Category Archives: Books

It’s All for Show

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This week’s edition of Dymphna’s Greatest Hits is a follow-up to last week’s, which discussed Annie Jacobsen’s encounter with the Syrian trombonists. This one is a review of Ms. Jacobsen’s book.

It’s All for Show

by Dymphna
Originally published on Sept. 27, 2005

Does the accumulation of four years without further terrorist attacks make you feel safer when you fly? It shouldn’t. The Bureaucratic Bunglers are out in full force and with them in charge you don’t have a prayer. Or rather, all you do have is prayer.

According to Annie Jacobsen, we’d better do our homework on this one because there is no one watching out for us. Back in April, Gates of Vienna posted on Ms. Jacobsen’s tenacity and her willingness to follow this story wherever it led. That post, “Silence of the Sheep,” proved that the author is a sheepdog indeed. Her interviews with other passengers, with government agencies, with the House Judiciary Committee, with airline personnel, and with individual people who bear the day-to-day hazard of working in this field, have made her case. The tale of her experiences is documented well in Terror in the Skies.

This is a top-down problem. The guys in harm’s way — the pilots and flight attendants — know the problems but they have no more power to address them than you do. Less than two percent of pilots are armed. Want to know why? Because in order to actually carry a firearm on board, the firearms training must be done on the pilot’s own time and it has to be done in a place far from home, squeezed into his holiday time or vacation.

And flight attendants? Again, they have to arrange self-defense training on their own time, at their own expense and without the cooperation of the airlines themselves. Think of it this way: what if Brink’s hired drivers and gave them no training in handling attempted robberies? What if they expected their employees to get training — if any — on their own time and their own dime? How long do you think Brink’s would be in business?

That’s the situation we have in the friendly skies of America. When you add to that the cruel joke of the Federal Air Marshals, the lackadaisical behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the farce we all know as the Department of Homeland Insecurity, it’s enough to make you want to stay home and do your business by long-distance and email.

Let’s take just one: FAMS. This is bureaucratese for the Federal Air Marshal program. You know the old joke that goes “you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny”? Well, for this program, the first part may or may not be the case, but for the second premise — being dressed funny — you can count on FAMS. Due to the boneheaded policies of those in charge, Federal Air Marshals are required to wear sport coats and collared shirts. Yes, that’s right: they must look like Federal Air Marshals at all times because they are a reflection of FAMS and dressing in a slovenly disguise would somehow bring disgrace to the organization. Comments about being a lovely corpse would be appropriate here.

Then there’s what they do after they’re up and dressed. Remember, they’re carrying guns, right? So obviously they can’t go through security. However, there’s a second obvious thing they can do — they can fight the current and walk through the exit lanes for deplaning passengers. How’s that for subterfuge?

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Conspiracy Theories? We Have Them A-Plenty

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Ever since J. Christian Adams, a career Department of Justice attorney, resigned in 2010 (during Obama’s first term) due to his own unwillingness to turn a blind eye to Eric Holder’s highly charged racialist program within the DOJ, I’ve been wondering when the corruption would be called to account. But it never happened. It never happens in the Democrat Deep State…unless, like Sidney Powell, you know where to look.

No, I didn’t know of her either, but I sure plan to follow what she has to say as this plotting is unloaded on a sickened American electorate. Can They manage to kill off the first capable president we’ve had in more than a generation??

This is a woman after Diana West’s own heart. Mine, too. She not only knows American jurisprudence, but she knows where (some of) the bodies are buried.

From her book page on Amazon from 2014 [five years in, and it’s still selling]:

Sidney Powell was an Assistant United States Attorney in three judicial districts under nine United States Attorneys from both political parties. She represented the United States in 350 criminal appeals and represented private parties in another 150, all resulting in more than 180 published decisions. She was the youngest Assistant U.S. Attorney when she began practicing. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the past president of the Bar Association for the Fifth Federal Circuit and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is a book she prayed she would never have to write. It’s written in the style of a legal thriller to be enjoyable and understandable to non-lawyers, but it is the true, behind-the-scenes insider perspective on major litigation during the last decade. If you think you know the truth about what happened to Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Enron, and former United States Senator Ted Stevens, think again. You won’t know the truth until you read LICENSED TO LIE. It tells a very human story that every informed citizen, lawyer, and judge should know. The foreword to the book is written by Judge Alex Kozinski, one of the most brilliant legal minds in the country. He is the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but he wrote the foreword in his personal capacity.

She also writes for the New York Observer…and her opinion pieces have received over 16,000 facebook posts, countless tweets, and other methods of “sharing.” […] They include 1. All the President’s Muses 2. Holder Protects Corrupt Prosecutors 3. War on Wall Street 4. Meet Emmet Sullivan (the IRS Judge who scheduled a hearing for July 10); 5. One Two Punch (IRS faces Two Federal Judges), and others. Her news articles and opinion pieces may be found here. These outstanding stories have been picked up multiple times by the Drudge Report, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart, Fox News, Greta Van Susternen, and countless other blogs and reporters. She is the only published authority on federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, former White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, and now Mueller team special prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and others.

She has been featured on Fox News, the CATO INSTITUTE (broadcast on C-Span), NewsMax TV, and countless radio shows. She has spoken on the topic of prosecutorial misconduct for two federal judicial conferences and numerous bar associations. Her website is here.

This book has over nine hundred customer reviews, overwhelmingly five-star, and they have continued to accrue over the five years since the book came out.

[NOTE: This post has been moldering in my Drafts since the video was brand-new. I’m sorry it’s no longer au courant, but my health (or lack thereof) interfered. While not breaking news, the main elements in this story will continue to drag their sadsack selves through the purgatory of American national politics. If I find any further Sidney Powell commentary, I’ll post it for you.]

The Sad Reality of Memorial Day 2019

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It’s back to work tomorrow after a weekend of Remembering with cook-outs and family gatherings.

As the wrappings around the treacheries of World War II begin to rot and drop away, the emerging truths are difficult for the average person to comprehend, much less metabolize. When you know our government policy was to leave behind living, breathing men from three generations to the mercies of Communist butchers, it is hard to memorialize what remains. Or perhaps it is easier to turn away from the despair…

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Yesterday, the nationwide group, Rolling Thunder, remembered kinetically these MIAs and POWs -more than 85,000 souls – still honoring them on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. This year was to have been the last ride through Washington because of the expense and red tape, but President Trump and some anonymous donors have stepped in to say they will facilitate the run in 2020.

I have mirrored Diana West’s account of these losses; the cynical and barbaric disappearance of our young, then-living American POWs who were disappeared by Communists is truly tragic. And make no mistake: it has indeed been Communism that is responsible for this bleeding loss. As she says in her post,

Ever since I delved into the darkest corners of our past and came up with American Betrayal, this season of national holidays and observances, including VE-Day on May 8 (but really May 7), Memorial Day, D-Day, for my own family, the day in July my dad was wounded at the Battle of St Lo, and the anniversary of Hiroshima on August 15, has become an unnerving time of year. That’s because this annual procession of national holidays and observances serves to bury in red, white and blue bunting the amalgam of Big Lies — “court history,” error and disinformation — which Americans are instructed to hold to be as sacred as truth. As the late M. Stanton Evans put it here, all of that Establishment-history or consensus-history is “pretty much bogus.”

It is this bogus history that hides a cascade of lies and treachery, including communist and Soviet influence inside our highest government circles and even war councils, all of which becomes difficult for the American patriot to fathom, when the conditioned behavior is to look the other way at Old Glory passing by and salute.

Thanks to Stefan Molyneux, I had the opportunity to discuss what is the greatest American betrayal of all, the betrayal of our own fighting men, our POWs/MIAs who never came home because they were abandoned by the US government in successive wars and proxy wars against Moscow and Beijing. This includes the story of the American GIs in POW camps who, as Nazi Germany crumbled, came under Soviet control … forever.

The US government continues to pretend these American sons never existed, but, of all days, We, the People, should remember them on Memorial Day.

Here’s her eloquent dialogue with Stephan Molyneux:

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She doesn’t mention the sudden death of General Patton, that staunch anti-Communist who was a driving force in the attempt to rescue the World War II Allied POWs held in Germany; I doubt he had any illusions as to their fate if the Russians got there first. But he died suddenly in a motor accident, and the Russians did get there first.

As Diana mentions, this also happened to the doughboys being held in World War I [welcome to the 20th century]. Yes, it really does go that far back. Our government can be forgiven its ignorance about Soviet Russia and world Communism at that point, but not in later wars.

Here’s her latest book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Only a hundred pages long, or you can get the audio or Kindle version. I read the e-book and recommend it for her detailed discoveries about the ways Communism still infects our body politic at the highest levels.

Meanwhile, read her earlier post, from Friday, in which she delineates Roosevelt’s betrayal, leaving thousands of G.I.s to be disappeared into Stalin’s gulag. The photo is a stunner.

Please Read This Book!

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We’ve discussed the importance of American Betrayal here in the past, but JLH sends this reminder for those who have not yet read the book.

Please Read This Book!

by JLH

It’s the new McCarthyism! It’s a return to McCarthy!

I find this annoying but also amusing when I encounter it in the remarks of a left-leaning writer or politician. When I find it in the remarks of one of the many uninformed or oblivious as a parenthetical characterization, I am disappointed that there are so many of them.

But when I find it in the remarks of Republican members of Congress, or even in an essay in that most effective and informed conservative blog Breitbart, I vacillate between fury and the despair Kierkegaard referred to as “the sickness unto death.” How can it be that informed conservatives and constitutionalists are unaware of the serial vindication of Senator Joseph McCarthy — “Tailgunner Joe,” the presumptive creator of the “Red Scare”? And the REALITY of what he was uncovering when he was smeared and forced into a corner… the most memorable moment of which may have come in the Army-McCarthy hearings, when the army’s attorney Joseph Welch, reproached McCarthy for offering the information that a young man in Welch’s firm’s employ belonged to a suspect organization: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” This cry of apparent outrage in defense of a member of his own team has become a shibboleth of McCarthy foes ever since, used as though it applied to everything he had done.

How can anyone not know of the work of the distinguished academic, M. Stanton Evans: Stalin’s Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History; or of Vladimir Bukovsky, author of To Build a Castle and co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement, and others. And if they were in fact ignorant of these and other figures who have offered a different perspective, how can they not know of Diana West’s 2013 book: American Betrayal: The Secret Assault On Our Nation’s Character.

Well, of course, it may be that “right-thinking” bookstore owners and librarians do not consider it fit for public display. The profit motive still works, though, as I found out when I ordered it through my local (need I say left-leaning, virtue-signaling) bookstore and, after reading it, donated it to my (ditto) library, because I knew they would not refuse a donation. For heaven’s sake, go find it in a public library, locate it on Amazon, just look it up online. But do not delay in finding and reading this meticulously annotated and devastating analysis of the McCarthy era, of the FDR administration, of everything you have not been told by all those who have an interest in keeping you ignorant and encouraging you to continue saying “McCarthyism” when you should be saying “socialism,” “elitism,” or “just plain damned ignorance.” So no one can say to you, “Have you no intelligence?”

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I Take This Woman…

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Tabitha Korol’s latest guest-essay takes a look at the plight of women under Islam.

I take this woman…

by Tabitha Korol

The internet provides everything you’d want to know about courtships, weddings, married life, but few of them include the instructions on wife-beating. There is a brief but enlightening film, produced by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and posted on Jihad Watch, of a Muslim sociologist who demonstrates the “proper” wife-beating technique. Of course, the sociologist assures his audience that Islam is merciful, and that the man, the head of the household, should not have to beat his wife every day, and to do so lightly, never to hit her face or head, bruise, break bones or cause blood to flow (m10:12, Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law — ROTT). But the cautionary statement rings hollow when the wife’s bruises will never be seen because she must be covered from head to toe. And, should she become inured to the discipline’s sameness, there are other means of control and punishment available to him, all sanctioned by The Religion of Peace.

When is it necessary to beat one’s wife? The sociologist did posit that there are women who prefer domineering, authoritative, and even violent husbands. For the most part, however, beatings are needed when the wife has disobeyed him and the strict Islamic rules of marriage. She may have refused to wear a hijab (m:2:7-8, ROTT) or the finery he chose for her; or fancied attending school with the hope of one day having a career and earning a wage. She may have wanted to leave the house unaccompanied or without her husband’s permission; she is literally under house arrest.

The Shari’a marriage contract contains her virginity status, the dowry amount, and grants sexual intercourse rights to the male, giving him total control over his wife or wives. Should she refuse his advances, be too ill or too young to have sex, or if she engages in sex with another man or was raped, he could stop her daily (financial) maintenance. The woman is considered a she-devil, equal to a domestic animal, harmful and with crooked character. Therefore, he may disallow her to sleep in his bed; or lock her in a room, naked, and without food. Should he choose to enact a simple divorce by repeating “I divorce you” three times — she may receive no more than three months’ maintenance and could lose her children older than age seven.

The Muslim husband has the right to accuse her of adultery, in which case he might gather his friends and neighbors together to bury her almost up to her shoulders and stone her to death. The film The Stoning of Soraya M portrays the true story of Soraya, in Iran, whose husband Ali convinced their two sons and the townsfolk that she was committing adultery so that he could marry a 14-year-old girl. The Internet has an actual film of a Syrian woman being stoned to death by ISIS. About four women per day are murdered in “stove bursts” in Pakistan, by husbands or in-laws who claim the wives’ scarves caught fire while they were cooking.

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On Being Snookered by Penny-ante Political Obfuscations

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Hey, Jordan Peterson! Your descriptions of what young men need if they are ever to mature in our Western world are spot on. But as a political philosopher, you lack the foundation to address the ugly divisions the Left has driven into the heart of civil discourse.

Which is unfortunate for us all. You are good at stating what you don’t know, but sometimes you enter into the realms of what you don’t know that you don’t know, i.e., what you have glossed over or failed to comprehend. Yes, you want your reach to transcend politics but it can’t since the Left has inextricably bound the political into every facet of life, a merging the right rejects categorically. You say the right can be seen by its identity politics but you don’t say the left does exactly the same thing. Try saying “All Lives Matter” in public and see where it gets you.

People are anxious to pigeonhole your ideas and you want to allay their fears that you might be -gasp! – right wing. You attempt to declare your political agnosticism while refusing to bow to an overweening leftist identitarianism. When you refuse the strictures of compelled speech from the rulers of Canada, you are speaking from the right. Compelled speech is a leftist/socialist trope; it is the Right which defends freedom of speech.

By the way, how many rightwingextremists have shown up to disrupt your talks, trash your ideas, or make you feel unsafe in public? And if you think Charlottesville was reality-based, you’ve been snookered, sir. We live near there; we watched it go down. From the beginning, the whole mess was a false flag set-up.

Read Tomas Sowell, sir. Across more than fifty years, his body of work, his opera of conservative political philosophy, has been consistently correct. In his eighties now, he’s still sharp. Here’s his Amazon Page It’s a wealth of information that never stale dates.

Meanwhile, listen to Dr. Turley explain why Nazism -National Socialism- is leftist. It did not come from the Right.

Now tell us why wanting to be a nation-state with one’s own peculiar culture, language and traditions is not a good thing. Ask Les Québécois why they won’t give up and join you Anglos. Do you think they should? If not, why not? Compare and contrast.

Loopies and Kooks

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During the past week Dymphna and JLH have discussed Diana West’s new book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, which extends the theme of her previous book American Betrayal. I’ll take this opportunity to recycle a graphic I made several years ago. It didn’t draw much attention at the time, because by then the intense controversy over American Betrayal had faded into background muttering. But it was one of my better productions, so here it is again:

This delicious and nutritious breakfast cereal requires some explanatory context.

In the early months (summer and fall of 2013) of the “barroom brawl” prompted by Diana’s book, various indefensibly nasty things* were written by a number of neoconservatives, most of them stars in the David Horowitz constellation.

In one of several vituperative pieces, Conrad Black called her “a right-wing loopy” who had not yet been “house-trained”, and described her book as a “farrago of lies”. In reference to Diana and those who agreed with her, Mr. Black decried the “unutterable myth-making and jejune dementedness, as they hurl the vitriol of the silly and the deranged” (August 16, 2013).

As soon as that little literary delicacy was published, Ronald Radosh sent Diana a triumphant email with the subject line “Conrad Black tears you apart”. To make sure she understood, he enclosed the text of Mr. Black’s essay, with the introduction: “Sorry to upset you once again, Diana, but I’m afraid you’ve lost, big time.”

David Horowitz himself said that she had “organized a kook army”.

Since then Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Radosh have supposedly had a falling-out. I’m not sure about Conrad Black; I haven’t heard much about him recently. However, if I recall correctly, he’s an adamant #NeverTrump guy.

This is just a little taste of the background for the discussion we’ve been having for the last few days.

*   For additional source links to these and other ad-hominem insults, see “An Addled Barroom Brawler”. But it’s been six years; some of them may be stale by now.
 

A Moment of Clarity

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You’re driving down a winding country road late at night. Up ahead, just barely within range of your headlights, you catch a glimpse of a moving shape. Uh-oh — could it be another one of those #@%&?!# deer? After a split second your guess is confirmed: you see the twin red pinpoints of its eyes. And then another pair, and another — the little red winking lights of four or five deer, looking like a row of error codes on a modem. The creatures leap into the road, eager to throw themselves in front of your car and send it to the body shop, and possibly you to the hospital. You brake hard and swerve… Phew! Your luck holds — you miss them by a couple of yards.

Yes, we denizens of the Virginia Outback are all too familiar with the awful moment when the view ahead becomes well-lit and clear enough to see that another close encounter with a deer is on the way. It’s a moment of ghastly clarity.

That’s what the last four years at Gates of Vienna have been like for me. Beginning with the Great Migration Crisis in the summer of 2015, some of the previously obscure underpinnings of currently unfolding events have sprung clearly into view, as if a row of light switches by the door to reality were being flipped on, one by one.

I could list any number of processes that make up this ongoing moment of clarity, but for simplicity of exposition, I’ll condense them into three major categories:

1.   The coordinated, planned invasion of Europe by masses of third-world migrants.
2.   The election of Donald Trump, and the consequent events that followed it.
3.   The global de-platforming of Tommy Robinson.
 

What these events have in common is that they reveal the otherwise occluded machinations of the international elite who strive to manage global affairs to suit their plans. The interference and manipulation have become so obvious that even non-paranoid people can’t help but notice them.

In the following analysis I’ll draw on vast quantities of data that I’ve absorbed over the past few years, without including any links. However, anything that is speculation will be clearly marked as such.

1. The Great Migration Crisis

When the columns of (mostly young male) migrants marched into Europe through the Balkans in the summer and fall of 2015, it quickly became clear that the whole operation had been planned in advance. Yes, Angela Merkel took advantage of the Dead Baby Moment when the corpse of little Ayan was carefully arranged and then “found” on a beach in Anatolia. No good socialist lets a crisis go to waste. Yet the logistical process that followed was far too large, complex, and expensive not to have been arranged ahead of time. Endless caravans of buses were lined up at various national borders to carry the migrants from one photo-op to the next, when they took those brief walks across the frontier that created such good visuals for the media.

And the culture-enrichers were carrying €500 notes to spend at their first stops in the European Union. Where did they get that kind of cash? Almost nobody uses that denomination of banknote in the EU.

A couple of years later it became clear that the EU itself was the cash cow for the migrants, when a credit card company acknowledged that it had partnered with the EU — which had guaranteed repayment of the debt — to hand out prepaid cards to migrants when they arrived in Europe.

Early in the game it became clear that George Soros was heavily involved in the process of migration. His NGOs ferried the “refugees” across the Med, handed out maps and instruction booklets, and chartered the buses that carried them onward towards Germany. But Mr. Soros wasn’t playing the philanthropist — he made that explicit when he told an interviewer that he expected to turn a profit on all his dealings.

Governments across Europe fell into line with the plan. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stood alone against the migration, and has become the sworn enemy of Brussels as a result. Until Matteo Salvini became Italian interior minister last year, Mr. Orbán was the sole governmental leader on the continent to actively resist what was happening.

Mass migration into Europe is not intrinsically profitable for anyone except the culture-enrichers themselves. Yet lots of people — people-smugglers, businesses, NGOs, and local governments — have been making money off the process. So who is paying for the population transfer?

Somebody wanted those migrants to get to Europe, and was willing to pay billions of dollars to make it happen.

Three years later, an exactly analogue of the process could be observed in the migrant “caravans” traveling from Central America through Mexico to the southern border of the USA. That was also a complex logistical process costing a lot of money. The trek overland through several countries had to be organized and supplied. Local officials had to be paid off to allow it through.

Who bankrolled all of that?

I don’t have any definitive answers to these questions, just speculations. I’ll get into those later.

2. The election of Donald Trump

Twenty-five years or so before the 2016 election I noticed how unpopular mass immigration was with American voters. Polls routinely showed that somewhere between 60% and 80% of the population said they opposed immigration, and some considered it an important issue. It seemed that an aspiring presidential candidate could do well if he included a prominent anti-immigration plank in his platform. Yet no one ever did, and that seemed peculiar. How could a pragmatic politician resist such an electoral advantage? Yes, it was considered a “populist” position, and everyone knew that populism was bad. Still… the issue could have helped a candidate win an election because it was, well, popular.

Fast-forward to 2016. As the campaign progressed, and Donald Trump deftly picked off all his opponents during the primaries, it became clear that the reason no one ever took up opposition to mass immigration was because they were not allowed to. The intense vitriol aimed at Mr. Trump from both parties — what we now refer to as the Uniparty — made it clear that primaries were designed to weed out any opponents of immigration. And that was OK with the Republican establishment — they didn’t really want to win elections that much anyway, as their rush to join #NeverTrump proved.

The events since January 20, 2017 have provided more evidence that the political establishment (a.k.a. the Swamp) in Washington D.C. is prepared to use all its wealth and power and influence to push Donald Trump out of the Oval Office. And the major issue that makes Mr. Trump so popular is his staunch opposition to mass immigration.

Why do all those wealthy, powerful members of the entrenched elite want so badly to bring millions of illiterate immigrants into the United States?

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St Patrick’s Day – When the Irish Invaded Canada

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Who knew?

This fine fellow researched the whole tilting-at-windmills brouhaha — including all the internecine fighting that kept that Hunger Generation from succeeding.

It’s here:

When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom

The thing is, those fighting Irish didn’t actually want Canada; they simply thought they could use it as a hostage to gain freedom for Ireland and they worked hard to make it happen.

The new Irish immigrants flooded to America in order to work for something to eat. Thus, they fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil War and then kinda, sorta joined forces afterward to secure Canada. The rationale was that if they held Canada hostage then the English would have to let much-poorer Ireland go in exchange.

Several things came out of the attempt. First, the British moved the capital further in from its border with America in order to make it more secure. Secondly, the overdue idea of founding a confederation of Canada’s territories became a reality much sooner than might have been the case otherwise.

‘Tis a fascinating book if you’ve the necessary DNA component which allows one to read gobs of stories about in-fighting and betrayal. Though he mentions it, what the writer doesn’t cover sufficiently, me thinks, is the reality of America’s desire for grabbing Canada its ownself. We had taken Texas from Mexico by then and bought Alaska from Russia. Bringing in Canada had great appeal for many Americans. For Canadians, not so much. They are too peaceable; being part of the rowdy U.S. would cause a profound unease. They weren’t called Loyalists for nothing.

Back during the Irish shenanigans, some of America’s politicians bloviated about the desirability of owning the whole hog, but those who did have an eye on the North wanted someone else to do the dirty work. There was little dirty work the Irish weren’t willing to do to get the English out of the Emerald Isle.

A recent video of the author’s talk in Lawrence Massachusetts about this bit of history is below the fold.

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Living Through a Dark Fatherless Time

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Tucker Carlson is a prominent conservative talking head in America. For the better part of a year, he’s been accumulating occasional pieces on the fate of men in our gynetrophied culture. As usual, this phenomenon is tied implicitly to the unintended effects of globalism.

In this episode, Carlson features Heather MacDonald and her recent book:

Men leaving the scene (#MGTOW) was predicted a generation ago by Lionel Tiger, a cultural anthropologist from Rutgers. Somewhere, in one of his books I read back in the 1980s, he made the observation that when women begin to crowd any given field the men quietly drift away. I recall one of the occupations he cited historically was the way women gradually took over the niche male secretaries once held. But which book that was I’ve since forgotten (though you don’t forget a person named Lionel Tiger, do you?).

Here’s a book of his from the turn of this century:

The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women

A blurb from that page:

“Lionel Tiger, a pioneer of biological anthropology and developer of the concept of male bonding, here delivers a very well-researched and well-written brief for masculinism, which if successful, may gain parity with feminism and eventually transform women’s studies within academia into what they should have always been, namely, gender studies.” (Edward O. Wilson, author of Consilience and Pellegrino University Research Professor, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University)

Here is his Wikipedia page with a partial listing of his books. There is a larger listing at Amazon, here.

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Lest I forget… don’t overlook Heather Mac Donald’s fine new work on our “metastasizing diversity bureaucracy”

Let’s Even the Odds

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In this episode, Dr. Turley covers the American petition to get White House press credentials for Alex Jones so he can sit next to CNN’s infamously rude microphone hog, Jim Acosta. Frankly, I don’t understand why Alex Jones has to have special permission to gain press access nor why a sitting president isn’t allowed to rein in the perfervid jornolistos appearing at the White House on his time.

Here’s a link to the book Turley mentions and the (edited) introductory blurb from Amazon:

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battleground is the internet. On one side the alt-right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian, Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signaling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

For Americans, here’s the petition you can sign. They need a hundred thousand signatures by mid-December to have any impact.

German “Right-Wing” Publisher and his Wife Attacked after Frankfurt Book Fair

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Our German readers are probably familiar with the attack on Götz Kubitschek and his wife last Saturday in Frankfurt, but people who don’t follow the German-language news have most likely heard very little about it. Rembrandt Clancy sends this digest of the available information on the incident.


Götz Kubitschek in Chemnitz

German “Right-Wing” Publisher and his Wife Attacked after Frankfurt Book Fair

by Rembrandt Clancy

Götz Kubitschek is a well-known German book publisher and journalist who resolutely places himself to the right of the political spectrum: “Where there is a Left, there must be a Right and if there are intellectuals of the Left there are intellectuals of the Right.” For Kubitschek “Right” is virtually a brand name, even though it is weighted with a negative, “denunciative” or “pejorative” valuation, whilst the Left draws normative descriptors. For the executive editor of Sezession, the only journal for right-of-centre intellectuals in the German-speaking world, being intellectually to the Right is a “metapolitical theme” also for Antaios-Verlag (Antaios Publishing House), which he founded and still manages from the old Schnellroda manor in Saxony-Anhalt. But it is not a question of promoting the word “Right” or “right-wing intellectual” as an end itself; rather, it is a task of Antaios to turn the word “Right” into a positive concept. To be intellectually to the Right in today’s world is clearly more interesting, firstly because its ideas are new; and secondly, because it tackles matters in a different way, hence yielding a more accurate description of reality. (Interview with Kubitschek by RT Deutsch, Der Fehlende Part, 2017).

Writers such as the Austrian Identitarian leader Martin Sellner find a home at Antaios-Verlag. Kubitschek recently published Finis Germania, or “Germania, You are Dying” by the late Rolf Peter Sieferle and thereby called up an hysterical storm among the established press in Germany. Gates of Vienna published a translation of the book’s third chapter entitled “Mythos VB [Vergangenheitsbewältigung]” or “ The Mythos of Overcoming the [National Socialist] Past”.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the first to report the attack by three hooded men on Götz Kubitschek and his wife after the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse) in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen on Saturday 13 October. They were dining at about 2200 hours in the outdoor area of the Pizzeria dal Bianco on Darmstädter Landstraße, a situation which placed Kubitschek immediately adjacent to the sidewalk.

Junge Freiheit reports:

Kubitschek sits with his back to the street and cannot see the attackers. “I never do that otherwise. They came out of nowhere… then I felt someone kick me in the back of the head; I fell with my head against the top of the table and was dazed”.

Kubitschek continues to describe how his wife and an acquaintance were injured, saying “The entire affair lasted five to eight seconds at the most.”

Caroline Sommerfeld is an Antaios author and intellectual of the New Right. She was present during the incident and reports that when Kubitschek’s wife, Ellen Kositza, realised that the perpetrators were trying to steal a notebook computer and a satchel which were on the table, she held on tightly to the items. The attackers dragged her from her bench onto the ground causing an injury to her left knee and wounds to her head. A third acquaintance suffered a black eye and a cut to his temple from a flying bottle (unzensuriert.at, 15 October).

The mainstream Frankfurter Allgemeine provided additional detail suggesting the perpetrators knew their victims:

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Social Justice: An Analysis (Part 4)

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Below is the final part of a four-part guest essay by Richard Cocks about Social Justice. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Social Justice: An Analysis

Part 4
by Richard Cocks

Who gets to be a student?

In the 1980s in New Zealand, university students tended to be the children of parents who had also been university students. This was at a time when only five percent of the population was admitted to college. Universities were funded by the government at great expense and reserved for the academically capable. Standards were high, with no grade inflation. Every student was literate and/or numerate and tended to be interested in his studies. Nearly every student pursued his own reading agenda and most would take an interest in classical literature and foreign (i.e., difficult) movies.

This fact about the parentage of university students was presented as a problem.

However, far from being unfair, it only stands to reason. The children of academically successful people are likely to have inherited a higher genetically derived intelligence. They are more likely to be exposed to a larger vocabulary from their parents, along with relatively sophisticated concepts. Their parents are likely to read to them and to treat education as valuable and important. There will likely be easy access to books with frequent trips to the library. The parents are more likely to be exemplary role models in their own reading habits. Academic subjects might be treated as interesting and discussed around the dinner table.

Many of these New Zealand students grew up wanting to be educated and knowledgeable. Some of it was just vanity and fear — not wanting to be the only person at the party who did not know about, say, Freud.

In my own case, long before attending university, “The Academic Calendar,” a bound book in which all university courses were listed along with their reading requirements, would be eagerly examined. Practically salivating at the books that would be read and discussed, fantasies of alternative course loads ensued. Imitating a friend of the family meant wanting from the age of seven to be a philosophy professor, before even knowing what philosophy really was.

The advantages of having university-educated parents were ones of class, family and genetic inheritance. Are those advantages fair? They are neither fair nor unfair. They are certainly an undeserved good fortune a.k.a. luck.

Crucially, what is the alternative to such a state of affairs?

Social justice would require “fixing” these advantages. One problem with this is that a student who is less able, less literate, less motivated, less interested, with a smaller vocabulary, having read fewer books would take the other’s place. This is a poor use of resources and creates its own unfairness. The other problem is that social justice attempts a kind of unknowable counterfactual — one of putting someone where they would have been had not social, familial and genetic factors counted against him. Sowell points out that social justice requires non-existent God-like abilities to determine what might have been.

Unintended consequences of social justice

One thing that was attempted in many countries to try to counteract disadvantages acquired “through no fault of their own” was to take children away from parents who were poor, unemployed, perhaps drug- or alcohol-addicted, unsuccessful, with bad attitudes towards education and industriousness and to put those children in more middle-class and successful households. This happened to Australian Aboriginal children and to Native American children among others. This attempt at cosmic justice is now regarded as an abomination, though it was well-meaning. Ripping such children from their birth home changes their likely educational and employment attainments positively, but destroys families and the parent/child bond. It is now completely out of fashion and widely condemned.

However, the desire for cosmic justice continues in other forms and similar sorts of things result from it.

In the 1960s liberal judges argued that amateur criminals often implicated themselves in ways that professional offenders would not. Bizarrely, the judges wanted to even the playing field for the amateurs and instituted the Miranda Rights rule. This means more violent criminals wandering the streets, getting off on technicalities, and more difficulty in prosecuting them. A certain number of extra victims will have died as a result of judges’ wanting amateur criminals to avoid conviction as often as the professionals. Those living in high-crime areas such as inner cities will have particularly suffered, and a very high proportion will have been black. Similarly, justices wanted hard-luck stories concerning murderer’s childhoods to be considered, even though there is no way to tell how much this contributed to their offending. These kinds of considerations mean murder trials commonly extend for three years at great expense, while violent criminals are out on bail.

“Social justice” for criminals means more victims, rapes and deaths, especially among the poor.

Traditional justice means one rule for all. Social justice for vicious murderers means the punishment will vary depending on how bad the killer’s childhood was. This means a different punishment for two criminals who commit the same crime. A criminal who could prove he had a particularly harsh childhood could expect a reduced punishment. Reducing the punishment means there is less of a disincentive to offend. If anything that contributes to his greater chance of offending should mean a lighter sentence, then the rule that criminals with bad childhoods should get lighter sentences will justify giving criminals even lighter sentences, thereby reducing the disincentive to offend, ad infinitum.

Affirmative action programs in California, for instance, were shown to actually reduce the graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics. By putting such students in colleges for which they did not qualify based on their grades, the students found themselves outgunned and at the bottom of their classes. This discouraging state of affairs tends to undermine self-confidence and reduce graduation rates. When the University of California system was forbidden by legal decisions to engage in affirmative action admission policies, the graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics rose by 55%.The number of doctorates among that group in the sciences went up 25% after affirmative action policies were banned. [1]

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You Say You Want a Revolution…

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A few days ago I was looking through a box of old papers, vintage ca. 1970, and I found a copy of the 1966 Pelican edition of Volume 2 of The Bolshevik Revolution by E.H. Carr. Since the book hasn’t seen the light of day in forty-odd years, it’s in pretty good shape. I bought it in 1968 — for 9s6d, or about 48p, as a matter of interest — when I was studying for A-levels. My history teacher recommended that anyone who was planning to sit special papers (which I was) should read it in preparation for the exam.

E.H. Carr, if not an outright communist, was definitely a communist sympathizer and an apologist for Stalin. But that doesn’t detract from his work as a historian — like many of the comsymp historians, he was from the old school: researching history meant studying the facts and writing them up, with thorough annotation of sources. A historian might color his narrative with his own opinions, but he didn’t scamp the facts.

The same was true of Isaac Deutscher, an actual communist, whose biography of Stalin was also on my reading list back then. I read those books and others, discounted the bias of the writers, and accumulated a vast store of information about the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Russia, some of which is still stuck in my head today. Reading history written by commies never improved my opinion of communism — in fact, some of the ghastly truths about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin contained in those books hardened my attitude even further. A few months ago, when I was arguing with Felix Quigley (who was our resident Marxist commenter for a while), he wanted to know where I got my bogus information about Lenin. My source was in fact the book shown above — I couldn’t remember the author’s name at that point, but I told him it was written by a communist or communist sympathizer.

Facts is facts. And they’re in there.

This book was the second of three volumes on the Bolshevik Revolution, which themselves were part of a series on the history of Soviet Russia. The blurb on the Pelican book says there were eight volumes, but I thought there were about fourteen — maybe Carr wrote more of them after 1966.

Anyway… The font size in the book is microscopic, so I know I’ll never read it again. Oh, for the days when I could read those tiny little black letters!

So here’s my proposal: I’ll put this in a book mailer and send it to anyone in the USA who would be interested in reading it. It’s in good condition; the spine is intact. There’s only a bit of yellowing and that coffee stain from 1968 at the top. I’m restricting it to recipients the USA because book rate is cheap, so I won’t mind paying the postage.

If you’d like it, email me with your address at gatesofvienna (at) chromatism (dot) net. A week from today I’ll compile a list of interested parties (if any), have Dymphna choose one of them at random, and mail it off to the lucky winner.

This book is dense with information. I noticed that there’s a big section on the NEP in the second half of it. That’s one of the more interesting developments in the early history of the Soviet Union.