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Seven in Ten Say US ‘On the Edge of Civil War,’ New Poll Finds
Paul Bedard - Washington Examiner
Partisan political division and the resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67 percent believing that the nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey. “The majority of Americans believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service. And worse, he said in announcing the results of the institute’s Battleground Poll, the political division is likely to make the upcoming 2020 presidential race the nastiest in modern history … While it found that 87 percent are frustrated with the rudeness in politics today, it also revealed that the public really isn’t interested in traditional compromise.
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Most voters fear that political violence is coming from opponents of the president’s policies, just as they did in the second year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and nearly one-in-three think a civil war is next. Thirty-one percent of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years, with eleven percent who say it’s Very Likely. A new [June 2019] Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 59 percent consider a second civil war unlikely, but that includes only 29% who say it’s Not At All Likely. Democrats (37%) are more fearful than Republicans (32%) and voters not affiliated with either major party (26%) that a second civil war is at hand. But 59 percent of all voters are concerned that those opposed to President Trump’s policies will resort to violence …
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Is Democracy a Dying Species?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… Why are these outbursts of violent protests and rioting taking place in stable, free and prosperous societies? Chile is the most stable and wealthy country in South America. Catalonia is the most prosperous part of Spain. Paris is hardly a hellhole of repression. And Hong Kong is the freest city of China. If the beneficiaries of freedoms and democratic rights come to regard them as insufficient to produce the political, economic and social results they demand, what does that portend for democracy’s future? … If the “end of history” and worldwide triumph of democratic capitalism thesis has, as most agree, been disproven, is it possible that the Age of Democracy is itself a passing phase in the history of the West and the world?
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Americans Want an End to Forever Wars. But That’s Not What Trump Offers
Joshua Leifer - The Guardian (Britain)
… Instead of “ending endless wars”, as he has periodically pledged to do, Trump has mostly done the opposite: vetoing in April a resolution that would have ended US military involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen; expanding US military presence in Saudi Arabia; and repeatedly risking armed conflict with Iran … It is crucial not to confuse the president’s cruel calculus with a genuine commitment to ending protracted wars, regardless of what he might tweet. Trump’s Syria withdrawal should also serve as a reminder to liberals and leftists of the urgent need to articulate a strong alternative to the policies of imperial maintenance – a swollen defense budget, drone strikes and targeted assassinations – advocated by Democrats and Republicans alike as well as to the cruel, cynical foreign policy of Trump.
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The Myth of Rising Hate Crime
Fraser Myers - Spiked (Britain)
… Every year, the press presents terrifying figures illustrating an apparent explosion in hate crime. But there is no evidence that hate crime is on the rise … In fact, when you look at statistics that are, according to the Home Office, ‘unaffected by changes in recording practice’, you find the complete opposite … Over the long term the trend is clear: over the past decade, it shows a fall in hate crime of 40 per cent. The CPS’s prosecution statistics paint a similar picture. Despite surges in the number of reports made to the police, the number of people actually being prosecuted for hate crimes has also fallen … In other words, for an incident to appear in the police-recorded hate-crime data, there does not have to be any evidence of any ‘hatred’, nor does the incident even have to be a crime.
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Franco’s Victory Was Necessary, But Ultimately Meaningless
Grayson Quay - The American Conservative
… For these reasons, I’ve come to the same conclusion: … if I had to choose a side, I would have fought for Franco, but only because his enemy was evil incarnate. I believe equally strongly, however, that in the end his victory accomplished nothing. If Franco was fighting for traditionalist Catholicism against the forces of modernity, then he failed to preserve what he’d fought so hard to protect … After his exhumation last week, the message for us is that the Christendom that endured from Constantine until the middle of the 20th century cannot be preserved, certainly not by force. If we try, we’ll only make things worse.
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Leave Franco Alone
Eric Margolis
… The Spanish civil war became the holy grail of the liberal left, and so it remains today. Forgotten or ignored was the vicious struggle in Spain between Stalin’s minions and those of Hitler and Mussolini … In Spain, Stalin’s secret police murdered large numbers of ‘unreliable’ socialists, unmanageable Communists, and renegade Trotskyites. Spain’s Catholic clergy became a particular target of murder and torture by Spain’s Communists. This was the reason that the Vatican quietly favored Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s … Much of the western liberal media will continue to perpetuate the myth of wicked Franco versus the saintly republicans. Few will ever tell us that Franco kept Spain out of World War II and paved the way to its vibrant democracy.
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A highly publicized German exhibition of atrocities allegedly carried out by regular German army forces during the Second World War has been closed down in the wake of revelations that many of the harrowing photographs it displayed are deceitful. The organizers of “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the German Armed Forces, 1941-1944,” announced the shutdown … after ever more evidence had come to light proving that much of the controversial exhibit is fraudulent … In one exhibition photo, Musial explains, the corpses shown were actually Ukrainians who had been killed by the Soviet security police …
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How We Pale Compared to Previous Generations
Victor Davis Hanson
… Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system? California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements … America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years … In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?
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America’s Syria Debacle Is Not Trump’s Alone
Trita Parsi, Stephen Wertheim - Foreign Policy
… As in Syria, so in the greater Middle East. Trump may lambast endless war in tweets, but he has increased U.S. troop levels by 30 percent since May, in addition to nearly doubling U.S. forces in Afghanistan since taking office. The first two years of his presidency saw 28 percent more drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan compared with his predecessor’s first two years … In short, the president claims to be ending endless war while only waging more … The United States’ wars can end — and end decently. Yet as long as militarized mindsets occupy each side of the national debate, destruction will persist.
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Condemning Trump on Syria? It’s ‘Buffet Outrage’
Stephen Kinzer - Boston Globe
… The more recent set of causes for our Kurdish misadventure began in 2011, when President Obama ordered President Bashar Assad of Syria to “step aside.” Beyond the arrogance that leads American presidents to think they can and should decide who may rule other countries lay the utter impossibility of achieving that goal …The Kurds’ alliance with the United States was doomed from the start. Alliance with Assad makes more sense. He may not be the world’s most reliable ally, but he is more trustworthy than the feckless United States … Although the Kurds’ decision to ask pardon from Assad and join him in rebuilding a secular state is years overdue, it is welcome and wise.
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New Push to Ban Criticism of Israel on US Campuses
The Guardian (Britain)
Rightwing activists are attempting to spread new laws across Republican-controlled states that would ban criticism on public university campuses of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory. Pro-Israel and conservative lobbyists are encouraging state lawmakers to outlaw antisemitism in public education, from kindergarten through to graduate universities. But the proposed definition of antisemitism is so wide that, in addition to standard protections against hate speech towards Jews, it would also prohibit debate about the human rights violations of the Israeli government … Among the activities that would be prohibited by the new laws are human rights investigations focusing specifically on Israel.
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Did Jeffrey Epstein Work for Israel’s Mossad?
Philip Giraldi
I have long argued that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was clearly an intelligence agent and that he was most likely working for the Israeli external service Mossad. My belief was based on the nature of his activity, which suggested that he was able to blackmail important Americans using the sex tapes that he had been able to make at his Manhattan mansion … What Epstein did and how he did it was an intelligence operation in support of Mossad. There is no other viable explanation for his filming of prominent politicians and celebrities having sex with young girls … Given the high stakes in the game, quite likely there will be a cover-up both of how Epstein lived and how he died and, most importantly, whom he worked for.
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“The new anti-Semitism of the far-Left is just as dangerous as classical anti-Semitism of the far-right,’’ Elan Carr, the U.S. Special Envoy for Combating Anti-Semitism said this week. Carr, who was appointed last year by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, spoke at a conference organised by the European Jewish Association in the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, alongside Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan … “This is my charge, on behalf of the President of the United States, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who are committed in an unprecedented fashion to the fight against anti-Semitism throughout the world, the protection of the Jewish people, and to support the State of Israel.” He stressed that the official policy of the U.S. is that ‘’anti-Zionism is antisemitism.’’
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Separation and Its Discontents
Kevin MacDonald - Book available from IHR
This important work focuses on the phenomenon of anti–Semitism, and explains why hostility toward Jews has persisted over the centuries in a wide range of cultures and societies. This scholarly book – with source notes, bibliography, and index – is the second in an important trilogy by Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach. In a review published in the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review, Peter Harrison wrote of this book: “One would have to go back at least 50 years to find anything comparable to this extraordinary work. It is serious, exhaustively researched, and relentlessly factual.”
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“Long live Franco” and “Desecrators” were painted in graffiti on the Madrid statue of the founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Pablo Iglesias, on Thursday. In another part of the city, a monument dedicated to the international brigades, who fought against Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War, was defaced with pro-Franco slogans and the words “Death to communists.” The link to the exhumation and transfer of the remains of General Francisco Franco, overseen by today’s Socialist government, was obvious. Yet such a response hardly chimed with acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s aim in carrying out the procedure.
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Wartime newsreel report on the historic meeting of Spanish leader Francisco Franco with Germany’s Hitler, Oct. 23, 1940. French-language narration. Runtime: 2:24 mins. The German leader talks with colleagues, including air force chief Hermann Göring, in the special train as it speeds southward along the French coast. At a stop in the town of Bayonne, Hitler is greeted by nurses and others. Then, in the small town of Heydaye, at the French-Spanish border, Hitler waits on the station platform for the arrival of the special train from Spain. After arriving, Franco warmly greets and shakes hands with Hitler. The two men salute an honor guard of German soldiers.
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German Lawmakers Under Fire for Meeting Iranian 'Holocaust Denier'
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
… Three members of the German Bundestag are facing charges of hypocrisy for meeting last week with Ali Larijani, an Iranian Holocaust denier who defends the obliteration of Israel … The Iranian regime-controlled Tehran Times media outlet shows a picture of Claudia Roth, vice president of the Green Party in the German parliament, greeting Larijani, the clerical regime’s parliament speaker. A second photograph of Roth show her euphorically welcoming Larijani with open arms and a smile. The widely-circulated Bild paper reported that MPs Peter Beyer, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, was also present at the meeting with Larijani.
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The Mother of All Messes in Syria
Eric Margolis
… US attempts to overthrow Syria’s government created national chaos … Into this maelstrom strode Donald Trump, who knew nothing about Syria. There were only about 1,000 US troops in Syria, but they could call down the US Air Force based in nearby Qatar. These token troops are being withdrawn to neighboring Iraq … In short, Syria is being ground up by wars for no good purpose. Turkey made a grave error by joining efforts to overthrow Syria’s Assad regime. The US, France, Britain and Israel have no business at all there. Only Russia has a legitimate geopolitical interest in Syria, which is close to its southern border. So far, Vlad Putin has played a very skillful game of big power chess in Syria while the US has blundered time and again.
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The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War Was Won
Pepe Escobar
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way: “It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.” Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
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Is Putin the New King of the Middle East?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war for them – against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran – why does Congress not declare those interests and authorize war to secure them? Our foreign policy elites have used Trump’s decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values. If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and treasure to keep his Russia’s toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have gone under without him. Who dares, wins.
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U.S. Imperial Delusion in the Middle East
Geoffrey Aronson - The American Conservative
America’s strategy in the Gulf region, where 40 percent of the world’s oil supplies transit, is in tatters … Trump’s policy to squeeze Iran is of a piece with other unfeasible administration efforts to work its will in the region. But instead of expanding American power in the region, these efforts have merely exposed Washington’s shortcomings in policy-making and execution and reduced its influence in the Gulf … Like a modern day Gulliver, the Trump administration has been all but immobilized by the modulated, well-considered military challenges from Iran. Responding to these encounters in haphazard, ill-considered fashion only highlights the persistent failure of this administration to use the policymaking system to actually make policy …
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As US Withdraws, Jerusalem Spooked by Moscow’s Growing Control Over Middle East
Raphael Ahren – The Times of Israel
US President Donald Trump’s newly announced withdrawal of nearly all US troops from northern Syria has cemented Russia’s status as the predominant global military power actively engaged in the Middle East. This week, Russian troops arrived at military bases in northern Syria that the American army had hastily left just days earlier, in what can be regarded as both a literal and figurative handover of regional hegemony. Many officials in Jerusalem are deeply worried about being abandoned by their superpower ally, as the American decision to gradually disengage from this part of the world – which started under former US president Barack Obama – threatens to embolden Israel’s enemies: Iran and its allies and proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere.
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Tulsi Gabbard Is Right, and Nancy Pelosi Wrong. It Was US Democrats Who Helped Cultivate the Barbarism of Isis
Jonathan Cook
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria … Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies. Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.
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Democrats Have No Answer for Trump’s Anti-War Posture
Danny Sjursen
… What’s truly striking, though, and increasingly apparent, is that President Trump possesses — as a foreign policy autocrat, of sorts — the power to derail the Democrats and place 2020 hopefuls in an awkward position of defending U.S. forever wars. It’s already happening, at least among mainstream “liberal” media and political personalities who’ve flooded the networks with anti-Trump vitriol since the Syria withdrawal … The attention suddenly focused on Syria is rather cynical, of course, with the country’s civil war only receiving notice now because it’s a cudgel used to reflexively attack Trump. It’s not about Kurdish ethnic rights or women’s, rights — and it never was. No, this is all about partisan political advantage. And it might just backfire on the Dems.
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Why The IHR Deserves Your Support
Mark Weber – Institute For Historical Review
From our offices in southern California, we reach activists, students, educators and opinion-makers across the country and around the world, providing solid information and sound perspective on distortions of American history, World War II lies, the Jewish-Zionist grip on our cultural and political life, the Zionist push for war, Third Reich Germany, the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, Soviet Communism, and more. Through meetings, lectures, interviews, online outreach, websites, and distribution of books, discs and flyers, we supply “intellectual ammunition” that’s crucial for victory in the global battle for freedom and historical truth. To make a secure online credit card donation, click on our website’s “Support” page, and then click on the “Online Donation” icon.
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The 'Jewish Soap' Fable
Mark Weber
One of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards, it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. More important, this accusation was “proved” at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since. In recent years, though, as part of a broad retreat from the most obviously untenable aspects of the “orthodox” extermination story, Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap tale is a wartime propaganda lie.
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Don’t Expect Regime Change in Iran
Jack A. Goldstone - Atlantic Council
Since the 1979 revolution, the United States has been waiting for the Islamic Republic to fail. Yet the regime has withstood an eight-year war with Iraq, decades of sanctions, and the 2009 massive internal uprising known as the Green Movement … Indeed, despite these challenges, the power of the regime seems to have grown … There are half a dozen reasons why the Islamic Republic has been so resilient in the face of extraordinary internal and external pressures … The idea that more US pressure would somehow be welcomed and lead to a more pro-Western government is a dangerous illusion … The Islamic Republic may be religious-led and can be morally oppressive, but it has had mostly free elections that allowed Iranians to express their preferences regarding the regime.
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Donald Trump’s Iran Humiliation
Scott Ritter
… Rather than retreat in the face of U.S. military pressure, Iran doubled down … The problem for the United States has been that its campaign of “maximum pressure” has had zero impact on Iran’s so-called “malign activities” in the region … The Houthi drone attack proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran … Seen in this light, the collapse of the U.S. campaign of “maximum pressure” can only be interpreted as a strategic victory for Iran, and a decisive defeat for the United States.
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Researchers Placed 17,000 Wallets In Different Cities To See How Many People Would Return Them
Rugile - BoredPanda
… The idea is quite simple. Eleven men and two women have traveled to 355 major cities across 40 countries where they “lost” 17,000 wallets. The main goal was to see how differently citizens in each country responded to a lost wallet … There were two types of wallets used in the experiment, one had a key and no money inside, another one had some money and a key … The average amount of money in the wallet was $13.45 (USD) in the country’s currency, and a few countries (United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States) had a larger sum of $94.15 … Here’s the graph portraying how different countries responded to this experiment … Scandinavian countries aced the experiment by returning the biggest amount of lost wallets. Unfortunately, countries like China, Morocco, Peru, and Kazakhstan had the smallest return-rate.
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IQ Compared by Countries: A Global Ranking
WorldData.info
The question of the intelligence of a certain nationality or population may be controversial … With an average IQ of 98 points, the USA ranks 27th in this ranking. With 108 points, the inhabitants of Singapore reach the highest intelligence quotas worldwide. The last place with only 56 points is occupied by Equatorial Guinea … The intelligence quotients by countries are taken from the studies conducted by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2002), Heiner Rindermann (2007), Khaleefa and Lynn (2008), Ahmad, Khanum and Riaz (2008), Lynn, Abdalla and Al-Shahomee (2008), Lynn and Meisenberg (2010), as well as the PISA tests in 2003, 2006 and 2009.
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The Association Between County-Level IQ and County-Level Crime Rates
K. M. Beaver, J. P. Wright – Intelligence
An impressive body of research has revealed that individual-level IQ scores are negatively associated with criminal and delinquent involvement … Taken together, the results of these three studies indicate differences in crime rates at the state level are associated with differences in the average IQ of citizens in the state … The association between IQ and the overall property crime rate remains statistically significant even after controlling for concentrated disadvantage. Similar results were garnered for the models estimating the association between IQ and the burgulary rate, the larceny rate, and the motor vehicle theft rate. In all of the models, the association between IQ and crime was statistically significant both before and after controlling for concentrated disadvantage.
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Hitler and/or Chomsky on Capitalist Democracy
Guillaume Durocher
I can think of only one thing which unites Adolf Hitler and Noam Chomsky: a shared contempt for and critique of capitalist mass-media democracy. Concerning Hitler’s speeches, we usually think of rapturous exhortations to his party-comrades. However, the Führer could sometimes strike a more pedagogical note. Such was the case in a December 1940 speech on what Hitler called “the so-called democracy” in the “Anglo-French world” and the United States. Listening to this speech, I was struck at how similar Hitler’s critique of capitalist democracy was to Noam Chomsky’s. For both Hitler and Chomsky, the corporate media, oligarchic influence, and an incestuous political class make a mockery of Western capitalist regime’s claims of being “democratic.”
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Hitler's Forgotten Library
Timothy W. Ryback - The Atlantic Monthly
… By the late 1930s Hitler had three separate libraries for his ever-expanding collection. At his apartment he removed a wall between two rooms and installed bookshelves. For the Berghof, his Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler built a second-floor study with handmade bookcases; color photographs of the finished space show an elegant setting with Oriental carpets, two globes, and bookcases fitted with glass doors and brass locks … By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels, though he once ranked Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Doré) among the world’s greatest works of literature.
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Hitler’s War
David Irving – Book available from IHR
Latest edition! Back in Print! / Deluxe hardcover edition of an outstanding historian’s masterful, in-depth look at Adolf Hitler, Third Reich Germany and World War II. With full color dust jacket, photos, source notes, and index. A product of 25 years of dedicated research and unmatched scholarship, written in gripping, page-turning prose, this monumental work traces Hitler’s entire epoch-making career. In this meticulously referenced work – the crowning achievement in the career of a fiercely independent, best-selling historian – Irving demolishes the familiar propaganda image of Hitler and the Third Reich, tearing apart one historical fable after another. Sumptuously illustrated with more than a hundred photographs, including 40 in color.
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Google Engineer Leaks Nearly 1,000 Internal Documents, Alleging Bias, Censorship
P. Svab – Epoch Times
A former Google engineer has released nearly 1,000 pages of documents that he says prove that the company, at least in some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on what it deems to be true or false, while publicly claiming to be a neutral platform … One of the documents says that Paul Haahr, Google’s principal engineer, leads the effort on “fringe ranking” with the goal of “not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.” … Yet another document lists websites whose content is manually banned from showing up in the “Feed.”
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Empire America: Why Washington Can't Reduce Its Military Footprint
Ted Galen Carpenter - The National Interest
… It has been a strikingly consistent pattern. The United States still has troops stationed in Europe and Japan long after World War II ended. Even the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself led only to a reduction, not the elimination, of the U.S. troop presence in Europe … The United States does not practice the old-style imperialism of conquest, the establishment of colonies, and the use of direct rule. Instead, U.S. imperialism consists of creating patron-client relationships with security dependents and enforcing that policy through a global network of military bases. Nevertheless, it is an imperial policy, and the U.S. military footprint in a client state becomes as permanent as if it were encased in concrete.
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The New York Times 1619 Project Puts Slavery at the Center of America’s Founding
Bruce Thornton – Frontpage mag
Last week the New York Times embarrassed itself twice. First, a transcript was leaked of editor Dean Baquet’s exhortation to reporters that the Russian-collusion fiction having been exploded, they now needed to focus on the endemic “racism” and “white supremacism” of Trump and his supporters in order to defeat the president. Next, as the “theory” behind this partisan journalistic “praxis,” the self-proclaimed “paper of record” announced the “1619 Project,” a series of articles and essays showing “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” Both incidents definitively reveal that the cultural bacilli that erupted during the Sixties have at last destroyed the minds of some of our most prestigious and powerful institutions.
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The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism
Andrew Sullivan - New York Magazine
… The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism … This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship … The NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one. Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln.
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The Far Right Past of Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of Ikea
E. Åsbrink - Literary Hub
… There are also two ways into the Ikea story. One is uplifting and inspirational: a young man [Ingvar Kamprad] from a modest background, but with more than the usual dose of business acumen, builds an empire. Although the hero of the story makes the occasional mistake, that is precisely what makes him human and such a treasured symbol of Swedishness. The other way leads from Mr. Kamprad’s childhood and adolescence in a Hitler-loving family, Germans who had immigrated from the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, where both his paternal grandmother and his father were Nazis; his long-lasting commitment to the Swedish fascist movement; and his membership, during the Second World War, of Sweden’s Nazi party, Swedish Socialist Unity. Both stories are equally true.
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Distorting the Definition of Antisemitism to Shield Israel from All Criticism
Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal - LobeLog
There is a growing tendency among both Jews and non-Jews to label those with whom they have profound political differences, especially on the subject of Israel-Palestine, as antisemitic. The accusation is a severe one: in most countries in the West, antisemitism is considered a taboo, and the identification of a person or organization with anti-semitism often renders them illegitimate in the public arena … The burden of proof lies with critics of Israel, who are constantly asked to prove that they are not anti-Semites … The message to the public — and to scholars — was clear: it is better to forget about free speech and not criticize Israel. After all, doing so means you could be subject to a grave accusation … In this reality, Israel no longer needs to defend itself against allegation — it has a free hand to throw around accusations.
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America’s Ill-Fated Syria Intervention: The Lessons Washington Must Learn
Christopher A. Preble, Doug Bandow - The National Interest
… The U.S. mission in Syria does not advance a vital U.S. national-security objective; the threat from ISIS has always been overblown, and claims that a few hundred — or even a few thousand — U.S. ground troops are all that stand between the group and a global resurgence defy all logic … Not every problem is America’s to solve, and not every problem can be solved by U.S. military power. Policymakers should commit U.S. forces to wage war only when vital interests are stake, the mission is clear, and the objectives are attainable. The Syrian escapade never met any of these criteria. Alas, it likely will take more than a couple of Trump tweets to cure the U.S. government of its interventionist addiction.
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The Kurds and the Sticky Wicket of Foreign Entanglements
Ted Galen Carpenter - The American Conservative
… The ongoing episode with the Syrian Kurds provides an opportunity to re-learn such crucial distinctions. Trump’s critics seem to be advocating a permanent security relationship with the Kurds over a situation that does not even remotely constitute an extraordinary emergency for the United States … There was, and is, no foundation for a long-term security relationship between the United States and the Syrian Kurds … In any case, the Trump administration appears to have concluded that the drawbacks to maintaining the de facto alliance with the Syrian Kurds significantly outweighs any benefits. It is a realistic attitude, one that stands in sharp contrast to the growing view among elites that once the United States acquires an ally (or, more often, a security dependent), it can never relinquish that relationship.
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Trump Wants to End the 'Stupid Wars'?
Philip Giraldi
… The Syrian incursion by the American military, which was initiated by President Barack Obama and his band of lady hawks during the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, was illegal from the gitgo. Syria did not threaten the United States, quite the contrary. Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington that soured the relationship … When American soldiers first arrived in Syria the U.S. War Powers act was ignored, making the incursion illegal. Nor was there any mandate authorizing military intervention emanating from any supra-national agency like the United Nations … The objectives were from the start unattainable as Iran and Russia were supporting the Syrian Army in doing most of the hard fighting against ISIS …
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The Epidemic of Police Violence Against Blacks: A Persistent Myth
Christopher DeGroot - Taki mag
… The most insidious myth, when it comes to black cultural dysfunction, is the view that there is an epidemic of police violence against blacks … In a study published in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Johnson et al. found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race.” This is consistent with a 2017 paper by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, which found no evidence of racial discrimination in police shootings of blacks or other minorities. In general, police violence against citizens reflects racial differences in crime rates.
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The swastika (from Sanskrit svástika) is an ancient Indo-European religious symbol … The swastika (gammadion, “fylfot”) symbol became a popular symbol of luck in the Western world in the early 20th century, as it had long been in Asia, and was often used for ornamentation. The Nazi Party adopted the symbol in the 1920s, and its use in Western countries faded after the Nazi association became dominant in the 1930s … In recent decades many public swastikas have been removed or covered over, although others have been deliberately retained … The 45th Infantry Division of the United States Army used a yellow swastika on a red background as a unit symbol until the 1930s, when it was switched to a thunderbird.
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Recordings From Nuremberg Trials of Nazi Leaders to Be Made Public
Associated Press
Audio recordings from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders will be made available to the public for the first time in digital form after nearly two years of work conducted in secret. The Memorial of the Shoah in Paris will officially accept the recordings at a ceremony Thursday evening. The files capture several hundred hours of the first, high-profile trial of top Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. Since 1950, they have existed only on 2,000 large discs housed in wooden boxes in the International Court of Justice library in the Hague, Netherlands. Now, curious listeners will be able to listen to the entirety of the judicial proceedings in reading rooms at the Hague, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum … Researchers previously had access to trial transcripts.
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The Injustice of the Nuremberg Trials
Mark Weber - Podcast
The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46 — the most spectacular judicial enterprise in history — was meant to prove that the defeated German regime had been one of unique and monstrous deceit, rapaciousness and evil. But in fact the Tribunal dispensed not justice, but injustice. The four Allied powers that organized and ran it were themselves guilty of some of the very same crimes they accused the German defendants of having committed. The Tribunal operated on the basis of “ex post facto” law created after the fact expressly for the occasion, and which the Allies applied only to the defeated. The hangings of German leaders ordered by the Tribunal were little more than murders glossed over with a veneer of makeshift, hypocritical pseudo-legality.
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Major Poullada’s Final Defense Plea In the Nordhausen-Dora Concentration Camp Case
Leon B. Poullada – Institute for Historical Review
… In his plea, Major Poullada systematically confronts one emotion-charged issue after another, calmly but persistently challenging the judges to set aside prejudice and presumption to consider all the evidence with an open mind. Poullada concludes with an eloquent defense of traditional Anglo-American standards of justice. As Poullada repeatedly emphasizes, these postwar “war crimes” trials violated basic principles of justice. With specific examples, he shows how the prosecution has encouraged witnesses to give clearly false hearsay testimony evidence. With prosecution connivance, Poullada establishes, some witnesses gave demonstrably perjured testimony.
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When President Trump Tweeted last week that “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous endless wars,” adding that the US would be withdrawing from Syria, Washington went into a panic. Suddenly Republicans, Democrats, the media, the think tanks, and the war industry all discovered and quickly became experts on “the Kurds,” who we were told were an “ally” being sent to their slaughter by an ignorant President Trump … All of a sudden our military presence in Syria was not about fighting terrorism but rather about putting US troops between our NATO ally Turkey and our proxy fighting force, the Kurds … On Sunday the Kurds and the Syrian government signed an agreement, brokered by the Russians, to put aside their differences and join together to defend against Turkey’s incursion into Syrian territory.
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Is the Interventionists’ Era Over for Good?
Patrick J. Buchanan
President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria against the will of the Damascus regime and army. Had the U.S. refused to vacate Syrian lands on Turkey’s demand, a fight would be inevitable, whether with Turkey, Damascus or both. And this nation would neither support nor sustain a new war with Turks or Syrians. And whenever the Americans did leave, the Kurds, facing a far more powerful Turkey, were going to have to negotiate the best deal they could with Syria’s Bashar Assad.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center is a Hate-Based Scam That Nearly Caused Me to be Murdered
Jessica Prol Smith - USA Today
… It was the type of violent incident that one could expect a group that purportedly monitors “hate,” like the Southern Poverty Law Center, to notice, research and decry. In fact, we were on the center’s radar but for all the wrong reasons. The assailant acknowledged later in FBI testimony that he had selected our office precisely because the SPLC had labeled my employer a “hate group.” … The SPLC has chosen to take the easy path — to intimidate and mislead for raw political power and financial benefit. For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme.
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Destroying the Classics
Mary Frances Williams - Quillette
I am a Classics Ph.D. who recently attended the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies … I now regret doing so since some remarks I made at the conference led to me being branded a “racist” and the loss of my editing job with the Association of Ancient Historians … The following day, Helen Cullyer, the SCS Director, sent me an email in which she forbade my attendance at the meeting on Sunday, the last day of the conference … Of all the academic disciplines, Classics alone has managed until now to withstand most of the corrupting influences of modern critical theory and “social justice” activism. Ours is the last bastion of Western Civilization in the academy.
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… America’s recently imposed total ban on Iranian petroleum exports comes with secondary sanctions that can be initiated on any country that buys the oil, alienating Washington’s few remaining friends and creating universal concern regarding the United States’ long-term intentions. Indeed, the United States was a country that prior to the “Global war on terror” was generally liked and respected, but today it is widely regarded as the most dangerous threat to peace in the world … Another aspect to sanctions that is somewhat invisible is the impact that government action has had on what are regarded as the constitutional rights of American citizens.
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Free Speech: Shot Down in Beirut
Joseph Sobran
… This year [2001] the IHR decided to co-sponsor a conference in Beirut. But just before it was to begin in late March, when all preparations had been made and the attendees had bought plane tickets and reserved hotel rooms, the Lebanese government suddenly banned the meeting. The Lebanese reportedly did this under American pressure, and the United States government, it is not far-fetched to suspect, had in turn been pressured by the usual suspects: Jewish-Zionist organizations. So the U.S. government acted, underhandedly, to ban a meeting that would have been entirely legal and constitutionally protected in the U.S.
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Iceland, Israel and the Jews: A Largely Negative History
Manfred Gerstenfeld - Begin-Sadat Center/ Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
Whenever the media mention Iceland in the context of Israel, it is usually to report negative news … In 2011, Iceland’s parliament was the first country in Western Europe to recognize a Palestinian state … Iceland’s attitude toward Jews, both recently and in the past, can be described as wretched. The latest indignity was a proposal this year to be the first country in Europe to ban circumcision. In addition to politicians, 400 doctors supported the bill … In 2004, Iceland offered asylum to Bobby Fischer, the extremely anti-Semitic former chess world champion … Several Icelandic members of the Waffen SS fought for Nazi Germany … After the war various former members of Iceland’s Nazi party quickly “attained high positions in society, including a couple of chiefs of police, a bank director and some doctors.” Iceland’s anti-Semitism still continues.
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Iceland Under WWII British and American Occupation
Betrand M. Roehner
A French scholar looks at the occupation of Iceland by British and then American military forces during World War II, and afterwards. Local civilians were victims of violent assault, brawls and vandalism by occupation troops. “American soldiers, particularly sailors and the regular army enlisted men, are belligerent with the Icelanders,” one official protested. “Very often the soldiers trail Icelanders for several blocks endeavoring all the while to pick a fight. Attacks are usually without provocation and seemingly without motive.” “The reception of British and Canadian troops in Iceland was anything but warm,” Time magazine reported. “The Icelanders so resented them that soldiers had to go out in parties of three, well-armed and on their guard against stabbing and shootings.”
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More 'Stupid War' in Syria
Eric Margolis
More war in wretched Syria. Half the population are now refugees; entire cities lie shattered by bombing; bands of crazed gunmen run rampant; US, French, Israeli and Russian warplanes bomb widely … The US media is fiercely anti-Turkish because Ankara is seen as somewhat pro-Palestinian. Israel is a bitter foe of Turkey’s Erdogan. One rarely reads anything positive about Turkey or its leader … Trump rightly calls the fracas in Syria ‘a stupid war.’ … Ironically, former president Barack Obama foolishly authorized America’s effort to overthrow Syria’s Assad government under the guise of a phony civil war. This was one of the few Obama policies that Trump chose to follow.
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A Disastrous 18 Years in Afghanistan
C. Lutz, N. Crawford - Providence Journal
… Americans cling to the notions that war is necessary; that it can be quick, cheap, and controllable; that it primarily harm soldiers, not civilians; and that it “works” to achieve its declared aims. The war in Afghanistan has matched none of those promises … Nor has this war been cheap. Just counting Pentagon and State Department war spending, the bill so far is $1 trillion … Above all, the Afghanistan war has failed to achieve its goals. One goal was a democratic, sovereign and secure Afghanistan, but the country currently ranks as one of the least democratic countries in the world, and the Afghan government controls less territory with each passing year. Nor has the war rooted out a global terrorist threat — the number of militants in that country has only multiplied.
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Columbus Day Or Indigenous Peoples' Day?
L. Fadel – NPR
On Monday in the nation’s capital, there is no Columbus Day. The D.C. Council voted to replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day in a temporary move that it hopes to make permanent. Several other places across the United States have also made the switch in a growing movement to end the celebration of the Italian explorer in favor of honoring Indigenous communities and their resiliency in the face of violence by European explorers like Christopher Columbus … At least ten states now celebrate some version of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday in October, like Hawaii’s Discoverers’ Day or South Dakota’s Native Americans’ Day. Many college campuses have dumped Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples’ Day as have more than 100 cities, towns and counties across the country.
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Columbus Day Haters are Missing the Point of the Holiday
Kyle Smith - New York Post
… There’s no doubt Columbus — and the conquistadors who followed — enslaved and slaughtered on a mass scale. But Columbus didn’t bring cruelty to peaceful, benign peoples. The indigenous people were also cruel to one another. Iroquois Indians were famous for their practice of torturing enemies to death over a period of days. … Ritual child sacrifice was common among the Mayans, the Aztecs and many other peoples. …. While the clash of civilizations was bloody, celebrating Columbus Day is not a salute to conquest. Columbus is simply a handy symbol for all of the energy Italians and other Europeans brought to the Americas … Look around you. Most of the things you have and love are derived from the European settlers tracing back to Columbus.
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Trump Swears Allegiance to Israel as He Decries Endless Middle East Wars
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
US President Donald Trump swore allegiance to Israel as he decried endless Middle East wars and defended his decision to withdraw US troops from the Kurdish area of northern Syria, when he spoke Saturday at the annual Values Voters Conference in Washington. “We are standing with our close friend and partner, the State of Israel,” Trump said, as he reviewed the steps he has taken on behalf of the Jewish state since taking office, including relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
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Are There Israelis in the U.S. Government?
Philip Giraldi
… Jews who are Zionists are vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the Middle East … There are, of course, some Jews who flaunt their identification with Israel, to include current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who describes himself as “protector” of Israel and former Senator Frank Lautenberg, frequently referred to as “Israel’s Senator.” … To be sure there are many non-Jews in the American government who have hitched their star to the Israeli wagon because they know it to be career enhancing … That Mandelker and company have been engaging in economic warfare with a country with which the United States is not at war seems to have escaped the notice of the media and Washington’s chattering class, not surprisingly as Israel is a beneficiary of the policy.
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Jack London?
Linh Dinh
As writer or thinker, Jack London can’t touch George Orwell, but he’s nearly the Brit’s equal when it comes to describing society’s bottom. To both, being a writer is as much a physical as an intellectual endeavor. Wading into everything, they braved all discomforts and dangers. This attitude has become very rare, and not just among writers. Trapped in intensely mediated lives, we all think we know more as we experience less and less … London insisted a worldwide class revolution was the answer. A century and several gory nightmares later, there are those who still cling to this faith, but only in the West. In the East, even the most ignorant know the survival of his identity and dignity is conterminous with his nation’s. Orwell understood this well. It is the biggest crime to wreck anyone’s heritage in a flash.
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Murray Rothbard
Mark Weber
Uncompromisingly hostile to war and war propaganda, Rothbard was one of the few who remained true to his convictions even during the stifling Cold War era. Along with Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, he continued steadfastly to oppose the US military-industrial complex and the military adventurism that is an integral part of its “perpetual war for perpetual peace” policy. Rothbard embraced historical revisionism in all its facets, including taboo issues of the Second World War.
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Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader
Arthur Goddard, editor. Book available from IHR
This encyclopedic work is more than an impressive collection of first-rate history writing on a range of critical historical issues. It’s also a tribute to the life and work of Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968), historian, educator and an eminent and influential American historian, educator and sociologist. The many contributions range from documented essays to mellow memoirs. Hardcover, 884 pages, with dust jacket, source references, extensive bibliography, many photos, and index. Barnes was one of the most influential American scholars of the twentieth century. His consistently clear, effective and knowledgeable prose earned him the appreciation of the educated public as well as praise from scholars.
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America Doesn’t Belong in Syria
Doug Bandow - The American Conservative
.. Without seeking congressional approval, the Obama administration embarked on a multi-faceted campaign: oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who had not attacked or threatened America; find, train, and empower moderate insurgents to create a liberal democracy in Syria … It was the plan of a madman – or an arrogant, officious, ignorant social engineer with no understanding of human nature, the Middle East, or America. Predictably, the result was almost complete failure … In spite of all that, today, Assad is still in power, and aided by the Iranians and Russians … Moreover, the mission remains entirely illegal, without congressional or international warrant.
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Withdrawal of All US Troops From Syria – Not a Partial Repositioning – Should be American Policy
Daniel L. Davis (Lt. Col., ret.) – The Hill
… This entire episode, however, graphically highlights why the United States should have long ago withdrawn all troops from Syria – and why Trump should do so now. At the heart of the bipartisan criticism being leveled against the president is an appalling lack of understanding about America’s interests in Syria … Conventional wisdom says that our Kurdish partners in Syria did America a huge favor in routing ISIS from their so-called capital of Raqqa, and without their help, we would still be at risk from ISIS. Therefore, the thought goes, the Kurds deserve – and we owe them – our continued support. The premise, however, is flawed from the start, and thus the conclusion that we “owe them” is also wrong.
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… In one fell swoop, China may have nullified America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. missile defense capability. Through its impressive display of new weapons systems, China has underscored the reality that while the United States has spent the last two decades squandering trillions of dollars fighting insurgents in the Middle East, Beijing was singularly focused on overcoming American military superiority in the Pacific. If the capabilities of these new weapons are taken at face value, China will have succeeded on this front … In doing so, China has gained the strategic advantage over the U.S. when it comes to competing power projection in the Pacific.
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Understanding World War II
Ron Unz
… Although my knowledge of the history of the Second World War was quite rudimentary back in 2008, over the decade that followed I embarked upon a great deal of reading in the history of that momentous era … I gradually began to recognize that our own history had been marked by an ideological Great Purge just as significant if less sanguinary than its Soviet counterpart. The parallels seemed eerie … John T. Flynn, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Russell Grenfell, Sisley Huddleston, and numerous other scholars and journalists of the highest caliber and reputation all told a rather consistent story of the Second World War but one at total variance with that of today’s established narrative, and they did so at the cost of destroying their careers.
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Barnes Against the Blackout: Essays Against Interventionism
Harry Elmer Barnes -- Book Available from IHR
An outstanding American historian is at his best in these passionate and well-reasoned essays and reviews on the Second World War, and on the “Cold War” with the Soviet Union that soon followed. Professor Barnes takes aim at the writings of “establishment” historians on the causes, conduct, and results of America’s “crusade” against Germany and Japan. He presents stern assessments of the widely accepted accounts of Williams Shirer, Walter Millis and others, which laid the groundwork for today’s wrongheaded history. Barnes also brilliantly reviews such revisionist writings as A. J. P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War and David Hoggan’s Forced War.
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America’s Second Crusade
William Henry Chamberlin – Book available from IHR
An award-wining American journalist and historian takes a close, critical look at the origins, course and consequences of the US role in World War II. In this lucid and well-researched survey, he examines President Roosevelt’s illegal efforts to push the US into war, the hidden background story of the Pearl Harbor attack, United States betrayal of its proclaimed principles, America’s wartime alliance with the Stalinist Russia, the British-American stab in the back of Poland, the hypocrisy and injustice of the Nuremberg trials, and more. With bibliography and index. The great American historian Harry Elmer Barnes praised this book as “the ablest revisionist study of the background, course and results of the Second World War. It will long remain the best survey for the general reader.”
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British Pathé newsreel report, with narration in English, on the first visit to Germany by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Sept. 15, 1938. Runtime: 2:02 mins. After arriving from England by plane at Munich airport, the British statesman travels by car and train to the home of the German Chancellor in the Bavarian mountains. The two leaders arranged this meeting to discuss the Czechoslovakia crisis. Hitler firmly supported the demand for freedom and self-determination by the three million ethnic Germans in the country’s “Sudetenland” region. Hitler greets the British statesman as he arrives at the mountain home. Chamberlain returns to England the next day, and speaks at the airport about his frank and friendly talk with the German leader.
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San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless
Heather MacDonald - City Journal
… For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless. The results have been the opposite: street squalor and misery have increased, even as government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles that have guided the city’s homelessness policy remain inviolate: homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.
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Joe Biden Is Lying Through His Teeth About Iraq
N. Solomon - TruthDig
Joe Biden’s recent efforts to deny his record of support for invading Iraq are marvels of evasion, with falsehoods that have been refuted by one well-documented appraisal after another after another. This month, Biden claimed that his vote for war on the Senate floor was somehow not a vote for war … Biden – who played a pivotal role in the rush to war as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee –proceeded as though people had no right to know. He excluded critical voices and key information from the committee’s high-profile hearings in mid- summer 2002, deceptively serving as the most important lawmaker ushering the war resolution to the Senate floor, where he voted for it in mid-October. The war began five months later.
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Joe Biden’s Haunted Legacy in Iraq
Mike Giglio - The Atlantic
If Joe Biden wins the 2020 presidential election, he will be haunted by an old problem: the U.S. war in Iraq. It’s an issue he has struggled with since 2002, when he cast a Senate vote that led to the U.S. invasion, and throughout his time as vice president — and one at the heart of an identity crisis engulfing the Democratic Party on foreign policy. Uncertainty over how and when the U.S. should engage overseas defined the Obama administration’s failures in new wars in Syria and Libya, as well as in old ones in Afghanistan and Iraq … While Biden touts his foreign-policy experience as one of his qualifications for office, his rivals bill Iraq as a prime example of his bad judgment.
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Deglobalization and its Discontents
Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
… Democracy is contracting, not because it is under pressure from foreign foes, but because citizens in democratic countries have diminished confidence in it. They increasingly regard their elected leaders as incompetent, indecisive, self-serving, corrupt, contemptuous of them, and ineffectual or indifferent to their interests and needs. Dissatisfaction with what democratic governments now actually deliver to their citizens fuels “populism” and empowers demagoguery … America’s wars and those of its major security partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia no longer have fixed or feasible objectives or terms for their termination, so they never end … Europeans do not share the American obsession with the rise of China, and do not agree with Washington’s something-for-nothing appeasement of Israel.
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Beginning of US Slavery
Walter E. Williams
… The founders had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, that in a pure democracy “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegate Edmund Randolph said, “that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
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The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy
R. Shenkman - Politico
… . As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about a hundred started shifting in their seats … Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging a core assumption about America and the West. His theory? Democracy is devouring itself — his phrase — and it won’t last … His prediction? “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.” … Our brains, says Rosenberg, are proving fatal to modern democracy. Humans just aren’t built for it. People have been saying for two millennia that democracy is unworkable, going back to Plato … Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from becoming a totally unfettered democracy …
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Why I Support the IHR
Richard Herman
… For 16 years I lived and worked in the Middle East. It was during that time that I first began to understand that much of what we Americans are told about the Israel-Palestine conflict and Middle East history is slanted and misleading … Although my interest was first captured by the IHR’s perspective on the Middle East, I was steadily more impressed with the Institute’s insights on other historical issues. The IHR’s perspective has not only been enlightening; it’s gotten me to change my outlook on a range of issues. I now much better understand that the distortion of history and current affairs in our society is no accident, but is part of a systematic, well-organized campaign to promote partisan interests, and to justify war, oppression and injustice … The IHR identifies and counters the forces that corrupt and degrade our world …
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The Real Saudi-Israeli Relations
G. Cafiero, L. Carrieri - Consortium News
Over the past two decades, Israel and Arab Gulf monarchies have forged a tacit partnership, increasingly aligning their interests and agendas, while hiding behind a public perception of being enemies. … The two nations agree about the region’s conflicts and Iran’s role, and perceive what they regard as the same emerging threats; thus they have put religious and ideological differences aside at a time of unabated hostilities in Iran’s relationship with both Saudi Arabia and Israel … In a region where both states feel increasingly threatened and most Arab officials only pay lip service to the Palestinians, Saudi and Israeli overlapping interests will likely drive the governments ever closer.
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As Went the British, So Will Go America’s Empire
Will Collins - The American Conservative
… The parallels between Britain’s interwar myopia and today’s American foreign policy establishment, which is relentlessly fixated on Russia and the Middle East even as a rising China presents profound new security challenges, should be obvious … The steady erosion of America’s international alliances is yet another worrying parallel. Just as Japan and Italy drifted away from Britain during the interwar period, many American allies seem to be moving toward, if not outright hostility, at least neutrality in the event of a serious confrontation with China … The interwar period is usually invoked to push the United States into foolish commitments to strategically unimportant countries. The more relevant lesson is that a changing world demands a changing grand strategy.
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Making China Great Again
Eric Margolis
… Last week, China feted the 70th anniversary of the Communist takeover of the mainland. It was a gala demonstration of the nation’s military and social power … Today, China’s ground forces look hi-tech and effective … Most alarming in China’s 70th anniversary display was its new DF-41 ICBM heavy missile. Solid-fueled, road mobile, and with multiple warheads, this big beast of a missile is said to be able to reach anywhere in North America within 30 minutes from launch … The Pentagon is still too embroiled in petty Mideast and African conflicts to face the Asian music … China has indeed awakened. Beijing’s next targets will be the US Navy, Taiwan, Japan, Burma and part of India. While Washington fiddles and burns, Chairman Xi Jinping, the new Chinese emperor, is fast making China great again.
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The Imported Priests Saving Ireland’s Ageing Clergy
T. O'Donnell - BBC News
… Kochuveettil is one of four priests from the Cochin diocese (a Catholic administrative district) in Kerala [India] who are currently serving in Ireland’s Killaloe diocese. These men, along with other priests from abroad, are helping fill a gaping void in Ireland’s clergy as priests age and younger generations eschew the once-esteemed profession. The number of priests in Ireland has fallen precipitously since 1959 … Last year, only five men began training for the priesthood at Ireland’s main seminary, St Patrick’s College in Maynooth … In short, the number of priests dying or retiring far outweighs the number joining the ranks … Priests have also come to other dioceses in Ireland from countries such as Romania, Nigeria, Uganda and the Philippines.
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Do Jews Think Differently?
Norman Lebrecht - The Spectator
… Between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries some three dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. For no obvious reason, half of them were Jews. Why is that? Some of these remakers of our minds are so famous they are known by surnames alone — Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Trotsky, Disraeli, Gershwin … Could a common ancestral way of thinking have freed Karl Marx or Benjamin Disraeli or Sarah Bernhardt or Magnus Hirschfeld (we’ll come to him) to change the world as we know it? … The founders of Hollywood were Jews in flight from Tsarist pogroms. Casablanca, their most enduring movie, is a parable of Jewish anxiety in a Californian desert; the director, Michael Curtiz, was a Budapest emigré … Do Jews think differently? The moment I asked that question, there could be only one answer.
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Three Jewish Supreme Court Justices Putting a Powerful Stamp on US Jewry
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Like most of the US Jewish community, all three of the US Supreme Court’s Jewish justices are on the liberal side [Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg]. But agree or disagree with their decisions, they each have their own unique character and image that have put a powerful stamp on US Jewry and Israel.
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In the past seven years, the American Jewish population has grown ten percent. It remains a population that is mostly liberal, college educated and overwhelmingly white. And it’s not getting any younger … The study found that as of 2018, there are approximately 7.5 million Jews in the contiguous United States … That’s only about two percent of the U.S. population, but it’s enough to make the United States home to the largest Jewish community in the world. According to recent government statistics, Israel has 6.7 million Jews. People who say their religion is Jewish account for some 1.8 percent of all U.S. adults, or 4.4 million people, according to the study. There are an additional 1.5 million or so adults who “consider themselves Jewish by background and other criteria.”
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Report of Israeli Eavesdropping on White House Telephones Gets Varying Media Treatment
R. H. Curtiss - WRMEA
In its May 29 [2000] issue Insight magazine published an in-depth report headlined “FBI Probes Espionage at Clinton White House.” The article, actually released on May 5, was the result of a one-year investigation by editors J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez into reports that the FBI was probing allegations that the government of Israel had penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording. The article also charged that the FBI was investigating whether similar penetrations had been made into State Department lines, possibly Pentagon lines and, most interesting, into unlisted, secret lines used by the FBI in its counterintelligence work …
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Jewish Genius
Linh Dinh
… In 1939, Einstein sent a letter to FDR urging the US to develop the atomic bomb, to beat Germany to the same. In 1944, Einstein wrote, “The Germans as an entire people are responsible for these mass murders and must be punished as a people if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely.” Since Jews were collectively targeted, Germans must be collectively punished. This is Old Testament justice … In war, it’s only too natural to strive to destroy your opponent completely, and I’m not singling out Einstein for censure here, but only to highlight that he’s not the slightly goofy pacifist of the popular imagination.
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Jewish-Zionist Power in America
Mark Weber – Video
A factual, reasoned 16-minute talk on the immense power and influence of the “Jewish lobby” in the US, and its harmful role, especially in directing US Middle East policy. As long as this power remains entrenched, says Weber, there will be no end to the Jewish-Zionist domination of American political life and the mass media, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the Israeli threat to peace, and the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East.
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Idiocy or Perfidy? How We Get Hooked on Foreign Democracy Movements
James Bovard - The American Conservative
… What explains this unbroken record of deadly folly? According to Ted Carpenter, author of the new book Gullible Superpower, Washington policymakers have been deceived by foreign con men who claim to adore freedom and democracy … Gullible Superpower walks readers through almost 40 years of pro-democracy shams … John McCain was canonized as a saint after he died last year, despite or perhaps because of his endless mania for bombing foreign nations … Carpenter’s book is a blunt call for realism in U.S. foreign policy. But the deck is increasingly stacked against clear assessments of American interests abroad in part because of deluges of foreign funding for Washington advocacy … Considering the perennial foreign debacles, the question arises: are U.S. policymakers fools, liars, or both?
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The CIA has declassified documents revealing its Cold War spy pigeons program, the latest revelation of the truly bizarre lengths the US went to win the war which included killer cigars, trained dolphins and acoustic kitties … The new documents also reveal how the CIA used ravens to drop bugging devices on window sills, and trained dolphins for underwater “harbour penetration” missions. The mammals were also tested to see if they could carry sensors to detect Soviet nuclear submarines and traces of radioactive weapons. In Key West Florida, the US tried to use dolphins in underwater attacks against enemy shipping … The CIA spent $14 million to put listening devices inside cats in the 1960s. The plan was for them to roam around and listen to Russian intelligence.
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The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia’s Longest Hoax, Exposed
Omer Benjakob - Haaretz (Israel)
This dry description of the systematic murder of ethnic Poles by Nazi forces during World War II was taken from the English-language Wikipedia article for the “Warsaw concentration camp,” also known as Konzentrationslager Warschau. The site where the camp stood is an object of pilgrimage for some in Poland, who hold periodic ceremonies on what they believe is hallowed ground. They come to honor the memory of thousands of Poles murdered in a gas chamber … There’s just one problem: No such death camp ever existed. There is no historical evidence of German gas chambers ever existing in Warsaw, and nowhere near 200,000 people died in the cluster of Nazi internment centers that did stand at the basis of the myth of KL Warschau. “It’s fake history,” says Prof. Havi Dreifuss …
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Bergen-Belsen Camp: The Suppressed Story
Mark Weber
… On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The anniversary was widely remembered in official ceremonies and in newspaper articles that, as the following essay shows, distort the camp’s true history … Ghastly images recorded by Allied photographers at Belsen in mid-April 1945 and widely reproduced ever since have greatly contributed to the camp’s reputation as a notorious extermination center. In fact, the dead of Bergen-Belsen were, above all, unfortunate victims of war and its turmoil, not deliberate policy.
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Buchenwald: Legend and Reality
Mark Weber
Buchenwald is widely regarded as one of wartime Germany’s most notorious “death camps.” In fact, though, this carefully cultivated image bears little resemblance to reality … The camp deserves another, more objective look … General Lucius D. Clay, Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe and Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone of Germany, 1947-49, carefully reviewed the Ilse Koch case in 1948 and found that, whatever her other misdeeds, the lampshade charge was baseless.
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'No Gassing in Dachau'
Martin Broszat – Die Zeit (Germany)
Reproduced here in facsimile is the 1960 letter by Dr. Martin Broszat, as it appeared in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit under the headline “Keine Vergasung in Dachau” (“No Gassing in Dachau”) … Dr. Broszat writes in the name of the prestigious Institute for Contemporary History. He later served as director of the Munich-based archive and research center, which is funded by German taxpayers … “Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed.”
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Northern Ireland Boy Abused by Lord Mountbatten Later Committed Suicide
J. de Burca – Village
It has long been rumoured in Britain that Lord Louis Mountbatten was a paedophile. A book now on sale has dug up impressive new evidence confirming what Irish sources – including the Provisional IRA – have known for decades about his sexual predilections. So impressive is the new evidence that mainstream British media outlets such as The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Times and The Sun are covering the story … Lownie’s research unearthed a number of FBI files which reveal that Lord Mountbatten “was a homosexual with a lust for young boys”. The FBI dossier was compiled by American agents during WWII and the Suez Crisis. The Americans began compiling the Mountbatten file in February 1944, shortly after Mountbatten became Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia.
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Nine Ancient Sumerian Inventions That Changed the World
History Channel
The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention.” In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large-scale use of existing ones. In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time … Here are some of the areas where the Sumerians left their mark: Mass-Produced Pottery; Writing; Hydraulic Engineering; The Chariot; The Plow; Textile Mills; Mass-Produced Bricks; Metallurgy; Mathematics.
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Egypt’s parliamentary speaker has sparked outrage online after praising Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s infrastructure projects. Ali Abdel Aal made the comments while defending Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi development plans. “Hitler had his mistakes, but what allowed him to expand eastward and westward was that he created a strong infrastructure,” the speaker said. Mr Abdel Aal has since said his words were taken “out of context” … It was during this speech that he praised “the infrastructure that Germany has constructed, which is a model for the whole world”.
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Berlin Has ‘Serious Anti-Semitism Problem’ Says City Commissioner
B. Cohen - Algemeiner
A slight drop in the number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin during the first half of this year is no excuse for complacency, the city’s antisemitism commissioner emphasized … There were 404 reported antisemitic outrages during the first half of 2019 — an average of two per day. While the great majority of these incidents were confined to verbal insults and abuse … The RIAS report named three Berlin neighborhoods … where Jews were at the greatest risk of being attacked. All three sections contain high concentrations of the Muslim communities that compose ten percent of Berlin’s overall population. Approximately 30,000 Jews live in Berlin, including a growing community of Israeli emigrants. While 30 percent of the incidents involved far-right perpetrators, RIAS reported, the larger number are committed by pro-Palestinian Muslims.
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The Ukraine Impeachment Fiasco
Philip Giraldi
The problem with the current imbroglio over Ukraine is that the discussion does not begin where it should. Here is the timeline: the United States decided to make a serious effort to bring about regime change in Ukraine under the Obama Administration after that country’s election on June 2010 returned Viktor Yanukovych, who sought closer ties with Russia rather than Europe, as president. The White House claimed that the election results were fraudulent, even though international observers disagreed, and decided to intervene. The job was given to noted Democratic Party-linked neoconservative Victoria Nuland …
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In a disturbing example of revising the role of Nazi collaborators in World War II, a Latvian minister said veterans, his compatriots who fought in the Waffen-SS, were “heroes” and memories of their sacrifice must be cherished. “It is our duty to honor these Latvian patriots from all the depths of our souls,” Defense Minister Artis Pabriks told the crowd during a memorial event on Saturday. He then called the Latvian legionnaires – Nazi collaborators now praised as freedom-fighters for their anti-Soviet alignment – “heroes” and “the pride of the Latvian nation and state.” … The legionnaires comprised two grenadier divisions within the Waffen-SS … Former legionnaires and their supporters stage annual marches in downtown Riga. Their cause is supported by many local right-wing politicians, historians, writers, and media figures.
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Soviet Russia’s Persecution of Latvia
Alexander V. Berkis – Institute for Historical Review
The focus of this paper is the oppression and persecution which the rulers of the Soviet Union inflicted on the Baltic nation of Latvia, from its declaration of independence in 1918 to 1987. The Red Army invaded and occupied Latvia three times in seventy years. Its last aggression, in 1944, resulted in continuing, illegal Soviet occupation of Latvia. Each Soviet incursion was accompanied by mass killings and deportations of Latvians, and Soviet authorities sought to destroy Latvian nationhood by the illegal annexation of Latvia to the USSR and through measures aimed at eradicating the Latvians’ historical, cultural, and religious traditions.
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Estonia’s plans to bring back a monument to a soldier dressed in Waffen SS uniform is a provocation and affront to the memory of those who died fighting the Nazis, the Russian Embassy has said. The stela with a bronze bas-relief depicts an armed trooper in Nazi gear, and a tablet reading: “To Estonian men who fought in 1940-1945 against Bolshevism and for the restoration of Estonian independence.” It caused a lot of controversy after being erected at the cemetery in the town of Lihula in August 2004. The government ordered its removal less than two weeks later … Nazi sympathizers staged rallies on the spot where the stela once stood … This June, a local MP for the Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) in the Laaneranna Parish Council suggested that it was high time to restore the SS monument.
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This 16-minutes video presentation, with English-language narration, reviews the “Battle of the Tannenberg Line” – a major World War II battle in Estonia for the strategically important Narva Isthmus. A pan-European Waffen SS force of 22,250 men, including Germans, Estonians, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians (Flemish and Walloons), fought July 25 to August 10, 1944, against vastly larger Soviet forces. About half of the Waffen SS infantrymen were Estonians. Known in Estonia as the “Battle of the Blue Hills,” it is regarded as a tactical victory for the European forces. The greatly outnumbered and outgunned defenders suffered about 10,000 casualties, while Soviet losses were 170,000 dead, missing or wounded.
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Epic: The Story of the Waffen SS
Leon Degrelle
… The Waffen SS had a solemn duty, after the defeat of Communism, to focus all their efforts and strength to build a united Europe … All the SS understood that European unity meant the whole of Europe, even Russia … This Europe would be the beacon of the world. It would be a remarkable racial ensemble. An ancient civilization, a spiritual force, and the most advanced technological and scientific complex … Not since the great religious orders of the Middle Ages had there been such selfless idealism and heroism. In this century of materialism, the SS stands out as a shining beacon of spirituality. I have no doubt whatsoever that the sacrifices and incredible feats of the Waffen SS will one day have their own epic poets like Schiller.
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Alain Soral Sentenced to Two Years Jail for Sharing `Yellow Vest’ Anti-Rothschild Rap Video
Guillaume Durocher
The French civic-nationalist and anti-Zionist intellectual Alain Soral was sentenced to two years prison for sharing a rap video entitled “Gilets-Jaunes” [“Yellow Vests”] … In case the denunciation of Jewish-globalist and Jewish-Zionist power elites in the financial and media spheres were not explicit enough, the video also states: “We’re not talking about a so-called oppressed minority. We’re talking about the deliberately neglected majority [of workers, farmers, and pensioners] . . . France has decided to free itself from the Rothschilds.” … The video then artfully interweaves mainstream yellow-vest concerns about French democracy’s subversion by high finance with a denunciation of the specific role of Jewish elite power in this process.
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Hanseatic League: The First European Union?
C. Morris - BBC News
… This was the London base of the Hanseatic League – a powerful trading network for hundreds of years, stretching all the way from the East of England to the heart of Russia. It was one of the most successful trade alliances in history – at its height the League could count on the allegiance of nearly 200 towns across northern Europe. London was never formally one of the Hanseatic cities, but it was a crucial link in the chain – known as a kontor or trading post. The community of German merchants who lived on the banks of the Thames were exempt from customs duties and certain taxes … The legacy of the Hanseatic period endures all along Germany’s Baltic coast.
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Argentina's Holocaust Museum 'Takes Custody' of 'Nazi' Artifacts
Associated Press
The Museum of the Holocaust in Argentina’s capital on Wednesday took custody of the largest collection of Nazi artifacts discovered in the country’s history. Federal police and Interpol agents found the more than 70 Nazi objects hidden behind a bookcase in a collector’s home north of Buenos Aires in 2017 as part of an investigation into artworks of illicit origins. The Nazi items include busts of Adolf Hitler, an instrument to measure people’s heads to supposedly determine their racial purity and statues of the Nazi eagle with a swastika under its talons. Owning Nazi objects in Argentina can be illegal if it is determined that the items incite racial or religious hate in public, although they can be allowed in private.
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The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’: Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy
Joe Lauria - Consortium News
… We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation. That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government … This fundamental corruption of U.S. foreign policy, which includes overthrowing elected governments, is matched only by the corruption of a political system that exalts partisan political power above all else. Exposing this deep-seated and longstanding corruption should take precedence over scoring partisan scalps, whether Biden’s or Trump’s.
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The Alliance Between America and Saudi Arabia is Over
John R. Bradley - The Spectator
… We are witnessing the beginning of a new geopolitics in the Middle East. Trump has embraced his America First instincts, and it’s not difficult to see why. He would have nothing to gain — and every-thing to lose — by jumping into another Gulf quagmire, not least when it comes to his chances of re-election. He is in tune with the overwhelming majority of Americans horrified at the prospect of war with Iran in defence of the House of Saud. Opinion polls show huge majorities — among both Democrat and Republican voters — opposed to any such action … Iran’s sphere of influence is holding strong. Syria is mostly stable, Hezbollah dominates Lebanese politics, Iraq is threatening to expel all US forces, and Iran’s economic and military ties with China and Russia are more extensive than ever.
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Deep-sea drones and an intercontinental ballistic missile were among the advanced weapons on public display for the first time at a parade marking 70 years of communist rule in China. According to the Ministry of National Defence, about 15,000 military personnel, 580 pieces of military equipment and 160 aircraft featured. Military march-pasts on a grand scale have a long history in the country. But experts say this year’s display showed China’s ambitions to modernise … “The technological advancement that China has achieved is almost unprecedented.” Warfare has become increasingly information-driven in recent years – about networks rather than just systems … For China, experts say today’s parade is also a show of strength to the US.
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How Israel Controls Its Narrative
Philip Giraldi
It is interesting to note how the Israel Lobby is able to manage and contain the commentary of groups in America that might normally be critical of Israeli policies vis-à-vis the United States … Anyone who wants to be a player in Washington DC has to avoid the Israel hot wire. That it should be so is a tribute to the power of the Jewish lobby coupled with the bulk support and Bible-belt votes of its brain-dead Christian Zionist spear carriers. Congress, once described by Pat Buchanan as “Israeli-occupied territory,” likewise knows whom not to offend lest one be unemployed in the next electoral cycle … Fourteen states now require holocaust education, where students are compelled to read fiction like Eli Wiesel’s “Night” while also consuming the established and standard, largely fabricated, account of what the so-called holocaust was all about.
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America’s Support for Israel is Costly and Dangerous
Council for the National Interest
Our uniquely massive support for Israel has cost trillions of dollars and multitudes of lives. It has diminished our moral standing in the world, lessened our domestic freedoms, and exposed us to unnecessary and growing peril. The majority of Americans – as well as our diplomatic and military experts — oppose this unique relationship. Yet, the lobby for Israel continues to foment policies that are disastrous for our nation and tragic for the region … Below are the facts: …
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Growing Awareness of the Reality of Israeli Policy and Jewish-Zionist Power
Mark Weber – Podcast
As Israel and the Jewish-Zionist lobby in the US press for war against Iran, awareness is growing everywhere about the realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the harmful impact of Israel’s policies, and the crucial role of the Jewish lobby in setting US foreign policy. A bold statement by travel guru Rick Steves (“I’ve been duped”) about deceitful US media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a stern warning by German author Günter Grass about the danger to world peace posed by Israel, are just two signs that attitudes are changing, even in countries that have been subjected to decades of relentless pro-Zionist propaganda.
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A new report by an antisemitism watchdog has found that anti-Israel activities on U.S. college campuses are on the rise. According to AMCHA Initiative, the number of Israel-related, anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish students on campuses increased 70 percent from 2017 to 2018 … On U.S. campuses across the country, harassment motivated by classical anti-Semitism actually decreased, and significantly so. At the same time, however, the number of Israel-related acts of harassment increased significantly,” the report writes. One main reason for this, the report said, was that faculty “took a much more active and prominent role in academic BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) promotion and implementation, and in the promulgation of anti-Semitic expression used to justify academic BDS.”
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‘Jews Exploit Poles’ Report Leads to Massive Online Hate in Poland
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Polish portals such as Wiadomosci began to be filled with hateful comments against Israel and Jews on Friday when news broke that Polish President Andrzej Duda allegedly blamed antisemitism in Poland on Israel. The report earlier on Friday by the Jewish Insider was quickly denied by the office of the president as well as people who were at the meeting … Still, at least online, Polish anger began to take shape in hundreds of comments, the Algemeiner reported. “I used to feel sorry for the Jews, but having observed Israel’s actions over the last year, I now understand that they are guilty,” one person wrote. “Poles don’t like Jews because Jews exploit Poles with privatization, they rob Poles because they are cunning and better-organized, and they own newspapers like The New York Times that slander Poles,” another added.
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A deadline for Jews living outside Spain to request Spanish nationality has expired with 127,000 applications, most of them from Latin America. Jews living in Mexico top the list, with about 20,000 requests, followed by Jews in Venezuela and Colombia. In 2015, Spain passed a law to atone for the medieval expulsion of Sephardi Jews from the country. In the 15th Century, Spain’s Catholic monarchs, having defeated the Muslim Moors, forced Jews to convert or leave. Applicants have had to prove a family connection with medieval Spain – and in many cases, that proved difficult … Applicants for Spanish nationality were entitled to keep their current nationality, though in general Spain does not allow dual citizenship … A similar scheme in Portugal is still open … Jews who get Spanish nationality under the new law are not required to move to Spain.
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Trump’s Iran Strategy: Maximum Pressure, Minimum Impact
J. Glaser, C. Preble, A. T. Thrall - The Hill
… While the world can be glad that Trump hasn’t yet decided to start a war with Iran, Trump’s latest sanctions are another chapter in a “maximum pressure” campaign that has resulted in no benefits for the United States … Trump’s unilateralist approach and maximalist objectives are a recipe for failure. Not only does most of Europe and the rest of the world want to re-embrace the original nuclear deal, but the Iranians will never give in to U.S. demands. To do so would amount to utter capitulation, the complete surrender of Iranian sovereignty, and the de facto end of the Iranian government … Trump’s tough guy approach to foreign policy is making the United States, and the world, less safe.
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Trust and Distrust in America
Pew Research Center
Trust is an essential elixir for public life and neighborly relations, and when Americans think about trust these days, they worry. Two-thirds of adults think other Americans have little or no confidence in the federal government. Majorities believe the public’s confidence in the U.S. government and in each other is shrinking, and most believe a shortage of trust in government and in other citizens makes it harder to solve some of the nation’s key problems. As a result, many think it is necessary to clean up the trust environment: 68% say it is very important to repair the public’s level of confidence in the federal government, and 58% say the same about improving confidence in fellow Americans.
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Best-Selling Introductory Psychology Textbooks Give a Misleading View of Intelligence
C. Jarrett - Research Digest – British Psychology Society
A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University has analysed the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US – some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive – and concluded that they present a highly misleading view of the science of intelligence. Russell T. Warne and his co-authors found that three-quarters of the books contain inaccuracies; that the books give disproportionate coverage to unsupported theories … and nearly 80 per cent contain logical fallacies in their discussions of the topic … The most common inaccuracy (appearing in nearly half the books) was that intelligence tests are biased against particular groups or individuals … Other common inaccuracies included promotion of the idea that it is not possible to measure intelligence in a meaningful way …
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U.S. No Longer Dominant Power in Western Pacific, Australian Study Finds
P. D. Shinkman - US News
The U.S. is no longer the dominant power in the western Pacific and would struggle to win a conflict against China, according to a new study from an Australian institute. A combination of overly stretched budgets, underprepared forces and outdated thinking among war planners would undercut America’s ability to defeat China, particularly as Beijing invests heavily in particular aspects of its military, a study from the University of Sidney’s United States Studies Centre states. It speculates the U.S. could lose a war before it starts … Meeting the challenge will require hard choices that leaders in the U.S. may be unwilling or unable to make, they write, particularly if Washington continues to see itself as the global guarantor of “an expansive liberal order.”
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In the 1930s, many English families sent their daughters to finishing school in Nazi Germany. Rachel Johnson, sister of the London mayor, interviewed several for her most recent book. / … They said: “We had the best time of our lives.” They felt fantastic being in Germany during the Third Reich. “It was the highlight of my life,” one told me. To them, it was a rich experience, because England was very stuffy at that time — lots of unemployment, terrible food and nasty weather. In Bavaria they had the crisp mountain air, a healthy life, the opera, the mountains and handsome Germans in uniform. They couldn’t believe their luck! No chaperons, no parents. They had everything, including sex.
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How Hitler Revived Germany's Economy
Mark Weber – Video
Immediately after taking power, Hitler and his new government launched ambitious programs to deal with the massive unemployment and economic paralysis of the Great Depression. These innovative and comprehensive policies proved remarkably successful. Within three years unemployment was banished and Germany’s economy was booming. As historian Mark Weber explains here, this remarkable achievement is little known and rarely acknowledged. He also takes a look at the Third Reich’s economic and taxation policies, and their impact on people’s lives, as well as the ideology and social-economic principles on which they were based.
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Hitler and the Third Reich
Anthony M. Ludovici – English Review (1936)
… Something akin to a new religious zeal has spread throughout the land, making the people wistful, but strangely light-hearted and confident in their earnestness. It is as if they had been not only raised from the dust, but also shown a star or ball of fire which will lead them to the fulfilment of their destiny … The fact that Germany is to-day stirred by a purpose super-personal and therefore religious, is beyond question … For to-day the sound in health and mind are the honoured of the German nation and, as the guarantors of a desirable posterity, are granted many privileges. Although to us over here this cannot help seeming slightly odd, it is, of course, the most elementary wisdom.
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There Are No Nostalgic Nazi Memorials
Susan Neiman – The Atlantic
… As an American Jew from the South who has lived in Berlin for decades, I’ve been asked whether Americans, in contemplating a plantation home, Confederate statue, or some other monument to our nation’s slave past, should emulate the way Germans treat Nazi memorials. To which I respond: There aren’t any. Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them … The deliberate national penance that most Germans now take for granted offers a striking contrast with the ways Americans have confronted our own national crimes … Not everyone seeking to preserve symbols of the Confederacy is a Nazi. But the Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause makes plain: Anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for Nazi values.