no one knew it was ass.

But alas. It's even worse than that. Everyone knows the whole Internet is ass.

It's the 21st century. We should be soaring like eagles above the 20th-century legacy bullshit, expressing only the purest of functions in the pure language of mathematics. But somehow it hasn't happened. The technology just isn't there, or at least it isn't deployed. All we have is the same old assware, and no alternative but to live in its crack. Brendan Eich took what, two weeks, to build Javascript? And it has no long integers - just floating point. Millions of brown hours, deep in Brendan Eich's valley. To be fair, the fellow appears to be sorry. Not that this helps.

So - we're just going to assume that God won't tolerate this shit. Not that he spares the rod. But there's always a limit. So we're just going to pick an arbitrary year, 2020, by which the 20th-century assware will all be gone, all of it. And software will instead be great. From top to bottom, server to client, cloud to mobile, end to end and ass to elbow. (Note that 2020 is two years before the famous HTML 5 deadline.)

The question then becomes: with this great new software infrastructure, scheduled for 2020, what the heck will we be doing? How will we be living our wondrous 2020 digital lives?

I actually have an answer to the question. The answer is: personal cloud computing. I mean, duh. Yes, I know it sounds like yet another Palo Alto buzzword. Blander, in fact, than most. Google even finds it, a little bit, in reference to various BS.

Actually, I think the transition from 2011 computing to 2020 computing - if 2020 computing is personal cloud computing, as per my buzzword, which I claim in the name of Spain - should be at least as radical a disruptive break as any previously experienced in the seismically unstable Valley of Heart's Delight.

Consider a classic San Andreas tech-quake: the transition from minis to PCs. Cloud computing in 2011 is a lot like all computing in 1971. Why? Because industrial and consumer computing products are entirely disjoint. In 1971, you can buy a PDP-11 or you can buy a solar calculator. The PDP-11 is industrial equipment - a major capital expenditure. The solar calculator is a toy - an information appliance. The PC? The concept is barely imaginable.

In 1971, you already exist as a database row in various billing and banking systems. (I lived in Palo Alto in 1976 when I was 3. My parents apparently had Kaiser. When an employer in the late '90s put me on Kaiser, I was amazed to be asked if I still lived on Alma Street.)

Is this Kaiser miracle personal cloud computing? No, it's consumer cloud computing. It's exactly the same kind of consumer cloud computing we have today. It's your data, on someone else's computer, running someone else's code - an information appliance. Care for another helping of ass, Mr. Chumbolone?

What's an information appliance? Any fixed-function device, physical or virtual, whose computing semantics the user does not control. An IA is anything that processes data, but is not a general-purpose computer. (A non-jailbroken smartphone is about half an IA and half a computer, because the user controls the apps but not the OS, and the interface is app-centric rather than document or task-centric - the OS as a whole is little more than an app virtualizer, ie, a browser.)

To generalize slightly, we can say that in 1971, there was a market for industrial computing, and there was a market for information appliances. Not only was the connection between these two product lines roughly nil, it was more than a decade before the PC emerged to replace "smart typewriters," and the early 2000s before Linux effectively merged the PC and workstation markets.

Today, in the cloud, you can go anywhere and rent a virtual Linux box. That's industrial computing. You also have to cower in your closet, like me, to avoid having a Facebook profile. That's a virtual information appliance. So is just about any other consumer cloud service. Therefore, we have industrial cloud computing that isn't personal, and we have personal cloud computing that isn't computing.

In fact, if you use the cloud at all seriously, you probably have 10 or 20 virtual information appliances - each one different and special. If you are especially well-organized, you may have only two or three identities for this whole motley flock, along with seven or eight passwords - at most four of which are secure. Welcome to the wonderful new world of Web 2.0. Would you like some angel funding? Ha, ha.

In the future, in 2020, you don't have all these custom information appliances, because you have something much better: an actual computer in the sky. Instead of using Web services that run on someone else's computer, you use your own apps running on your own (virtual) computer.

I realize - it's completely wild, unprecedented and groundbreaking. But let's look at an example.

Let's imagine 2011 software is 2020 software, so we can see how this works. In 2020, of course, you use Facebook just like you do now. Facebook still rules the world. Its product is a completely different one, however - personal cloud computing.

This started in 2012, when Facebook introduced a new widget - Facebook Terminal, your personal Ubuntu install in the cloud. Everyone's Facebook state profile now includes a virtual Linux image - a perfect simulation of an imaginary 80486. Users administer these VMs themselves, of course. In the beginning was the command line - in the end, also, is the command line. Moreover, just because it's run from the command line on a remote server - doesn't mean it can't open a window in your face. If you're still reading this, you've probably heard of "xterm."

Terminal will simply bemuse Joe Sixpack at first - Facebook's user base having come a long way from Harvard CS. But Joe learned DOS in the '80s, so he'll just have to get used to bash. At least it's not sh. It has history and completion and stuff.

Furthermore, Joe has a remarkable pleasure awaiting - he can host his own apps. All the cloud apps Joe uses, he hosts himself on his own virtual computer. Yes, I know - utterly crazed.

Today, for instance, Joe might use a Web 2.0 service like mint.com. Beautifully crafted personal finance software on teh Internets. Delivered in the comfort and safety of your very own browser, which has a 1.5GB resident set and contains lines of code first checked in in 1992. Your moneys is most certainly safe with our advanced generational garbage collector. Admire its pretty twirling pinwheel as merrily your coffee steeps. Mozilla: making Emacs look tight and snappy, since the early Clinton administration.

But I digress. Where is Joe's financial data in mint.com? In, well, mint.com. Suppose Joe wants to move his financial data to taxbrain.com? Suppose Joe decides he doesn't like taxbrain.com, and wants to go back to mint.com? With all his data perfectly intact?

Well, in 2011, Joe could always do some yoga. He's got an ass right there to suck. It's just a matter of how far he can bend.

Imagine the restfulness of 2020 Joe when he finds that he can have just one computer in the sky, and he is the one who controls all its data and all of its code. Joe remembers when King Zuckerberg used to switch the UI on him, making his whole morning weird, automatically sharing his candid underwear shots with Madeleine Albright.

Now, with Facebook Terminal, Joe himself is King Customer. His Facebook UI is just a shell - starting with a login screen. Joe can put anything in his .profile or even fire it off directly from /etc/rc. He changes this shell when he damn well pleases. And where is his personal data? It's all in his home directory. Jesus Mary Mother of God! It can't possibly be this easy. But it is. So if he wants to switch from one personal finance app to another - same data, standard data, different app. He's a free man.

Suppose Joe wants to go shopping on teh Internets? He doesn't fire up his browser and go to amazon.com. He stays right there on Facebook Terminal and runs his own shopping application on his own virtual Linux box. Heck, he probably downloaded it from source and tweaked the termcap handling and/or optimization flags. (It's a general principle that anything written for termcap won't work on terminfo, even if it says it will.) Through an ASCII curses telnet in his Facebook Terminal - or, better yet, a Javascript X server in a Mozilla tab - he executes his shopping application (in C++ with OSF/Motif - that ultra-modern 3D look).

How does Joe's shopping application, which he hosts himself on Facebook Terminal, communicate with Amazon and other providers? Of course, book distributors in 2020 no longer write their own UIs. They just offer REST APIs - to price a book, to search for books, to buy a book. All of online shopping works this way. The UI is separate from the service. The entire concept of a "web store" is so 2011. Because Joe controls his own server, he can use classic '90s B2B protocols when he wants to replenish his inventory. I wouldn't at all rule out the use of SOAP or at least XML-RPC.

So. We have a problem here, of course, because Facebook Terminal is a joke. If Facebook users were a group of 750 million "original neckbeards," the system above would be the perfect product. Also the world would be a very different place in quite a number of ways. But let's continue the thought-experiment and stick with this spherical cow.

Consider the difference between the imaginary Facebook Terminal and the real Facebook Connect. The former is a platform - the latter is a "platform." There is a sort of logical pretence, at the user-interface layer, that a third-party site which uses Facebook authentication to commit, of course with your full cryptographic approval, unnatural acts upon your private data, is "your" app in just the same sense that an app on your iPhone is "your" app.

But you control one of these things, and not the other. When you host an app, you own the app. When you give your keys to a remote app, the app owns you. Or at least a chunk of you.

It's almost impossible for a Web user of 2011 to imagine an environment in which he actually controls his own computing. An illustrative problem is that chestnut of OS designers, cross-application communication. Look at fancy latest-generation aggregators like Greplin or ifttt. These apps work their tails off to get their hooks into all your data, which is spread around the cloud like the Columbia over Texas, and reconstruct it in one place as if it was actually a single data structure. Which of course, if you had a personal cloud computer - it actually would be. And "if" and "grep" would not seem like gigantic achievements requiring multiple rounds of angel funding, now, would they?

The Facebook of 2011 - and more broadly, the Web application ecosystem of 2011 - is not a personal cloud computer, because it's not a computer. Generalizing across your state in Facebook itself, plus all the external apps that use your Facebook identity, we see a collection of virtual information appliances, mutually unaware and utterly incompatible.

Even if Facebook becomes the universal authentication standard of the Web, a feat it would surely like to achieve, and surely a great advance at least in usability over the status quo, its users' lives in the cloud would not be anything but a disconnected salad of cloud information appliances. They would not have a personal cloud computer, or anything like one. Moreover, if one of these information appliances somehow evolved into a general-purpose computer, its users would realize that they no longer needed all the other information appliances.

Comparing the consumer cloud computing of 2011 to the personal cloud computing of 2020 is like comparing the online-services world of 1991 to the Web world of 2000. It's easy to forget that in 1991, Prodigy was still a big player. Prodigy: the Facebook of 1991. In 1991, you could use your 2400-baud modem to call any of a number of fine online services and other BBSes. By 2000, your 56K modem called only one thing: the Internet. The Internet, seen from the perspective of the Bell System, was the killer online service that killed all the other services.

Another difference between 2011 and 2020 is the business model. The Web 2.0 business model is first and foremost an advertising model. Or so at least has this present boom been built. Yo, bitches, I've seen a few of these booms.

Advertising is a payment model for information appliances. Your TV is an appliance. You see ads on your TV. Your PC is not an appliance. You'd find it shocking, disgraceful and pathetic if the new version of Windows Vista tried to make money by showing you ads. In fact, there have been attempts at ads on the PC - in every case, heinous, tacky and unsuccessful.

Advertising ceases to exist where an efficient payment channel arises. Why does TV show ads? Because the technical medium does not facilitate direct payment for content. It would be much more efficient for the producers of a new show to charge you fifty cents an hour, and most people would easily pay fifty cents per hour to never have to even skip past ads. Or to put it differently, fairly few people would choose to watch ads for fifty cents per hour.

Thus, if payment is straightforward, the whole inefficient pseudo-channel of advertising evaporates and the digital Mad Men are out on their asses. Taste the pain, algo-bitches! (There's only one thing I hate more than algorithms: the pencil-necked geeks who are good at algorithms.)

In 2020, how does Joe pay for computing? He pays for three things: content, code (ie, content), and computing resources. Probably his ISP is his host, so that's a very straightforward billing channel for resources, easily extended to code/content. Joe would never even dream of installing an app which showed him ads. So there's no use in figuring out what his buying patterns are, is there? Sorry, Mad Men. Go back to the math department.

Consider search in 2020. In search, too, PCC (not to be confused with proof-carrying code) separates the UI and the service. Joe uses one search app, which can be connected to any number of remote back-ends. If he doesn't like Google's results, he can Bing and decide, without changing his user experience at all. Result: brutal commoditization pressure in the search market, which has to bill at micropennies per query and has no channel for displaying ads - except in the results, which sucks and won't happen. Consider Mexican bikers, cooking meth in a burned-out Googleplex.

Alas! All that is great passes rapidly away. In this imaginary 2020, we see nothing left of Silicon Valley's existing corporate giants, except possibly a Facebook on steroids, whose information-appliance profiles have morphed into virtual Linux instances. Death by commoditization. Hey, it wouldn't be the first time.

But wait! Can this actually happen? Is it really possible to turn everyone's Facebook profile into a general-purpose computer? Frankly, I doubt it. If I worked at Facebook, which of course I don't, I would be extremely skeptical of Facebook Terminal, for reasons I think are quite obvious.

In real life, this apocalypse just isn't going to happen. In real life, 2020 will be pretty much just like 2011. And why? Because we just don't have the software technology to build 2020. And we're probably not about to get it, either.

Let's look at this issue in a little more detail. But the point is obvious. Hosting mint.com is pretty much a full-time job for the guys at mint.com. Expecting Joe Sixpack to download their code, for free or for pay, and set up his own server, is just absurd.

Of course, Joe is unlikely to have a serious load issue on his private server - because he's the only user. But still, Joe is not an Ubuntu administrator, he doesn't want to be an Ubuntu administrator, and frankly he probably doesn't have the raw neurological capacity to be an Ubuntu administrator. Scratching his balls, booting MS-DOS and typing "copy a:*.txt b:" is about the limit of Joe's computational ambitions and abilities. You could put a visual interface on his console, but frankly, this would probably only confuse him more. I want to serve Joe's needs, but I won't let myself overestimate his qualities.

We're starting to answer the essential question here: why hasn't personal cloud computing already happened? Why doesn't it work this way already? Because frankly, the idea is obvious. It's just the actual code that isn't there. (Here is the closest thing I've seen. Let's hope Joe Sixpack is a good node.js sysadmin.)

Let's go back to 1971. The idea of a personal computer was also obvious to people in 1971. Moore's Law was reasonably well understood in 1971. So it was clear that, if in 1971 you could build a PDP-11 the size of a refrigerator and sell it for $20,000, in 1981 it would be possible to build a PDP-11 that fit under a desk and cost $2000.

But this irresistible logic ran into an immovable object. Who wants a PDP-11 on their desk? The PDP-11 evolved into the mighty VAX. Who wants a VAX on their desk? Even if you can build a VAX that fits on a desk and cost $2000, in what way is this a viable consumer product? It's not, of course. Similarly, turning 700 million Facebook profiles into virtual Ubuntu images is not, in any way, a viable product strategy - or even a sane one.

The "Facebook Terminal" example is ridiculous not because the idea of personal cloud computing is ridiculous, but because "Facebook Terminal" is a ridiculous product. Specifically, the idea that, to build a virtual computer in 2011, we should design a virtual emulation of a physical computer first produced in 1981, running an OS that dates to 1971, cannot fail to excite the mirth of the 2020 epoch. (And I say this as one who still owns a copy of the seminal BSD filesystem paper, autographed by Keith Bostic.)

Again: who wants a PDP-11 on their desk? Here we encounter Gall's law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

If you want an Apple II, you don't start by shrinking a PDP-11. You have to build an Apple II. If you want not an Apple II but rather an electronic typewriter, there's a market for that. I recall that market. In the long run I'm afraid it didn't compete too well with the PC.

But why was the Apple II simple? Because its inventors understood Gall's law, or at least its Zen? Well... possibly. But also, simply due to the limitations of the hardware, it had to be. Early microcomputers simply did not have the computational power to run a PDP-11 OS. Thus, there was no choice but to build a new software infrastructure from very simple roots.

This is of course a notable contrast from our present age, in which your Ubuntu image, carried on the back of a sturdy Xeon, smiles cheerfully from under its seven gigabytes of crap. The Xeon can run seven gigabytes of crap - but Joe Sixpack cannot manage seven gigabytes of crap. Amazing things, of course, are done with this assware. Amazing things were also done with VMS. Amazing things were done with Windows. Don't take it personally.

So: we've identified one existential obstacle to personal cloud computing. We don't have a cloud operating system, or anything like it, which could be remotely described as simple enough to be "personal" - assuming said person is Joe Sixpack and not Dennis Ritchie. No OS, no computer, no product, no business. The thing simply cannot be done. And Gall's law says we can't get there from here.

But actually it's not the only such obstacle. If we somehow surmounted this obstacle, we would face another insurmountable obstacle. It's not just that we need a new OS to replace Unix - we also need a new network to replace the Internet.

Managing a personal server in the sky is much harder than managing a phone in your pocket. Both run apps - but the personal cloud computer is a server, and the phone is a client. The Internet is already a bit of a warzone for clients, but it's digital Armageddon for servers. You might as well send Joe Sixpack, armed with a spoon, into the Battle of Kursk.

An Internet server is, above all, a massive fortified castle in alien zombie territory. The men who man these castles are men indeed, quick in emacs and hairy of neck. The zombies are strong, but the admins are stronger. They are well paid because they need to be, and their phones ring often in the night. Joe is a real-estate agent. No one calls him at 3 in the morning because Pakistani hackers have gotten into the main chemical supply database.

So long as this is true, it really doesn't matter what software you're running. If network administration alone - and if on a real computer, user-installed apps talk to foreign servers directly, and vice versa - is a job for professionals, no cloud computer on this network can conceivably be personal. It is an industrial cloud computer, not a personal one.

So: serious problem here. By 2020 - two years before the apotheosis of HTML 5 - we're going to need (a) a completely new OS infrastructure, and (b) a completely new network. Or we can also, of course, remain in our present state of lame.

Can it be done? Why, sure it can be done. If anything, we have too much time. The simple fact is that our present global software infrastructure, ass though it be, is almost perfectly constructed for the job of hosting and developing the upgrade that replaces it. All we have to do is make sure there is an entirely impermeable membrane between assware and the future. Otherwise, the new infrastructure becomes fatally entangled with the old. The result: more ass.

Assware has one great virtue: ass is easy to glue. All useful software today is at least 37% pure glue. You can just count the spaces between the letters. For instance, when we see a LAMP stack, we see four letters and three gallons of glue.

It is perfectly possible to create and even deploy an entirely new system software stack, so long as it entirely eschews the charms of Unix. If your new thingy calls Unix, it is doomed. Unix is like heroin. Call Unix once - even a library, even your own library - and you will never be portable again. But a Unix program can call a pure function, and indeed loves nothing better. You can't use ass, but ass can use you.

When people created the first simple operating systems from scratch, they had only simple computers to build them on. This enforced an essential engineering discipline and made the personal computer possible. No forces enforces this discipline now, so there is no economic motivation for creating simple system software stacks from scratch.

As for new networks - phooey. Layering a new peer-to-peer packet network over the Internet is simply what the Internet is designed for. UDP is broken in a few ways, but not that can't be fixed. It's simply a matter of time before a new virtual packet layer is deployed - probably one in which authentication and encryption are inherent.

Putting our virtual computer on a virtual overlay network changes the game of the network administrator, because it splits his job into two convenient halves. One, the node must protect itself against attacks on the underlying network by attackers without legitimate credentials for the overlay network. Two, the node must protect itself from attacks by legitimate but abusive overlay users.

Job one is a generic task - DOS defense of the most crude, packety sort - and can be handled by Joe's ISP or host, not Joe himself. Attacking an overlay node at the Internet level is a lot like trying to hack an '80s BBS by calling up the modem and whistling at it. Job two is a matter for the network administrators, not Joe himself. All of the difficulty in securing the Internet against its own users is a consequence of its original design as a globally self-trusting system. So again, we solve the problem by washing our hands completely of any and all legacy assware.

Let's review the basic requirements for a personal cloud OS - in case you care to build one. I see only three:

First, that motherfucker needs to be simple. If there's more than 10,000 lines of code anywhere in your solution, or the compressed source distribution exceeds 50K, Gall's law says you lose. Various kinds of virtual Lisp machines, for instance, can easily hit this objective. But, if it's Lisp, it had better be a simple Lisp.

What is a simple cloud computer, when introduced, version 1.0? Can it be a personal cloud computer? It cannot. The Apple II cannot exist without the Altair. With 10,000 lines of code or less, you cannot compete with Ruby on Rails for hosting the newest, greatest Twitter ripoff, just as the Altair cannot compete with the VAX - at the job of being a VAX. But the VAX also makes a pretty crappy Altair.

If history repeats itself, the 2012 ancestor of the 2020 personal cloud computer is neither the 2012 cloud information appliance, nor the 2012 industrial cloud computer. If it exists at all, it can only exist as a hobby computer - like the Altair.

A hobby computer doesn't try to serve the needs of any existing user base. It is its own need. It exists to be played with. As it is played with, it will naturally mature and learn to serve needs. But at first, it is much more important to remain simple, than to solve any specific problem.

Second, your virtual OS needs to be semantically isolated from the host OS. Anything that can call Unix, is Unix. That's why the Javascript/browser ecology, for all its stank, succeeds: it can't call Unix. It could invent its own compatibility disasters, but at least it didn't import Posix's. If Netscape had cut a hole into Unix, it would have died without a trace - as perhaps it deserved.

The natural consequence of this restriction is that Joe's virtual computer is, or at least should be, portable across hosts. This is a delightful service which can of course be implemented by assware with yet another layer of complexity, but should emerge naturally from any really simple system.

Third, your virtual computer needs to be a computer, ie, capable of arbitrary general-purpose Turingy goodness. It can compute, it can store data, it can communicate with other computers - it can even talk to the old legacy Internet, albeit via a gateway. Think of any Web app you use. If Joe's computer can't implement this app, at least logically, it is not in some sense a computer. For example, can it virtualize itself? If not...

So my view is: not only is personal cloud computing solvable, but it's simple by definition. So it can't even be hard. Some nigga should just do it. He's got eight years.

Professor Krugman on maturity transformation

2011-10-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

There's always time for a short lecture on UR's favorite topic. It's important to remember that Paul Krugman is an idiot, but he's not a fool:

Like a lot of people, my insights draw heavily on Diamond-Dybvig, one of those papers that just opens your mind to a wider reality. What DD argue is that there is a tension between the needs of individual savers — who want ready access to their funds in case a sudden need arises — and the requirements of productive investment, which requires sustained commitment of resources.

Banks can largely resolve this tension, by offering deposits that can be withdrawn on demand, yet investing most of the funds thus raised in long-term, illiquid projects.

I face a similar tension between going to Reno every weekend, and buying strained carrots to feed my one-year-old. The Fed could largely resolve this tension, by printing fat stacks of benjamins for me to blow on coke and whores before I hit the Safeway for some Gerber. I note also that the policy would create demand - a favorite consequence of Professor Krugman's.

Just as the entire purpose of a monetary system is to decide who gets to go to Reno and who has to scrimp and save for strained carrots, the entire purpose of an interest-rate market - as well understood when Professor Krugman was eating strained carrots - is to match the supply and demand of loanable funds and eligible borrowers at every duration.

If you convert loanable funds of one duration into loanable funds of another duration, either by wholesome George Bailey banking or by synthesizing collateralized instruments (a category which logically includes nominally zero-term demand deposits), you are taking this elegant market signal, the yield curve, and raping it in the ass. You will give it AIDS. It will give you AIDS back. This will become known as the "business cycle" - a sort of historical quartan ague. Though no one understands it, it exists.

And both Wall Street and Main Street will exhibit a pattern of unending financial crises for all of modern Anglo-American history - from Walter Bagehot to Secretary Geithner. I'm sure this couldn't be due to a defective, archaic banking system which wasn't even redesigned for the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

Indeed, as Bagehot's Wiki - not cattily - notes:

Bagehot’s observations on finance remain relevant and cited by central bankers, most recently in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007.

Indeed. I could hardly put it better myself. I've proposed before that classic Lombard Street banking, borrowing short and lending long, should be forever known as a "Bagehot scheme." Isn't it fascinating that while so many other 19th-century English institutions - like slavery, the gallows, and impressment of sailors - have met their demise, this one continues merrily on? Talk about a barbaric relic!

Professor Krugman is unintentionally wonderful on this point:

The problem, of course, is the vulnerability of such a system to self-fulfilling panics: if people believe that a bank will fail, everyone will in fact want to withdraw funds at the same time — and because the bank’s assets are illiquid, trying to meet those demands through fire sales can in fact cause the bank to fail.

Actually, Professor Krugman, the Diamond-Dybvig model is not a true multiple equilibrium. The maturity-matched model - in which long-duration asset prices are much lower - is the only free-market equilibrium.

If you can fix asset prices, of course - whatever. But in a free market, the value of a synthetic asset is always epsilon less than the value of the equivalent real asset. By definition the synthetic asset can default, whereas the real asset can't. (In a George Bailey bank, for instance, your demand deposits are loans to the bank collateralized by the bank's portfolio of burned-out Section 8 New Deal ghetto towers.)

No perfect system of collateralization can be constructed. Epsilon exists. As free markets become frictionless, epsilon becomes tradable. The bank run happens automatically. Intervention is required to prevent it:

This then leads to the need for policy: deposit insurance and/or lender of last resort facilities to head off bank runs, and bank regulation to reduce the moral hazard from these explicit or implicit guarantees.

Unless the lent asset is USG shares - ie, dollars. USG can issue and lend as many USG shares as it wants. By engaging in this practice, it can lower interest rates to zero across the duration curve. Indeed, it is in the process of doing so. In theory, Google could just as easily operate a Bagehot scheme in GOOG shares. They are neither idiots nor fools, so they don't.

In the end state of this pernicious practice, there are no "private" banks at all. There is just one big bank: the government. Congratulations, Professor Krugman! You've reinvented the Soviet Union. Could you get a second Nobel for this mighty discovery? When the zero bound is hit across the curve, there is no lending even at zero interest rates, and capitalism is officially flatlined. Instead of infinite stimulation, this is the point of infinite stagnation. All economic organization becomes the task of the government. Soy Cuba! Yo, Cuba!

A "lender of last resort facility" is a crucial piece of machinery in the Bagehot scheme. In all cases, "loan guarantees" can be modeled simply as loans. If A guarantees B's loan to C, what is really happening is that B lends to A, and A to C. A in this case being our friend, tha USG. Or more specifically, the Fed.

So, when you "deposit" dollars "in" a bank, not only are you really lending them to the bank - you're really lending them to the Fed. Moreover, when a bank lends you dollars, you are really borrowing from the Fed. Yo, Cuba! Never in the history of Bagehot schemes has this been more clear. Fortunately, at least we're not on a gold standard, under which no Bagehot scheme can survive (USG being a perfect credit risk for USG equity, and nothing else). Naturally, this is Professor Krugman's most devastating argument against the gold standard.

What I love - what really illustrates the difference between an idiot and a fool - is the bizarre overall thrust of the Professor's argument, which clashes so baldly with the rest of his political idiocy. Graphite-cooled plutonium reactors, Professor Krugman tells us, are essential, because they generate electricity. How else can you generate electricity?

(Obviously, if we did not synthesize loanable funds at 30-year duration, no one would invest in 30-year mortgages, because no one saves money with the intent to spend it 30 years later. Thus, the price of a 30-year dollar would be a present nickel. And we will all be zillionaires when we retire, because each of our 2011 nickels will buy a 2041 dollar. Hey, wait...)

But graphite-cooled plutonium reactors also have a tendency to burn when they melt down, contaminating half the Ukraine. We need electricity, though! So we'll just have to cover the Ukraine with plastic sheeting, which teams of Mexicans in bunny suits can wipe down every time there's another Chernobyl. As an added benefit, this will create demand and stimulate the Mexican economy. Also, tomatoes can be grown under the sheeting.

No fool could come up with this. But an idiot could. Also, one lovely benefit of this dangerous brush with reality is that we have the opportunity to hear the Professor's rare, shy and beautiful libertarian side - the prothonotary warbler of the liberal conscience. Regulation, you see, is hard:

So, are you going to ban fractional reserve strategies by money market funds? Are you going to ban repo? Auction rate securities? Where does it stop?

Professor! I know! I know! Hey, look at me! "Yes," "yes," "yes," and "a long way farther on."

They have an oddly antiquated notion of what money and finance are about, one that misses the “virtualness” of the modern world. They still think of money as being pieces of green paper, rather than what it mostly is now, zeroes and ones in some server somewhere. They still think of banks as being those big marble buildings, in a world in which most banking is a lot more abstract than that.

This is, after all, the 21st century. Things have moved on a bit.

No, actually. They haven't. They should, though.

Now, to be fair, Professor Krugman is a fool but not an idiot. If there are any Austrians left who can't understand that fractional reserve is a special case of maturity transformation, and they prefer to consult living professors, they can ask Philipp Bagus. If they prefer the idol himself:

For the activity of the banks as negotiators of credit the golden rule holds, that an organic connection must be created between the credit transactions and the debit transactions. The credit that the bank grants must correspond quantitatively and qualitatively to the credit that it takes up. More exactly expressed, "The date on which the bank's obligations fall due must not precede the date on which its corresponding claims can be realized."

In other words, a healthy bank - virtual or marble-pillared - expects to meet all its obligations from cashflow, without new borrowing to pay off old loans. Well, knock me over with a feather. If that's not simplistic, I don't know what is. That's what accounting should be - simplistic.

The genius of Professor Krugman is that he goes so near the truth that he makes it obvious even to his commenters - who typically are both idiots and fools, but several of whom spontaneously exhibit the same insight themselves:

Why can't we regulate or even ban the maturity mismatch? Savers would have to make the maturity choice themselves and it would be transparent. Currently, the savers don't understand the huge run risks that the banks have by funding with demand deposits and lending long. It's hiding the risk.

And almost cogently:

I'm not a hard-money crazy, but I have wondered if there's a weaker version of hard money that makes sense: forcing duration matching. Is borrowing short-lending long actually a required service? What if the bank only lent long money borrowed long such that the assets and liabilities matched in duration?

It'd still be fractional reserve banking, but it would not be subject to bank runs. While we're on the subject of hard-money feasibility, can you comment on this variant?

Somehow I don't expect an answer.

Thos. Carlyle on Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T21:44:00.000-07:00

From Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840):

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship.
The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. He is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still better; King, Könning, which means Can-ning, Able-man. [Carlyle's etymology is pretty but wrong - MM.]

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps fair Trial by Jury was the soul of Government, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the rest of it, went on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men into a jury-box;"—so, by much stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of your Ableman and getting him invested with the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship (worth-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that he may actually have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it,—is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in this world!
Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country.
The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhow learn;—the thing which it will in all ways behoove US, with right loyal thankfulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our doing and life were then, so far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal of constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man.
And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too much from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand—! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down into confused welter of ruin—!

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos—!

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the "Divine right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the same time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought, some soul of it behind—I will say that it did mean something; something true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind.
To assert that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and called King,—there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that he became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths: this,—what can we do with this but leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god-created can form among each other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two!
For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one man makes upon another.

And when, in the third millennium, we meet an Able-man - to what work do we set him? To building toys. Gewgaws, gadgets, pretty beads for department-store Indians.

And yet - there is a God in this world. There is right, at least, and wrong. In everything. In code. In a toy. And this is our special torture: as the planet rots, as fools rule and hyenas feast, as nations lie prostrate, churches decompose, and the Devil with a knife owns London, Paris, New York after dark, fell in our hairy hands the real work of a real King, an Able-man, Ken-ning - who served God, or right at least, and could bend small armies to obey. And make - a toy. So near we are to salvation; so infinitely far away. Rest in peace, Steve.

Occasional discourse on the hate question

2011-09-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Choose well your language! In a glass
Shaped like history, the focused eye
Is utterly pitiless. Our century,
Rich in indestructible paperwork,
Is also a regular El Dorado

Of unintentional and/or black humor.
Measure yourself therefore not just
Against peers but before descendants.
Some Chateaubriand waits, "charged
With the vengeance of nations," armed

In time's mail with an icepick wit.
You'd be advised not to resist him.
To serve him, indeed, as you can
Across some golden gulf of fools.
Alas, there is no book. To start,

Serve the gods and obey the ancestors,
And call a thing by its actual name.
What then hate? First and foremost,
Hate is the word in quotes - "hate."
A marvel of our age, a marvel even

Of all the human story; a Saturn 5
Of the art of public enlightenment;
Your very Sumerians had nothing on it.
We do see other contemporary work,
Like "change," but what comparison?

Just a huger sound, whacking you
In the liver like a ton of heroin.
You might not be sure about "change" -
You know how to feel about "hate."
We won't try to change that. We'll

Just seal it in a bag of quotes, and
Carry on with the mere word itself.
Hate is like color, an abstraction
Made concrete by mere diffraction.
And only a binary monochrome:

Resentment and contempt, brackets
Of the spectrum of personal status.
If your time zeppelin lost sync
And you had no idea when you were,
You'd set the controls for any age

Which had abolished contempt, under
Great penalty of law, tamen usque
Recurret - and worked indeed the week
Of Sisyphus with Virgil's pitchfork -
And, with the very same hand, yea

In the very same word, did adore
Fondly as a hand-cupped chick,
Seed and water, reap and thresh
Year upon year, revere even
As some proto-man served a fire

He could steal but not yet set,
A secular coal in a shaman's box,
Nestled in grass and eiderdown,
Bane of wolves and cause of soup,
Heating caves and branding knaves,

A ruby defined as life itself -
Resentment, the last god found
Living in America. Observe yon
Castle; well-made as any other;
Its stones are marble coffins,

As in any age; indeed no age
Seems made without its tower,
But each defined by choice of grout.
What is this mortar of power? What,
The gunk between the ashlar? What,

You should ask. You learned all about
Those old forts of contempt, whose
Lime was white with human chalk -
But nothing mixed on site is pure.
White on inspection is always gray.

And gray is black, the tensed wire
Between our stones, which takes its own
Prey in its own way. If hate was not
A hazardous material, it would not hold
One stone upon another. Do you find it

To a fresh eye noxious? Have patience,
For men have always mocked the stacks
Of stone that lock their eyes in place.
But marble without mortar is rubble,
And life without lords soon terrible.

Timeless mind in temporal man
Is the only ideal; the soul is free,
The meat must serve. And please note:
When mind and man divide, the
Tongue and fingers remain in earth.

The demons

2011-09-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

"Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine."

--Melville, Benito Cereno

Across the last swerve of 101
Between the soundwalls, before
The road splits and opens up
To the usual emerald city,
To the San Francisco skyline -
The London of California -
(In London London, the paper says,
The best-invested now dig
Infinite pools in their basements
For sheer lack of square feet) -
Someone in '62 once threw
A soaring footbridge, now caged
Full round in Ohio chainlink,
Over all nine lanes, allowing
The new Californian to travel
In perfect comfort and safety,
From his home in the Sunnydale
Homes, to his homies in Potrero -
Obviously, I jest. Racism! In verse!
You won't say I didn't warn you.
And this shit actually happened.
I was there - not a month ago.
Not on the bridge, but on the road,
Alone in the car, evening rush hour,
Moderate traffic. As the Cougar
Swept around the curve, in a span
Not over fifteen seconds, three men
Came on the bridge. Did I call them men?
These were animals, from the ghetto.
Did I say animals? They were nobles,
In splendid robe of privilege,
Prancing with glory of lions.
Performing, sure. But just walking -
Across the road to tha Sunnydale.
Your eye might not have caught them,
From below on the freeway, but mine
And others did. When these men
Came center over the median,
One turned, faced the traffic,
Dropped to a shooter's crouch,
Pulled out his finger, and blew
Us all away - laughing, I assume,
Like a perfect fool. And then -
I slid under them, and was gone.
Now, since I'm such a racist,
My position with respect to these
Particular terrorists is clear;
The instant reaction was no less.
I simply felt, as a human being,
As a San Francisco parent,
It essential that this population
Cease at once to exist - means
No object. They could be broken
In some way, as by the whip,
Or educated into professors, or
Superman could swoop down,
Seize them by the pants and hurl
Them without trial into the Sun.
Does Superman do genocide? Heck -
What would Hitler do? - and this,
A train of thought I am not, of
Course, endorsing, but rather
Confessing - this simplicitude
Flashed like powder in my simple head.
(Hitler too, says Trevor-Roper,
Had this knack for simplicity.)
But consider the complex! We,
Apart from my rotting Cougar,
River of post-Axis automotive,
Educated and expensive,
Unimpeachably progressive -
Confronted suddenly, without
Warning, by this unmistakable
Parade of pure warrior hate,
Almost classical in its beauty,
Tablet of Akkad or Ur. What
Does a person do? Might he find
Refuge in the church of his youth?
We both know what he should think.
But here appears the animal itself.
Who would argue its humanity?
Before his eyes it is clearly itself.
What of his complexities, his
Cliches, his studies? They scatter,
They can hardly compete. But
Nothing competes with them;
For our sample driver, a man
Perfectly made for the period,
Young, bright, even cultivated,
Roughly as lost in history
As a toddler in a steel mill -
Has not a thought to think.
Instead, I think, a black smog
Of grand, impeccable despair
(Exactly as intended, I fear,
By our urban performers),
No logic at all, just emotion,
Truth in its way nonetheless,
Swirls up in an instant from
His medulla; looms; wavers;
Then blows away - as his Audi,
Too, passes the footbridge
Without so much as a BB
In the wipers; the soundwalls
Recede, and reveal the vista
Of Dorothy; and the bite
Of our cold sweet Pacific air
Elides any small unpleasantness...
No, it is this man, who exists,
Who is history; who is, I'm sure,
The future; and the drama is his,
As dangerous as elegant. His
Demons, made by him, are sent
By the great gods to scourge him,
And have doubtless barely started.
As such these creatures are divine,
Like the tiger or the killer whale,
And must not be disrespected:
A slice of advice both prudent
And compliant with federal law.

Choose empire

2011-08-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

For Caesar the Sibyl had two words.
"Choose empire," she said. And explained:
"The republic has failed." No, really?
Why golly, what whatsoever would ever
Make anyone say that? Or, what's worse,
Abstract so seditious a converse?
Caesar was a man of few words,
Not in any way a dimwit. What,
Was he wrong? And Cicero right?
Octavian lived and Cicero died;
Octavian might die, Cicero live,
Him and time restore a real Senate,
Rome republican as snow, that cast
Out kings and never whined them back,
Abhorring to its last scheduled meeting
The seducing sins of monarchy -
To the Antonine age, and beyond? Ha!
As any fool once knew, that second Rome
(Bigger, if not greater, than Numa's hill),
Died not by murder but of cancer.
Brick? Marble? Euphemisms here.
Augustus found Rome graffiti, sumac,
Bandits, drones, and professional liars.
A Rome of zombies! A zombie republic,
That the Caesars burned, and in whose ash
Was found: Rome. What Augustus did:
He slew the zombies. He saved the world.
Time indeed might well have preserved
A zombie Senate. The Quadi would not.
What has time to say to the Quadi?
The Quadi, men, not zombies like us,
Wield metal bars, ugly but effective.
A zombie has no chance with the Quadi.
They take our heads. They cart off
Our women. They must have some
Special or Quadi time of their own.
Surely our story is not their own,
Terrible and now just beginning.
Indeed the real mystery of the fall
Is that as Rome fell soft, all around
Her enemies weakened too - the Vandals
Being mere pussies, next to the Quadi.
And weakness is blood, terror, death:
The boy to be Gildas is already born.
Did "Rome die laughing"? Absolutely -
Though by then, others laughed too.
Choose empire! We can say one thing
For our old republic: where Cicero
Chose wrong, Sidonius had not the
Choice. The Sibyl grants it just once.

Movers and shakers in sports & leisure

2011-08-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

From amazon.co.uk. The work of Sir Billy Howe appears complete - the Atlantic is no more:

Movers and shakers #4, #5, and #6 evince the same remarkable upsurge - in the last 24 hours! - in transatlantic attention to our romantic national pastime. Now that's what I call a special relationship! Can an expansion team be far behind? The London Chavs, perhaps? But why is no one buying gloves? UK readers please note: barehanding a long fly ball is no joke.

You're displaying remarkable perspicuity, however, in voting aluminium. Admittedly, the "Bronx" brand exerts a powerful fashion attraction. But not only is the aluminium bat cheaper, it's almost impossible to break. There's not much use in a broken baseball bat. And remember: the strike zone starts at the knees.

We might also compare

Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O
Dead the ends and colour war for now so
if you see a brother... SALUT!
if you see a fed... SHOOT!
We need more MAN then feds so Everyone run wild, all of london and others are invited! Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff....just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want! Oxford Circus!!!!! 9pm, we don't need pussyhole feds to run the streets and put our brothers in jail so tool up,
its a free world so have fun running wild shopping;)
Oxford Circus 9pm if u see a fed stopping a brother JUMP IN!!! EVERYONE JUMP IN niggers will be lurking about, all blacked out we strike at 9:15pm-9:30pm, make sure ur there see you there. REMEMBA DA LOCATION!!! OXFORD CIRCUS!!!
MUST REBROADCAST TO ALL CONTACTS!!!"

and contrast:

All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary. You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction: a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!”— this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and thought sublime and beneficent by some.

So that now hardly any limb of the Devil has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it: — there needs almost superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a Garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very peculiar British Prytaneum of these days! And in fact, THE DEVIL (he, verily, if you will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman; lithe of limb as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any more. And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.

"Enormous Megatherions, ugly as were ever born of mud." "Fuck the feds, dead the ends, and color war for now." "Hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam." "Niggers will be lurking about, all blacked out." Who can deny that history itself is a poem? A nigger's got to admit - it's epic. If only we knew the ending!

The Reuther memorandum, 1961

2011-08-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

Written by Walter and Victor Reuther in 1961, distributed around the Kennedy administration and indeed put into practice by the IRS, this is the classic strategy statement of how postwar American communism - aka ADA liberalism - in the mid-century era dealt with the ever-present threat of genuine political opposition. There was no clean copy of the Reuther memorandum on the net, so I thought I'd dig it out of hideous obscurity and repost it here. (I'm still looking for the related "Fulbright memorandum," aka "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public.")

Note the appearance of none other than Richard Nixon as a good team player on the Republican side. The "Katanga operation" is the US-supported UN assault on Katanga, then regarded by all responsible authorities as a crucial step in freeing the backward colonial despotism of the Belgian Congo to grow into a prosperous and independent democratic republic. It was critical to prevent ignorant Neanderthals from Mississippi from interfering with this sort of enlightened and progressive foreign policy - or any other policy for that matter.

Indeed it's interesting to note the abject failure and/or disappearance of almost all the dissident organizations mentioned in the memo, along with the rest of traditional American anticommunism. Harding College (now University) still exists, though I had to look it up, and the JBS keeps limping along. Meanwhile, William Ayers' office boy is President of the United States. It is also hilarious, even for the time, to note the juxtaposition of the breathless paranoia with the ridiculous shoestring funding of the dissidents - a million dollars a year! One million dollars!

There is also an interesting discussion of Eisenhower and American communism at Foseti's, which is what prompted me to post this document. Suffice it to say: unless you're over 78, America is a communist country and has been for your entire life. What is communism? Democracy without authentic political opposition. How does communism eliminate opposition while maintaining the appearance of a genuine political contest? See below.

(This is not to say America is a Stalinist country, except as an assignment of retrospective guilt for the "Mission to Moscow" era. Mainstream American liberalism of course broke with Russia after FDR's death. This "Anglo-Soviet split" produced the phenomenon known to our communist historians as "the Cold War." If communion with Moscow is your definition of "communism," there was no such thing as communism before 1917 or after 1989, and Mao Tse-tung (after 1961) was a staunch anti-communist. I hope there aren't any little boys in the room once you've finished raping the English language.)

What's nice about the Reuther memorandum is that, since it was written for insiders only, it is relatively transparent, though it still uses the propaganda language of the time. Thus "democracy" is American communism (ie, Cold War liberalism), "international Communism" is Soviet communism, and "domestic Communism" is Americans who are so dense they didn't get the message and are still working for Moscow. Since only true believers are meant to be reading, the memo doesn't work too hard to disguise this reality. "Although the radical right poses a far greater danger to the success of this country in the battle against international Communism than does the domestic Communist movement, the latter have been branded subversive by the Government and the former have not."

My sourcing is extremely tenuous but I believe I have basically the correct text. I've fixed some apparent typos, removed irrelevant front matter, and attempted interpolations in [brackets]. This certainly reads as an authentic internal document of the period. Here it is:

December 19, 1961
The Radical Right in America Today

President Kennedy's address to Seattle and Los Angeles on November 16 and 18 evidenced both a deep concern with, and a profound understanding of the serious problems injected into American life by the growning strength of the radical right. A spate of articles in responsible newspapers and periodicals reflect this same concern and understanding. Perhaps therefore this memorandum will prove but a repetition and restatement of suggestions already under consideration by the Administration. Since, however, the public discussion to date concerning the radical right has produced little in the line of suggested policies and programs for dealing with the serious problems raised, this memorandum may have some value in focusing attention upon possible Administration policies and programs to combat the radical right.

Initially, it needs to be said that far more is required in the struggle against the radical right then simply calling attention to present and potential dangers. If the Administration truly recognizes this as a serious problem, as it certainly appears to do, it is most important that President Kennedy's addresses in Seattle and Los Angeles be implemented. Speeches without action may well only mobilize the radical right instead of mobilizing the democratic forces within our nation. It is with this consideration in view that there is set forth below an estimate of the extent of the problem and suggested Administration policies and programs for dealing with the problem.

Extent of Problem

The radical right or extreme right-wing, or however it may be designated, includes an unknown number of millions of Americans of viewpoints bounded on the left by Senator Goldwater and on the right by Robert Welch. The active component of these radical right millions would, of course, be only a small fraction of the total. But, whatever may be the difficulty of ascertaining their numbers, these radical right groups are probably stronger and are almost certainly better organized than at any time in recent history. More significant yet, they are growing in strength and there is no reason to expect a turning of the tide in this regard during the foreseeable Cold War period ahead. And, possibly most significant of all, their relationship to and infiltration of the Armed Service adds a new dimension to the seriousness with which they must be viewed.

New radical right organizations have sprung up like weeds in the last few years; it is estimated by the Anti-Defamation League that almost a hundred such organizations have been organized in 1961 alone. Welch's Birch Society, Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, and Hargis' Christian Crusade, are among the most powerful of the new groups. Benson's Harding College and National Education Program and H.L. Hunt's Life Line have earlier histories, but they have expanded along with the growth of the new groups. But all of these groups together are only part of an even larger and constantly growing movement which is well manned and even better financed.

The Birch Society alone probably has a million dollars a year at its disposal; so does the Christian Crusade (which is just one of 3 Hargis ventures). The radical right as a whole -- and estimating conservatively -- must have twenty or more times this much on call. There are vast quantities of literature, films and records emanating from the radical right and even such things as radical right bookshops are beginning to spring up. (General Walker gave one of these bookshops, The Bookmailer in New York, a big plug on national television December 3rd).

The Birch Society may be the best known today. But others are equally strong and perhaps more influential. Take a look at Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, for example. In the Anti-Communist School he ran in St. Louis earlier this year he was backed by the St. Louis Globe Democrat and was sponsored by the Mayor and Chief of Police of St. Louis and both United States Senators. Governor John M. Dalton even officially proclaimed this "Anti-Communism week in Missouri." The New York Times eyewitness report from St. Louis asserted that one of the most striking things there was "the large proportion of younger people."

Schwarz' Hollywood rallies are even more disturbing than his St. Louis and other schools. His Crusade had a three-hour rally before some twelve to fifteen thousand persons in the Hollywood Bowl and an estimated four million more watched the program over television on 33 stations in six states. Actors John Wayne, James Stewart, Pat O'Brien, and George Murphy were there, as were such top "movie-makers" as Jack Warner of Warner Brothers and Y. Frank Freeman of Paramount. The gross take at the rally (plus the week's Hollywood Anti-Communist School) was $214,796.

Even more significant was the presence of C.D. Jackson, a top executive of Life Magazine. In early September Life had run a disparaging story about Schwarz. The kickback at Life was sufficient to induce Jackson to fly to Los Angeles to appear in the Hollywood Bowl and offer a public apology. Jackson told the audience, "I believe we were wrong and I am profoundly sorry. It's a great privilege to be here tonight and align Life Magazine with Senator Dodd, Representative Judd, Dr. Schwarz, and the rest of these implacable fighters against communism." Only recently the Los Angeles rallies were re-telecast in New York City for three full evening hours with the Schick Safety Razor Company picking up the tab. (Richfield Oil and Technicolor Corp., as well as Schick, appear to be regularly available to Schwarz as television sponsors).

Take a look, too, at another one of these groups -- Harding College and the National Education Program (both headed by Dr. George S. Benson). The propaganda operation, exclusive of the college, is budgeted at $200,000 a year. They produced some 30 movies of which "Communism on the Map" is the most famous and has been seen by 10 million persons. Dr. Benson's weekly column has wide distribution and one version is sent in bulk mail to a thousand business organizations. He has a monthly newsletter with 50 thousand subscribers, he has outlets in a great many Farm Bureau monthly state papers (the effect of which was seen at the recent Farm Bureau Convention). He has a series of high school study outlines in "American Citizenship Education" sent free to schools requesting them.

The Life Line Radio Program, now on about 200 radio stations (some run [the program] twice), is planning to branch out into television. Businessmen all over the Nation are sponsoring this program. H.L. Hunt, one of the richest oil men in the country and owner of Life Line, boasts that "the Free World cannot be saved at a profit."

All of these radical right organizations have the same general line. The danger to America is domestic Communism. While their particular traitor will vary from Harry Hopkins to George Marshall, from President Truman to President Eisenhower, from Senator Fullbright to some labor leader, there is no question that anybody even slightly to the left of Senator Goldwater is suspect. They traffic in fear. Treason in high places is their slogan and slander is their weapon. They undermine loyal Americans' confidence in each other and in their government.

Their appeal is for "total victory" (note that Goldwater is with them all the way on this) and they thrive on every defeat, retreat, concession, or even negotiations. Americans feel they are "losing" for the first time in history. Since Americans intuitively tend not to believe they ever lose fairly, the radical right's charges that we are "losing" (itself a dubious assumption) because of treason in high places falls on fertile soil. In Schwarz's Southern California meetings, as shown in the New York re-telecast a couple of weeks ago, Senator Dodd's and Representative Judd's heavy-handed foreign policy polemics received little applause, but when W. Claus Skousen (author of "The Naked Communist") charged treason in high places, the place went up in a roar of applause.

The suggestion is being made in some quarters (e.g., Reston in the Times of November 19, 1961) that the radical right is primarly a "Republican problem" because it utilizes money that might otherwise be available to Republican Party candidates. Former Vice President Nixon shares this view.

Yet on reflection, this would appear quite superficial. The growing strength of the radical right may indeed be an inconvenience to the Republican Party, but it is far worse than that for the Nation and the Democratic Party -- for it threatens the President's programs at home and abroad.

By the use of the twin propaganda weapons of fear and slander, the radical right moves the national political spectrum away from the Administration's proposed liberal programs at home and abroad. By vicious local pressure campaigns against teachers or preachers or any one else who supports anything from negotiation in foreign affairs to governmental programs in domestic affairs, they frighten off support for much-needed Administration programs. Pressure tactics on already-timid Congressmen are reinforced with fanaticism and funds. The pressure campaign against the Katanga operation is only one example of what is ahead. Any hard-boiled realistic appraisal of the situation evokes this conclusion: The growing strength, organization and financial resources of the radical right is not something that can be wished away or that can be confidently ignored as a Republican problem.

Action On The Problem

As the radical right cannot be wished away or ignored, likewise its demise is not something that can be readily accomplished. The struggle against the radical right is a long-term affair; total victory over the radical right is no more possible than total victory over the Communists. What are needed are deliberate Administration policies and programs to contain the radical right from further expansion and in the long run to reduce it to its historic role of the impotent lunatic fringe.*

[* Private agencies can do much too, to identify and expose the radical right. Indeed, in the long-run the extent of participation by private agencies in this struggle is more likely to determine its outcome than anything the Government can do. The press, television, church, labor, civic, political and other groups whose constitutional freedom is directly involved must carry the prime burden in this struggle. But the purpose of this memorandum is to consider possible Administration policies and programs rather than those of private groups. Furthermore, affirmative Administration policies and programs can set the backdrop against which private activity is most likely to succeed.]

As the radical right today feeds like a leech on the frustrations of the American people, so reducing these frustrations by accomplishments at home and abroad is the most important part of the long-range battle against the radical right. Indeed, in the long run, only democratic initiative in the world struggle against Communism will roll back the radical right to its traditional insignificance. But the Nation cannot look the other way and wait for this to happen. The radical right organizations threaten to render impossible the very steps (action and negotiation) that need to be taken by the Administration if our nation is to survive and succeed in the world struggle; they must never be permitted to become so strong as to obstruct action needed for democratic survival and success.

As we gird ourselves for a long struggle against world Communism, so we must grid ourselves for a long struggle against the radical right. But there are some steps which can and should be taken now to halt the growth of the radical right and possibly to turn the tide against it. There are other steps of a more long-range nature. Among the programs and policies of both types which the Administration might consider are the following:

1. The radical right inside the Armed Services presents an immediate and special problem requiring immediate and special measures.

The problem of radical right influence inside the Armed Services is an immediate one and made all the more so by the up-coming hearings of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee. But even if there were no hearings, this challenge to the basic American concept of separating military personnel from partisan politics must be met now. Tolerance of such a challenge can only embolden those who do the challenging.

It has been widely reported that General Walker's radical right viewpoint is shared by a substantial number of his colleagues. One observer, Louis J. Halle, has reported that Walker's position "represents the publicly unexpressed but privately outspoken view of an important part of our American officer corps in all three services" (New Republic, November 20, 1961). Drew Pearson has twice reported without contradiction that a Lieutenant General has leaked secret information to Senator Thurmond in support of the Walker position. The "American Seminars," espousing radical right doctrine and sponsored or co-sponsored by the Armed Services in various places, could only have been accomplished by radical right officer personnel within the armed forces; the spectacle of the U.S. Army sponsoring Skousen's reflection on the patriotism of Franklin Roosevelt and the loyalty of Harry Hopkins, could only have been achieved through the connivance of inside military personnel. Former top brass work with all the radical right groups. The recent experience in Algeria demonstrates that the soldiers of an army of a democratic nation may be tempted, out of frustration, to engage in anti-democratic operations; as reports from France make so abundantly clear, the radical right Generals and Admirals continue today to threaten the stability of France's democratic system.

What appears to support the position of widespread infiltration of the radical right into the Armed Services is the manner in which the Walker case was handled. Indeed, the shocking thing about the Walker case is not that his resignation was accepted in 1961, but that the Armed Services rejected his resignation in 1959 when he tried to resign because of "the fifth column conspiracy and influence in the United States" and the "conspiracy and its influences on the home front." Whether the resignation was rejected because Walker's superiors agreed with his views or simply were not shocked by them is not known; but in either event, the failure to accept his resignation constituted a dangerous tolerance of the radical right inside the Armed Services. Even worse was the action towards Walker in 1960 and early in 1961; the Army failed to act against Walker's [insubordination] and illegal acts of "radical right politics" until public notice of Walker's offenses (brought about by a newspaper exposé) forced the Pentagon's hand. Again, it is not important why this happened; what is important is the degree of tolerance of the radical right inside the Armed Services.

It also appears to have been widespread pressure from right wing Generals and Admirals in the Pentagon which brought about the recall to duty of General Van Fleet. It is common knowledge that General Van Fleet has himself been a member of the extreme right wing (Board member of "For America"; endorser of the Florida Coalition of Patriotic Societies; Board of Advisors of H. L. Hunt's Life Line). Not only does the Pentagon pressure for the recall of General Van Fleet evidence radical right influence inside the military establishment, but it demonstrates the absolute unappeasability of this group. All that the recall has accomplished is to embarrass the Administration when Van Fleet irresponsibly attacked the Administration's Ambassador to the United Nations.

Once it is recognized that there is a serious problem of radical right infiltration of the military and that appeasement is not the answer, the indicated course of action becomes clear. The Administration must get off the defensive in the Walker case; it must shift the battleground from the defensive posture of justifying the "muzzling of Walker" to an offensive posture supporting the basic American concept of separation of military personnel from partisan politics. To shift the posture from defense to offense, consideration should be given to requesting Senator Russell to broaden the hearings to cover the problem of radical right infiltration of the Armed Services. As the Washington Post said on November 28th, the hearings "ought to be aimed not to determining whether General Walker and his imitators were improperly silenced by civilian authorities, but at determining how widely the infection they represent is spread in the armed services."

An alternate to getting Senator Russell to broaden the hearings would be for Secretary McNamara to start his own investigation of radical right Generals and Admirals. Those Generals and Admirals who have lost confidence in democracy and who feel that the danger to our country is treason at home rather than the strength of the International Communist movement abroad, should be warned against political activity in any way, shape or form. This might have the effect of causing the resignation of some of these Generals and Admirals which would certainly be in the national interest. At any rate, political activity after such warnings would be grounds for dismissal from the service. Above all, the suggested investigation would give courage to the officers, old and young, who believe in democracy and in a non-political democratic Army.

Then, too, Secretary McNamara should try to take the offensive at the forthcoming hearings. Secretary McNamara certainly has the right to be the first witness at the hearings. Instead of being on the defensive concerning his muzzling of Walker, he should take the offensive by telling how action against Walker was too long delayed and how there is a serious problem in the Armed Services concerning persons who no longer believe in democracy. If, as suggested in the previous paragraph, Secretary McNamara has by that time instituted his own investigation of radical right Generals and Admirals, he should give his report of his plans in this regard. Whether or not he has instituted an investigation, he should make clear that the Defense Department's policy rejects these extreme right-wing organizations and rejects the views of those who participate in them. He should have those of the real top brass who share his views get right up behind him at the hearing and back him up. He should get the full support of the President. In this way, the hearings could be turned against those who presently plan to use them to help the right wing embarrass Secretary McNamara.

The strong posture against radical right Generals and Admirals suggested in this memorandum would go far to answer Soviet propaganda that American foreign policy is not in responsible hands and that there is a substantial "preventive war" group in the Pentagon which may ultimately get the upper hand. This strong posture would not only reassure our own allies, but might give support to factions within the Soviet Union that [argue] for a more flexible position on the Soviet's part.

2. The radical right and the Attorney General's subversive list.

The Attorney General's list of subversive organizations is lending aid and comfort to the radical right. Although the radical right poses a far greater danger to the success of this country in the battle against international Communism than does the domestic Communist movement, the latter have been branded subversive by the Government and the former have not. No one loses his job or is subjected to public obloquy because he joins one of these radical right groups; yet these groups can use the subversive list to get at liberals and moderates who twenty years earlier had joined some Communist "front" organization which looked patriotic and socially desirable. The list today is almost like a Good Housekeeping seal for the radical right. Whatever one's views may be toward the list, as long as it exists it should not remain one-sided and be permitted to work in favor of the radical right.

Under existing regulations, the Attorney General can only put an organization on the Attorney General's list if he finds, after notice and hearing, that it meets the standards of the list -- i.e., that the organization is "totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution..., or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means." Certain of the radical right organizations may well meet one or more of these criteria.

For example, the Birch Society appears to advocate the denial of constitutional rights by force and openly seeks to substitute some other form of society for existing democratic forms; to it democracy is "merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perpetual fraud." Three of the best known radical right groups are predicated on secrecy: the Birch Society keeps its members secret; Hargis, head of the Christian Crusade, has announced plans for a secret fraternity with Greek letters; and the Minutemen which conduct guerilla warfare maneuvers also keeps its members secret. Then, too, Birch operates on a monolithic or totalitarian system within the organization and other radical right groups may also so operate. These organizations have succeeded in promoting disaffection and, as in the case of General Walker, outright rebellion in the Army. There would thus appear to be adequate grounds for holding a hearing on one or more of these organizations to determine whether they should be listed.

It might therefore be advisable for the Attorney General to announce at this time that he is going to investigate one or more of these organizations with a view to determining whether charges will be filed and hearings held on the questions of listing one or more of these organizations. The mere act of indicating that an investigation will be made will certainly bring home to many people something they have never considered -- the subversive character of these organizations and their similarity to the listed groups on the left. To make this announcement before the hearings of the Armed Services Committee on the muzzling of General Walker might well be an additional way to take the offensive against Senator Thurmond and the radical right.

It is not known the extent to which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has planted undercover agents inside the radical right movement as it has inside the Communist Party and its allied organizations. If it has already done so, the information would be readily available upon which to draw up charges for a hearing against one or more of the radical right groups. If the Bureau has not as yet infiltrated these organizations, a longer time will of course be necessary to obtain the information for the charges, although much of the needed information for the charges is available through public sources.

In any event, the announcement of the investigation would have an immediate salutary effect and the later announcement of the hearing or hearings might have an even greater one. It is not unlikely that these groups will refuse information and otherwise act towards the Attorney General's procedures just exactly as the Communists have acted in the past. Nothing could better reveal to the public the true nature of these groups than defiant resistance to their government.

3. The flow of big money to the radical right should be damned to the extent possible.

The growing power of radical right propagandists and groups is directly related to their expanind ability to secure large sums of money. As funds are a source of power to the radical right, action to dam up these funds may be the quickest way to turn the tide now running in their favor.

Benson's National Education Program, Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Hargis' Christian Crusade and William Volker Fund, Inc. are among the radical right groups which are reported to have federal tax exemptions. It would appear highly doubtful, to say the least, that any or all these groups properly qualifies for a federal tax exemption. Prompt revocation in a few cases might scare off a substantial part of the big money now flowing into these tax exempt organizations.*

[* An additional suggestion in this regard might be considered. This would be the feasibility of including in the publicly available files of these tax-exempt organizations, their annual receipts and expenditures reports which can now be obtained only with great difficulty. Appropriately organized files available to the public would tend to create a little self-enforcement.]

Then, too, corporate funds are used to put radical right views on the air for political rather than business reasons; propaganda is peddled far and wide under the guise of advertising. H. L. Hunt openly urges big business not to rely on contributions to finance the radical right but to use their advertising funds. The Internal Revenue Service sometime ago banned certain propaganda ads by electrical utilities as deductible expenses. Consideration might be given to the question whether the broadcast and rebroadcast of Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade rallies and similar rallies and propaganda of other groups is not in the same category.

A related question is that of free radio and television time for the radical right. Hargis Christian Crusade has its messages reproduced by 70 radio stations across the country as public service features, and Mutual Broadcasting System apparently gave him a special rate for network broadcasts. In Washington, D.C. radio station WEAM currently offers the "Know Your Enemy" program at 8:25 pm., six days a week as a public service; in program No. 97 of this series the commentator advised listeners that Gus Hall of the Communist Party had evoked a plan for staffing the Kennedy Administration with his followers and that the plan was being carried out with success. Certainly the Federal Communications Commission might consider examining the extent of the practice of giving free time to the radical right and could take measures to encourage stations to assign comparable time for an opposing point of view on a free basis. Incidentally, in the area of commercial (not free) broadcasting, there is now pending before the FCC, Cincinnati Station WLW's conduct in selling time to Life Line but refusing to sell time for the UAW program, "Eye Opener."

In addition to possible misuse of federal tax exemptions and the misuse of corporate funds for propaganda advertising, it seems not unlikely that corporation funds are flowing into the radical right in other and covert ways. The President of Schick Razor Company, for example, has made it clear that "Dr. Schwarz will not lack for money while I'm around." And, finally, there is the big question whether Schwarz, Hargis, etc. are themselves complying with the tax laws.

Adequate information on the financing of the radical right can only come from the inside of these organizations. As already indicated, it is not known whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation has undercover agents inside these organizations in the same manner and to the same degree as the Bureau has inside the Communist Party and other left-wing groups. Similarly, it is not known what the Treasury Department has done in the way of undercover operations to get at tax violations in the financing of these organizations. Likewise, it is not known whether the Federal Communications Commission has ever assembled information on the degree to which the radical right is getting free time without comparable expression of the opposing point of view. Certainly, there is sufficient public information indicating possible tax violations in this area and possible violations of FCC policies to justify the most complete check on these various means of financing the radical right.

4. The Administration should take steps to end the Minutemen.

Free speech is the essence of democracy, but armed bands are not the exercise of free speech. There is no warrant for permitting groups to organize into military cadres for the purpose of taking the law into their own hands.

It is not known whether the Minutemen will grow or whether they will fade out of the picture. They do, however, represent a dangerous precedent in our democracy. Consideration should be given to the question whether they are presently violating any federal laws and, if not, to the Federal Government calling a conference of States where the Minutemen exist to see what action could be taken under state laws. There is, of course, the additional possibility, as indicated earlier, that the Minutemen might fall within the terms of the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations.

5. The domestic Communist problem should be put in proper perspective for the American people, thus exposing the basic fallacy of the radical right.

The radical right feeds on charges of treason, traitors and treachery. It has its roots in a very real sense in the belief of the American people that domestic Communism has succeeded in betraying America and threatens its very survival. Putting the domestic Communist problem in proper perspective would do much to expose the basic fallacy of the radical right.

The Administration has inherited an extremely difficult problem and posture in this area. Executive and legislative speech writers have automatically maximized the domestic Communist menace ever since World War II. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Hoover, although he made an admirable recent statement concerning the radical right, exaggerates the domestic Communist menace at every turn and this contributes to the public's frame of mind upon which the radical right feeds. Assistant Attorney General J. Walter Yeagley, who continues in charge of internal security matters, has always maximized the domestic Communist menace. There is grave danger that the upcoming legal battle between the Department of Justice and the Communist Party over registration (particularly if there are additional indictments of individuals) will itself fan these same flames.

Each Administration since World War II has mazimized the Communist problems. It will therefore be no easy task for the Administration to turn the corner and take a different attitude. But action along this line is necessary to contain and in the long-run to roll back the radical right. Without minimizing the Communist Party strength or potential in the thirties and forties, it has no capacity today to endanger our national security or defeat our national policies. There is no need for a further effort to dramatize the domestic Communist issue; the need now is to rein in those who have created the unreasoned fear of the domestic Communist movement in the minds of the American people and slowly to develop a more rational attitude toward the strength of this movement. Without forbidding dissenting officials from expressing a contrary viewpoint (and thus evoking charges of muzzling Hoover, etc.), an effort to take a more realistic view of domestic Communism by the leaders of the Administration would probably cause most of the Administration officials to fall into line and even some legislators might be affected thereby. Fifteen years of overstating a problem cannot be reversed overnight, but thoughtful handling can reduce tensions and misconceptions in this area, too.

It would be the easier course to look the other way and say that the radical right will disappear when we solve our problems at home and abroad. But the radical right may, if it is not contained, make it more difficult, if not impossible, to solve our problems at home and abroad.

Efforts to deal with radical right Generals and Admirals and Minutemen, investigation to determine whether to list radical right organizations, efforts to dam the illegal flow of money in their direction, efforts to set the domestic Communist problem in perspective -- all will evoke immediate charges of softness on Communism. But this is not a problem that can be swept under the rug. The Administration can no more combat the radical right by being "tough on domestic Communism" or appeasing radical right Generals than the Republican Administration was able to fight McCarthyism by its own excesses in this area. It is very late in the day to start dealing with these problems, but it will never get earlier.

Petition against the reactosphere

2011-07-31T23:52:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, life is stirring in old Europe. The fate of that sad continent has always reminded me of a fantasy novel I read when I was 18 and read fantasy novels, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. As La Wik explains:

The plot focuses on a group of rebels attempting to overthrow both tyrants and win back their homeland. Many of the rebels are natives of the province of Tigana, which was the province that most ably resisted Brandin: In a crucial battle, Brandin's son was killed. In retaliation for this, Brandin attacked Tigana and crushed it more savagely than any other part of the Palm; then, following this victory, he used his magic to remove the name and history of Tigana from the minds of the population. Brandin named it Lower Corte, making Corte, their traditional enemies to their north, seem superior to a land that was all but forgotten.

Only those born in Tigana before the invasion can hear or speak its name, or remember it as it was; as far as everyone else is concerned, that area of the country has always been an insignificant part of a neighbouring province, hence the rebels are battling for the very soul of their country.

When we Americans contemplate the depressing spectacle of "European socialism" - ie, American socialism, sent by airmail - squatting like an evil alien bat where once reigned the forty kings that made France, it's hard for me to forget this otherwise trifling confection. Of course I assume the author had something entirely different in mind. But you never know.

In any case, our patriotic magicians remain hard at work:

Part of the problem is that mass media in Scandinavia (and elsewhere) allow massive quantities of hatred by anonymous/pseudonymous commentators to be attached to almost any article in the web editions of their publications. That is a marked shift for the publishing standards previously used for letters columns.

True, you can’t stop hate speech on all of the internet. But there is arguably a big difference between hate speech on fringe sites populated mostly by violencemongering racists/islamophobes and giving such individuals space in the comments section of large papers. That only gives them a sense of breakthrough and the comment section format makes robust counterargumentation not very likely. Papers ought to either ban anonymous comments altogether or hire enough moderators to be able to keep up with a very strict moderation 24/7.

Indeed. You'd think it would be trivial just to configure a filter which detected the word "Tigana" - replacing it with the correct "East England," simply ditching the post, or more proactively alerting the relevant authorities. Alas, there's no limit to the typographic tricks of these scoundrels. Fortunately, many socially conscious Europeans are already seeking employment. Now that we've seen the dangers, I'm sure this little newspaper thing will be solved toot sweet.

But concerned Americans may be surprised at the extent of information terrorism in East England. It's for our own good, of course. America is the Jedi nation, and it's natural that we fear the ancient peril of the Sith. If we knew how strong they have already become, in their old nest of East England, the cold reality might paralyze us into inaction. Can we ever forget that 250 years ago, America herself was nearly conquered by this foul pseudo-nation? Those days are over, of course. But if we are too quick to forget them, they might return.

For instance, I'd be surprised if there are a hundred Americans whose noble souls have been lost truly and for good to the utter darkness of reaction. That's not much of a reactosphere - more like a reacto-dot. When I search for the word réacosphère, however - yes, misspelled, I know, with the odd marks of East England's funny old dialect - I get - wait for it - 185,000 hits. Is that disturbing? Or is that disturbing? Don't forget, these same people came very close to killing George Washington.

Fortunately, one patriotic East Englishman is on the case. He has identified the central hive or Death Star of this hateful "réacosphère" - or as more socially conscious East Englishmen put it, fachosphère (I trust no translation is necessary). This is the notorious François Desouche. The identity of M. Desouche is not known. He is known to be a racist, however.

Fortunately, as an American I am unable to read East English - actually now illegal in many states. But like everything American, our computers are the best in the world, and can translate this horrible gargling muck with mechanical precision, saving my tonsils from carcinogenic hate speech. In fact, I suspect that Google's algorithms have actually improved this material.

Otherwise, it would surely have already done the trick, as M. Desouche is still out there abusing our tolerance. Whereas just from the picture, it's clear that East Englishmen have always known what to do about hate speech:

The caption reads:

The abuse of freedom of expression is a crime. Blogress arrested, 1832.

We must remember that those who tolerate intolerance abuse tolerance itself, and an enemy of tolerance is an enemy of democracy. If this isn't obvious to East Englishmen, perhaps we still have a few B-24 Liberators in the hangar somewhere. Remember - freedom isn't free.

But let's let this brave young East Englishman say his piece:

Why

Far be it from us to make amalgams shame or stigmatize anyone. But still. The [East English]-born, or under-dog, native to this country or shabby, is a young low-skilled, uneducated, unemployed, inbred, [East English], old, severely retarded, warty, syphilitic, illiterate, full of phobias, addictions and racist pedophiles who complacently lounging in a sea of ignorance for living idly nauseating stench in a cave to vapors of wine, eating his feces, screaming loudly patriotic songs and German patiently accumulating his boogers as appetizers for holidays: Gandhi's death, discovery of the AIDS virus, the anniversary of his piranha Adolphe, eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the disappearance of a protected species, air disaster.

Jesus! The only bright spot is that no one in America matches this description - thanks, we can only assume, to our strict border controls. Still, the Internet is a loophole. How was I even able to access this post, for instance, without a research authorization? More can always be done. More needs to be done:

Pest, the native [East English], because of its puny and stunted body size, has only one interest in pharmaceutical clinical trials or as an extra in major films such as Gremlins and Troll 2. Outside the daily cleaning of his collection of cast iron blocks, the native [East Englishman] loves: his cheese rind, remembering his vacation on the Atlantic Wall, shine his boots, clean your terrarium cockroaches, watch hangings of 'homos on Iranian television, see Haitians small slam of Cholera, and shine his boots yet.

Frightened by the Enlightenment, it moves at night in his Panzer Used Tune blue-white-red and think go unnoticed by covering the sound tracks of powerful Wagnerian arias. Constantly in search of baby seals skinned alive in Africa to its mandibles racist, his little eyes anxiously scans the web vicious foul, attracted by the smell of the innocent who would come bogged down in the dark belly of the still fertile zeurlépluzombres.

Google tells me that this last word, or "word," has only been used once on the Internets. Whatever the truth is - I'm pretty sure I couldn't handle it:

That's why we say: sub-dogs are idiots and need to be silenced. Protect our democracy. Stop the stereotypes, stigma, looking for scapegoats to evade our responsibilities and shortcuts are easy to stifle debate. Because all together in the Living Together, we defend the diversity that enriches us close mixed as millions of small sticks and colored sugar.

All together in the Living Together! Sub-dogs are idiots and need to be silenced!

M. Derville then cites a long list of responsible East English authorities who have already signed his petition - such as the famous King of East England, Henry IV, well-known for his epigram: "Paris is worth a mosque." I would include this, but come on - it's East England. All these peasants put together aren't worth one authentic State Department cable.

We also learn more about the notorious M. Desouche:

François Marcel Desouchitsyne is a [East English] blogger and dissident, author of A Day of Lawrence Moucharovitch Archipelago and salads. In 2015, he was sentenced to eight years in rehabilitation in the death camps of tolerance for "business information", after setting out on his blog policy Martine Aubropovitch "Titans". In a post intercepted by the Halde, François Desouchitsyne criticized the "génialissime Marshal, best friend of mankind" (according to official qualifiers) alliance with Joseph Sarkopovitch purges and so-called "positive" conducted as part of the operation "Tolerance immutable."

His novels The Last Celt and The Pavilion Jounaleuh and the twelfth volume of his historical epic on the media, Mud Bouge, appear in Asia and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, it will reward that after being expelled from UERSS. His life becomes a permanent conspiracy to steal the right to inform the hunt despite more diligent of the Ministry of Love, and convicts of Chicha.

In 2024, when he is wanted in the case of small tubes Caribbean Myrha the street, it is hosted by a Sanglierovitch. He missed being assassinated December 25, 2024 by a real bearded / false Santa Claus. One of his closest colleagues, Robinovitch, narrowly escaped an assassination committed by the past participle of the Truands Grammar aboard a Zeppelin steam en route to Tibet. The attack is a serious injury: Bernard Pivot, who was drinking quietly in a chamomile 10 000 km away. Appeared in 2027 in Shanghai Archipelago salads, extensive book outlining the nature of the media and unambiguous written between 2014 and 2017 on tiny sausage skins, one to one hidden in bins geraniums. In short, a life "entirely devoted to the service of Hate" in the words of the generous free Moucharovitch Laurent.

This material, as we see, is becoming extremely obscure. But no less disturbing:

The heroic little finger is then shown in a relic in the House of Martyrs intolerance. A wreath was laid before the Good bucket in memory of the illustrious Appendix promoted to the Legion of Honor posthumously. Minute of silence in schools. Flags at half mast. National mourning. Pinot at the bedside of proud, "father" of the hero, Martine Aubropovitch "Titine" barely hold back her tears. It declared war on the small Caribbean puddings "symbols of hatred."

Sniffing the scrambles, the Council is not representative of blacks in [East England] and elsewhere denounced him as "an orgy of hatred Islamophobic" but is quick to warn against any "stigma small tubes Caribbean." As vice alas: a misunderstanding, two thousand small West Indian were killed in pogroms anti-rolls following a fatwa. "It's nerd 'comment on the GG on RMC who is responsible for Desouchitsyne does, however, no doubt in the tragic day of April 12 which saw the Appendix fall in battle. And Claude Askolobels on Radio One added, "the ogre is Desouchitsyne demiurgic of hatred." Titin, she swears on the nail of St. Atrial to get your hands on "Desouchitsyne monster." April 25, the overwhelming evidence is found in the cave of ~~suspect~~ guilty.

There is more. Read it. Or try. If you know the East English dialect, somehow (this is a red flag, so be sure to mask your IP) you could even translate in the comments section.

But finally, the colored sugar itself concurs, even more bravely, in M. Derville's comments:

Hello Master, I agree with you Fdesouche must be closed, this site is a real misère.J did it thousands of copies-screen that I am at your disposal if you were going to process (I have blackened the comments written by my brothers for the sake of caution because frankly that I approve, they do not go by halves, and this could be detrimental to your action).

I am Honorary President of Truands of grammar, I applied to be President but the officers evicted me because I can not read or write. I got the post of Honorary President through him who wields the best grammar and sign the documents of the association of a sticker or it is written, 1,2,3 live Algeria, he had thought sign of a cross but it was strictly forbidden by the Imam. We were sore after that I had to make me do a cerclage of the anus and this is thanks to the fact that I pay all the money remaining on benefits (the rest is my man who sent them to countries where we have built a villa with pool all with a few white slaves).

It's okay for the money because all Christian charities cater to the daily filling our refrigerator and clothing for the whole family with clothes, the rest are my little angels that are in the street "fell from a truck" as they say.

I'm 24, I'm black, forcibly married at the age of 12, without qualifications, unemployed mother of 14 cherubim that happiness! that made my apartment a beautiful branch of local African and traffic is prohibited in [East England] (I wonder why), a 7 rooms paid by the CIF (my third co-wife pays the residual is 1 euro per month). My little angels or détraquent burn every day lifts (among others) that are not quite luxurious for the building they are right but I'm following myself obliged to wrestle the 10 flights of stairs to climb the huge packages containing herbs from North Africa.

When I too rather than the garbage disposal is clogged, I send the oil from the fryer through the window the other day I even almost missed a small cheese-white under-dog, fortunately it disappeared from the neighborhood with his family, anyway the car his father had gone up in smoke, this poor fool than to enjoy the preferred benefits for a time go to the factory on foot, good riddance it is much better between us.

My dear man, a fervent believer, shows me every day how much he loves me, it strikes me that I am authorized by religious bruised from Monday to Sunday and it serves me, there is on Friday that I escaped because he will attend to their spiritual obligations without which he would burn in hell instead of being able to please the penis by 72 virgins. For Mother's Day he gave me two dozen mops I've made a dress, as well as my neighbors are jealous.

I am very fulfilled in my life, the only downside of these are crap Fdesouche they are the real culprits, as it is said everywhere that their racist like all of the extreme right are responsible for the massacre in Oslo small innocent children, supervised by pro-Palestinian-playing innocently in the war (I saw it on the other unspeakable cloth Net Bivouac-ID) with a dirt Christian who is also the Masonic lodge and anti -musumans.

Because of this pest that eats pork and drinks wine, we find it hard to apply the commandments of our great God and our beloved prophet, it is imperative to destroy the nest anti-secular by any means. If you need help with logistics, you can count on my little angels we have a well stocked arsenal stashed in the corner of the madrassa.

No, I have exaggerated nothing, any more than you. Please put a cross where I have to vote.

Please put a cross where I have to vote! Or would that be sacrilegious? After all, Paris is worth a mosque...

Dispatches from the real America

2011-07-31T00:45:00.000-07:00

I admit it. I'm a reality junkie. I'm like the junkie junkie who's figured out that he can buy drugs on the Internet. I've figured out that I can get me some reality, real reality, not oregano sprayed with paraquat. And where else? On the Internet.

The serious heroin aficionado, if still functional, lives his junkie life surrounded by poor dumb muggles who believe they're getting "high on life." Bullshit! High is spelled heroin. Your muggle can't even imagine high. It's like trying to explain electricity to a blind man.

And your reality muggle, your good sober Republican or Democrat, thinks he's mainlining reality every day with his daily dose of the Times, his CNN, his Harvard education, maybe if he's a little bit edgy his Reason or Instapundit or, God forbid, Overcoming Bias. He's even smoked marijuana a few times! He's totally plugged in! The poor fscker. He'll always be a muggle. There's something going on here, Mr. Jones. And you don't know what it is - do you, Mr. Jones?

It simply never ceases to amaze the junkie that not everyone does heroin. So far as I can tell, out of the gigantic, saccharine, mendacious collective mugglesphere response to Anders Behring Breivik, I have not seen one outlet new or old, left or right, so much as even mention the only interesting non-plagiarized part of Herr Breivik's vast Templar manifesto - the killer's own reminiscences of growing up as a hip-hop tagger in Pakistani gang-ruled Oslo. Human beings cannot stand very much reality. Then again, I guess they can't stand much heroin, either.

Okay, to be fair, his mother's herpes-induced brain damage earns props - as does Utoya's revolutionary brotherhood with al-Fatah. Peace and love! Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades! Didn't Malcolm X say something about chickens coming home to roost? But those links hardly point to Mr. Jones. Yes, you can order heroin on the Internet. No, you can't order it at fscking drugstore.com. You've got to actually go out and score that shit.

And right now, there's no contest for the hardest reality on the Internet. You get your heroin at Silk Road (if it still exists, or ever did - alas, I'm simply too old to be a junkie junkie). And you get your reality at Second City Cop , which is to the New York Times as heroin is to fscking Advil.

Click on that link. It's primo, of course. It's nothing out of the ordinary. SCC serves up shit this good two or three times a month. You're getting your heroin straight from a fscking cop. How much purer can it get? And good as the posts are - the comments are even better. They're pretty much all cops, too. Some of them aren't literate. But others are.

So like a good pusher, I thought I'd collect some of this stone-cold reality for the discerning aficionados here at UR. Remember, kids: always use a clean needle. And think twice before you apply for your Cultural Marxist hunting license, no matter how appalling this material is:

Let's start with some heartwarming, if dubious, optimism:

I work at a small new media publication that serves Chicagoland.

Newspapers are like Amy Winehouse a week ago. They may be alive right now, but there's no doubt how their story turns out.

They will always exist in one form or another- owning one will be a hubris thing for local big shots (kinda like owning a sports team)- but their days of being of 'premier relevance' are over.

Going forward, "New Media" will consist of the following three entities.

1) Credible, independent commentary (just like this blog)

2) Established "masterbrands" serving video content (ie- the networks)

3) Amateur content and commentary.

In the year 2011 and beyond, there is just no room left for grinding trees into dried, bleached pulp, dousing them with ink and hoping people care enough to pay for it.

The newspaper's glory days as the 'immutable ideological bastion of liberal thought and idea' died as soon as US internet saturation broke 50% and opened up the free exchange of information to everyone, rather than being filtered by a closed-circuit cabal of old media clerics.

Don't confuse yourselves, my uniformed friends. Just because they aren't 'gone' yet doesn't mean they aren't wholly and entirely dead.

Do not fret when you see some BS story published by old media. Their 'reach' figures are padded and dishonest, meant to keep their kooky old shareholders believing... They're a tree falling in the woods.

Amateur content and commentary? Credible and independent? Or just racist?

I was at the express DMV at the Thompson Center last month, I had to wait to talk to a supervisor about my license renewal (I'm a reservist and did a tour, and because my license has been expired longer than a year they were trying to tell me I have to take a friggin road test like I'm some 16 year old kid, but I digress...) and right next to me sits this fat, 300lb monstrosity of a human being, pregnant, eating, can't make this up, flaming hot cheetos. I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

So the super comes out and tells me he has to make a phone call to check on that, and then he kinda walks away and Kikishawreeka asks me "dat be da manager?" I look at her, and after about 5 seconds, hesitantly, disgustingly say "yes." She then tries to get his attention via ebonics, and he told her she had to wait. Haha, it was great, a little victory in an otherwise shit city with shitheads roaming the streets.

All I could think, was SHE WAS THE PROBLEM. IT'S YOU FUCKING THIS CITY UP. You are waiting to pop out a welfare check that I get to pay for, as they train to point guns at da poleece.

I went home and took 5 showers in a row.

Anyway, keep up the good work CPD. You are the real police. Fuck the liberals, fuck the yuppies, fuck the media, and of course fuck the rev-undones.

This kid in the pic, has a damn blunt in one and, and throwing up VLN in the other, at 13 years old. Yep, great kid you got there, must be proud. Here's hoping this kid stays in Juvi till he's 18, gets out, commits a felony where nobody gets hurt, and spends the next 20 with IDOC.

Get used to them bars kiddo, you'll be seeing them the rest of your pathetic, ghetto, poor excuse of a human life.

That's racist! "VLN," I believe, means "Vice Lord Nation." This is racist too:

Saw Jimmell's mother on the tv news talking shit about how the cops shot her son in the back with his hands up. I really hope she uses some of that money she gets from the city to get her jack-o-lantern looking teeth fixed.

Back to hopeful patriotism:

Thank you SCC. When the story was on the news tonight, I listed to the POS father say that his son was a good boy that was never around guns. The media allowing the POS father's statement to be aired in order to sway America is disgusting. I prompty took my three young children to the SCC site and showed the picture of the boy throwing up "Vice Lord". Yeah, the same VL's that want to kill their Dad and terrorize Chicago.

My little kids just got the biggest life lesson about manipulative liberal media tonight, and because of you SCC they are one step closer to being conservative, pro union, anti WIC, anti LINK, ANTI Section 8, anti Obama, and anti-combine.

SCC continue to do this for America.

Patriotic Americans are not above criticizing the press:

If he's a "straight A and B" student, then why is he in the sixth grade at the age of 13? That would make him around twenty years old if he graduates high school without flunking again, right?

Also, why does Pravda, I mean the Scum Times and Fibune, not just come clean about the cropped gang picture? Do they really believe that they can call themselves ethical reporters if they have to crop and edit pictures to get their version of a story out?

Instead of giving air time to the "parents" of this young thug, do they want to report on the criminal history and gang affiliation on the father and ask why the kid was armed with a BB gun past curfew? How about why the only photo the "family" has to give anyone shows the kid flashing gang signs?

Oh, excuse me. That's what a real reporter would do if they weren't agents for a propaganda machine and seeking instead to do a real job of reporting the truth. That's WAY too much to ask of Chicago "journalists."

I guess people will just have to come to this blog if they want the truth in current events. Pathetic.

To be fair, the Chicago Tribune was once a great newspaper. The educational system has also, apparently, declined:

This POS received mostly A's with a few B's because his baby sitter/teacher wanted him out of his/her classroom.

Why?

Because the baby sitter/teacher was aware that the POS liked to play with firearms and feared that he would bring the weapon to the building that he would occasionly frequented in the winter and possibly shoot the baby sitter/teacher.

P.S. Will the baby sitter/teacher be required to visit the POS's home during the school year? What time should he visit? Will the windows of the baby sitter/teachers vehicle windows be shot out while he is counselling the POS and his breeders?

Apparently you don't need to have read all these obscure old books to have a sound grasp of American postwar political history:

Is photo shop editing part of the course work at Northwestern's school of journalism? How do they teach propaganda to the students there these days?

I know they're busy lying to get convicted felon murderers out so they can get good grades, but when do they have time to learn the finer points of propaganda making?

Do you get it yet, folks? It starts with the communist education system and ends with the propaganda machine of the communist dictators.

It must be easy to win a Pulitzer when most of your co-workers have no investigative skills and work for rich politicians.

Do you reporters sometimes laugh when you have to cover things up for the political class? Do you feel like whores when you do their bidding?

"Dictators" is a little strong. If only we had a communist dictator! At least we'd have a dictator. We have witty repartee, though:

> Will that make him 20 or 21 when he's a senior in high school?

no, it will make him 16 when he drops out of 8th grade.

But not without broad perspective:

The kid is a piece of shit. The family is a piece of shit. Now multiply this statement a couple of million times to accurately describe a HUGE portion of the American population. We as a nation are really really screwed.

It wouldn't be fun if the journalopes didn't fight back:

The tribune sitting now has replaced the cropped photo with a picture of the scumbag in his hospital bed. Unbelieveable.

They may be less honest, but they're certainly more literate. They also talk back - a little:

Long Post, sorry SCC.

I emailed the reporter this....

"Your first picture on the tribune website, WAS CROPPED, to eliminate the fact this teen was flashing GANG SIGNS. The full picture is available all over the internet. Now your picture of this teen in the hospital is bordering on scandalous. How dare your newspaper use these subtle techniques to slant the news. The fact is he had a realistic looking gun. Was already in the grip of a street gang, these are the things your story should mention, and that this is a BIG problem with youth in certain areas of the city. These are the facts. I feel sorry for the officer and the rest of the CPD that the trouble that your slanted biased coverage will cause. Yellow Journalism is alive and well in Chicago"

He replied with this
"A couple of things...
Our "first" picture -- I take it you mean the first photo we posted -- was uncropped. If you're a regular reader on our site, you'll know that most of the pictures we post are cropped, so our photo folks cropped it as they always do.
I'm not aware whether the picture is "all over the internet" but we posted it with the family's permission.
I don't know if the gun in question was realistic looking, I haven't seen it, though from past experience, many BB or pellet guns do look like their real counterparts. I don't know if he was "already in the grips" of gang life, either.
Yellow journalism refers to the sensationalism of the news. What you're accusing us of is the exact opposite: still incorrect, but not yellow journalism by its definition. Your statement is wrong because it flatly states that we as a newspaper, or I, as a journalist, have a pre-determined point of view.
I'm a fact gatherer. Sometimes we get the facts, sometimes we don't. Whatever we get, we pass it on to our readers.
I like to interact with readers. I like it even better when they're correctly informed.
I hope this clears a few things up.
W."

So then I emailed him the full picture. No response, Hmmmm.

To be fair, the correspondent's handle was "I dins do nuffins." Sounds like AAVE to me, so he's probably a racist. Another Mark Fuhrman! Don't answer - subpoena that man's IP address. We've got to get these bad apples off the force. Fortunately, Islam may be the solution:

Isn't it amazing that you have to obtain a license to:

Catch a Fish
Drive a Car
Style Somebody's Hair
Paint Somebody's Nails

...and yet any two morons who can figure out sex can make more people like this little bastard?

Tell me that this country (not just our city) isn't going straight to hell. When the Islamofascists tell us how decadent and pathetic we are it's getting harder and harder to argue with them.

SCC's master of disaster, The Box Chevy Phantom, weighs in:

Hush up that talk about Yummy Sandifer, SCC!

99% of the fools working for the anal-whore media weren't around when that madness was going on.

Even if less than a handful actually were, They're so beholden to advancing the liberal, yellow-pinky Pravada-esque agenda of casting the Police as being the enemy; they can't and won't see the relevance of the the point you're making.

Yummy Sandifer was a true super-predator in the making in spite of his tender years.

Yeah... His homies/executioners are caged as well they should have been.

Wonder what happened to the funky-assed leaders who not only ordered the hit but kept moving him around because if memory serves right, The Police were beating the bushes HARD looking for his little narrow ass.

They should have had the Yummy Sandifer Memorial Tour... Just rolled him from school to school to show the reward of thug life...

"He thought his boys had his back but they popped his l'il stanky ass!"

Our sympathy gland stopped working many years before that incident...

Keep Puttin' It On 'Em SCC!
They hate you because you're a vehicle for the REAL uncensored truth getting out and it drives the yellow-pinky, trotskyite media and the political-criminal class insane to have a source of information out here that they can't edit, spin, filter and photoshop.

To them, The Police are the enemy.

Yummy Sandifer? Yummy Sandifer. More on the demographic:

In response to 1:24 am today ("Kikishawreeka," classic)

When I moved to Chicago from out of state 5 years ago, I went to the DMV to get an IL license. I was 32 at the time, married, no kids, working as an attorney, 29 year old wife a CPA, so both paying LOTS of taxes.
During my wait, I was sitting next to a young black lady with a cute little baby on her lap, so asked her, "How old is your daughter?"

Her reply - "Oh this ain't my daughter, she my grandbaby. I need to become her official guardian bc my daughter is 15, I still get her social security, and need to get it for the baby too."

I asked her how old she was - same age as me, 32. Appalling, sick, disgusting - talk about your generational welfare. It's like the state might as well just take the money directly from my pocket, and put it into that bitch's (though if it did that, it couldn't profit as a middleman). I told my wife that day that we're never buying property in Chicago, that we're keping our cars licensed at our family's homes in MI, and once our future (since born) children are old enough for school, we are peacing out to the burbs up north NOT in Crook County.

On an unrelated note, she & I both are grateful for you men & women in blue, especially for being willing to deal with POSs like these every day. And most attorneys here, save for the fucking litigators, feel the same was as we do.

More philosophical perspective:

We, as coppers, see it all--the good, the bad, the ugly. We don't have the option of having filters on our eyes, hearts, or souls. We see reality. I think that is why we get so pissed off when things are distorted by the media. Tell the damn truth. It's pretty arrogant of them to think they have the moral authority to spin stories. If that was the pic given, print the damn thing.

SCC himself continues in a new story:

Is this real?

[picture of replica BB gun]

It sure looks real.

Now what if someone pointed it at you? Would you defend yourself?

We certainly would. And we wouldn't blame anyone else who did. Guess what?

That's exactly what happened. With that specific gun. You see, that's the gun used by this kid...

[picture of 13-year-old honor student with blunt, flashing gang signs]

...to shoot out a bunch of windows at the Piccolo School and a van in the 011 District before he pointed it at an officer, who then shot him. The gun pictured was recovered and inventoried and the subject made a full confession.

So the next time the Slum Times says police are "trigger happy," remember that first photo. That dumbass kid is lucky to be breathing in the hospital instead of pushing up daisies at Burr Oak, though that will probably happen soon enough anyway.

I'm definitely keeping my brats away from the "Piccolo School." I'm also encouraging them not to point their BB guns at any Chicago cops:

In the words of Apollo Creed... I would drop him like a bad habit!

Violence is never far from the savage mind of the redneck cop:

That picture makes me wanna punch that kid in the fucking face.

But interpretation of motives is his profession:

Wow, he was shooting out the windows of the school where's he's an A/B student at. Maybe they should have given him all A's? That's why he's mad at the school.

Definitely do not point any kind of weapon at a police officer, honor students:

About 15 years ago a 14 year old pointed one of those 1911 look-a-likes that shoots darts, BBs, and pellets at me. He then ran into a building. I kicked the door open and he already had his hands in the air and the gun was on the ground. If not for that I would have shot him. The point is that that gun looked real enough to me, so much so that the barrel looked like it was a real 45 or 44.

But we are reminded of how easy it is for a pinko Trotskyist to spin a story:

That isn't what most people think of when they think of BB guns.

They think of the Red Ryder like on "A Christmas Story."

NOT.

Hell I'll still shoot if that was pointed at me. It looks like a cut down 22.

There's no pity at all on the street:

I saw the daddy on tv saying his son's hand is mangled--isn't that what they want us to do? Shoot the gun out of their hands and not kill them?

So what's he bitching about? It's not like the kid used his hands to practice arithmetic! Or to communicate with the deaf!

He won't be flashing gang signs any more, it sounds like--and if there is a God, he won't be able to hold a gun either!

Or wipe his ass!

There is no sympathy whatsoever for Americans with disabilities:

I recall working CTA special on Chicago Ave one hot July 3rd watch shift some years ago. It looked like a convention of motorized wheelchair salesmen with all the young thugs and their paralyzing GSW's motoring up and down Chicago Ave from about 3600 - 3800 W. in their nice shiny 'guvment paid for battery powered wheelchairs.

It was one of those west side moments most people never get a chance to appreciate or comprehend. Like a big old ghetto ride tooling along on one tire with air, one flat tire and two bare steel rims with sparks flying, driver grinning like it's Christmas.

And this is just classic cop humor:

This kid is already gone, lost to society, forever unemployable and destined for prison or the graveyard. He saw the video, he got the style. Hell, people were laughing and putting hats on him sideways, taking snapshots, when he was 18 months old. Teaching him to signify. Little party joke. "Look! He doin' it! He doin' it!"

"Whoo!"

Thug life is imbibed along with baby mama's lumpy-mixed Similac in these houses. End of story.

There is not a moment's doubt in my mind that he'd have been banging off a real gun at everyone and everything he could see if he'd been able to get hold of one.

He doin' it! He doin' it! Hm, sounds like more of that AAVE. Racist, murderous cops:

I'd smoke him like a pack of KOOLS!

But fortunately, not all cops are racist:

I should begin this posting, SCC, by identifying myself as a recently retired Detective of 30 years with the Chicago Police Department, and I am also African American.

I have always been proud of this organization and supportive of it even during it's lowest times. I have seen both the very good and bad of the Department, have weathered the many storms it has faced since I came on in 1981, have enjoyed it's brother/sisterhood and fraternity, have been there to mourn our loses and support our fallen members families and friends.

I say all this because I am particularly incensed at comments made by a group of "reverands", who's remarks were televised on WBBM Channel 5, 29 Jul 11 during the 6:00 pm broadcast. Some "spokesman" for the group suggested that the Chicago Police Department were neither properly trained, were not executing their assignments and were afraid/scared to do their jobs in the Black community. This clown had the audacity to say that as a result of his "observations" of police behavior in the African American community that he and his group of "holy men" would be petitioning the United States Justice Department to intervene in some fashion because they are dissatisfied with how the Chicago Police are shooting indiscriminately in the Black community.

Having been there, as a police officer who has pushed a beat car, worked Tact, several specialized units, assigned as a Detective, and as a current resident of the community, I would beg to differ with this fool and his cohorts. If he had the same opportunities I've had and seen what really goes on in some of these communities from my/our perspective, he would be loath to have spoken those words.

My disgust and revulsion at his remarks are difficult to describe. I cannot find the words to explain how much I dispise he and his kind. They are no more than leeches that feed off City programs so long as they turn out Machine votes from a constituency who care neither about themselves or their neighbors. He need only do a "ride along" for one tour of duty, have his ass shot at once, or suffer a beatdown or "punkin' head" at the hands of a member of his flock and I'm certain he would have a chance of perspective. If he actually lives in one of these communities, he is either blind or a complete liar to suggest that his "flock" are innocent and should not be treated the way they are. Just how would he expect the police to respond to being shot at or confronted with an armed offender - irrespective of race?

My point is, SCC, keep putting out the correct information and rally the troops. Once again we are on our own with our backs to the wall. While we fight daily to do our jobs, protect our brothers and sisters in arms and still come home at the end of our tour the same as we left, we need not feel ashamed for protecting ourselves or one another. WE are the only ones we have. There is no one else. We owe no one an apology and we should afford no quarter to anyone who would attempt to prevent us from doing our job or threaten our lives or those of our brothers and sisters.

This hateful rhetoric from opportunistic race pimps and politically connected community "leaders" will not abate until they themselves become victims of the very "victims" they claim to represent.

This whole thing is not about race. It about adhering to and following the law, respecting lawful authority and our established institutions, and it about moral behavior. Nothing more, nothing less.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, haters - like a pack of KOOLS! If only it were just about race. Why, if it were only about race, we could send all the "mutts" and "shitbirds" (common SCC labels for "the element") back to Africa. Then all we'd have to deal with is our beautiful, white, homegrown meth-heads.

But someone has a solution in mind:

If people are interested I will pursue this. I will set up a holdings company with little to no assets and a low cash flow (for possible law suit reasons). I will have that holdings company start and own a real and factual Chicago newspaper. I can handle the business end and possibly some stories. But I would need help from others for stories and other paper content. We could set it up as a 1 day a week paper at first and see where it goes. If it goes nowhere we only loose our time and some printing costs associated with the copies we ran. I would be willing to gamble a few thousand at first to see where it goes but I would rather not risk much more than that.

I am not a cop. I have CPD in my blood. I am a former member of the armed forces and I currently own a few businesses. I will watch the postings. If people are interested in helping in any way post it. If there is interest (postings) I will set up an email address solely for getting us together to coordinate our approach. I will say that if anyone wants to be involved just to make money off this don’t bother. Startup companies even with low overhead take a long time to get out of the red.

Hmm. Good intentions, sir, but if you were an Ivy-educated Jew like me, you'd know to say "lose our time." You can lose a lot of time and money both, trying to fight the great and the good. And to what end? You inform the people, and they do... what?

The Box Chevy Phantom goes straight to the point:

In our honest and very biased opinion?

We would try our level best to kill the non-stop shit out of this little misfit whether full sunlight or the blue-purple hour of midnight if he brandishes the item in question.

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on" to anybody who says The Police should check their fire in the face of this madness.

Keep. Killing. Them.

They boast and swagger about not having fear of The Police.

Funny how they fear each other and cry for The Police to baby-sit vast swaths of the West and South Sides because the inhabitants embrace a lifestyle of that encourages willful ignorance and embraces death and destruction purely for the sake of destruction and death.

It's the only way they think they can guilt-trip the rest of society into giving them what they want instead having a desire to reap the true benefit of joining the rest of society by virtue of hard work, delayed gratification etc.

The reality is that there will be some people who choose to be left behind.

Heh...

Bet you a fat-man that when Noah's Ark started floating and that water got kinda high, some fools were hollering and banging on the sides demanding to be let in...

"Noooaahhh! You racist for not lettin' us in!"

*Noah*

"Heh... Ain't gonna hap'n cap'n! if you wanted to be dry and inside, you had every chance to get right... Now yo ass is gonna get left! Gonna pray for you though..."

We think the stage is being set either for the death of this country as we know it or the second Revolution.

Or possibly both. Either way, though, I'm hearing some serious AAVE. That's reality for ya, dog. All I know about America in the 22nd century is that everyone, regardless of race, color or creed, will call everyone else "nigga."

The indisputable humanity of Anders Behring Breivik

2011-07-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

It's pathetic but typical, I feel, that the likes of Robert Spencer and Fjordman are denying their connection to Anders Behring Breivik. Of course they are responsible for Breivik's terrorism, just as communist intellectuals are responsible for Islamic terrorism. Someone skipped Aesop:

THE TRUMPETER TAKEN PRISONER.

A Trumpeter, being taken prisoner in battle, begged hard for quarter, declaring his innocence, and protesting that he neither had killed nor could kill any man, bearing no arms but his trumpet, which he was obliged to sound at the word of command.

For that reason, replied his enemies, we are determined not to spare you; for though you yourself never fight, yet with that wicked instrument of yours, you blow up animosity among other people, and so become the cause of much bloodshed.

APPLICATION.

The fomenter of mischief is at least as culpable as he who puts it in execution. A man may be guilty of murder who never has handled a sword or pulled a trigger or lifted up his arm with any mischievous weapon. There is a little incendiary called the tongue, which is more venomous than a poisoned arrow, and more killing than a two-edged sword.

The moral of the Fable therefore is this, that if in any civil insurrection the persons taken in arms against the government, deserve to die, much more do they whose devilish tongues or pens gave birth to the sedition and excited the tumult.

The Fable is also equally applicable to those evil counsellors, who excite corrupt or wicked governments to sap and undermine, and then to overturn the just laws and liberties of a whole people...

Aesop, you see, is above the whole thing. Aesop has no problem with putting the hammer to either seditious rabble-rousers or tyrannical commissars. He accepts it as normal. It is normal. It is war, and only the dead have seen the end of war. The trumpeter, on either side, is a soldier.

This mental habit of separating "democratic dissent" and "violent terrorism," which the Robert Spencers of the world vainly attempt to invoke, and the Noam Chomskys successfully invoke, is one of the most curious psychological tics of the deranged 20th century. Of course its raison d'etre, as a psychological-warfare device, is to forestall the realization that leftist movements achieve power through violence, then demand pacifism of the subjugated.

All power is rooted in violence - even electoral power (to the extent that any such thing still exists). There is most definitely a continuum between democratic activism and civil war. The struggle for power is one. The whole point of the classic picket sign is that the writing on the cardboard sends one message; the two-by-four it's stapled to sends another.

And we can tell that left rules right, because we can see that Noam Chomsky has the right to trumpet his ideas to Osama bin Laden, whereas Robert Spencer does not have the right to trumpet his ideas to Anders Behring Breivik. Did he think he had that right? He had not the might, so he had not the right. He's finding that out right now, as he stares down the barrel of a very angry New York Times.

The trumpeter game, version left, is played ad nauseam in every school system in the world today. All our noble workers and peasants are constantly inculcated with two messages. First, you are the victim of injustice. Second, even though you are the victim of injustice, violence is evil and you must under no circumstances punish the guilty. Human beings are human beings, of course, so the second message doesn't always take. Aww. Another "random attack."

Robert Spencer, Fjordman, and the like - even so perspicacious a conservative as Lawrence Auster - thought they could play this game from the other side. Why? Because they believe in the game. They believe in democratic activism, and they believe they live in a democratic society and have just as much right as anyone at Harvard to toot their trumpets.

They are wrong on every count. What every conservative, moderate or "extreme," needs to learn from ABB is that all action by the powerless, "violent" or "nonviolent," is misguided. It is not wrong, of course, to aspire to power - but action does not create power. Action dissipates power. Until you amass the power to capture the State, refrain from any action whatsoever - certainly including voting. The weak have no right to oppose the strong.

And then there's the "insanity" angle. In case anyone has any doubt about Breivik's sanity, I thought I'd cut and paste the most interesting parts of his manifesto, which are naturally the parts everyone is ignoring. Not the endless Fjordman essays, but his own personal story. Page 1393:

Q: Violent Muslim gangs in European cities are not exactly a new phenomenon. We hear about indigenous European youths getting harassed, beaten, raped and robbed quite often. Tell us about your experiences during your "vulnerable years" (14-18) growing up in the urban multicultural streets of Oslo.

A: Since I was 12 years old I was into the hip-hop movement. For several years I was one of the most notable "hip-hop‘ers" from Oslo‘s West side. It was a lot easier to "gain respect and credibility" in Oslo West because of the demographic factors. Oslo West was the "privileged and predominantly native side" of Oslo with very few immigrants in contrast to the East side which was less peaceful. Graffiti and break dance was an important part of our life at that point. Around 1993 and 1994, at 15, I was the most active tagger (graffiti artist) in Oslo as several people in the old school hip-hop community can attest to.

Our standard "graffiti raid" consisted of going out at night, in groups of 2-3, with our backpacks full of spray cans. We took our bikes and "bombed" city blocks with our tags, "pieces" and crew name all over Oslo. "Morg, Wick and Spok" was everywhere. The fact that hundreds of kids our own age all over Oslo West and even Oslo East looked up to us was one of the driving forces I guess. At that time it felt very rewarding to us. If you wanted girls and respect then it was all about the hip hop community at that time. The more reckless you were the more respect and admiration you gained.

Everyone didn't approve though. The government had a no-tolerance attitude towards graffiti and removed 90% of our "creations" within 48 hours. I remember it was an unofficial war between the hip-hop community and the government and Oslo Sporveier, our public subway company. Two guys I knew, Stian and Charles, a few years older than me were arrested, received gigantic fines and was put in jail.

The hip-hop movement In Norway had its climax around that time, in 92-93. The community was very "politically correct" in nature with close ties to the extreme left groups like SOS Rasisme (an extreme left wing movement) and Blitz (a violent left wing extremist movement). I remember we used to hang out with various people and groups all over Oslo. There were plenty of hip-hop concerts at Blitz and it was at this time that the communist hip-hop group; "Gatas Parlament" was created. It‘s hard to imagine but during this time everyone was into graffiti and hip-hop.
[...]
We used to hang out with GSV crew, or B-Gjengen as they are popularly called today, a Muslim Pakistani gang, quite violent even back then. "Gang alliances" was a part of our everyday life at that point and assured that you avoided threats and harassment. Alliances with the right people guaranteed safe passage everywhere without the risk of being subdued and robbed (Jizya), beaten or harassed. We had close ties with B-Gjengen (B-Gang) and A-Gjengen (A-Gang), both Muslim Pakistani gangs through my best friend Arsalan who was also a Pakistani.

Even at that time, the Muslim gangs were very dominating in Oslo East and in inner city Oslo. They even arranged "raids" in Oslo West occasionally, subduing the native youths (kuffars) and collecting Jizya from them (in the form of cell phones, cash, sunglasses etc.). I remember they systematically harassed, robbed and beat ethnic Norwegian youngsters who were unfortunate enough to not have the right affiliations. Muslim youths called the ethnic Norwegians "poteter" (potatoes, a derogatory term used by Muslims to describe ethnic Norwegians). These people occasionally raped the so called "potato whores."

In Oslo, as an ethnic Norwegian youth aged 14-18 you were restricted if you didn‘t have affiliations to the Muslim gangs. Your travel was restricted to your own neighbourhoods in Oslo West and certain central points in the city. Unless you had Muslim contacts you could easily be subject to harassment, beatings and robbery. Our alliances with the Muslim gangs were strictly seen as a necessity for us, at least for me. We, however, due to our alliances had the freedom of movement. As a result of our alliances we were allowed to have a relaxing and secure position on the West side of Oslo among our age group. Think of it as being local "warlords" for certain "kuffar areas," which were regulated by the only dominant force, Muslim gangs collaborating with anarcho-Marxist networks.

Many of these groups claim to be tolerant and anti-fascist, but yet, I have never met anyone as hypocritical, racist and fascist as the people whom I used to call friends and allies. The media glorifies them while they wreck havoc across the city, rob and plunder. Yet, any attempts their victims do to consolidate are harshly condemned by all aspects of the cultural establishment as racism and Nazism. I have witnessed the double standards and hypocrisy with my own eyes, it is hard to ignore. I was one of the protected "potatoes," having friends and allies in the Jihadi-racist gangs such as the A and B gang and many other Muslim gangs.

I gradually became appalled by the mentality, actions and hypocrisy of what he calls the "Marxist-Jihadi youth" movement of Oslo disguised under more socially acceptable brands such as: "SOS Rasisme", "Youth against Racism", Blitz who literally hijacked segments of the hiphop movement and used it as a front for recruitment.

I have personally heard of and witnessed hundreds of Jihadi-racist attacks, more than 90% of them aimed at helpless Norwegian youth (who themselves are brought up to be "suicidally" tolerant and therefore are completely unprepared mentally for attacks such as these). This happens while the Marxist networks in the hiphop movement and the cultural establishment silently and indirectly condone it. There is absolutely no political will to ensure that justice is served on behalf of these victims. I remember at one point thinking: "This system makes me sick".

Q: Did you ever contribute to the Muslim atrocities against the indigenous during this period?

A: I saw the "security alliances" in a strictly pragmatical way. They were a necessary evil at that time. During these years I heard of hundreds of cases where ethnic Norwegians were harassed, robbed and beaten by Muslim gangs. This type of behaviour was in fact acts of racism or even based on religious motives (Jihadi behaviour), although I failed to see that connection then due to lack of knowledge about Islam; I saw the practical manifestations and I didn‘t like it at all. The only thing you could do was to take the necessary precautions, create alliances or be subdued by them.

If you made any attempt to create a "Norwegian gang" you would be instantly labelled as a Nazi and face the wrath of everyone, in addition to the Muslim gangs. They, however, were allowed to do anything while being indirectly cheered by society. So in other words, we were trapped between the "wood and the bark". This is still the case in all Western European major cities. They are allowed to consolidate, while we are not.
[...]
The lefties/hip-hop movement, including the Pakistani gangs and other minority gangs – in cooperation with SOS Rasisme and Blitz were notorically and systematically violent, even racist and discriminating towards ethnic Norwegian youths and anti-immigrant individuals. They abused drugs and many were involved in criminal activity, yet cheered by the media because of their "tolerance" and so called "anti-racist" attitude.

Intolerance, racism and acts of Jihad were tolerated against native Norwegians as the perpetrators were categorised as victims by default (as minorities). They were seldom punished properly.

I remember the occasional crackdowns on right wing youth movements during this period. The police raided them several times, called their parents and invested a lot of resources on squashing the right wing movement all over Norway. Blitz and other extreme left, SOS Rasisme and the hip-hop community on the other hand received public funding. The Blitz house, a building they had occupied a few decades earlier, was subsidised and under protection by the government in Oslo and still is even today. They are often referred to as the "storm troops" of the Norwegian Labour Party. The government subsidy of the apartment block were Blitz resides equates to more than 3 million USD per year alone. The violent Marxist group "SOS Rasisme" receives 2-3 million NOK annually. It‘s disgusting.
[...]
When my friendship with Arsalan, Jon Trygve and Richard ended, I pursued and further developed a friendship with my old friends Marius and Christen who lived in my neighbourhood. They were to become my new core of close friends. I also befriended myself with a predominantly "ethnic Norwegian" gang from Tåsen in Oslo. Some of them were active on the graffiti front from earlier and that‘s how I first met them. This new "alliance" was also quite useful to create "security" for the rest of our "vulnerable years".

I remember once when a gang of Moroccans came to Tåsen (a predominantly ethnic Norwegian area in the northern part of Oslo) and tried to rob a couple of ethnic local youths. The Moroccan gang was well known for being notoriously violent, having robbed and beaten hundreds of ethnic Norwegian youths all over Oslo. We were at a party at that time. As we heard of the incident we rallied around 20 guys and found the Moroccans near the subway station. We made a deal with them telling them to never come back for their so called "Jizya raids". They never showed their face on Tåsen again as far as I know. Muslim gangs respect people who respect themselves which is why they have no respect for people who are not prepared to use violence.

As time went by and we started high school at around 17-18, the situation changed drastically. The need for security decreased considerably during this period (mostly because we kept to certain areas). Individuals affiliated with the Muslim gangs were academically weak and were basically "left behind" or they selected practical professional studies like mechanics courses or carpentry. Very few of them had the grades to enter any quality schools in Oslo West. In this regard the need for security vanished and a type of academic segregation occurred.

In retrospect, it‘s easy to understand why ethnic Norwegians are fleeing Muslim areas. No one likes to be "subdued" – live in fear, being harassed, beaten and robbed. The Muslim ghettofication process has been ongoing the last 30 years and it will continue until there is close to 100% concentrated Muslim areas in Oslo (the same tendency we see in Paris, London and other large Western European cities). When I was around 15-16 there was only 1 or 2 schools where the majority was non-ethnic Norwegian. Now, 15 years later there are around 50 schools on the East side of Oslo where the majority of students are non-natives and primarily Muslim.

It‘s a miracle how I managed to successfully pass through my "vulnerable years" without being subdued by Muslim gangs even once. I know that there are hundreds, even thousands of incidents per year (I have personally witnessed around 50 incidents) where ethnic Norwegian youths ranging 14-18 are harassed, beaten, raped and robbed and it‘s getting worse every year. I really don‘t envy the new generations and the challenges that are facing them regarding Muslim subjugation.

If ethnic Norwegian youth or other non-Muslims attempt to create gangs of their own (for protection purposes), they are immediately labelled as racists and Nazis. At the same time numerous Muslim gangs commit thousands of racist acts each year against ethnic Norwegians and it‘s either hushed down, ignored and therefore tolerated.

The last 20 years more than 100-200 ethnic Norwegians have been killed by Muslims, a majority by racist or religious/Jihadi motives. Yet, the press are systematically ignoring this and they attempt to link every single incident to non-relevant motives like for example the influence of narcotics/alcohol or blame the accused Muslim of being "psychologically unstable". Norwegian media refuse to face the truth of the matter which is that most of these incidents are religiously and/or racially motivated.

The only incident I can remember where a racist native have killed a non white was the murder of Benjamin Hermansen, who at the age of 15 years, was murdered in Holmlia, in Oslo, Norway. The death was racially motivated. The murder mobilised large parts of the Norwegian population. Throughout the entire country, marches were organised to protest against the murder, with nearly 40,000 people participating in Oslo. The Benjamin Prize was established as a Norwegian prize to counter racism in 2002. The prize is awarded to a school that actively works against racism and discrimination.

Could this have happened if the victim was native and the aggressors were Muslims? No, not in a million years! Our politicians are terrified of offending the Muslim community in any way.

Also, more than 80% of our parliamentarians have never experienced Muslim gangs with all its ugly manifestations. A great majority of them haven‘t even been raised in Oslo or any large European city with small but dominant Muslim minorities. They usually move to Oslo as adults and settle in the non-Muslim areas of the city. Our parliamentarians and media are completely unplugged from reality, they don‘t know what‘s going on or they don‘t want to know. On the other hand, the new generations that have experienced this development the last two decades are all urban, young individuals under 30-35 years. I‘m quite sure the majority of them now vote the Progress Party, Norway‘s only anti- immigration party. Several statistics indicate that indigenous Europeans in Muslim dominated areas oppose mass Muslim immigration.

Oslo used to be a peaceful city. Thanks to the Norwegian cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regime they have transformed my beloved city into a broken city, a bunkered society, a multiculturalist shit hole where no one is safe anymore, to use blunt language.

The following is an overview of experiences I have had during my youth in Oslo. I‘ve ―only‖ experienced 8 assaults, attempted robberies and multiple threats. I‘ve never actually been severely ravaged, robbed or beaten my Muslims (a broken nose is the worst thing that occurred) but I know more than 20 people who have. I know at least 2 girls that have been raped my Muslims and I am familiar with two more cases in my broader network (1 gang rape). One girl though was cut badly in the face by Muslims. As such, I guess I should feel lucky or privileged. I live in Oslo West far away from the nearest Muslim enclave as more or less all of them are localised on Oslo East. There is little difference in their level of aggressiveness among the various Muslim groups, regardless if they are from Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco or Albania.

I do, however, acknowledge that only a small proportion of Muslims are so called "Jihadi youth" but this argument is defeated by the mere fact that the same thing can be said about the Taliban in Pakistan. The Taliban only makes out 1-3% of the population, yet they have caused a civil war. It is apparent that dhimmitude and a bunkered society is the new reality as long as Islam (and individual Muslims) are allowed to move freely in our societies. Our major cities will remain "broken" as long as multiculturalism is allowed to be the prevalent ideology, as long as cultural Marxists are allowed to set the agenda.

15 years – (when I was 15, time: 20.00) - Attempted robbery by Pakistani gang outside a concert. Luckily for me I knew a hardcore Pakistani thug (from the Pakistani A gang in Oslo) who told them I was under his protection. There have been approximately 10 other threatening situations where me and my friends were unharmed.

16 years – (Time: 16.30) - Assault – an older and much stronger/bigger Pakistani hit me without provocation in front of Majorstuenhuset. Apparently, he wanted to subdue me in front of my "friend" Arsalan who apparently had told him to do it. This concluded, for my part, my friendship with him and I re-connected with my old friends after this incident. However, this restricted my territorial freedoms, as I was no longer under the protection of the Oslo Ummah. From now on we would have to arm ourselves whenever we went to parties in case Muslim gangs showed up and we usually chose to stay in our neighbourhoods‘ on Oslo West.

17 years – (Time: 01.30) - Attempted assault and robbery - Us 2, them 3: 2 Pakistanis and 1 wannabe-Pakistani. We were actually heading home after being on the same party together. The wannabe-Pakistani suddenly turned on me without provocation and rallied the other two. Me and my friend had to run as we were unarmed at the time.

17 years – (Time: 23.30) - Assault and attempted robbery - Us 10, them 12 Moroccans. Location Tåsen, Oslo.

They were robbing (collecting Jizya) and beating local kafr/Norwegian kids at Tåsen center, they had done this on numerous occasions. They didn‘t live there but travelled to Tåsen from a Muslim enclave on Oslo East. I was at a party on Tåsen when we heard they had just beaten one of my friends younger brothers. We went there to chase them away from the neighbourhood. They had weapons, we had weapons. I was hit with a billiard pool in the head. Result of the fight: we made a deal with them, they promised they would never return and harass the Tåsen youngsters again.

18 years – (Time: 01.00) - Assault by Pakistani gang outside a club. A friend of mine was attacked without provocation by a gang of 6. I told him to run as they outnumbered us. Result: broken nose.

19 years – (Time: 02.00) - Attempted robbery by two Pakistanis at a bar. I had my friends nearby so I told them to fuck off or I we would bash their faces in (an effective psychological deterrent, most Pakistani thugs have a Neanderthal mentality so to show weakness will only invite to abuse etc;). Pakistanis are usually a lot more cowardly than Northern African Muslims though (I wouldn‘t have tried that strategy on Moroccans‘).

20 years – (Time: 22.00) - Threats and attempted assault - Us 3, them 4. Me and two friends were about to order at Burger King when a Norwegian girl crossed the food queue. As she went by she pushed me, saying; "MOVE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!". Needless to say, I was very surprised and I managed to stutter the words; "suck my dick, bitch", while perplexed. She ran over to her friends, 4 Moroccans‘ sitting at a corner and just waiting to pick a fight... They approached me (I was alone at the time) and told me they were going to "fuck me up severely" as soon as I left Burger King. I had tear gas on me, as I always have when going out late. However, I decided to go with the "deterrent strategy", so I called my two friends, Erling, a relatively small adopted Columbian, and his friend a relatively big Christian Ugandan. Having established my deterrent, and obviously not interested in fighting these savages (as is my policy with all Muslim bullies under normal circumstances), I went ahead and started negotiating, offering the "Muslim whore" an apology. End result was, we left as a group and had the Muslims follow us until we managed to lose them. The most annoying things about the encounter is that you really can‘t control when you bump into them again. Luckily, a majority of Muslim savages like them live on the East side of town.

21 years – (Time: 01.30) - Attempted assault and robbery - Us 4, them 4. Me and my best friends; Peter, Marius and Martin were out clubbing and drinking. This was actually the first time I smoked (normal cigarettes) and I fainted for a few seconds outside a store not far from the club. This was the first and only time I have fainted in my life btw, lol. Apparently, 4 Albanian Muslims saw this incident and figured I would make an easy target. All 4 of them approached me and tried to rob me. At that time my friends just arrived and they started to threaten them as well as one of them pulled out a knife.

Obviously, we didn‘t want to fight these savages, so we said we would take out some cash for them in an ATM in the nearby Burger King. We called the police as soon as we entered. However, this was Saturday night so we had no luck getting a response. We ordered some food and stayed at Burger King for a little more than an hour, at which point the Muslim savages had left (probably busy robbing other victims).

While I am not so gullible as to take ABB's autobiography as gospel, it's also obvious that he has neither the literary talent nor the imagination to invent these squalid realities.

Robert Spencer and his ilk also need to face another obvious fact: none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the Koran, "jizya" or no "jizya." I've been relieved of my lunchmoney. Who in America hasn't? I'm pretty sure none of the collectors had any familiarity with the suras whatsoever. This is not Muslim behavior. It is human behavior.

The trouble with Oslo isn't that the Norwegian Workers' Party has imported a Muslim underclass - it's that the Norwegian Workers' Party has imported an underclass. If for whatever reasons they'd chosen their immigrants from Papua New Guinea, perhaps Robert Spencer could have become an expert in penis sheaths, noting that all the offenders had wrapped their junk in banana leaves. Instead of converting them to Christianity, he'd want to convert them to underwear. Perhaps not every population can be civilized; every population can be feralized.

It is impossible to separate Breivik the "hip-hop" Norwigga tagger from Breivik the "Knight Templar." In both we see characteristic fauna of our era, one common and the other rare, both absolutely normal. If you ask a lot of people to be angry about the Bronxification of East Oslo, someone is going to act on it. The goal of trumpeting is to obtain power, and the means of power is violence. To denounce violence is to renounce power. To renounce power is to surrender.

So it simply won't wash for conservatives to describe this act as "senseless" or "random" or "inexplicable," like all those inexplicable liberal-inspired terrorists. (Much if not most black-on-white violence in America is best characterized as terrorism, because it proceeds from military, not avaricious or psychopathic, motives.) Nor will it work to rue injustice but suggest that, like Christ, Christians should turn the other cheek. Christ was Christ, perhaps, but humans are humans. And besides, didn't he bring not peace but a sword?

Rather, a right that seeks to win power must accept that violence is a normal, essential and ineradicable aspect of human psychology, as it accepts every other reality. Fantasy is a luxury the powerless cannot afford. Denouncing violence in general is either supine (if sincere) or mendacious (if insincere), and both are equally fantastic and unaffordable. If you demand power, you are demanding violence, since power constitutes the ability to execute violence. If you are not demanding power, what are you demanding? Why are you even talking?

But there is a difference between right and left - and it's just not that the left is in and the right is out. The right stands for order and the left for chaos. Violence is essential to both - but certainly not the same kind of violence.

The left (hilariously still named the "Norwegian Workers' Party" - they should really update their name to match their clients) brought "A-Gjengen" and "B-Gjengen" to Oslo. And the right? There is no Norwegian right. Just Norwegian gangsters, a C-gang if you will. An ABB knows Oslo needs order, but all he can think to do about it is a spectacular gang massacre - basically a giant drive-by. In his heart he's still a tagger. And a Robert Spencer? Tom Paine with a tame Koran. Leftism has devoured our entire civilization, which exists only in its belly.

Can violence bring order to Oslo? Or to Baltimore? Nothing is more certain. Will it? Well, I hope so. I'm not too optimistic at present. Will it involve the mother of all drive-bys? It most certainly will not.

Right-wing terrorism as folk activism

2011-07-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

[Edit: I've improved this post to make it even worse Stalinist linkbait.]

I won't waste time condemning Anders Behring Breivik for being a political murderer. Our society, right or left, has no standing whatsoever for condemning political murder. Che murdered over twice as many of his political enemies. He's a hero to millions.

No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't even make triple digits. ABB is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet. Besides just killing people with bombs, here's the sort of thing "armed struggle" meant to St. Mandela:

On the record, I note, St. Mandela "opposed" the ANC necklacing of "traitors." No - possessed of infinite reserves of human compassion, this living symbol of man's global unity favored a far milder punishment. He just wanted to cut off their noses. Do you need a picture of that, too?

If you ask me to condemn them both, because terrorism is inherently wrong, I can respect you, though I may ask you to think harder. (I don't think terrorism is inherently wrong. I just think right-wing terrorism is inherently wrong.) If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck.

Brown Scare! Brown Scare! The Brown Scare is on! But then again, when hasn't it been on? Certainly not since your grandpa was a little boy. Can't we get another two minutes' hate for the Nazi Peril? The world progressive community had sure as hell better hope it can raise a new global hard-on over Anders Behring Breivik. If you have Claudia Schiffer on your lap and a gram of Viagra up your nose, and you're still limp, age has finally defeated you.

Age has certainly not defeated us. So as an act of collective defiance, we have to start by praising ABB, in every way we possibly can. What ways are those? Not many.

We can note the only thing he didn't screw up. At least he shot communists, not Muslims. He gored the matador and not the cape. While still basically animal behavior (especially when it comes to the 15-year-olds - is there a 15-year-old in the world who isn't a communist?), it's more than I'd expect from a rogue Gates of Vienna commenter. We should also praise ABB for his spectacular stupidity, which I'd like to think can be a learning experience for the entire right - from Instapundit to Stormfront. You can relax now, because we won't be praising him again.

But we do need to remember that terrorism, left or right, is a legitimate military tactic. Just as a nation that idolizes Che has no genuine moral grounds for condemning ABB, a nation that annihilated Dresden has no genuine moral grounds for condemning OBL. We're not exactly history's pure and precious little snowflake.

For instance, the entire political landscape of postwar France - closely allied, of course, to the great and good of the noble, innocent, grieving Norwegian Labor Party - was created by the 10,000 murders of the épuration sauvage. If you lived in France in 1945 and your political record was anywhere to the right of Larry Beria, you had a pretty good chance of being murdered. Your murderers had zero chance of being punished. Indeed Norway had its own purge, though nowhere near so bloody. I've never seen any liberal pundit shed so much as a milliliter of sterile saline for these events. When they start, I might begin to take their deep moral convictions a little more seriously.

Terrorism - the random killing of defenseless civilians - is an act of war. It needs to be judged by the laws of war, not the laws of peace. ABB's personal hero was the Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus. Would Max Manus have hesitated to single-handedly wipe out a Nazi Party youth camp? Would Norwegian history books describe him as a hero for doing so? Of course they would. It is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene.

Anders Behring Breivik made war on communist Norway, just as Max Manus made war on fascist Norway, just as Osama bin Laden made war on imperial America, just as Nelson Mandela made war on apartheid South Africa. Terrorism is the normal mode of warfare in our delightful post-WWII utopia. That is, it is the most common way to use force to achieve political objectives. Condemning terrorism, as such, is in every case retarded. You are simply condemning the 20th century. Fine, but where does this leave you?

So let's judge ABB - but let's judge him by the natural and historical laws of war. Ironically, by the (pre-20C) laws of war, ABB does quite poorly.

Whose terrorism is more morally legitimate? The right-wing terrorism of ABB, or the left-wing terrorism of OBL? As a rightist, I am obviously far more in sympathy with the goals of ABB. But by the natural law of war, which no man made and no man can unmake, 9/11 was far more legitimate as a military act than the Utoye massacre. ABB is worse than OBL.

Why? Because the law of war is that all war's carnage, whether it affects "soldiers" or "civilians" (a completely arbitrary distinction) is legitimate if and only if it serves a military purpose. What is a military purpose? Since the purpose of all war is the transfer of political power, a military purpose is a political purpose.

Slaughter that serves no purpose is sadistic, insane, terrible. Slaughter for purpose is the very nature of war, and cannot be separated from it. Since right-wing terrorism does not work, it is illegitimate as a tactic of war. Since left-wing terrorism does work, it is perfectly legitimate. Thus, OBL is legitimate and ABB is not.

Islamic terrorism (which is in every case left-wing - as you can see every time Osama quotes Chomsky) is legitimate because it's effective. It's effective because its political result is to expand the political power and privilege of Muslims and their progressive sponsors. Right-wing terrorism is illegitimate because it's ineffective. It's ineffective because its political result is to contract the political freedom and influence of conservatives (extremist or moderate).

If it was militarily possible to free Norway from Eurocommunism by killing a hundred communists, or a thousand communists, or ten thousand communists, we might have an interesting moral debate over whether this butcher's bill was worth paying. Since it is not possible to free Norway from communism by killing a hundred communists, ie, roughly 0.01% of all the communists in Norway, leaving the other 99.99% with a permanent raging hard-on, no debate is possible. The verdict is clear: illegitimate, ineffective and wrong. I condemn Anders Behring Breivik! So there.

Of course, there are plenty of historical contexts in which right-wing terrorism did work - for instance, Germany in the 1920s. In these contexts, it was legitimate. Conversely, left-wing terrorism was ineffective in the fascist nations, and hence illegitimate.

Why does left-wing terrorism work, and right-wing terrorism not? As Carl Schmitt explained in Theory of the Partisan, terrorist, guerrilla or partisan warfare is never effective on its own. While an effective military strategy, it is only effective as one fork of a pincer attack. The terrorist succeeds when, and only when, he is allied to what Schmitt called an interested third party - either a military or political force.

Left-wing terrorism succeeds as the violent arm of a political assault that would probably be overwhelming in any case. In every case, the terrorist plays Mutt in a Mutt-and-Jeff act. Right-wing terrorism in the modern world is cargo-cult terrorism: Mutt without Jeff. Indeed, in historical cases where right-wing terrorism has been successful, in every case we see it aligned with powerful forces within the state. Right-wing terrorism worked in Weimar Germany, for instance, or prewar Japan, because it aligned with fascist conspiracies in the security forces. Somehow I don't see a lot of that in 2011 Norway.

Thus, we note that there are two responses to terrorism: the natural response and the unnatural response. The natural response is to take revenge on the terrorist and everyone even remotely resembling him. If he is a Muslim, the natural response is to chastise the Muslims. When Grynzspan, a Jew, kills the German vom Rath, the German people must chastise the Jews. And, of course, when a right-wing piece of filth slaughters the cream of the Norwegian Komsomol, all racists and reactionaries are automatically suspect.

The unnatural response - which will not happen by itself, but can be made to happen by a sufficiently powerful psychological-warfare machine - is to look instead at the grievances of the attacker. After all, no one commits terrorism unless he has some complaint. No complaint - no terrorism. Thus while the Nazi response to the terrorism of Grynzspan is to collectively punish the Jews, the Atlantic response to the terrorism of Grynzspan (ineffective and thus illegitimate) is to attribute it to the injustices suffered by the Jews. This of course is also our response to the terrorism of Mandela (effective and thus legitimate).

Actually, there was no nuance at all in the response of the great and the good, the same wise and trusted organs now deploring ABB with the sound of a thousand jet engines, to Nelson Mandela. There's no room for nuance when a saint is in the room. But St. Osama is a bridge too far.

So in typical cases, when the cause is good but the means a little too gory, the interested third party of a successful terrorist campaign adopts a strategy of dualism. Here is our Mutt-and-Jeff act: the unnatural response. We can always tell a Mutt-and-Jeff strategy because Mutt and Jeff have the same demands. Mutt tells you to satisfy these demands, or die. Jeff tells you to satisfy these demands, to "take the wind out of Mutt's sails." Also, Jeff and Mutt are frequently found at the same parties, enjoying the hell out of one another's company.

Thus, Islamic terrorism is productive, because it results in increasing communal deference to the Islamic community and its progressive allies. Fascist terrorism is counterproductive, because it results in increasing communal intolerance toward the fascist community - which of course has no conservative allies.

Rather, the community - whose information source consists almost exclusively of progressive organs - adopts a monist approach, ascribing guilt by association to everyone even remotely resembling a fascist. Ie, everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. Since the monist response is the natural response, it is not at all difficult to orchestrate. The story writes itself.

This gets us to the essence of what's wrong with ABB's thinking. The error of ABB goes far beyond his decision to run wild with a Glock. This is just his specific error.

His general error is what Patri Friedman calls folk activism - a broad pattern of ineffective or counterproductive political action which extends across the entire right-wing spectrum, from moderate libertarians to hardcore neo-Nazis. It's not just that running wild with a Glock is stupid. Almost everything the right does is stupid. Very few rightists are running wild with a Glock, but most are in some way or other guilty of folk activism.

Why did ABB think right-wing terrorism could work? Because ABB grew up in a leftist world, he thinks like a leftist. His heroes are leftist heroes - Max Manus, not Vidkun Quisling. Terrorism works for leftists - and so do many other forms of democratic activism.

Terrorism is anarchism: a shattering of order. Is there such a thing as right-wing anarchism? Of course not: the concept is retarded. If the word "right" means anything, its goal is not to shatter order, but impose it.

Who governs Norway? The Norwegian Labor Party? If an ABB wanted to accomplish something useful, he shouldn't have decimated the Norwegian Labor Party. Rather, he should have joined the Norwegian Labor Party. After all, Chinese communism became fascist - why can't Norwegian communism? ABB could have been Norway's Deng Xiaoping, not its Timothy McVeigh. That's the difference between action and folk activism.

The thoughtful people at Document.no (who should move to the US just for their graphic design) have assembled Anders Behving Breivik's comments, which Google Translate does a pretty decent job on. Obviously, Herr Breivik's problem started with his own lying eyes:

Speaking of stubborn multiculturalists. I remember a story from the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten for approx. 6 months ago very good (I find, unfortunately, not this).

I can remember that it was a school in the City Center East, in a class where there was only a single Norwegian boy again (the majority were Muslims). Most others had taken their children out of school. The mother of this boy was, of course, a hardcore Marxist who died and life was to prove that multiculturalism and Islam will be functioning. She refused to move to another area or take him out of school. Her son would prove once and for all that Islamophobes on documents and other cultural conservatives were wrong and that it WAS possible.

The poor boy was harassed for several years until satisfactory one day he began to self harm. He told his marxistmor that he wanted to die. Only after this the mother realized that she had been wrong. The result was that they moved to another neighborhood and changing schools.

So one should not underestimate the fact how "hardcore" some of these kulturmarxistene is. I'm sure some of these actually had sacrificed their own children just to prove this sick Marxist theory.

But there are, after all, some justice up in it all. The positive for us, the cultural conservatives, is that we are among the first to protect our children, we move to safe areas where our children do not need to live in dhimmitude.

It is often the children of the boundless naive and Marxist kids who end up as victims. The irony here is that those who survive with psyche intact ends up as a dedicated cultural conservatives or to with which etnosentrerte of great frustration for their kulturmarxistiske or humanist parents:))

I have left Google's delightful Norwegianisms intact. I'm sure you can translate them.

Note this emphasis on victimology. ABB is following the exact script of left-wing terrorism. Why does he commit his bloody deeds? Because he is a victim. He is persecuted. Personally, in fact:

Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment of Muslim youth. I myself am born and raised here and chose out of necessity to the friendships / alliances with A and B team to move freely. The alternative is that you stick to your neighborhood or west side. I know of hundreds of incidents where non-Muslims were robbed, beaten and harassed by Muslim gangs.

My friend aged 12-17 was Pakistan that I was one of the protected sphere "potatoes" who had protection. But I saw hypocrisy at close range and was disgusted. Muslim gangs have / could devastate free (racism / Jihad behavior), while all attempts "potatoes" do / did to make the same thread are systematically stamped on racism and deconstructed by the local police.

Well, as Leonard Pitts put it, cry me a river!

Of course ABB and his fellow "potatoes" (perhaps any Nordic readers can enlighten us on the meaning - is this Norwegian for "wigga"?) are victims. When your country is conquered by ruthless communists, which import a new people to oppress the old one, you don't think you're going to be robbed, beaten and harassed in your own former capital city? Hypocrisy is a prerogative of the rulers. Submission is a duty of the ruled. Bend over, Norwegians.

Don't forget, the British were the first to violate Norway's sovereignty in 1940. Was Norway liberated? Sure - she was liberated by German fascism in 1940, then liberated back by Allied communism in 1945. Arguably, Norway has been a tool of British diplomacy since the Royal Navy liberated her from Denmark. Norway is the bargirl of Scandinavia. She's so liberated, she's lubricated. Just slap her butt and she presents obligingly. It's only a question of who will liberate her next - the Russians or the Chinese. I'm sure she can't wait.

What ABB is doing here is, in plain non-Google English, whining. Whining is the act either of a slave, or a bitch. The slave whines to his master. Master, the overseer is beating me! And so, the protected minority whines to the communist judge. Whitey call' me a bad name! But ABB would be a free man - who, then is he whining to? He's whining to nobody. He's whining because, having grown up on heroic Nelson Mandela, he thinks he can free himself and his nation by a combination of (a) whining and (b) mass murder.

The entire spectrum of right-wing folk activism, from pointless whining through spectacular terrorism, is what Roissy would call "beta." It is strictly man-bitch behavior. Look, if you think Norway should be ruled by patriotic, axe-wielding, Odin-worshipping Vikings rather than Euroquisling kulturmarxistene, I agree! A gelded and humiliated Norway, mentally sodomized by her raceless, epicene internationalist masters as she gradually morphs into Somalia North, is a pathetic and sickening spectacle. Haakon the Fairhaired could not possibly approve.

What would Haakon the Fairhaired do about it? That would depend on whether he had any viable options, or didn't. If he could do something that worked, he would. If not, he wouldn't. He certainly was neither a man-bitch, nor a mass-murderer.

What strikes the reactionary observer about all this beta folk-activism, harmless or lethal, is its enormous intellectual timidity, to the point of cowardice. Do you want to turn back the clock in Norway? If so, why are you stuck in the 20th century? Do you hate communism? Why are all your models for dissent and change and rebellion straight out of the communist playbook?

A restoration of traditional, pre-liberal or even pre-Christian Norway is a herculean task of social and political engineering. It cannot possibly be carried on without absolute sovereignty. Indeed, the task of eradicating liberal institutions and liberal culture in Norway, though tremendous (and itself requiring absolute sovereignty), pales before the much more difficult task of recreating a genuine Norwegian society that isn't a ridiculous theme-park joke.

The idea that any incremental political change, achieved by any sort of "activism" (from mass whining to mass murder), can advance this project in any way at all, is inherently retarded. It's as if you wanted to replace your horse with a BMW, so you start by cutting off one of your horse's hooves and whittling it into a crude, wheel-like disc.

Rather, any significant regime change can happen only in one step. The stable must become a garage. There is no way to have a combined stable and garage, which contains a means of transportation which is half a horse and half a BMW. There is no way to have a Norway which is half communist and half Crusader, let alone 99.9% communist and 0.1% Crusader.

Furthermore, it's very hard to imagine any successful regime change which involves killing, imprisoning, deporting or otherwise liquidating the former ruling elite. You'd certainly have to bump off a lot more Young Pioneers if you want to eradicate Norwegian communism this way. I will certainly concede that it is theoretically possible to conduct regime change via aristocide, if you're going to be really thorough about the matter. But think of the impact on the gene pool. Does Norway really need a Pol Pot?

Rather, if you're going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you'll need their children. Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don't slaughter the youth camp - recruit the youth camp.

After all, how in 2011 can anyone genuinely, truly, believe in "kulturmarxisme"? They think they do - just like that pretty girl thinks she's looking for a sensitive, new-age guy. But actually what brought the cream of young Norway to Utoye was the blind, eternal human quest for good old political power. Can you find a way to offer them that? Haakon the Fairhaired would...

A century of academic sovereignty

2011-07-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Frederick T. Gates, chairman, General Education Board, "Occasional Letter No. 1", 1906:

In the state of Wisconsin, now perhaps the best governed of all our states, the University writes the laws that go on the statute books, University professors guide and control the main departments of state administration and inquiry; there is no limit to the financial resources which a grateful people are placing at the disposal of learning, thus consecrated to the service of the commonwealth.

Our more ancient seats of learning pride themselves justly on their antiquity, on their dignity, on the reverence in which they are held, on the great names that have been and are associated with them. But it is yet theirs to reign over empires now undreamed; to inherit a kingdom that has awaited them from the foundation of the world; to write the laws of obedient states; to know the love of a reverent, grateful, and generous people; to
"Scatter plenty o'er a smiling land
And read their history in a nation's eyes."

No shit, n--a. Could a n--a make this shit up?

No limit to the financial resources? Write the laws of obedient states? F--n' A, n--a! You can sign this n--a up for that. N--a shakes with Rockafella makes history like Nelson Mandela.

Taken out of context? Au contraire, mon frere. There is no context. The "Letter" ends here. The entire piece is delightfully freckled with cowpies in this vein - many with a thick frost of early hippie-Jesus. Read it and grimace with sheer bruxist mirth. Oh, and if you think these n--az didn't matter? Yo, n--a, you wrong.

Slow history extravaganza

2011-06-09T03:54:00.000-07:00

(I apologize for the hiatus. As usual, I've been way too busy with the engineering track. The rotary jumbulator now rotates fully, but small sparks keep appearing in the charged ion duct - which of course precludes any activation outside the facility.)

So why not grapple with some slow history? Slow history, which is a lot like slow food but cheaper, is no more than the habit of reading old books, whole and unframed. By "old" we generally mean pre-WWII, or better yet pre-1923 (the copyright cutoff date). By "unframed" we mean: take the work seriously, without "deconstructing" or patronizing.

Frankly: slow history is cool. Isn't Mark Zuckerberg cool? Mr. Zuckerberg is taking slow food seriously. This year, the only meat he'll eat is meat he's killed himself. While morally admirable in every way, this may conflict with your renter's agreement. So why not take slow history seriously instead - and kill your own past?

Indeed the past is quite literally dead. But might it not be listening? You can say one of two things to the past. You can read about the past, or you can read the past. You don't think it sees you, but maybe it does. Do you want to piss it off?

When you read about the past, you say to the past: Past, I despise you. I want to read about you - to remind me how much better my world is without you. And of course, you make a nice undergraduate exercise for training future lawyers and MBAs.

When you read the writers of the past, you tell them: Past, I admire and cherish you. I want to meet you, answer your questions, fill you in on the whole wild world of 2011. I can't do that. But I can read you - and I promise to treat you with the same respect I expect from my peers.

Describing practitioners of both these arts as "historians" is like classifying muggers and policemen as "crime professionals." Indeed if you have a decent 21st-century education, you've spent time enough in the tutelage of these muggers of the past, for there are more history professionals than ever before. (In fact our own era has its policemen as well - few and far between. You won't run into them by accident.)

You think of a hamburger as something you get at McDonald's. Your Big Mac is made of actual beef, no doubt, from actual cows. There is nothing really wrong with it, besides the fact that it's been industrially processed into culinary oblivion.

Chez Panisse will also serve you a hamburger. The difference between fast history and slow history is the difference between a Big Mac, and a grass-fed Niman Ranch with a hand-cut square of aged raw-milk white cheddar. The former is certainly more efficient. You can learn all the beefy and factual facts you care to absorb from textbooks, Wikipedia, and even academic sources. Fast history, like McDonald's, is a magnificent production. All we're saying is that McDonald's is not, and will never be, Chez Panisse.

Is UR Chez Panisse? Chez Panisse is pretty expensive. UR is free, if only because we can just link straight to our beef. And in concert (but not collaboration) with the admirable, if perhaps misguided, humanity-lovers who scanned these works in bulk, we are proud to present our first three Limited Edition Slow History Action Paks, for your summer beach enjoyment - each available exclusively to UR readers at no cost whatsoever.

Our first Action Pak is the only one we've presented so far. This one-step, high-power Pak, ideal for the younger and more flexible mind, delivers a huge triple dose of hardcore 19th-century reaction directly to the upper brainstem. Users, who should not be over the age of 45, are warned to allow two or three days for a complete recovery.

Naturally, we've dubbed this Action Pak, our original and still most popular, the Imperial Reaction Instant Red-Pill Super Victorian Headcharge. The Super Victorian Headcharge contains (in this order):

Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government (1886)

James Anthony Froude, The Bow of Ulysses (1888)

Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)

Warning! The Headcharge contains the maximum legal dose of undiluted High Victorian reactionary thought. If your usual fare is, say, Instapundit, sip slowly and with caution. If you are still, God help us, a "progressive," God may be able to help you - I'm not sure I can. Try the medicine anyway, if only because you have so little to lose. Even for the prepared, these are difficult works - especially the last.

(Completion of all three works in the Super Victorian Headcharge qualifies you automatically for membership in the exclusive Froude Society - pronounced "Frood." Contrary to some reports, the FS is not a "paramilitary cult," nor do its small decorative armbands constitute any kind of "uniform." It's true that we'd prefer a dictatorship - but who wouldn't these days?)

If you're not ready for a Super Victorian Headcharge - or if you loved it, and wouldn't mind a little top-off - we've expanded our programming to create, for the first time ever, two new Extended Play Slow History Supplemental Action Paks. Despite the name, there is no prerequisite for these experiences, each of which is complete and satisfying in and of itself.

We call our first Extended Pak the Old America Quantum Tourist Psycho Railroad. Profoundly steampunk in every way, the Psycho Railroad slams you into Victorian America with three hardened European travelers, two British and one French. Ride the Psycho Railroad! Oysters served at every hour! You've never taken a trip like this before:

Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America (1859) [skip Canada, it's boring]

George Steevens, Land of the Dollar (1898)

Paul Bourget, Outre-Mer (1895)

Don't be afraid to visit Old America - but note that slow history is not always "safe for work." There's a big difference between a period book club and a reactionary sabotage squad. Make sure you and your friends stay on the right side of that line.

Finally, we fear some UR readers have a rebellious bent. Just for them, we've created the Varina's Revenge Sith Civil War Confederate Mindbomb - our first tentative step into this most divisive of American conflicts.

Deo vindice! Now you too, regardless of the premasticated opinions with which McDonald's once supplied you, can grow and learn and change, and become a 21st-century post-Confederate (what separates a post-Confederate from a neo-Confederate? That he gets his Confederacy from Google Books, not the Dukes of Hazzard) in the privacy of your own home.

And private is exactly the way to keep it! The Confederate Mindbomb, like all our products, ships in an unmarked package for absolute discretion. (Again, for advertised results, always read our carefully engineered selections in the order specified - this is especially important with the Mindbomb.)

Charles Francis Adams Jr., Shall Cromwell Have a Statue? (1902)

Adm. Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat (1869)

James Redpath, The Roving Editor (1859)

Being Extended, each of UR's new Action Paks ships with a special Extra Credit Prix-Fixe Dessert, which will add additional flavor but can be skipped by readers on the go. Dessert for the Old America Quantum Tourist Psycho Railroad is Moisei Ostrogorskiy, Democracy and the Party System in the United States (1910). Dessert for the Varina's Revenge Sith Civil War Confederate Mindbomb is Nehemiah Adams, A South-Side View of Slavery (1860).

Readers should use the space below to discuss these fine works - or even suggest their own alternatives. Stick to the format, please.

USG: more Russian than the Tsar, more Muslim than Osama

2011-05-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Woodrow Wilson, April 2, 1917:

The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a league of honour.

B.H. Obama, May 2, 2011:

As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not –- and never will be -– at war with Islam. I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.

Of course I need not remind the reader that the international community is also more German than Hitler, more Egyptian than Mubarak, and more Libyan than Qadhafi. And that's not even to mention that there's more Ivoirité in Hillary's nail polish than Laurent Gbagbo's whole body.

Who says USG rules the world? USG is the world. Stand by for more peace and human dignity. Once in a while you've got to admit that Unitarianism is just fuckin' awesome.

Carlyle and Froude on monarchy and religion

2011-04-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

From Historical Sketches of Notable Persons in the Reigns of James I and Charles I (a manuscript recovered and edited by Carlyle's nephew, Alexander):

Those dreadful Overbury-Somerset affairs being well over, and the parties either hanged or lodged in the Tower, his Majesty thinks he will relieve his royal heart by a bit of good public speaking. He proceeds, on the 20th of June, 1616, to the Star Chamber, and to the assembled Peers and Judges there pronounces with a most earnest face, and energetic Northern accent of voice, his world-famous 'Discourse in the Star Chamber'; -- intimating to all ranks of persons in this country how their respective duties are to be done.

As a universal Brood-hen and most provident assiduous Clucker, does this great Monarch gather the three Nations under his wings, and cluck-cluck to them: lulling, admonishing, caressing, reproaching them. He thinks, after these commotions, it will have a good effect in composing the general mind a little. A kinder heart beats not in any man or clucker; think also what a flashing fury there is, should danger, disobedience, or any devilry occur! A most vigilant, vehement, Royal Clucker, rolling large eyes on every side of him; coercing, compescing; ready, if need be, to fly out in flashes of fury, with his feathers up, and voice at a mere screech! Dread Sovereign! For we are an old and experienced King. And consider, Master Brook, whether it be a light matter to lead some millions of people, and be clucker over them?

This world-famous Discourse can still be read in King James's Works; but I do not much advise the general reader to try it. Heaven knows, the British Nation did and does ever need to be admonished, rebuked, guided forward by some King! Some greatest man, who, with gold crown on his head and bodyguard round him, or totally without any such appendage and mark of recognition, is King of the country; is, I say, and remains King, the other King so-called being merely one of shreds and patches, with much broken meat, expensive cast apparel, and waste revenue flung to him, but with no real authority in this world or in any other,--a Morrice-dance King, most beautiful to the flunky; most tragic, almost frightful to every thinking heart.

The peculiarity of this King James is that he assumes the part of a real King, not in the least suspecting that he has become a sham-King. Hence our laughter at his cluck-clucking, which were otherwise very venerable. Nowadays your Sham-king knows his trade too well: it has been followed for above two hundred years now, and he ought to know it a little.

Make that four hundred, or so. I wrote to Larry Auster:

Is not this passage all that needs to be said of your Dead Island? Which suffers (along with the rest of the world) one and only one disease, kinglessness--of which all other pathologies are no more than symptoms.

It is possible to be kingless without a Sham-King. But it takes more work. Our presidency serves more or less the same function--providing the necessary symbol of executive authority, to conceal the fact that the reality has disappeared (there is nothing genuinely executive about our "executive branch"). The Hanoverian dynasty is remarkable, though, in that its monarchs have been shams from beginning to end, with perhaps a minor exception in George III's attempts at a king's party.

What do you think Americans respond to in "The Donald" and Gov. Christie? To the obvious kinginess of these figures. Supreme personal authority, generally male, is a normal human function and one we recognize instinctively. The job of King does not exist, at least not in the public sector, but the Trumps and Christies come as close to it as possible and are clearly biologically suited for the position.

Thus the genuine enthusiasm for these figures, who alas, win or lose, will never enjoy a fraction of the old Plantagenet, Tudor or Stuart royal prerogative. A true King could still save England, I think, or any of her far-flung children...

Froude, hunting the Bow of Ulysses in old Cuba, gives past a peek at present:

Don G--- had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own neck.

But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred years is accomplishing much in that direction.

I found myself arguing with Don G--- that if Charles V and Philip II were to come back to this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought against the movement, Charles V in his cabinet and Erasmus in his closet, had seen that it could not rest; there that it was the cradle of a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of Europe would be flung into the crucible.

Under that organisation human nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England. The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position, which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a common level -- a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom; and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a little higher than the apes.

This was the aspect in which the world of the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of Alva. From the Grand Captain to Señor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Doré, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;' from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V, after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change had been really for the better.

It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands, produces now nothing higher, nothing better, than the Protestant. Human systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force is exhausted.

The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson, were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed; but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty; and confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity struggles on as well as it can, all things considered, respectably enough in its chrysalis condition, the old wings gone, the new wings that are to be (if we are ever to have another set) as yet imprisoned in their sheath.

Poor Froude! Poor us. "Not of baseness or badness" - no. Not yet. Not in 1898, anyway. Not, at least, by comparison. But can we conjure the Scipios and then Trajan, without seeing Heliogabalus, Caracalla, Honorius? Oh, honey, if only you knew.

Fortunately, however, I've retrieved Froude's Tudors from the howling, copyfraud-haunted bitrot wasteland of Google Books. James Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII. Knock yourselves out, kids. I myself have only read the first of these volumes, which is of course superb.

Can the bow of Ulysses be restrung? Probably not. But without the past, there is nothing.

On monetary restandardization

2011-04-21T02:00:00.000-07:00

In any economy, there exists no less than one commodity or security of inelastic volume which is overvalued due to reservation demand. Ie: one scarce good which is money.

People, I feel, are starting to understand this. A lot of people read James Grant. Grant says:

To me the gold price takes the form of a very uncomplicated formula, and all you have to do is divide one by ‘n.’ And ‘n’, I’m glad you ask, ‘n’ is the world’s trust in the institution of paper money and in the capacity of people like Ben Bernanke to manage it. So the smaller ‘n’, the bigger the price. One divided by a receding number is the definition of a bull market.

You’ll notice that this had nothing to do with security analysis. This is conceptualizing, brainstorming, nothing to do with price/earnings ratios, other valuation methods like cash flows. It is a proposition or a hypothesis on what is driving the gold market. So the gold market is necessarily a speculative piece of business. It’s not to be confused with the kind of investment that Ben Graham wrote about.

UR is much cheaper than Grant's Interest Rate Observer. We too conceptualize and brainstorm. We try to be rigorous, however, at least where rigor seems called for. We were also on this five years ago - just so ya know.

For instance: why gold? Why not silver? Or silver and gold? Or, gosh, the good old dollar? It's certainly true that Messrs. Graham and Dodd have nothing to add on the subject. But I feel we can get considerably past Mr. Grant's "uncomplicated formula" - roughly correct though it is.

Why gold, not silver? This collective choice is a standard - a persistent group decision. Why does your computer speak IP, not IPX? The Internet, or something much like it, could have been built on IPX, a perfectly good internetworking protocol. Gold works as money. So does silver. So does nicely engraved government paper. Before the 19th century, we see a patchwork of gold and silver standards around the planet. In the late 19th, gold emerges as a global monetary standard, displacing and demonetizing silver. In the 20th, paper (mostly) displaces gold.

Normal economic calculation, macro and micro, assumes a stable monetary standard. But monetary standards change. Why and when? What happens when they do? What is the effect on traditional macro indicators - interest rates, GDP, CPI?

First, let's review the basic material.

There are two schools of thought on monetary standardization. One assumes that monetary standardization is inherently a sovereign function: the monetized good in any economy is what that economy's government wants it to be. Alas, we live in an age of state-sponsored economics, whose state-sponsored economists easily assume this chartalist theory. Chartalism by definition precludes spontaneous restandardization. If the gold standard is considered, which it generally isn't, it's considered only as a policy option. A bad one, needless to say.

Economists in the Austrian tradition (ie, legitimate economists) believe that monetary standardization is a normal market process - though, like all market processes, subject to government intervention. Clearly, the market today has selected dollars (USG liabilities) as a global monetary standard. Austrians agree that dollars and other fiat currencies are money. They also agree that the omnipotent state can compel its citizens to save in fiat currency. They disagree, however, that fiat currency is in all cases compatible with a free market - especially a free market in the precious metals. So for Austrians, restandardization is not only a policy, but also an event.

It's worth arguing for a moment with the modern super-chartalists or Moslerites, who have awarded their system the pretentious caption of "Modern Monetary Theory" or "MMT." I take the acronym as a personal insult: it conflicts with my own Moldbug Monetary Theory (MMT). Indeed, the same "modern" ideas are found in the great '30s inflationists Silvio Gesell and C.H. Douglas, not to mention Attwood a century earlier - butt of John Stuart Mill's immortal essay, "The Currency Juggle." The Juggle, indeed, has never been zanier.

But every juggle is based on some fundamental truth. It's important to recognize the fundamental truth behind this new outbreak of Ezra Pound economics, which is that fiat currency is sovereign equity. Dollars are best defined as shares of stock in USG.

These shares convey no corporate control and pay no dividends, but this does not make them worthless - the same could be said of Google's A shares, or even of Delta SkyMiles. USG redeems its paper for concrete benefits at its pleasure, as with any and all equity instruments.

Even USG's "debts" (such as Treasury notes) are not debt but equity, because they are denominated in equity (dollars). A Treasury STRIP or zero-coupon bond, for instance, is a form of restricted stock - financially equivalent to a dollar with a "not valid until" date.

Thus it is sheer nonsense (as Mosler will tell you) to talk of USG being unable to repay its "debt," because its "debt" is not debt but equity. If USG had contracted to deliver 20,000 tons of gold in 2020, it would have debt. If it had contracted to deliver 20 trillion euros in 2020, it would have debt. If it had promised to wash 20 million cars, it would have debt. Its promises to deliver its own shares, however, are no more than restricted shares. Of course, any corporation may issue any number of shares at any time. No sweat!

So the reality, unbelievable as it seems, is that USG has no debt at all. (This does not mean its financial condition is healthy: it is not healthy to fund continuing operations by issuing new equity.)

That fiat currency is sovereign equity, the Moslerite gets. It is his one big hedgehog truth. But what the hedgehog misses is that the dollar is not just USG equity. It is monetized USG equity. It can lose this status - and if USG follows Mosler's advice, it probably will. Alas, this would produce substantial purchasing-power decreases in your USG securities.

Given that 30% of USG's revenue is generated by issuing new equity, the dollar operation is already pretty far into the Ezra Pound spectrum. It is the incumbent standard, however, and this represents a form of capital - one fast being dissipated. Also, not a small thing, USG is sovereign - perhaps the only true sovereign on the planet.

(USG's financial status is better than it seems, not only because its sovereignty is so secure, but also because a meaningful financial analysis of USG consolidates the entire "private" banking system onto USG's balance sheet. If the banks are (not formally, but in reality) part of the government, bank debt is government debt; your securitized mortgage is a government security, your mortgage payment is government revenue. This "private" debt is at present expanding slowly and actually contracted in 2009. On the other hand, many projected future expenditures do not appear as debt in the Z.1 report.)

Securities, sovereign or not, are just like precious metals. They can be monetized (overvalued), or demonetized (Ben Graham valued). In a sense, the naive chartalist is like the naive goldbug, who believes that gold and silver prices represent "intrinsic value." In fact we can easily imagine a pure platinum standard, under which gold and silver trade at industrial prices. Since gold and silver are already slightly monetized, we'd expect these prices to be much lower than today's.

Is USG both able and willing to force its subjects, not to mention the rest of the planet, to save in its own securities? If so, its securities will never be demonetized. If not, we must consider the possibility that Americans and/or foreigners will move their savings to another currency, such as gold. Regardless of how we calculate USG's market capitalization, at present exchange rates its total liabilities are well over a million tons of gold - 10 times as much as has ever been mined. This seems a bit rich, especially for an enterprise so deep in the red.

USG is an awesome operation. Its nuclear aircraft carriers are pimped beyond belief. Its fighter planes are the best fucking fighter planes in the world, and it owns California. Its paper is certainly not without value. But, just as with gold, we need to distinguish between the hypothetical intrinsic or "Ben Graham" price (set by non-monetary demand, and immeasurable while the good is monetized) of USG shares, and the monetary price of USG shares.

For which the denominator is, of course, gold. Anyone can practice gold accounting - whatever country they live in. How many USD do you have? How many milligrams Au does a USD run you these days? Multiply and get your net worth, in gold. It's a weight, which is actually kind of cool.

(Of course (having upgraded to gold accounting), if you keep your entire portfolio in USD - or USD-denominated securities - it may fluctuate alarmingly. And, more alarmingly, generally in a downward direction. That's a good indication that you should diversify out of this marginal and unstable soft currency. What next, naira? Baht? Imagine you're a reasonably wealthy person - a retired cardiac surgeon, for instance. Imagine you admitting to your new accountant: "Oh, yes. Of course. I keep all my money in baht." Even if you lived year-round in Chiang Mai.)

Under gold accounting, consider the effect of new dollar issuance on dollars priced in gold. In the intrinsic or "Ben Graham" analysis, issuing new shares dilutes all existing shares, while leaving the market capitalization unchanged. A share is always defined as a fraction of shares outstanding. By issuing new dollars, USG effectively expropriates existing dollar-holders, salami-style, to pay its ongoing expenditures. Ben Graham doth frown.

But this intrinsic analysis is not in fact relevant to dollar prices, because dollars are monetized. Consider a gold standard in which all gold is in a central repository, and the medium of exchange is warehouse receipts denominated in fractions of this grand vault. Now suppose the gold is radioactive; 5% of it decays every year, resulting in a corresponding decrease in industrial utility. Will this affect the monetary system (assuming it remains the standard)? Not at all, as the gold is never used. The industrial price of a monetary good is purely hypothetical. Likewise, a securities analysis of the dollar yields no relevant results.

Not that issuing new dollars does not, ceteris paribus, increase the price of goods in dollars. But this is monetary inflation, not stock dilution; it plays by different rules.

For instance, if USG delivers $5 trillion in pallets to Bill Gates, and Bill stores the cash in a hole in the ground, the Ben Graham dilution is considerable, but no price inflation whatsoever can be expected - an extreme reverse Cantillon effect. Conversely, if the $5 trillion goes to Chinese peasants with a high marginal propensity to consume, we can expect considerable increase in the prices of noodles and soy sauce, but perhaps less in luxury yachts (except inasmuch as a soy-sauce tycoon or two needs a luxury yacht).

When restandardization is a possibility, the intrinsic value of a monetary good still matters. Intrinsic value represents a put option against the horrific possibility of demonetization. Hence, if gold, at present lightly monetized, becomes fully demonetized, your gold will still make pretty earrings and excellent electrical contacts. If dollars, at present heavily monetized, demonetize, they remain Federal Brownie Points which USG may choose to redeem for valuable goods and services. Ben Graham would be happy to snap them up, of course at a low, low price, and install a new CEO who can turn the operation around.

Should this influence your desire to save in dollars and/or gold? It should, but as a relatively minor factor. The intrinsic price is generally much lower than the monetary price, for both metals and securities.

So much for dollars. Fiat currency, though historically evanescent, is no exception to any valid theory of money. But the enormous cognitive complexity of existing fiat financial systems makes for poor thought-experiments. Therefore, we'll consider only restandardization between metallic currencies. If we need to create these metals, we'll need alchemists. As a convention, we'll suppose that silver is collapsing (due to excessive alchemy), and the new standard is gold.

Let's answer the question again. Why and when does monetary restandardization happen?

Moldbug Monetary Theory (MoMT) is a post-Austrian theory of money. It is a minor refinement of Mises' standardization theory, which asserts that money is standardized by the demand for a standard medium of exchange. Rather, I assert, the demand is for a standard medium of saving.

In a pre-industrial or even pre-electronic age, it's easy to understand the standardization of media of exchange. If Thag the axe-maker wants silver for his axes and all you have is gold, you have to go fetch Drog the money-changer, which is a pain in the ass. However, on a modern (or at least future) trading platform, translating commodities is a matter of milliseconds. Thus it would appear that the demand for a monetary standard is epsilon. You can buy axes with pork bellies, no problem.

Or consider an economy in which the daily medium of exchange is silver, but all significant silver accounts are converted to gold overnight. This economy demands a very small amount of silver (petty cash) and a very large amount of gold (savings and other long-term positions). Hence, it is one in which silver is substantially demonetized - yet the medium of exchange.

But in a modern economy, anyone can save in anything. Retiring in 2030? You can put your entire retirement portfolio in 2030 pork-belly futures. If you don't want to spend your entire old age gnawing on pork bellies, you can trade these for other goods.

So it's clear why the whole world needs one standard for Internet packets. It's also clear why it might want one standard for payments. It's not as clear why it needs a standard commodity (or security) of saving.

Probably the easiest way to understand monetary standardization is to forget about Thag, Drog, and the historical origin of money, and consider only the problem of restandardization: selecting a new standard when the existing standard collapses.

The fundamental phenomenon of monetary restandardization is Mises' "flight to real values," which sounds better in German: Flucht in die Sachwerte. You will often hear of consumers buying gold, land, foreign currencies, etc, to "preserve their savings" against "inflation." This intuitive understanding, though roughly correct, must be tuned before we can proceed.

The goal of a rational economic actor in the Flucht is not in fact to preserve the purchasing power of his assets, but to maximize it. The alchemists have figured out to turn lead into silver. Silver, as a currency, is toast. You hold silver for your retirement in 2030. Run away!

You need to sell your silver and buy some new medium of saving X, which you will sell in 2030, in exchange for pizza, cruises and wine. What X should you choose? What X will get you the maximum pizza, cruises and wine? (Yes, instead of buying spot X, you should probably buy X futures maturing in 2030. You still need to choose X, as there are no pizza futures.)

The trick to understanding this decision is understanding its collective nature. Whatever X you choose, others will choose that same X. This will affect the market for X - ceteris paribus, driving up its price. If "real value" means Persian rugs, the Persian-rug market will boom. If this price increase is sustainable, you are buying into the next monetary standard. If it is not sustainable, you are buying into a bubble.

Thus, the goal of the rational actor is to choose the X that everyone else will choose (assuming they choose right), but choose it first. In standards terms: pick the winner, be an early adopter.

Value investors often describe a commodity or security already popular with other investors as a "crowded trade." This is by definition an overvalued good. When a crowded trade un-crowds, a bubble pops.

The pons asinorum to success in the Flucht is to reverse the normal investor psychology of avoiding the crowded trade, and crowd instead into the most popular trade, finding the most overvalued good. This will become the standard trade: money, which is the bubble that never has to pop. The strategy is a Nash equilibrium: the correct strategy for everyone to follow, if everyone follows it. It needs some refinements, of course, discussed below.

When the Flucht is finished and the restandardization process is complete, instead of a large number of somewhat overvalued storable commodities, we see one extremely overvalued storable commodity - again, money. As for the runners-up - goods that became overvalued, then returned to industrial price equilibrium - they look like popped bubbles. They are popped bubbles. Tulip bulbs, for instance, are almost like a monetary good, but not quite.

One metaphor for monetization is that of a storage vessel, like a battery for electricity or a tank for compressed gas. When people buy into the currency, they are charging the battery and compressing the tank. When they sell out, they are discharging the battery. When new currency is created (perhaps by alchemists) without a buy-in, the tank has sprung a leak. Etc. The charge, or the pressure, is simply the market capitalization of the entire present (and discounted future) monetary good.

But wait. Why did we have this Flucht in the first place? What happened to silver? We know intuitively - too many alchemists around. Let's try to make it a little more rigorous. What is the correct, rational, Nash-equilibrium strategy for the flight to real values?

To pick between silver and gold, we need two variables: interest rates in silver and gold. An interest rate in any good can be restated as the price of the future good in the present good - a discount rate. Most people are used to interest rates, but I like discount rates better - I feel they are more intuitive. However, the two are equivalent and can be used interchangeably.

If there is a 20% one-year interest rate in silver, you can exchange one gram of present silver for 1.2 grams of one-year-later silver, which means the price of a gram of one-year silver is 0.83 grams of present silver. Of course, there is not a single interest/discount rate within any good, but an entire yield curve - the price of four-year silver cannot be computed from the price of one-year silver. But we'll forget this important fact.

Of course, there is a discount rate in gold as well. There is also a current exchange rate between gold and silver. Since we can calculate the price of future silver in present silver, the price of present silver in present gold, and the price of future gold in present gold, we can compute a rather interesting number: the price of future gold in future silver, or future gold-silver ratio (FGSR), for any instant after now.

In short, the interest rate in each of these currencies, combined with the present exchange rate, defines a prediction market for the future exchange rate. On January 1, 2012, it is possible to compute an FGSR for January 1, 2013 - at least, if you know the current GSR, the gold lease rate, and the silver lease rate. Over time, this FGSR will converge on the actual GSR for its date. The prediction, while not guaranteed to be correct, is arbitrageable: if you know your prediction is better than the market's, you can profit.

This equivalence is an accounting identity. What do identities tell you? Murray Rothbard once parodied Irving Fisher's quantity theory of money, MV=PQ, by saying "the volume of water that hits the ground is the same as the amount of rain that falls from the sky." A statement which, while true, does not enable you to predict the weather. We know the identity; what is the causality?

The causality in this identity is particularly peculiar. The future exchange rate is decided by interest rates within each currency - the supply and demand between present and future gold, and present and future silver. Therefore, the predictors are not moneychangers; they are not people who know anything about exchange rates. Therefore, although the prediction market is correctly defined, its players are not generally informed about the question it predicts.

We'll return to this interesting paradox. But first: to decide between silver and gold, what do we need to know? Simply the ratio between gold interest rates and silver interest rates. This will tell us the extent to which silver is expected to depreciate against gold.

If gold interest rates are 20% and silver interest rates are 10%, which would you prefer to hold? Would you say: look at those juicy gold rates, I should be in gold? You mean not "hold" but "invest in" - a very different concept. If you can invest in gold at 20% or silver at 10%, whichever currency you start from, the decision is neutral: the increased return in gold will be canceled by the expected currency depreciation.

Are you willing to exchange present money for discounted future money? In other words, to lend? Bear in mind that lending does not decrease the set of currency holders. If you lend money to someone, it's because he either wants to hold it himself, or lend it to someone else who will hold it. Thus, we cannot evade the contest for holders. The true saver is the "hoarder," not the lender.

If gold rates are higher than silver, everyone should (ceteris paribus) prefer to hold gold rather than silver - simply because silver is depreciating against gold. Thus, we see exit pressure out of silver and entry pressure into gold. The silver battery is much taller than the gold battery, because silver is the monetary standard and gold is the upstart. However, money is leaking out of the silver tank into the gold tank, as rational hoarders obey incentives.

But there is worse ahead for silver, because this tendency is self-accelerating. As silver holders bail out in favor of the harder currency, gold, they create pressure on the spot exchange rate, which of course is set by supply and demand. Thus, gold goes up and silver goes down. This tendency can continue until gold is fully remonetized, silver fully demonetized.

Our first-order strategy (not, of course, to be construed as financial advice) to game players is thus: of any two competing currencies, hold the appreciating one: that is, the one with the lowest interest rate. As everyone else follows this strategy, the appreciating currency will appreciate even more, until eventually there is only one. Gold is money, silver is stuff.

This strategy has some obvious deficiencies - or at least, raises some obvious questions.

Why doesn't this happen all the time? How hard is it for a non-monetary commodity to exhibit interest rates lower than those of the present monetary standard? Does this process really have to run to termination once it begins? Is epsilon sufficient to initiate the chain reaction, or can a current standard sustain its dominance given some mild exit pressure?

But first, we have a causal inconsistency to resolve. Earlier, we said that the gold-silver ratio is predicted by interest rates within each of these currencies. But now, it seems, the ratio is set by supply and demand to exchange gold for silver. These seem like very different economic activities, so perhaps it's puzzling that they would produce the same number.

In fact, both statements are true. The GSR is predicted in the future by interest rates, and set by supply and demand in present. If supply and demand sets a different number than past interest rates predicted, all that means is that the prediction was wrong. Yes, Virginia, this happens.

I promised not to say anything about dollars. But in fact, the gold-dollar ratio (GDR) has been rising by about 20% a year for the last decade. Was this predicted by interest rates? No. Do interest rates predict a continuation of this trend? No. Does this mean that you could walk down the street right now, and find a $20 bill on the sidewalk? Wouldn't preclude it at all.

In fact, it is impossible for loan markets in dollars and gold to predict this result, because there is no such thing as a negative interest rate in a loan market - the transaction is meaningless - and dollar interest rates, at least official rates, are well under 20%. Nonetheless, over the last 10 years, simply holding gold has produced a better return then almost any real capital activity. In other words, the gold futures market's prediction of future gold prices has been reliably wrong, in the same consistent direction, for the last decade. A puzzle for Professor Hanson!

What is the problem here? Where is the misprediction coming from? It is coming from the fact that the lending market, since it does not understand the monetary standardization game, cannot play it. If it could play this game, we would see its prediction rapidly converge with the reality of the exchange market.

How would this work in practice? If gold predictably appreciated by 20% against silver, but the loan markets predicted only 5% appreciation, lenders would drive up silver interest rates to 15%, by offering lucrative investments in "enterprises" whose only activity was to hold gold - hedged by the market's modest and incorrect prediction of appreciation. Bonds issued by these ventures would drive all other bonds off the market. Of course, in reality, no such bonds can be offered, because a bond is a fixed-income instrument and the exchange market is inherently unpredictable.

The interest-rate signal can also be disrupted - for instance, by lending alchemists who create present silver to buy future silver. By increasing the supply of present silver at any time, this can be expected to increase the price of present silver in present gold. But it certainly does tend to lower interest rates. The alchemists, of course, should be careful that they don't find themselves buying future silver that is generated by the profits from holding gold. This would leave them pouring silver into an infinitely deep hole.

If the signal is absent or disrupted, speculators can speculate - and they do. In all cases, this involves being short silver and long gold. Thus we see the cycle again: predictable appreciation of gold over silver, generates exit pressure in silver and entry pressure in gold, which generates predictable appreciation of gold over silver.

(In the dollar-gold market of the past decade, although we cannot see gold's rise predicted in the the futures market, we can see it reflected in a market of generally savvy speculators: gold miners. Miners can choose between selling future production forward into the futures market (hedging), which they will do if their own price predictions are equal to or lower than the market's prediction; or selling the gold when they produce it. Sure enough, the global gold hedge book rises in the '90s as gold is falling, and drops (to almost zero) in the last decade as gold rises. This indicates an accurate perception of market inaccuracy by expert speculators.)

We see the fundamental instability of monetary competition. Stable systems are buffered - they experience negative feedback. But this is very much a positive-feedback story. Whoever starts winning, can be expected to keep winning. A tiny breath of air, and the pencil, balanced on its point, falls over.

This explains some facts - for instance, why bimetallic standards are historically unstable. Across the millennia, governments are always trying to fix gold-silver ratios, and always failing. One money drives the other out by Gresham's law. But even if no one is so foolish as to fix this unfixable price, in the end there can be only one.

As natural market fluctuations push one metal above the other, the rational saver will rebalance into the rising standard and de-diversify away from the falling. As gold rises and silver falls, he will exchange silver for gold. Or at least, the sooner he figures out this strategy, the more gold he will end up with. The collective behavior of all rational savers results in an industrial silver market and a gold standard. Thus, the bimetallic standard is like a pencil standing on its point: stable only as a perfect mathematical abstraction.

The instantaneous feedback is positive. But is there any negative feedback? As the pencil falls, is there a magnet that catches it and stands it back up?

Consider the case of competition between ordinary 20th-century fiat currencies. These predictably depreciate against each other all the time - that is, different currencies exhibit different interest rates. Why doesn't all international currency competition collapse, as our gold-and-silver model has? Why didn't everyone in America in 1979 switch to D-Marks?

Good old forex has a very powerful buffer mechanism: the balance of trade. If country A starts to adopt country B's currency, country B's currency rises versus country A, which gives country B (ceteris paribus) a trade deficit relative to country A. This implies a flow of money from B to A: negative feedback. This feedback is absent from our gold-silver model because, and only because, we've assumed that gold and silver users are homogeneously distributed.

There is another negative feedback, however: monetary production. This is probably the strongest stabilizing element in metallic currencies.

The ideal currency is perfectly inelastic in volume: no new money can be created. Elasticity is defined as a percentage of the stockpile: how much work does it take to create 10% more gold than exists at present? Or to put it more precisely: how much gold per annum, as a percentage of gold already mined, will be mined at the present price?

We can look at monetary elasticity through two lenses: interest rates and exchange rates. We should expect higher interest rates in an more elastic currency, because more elasticity implies production of more future money, whose price will therefore drop. We should also expect this currency to depreciate, because we can compute exchange demand not in unadjusted physical terms, but in relative terms - not as grams of metal, but as percentages of the entire market capitalization of that metal.

Suppose the silver battery is neither being discharged into the gold battery, nor the gold battery into the silver battery. Priced in either metal, the ratio of total gold stockpile capitalization to total silver stockpile capitalization remains constant. However, gold is being diluted by new production at 5% a year, whereas new silver is 10% of the silver stockpile.

Thus, in relative prices, the GSR remains constant. But in grams of metal - which is the actual GSR - gold appreciates by 5% against silver. Again, this appreciation will be magnified by positive feedback.

So where is the negative feedback? Remember, in our model, silver starts out as money, and gold as an industrial metal. Alchemists, however, have figured out how to make 5% more silver a year than gold. So silver energy starts to flee into gold, and gold starts to go up.

But wait! As gold's price increases - perhaps stratospherically - its elasticity changes. At the original, industrial price, gold was less elastic than silver. But to win the monetary game, its price in silver must rise by a factor of (let's say) 100. This is because silver falls, of course, but let's say gold's price in a neutral commodity - like wheat, a grain often eaten by gold miners - rises by a factor of 10.

Moreover, because gold was not a monetary metal, it has a small stockpile. Therefore its old elasticity experiences a brutal double whammy: much higher prices, much smaller base. Gold rises under its own power until its elasticity equals that of silver; possibly it rises on momentum, after that; and then the feedback becomes negative. The gold bubble pops. The old standard, silver, which was stable after all, reasserts its unquenchable will to monetary power.

Our goal, remember, is not to select the X ahead at present, but the X who will win the game: finem respice. With our first-order strategy, money rushed into gold not to correct a supply-demand imbalance in the industrial gold market, but to speculate on a monetary transition from silver to gold. But if that transition cannot actually occur, it has no reason to happen in the first place, and the rational herd will stay in their present standard money - silver.

Thus a correct, second-order strategy to pick a winner has to consider the monetary pressures across the whole path to complete monetization. If the leak will reverse direction halfway through the process, the process cannot complete and should never start. If large price increases in a commodity would cause a stockpile blowout, the walls of the tank are too thin. The whole premise of monetary restandardization is that the new currency will be stable and permanent.

Note in general the social effect of a total restandardization. The result is nothing less than a general redistribution of wealth - or at least, money. When silver goes down the toilet and gold becomes king, all the silver in the world has to pass through the gold-hole. This is Grant's "1/n." He who exits first is a mogul. He who exits last finds his portfolio has turned into a small stockpile of industrial metal - a metal the world has enough of right now. Similarly, if he has any Semper Augustus tulips, he can always plant them in his garden.

Indeed, the political effect of this transition is hard to understate. But that's a separate post. Ideally, a well-run political system will not let such a chaotic, spontaneous wealth redistribution happen, but will bend to reality and orchestrate an orderly liquidation. This is especially straightforward when the transition is from a fiat to a metallic currency. It is not especially difficult to establish a liquidation price at which all fiat obligations can be repaid in metal. The main problem is that any such ordered liquidation involves a large discontinuous transition in the exchange rate, which makes it a difficult policy in practice to plan and implement.

What will happen to interest rates, inflation and growth during a spontaneous remonetization? We're finally in a position to answer the question we started with.

Demonetizing silver in favor of gold means a striking fall in the silver-gold ratio, which normally implies inflation in the silver price of all goods, deflation in the gold price of all goods.

But wait: we have another causality problem. This one is a frequent bugaboo of arguments between goldbugs and deflationists. Prices are set by supply and demand. If the price of bacon in silver is to increase, where does all the extra silver to bid up bacon come from? One deflationist writes:

My argument is simple, and I will not yield ground to any hyperinflationist who fails to explain, if the system collapses, where the money will come from to bid tangible assets skyward.

In other words, inflation means more money chasing the same goods. Where's the more money?

There are two ways to answer the question. The first is to point to the enormous stockpile of monetary silver that built up while silver was money. Previously, this metal was hoarded by savers; gold has displaced it in that role; Gresham's law pushes it onto the market, increasing velocity as people try to spend their silver on bacon while silver can still buy bacon.

This is an accurate answer, but it is confusing, because it answers the question from the opposite direction. A better way to say it is to say that prices in silver are a function of purchasing power in silver, which is a function of everyone's net worth as measured in silver.

After the restandardization from silver to gold, everyone's net worth in silver has massively increased. Why? Not because there is much more silver in the world - because everyone's portfolio has been converted to gold, which has been revalued in silver. Thus, their purchasing power in silver, by the end of the transition, can and should considerably exceed the amount of silver in the world.

This is a little tricky to understand, so let's go back to the real-world players. It is not silver but the dollar which is the falling incumbent currency. To holders of gold, this is of course deflation - a most salubrious phenomenon. Holders of gold (and dollars) likewise had a blast during the Weimar experience. Their wallets turned into fountains of money.

It is these fountains which bid up prices. The new purchasing power comes from the exploding portfolios of gold's "early adopters." As this effect spreads from a few Internet nutcases and daring hedge funds, out across the broader global economy, that economy (still on the dollar standard for most prices) experiences a gold-driven wealth effect. Consumer spending rises; the same sort of broad economic boom as the '90s tech-stock boom is seen.

On the dollar's last day as a meaningful unit of account, total dollar net worth is at its historical peak. If there is a free market in future dollars (unlikely), future dollars in an expanding dollarsphere will be cheap relative to present dollars, and interest rates therefore high.

Best of all, unlike theglobe.com, this boom is sustainable. Ideally, it terminates in an allocated gold standard with no debt - the American and European economies at present, of course, being brutally overcapitalized. The dollar debt will be largely inflated away - along with any dollar savings which tarry too long in that currency. Can we imagine a debt-free world? Yes, we can.

(Except by actual gold-generating ventures (such as gold mines), gold debt will not be generated until remonetization completes. With gold rising like a rocket, there is simply no practical venture that can exchange discounted future gold for present gold at a profit - at least, not a venture that operates a business in a dollar economy, for in dollars this venture would be wildly profitable. Thus, gold interest rates will be low, and forward sales restricted to gold producers - if the futures market can match the producers' predictions of appreciation. Otherwise, producers will not hedge, and there will be no gold lending at all.)

Thus remonetization should be welcomed by political authorities, because it promises reflation - or, in other terms, national bankruptcy and a general restructuring of public and private debt. The Moslerites are certainly right that the world carries too much debt, and that this debt needs to be restructured. Where they err is only in suggesting that this restructuring should be carried out as an ongoing process of massive deficit spending in classic Argentina style.

Remonetization, spontaneous or orderly, is a one-time restructuring event. The smart rich will profit, of course, by early adoption of the new standard in a spontaneous remonetization. It is the stupid rich who will suffer, and perhaps deserve to. Who can defend the stupid rich? Still, as a general friend of order, I prefer an orderly remonetization in which every dollar is equal.

(Another way to state the effect of remonetization: Arnold Kling's recalculation. All prices and positions are new, not just quantitatively but qualitatively. New prices cannot be computed from the old ones; they must be computed by the market.)

USG as an economic entity has two problems. One: it is overcapitalized (has too much debt). Two: it loses more money every year. Both these descriptions are accurate for both the conventional public-sector balance sheet, and the national balance sheet (consolidating public and private). (On the national balance sheet, only foreign transactions appear; the annual loss is the trade deficit, the capitalization is the foreign debt.)

Why do we see an oncoming storm of commodity-price inflation? When America runs a trade deficit and exports net dollars to the rest of the world, it sends those dollars to places with a high marginal propensity to consume commodities. More money chases the same goods, and prices rise. Moreover, as new dollars are being produced but not staying in America, we see an inflationary boom in reserve-accumulating nations (China) but stagnation here. Stagflation is inflation without the fun, like liquor that only gives you a hangover.

In its present operating structure, America leaks cash, like a Soviet car factory. The Soviet car factory may also be overcapitalized; a haircut will maximize the return to its creditors. If it remains unprofitable after the haircut, however, there is no point in continuing operations. The factory might as well be sold as scrap metal.

This is what's so frightening about a money-losing country: the rational option is to terminate all economic activity. In the human dimension, unprofitability disconnects an enterprise from all economic discipline, which is often the only discipline it has left. It becomes depressed and psychotic - especially in the long run. Would you want to eat in a money-losing restaurant? Why would you want to be governed by a money-losing government?

Remonetizing gold, and restoring USG to an allocated-gold balance sheet, fixes both these problems (if the gold price of the dollar is set correctly - about a milligram is my wild guess). It both annihilates past debt, and enforces future financial discipline.

So much for the theory. Let's take a quick moment to apply it to present-day reality. Where should you store your money? This analysis is anything, of course, but financial advice.

First, the incumbent: dollars. All liabilities issued or guaranteed by USG, even informally, are dollars - such as all bank liabilities. All investments whose price is calculated by Ben Graham as a structure of future dollars are also dependent, of course, on the value of the dollar.

The basic problem with the dollar is that new dollars are winding up not in the hands of Bill Gates, but in the hands of Chinese peasants, who use them to bid against global commodities. If USG adjusts its fiscal and monetary policy so that it is not exporting dollars, it winds up with net dollar destruction domestically, which means politically unsustainable deflation. If it eases to avoid this, it bleeds dollars. In the worst case, it is quite capable of both inflating foreign dollars and deflating domestic dollars. The problem is structural: the whole enterprise is unprofitable.

The dollar alchemists are constantly buying future dollars with new present dollars, effectively concealing the high interest rates inherent in a hemorrhaging balance sheet. This need not fool exchange-rate predictors, however. Increasing dollar supply in the hands of commodity consumers produces an upward bias in all commodity prices, kicking off the Flucht in die Sachwerte and creating demand for a new monetary standard. The question, therefore, is whether the dollar has any plausible competitors.

It's worth considering non-dollar currencies. While these may rise against the dollar, their appreciation is constrained by the balance-of-trade buffering mechanism described earlier. Fiat currencies are managed by central banks. Central banks are political actors. Political actors do not like to see industrial destruction, which is what happens when currencies become overvalued. The Swiss central bank, for instance, has to work very hard to keep Swiss army knives affordable to non-Swiss buyers.

The obvious competitor, and almost certainly the final winner: gold. Gold can be revalued to whatever level is necessary to liquidate the dollar system. The high price of a milligram is no obstacle, even if physical gold needs to circulate as cash. A modern gold currency should not have exposed metal surfaces! If a milligram coin is needed, wrap a disc of gold leaf in Lucite. Or simply circulate token coins as warehouse receipts to allocated gold.

The wild card in the gold market, as I hasten to remind readers, is the existence and/or new creation of synthetic or "naked short" gold, presumably by central banks (no one else could hide the losses). If dollar liabilities can be transformed to gold liabilities, currency issuers (central banks) can create infinite synthetic gold to neutralize all monetary demand.

Perhaps this is a crime. If so, the CBs exhibit motive, opportunity, and propensity. The official gold market, including bullion banks, is a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. I would like to see the gold books of all governments, exchanges, and banks. Who is naked? Who is transforming maturities? It won't happen.

Especially if gold longs are indifferent to the exact nature of their holdings - synthetic and backed by hot air, synthetic and well-collateralized, synthetic and government-guaranteed, present backed by future (maturity-transformed) gold, or allocated present gold - "paper gold" is a potent weapon against restandardization. Public service message: insist on allocated or physical gold. If it matters, you'll be glad you did. Fortunately, Chinese peasants do not buy a lot of Comex futures.

There is little real financial activity in the gold market, aside from gold-miner forwards. Gold interest rates are derisory. There is no stock market denominated in gold, though there should be, if only for gold producers. With gold appreciating at 20% a year, this matters very little.

We turn to silver, which has exploded recently. The short story on silver is that silver is the perfect bubble. Silver at $50? Silver could go to $500. It would not surprise me in the slightest. It would surprise me considerably, however, to end up with a new silver standard. If gold and silver defeat the dollar, gold will almost certainly defeat silver.

Eric Sprott, a rare trustworthy source (Bron Suchecki is another rare trustworthy source), outlines the present silver market. It is no surprise that silver is appreciating rapidly relative to gold, because comparable quantities of saving are pouring into each metal. However, because silver was fully demonetized in the 20th century and gold was not, the market capitalization of the gold stockpile is 60 times the capitalization of the silver stockpile. Thus, comparable volumes of gas are pressing in to the gold tank and the silver tank, but the silver tank is 60 times smaller. It is actually surprising that silver has not risen faster and harder.

But this present advantage is also silver's long-term Achilles heel. The silver tank, being so much smaller, cannot take this kind of pressure. It will almost certainly explode. I have personal advice for those playing the silver market: bring your steel balls. If you buy into a bubble when it's small, and get out before it pops, you can do quite well.

How will gold defeat silver? If silver wins, it will go to $500 and well beyond. But consider the dilution with silver at $500! First, it will draw every last silver fork out of the attic. Secondly, today's silver mines are the silver mines which are profitable with silver at, say, $12. The set of silver mines profitable at a price an order of magnitude higher: a considerably larger set.

Because the present stockpile of monetary silver is so small in relation to productive capacity, even present productive capacity, that stockpile is easily diluted. In contrast, because gold was never demonetized, gold is much harder to dilute even if it revalues by orders of magnitude. By Sprott's figures, annual silver production: 50% of the present stockpile. Annual gold production: 2%. As you see, gold is a much harder currency than silver.

Therefore, when gold competes against silver, rational actors choose gold, because silver will dilute much faster ceteris paribus. The secondary feedback loop is dependent on the primary depreciation analysis. Silver, because of its small stockpile, is easy to dilute. Because easy to dilute, it is not a plausible monetary metal at all - it is barely more than industrial metal. And this though "money" and "silver" are synonyms in half the languages in the world. All that silver has going for it is tradition, and this is not enough - not when gold retains so much of its Victorian monetary structure.

Finally, we examine a new contender - the mysterious and awesome Bitcoin.

I'll be frank with you, dear reader. When I came up with the MoMT, my first thought was: how can I, Mencius Moldbug, make some damned money from this? As system software is my first love, it was not that hard to think of an answer. In some ways Bitcoin is actually much better designed than my design, which was not distributed. The use of Lamport hash chaining is particularly elegant. I did not wind up building my design, however, because I sensed a problem. Bitcoin has the same problem, but worse.

But the basic economic design is the same: an artificial currency of limited supply. What is the currency backed by? Nothing but speculation and hot air. Note that this (contrary to its exponents' claims) violates Mises' classical "regression theorem." MoMT has no problem with an unbacked monetary candidate, because the required epsilon can be provided simply by the probability that the monetary system is adopted.

If Bitcoin becomes the new global monetary system, one bitcoin purchased today (for 90 cents, last time I checked) will make you a very wealthy individual. You are essentially buying Manhattan for a quarter. There are only 21 million bitcoins (including those not yet minted). (In my design, this was a far more elegant 2^64, with quantities in exponential notation. Just sayin'.) Mapped to $100 trillion of global money, to pull a random number out of the air, you become a millionaire. Wow!

So even if the probability of Bitcoin succeeding is epsilon, a million to one, it's still worthwhile for anyone to buy at least a few bitcoins now. The currency thus derives an initial value from this probability, and boots itself into existence from pure worthlessness - becoming a viable repository of savings. If a very strange, dangerous and unstable one.

I think the probability of Bitcoin succeeding is very low. I would not put it at a million to one, though, so I recommend that you go out and buy a few bitcoins if you have the technical chops. My financial advice is to not buy more than ten, which should be F-U money if Bitcoin wins. Or, of course, you can invest in those alpaca socks.

Here is the problem with Bitcoin: the tank, I think, will pop. This is not due to any technical fault in Bitcoin's algorithms or economics. It is due to a political fault in our society, which is that we're governed by dumb people.

Because we're governed by dumb people, here is what I think will happen with Bitcoin. Stage 1: Bitcoin does not exist. Stage 2: Bitcoin exists, but is worthless. Stage 3: Bitcoin exists, and is used by strange and desperate weirdos and geeks. Stage 4: Bitcoin is used by Slashdot readers, perhaps slightly less desperate. (You are here.) Stage 5: Bitcoin is used by criminals. Stage 6: All Bitcoin exchanges are shut down by USG. Stage 7: Bitcoin exists, but is worthless. Stage 8: Bitcoin does not exist.

At least on the surface, Bitcoin exchanges violate the critical know-your-customer rule which USG enforces on all money-transfer businesses. As a money-transfer business, you are essentially an agent of the government - a spy. To a regulator, Bitcoin seems like a way to transfer arbitrary quantities of money anonymously. This is a nonstarter, and the regulator knows exactly whose necks he has to squeeze - the spies who are not doing their jobs.

He cannot shut down Bitcoin itself. He can trivially shut down Bitcoin-dollar exchanges, or even Bitcoin-gold exchanges. Probably seizing all their dollars, etc. He probably can't seize their bitcoins, but it doesn't really matter.

To save in a currency is to place your trust in that currency. If you put energy into this great collective battery, you have to be able to get it back out. If that trust can be convincingly damaged, the currency has no chance. If people lose money in bitcoins, the currency can never recover. No one will ever again exchange it for dollars, or even alpaca socks. It will be dead. Its chances, now and forever, will be zero - not even epsilon.

If Bitcoin was centralized - sacrificing all real coolness - it could deal with this problem, perhaps, by applying KYC to all dollar transactions. But Bitcoin is not centralized, so there is no way the development team can prevent exchanges from operating. These exchanges are obvious targets for numerous predatory authorities. When they are destroyed, the currency dies.

What is Bitcoin's only chance? Perhaps that Bitcoin is not really anonymous. In fact, it is anything but. All transactions, though pseudonymous (named by a random key), are public and can be tracked by anyone, including said authorities. There is no financial secrecy in Bitcoin - it's a completely transparent system.

Which means that, if money launderers try to launder money through Bitcoin, they are actually doing the authorities a massive favor. It is very easy to track dirty bitcoins. If you know Pablo, a drug dealer, is using Bitcoin address X, you can download the entire graph of parties that X trades with, and roll up Pablo's whole network. Instead of shutting down the real-money exchanges, you can secretly force them to send you their entire customer database. That way, the terrorists, drug dealers, etc, are not hiding their transactions at all - they are sharing their most intimate details with the government. Heck, the DEA probably understands Pablo's finances better than Pablo's own people. That's what he gets for using Bitcoin.

But, as I said, we are governed by dumb people. Or, worse, committees of smart people. Therefore, I reiterate my target price on bitcoins: epsilon. Nonetheless, it probably wouldn't kill you to go buy five or ten - not that this is financial advice.

Ivory Coast: are they going to come and kill my cat?

2011-04-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

Or, Ivory Coast: Fresh Victory for International Law. Or Ivory Coast: Responsibility to Protect. Or even Ivory Coast: The Africa of Paris.

As you can see, I just can't resist this material. But the latest, via (but not from) the Guardian, really stands on its own. It's a montage without a mount, the perfect Hollywood trailer for our cute young century. And an epitaph, even, for the last:

A 26-year-old German, who did not wish to be named, told how she and her daughter were rescued from a furious crowd by the French army. "We spent two days locked in our home," she said. "We were on the internet all the time and calling everyone we could think of for help. There were big explosions outside and we didn't sleep for those two nights.

"A mob of a thousand people came storming down the street. They were all over the place, smashing boxes, breaking into shops and looting. Everyone was going nuts. One was carrying a tray of drinks; someone would grab a drink and run off in another direction.

"They set fire to the Honda garage and we could see flames seven metres high. There was a sugar factory that was completely destroyed. They stole all the sugar first; it should have taken them two days to take it all but they did it in three hours.

"We had no idea who was actually who or what the hell was going on. There were people with filthy hair – I don't know if they were prisoners who escaped. We were scared of stray bullets.

"My daughter is seven and was born here. At first she didn't understand what was going on. After a while she started asking, 'Are they going to come and kill my cat?'"

Does this need a montage? I don't know. It might. It might just stand on its own. But terhaps, since these people were on the Internets anyway, they could have gained perspective on the ineluctable humanitarian necessity of the Ouattara-Gbagbo war by a quick glance at La Wik:

The responsibility to protect (RtoP or R2P) is a norm or set of principles based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility. RtoP focuses on preventing and halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.

The responsibility to protect can be thought of as having three parts. A State has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing (mass atrocities).

If the State is unable to protect its population on its own, the international community has a responsibility to assist the state by building its capacity. This can mean building early-warning capabilities, mediating conflicts between political parties, strengthening the security sector, mobilizing standby forces, and many other actions.

If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.

Gbagbo's, you see, is the stronger party. In one form or another, it has always ruled since the French. But demographics have changed, so Gbagbo loses in the census - excuse me, the election. Hence the international community must step in to protect the weak from the strong, Outtara from Gbagbo, Muslim from Christian, the backward north from the elevated south. Thus, despite its tremendous respect for the principle of sovereignty, etc, etc.

Couldn't the little girl, or at least her mother, understand this simple humanitarian principle? Language is no excuse. The same edifying material is available in Deutsch, where it sounds even better: Verantwortung zum Schutz. Next time you see a mob of a thousand people storming down the street, you have probably been Verantwortung-zum-Schutzed. Hide your wife, hide your daughter, hide the cat.

Alas, there is no word in either language for what you're supposed to do when the "international community" fails to protect you. Especially when it fails to protect you from the weak - who are too weak to resist heavy weapons, that's true. But not too weak to scare your daughter.

So our subjects, locked in a closet with their laptops, might have found better consolation in Vanity Fair's April photo spread, Faces of the Facebook Revolution:

In essence, they had set up a small, Utopian city, where they were interacting with each other in this leaderless, self-organized system. It wasn’t just a protest. It was a model for how they wanted Egypt to be. It was a chaotic but somehow working system. I truly had this feeling of being surrounded by people drawn together by the strong ideals that they wanted to achieve. The atmosphere was extremely charged and fast-paced, changing minute by minute.

The concept of being self-organized and leaderless made the revolution a success. That was the aspect that fascinated me most. These anonymous people in the photographs—they are the ones who are so important. I may never see them again. I may never know who they were. But they’re the ones who made the revolution happen. I could have picked virtually anyone out of the square and each one of them would have been incredibly and equally as important.

Of course, while everyone is incredibly and equally as important, not everyone is equally photogenic. But Vanity Fair can find them. And so all the young, handsome and fashionable doctors and screenwriters in Cairo came together to be photographed. At negligible expense, with no big fuss at all.

This will get them laid continuously for the next five years, and in any case they weren't doing anything else - having lost all genuine political relevance immediately after their "victory." No word on whether Vanity Fair plans a sequel: "Faces of The Forces Nouvelles."

In the same issue we see two violent screeds against the "top 1%." Indeed there has never been a time in history when the top 0.01%, who of course constitute the world real or purported of Vanity Fair, have not despised the top 1%. Wanted to conjure up an army of cannibals, in fact, to slaughter them and eat their cats. (FDR, for instance, was a "traitor to his class" in exactly this sense. In fact he was fiercely loyal to his class: the socialite class.)

But the only difficulty with this pleasant fantasy of rabble-scourging is that the cannibal army, once conjured, cannot really tell the difference between James Wolcott, Donald Trump, you and me. Also, just because a civil war was conjured by Vanity Fair, does not mean Vanity Fair can un-conjure it. Welcome to the 21st century! Please hide the cat.

A small segue of subject

2011-04-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

I have to apologize for the unusual lag. And enough with Libya, and foreign policy as a whole! And I swear to never again deploy the word "nadir" in the context of the USG.

Worse, I have not actually been ignoring UR. Rather, events have been overcoming my overgrown posts. For a while I had one draft called "Med Max 2.0: Foggy Bottom beyond Ras Lanouf," and another one called "Cote d'Ivoire: New Chocolate Somalia." These soi-disant prophecies, once perspicuous, have become jejune. They are best left to the literary executor. A third essay, "Ass-Raped Again in Deraa: A Century of Liberal Revolution," will likely never appear. Still in the works, for now, are "Grand Opening to Libya: In Their Own Words" and "From Ilyich to Ilyich: 300 Years of US Foreign Policy."

If I had to venture a general comment on the international news of the last three weeks, what I would say is that a flailing bureaucracy always has one very natural step available to it. It can double down. If it has nothing else to do, doubling down is what it will do. Hence in a sense when I look at the "international community" - ie, the whole global octopus of world-news production, but principally the State Department and the journalism-education-NGO complex - in the light of early 2011, what I see more than anything is what poker players call tilt.

At every turn, the international community (which consists, in reality, of a large number of very capable, even responsible, professionals) is full well aware that it both has screwed, and continues to screw, the pooch. And at every turn, it figures that since it's in so deep already, it might as well go ahead and try to finish its wad. Hence, bombs over Libya. Bombs? Troops! As my ex-girlfriend from Carolina once put it, I hain't had so much fun since hogs et my little brother. And I fear we are just getting started in the Middle East.

Indeed, there is no right answer here. As we saw, the policy of abandoning an incited revolt is morally untenable - it would become an instant classic of cynical disaster. At least the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was of genuine indigenous origin. (The USG, to my knowledge, did little or nothing to start or inflame that civil war - unless of course you count expelling the Belgians.) I will stick by my contention that not intervening as the rebels are defeated and Qadhafi goes zenga-zenga, dar-dar, is right up there with Stalin and the Warsaw revolt. You may recall that Stalin, too, went on the radio and told the Poles it was time to rise up.

On the other hand, in the long run, this cynical buggering of Libya's brave and gullible best might well have produced less suffering than a protracted civil war. It might still. In fact, I'd bet on it. Moreover, by our responsible protection of Libya, we have now created what looks like exactly the same dilemma in Syria. Are we really going to bomb Syria? But then, that responsibility to protect... Oops. D'oh! Oh noes! And we pound that puppy once again.

(Your foreign-policy experts at work, dear Americans. There are a lot of them. That's not to say, however, that they outnumber your lampposts - to speak metaphorically, of course. My own father was an FSO, which is the one and only reason I can see through State's Jedi mind-tricks.)

Heck, in the Ivory Coast, our IMF vice-president, endorsed by the entire international community, seems to have actually presided over a genuine cannibal genocide - if a small one. How can you beat that? Well, a large cannibal genocide, I suppose. Never the nadir. Never! Still, perhaps we could get away with "Harry Dexter White and the Cannibals: A Half-Century of International Monetary Coordination." Reader, if you want to borrow this title, feel free.

Or take the embarrassed half-silence of the neocons. A neoconservative is a liberal who actually believes in liberalism, and thus has no alternative to rational consistency. If he is against Saddam, he must be against Muammar, and vice versa. How different are they, really? Worse, he perceives USG's demented madonna-whore complex towards dictators. The ones we beat up and/or kill are our friends; the ones we adore are our enemies. Noting this, the neoconservative concludes: we should only scream at our friends, but must beat up and kill our enemies. Well, okay. It's a pretty aggressive foreign policy. But at least it qualifies as sane.

Yet the whole debate is increasingly comical, because the USG (though its scream is louder than ever) cannot beat up or kill anyone. Nor, I fear, will it ever again. Indeed, why is the Middle East catching fire only now, over two years after the Democrats' election? Perhaps because it took the apparatus this long to realize that it had really, truly escaped any semblance of adult supervision. Or at least, executive supervision.

Without a Republican in the White House, Foggy Bottom is responsible to no one at all. (With a Republican, it is responsible to a Republican.) It thus reverts to its natural and permanent attitude of bureaucratic toddler tantrum, at least until the next peasant revolt. In this inevitable but transient Washington winter, any agency which did not labor as the grasshopper in spring to expand its operations in the lush years, is sure to get squeezed out. Thus all must scream as loudly as possible for meaning, budget, and front-page space on the Times. And indeed they're getting that!

Frankly, this spectacle is as depressing as it is predictable. As in the late Carter years, US foreign policy faces a long period of unrelieved public-relations disasters, each more spectacular and hilarious than the last. I cannot help but find myself applauding this sick comedy, until I remember that actual human beings are suffering - etc. Then I reproach myself for Christian slave morality, especially as applied to an out-group, and go back around again. The process, reaching both extremes, is as philosophically draining as viscerally nauseating.

So I wanted to get back to the roots of this blog, for a change, and talk about finance. It's almost 5 years ago that my first-ever posting on teh Internets, the "John Law" post (tip to aspiring bloggers: pick a pseudonym that people can search), predicted the immediate death of the financial universe. A prediction that, by its nature, was falsified almost instantly. Then again, I still feel the prediction would have come true if not for one of its supporting assumptions - infinite collective rationality.

Nonetheless, if we discard the blue-eyed men on the island, and look at real human markets, we would expect to see a collective rationality not finite, but not zero either. Thus we would expect the instantaneous events predicted by "John Law" to happen, but slowly.

Indeed we seem to see, not over a day but half a decade, something like a self-accelerating increase in gold and silver prices. That is, we see people buying gold because gold is going up, since gold is going up because people are buying it: the Nash equilibrium strategy, exactly as described by "John Law." This phenomenon is found especially in China - where demand, while still relatively low, is increasing at high exponents. Fortunately, it is not because all the old ladies in Macau have read "John Law." But their version of the theory, while anything but refined and analytical, works more or less as well as mine.

Silver, however, is going up even faster. As a result, the gold-silver ratio is falling. What does monetary standardization theory say about the gold-silver ratio? You may recall John Law's discussion of the "fission primary." Tune in Thursday the 14th, however, for an update.

Libya, the nadir achieved

2011-03-16T01:54:00.000-07:00

This morning my stepfather - a former Hill staffer, National War College professor and author of several specialist historical monographs; an absolutely typical Washington insider - asked me what I thought "we" should do in Libya.

We? Do? As I replied, American foreign policy has found its nadir in every dimension. Is it moralizing, but unrealistic? Is it realistic, yet amoral? Neither! It is as unreal as it is immoral, as criminal as it is insane. "We had fed our heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal on the fare." While the trope is anything but new, this spring its diabolical clarity burst out with a passion too bright to believe. Does the Devil shine? Is he passionate? He does, he is! Warning: ugly pictures ahead.

Nor is the sin merely that of the organs - State, the press, the NGOs. Oh, no! The sin is in our hearts. The nation itself stands at the bar. True, the organs are irresponsible. So was Hitler. Hitler was popular, however, and so are the organs. Hitler depended on his popularity; so do the organs. If we repented in our hearts, they wouldn't last a minute. Were the German people guilty? They were, and so are we.

These crimes are ours. These crimes are yours. These crimes are mine. Whatever I have done, whatever I have said, I have not succeeded; so these crimes are mine. And ours, and yours. Useless to deny it! Scroll down and cringe.

Through the organs - the press's eye, the tongue of State, even DoD's cold and useless fist - it is America herself, the Great Spectator, for whom all puppets dance and yell, kill and die. And not just America - for in 2011, America is bigger than America, not a continent but a planet. International public opinion! The international community! In 2011, anyone anywhere with any kind of education is an American. Race, color, language, citizenship - details, archaic details. Everyone on Twitter: American. The global hive mind is born, and born American.

Could the rough beast be here? In January, we saw our first Twitter revolution. In February, we got our first Twitter military coup. Now it's March, and we have our first Twitter civil war. Jack Dorsey in Vanity Fair:

"That dead young soldier in his blood:"

"We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare."

No clear fact to be discerned? We have that over Yeats: it's quite clear. At least, I think so. Let me explain.

The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him.

Still he can fantasize. He has an XBox, for one. On the screen he is general and king, mayor and priest, warrior and detective. But alas, it's all just triangles, and worse yet he knows it. Oh, for a real Matrix, with a proper blue pill that actually works.

So he finds fulfillment in the "news." Control his reality? Not even his dog obeys him properly - if his lease permits a dog. But there is another kind of screen, and on it whole countries! Egypt, Libya, Tunisia... millions and millions of people! Real human beings!

And best of all, he finds, these human beings care what he thinks. He matters to them - for he is America, America the world. International public opinion! Who can resist it? "Join us or die," says international public opinion. Of which our Twittering protagonist is one small part. Here, he finds his power. And he uses it.

Egypt is not the world. Egypt is a backwater. And to Egypt, Tunisia is a backwater. And to Tunisia, Libya is a backwater. Does the candle admire the sun? The candle hopes, all its life, to be mistaken for one small part of the sun. If the sun jumps off a cliff, the candle jumps twice. If the sun does not jump, but just says "jump..."

Suppose you're an Egyptian novelist. Or an Egyptian filmmaker, a surgeon, a programmer - any of the real, American professions. All those cheering crowds, demanding "freedom," getting "freedom," full - so our trusted friends of the press were quick to tell us - of filmmakers, surgeons, programmers - Americans.

And indeed, you saw them on the screen. Impossible not to see the type. The camera lies; it cannot invent. There they were, born Americans, hipsters even, with the mere misfortune to be born in Egypt. How unjust, that a man's citizenship should depend on the geolocation of the obstetric ward! But such is the system, a paint chip of the irrational and reactionary past, in which nations for some reason existed and mattered - how weird.

So you're an Egyptian novelist, striving for recognition. Everyone and his asshole, of course, has a novel and wants to be a Real Novelist. Who is the sun in your world? Whose beam lights upon you, and makes you a Real Egyptian Novelist? Mubarak's brother, perhaps? Or some smelly mullah at al-Azhar?

Of course not. An Egyptian novelist is a Real Egyptian Novelist if his novels are known and praised in New York, London, maybe even Paris. (That would be American London, of course, and American Paris. After the 20th century, is there any other?) Is there any force, in Egypt and of Egypt, great enough to dub any Egyptian a Real Egyptian Novelist? Of course not.

Which makes Egypt, as Egypt, a non-country. And its government a non-government. How unfair, that our Real Egyptian Novelist - a citizen of the world, toasted in London and feted in Paris - should return home to be governed by backward, nyekulturny peasant-thugs.

And it is. It is. It is unfair. The noble should not be governed by the base. The base should be governed by the noble. History teaches us nothing less. To govern the base is the duty of the noble; to be governed by the noble is the freedom of the base. When this pyramid inverts, the sky turns black and roaring ogres stalk the land.

On the other hand, if Egypt wanted to be governed by the noble, it had Lord Cromer. If it wanted to be governed by foreigners, it had Lord Cromer. To the extent that it contains a 20th-century civilization, it can thank Lord Cromer. But Lord Cromer is dead and there are no more of him, so Egypt resorts to the best available substitute - Twitter and the State Department.

There is no shortage of human nobility, or at least gentility, in these institutions. For that matter, there is no shortage of educated, capable, intelligent and energetic Egyptians - in short, of American Egyptians, in the best and broadest sense of the world. There are not millions of them, let alone tens of millions. There are certainly tens of thousands. All they lack is one small commodity: the power to rule Egypt.

Not that they are without power. Anything but! Thanks to their American friends, thanks to State and CNN and Human Rights Watch and all their many Twitter followers, the Egyptian liberal is anything but powerless. If he was powerless, Mubarak would still be in power. But Mubarak (via Sadat) wore America's ring, took America's money and sold America his soul. After 35 years of dependency, the Egyptian regime was defenseless against Foggy Bottom. Extra, extra - read all about it in the Post.

The Assads were smarter - they stayed Soviet clients, and later transferred their allegiance to Iran. No "Arab Spring" for them! Peace with America was the death of Nasser's Egypt, albeit with a somewhat delayed fuse. Lesson: on an American planet, anti-Americanism is the only path to independence. A shitty, pissant, perpetually unsafe independence - independence nonetheless. And independence, which is sovereignty, which is power, is the ultimate freedom.

Mubarak, while he ruled, was free. Those he ruled were not free, for to be free is to rule. Now the novelists and filmmakers and surgeons are free, for they rule (for now), and Mubarak is not free - in fact, he's under house arrest. And so it goes. Someone always rules; everyone else is always ruled. Political reality in three words: sovereignty is conserved.

Did I say they rule? They feel like they rule - for no one rules them. Like Clapton, they feel free! Bop-bop-bop-bo-bop-bop! But, since the Egyptian liberals do not in fact rule - since they do not in fact govern - since they cannot in fact govern - no one rules. Everyone rules. This is anarchy, real anarchy, a temporary but very unpleasant state. The liberals have the power to un-rule Egypt; rule it, they cannot.

A small fact occasionally noted in the unashamed press: since Twitter twittered their old rulers out of power, both Egypt and Tunisia have been essentially without police. Salon (of all outlets) tells us:

Since Mubarak's ouster, Egypt has been gripped by a crime wave not seen in years, with a marked rise in armed robberies, arson and street battles between rival criminal gangs over territory.

No shit. This is after a month. After a year? When the gangs get smart, and turn into political parties? Which they acquire paramilitary wings? Sovereignty is conserved. You can spread it around, though, but don't expect to enjoy the result.

For the Egyptian liberal, "freedom" means government by liberals. Or at least, the absence of government by non-liberals. For now he has it, with a small frisson of carjacking. If he moved to America, he could have freedom forever! But alas, the immigration process is so difficult. (And apparently there are gangs here, too. Ah, liberals.)

Power in Egypt - and the world has many Egypts - is a simple game of rock, paper, scissors. In Egypt there are three kinds of people: sheep (liberals, upper-class), dogs (nationalists, lower-class), and wolves (Islamists, beyond class). Sheep (with a big hand from Twitter and State) beat dogs, dogs kill wolves, wolves eat sheep.

If our twittering hipster is especially hip, she's seen Persepolis and met the wolves. And indeed, the wolf form is natural to humanity. It is our society, the civilized European system with lots of sheep and some dogs and a very, very rare wolf, that is anomalous. And if it keeps behaving as it is, the anomaly will not take long to rectify.

The "Arab Spring" is springtime indeed for the violent, ruthless young man with a mission. Mubarak's dogs, equally violent - indeed once Nasser's wolves themselves, for fat authority turns wolves into dogs - tamed the most violent of wolves with the most wolfish of methods. The dog, half wolf himself, speaks the language of the wolf. The sheep looks at the wolf - and sees a sheep. And there has never been any shortage of wolves who speak sheep. Baa! Baa!

In the dog state, so long as they minded their own business, within very broad definitions of their own, a sheep could live as a sheep. Now we see the sheep state, young heaven for wolves. Even the dogs turn into wolves - what's an old Mubarak thug to do? Thuggery is all he knows. The old firm has disbanded. The jihad is hiring. Allahu akbar! Indeed, Islam is the future in Egypt - if I were an Egyptian, I'd be working on my raisin right now. Sovereignty is conserved; power creates its own popularity. In anarchy, violence is power, and the wolves have it.

The tragedy of Egypt is that if the dogs and sheep did not respond to different masters, if the sheep did not have Twitter and Harvard to follow, the sheep would do what sheep do naturally and follow the dogs. Who would in turn love and cherish the sheep, and kill the wolves. This is the difference between Mubarak's Egypt and Elizabeth's England - both societies with a small educated elite, a vast base of varlets, an absolute ruler and an active, efficient secret police.

In other words, if Egypt's natural intelligentsia was not Americanized, if it was not drawn away from its own country and its own leadership by the lure of Twitter, it would have no choice but to participate in the government of its own country. Which would, in turn, lose much if not all of its peasant-thug character, having better talent to draw on than peasant thugs. If this hypothesis is correct, it's the apparent solution - the Americanization of Egypt - which creates the problem.

So the American liberal, who is not after all dumb, if he was genuinely concerned about the Egyptian liberal, would observe reality and tell his tawny friends: chill out. Deal with it. You cannot rule Egypt; we are not the British Empire, we are not going to rule it for you. Yet someone will rule Egypt, as they have since the Scorpion King was a little boy. Do you even begin to know how much worse than Mubarak it can get? If you don't like peasant thug secret policemen, apply for a visa or just come illegally. Learn a little Spanish and pass for Mexican. Or, you know, just deal. I mean, it's not like our permanent government is that great either.

But no. And here is the American's sin: from his own cupidity, from his ennui and folly and innate, instead of using the power of America in the best interest of Egyptians, or even in the best interest of Americans with an Egyptian passport, what does he do? To entertain himself, to get his TV jollies, shouting hosannahs and clapping himself on the back, he assists his Egyptian friends in committing horrible and spectacular political suicide. Is the American moral? Is he realistic? He is both criminal and insane. His nightly news is quite dramatic; his gas goes up by a dollar a gallon; his friends are devoured by wolves. Hell, it's America, we're bored and rich.

Thus brains on the road. And thus, Libya - which is to Egypt as Egypt is to New Jersey, at least culturally. Thus America, twittering away, says to Libya: "Come on! Have a revolution! It's fun! Don't miss out! Besides, we're all done with Egypt and we're getting bored bored BORED!"

Only... Libya is not a recipient of American aid. Libya has no well-funded democracy movement. Libya has no branch of Human Rights Watch. Libya cannot be entirely free of novelists, poets, filmmakers, surgeons and programmers - in short, liberals - but it's about as liberal-free as North Africa gets.

However, it has plenty of tribesmen, Islamists, etc, who love a good fight. Also, Libya appears, from pictures, to be positively infested with .50-caliber "antiaircraft" guns - possibly a legacy of the Reagan bombing. Do you know what happens when someone's head takes a .50-caliber round? Scroll up. Whether he's a tribesman or a filmmaker, the result is roughly the same.

Most important, Qaddafi had let his anti-Americanism slip. Since 2003, terrified by the invasion of Iraq, he'd done almost what Egypt did in 1978 - made kissy-kissy with the West. And since he was originally a Communist, not a fascist, colonialist, or other Nazi, the West had no shortage of Davos people ready to make kissy-kissy back at him. Result: it became a bit difficult for him to persecute Libyans for kissing up to the West.

So when Twitter and Obama came calling... everything was ripe for a nice, telegenic civil war. There was no civil war in Syria, there was no civil war in Iran, because the evil thug dictators of these countries had not made Libya and Egypt's mistake of "engaging" with our organs.

Why does civil war happen? Civil war is by definition a conflict between two power centers that wish to rule the same population. In this case, the two power centers are Qaddafi and Twitter, ie, America. If Qaddafi's regime was too weak to survive a little push, no civil war. If America couldn't get its hooks into any Libyans, no civil war. America, however, is too gutless to use its own weapons, so it has to rely on Libyan volunteers seduced by its Twitter feed. If its puppets had won, of course, everyone would have sworn they won on their own - just like in Egypt. But the rebels are losing, so they cry: where are Obama's airstrikes? And not without reason.

And history rhymes once again, for Libya's failing revolution looks remarkably like one 20th-century event: Poland's Warsaw uprising. Stalin exhorted the Poles to revolt, then stood aside as the SS ate them for breakfast. We exhorted the Libyans to revolt, and when they lost it was none of our business. Behold our foreign-policy "realism": ie, selective isolationism. Which is selective morality - which is hypocrisy. To start again, start with amorality, and work up.

Morally, the comparison favors Stalin. Few ever accused Stalin of hypocrisy; he was just ruthless. He at least had a reason - a concrete interest - for pulling his trick. (He wanted to kill off the Polish leadership before he took Poland for himself.) America's actions, however, are actually against our collective interests; they are motivated entirely by sadistic boredom. We love a revolution because it's good TV. When one fails, we're sad and we cry. But frankly, it adds suspense next time the show is on.

And it's not just TV. Drama is drama, and the same trick works just as well in text - for the benefit of sophisticated intellectuals like you and me. Do you read the New Yorker? Do you subscribe to the New Yorker? Here is Jon Lee Anderson, in the New Yorker:

On Saturday, in Brega, I met Osama BenSadik, a forty-seven-year-old Libyan-American who had returned to his homeland from Martinsville, Virginia, to help the revolution. He was offering his services in the hospital. (He is a volunteer firefighter in Henry County.) He told me, full of passion and pride and fear, that his twenty-one-year-old son, Muhanad, a second year medical student and a Boy Scout, who had been in school here in Libya, had gone to fight at the front line. “Tell America to come and help, because if we don’t, if we let the Libyan revolution fail, then we—you and I and all of us—would see things we could never imagine,” he said.

And sure enough:

At Ajdabiya hospital yesterday, I ran into Osama BenSadik. He crumpled in my arms as I walked up to him, and his whole body heaved as he wept. Muhanad had been killed, fighting, not far from Brega, Saturday morning. BenSadik sobbed with a father’s inconsolable grief.

Perhaps that was his med-student brain we saw, on the road. Anderson is incorrigible:

In truth, even if a no-fly zone is imposed now, it might not be enough to stop Qaddafi’s advance. Its real value, as far as I have been able to ascertain, would be the symbolic importance, the morale boost it would give the fighters, to allow them to feel that they are not entirely alone in the world.

Does Osama have any other sons? Perhaps Jon Lee Anderson could get them killed too. Do you subscribe to the New Yorker? Do you give these people money? Scroll up, look at the picture, then run to the toilet and vomit.