The Rivkin Project: How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations

The Rivkin Project:
How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 1

Kerry BOLTON

Ex: http://counter-currents.com/

During October 19–22, 2010, Charles Rivkin, US Ambassador to France, invited a 29-member delegation from the Pacific Council on International Policy (PCIP) to a conference in France, the main purpose of which was to discuss Arab and Islamic relations in the country.[1] The meeting was part of a far-reaching subversive agenda to transform that entire character of France and in particular the consciousness of French youth, which includes the use of France’s Muslim youth in a typically manipulative globalist strategy behind the usual façade of “human rights” and “equality.”

Globalist Delegation at US Embassy

The PCIP report states of the conference:

. . . The delegation further focused on three key themes. First, the group examined Franco-Muslim issues in France through exchanges with Dr. Bassma Kodmani, Director of the Arab Reform Institute, and Ms. Rachida Dati, the first female French cabinet member of North African origin and current Mayor of the 7th Arrondissement in Paris. A trip to the Grand Mosque of Paris and a meeting with the Director of Theology and the Rector there provided additional insight. Second, meetings with Mr. Jean-Noel Poirier, the Vice President of External Affairs at AREVA (a highly innovative French energy company), and with Mr. Brice Lalonde, climate negotiator and former Minister of the Environment, highlighted energy and nuclear policy issues and the differences between U.S. and French policies in these arenas. And finally, the delegation explored the connections between media and culture in California (Hollywood) and France in meetings at the Louvre, the Musee D’Orsay, and at FRANCE 24 — the Paris-based international news and current affairs channel.[2]

The over-riding concern seems to have been on matters of a multicultural dimension, including not only Arab and Islamic relations in France, but perhaps more importantly in the long term, a discussion on the impact of Hollywood “culture” on the French.

The USA has long played a duplicitous game of “fighting terrorism” of an “Islamic” nature as one of the primary elements of its post-Cold War stratagem of manufactured permanent crises, while using “radical Islam” for it own purposes, the well-known examples being: (1) Supporting Bin Ladin in the war against Russia in Afghanistan, (2) backing Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, (3) supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army in ousting Serbian sovereignty over mineral rich Kosovo, the KLA having been miraculously transformed from being listed by the US State Department as a “terrorist organization,” to becoming “freedom fighters.”

When US globalists pose as friends of Muslims, the latter should sup with the Great Shaitan with an exceedingly long spoon.

What is the Pacific Council on International Policy?

The PCIP of which Rivkin is a member was founded in 1995 as a regional appendage of the omnipresent globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Reactions (CFR),[3] is headquartered in Los Angeles, but “with members and activities throughout the West Coast of the United States and internationally.” Corporate funding comes from, among others:

Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
City National Bank
The Ford Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
The Rockefeller Foundation
United States Institute of Peace[4]

The PCIP is therefore yet another big player in the globalist network comprising hundreds of usually interconnected organizations, lobbies, “civil society” groups, NGOs, and think tanks, associated with banks and other corporations. As usual, there is a conspicuous presence by Rockefeller interests.

Why France?

France has long been a thorn in the side of US globalism because of its stubborn adherence to French interests around the world, rather than those of the manufactured “world community,” although the Sarkozy regime is an exception. However, France is one of the few states left in Western Europe with a strong national consciousness. The best way of destroying any such feeling — which translates too often into policy — is to weaken the concepts of nationhood and nationality by means of promoting “multiculturalism.”

Was it only coincidence that the 1968 student revolt, sparked by the most puerile of reasons, occurred at a time both when the CIA was very active in funding student groups around the world, and when President De Gaulle was giving the USA maximum trouble in terms of foreign policy? De Gaulle did little to play along with American’s post-war plans. He withdrew France form NATO command, during in World War II was distrusted by the USA.[5]

Of particular concern would have been De Gaulle’s advocacy of a united Europe to counteract US hegemony.[6] In 1959 he stated at Strasbourg: “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.” The expression implied co-operation between a future Europe and the USSR. In 1967 he declared an arms embargo on Israel and cultivated the Arab world. This is the type of legacy that globalists fear.

With the buffoonery of Sarkozy, and mounting tension with disaffected Muslim youth, a backlash could see an intransigently anti-globalist, “xenophobic” regime come to power. In today’s context, what better way now to subvert French nationalism and any potential to revive as an anti-globalist force, than to use its large, unassimilated Islamic component, just as the Bolshevik revolution was undertaken to a significant extent by the disaffected minorities of the Russian Empire?

Of interest also is the concern this delegation had for the influence of Hollywood on French culture. This might seem at first glance to be an odd concern. However, Hollywood, as the economic symbol of globalist cultural excrescence, is an important factor in globalization, in what amounts to a world culture-war. Ultimately the goal of globalism is not to promote the survival of ethnic cultures and identities, but rather to submerge them into one big melting pot of global consumerism, to uproot every individual from an identity and heritage and replace that with the global shopping mall, and the “global village.” Therefore multiculturalism should be viewed as the antithesis of what it is understood as being.

So far from the global corporates wanting to promote so-called multiculturalism in terms of assuring the existence of a multiplicity of cultures, as the term implies; it is to the contrary part of a dialectical process whereby a under the facade of ideals, peoples of vastly different heritage are moved across the world like pawns on a chess board, the aim being to break down culturally specific nations. It is an example of Orwellian “doublethink.”[7]

It is notable that the instigators of the “velvet revolutions” now sweeping North Africa and reaching into Iran are largely “secularized” youths without strong traditionalist roots. Similarly, the best way to solve France’s ethnic conflicts and to assure that France does not re-emerge again to confront US/globalist interests, is to dialectically create a new cultural synthesis where there is neither a French culture nor an Islamic culture, but under the banner of “human rights” and “equality,” a globalist youth-based culture nurtured by Hollywood, MTV, cyberspace, MacDonald’s and Pepsi.

That this is more than hypothesis is indicated by the manner by which the secular youth revolts now taking place in North Africa have been spawned by an alliance of corporate interests, sponsored by the US State department and sundry NGOs such as Freedom House.[8] The North African “revolutionaries” toppling regimes are just the type of “Muslim” that the globalists prefer; imbued with the cyber-consumer mentality.

So what are Rivkin and the US State Department up to in France, that they should be so interested in the place of Hollywood and of Muslims in the country?

Notes

1. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” PCIP,  http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=583

2. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” ibid.

3. “Founded in 1995 in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations,” PCIP, Governance, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=373

4. Corporate and Foundation funding: http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=513

5. S. Berthon, Allies At War (London: Collins, 2001), p. 21.

6. A. Crawley, De Gaulle (London: The Literary Guild, 1969), p. 439.

7. “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . .” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1949), Part 1, Ch. 3, p. 32.

8. K. R. Bolton, “Twitters of the World Unite! The Digital New-New Left as Controlled Opposition,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” Global Research, February 23, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

The Rivkin Project:
How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 2

The Rivkin Project for Subverting French Youth

In 2010 when US ambassador Charles Rivkin invited a delegation of fellow Pacific Council on International Policy members to France, he had outlined a program for the Americanization of France that primarily involved the use of the Muslim minorities and the indoctrination of French youth with corporate globalist ideals. The slogan invoked was the common commitment of France and America historically to “equality.”

Wikileaks released the “confidential” program. It is entitled “Minority Engagement Strategy.”[1] Here Rivkin outlines a program that is a flagrant interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation and, more profoundly, seeks to change the attitudes of generations of Muslim and French youth so that they merge into a new globalist synthesis; or what might be called a new humanity: Homo economicus, or what the financial analyst G. Pascal Zachary calls “The Global Me,”[2] to achieve what Rivkin describes as the USA’s “national interest.”

Rivkin begins by stating that his embassy has created a “Minority Engagement Strategy” that is directed primarily at Muslims in France. Rivikin states as part of the program: “We will also integrate the efforts of various Embassy sections, target influential leaders among our primary audiences, and evaluate both tangible and intangible indicators of the success of our strategy.”[3]

Rivkin is confident that France’s history of ideological liberalism “will serve us well as we implement the strategy outlined here . . . in which we press France . . .” Note the phrase: “press France.” America’s global agenda is linked by Rivkin to his blueprint for transforming France into “a  thriving, inclusive French polity [which] will help advance our interests in expanding democracy and increasing stability worldwide.” The program will focus on the “elites” of the French and the Muslim communities, but will also involve a massive propaganda campaign directed at the “general population,” with a focus on youth.

At high levels US officials will place French officials on the defensive. The program also includes redefining French history in the school curricula to give attention to the role of non-French minorities in French history. It means that the Pepsi/MTV generation of Americans will be formulating new definitions of French culture and writing new pages of French history to accord with globalist agendas. Towards this end: “. . . we will continue and intensify our work with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools.”

“Tactic Number Three” is entitled: “Launch Aggressive Youth Outreach.” As in other states targeted by the US State Department and their allies at the Soros network, Freedom House, Movement.org, National Endowment for Democracy, Solidarity Center,[4] and so forth; disaffected youth are the focus for change. Leading the charge on this effort, the Ambassador’s inter-agency Youth Outreach Initiative aims to “engender a positive dynamic among French youth that leads to greater support for US objectives and values.” Can the intentions be stated any plainer? It is Americanization culturally and politically.

It is here that we can most easily get past the cant and clearly see what is behind the strategy: to form a generation “that leads to greater support for US objectives and values.” These “US objectives and values” will be sold to the French as French values on the basis of the bourgeois ideals of 1789 which continue to encumber French ideology on both Left and Right. They will be taught to think that they are upholding French traditions, rather than acting as agents of change according to “American values”: the values of the global village and the global shopping mall. A far-reaching program incorporating a variety of indoctrination methods is outlined:

To achieve these aims, we will build on the expansive Public Diplomacy programs already in place at post, and develop creative, additional means to influence the youth of France, employing new media, corporate partnerships, nationwide competitions, targeted outreach events, especially invited US guests.[5]

The program directed at youth in France is similar to that directed at the youth that formed the vanguard of the “velvet revolutions” from Eastern Europe to North Africa. Potential leaders are going to be taken up by the US State Department in France and cultivated to play a part in the future France of American design:

We will also develop new tools to identify, learn from, and influence future French leaders.

As we expand training and exchange opportunities for the youth of France, we will continue to make absolutely certain that the exchanges we support are inclusive.

We will build on existing youth networks in France, and create new ones in cyberspace, connecting France’s future leaders to each other in a forum whose values we help to shape — values of inclusion, mutual respect, and open dialogue.[6]

Here Rivkin is advocated something beyond influencing Muslims in France. He is stating that a significant part of the program will be directed towards cultivating French youth, the potential leaders, in American ideals, under the façade of French ideals. The US State Department and their corporate allies and allied NGOs intend to “shape their values.” The globalist program for France is stated clearly enough to be the re-education of French youth. One would think that this is the most important role of the French Government, the Catholic Church and the family; the latter two in particular. American bureaucrats and their inane sidekicks recruited from professions are to formulate new “French values.”

As in the states that are chosen for “velvet revolutions” part of the strategy includes demarcating the political confines. As Hillary Clinton recently stated in regard to the type of state the US Establishment expects to emerge after Qadaffi, the new Libya should be an inclusive democracy, open to all opinions, as long as those opinions include a commitment to “equality” and “democracy”; in other words, there must be a new dispensation of freedom in Libya, so long as that freedom does not extend beyond America’s definition of it. And if someone oversteps the lines of acceptable democracy, American bombers are on standby. In the context of France, however, it is clear that the demarcation of French politics according to globalist dictates cannot include any elements of so-ccalled “xenophobia” (sic), which in today’s context would include a return to the grand politics of the De Gaulle era. Hence, “Tactic 5” states:

Fifth, we will continue our project of sharing best practices with young leaders in all fields, including young political leaders of all moderate parties so that they have the toolkits and mentoring to move ahead. We will create or support training and exchange programs that teach the enduring value of broad inclusion to schools, civil society groups, bloggers, political advisors, and local politicians.[7]

Rivkin is outlining a program to train France’s future political and civic leaders. While the programs of US Government-backed NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy — ostensibly designed to develop entire programs and strategies for political parties in “emerging democracies,” such as the states of the ex-Soviet bloc — can be rationalized by way of a lack of a heritage of liberal-democratic party politics, the same rationale can hardly be used to justify America’s interference in France’s party politics.

Towards this end Rivkin states that the 1,000 American English language teachers employed at French schools will be provided with the propaganda materials necessary to inculcate the desired ideals into their French pupils: “We will also provide tools for teaching tolerance to the network of over 1,000 American university students who teach English in French schools every year.”

The wide-ranging program will be co-ordinated by the “Minority Working Group” in “tandem” with the “Youth Outreach Initiative.” One of the problems monitored by the Group will be the “decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.” This is to ensure that the program is working as it should to block the success of any “extreme” or “xenophobic” party that might challenge globalization.

Rivkin clarifies the subversive nature of the program when stating: “While we could never claim credit for these positive developments, we will focus our efforts in carrying out activities, described above, that prod, urge, and stimulate movement in the right direction.”

What would the reaction be if the French Government through its Embassy in Washington undertook a program to radically change the USA in accordance with “French national interests,” inculcating through an “aggressive outreach program” focusing on youth, “French ideals” under the guise of “American ideals on human rights.” What would be the response of the US Administration if it was found that the French Government were trying to influence the attitudes also of Afro-Americans, American-Indians, and Latinos? What would be the official US reaction if it was found that French language educators in American schools and colleges were trying to inculcate American pupils with ideas in the service of French interests?

The hypothetical reaction can be deduced from the US response to the “Soviet conspiracy” when Senate and Congressional committees were set up to investigate anyone even vaguely associated with the USSR. So what’s different? The USA perpetrates a subversive strategy in the interests of it globalist cooperate elite, instead of in the interests of the USSR or communism. It is not as though the USA has had much of a cultural heritage that it can present itself to any European nation, let alone France, as the paragon of good taste and artistic refinement upon which a national identity can be constructed. It this matter, it is a case of deconstruction.

Notes

1. C. Rivkin, “Minority Engagement Report,” US Embassy, Paris, http://www.wikileaks.fi/cable/2010/01/10PARIS58.html

2. G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me: Why Nations will succeed or Fail in the Next Generation (New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2000).

3. Rivkin.

4. K. R. Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” Foreign Policy Journal, February 7, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/07/the-globalist-web-of-subversion/

5. Rivkin.

6. Rivkin.

7. Rivkin.

The Rivkin Project:
How Globalism Uses Multiculturalism to Subvert Sovereign Nations, Part 3

The Role of Multiculturalism in the Globalist Agenda

Many nefarious aims have been imposed under the banner of multiculturalism and slogans such as “equality” and “human rights.” As “democracy” has been used to justify the bombing states throughout recent history, these slogans often serve as rhetoric to beguile the well-intentioned while hiding the aims of those motivated by little if anything other than power and greed.

One might think of the manner by which the issue of the Uitlanders was agitated to justify the Anglo-Boer wars for the purpose of procuring the mineral wealth of South Africa for the benefit of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, et al.

A similar issue was revived in our own time, under the name of “fighting apartheid,” and while the world was jubilant at the assumption to power of the ANC, the reality has been that the Africans have not benefited materially one iota, but the parastatals or state owned enterprises are being privatized so that they can be sold off to global capitalism. When the patriarch of South African capitalism, Harry Oppenheimer, whose family was a traditional foe of the Afrikaners, died in 2000,Nelson Mandela eulogized him thus:  “His contribution to building partnership between big business and the new democratic government in that first period of democratic rule can never be appreciated too much.”[1]

The “democracy” Oppenheimer and other plutocrats in tandem with the ANC created in South Africa is the freedom for global capital to exploit the country. Mandela stated the result of this “long march to freedom” in 1996: “Privatization is the fundamental policy of the ANC and will remain so.”[2] In commenting on the privatization of the Johannesburg municipal water supply, which is now under the French corporation Suez Lyonnaise Eaux, the ANC issued a statements declaring that: “Eskom is one of a host of government owned ‘parastatals’ created during the apartheid era which the democratically elected government has set out to privatise in a bid to raise money.”[3] It is the same outcome for South Africa that was achieved by the “liberation” of Kosovan minerals in the name of “democracy” and in the name of the rights of Muslims under Serb rule, while other Muslims under their own rule are bombed into submission by the USA and its allies.

The Aims of Global Capitalism

The nature of the globalist dialectic has been explained particularly cogently by Noam Chomsky:

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.[4]

The Chomsky statement cogently expresses the situation in its entirety.

France as a Social Laboratory for Globalization

The Rivkin offensive is the latest in a long line of programs for undermining French identity. France is a paradox, combining the cosmopolitan values of the bourgeois Revolution of 1789 with a stubborn traditionalism and nationalism, which the globalists term “xenophobia.” It is manifested even in small ways such as the legal obligation of French public servants and politicians to speak only French to the foreign media, regardless of their knowledge of any other language; or the widespread resistance in France to McDonalds and Disney World.

France, like much of the rest of the world, however, is fighting a losing cultural battle against globalization. Jeff Steiner’s column “Americans in France,” refers to the manner by which the French at one time resisted the opening of the American fast food franchise as “part of an American cultural invasion.” Steiner writes:

. . . That seems to be past as McDonalds has so become a part of French culture that it’s not seen as an American import any longer, but wholly French. In short, McDonalds has grown on the French just like in so many other countries.

I’ve been to a few McDonalds in France and, except for one in Strasbourg that looks from the outside to be built in the traditional Alsatian style, all McDonalds in France that I have seen look no different than their American counterparts.

Yes, there are those that still curse McDo (They are now a very small group and mostly ignored) as the symbol of the Americanization of France and who also see it as France losing its uniqueness in terms of cuisine. The menu in a French McDonalds is almost an exact copy of what you would find in any McDonalds in the United States. It struck me as a bit odd that I could order as I would in the United States, that is in English, with the odd French preposition thrown in.

If truth were told, the French who eat at McDonalds are just as much at home there as any American could be.[5]

This seemingly trivial example is actually of immense importance in showing just how a culture as strong as that of France — until recently an immensely proud nation — can succumb, especially under the impress of marketing towards youngsters. It is a case study par excellence of the standardization that American corporate culture entails. It is what the globalist elite desires on a world scale, right down to what one eats.

It is notable that the vanguard of resistance to McDonalds came from farmers, a traditionalist segment of Europe’s population that is becoming increasingly anomalous and under the globalist regime will become an extinct species as agriculture gives way to agribusiness.

Given France’s status in Europe and its historical tendency to maintain its sovereignty in the face of US interests — even quite recently with its opposition to the war against Iraq — France remains one globalism’s few stumbling blocks in Europe. An added concern is that the French will take their stubborn “xenophobia” to the polls and elect a stridently anti-globalist party, as reflected in the electoral ups and downs of the Front National, which opposes both globalization and privatization.

This is a major reason for Rivkin’s far-reaching subversive and interventionist program to assimilate Muslims into French society, which would fundamentally transform French consciousness to be more thoroughly cosmopolitan. The intention is clear enough in the Rivkin embassy documents where it is stated that the Embassy will monitor the effects of the “outreach” program on the “decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.”

Contra the “xenophobia” of France, R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller’s study of the global corporation, Global Reach,[6] based on interviews with corporate executives, shows that the French business elite has long been seeking to undermine the foundations of French tradition. Jacques Maisonrouge, president of the IBM World Trade Corporation “likes to point out that ‘Down with borders,’ a revolutionary student slogan of the 1968 Paris university uprising – in which some of his children were involved – is also a welcome slogan at IBM.”[7] Maisonrouge stated that the “World Managers” (as Barnett and Muller call the corporate executives) believe they are making the world “smaller and more homogeneous.”[8] Maisonrouge approvingly described the global corporate executive as “the detribalized, international career men.”[9] It is this “detribalization” that is the basis of a “world consumer culture” required to more efficiently create a world economy.

Paris is already a cosmopolitan center and therefore ideal as a prototype for the “global city” of the future. In the 1970s Howard Perlmutter and Hasan Ozekhan of the Wharton School of Finance Worldwide Institutions Program prepared a plan for a “global city.” Paris was chosen for the purpose. Prof. Perlmutter was a consultant to global corporations. His plan was commissioned by the French Government planning agency. Perlmutter predicted that cities would become “global cities” during the 1980s.

For Paris, this required “becoming less French” and undergoing “denationalization.” This, he said, requires a “psycho-cultural change of image with respect to the traditional impression of ‘xenophobia’ that the French seem to exude.” The parallels with the current Rivkin program are apparent. Perlmutter suggested that the best way of ridding France of its nationalism was to introduce multiculturalism. He advocated “the globalization of cultural events” such as international rock festivals, as an antidote to “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture.”[10]

Undermining France’s “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture” is the reason Rivkin sought to foster stronger connections between Hollywood and the French culture industry.[11] Rivkin knows the value of entertainment in transforming attitudes, especially among the young. After working as a corporate finance analyst at Salomon Brothers, Rivkin joined The Jim Henson Company in 1988 as director of strategic planning. Two years later, he was made vice president of the company.

The Jim Henson Company produces Sesame Street, whose cute little muppets push a well-calculated globalist agenda to toddlers. Lawrence Balter, professor of applied psychology at New York University, wrote that Sesame Street “introduced children to a broad range of ideas, information, and experiences about diverse topics such as death, cultural pride, race relations, people with disabilities, marriage, pregnancy, and even space exploration.” The series was the first to employ educational researchers, with the formation of a Research Department.[12] Sesame Street has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the US Office of Education. Of passing interest is that the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation are also patrons of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Creating the World Consumer

As Chomsky has pointed out, global capitalism sees humanity in terms of interchangeable cogs in the production and consumption cycle. The summit of corporate human evolution is transformation into “detribalized, international career men.” According to financial journalist G. Pascal Zachary, these rootless cosmopolitans constitute an “informal global aristocracy” recruited all over the world by corporations, depending totally on their companies and “little upon the larger public,” a new class unhindered by national, cultural, or ethnic bonds.[13]

Barnett and Muller quoted Pfizer’s John J. Powers as stating that global corporations are “agents for change, socially, economically and culturally.”[14] They stated that global executives see “irrational nationalism” as inhibiting “the free flow of finance capital, technology, and goods on a global scale.” A crucial aspect of nationalism is “differences in psychological and cultural attitudes, that complicate the task of homogenizing the earth into an integrated unit. . . . Cultural nationalism is also a serious problem because it threatens the concept of the Global Shopping Center.”[15]

This “cultural nationalism” is described by Rivkin and all other partisans of globalism as “xenophobia,” unless that “xenophobia” can be marshaled in the service of a military adventure when bribes, embargoes and threats don’t bring a reticent state into line, as in the cases of Serbia, Iraq, and perhaps soon, Libya. Then the American globalist elite and their allies become “patriots.”

Barnet and Muller cite A. W. Clausen when he headed the Bank of America, as stating that national, cultural, and racial differences create “marketing problems,” lamenting that there is “no such thing as a uniform, global market.”[16] Harry Heltzer, Chief Executive Officer of 3M stated that global corporations are a “powerful voice for world peace because their allegiance is not to any nation, tongue, race, or creed but to one of the finer aspirations of mankind, that the people of the world may be united in common economic purpose.”[17]

These “finer aspirations of mankind,” known in other quarters as greed, avarice, and Mammon-worship, have despoiled the earth, caused global economic imbalance, and operate on usury that was in better times regarded as a sin. These “finer aspirations,” by corporate reckoning, have caused more wars than any “xenophobic” dictator, usually in the name of “world peace,” and “democracy.”

The Rivkin doctrine for France — which according to the leaked document, must be carried out in a subtle manner — is a far-reaching subversive program to transform especially the young into global clones devoid of cultural identity, while proceeding, in the manner of Orwellian “doublethink,” under the name of “multiculturalism.”

Notes

1. “Mandela honours ‘monumental’ Oppenheimer”, The Star, South Africa, August 21, 2000, http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=ct20000821001004683O150279 (accessed September 27, 2009).

2. Lynda Loxton, “Mandela: We are going to privatise,” The Saturday Star, May 25, 1996, p.1.

3. ANC daily news briefing, June 27, 2001. See also “Eskom,” ANC Daily News Briefing, June 20, 2001, 70.84.171.10/~etools/newsbrief/2001/news0621.txt

4. Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New York Press, 2002), pp. 88–89.

5. J. Steiner, “American in France: Culture: McDonalds in France, http://www.americansinfrance.net/culture/mcdonalds_in_france.cfm

6. R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

7. Global Reach, p. 19. For an update on Maisonrouge see: IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_maisonrouge.html

8. Global Reach, , p. 62.

9. Global Reach, ibid.

10. Global Reach, pp. 113–14.

11. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” PCIP, op. cit.

12. L. Balter, Parenthood in America: An Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1 (ABC-CLIO, 2000), p. 556.

13. G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000).

14. Global Reach, p. 31.

15. Global Reach, p. 58.

16. Global Reach, ibid.

17. Global Reach, p. 106.

 

  

German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden, NY, 1939

The Enigma of American Fascism in the 1930s

by Michael Kleen

Ex: http://www.alternativeright.com/

In the third decade of the Twentieth Century, as the Great Depression dragged on and the unemployment rate climbed above 20 percent, the United States faced a social and political crisis. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was swept to power in the election of 1932, forcing a political realignment that would put the Democratic Party in the majority for decades. In 1933, President Roosevelt proposed a “New Deal” that he claimed would cure the nation of its economic woes. His plan had many detractors, however, and at the fringes of mainstream politics, disaffected Americans increasingly looked elsewhere for inspiration.

Catholic priest and radio-personality Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front, the German American Bund, the Black Legion, and a variety of nationalist, anti-Semitic, and/or isolationist groups opposed to President Roosevelt, “Moneyed Interests,” and Marxism attracted over a million members and supporters during that decade. Collectively, these groups have long been considered to be a particularly American expression of the same type of fascism that swept Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The application of the term “fascism” to such a wide variety of individuals and organizations has proved troublesome, however, and the historiography on the subject is conflicted. Did European-style fascism appeal to Americans? Could an “American fascism” have kept the United States out of World War 2?

In order to answer those questions, we must first determine what American fascism was and was not, and then we have to understand why these groups and individuals failed to form any kind of broad coalition against Roosevelt, the New Deal, or liberal democracy itself.

Depending on the historian, American fascism began either as a far-ranging, populist-inspired movement and later degenerated into a number of fringe groups and fanatics, or it began as an isolated phenomenon that lost credibility during the Second World War and simply disappeared. Its adherents either consisted of a wide spectrum of Americans, or of a few thousand recently naturalized immigrants and two or three intellectuals.

“In the United States there were all kinds of fascist or parafascist organizations,” Walter Laqueur asserted in Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996), “but they never achieved a political breakthrough.”[i] A decade earlier, historian Peter H. Amann took an opposite track. “It seems clear that there were far fewer authentically fascist movements in Depression America than was thought at the time,” he argued.[ii] Conversely, Victor C. Ferkiss, writing in the 1950s, contended that American fascism “was a basically indigenous growth,” and that a broad fascist movement “arose logically from the Populist creed.”[iii]

According to Ferkiss, American fascism was defined as a movement that appealed to farmers and small merchants who felt “crushed between big business . . . and an industrial working class,” espoused nationalism in the form of isolationism, believed that authority came from popular will and not from “liberal democratic institutions” that had been corrupted by moneyed interests, and possessed “an interpretation of history in which the causal factor is the machinations of international financiers.”[iv] According to Peter Amann, all fascism (even the American type) was characterized by an opposition to Marxism and representative government, advocacy of a “revolutionary, authoritarian, nationalist state,” the presence of a charismatic leader and a militarized mass movement, and commonly (although not universally) racist and anti-Semitic views.[v]

These two divergent portrayals, one inclusive and one exclusive, mark the ends of the spectrum in regards to defining fascism in the United States during the 1930s. The former portrays fascism as a legitimate threat to the status quo, and the latter nearly calls its existence into question because so few groups actually fit this model.

American fascism’s cultural roots raise questions as well. Where did the members of these organizations come from? Did American culture encourage or condemn their growth? The data shows a complex picture. American fascism may have been encouraged by some aspects of American culture, but was vigorously condemned by others. The diversity of American interests made a unified fascism that posed a genuine threat to the social order nearly impossible. For instance, while the main constituency of Father Charles Coughlin’s movement was Irish Catholic,[vi] and the members of the German-American Bund mostly recent immigrants,[vii] the Black Legion of the Midwest was fiercely nativist and only accepted Protestants into its ranks.[viii]

What was it about American history and culture doomed openly fascist or fascoid movements? All historians, in their answers, point to our differing conceptions of individual liberty, suspicion of authority, and the commitment to republican government. “No country with a deeply rooted liberal or democratic tradition went fascist,” Peter Amann argued.[ix] For American intellectuals, Victor Ferkiss wrote, “fascism was by definition un-American.”[x] Even the openly racialist and white supremacist South overwhelmingly rejected any comparison to Nazi Germany, and denied it’s Ku Klux Klan had anything to do with fascism.[xi] It seemed that even while incorporating fascist elements, very few Americans openly advocated fascism according to the European model.

Victor C. Ferkiss was far more liberal in his assessment of American fascism than later historians. In his essays “Ezra Pound and American Fascism” (1955) and “Populist Influences on American Fascism” (1957), he attempted to link American fascist groups of the 1930s to the Populist movement of the 1890s, and he broadened the definition of fascism to include prominent aspects of Populism in the United States.

Ezra Pound, American expatriate, poet, and supporter of Benito Mussolini, was the lynchpin of Ferkiss’ argument for an inclusive definition of American fascism. Pound’s ideas, in the widest sense, mirrored those of others in the United States who were known as fascists by their detractors. Ferkiss justified his application of the term by arguing that those individuals and groups “espouse sets of beliefs which have more in common with one another and with European fascism than they do with any other broad area of political thought.”[xii] He listed Huey Long, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Charles E. Coughlin, and Lawrence Dennis as among those individuals, regardless of how few commonalities their ideas they may have actually shared with European fascist thought.

With this list in hand, Ferkiss held Populism directly responsible for these individual’s fascist tendencies. “American fascism had its roots in American populism,” he declared. “These populist beliefs and attitudes form the core of Pound’s philosophy, just as they provide the basis of American fascism generally.”[xiii] His definition of American fascism followed from that broad interpretation of the commonalities of American fascist thought, even though he acknowledged some fundamental differences. Ezra Pound’s “main divergence from [Lawrence] Dennis is the emphasis which, along with Father Coughlin and Huey Long, he places on the role of finance capitalism as a direct cause of war,” he explained. “For Pound, democracy is a sham.”[xiv]

Ferkiss argued that American fascists viewed the American Revolution as a revolt against the international banking system of England, and that “Mussolini’s objectives are those of Thomas Jefferson,” in his effort to free his country from the power of banks and usury.[xv] That focus on the fascist powers of Europe as defenders of money reform lent to their American supporter’s isolationism, but Ferkiss failed to take into account that approval or agreement does not directly translate into political imitation.

As for the constituency of American fascism, Ferkis argued that “the America First Committee provided the culture in which the seeds of American fascism were to grow.” The AFC was predominantly made up of Midwesterners and a few prominent businessmen, but also had chapters in large Eastern and Western cities. While the AFC was not overtly fascist, “a considerable portion of its chapters were dominated by fascists or their friends,” Ferkiss explained.[xvi] Ezra Pound was also a Midwesterner, having been born in Idaho. He later took a teaching job in Indiana, but he was let go for being “too European” and “unconventional.”[xvii] He emigrated to Europe shortly thereafter.

Written at the same time as Victor Ferkiss’ essays, Joachim Remak’s article “'Friends of the New Germany': The Bund and German-American Relations” (1957) chronicled the nearly universal American reaction against one of the few American fascist groups to consciously model itself after and receive direct inspiration from a European fascist regime: the German-American Bund. Even though the German government forbid its citizens from becoming members of the Bund, and requested that the Bund cease using National Socialist emblems in 1938, most Americans still believed the organization was a foreign entity. “The Americans on its rolls were all of them recent immigrants” from Nazi Germany, Remak explained. “German-Americans had no use for the Bund… the president of the highly conservative Steuben Society called on the [German] embassy to say that his group felt compelled to issue a public repudiation of the Bund.”[xviii]

Remak argued that the German-American Bund, rather than appealing to some broad pro-fascist sympathy in the United States, only harmed relations with National Socialist Germany by demonstrating to Americans the nature of European fascism. “Naziism, with its brutality and its suppression of basic liberties and decencies, could hold no greater appeal for the German-Americans than for the rest of the nation,” he argued.[xix] The rejection of an explicitly fascist organization by those Americans who Victor Ferkiss believed made up the core of ‘American fascism’ is instructive.

Along the same lines, Leland V. Bell, in his book, In Hitler's Shadow: the Anatomy of American Nazism (1973), argued that the real supporters of fascism in the United States were few and far between. In the 1930s, the Nazi party’s pleas for money from American contributors like Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan fell on deaf ears. Teutonia, one of the first pro-Nazi groups in the United States, numbered less than one hundred members in 1932, and the typical members of those groups were “young, rootless German immigrants,” and “arrogant, resolute, fanatics.”[xx] When Heinz Spanknoebel formed the Friends of the New Germany in July 1933, “a storm of public protest” greeted them. Four months later, Spanknoebel, like Ezra Pound had earlier, fled the United States.[xxi] The Friends of the New Germany failed to attract significant support from German Americans, who by that time “were accepted, respected citizens and easily assimilated into American life,” Bell explained.[xxii]

In 1936, Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized American citizen who had served in the German army during the First World War, became head of the organization. He renamed it the German-American Bund to attract more American nationals. Most of the constituency of the Bund was made up of recent German immigrants, however, despite Adolf Hitler having banned German citizens from becoming members of the organization. In contrast to Victor Ferkiss’ claim that supporters of American fascism were predominantly rural, the Bund was an urban lower-middle-class movement.[xxiii]

 

It is clear from Joachim Remak and Leland Bell’s analysis of the German-American Bund that Americans were generally suspicious of overtly fascist groups along the European model. Even the ethnic Germans who had established themselves in the Midwest as farmers and craftsmen, who generally supported isolationism before both World Wars, were not sympathetic to the anti-Democratic, outspokenly pro-Hitler Bundists.

One of the intellectual proponents of American fascism mentioned by Victor Ferkiss was Seward Collins, editor and publisher of the journal American Review. In his article “Seward Collins and the American Review: Experiment in Pro-Fascism, 1933-37” (1960), historian Albert E. Stone argued that Collins’ attempts to “define fascism and apply it to American life” not only produced nothing but controversy, but also undermined his project by alienating his supporters.

Seward Collins’ definition of fascism was unique compared to those covered thus far. According to Stone, Collins amalgamated four schools of thought—two English and two American—which he trumpeted in the American Review: Distributism, Neo-Scholasticism, Humanism, and Southern Agrarianism. Stone explained, “Where these four bodies of thought converged, Collins believed, could be found a definition of fascism which should be offered to thoughtful Americans.”[xxiv] For Seward Collins, fascism meant an end to parliamentary government, but not necessarily an end to democracy. Instead of a president, the head of state would be a monarch― “A strong man at the head of government,”[xxv] which would be coupled by nationalism undivided by rival oppositions.

Collins asserted that the essence of fascism was “the revival of monarchy, property, the guilds, the security of the family and the peasantry, and the ancient ways of European life.”[xxvi] However, that conception of fascism seemed to be a Collins’ own invention and was certainly far afield from the views of Ezra Pound or the German-American Bund. Also, Collins’ espoused anti-Semitism “bore virtually no trace of racial superiority.” He wished to exclude Jews from his fascist state only because they represented social and political rivals, as well as potential dissenters. There was no place in his mind for ideas of Nordic racial superiority, which he called “nonsense.”[xxvii] That would also distinguish him from organizations like the Black Legion and the German-American Bund.

According to Albert Stone, Collins’ views on monarchy and nationalism ultimately alienated one of his important constituencies in the United States, Southern Agrarians. “Southern Agrarians opposed in theory a strong central government,” Stone explained. They were also suspicious of nationalism, deeply isolationist, and “welcomed regional, social and racial differences as healthy manifestations of time, place and tradition.”[xxviii] During a January 1936 interview with the pro-communist magazine FIGHT, Seward Collins colorfully explicated his desire for a monarchy and a return to a medieval society, disparaged liberal education, and voiced admiration for Hitler and Mussolini.

Almost immediately after the interview was published, the American Review’s Southern Agrarian writers left in protest. The Distributists also distanced themselves. Herbert Agar, a prominent member of that bloc, stated, “I would die in order to diminish the chances of fascism in America.”[xxix] The American Review ceased publication in 1937. In the end, it seemed that the majority of Seward Collins’ contributors wanted nothing to do with his views.

 

In “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid” (1983) and “A 'Dog in the Nighttime' Problem: American Fascism in the 1930s” (1986), Peter H. Amann argued for a narrow definition of fascism that held closely to the European model and therefore excluded most American groups. Instead, he employed the terms “protofascist” or “fascoid” to describe American organizations that embraced certain aspects or appearances of fascism, but failed to develop into mature fascist political movements.

One such group was the Black Legion, a secret offshoot of the Midwestern Ku Klux Klan. An Ohioan named Dr. William Jacob Shepard formed the Legion during the late 1920s, but never intended the group to take on a life of its own. He was a Northerner who idolized the old South, and he “spouted, and apparently believed, the most rotund platitudes about southern chivalry.”[xxx] He was also a baptized Catholic who hated Catholics, and a doctor who did not shy away from violence.

His Black Legion donned black robes instead of white and held secret initiation rituals. “They were asked to endorse the standard nativist anti-immigrant, anti-Negro, and anti-Catholic positions,” Amann explained, and “pledge support to lynch law.”[xxxi] Initiates were often coaxed or deceived into coming to meetings, and then threatened with death if they did not join.[xxxii] The membership of the Legion was spread across Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and parts of Illinois, and the majority of members were urban and working class.[xxxiii]

The Black Legion became more violent and more revolutionary as time went on, bringing them closer to the European fascist model. Bert Effinger, their defacto leader during the 1930s, even planned “to kill one million Jews by planting in every American synagogue during Yon Kippur time-clock devices that would simultaneously release mustard gas.”[xxxiv]

Amann argued that the secretive nature of the group prevented them from becoming an effective organization. They were powerful in some ways, but their secrecy made it impossible for them to appeal to a mass audience. No one outside of their organization knew they existed—not even their enemies—so fear and intimidation became a useless tactic. They attempted to create front organizations to infiltrate established political parties but, ultimately, “by pretending to be mere Republicans, Legionnaires ended up acting as mere Republicans.”[xxxv]

Despite their failure, the Black Legion did share many characteristics with European fascist groups. According to Amann, they shared many of the same hatreds, revolutionary goals, and dictatorial tendencies. However, their initiation ceremonies, because of their ultra secrecy, never held the same weight as the mass rallies and rituals of European fascists. Also, the Legion’s nativism was patriotic in a crucial way: the American system may have been corrupt, but there was no alternative to the Constitution or the Republic. Their goal was only to purify the current system, not overthrow it. The history of the Black Legion ultimately shows, Amann argued, that “vigilante nativism and revolutionary-fascism were fundamentally incompatible.”[xxxvi] Additionally, he concluded, “by no stretch of anyone’s imagination can the Black Legion under Dr. Shepard be described as fascist. His Night Riders were to fascism what the Shriners are to Islam.”[xxxvii]

Similarly, the ultra-patriotic societies of the 1930s that evolved into the America First Committee, which Victor Ferkiss believed provided the cultural basis for American fascism, lacked the same crucial ingredients as their alleged European counterparts. “Whatever emphasis prevailed,” Amann explained, “there was never any thought of attacking the American constitutional system, the incumbent politicians, or the two major parties. Nor was there any attempt at mass mobilization.” The Ku Klux Klan, for example, never formed a political party or sought to change the political or economic system of the United States. Therefore, Amann concluded, “the overlap between American nativism and the European type of fascism is… more apparent than real.”[xxxviii]

The nature of these diverse groups also prevented them from working together to present a united front. “The nativist inheritance included… a divisive traditional anti-Catholicism that led the Black Legion to plant explosives in Father Charles Coughlin’s shrine rather than to seek him out as a potential ally,” Peter Amann pointed out.[xxxix] Additionally, genuinely fascist groups like the German-American Bund, with their “aping” of European fascist models, had their patriotic credentials routinely called into question. “It became obvious that in the United States such a nationalism could not be imported from abroad without looking both foolish and unpatriotic,” Amann argued.[xl] A genuine American fascism appealed to very few Americans in the 1930s, and every protofascist organization fell apart the more violent and overtly fascist in appearance and action it became.

In his book Hoods and Shirts: the Extreme Right in Pennsylvania (1997), Philip Jenkins tackled the problem of American fascism from a different angle. He argued that fascism was “polychromatic rather than monotone,” and embraced a spectrum of beliefs across Europe that was also reflected in the United States.[xli] If historians were not hesitant to label such diverse groups as Na Léinte Gorma in Ireland and the Croatian Ustashi (who were lead by church figures and clergymen) as fascist, he reasoned, then they should not be hesitant to label an organization like Father Coughlin’s Christian Front in the same manner.

However, the issue is complicated by the fact that fascist groups in the United States hesitated to call themselves as such. “The organizations most enthusiastic about European Nazism or fascism rarely included these provocative terms in their titles,” he explained. Most often, “Christian” and “Nationalist” were substituted instead because their appeal to American patriotism precluded foreign ideologies. In his own words, “a denial of fascism was phrased as part of a general rejection of any foreign theories.”[xlii]

Father Coughlin’s Christian Front was one of the primary organizations profiled in Hoods and Shirts. According to Jenkins, the Christian Front was founded on “traditions of Irish nationalism” and “anti-British feeling.”[xliii] Although Coughlin himself broadcast his radio messages from Michigan, the Front’s membership was heavily Irish and centered in large cities such as New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Boston and Philadelphia. Jenkins described Father Coughlin as akin to Spanish Nationalist leader Francisco Franco, to whom Coughlin had given moral support during the Spanish Civil War.

 

Coughlin’s movement linked Jews with communism and saw the Spanish Civil War as a war between good and evil. “Sympathy for Jews was indistinguishable from providing aid and comfort for Communist subversion,” Jenkins explained. The Christian Front allied itself with an assortment of groups, including the German-American Bund, in support of attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses.[xliv] These activities, along with some outspoken statements in favor of Adolf Hitler, led to the arrest of dozens of movement members. Not all Irish Catholics supported those activities. After one particularly violent incident, an Irish Catholic magistrate “accused the Coughlinites of attempting to spread ‘European’ conditions in Philadelphia.”[xlv] Other Catholics regularly denounced Coughlin in newspapers and journals.[xlvi]

The Christian Front did welcome members from other backgrounds, as evidenced by its willingness to work together with Bund members as well as Italian-Americans. “In New York City over half of all Catholic clergy serving predominantly Italian parishes demonstrated sympathy for the Fascist cause and thus cooperated with the emerging Front,” Jenkins explained.[xlvii] African-American anti-Semites, especially those involved with Black Muslim sects, also attended gatherings and supported Front anti-Jewish activities. Some African Americans in large cities saw Jews as “exploitative landlords and grasping merchants,”[xlviii] which echoed the crusade against “moneyed interests” that was so central to Victor Ferkiss’ definition of American fascism.

As the Second World War broke out in Europe, the Christian Front faced increasing public opposition, as well as persecution by the FBI. Jenkins concluded that both its supporters and its enemies exaggerated the impact of the movement, but it represented one of the only fascoid groups in the United States during the 1930s to have been genuinely domestic in origin. “Of all the activist groups,” he argued, “this had perhaps the greatest potential to become a genuine mass movement around which others could coalesce.”[xlix] Even still, like every other American group on the far right, the political movement it sought to inspire fizzled out when the United States entered the war.

The historical record is very clear. The range of individuals and organizations surveyed by Victor Ferkiss, Peter Amann, and Philip Jenkins all show a similar arch: a steady rise in popularity followed by radicalization, which then ran up against resistance when the group’s activities were exposed. The end result was the rapid dissolution of the organization or the exile of the individual. By 1941, no one who openly came out as being supportive of fascism survived very long in the public eye.

Although a certain cultural undercurrent was needed in order to support the existence of these groups, that cultural undercurrent was undermined by the American democratic tradition they sought to oppose. It seems that, at least in the atmosphere of 1930s America, one could not be both a fascist in any meaningful sense of the word and also be supported by the majority of Americans who saw fascism as a threat to their liberal democratic institutions. The experiences of groups such as the German-American Bund, the Black Legion, Father Coughlin’s Christian Front, and individuals like Seward Collins and Ezra Pound seem to confirm that fascism was by definition a fundamentally “European” phenomenon.

---

[i] Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17.

[ii] Peter H. Amann, “A 'Dog in the Nighttime' Problem: American Fascism in the 1930s,” The History Teacher 19 (August 1986): 574.

[iii] Victor C. Ferkiss, “Populist Influences on American Fascism,” The Western Political Quarterly 10 (June 1957): 350, 352.

[iv] Ibid., 350-351.

[v] Amann, 560.

[vi] Ibid., 574.

[vii] Leland V. Bell, In Hitler's Shadow: the Anatomy of American Nazism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973), 21.

[viii] Peter H. Amann, “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25 (July 1983): 496.

[ix] Amann, “A ‘Dog in the Nighttime Problem”: 559.

[x] Ferkiss, “Populist Influences on American Fascism”: 350.

[xi] Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?,” The Journal of Southern History 58 (November 1992): 688.

[xii] Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism”: 173-4.

[xiii] Ibid., 174.

[xiv] Ibid., 186.

[xv] Ibid., 190.

[xvi] Ferkiss, “Populist Influences on American Fascism”: 367-8.

[xvii] Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism”: 175.

[xviii] Joachim Remak, “'Friends of the New Germany': The Bund and German-American Relations,” The Journal of Modern History 29 (March 1957): 40.

[xix] Ibid., 41.

[xx] Leland V. Bell, In Hitler's Shadow: the Anatomy of American Nazism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973), 7.

[xxi] Ibid., 13.

[xxii] Ibid., 15-16.

[xxiii] Ibid., 21.

[xxiv] Albert E. Stone, Jr., “Seward Collins and the American Review: Experiment in Pro-Fascism, 1933-37,” American Quarterly 12 (Spring 1960): 6.

[xxv] Ibid., 7.

[xxvi] Ibid., 9.

[xxvii] Ibid., 12.

[xxviii] Ibid., 13.

[xxix] Ibid., 17.

[xxx] Peter H. Amann, “Vigilante Fascism”: 494.

[xxxi] Ibid., 496.

[xxxii] Ibid., 498.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 509.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 512.

[xxxv] Ibid., 515.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 524.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 501.

[xxxviii] Peter H. Amann, “A 'Dog in the Nighttime' Problem”: 562.

[xxxix] Ibid., 567.

[xl] Ibid., 569.

[xli] Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: the Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 27.

[xlii] Ibid., 25-26.

[xliii] Ibid., 166.

[xliv] Ibid., 173.

[xlv] Ibid., 174.

[xlvi] Ibid., 187-8.

[xlvii] Ibid., 183.

[xlviii] Ibid., 185.

[xlix] Ibid., 191.

 

Michael Kleen

Michael Kleen is the Editor-in-Chief of Untimely Meditations, publisher of Black Oak Presents, and proprietor of Black Oak Media. He holds a master’s degree in American history and is the author of The Britney Spears Culture, a collection of columns regarding issues in contemporary American politics and culture. His columns have appeared in various publications and websites, including the Rock River Times, Daily Eastern News, World Net Daily, and Strike-the-Root.

Aufstand und militärisches Eingreifen – der versuchte Staatsstreich der USA und NATO in Libyen?

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

Die USA und die NATO unterstützen einen bewaffneten Aufstand im Osten Libyens in der Absicht, ein »Eingreifen aus humanitären Gründen« zu rechtfertigen.

Hier geht es nicht um eine gewaltfreie Protestbewegung wie in Ägypten oder Tunesien. Die Lage in Libyen ist grundsätzlich anders geartet. Der bewaffnete Aufstand im Osten Libyens wird direkt von ausländischen Mächten unterstützt. Dabei ist von Bedeutung, dass die Aufständischen in Bengasi sofort die rot-schwarz-grüne Flagge mit dem Halbmond und dem Stern hissten – die Flagge der Monarchie unter König Idris, die die Herrschaft der früheren Kolonialmächte symbolisiert.

Militärberater und Sondereinheiten der USA und der NATO befinden sich bereits vor Ort. Die Operation sollte eigentlich mit den Protestbewegungen in den benachbarten arabischen Staaten zusammenfallen. Der Öffentlichkeit sollte glauben gemacht werden, die Proteste hätten spontan von Tunesien und Ägypten auf Libyen übergegriffen.

Die Regierung Obama unterstützt derzeit in Abstimmung mit ihren Alliierten einen bewaffneten Aufstand, und zwar einen versuchten Staatsstreich:

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/pro...

Alain Soral: Mieux comprendre l'empire afin de mieux le combattre...

Mieux comprendre l’empire afin de mieux le combattre…

Entretien avec Alain Soral

 

Ex: http://www.flashmagazine.fr

S’il y a un livre tombant à point nommé, à en juger de l’actualité, c’est bien celui-ci : le dernier essai de notre chroniqueur. En exclusivité, il nous en dit plus (paru dans Flash Magazine N°59).

Vous nous aviez habitués à parler légèrement de choses graves et là, on sent une rupture de ton dans ce dernier ouvrage… C’est la cinquantaine qui vous change ou sont-ce les temps qui changent ?
Disons que nous ne sommes plus dans les années 1990/2000 où quelque chose se mettait en place avec l’UE, l’Euro, mais où la tentative de putsch mondialiste n’était pas aussi imminente et visible. À cette époque, on pouvait encore tergiverser, mais là, entre la crise financière américaine, les déficits publics européens, les tensions ethniques et sociales qui se généralisent, et pas seulement dans le monde musulman, plus ici l’écroulement de la classe moyenne et la candidature de Strauss-Kahn qui s’avance… Vous conviendrez que les temps ne sont plus à la rigolade, à moins d’être Martien !

Vous êtes de formation marxiste et pourtant vous continuez de défendre la monarchie capétienne. Le paradoxe est plaisant, mais on sent du fond derrière ce raisonnement. Dites-nous en un peu plus…
Pour apaiser nos lecteurs de droite, je vais commencer par une citation de Marx, afin de bien leur faire sentir quelle était la position de ce grand penseur sur l’Ancien régime et le monde bourgeois qui lui a succédé : “Partout où la bourgeoisie est parvenue à dominer, elle a détruit toutes les conditions féodales, patriarcales, idylliques. Impitoyable, elle a déchiré les liens multicolores de la féodalité qui attachaient l’homme à son supérieur naturel, pour ne laisser subsister d’autre lien entre l’homme et l’homme que l’intérêt tout nu, l’inexorable “paiement comptant”. Frissons sacrés et pieuses ferveurs, enthousiasme chevaleresque, mélancolie béotienne, elle a noyé tout cela dans l’eau glaciale du calcul égoïste.”

Ceci pour rappeler que le sujet de Marx c’est la critique de la bourgeoisie, pas de l’Ancien régime ! En revanche, l’outil sociologique marxiste est très utile pour comprendre le renversement de la monarchie française par le nouvel ordre bourgeois. Et ces deux siècles de régime démocratique nous permettent aussi de juger largement des promesses et des mensonges de notre fameuse République égalitaire et laïque, en réalité démocratie de marché et d’opinion sous contrôle de l’argent et des réseaux maçonniques… Je peux donc, à la façon de Maurras, conclure de cette analyse objective que la monarchie catholique, comme système politique, était meilleure garante de l’indépendance nationale et de la défense des intérêts du peuple, que la finance apatride qui se trouve aujourd’hui au sommet de la pyramide démocratique qui n’a, en réalité, de démocratique que le nom !

De même, vous avez rejoint le PCF au début de sa dégringolade et refusez de vous acharner sur la défunte URSS, y voyant une sorte de tentative maladroite de lutter contre un empire encore plus puissant. On se trompe ?
Je suis persuadé, par intuition, mais aussi par l’analyse philosophique et historique, que le communisme n’a pu séduire une grande partie des masses travailleuses et des élites intellectuelles en Occident, que parce qu’il renouait avec la promesse chrétienne du don et du nous, détruite par le libéralisme bourgeois et son apologie de l’égoïsme individuel. Tout le reste n’est qu’une histoire de manipulation et de récupération, comme il en va toujours des religions par les Églises. Comme Tolstoï à son époque, je ne vois donc pas le communisme comme une aggravation du matérialisme bourgeois, mais comme une réaction au matérialisme bourgeois. Une tentative de respiritualiser le monde, malgré la mort de Dieu, et il y a pour moi, à l’évidence, bien plus de spiritualité et de christianisme dans l’espoir communiste tel que l’avaient compris le peuple et les poètes, que dans la bigoterie catholique de la IIIe République !

Par ailleurs, le monde bipolaire USA/URSS était la chance de la France, qui pouvait faire valoir, dans ce rapport de force, sa petite troisième voie. Ce qu’avait parfaitement compris de Gaulle dès 1940. Se réjouir, pour raison doctrinale, de la chute de l’URSS, alors que la nouvelle hégémonie américaine qui en a résulté nous a fait tout perdre, n’est donc pas une attitude de patriote français intelligent.

Bref, comme je l’explique aussi dans mon livre : l’ennemi de la France catholique est, et reste, la perfide Albion et ses rejetons, le monde judéo-protestant anglo-saxon libéral ; pas la rêveuse Russie d’hier, pas l’Orient complexe et compliqué d’aujourd’hui…

Continuons à parler de vous. De tous les intellectuels “alternatifs” ou “déviants”, vous êtes l’un des meilleurs dans la maîtrise des codes de la “modernité”. Mais aussi l’un des plus en pointe dans la défense de la tradition, gréco-romaine et chrétienne. Un autre paradoxe ?
Merci du compliment. Mais je crois que ma réponse précédente éclaire en partie cette juste remarque. La France, qui a été la grande Nation, a produit les plus grands penseurs occidentaux du XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle – les Allemands ayant pris le relai au XIXe après que l’Angleterre nous eut détruits avec Napoléon, comme elle détruira ensuite l’Allemagne avec Hitler… – la France donc, pour des raisons sociologiques et épistémologiques, reste encore aujourd’hui, malgré sa faiblesse politique, la citadelle morale capable de résister, en Occident, au rouleau compresseur judéo-protestant anglo-saxon. À ce rouleau compresseur qui avance en détruisant les deux piliers de notre civilisation qui sont le logos grec et la charité chrétienne. Cette pensée et cette vision du monde helléno-chrétienne – celle de Pascal – qui est française par excellence et européenne, au sens euro-méditerranéen du terme. Une compréhension spirituelle de l’Europe qui passe malheureusement très au-dessus de la tête des Identitaires et de leurs fatales alliances judéo-maçonniques (Riposte laïque + LDJ) d’adolescents niçois…Toute la modernité, comme sa critique intelligente, c’est-à-dire la compréhension et la critique du processus libéral-libertaire provient de cette épistémè helléno-chrétienne, si française. Il est donc logique que quelqu’un qui prétende maîtriser la modernité défende cet outil et cet héritage national incomparable…

Cela vous amène tout naturellement à prendre la défense d’un islam dont on sent bien que les élites dominantes souhaitent la diabolisation, après avoir eu la peau du catholicisme. Une fois de plus, vous ramez à contre-courant…
Pour enfoncer le même clou, je rappellerai qu’un Français, donc un catholique, se situe à égale distance d’un anglo-saxon judéo-protestant et d’un arabo-musulman. Et c’est de cet équilibre, comme l’avait déjà compris François 1er, qu’il tire son indépendance et sa puissance. Une réalité spirituelle et géopolitique encore confortée par notre héritage colonial, l’espace francophone qui en a résulté… En plus, la situation aujourd’hui est d’un tel déséquilibre en faveur de la puissance anglo-saxonne, et cette hyper-puissance nous coûte si cher en termes de soumission et de dépendance, qu’il faut être un pur agent de l’Empire – comme Sarkozy et nos élites stipendiées pour se tromper à ce point d’ennemi principal !

Quant à la question de l’immigration, qui est la vraie question et pas l’islam, il est évident que pour la régler il faudra d’abord que la France reprenne le pouvoir sur elle-même. Or, ce pouvoir en France qui l’a ? Pas les musulmans…

Revenons-en à votre livre. Si on le résume à une charge contre le Veau d’or et ceux qui le servent, la définition vous convient-elle ?
Oui. “Comprendre l’Empire” c’est comprendre l’Empire de l’Argent. Et la lutte finale n’est pas contre la gauche ou la droite, les Allemands ou les Arabes, mais contre la dictature de Mammon. C’est en cela que le combat actuel rejoint la tradition…

Un dernier petit mot d’optimisme pour nos lecteurs, histoire de les inviter à ne pas désespérer ?
D’abord pour citer Maurras après Marx : “Tout désespoir en politique est une sottise absolue”. N’oubliez pas que, contrairement au football, l’Histoire est un match sans fin. On peut donc être mené 20-0, rien n’est jamais perdu. De plus, notre empire mondialiste en voie d’achèvement ressemble de plus en plus à l’URSS. Un machin techno-bureaucratique piloté par une oligarchie délirante, stupide et corrompue, ne régnant plus sur le peuple, contre ses intérêts, que par le mensonge et la coercition. Le Traité de Lisbonne et la réforme des retraites en témoignent. Il n’est donc pas exclu que, comme pour l’URSS, l’Empire mondialiste s’écroule sous le poids de ses mensonges et de ses contradictions, au moment même où il pensait arriver aux pleins pouvoirs officiels par le Gouvernement mondial, après deux siècles de menées souterraines…

De ce point de vue, les soulèvements populaires au Maghreb, et qui pourraient bien culminer par la chute d’Israël et la défaite du lobby sioniste aux USA, sont un signe d’espoir bien plus probant que la montée des extrêmes droites sionistes et libérales européennes !

Propos recueillis par Béatrice PÉREIRE

 

À propos de Alain Soral

Écrivain, essayiste et dynamiteur bien connu des plateaux de télévision, l’homme est incontrôlable,. À Flash, il a parfois du mal à se contrôler. Et c’est aussi et surtout pour cela qu’on l’aime. Devant le politiquement correct, il est comme un taureau devant un chiffon rouge. Tout plutôt qu’un veau !

Voir tous les articles de Alain Soral →

US-Militärschlag gegen Gaddafi wegen Ungehorsam?

Wolfgang Effenberger

Nachdem am 26. Februar 2011 US-Präsident Barack Obama finanzielle Sanktionen gegen Libyen beschlossen hat, werden nun  auch militärische Optionen nicht mehr ausgeschlossen. Eine derart schnelle Reaktion war bisher nur zu beobachten, wenn wirklich handfeste US-Interessen auf dem Spiel standen. Das war zum Beispiel der Fall, als die Vereinigten Staaten Ende Oktober 1983 im Rahmen der Operation »Urgent Fury« die idyllische Karibikinsel Grenada handstreichartig besetzten und damit die ihnen nicht genehme Linksentwicklung des Landes beendeten. Am 20. Dezember 1989 fielen US-Streitkräfte in Panama ein. Die Operation »Just Cause« hatte das Ziel, den ungehorsam gewordenen panamaischen Machthaber, General Manuel Noriega, zu verhaften und ihn in die Vereinigten Staaten zu entführen. Dort wurde er wegen Drogenhandels und Geldwäsche angeklagt und am 10. Juli 1992 zu 40 Jahren Haft verurteilt. 

In vielen Fällen setzten die USA nicht nur direkte Aggression, Subversion und Terror als politische Waffe ein, sondern sie unterstützten auch derartige Methoden bei Satellitenstaaten. So führte das NATO-Mitglied Türkei massive ethnische Säuberungen und andere Terroraktionen durch, wobei die Regierung Clinton noch durch umfangreiche Waffenlieferungen dazu beitrug, als die Verbrechen gegen die Zivilbevölkerung ihren Höhepunkt erreichten. (1)

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/wol...

Liberalism is the cause of inequality

Liberalism is the cause of inequality

by Brett Stevens 

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/

One of the pitfalls of being human is the many perceptual traps that can ensnare us. Spotting an object in water is difficult because of refraction; our ability to estimate the lengths of lines is hampered by nearby objects. Colors surrounding an object affect how we perceive it.

For the past five hundred years, a perceptual trap has gained momentum. This trap starts simply: we see civilization around us, and that it provides for us, and we assume that it will always be that way, even if we make changes. So greedily we demand as much as possible for ourselves and ignore the consequences of those acts.

More than a political movement, this is a social movement based on the wishful thinking of people who are not engaged in maintaining the civilization itself. They view society as like a supermarket: you take what you want, pay your money, and worry about nothing else.

In the USA and Europe, a resistance movement has awakened to resist this perceptual trap. We resist it both as an economic doctrine (socialism/liberalism) and as a philosophy of civilization (narcissism). We don’t want it in any form because it is the opposite of a healthy attitude toward life, and its results are correspondingly bad.

A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. – MJ

The good liberals over at MotherJones.com, who provided us the above quotation and several informative charts, have stepped into a perceptual trap. They assume that individual equality exists, therefore that if inequality exists, something must be wrong.

They point out an interesting fact, however: the average income in the USA is dropping, while the incomes of the “super-rich” are rising, which is symptomatic of a third-world population. However, what they forget is that liberalism caused this vast inequality by undermining the middle class:

• Spreading the wealth. The agenda of liberalism is equality, which becomes filtered through the socialist notion of redistributing the wealth from rich to poor; if we’re all equal, the rich have that wealth unfairly, they think. The problem is that in doing this they take money away from those who are more competent, and who will use it to make more money, and spread it to people who are by definition less able to make competent financial decisions.
• Importing voters. A favorite liberal tactic since 1965 has been to import voters from third-world nations. The problem with this is that it skews the population demographic toward low-income low-skilled workers. This cheapens our cost of basic labor-oriented tasks, but in turn, forces the same amount of value to go to more people and ensures that any given task requires more people. The result is a dissipation of value, so that even if the number values remain the same, quality declines, as we’ve seen happen in American construction, poultry/meat and manufacturing since the 1990s.
• Fast money. Bill Clinton effected an economic miracle by making money easy and quick to borrow. While this provided a great stimulus to business in the short-term, in the long-term it shifted profitability from production of value-adding goods to the shuffling of paper and reselling of financial instruments. This produced an economy that while “profitable” existed entirely on paper. This not only creates a new class of super-rich manipulators, but also devalues the currency as investors worry about its actual value.
• Red tape. Affirmative action, H1-B visas, anti-discrimination legislation, Obamacare, environmental regulations, extensive safety rules and a Byzantine tax code afflict our businesses with miles of red tape. This in turn makes them less competitive, which they compensate for by cutting corners, which in turn reduces the value of their goods relative to those who have fewer obligations. Even more, this tempts them to outsource, where they don’t have to pay these costs.
• Unions. Unions combine the worst of all of the above: they spread money to the wrong people, including organized crime; they create violent social polarization between classes; they support and encourage immigration; they generate miles of red tape; they spread the wealth from those who make more wealth to those who sit in offices and pore over books of rules. In addition, unions wreck our competitiveness by creating more internal communication over non-productive issues, having more rules and more people to buy in on any compromise. If unions were biological we’d call them cancers.
• Allegiance. Removing the more organic questions of culture, heritage and ability, the liberal Utopia promotes people based on their allegiance to political concepts. Whether Viet Cong recruits reciting Mao, or Bono from U2 having the “right opinions,” we make a new elite for political motives. Surely Barack Obama, with his missing dissertation and questionable accomplishments, serves as a vanguard for this new political ueber-class.

All of the above are liberal darlings because the above support the liberal agenda of equality through wealth distribution and fragmentation of any majority group (who could possibly be more equal than the rest of us). In addition, the American left gets most of its funding from unions and associated concerns.

Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. – Washington Examiner

If you want to know why your money is decreasing in value, and thus inequality is increasing, it is because of the liberal left’s attempts to make inequality disappear.

Before the left took over, the philosophy of Europe and the United States was that we would provide opportunity and reward those who were more competent. This natural philosophy, a lot like natural selection, enabled us to grow and challenge ourselves and produce an elite of smart, capable, dedicated people.

As the fight over the federal budget gathers pace, we will also see big confrontations between the reformers and the hostages to the status quo in Washington. Democrats are salivating over a possible backlash against Republican lawmakers if they force a government shutdown in early March by insisting on spending cuts. And complacent Republicans are dreading that very possibility in the face of the onslaught from the more energetic House Republican freshmen who recently passed that bold measure to reduce the federal budget by $61 billion.

The United States has been getting away with surreal levels of debt for far too long. If the dollar were not the world’s reserve currency, a major debt crisis would have exploded by now. The total outstanding federal debt has reached $14.1 trillion, almost the equivalent of what the economy produces in a year. Meanwhile, the annual deficit, a major source of that ever-mounting debt, stands at more than $1.6 trillion for 2011. It represents almost 11 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — which compares pitifully even with Greece, whose deficit in 2010 amounted to 8 percent of that country’s economy.

As a result of these imbalances, and of the illusion that unemployment can be brought down with government spending, the Federal Reserve has been printing dollars like crazy — half of them to purchase Treasury bonds. The policy of easy money has contributed to skyrocketing commodity prices, whose ugly political, social and economic consequences we are only beginning to see around the world. – Real Clear Politics

As the left got more popular, it introduced the perceptual trap: why can’t we all just be equal, spread the wealth, be pacifists, and live in tolerance of each other. The problem is that wealth redistribution penalizes the competent and responsible, and replaces them with a few vicious controllers and vast clueless masses who do not care about social problems they cannot understand.

There’s a major difference between the US aristocracy and the meritocracy though. Aristocrats like Henry Chauncey, bred at Saint Grottlesex boarding schools and the Ivy League, were conscious of their privilege and social responsibility, and focused on developing the character and leadership skills necessary for public service. Many of today’s meritocrats, in contrast, don’t believe it’s a rigged game in their favour, and commit themselves to winning it at all costs, which means stepping on everyone else. As a result, too many lack self-reflection or self-criticism skills, meaning even those who are grossly overpaid give themselves outrageous bonuses.

…

But as long as the global elite is armed with and shielded by the belief that they are a genuine meritocracy they’d find it morally repulsive to make the necessary compromises. Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.

That’s the ultimate irony of the otherwise admirable efforts of Conant and Chauncey to create a fairer world: in giving opportunities for the bright and able (regardless of whether they are rich or poor), they’ve created a selfish and utilitarian elite from which no Conant or Chauncey will be likely to appear from in the future. – The Diplomat

Liberal policies create inequality. By enforcing an equality of political means, instead of practical ones, they create a false elite. This false elite then takes from the middle class, and funnels that wealth into a cancerous government and a new “elite” fashioned out of those who benefit from gaming the system. These aren’t innovators and trailblazers; they’re people who have learned to manipulate society for their benefit.

In addition, much like the Soviet Union and the ill-fated Southern European socialist states, these entitlement states spread the wealth too thin and re-direct it from growth areas into dead-ends, resulting in not only bankruptcy but a delusional population who, when the money runs out, won’t stop their own benefits in order to get everyone through the trouble. A nation that is disunified like that isn’t a nation; it’s a supermarket.

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited amount of good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft; they must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy, rather than admiration of success, reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off. – National Review

The psychology of hating inequality produces greater inequality. Where natural inequality may seem unfair, it works to produce “more equal” people who rise above the rest and, through their competence, give to the rest of us a functional society with profitable industries. Artificial equality on the other hand forces us all to the same level of poverty, leaving a few cultural/political elites to rule us, as is the case in most third-world nations.

The choice is upon us: first-world inequality, or third-world equality? The battle in Wisconsin is symbolic more than it is a choice of Wisconsin as a place particularly in need of fixing; it’s a battle over the philosophy that will define us, and decide which of these two societies we pick.

James J. O'Meara on Henry James & H. P. Lovecraft

James O’Meara on Henry James & H. P. Lovecraft

The Lesson of the Monster; or, The Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep

James J. O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

We’ve been very pleased by the response to our essay “The Eldritch Evola,” which was not only picked up by Greg Johnson (whose own Confessions of a Reluctant Hater is out and essential reading) for his estimable website Counter-Currents, but even managed to lurch upwards and lay a terrible, green claw on the bottom rung of the “Top Ten Most Visited Posts” there in January.

Coincidentally, we’ve been delving into the newer Penguin Portable Henry James, being a sucker for the Portables in general, and especially those in which a wise editor goes to the trouble of cutting apart a life’s work of legendary unreadability and stitching together a coherent, or at least assimilable, narrative, for the convenience of us amateurs, from Malcolm Cowley’s first, the legendary Portable Faulkner that rescued “Count No-Account,” as he was known among his homies, to the recent Portable Jack Kerouac epic saga recounted by Ann Charters.

The “new” Portable Henry James attempts something of the sort (as opposed to the older one, which was your basic collection) by recognizing the impossibility of even including large excerpts from the “major” works, and instead gives us some of the basic short works (Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw, “The Jolly Corner,” etc.) and then hundreds of pages of travel pieces, criticism, letters, even parodies and tributes, as well a a list of bizarre names (Cockster? Dickwinter?) and above all, in a section called “Definition and Description,” little vignettes, often only a paragraph, exemplifying the Jamesian precision, a sort of anthology of epiphanies, the great memorable moments from “An Absolutely Unmarried Woman” to “An American Corrected on What Constitutes ‘the Self’” from the novels, and similar nonfiction moments from James’ travels, such as “The Individual Jew” to “New York Power” to “American Teeth” and “The Absence of Penetralia.”

The latter section in particular is part of a defense which the editor seems to feel needs to be mounted in his Introduction, of the Jamesian “difficult” prose style (as are the collection of tributes, including the surprising, to me at least, Ezra Pound).

I bring these two together because I could not help but think of ol’ Lovecraft himself in this context. Is Lovecraft not the corresponding Master of Bad Prose? As Edmund Wilson once quipped, the only horror in Lovecraft’s corpus was the author’s “bad taste and bad art.”

One can only imagine what James would have thought of Lovecraft, although we know, from excerpts here on Baudelaire and Hawthorne, what he thought of Poe, and more importantly, of those who were fans: “to take [Poe] with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection”; James may even have based the poet in “The Aspern Papers,” a meditation on America’s cultural wasteland, on Poe. However, his distaste is somewhat ambiguous, as compared with Baudelaire, Poe is “vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.”

For all his “better” taste and talent for reflection, it’s little realized today, as well, that James’s reputation went into steep decline after his death, and was only revived in the fifties, as part of a general reconsideration of 19th century American writers, like Melville, so that even James could be said to have, like Lovecraft, been forgotten after death except for a small coterie that eventually stage managed a revival years later.

Are James and Lovecraft as different as all that? One can’t help but notice, from the list above, that a surprising amount of James’s work, and among it the best, is in the ‘weird’ mode, and in precisely the same “long short story” form, “the dear, the blessed nouvelle,” in which Lovecraft himself hit his stride for his best and most famous work. (Both “Daisy Miller” and “At the Mountains of Madness” suffered the same fate: rejection by editors solely put off by their ‘excessive’ length for magazine publication.) The nouvelle of course accommodated James’ legendary prolixity.

The editor, John Auchard, puts James’s prolixity into the context of the 19th century ‘loss of faith.’ Art was intended to take the place of religion, principally by replacing the lost “next world” by an increased concentration on the minutia of this one. Experience might be finite, but it could still “burn with a hard, gem-like flame” as Pater famously counseled.

That counsel, of course, took place in the first, then self-suppressed, then retained afterword to his The Renaissance. René Guénon has in various places diagnosed this as the essential fraud of the Renaissance, the exchange of a vertical path to transcendence for a horizontal dissipation and dispersal among finite trivialities, usually hoked-up as “man discovered the vast extent of the world and himself,” blah blah blah. As Guénon points out, it’s a fool’s bargain, as the finite, no matter how extensive and intricate, is, compared to the infinite, precisely nothing.

Baron Evola, on the other hand, distinguishes several types of Man, and is willing to let some of them find their fulfillment in such worldliness. It is, however, unworthy of one type of Man: Aryan Man. See the chapter “Determination of the Vocations” in his The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts.

So the nouvelle length accumulation of detail and precision of judgment, in James, is intended to produce some kind of this-worldly ersatz transcendence. Was this perhaps the same intent in Lovecraft, the use of the nouvelle length tale to pile up detail until the mind breaks?

Lovecraft of course was also a thorough-going post-Renaissance materialist, a Cartesian mechanist with the best of them; when he finally got “The Call of Cthulhu” published, he advised his editor that:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. One must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

But as John Miller notes, this is exactly what is needed to produce the Lovecraft Effect:

That’s nihilism, of course, and we’re free to reject it. But there’s nothing creepier or more terrifying than the possibility that our lives are exercises in meaninglessness.

What is there to choose, between the unrealized but metaphysically certain nothingness of the Jamesian finite detail, and the all-too-obvious nothingness of Lovecraft’s worldview?

What separates James from Lovecraft and Evola is, along the lines of our previous effort, is precisely what T. S. Eliot, in praise of James (the essay is in the Portable too): “He has a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it.” Praise, note, and contrasted with the French, “the Home of Ideas,” and such Englishmen, or I guess pseudo-Englishmen, as Chesterton, “whose brain swarms with ideas” but cannot think, meaning, one gathers, stand apart with skepticism. One notes the Anglican Eliot seeming to flinch back, like a good English gentleman, from those dirty, unruly Frenchmen like Guénon, and such Englishmen who, like Chesterton, went “too far” and went and “turned Catholic” out of their love of “smells and bells.”

What Evola and Lovecraft had was precisely an Idea, the idea of Tradition; in Lovecraft’s case, a made-up, fictional one, but designed to have the same effect. But that’s the issue: when is Tradition only made up? For Evola and Guénon, the mind of Traditional Man is indeed not “fine” enough to evade penetration by the Idea; he is open to the transcendent, vertical dimension, which is realized in Intellectual Intuition.

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Intellectual Intuition, or what Evola calls his “Traditional Method” is usefully compared with what Spengler called, speaking of his own method, “physiognomic tact.” I wrote: “A couple years ago I found a passage in one of the few books on Spengler in English, by H. Stuart Hughes, where it seemed like he was actually giving a good explication of Guénon’s metaphysical (vs. systematic philosophy) method. I think it could apply to Evola’s method as well” Hughes writes:

Spengler rejected the whole idea of logical analysis. Such “systematic” practices apply only in the natural sciences. To penetrate below the surface of history, to understand at least partially the mysterious substructure of the past, a new method — that of “physiognomic tact”— is required.

This new method, “which few people can really master,” means “instinctively to see through the movement of events. It is what unites the born statesman and the true historian, despite all opposition between theory and practice.” [It takes from Goethe and Nietzsche] the injunction to “sense” the reality of human events rather than dissect them. In this new orientation, the historian ceases to be a scientist and becomes a poet. He gives up the fruitless quest for systematic understanding. . . . “The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think.” They failed to observe the most elementary rule of historical investigation: respect for the mystery of human destiny.

So causality/science, destiny/history. Rather than chains of reasoning and “facts” the historian employs his “tact” [really, a kind of Paterian "taste"] to “see” the big picture: how facts are composed into a destiny. Rather than compelling assent, the historian’s words are used to bring about a shared intuition.

I suppose Guénon and Co. would bristle at being lumped in with “poets” but I think the general point is helpful in understanding the “epistemology” of what Guénon is doing: not objective (but empty) fact-gathering but not merely aesthetic and “subjective” either, since metaphysically “seeing” the deeper connection can be “induced” by words and thus “shared.”

What Guénon, Evola, and Spengler seek to do deliberately, what Lovecraft did fictionally or even accidentally, what James’s mind was “too fine” to do at all, is to not see mere facts, or see a lot of them, or even see them very very intently, but to see through them and thus acquire metaphysical insight, and, through the method of obsessive accumulation of detail, share that insight by inducing it in others.

 

To do this one must be “penetrated” by the Idea, Guénon’s metaphysics, Evola’s historical cycles, Lovecraft’s Mythos, and allow it be be generated within oneself. Only then can you see.

 

“You are privileged to witness a great becoming. . . . Do you see? Do you see now?”

Speaking of “penetration,” one does note James’s obsession with “penetralia”; also one recalls the remarkable way Schuon brings out how in Christianity the Word is brought by Gabriel to Mary, who in mediaeval paintings is often shown with a stream of words penetrating her ear, thus conceiving virginally, while in Islam, Gabriel brings the Word to Muhammad, who recites (gives birth to) the Koran. Itself a wonderful example of the Traditional Method: moving freely among the material elements of various traditions to weave a pattern that re-creates an Idea in the mind of the listener. Do you see how Christianity and Islam relate? Do you see?

Finally, we should note that Lovecraft, for his own sake, did get in a preemptive shot at James:

In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class.– Supernatural Horror in Literature, Chapter VIII.

Source: http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/

Walsh, le génie sauvage du cinéma

Walsh, le génie sauvage du cinéma

par Nicolas Bonnal

 

Ex: http://www.france-courtoise.info/

Comparer un film de Walsh à un film hollywoodien ou cannois actuel, c’est comme comparer un Dostoïevski à l’un des 667 ouvrages de la rentrée littéraire ; autant dire impossible. Essayons modestement d’expliquer pourquoi c’est impossible en quelques lignes, à l’aide des quelques DVD qui nous tombent entre les mains.

Walsh a vécu 90 ans, c’est un catholique hispano-saxo-celte, il a réalisé des centaines de films, il a été un des grands acteurs du muet, il est devenu borgne comme Ford, Horatius Coclès ou le dieu Odin précédemment cité, il est le plus grand maître du cinéma d’épopée, d’action, et d’amour noble, il est Homère avec une caméra.

_*^*_*

La quête solaire du héros walshien est souvent suicidaire, comme on dirait aujourd’hui : le héros walshien va au bout d’un destin de fou, il est tragique et épique à la fois. C’est Errol Flynn cherchant la mort dans la peau du général Custer, alors qu’il est l’ami des Indiens et qu’il a combattu les intrusions du gouvernement fédéral. C’est Humphrey Bogart cherchant l’impossible liberté dans les montagnes rocheuses de High sierra, alors qu’il est miné par son destin de loser solitaire, gangster raté et récupéré par la mafia au pouvoir. C’est Joel McCrea dans Colorado territory, qui reprend le même sujet, mais aux temps du western, quand il est encore possible de se croire au temps des Grecs, flanqué de montagnes et de chevaux, de vrais indiens et de faux dieux...

Cet héroïsme s’accompagne d’une flamboyance féminine incomparable ; la femme walshienne est sublimée par l’amour fou que lui inspire son héros de compagnon ou de mari, souvent bien plus âgé (la fille est Antigone et Iseut à la fois) ; ils sont comme un couple nietzschéen près pour une danse lyrique avec la mort : voir la fin sublime, incomparable de Colorado territory, lorsque Virginia Mayo accompagne McCrea pour son règlement de comptes final avec le sheriff et ses tueurs. La nature est encore le témoin neutre et silencieux de la brutalité humaine, non le macrocosme où celle-ci s’accomplit.

_*^*_*

Walsh est le cinéaste de deux appétits inconciliables ; celui de l’individu doté de courage et d’esprit tragique, et celui de la société ou de l’Etat moderne, de plus en plus monstrueux, de plus en plus froid. Le montage technique du cinéaste, qui renvoie aux oubliettes le montage numérique d’aujourd’hui, marque cette accélération de la folle efficacité étatique, sa froide et noire science du malheur : voir les plans de sirènes et de radios dans High sierra, les télégraphes et les journaux dans la Chevauchée fantastique, la maîtrise spatiale et routière dans The Big Heat, son plus terrible chef-d’oeuvre.

Si l’on veut comprendre en effet ce qu’est un dictateur, on verra ou reverra ce film de 1949, plus nerveux et stressant qu’aucun spectacle actuel, au moins dix fois : on comprendra ce qu’est le dictateur en voyant ce passage muet où James Cagney apprend en prison que sa mère est morte et assomme en hurlant la moitié du personnel du pénitencier ; on comprendra en voyant ce passage où il tire sur le coffre d’une voiture parce que son prisonnier, enfermé dedans, lui demande de l’air pour respirer ; où, lorsqu’il apprend que son meilleur ami et lieutenant est un flic infiltré, professionnel glacial et post-humain, un « expert » avant l’heure, il devient et se lance dans la folle conquête du monde, une centrale thermique en l’occurrence, sur laquelle il explose littéralement, tout en riant aux armes.

_*^*_*

Dans une de ses dernières oeuvres, Walsh offre une vision décalée, conservatrice, provocatrice, anarchiste de droite de l’esclavage et de la guerre de Sécession. A la brutalité des yankees, voleurs, violeurs, assassins, bien sûr prédicateurs, Walsh oppose le monde de la féodalité sereine et traditionnelle du Sud, qui font que les esclaves sauvent le bon maître dans le respect des règles du devoir, de l’honneur et de la charité. Ce sont eux qui le libèrent et de ses fautes passées et du monde moderne qui arrive. Clark Gable (c’était l’acteur US préféré d’Hitler, qui aurait dû se reconnaître dans James Cagney...), sublime, mûr et seigneurial d’un bout à l’autre y est inoubliable, notamment dans la scène où il liquide, en guerrier froid et désabusé, la mythologie vague du duel.

Walsh est dans un monde épique, serein, solitaire, aérien, il est avec les dieux de l’Olympe, il est avec les neuf muses ou avec les scaldes scandinaves, il est au panthéon avec Virgile, avec Hugo, auquel on l’a souvent comparé. Il maîtrisait comme personne un art d’industrie, de masse, promis le plus souvent à la plus creuse distraction, promu par lui à la plus haute distinction.

"Lahme Ente" contra chinesischer Drache

»Lahme Ente« contra chinesischer Drache

 

von Dr. Kersten Radzimanowski

 

Ex: http://www.deutsche-stimme.de/

 

 Supermächte: Der neue Start-Vertrag symbolisiert ein verändertes Kräfteverhältnis in der Welt

Es war kurz vor Weihnachten. US-Präsident Obama durfte seinen letzten Auftritt als »starker« US-Präsident absolvieren, bevor mit Jahreswechsel Senat und Repräsentantenhaus in neuer Zusammensetzung zusammentreten, die ihn vollends zur lahmen Ente degradiert.

Wie im griechischen Drama wurde zunächst die Spannung hinsichtlich des Abstimmungsergebnisses angeheizt, damit der mit dem Friedensnobelpreis ausstaffierte Präsident 43 A die politische Bühne nutzen konnte, um die heimische wie internationale Öffentlichkeit zu täuschen: Obama als Architekt atomarer Abrüstung und Retter der Welt!
Doch was steckt dahinter? Was sieht der nun von den USA ratifizierte neue Start-Vertrag tatsächlich vor? Ist er wirklich ein Meilenstein auf dem Weg zur atomaren Abrüstung der Kernwaffenstaaten? Oder soll er ein Alibi gegenüber den atomaren Habenichtsen darstellen, die immer stärker auf eigene Verfügungsgewalt über Atomwaffen drängen, um sich der politisch-militärischen Erpressung von Staaten wie den USA und Israel zu erwehren?
In den nächsten Jahren werden es an die 40 Länder sein, die über eigene Atomwaffen verfügen, und der Kreis derer, die mit dieser militärischen »Lebensversicherung« liebäugeln, wird immer größer. Da bedarf es der Augenwischerei, Taschenspielertricks à la Obama, um zumindest den Eindruck zu erwecken, auch die atomaren Schwergewichte USA und Rußland würden sich in Richtung Reduzierung ihrer Atomwaffenpotentiale bewegen, um ihre Verpflichtungen aus dem Atomwaffensperrvertrag zu erfüllen. Obamas Zauberstab für die Vorführung hieß START. Start steht für »Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty«, zu Deutsch: »Vertrag zur Verringerung der strategischen Waffen«.

Washington ringt um die Hegemonie

Der neue Start-Vertrag sieht eine Reduzierung der Zahl der nuklearen Sprengköpfe innerhalb der nächsten sieben Jahre auf 1550 und der Zahl der Trägersysteme auf jeweils 800 vor. Damit braucht Washington seine aktiven strategischen Trägersysteme nur um wenige Dutzend zu reduzieren, um die neue Höchstgrenze von 800 Trägern zu erreichen, Moskau gar keine. Es hat nur noch 556 Träger.
Ähnlich das Bild bei den Sprengköpfen: Da nur aktiv stationierte Sprengköpfe zählen, hat Hans Kristensen von der Federation of American Scientists berechnet, muß Washington die Zahl seiner aktiven Sprengköpfe rechnerisch nur um 100, Moskau um 190 reduzieren.
Hinzu kommt, daß das Pentagon seine alten Pläne zur Modernisierung der nuklearen Trägersysteme umsetzen darf. Eine neue nuklearfähige Jagdbomberversion, der Joint Strike Fighter, wird weiter entwickelt. Die Arbeit an einer neuen Generation strategischer Raketen-U-Boote geht ebenfalls weiter. Auch die Entwicklung eines neuen luftgestützten Langstreckenmarschflugkörpers wird ebenso in Angriff genommen wie die Planungen für einen neuen strategischen Bomber. Selbst die Voruntersuchungen für eine neue Generation von Interkontinentalraketen sollen anlaufen.
Zusätzlich haben die Republikaner sich ihre Zustimmung zum neuen Start-Vertrag damit »versüßen« lassen, daß in einem Zusatz zum Vertrag von den USA einseitig festgelegt wurde, daß dadurch der Aufbau der US-Raketenabwehr und die Einführung von Langstreckenraketen mit konventionellen Sprengköpfen nicht berührt werden.
Gerade die Pläne zur Raketenabwehr ließen das russische Parlament nicht wie vorgesehen noch zum Jahreswechsel den Start-Vertrag ratifizieren. Es sucht vielmehr nach diplomatischen Formeln, um eben diese Zusätze wieder aufzuheben. Nach Ansicht des Verfassers waren auch die angenommen Zusätze nur Tricksereien. Denn den herrschenden Kreisen in den USA ist sehr daran gelegen, Moskau auf ihre Seite zu ziehen. Zumindest aber zu neutralisieren, wenn es zur (militärischen) Konfrontation mit China kommen sollte.

Glanzleistung der chinesischen Diplomatie

Die Eindämmung und das »roll back« des weltpolitischen Einflusses Chinas hat für die USA höchste Priorität. Davon zeugt nicht nur die Eskalation der Spannungen auf der koreanischen Halbinsel und im Gelben Meer, sondern auch die massive Formierung eines antichinesischen militärischen Blockes mit Japan, Korea, Australien und weiteren Staaten.
Der Start-Vertrag offenbart aber die Erkenntnis der Plutokraten, daß die USA allein nicht mehr in der Lage sind, die weltweite Herrschaft des Geldadels durchzusetzen. Deshalb die Kurskorrektur der USA, um den einstigen Hauptfeind an das eigene Lager zu binden. Doch dieses Ansinnen ist nicht sehr aussichtsreich. Weiß Rußland doch zu gut, daß der mächtige Nachbar im Osten kraftvoll, dynamisch und zudem verläßlich ist, während die USA ihren Zenit längst überschritten haben und zudem nur auf ihren eigenen Vorteil bedacht sind.
China hingegen betreibt seit längerem eine kluge und weitsichtige Außenpolitik, die sich nicht der andernorts üblichen Großmachtallüren bedient, sondern auf Interessenausgleich und beiderseitigen Nutzen abzielt. Das »Reich der Mitte« hat das diplomatische Meisterstück vollbracht, auch sein Verhältnis zum wichtigsten Konkurrenten Indien konstruktiv zu gestalten, ohne seine engen Beziehungen zu Pakistan zu beschädigen.
China und Indien stellen heute zusammen mehr als ein Drittel der knapp sieben Milliarden Erdbewohner. Ein auch für die hochgerüstete USA uneinnehmbares Bollwerk, das zudem die »gekaufte Demokratie« des Westens entschieden ablehnt. Beide Länder gehen sehr verschiedene politische wie wirtschaftliche Entwicklungswege, aber sie sind keine Kopie des von ihnen verachteten westlichen Herrschaftsmodells, das das Volk in Geiselhaft der mächtigen Interessengruppen genommen hat, wie etwa bei der »Bankenrettung« oder dem sogenannten Euro-Rettungsschirm. Asien geht seinen eigenen Weg.

Das amerikanische Zeitalter endet

Auch im Handel sind die USA längst als Weltmacht abgeschrieben. Der innerasiatische Warenaustausch wächst kräftig. Indiens wichtigster Handelspartner ist heute China und das Handelsvolumen zwischen beiden Ländern betrug im Jahre 2010 etwa 60 Milliarden Dollar. Es dürfte sich laut Schätzungen bis 2015 mehr als verdreifachen.
Doch während Merkel und die bundesdeutschen Medien gegen China wegen der Verletzung von Menschenrechten wettern und dabei selbst im Glashaus sitzen, tränenreich und pflichtschuldig die Verurteilung des jüdischen Millionenbetrügers, Geldwäschers und Ex-Oligarchen Michail Chodorkowski in Rußland beklagen, haben deutsche Unternehmer schon längst die Zeichen der Zeit erkannt und arbeiten eng mit russischen und chinesischen Partnern zusammen.
Dabei besinnen sie sich sogar ihrer alten deutschen Werte und produzieren kundengerecht, so etwa Daimler, der in Indien eine komplette Modellreihe einfacher Lastwagen entwickelt, die so billig sein sollen, daß sie im Preiswettbewerb mit dem indischen Marktführer Tata Motors mithalten können.
In China und Indien gibt es zusammen etwa eine Milliarde Menschen, die man zur dortigen Mittelschicht zählen kann und die technisch solide Produkte zu günstigen Preisen benötigen. Qualitätsarbeit aus Deutschland, damit können wir in China, Rußland und Indien punkten und getrost Uncle Sam jenseits des Atlantik vergessen, der wie so viele Fremde in Deutschland und der EU zwar nicht gewillt ist, selbst etwas Konstruktives zu schaffen, aber von unserer Hände Arbeit ein gutes Leben führen will.

Unser Autor Dr. Kersten Radzimanowski war letzter geschäftsführender Außenminister der DDR

Klansmen, Irishmen, & Nativists

Klansmen, Irishmen, & Nativists:
The Origins of Racial Nationalism in America

Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

The heterogeneity of America’s European population has always posed a challenge to its national identity. Only late in the nineteenth century was this identity extended to European immigrants assimilated in its Anglo-Protestant values and, in the twentieth century, to Catholics, whose Church (the “Whore of Babylon”) had learned to accommodate the Protestant contours of American life (or what John Murray Cuddihy called its “civil religion”). From this ethnogenesis, the original Anglo-Protestant identity of the American people gradually evolved into a more inclusive European Christian identity, though one closely tied to its Anglo-Protestant antecedents.

Based on this heritage, racial nationalists today define America as a European nation and designate its anti-white elites as their principal enemy.

It was, though, but in fits and starts that American whites acquired an ethnonational identity. What’s often referred to as American nationalism—the expansionist slogans of Manifest Destiny, the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism, the gunboat diplomacy of the Progressives (McKinley, T. Roosevelt, Wilson)—was more a chauvinist statism legitimating territorial expansionism and land speculation than an ideological offshoot of the country’s racial-historical life forms. The primordial concerns of the American nation were thus only tangentially represented in these imperialist movements associated with the state’s expansion.

The first genuinely post-revolutionary expression of American ethnonationalism (i.e., “nationalism in its pristine sense”) began, accordingly, with the first wave of mass immigration, in the late 1830s and “the hungry Forties,” as Irish and South German Catholics reached American shores, affronting “Anglo-Americans” with their “otherness.” The “nativists” (native born, White, Protestant Americans) opposing the new immigrants rejected the crime, public drunkenness, pauperism the Irish brought, but above all the Catholicism of both groups, for “the Church of Rome” was an anathema to a liberal nation born of the Reformation and of the struggles against the Catholic empires of Spain and France.

The nativist response was nevertheless a nuanced one recognizing the distinctions that culturally separated Irishmen from Germans. The latter, who began to outnumber the Irish only in the late 1850s, tended to be farmers and artisans. That they settled inland, away from the older coastal settlements, and engaged in respectable occupations also mitigated nativist opposition, though nativists opposed the formation of German-speaking communities, beer-drinking forms of sociability, and the Germans’ political radicalism.

The Germans nevertheless seemed assimilable, which was not the case with the Irish. The first expression of American nativism was thus largely an anti-Irish movement, for the tribal solidarity of this unbourgeois people, their aggressive rejection of Protestant culture, their whiskey drinking and pre-modern behavior, and their anti-liberal sympathy with the slave states (which nativists resented because these states closed off land to white settlement) were an offense to the country’s Anglo-Protestant culture.

This anti-Irish sentiment became especially prominent once the famine ships, with their destitute cargoes, began arriving.

The Irish, though, offended not simply the Yankees’ religious and behavioral standards, their quick exploitation of the political system offended their republican convictions. Though one of the most afflicted of Europe’s nations, Erin’s exiles were also one of the most politically “advanced.” Not only had they a long history of secret societies (such as the Defenders, Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, etc.), which had waged an underground war against English landlords and Orangemen, in the 1820s, Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, “the first mass political party in history,” taught the Irish how to exploit the new electoral forms of liberal parliamentary politics in order to throw off England’s Protestant ascendancy and its genocidal Penal Laws.

In America, the politically savvy Irish (led by their priests, saloon keepers, and eloquent rebels) challenged not just Yankee folkways, but the individualistic tenor of republican governance.

The terrible age of American ethnic politics begins with the Irish.

From the 1830s through to the late 1850s, nativist opposition to Catholic, specifically Irish, immigration took the form of intercommunal strife, the proliferation of anti-immigrant associations, and, then in 1854, the establishment of a national political party—the American Party (known as the “Know-Nothings”)—which, for a time, became a refuge for abolitionist and free-soil opponents of Southern slavery who had broken with the Whig party but not yet affiliated with the newly formed Republican party. (That is, this nativist party was partly the creation of those who now seek our destruction as a people.)

The Know Nothings held that Protestantism was an essential component of American identity; that Catholicism’s “autocratic” Pope and Church hierarchy were incompatible with republican self-rule; that Catholics had acquired undue political advantage; and that a longer, more thorough process of naturalization (Americanization) was necessary for the acquisition of citizenship. More fundamentally, it gave expression to the deep reservation which Anglo-American Protestants had about allowing their country to be overrun by Catholic immigrants.

Like most future manifestations of American racial nationalism (though they lacked a genuinely racial dimension), the Know Nothings were moved by a populist distrust of the state and the established political parties, which were seen as indifferent to the ethnocommunal identity of native whites.

Within but a year of its founding, the American Party succeeded in electing eight state governors, more than a hundred Congressmen, the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and thousands of local officials. Its future looked bright.

But the party fell almost as rapidly as it rose, having been swept up and then forced off the political stage by powerful sectional conflicts related to slavery and the preservation of the Union.

Its struggle for an Anglo-Protestant America in the 1850s nevertheless represented the first bloom of American nationalism in its blood-and-soil stage (somewhat earlier than other European nationalisms, which were still at the liberal political stage). As such, it resisted a political system privileging economics over community, opportunity over belief, and a liberal over a biocultural understanding of American life.

Though race was not an issue, religion, culture, and an endogamous sense of community were—issues that are preeminently ethnonationalist. Nativism became, as such, the foundation upon which the future defense of European life in America would be waged—for in however rudimentary and unfocused a way, it defended the American nation as an Anglo-Protestant community of descent, not a political entity based on an abstract ideological or creedal notion of nationality opened to all the world. (We Irish, supreme irony, have, as any roll of white nationalist ranks reveals, become the foremost exponent of this view today.)

The racial component of this biocultural definition of the nation did, though, soon come into its own—in the anti-Chinese movement that dominated California politics in the half century following the Gold Rush (1848).

As European immigrants, native Americans, and the first Chinese made their way to California in this period, so too did racial conflict—though conflict here would not be between natives and immigrants, but between Occidentals and Orientals, White against Yellow.

Standing together against the first Chinese arrivals—and to the swarming millions threatening to follow in their wake—native Americans and Irish Catholics discovered their common racial identity.

Almost from the start, they recognized the joint stake they had in opposing a people which worked at half the white man’s wage, retained their alien clothes, customs, and language, practiced a “heathen” religion, and created distinct, over-crowded, dirty, and often self-contained communities associated with vice and disease.

Comprising more than a fifth of the California labor force in the 1870s, these Chinese newcomers, with their low living standards and servile conditions, were seen as threatening not just the racial definition of the nation, but the American way of life—the prevailing standard for what it meant to be a free white man—and, ultimately, white civilization.

In such a situation, white solidarity was paramount—which meant that, in face of the Yellow Hordes, religious differences dividing Protestant natives and Catholic immigrants in the antebellum period had to be superseded.

Accused of cheapening labor and introducing foreign elements in the East, the Irish were now welcomed into California nativist ranks—as whites facing a common threat—and, accordingly, they came to play a leading role—perhaps the leading role—in spearheading the trade-union, political, and communal opposition to the Chinese.

The extent of white solidarity in the popular classes was such that it spurred numerous official and unofficial measures to restrict Chinese participation in the economy and in other realms of American life.

As early as the 1850s, local and state laws were passed to limit the type of jobs the Chinese could work, the land they could own, and the schools their children could attend, while white, especially Irish, workingmen not infrequently resorted to violence to drive them from certain trades and neighborhoods. In mining, logging, and construction, the Chinese were forced out entirely and in numerous small towns throughout California and the Northwest, Chinese communities were abandoned in face of angry white mobs.

Then, in the late 1870s, in a period of economic crisis, a Workingmen’s Party, led by an Irish demagogue, Denis Kearney, was formed in San Francisco.

Its principal slogan was “The Chinese must go.”

Supported by a mass network of “anti-coolie clubs” and trade unions, the party became the chief vehicle for the cause of Chinese exclusion.

The state organization of the two established national parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, each, for the sake of appeasing the pervasive anti-Chinese sentiment the Workingmen represented, were forced to support its exclusionist policies.

But more than transcending religious and political differences between closely related whites, the Chinese exclusion movement took aim at those large-scale corporate interests (primarily the railroads) responsible for importing Chinese contract labor and using it as leverage against white workers.

In frequent sand-lot demonstrations and in broadsheets, the movement, buttressed by large crowds of male workers, warned the monied men of Judge Lynch, targeting not just alien, but native threats to the nation’s bioculture.

Its slogan—“We want no slaves or aristocrats”—was an “egalitarian” affirmation of the existing racial hierarchy, and of the right of white men to the ownership of the land their people had conquered and created.

The movement’s achievements were momentous. For the first time in modern history, national legislation (to supplant the less effective immigration law of 1790) was passed to prevent non-whites from entering the United States and preventing those already within its borders from setting down roots.

White workers, supported by their trade unions, workingmen associations, and other organized expressions of white power, succeeded in frustrating capitalist and official efforts to change the country’s demographic character. White racial solidarity, at this stage, triumphed over those differences that stemmed from the religious wars of the Reformation.

Racially consciousness, populist, and at times anti-capitalist, the anti-Chinese movement of the 1870s (whose spirit, incidentally, lived on in the national-socialist novels of Jack London) succeeded in preserving the American West as a white Lebens-raum. As I see it (and I see it from both from an Irish and American perspective), it represents the single greatest movement of White America

The third great formative influence affecting the shape of American racial nationalism—though a step back from the anti-Chinese movement—came during the First World War.

The Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged after Appomattox to defend Southern whites from Negro aggression and the Yankee military occupation, was re-organized in 1915 to address certain changes in American life.

Like the European fascist movements of the interwar period, this “Second Klan” constituted a mass populist reaction to the war’s radical cultural/social dislocations.

The war had imbued the central government with unprecedented powers, enabling it to encroach on local communities in ways previously unknown; the recently founded Federal Reserve, in charge of the money supply, and the growing influence of Wall Street and the great corporations assumed an influence in national life that seemed to come at the expense of independent entrepreneurs and “the little men.” At the same time, the war effort assaulted the existing racial, familial, and moral hierarchies.

Blacks in this period acquired a foothold in northern industries and discharged Negro soldiers, “after having seen Paris,” were no longer willing to tolerate their caste status. The year 1919 was accordingly one of unprecedented racial violence, as Negroes challenging the existing system of race relations set off bloody riots in 26 urban centers.

In the same period, the middle-class family came under attack. Suffragettes carried the day with the 19th Amendment, a “new women,” promoted by advertisers and by Hollywood, questioned conventional “gender” relations, divorce rates suddenly shot up, and children were increasingly exposed to anti-traditionalist influences.

Finally, there was the specter of Bolshevism, which appealed to the unassimilated communities of recently arrived Eastern and Southern European immigrants (only 10 percent of the CPUSA membership could speak English by the mid-1920s) and assumed a menacing form in the great industrial conflicts that swept up more than a fifth of the national workforce.

On every front, then, it seemed as if small-town, rural, and middle-class White America was in retreat.

But not before making a last—and, for a generation, successful—stand in its defense, for within a decade of its founding, the Klan had rallied 5 million members to its ranks, penetrating local and national power-structures as few other anti-liberal movements in US history.

Comprised of white, native-born, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish elements, particularly in the South and the Midwest, this “Second Klan” saw itself as an “army of Protestant Americans.” As such, it sought to defend “pure Americanism, old-time religion, and conventional Protestant morality”—in the process reviving those religious issues that had earlier divided whites along sectarian lines (like in the 1850s), yet at the same time attempting to preserve the hegemony of Anglo-Protestants against the forces seeking to subvert the nation’s historic ethnic core.

To the degree the Klan was more sectarian than racial, favoring the conformist, materialist, and philistine elements in American life, it was a step back from the white consciousness of the anti-Chinese movement. (A similar phenomenon occurred after the Second World War among recently assimilated, often Catholic, immigrants, whose support for Joseph McCarthy was part of a more general effort to demonstrate that the “Americanism” of the “old immigrants,” largely Irish and German, was superior to that of the established but liberal and cosmopolitan Anglo-Protestant elite).

The Klan (like McCarthyism) was nevertheless not entirely the “reactionary” movement that academic historians make of it, for like its European counterpart, it was both traditionalist and populist, favoring measures that were anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, and anti-egalitarian in spirit but by no means regressive.

In this capacity, it forced the government to close the border to immigration, it beat back the black assault on white hegemony, it let the wheeler-dealers in Washington and New York know that their “progressive policies” would not go unchallenged in the Heartland, and it acted as a moral bulwark against the permissive forces of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Above all, it upheld a racial standard for American existence.

Only in the late 1920s, after successfully preserving many traditional areas of American life that might otherwise had succumbed to the race-mixing modernism of the postwar “Jazz Age” did the movement finally subside in face of the economic breakdown of the 1930s.

* * *

The history of American racial nationalism, as exemplified by the Second Klan, the Chinese exclusion movement, and the early nativists, is a history whose legacy has, in the last half century, been squandered and suppressed by the elites now controlling American destinies.

Yet this is the legacy that the heirs of European-America today, if they are to survive, need to reclaim.

For this history confirms them in their belief that the popular classes in America have always rejected the creedal definition of the nation; that they refused to allow their society and territory to be overrun by non-whites; and that divisive sectarian issues (between Protestants and Catholics, leftists and rightists, modernists and traditionalists, etc.) served only the interest of their enemies.

Most of all, this heritage of American ethnonationalism calls on whites today, in this era of their dispossession, to defend the racial-cultural-civilizational “nation” to which they once belonged and which, if regained, might again distinguish them from the world’s less favored races.

Ghosts of the Truman Doctrine

Ghosts of the Truman Doctrine

by Paul Gottfried

Ex: http://takimag.com/

In the last few days I’ve run across two authoritative statements by neocon journalists which provide a new American “Freedom Doctrine for Arab democracy.” One statement is by Pod the Younger in the New York Post summoning Americans back to the Truman Administration’s pro-democracy policy. In Europe after World War II, it seems, American stewardship kept Europe from going communist.

Pod is referring to the arduous string-pulling that the US engaged in after the Second World War to keep European countries with large communist parties, particularly France and Italy, from moving into the Soviet Bloc. But those countries had communist parties that rarely received above a quarter of the popular vote. It is also doubtful that these places would have fallen behind the Iron Curtain even if the US didn’t bankroll what quickly became corrupt blocs such as Italy’s Christian Democrats. In the German case, with due respect to Pod and other neocons, there were pre-Nazi parliamentary institutions dating back to the early nineteenth century. Germany always had a substantial, well-educated middle class and very industrious workers. Unlike the Egyptians, almost all Germans were literate and most had marketable skills. Comparing the Germans, even after World War II, to most of the Arab world today is almost infantile. Would Pod suggest that we export our labor unions to foreign countries to teach others about “democracy”? That may not be a bad idea, provided we could move our unions out of this country into North Africa.

Krauthammer exhibits more mental energy than Pod in framing his detailed endorsement of global democracy. He appeals to the Truman Doctrine, the third reference point in neocon memory after the 1938 Munich Agreement and Israel’s founding in 1948. The US is urged to “use its influence to help democrats everywhere throw off dictatorial rule.” We must also intervene to make sure that we have true democracy when we foster (or incite) revolution.

It is furthermore in our government’s interest to protect “these new democracies…against totalitarians, foreign and domestic.” Just as during the Cold War’s early phase when we kept communist parties from entering European governments, we must now take action to keep totalitarian parties, meaning here Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, “out of power.” Krauthammer does not imagine that the policies he proposes can be implemented without extensive American involvement. But he reminds us: “A freedom doctrine is a freedom agenda given direction by guiding principles. Truman did it. So can we.”

Is what Krauthammer proposes really self-rule for other countries, or is it acceptance of a permanent American suzerainty? He seems far less willing to allow Egypt to go its own way than to have Egyptians live according to his wishes. Why not describe his political program as having the US government force the rest of the world into compliance with the neocon vision of a good society?

If Krauthammer is universally concerned with freedom, why doesn’t he protest the continual infringement on free speech and inquiry in Western “democracies” in the name of fighting hate speech and unkind thoughts? In France one can now be arrested and thrown in jail for questioning the “Turkish genocide.” The same is true throughout the EU for those who challenge the governmentally recognized account of the Holocaust. It is also quite possibly a punishable crime in France to reissue Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints. According to Le Figaro Magazine, the novel’s 85-year-old author will have courts prosecuting him and his publisher on 87 counts as soon as his reprinted work hits the bookstands. In this novel, first published 35 years ago, Raspail depicts Indians fleeing en masse in a boat to France. Since this voyage is shown in a less-than-complimentary fashion, the author is subject to judicial prosecution for having insulted Third World sensibilities.

Raspail told Le Figaro that freedom’s primary threat isn’t “Big Brother,” it’s “Big Other”—the silent shaming collective force of those who aren’t native Europeans. He points out that there are now multiple laws in his country, mostly passed by French communists and socialists, criminalizing ungracious speech against certain (particularly non-Christian and usually nonwhite) minorities.

 

But there are governmental attacks on politically incorrect sentiments closer to home. In Saskatchewan, ministers have been threatened with jail if they read aloud passages from the Bible that are sexist or homophobic. Presumably said ministers can get away with this act against Canadian “human rights” if they dissuade their parishioners from believing in the offending biblical ethics. Why are attacks on liberty acceptable when done in the name of “human rights” but not because of the Koran?

Krauthammer complains that there are still Americans who question his “freedom doctrine”: Although the left is “enthusiastic for Arab democracy,” they have not been consistent in their willingness to do what is necessary to sustain it. “Indeed, the left spent the better part of the Bush years excoriating the freedom agenda as either fantasy or yet another sordid example of U.S. imperialism.” Krauthammer is particularly bothered by what we are led to believe is the exclusively leftist idea of “Arab exceptionalism,” namely the idea that our Western ideas about democracy are not workable for Arabs.

Is Krauthammer such an idiot that he doesn’t know that lots of people on the right, including most Ron Paul voters, believe it’s a bad idea to invest money and lives trying to convert most of the world to those features of modern democracy that Krauthammer considers desirable? These mavericks (to borrow Sarah Palin’s term) also believe that we would do better to fight for our diminishing freedom in the Western world rather than going elsewhere in search of monsters to slay. No one is asking Krauthammer or his buds on FOX News to agree with this alternative point of view. It’s only a question of acknowledging that those who disagree with them are by no means exclusively on the left. Why can’t they treat their enormous opposition on the right as worthy of respectful mention?

I believe there are two obvious reasons for this rejection of reality. First, the predominantly Jewish neocons who run the conservative media apparatus loathe “opponents on the right,” meaning people who are collectively dismissed as anti-Semites and who are so uniformly contemptible that one is supposed to avoid noting their existence. Krauthammer on TV can barely conceal his revulsion for Ron Paul, and last week he poured out his contempt on the mostly conventional Republican CPAC because some of the participants were enthusiastic Paul-backers. Such enthusiasm has not been authorized, and those who express it are, from Krauthammer’s perspective, deserving of suspicion. Who knows whether such enthusiasts aren’t also “neo-Confederates” like Tom DiLorenzo, who has been beaten from pillar to post in the national press for having addressed the League of the South in addition to being an economics advisor to Ron Paul? Krauthammer, Kristol, and the Pod people surely wouldn’t want such a person allowed anywhere near the conservative-GOP coalition. Someone as extremist as DiLorenzo might scare off Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, or those liberals whom the neocons have wooed onto their TV programs.

Two, it is important that the neocons, who are having their way in terms of controlling “movement conservative” resources, don’t cause their benefactors to notice that theirs is not the only show on the very loosely defined “right.” There are still competing views from bona fide conservatives, and if business donors are made aware of this fact they may take their donations elsewhere. For those who are monopolizing the goodies, it is important to keep those who count from noticing other conservative positions.

The liberal media has exactly the same interest. The establishment left does not care any more than the neocons to see the present “conservative” opposition pulled toward a harder right. Even if the left and the non-neocon right occasionally agree on foreign policy, they are farther apart sociologically than, say, Jonah Goldberg is from Matthew Yglesias or Bill Kristol from Alan Colmes. Those permitted to participate in the conversation keep the others out of view. Why complicate the picture by seeking the opinion of nonpersons?

What is the American Nation?

 

Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

The following is part of a larger series of articles that was written for an audience of French “revolutionary nationalists” whose image of America is almost categorically negative. Its ostensible aim was to highlight the positive in the heritage we White Nationalists claim. But at a deeper level, it was also an effort to convince myself that America has not been a historical disaster for the white race. The negative interpretation opposed here can be found in the chapter “Anti-Europe” in my New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe.

In the United States, the closest thing to Europe’s “new revolutionary nationalism”—which designates liberalism’s cosmopolitan plutocracy as Europe’s chief enemy, resists the de-Europeanization of its capital, population, and territory, and identifies with a biocultural vision of Magna Europa rather than the 19th-century nation-state—is “White Nationalism.” Though a marginal force on the American political scene (theoretically deficient, fragmented into scores of tiny organizations, and with a greater presence in cyberspace than in the public sphere), it nevertheless wages the same fight as its European counterpart and, on the most decisive issue, race, is considerably more advanced. In this spirit, it takes its stand with the “Old America” that is the counter-part to Bush’s “Old Europe,” it considers its people part of Europe’s biosphere, and opposes not just the present Hebraicized administration in Washington, but the anti-White impetus of “the American century.”

Fundamental to White nationalism is the understanding that, historically, America was not a melting pot, but a settler nation: hence a European transplant. Its original settlers (all of whom were Protestant, but not exclusively Puritan or Calvinist) may have had an ambivalent attitude to the Europe they left behind, but they had no intention of shedding their European being for the sake of mixing with races and cultures unlike their own. Their identity as such was rooted in distinctly European life forms, which were opposed to those of the country’s aboriginals and to its imported Black slaves. Specifically, this identity was an Anglo-Protestant one adapted to the nativist environment of colonial America.

At the time of the revolution, 80 percent of the population was of Anglo-Protestant descent. Of the remaining 20 percent, most were Dutch, German, and Swedish, all of whom were Protestant and easily assimilated into the original core population. Only one percent of its people, mainly of French Canadian and Irish origin, was Catholic. The country’s institutions were accordingly reflective of the values and beliefs of its transplanted Anglo-Protestant settlers, just as the state’s republican ideology and the producerist ideology of its popular classes were in harmony with its specific ethnic disposition.

At the time of revolution, the country’s national identity was still an embryonic one. The loyalties of the revolutionary generation were more to the individual colonies that had become states, such as Virginia and Massachusetts, than to the federal republic established in 1789. But despite the absence of a strong state, informed by tradition and aristocracy, the American polity was not simply the cultureless, economic enterprise that certain Nouvelles Droitistes make it out to be and it was certainly not the “nation of nations,” “the first universal nation,” or “the proposition nation” that our virtualist-minded anti-White elites insist on.

Even in this early period there existed an American national identity, buttressed by several hundred years of history; and by the development of specifically American institutions based on instincts of racial superiority and self-reliance; by conflicts with the British crown, which caused its people to see itself as a transplanted nation of Anglo-Protestant descent (though one imbued with freedoms Englishmen had allegedly lost during the Norman Conquest); but above all by an ethnic or biocultural identity rooted in the North European, specifically British (that is, Celt, Norse, and Saxon) stocks of the country’s settlers.

America, thus, may have lacked Europe’s ancient genealogy, cultural legacy, rooted, territorial sense, and distinct ethnic consciousness, but its people spoke a European language, practiced a European religion, had a history informed by European symbols and themes, represented a fusion of European racial stocks, and felt their North European identity to be the defining part of their individual and collective identity. Until quite recently, as Jared Taylor argues, “America was a self consciously European, majority-white nation.”

Accordingly, the Americanized Englishmen who declared their political independence in the late 18th century did not simultaneously declare their autonomy from Europe’s ethnoracial identity. The liberal ideals of the revolutionary generation, in any case, were soon superseded by a Romantic emphasis on the particularisms and “special inner characteristics” of its people—a Romanticism that betrayed the new republic’s rationalist or Enlightenment premises. To these Indian-fighters, slavers, borderland Celts, and Texas revolutionaries, whose physical proximity to non-Whites had a powerful effect in enhancing their racial identity, it was obvious that the world’s peoples lacked the innate capacity to share in “the free government, power, and prosperity of the United States.”

What Tocqueville called the “Anglo-Americans” had not the slightest intention of extending their liberties to Indians or Negroes, nor even to those White men whose (Catholic) religion and (Irish clannish) temperament seemed to disqualify them for republican government. America’s founding liberal principles were, in fact, little more than the ideological gloss of the country’s Anglo-Protestant life forms.

Despite the Calvinist conceit of believing itself “chosen,” America’s political principles had universal import only in the most vacuous theoretical sense. For example, the Puritan vision of America was less a call to world reform than an affirmation of its uniqueness and superiority. And though the principles of American republicanism have since been re-interpreted to justify the present de-Europeanization, this was neither the intention of the Founders nor that of the country’s settlers, for their republic was preeminently a Herrenvolk democracy — germane not to humanity, but to the “historical humanity” that was White America.

In this vein, the US Constitution, which contemporary liberals have re-interpreted for the sake of their multiracial utopia, defended the institution of slavery and posited that a Black’s worth was only 60 percent of a White. The first Congress (1790) voted that only Whites could be naturalized as citizens. And even after the Civil War, the granting of basic civil rights to former negro slaves, as Sam Francis points out, had “nothing to do with voting, holding political office, sitting on juries, intermarriage, getting a job or being promoted . . . which is what civil rights have come to mean today.”

White immigrants were assimilated into the founding stock only after they (or their children) shed the cultural-linguistic identities that separated them from native Whites. As late as the Kennedy Administration (1960), the nationally conscious Irish, the first immigrant group, were still not fully assimilated. The so-called “melting pot” (a 20th-century concept invented by a cosmopolitan “Englishmen,” Israel Zangwill) was similarly selective, accepting only White immigrants as possible Americans (though it did mistakenly think that Jews from European countries were European).

Moreover, this racially defined identity was the legacy of both the popular classes and the country’s ruling elites. For example, Thomas Jefferson, who in a fit of Enlightenment enthusiasm included the phase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, never — not for a moment — thought of extending equal rights to Negroes; Abraham Lincoln, the two faced Whig pioneer of the liberal leviathan, wanted to repatriate Blacks back to Africa; and the great liberal crusader, Woodrow Wilson, was an ardent segregationist who thought his cherished “democracy” inappropriate to all but Whites. Until the postwar period, White Americans of virtually every class and denomination saw themselves not as an amalgam of humanity, but as an American nativist variant of Europe’s white Christian nations. The racial vision of America which White nationalists today defend against the anti-European regimes in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv was actually the prevailing vision for most Americans for most of their history.

The racially selective character of America’s republican, and especially egalitarian, rhetoric, was indisputably evident in the country’s enslavement of Negroes, its extermination and/or ethnic cleansing of the aboriginal population, its territorial expansion at the expense of mestizo Mexico, and its effort to prevent Chinese and Japanese immigration. Its racial identity was so deeply rooted in the emerging national consciousness that it imbued Anglo-Americans with the confidence to assimilate different White ethnicities.

In the latter half of the 19th century, as European immigration and intermarriage demoted the prevalence of the British elements and the reigning spirit of American Anglo-Saxonism diminished the immigrants’ attachment to their past, American identity gradually extended beyond its original Anglo-Protestant core to become a European-American Christian identity. Race as such remained primary, for only on the basis of the immigrants’ racial compatibility with Anglo-Americans were they able to assimilate. The later advent of Black nationalism, as Walker Connor argues, testifies to the fact that American nationalism has always been a White nationalism. By the same token, the state’s new-found multicultural ideology inadvertently acknowledges that the historical forms of American identity are incompatible with non-European races and cultures.

From the time of the revolution until the beginning of the Civil Rights revolution (1956), American nationality was articulated almost exclusively in terms of three mutually reinforcing influences: an Anglo-European racial identity, Protestantism, and republicanism. The latter, it needs stressing, owed less to 18th-century liberalism than to the character of Anglo American society, whose small proprietors and farmers defined themselves in terms of self-sufficiency, relative equality, and self-rule.

Though the corporate capitalism and New Class managerialism today stifling this self-sufficiency grew out of the country’s liberal postulates, this was only one (however consequential) of its manifestations, for Anglo Protestant culture also nurtured a conservative, traditionalist, and authoritarian dimension opposed to much of what presently passes for “Americanism,” (just as the feminist, homophile, and ethnomasochistic beliefs of today’s mainstream Protestant denominations would have shocked earlier generations of Protestants). The Reformation heresies that prompted America’s Low Church settlers to accept the Bible’s inerrancy and uphold a literal interpretation of scripture also compelled them to spurn the behavioral, moral, and social principles of a purely materialist society of individualist gratification. Though this type of Protestantism engendered (or expressed) that “spirit of independence, self-reliance, and freedom” which accompanied the rise of capitalism in Northern European and today encourages the cosmopolitan nihilism of the existing order, at the same time its original impetus rejected an indifferent, massifying capitalism destructive of community and morality. In this spirit, it upheld hierarchy, authority, and tradition, opposed modern feudalism (corporate capitalism) and its verso, mob democracy (Communism), privileged the centrality of family, community, and mutuality, and cultivated behaviors and social structures supportive of a communally responsible rather than an atomized individuality.

In a conscious effort to re-engineer the character of the American people, the ruling Judeo-oligarchy has re-christened the republican component of traditional American identity the “American Creed” and made it the sole legitimate basis of American nationality — as if being an American were merely a matter of subscribing to a certain liberal beliefs. Divested of its racial-cultural grounding, and the political responsibilities it once entailed, the liberal, cosmopolitan, and globalist implications of this so-called creed is now used to legitimate the multiracial pluralism that presently assaults the nation’s European heritage. For at least the last two generations, the country’s elites have waged a merciless war on the ethnonational interests of America’s Whites, who are treated with “mingled scorn and apprehension” for hampering the country’s transformation into an economically efficient Brazil.

But if America for racial nationalists is preeminently a European country, it is — admittedly — “also something less than Europe. As a settler nation, America was founded and remains, to use Georges Dumézil’s term, a country of the “Third Function.” Lacking the warrior and priestly functions of its motherland and centered on the productive/reproductive activities of the lowest order, the American people traditionally immersed themselves in economic and mundane activities devoid of High Cultural possibility.

It would be exaggerated, though, to claim, as certain Europeans have, that this emphasis on economics (with its accompanying values of hard work, self reliance, and technical efficiency) made Americans somehow un-European. A middle-class country of the Third Function, America materialistically thrived in the technoeconomic realm. This may have left its culturally-impoverished society of self-made men something less than Europe — but hardly un-European.

While the country’s economic and materialist passions rendered its people vulnerable to the machinations of plutocrats and monopolists, bankers and corporate barons, and, above all, Jewish peddlers and illusionists, this, alas, has been the fate of White people worldwide. In America’s defense it should be emphasized that until the postwar era, when the state and the dominant institutions fell into the hands of corporate managers, social engineers, and alien interests, its popular history was very much a history of struggle against the great economic powers, as these powers endeavored to subordinate the nation to those systemic imperatives threatening the economic self-sufficiency and biocultural identity of its large middle class.

This is evident in the history of Jacksonian producerism, the nativism of the 1840s and ‘50s, the Confederate insurgency of the 1860s, the struggle against Chinese immigration in California in the 1870s, the populist revolt of Midwestern and Southern farmers in the 1880s and ‘90s, the bitter labor wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rise of the Second Klan in the 1920s, Father Coughlin’s Social Justice movement in the 1930s, etc.

Though lacking an established church and an aristocracy (the First and Second Functions), even here the European racial spirit influenced the formation of the American nation. The yeoman farmers making up the ranks of the Minute Men who bloodied Britain’s imperial troops at Lexington and Concord, the gentlemen warriors like Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, and George Washington who led the revolutionary armies, the Anglo-Celtic frontiersmen and colonists of the Texas Revolution who triumph over massively larger Mexican forces, the gallant Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, even George Patton of World War II fame, all these figures stand in the tradition of European arms and are tributes not just to America, but to the warrior spirit of their ancestral homeland.

Moreover, whatever High Culture Americans have known has been European. Disneyland may be the contemporary emblem of America’s Culture Industry, but its relationship to American life is as contrived as is Hollywood’s. The composers, philosophers, and great artists animating the higher reaches of American life have always been European. The few great men of literary stature they have produced— Edgar Allen Poe, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Jack London, William Faulkner — belong to Europe’s Pantheon and are recognized as such. Only an intellectual sleight of hand can justify the argument that the American people are not an organic (however culturally hybrid) expression of Europe’s life-world.

Perhaps more to the point, the growth of the American republic ought to be seen as one of the great feats of modern history, for, from its origins as a small outpost on the outer edge of Western Civilization, it grew, in a remarkably short period, into a great power. Given the prominence of its Third Function, much of course was lost in this process, for America lacked the depths of its motherland, retained a weak grasp of history and tradition, and never developed a political class capable of sustaining its political ideals. Yet beyond the shallow, often philistine character this cultural paucity imparted to American life, the European settlement of North America represented an unprecedented manifestation of Nietzsche’s will to power — an untamed life force — that had transformed a vast wilderness into a flourishing extension of the European life world.

Against those transatlantic critics whose grand pronouncements are based on their familiarity with Los Angeles or New York (both of which have ceased to be American cities), it needs stressing that no White nationalist fails to honor Europe or to distinguish himself from its heirs. His opposition to the New Class, war-mongering, and Zionist hegemonism of the country’s deracinated elites stems, in fact, from his commitment to Europe’s biocultural heritage. This heritage, as such, informs virtually every significant facet of the country’s racial nationalism.

Schweres Zerwürfnis zwischen den USA und Saudi-Arabien: Abdullah steht zu Mubarak und wendet sich Teheran zu

Redaktion

 

Wie Quellen aus dem Nahen Osten berichten, gehört das Gespräch zwischen US-Präsident Barack Obama und dem saudischen König Abdullah vom Dienstag, dem 10. Februar, zu den heftigsten Gesprächen, die ein amerikanischer Präsident jemals mit einem arabischen Herrscher führte. Die Auswirkungen der ägyptischen Krise hatten den saudischen König dermaßen verärgert, dass er einen überraschenden Herzanfall erlitt. Gerüchte seines Todes erschütterten die weltweiten Finanz- und Erdölmärkte, wurden aber von einem Berater der Königsfamilie dementiert. Andere Quellen berichten, er habe bereits in der Vergangenheit Herzanfälle erlitten.

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/red...

 

 

LEAP : fin 2011 - Chute du «Mur des pétro-dollars» et choc monétaro-pétrolier majeur pour les Etats-Unis

Communiqué public du Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique (LEAP), du 15 février 2011

Ex: http://fortune.fdesouche.com/

 

Avec ce numéro 52 du GEAB, notre équipe célèbre deux anniversaires importants en terme d’anticipation. C’est en effet en Février 2006, il y a donc cinq ans exactement, que le GEAB N°2 a rencontré brusquement un succès mondial en annonçant le prochain « Déclenchement d’une crise mondiale majeure » caractérisée notamment par « La fin de l’Occident tel qu’on le connaît depuis 1945 ». Et c’est il y a deux ans exactement, en Février 2009, qu’avec le GEAB N°32, LEAP/E2020 anticipait le début de la phase de dislocation géopolitique mondiale pour la fin de cette même année.

Dans les deux cas, il est important de noter que l’intérêt indéniable suscité par ces anticipations au niveau international, mesurable notamment aux millions de lecteurs des communiqués publics concernés, n’a eu d’équivalent que le silence des principaux médias sur ces mêmes analyses et l’opposition farouche (sur Internet) de la très grande majorité des experts et spécialistes économiques, financiers ou géopolitiques.

Taux de chômage officiel (décembre 2010) - Source : BMGBullion, janvier 2011

Pourtant, en ce début 2011, plus grand monde ne doute que nous sommes bien engagés dans un processus d’ampleur historique qui voit le monde d’après 1945 s’effondrer sous nos yeux, Etats-Unis en tête, tandis que la communauté internationale se disloque chaque jour un peu plus, tout comme le tissu social et économique de la plupart des pays de la planète (1).

Mais cette évidence actuelle n’a bien entendu pas empêché « décideurs et experts » (2), en 2006, d’être certains qu’il n’y avait aucun risque de crise importante à l’horizon ; et, en 2009, qu’il était absurde d’imaginer le moindre risque de dislocation de l’ordre mondial en place et encore moins de l’ordre social. Hélas, aujourd’hui, la capacité intellectuelle de ces élites à faire face aux changements en cours ne semble pas s’être améliorée puisque les mêmes « décideurs et experts » n’imaginaient pas possible il y a seulement deux mois que la Tunisie, puis l’Egypte puissent voir leurs régimes être renversés prochainement.

Gouvernements et institutions internationales aveugles (3), experts et médias dépassés (4), … les élites occidentales, et leurs clones des différentes régions du monde, continuent à s’enfoncer sur les « holzweg » de l’Histoire, ces chemins forestiers qui ne mènent nulle part, ou plus exactement comme le soulignait Heidegger, qui ne mènent quelque part que si on a l’humilité d’être constamment à l’écoute de la forêt et de ses signaux (5).

Néanmoins, alors que les signaux deviennent de vraies sirènes d’alerte, nos élites semblent décider à tout faire pour les ignorer. Prenons un exemple très récent : la comparaison des évènements affectant le monde arabe avec la Chute du Mur de Berlin. Notre équipe a été très intéressée de constater que cette image que nous utilisons depuis 2006 pour aider à comprendre le processus en cours de désintégration de la puissance des Etats-Unis, est désormais reprise allègrement par des dirigeants politiques (Angela Merkel en-tête (6)) et des experts en tout genre.

Pourtant, à ce jour, ceux-là même qui font cette comparaison semblent s’interdire de poursuivre leur cheminement intellectuel jusqu’au bout, jusqu’au moment où il débouche sur une compréhension de la dynamique des évènements. Ils se contentent de décrire, sans analyser.

Taux de chômage par pays dans le monde arabe et en Iran - Source : Le Temps, 11 février 2011

Or ce « mur » qui s’effondre a bien été construit par quelqu’un, ou quelque chose, et dans un but précis.

Le « Mur de Berlin » avait été construit par le régime est-allemand, dans le contexte plus général du « Rideau de Fer », voulu par l’URSS, pour séparer le plus hermétiquement possible le bloc communiste de l’Occident. Et cela visait essentiellement à éviter toute remise en cause du pouvoir détenu par le parti unique dans chaque pays communiste afin de perpétuer le contrôle par Moscou des pays européens de l’Est ; en échange, Moscou assurait soutien sans faille et prébendes en tout genre aux dirigeants des pays d’Europe de l’Est.

L’effondrement du « Mur de Berlin », remettant en cause ces monopoles de pouvoir et donc les objectifs qu’ils servaient, a ainsi provoqué en quelques mois la chute successive de tous les régimes communistes d’Europe de l’Est pour se terminer deux ans plus tard par la dissolution de l’URSS et la fin de soixante-dix ans de pouvoir absolu du parti communiste russe.

Alors, si c’est aussi un « mur » qui est en train de tomber sous nos yeux dans le monde arabe, pour pouvoir espérer anticiper la suite des évènements, il est essentiel de pouvoir répondre à ces questions : qui l’a construit ? Dans quel but ? Et les réponses ne sont pas si difficiles à trouver pour qui ceux qui ne regardent pas l’actualité avec des œillères idéologiques :

• ce « mur » a été construit par chacun des dictateurs (ou régimes) arabes de la région afin de s’assurer du maintien de leur monopole sur le pouvoir et les richesses du pays, en évitant tout risque de remise en cause de leur parti unique ou de leur légitimité dynastique (pour les royaumes). En ce sens, il y a très peu de différence entre les cliques au pouvoir dans les pays arabes et celles qui dirigeaient les pays communistes.

• ce « mur » s’intégrait dans le dispositif plus général mis en place par Washington pour préserver son accès préférentiel (et en Dollars US) aux ressources pétrolières de la région et préserver les intérêts d’Israël. L’intégration poussée de l’appareil militaire et sécuritaire de ces pays (sauf la Syrie et la Lybie) avec le dispositif de défense des Etats-Unis assur(ait) un soutien américain sans faille et permet(tait) aux dirigeants arabes concernés de bénéficier de prébendes en tout genre sans risque de remise en cause par des forces intérieures ou extérieures.

Ainsi, en réfléchissant un peu plus à sa comparaison avec la Chute du Mur de Berlin lors de la Conférence sur la Sécurité de Munich, la chancelière allemande aurait pu se tourner vers sa voisine de débat, la Secrétaire d’Etat américaine Hillary Clinton, et lui demander : « Ne pensez-vous pas que les évènements actuels en Tunisie et en Egypte sont les premiers signes de la chute de tous les régimes qui dépendent de Washington pour leur survie ? Et qu’ils peuvent en particulier conduire à un effondrement rapide du système d’approvisionnement en pétrole des Etats-Unis tel qu’il a été mis en place il y a des décennies ? Et donc du système global de facturation du pétrole et du rôle central du Dollar en la matière ? (7) ».

Pendant que l’audience de la Conférence sur la Sécurité de Munich se serait soudain rendu compte qu’ils débattaient enfin de quelque chose de sérieux (8), Angela Merkel aurait pu ajouter : « Et concernant Israël, ne pensez-vous pas que cette chute de « mur » va impliquer très vite la nécessité de reconsidérer toute la politique américano-israélienne dans la région ? (9) ». Et là, miracle, la Conférence sur la Sécurité de Munich aurait repris pied dans le XXIe siècle et le débat euro-américain pouvait se ressourcer dans le monde réel au lieu de divaguer dans la virtualité transatlantique et la lutte contre le terrorisme.

Hélas, comme nous le savons tous, cet échange n’a pas eu lieu. Et les divagations de nos dirigeants risquent donc de continuer avec comme conséquence d’accentuer les chocs de l’année 2011 et de son caractère impitoyable comme anticipé dans le GEAB N°51.

Performance annuelle relative de 40 classes d'actifs (en %, valorisation en dollars US) (en vert : gain / en rouge : perte) - Source : Chris Martenson, 04 février 2011

Pourtant, LEAP/E2020 est convaincu que les évènements actuels dans le monde arabe, dont nous avions correctement anticipé les mécanismes, sont avant tout la traduction régionale des tendances de fond de la crise systémique globale, et en particulier de la dislocation géopolitique mondiale (10). A ce titre, ils sont les prémisses de chocs majeurs dans les trimestres à venir.

Nous estimons en particulier que la fin 2011 sera marquée par ce que notre équipe appelle la « Chute du Mur des pétro-dollars » (11) qui génèrera immédiatement un choc monétaro-pétrolier majeur pour les Etats-Unis.

C’est d’ailleurs l’un des sujets principaux de ce GEAB N°52 avec l’anticipation plus générale de l’évolution du monde arabe (y compris un indicateur précis du risque-pays dans la région). D’autre part notre équipe analyse l’accélération en cours du processus d’émergence de l’Euroland et ses conséquences pour l’Euro et la situation en Europe. Enfin, nous présentons nos recommandations concernant tous ces évènements.

———————

Notes :

(1) Même le FMI, à l’imagination pourtant peu développée, évoque désormais le spectre de guerres civiles à travers toute la planète comme le rapporte le Telegraph du 1er février 2011 ; tandis que The Onion du 24 janvier 2011 s’exerce avec succès à l’humour noir dans un article étonnant, mais révélateur de l’ambiance actuelle, qui évoque la désignation par la Fondation du Patrimoine Mondial, sponsorisée par Goldman Sachs, du « Fossé entre riches et pauvres de la planète » comme étant la 8° Merveille du Monde du fait de son ampleur désormais sans équivalent.

(2) Nous mettons des guillemets car à notre avis un décideur qui ne prévoit rien et un expert qui ne sait rien sont en fait des imposteurs.

(3) La CIA et le gouvernement français fournissent deux illustrations exemplaires de cette tendance générale : ils n’ont rien vu venir en Tunisie et en Egypte, alors même que les uns dépensent des dizaines de milliards de Dollars par an pour espionner le monde arabe et que les autres se promenaient au plus haut niveau (Premier Ministre et Ministre des Affaires étrangères) au cœur des pays concernés. La simple lecture de nos anticipations de 2008 (GEAB N°26) sur le sujet aurait pourtant pu les mettre sur la piste puisque ce sont exactement les tendances décrites alors qui ont abouti aux évènements tunisiens et égyptiens de ces dernières semaines. Comme le résume brutalement le Spiegel du 03 février 2011, « La révolution, ça n’est pas bon pour les affaires » … surtout quand on a rien vu venir pourrait-on ajouter.

(4) En la matière, les investisseurs et les acteurs économiques qui se sont contentés de ces analyses se retrouvent aujourd’hui dans des difficultés sérieuses puisque les « El Dorado » promus à coup de reportages et de commentaires « éclairés » se sont transformées brutalement en piège à capitaux, en zones instables, en prévisions incertaines. Les « fantastiques avantages compétitifs » sont quant à eux devenus en une nuit ou presque des « risques pays insupportables ». Délocalisation, sous-traitance, tourisme, construction d’infrastructures, … pour l’ensemble de ces activités, c’est en effet tout le contexte social, légal, économique, monétaire et financier des pays concernés qui est projeté dans l’inconnu.

(5) Petite remarque philosophique et méthodologique : sans aucune préméditation, notre équipe s’inscrit ici à nouveau dans une approche très franco-allemande puisque notre travail d’anticipation s’appuie non seulement sur cette notion d’ « écoute » et de dévoilement de réalité chère à Heidegger, mais également sur l’approche défendue par Descartes, à savoir, la définition d’une méthode rationnelle. Voilà d’ailleurs une synthèse qui devrait inspirer ceux qui actuellement travaillent à définir les futures caractéristiques de la gouvernance de l’Euroland. Pour en savoir plus sur cette question du « chemin » chez Heidegger et Descartes, on peut lire utilement cette page du site Digressions. Et pour mieux comprendre la méthode utilisée par LEAP/E2020 et tenter de l’appliquer vous-même directement, nous vous recommandons le Manuel d’Anticipation Politique publié aux éditions Anticipolis.

(6) Source : Bundeskanzlerin, 10 février 2011

(7) On assiste déjà à des mouvements d’ampleur autour du pétrole puisque les Etats-Unis s’apprêtent à abandonner leur propre indice WTI du cours du pétrole pour se rallier à l’indice européen Brent auquel l’Arabie saoudite s’est déjà convertie en 2009 en abandonnant le WTI. La divergence des cours entre les deux indices a culminé avec la crise égyptienne. Nous revenons sur la question pétrolière dans un autre chapitre de ce numéro du GEAB. Source : Bloomberg 10 février 2011

(8) Cette conférence, à l’instar du Forum de Davos, a un air délicieusement rétro. Les organisateurs et les participants semblent ne pas avoir réalisé que le monde auquel ils appartiennent a disparu, que leurs débats n’intéressent en fait plus personne dans le monde « réel » et que les nombreuses heures d’émissions qui leurs sont consacrées sur les chaines de télévision internationales sont la mesure inverse du très petit nombre de spectateurs qui les regardent. Avec plus de 1.500 participants américains et britanniques contre 58 latino-américains et moins de 500 asiatiques, Davos incarne indéniablement le forum typique du « monde d’avant la crise », confirmé par sa signature linguistique, le monolinguisme anglophone (même sur son site web). Monolinguisme ou multilinguisme constitue d’ailleurs selon LEAP/E2020 un premier critère très simple d’évaluation pour savoir si un projet ou une organisation à vocation internationale appartient plutôt au monde d’avant la crise ou au contraire est déjà en partie adaptée au monde d’après.

(9) A ce sujet, il faut lire le remarquable éditorial de Larry Derfner dans le Jerusalem Post du 09 février 2011.

(10) Washington a ainsi fait preuve d’une impréparation absolue, puis d’une indécision évidente, confirmant non seulement la fin de tout leadership américain au niveau international mais l’accélération d’un processus de paralysie du pouvoir central américain. Pour comprendre l’importance du phénomène, il faut garder en mémoire que l’Egypte est l’un des pays au monde qui est le plus directement financé et encadré par les Etats-Unis depuis la fin des années 1970. D’ailleurs, le New York Times du 12 février 2011 résume très bien la situation, tout en essayant de la présenter comme une stratégie alors qu’elle n’est qu’une absence de stratégie, en décrivant la gestion de la crise par Barack Obama comme étant du « straddle », une technique boursière consistant à essayer de se couvrir des deux côtés quand on sent qu’un événement important va arriver mais qu’on a aucune idée du sens qu’il va prendre. Au passage, l’article illustre le clivage entre « anciens » et « modernes » que cette crise a fait émerger au cœur du pouvoir US. Mais, nous revenons plus en détail sur tous ces aspects et leurs conséquences dans une autre partie de ce GEAB.

(11) Qui est un segment stratégiquement essentiel du « Mur Dollar », comme le « Mur de Berlin » l’était pour l’ensemble du « Rideau de Fer ».

Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique

Teilung Ägyptens: Droht ein militärisches Eingreifen der USA, Israels oder der NATO?

 

Teilung Ägyptens: Droht ein militärisches Eingreifen der USA, Israels oder der NATO?

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

 

Die Proteste in Tunesien haben in der arabischen Welt einen Domino-Effekt ausgelöst. Das größte arabische Land, Ägypten, ist durch die weitverbreiteten Proteste, die auf den Sturz des Mubarak-Regimes in Kairo abzielen, wie elektrisiert. Es stellt sich die Frage, welche Folgen könnte dies haben? Werden die Vereinigten Staaten, Israel und die NATO einfach nur zuschauen, wie das ägyptische Volk eine freie Regierung einsetzt?

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/mah...

 

 

"Egypte" zorgt voor Amerikaans-Saoedische ruzie

"Egypte" zorgt voor Amerikaans-Saoedische ruzie

       
WASHINGTON 10/02 (DPA/BELGA) = De crisis in Egypte heeft volgens de Britse
krant The Times van donderdag voor spanningen gezorgd tussen de
Verenigde Staten en hun Saoedische bondgenoten. Koning Abdullah van
Saoedi-Arabië zou president Barack Obama in een telefoongesprek er
uitdrukkelijk voor gewaarschuwd, een prompte regimewissel in Egypte te
eisen. Volgens de krant, die diplomaten in Riyad aanhaalt, vond het
gesprek in een verhitte stemming plaats. 

Het gesprek dateert van enkele dagen na het begin van de volksopstand.
Abdullah dreigde ermee, zich achter de Egyptische dictator te
scharen. De Saoedische koning waarschuwde Obama, Moebarak niet te
vernederen en hem een eervolle exit aan te bieden. 

Ook de Amerikaanse dreiging, de jaarlijkse (militaire) hulp van
anderhalf miljard dollar aan Egypte bij gebrek aan "democratische
hervormingen" in te houden, lokte kritiek van de Saoedische vorst uit.
Mocht Washington overgaan tot financiëlec sancties, dan zou Riyad met
het geld over de brug komen, waarschuwde Abdullah. 

De door de krant aangehaalde diplomaten hebben het over de
ernstigste beuk tussen beide landen sinds de oliecrisis van begin de jaren
zeventig. Het regime van Abdullah wordt, net als dat van Moebarak,
vaak bestempeld als "gematigd" omdat de dictaturen een pro-Westerse
houding hebben. MAE/

The Multicultural Mystique

The Multicultural Mystique, by Harriet E. Baber

by Brett Stevens

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/ 

The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity
by Harriet E. Baber
Prometheus Books, 246 pages, $27.

This book caught my eye because it contains some of the most insightful and honest critique of multiculturalism I have ever read. On the other hand, its “solution” is to remove culture from the picture entirely, which is so brain-dead I have trouble respecting the book.

Onward to the good, however: this book gives us a working definition of each type of multiculturalism, albeit with hokey postmodern-style metaphors. The kind the author rails against is “salad bowl” multiculturalism, where members of different ethnic groups move to a new land and then stay segregated by ethnicity. The kind the author endorses is assimilation, or everyone giving up on their source culture and joining the new culture. Difficulty: the author admits that such a culture doesn’t exist, and just about goes far enough to admit that diversity kills it, but then launches on a praiseful tirade in favor of individualism and having no higher cultural goals.

The justification used for this course of action comes right out of the early 1990s. Baber distinguishes between “salient,” or components of our social identity, and non-salient attributes to individuals, like ethnicity. No attempt is made to address populations as organic wholes; in fact, that heresy against deconstruction is considered outside the realm of intelligent discourse. Her point is that majority cultures like indigenous whites in Europe and America do not have to notice their race (you can find this sentiment in any publication on “white privilege”) but that anyone else must.

For white Americans, ethnic identification is largely a matter of choice, since whiteness in the United States and Europe is nonsalient and, as it were, transparent. This is, indeed, the fundamental characteristic of “white privilege”: to be white is, in an important sense, to lack racial identity, to be “just regular” as regards race. (10)

At this point, her liberal thinking takes a turn toward the semi-Randian. Having expectations of culture imposed upon you, she says, limits your ability to be individualistic and to make individualistic choices because your ethnic group will enforce them upon you and if they don’t, society at large will project them on you. She uses delightful examples like overachieving black kids getting dinged for “acting white,” or clueless white people politely asking random black people to explain Kwanzaa.

However, ultimately her solution is a dumbed-down modern form of colonialism: import the people to your country, integrate them into your culture, and in a few generations they will have lost whatever origins they had. It is colonial because as she frequency points out, non-majority-ish populations get imported as cheap labor, with the hope and guess that they will depart when the wages go:

The worry that mass immigration will make receiving countries “too diverse” or that it will “thin out” their cultures is a sham. The fear is that immigrants will not remain sufficiently “diverse” to accept second-class jobs, do harsh jobs for low pay, and conveniently disappear when their labor is not needed. (233)

This passage shows the book in microcosm: insightful analysis that reveals the attitudes of Americans toward their imported diverse labor pool, coupled with editorializing that considers a few out of the many factors and plays fast and loose with the concept of ethnicity in contrast to culture.

Profundity and the same old boilerplate wrapped together in an easy package? It’s kind of like honor students who own that one Iron Maiden album so they can, you know, let loose and walk on the wild side every tenth Saturday night. If you write for the liberal establishment, you have to smother any dose of shock with a heaping helping of familiar territory.

Another example:

The relevant moral questions are: to what extent does the cultural self-affirmation of some members of a group have consequences for other members of the group and are those consequences so significant as to override rights to free speech, religious freedom, and self-expression? These rights are not absolute. (165)

Baber hones in on the central issue of modern time, which is whether our individualism is absolute, and comes down in favor of the absolute — without presenting an argument for it. Assumptions exist, and personal histories, but we’re not seeing a cause-effect reason for these assumptions. However, the question needed to be asked, and it’s better in print from a liberal source than from a conservative one which would immediately be dismissed by anyone left of center.

In this chapter, I also address the important question, rarely discussed, of when, if ever, ethnic diversity ends. Do multiculturalists imagine that the salad bowl is forever and that ethnic minorities will maintain distinct cultural identities in perpetuity without coalescing? It is hard to see how such an arrangement could be maintained without the establishment of a virtual millet system of semiautonomous communities maintaining their own schools, institutions, and, perhaps, systems of personal law with the approval and support of the state. (11)

These are very important questions. Baber does not ask what happens when the “majority” population the United States and Europe is in fact worldwide a minority population, and a wealthy one, which means that many more of them want to move here than there are members of the “majority” group. Do they get bred out? Do they have a right to exist as well? You won’t find that in this book.

The Multicultural Mystique may be fun because it is such a mixed bag. Baber brings up the important issues; she then explains them away with stock-in-trade liberal platitudes. Because the liberal modus operandi is to take an individualist position, and passive aggressively react to any assertion of a different viewpoint as if it were straight out of a hostile nation’s propaganda broadcast, she does what most political writers tend to do, which is cherry-pick sources. Why consider multiple factors, when there’s one you need? Why mention the breadth of an issue, when you can take data out of context and imply its relevance? A good deal of the arguments in this book conclude with her asserting an example that might support them, and as if that proof were evident, ending the paragraph.

In style, the book resembles much of the other popular literature from our philosophy departments. Its strength is that it makes its points clearly; its weakness is that it deconstructs so much that the entire document is not a strawman attack, but a strawman discussion, with theoretical beings existing in vacuums without time, place or context batting each other around using absolute concepts like individual rights. Much of it reeks of a lonely white woman alone in a Starbuck’s, writing from a stack of The Atlantic magazines and what she can find with Google, and not bothering to edit for circularity. Around we go again and again; fifty to a hundred pages could have dropped from this book with no loss in meaning.

For all of its faults and biases, however, The Multicultural Mystique won me over because it kicks open the door on several important issues: Assimilate or respect culture? We know this path will destroy culture and replace it with individual desire, right? No one is thinking past the immediate; most people who support diversity do so for low-cost lawn care and social identity points. And last but not least, what is the goal here? Do we want culture, or not, and if not, why? Many of these questions arise from the reading of the book and are not embedded in it, which makes it doubly impressive as a conversation starter.

Your average person will not find this book compelling because it is, without exception, and indulgently so, written in the “philosophical” style of lots of flavor-words for concepts, plenty of comma-separated phrases, with allusions to terms trending in academia. However, for those who are interested in this issue which since 1865 has dominated American and European politics, The Multicultural Mystique provides a good place to start your open-minded research by seeing what the best of the liberal side have to say.

You can find this book on Amazon for $27.

Rivoluzione d'Egitto - Distruzione creativa per un "Grande Medio Oriente"?

Rivoluzione d’Egitto – Distruzione creativa per un “Grande Medio Oriente”?

 

Fonte: http://globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23131 ^[1]

Velocemente sulla scia del cambiamento di regime in Tunisia, s’è alzato il movimento di protesta popolare lanciato il 25 gennaio contro l’ordine radicato di Hosni Mubarak in Egitto. Contrariamente all’impressione coltivata con cura secondo cui l’Amministrazione Obama sta cercando di mantenere l’attuale regime di Mubarak, Washington, infatti, sta orchestrando i cambiamenti di regime egiziano e regionali, dalla Siria allo Yemen, alla Giordania e ben oltre, in un processo cui alcuni si riferiscono come “distruzione creativa”.

Il modello per tale cambiamento di regime sotto copertura è stata sviluppata dal Pentagono, dalle agenzie di intelligence degli Stati Uniti e dai vari think-tank come la RAND Corporation. nel corso di decenni, a partire dalla destabilizzazione del maggio 1968 della Presidenza de Gaulle in Francia. Questa è la prima volta dal cambiamento di regime sostenuto dagli USA in Europa orientale, circa due decenni fa, che Washington aveva avviato con operazioni simultanee in molti paesi di una regione. Si tratta di una strategia che nasce dalla disperazione e certo non è senza rischi significativi per il Pentagono e per l’agenda a lungo termine di Wall Street. Cosa ne risulterà per i popoli della regione e per il mondo, non è ancora chiaro.

Eppure, mentre il risultato finale della sfida delle proteste di piazza al Cairo e in tutto l’Egitto e il mondo islamico non è chiaro, le grandi linee di una strategia occulta degli Stati Uniti sono già chiare.

Nessuno può mettere in discussione le motivare genuine rimostranze di milioni di persone scese per le strade, a rischiare la vita. Nessuno può difendere le atrocità del regime di Mubarak e la tortura e la repressione del dissenso. Nessuno può contestare l’aumento esplosivo dei prezzi alimentari, ad opera degli speculatori di materie prime di Chicago e Wall Street, e la conversione dei terreni agricoli americani per la folle coltivazione del mais per l’etanolo combustibile, che ha fatto schizzare i prezzi del grano. L’Egitto è il più grande importatore di grano al mondo, in gran parte dagli Stati Uniti. I futures del grano di Chicago sono aumentati di uno sbalorditivo 74% tra giugno e novembre 2010, portando ad un inflazione dei prezzi alimentari egiziani di circa il 30%, nonostante i sussidi governativi.

Ciò che è largamente ignorato da CNN, BBC e altri media occidentali, nella loro copertura degli eventi in Egitto, è il fatto che tutto qualsiasi siano i suoi eccessi interni, l’egiziano Mubarak costituisce un ostacolo rilevante all’interno della regione, alla maggiore agenda degli Stati Uniti.

Dire dei rapporti tra Obama e Mubarak sono stati congelati fin dall’inizio non è esagerato. Mubarak è stato fermamente contrario alle politiche di Obama sull’Iran e su come trattare il suo programma nucleare, sulle politiche di Obama verso gli Stati del Golfo Persico, la Siria e il Libano, nonché verso i palestinesi. [1] E’ stato una spina formidabile ai grandi ordini del giorno di Washington per l’intera regione, il progetto di Washington del Grande Medio Oriente, recentemente riproposta col meno inquietante titolo di “Nuovo Medio Oriente”.

Reale come i fattori che stanno spingendo milioni in piazza in tutto il Nord Africa e il Medio Oriente, ciò che non può essere ignorato è il fatto che Washington sta decidendo i tempi e come li vede, cercando di plasmare il risultato finale in un cambiamento di regime globale destabilizzazione tutto il mondo islamico. Il giorno delle straordinariamente ben coordinate manifestazioni popolari che chiedevano a Mubarak le dimissioni, i membri chiave del comando militare egiziano, incluso il capo di Stato Maggiore Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, erano tutti a Washington in qualità di ospiti del Pentagono. Neutralizzando opportunamente la forza decisiva dell’esercito nel fermare la protesta anti-Mubarak, crescente nei primi giorni critici [2].

La strategia era in vari dossier del Dipartimento di Stato e del Pentagono da almeno un decennio o più. Dopo che George W. Bush ha dichiarato la Guerra al Terrore, nel 2001, ciò è stato chiamato programma per il Grande Medio Oriente. Oggi è noto come il meno minaccioso titolo di progetto per il “Nuovo Medio Oriente“. Si tratta di una strategia per spezzare gli Stati della regione dal Marocco all’Afghanistan, la regione definita dall’amico di David Rockefeller, Samuel Huntington nel suo infame saggio Lo Scontro di Civiltà apparso su Foreign Affairs.

Egitto in ascesa?

Lo scenario attuale per l’Egitto del Pentagono si legge come uno spettacolo Hollywoodiano di Cecil B. DeMille, solo che questo ha un cast di milioni di giovani ben addestrati fanatici di Twitter, reti di operatori della Fratellanza musulmana, che operano con militari addestrati dagli USA. Nel ruolo di protagonista della nuova produzione, al momento, non è altro che un premio Nobel della Pace che convenientemente appare tirare tutti i fili dell’opposizione all’ancien régime, in quello che appare come una transizione senza problemi in un Egitto di nuovo sottoposto a un auto-proclamata rivoluzione liberal-democratica.

Alcuni retroscena sugli attori sul terreno sono utili, prima di guardare a ciò che sul piano strategico a lungo termine di Washington, potrebbe accadere al mondo islamico dal Nord Africa al Golfo Persico e, infine, alle popolazioni islamiche dell’Asia centrale, ai confini di Cina e Russia.

Le ‘rivoluzioni‘ soft di Washington

Le proteste che hanno portato al brusco licenziamento dell’intero governo egiziano da parte del Presidente Mubarak, sulla scia del panico per la fuga dalla Tunisia di Ben Ali, verso un esilio saudita, non sono affatto “spontanee“, come la Casa Bianca di Obama, il Dipartimento di Stato della Clinton, o CNN, BBC e altri media importanti dell’Occidente pretendono siano.

Sono stati organizzati nello stile high-tech elettronico ucraino, con grandi reti di giovani collegato tramite internet a Mohammed ElBaradei e ai torbidi e clandestini Fratelli Musulmani, i cui legami con servizi segreti e alla massoneria britannici e statunitensi, sono ampiamente indicati. [3]

A questo punto il movimento anti-Mubarak sembra tutt’altro che una minaccia per l’influenza statunitense nella regione, anzi. Ha tutte le impronte di un altro cambio di regime appoggiato dagli USA, sul modello delle rivoluzioni a colori del 2003-2004 in Georgia e in Ucraina, e della fallita Rivoluzione verde contro l’Iran di Ahmadinejad, nel 2009.

La richiesta di uno sciopero generale egiziano e del giorno della rabbia del 25 gennaio, che ha scatenato le proteste di massa che esigono le dimissioni di Mubarak, sono state lanciate da una organizzazione basata su Facebook e che si fa chiamare Movimento 6 aprile. Le proteste erano così consistenti e ben organizzate che hanno costretto Mubarak a chiedere al suo governo di dimettersi e di nominare un nuovo vice-presidente, il generale Omar Suleiman, ex ministro dell’Intelligence.

Il 6 aprile è guidato da un tale Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, un ingegnere civile di 29 anni, che ha configurato il sito di Facebook per sostenere l’appello ai lavoratori per lo sciopero del 6 aprile 2008.

Secondo il New York Times, dal 2009 circa 800.000 Egiziani, la maggior parte giovani, erano già allora membri di Facebook o Twitter. In un’intervista con la Carnegie Endowment di Washington, il capo del movimento 6 aprile Maher, ha dichiarato: “Essendo il primo movimento giovanile in Egitto ad avere l’uso delle modalità di comunicazione basate su Internet come Facebook e Twitter, ci proponiamo di promuovere la democrazia, incoraggiando il coinvolgimento del pubblico nel processo politico.”[4]

Maher ha inoltre annunciato che il suo Movimento 6 aprile sostiene l’ex capo dell’Agenzia internazionale per l’energia atomica (AIEA) delle Nazioni Unite, capo e dichiarato candidato presidenziale egiziano, ElBaradei assieme alla coalizione di ElBaradei, l’Associazione Nazionale per il Cambiamento (NAC). Il NAC include tra gli altri George Ishak, leader del Movimento Kefaya, e Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, presidente del controverso blocco parlamentare Ikhwan o Fratelli Musulmani [5].

Oggi Kefaya è al centro degli attuali avvenimenti egiziani. Non lontano, sullo sfondo vi sono i più discreti Fratelli Musulmani.

ElBaradei, a questo punto viene proiettato come figura centrale in un futuro cambiamento democratico parlamentare egiziano. Curiosamente, anche se egli non ha vissuto in Egitto negli ultimi 30 anni, ha avuto l’appoggio di ogni parte immaginabile dello spettro politico egiziano che va dai comunisti ai Fratelli Musulmani, da Kefaya ai giovani attivisti del 6 aprile.[6] A giudicare dal comportamento calmo che presenta ElBaradei in questi giorni verso gli intervistatori CNN, anche lui ha probabilmente il sostegno dei principali generali egiziani contrari al dominio di Mubarak per qualche motivo, così come di alcune persone molto influenti a Washington.

Kefaya è al centro delle mobilitazioni delle manifestazioni di protesta egiziane che supportano la candidatura di ElBaradei. Kefaya di traduce “basta!”

Curiosamente, i progettisti della National Endowment for Democracy (NED) di Washington [7] e delle ONG connesse alla rivoluzione colorate, sono apparentemente prive di creatività riguardo degli accattivanti nuovi nomi per la loro Color Revolution egiziana. Nel novembre 2003 per al loro Rivoluzione delle Rose in Georgia, le ONG finanziate avevano scelto una parola attraente, Kmara! Al fine di identificare il movimento giovanile per il cambiamento di regime. Kmara!, anche in georgiano significa “basta!”

Come Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia è stata costruita da consiglieri del NED finanziati da Washington e di altri gruppi come la mal denominata Albert Einstein Institution di Gene Sharp, che utilizza ciò che Sharp aveva una volta identificato come “la non-violenza come metodo di guerra.” [8]

Le diverse reti giovanili in Georgia come in Kefaya sono stati accuratamente addestrate come libera e decentrata rete di cellule, evitando deliberatamente una organizzazione centrale che poteva essere distrutto portando il movimento ad una battuta d’arresto. La formazione degli attivisti alle tecniche di resistenza non-violenta venne fatta in impianti sportivi, facendola apparire innocua. Gli attivisti erano stati assegnati a corsi di formazione in marketing politico, relazioni con i media, tecniche di mobilitazione e reclutamento.

Il nome formale di Kefaya è Movimento egiziano per il cambiamento. E’ stato fondata nel 2004 selezionando intellettuali egiziani presso Abu’ l-Ala Madi, leader del partito Al-Wasat, un partito creato dai Fratelli Musulmani [9]. Kefaya è stato creato come movimento di coalizione unito solo dall’appello per la fine del dominio di Mubarak.

Kefaya come parte dell’amorfo Movimento 6 aprile, ha capitalizzato subito i nuovi media sociali e la tecnologia digitale come suoi principali mezzi di mobilitazione. In particolare, i blog politici, che postano senza censure videoclip e immagini fotografiche su youtube, sono molto abilmente e professionalmente utilizzati. In un raduna già effettuato nel dicembre 2009, Kefaya aveva annunciato il sostegno alla candidatura di Mohammed ElBaradei per le elezioni egiziane del 2011 [10].

RAND e Kefaya

Non di meno un centro di riflessione della dirigenza della difesa statunitense, quale la RAND Corporation, ha condotto uno studio dettagliato su Kefaya. Lo studio su Kefaya come la RAND nota, è stato “promosso da Ufficio del Segretario della Difesa, Stati Maggiori riuniti, Comandi Operativi Unificati, Dipartimento della Marina Militare, Corpo dei Marines, organismi della difesa, e la la comunità d’intelligence della difesa“. [11]

Un gruppetto di simpatici signori e donne più democraticamente orientati difficilmente potrebbe essere trovato.

Nella loro relazione del 2008 al Pentagono, i ricercatori della RAND ha rilevato quanto segue in relazione a Kefaya dell’Egitto:

“Gli Stati Uniti hanno professato un interesse a una maggiore democratizzazione nel mondo arabo, in particolare dopo gli attentati del settembre 2001 da parte di terroristi provenienti da Arabia Saudita, Emirati Arabi Uniti, Egitto e Libano. Questo interesse fa parte di uno sforzo per ridurre dei destabilizzanti violenza politica e terrorismo. In qualità di presidente, George W. Bush ha sottolineato in un discorso del 2003 al National Endowment for Democracy, “Finché il Medio Oriente rimane un luogo dove la libertà non fiorisce, rimarrà un luogo di stagnazione, risentimento e violenza pronta all’esportazione” (The White House, 2003). Gli Stati Uniti hanno utilizzato mezzi diversi per perseguire la democratizzazione, compreso un intervento militare che, anche se è stato lanciato per altri motivi, ha avuto l’installazione di un governo democratico come uno dei suoi obiettivi finali. Tuttavia, i movimenti di riforma indigeni sono nella posizione migliore per far avanzare la democratizzazione del proprio paese.“[12]

I ricercatori della RAND hanno speso anni per perfezionare le tecniche di cambio di regime non convenzionale sotto il nome di “brulichio“, un metodo di diffondere masse folli di gioventù collegata per via digitale e attuare forme di protesta mordi-e-fuggi, muovendosi come sciami di api [13].

Washington e la scuderia di ONG dei “diritti umani“, della “democrazia” e “non violenza” che sovrintende, negli ultimi dieci anni o più, ha sempre più fatto affidamento su sofisticati movimenti di protesta indigena locale spontanei e che si “autoalimentano“, per creare un cambiamento di regime filo-Washington e far progredire l’agenda globale della Full Spectrum Dominance del Pentagono. Così lo studio della RAND afferma, nelle sue raccomandazioni conclusive del Pentagono, che Kefaya:

“Il governo degli Stati Uniti già sostiene gli sforzi di riforma attraverso organizzazioni come l’Agenzia statunitense per lo sviluppo internazionale e il United Nations Development Programme. Data la corrente opposizione popolare contraria agli Stati Uniti nella regione, il sostegno degli Stati Uniti alle iniziative di riforma è meglio effettuato attraverso organizzazioni non governative e istituzioni senza scopo di lucro.“[14]

Lo studio del 2008 della RAND era ancora più concreto sul futuro sostegno degli Stati Uniti al governo egiziano e gli altri movimenti di “riforma“:

“Il governo degli Stati Uniti dovrebbe incoraggiare le organizzazioni non governative offrendo una formazione ai riformatori, tra cui una guida per la costruzione della coalizione e come trattare le differenze interne nel perseguimento delle riforme democratiche. Istituzioni accademiche (o anche organizzazioni non governative associate a partiti politici statunitensi, come l’International Republican Institute o il National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) potrebbero effettuare tale formazione, equipaggiando i leader delle riforme, nel conciliare le loro divergenze in modo pacifico e democratico.

“In quarto luogo, gli Stati Uniti dovrebbero aiutare i riformatori ad ottenere e utilizzare le tecnologie dell’informazione, magari offrendo incentivi alle società statunitensi per investire nelle infrastrutture delle comunicazioni e nelle tecnologie dell’informazione regionali. aziende tecnologiche dell’informazione USA potrebbero anche contribuire a garantire che i siti dei riformatori possano rimanere in funzionamento, e potrebbero investire in tecnologie come l’anonymizer, che potrebbero offrire qualche riparo dal controllo del governo. Questo potrebbe essere raggiunto anche con l’impiego di tecnologie di sicurezza per impedire ai regimi di sabotare i siti web dei riformatori.“[15]

Come la loro monografia su Kefaya afferma, è stata preparata nel 2008 dalla “RAND National Security Research – Divisione per di iniziativa strategica alternativa”, patrocinata dal Rapid Reaction Technology Office presso l’Ufficio del Sottosegretario alla Difesa per l’acquisizione, la tecnologia e la logistica.

La iniziativa strategica alternativa, proprio per sottolineare il punto, comprende “la ricerca su un uso creativo dei media, della radicalizzazione dei giovani, dell’impegno civile per arginare la violenza settaria, la fornitura di servizi sociali per mobilitare settori danneggiati delle popolazioni indigene e, tema di questo volume, i movimenti alternativi.”[16]

Nel maggio del 2009 poco prima del viaggio al Cairo di Obama per incontrare Mubarak, la segretaria di Stato statunitense Hillary Clinton ha ospitato una serie di giovani attivisti egiziani a Washington, sotto gli auspici della Freedom House, un’altra ONG dei “diritti umani” con sede a Washington e una lunga storia di coinvolgimento in cambi di regime sponsorizzati dagli USA, dalla Serbia alla Georgia all’Ucraina e ad altre rivoluzioni colorate. Clinton e l’assistente al Segretario di Stato per gli Affari del Vicino Oriente, Jeffrey Feltman, hanno incontrato sedici attivisti al termine di una ‘visita‘ di due mesi organizzata dal programma New Generation della Freedom House [17].

Freedom House e la ONG dei cambi di regime, finanziata dal governo di Washington, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), sono al centro delle rivolte che ora attraversano il mondo islamico. Esse si adattano al contesto geografico di ciò che George W. Bush ha proclamato, dopo il 2001, come il suo Progetto di Grande Medio Oriente per portare la “democrazia” e una riforma economica “liberale e per il libero mercato” nei paesi islamici, dall’Afghanistan al Marocco. Quando Washington parla di introdurre la “riforma liberale del libero mercato” la gente dovrebbe guardare fuori. E’ poco più di un codice per portare quelle economie sotto il giogo del sistema del dollaro, e di tutto ciò che esso comporta.

La NED di Washington fa parte di un’agenda più grande

Se facciamo un elenco dei paesi della regione che sono sottoposti a movimenti di protesta di massa dagli eventi tunisino ed egiziano, e li riportiamo su una mappa, troviamo una quasi perfetta convergenza tra i paesi oggi coinvolti nelle proteste e la mappa originale del progetto di Washington per un Grande Medio Oriente che fu per prima presentato durante la presidenza di George W. Bush, dopo il 2001.

La NED di Washington era tranquillamente impegnata nella preparazione di un ondata di destabilizzazioni dei regimi in tutto il Nord Africa e Medio Oriente, dopo l’invasione militare degli Stati Uniti, nel 2001-2003, di Afghanistan e Iraq. L’elenco dei luoghi dove la NED è attiva, è rivelatore. Il suo sito web elenca Tunisia, Egitto, Giordania, Kuwait, Libia, Siria, Yemen e Sudan e, curiosamente, Israele. Casualmente questi paesi sono quasi tutti soggetti oggi a “spontanee” insurrezioni popolari per un cambio di regime.

L’International Republican Institute e il National Democratic Institute for International Affairs citati dal documento della RAND su Kefaya sono organizzazioni affiliate alla National Endowment for Democracy, di Washington e finanziata dal Congresso USA.

La NED è l’agenzia di coordinamento di Washington per la destabilizzazione e il cambiamento dei regimi. E’ attiva dal Tibet all’Ucraina, dal Venezuela alla Tunisia, dal Marocco al Kuwait nel ridisegnare il mondo dopo il crollo dell’Unione Sovietica, in quello che George HW Bush, in un discorso del 1991 al Congresso, proclamò trionfalmente essere l’alba di un Nuovo Ordine Mondiale. [18] Mentre l’architetto e primo capo del NED, Allen Weinstein ha detto al Washington Post nel 1991 che, “molto di quello che facciamo oggi è stato fatto di nascosto 25 anni fa dalla CIA“. [19]

Il Consiglio di Amministrazione della NED comprende o ha incluso, l’ex Segretario alla Difesa e vice capo della CIA, Frank Carlucci del Carlyle Group, il generale in pensione della NATO Wesley Clark; il neo-conservatore Warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad, che fu architetto dell’invasione afghana di George W. Bush e più tardi ambasciatore in Afghanistan, nonché nell’occupato Iraq. Un altro membro del consiglio della NED, Vin Weber, ha co-presieduto una task force indipendente importante sulla politica degli Stati Uniti verso le riforme nel mondo arabo, con l’ex Segretaria di Stato statunitense Madeleine Albright, e fu uno dei membri fondatori dell’ultra-aggressivo think-tank Progetto per un Nuovo Secolo Americano con Dick Cheney e Don Rumsfeld, che auspicava un forzato cambio di regime in Iraq, già nel 1998 [20].

La NED si suppone sia una fondazione privata, non governativa, senza scopo di lucro, ma riceve uno stanziamento annuale per i suoi lavori internazionali dal Congresso degli Stati Uniti. Il National Endowment for Democracy dipende dal contribuente statunitense per il finanziamento, ma perché la NED non è un ente governativo, non è soggetta alla normale supervisione del Congresso.

Il denaro della NED è incanalato ai paesi di destinazione attraverso quattro “basi centrali“, il National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, legato al Partito Democratico, l’International Republican Institute legato al Partito Repubblicano, l’American Center for International Labor Solidarity legata alla federazione del lavoro statunitense AFL-CIO e al Dipartimento di Stato statunitense, e il Center for International Private Enterprise legato alla liberista libero Camera di Commercio statunitense.

La defunta analista politica Barbara Conry aveva osservato che, “La NED ha approfittato del suo presunto status privato per influenzare le elezioni all’estero, attività che è oltre la portata dell’AID o della USIA, e sarebbe altrimenti possibile solo attraverso una operazione segreta della CIA. Tali attività, si può anche notare, sarebbero illegali per dei gruppi esteri che operassero negli Stati Uniti.”[21]

Significativamente la NED dettaglia i suoi vari attuali progetti nei paesi islamici, tra cui oltre all’Egitto, Tunisia, Yemen, Giordania, Algeria, Marocco, Kuwait, Libano, Libia, Siria, Iran e Afghanistan. In breve, la maggior parte dei paesi che attualmente sentono gli effetti del terremoto delle proteste per una riforma radicale in tutto il Medio Oriente e il Nord Africa, è un obiettivo della NED [22].

Nel 2005 il presidente statunitense George W. Bush ha pronunciato un discorso alla NED. In un lungo discorso incoerente che equiparava il “radicalismo islamico“, con il malvagio comunismo, quale nuovo nemico, e usando un termine più volutamente morbido di “più vasto Medio Oriente” invece di Grande Medio Oriente, che aveva suscitato molto disturbo nel mondo islamico, Bush aveva dichiarato,

“Il quinto elemento della nostra strategia nella guerra al terrore è quello di negare future reclute ai militanti, sostituendo l’odio e il risentimento con la democrazia e la speranza attraverso un più vasto Medio Oriente. Si tratta di un lungo e difficile progetto, ma non c’è nessuna alternativa ad esso. Il nostro futuro e il futuro di quella regione sono collegate. Se il più vasto Medio Oriente viene lasciato crescere nell’amarezza, se i paesi rimangono in miseria, mentre i radicali suscitano il risentimento di milioni, allora quella parte del mondo sarà una fonte infinita di conflitto e pericoli montanti, per la nostra generazione e per quella successiva. Se i popoli di quella regione potranno scegliere il proprio destino, e far avanzare la loro energia, con la partecipazione di uomini e donne liberi, gli estremisti saranno marginalizzati, e il flusso del radicalismo violento verso il resto del mondo sarà rallentato, e alla fine finito… Stiamo incoraggiando i nostri amici in Medio Oriente, compreso l’Egitto e l’Arabia Saudita, a prendere la strada delle riforme, per rafforzare la propria società nella lotta contro il terrorismo, rispettando i diritti e le scelte del proprio popolo. Appoggiamo i dissidenti e gli esiliati contro i regimi oppressivi, perché sappiamo che i dissidenti di oggi saranno i leader democratici di domani… “[23]

Il Progetto degli Stati Uniti per un ‘Grande Medio Oriente’

La diffusione di operazioni di cambio di regime di Washington dalla Tunisia al Sudan, dallo Yemen all’Egitto e la Siria, sono assai ben visti, nel contesto della lunga strategia del Pentagono e del Dipartimento di Stato verso l’intero mondo islamico da Kabul in Afghanistan, a Rabat in Marocco.

I rozzi lineamenti della strategia di Washington, in parte basata sulle sue riuscite operazioni di cambio regime nell’ex Patto di Varsavia, il blocco comunista dell’Europa orientale, sono state elaborate dall’ex consulente del Pentagono e neo-conservatore Richard Perle, e poi dall’assistente di Bush Douglas Feith, in un Libro bianco elaborato per l’allora nuovo regime del Likud israeliano di Benjamin Netanyahu, nel 1996.

Tale raccomandazione politica è stata intitolata Un taglio netto: Una nuova strategia per assicurare il Reame. Fu la prima che uno scritto del think-tank Washington chiedeva apertamente la rimozione di Saddam Hussein in Iraq, un atteggiamento militare aggressivo nei confronti dei palestinesi, di colpire la Siria e gli obiettivi siriani in Libano. [24] Secondo quanto riferito, il governo Netanyahu in quel momento seppellì la relazione di Perle Feith, in quanto troppo rischioso.

Con gli eventi dell’11 settembre 2001 e il ritorno a Washington degli ultrafalchi neoconservatori del gruppo di Perle, l’amministrazione Bush diede priorità assoluta alla versione allargata del piano di Feith-Perle, chiamandolo Progetto per un Grande Medio Oriente. Feith fu nominato da Bush Sottosegretario della Difesa.

Dietro la facciata delle annunciate riforme democratiche dei regimi autocratici in tutta la regione, il Grande Medio Oriente era ed è un progetto per estendere il controllo militare degli Stati Uniti e spezzare le economie stataliste in tutto l’arco degli stati dal Marocco fino ai confini della Cina e della Russia.

Nel maggio 2003, prima che le macerie del bombardamento statunitense di Baghdad fossero tolte, George W. Bush, un presidente che non sarà ricordato come un grande amico della democrazia, proclamò la politica di “diffondere la democrazia” in tutta la regione ed aveva esplicitamente sottolineato cosa ciò significava: “La creazione del Medio Oriente come area di libero scambio con gli Stati Uniti entro un decennio.” [25]

Prima del Summit dei G8 del giugno 2004 a Sea Island, Georgia, Washington aveva pubblicato un documento di lavoro, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership“. Sotto la sezione intitolata opportunità economiche vi era un drammatico appello di Washington per “una trasformazione economica simile, in grandezza, a quella intrapresa dai paesi ex comunisti dell’Europa centrale e orientale”.

Il documento statunitense aveva detto che la chiave di ciò era il rafforzamento del settore privato come strada per la prosperità e la democrazia. E sosteneva, in modo fuorviante, che ciò sarebbe stato fatto attraverso il miracolo della microfinanza, come il documento chiariva, “solo 100 milioni di dollari all’anno per cinque anni saranno creerebbero 1.2 milioni di imprenditori (750.000 dei quali donne), uscendo dalla povertà, attraverso prestiti di 400 dollari a ciascuno.”[26] (Et Voilà, ecco il perché del nobel a Muahmmad Yunus, ideatore della microfinanza per i poveracci… NdT)

Il piano statunitense prevedeva l’acquisizione di banche regionali e finanziarie da parte delle nuove istituzioni apparentemente internazionale ma, come la Banca Mondiale e il FMI, di fatto controllate da Washington, tra cui il WTO. L’obiettivo del progetto a lungo termine di Washington, è quello di controllare completamente il petrolio, controllare completamente i flussi di entrate dal petrolio, controllare completamente le intere economie della regione, dal Marocco fino ai confini della Cina, e tutto ciò che sta in mezzo. E’ un progetto ardito quanto è disperata.

Una volta che il documento del G8 degli Stati Uniti era trapelato nel 2004, su Al-Hayat, l’opposizione ad essa si diffuse in tutta la regione, con una grande protesta per la definizione statunitense del Grande Medio Oriente. Un articolo del francese Le Monde Diplomatique di aprile 2004, aveva osservato che “oltre ai paesi arabi, si estende a Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turchia e Israele, il cui unico comune denominatore è che si trovano nella zona in cui l’ostilità verso gli Stati Uniti è più forte, in cui il fondamentalismo islamico nella sua forma anti-occidentale è più diffuso.”[27] Va notato che la NED è attiva anche all’interno di Israele, con un certo numero di programmi.

In particolare, nel 2004 vi è stata la veemente opposizione da due leader del Medio Oriente, l’egiziano Hosni Mubarak e il re dell’Arabia Saudita, che hanno costretto i fanatici ideologi dell’amministrazione Bush a mettere temporaneamente il progetto per il Grande Medio Oriente nel dimenticatoio.

Funzionerà?

In questo scritto non è chiaro quale sia il risultato cui porterà finale delle ultime teleguidate destabilizzazioni USA in tutto il mondo islamico. Non è chiaro quale sarà il risultato per Washington e i sostenitori di un Nuovo Ordine Mondiale dominato dagli USA. La loro agenda è chiaramente sia la creazione del Grande Medio Oriente sotto la presa salda degli Stati Uniti, come un maggior controllo dei futuri flussi di capitali e flussi di energia verso Cina, Russia e Unione Europea, che potrebbero portare, uno di questi giorni, all’idea di allontanarsi da questo ordine statunitense.

Essa ha enormi implicazioni potenziali per il futuro di Israele. Come un commentatore statunitense ha ammesso, “Il calcolo israeliano di oggi è che se ‘Mubarak se ne va’ (che di solito viene indicato con ‘Se gli USA permettono che Mubarak vada via’), l’Egitto andrà via. Se va via la Tunisia (stessa storia), anche il Marocco e l’Algeria andranno. La Turchia è già andata (per la quale gli israeliani devono solo incolpare se stessi). La Siria è andata (in parte perché Israele ha voluto escluderla dall’accesso all’acqua del mare di Galilea). Gaza è andata ad Hamas e l’Autorità palestinese potrebbe presto pure andarsene (con Hamas?). Lasciando Israele tra le rovine della politica del dominio militare della regione.” [28]

La strategia di Washington di “distruzione creativa“, sta chiaramente causando notti insonni non solo nel mondo islamico, ma anche a Tel Aviv, e infine da ora anche a Pechino e a Mosca e in tutta l’Asia centrale.

* F. William Engdahl è autore di Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Il suo libro A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order è stato appena ristampato in una nuova edizione. È membro del Comitato Scientifico di “Eurasia”.

Note

[1] DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA Debka è aperto circa i sua buoni legami con l’intelligence e le agenzie di sicurezza di Israele. Mentre i suoi scritti devono essere letti con questo in mente, alcuni rapporti che pubblica spesso inducono a interessanti ulteriori indagini.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. Secondo il defunto Miles Copeland, un funzionario della CIA di stanza in Egitto durante il periodo di Nasser, la CIA si alleò con i Fratelli Musulmani che si opponevano al regime laico di Nasser, così come all’opposizione dell’ideologia nazionalista alla fratellanza pan-islamica.

[4] Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, 1 Febbraio 2011, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm

[5] Ibidem.

[6] Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, 31 gennaio 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/31/AR2011013103470_2.html?sid=ST2011013003319.

[7] National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africa-highlights.

[8] Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, 1 marzo 2007.

[9] Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9

[10] Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya

[11] Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

[12] Ibidem.

[13] Per altre discussioni dettagliate sulle tecniche del “brulichio” della RAND: F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

[14] Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

[15] Ibid., p. 50.

[16] Ibid., p. iii.

[17] Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, 29 gennaio 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22993

[18] George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 gennaio 1991. Nel discorso, Bush a un certo punto ha dichiarato con aria trionfante di celebrazione del collasso dell’Unione Sovietica, “Ciò che è in gioco è più di un paese piccolo, è una grande idea, un nuovo ordine mondiale …”

[19] Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy , Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 Settembrw 1991, pp. 24-25.

[20] National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, http://www.ned.org/about/board

[21] Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy , Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, 8 Novembre 1993, http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html.

[22] National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.

[23] George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, 6 ottobre 2005, http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.

[24] Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm , 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

[25] George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 Maggio 2003.

[26] Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, 4 Aprile 2004, http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

[27] Ibid.

[28] William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

Traduzione di Alessandro Lattanzio

Notschalter: Die Regierung Obama fürchtet in den USA Aufstände wie in Ägypten

Steve Watson

Die Regierung Obama ist derzeit bemüht, schnell einen Gesetzentwurf passieren zu lassen, der dem Präsidenten praktisch einen Notschalter für das Internet in den USA an die Hand gibt, während die ägyptischen Behörden gleichzeitig dafür kritisiert werden, das Internet abzuschalten, um der sich anbahnenden Revolution gegen Hosni Mubarak etwas den Wind aus den Segeln zu nehmen. Der Grund dafür liegt auf der Hand: Die Regierung fürchtet, es könnte in den USA zu ähnlichen Protesten wie in Ägypten kommen und will in der Lage sein, gegebenenfalls den Zugang zum Internet sperren zu können.

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/ste...

Ägypten vor Militärputsch: Amerikanische Kriegsschiffe im Suezkanal

Redaktion

Ägypten steht vor dem wirtschaftlichen Zusammenbruch. Die Lage ist so angespannt, dass eine Machtübernahme des Militärs nicht länger als Bedrohung, sondern als einzige Hoffnung gesehen wird, das Land vor einem wirtschaftlichen Kollaps zu bewahren. Ein amerikanischer Marineverband mit sechs Kriegsschiffen und einem Hubschrauberträger ist in den Suezkanal eingelaufen.

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/red...

Pierre Vial: Obama et la Turquie (avril 2009)

Pierre Vial : Obama et la Turquie (avril 2009)

WikiLeaks, die CIA und die amerikanische Regierung

Webster G. Tarpley

Weltweit wächst die Erkenntnis, dass das absurde Theater von WikiLeaks und Julian Assange keineswegs authentisch, sondern vielmehr eine Psychokriegs-Operation ist. WikiLeaks und sein Chef sind die klassische Form von »Limited Hangout« oder partieller Selbstenthüllung, eine Art von reißerischem Striptease, bei der eine Frontorganisation sorgfältig ausgewählte, oft genug auch getürkte Dokumente veröffentlicht, die ihr vom Geheimdienst überlassen werden, und zwar in der Absicht, nicht etwa der CIA, Großbritannien oder den Israelis Schaden zuzufügen, sondern vielmehr klassischen Vertretern auf der »Feindesliste« der CIA wie beispielsweise Putin, Berlusconi, Karzai, Gaddafi oder Rodriguez de Kirchner. In Tunesien haben von WikiLeaks veröffentlichte Dokumente, in denen sich abfällig über Ex-Präsident Ben Ali geäußert wurde, der CIA in Langley schon zu einem unverhofften Gewinn verholfen, indem sie zum eher seltenen Sturz einer etablierten arabischen Regierung geführt haben.

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/web...

Gerhoch Reisegger: 9/11 - Das Lügengebäude fällt!

Gerhoch Reisegger:

9/11 - Das Lügengebäude fällt !

Die Rolle der CIA in Ägypten: wer ist Omar Suleiman?

Redaktion

 

Omar Suleiman ist eine der Personen, die derzeit als mögliche Alternative für die Nachfolge des ägyptischen Präsidenten Hosni Mubarak ins Spiel gebracht werden. Nachdem Mubarak am 28. Januar sein Kabinett entlassen hatte, ernannte er Suleiman zum Vizepräsidenten. Doch wer ist dieser Omar Suleiman?

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/red...

 

 

L'antiamericanismo di Evola

L’antiamericanismo di Evola non è pregiudizio, ma parte d’una visione coerente del mondo

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

 

Recentemente la Fondazione Julius Evola ha curato la seconda edizione (dopo quella del 1983) dell’antologia di testi evoliani dedicati alla civiltà statunitense, a cura di Alberto Lombardo, intitolata «Civiltà americana».

Si tratta di una raccolta di quattordici scritti, apparsi fra il 1930 e il 1968, ossia da prima dello scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale a pochi anni prima della scomparsa del filosofo, avvenuta nel 1974. Il primo testo è il celebre «Noi antimoderni»; l’ultimo s’intitola «Suggestione negra». Fra i più significativi, come appare già dai rispettivi titoli, «”Libertà dal bisogno” e umanità bovina» (del 1952) e «Difendersi dall’America» (del 1957).

  

Molto è stato detto e scritto sull’antiamericanismo di Evola, nonché sulla circostanza, invero eloquente, che la sua produzione su questo tema è perfino più abbonante di quella dedicata all’anticomunismo; per cui riteniamo che questa ripubblicazione di una serie di scritti evoliani, dispersi su svariate riviste oggi in gran parte introvabili, sia di per sé una operazione culturale meritoria e di alto profilo.

  

Coglie perfettamente nel segno Alberto Lombardo allorché osserva che tutta la discussione in merito è sostanzialmente viziata dal fatto che americanismo e antiamericanismo, nel panorama politico e culturale italiano (ed europeo), hanno finito per assurgere al ruolo di bandiere di due co0ntrapposte - ma non opposte - visioni del mondo, che neppure la fine della Guerra Fredda, in apparenza, è riuscita a comporre o a rendere obsolete.

  

E questo per la buona ragione che tanto gli americanisti quanto gli antiamericanisti continuano a muoversi entrambi sul medesimo terreno culturale, proprio della modernità intesa in senso puramente quantitativo: democrazia, capitalismo, egualitarismo, cultura dei diritti, scuola di massa, dominio di una vociante “opinione pubblica” che non si rende conto di essere strumentalizzata, dietro la maschera della demagogia più sfrenata, da una rete occulta di “poter forti” di matrice finanziaria ed economica.

  

In questo senso, ha ancora ragione Lombardo quando osserva che l’antiamericanismo superficiale e viscerale di casa nostra non è affatto una alternativa ai valori, se così vogliamo chiamarli, rappresentato dalla civiltà americana, perché, in ultima analisi, si riduce ad un americanismo purgato dai fast-food di McDonald’s e dalla Coca-Cola.

La vera alternativa all’americanismo non è, pertanto, una modernità che vorrebbe accettare tutto il regno del quantitativo, rappresentato allo spirito americano, ma senza i suoi simboli più vistosi e appariscenti, per non dire più chiassosi e volgari; ma un lucido, ragionato rifiuto di tutto l’universo spirituale (o piuttosto anti-spirituale) sotteso a quella civiltà. 

  

Diversamente, l’antiamericanismo nostrano si riduce a quella misera cosa che in realtà è: una servile accettazione della sua essenza profonda, pretendendo però di nascondere alla vista - ipocritamente - certe forme esteriori.

  

Osserva, infatti, Antonio Lombardo a questo proposito (op. cit., 16-18):

«L’antiamericanismo, che un autore apprezzato dagli americani nostrani ha definito “una malattia psicologica”, non è sufficiente ad accostare Evola al movimento no/new global o ad altre correnti di pensiero. In Evola l’avversione al modello di civiltà propugnato dagli Stati Uniti non è un pregiudizio, come vorrebbe Massimo Teodori, ma parte da un’autentica visione del mondo e della storia. Già in due capostipiti della rivoluzione conservatrice tedesca, Oswald Spengler e Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, vi è una critica all’occidentalismo di marca anglosassone che è il risultato di un’analisi storica e geopolitica; analoghe posizioni si trovano in Johann von Leers e in Carl Schmitt. Vi è, soprattutto, il richiamo alla tradizione politica europea e la teorizzazione di una sua rinascita n forme nuove. Al contrario, tanto nei laudatori dell’americanismo che nei suoi detrattori, si osserva un’attitudine prona e remissiva che altro non è che una forma di disfattismo o di incoscienza. Anche i più accalorati antiamericani infatti non dubitano della validità dei dogmi  egualitari, della sacralità della democrazia, dell’importanza del meticciato come mezzo per abbattere le costrizioni di un modo che ha ancora troppe differenze.  Entrambi, americanofili e americanofobi, sognano un mondo on più ricchezza diffusa meno frontiere e più libertà di scambi e movimenti, con la peculiare variante della presenza, o meno, delle catene dei McDonald’so della Coca-Cola.

La recente elezione negli Stati Uniti del primo Presidente di colore della storia avrebbe certo dato lo spunto a Evola per qualche articolo, non tanto per la persona considerata in se stessa (Barack Obama), quanto per il valore simbolico e sintomatico del fato. Non vi è alcun dubbio che vedesse nella componente di colore della popolazione nordamericana la componente più tipica dello “spirito americano”: “L’America è ‘negrizzata’ in termini non semplicemente demografici, ma altresì di civiltà e di sensibilità,, quindi anche quando non esistono che scarse relazioni col sangue negro” (in “Il popolo italiano”, 12 luglio 1957). Evola avrebbe indubbiamente interpretato questo fatto come una conferma della degenerazione spirituale american, tanto più considerando che è stata una maggioranza bianca ad eleggere un presidente negro.

  

Comunque non è paradossale che proprio in America, a partire dagli anni Novantadel secolo corso, Evola abbia goduto di una marginale ma non del tutto trascurabile fortuna, dovuta soprattutto alla traduzione delle sue opere principali da parte della casa editrice Inner Traditions, oltre che ala presentazione del pensiero evoliano (in termini assai diversi) da parte di Thomas Sheehan, Richard Drake e Joscelyn Godwin. Ed è piuttosto significativo che in internet, dove il nome di Evola compare in centinaia di migliaia di pagine in tutte le lingue, uno dei primi testi integralmente tradotti e disponibili i inglese (così come in altre lingue) sia stato proprio il volumetto “Civiltà americana”.

  

A ben vedere, infatti, l’autentica opposizione al modello americano è proprio quella teorizzata da Evola, che punta al primato della qualità sulla quantità, dello spirito sulla materia dell’organicità sull’individualismo e della politica sull’economia. Però, così come la Tecnica è per sua natura universale, lo sono anche il modello economico capitalistico e l’ideologia egualitaria. Storicamente, laddove un’idea particolare si oppone ad una universale, la prima è destinata a venire travolta. Il messaggio fondamentale di Evola è proprio quello di interpretare e vivere i valori tradizionali in una prospettiva più che storica, assolutizzarli: solo con ciò potranno essere opposti a quelli dominanti, indipendentemente a ogni effettiva speranza pratica.»

Quello che non può trovarci d’accordo, nel pensiero di Evola sulla civiltà americana, è, d’altra parte, il suo atteggiamento nei confronti della questione degli afroamericani, che risente di un biologismo estraneo, a ben guardare, alle stesse motivazioni ideali del pensiero del filosofo e che si presta ad una lettura in chiave francamente e inaccettabilmente razzista.

  

Se la questione si riducesse ad un fatto puramente biologico, allora l’unico (ed ultimo) uomo politico europeo apertamente evoliano sarebbe Berlusconi, con la sua mediocrissima battuta sull’«abbronzatura» di Barack Obama. 

  

Invece, per le stesse ragioni per cui non è accettabile una critica all’americanismo che ne lasci intatte le base ideologiche e si fermi ad alcuni simboli e funzioni materiali, del pari ci sembra non sia accettabile una lettura in chiave razzista della questione afroamericana. 

  

Al contrario, ci sembra che proprio la sorte dei due gruppi umani che più hanno sofferto della intrinseca malignità dello “spirito americano”, sempre camuffata dietro una roboante enfasi retorica, i neri vittime della schiavitù e gli indiani vittime della “pulizia etnica”, dovrebbe essere vista come un perenne monito contro le sirene di quella ideologia che proclama diritti e libertà per tutti, ma non esita a spazzar via con le bombe al napalm chiunque osi attraversarle il cammino, come si vede, anche ai nostri giorni, per esempio, in Iraq e in Afghanistan.

  

Occorre demistificare l’intrinseca ipocrisia del “sogno americano” e la brutalità, eretta a sistema, dello “spirito della frontiera”, entrambe versioni rivedute e corrette di quel “destino manifesto” che ha fatto del nazionalismo statunitense la molla di una feroce volontà di sopraffazione a livello planetario, realizzata attraverso le immani distruzioni di due guerre mondiali, l’uso spregiudicato dei bombardamenti a tappeto e delle bombe atomiche, la cinica dottrina della “guerra preventiva” e la regia occulta delle lobbies politiche e finanziarie che hanno i loro centri nevralgici non solo a New York, ma anche a Londra e Gerusalemme.

  

E che il pensiero di Evola non sia immune da una certa vena razzista, lo dimostrano le pagine dedicate alla questione dell’apartheid nell’Africa australe; ove ad alcune osservazioni giuste e condivisibili, si intrecciano altre, che dovrebbero ripugnare non diciamo ad una coscienza cristiana - ed Evola è stato, infatti, un pensatore dichiaratamente pagano -, ma anche a quel tanto di coscienza morale che l’umanità ha comunque elaborato sotto l’influsso del Cristianesimo, anche senza rendersene conto o magari, come nel caso dell’Illuminismo, in antitesi ad esso e in aperta polemica contro di esso.

Queste riflessioni ci riconducono anche al discorso sulla posizione di Evola di fronte all’alternativa fra capitalismo di matrice americana e comunismo di modello sovietico. Per lui, si tratta di una falsa alternativa, e questa è la ragione per la quale rifiuta di farsi arruolare, sotto ricatto, nelle file degli “americanisti”. Capitalismo e comunismo non sono alternativi, proprio come, per Nietzsche, non lo sono liberalismo e marxismo: al contrario, si tratta di ideologie simmetriche e complementari, frutto, entrambe, della degenerazione quantitativa della modernità e dell’avvento di una concezione materialista, economicista, radicalmente laicista e avversa all’idea stessa del sacro, della gerarchia, del primato spirituale.

Alberto Lombardo osserva che, quando un’idea particolare si scontra con una universale, finisce per essere travolta. Come è stato fatto notare da diversi studiosi, la forza dell’americanismo sembra consistere proprio nel suo apparente universalismo; che, ad esempio, rende simili a penose battaglie di retroguardia gli sforzi della Francia di preservare la propria identità linguistica e culturale, dato che una strategia rigida soccombe sempre davanti ad una elastica.

Ebbene, si tratta di mostrare che il re è in mutande e cioè che l’americanismo, lungi dall’essere quella ideologia universalistica che cerca di apparire, è, in effetti, la più compiutamente particolaristica e la più ottusamente nazionalistica fra tutte quelle finora apparse durante il processo della modernità: l’ultimo e più abnorme frutto di una parabola degenerativa e non già il primo di un’epoca nuova e di un mondo nuovo.

Del resto, la cosa è evidente anche a livello puramente numerico. Estendere il “sogno americano” all’umanità intera, ad esempio a quei due miliardi e mezzo di Cinesi e di Indiani che bussano energicamente per sedere anch’essi alla tavola del capitalismo trionfante, prima che venga sparecchiata, è cosa semplicemente impossibile, e gli Stati Uniti saranno disposti a qualunque cosa pur di opporvisi. 

A quel punto, però, dovranno gettare la maschera e tutto il mondo potrà vedere che l’americanismo altro non è ce un meschino nazionalismo elevato all’ennesimo potenza e che, per oltrepassare le sue mendaci promesse, occorre ripensare radicalmente il posto dell’uomo nel mondo, il ruolo dell’economia e della tecnica, e soprattutto la dimensione trascendente dell’anima, che la cultura materialista e liberale ha voluto rinnegare e che ha cerato in ogni modo di estinguere.

Molto di più che una questione puramente politica, dunque: ma una vera e propria rifondazione dei valori ideali e perenni dello spirito umano.

In questo senso, ci sembra che la rilettura degli scritti di Evola sulla civiltà americana, nonché del saggio introduttivo di Alberto Lombardo, possa costituire un utile laboratorio di riflessioni e una autentica miniera di spunti critici per chi voglia porsi in maniera consapevole, e al tempo stesso propositiva, nei confronti della sempre più allarmante deriva nichilista di questa nostra tarda modernità.

 

 

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