A week or so ago I had come across an interview with Enoch Powell, he of the famous “rivers of blood” speech given in 1968. I’d heard of Powell quite a while before that, and had read the famous speech for which he became a pariah (although a hero to some) by warning about the growing pace of immigration to Britain from third-world countries that were part of the British Commonwealth. The term “rivers of blood” came from this quote from the speech:

Here [referring to a proposed anti-discrimination law] is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

Because the speech was made in 1968, the specter he was raising was of the widespread race riots and unrest in the US at the time.

Here’s more from the 1968 speech that stirred so much controversy [emphasis mine]:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen. …

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine. …

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

That was followed by a quote about Sikhs not assimilating but rather wanting to be granted “special rights”; that reminds me, on reading it now, of the killing of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa, the knife-carrying Sikh.

Powell’s speech certainly describes with some accuracy trends which have only increased. He seems to have foreseen not only the growth of third-world immigration to Britain, but describes the phenomenon of the reaction of native British people feeling like third-class citizens, the desire of the immigrant groups for power, and the fear of reprisals and censorship native Britishers felt for speaking out against the immigrant influx. These are not recent trends; they were already present over fifty years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I’d come across some interviews with Enoch Powell from the 1960s and 1970s in which he further discussed the reasoning in Britain of those encouraging immigration at the time. But when I tried to find one interview in particular just now I couldn’t locate it, although I’ll continue to look. Instead, I found the following fascinating segment from a 1971 Dick Cavett Show in which Powell and Jonathan Miller debate the two sides of the issue. It is absolutely fascinating how Powell states the nativist side and Miller states the globalist side, the same battle that goes on today. Note also how eloquent they both are, although I think Powell is the more impressive in that regard:

That clip makes me sad. It not only shows how long these problems have been with us and how long the sides have been at loggerheads, but it also shows how public discourse has degenerated over the years.

[NOTE: I’ll post the other Powell video – the one I was originally searching for – if I find it.]

The post Enoch Powell: on immigration to Britain appeared first on The New Neo.

Today is the eighty-second anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII that led to Western Europe’s liberation.

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And although until a while ago I still thought that we would probably be up to the task, I now have my doubts. It would depend on the administration in charge. And we pretty much know our press would fail us.

About forty-eight years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

.

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (at least, while under the aegis of a Republican administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred.

[NOTE: I’ve read that there’s a new movie out about Eisenhower and D-Day, entitled Pressure. Has anyone seen it?]

The post D-Day: 82 years after appeared first on The New Neo.

Cultural illiteracy.

Not knowing anything about Chu other than what I said above, I assumed that perhaps she hadn’t been educated in the US, which might account for the lacuna in her knowledge of history. But I discovered that she was born, raise, and educated in this country, and that her father was a WWII veteran:

Chu was born in Los Angeles as the second of four children to May Lin and Judson Chu. Judson was born in Chico, California, to Chinese parents from Jiangmen, Guangdong and served during World War II in the 10th Army Corps in Okinawa. He brought over his wife May from his ancestral home in Xinhui County as a war bride in 1948.

Chu grew up in South Los Angeles, near 62nd Street and Normandie Avenue, until her early teen years, when the family moved to the Bay Area. She graduated Buchser High School in Santa Clara, California in 1970.

In 1974, Chu earned a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1979, she earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology of Alliant International University’s Los Angeles campus.

She’s been in Congress since 2009. And since Chu is 72 years old, she also doesn’t have the excuse of having been educated recently, when history has mostly been jettisoned in favor of wokeness. And yet there is that abysmal ignorance.

Nor does Chu say something like, “I know, it’s on the tip of my tongue but I forgot for the moment.” That would be more acceptable. But no; she merely says “I don’t know” and proceeds with her prepared talking points.

The post And now, presenting Congress member Judy Chu appeared first on The New Neo.

So, what will happen in Iran – to Iran – this evening?

Trump has issued an ultimatum, threatening various things such as that “a whole civilization will die”:

Pakistan, which is an intermediary between the U.S. and Iran, asked for a two-week delay in escalating attacks on Iran.

President Donald Trump sharply ramped up his threats against Iran on Tuesday, warning “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless a deal is struck.

The White House will respond to Pakistan’s request, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The left is extremely incensed at Trump’s threat, putting out the unified message that he’s insane.

Current Islamophile Tucker Carlson says Trump’s going to nuke Iran (despite Carlson himself having advocated nuking Iran not so very long ago), and also says that Trump is trying to “eradicate” Christianity by rescuing the downed airman on Easter [Ace has corrected his report to say that Carlson’s assertion about Trump and Easter was due to Trump’s threatening tweet using the F-word on Easter]. Read those links; it’s so far gone it’s hard to believe – and even if 99% of Carlson’s audience is bots and foreign Muslims, what he’s saying is horrendous and it does also reach many people in the US although it’s impossible to say how many.

I kid you not about his message:

Desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.

What is this “civilization” of which Trump writes? Those who think Trump is insane – or want to make others think Trump is insane – think it’s the Iranian people, although that makes no sense. I assume it’s his usual hyperbole, and that he means the mullahtocracy that’s been in control of that country for nearly half a century. But he likes to keep people guessing and seem like a wild man; whether that will work to his benefit in this case I simply don’t know.

And no, it’s not a war crime to bomb bridges and power plants – although there’s no dearth of leftist “experts” who are willing to say it is.

As for the Iranian regime, it’s threatened to destroy the economy of the Gulf States and the economy of the world by holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage.The leaders, past and present (if there are any now) do not care if there’s a great deal of destruction. It is part of their religious belief that this is necessary for the coming of the Mahdi. They don’t mind how much their own people suffer, but they count on the US and Israel to spare the people and the most important infrastructure for the people.

And that’s why they have asked their young people to surround power plants to “protect” them:

Iranian officials on Tuesday urged their people to form human chains around power plants as the country faces a deadline set by President Trump to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or risk major strikes on civilian and energy infrastructure.

The regime called on “all young people, athletes, artists, students and university students and their professors” to protect power plants threatened by Trump, according to The Associated Press.

These are more or less the same groups of people the regime killed by the many thousands when they protested. It’s a win/win situation for the Iranian regime: either the US and Israel desist because of their own compassion for the people (a compassion the regime lacks), or the regime can claim war crimes if and when the people are killed by the US or Israel.

The West has stood for decades in an extremely difficult position regarding Iran: let them be, while they arm more and more and become more and more dangerous, until they feel strong enough to attack. Or attack them now, when the hour is already late in terms of their missiles and drones and uranium, and bear the criticism of the left and much of the world.

The Iranian regime are not Nazis. But they resemble them in at least two ways: hating Jews and wanting to destroy them, of course. And not caring about their own people in the end – in fact, in that respect, Hitler wanted to destroy his people as having been ultimately unworthy of the task he’d set for them. Ever hear of
Hitler’s Nero Decree?:

Even as the Third Reich he had once prophesied would last a thousand years crumbled all around him, Adolf Hitler desperately clung to his racist vision of the world. In March 1945, Allied forces poured over the Rhine River after the Americans captured the Ludendorff Bridge on March 7. On March 16, the German army’s last offensive of the war, Operation Spring Awakening in Hungary against the Red Army, collapsed. For the Führer the impending defeat proved that Germans were simply neither strong nor ruthless enough to do what was necessary to achieve victory. Deeming Germany a failure of a nation, Hitler prepared a decree that would seal the country’s collapse with catastrophic finality. …

… Speer reported the German economy could only hold out another four to eight weeks. That was the absolute limit for the Third Reich’s war effort. In the text, Speer went on to urge Hitler to concentrate on doing everything possible for the country’s population to ensure their survival.Unmoved, Hitler did not yield an inch. In Gitta Sereny’s biography of Speer, Hitler is quoted as responding, “it is not necessary to worry about their [the German people’s] needs for elemental survival.” He stunned his Armaments Minister, accustomed to the Führer’s fulminations against the “inferior” peoples of the Soviet Union, by declaring “the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East.” On March 19, Hitler then promulgated a special decree titled “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory.” Otherwise remembered as the “Scorched Earth Decree” or “Nero Decree,” for the brutal Roman Emperor Nero (ruled 54-68 C.E.), the order mandated the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure. …

The order applied to all production, communication, and transportation facilities. Railroads, bridges, communication lines, docks, public utilities, factories and mines were to be demolished.

Speer didn’t carry it out, however. But the impulse was there.

I don’t predict that the mullahtocracy will do this to the Iranian people – although if they really feel they are defeated, I bet they wouldn’t mind in the least. Then again, to accomplish their goals, they need something short of utter destruction.

UPATE 7:05 PM:

I started out this post with a link to something that mentioned Pakistan’s suggestion of a 2-week ceasefire, and that Trump’s press secretary had said that the White House will respond to Pakistan’s request. Sure enough, this announcement just came out a few minutes ago:

The U.S. has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran proposed by Pakistan, President Trump said Tuesday night.

The big picture: The Pakistani proposal, which came hours before Trump’s deadline to launch massive strikes if no deal was reached, involves a pause on Trump’s threat and a commitment from Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz for two weeks.

Fancy that. He got what he wanted – if they comply. And if they don’t, he can always carry out his threat.

I seem to recall that Trump’s art of the deal involves always being willing to walk away.

And I continue to wonder with whom these negotiations are happening – negotiations the regime initially denied were taking place.

The post The Iranian regime exploits our compassion for the Iranian people – a compassion the regime lacks appeared first on The New Neo.

The public shaming over that leftist labor hero, the late United Farm Workers Union co-founder César Chávez, has continued apace as detestable allegations of child sexual abuse and even rape have been making the rounds following a New York Times exposé published on Wednesday.

The accusations by his former ally, Dolores Huerta, are horrific and have caused celebrations of the planned March 31st “César Chávez Day” in multiple states to be altered or canceled outright.

I admit to being somewhat puzzled as to why this is being revealed now. Whether it’s true or not is unknown and will almost certainly never be known, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s probably true. Even though one might have thought these women would have come out with their stories back when MeToo had its heyday, the delay can be at least partly explained by Chavez’s longtime status as leftist icon. Who wants to point out his feet of clay?

I’ve read several people on the right who said that Chavez’s cancellation comes now because of his history of being against illegal immigration. That’s his real crime against the left of today, and the reason he’s being exposed. I think that’s as good an explanation as any and probably better than most. But it’s not as though his anti-illegals position has been a secret all this time. From 2015:

For every positive image of Chavez, though, there’s another one that paints a different picture, as Miriam Pawel brings to light in her meticulously researched, NEH-funded biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez. The union organizer was vehemently opposed to undocumented immigrant workers, looked with disdain upon the material comforts his own union members yearned for, and slipped into despotic isolation at his California mountain compound, La Paz, purging the UFW of many of his closest friends, allies, and mentors.

Well, now they’re purging him.

The post MeToo has come for Cesar Chavez, rather late in the game appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

The post President’s Day poetry appeared first on The New Neo.

His actual birthday, that is.

When I was a child, Lincoln had a birthday all his own. Nowadays he’s lumped in with other presidents. And who knows where he’ll be in the future?

When I was a child, Lincoln also fascinated me more than any other president. One reason was a superficial one: he was just about the strangest-looking president ever (see this). Another was his eloquence, and a third was his sense of humor.

Which brings us to a series of Lincoln quotes. This first one seems especially apropos today:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

More:

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.

I hope this prediction is correct:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

And of course, one of the most famous:

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

The post Today is Lincoln’s birthday appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve written many many posts on the subject of the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in its wake. You can find them here, and I’d like to call particular attention to this post. In it, I quote the Bugliosi book on the subject, Reclaiming History, which can be found online here:

It is remarkable that conspiracy theorists can believe that groups like the CIA, military-industrial complex, and FBI would murder the president, but cannot accept the likelihood, even the possibility, that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act, despite the fact that there is a ton of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy, and not an ounce showing that any of these groups had anything to do with the assassination.

It is further remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren’t troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence. More importantly, there is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world—you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera—you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you…

…[T]he evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80% of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt…

The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald’s guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the individual branches. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence.

Whenever I post about the assassination, people argue with me about my certainty that Oswald killed him and that he acted alone. It’s no surprise that this would occur, because the vast majority of Americans believe that it was a conspiracy of some sort. The most recent poll I could quickly find right now is a 2023 Gallup poll, but it says what most polls have said for many years: that a little less than a third of Americans believe that Oswald was the sole assassin. In fact, if you look at this chart, there have been times when even fewer Americans have believed that:

I’m harping on this because I’ve long thought that this strain of American life is damaging. No, I don’t automatically trust the government – that would be absurd. But I do try to look at evidence and to use logic, realizing that absolute and complete certainty is never possible.

And of course, it’s possible to ignore the evidence by saying it’s manufactured, which already presupposes the existence of a conspiracy (making up false evidence), further solidifies that belief, and then uses the resultant state of mind in the populace to plant an idea about who is really to blame.

The ways in which I’ve seen this play out in recent years are many. Russiagate was a conspiracy theory fostered by actual conspiracists on the left to hurt the right, and is believed to this day by an enormous number of Democrats. The uncovering of the perpetrators of the conspiracy theory, and attempts to describe what happened, is itself called a conspiracy theory. Likewise, we indeed were told lies about COVID, and they were damaging, but they also eroded trust so much that now people believe all sorts of things connected with the vaccine in the absence of actual evidence or through misrepresentation and/or misinterpretation of actual evidence (I’ve written a great deal about that, too; for example, here, here, and here).

There are other examples, but the most recent one is the ancient conspiracy theory about Jews running the world and being responsible for everything that’s bad. It has the appeal of being simple, and there are those on left and right busily engaged in spreading the word. Many times recently I’ve heard Candace Owens – who has gazillions of devoted followers and does indeed merit the title “influencer” – reference the JFK assassination, tie it to Kirk’s assassination, and accuse just about everyone of killing Kirk but mostly the Jews/Israelis. She explicitly says Israel killed JFK, and doesn’t even seem to feel the need to offer any evidence whatsoever, because her audience is so ready to believe anything about the killing of Kennedy.

The JFK assassination functions in the US as the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, and it’s a very useful one indeed to those who would spread Jew-hatred – or any other hatred or distrust.

The post Today is the 62nd anniversary of the JFK assassination appeared first on The New Neo.

He had such serious heart problems even as a youngish man (starting at age 37) that I never thought he’d make it through Bush’s presidency. Yet he made it to 84, courtesy of a 2012 heart transplant along the way.

RIP.

The post Dick Cheney dies at 84 appeared first on The New Neo.

The stock of Christopher Columbus has fallen in recent years as a result of the general campaign on the part of the left by figures such as Howard Zinn to emphasize the bad in American history and to elevate native Americans as uniformly good in comparison, as well as specific campaigns to make people more aware of the bad things white people of yore such as Columbus actually did. There was a Marxian slant because Columbus was also considered the man who brought capitalistic greed to this hemisphere.

The Columbus Day battle is also—although most people may not realize this—a struggle between two ethnic identity groups: native Americans and Italians, the latter being the people who spearheaded so much of the recognition of Columbus in this country in the first place. And the Ku Klux Klan had a role, as well.

You can read some of this Columbus Day history in this National Review article in which Jennifer C. Braceras describes the situation [emphasis mine]:

Here, in the United States, the anti-Columbus movement was sparked by white supremacists nearly 100 years ago. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan promoted negative characterizations of Columbus in order to vilify Catholics and immigrants, many of whom celebrated Columbus not only as a source of ethnic and religious pride but also as a symbol of the free and diverse society that resulted from the European presence here. The Klan tried to prevent the erection of monuments to the Great Navigator, burned crosses in opposition to efforts to honor him, and argued that commemorations of his voyage were part of a papal plot. Rather than honor a Catholic explorer from the Mediterranean, Klansmen proposed honoring the Norseman Leif Eriksson as discoverer of the New World and a symbol of white pride.

It’s not just the left that can play the identity game, or get incensed about statues:

In the 1920s, from coast to coast, members of the Ku Klux Klan opposed Columbus. In Richmond, they tried to stop the erection of a Columbus monument. In Pennsylvania, they burned fiery crosses to threaten those celebrating Columbus. The Klan newspaper, The American Standard, attacked honoring Columbus – on the basis that a holiday for him was some sort of papal plot.

The Klan was no fan of Columbus. He stood athwart their nativist desire for a country pure in its Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origins.

What Americans have forgotten is that white supremacy has historically sought not only the denigration of African-Americans and Jews but also of Catholics – and among them Hispanics – ascribing to the latter all manner of harmful stereotypes as brutal criminals and sexual predators. This narrative is known throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in academic circles as the “Black Legend.”

Historian Philip Wayne Powell wrote of this smear campaign: “The basic premise of the Black Legend is that Spaniards have shown themselves, historically, to be uniquely cruel, bigoted, tyrannical, obscurantist, lazy, fanatical, greedy, and treacherous; that is, that they differ so much from other peoples in these traits that Spaniards and Spanish history must be viewed and understood in terms not ordinarily used in describing and interpreting other peoples.”…

In the rush to judge and deface, few remember that it was Spain that forbade slavery of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens. Fewer still remember that Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing – even executing – those who had abused Native Americans. And almost no one recalls that it was not Columbus but the exaggerating zealot Bartolome De Las Casas, who is most often cited in smearing Spanish exploration and with it Columbus, who was the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.

When I first wrote a draft for this post, I hadn’t yet seen those articles I just quoted and I was doing my own research on Columbus. My goal was to determine (as best I could) the truth about what Columbus actually had done. I encountered the confusing information these quotes allude to—tales of Columbus’ devotion to slavery and his stand against it, discussions of whether the natives Columbus brought back to Spain were actually slaves or not, talk of the vicious violence of Columbus’ men and the reasons they gave for whatever violence did occur.

I also could not help but note that most of the tales of the awfulness of Columbus and the Spaniards came from one person, the aforementioned Bartolome de las Casas. Reading some excerpts from his work, I felt the buzz of possible propaganda. For example, just about everyone has agreed that a great deal of native American suffering was the result of the diseases that came from the European contact and for which the natives had no natural defenses; this is really not disputed. But de las Casas doesn’t seem to even mention it in passages where it would have been highly appropriate to have done so.

I refer to quotes such as this:

Among reasons for this criticism [of Columbus] is the treatment and disappearance of the native Taino people of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton. The people disappeared rapidly after contact with the Spanish because of overwork and the first pandemic of European diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. De las Casas records that when he first came to Hispaniola in 1508, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it….”

‘War slavery, and the mines”—shouldn’t “disease” or “pestilence” be in there somewhere, too? And it also occurred to me that de las Casas, as a one-time supporter of slavery in the Americas, may have been writing to try to frantically expiate his own feelings of guilt. So I independently came to the conclusion that de las Casas might have been the Howard Zinn of his day, only with a different philosophy and different motives. And, since de las Casas appears to be practically the only chronicler of what happened between the Spaniards (plus the Italian Columbus) and the natives—except the Spanish themselves—I found it impossible to tell who was telling the truth and who either lying or exaggerating.

For each side, a certain amount of self-interest seems to have been involved. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in-between? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

At the time all of this happened, slavery was common all over the world, to different degrees and with different details. Columbus’ opening up of the New World to the Old enabled slavery to traverse oceans, which was a great evil. But even many of the indigenous people in the Americas whom Columbus had “discovered” (although apparently not the specific cultures he personally encountered there) had the practice of enslaving people they captured in war.

Note also this observation on the Arawaks, made by Columbus, writing in his journal on October 12, 1492 (the first Columbus Day, as it were) [emphasis mine]:

Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language.”

When trying to determine the truth of what actually happened between Columbus and the natives, one thing is certain: it ended up with a lot of death and destruction for the natives, and many of the early Spanish didn’t exactly flourish in the New World themselves although they did significantly better. Also from Wiki [emphasis mine]:

The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus, which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe. Disease played a significant role in the destruction of the natives. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1500 colonists who accompanied Columbus’s second expedition in 1493. And by the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers. When the first pandemic finally struck in 1519 it wiped out much of the remaining native population.

If the encomienda system did in fact resemble feudalism in Europe, then the Spaniards only did to the Tainos what Europe’s elite did and were still doing to its peasants at the time, and although that is bondage it’s not slavery.

Now for a little more about the “Black Legend“:

A testimony of the time accuses Columbus of brutality against the natives and forced labor. Las Casas, son of the merchant Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus’s treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies. The writings of Las Casas are seen by some historians as exaggerated and biased. Their anti-Spanish sentiment was used by writers of Spain’s rivals as a convenient basis for the Black Legend historiography. They were already used in Flemish anti-Spanish propaganda during the Eighty Years’ War. Today the degree to which Las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish colonization represent a reasonable or wildly exaggerated picture is still debated among some scholars. For example, historian Lewis Hanke considers Las Casas to have exaggerated the atrocities in his accounts and thereby contributed to the Black Legend propaganda. Historian Benjamin Keen on the other hand found them likely to be more or less accurate. In Charles Gibson’s 1964 monograph The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, the first comprehensive study of the documentary sources of relations between Indians and Spaniards in New Spain (colonial Mexico), he concludes that the Black Legend builds upon the record of deliberate sadism. It flourishes in an atmosphere of indignation which removes the issue from the category of objective understanding. It is insufficient in its understanding of institutions of colonial history.”

This historical ill-treatment of Amerindians, common in many European colonies in the Americas, was used as propaganda in works of competing European powers to create slander and animosity against the Spanish Empire. The work of Las Casas was first cited in English with the 1583 publication The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England was preparing for war against Spain in the Netherlands. The biased use of such works, including the distortion or exaggeration of their contents, is part of the anti-Spanish historical propaganda or Black Legend.

From the perspective of history and the colonization of the Americas, all European powers that colonized the Americas, such as England, Portugal, the Netherlands and others, were guilty of the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples.

One of my favorite phrases in the above quote is “removes the issue from the category of objective understanding.” This issue has certainly been “removed”—at least for now—from the category of my objective understanding, except that I am firmly convinced that each side was motivated greatly by the need to create effective propaganda in what I think can be rightly called a case of competing “narratives.”

Or, as Allan Bloom once put it many decades ago:

You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings – I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy – up till now.

Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves – how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past. Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.

Happy Columbus Day!

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