Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:

… [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general.

Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.

A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:

This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.

But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:

When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

All of which need to be destroyed.

I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals.

[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.

Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]

The post You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you appeared first on The New Neo.

Offers of up to $3,000 per person have helped spur more than 200,000 migrants to “self-deport” from the U.S. — but about half made the move while locked up in detention centers, according to a report Tuesday.

The voluntary mass exodus started slowly, with only about 24,000 people signing up during the six months after the Department of Homeland Security launched the widely advertised program in May 2025, Axios said, citing internal agency data.

But White House officials — including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — pressured DHS to ramp up the operation, called Project Homecoming, an unidentified source told Axios.

“They wanted like thousands pushed through on a daily basis, and we were putting through like dozens,” the source said.

Self-deportation actually wasn’t uncommon in the much more distant past – a past that included a lack of government-funded welfare for immigrants. It was sink or swim, except for voluntary charities which included help from religious and/or ethnic communities.

Later, there were requirements that to come here legally through the family-based program, an immigrant’s relatives (or other sponsors in certain cases) who were already here legally were required to document that they have the funds to help support the immigrant if need be. This still occurs for those particular programs for legal immigrants, but if you look at the link you’ll see there are many circumstances where the immigrants are nevertheless eligible for government aid.

And today, apparently 61% of households in the US headed by an illegal immigrant receive means-tested government aid of some type. Here are some figures:

Roughly half of all immigrant-headed households in the U.S. use welfare — and among illegal immigrant homes in particular, it’s even higher, at 61%, according to a new study Wednesday that argues that’s another reason to enforce immigration laws.

By comparison, just 37% of U.S.-born households use welfare, the Center for Immigration Studies calculated, based on 2024 Census Bureau data.

The numbers challenge the notion that illegal immigrants can’t get assistance.

Do you remember back in 2012 when Mitt Romney talked about self-deportation of illegal aliens, and he was criticized for it?:

Governor Romney: “Well the answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they could do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”

Will this work? Unlikely. Lessons from Mexican migrants, which comprise more than half of the unauthorized population and, the country closest and presumably the least costly for “self-deportation,” suggest otherwise. Studies show that during the 1970s and early 1980s, roughly one of every two migrants returned home within a year – and seventy-five percent left within two years – meaning most did in fact “self-deport.” The vast majority of Mexicans came not to settle, but to earn enough money to better their and their families’ lives at home. But this pattern – called circular migration by scholars – starting changing in the late 1980s (also when the United States began hardening its southern border). Today, fewer than one in ten immigrants return each year to Mexico. Thirty odd years ago Romney’s policy of self-deportation occurred regularly, today it does not.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the phenomenon of self-deportation was called “return migration” and the numbers were significant. Here’s some data (the article was written in 2017):

Thirty million migrants moved from Europe to the United States during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913). Yet one in three of these arrivals eventually returned to Europe, a rate of return migration that is even higher than today.

[A personal note: one of my relatives who came here in the first years of the 20th century had trouble making it in the US and was unhappy here. He had come from Russia prior to the revolution and was so hopeful about the possibilities of life under Communism that he returned to the USSR some time during the 1920s. A bad bet, it turns out. He was still alive when I was a child, and my (Communist) uncle, who lived near us, used to periodically visit the USSR, bringing back a ton of boring slides that we were forced to politely watch. My uncle’s trips to the USSR included visiting this self-deported cousin or whatever he was. My uncle bought him many things to make his life easier, because he was living a subsistence existence, whereas my uncle had amassed quite a cozy nest egg living under evil capitalism.]

The post The art of the self-deportation deal appeared first on The New Neo.

First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.” It has a very specific origin date and a founder: the date is 610 CE. So it’s 1,416 years old.

Yes, there are certainly passages in the Koran that show hatred of Jews. But no, there wasn’t any “war” – and one very basic reason is that for almost all of those years Islam has been in existence, right up till 1948, Jews had no army and couldn’t fight wars. They certainly were the victims of violence, but that violence was not mainly at the hands of Muslims; more of it occurred in Christian lands, and it was more in the nature of sporadic massacres than formal wars. The Holocaust was a very special case in which there was an attempt by Nazis (with the cooperation of many others) to eradicate the Jews of Europe and it was during a war, but that was not a Muslim endeavor.

But to go back to the origins of Islam – Islam is a religion that claims to spring from Judaism and Christianity in that it incorporates some elements of each, but in a different way, and it believes it superceded and ought to replace both worldwide. Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion (Luther had a similar reactoin – he thought he could convert the Jews and when they said no he turned on them with vicious hatred). There are definitely some hadiths that are anti-Jewish.

However, over the centuries, Islamic countries actually “tolerated” their Jews – and they had many many Jews within their borders. Attitudes varied over the years, but as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres. But the massacres of Jews in Muslim lands tended to kill fewer than the ones in Christian lands for many years during ancient and medieval times. And as far as I can tell, Muslim countries did not expel their Jews, unlike many European Christian countries who periodically did so over the centuries. Therefore, Muslim countries often had stable Jewish communities that had lasted for well over a thousand years.

Of course, Jews didn’t have a country until 1948. However, starting a couple of decades before that, the Nazis began to influence Arab leaders in particular to hate Jews in the Nazi-esque way. That’s when the more serious trouble began to rev up for Jews in those lands. Google AI has a nice summary of what happened:

Prior to the 1930s, antisemitism in the Arab world was primarily social and religious, but the rise of Nazism and the intensification of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine fueled a toxic cultural fusion of European conspiracy theories and radicalized local prejudices.

Ideological Penetration: European antisemitic literature, notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, began circulating in the Arab world in the 1920s and 1930s.

Strategic Alliance: Following the 1937 British Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, Nazi Germany reversed its earlier policy and began actively supporting Arab opposition forces. Germany supplied money and arms to radical Arab leaders to undermine British colonial control and check Jewish influence in the Middle East.

Anti-Zionist Mobilization: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, received ideological and financial assistance from Nazi Germany, shifting from a primarily religious group to a heavily mobilized, anti-Zionist, and vehemently anti-Jewish political force.

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the most prominent Arab leader to collaborate with the Axis powers.

Al-Husayni utilized his overarching religious authority to fuse traditional Islamic anti-Jewish sentiments with modern European totalitarianism.

He sought to secure Axis approval to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine, eventually broadcasting Nazi-sponsored, anti-Allied, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East during World War II.

The Nazis circumvented the non-Aryan prejudices in their ideology by framing the conflict strictly against “International Jewry,” characterizing it as the shared enemy of both the German state and the Arab peoples.

Propagandists often invoked selective readings of the Qur’an and linked them to Nazi ideology to frame Zionism as an existential threat to Islam and Arabs.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration by Britain, prior to that, also fanned the flames of Arab anger because it promised the Jews a homeland. There were several massacres as a result of these forces, years before Israel became a country (see this, for example).

These days, half of Israel consists either of Jewish refugees from Arab and North African Muslim countries or their descendants. Many fled during the 1940s and 1950s till the 1970s. Some came to this country as well. As far as I know they never received any compensation. Until that period, they had lived in Muslim lands with some problems, but nothing like what was happening in the 20th century.

Also from Google AI:

Approximately 600,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa to settle in the State of Israel, primarily between 1948 and the early 1970s.

In total, an estimated 850,000 to 900,000 Jews left the Islamic world during this period, with the remaining refugees migrating to France, the United States, and other Western countries. This mass displacement was largely the result of escalating persecution, state-sponsored expropriation, and anti-Jewish violence following the establishment of Israel.

I often wonder how widely any of these facts are known. My sense is: not widely at all. And so the “cycle of war for thousands of years” myth goes on.

The post Have Muslims and Jews been “at war” for “thousands of years”? appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the video interview between Coleman Hughes and Rothman:

Here’s a part that especially caught my attention. It’s about six minutes long. The subject is the heyday of anarchist attacks a hundred or so years ago. Most if not all of us have heard of Sacco and Vanzetti and the disagreements about whether they were innocent or guilty, and that’s such a huge topic I’m not going to tackle it here. Suffice to say that two things are known: they were anarchists, and it was a time of violence in the US by anarchists who were mostly Italian:

My curiosity was piqued by this. Now, Italian anarchists of the early 20th century are not closely analogous to Islamic terrorists or leftist terrorists of the 1960s-1970s or the present day (despite the echoes in the name “Luigi Mangione”), but they share some characteristics such as the desire to destroy the current order through violence. How did the US actually deal with the problem a hundred years ago? Well, there was what’s known as the First Red Scare:

The First Red Scare in the United States, occurring from 1917 to 1920, was a period of intense public fear and anxiety regarding the perceived rise of communist and socialist ideologies. This era was marked by increased labor activism, immigration, and industrialization. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which saw the overthrow of the tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks, fueled fears of a similar uprising in the U.S. A. Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General, initiated a series of raids, known as the Palmer Raids, targeting foreign-born individuals suspected of radical leftist sympathies. These raids, often criticized for their questionable legality and brutality, failed to uncover evidence of a widespread conspiracy, and public concern waned by 1920 when predicted revolutionary actions did not materialize.

Some of the information you can find online ascribes fear of Italian anarchists to xenophobia and bigotry and glosses over the very real and radical destructive goals of the anarchists (see this Boston Public Library site for an example). Why did anarchy take such root among Italians? Here’s a short summary:

From the last third of the 19th century until soon after the turn of the 20th century, Italy (with the exception of Spain) was the site of Europe’s largest anarchist movement. Mikhail Bakunin, the progenitor of modern anarchism, first found widespread support in Italy, and, while there, from 1863 to 1867, he published his seminal writings, which remain the framework for anti-organizational, libertarian anarchism. Italian intellectuals, notably Carlo Pisacane and Errico Malatesta, contributed to the development of anarchist theory. In the United States, anarchism persisted longer and had more effect in the Italian immigrant community than elsewhere. Most significantly, it challenged (for a time successfully) Fascist hegemony in the multitudinous Little Italys where the vast majority of Italian Americans resided.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a largely Italian community, and by then there wasn’t a trace – to be seen by me, anyway – of either anarchism or Fascism. But earlier, apparently, things were different. More here:

Galleanists [anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani] were primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920. Instances included mail bombs to business and government officials and the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which killed 38 people. In effect, however, none of the Galleanisti bombs hit their targets: capitalists, police, or judges. Their casualties were themselves and bystanders. Their bombing methods borrowed from the Italian Black Hand extortion rackets, in which the attacker would write a threat of future violence and place bombs in doorways. These extortionists adapted fireworks, a popular Italian industry, with shrapnel or stolen dynamite from construction jobs. Anarchists, however, lacked the community experience with high explosives and thus overestimated their ability to create working bombs and underestimated their own risk.

New York City Galleanisti formed the Bresci Circle in honor of Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist assassin of Umberto I of Italy. By 1914, almost 600 members met regularly at a rundown house in East Harlem. A plot to bomb the Rockefellers increased police interest in the group.

Several months after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre that had incensed Galleanisti, a group of anarchists carried a bomb to the Tarrytown estate of the Ludlow coal mine owner, John D. Rockefeller, in July 1914. They miscalculated, both in failing to trigger the device and since Rockefeller was then out of town. A member of the Circle was arrested[8] and the bomb, which they carried to an East Harlem tenement near the Circle’s headquarters, exploded, demolishing half of the building and killing three anarchists.

That’s just the tip of a pretty large iceberg; also don’t forget that in 1901 President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, although not an Italian one:

[The assassin] Czolgosz had lost his job during the economic Panic of 1893 and turned to anarchism, a political philosophy adhered to by contemporary assassins of foreign leaders. He regarded McKinley as a symbol of oppression and was convinced that it was his duty as an anarchist to kill him. He was unable to get near the president during an earlier visit, but he shot him twice as McKinley reached to shake his hand in the reception line …

Another event in the series was this:

On June 2, 1919, a militant anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci blew up the front of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C.—and himself up in the process when the bomb exploded too early.

A young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street, were also shaken by the blast.

The bombing was just one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide.

About a month earlier, radicals had also mailed bombs to the mayor of Seattle and a U.S. Senator, blowing the hands off the senator’s domestic worker. The next day, a postal worker in New York City intercepted 16 more packages addressed to political and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller.

One way the US dealt with the problem was mass roundups and deportation:

[Attorney General] Palmer created a small division to gather intelligence on the radical threat and placed a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized every scrap of intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. …

…[T]he Department of Justice began arresting, under recently passed laws like the Sedition Act, suspected radicals and foreigners identified by Hoover’s group, including well-known leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In December, with much public fanfare, a number of radicals were put on a ship dubbed the “Red Ark” or “Soviet Ark” by the press and deported to Russia.

At this point, though, politics, inexperience, and overreaction got the better of Attorney General Palmer and his department. Hoover—with the encouragement of Palmer and the help of the Department of Labor—started planning a massive roundup of radicals.

By early January 1920, the plans were ready. The department organized simultaneous raids in major cities, with local police called on to arrest thousands of suspected anarchists. But the ensuing “Palmer Raids” turned into a nightmare, marked by poor communications, planning, and intelligence about who should be targeted and how many arrest warrants would be needed. The constitutionality of the entire operation was questioned, and Palmer and Hoover were roundly criticized for the plan and for their overzealous domestic security efforts.

You can find a longer discussion here with a lot more details. The most important part, I think, is this:

The people who were arrested during the Palmer Raids were picked up not because of anything they had done but because of what they might do. In fact, many of those arrested and held for deportation did not believe in violence. The Union of Russian Workers had declared its belief in revolution when it was founded in 1907, but by 1919 it had largely become a social club whose members were unaware of its founding principles. The Department of Labor later canceled thousands of deportation orders issued to members of the Communist Labor Party on the grounds that it, too, was not a truly revolutionary party. In the end, the government succeeded in deporting only eight hundred of the more than four thousand people it had arrested.

Another thing that happened was a change in immigration policies. The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 (after McKinley’s assassination) prohibited anarchists from entering, although it doesn’t seem to have been all that effective. In 1924 far more restrictive immigration quotas were implemented and made it more difficult for newer populations such as Italians to come here.

Thus, the immediate threat died down. But the threat had been very real. And there remain lingering echoes of anarchism in today’s political violence. Are Antifa anarchists, for example? Some most definitely are, although today’s radical leftist terrorists are more of a mixed bag in terms of their philosophy. But although history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

ADDENDUM: Recently Rubio gave a speech on the subject of left-wing terrorism. Here it is:

The post The history of violent leftist anarchists in the US appeared first on The New Neo.

You might be surprised by the fact that, at least measured by official membership, the Democratic Socialists of America is a small group: 95,000 members. And yet in recent years they’ve certainly had a much greater influence on American politics than that would suggest.

The DSA has been around for close to fifty years, however, and before that elements existed that merged in 1982 to become the DSA. Socialists are famous for splitting and splintering, but these groups were able to merge.

By the way, a little digression here for levity’s sake:

Back to the DSA and its history. Note the later prominence of Bernie Sanders, whose leadership around 2015 marked a turning point for the organization:

Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president … DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.

Michael Harrington was a well-known professor, author, and leftist activist, and I recall his book on poverty in the US, The Other America, quite well. I was required to read it either in high school or college. No mention whatsoever was made at the time of the fact that he was a socialist. As Democratic Socialists go today, though, he was more mild and old-fashioned. Harrington hated Communism and really did think socialism could be accomplished without all the totalitarianism – or at least, had that hope. He supported Israel, too; how quaint!

But Harrington was responsible for promoting one idea that turns out to have been quite inspired: not to run as socialist (or Socialists), but to run as Democrats:

Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.”

That seed came from the failure of Socialists like Norman Thomas to achieve much at all in elections. Running as Democrats despite actually being socialists was the idea behind the name of the group, with the word “Democratic” coming first. The DSA also did not call itself a party even though it could have done so. It was not going to make Thomas’ mistake; it was going to back candidates but they would not be running as DSA members for the most part, and certainly not as Socialist Party members:

Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s. He considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign. He later endorsed Kennedy and said, “if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left”.

Some examples of early DSA members who got elected were the following:

Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins.

Dinkins was the NYC mayor who ran NY into the ground during the early 1990s. Who knew he was a DSA member? Not I. And, going to this Wiki page that purports to list prominent DSA members just from New York, I find – in addition to the obvious, like AOC and Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier – people such as Jerry Nadler, Jamaal Bowman, Linda Sarsour, and actor Wallace Shawn.

During the 1980s, the DSA backed Israel and Zionists. As you might expect, that is certainly no longer the case. They also supported leftist groups in Latin America, such as the Sandinistas.

The 1990s were difficult years for the DSA, due to Harrington’s death in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A younger group kept the movement alive, but barely – and of course leftism worked its way through academia, preparing the ground. It was during the Obama administration that the DSA had its resurgence (my guess is that there was an influx of money at that point, as well):

This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.

The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.

Those were the years when the modern DSA was coming of age. Then, with Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy in 2015-2016, it burst forth from its semi-cocoon. According to the way the DSA tells the story (at least, according to the DSA member writing the piece I’m quoting), it was the DSA pushing Sanders rather than the other way around:

In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd. …

That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.

As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.

I assume you know much of the rest of the story – for example, the election of the Squad, and recent victories such as that of Mamdani (some of that is in Part I). Nearly all these people ran as Democrats, with AOC’s defeat of an entrenched and powerful Democrat incumbent being an especially important turning point moment that showed the DSA the sort of victory that was now possible.

If you want to read the type of propaganda the DSA puts out at its website to woo prospective supporters, see this:

Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.

We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.

We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.

We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.

Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.

You can see the appeal.

The post DSA history: Part II appeared first on The New Neo.

James Lindsay is the interviewee:

The post Fascism explained appeared first on The New Neo.

Some of history’s greatest empires have devolved into genocidal lunacy—often with shocking compliance from their own people. What methods can create this madness?

In Manufacturing Delusion, acclaimed conservative commentator and former CIA officer Buck Sexton offers answers. Drawing on his intelligence experience, expertise in crowd psychology, knowledge of propaganda, and research into some of history’s darkest totalitarian chapters, he equips you to identify mind control tactics used to form compliant citizens. He explores the eight tactics of mass delusion through examining:

— How Stalin used Pavlovian mind games to establish absolute control
— How Chinese thought reform transformed opposition into terrorized pawns
— How Jihadist preachers replace shared humanity with weaponized fear

Using these examples and others, Sexton walks you through a history of controlling regimes and the methods they used to create passive citizens. More importantly, he shows you how some of the early stages of mass delusion have already occurred right here in the United States of America, on issues of public health, gender, and racial justice.

I heard about the book through this interview with the author. Although the book’s title only mentions the left, he says in the interview that he also sees it on the right (or the former right, or the pretend right – aka Carlson and Owens). However, that is still a fringe group on the right, whereas it’s a widespread and mainstreamed tool of the left.

Here’s the interview:

In the interview, Sexton also mentions a much older book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo. It was first published in 1956 and this is from Amazon’s description:

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov’s Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom — Our Mental Backbone

I think “our mental backbone” has gone rather squishy lately.

The reason I have highlighted the Meerloo book, though, is that – strangely enough – I read it when I was about ten years old. Did I understand it? Certainly not deeply. But the topic already interested me so much that I plowed through it.

How did it fall into my hands? My family had received a free and unsolicited catalogue in the mail from Marboro Books, which was (according to Google AI) “a notable discount book retailer and publisher founded in 1947, famous for selling remainders and overstock books at steep discounts through retail stores and mail-order catalogs, the chain was acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1979.” When the catalogue came, I pored over it, fascinated. It was the first time it occurred to me that I could order an adult book – and by “adult” I certainly don’t mean anything to do with sex.

My childhood interests were a portent of things to come as a blogger, because not only did I order that Meerloo book with my allowance, but I also ordered Charles MacKay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. That one was first published in 1841:

The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.

I think I’m going to order the Sexton book. I seem to have lost the others along the way, although I had them for a long long time.

The post Writing the book on mass indoctrination appeared first on The New Neo.

Last Tuesday was not the first time socialists have won elections in the US, but until recently most of those elections occurred close to a hundred years ago (see this). And for the most part the candidates ran as Socialists, not Democrats, and fit the mold of more conventional socialism as well.

More recently, Bernie Sanders ran as an Independent, beginning in the 1970s (first for mayor of Burlington, then for US Congress, than as US senator from Vermont), even though he is “self-described democratic socialist.”

The most recent pattern goes even further, because as far as I can tell all the DSA candidates who won last Tuesday (and Mamdani before them), and those of a few years ago (such as AOC), ran not as Socialists or Independents but as Democrats. They are also even more radical than the ones who came before. The approach is to choose a low-turnout primary election in a deep blue city and field an extremely radical candidate who will run as a Democrat and who is often chosen for physical attractiveness and youth. Often, although not always, the candidates themselves and/or their parents have apparent 3-world immigrant roots. The idea is to challenge the old guard and win, often with a tiny percentage of the voters, the win being possible because the turnout is so low.

I watched a video after the New York primaries the other day, and although I no longer can find that video it featured interviews with people in the districts where the DSA radicals won. They were flabbergasted and distressed, but all but one of them said they hadn’t voted. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask them why they had failed to vote, and so we can only speculate. But it was clear that they hadn’t quite realized what was going on until it was too late. They were all Democrats, by the way, and even moderately leftist. But they did not like these candidates.

Another thing that wasn’t asked of them was whether they would be willing to vote for these candidates’ Republican opponents in the general election. But I bet their answer would be “no” if they were to be honest.

As best I can recall, this sort of approach to fielding very radical candidates began with the Soros-backed DAs in blue areas. They slipped in somewhat under the radar in a similar way. Soros (and others; I doubt he was alone in this) had the rather brilliant idea of targeting low-turnout primaries for DA in places where the Democrat nominee invariably wins, and so the key to a victory was gaming the primary vote. As best I can tell, this tactic began in 2015 (the linked article was written in August 2016):

While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

Prior to that, as far as I know, most DA candidates were at least somewhat tough on crime, or campaigned that way. It was part of the concept of a DA: these were head prosecutors, after all. Voters weren’t especially energized and probably had no idea that this time was very very different. In fact, one difference was that – according to the article – prior to the 2015 push, 85% of DA candidates ran unopposed. Some of these Soros prosecutors ended being booted and some are still in place, but I wager that all of them have harmed their communities.

This Soros push was very well-researched and well-orchestrated. The people running the show are not at all dumb:

Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.

“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.

Ripe for the picking, obviously.

More:

… “I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”

Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)

“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”

They certainly succeeded in doing so.

That same approach was used in 2018 for one of the very first carefully-chosen DSA candidates for a federal position: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Young (29 at the time), energetic, and telegenic, she managed a primary victory in New York’s 14th Congressional district that was shocking, defeating Joe Crowley, a powerful (10-term) US House member who was the Democratic Caucus chair. This set the template for subsequent victories over Democratic establishment figures, one that expanded and which we see occurring today, especially in New York.

AOC was not alone, either. She was part of the “Squad,” who all entered Congress that year, the others being Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All women, all relatively young and energetic as well. The group has since expanded. Not all were or had been DSA-sponsored (Omar and Pressley were not), but they almost undoubtedly are supporters of the same or similar principles, and:

At least three Squad members provided fundraising and volunteer assistance during the other members’ campaigns.

It was AOC who gave the group the moniker “the Squad,” which has stuck.

I believe that it was with AOC that I first became aware of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) designation and realized that it had become a force with which Democrats would need to contend. It’s no accident some of this is happening in New York, either – as have the recent DSA victories of even more radical candidates. New York is the DSA’s headquarters.

And the earlier history of the DSA is the subject of a planned Part II.

The post Recent socialist wins in US elections – how it began: Part I appeared first on The New Neo.

World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 60–75 million deaths were caused by the conflict … This represents about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940. Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilian fatalities) are estimated at 50–56 million, with an additional estimated 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilian deaths totaled 50–55 million. Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war.

Those are estimates, of course. But we won’t quibble here; the point is that a lot of people died and a great many were civilians. Many civilians died from bombing that deliberately targeted civilians, or from killing fields and camps that performed mass murder of the premeditated kind. The US was spared those civilian deaths, but certainly saw the suffering that resulted from them abroad.

Atomic weapons targeting civilians ended the war with Japan. It is a paradox that the enormous number of civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably spared the deaths of many more by hastening the Japanese surrender (see my posts here).

By the time of the Vietnam War, our opponents had learned a thing or two. This was a guerilla war and a war of propaganda. The enemy read the US very well, and realized we didn’t have the stomach to go on and on and on. Also, it was as a result of the Vietnam War that the US draft ended and our military became all- volunteer, which removed most citizens from much knowledge of the calculations involved in fighting a war.

Later, instruments of war became more accurate. Our bombs are now relatively “smart,” certainly compared to in WWII or Vietnam. That doesn’t mean there is no collateral damage in which civilians die. But we don’t target civilians, and we have very little tolerance for the death of civilians even when it occurs by accident. These are not bad things; I think it’s a good thing to have compassion for civilians in war and even to try not to have many military casualties in war, if possible. But the unintended consequence is that it becomes more and more difficult, despite our technology, to definitively end a war against a foe who’s determined to resist and to use against us our reluctance to inflict massive harm on civilians or to put our own boots on the ground.

Terrorists and terrorist regimes have no such reluctance. Au contraire; they target civilians. Not only do they target civilians in terrorist attacks, but they also willingly put their own civilians in harms’ way, the better to accuse us of barbarity when we inevitably kill some of them.

[NOTE: See also this previous post of mine on clean hands in war, as well as this one.]

The post The dilemma of modern warfare 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.