-
Paradise Lost: Homeless in Los Angeles
KOMO News
On the streets of Los Angeles and almost every other major city in the state, tens of thousands of the homeless are desperate for shelter, services and of course, drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Eric Johnson reports. Runtime: 6:33 mins. Is Los Angeles a portent of the future of America, and the Western world? Runtime: 6:33 mins.
-
American Atrocities in Germany
Edward L. Van Roden - The Progressive
American investigators at the U. S. Court in Dachau, Germany, used the following methods to obtain confessions: Beatings and brutal kickings. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws. Mock trials. Solitary confinement. Posturing as priests. Very limited rations. Spiritual deprivation. Promises of acquittal … Royall appointed Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court and me to go to Germany and check up on the reports. Accompanied by Lt. Col. Charles Lawrence. Jr., we went to Munich, Germany, set up offices there, and heard a stream of testimony about the way in which American atrocities were committed.
-
Why Are So Many Players in the Impeachment Trial Jewish?
Religion News Service
… As readers following the saga may have already gleaned, there’s a disproportionate number of Jewish actors in this drama … Behind the scenes there are others, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian-American business associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. (The two were allegedly involved in helping Trump remove Marie Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine.) And then, of course, there’s Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky … Parnas, Fruman and Zelensky are also Jewish … Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, is also Jewish, though unlike the others he was born in the United States to a couple that escaped the Holocaust. Why so many? Scholars say it’s mostly a coincidence … Jews comprise less than one percent of the [Ukraine] population.
-
'Outdated Cultural Depictions': Disney Adds Warnings to its Classic Movies
Washington Examiner
Disney has added cultural warnings to several of its classic animated films on its new streaming platform Disney+. “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions,” a line in several of Disney’s classic films summaries states. The warning was attached to The Aristocats, The Jungle Book, Lady and the Tramp, and Dumbo. Each of the movies included one or more scenes of animals portraying different racial stereotypes. The Aristocats and Lady and the Tramp contain stereotypes of Chinese people … The streaming platform … does not include Disney’s 1946 movie Song of the South, which the company has kept out of circulation for years. The movie has been accused of racism for painting a rosy picture of sharecropping.
-
US and Israel Cast Lone UN Votes Against Historic Peace Measures
B. Norton – Grayzone
The United States and Israel were the only countries that voted against UN General Assembly draft resolutions calling for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, measures to stop an arms race in outer space, and an end to the blockade of Cuba / As nearly all UN member states have united in calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Israel have singlehandedly undermined their peace efforts … The UNGA’s [General Assembly] First Committee, which oversees disarmament and international security, voted on November 1 to overwhelmingly approve a draft resolution entitled “Establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region of the Middle East.” A staggering 172 countries voted in support of this resolution. Only two nations voted against it: the US and Israel. Just two more countries abstained …
-
China Signs Defence Agreement With South Korea as US Angers Seoul With Demand for $5 Billion Troop Payment
The Telegraph (Britain)
The defence ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in north-east Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s long-standing alliances in the region are fraying … The South Korean minister of defence, and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, agreed to set up more military hotlines and to push ahead with a visit by Mr Jeong to China next year to “foster bilateral exchanges and cooperation in defence” … Seoul’s announcement coincided with growing resentment at the $5 billion annual fee that Washington is demanding to keep 28,500 US troops in South Korea … A recent survey by the Korea Institute for National Reunification showing that 96 per cent of people are opposed to Seoul paying more for the US military presence.
-
A Confederate monument that had stood in front of a North Carolina courthouse for 112 years was taken down overnight after months of debate and protests. Crews used cranes early Wednesday [Nov. 20] to remove the monument – a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier atop a marble pedestal — from its spot outside the Chatham County courthouse in Pittsboro, roughly a 35-mile drive west of Raleigh. It was the latest Confederate memorial in the South to be moved in the past few years amid a national debate about their purpose and necessity. The county Board of Commissioners voted in August to remove the statue …
-
NASA Renames Object After Uproar Over Old Name’s Nazi Connotations
The New York Times
Until Tuesday, Ultima Thule was the informal name NASA used for a small, snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper belt, a desolate region of deep space that the agency said in statement is home to “thousands of known small icy worlds.” … The term Ultima Thule, however, has its origins much closer to home. It is a Latin term used in classical antiquity to denote distant and unknown lands, in particular ones that were cold, like the Nordic countries. That Northern European connection drew the attention of the Nazis … “This isn’t just some obscure element among hundreds of others in the Nazi cosmology,” Dr. Kurlander said. “They named a tank division after Thule in World War II. It keeps popping up, which is why it probably makes sense not to name something that anyone has any interest in Thule. It has too much baggage as this point.”
-
Tyler Kent and the Roosevelt Whistle-Blow Job
David Cole – Taki’s Mag
… Even as present-day D.C. is in turmoil over a “whistle-blower” who supposedly exposed a president’s mischief with a foreign leader, no one’s mentioning Tyler Kent … What he saw was collusion, true collusion, low-down and dirty. FDR was secretly conspiring with Churchill to violate U.S. neutrality and accelerate American involvement on behalf of Great Britain … I spoke with the Institute for Historical Review’s Mark Weber, my old friend and the author of an essential essay on Kent. Mark stressed that perhaps the most vile aspect of the Kent affair was that FDR’s cronies blatantly admitted that British needs took precedence over U.S. law and the rights of a U.S. diplomat … FDR was indeed colluding with a foreign power to violate U.S. law, and Tyler Kent wanted people to know about it.
-
Whistleblower of an Earlier Era: The Roosevelt Legacy and The Kent Case
Tyler Kent - Institute for Historical Review
… In 1940, an obscure cypher clerk at the American Embassy in London came across documents which, in his judgment and that of many reputable historians subsequently, proved conclusively that Roosevelt both directly and through his agents was engaged in activities designed to foment a war and eventually to compel American participation in it. I was that cypher clerk … The new basic law of nations requires only one clause, very simply: “It pays to be on the winning side.”
-
Following an update report on the day’s session, two American specialists provide perspective on the ongoing Trump impeachment hearings: Mark Weber, historian and director of the Institute for Historical Review, and Frank Emspak, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Department of Labor Education. Runtime: 10:13 mins.
-
The US has shifted its position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, no longer viewing them as inconsistent with international law. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the status of the West Bank was for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Israel welcomed the move – a reversal of the US stance under President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Settlements are communities established by Israel on land occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. They have long been a source of dispute between Israel and the international community, and the Palestinians.
-
We Are All Palestinians
Philip Giraldi
In spite of the fact that Israeli snipers continue to shoot scores of unarmed protesting Gazans every Friday with virtually no coverage from the media, there are some signs that the ability of Israel and its friends to control the narrative regarding the Jewish state’s appalling human rights violations is beginning to weaken. To be sure, The Lobby still has sharp teeth and is prepared to use them … One might reasonably suggest that even though change is in the air, the process of disencumbering from the Israeli grip will be both long and painful … America’s support of Israel is both morally wrong and, worse, contrary to actual U.S. interests … Our country’s endorsement of Israel’s inhumanity makes us Americans complicit in the war crimes. In this struggle, we are all Palestinians.
-
Social Media Censorship Reaches New Heights as Twitter Permanently Bans Dissent
M. Muhawesh - MintPress News
It’s an open secret. The deep state is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google to control the flow of information. That includes suppressing, censoring and sometimes outright purging dissenting voices – all under the guise of fighting fake news and Russian propaganda … Meanwhile, the [Facebook] social media platform has been partnering with the U.S. and Israeli governments to silence Palestinian voices that show the reality of life under Israeli apartheid and occupation. The Israeli Justice Minister proudly revealed that Facebook complied with 95 percent of Israeli government requests to delete Palestinian pages.
-
When Did Ukraine Become a ‘Critical Ally’?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… The “territorial integrity and sovereignty” of Ukraine is not now and has never been a vital interest of ours that would justify a U.S. war with a nuclear-armed Russia. Instead, it was the avoidance of such a war that was the vital interest that nine U.S. presidents, from Truman to Bush I, secured, despite such provocations as the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the building of the Berlin Wall. In February 2014, the elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by U.S.-backed protesters in Maidan Square, cheered on by McCain. This was direct U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Ukraine. Victoria Nuland of the State Department conceded that we had dumped billions into Ukraine to reorient its regime to the West.
-
Cyprus Police Say They Seized Israeli ‘Spy Van,’ Question Owner
The Times of Israel
Cypriot police said Saturday they had seized an alleged “spy van” equipped with sophisticated surveillance equipment capable of hacking communications and questioned its Israeli owner … Cyprus police chief Kypros Michaelides told private radio station Astra that the Israeli owner had given “some explanations,” but he would be questioned further, along with Cypriot nationals. Forbes had named the owner of the van as ex-Israeli intelligence officer Tal Dilian, who allegedly heads a Cyprus-registered company that owns the vehicle. It said the $9 million state-of-the-art equipment in the van can monitor electronic devices within a 500-meter radius, hack any phone and listen in to conversations regardless of the level of encryption.
-
… Even though the federal deficit is already over one trillion dollars (and growing), President Trump and Congress have no interest in cutting spending, especially in an election year. Should he win reelection, President Trump is unlikely to reverse course and champion fiscal restraint. Instead, he will likely take his victory as a sign that the people support big federal budgets and huge deficits. None of the leading Democratic candidates are even pretending to care about the deficit. Instead they are proposing increasing spending by trillions on new government programs. Joseph Zidle, a strategist with the Blackstone investment firm, has called the government – or “sovereign” – debt bubble the “mother of all bubbles.” When the sovereign debt bubble inevitably busts, it will cause a meltdown bigger than the 2008 crash.
-
Trump Keeps Contradicting Pentagon on US Role in Syrian War
J. Ditz - Antiwar.com
President Trump’s position on the Syrian War aims to further simplify matters. Turkey’s President Erdogan says he is worried about Turkey’s border with Syria, and President Trump sees an opportunity to contrast his own war, saying “we left troops behind only for the oil.” … Admitting that the whole US war is for oil isn’t the panacea Trump thinks it is, however, and he’s running up against other US officials on this issue … Trump’s comments may simply reflect his agenda and what he cares about in Syria, just the oil. At the same time, other top officials plainly see the legal complications to overtly looting oil during a military occupation, and are downplaying that matter hoping nothing ever comes of it, or that at the very least they can avoid culpability by making their role in the war something else.
-
Remembering Modern History's Greatest Crime
Eric Margolis
… For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been shamefully covered up or ignored … If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States, where World War II has become something of a state religion and is endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign military adventures.
-
When Some High-Ranking Americans Opposed the Creation of Israel
I. Tharoor - The Washington Post
… In the aftermath of World War II, President Harry Truman was faced with two competing camps at loggerheads over how to deal with the question of Palestine … One camp favored the Jewish Agency’s desire to create Israel, a Jewish state … The other camp, represented by [Secretary of State George] Marshall, sided with the British proposal to cede Palestine to U.N. trusteeship, or administration … The [Pentagon] Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued numerous reports on Palestine, some of which concluded that a Jewish state would present a headache for future American policy … Another JCS report published on March 31,1948, warned that a fledgling Israeli state would involve the United States “in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.”
-
Recalling Truman’s Fateful May 1948 Decision to Recognize Israel
Richard H. Curtiss
… An “insider’s account” of the discussions leading up to these [1947-1948] decisions has been published by former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, one of the few living parties to the discussions leading to partition … Clifford’s story once again disproves the assertion that American diplomatic or military personnel ever viewed Israel as a “strategic asset.” The foreign policy establishment, 43 years ago as today, saw Israel as a geopolitical liability that owes its US support to the extraordinary clout of its apologists within the American Jewish community and the American political system.
-
Media Outlets Turn Syria Into Their Latest Melodrama
Ted Galen Carpenter – The National Interest
Mainstream media outlets inundated President Donald Trump with shrill denunciations when he announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria’s northern border with Turkey … Once again, news coverage turned a complex geopolitical issue into a simplistic melodrama featuring admirable protagonists confronting odious villains … The stark oversimplifications that characterize much of the media treatment of Trump’s decision to sever ties with the Syrian Kurds have typified coverage of other foreign policy issues. Indeed, for most portions of the media, the entire Syrian civil war since 2011 has been a stark melodrama between good and evil … Media coverage of the Balkan and Syrian conflicts was horribly simplistic and one-sided, but the worst example of media malpractice occurred in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
-
Most Veterans Believe the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Weren’t Worth Fighting
J. Clark - Task & Purpose
The majority of U.S. military veterans say America’s most recent wars were not worth fighting, according to the results of a recent Pew Research Center survey published ahead of Veterans Day. In addition to polling 1,087 former service members on their opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pew survey attempted to gauge differences in wartime experiences between different generations of service members … When it comes to the Global War on Terror, roughly two-thirds of veterans (64 percent) say they think the war in Iraq was not worth fighting in light of the “costs versus the benefits to the United States,” while 33 percent say that it was. While a majority of veterans say the same about Afghanistan, that number is slightly lower, at 58 percent.
-
Israel Is Not A U.S. Ally
Daniel Larison - The American Conservative
… Israel is not our ally. Its government does not behave as an ally does, it has never fought alongside U.S. forces in any of our foreign wars, and its interests are not aligned with ours as an ally’s should be. There is no formal treaty and no binding obligations that require our governments to do anything for the other … Dozens of other states all over the world are better allies to the United States than the “most cherished ally” is, and they don’t preside over an illegal occupation that implicates the U.S. in decades of abuses and crimes against the Palestinian people living under that occupation, but none of them enjoys the lockstep, uncritical backing that this one state does. The effect of this constant repetition is to make the U.S.-Israel relationship seem extremely important to U.S. interests when it is not …
-
Is It Worth It?
Joseph Sobran
… In the early 1980s it became clear to me that the pro-Israel lobby was trying to steer the United States into conflict with the Arab world. I saw nothing in the American interest in that; and my own two sons were approaching the draft age. Until then, I had been strongly pro-Israel myself; but sacrificing my boys for Israel was a higher price than I wanted to pay. Nor did I want other Americans to pay it. But as soon as I began arguing publicly that the U.S.-Israel alliance was not only costly but dangerous to the United States, I became the target of Zionist vituperation and worse. Some, like Podhoretz, tried to ruin my career. And I’ve seen others get the same treatment.
-
The Nobel Prize Goes to the Wrong Person
Michael Curtis - American Thinker
A haunting, troubling social problem is whether we, as a society, should honor people who have achieved fame in some form of intellectual or artistic achievement but have committed an act or acts that are despicable. Can we distinguish between the creator and the creation? … Perhaps the most questionable issue was that of Ezra Pound, a poet who helped James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and D.H. Lawrence, but was an advocate of Italian fascism who lived in Italy and during the war broadcast on Italian radio anti-American and anti-Semitic diatribes and propaganda … The Norwegian Knut Hamsun, poet, dramatist, pioneer of psychological literature, was an admirer and advocate of Nazism and fascism, welcomed the Nazi occupation of Norway, and met Hitler in Bavaria, was also the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
-
Jewish Terrorism in France
Institute for Historical Review
…Under these various names, Jewish activists for 15 years have unceasingly sown terror [in France] with total impunity. Provocations that have no other aim than to incite reprisals. As if certain people wanted the [French] Jewish community to feel threatened … The victims of the 50 cases listed by Le Choc du mois, who number in the hundreds, suffered: loss of life, an eye put out, acid throwing, numerous hospitalizations, injuries followed by deep coma, lifetime disabilities, and serious post-traumatic conditions, “the commission of barbaric acts,” severe beatings in the presence of policemen who refused to intervene, and numerous ambush attacks …
-
Spanish Elections: How the Far-Right Vox Party Found its Footing
G. Hedgecoe - BBC News
After decades without making an impact on Spanish politics, the far-right has made huge gains in the country’s general election, becoming the third force in parliament. The Vox party took 52 seats in Congress on Sunday, outstripping most forecasts and representing a major increase on the 24 seats it held previously. Before Vox made its debut in parliament following the last election in April, many believed Spain was electorally immune to the far right because of memories of life under a fascist dictatorship … Founded in 2014, Vox has been derided as far-right and populist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. Mr Abascal, however, says his party is “in step with what millions of Spaniards think”.
-
Researchers Speak Out at 'Holocaust Denial' Conference in Jordan
Middle East Media Research Institute (Washington, DC)
A conference titled “The Holocaust – the Biggest Lie in Modern History” was held in Jordan and broadcast by Al-Finiq TV (Jordan) on October 14, 2019. At the conference, Jordanian researcher and journalist Muwaffaq Muhadin expressed doubt that Jews were burned in furnaces during WWII, and he claimed that more Roma had been killed by the Nazis than Jews, who he said had been killed just the same as Germans and other non-Jews had been killed. Jordanian researcher Mahmoud Awad said that the Nazis’ Final Solution had actually been to drive the Jews out of Germany in order to get rid of the Jewish influence that had ruined German and Western culture.
-
A European Jewish leader has asked a Munich auction house to cancel the sale of Nazi Memorabilia, saying that ”some things simply cannot be traded.” Hermann Historica will be holding an auction on the Nov. 20 that includes a number of pieces for sale from infamous Nazis Hess, Göring, Himmler and Hitler himself. The pieces include framed photographs, silver dinner services, plates, letters and jewelry belonging to Göring’s wife … Rabbi Menachem Margolin, Chairman of the European Jewish Association (EJA), wrote a letter to the head of the auction house in which he said: “I am writing to respectfully ask you to withdraw the auction. This is not a legal appeal to you, but very much a moral one. What you are doing is not illegal, but it is wrong.’’
-
Miracle in Berlin
Eric Margolis
Where did all the time go? Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell. Then Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite. It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle of our times. The once mighty Soviet Union had become exhausted by its long military/ economic/ political struggle to keep up with the much wealthier United States and its rich allies. Moscow had 40,000 tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an empty shell … The Soviet Empire came crashing down after a revolt by East Germans, followed by Baltic peoples and central Europeans. Secretary Gorbachev, an idealistic leader of high ethics, refused to use the Red Army to crush the rebellion.
-
Activists Want to Abolish Honors Classes, Cite ‘White Toxicity’ and ‘Supremacist’ Values of High Achievement
Luke Rosiak – Daily Caller
School systems across the country are seeking to abolish honors classes, teach how math has been used to oppress people, and let truant students into gifted schools. Advocates say the moves are aimed at diminishing an achievement gap between demographic groups. In one county, a busing initiative led to a populist uprising and rare bipartisan unity. Parents spanning races and parties say they did not ask for the changes, but politicians are pushing them through, anyway. In October, Seattle public schools unveiled a “framework” to inject “math ethnic studies” into all K-12 math classes, teaching “how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”
-
An expert opinion submitted to an Israeli court claims Israel’s Bank Leumi is hoarding between NIS 172 million (approximately $50 million) and NIS 414 million (approximately $118.5 million) belonging to Holocaust survivors, victims, and their heirs … In 2007, after a parliamentary committee on the rights of Holocaust survivors produced its findings and a legal amendment was passed regarding the assets of Holocaust victims, the bank was accused of holding on to much of that money … There is no doubt that Leumi undertook a policy of concealment and made any attempt to find relevant documentation on the issue more difficult, Barlev wrote. Over a period of decades, the bank did not take any action to find the rightful owners of the money it was holding, nor did it take any action to make the matter known publicly, he added.
-
November 11: Remembering the Tragedy and Legacy of World War I
H. Patricia Hynes
World War I was the first industrial war: poison gases, flamethrowers, aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensified the scale of war wreckage and war dead … Little has changed with regard to war greed except that war industry profits have grown exponentially together with the national budget for the military. Today spending on military defense greatly exceeds the total spending for our real national security needs, namely education, transportation, housing and community development, diplomacy, environment, science and energy, and health and human services. As a country, the US has moved from being a reluctant, late entrant into World War I to being the premier merchant of death in weapons sales and premier militarist nation, engaged in a perpetual state of war waged from an empire of military bases.
-
The Karl Muck Scandal
Fordham T. Smith
This year saw the publication of a curious little history about a curious little event from the First World War. Karl Muck is a name that might not be on the lips of many people these days. A hundred years ago, however, as the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) who was interned in a Georgia concentration camp under dubious circumstances, he certainly was. His story offers a sometimes poignant, sometimes baffling glimpse into our contentious political natures … He was the most celebrated conductor in America at the time. Under his leadership, the BSO became the nation’s leading orchestra, which aided greatly in keeping Boston at the forefront of American high society and culture. Affable, charismatic, and cultured, Muck was extremely popular in Boston …
-
In Quest of Truth and Justice: Debunking the War-Guilt Myth
Harry Elmer Barnes. Book available from IHR
The most complete and cogent summary of the revisionist controversy over the causes of the First World War. Total debunking of the war-guilt myth, and a ruthless exposure of the disgraceful complicity of America’s establishment historians in the frenzied jingoism and German-baiting that led to Versailles and the decades of misery and injustice which followed. Introduction by William L. Neumann. With source references and an index.
-
The Corpse Factory
Arthur Ponsonby
A series of extracts will give the record of one of the most revolting lies invented during the First World War, the dissemination of which throughout not only Britain but the world was encouraged and connived at by both the [British] government and the press. It started in 1917, and was not finally disposed of till 1925 … The story had a world-wide circulation and had considerable propaganda value in the East. Not till 1925 did the truth emerge.
-
German 'Super Weapons' That Actually Saw Service During WWII
J. Nieuwint - War History Online
During WWII, the Nazi Germans were developing a wide range of superweapons that would turn the tide and ensure ultimate victory. Most of them never made it off the drawing boards and only a few saw active service, but a number of them laid the foundation for weapons that are still being used today … While all the major powers fielded short-range rockets, only Nazi Germany put serious effort into the development of long-range, liquid-fueled rockets. The result was the V-2, a 14-ton, vertically launched missile with a range of 200 miles and a top speed of 3,500 miles per hour … There are very few aircraft throughout the history of aviation that were as unique and innovative as the Messerschmitt Me 262 … As early as 1939, the first-night vision devices were introduced by the German army.
-
America’s Teens Keep Getting More Unhappy
C. F. Lehman – Washington Free Beacon
Nearly 15 percent of American teenagers experienced major depression in 2018, new data show. This figure represents a sharp increase from just six years ago, with adolescent girls in particular seeing a substantial jump in their reported rates of depression. The report reflects yet another frightening indicator of America’s teen mental health crisis. The new data were released as part of the 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual survey of teens aged 12 to 17, as well as adults … America has now reached a point in which more than one out of every five girls has experienced depression in the past year. That is nearly double the 2011 rate. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal recently noted, today’s teenage girls experience disturbingly high levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
-
Trump’s 'Take the Oil' Strategy in Syria Is a Mistake
Paul R. Pillar - The National Interest
Confusion has prevailed regarding the purposes of the U.S. troop presence in Syria, and whether the declared purposes are the actual ones. Originally the expedition was widely understood to be all about combating the Islamic State (ISIS) after the group had established a mini-state on a large portion of Syrian and Iraqi territory. Then hawks within the Trump administration and President Trump himself, in a classic case of mission creep, declared that the U.S. troops were also in Syria to “watch Iran.” … More recently, Trump has been under much pressure from various parts of the political spectrum to keep the U.S. military in Syria, in contradiction with his earlier stated intention to exit …
-
The Story Behind Donald Trump’s Fake Withdrawal From Syria
John R. Bradley - The Spectator
… As so often, the President says one thing, then orders the military to do the other. On Twitter, Trump is ending the endless wars. In the real world, he is perpetuating them … Trump’s other great miscalculation in Syria was to underestimate how the neocons – also strong supporters of Israel and therefore fearful of Iranian expansionism – would outflank him on the domestic front. With the threat of impeachment hanging over his head, Trump cannot afford to alienate hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham … The reason Trump was put off war with Iran was less to do with a public backlash and more because he was persuaded that it might well mean losing votes. Trump, like most Americans, likes winning and kicking ass.
-
How the Jew Whom Hitler Blamed for 'Kristallnacht' Outsmarted His Captors
Mosaic Magazine (New York)
When a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and assassinated an official in retaliation for the Nazis’ persecution of his family, Adolf Hitler immediately used it as a pretext to launch violent attacks on Jews throughout the Third Reich. Saturday [Nov. 9] marks the 81st anniversary of these [1938] pogroms, which came to be known as Kristallnacht … Grynszpan – arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 – foiled Nazi plans to use him as a pawn … To prevent that disgrace, he concocted an extraordinarily ingenious lie. He claimed that he had not really killed the German diplomat for any political reason at all. His “protest” had merely been his cover for a deeper secret: the unspeakable truth that he’d killed the diplomat in the midst of a homosexual lovers’ quarrel.
-
'Crystal Night': Revelations from Goebbels' Diary
David Irving – Institute for Historical Review
The key event in this whole story was, of course, the [Nov. 1938] “Crystal Night” (“Kristallnacht”) … Here the Goebbels diary must be treated with the utmost caution … The orders were that the Aktion (operation) was to be carried out by SA men in plain clothes, and the police were not to intervene. There was to be no bloodshed and no harm done to anyone unless, of course, Jews offered armed resistance … “There is to be no looting,” stormtroopers in Kiel were told. “Nobody is to be roughed up. Foreign Jews are not to be touched. Meet any resistance with firearms. The Aktion is to be carried out in plain clothes and must be finished by five a.m.” The result was the Night of Broken Glass, one of Germany’s darkest nights.
-
Not to Be a Jewish State, That is the Question
Sheldon Richman
Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country … The prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect the Jewish people from impurity … Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is legally applied to the “right of return.” … Israel by its founding doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year in the Nation-State Law, which declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
-
Is Israel Germany’s 'Reason for Existence'?: A Politician Speaks
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
… “In dealing with the Iranian regime, too, Germany must raise its raison d’etre [reason for existence] over all other interests and advocate the necessary sanctions,” [CDU party politician Uwe] Becker said. “This is not about the Iranian people, who are being oppressed by the mullah regime. Independent of the issue of the nuclear deal, the federal government must realize that the Iranian regime, through its guards in Syria or through the support of Hezbollah in Lebanon and its intervention in Gaza, is waging a fight against Israel, which must result in painful sanctions.” Becker’s statement about raison d’etre is a reference to Merkel’s Knesset speech in 2008 when she declared Israel’s reason for existence is now part of Germany’s raison d’etre.
-
Jewish Writer Grapples With Ethical Dilemma of the Holocaust and Zionism
Robert Countess - Institute for Historical Review
… As Marc Ellis, a bright young Jewish scholar, persuasively argues in this insightful and provocative book [Beyond Innocence and Redemption], a pseudo-religious mythos centered upon the Holocaust and an increasingly brutal and suppressive Israel state have now firmly replaced the Jewish religion as the binding force that unites Jews everywhere. This new situation, Ellis goes on to emphasize, has had the most profound consequences for the Jewish people, and for the perpetually difficult relationship between Jews and non-Jews.
-
Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Kathleen and Bill Christison
These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism.
-
Yalta: The Great Betrayal
Eric S. Margolis
… In February 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill, and Soviet ruler Josef Stalin met to decide postwar Europe’s future. In modern history’s greatest betrayal, the Allied war leaders handed half of Europe to Soviet rule, betraying tens of millions of its people to the gulag, dictatorship, and confiscation of all their property … The Soviet Union had done the lion’s share of fighting in Europe, destroying 75 percent of all German land and air forces, and naturally expected the lion’s share of the spoils.
-
Disproportionalities: Whose Fault?
Walter E. Williams
… Proportionality injustice doesn’t end with the Nobel Prize. Blacks are about 13% of the U.S. population but close to 70% of the players in the National Football League. Blacks are greatly overrepresented among star players and highly paid players. .. Proportionality and diversity injustice is worse in the National Basketball Association, with blacks being over 80% of the players … What about the gross lack of proportionality in incarceration? According to 2015 figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall U.S. prison and jail population is 90.6% male and 9.4% female. The only way that I see to remedy such a gross disproportionality injustice is to either incarcerate more female prisoners or release male prisoners.
-
Can Europe Be Saved From Demographic Doom?
Alessandra Bocchi - The American Conservative
Europe’s birthrate is among the lowest in the world. At 1.59 per year, the European Union’s current births are too low to sustain its survival. And while native birthrates have declined, Europe’s overall population continues to grow due to mass immigration … For politicians, the crisis of meaning among European youth isn’t an issue worth addressing. They see declining birthrates as a natural result of post-industrialized economies … And importing a new generation of young people from abroad seems like a convenient solution to an aging European population that isn’t able to sustain itself … The problem of low birthrates ultimately lies internally, within Europe’s culture and social life. A young generation that doesn’t aspire to have families and that’s increasingly alienated from any sense of community has driven much of the crisis.
-
Hitler’s Revenge, the 'Return of the Strong Gods,' and the Resurrection of the West
James Kirkpatrick
R.R. Reno’s book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, is a brilliant analysis with a disappointing conclusion. Reno, Editor of First Things magazine, describes the development of a “postwar order” wherein both the mainstream Right and Left agreed that an “Open Society” was the highest good, necessary to prevent the return of “Strong Gods” like nationalism and traditional religion, which supposedly lead to totalitarianism. Reno conclusion: we must turn back to the “Strong Gods” to recreate social solidarity … One after the other, everything that is solid in the Western tradition was undermined, weakened, and ultimately pummeled into slime, a spirit of entropy we see in our politics, universities, and even our hideously ugly modern architecture.
-
Revisiting Hitler in a New Authoritarian Age
Talya Zax – The New York Times
… This fall, two new books seek answers: Longerich’s “Hitler: A Biography” and the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms’s “Hitler: A Global Biography.” Both were underway well before the tumult of current events, but both biographers recognize that recent political trends have made their subject especially charged. “The questions that Hitler was addressing – inequality, migration, the challenge of international capitalism – they’re as salient as they were when he set out to provide his peculiarly destructive and demented answers,” Simms said. “In a very alarming and upsetting way, Hitler is actually less strange today than he was 20 or 30 years ago.” … Longerich and Simms are among several historians to reassess that attitude lately. (Another is Volker Ullrich, author of a recent two-volume biography of Hitler.)
-
Hitler as 'Enlightenment Intellectual'
Mark Weber
A specter is haunting the world – the specter of Hitlerism. That, in short, is the stern warning of this provocative book, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism, by Lawrence Birken … In spite of decades of vehement vilification, says author Birken, Hitler’s views have enduring and dangerous appeal – not because they are bizarre and alien, but precisely because they are rational and well grounded in Western thought.
-
More than 80 percent of Jews in the US think anti-Semitism is on the rise, a new survey by a Jewish advocacy group found. The survey of 1,283 Jews nationwide found that 88 percent think anti-Semitism is a problem in the US today – with 38 percent saying it’s a “very serious” problem – and 84 percent feel it has increased over the past five years, according to the American Jewish Committee, an international advocacy group. Nearly 90 percent of those polled said the “extreme political right” pose at least a slight threat to Jews, with 73 percent saying they disapprove of how President Trump “is handling the threat” of anti-Semitism, according to the survey …
-
A Window to Jewish Guilt
Gilad Atzmon
It has become an institutional Jewish habit to examine how much Jews are hated by their host nations and how fearful Jews are of their neighbours. Jewish press outlets reported yesterday that “9 out of 10 US Jews worry about anti-Semitism.” I, for one, can’t think of another people who invest so much energy in measuring their unpopularity … American Jews have much to learn from Herzl and other early Zionists. They should ask themselves how their American ‘Golden Medina’ their Jewish land of opportunities, has turned into a ‘threatening’ realm. What happened, what has changed in the last few years? Was it the constant cries over anti-Semitism and the desperate and institutional attempts to silence critics that turned their Golden Medina into a daunting space?
-
One in Four Germans Hold 'Anti-Semitic' Views, World Jewish Congress Survey Finds
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Anti-Semitism is gaining a stronger foothold in German society, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing a new study from the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Out of the 1,300 Germans who took part in the representative survey, 27 percent agreed with a range of anti-Semitic statements and stereotypes about Jewish people. Some 41 percent said they agreed with the statement that “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much.” The same portion said they believed “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to Germany.” Over 20 percent of respondents said they agreed that Jewish people have “too much power” over the economy, international financial markets and the media. Another 22 percent agreed that “people hate Jews due to the way they behave.”
-
A Jewish Defector Warns America
Benjamin H. Freedman
A Jewish “insider” provides startling revelations and insights in this address at a meeting in 1961 in Washington, DC. Text and audio recording. Runtime: 43 mins. “Here in the United States,” says Freedman, “the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.”
-
The White House Plan to Strangle Iran
Philip Giraldi
… The real reasons for maintaining a U.S. military presence in Syria all have to do with Israel, which has long supported a fracturing of that country into its constituent parts both to weaken it as an adversary and to enable the Jewish state to steal still more of its land, possibly to include the sparsely populated oil producing region. Israel also wants a robust American military presence in Syria to prevent Iran from turning it into a base for attacks across the border, an unlikely prospect but one that has resonated with the U.S. Congress. Indeed, deterring Iran is the reason most often cited by both Washington and Tel Aviv for American interference in Syria, where it has no other actual interest apart from an apparent demented desire to remove President Bashar al-Assad.
-
Pres. Trump OKs Wider Syria Oil Mission, Raising Legal Questions
Associated Press
President Donald Trump has approved an expanded military mission to secure an expanse of oil fields across eastern Syria, raising a number of difficult legal questions about whether U.S. troops can launch strikes against Syrian, Russian or other forces if they threaten the oil, U.S. officials said. The decision, coming after a meeting Friday between Trump and his defense leaders, locks hundreds of U.S. troops into a more complicated presence in Syria, despite the president’s vow to get America out of the war … Trump’s order also slams the door on any suggestion that the bulk of the more than 1,200 U.S. troops that have been in Syria will be coming home any time soon, as he has repeatedly promised.
-
Despite Vow to End 'Endless Wars,' Here's Where About 200,000 Troops Remain
T. Gibbons-Neff, E. Schmitt - The New York Times
President Trump has repeatedly promised to end what he calls America’s “endless wars,” fulfilling a promise he made during the campaign. No wars have ended, though, and more troops have deployed to the Middle East in recent months than have come home. Mr. Trump is not so much ending wars, as he is moving troops from one conflict to another. Tens of thousands of American troops remain deployed all over the world, some in war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and – even still – Syria … A rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed overseas today.
-
Edison: A New Biography
Review by Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
… Depending on whether you incline to a reverential or a revisionist perspective, [Thomas Alva] Edison (1847-1931) was a genius or a thief, a hero of American capitalism or a monster of greed, history’s greatest technologist or a hall-of-famer in the competitive category of overrated American white guys … He was a workaholic whose final résumé boasted 1,093 patents and countless inventions – including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline battery, the X-ray fluoroscope, and the carbon-button microphone … Barely pubescent, Edison was already combining the twin skills that would make him world-famous: a natural talent for earning money and an innate compulsion to invent.
-
More Millennials Are Dying 'Deaths of Despair,' as Overdose and Suicide Rates Climb
J. Ducharme - Time
There’s been a marked uptick in so-called deaths of despair – those involving drugs, alcohol or suicide – among millennials over the last decade, according to a new report released by public-health groups Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust. Drug, alcohol and suicide deaths have risen in nearly every age group over the last decade, but the increase has been especially pronounced for younger Americans. Between 2007 and 2017, drug-related deaths increased by 108 percent among adults ages 18 to 34, while alcohol-related deaths increased by 69% and suicides increased by 35%, according to the report, which drew on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. All together, about 36,000 millennials died “deaths of despair” in 2017, with fatal drug overdoses being the biggest driver.
-
Leaked footage shows a US TV anchor complaining that editors “quashed” a story about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein due to pressure from the Royal Family. ABC’s Amy Robach is seen in the clip griping that her interview with an alleged victim of Epstein and Prince Andrew never made it to air. “The Palace found out and threatened us a million different ways,” she says. ABC News said there was “zero truth” to the claim, while Buckingham Palace told the BBC “this is a matter for ABC”. Epstein, a wealthy and well-connected financier, was found dead in a jail cell in August while awaiting trial for sex crimes. His death was ruled a suicide by investigators. In the video, Ms Robach vents frustration that her 2015 interview with Virginia Giuffre – formerly Virginia Roberts – was never broadcast.
-
Nuremberg: Woe to the Vanquished
Review by Daniel W. Michaels – Institute for Historical Review
… In writing this “intimate look at the origins and conduct” of the 1945–1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Irving has relied heavily on many hitherto neglected papers and documents … As Irving shows [in his book, Nuremberg: The Last Battle], the victorious Allies who sat in judgment at Nuremberg were guilty of many of the same actions or crimes for which they tried (and hanged) the German defendants. Indeed, the Allies very probably outdid the Germans in crimes and atrocities … In some cases, the Nuremberg defendants were charged with or held guilty of crimes that were actually committed by the Allies … Irving tells the story of the Nuremberg Tribunal with great style and verve, painting a broad and vivid portrait.
-
Nuremberg: The Last Battle
David Irving – Hardcover book available from IHR
A prominent, controversial British scholar of World War II and Third Reich history takes aim at the “Trial of Century” – the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46. This handsome hardcover masterpiece has a full color dust jacket and more than 70 photographs, many in color, as well as source notes and index. A stunning masterwork of startling facts and myth-busting perspective – packed with revelations from long-suppressed private diaries and letters of judges, prosecutors, defendants and witnesses. Establishes that the Allies who sat in judgment were themselves guilty of many of the crimes for which the German defendants were tried and hanged. Exposes the Tribunal’s double standard, with the Allies acting as judge, prosecution, jury and executioner.
-
Streicher’s Last Laugh
David Cole – Taki’s mag
… There are three uncomfortable truths that those “in the know” generally accept about the Nuremberg trial, even if the news has yet to trickle down to those who get their World War II information from the History Channel … The third generally accepted truth (among historians) that probably contributes to the queering of anniversary festivities is the understanding that all of the main actors at the trial were foul … The “civilized” British and French charged the Germans with starting a war that was declared by…the British and French. At Nuremberg, everyone was a bad guy … Streicher should not have been executed at Nuremberg … Streicher was indeed a journalist (a reprehensible journalist is still a journalist), and nobody should ever be executed for mere words or cartoons.
-
Alone: The Decline of the Family Has Unleashed an Epidemic of Loneliness
Kay S. Hymowitz - City Journal
Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness … A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking … The loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown.
-
Trump’s Baffling Plan to Pillage Syria’s Oil
R. Wright - The New Yorker
… In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.” The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said … The President was wrong on so many counts. Seizing the oil, after twice ordering all U.S. troops out of Syria, violates a basic international treaty on war. It may amount to pillaging – even piracy, according to legal experts and former senior military commanders.
-
Tulsi Gabbard Introduces Bill to Withdraw Troops From Syria
D. Decamp - Antiwar.com
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) introduced a resolution to the House of Representatives on October 31 titled, “Directing the President pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Syrian Arab Republic that have not been authorized by Congress.” The idea of the bill is to remove any troops in Syria that do not have Congressional approval to be there, which is all of them … The resolution also points out that President Trump’s new plan to stay in Syria to “secure the oil” is a flagrant violation of international law. The resolution says, “Oil, natural resources, and land in Syria belong to the Syrian people, not the United States.”
-
Fuel to the Fire: Embracing Restraint
Daniel Larison – The American Conservative
… Trump respects neither international law nor the constraints imposed on him by the Constitution, and he has a similarly cavalier attitude when it comes to using American power to bully and attack other countries that refuse to give in to his excessive demands. Trump’s use of the slogan “America First” has nothing to do with being antiwar or staying neutral in foreign wars … This helps to explain why Trump is so quick to make insane threats to destroy other countries and why he keeps leading the U.S. into crises and confrontations that could have been easily avoided … An erratic president who can’t stay on track during a conversation isn’t going to implement sweeping changes to anything.
-
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan put US President Donald Trump’s letter “in the bin”, the BBC has been told. In the letter dated Oct. 9, and sent after US troops were pulled out of Syria, Mr Trump told Mr Erdogan: “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” President Trump was urging Turkey not to launch a military offensive against Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria, but Mr Erdogan ignored this request … Mr Trump wrote: “Let’s work out a good deal! You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy – and I will … History will look upon you favourably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen.”
-
A city in eastern Germany has declared a “Nazi emergency”, saying it has a serious problem with the far-right. Dresden, the capital of Saxony, has long been viewed as a bastion of the far-right and is the birthplace of the anti-Islam Pegida movement. Councillors in the city – a contender for the 2025 European Capital of Culture – have now approved a resolution saying more needs to be done to tackle the issue. But opponents say it goes too far. “‘Nazinotstand‘ means – similar to the climate emergency – that we have a serious problem. The open democratic society is threatened,” local councillor Max Aschenbach, who tabled the motion, told the BBC … Mr Aschenbach said adopting the motion showed the city council’s commitment to fostering “a free, liberal, democratic society that protects minorities and resolutely opposes Nazis.”
-
Law and Legislation in Third Reich Germany
Erich Schinnerer
… The starting point of the National Socialist conception of law is the people, not the State. The task of the State is to see that the law is carried out … Therefore, as the ideal of the Folk Community forms the basic principle of National Socialism, a legal form must be found which expresses that principle and gives each German his place as a constituent part of the national community … Führer and people, Folk Community and German citizen, constitute the essential elements of the National Socialist conception of law. And the purpose of the new laws is to give form to that conception.
-
There’s a History of Jews Playing Nazis on Screen
Kveller via JTA
Taika Waititi’s satirical film “Jojo Rabbit” is finally out! Set in Nazi Germany, the Jewish Maori director famously plays Adolf Hitler. “What better way to insult Hitler than having him played by a Polynesian Jew,” Waititi himself tweeted … For decades, Jews have played Nazis on the small and silver screens, including — startlingly, amazingly — during the height of the Holocaust … What better revenge against the Nazis is there? This isn’t just that Jews are thriving, creative and successful — they’ve also taken their deepest traumas and turned them into art. Here’s a look at some of the most famous times Jews played Nazis.
-
The 'Miserable' State: New Jersey
Steven Malanga – City Journal
Last week, Business Insider created a stir when it used demographic data to rank the 50 “most miserable” cities in America. Though California led the way with ten municipalities, considerably smaller New Jersey was close behind, with nine – including Newark, Trenton, Camden, and Paterson … Dishonest mayors who step down in disgrace are “A Jersey Tradition,” as a recent headline in another paper described the long, debilitating history of municipal corruption in the Garden State. There, urban political machines manufacture politicians who regularly enrich themselves at the expense of those that elect them, preferring to line their pockets instead of building – or, in the case of Jersey cities, rebuilding – communities.
-
A Message to All Professional Thinkers: We Either Hang Together or We Hang Separately
Niall Ferguson - Boston Globe
… A month rarely passes without some such tale of a conservative academic being “taken down.” In March it was the turn of the Canadian psychologist Jordon Peterson, who was informed by Cambridge University that the visiting fellowship he had been offered by the Faculty of Divinity was being canceled … In every case, the pattern is the same. An academic deemed to be conservative gets “called out.” The Twitter mob piles on. Mindless mainstream media outlets amplify the story. The relevant authorities capitulate. The most striking common feature, however, is the near-complete isolation of the target. Did Sam Abrams’s colleagues step up to defend his (and their own) academic freedom? On the contrary: Forty of his fellow professors endorsed the student leftists’ demand that his tenure be reviewed.
-
New York’s Race to Build Monuments Runs Into Friction on the Ground
The New York Times
A vote this month over one of New York City’s new, more inclusive monuments became so combative – with audience members shouting “How dare you!” – that the acclaimed artist who won the commission walked away from the job … The city is aiming to build monuments at an unusually rapid rate to honor women, people of color and others previously overlooked. But the effort has become far more contentious than expected, as a diverse, vocal and highly opinionated city fights over the legacy it should leave in bronze and stone. Tensions have dramatically increased in recent months as the mayor aims to fast-track the construction of more than a dozen new monuments. Arguments have broken out over who should be honored, who should create the statues, what they should look like and where they should be located.
-
George Orwell’s Evolving Views on Jews
Raymond S. Solomon - The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
… To be aware that Orwell had an antisemitic streak, you only have to read Down and Out in Paris and London, in which the term “the Jew” is used many times. Both Boris, a former soldier in the Czarist army, and the narrator of Down and Out, who is based on Orwell, are antisemitic … A diary written by Orwell, in preparation for Down and Out, has many antisemitic comments … There is also significant antisemitism in A Clergyman’s Daughter. In the Trafalgar Square scene there is a character called “The Kike.” … The tendency to use terms like “the Jew,” and “pro-Jew” continues into his later writings, letters and diaries. For example, in a July 15, 1942, letter to Alex Comfort discussing the book The Clue to History, Orwell comments, “This was a rather unbalanced book and extremely pro-Jew in tendency.”
-
Lost Empire: It’s a Myth That Britain Stood Alone Against Hitler
David Olusoga - The Observer/ The Guardian
… Churchill’s references to the empire in many of his most famous speeches are small reminders of a big reality. Britain fought the second world war with men and money partly drawn from the empire and that, after the defence of the home islands, the survival of the empire was a fundamental war aim … In addition to these myths there is the long established and unappealing habit of marginalising the war on the eastern front and the central role of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler’s armies … Britain went to war in 1939 in the name of freedom and democracy, but fielded armies within whose ranks were black and brown men who were regarded and often treated as second-class citizens.
-
Everything People Believed About Hitler's Intentions Toward Britain Was a Myth Created by Churchill
Kevin Myers - Irish Independent
… An even vaster falsehood – that in 1940, Hitler wanted to invade Britain. But he didn’t. He actually admired the British Empire … We know from the diaries of Lord Halifax, the British foreign minister, that Hitler offered terms that did not involve German control of Britain. Churchill refused to allow these terms to be read to the cabinet … And far from wanting to continue the war, in June 1940 Hitler ordered 20 percent of his army to be demobilised, in order to get the German economy going again … Just about everything that people believed about Hitler’s intentions towards Britain in 1940 — and still believe today — was a myth created by Churchill, which he probably came to believe himself.
-
Deflating the Churchill Myth
Eric Margolis
… In his powerful new book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, veteran politician and author Pat Buchanan challenges many historic taboos by claiming that Winston Churchill plunged Britain and its empire, including Canada, into wars whose outcomes were disastrous for all concerned. Other writers, me included, have made the same point for decades, but Buchanan has marshalled a formidable array of facts and historians to support his case … Buchanan’s book strips away lingering war propaganda and shows the cynicism, lust for power and foolishness of the “saintly” Allied war leaders and their “good” war.
-
Was World War Two Pointless?
Peter Hitchens - Daily Mail (Britain)
… On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry … We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938 … The two books … are Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke … Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief. If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.
-
The opioid crisis cost the U.S. economy $631 billion from 2015 through last year – and it may keep getting more expensive, according to a study by the Society of Actuaries. The biggest driver of the cost over the four-year period is unrealized lifetime earnings of those who died from the drugs, followed by health care costs. While more than 2,000 state and local governments have sued the drug industry over the crisis, the report released Tuesday [Oct. 15] finds that governments bear less than one-third of the financial costs. The rest of it affects individuals and the private sector. The federal government is tracking how many lives are lost to the opioid crisis (more than 400,000 Americans since 2000), but pinning down the financial cost is less certain.
-
President Trump Understands What Congress Does Not: Syria Is Not America’s War
Doug Bandow - The American Spectator
Congress wouldn’t declare war or even approve presidential troop deployments in Syria. But sanctimonious legislators now are preening for the cameras, demanding that U.S. military force remain entangled in that tragic nation, seemingly forever. They show greater concern for foreign fighters acting in their own interest than for American soldiers, as well as civilians who have suffered from blowback to Washington’s succession of Middle Eastern wars. It needs to be said bluntly: Syria doesn’t matter for U.S. security … What legal warrant does America have to invade, occupy, and divide the territory of another sovereign state? … In fact, Washington has routinely “betrayed” allies – states and peoples alike …
-
The Demonization of Dissent
James Carden - The Nation
… To get to the root of what is going on here, the spat between the Clinton camp and the upstart, anti-interventionist Gabbard must be placed within the broader context of the past several years during which, under the influence of Russiagate, the Democratic Party and the establishment media have taken the lead in calling for a new Cold War. Only then can Clinton’s accusation be seen for what it is, part of a long campaign of vilification and demonization against critics of the establishment consensus on Russia … What we are now seeing is nothing less than a joint effort by the former secretary of state and her allies in the media (which very much include certain former high-ranking members of the US intelligence community) to vilify those like Gabbard who vocally oppose a new Cold War with Russia.
-
Episcopal Church Officially Bars Investments in Companies Benefitting From the Israeli Occupation
Mondoweiss
This week, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church adopted a human rights investment screen related to Israel and Palestine and will sell its holdings in Motorola Solutions, Caterpillar, Inc., and the Israel Discount Bank. This is the latest step in response to a July 2018 General Convention Resolution (B016) which committed the Episcopal Church to a similar process taken by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America two years earlier. The action also follows steps previously taken by the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ. The human rights screen would bar Episcopal Church investments in “any corporation that supports or benefits from denial of human rights in or through the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip.”
-
The Ivory Debtors’ Prison
Neetu Arnold - Real Clear Education
The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor employed 76 diversity officers in 2018 – 39 more than they had in 2008. The 76 officers, along with six more at other University of Michigan campuses, received $10.6 million in salaries and benefits. The University of Michigan is now typical of colleges nationwide in its burgeoning diversity payroll. It’s bad enough that our universities spend billions of dollars each year on diversity bureaucrats alone, when all they’re paid to do is propagandize students. It’s worse that our colleges spend American families’ money to subsidize their political correctness – and spend profligately … We can’t fix higher education unless we fix the problem of student debt. We can’t fix student debt until we stop the bloat in higher education administration. All those student life officers and sustainability deans add up.
-
U.S. Universities Bow to Pressure
Philip Giraldi
The Israel lobby in the United States and its counterparts in Europe have been paying particular attention to curtailing the activities of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). This is because BDS, which is non-violent and based on established human rights principles, is extremely appealing to college students, who will be tomorrow’s leaders … The possible consequences are very clear. If you are an educational institution that criticizes Israel in any way, shape or form, you will lose any funding you receive from the federal government. The move has nothing to do with budgetary demands or the national security of the United States or even with the efficacy of the programs that are being funded. It has everything to do with promoting Israeli interests.
-
'Nazi' Arabic-English Dictionary Causes Stir at University of Minnesota
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
The revelation that the late German scholar Hans Wehr, who authored the preeminent Arabic-English dictionary, was a Nazi, has triggered a debate about the ethics of using his book. One of the world’s leading Islamic historians, Dr. Daniel Pipes, tweeted on Tuesday: “Hans Wehr’s Nazi role has – after 70 years – suddenly become a public issue at the University of Minnesota ‘after second-year student @Rodrigo_Tojo Garcia found information online about Wehr”s background’.” … Wehr was born in 1909 and joined the Nazi party in 1940. The German Arabist died in 1981 … Wehr’s dictionary was funded by the Nazi regime and published years after the defeat of the Hitler movement in 1952 … The dictionary was a requirement for all Arabic language classes but Vanpee has not made it obligatory since the disclosure of Wehr’s Nazi past.
-
Israel Government Ministry Posts Faked PR Photos, Stories
J. A. Gross – The Times of Israel
Until Thursday, the Ministry of Absorption and Immigration’s Twitter page was filled with pictures of grinning immigrants talking about how they’ve successfully established a life in Israel, despite the hardships of the move. The only problem: They are not real. Not only are the photographs stock images, but the purported immigrants and their quotes were made up. The ministry on Thursday confirmed that all of the supposed immigrants quoted on its social media account were invented – save for one person who is not an immigrant – and that the stories had been removed following The Times of Israel’s inquiry.
-
President Trump is reversing his foreign policy decisions so quickly these days that it almost seems like he overturns himself before making the decision in the first place. Last week he was very clear that the US was pulling its troops out of Syria. “Bringing soldiers home,” he said. “Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand.” But then he overturned himself later in the same speech. He said: “We’ve secured the oil and therefore a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we’re going to be protecting it and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.” Where does President Trump think he gets the legal or moral authority to send US troops to illegally occupy foreign territory and determine what that foreign country can or cannot do with its resources?
-
An Imperfect Bit of Statecraft
Philip Giraldi
… It is undeniably true that throughout the Syrian farrago, President Trump’s admittedly inherited policy could not possibly have been more incoherent, occasionally bizarre, predictably inconsistent, and actually dangerous to genuine American interests in the region. It is to everyone’s benefit that the game is finally over, but one can expect the neoconservatives in the United States to do their best to bring about yet another reversal by Trump … The president has also suggested, in true Trumpean fashion, that “We want to keep the oil, and we’ll work something out with the Kurds … Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly,” a step that even the feckless Obama Administration had hesitated to take on legal grounds as the oil unquestionably belongs to Syria.
-
Trump Should Ask Congress To Approve Military Intervention In Syria, If Members Want It So Badly
James Bovard – Daily Caller
… Former President Barack Obama promised 16 times that there would be no “U.S. boots on the ground” in Syria; when Obama betrayed that promise, Congress did nothing. Trump’s plans to have fewer U.S. boots on the ground in Syria – or at least in part of it – somehow became the moral equivalent of giving Alaska back to Russia. Trump’s critics would be aghast at the president asking Congress to support propping up terrorist groups in the Middle East. But, after Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of State John Kerry all publicly declared that Assad must exit power, the U.S. armed terrorist groups to topple Assad. The Obama administration’s beloved, non-existent “moderate Syrian rebels” achieved nothing.
-
US Military Envisions Broad Defense of Syrian Oilfields
Jason Ditz - Antiwar.com
The Pentagon intends to retain control of Syria’s oilfields going forward, and says they will repel anyone else trying to take that oil with “overwhelming force.” This has become the chief, and materially only, military goal of the US military operation in Syria. Since President Trump announced his intention to control the oil, and conceivably to try to take some of it on behalf of the US, the Pentagon has been revising the Syria mission around controlling the oil. This has included sending more troops and tanks. … Defense Secretary Mark Esper conceded on Monday that the deployment of US forces are meant to “deny access” to the oil to either Russia or the Syrian government.
-
High School Principal Whose Holocaust Remarks Went Viral is Fired
Associated Press
A high school principal in Florida who told a student’s mother “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened” has been fired. The Palm Beach County school board voted 5-2 to fire William Latson on ground of “ethical misconduct” and “failure to carry out job responsibilities.” Latson was principal of Spanish River High School in Boca Raton. The Palm Beach Post reports the official justification for Latson’s termination was failure to return messages from school district officials in the days after his comments made international news. Latson’s attorney has vowed to appeal the decision in state administrative court. Several Spanish River teachers spoke on behalf of Latson Wednesday, describing him as a kind and tolerant administrator whose words were twisted in a national media frenzy. Latson has been with the district for 26 years.
-
A former high school principal in Boca Raton, Florida, was fired on Wednesday as a result of emails he sent to a student’s parent in April 2018 that appeared to cast doubt on the historical truth of the Holocaust. The Palm Beach County School Board voted 5-2 to terminate William Latson’s employment effective on November 21, according to records from the meeting posted online. According to the district, there’s “just cause” for firing the former principal, based on ethical misconduct and failure to carry out job responsibilities. After a parent emailed Latson in April to ask him how the school teaches students about the Holocaust, Latson responded, “I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a district employee.”
-
Warmongers Fake It Till They Make It
David Cole - Taki Mag
… A portion of my fan base knows me only from my Holocaust work – the documentaries and TV shows I did in the early 1990s … exposing fakes in the evidentiary record of the Holocaust. Fake film footage, fraudulent testimony, and, most notoriously, physical evidence that was inaccurately or deceitfully presented … Every fake from long ago that’s debunked can give people a little more immunity to the fakes being employed today. Which probably explains why YouTube is pulling all of my 1990s videos and TV appearances. Up until now, YouTube pretty much left my old stuff alone. I never uploaded those ancient vids myself, but others did, and I’d occasionally note with amusement how many views they had (cumulatively, a couple million).
-
Revisionists and Holocaust Survivors Clash On 'Montel Williams' Broadcast
Montel Williams Show – Video
Historian Mark Weber and Jewish revisionist researcher David Cole exchange contrasting views with Jewish “Holocaust survivors” on the nationally syndicated “Montel Williams Show,” broadcast April 30, 1992, on television stations across the US. They discuss “Holocaust” myths and reality, including Germany’s World War II policy toward Europe’s Jews, the familiar “Six Million” figure, and homicidal gas chambers. Emotional and blunt comments by audience members add to the heated mood of this much-discussed broadcast. Runtime: 44:04 mins.
-
Republican Party Animal
David Cole - Book Available from IHR
In this hilarious, intriguing and sometimes spiteful memoir — subtitled “The `Bad Boy of Holocaust History’ Blows the Lid Off Hollywood’s Secret Right-Wing Underground” – a daring writer, commentator and filmmaker looks back at his tumultuous and controversial life. Republican “hero” David Stein made international headlines in 2013 when he was unmasked as David Cole, the Jewish “Holocaust denier” who made an entirely different set of headlines in the 1990s. This lively, humorous memoir includes revealing glimpses into the private lives of prominent personalities. And in a serious 25-page appendix, Cole lays out his view of what did, and did not, happen to Europe’s Jews in “the Holocaust.”
-
The Making of a White Supremacist Myth
Scott W. Stern - The New Republic
… In the last several decades, Levin writes, a growing number of people have begun to accept as fact claims that between 500 and 100,000 black soldiers fought in racially integrated units in the Confederate Army. There are hundreds of web sites, legions of online communities, and whole books devoted to perpetuating these claims … Yet, as Levin patiently explains, this is totally untrue – predicated on a misreading and misunderstanding of historical documents, as well as outright lies and manipulations … The myth of black Confederate soldiers is important because it allows neo-Confederates to manipulate the popular understanding of white supremacy; to claim that flying the Stars and Bars is a matter of heritage, not hate.