By FRED REED
The Army at work. Be all you can be.
A friend recently asked me what I would tell a young man thinking about enlisting in the military. (He had in mind his son.) I would tell him this, which I wish someone had told me:
Kid, you are being suckered. You are being used. You need to think carefully before signing that enlistment contract.
First, notice that the men who want to send you to die were draft-dodgers. President Bush was of military age during Vietnam, but he sat out the war in the Air National Guard. The Guard was then a common way of avoiding combat. Bush could do it because he was a rich kid who went to Yale, and his family had connections.
He dodged, but he wants you to go.
Vice President Cheney, also of military age during Vietnam, also didn’t go. Why? When asked by the press, he said, “I had other priorities.” In other words, he was too important to risk his precious self overseas. He dodged, but wants you to go.
If you take the time to investigate, you will always find this pattern. The rich and influential avoid combat. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton do not send young men to Iraq. The editors at magazines that support the war, National Review for example, didn’t fight. They are happy to let you go, though. The reason for the All Volunteer military was to let the smart and rich avoid service and instead send kids from middle-class and blue-collar families. It works.
In talking to recruiters, you need to understand what you are up against. You are probably nineteen or twenty years old, full of **** and vinegar as we used to say, just starting to know the world. Which means that you don’t yet know it. (Do you know, for example, what countries border Iraq?)
You are up against a government that hires high-powered ad agencies and psychologists to figure out how to lure you into the military. Over many years they have done surveys and studies on the weaknesses of young males to find out what will get them to join. They know that young men, the ones that are worth anything anyway, want to prove themselves, want adventure, want to show what they can do. Everything a recruiter does is carefully calculated to play on this. They go to recruiting school to learn how.
“The Few. The Proud.” You don’t think that came out of the Marine Corps, do you? These phrases—“An Army of One,” “Be All You Can Be"--come from ad agencies in New York. Nobody in those ad agencies, I promise you, was ever in the Marine Corps. New York sells the military the way it sells soap. It has no interest in you at all.
Recruiters know exactly what they are doing. They are manly, which appeals to gutsy young guys who don’t want to be mall rats. They are confident. They have a physical fitness, a clean-cut appearance that looks good compared to all those wussy lawyers in business suits. They invite you to come into a man’s world. They promise you college funds. (Check and see how many actually ever get those funds. Read the small print.)
And of course the military is a man’s world, and it is an adventure, and it does beat being a mall rat—until they put you in combat. Driving a tank beats stocking parts in the local NAPA outlet—until they put you in combat. Days on the rifle range, running the bars of San Diego far from home and parents, going across the border into Mexico—all of this appeals powerfully to a young man. It did to me. It beats hell out of getting some silly associate degree in biz-admin at the community college.
Until they put you in combat. Then it’s too late. You can’t change your mind. They send you to jail for a long time if you do.
Combat is not the adventure you think it is. Know what happens when an RPG hits a tank? Nothing good. The cherry juice—hydraulic fluid that turns the turret—can vaporize and then blow. I saw the results in the Naval Support Activity hospital in Danang in 1967. A tank has a crew of four. Two burned to death, screaming as they tried to get out. The other two were scalded pink, under a plastic sheet that was always foggy with serum evaporating from burns where the skin had sloughed off. They probably lived. Know what burn scars look like?
The recruiters won’t tell you this. They know, but they won’t tell you. Ever seen a guy who just took a round through the face? He’s a bloody mess with his eyes gone, nasty hole where his nose was, funny white cartilage things sticking out of dripping meat. Suppose he’ll ever have another girlfriend? Not freaking likely. He’ll spend the next fifty years as a horror in some forsaken VA hospital.
But the recruiters won’t tell you this. They want you to think that it’s an adventure.
Other things happen that, depending on your head, may or may not bother you. Iraq means combat in cities. Ordinary people live there. You pop a grenade through a window, or hit a building with a burst from the Chain gun, or maybe put a tank round through it. Then you find the little girl with her bowels hanging out, not quite dead yet, with her mother screaming over what’s left. You’d be surprised how much blood a small kid has.
You get to live with that picture for the rest of your life. And you will live with it. The recruiter will tell you that it doesn’t happen, that it’s the exception, that I’m a commy journalist. Believe him if you want. Believe him now, while you can. When you get back, you’ll believe me.
A lot of things in America aren’t what they used to be. The military is one of them. The army didn’t always use girl soldiers to torture prisoners. For that they had specialists in the intelligence agencies. You won’t get assigned torture duty, almost certainly, because the Army got caught. Ask your recruiter about it, just to be sure.
Don’t expect thanks from a grateful nation. Somebody might buy you a drink in a bar. That’s about all you get. Many will regard you as a criminal or a fool.
Wars seem important at the time, but they usually aren’t. Five years later, they are history. About sixty thousand GIs died in Vietnam. We lost. Nothing happened. It was a stupid war for nothing. Today the guys who lost faces and legs and internal organs back then are just freaks. Nobody gives a damn about them, and nobody will give a damn about you. A war is a politician’s toy, but your wheelchair is forever. If you want adventure, try the fishing fleet in Alaska.
Think about it.
Encourage your sister to enlist. She can be a leader of men.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Justice in our America
The Trials of the Edenton Seven, or How Joseph Goebbels Became the Standard for North Carolina Justice
by William L. Anderson
While the Duke non-rape, non-kidnapping, and non-sexual assault case continues to dominate the "justice" system of the State of North Carolina, it hardly is the first wrongful prosecution to have happened there. Given that charges almost certainly will be dropped against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, the results will not be as tragic as they have been for other people there who not only have been wrongfully prosecuted, but also wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.
In this article, I will deal with one infamous case, the Little Rascals Day Care prosecutions which dominated the North Carolina courts in the early 1990s, becoming the most expensive criminal case in state history. This was the case that heightened my own interest in wrongful prosecutions as it was a complete and utter hoax, yet the State of North Carolina was able to use its power to destroy innocent lives, throw people in prison, separate children from parents, and persecute people whose only crime was being the target of dishonest people.
Because no one who originally was charged in this case is in prison today, people might be tempted to say "the system worked," but that would be untrue. The system "worked," all right, but it "worked" for prosecutors, judges, state social workers, and lawyers. It did not work for those individuals who were wrongfully charged with crimes they never committed – or that even happened.
The "Big Lie"
In my title, I reference Joseph Goebbels, who was the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the National Socialist regime under Adolph Hitler. One of the ways that Goebbels would help to whip up hysteria against the Jews was to engage what he called "The Big Lie." The theory behind it was this: People would discount the extreme portions of his propaganda, but they also would conclude that there must be something to it, or the government would not go to such efforts to make the statements that it did.
Goebbels actually developed his techniques from what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler declared that the bigger the lie, the more credibility it would have. Wikipedia explains it in the following way:
This technique, he (Hitler) believed, consisted of telling a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". The first documented use of the phrase "big lie" is in the corresponding passage: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility."
In pursuing the Little Rascals case, the State of North Carolina decided to use the same techniques. As I will point out, the testimony given by the alleged "child victims" of abuse was so fanciful and so unbelievable that jurors would discount much of it, but then conclude that "something happened" or else the state would not be pursuing the charges. Thus, in the end, North Carolina jurors sent people to prison for life on the basis of "something happened," even if they could not define just what that "something" was.
The Little Rascals case began in early 1989, when one parent’s anger at the owners of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, turned into questioning other parents about the place. The parent spoke to a police investigator, and the perfect storm then began.
Some Edenton police officers and others had recently attended a seminar in which the subject was ritualistic child abuse by Satanist cults. When the investigator heard a complaint from the parent that Robert Kelley and his wife, Betsy Kelly, might be "playing doctor" with her child, the abuse machinery then kicked in, and nothing could stop it.
On the surface, there was nothing that reflected any kind of child abuse at Little Rascals, and especially ritualistic child abuse and molestation. First, the day care center, like most others, had people coming in and out all the time, and no one ever noticed anything out of the ordinary. Second, the layout of the day care center itself did not lend itself to secret rooms or places where such abuse could have taken place without at least some adults having noticed.
Nonetheless, as often would happen in such cases, the very absence of evidence was proof that "something" was going on. Moreover, the Kellys attended a local Baptist church and were active church members and had never been involved in any satanic cults, or at least no one ever knew them to be secret Satanists. Yet, the very fact that no one knew them to be Satanists, or that no one ever had witnessed any such behavior from them "proved" in the minds of police investigators that the Kellys and the others who worked at the day care center were a satanic cult, since everyone knew that Satanists worked in secret.
If this sounds to be Orwellian, one is correct. The Edenton police were operating upon the same wavelength that medieval witch-hunters functioned. At times, witch-hunters would weight down an accused witch and throw the hapless person into a pond or river. If the person drowned, it was proof that he or she was not a witch. However, if the person escaped, that was proof that the person was a witch. In the same vein, investigators in the Little Rascals case held that if no physical evidence could be found, that proved the accused to be guilty, since they must have been very clever about how they hid the evidence. Physical evidence was "proof" of abuse, and, at the same time, the absence of physical evidence also was proof of abuse.
Soon afterward, state social workers stepped in with interviews of the children. The pattern was depressingly familiar, social workers having learned from previous cases such as the McMartin case in California and Janet Reno’s various witch hunts when she was state’s attorney for Dade County, Florida. Children would deny they had been abused, but then after being badgered by social workers and parents, they ultimately would "disclose" with fantastic stories.
Operating under the "children don’t lie" mantra, social workers found some fantastic things. As Rael Jean Issac wrote:
Sample allegations by the children: they were taken aboard a space ship and abused in outer space; "Mr. Bob" [Kelly] killed babies with a gun; abused on a ship while trained sharks swam around the boat.
There also were the usual accounts that seemed to appear at all of these witch hunts across the country. Included in the litany were a "magic room" where all sorts of abuse happened, the sticking of swords into the rectums of children – but leaving absolutely no physical evidence – cooking babies in microwave ovens, having children eat human feces and drink urine – with no effects whatsoever.
Children who continued to say that nothing happened would be badgered with "Billy already has said that such-and-such happened. You don’t want to keep on lying, do you?" Children who finally "disclosed" would be given hugs from their parents and praise from the social workers, so the four- and-five-year-old children soon learned what behaviors would be rewarded, and what would be scorned. They acted accordingly.
Interestingly, some parents elected to have their children interviewed by private counselors who determined that nothing had happened. Indeed, it was the State of North Carolina itself that was going all-out to promote a hoax, and once the state machinery went into motion, nothing could stop it. The newspapers across North Carolina and elsewhere dutifully repeated what police and prosecutors told them. By the spring of 1989, seven people were charged, including the Kellys, Dawn Wilson, Shelly Stone, Darlene Harris and Robin Byrum. The seventh person charged was Scott Privott, the owner of a video store and personal friend of Bob Kelly.
The Edenton Seven were not the only alleged child molesters identified by the children. Others, including people well up in Edenton’s police department and city government also were pointed out, but authorities decided that in those cases, the children were "confused."
Sham Trials
Bond was set so high that none of the seven could post it, so all languished in prison, and because North Carolina does not require speedy trials, all spent several years being incarcerated, where they were attacked and abused by other prisoners because they were "child molesters." None were wealthy, so they could not afford good counsel, but given the legal travesties that had transpired and that would be transpiring, Clarence Darrow himself could not have gained an acquittal.
Bob Kelly went on trial in July 1991, with the trial lasting until April 1992, when a jury convicted him of 99 counts of child molestation. Kelly was given 12 life sentences. As Ofra Bikel, who did an outstanding series for PBS’s "Frontline," pointed out, the trial itself was a sham. The judge was hostile to Kelly (which was typical in these kinds of trials across the country) and made sure that the prosecution always held the upper hand. Jurors and others were enthralled with timid little children on the witness stand clutching teddy bears and expressing fear of "Mr. Bob."
The most zealous of the two state’s prosecutors was Nancy B. Lamb, who saw herself as the avenger of the children and who worked herself into near-rages during the trial. The press glowingly wrote of the Elizabeth City, North Carolina, prosecutor as a woman with "bobbed hair and flashing eyes," as thought that gave legitimacy to the nonsense she was spreading.
As for the jurors, they decided that since the trial had lasted so long, it was paramount that they come to a unanimous decision. Yet, what to do about the parts of the testimony that were so fantastic as to defy belief? Prosecutors had shown them how in declaring during closing arguments:
You don't have to wonder whether there was real or pretend snakes. We don't have to prove whether the snakes, the kids talked about, were real or pretend. Whether the animals that they talked about or puppets as some of the children said, whether they were real. None of that has to be proved to you beyond a reasonable doubt. And none of that information is elements of the case.
In other words, believe what you want and discount what you want, since it is all truthful, except that which is not truthful, but don’t worry about truth. Most jurors bought the nonsense, along with "children don’t lie." But prosecutors had not convinced three of the jurors, but after being badgered by the others, the three gave in. After the trial, each told "Frontline" that they regretted their decisions and believe that a travesty of justice had taken place.
Even before the trials, prosecutors had told each defendant that if he or she would testify against one of the others, that person would face greatly reduced charged, as well as instant freedom, since all of them were being held in prison because they could not make bond. None would agree to such terms, each staunchly holding to their own innocence and a stated belief "in the system." Wilson told Lamb to "Get your own patsy."
The next year, Dawn Wilson also was convicted and sentence to life in prison. During closing arguments, as Wilson held her little girl on her lap, Lamb told the jury that Wilson really did not love her own child, but was simply putting on a show for the jurors. Subsequently, the jurors meekly acquiesced to the demands of the State of North Carolina.
In all the cases, jurors admitted to falling to the "big lie." During interviews, they agreed that many, if not most, of the stories told were too fantastic to be true, but, as one juror told "Frontline," "Something must have happened."
Prosecutors also used different tactics than had been undertaken in the McMartin investigations. There had been no convictions in the McMartin case in part because the "disclosure" sessions with children and social workers had been videotaped. After the first McMartin trial ended, many jurors said they believed that the children had been coerced into giving their testimony, which made it unbelievable.
To make sure that did not happen, only a bare sketch of what occurred during the sessions between state social workers and the children were given. There were no videotapes and no transcripts of everything that was said. It was just Johnny saying something like "Mr. Bob did this and that" without any embellishment.
Lamb, writing boastfully in The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, said that they made sure that jurors would not see how the "disclosures" were made, just that they would only read what social workers wrote down. In other words, in a case where how the "evidence" was gathered was as important as the "evidence" itself, the State of North Carolina made sure that deception would be the rule.
Betsy Kelly and Scott Privott, both seeing how Bob Kelly and Wilson had been railroaded, agreed to plead nolo contendere in 1994. At their sentencing, each proclaimed innocence but said that they no longer had confidence in the system to treat them with justice. Despite the supposed seriousness of their "crimes," each served only one more year on top of the many years they had spent because they could not make bond.
Bob Kelly and Wilson appealed, and in 1995, appellate courts of North Carolina overturned their convictions, citing numerous errors made by the judge and prosecution at the trials. Although the state threatened to charge them again and even briefly brought new charges against Kelly, ultimately the state dropped all charges in 1997. Betsy Kelly and Bob divorced, and now she and Privott must register as sexual offenders wherever they go.
Aftermath
When the State of North Carolina, through District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, pressed rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault charged against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, I was not surprised. Here is a state that openly promoted a hoax, and spent millions of dollars to promote that hoax and wrongfully imprison people.
None of the defendants in the Little Rascals case has received as much as an apology from the state, and while they were financially ruined, the state never compensated any of them a penny. Being the promoter of the "Big Lie" means never having to admit to the truth.
Thus, in the Duke case, the State of North Carolina once again promotes the "Big Lie" and expects us to believe a number of things. First, it expects us to believe all of the stories told by Crystal Gail Mangum, even though they are mutually exclusive. Second, until the Friday before Christmas, it expected us to believe that it was possible for men to rape a woman and force oral sex on her, ejaculate without condoms into her various orifices, and yet leave absolutely no trace of DNA.
Even now, the state expects us to believe that Seligmann and Finnerty could be in two places at one time.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that three men could be involved in the kind of brutal sexual assault as Mangum described to police and to Nifong’s chief investigator, Linwood Wilson, and yet leave absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that three strong young men beat Mangum with their fists and choked her for more than 30 minutes, but left no visible injuries.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that in the infamous photo ID session in early April, Mangum was being truthful when she pointed out three men, went into excruciating detail about what each of them did to her, and then in December when she told a very different story, that both accounts are equally true, even though they are mutually exclusive.
Yes, thanks to the North Carolina Bar Association bringing charges against Nifong, he is off the case. However, at this very moment, the State of North Carolina through different prosecutors still is pursuing kidnapping and sexual assault charges and looking to bring this farce to trial.
Nifong is in disgrace and faces charges not only of making unwarranted statements, but also lying to judges and to the Bar Association investigators about the hiding of exculpatory DNA evidence. Unfortunately, Nancy Lamb still practices law in Elizabeth City, still spinning nonsense to jurors, and still insisting that the Edenton Seven really did have a "magic room," microwaved babies, and did all sorts of terrible things in secret.
And, unfortunately, the State of North Carolina still looks to convict innocent people and to throw them into prison and tell the rest of us that justice is being done.
January 27, 2007
William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
by William L. Anderson
While the Duke non-rape, non-kidnapping, and non-sexual assault case continues to dominate the "justice" system of the State of North Carolina, it hardly is the first wrongful prosecution to have happened there. Given that charges almost certainly will be dropped against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, the results will not be as tragic as they have been for other people there who not only have been wrongfully prosecuted, but also wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.
In this article, I will deal with one infamous case, the Little Rascals Day Care prosecutions which dominated the North Carolina courts in the early 1990s, becoming the most expensive criminal case in state history. This was the case that heightened my own interest in wrongful prosecutions as it was a complete and utter hoax, yet the State of North Carolina was able to use its power to destroy innocent lives, throw people in prison, separate children from parents, and persecute people whose only crime was being the target of dishonest people.
Because no one who originally was charged in this case is in prison today, people might be tempted to say "the system worked," but that would be untrue. The system "worked," all right, but it "worked" for prosecutors, judges, state social workers, and lawyers. It did not work for those individuals who were wrongfully charged with crimes they never committed – or that even happened.
The "Big Lie"
In my title, I reference Joseph Goebbels, who was the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the National Socialist regime under Adolph Hitler. One of the ways that Goebbels would help to whip up hysteria against the Jews was to engage what he called "The Big Lie." The theory behind it was this: People would discount the extreme portions of his propaganda, but they also would conclude that there must be something to it, or the government would not go to such efforts to make the statements that it did.
Goebbels actually developed his techniques from what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler declared that the bigger the lie, the more credibility it would have. Wikipedia explains it in the following way:
This technique, he (Hitler) believed, consisted of telling a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". The first documented use of the phrase "big lie" is in the corresponding passage: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility."
In pursuing the Little Rascals case, the State of North Carolina decided to use the same techniques. As I will point out, the testimony given by the alleged "child victims" of abuse was so fanciful and so unbelievable that jurors would discount much of it, but then conclude that "something happened" or else the state would not be pursuing the charges. Thus, in the end, North Carolina jurors sent people to prison for life on the basis of "something happened," even if they could not define just what that "something" was.
The Little Rascals case began in early 1989, when one parent’s anger at the owners of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, turned into questioning other parents about the place. The parent spoke to a police investigator, and the perfect storm then began.
Some Edenton police officers and others had recently attended a seminar in which the subject was ritualistic child abuse by Satanist cults. When the investigator heard a complaint from the parent that Robert Kelley and his wife, Betsy Kelly, might be "playing doctor" with her child, the abuse machinery then kicked in, and nothing could stop it.
On the surface, there was nothing that reflected any kind of child abuse at Little Rascals, and especially ritualistic child abuse and molestation. First, the day care center, like most others, had people coming in and out all the time, and no one ever noticed anything out of the ordinary. Second, the layout of the day care center itself did not lend itself to secret rooms or places where such abuse could have taken place without at least some adults having noticed.
Nonetheless, as often would happen in such cases, the very absence of evidence was proof that "something" was going on. Moreover, the Kellys attended a local Baptist church and were active church members and had never been involved in any satanic cults, or at least no one ever knew them to be secret Satanists. Yet, the very fact that no one knew them to be Satanists, or that no one ever had witnessed any such behavior from them "proved" in the minds of police investigators that the Kellys and the others who worked at the day care center were a satanic cult, since everyone knew that Satanists worked in secret.
If this sounds to be Orwellian, one is correct. The Edenton police were operating upon the same wavelength that medieval witch-hunters functioned. At times, witch-hunters would weight down an accused witch and throw the hapless person into a pond or river. If the person drowned, it was proof that he or she was not a witch. However, if the person escaped, that was proof that the person was a witch. In the same vein, investigators in the Little Rascals case held that if no physical evidence could be found, that proved the accused to be guilty, since they must have been very clever about how they hid the evidence. Physical evidence was "proof" of abuse, and, at the same time, the absence of physical evidence also was proof of abuse.
Soon afterward, state social workers stepped in with interviews of the children. The pattern was depressingly familiar, social workers having learned from previous cases such as the McMartin case in California and Janet Reno’s various witch hunts when she was state’s attorney for Dade County, Florida. Children would deny they had been abused, but then after being badgered by social workers and parents, they ultimately would "disclose" with fantastic stories.
Operating under the "children don’t lie" mantra, social workers found some fantastic things. As Rael Jean Issac wrote:
Sample allegations by the children: they were taken aboard a space ship and abused in outer space; "Mr. Bob" [Kelly] killed babies with a gun; abused on a ship while trained sharks swam around the boat.
There also were the usual accounts that seemed to appear at all of these witch hunts across the country. Included in the litany were a "magic room" where all sorts of abuse happened, the sticking of swords into the rectums of children – but leaving absolutely no physical evidence – cooking babies in microwave ovens, having children eat human feces and drink urine – with no effects whatsoever.
Children who continued to say that nothing happened would be badgered with "Billy already has said that such-and-such happened. You don’t want to keep on lying, do you?" Children who finally "disclosed" would be given hugs from their parents and praise from the social workers, so the four- and-five-year-old children soon learned what behaviors would be rewarded, and what would be scorned. They acted accordingly.
Interestingly, some parents elected to have their children interviewed by private counselors who determined that nothing had happened. Indeed, it was the State of North Carolina itself that was going all-out to promote a hoax, and once the state machinery went into motion, nothing could stop it. The newspapers across North Carolina and elsewhere dutifully repeated what police and prosecutors told them. By the spring of 1989, seven people were charged, including the Kellys, Dawn Wilson, Shelly Stone, Darlene Harris and Robin Byrum. The seventh person charged was Scott Privott, the owner of a video store and personal friend of Bob Kelly.
The Edenton Seven were not the only alleged child molesters identified by the children. Others, including people well up in Edenton’s police department and city government also were pointed out, but authorities decided that in those cases, the children were "confused."
Sham Trials
Bond was set so high that none of the seven could post it, so all languished in prison, and because North Carolina does not require speedy trials, all spent several years being incarcerated, where they were attacked and abused by other prisoners because they were "child molesters." None were wealthy, so they could not afford good counsel, but given the legal travesties that had transpired and that would be transpiring, Clarence Darrow himself could not have gained an acquittal.
Bob Kelly went on trial in July 1991, with the trial lasting until April 1992, when a jury convicted him of 99 counts of child molestation. Kelly was given 12 life sentences. As Ofra Bikel, who did an outstanding series for PBS’s "Frontline," pointed out, the trial itself was a sham. The judge was hostile to Kelly (which was typical in these kinds of trials across the country) and made sure that the prosecution always held the upper hand. Jurors and others were enthralled with timid little children on the witness stand clutching teddy bears and expressing fear of "Mr. Bob."
The most zealous of the two state’s prosecutors was Nancy B. Lamb, who saw herself as the avenger of the children and who worked herself into near-rages during the trial. The press glowingly wrote of the Elizabeth City, North Carolina, prosecutor as a woman with "bobbed hair and flashing eyes," as thought that gave legitimacy to the nonsense she was spreading.
As for the jurors, they decided that since the trial had lasted so long, it was paramount that they come to a unanimous decision. Yet, what to do about the parts of the testimony that were so fantastic as to defy belief? Prosecutors had shown them how in declaring during closing arguments:
You don't have to wonder whether there was real or pretend snakes. We don't have to prove whether the snakes, the kids talked about, were real or pretend. Whether the animals that they talked about or puppets as some of the children said, whether they were real. None of that has to be proved to you beyond a reasonable doubt. And none of that information is elements of the case.
In other words, believe what you want and discount what you want, since it is all truthful, except that which is not truthful, but don’t worry about truth. Most jurors bought the nonsense, along with "children don’t lie." But prosecutors had not convinced three of the jurors, but after being badgered by the others, the three gave in. After the trial, each told "Frontline" that they regretted their decisions and believe that a travesty of justice had taken place.
Even before the trials, prosecutors had told each defendant that if he or she would testify against one of the others, that person would face greatly reduced charged, as well as instant freedom, since all of them were being held in prison because they could not make bond. None would agree to such terms, each staunchly holding to their own innocence and a stated belief "in the system." Wilson told Lamb to "Get your own patsy."
The next year, Dawn Wilson also was convicted and sentence to life in prison. During closing arguments, as Wilson held her little girl on her lap, Lamb told the jury that Wilson really did not love her own child, but was simply putting on a show for the jurors. Subsequently, the jurors meekly acquiesced to the demands of the State of North Carolina.
In all the cases, jurors admitted to falling to the "big lie." During interviews, they agreed that many, if not most, of the stories told were too fantastic to be true, but, as one juror told "Frontline," "Something must have happened."
Prosecutors also used different tactics than had been undertaken in the McMartin investigations. There had been no convictions in the McMartin case in part because the "disclosure" sessions with children and social workers had been videotaped. After the first McMartin trial ended, many jurors said they believed that the children had been coerced into giving their testimony, which made it unbelievable.
To make sure that did not happen, only a bare sketch of what occurred during the sessions between state social workers and the children were given. There were no videotapes and no transcripts of everything that was said. It was just Johnny saying something like "Mr. Bob did this and that" without any embellishment.
Lamb, writing boastfully in The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, said that they made sure that jurors would not see how the "disclosures" were made, just that they would only read what social workers wrote down. In other words, in a case where how the "evidence" was gathered was as important as the "evidence" itself, the State of North Carolina made sure that deception would be the rule.
Betsy Kelly and Scott Privott, both seeing how Bob Kelly and Wilson had been railroaded, agreed to plead nolo contendere in 1994. At their sentencing, each proclaimed innocence but said that they no longer had confidence in the system to treat them with justice. Despite the supposed seriousness of their "crimes," each served only one more year on top of the many years they had spent because they could not make bond.
Bob Kelly and Wilson appealed, and in 1995, appellate courts of North Carolina overturned their convictions, citing numerous errors made by the judge and prosecution at the trials. Although the state threatened to charge them again and even briefly brought new charges against Kelly, ultimately the state dropped all charges in 1997. Betsy Kelly and Bob divorced, and now she and Privott must register as sexual offenders wherever they go.
Aftermath
When the State of North Carolina, through District Attorney Michael B. Nifong, pressed rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault charged against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, I was not surprised. Here is a state that openly promoted a hoax, and spent millions of dollars to promote that hoax and wrongfully imprison people.
None of the defendants in the Little Rascals case has received as much as an apology from the state, and while they were financially ruined, the state never compensated any of them a penny. Being the promoter of the "Big Lie" means never having to admit to the truth.
Thus, in the Duke case, the State of North Carolina once again promotes the "Big Lie" and expects us to believe a number of things. First, it expects us to believe all of the stories told by Crystal Gail Mangum, even though they are mutually exclusive. Second, until the Friday before Christmas, it expected us to believe that it was possible for men to rape a woman and force oral sex on her, ejaculate without condoms into her various orifices, and yet leave absolutely no trace of DNA.
Even now, the state expects us to believe that Seligmann and Finnerty could be in two places at one time.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that three men could be involved in the kind of brutal sexual assault as Mangum described to police and to Nifong’s chief investigator, Linwood Wilson, and yet leave absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that three strong young men beat Mangum with their fists and choked her for more than 30 minutes, but left no visible injuries.
Even now, the State of North Carolina expects us to believe that in the infamous photo ID session in early April, Mangum was being truthful when she pointed out three men, went into excruciating detail about what each of them did to her, and then in December when she told a very different story, that both accounts are equally true, even though they are mutually exclusive.
Yes, thanks to the North Carolina Bar Association bringing charges against Nifong, he is off the case. However, at this very moment, the State of North Carolina through different prosecutors still is pursuing kidnapping and sexual assault charges and looking to bring this farce to trial.
Nifong is in disgrace and faces charges not only of making unwarranted statements, but also lying to judges and to the Bar Association investigators about the hiding of exculpatory DNA evidence. Unfortunately, Nancy Lamb still practices law in Elizabeth City, still spinning nonsense to jurors, and still insisting that the Edenton Seven really did have a "magic room," microwaved babies, and did all sorts of terrible things in secret.
And, unfortunately, the State of North Carolina still looks to convict innocent people and to throw them into prison and tell the rest of us that justice is being done.
January 27, 2007
William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
Stop the Cannon Fodder
by Charley Reese
There are two concepts all of us have to struggle with. One is our individuality. The other is the mass.
Individual soldiers who survive combat often come home to realize that all of the horrific and heroic actions they took don't mean anything. Vietnam, for example, is ruled by a communist government. Nobody but a historian even remembers what World War I was all about, much less the 10 million young men who died fighting it. World War II and Korea are likewise fading from public memory.
It's poignant to realize that each human being, unique in the entire universe, has at best only a short life. If left in peace, he can experience childhood, youth, middle age and finally old age. But all too often, governments come along, lying to beat the band, and persuade youth to become part of the mass and fight in a war.
I saw a documentary on the Battle of the Somme recently. It was a dandy plan to subject the German trenches in World War I to a heretofore-unprecedented artillery barrage. Then the lads would charge out of their trenches across no man's land. The generals thought they would punch a hole in the German lines through which the cavalry would ride and break the war wide open.
The artillery barrage, hellish as it was, didn't do the job. German machine-gunners came out of their bunkers and mowed down the young Brits. About 20,000 died on that day. Altogether, before the battle was over, British casualties would total 370,000.
Even this brief description reduces it all to the abstract. Twenty thousand? What's that? A number. The Somme is just a place in France. One wishes one could put a face on each of the 20,000. Add a face, a name, a life story. But no, they are just part of the masses that were sacrificed in the 20th century, a portion of the nearly 200 million who died in that failed century.
I'm glad that I discouraged all my children from serving in the military, even though I had served. It is important, I believe, to separate the natural and noble feeling of love of country from the present reality. The young people dying in Iraq are not dying to protect their country. As usual, they were lied to. They're dying for corporate profits, in which they do not share; they are dying because of some academic's harebrained belief that we can turn Iraq into a liberal democratic state; they are dying because of political opportunists in Washington.
Iraq is an artificial country created at the end of World War I by British colonialism. It has always existed because a powerful central government, wielding its authority in the most savage manner, has forced it to hold together. That is the only history Iraq has. Can any honest American say that 10 years from now, Iraq will be a peaceful and prosperous country with many monuments to the Americans who liberated it? No, if Iraq exists, it will exist the way it always has – with a central government wielding its power in a savage and bloody manner.
American veterans, like the veterans of other modern wars since 1945, will conclude that all they did turned out to be meaningless.
When the enemy is in American surf, when his foot is on our soil, then we will all fight and gladly die in defense of our country. But it is time to stop supplying cannon fodder to an imperial government pursuing God-knows-what secret schemes in distant parts of the world.
Do not hand your precious one-of-a-kind children over to cynical men who will squander their lives without blinking an eye. It is a sad thing to die for another's profits.
January 27, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
There are two concepts all of us have to struggle with. One is our individuality. The other is the mass.
Individual soldiers who survive combat often come home to realize that all of the horrific and heroic actions they took don't mean anything. Vietnam, for example, is ruled by a communist government. Nobody but a historian even remembers what World War I was all about, much less the 10 million young men who died fighting it. World War II and Korea are likewise fading from public memory.
It's poignant to realize that each human being, unique in the entire universe, has at best only a short life. If left in peace, he can experience childhood, youth, middle age and finally old age. But all too often, governments come along, lying to beat the band, and persuade youth to become part of the mass and fight in a war.
I saw a documentary on the Battle of the Somme recently. It was a dandy plan to subject the German trenches in World War I to a heretofore-unprecedented artillery barrage. Then the lads would charge out of their trenches across no man's land. The generals thought they would punch a hole in the German lines through which the cavalry would ride and break the war wide open.
The artillery barrage, hellish as it was, didn't do the job. German machine-gunners came out of their bunkers and mowed down the young Brits. About 20,000 died on that day. Altogether, before the battle was over, British casualties would total 370,000.
Even this brief description reduces it all to the abstract. Twenty thousand? What's that? A number. The Somme is just a place in France. One wishes one could put a face on each of the 20,000. Add a face, a name, a life story. But no, they are just part of the masses that were sacrificed in the 20th century, a portion of the nearly 200 million who died in that failed century.
I'm glad that I discouraged all my children from serving in the military, even though I had served. It is important, I believe, to separate the natural and noble feeling of love of country from the present reality. The young people dying in Iraq are not dying to protect their country. As usual, they were lied to. They're dying for corporate profits, in which they do not share; they are dying because of some academic's harebrained belief that we can turn Iraq into a liberal democratic state; they are dying because of political opportunists in Washington.
Iraq is an artificial country created at the end of World War I by British colonialism. It has always existed because a powerful central government, wielding its authority in the most savage manner, has forced it to hold together. That is the only history Iraq has. Can any honest American say that 10 years from now, Iraq will be a peaceful and prosperous country with many monuments to the Americans who liberated it? No, if Iraq exists, it will exist the way it always has – with a central government wielding its power in a savage and bloody manner.
American veterans, like the veterans of other modern wars since 1945, will conclude that all they did turned out to be meaningless.
When the enemy is in American surf, when his foot is on our soil, then we will all fight and gladly die in defense of our country. But it is time to stop supplying cannon fodder to an imperial government pursuing God-knows-what secret schemes in distant parts of the world.
Do not hand your precious one-of-a-kind children over to cynical men who will squander their lives without blinking an eye. It is a sad thing to die for another's profits.
January 27, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The more things change the more they stay the same
The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden
· Treatment of suspected communists revealed
· Four court martialled after police inspector's inquiry
Ian Cobain
Monday April 3, 2006
The Guardian
Archive pictures of German prisoners held by the British following the second world war. Photographs: Martin Argles
For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.
As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".
Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.
The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away.
Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.
At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.
The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. He had been called in by senior army officers to investigate the mistreatment of inmates, partly as a result of the evidence provided by these photographs.
Insp Hayward's report remained secret until last December, when the Guardian secured its release under the Freedom of Information Act. The photographs seen here were removed before the Foreign Office released the report, apparently because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them to be published. That decision was reversed last week, following an appeal by the Guardian.
One of the men photographed, Gerhard Menzel, 23, a student, was arrested by British intelligence officers in Hamburg in June 1946. He had fallen under suspicion because he was believed to have travelled to the British-controlled zone of Germany from Omsk in Siberia, where he had been a prisoner of war. His weight, measured several weeks after his arrest at 10st 3lb, had fallen to 7st 10lb by the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf to a British-run internment camp eight months later.
In the meantime, he told Hayward, his hands had been chained behind his back for up to 16 days at a time, periods during which he was repeatedly punched in the face. He had also been held in a bare, freezing cell for up to two weeks at a time and doused in cold water every 30 minutes from 4.30am until midnight, a practice the detective discovered to have been common.
A doctor at the internment camp reported that Mr Menzel was one of a group of 12 inmates transferred from Bad Nenndorf, all emaciated and dressed in rags. Previous arrivals had also been half-starved. Some had facial scars, apparently the result of beatings. A few had scars on their shins, said to be the result of torture with shin screws which had been retrieved from a Gestapo prison at Hamburg.
Mr Menzel "was only skin and bones," the doctor wrote. "He could neither walk nor stand up without assistance, and could only speak with difficulty because his tongue and lips were swollen and broken open.
"It was impossible to take his body temperature because it was not higher than 35 degrees Celsius and the thermometer only starts at 35."
The prisoner was also confused, anxious and suffering memory loss, his lungs were badly infected and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Only after being washed, fed and heated with lamps could his body temperature be raised to 36.3C, but the doctor feared his chances of survival were slim.
Another man pictured, Heinz Biedermann, 20, a clerk, had been arrested in October 1946 because he was in the British zone, while his father, who lived at Stendal in the Russian zone, had been identified as "an ardent communist". By the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf four months later his weight had fallen from 11st 3lb to 7st 12lb. He said he had been held in solitary confinement for much of the time, threatened with execution, and forced to live and sleep in sub-zero temperatures while barely clothed.
One British army guard told Inspector Hayward that Mr Biedermann had "wasted like a candle" during his imprisonment. Another, a private in the Essex Regiment, told the detective that he complained that he and his comrades were behaving as badly as Germans. "I became very unpopular after this ... the sergeant appeared to take a poor view of my remarks."
On Mr Biedermann's transfer to the internment camp, an officer at Bad Nenndorf requested he be detained "for an adequate time" to prevent him giving the Soviets "detailed information on this centre and methods of interrogation".
Foreign Office records show that the navy officer commanding the internment camp, Captain Arthur Curtis, was so shocked by the condition of the men being sent to him that he ordered these photographs be taken to support his complaints about the treatment of these "living skeletons". Photographs of several other prisoners, taken at the same time, appear to have vanished from the Foreign Office files.
On the other side of the British zone, meanwhile, a Royal Artillery officer was complaining about the state of Bad Nenndorf inmates who were being dumped from a truck at the entrance to a military hospital. Some weighed little more than six stones, and two died shortly after their arrival.
The records show that Bad Nenndorf was run by a War Office department called the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC).
By late 1946, CSDIC appears to have lost interest in Nazis, and was targeting communists. It appears the prisoners were questioned about Soviet methods and intentions, rather than about the Communist party itself.
Some of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were indeed spying for the Soviets: one prisoner, who was half-Norwegian and half-Russian, told Hayward he was an officer in the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, and had been operating continuously in Germany since 1938. Another, a German journalist who had been freed by the Soviets from a Gestapo prison, was caught flying into Croydon aerodrome with false British papers. Both men were starved and badly tortured.
Others clearly were not spies, however. One man who was starved to death was a gay ex-soldier caught with forged papers while crossing into the British zone in search of his lover, while the other was a young German who was being interrogated because he had volunteered to spy for the British in the Russian zone, and was wrongly suspected of lying because of an official error over his medical records.
Four British officers were court martialled after Hayward's investigation. Declassified documents show that the hearings were held largely behind closed doors to prevent the Soviets from discovering that Russians were being detained.
Another consideration was admitted to be the determination to conceal the existence of several other CSDIC prisons. While it is now known that one interrogation centre was in central London, little is known about those in Germany, other than their locations.
Following the courts martial, the prison at Bad Nenndorf, which was in a converted bath-house, was replaced with a purpose-built interrogation centre near an RAF base at Gütersloh, and orders were issued for inmates to be examined by a doctor before interrogation. It is unclear when this centre closed.
The only officer at Bad Nenndorf to be convicted was the prison doctor. At the age of 49, his sentence was to be dismissed from the army. The commanding officer, Colonel Robin Stephens, was cleared of a charge of "disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind" and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.
· Treatment of suspected communists revealed
· Four court martialled after police inspector's inquiry
Ian Cobain
Monday April 3, 2006
The Guardian
Archive pictures of German prisoners held by the British following the second world war. Photographs: Martin Argles
For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.
As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".
Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.
The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away.
Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.
At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.
The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. He had been called in by senior army officers to investigate the mistreatment of inmates, partly as a result of the evidence provided by these photographs.
Insp Hayward's report remained secret until last December, when the Guardian secured its release under the Freedom of Information Act. The photographs seen here were removed before the Foreign Office released the report, apparently because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them to be published. That decision was reversed last week, following an appeal by the Guardian.
One of the men photographed, Gerhard Menzel, 23, a student, was arrested by British intelligence officers in Hamburg in June 1946. He had fallen under suspicion because he was believed to have travelled to the British-controlled zone of Germany from Omsk in Siberia, where he had been a prisoner of war. His weight, measured several weeks after his arrest at 10st 3lb, had fallen to 7st 10lb by the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf to a British-run internment camp eight months later.
In the meantime, he told Hayward, his hands had been chained behind his back for up to 16 days at a time, periods during which he was repeatedly punched in the face. He had also been held in a bare, freezing cell for up to two weeks at a time and doused in cold water every 30 minutes from 4.30am until midnight, a practice the detective discovered to have been common.
A doctor at the internment camp reported that Mr Menzel was one of a group of 12 inmates transferred from Bad Nenndorf, all emaciated and dressed in rags. Previous arrivals had also been half-starved. Some had facial scars, apparently the result of beatings. A few had scars on their shins, said to be the result of torture with shin screws which had been retrieved from a Gestapo prison at Hamburg.
Mr Menzel "was only skin and bones," the doctor wrote. "He could neither walk nor stand up without assistance, and could only speak with difficulty because his tongue and lips were swollen and broken open.
"It was impossible to take his body temperature because it was not higher than 35 degrees Celsius and the thermometer only starts at 35."
The prisoner was also confused, anxious and suffering memory loss, his lungs were badly infected and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Only after being washed, fed and heated with lamps could his body temperature be raised to 36.3C, but the doctor feared his chances of survival were slim.
Another man pictured, Heinz Biedermann, 20, a clerk, had been arrested in October 1946 because he was in the British zone, while his father, who lived at Stendal in the Russian zone, had been identified as "an ardent communist". By the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf four months later his weight had fallen from 11st 3lb to 7st 12lb. He said he had been held in solitary confinement for much of the time, threatened with execution, and forced to live and sleep in sub-zero temperatures while barely clothed.
One British army guard told Inspector Hayward that Mr Biedermann had "wasted like a candle" during his imprisonment. Another, a private in the Essex Regiment, told the detective that he complained that he and his comrades were behaving as badly as Germans. "I became very unpopular after this ... the sergeant appeared to take a poor view of my remarks."
On Mr Biedermann's transfer to the internment camp, an officer at Bad Nenndorf requested he be detained "for an adequate time" to prevent him giving the Soviets "detailed information on this centre and methods of interrogation".
Foreign Office records show that the navy officer commanding the internment camp, Captain Arthur Curtis, was so shocked by the condition of the men being sent to him that he ordered these photographs be taken to support his complaints about the treatment of these "living skeletons". Photographs of several other prisoners, taken at the same time, appear to have vanished from the Foreign Office files.
On the other side of the British zone, meanwhile, a Royal Artillery officer was complaining about the state of Bad Nenndorf inmates who were being dumped from a truck at the entrance to a military hospital. Some weighed little more than six stones, and two died shortly after their arrival.
The records show that Bad Nenndorf was run by a War Office department called the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC).
By late 1946, CSDIC appears to have lost interest in Nazis, and was targeting communists. It appears the prisoners were questioned about Soviet methods and intentions, rather than about the Communist party itself.
Some of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were indeed spying for the Soviets: one prisoner, who was half-Norwegian and half-Russian, told Hayward he was an officer in the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, and had been operating continuously in Germany since 1938. Another, a German journalist who had been freed by the Soviets from a Gestapo prison, was caught flying into Croydon aerodrome with false British papers. Both men were starved and badly tortured.
Others clearly were not spies, however. One man who was starved to death was a gay ex-soldier caught with forged papers while crossing into the British zone in search of his lover, while the other was a young German who was being interrogated because he had volunteered to spy for the British in the Russian zone, and was wrongly suspected of lying because of an official error over his medical records.
Four British officers were court martialled after Hayward's investigation. Declassified documents show that the hearings were held largely behind closed doors to prevent the Soviets from discovering that Russians were being detained.
Another consideration was admitted to be the determination to conceal the existence of several other CSDIC prisons. While it is now known that one interrogation centre was in central London, little is known about those in Germany, other than their locations.
Following the courts martial, the prison at Bad Nenndorf, which was in a converted bath-house, was replaced with a purpose-built interrogation centre near an RAF base at Gütersloh, and orders were issued for inmates to be examined by a doctor before interrogation. It is unclear when this centre closed.
The only officer at Bad Nenndorf to be convicted was the prison doctor. At the age of 49, his sentence was to be dismissed from the army. The commanding officer, Colonel Robin Stephens, was cleared of a charge of "disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind" and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Can We Achieve Peace in the Middle East?
by Ron Paul
Former President Carter’s new book about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has raised the ire of Americans on two sides of the debate. I say “two sides” rather than “both sides,” because there is another perspective that is never discussed in American politics. That perspective is the perspective of our founding fathers, namely that America should not intervene in the internal affairs of other nations.
Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.
The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is almost like a schoolyard fight: when America and the world stand watching, neither side will give an inch for fear of appearing weak. But deep down, the people who actually have to live there desperately want an end to the violence. They don’t need solutions imposed by outsiders. It’s easy to sit here safe in America and talk tough, but we’re not the ones suffering.
Practically speaking, our meddling in the Middle East has only intensified strife and conflict. American tax dollars have militarized the entire region. We give Israel about $3 billion each year, but we also give Egypt $2 billion. Most other Middle East countries get money too, some of which ends up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Both sides have far more military weapons as a result. Talk about adding fuel to the fire! Our foolish and unconstitutional foreign aid has produced more violence, not less.
Congress and each successive administration pledge their political, financial, and military support for Israel. Yet while we call ourselves a strong ally of the Israeli people, we send billions in foreign aid every year to some Muslim states that many Israelis regard as enemies. From the Israeli point of view, many of the same Islamic nations we fund with our tax dollars want to destroy the Jewish state. Many average Israelis and American Jews see America as hypocritically hedging its bets.
This illustrates perfectly the inherent problem with foreign aid: once we give money to one country, we have to give it to all the rest or risk making enemies. This is especially true in the Middle East and other strife-torn regions, where our financial support for one side is seen as an act of aggression by the other. Just as our money never makes Israel secure, it doesn’t buy us any true friends elsewhere in the region. On the contrary, millions of Muslims hate the United States.
It is time to challenge the notion that it is our job to broker peace in the Middle East and every other troubled region across the globe. America can and should use every diplomatic means at our disposal to end the violence in the West Bank, but we should draw the line at any further entanglement. Third-party outsiders cannot impose political solutions in Palestine or anywhere else. Peace can be achieved only when self-determination operates freely in all nations. “Peace plans” imposed by outsiders or the UN cause resentment and seldom produce lasting peace.
The simple truth is that we cannot resolve every human conflict across the globe, and there will always be violence somewhere on earth. The fatal conceit lies in believing America can impose geopolitical solutions wherever it chooses.
January 23, 2007
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.
Former President Carter’s new book about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has raised the ire of Americans on two sides of the debate. I say “two sides” rather than “both sides,” because there is another perspective that is never discussed in American politics. That perspective is the perspective of our founding fathers, namely that America should not intervene in the internal affairs of other nations.
Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.
The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is almost like a schoolyard fight: when America and the world stand watching, neither side will give an inch for fear of appearing weak. But deep down, the people who actually have to live there desperately want an end to the violence. They don’t need solutions imposed by outsiders. It’s easy to sit here safe in America and talk tough, but we’re not the ones suffering.
Practically speaking, our meddling in the Middle East has only intensified strife and conflict. American tax dollars have militarized the entire region. We give Israel about $3 billion each year, but we also give Egypt $2 billion. Most other Middle East countries get money too, some of which ends up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Both sides have far more military weapons as a result. Talk about adding fuel to the fire! Our foolish and unconstitutional foreign aid has produced more violence, not less.
Congress and each successive administration pledge their political, financial, and military support for Israel. Yet while we call ourselves a strong ally of the Israeli people, we send billions in foreign aid every year to some Muslim states that many Israelis regard as enemies. From the Israeli point of view, many of the same Islamic nations we fund with our tax dollars want to destroy the Jewish state. Many average Israelis and American Jews see America as hypocritically hedging its bets.
This illustrates perfectly the inherent problem with foreign aid: once we give money to one country, we have to give it to all the rest or risk making enemies. This is especially true in the Middle East and other strife-torn regions, where our financial support for one side is seen as an act of aggression by the other. Just as our money never makes Israel secure, it doesn’t buy us any true friends elsewhere in the region. On the contrary, millions of Muslims hate the United States.
It is time to challenge the notion that it is our job to broker peace in the Middle East and every other troubled region across the globe. America can and should use every diplomatic means at our disposal to end the violence in the West Bank, but we should draw the line at any further entanglement. Third-party outsiders cannot impose political solutions in Palestine or anywhere else. Peace can be achieved only when self-determination operates freely in all nations. “Peace plans” imposed by outsiders or the UN cause resentment and seldom produce lasting peace.
The simple truth is that we cannot resolve every human conflict across the globe, and there will always be violence somewhere on earth. The fatal conceit lies in believing America can impose geopolitical solutions wherever it chooses.
January 23, 2007
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Another Vietnam
Petraeus on Vietnam's Legacy
Among Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus's qualifications for the post of senior U.S. military commander in Iraq is his work training Iraqi security forces, as well as his oversight of the Army and Marine Corps' updated counterinsurgency field manual. But another document may prove useful to Petraeus in Iraq. In 1987, he earned a PhD from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School with a 328-page thesis titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." Excerpts below.
-- Rachel Dry
On the lessons of history
Historical analogies are particularly compelling during crises, when the tendency to supplement incomplete information with past experiences is especially marked. . . . The legacy of Vietnam is unlikely to soon recede as an important influence on America's senior military. The frustrations of Vietnam are too deeply etched in the minds of those who now the [sic] lead the services and combatant commands. . . .
Vietnam cost the military dearly. It left America's military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged. Even worse, it devastated the armed forces, robbing them of dignity, money, and qualified people for a decade. . . . While the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership, however, the senior leaders of all the services share a similar reaction to Vietnam. There is no desire among any of them to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as: "Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine"; "Self Destruction: the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era"; and "Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the United States Army." The simple essence of this feeling is that, in the words of then Colonel Dave Palmer, "there must be no more Vietnams."
On war and public opinion
Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. . . .
The military want to avoid what former Army Chief of Staff E.C. Meyer termed the Vietnam mistake of "putting soldiers out at the end of a string" without the full support of the American people. Since time is crucial, furthermore, sufficient force must be used at the outset to ensure that the conflict can be resolved before the American people withdraw their support for it. Nothing succeeds with the American public like success, the military realize; the sooner the mission is accomplished, the better.
On fighting insurgencies
Vietnam planted in the minds of many in the military doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to conduct successful large-scale counterinsurgencies. These misgivings do not in all cases spring from doubts about the capabilities of American troops and units per se. . . .
Rather, the doubts that are part of the Vietnam legacy spring from a number of interrelated factors: the previously noted worries about a lack of popular support for what the public might perceive as ambiguous conflicts; suspicions about the willingness of civilian policy-makers -- not just those in the executive branch -- to stay the course; and lurking fears that the respective services have yet to come to grips with the difficult tasks of developing the doctrine, equipment, and forces suitable for nasty "little" wars. . . .
Others, who believe that the U.S. could develop suitable American forces for counterinsurgency operations, have doubts about the existing capabilities of U.S. units in this area. As one U.S. officer put it, "I submit that the U.S. Army does not have the mind-set for combat operations where the key terrain is the mind, not the high ground. We do not take the time to understand the nature of the society in which we are fighting, the government we are supporting, or the enemy we are fighting."
On civilian officials
Very importantly, many in the military believe that the United States armed forces can win small wars if allowed to do so. Those who hold this view tend to believe that Vietnam was less an illustration of the limitations of American military power than an example of what happens if that power is limited and not used to best advantage. This feeling springs from conviction that the U.S. military in Vietnam were so hemmed in by restrictions that they could not accomplish their mission. The lesson for those of this persuasion, therefore, is that the military must be given a freer hand in future military operations. Even among the most fervent believers in this logic, however, there is a new recognition that the world is more intractable, and intervention with U.S. troops more problematic. . . .
The military also took from Vietnam (and the concomitant activities in the Pentagon) a heightened awareness that civilian officials are responsive to influences other than the objective conditions on the battlefield. A consequence has been an increase in the traditional military distrust of civilian political leaders. . . . While the military still accept emphatically the constitutional provision for civilian control of the armed forces, there remain from the Vietnam era nagging doubts about the abilities and motivations of politicians and those they appoint to key positions. Vietnam was a painful reminder for the military that they, not the transient occupants of high office, generally bear the heaviest burden during armed conflict.
On dealing with the President
The lessons taken from Vietnam work to that end; military support for the use of force abroad is contingent on the presence of specific pre-conditions . . . "Don't commit American troops, Mr. President," they hold, "unless:
1) You really have to (in which case, presumably, vital U.S. interests are at stake);
2) You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces (that is, more than just some fuzzy political goals).
3) You provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly. (Remember, Mr. President, this may necessitate the mobilization of the reserve components -- perhaps even a declaration of war.)
4) You can ensure sufficient public support to permit carrying the commitment through to its conclusion."
For the military, in short, the debate over how and when to commit American troops abroad has become a debate over how to avoid, at all costs, another Vietnam.
Among Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus's qualifications for the post of senior U.S. military commander in Iraq is his work training Iraqi security forces, as well as his oversight of the Army and Marine Corps' updated counterinsurgency field manual. But another document may prove useful to Petraeus in Iraq. In 1987, he earned a PhD from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School with a 328-page thesis titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." Excerpts below.
-- Rachel Dry
On the lessons of history
Historical analogies are particularly compelling during crises, when the tendency to supplement incomplete information with past experiences is especially marked. . . . The legacy of Vietnam is unlikely to soon recede as an important influence on America's senior military. The frustrations of Vietnam are too deeply etched in the minds of those who now the [sic] lead the services and combatant commands. . . .
Vietnam cost the military dearly. It left America's military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged. Even worse, it devastated the armed forces, robbing them of dignity, money, and qualified people for a decade. . . . While the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership, however, the senior leaders of all the services share a similar reaction to Vietnam. There is no desire among any of them to repeat the experience that provided the material for such descriptively titled books as: "Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine"; "Self Destruction: the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era"; and "Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the United States Army." The simple essence of this feeling is that, in the words of then Colonel Dave Palmer, "there must be no more Vietnams."
On war and public opinion
Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. . . .
The military want to avoid what former Army Chief of Staff E.C. Meyer termed the Vietnam mistake of "putting soldiers out at the end of a string" without the full support of the American people. Since time is crucial, furthermore, sufficient force must be used at the outset to ensure that the conflict can be resolved before the American people withdraw their support for it. Nothing succeeds with the American public like success, the military realize; the sooner the mission is accomplished, the better.
On fighting insurgencies
Vietnam planted in the minds of many in the military doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to conduct successful large-scale counterinsurgencies. These misgivings do not in all cases spring from doubts about the capabilities of American troops and units per se. . . .
Rather, the doubts that are part of the Vietnam legacy spring from a number of interrelated factors: the previously noted worries about a lack of popular support for what the public might perceive as ambiguous conflicts; suspicions about the willingness of civilian policy-makers -- not just those in the executive branch -- to stay the course; and lurking fears that the respective services have yet to come to grips with the difficult tasks of developing the doctrine, equipment, and forces suitable for nasty "little" wars. . . .
Others, who believe that the U.S. could develop suitable American forces for counterinsurgency operations, have doubts about the existing capabilities of U.S. units in this area. As one U.S. officer put it, "I submit that the U.S. Army does not have the mind-set for combat operations where the key terrain is the mind, not the high ground. We do not take the time to understand the nature of the society in which we are fighting, the government we are supporting, or the enemy we are fighting."
On civilian officials
Very importantly, many in the military believe that the United States armed forces can win small wars if allowed to do so. Those who hold this view tend to believe that Vietnam was less an illustration of the limitations of American military power than an example of what happens if that power is limited and not used to best advantage. This feeling springs from conviction that the U.S. military in Vietnam were so hemmed in by restrictions that they could not accomplish their mission. The lesson for those of this persuasion, therefore, is that the military must be given a freer hand in future military operations. Even among the most fervent believers in this logic, however, there is a new recognition that the world is more intractable, and intervention with U.S. troops more problematic. . . .
The military also took from Vietnam (and the concomitant activities in the Pentagon) a heightened awareness that civilian officials are responsive to influences other than the objective conditions on the battlefield. A consequence has been an increase in the traditional military distrust of civilian political leaders. . . . While the military still accept emphatically the constitutional provision for civilian control of the armed forces, there remain from the Vietnam era nagging doubts about the abilities and motivations of politicians and those they appoint to key positions. Vietnam was a painful reminder for the military that they, not the transient occupants of high office, generally bear the heaviest burden during armed conflict.
On dealing with the President
The lessons taken from Vietnam work to that end; military support for the use of force abroad is contingent on the presence of specific pre-conditions . . . "Don't commit American troops, Mr. President," they hold, "unless:
1) You really have to (in which case, presumably, vital U.S. interests are at stake);
2) You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces (that is, more than just some fuzzy political goals).
3) You provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly. (Remember, Mr. President, this may necessitate the mobilization of the reserve components -- perhaps even a declaration of war.)
4) You can ensure sufficient public support to permit carrying the commitment through to its conclusion."
For the military, in short, the debate over how and when to commit American troops abroad has become a debate over how to avoid, at all costs, another Vietnam.
Political Correctness is just another way to say Cultural Marxism
The Origins of Political Correctness
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted "victims" groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true," the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, "Who will save us from Western Civilization?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the "latest thing."
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this."
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure," – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. "Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. "The theme of man’s domination of nature," according to Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years." "Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness." In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his "protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, "Hell no we won’t go," they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted "victims" groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true," the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, "Who will save us from Western Civilization?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the "latest thing."
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this."
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure," – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. "Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. "The theme of man’s domination of nature," according to Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years." "Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness." In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his "protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, "Hell no we won’t go," they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
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