Columnist Jon Sanders of the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, NC has written a blog entry that reveals just how easy it is to get a job teaching Africana Studies at N.C. State University. It also demonstrates how the diversity movement is bringing people together in the great state of North Carolina.
Sandersâ recent blog directs readers to C-SPAN online, where they can click on the recent archives and scroll down until they find the "Black Media Forum on the Image of Black Americans in Mainstream Media." This was a program presented on October 14th at Howard University. Dr. Kamau Kambon makes his appearance about three hours into the four-hour event.
Dr. Kambon's closing remarks â given about twenty minutes before the programâs conclusion - are chilling:
And then finally I want to say that we need one idea, and we're not thinking about a solution to the problem. We're thinking about all these other things, but we're not dealing with a solution to the problem. And we have to start to think about a solution to the problem so that these young brothers and sisters who are here now, who are 15, 16 or 17, are not here 25 years later talking about these same problems.
Now how do I know that the white people know that we are going to come up with a solution to the problem? I know it because they have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks, and theyâre monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem. Now I donât care whether you clap or not, but Iâm saying to you that we need to solve this problem because they are going to kill us. And I will leave on that. So we just have to just set up our own system and stop playing and get very serious and not be diverted from coming up with a solution to the problem and the problem on the planet is white people.
Dr. Kambon also said that "white people want to kill you ⊠because that is part of their plan" and that âthe only n**ger on the planet is the white man and the white woman, and our people are not n**gers, they are imitation n**gers.â
An official at N.C. State University claims that Dr. Kambon - once a visiting professor being paid by the taxpayers of North Carolina â is no longer affiliated with the university. But, if that is true, why is he still listed on the universityâs Africana Studies faculty page?
After you visit that site, I bet youâll have the same question. And, like me, I hope youâll write the Africana Studies Department (afs@social.chass.ncsu.edu) demanding an answer. And, while youâre at it, ask them why they hired a genocidal racist in the first place. Link fixed
#5
No need to exterminate whitey in Europe, euro-whitey is happily un-breeding himself out of existence.
On the other hand, americano-whitey is faring pretty well (sorry wasp, but for me latinos and the likes are white, even with the indian blood), so this gentleman will have to wait.
And when it comes to exterminating a whole ethnic group, what can do it better than genetically-engineered biowarfare (there is a conspiracy theory israelis have designed an arab-targetting virus, wouldn't that be sweet?)...?
And we all know how much Africana Studies prepare for genetical engineering.
Just a plea for some advice. I'm trying to tweak my blog template. It looks great in Netsacpe and it looks like I had a stroke in IE. The link takes you to a post describing what I'm trying to do.
#2
chuck, did you write your site yourself? Have you considered moving onto the open source platform WordPress? CSS and PHP ... and you can tweak it at the source code level if you want to.
Works well on a wide range of browsers and lots of plugins are available and more being written.
#4
Forgot to add that one attraction about Word Press is the huge collection of templates that you can either apply without changes or use as a base for mods. 1 / 2 / 3 columns, color schemes, etc. Really quite a fun platform to work with.
#5
I host my own site on "Geocities" and use Blogger to author it. As I understand it, Word Press doesn't work on Geoshitties. Maybe I'm wrong. I am also not a CSS maven. Just plug it in, look at the result, and tweak as necessary.
I'm surprised Firefox pukes on it. I thought it was based on the Mosaic / Netscape engine.
#6
Chuck,
I assume you want to the post text to show up at the top (In Firefox, the text starts after the LH bar ends). In that case you can get of the two instances of style="clear:both;".
and
Posted by: ed ||
10/21/2005 10:11 Comments ||
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#7
Chuck,
I assume you want to the post text to show up at the top (In Firefox, the text starts after the LH bar ends). In that case you can get of the two instances of style="clear:both;".
Whoops, the html did not show up. Here is the search text. Replace "<." w/ "<" in the search.
<.div style="clear:both;"><./div> and
<.div style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;"><./div>
Posted by: ed ||
10/21/2005 10:16 Comments ||
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#8
Ed, so remove both instances of div.style=clear
and find the places where < is followed by a period and remove the period
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/21/2005 10:27 Comments ||
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Chuck,
I removed both (w/o the ".")
"<.div style="clear:both;"><./div>" and
"<.div style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;"><./div>"
but of course you can experiment and remove less if you want to keep the padding.
Posted by: ed ||
10/21/2005 10:29 Comments ||
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#11
I just tossed the javascript date and time thingy. More trouble than it's worth. Didn't solve the IE problem. All the CSS is supposed to work with IE 6+.
Added a neat little toy at the bottom of the left column, How Much Is Your Blog Worth?
#12
Hosting Matters can carry a decent-sized blog for about $6-11 / month. They have a script for automatically setting up Word Press and a web interface for all the things you'd want to do, like uploading any pre-designed templates etc. Email accounts are part of the deal, if you want to use them, also wholly managed via point and click.
Reader Jack Fulmer sent me the following item, which appeared a century ago â 13 September 1905 â in the Paris edition of the New York Herald:
Holy War Waged
St. Petersburg: The districts of Zangezur and Jebrail are swarming with Tartar bands under the leadership of chiefs, and in some cases accompanied by Tartar police officials. Green banners are carried and a âHoly Warâ is being proclaimed. All Armenians, without distinction of sex or age are being massacred. Many thousand Tartar horsemen have crossed the Perso-Russian frontier and joined the insurgents. Horrible scenes attended the destruction of the village of Minkind. Three hundred Armenians were massacred and mutilated. The children were thrown to the dogs and the few survivors were forced to embrace Islamism.
Plus ça change, eh? Last week Islamists killed a big bunch of people in Nalchik, the capital of the hitherto more-or-less safe-ish Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. True, in our more sensitive age the Herald Tribuneâs current owners, the New York Times, would never dream of headlining such a report âHoly War Wagedâ, though the Muslim insurgents are fighting for a pan-Caucasian Islamic republic from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
And in the long run itâs hard to see why they wonât get it, the only question being whether itâs still worth getting. Moscow has reduced Grozny to rubble, yet is further than ever from solving its Chechen problem. Moreover, the sheer blundering thuggery of the Russian approach has no merits other than affording Moscow some short-term sadistic pleasure as it exacerbates the situation. The allegedly seething âArab streetâ, which the Westâs media doom-mongers have been predicting for four years will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels, remains as seething as a cul-de-sac in Pinner on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federationâs Muslim street is real, and on the boil.
Remember the months before 9/11? The new US President had his first meeting with the Russian President. âI looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy,â George W. Bush said after two hours with Vladimir Putin. âI was able to get a sense of his soul.â Iâm all for speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but thatâs way too soft; itâs candlelight-dinner-with-the-glow-reflecting-in-the-wine-glass-just-before-you-ask-her-to-dance-to-âMoonlight-Becomes-Youâ soft. Even at the time, many of us felt like yelling at Bush: Get a grip on yourself, man! Lay off the homoerotic stuff about soulmates! This is a KGB apparatchik youâre making eyes at.
But Putin was broadly supportive â or at least not actively non-supportive â on Afghanistan (a very particular case) and Nato expansion (a fait accompli), and some experts started calling Vlad the most Westernised Russian strongman since Peter the Great and cooing about a Russo-American alliance that would be one of the cornerstones of the post-Cold War world.
Itâs not like that today. From China to Central Asia to Ukraine, from its covert efforts to maintain Saddam in power to its more or less unashamed patronage of Iranâs nuclear ambitions, Moscow has been at odds with Washington over every key geopolitical issue, and a few non-key ones, too, culminating in Putinâs tirade to Bush that America was flooding Russia with sub-standard chicken drumsticks and keeping the best ones for herself. It was a poultry complaint but indicative of a retreat into old-school Kremlin paranoia. Putin was sending Americaâs chickens home to roost. I wonder if Bush took a second look into the soulful depths of Vladimirâs eyes and decided he wasnât quite so finger-lickinâ good after all.
Russiaâs export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the last century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in this new century. As Iranâs nuke programme suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to America thereâs usually a Russian component somewhere in the background.
In fairness to Putin, even if he was âvery straightforward and trustworthyâ, heâs in a wretched position. Think of the feet of clay of Western European politicians unwilling to show leadership on the Continentâs moribund economy and deathbed demography. Russia has all the EUâs problems to the nth degree, and then some. âPost-imperial declineâ is manageable; a nation of psychotic lemmings isnât. As Iâve noted before in this space, Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It neednât decline at a consistent rate, of course. But Iâd say itâs more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. The longer Russia goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it, and when it comes to the future most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted.
Add to that the unprecedented strains on a ramshackle public health system. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. From virtually no official Aids cases at the time Putin took office, in the last five years more Russians have tested positive than in the previous 20 for America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 per cent of the population, the figure the World Health Organisation considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy in the mid-50s â lower than in Bangladesh â theyâre about to see Aids cut them down from the other end, killing young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By 2010, Aids will be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are regions that are exceptions to these malign trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a âMu-â and end with a â-slimâ.
So the worldâs largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterdayâs Russia was characterised by Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Todayâs has come unwrapped: itâs a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russiaâs got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in âsecureâ facilities â more secure, one hopes, than the secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease last week.
Russia is the bleakest example on the planet of how we worry about all the wrong things. For 40 years the environmentalists have warned us that the jig was up: there are too many people (see Paul Ehrlichâs comic masterpiece of 1970 The Population Bomb) and too few resources â as the Club of Rome warned in its 1972 landmark study The Limits To Growth, the world will run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993. Instead, poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians â and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.
What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? Youâve got nuclear know-how â which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. Youâve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland â which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic, incidentally, behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian empire couldnât hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the 2,000 miles of the RussoâChinese border. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of 56 will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of just having it snaffled out from under.
Thatâs the danger for America â that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East and a stronger China. In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russiaâs calculation is that sooner or later weâll be back in a bipolar world and that, in almost any scenario, thereâs more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. A SinoâRussian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, and so, in a darker way, does a RussoâMuslim alliance of convenience. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact crumbling before his eyes, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, the Ayatollah Khomeini: âI strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,â wrote the pioneer Islamist nutcase. âI openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.â
In an odd way, thatâs what happened everywhere but the Kremlin. As communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Afghanistan and Indonesia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay which would have been âMarxist fantasistsâ a generation or two back are now Islamists: itâs the ideology du jour. Even the otherwise perplexing enthusiasm of the western Left for the jihadâs misogynist homophobe theocrats is best understood as a latterday variation on the Hitler/Stalin pact. And, despite Gorbachev turning down the offer, it will be Russiaâs fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world.
We are witnessing a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. The âideological vacuumâ was mostly filled with a nihilist fatalism. Churchill got it wrong: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.
#1
Russia should open up the Pacific provinces to immigration from india (hard workers, well educated, and with no claim to the land (unlike the turkish folks, Chinese and Japanese) and investment from Japan (economies gotta kick into gear soon, and they make such nice cameras).
Lastly they need a good old Chinese-type have a baby for Mother Russia campaign to arrest the death spiral.
I think they should also develop a backup plan. They will lose the bulk of the Islamic stans. They should figure out how that might turn out, what borders they could live with if they absolutely had to, and start trying to promote migration of Muslims into the areas likely to break-away, and European Russians out of the areas likely to break-away. That way they can plan on stopping the breakage at some point.
#2
Bush should put in a bid for Siberia and send all the amnestified illegal Mexicans there to colonize it under the direction of Halliburton/KBR, the East India Company of the 21st century.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
10/21/2005 18:57 Comments ||
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#4
Part of the problem in Russia is massive environmental contamination. I'm no ecofreak, but the state of much of Russian soil, air and water is Not Good for Babies - or for adults who have reverted to alcoholism in the face of despair and poverty.
Interesting perspective, with a bit of balance. DC Examiner
Four years ago, President Bush was enjoying record approval ratings of 80 percent or higher. In 2002, he became the first president in decades to see his party increase their numbers in Congress during a midterm election. In 2004, he not only managed to survive one of the most heated presidential elections in history, but again saw his party gain seats. Following the 2004 election, the president spoke of the political capital he gained and Republicans seemed to be at the helm of American politics.
How quickly things change. The president's approval rating now hovers around 40 percent - the lowest of his presidency - and a mere 29 percent of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction. The public's dissatisfaction is understandable. Energy prices have soared to record highs. The Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina was lackluster at best. Numerous White House officials and Republican party leaders face potential indictments. The situation in Iraq is progressing at a snail's pace. To the Instant Gratification Generation, anyway. The economy has been lukewarm and there's been no action on the important issue of immigration. Sprinkle in a brewing mutiny among conservatives over the Harriet Miers nomination and President Bush and the Republican party could be in a tough political fight.
How did they fall from grace so quickly? Simple: pride. With things going well for Republicans in recent years, their success has caused them to, at times, govern with arrogance and act without humility. They should have known that, at some point, it would come back to haunt them.
Can Bush and his party recover? Sure. Here's how: Americans like feeling that their government is taking action on issues that are important to them and the Bush administration has been stumbling to do so recently. A recent poll by The National Journal's Hotline shows that Americans overwhelmingly view the economy as the most important issue, with 33 percent of respondents placing it at the top of their priorities. The war in Iraq garnered 15 percent and terrorism mustered a paltry 7 percent. This can no doubt be attributed to the record energy prices have started taking more money out of the pockets of Americans. The president would be wise to publicly address these concerns and perhaps even issue a Clinton-esque "I feel your pain" declaration. A little bit of empathy can go a long way.
Bush also would be wise to turn to his base. Already feeling betrayed by bloated federal spending and inaction on immigration, the nomination of Miers sparked a firestorm among conservatives. The president needs to quell this grumbling before it becomes a full-fledged uprising.
Even with all the bad press surrounding Republicans, however, Democrats have little to celebrate. Republicans may be shooting themselves in the foot, but it has not yet sparked an exodus to the Democrats. Democrat congressional leadership has an embarrassing 32 percent approval rating, which is only marginally above the 29 percent approval rating of Congress as a whole. The Democrats have failed to provide viable alternatives on issues such as high energy prices, Iraq or the economy.
And while the current outlook is bleak for Republicans in Washington, the GOP seems to be faring better nationally. Republicans may very well pick up two governorships this year in Virginia and New Jersey - which both are currently occupied by Democrats.
The president's "record low" approval rating also might be misleading. Both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan - the standard-bearing presidents of either party - had approval ratings below 40 percent during their presidencies. Before them, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon dipped below 30 percent approval. This may be a dubious source of comfort for Bush, but it could be worse.
For some perspective, the 29 percent "right direction" number is the lowest it's been since 1995, the year before Bill Clinton's rout of Bob Dole. So all is not lost for Bush. If the midterm elections were in November, he could very well be in dire straits. The elections are, however, more than a year away. And a lot can happen in a year.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/21/2005 07:45 ||
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[T]heir success has caused them to, at times, govern with arrogance and act without humility. They should have known that, at some point, it would come back to haunt them.
Interesting perspective. I'd argue that they've been too humble and accommodating to the left and have therefore sowed the seeds of dissatisfaction among their own base.
It's been four years since the Pentagon was attacked by suicidal foreigners armed with box cutters and Virginia driver's licenses. Izzat a dig? The United States is currently engaged in a bitter war in Iraq and government officials warn us to be on the alert for terrorists who like to blow up civilians to make their political points. As Tuesday's closure of two tunnels in the port city of Baltimore reminded us again, a major nuclear, chemical or biological attack on American soil remains a scary possibility.
What's even scarier is that we're still not ready.
"We are not where we need to be as a nation in the area of preparedness," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff admitted at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the governors of all 50 states apparently didn't think it was necessary to figure out how to evacuate their own people if any of these worst nightmares ever came true. Didn't the Frisco Mayor recently whine is wasn't possible to evacuate his city? It took an ordinary event like a hurricane - albeit a deadly hurricane that slammed the Gulf Coast - to wake them up, not the specter of Osama bin Laden's minions.
So Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner has now asked George Mason University's Center for Health Policy, Research and Ethics to develop a first-in-the-nation, post-Katrina plan detailing specific steps to be taken for rapid disaster mobilization and setting up emergency shelters for evacuees. While citizens of the commonwealth should be grateful that their popular, rich and handsome governor has taken time from his busy schedule as an unofficial presidential candidate to consider his constituents' basic security needs, one nonetheless has to wonder why it's taken him four years to make this request. Ow! That's gotta hurt! But doen't he know Hilly's got it all sown up?
Since the GMU effort will apparently be the first written state evacuation plan in the nation, Warner is well ahead of his even more tardy peers - who have been too busy spending billions and billions of homeland security funds to stop and think about what they're supposed to be doing with them. One wonders what Dick Cheney's home state (Wyoming) did with their 'share' of homeland security cash. Buy gas masks for ponies?
Or to put it another way, how can the states not have evacuation plans four years after Sept. 11? Relying primarily on "shelter in place" strategies to assuage citizens' very real fears that nobody from the government will be coming to save them, the governors simply assumed they could call upon the vast resources of the federal government if things got too dicey for them to handle. But as the federal response to Hurricane Katrina made uncomfortably clear, Washington's centralized Federal Emergency Management Agency is much too slow and bureaucratic to rely upon when hours count and thousands of lives hang in the balance. Sure, but a recent article in Scientific American predicted deaths from evacuation would exceed those caused by a 'dirty bomb' in New York City. Do we need a 'Comet Evaucaution Plan', too?
FEMA was not only too slow to respond itself, it actually prevented volunteers from helping hurricane victims. In one sickening instance among far too many, a 500-boat flotilla of fishermen, hunters and private boaters that arrived in New Orleans from nearby Lafayette was turned back by FEMA officials - who were then standing around doing nothing to rescue patients from flooded hospitals and nursing homes.
Chertoff told the House Government Reform Committee, chaired by Virginia Congressman Tom Davis, R-11th, that FEMA must be retooled to improve its response time to such natural disasters. More testimony will be heard and congressional fingers will point, but there's a high probability nobody in the federal government will ever candidly say: "If we can't respond in a timely manner when there's a few days' warning, there's no way we can possibly react appropriately when there's not." Appropriately is one thing. Fast enough to prevent MSM wailing is a completly different universe.
As The New York Times' John Tierney reported, when the chips were down in New Orleans, it was giant retailer Wal-Mart that immediately began handing out chain saws, water, ice, clothes and 100,000 meals to Katrina victims while then-FEMA Director Michael "Brownie" Brown was still trying to find out where they were. Wal-Mart isn't even in the disaster relief business, while emergency preparedness is supposed to be FEMA's main mission. How many times does government have to fail before people finally admit that reshuffling a centralized bureaucracy will not make it more responsive in a crisis?
But that would leave responsibility for mass evacuations to the governors who've spent the past four years doing squat. If there's a disaster requiring you to suddenly flee from your home or place of business, you might be better off just heading to Wal-Mart.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/21/2005 07:51 ||
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They don't teach capitalism in schools these days, do they?
Walmart is a business. It has a very simple command structure. The boss says do something, which as long as it is not illegal, gets done. He doesn't have to comply with a library full set of regulations and instructions imposed upon him by a board of directors, he doesn't have to coordinate and get the approval of regional managers, his suppliers snap to as soon as he issues orders, he has far more authority to shift monies from one column of accounting to another to cover operations and can do so in a phone call.
Now you can do that too in government, but they call the person Caesar, not Mr. Secretary. You want efficiencies? Are you prepared to pay for those efficiencies? Cause its not going to just be in money.
The inaugural issue of the new American quarterly The American Interest (Autumn 2005) includes an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the course of the conversation AI editor Adam Garfinkle asks Rice a question on anti-Americanism:
During the Cold War we were all familiar with varieties of anti-Americanism, mostly on the Left. A lot of people now claim that not only is there more anti-Americanism, but that its sources are more diverse. Do you think thatâs so and if you do, where does this new anti-Americanism come from? Is it just a reaction to American conduct after the 9/11 attacks or is it because weâre No. 1 and thereâs a natural envy? What do you think accounts for it?
It is a very pertinent question and it goes to the roots of one of the major problems confronting Europe but also America today, with not only political but also economic consequences. Is there more anti-Americanism today than before? Are its sources more diverse? Where does the new anti-Americanism come from? Is it a reaction to Americaâs reaction to 9/11? Or is it envy? What does the leading American foreign policy maker think? These were the things Garfinkle asked, but, unfortunately, Rice did not answer. What she said was as evasive as it was trivial:
I think people have to be more rigorous about what they mean by anti-Americanism. Clearly this is still the most popular place in the world to come if you want to be educated, or if you want to immigrate. The United States is still a pretty popular place. American culture, both good and bad, is very much sought after abroad. And I still think that the values of the United States are the most universal of all values.
Now, I do think that weâve gone through a period of time in which the United States has had to do very difficult things, as the most powerful state in the international system, to shape the environment so that things began to change. And I would give a couple of examples where those decisions were wildly unpopular at the time but now have become almost common wisdom. For example, the decision that we werenât going to deal with Yasir Arafat because he was a failed, bankrupt leader and there was going to be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians had new leadership. Now itâs almost common wisdom. But when the President said that in June of 2002, it was considered an outrageous statement.
Garfinkle and Rice then go on about the Middle East and a range of other issues but the topic of anti-Americanism is not raised anymore. Frankly, to me as a European, Riceâs answer is disappointing. She just says that America is still âthe most popular place in the worldâ for those seeking an education. (Nobody will deny that. The conspirators of 9/11 came to America to take flying lessons.) She adds that immigrants still flock to the US. (That is true for Europe, too. But these immigrants are not necessarily pro-American, or pro-European for that matter: it is doubtful whether most of them come to the West because they share Western values.) If America is still a âpretty popular place,â it would be interesting to know if its culture and values are less popular today than they used to be. If so, that would be a clear indication of growing anti-Americanism. Rice seems to imply that anti-Americanism is diminishing, because she refers to the âvery difficult,â âwildly unpopular,â seemingly âoutrageousâ decisions that America had to take a few years ago (as in 2002), but that are considered âalmost common wisdomâ nowadays.
My impression is that anti-Americanism is more widespread in Western Europe now than it has ever been before. If so, there must be a reason for it. I have argued that I do not think it has to do with the Iraq war, because the Western Europeans heap as much scorn on the American conservatives who oppose the war as on the so-called neo-conservatives. They are not even aware of what Joshua Muravchik pointed out in an article about âIraq and the Conservativesâ in the October issue of [the neo-conservative magazine] Commentary, namely that âthe most interesting arguments are not between Left and Right. The Left long ago lost any coherent voice on national security [âŠ] The most interesting arguments are within the Right, most of which supports the war but some of which contains its most trenchant and acerbic critics.â Europeâs anti-Americans reject not only Americaâs foreign policy, but also its economic and cultural values. The growing anti-Americanism, at least in Europe, predates the 2003 American intervention in Iraq.
Well, then, is it simply, as Garfinkle asked Secretary of State Rice, âbecause [America is] No. 1 and thereâs a natural envy?â Anti-Americanism as the equally irrational, deeply psychological envy that Freud said women feel towards men: a kind of Transatlantic âpenis envyâ that Europeans, who are said to come from Venus, feel for Americans, who are said to come from Mars? And could this, perhaps, be the subconscious reason why Rice evades the question?
Envy of those who are richer, or rather the egalitarian impulse to cut everyone down to the same level, is the driving force behind the Westeuropean welfare model. Since America is not only stronger than Europe, but also richer, this might go some way to explaining Europeâs attitude towards America. It does not explain, however, why anti-Americanism is growing, unless America is growing rapidly richer than Western Europe or the egalitarian impulses in Europe are rapidly increasing. A better psychological explanation for the growth of anti-Americanism might be anger rather than envy.
In the latest issue of The National Interest (Fall 2005) â not to be confused with The American Interest mentioned above â John Hulsman and William Schirano write that âthe European Union is dead.â For fifty years the European elite has been harbouring the dream of an ever closer union, described by the two authors as âa willful ignorance of the Continentâs amazing diversity assumed in an effort to force an artificial one-size-fits-all approach.â
âThere is little doubt, following the twin ânoâ votes in France and the Netherlands, that the European Union, long proudly proclaimed as the future model of international relations, is dead,â say Hulsman and Schirano. âSo, to understand what is happening here, we must think unconventionally about the end of the dream of ever closer union â about death and the process of coming to terms with it. In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth KÃŒbler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying â denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.â
Hulsman and Schirano argue that the European elites, after the initial stage of denial that their attempt to create the âpostmodern, post-Westphalian, post-nation-stateâ has proved impossible, are now in the second stage described by KÃŒbler-Ross: the state of âanger, rage, envy and resentmentâ â a state which âusually begins innocently, with a thought such as âwhy me, why not him or her?ââ The authors do not draw the parallel between this psychological state and Transatlantic relations, but apply the analysis to the relations between the European elite and the European people, where angry politicians such as the former head of the rotating EU presidency, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, told voters that âthe countries that have said ânoâ [to the European Constitution] will have to ask themselves the question again.â Jacques Chirac, too, they write, âbehaved exactly as KÃŒbler-Ross would have predicted.â The leaders are angry with the people because âthe cozy corporatist economics in the face of globalization or political elitism instead of broad-based support for Europe, can no longer be sustained.â
I believe the psychological model is more appropriately applied not just to the European federalist project but to the general plight of Europe as a whole, namely the fact that it is a dying continent in the most literal sense, as its demographic rates indicate. This issue (among others) is explicitly raised by Conrad Black in an article entitled âEuropeâs Dream Disturbed,â in the same issue of The National Interest. Black sees the European Union not only as an attempt âto be emancipated from the straitjacket of national identityâ but also as an attempt to â[impose] Euro-Socialismâ and âcasting off the soft hegemony of the United States.â
That Europe is dying can be seen in its âcollapsed birthrateâ â âit is ultimately unnatural for people not to reproduce themselves,â says Black â but also in âstagnant economic growth in France and Germany, double-digit unemployment, impending pension crises, and demographic levels sustained by relatively unassimilable immigration from Islamic countries.â One can easily see that, as this situation worsens, anti-American feelings are likely to grow because the âWhy me, why not himâ feelings will be directed towards the US. Indeed, in the perception of many egalitarian Europeans it is a gross injustice that the economy of the âsocialâ European model is collapsing while that of the capitalist American model keeps growing.
And yet, there is also a foreign policy reason for why anti-Americanism has grown even deeper than it was twenty years ago at the height of the Transatlantic debate over the deployment of American cruise missiles in Western Europe. At that time the Left in Western Europe succeeded in convincing part of West European public opinion that the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were basically of the same, evil, nature. This was the theory of moral equivalence, where some regarded the US as an âoccupyingâ force in Western Europe on a par with the Soviet Unionâs occupation of Eastern Europe. While the East Europeans had to liberate themselves from the warmongering Soviets, the West Europeans were told that they had to âliberateâ themselves from the warmongering Americans. This explains why in the early and mid 1980s hundreds of thousands took to the streets in anti-American âpeace demonstrationsâ in various West European capitals. These were the largest mass demonstrations that Europe had ever seen.
Interestingly, the moral equivalence idea was shared by others. This is where the Muslim radicals and the West European Left meet. According to Osama bin Laden the Muslim victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan, in which he took part, convinced him of the possibility of conquering the other infidel power, America. Having played their role in bringing down the Soviet Union, the fighters of Islamic Jihad turned their attention to the US. For them the attacks of 9/11 were a logical follow-up of the attacks on the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US had armed the Jihadists in the 1980s only to discover a decade later that it had been supporting its new mortal enemy.
In Western Europe, however, the idea of moral equivalence was reinforced after the collapse of communism in 1989. Contrary to the so-called âdenazificationâ which took place in Germany after 1945, with prosecutions of Nazi criminals and collaborators and moral condemnations of civil servants who had remained silent, there was no âdecommificationâ after 1989. On the contrary, many of the fellow travellers of the old regime simply turned their coats, rising to high positions in post-communist society. The Russian President Putin, a former high-ranking KGB official, is one example that immediately springs to mind. Imagine a former Gestapo officer of high rank becoming Chancellor of Germany in the 1950s!
In Germany, the pivot and cornerstone of Europe, the former Communists were allowed to refound their own party after German reunification in 1990, as if the former Nazis had been allowed the same in 1945. Others (such as Wolfgang Thierse and Rolf Schwanitz) who had been university professors in economics or law in East Germany â a position that was only open to collaborators of the regime â joined the SPD and became high-ranking Social-Democrat politicians in the new Germany. This reinforced the message that, indeed, there was no real moral difference between the collaborators of the old communist puppet regimes installed by the Soviet occupiers in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western politicians who had backed the Atlantic Alliance. It reinforced the message of the âpeaceâ movement of the 1980s that the Soviet occupation was basically on a par with the American domination of Western Europe. Now that the Soviet domination has ended, West European public opinion wants America out as well. It is a sentiment they share with the Jihadists. It is a pity that Condoleezza Rice does not seem to realise how dangerous this growing anti-Americanism in Europe is.
#1
Now that the Soviet domination has ended, West European public opinion wants America out as well. It is a sentiment they share with the Jihadists. It is a pity that Condoleezza Rice does not seem to realise how dangerous this growing anti-Americanism in Europe is.
Its a feature not a bug. The danger is Europe's not America's. Europe tried suicide twice in the 20th Century and it appears that America wasted hundreds of thousand lives and untolled trillions in providing an environment that would give them the same opportunities America enjoyed to become the most advanced, prosperous, and open nation [of such size] in human history. That the Europeans wish to pursue their own collapse in history is their choice. No more welfare for the rich! If they choose self-destructive behaviors let them join other cultures and civilizations in the history books. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Time to invest our time, resouces and emotions with this hemisphere or the Pacific and quit wasting an ounce more on Europe. Nice to have known you, goodbye.
#3
"The Russian President Putin, a former high-ranking KGB official, is one example that immediately springs to mind. Imagine a former Gestapo officer of high rank becoming Chancellor of Germany in the 1950s!"
This is a perfect example of false comparisons, or apples and oranges. Germany was conquered and physically destroyed and controlled by her enemies. The USSR imploded in the same was as a star collapses. It is not at all surprising that the Russians would follow those who had always been "leaders" in the past. Do you think that Putin would be Pres. if the US had actually occupied Russia after the wall fell?
Read this and the Steyn piece together. As AH says the danger is theirs not ours.
#7
It's a bit more than that. Imagine the EU openly leading moves to lock in market protections that just happen to define US goods as unacceptable. You think Kyoto and the chemical bit was a hassle? Wait until you see what they encourage others to join them in if they go overt.
Now, there are factors mitigating against them being overwhelmingly successful. But they can/will try and it won't be costfree for us. They might stretch the provisions of the latest trade treaties to break the patents on all US-created pharmaceuticals, electronics, software ....
Or place "observers" everywhere we want to act internationally. As an example.
#11
I think the good doctor does realize the danger.
I just think that Europe is collapsing around the people and they don't know it yet. I think we are buying for time, and the Secy of State realizes that...
#12
It is a pity that Condoleezza Rice does not seem to realise how dangerous this growing anti-Americanism in Europe is.
Interesting, but not quite sure what we could do about it anyway. We are not responsible for Europe's problems, not responsible for the cure and not willing to change ourselves to suit them.
WHAT IS the latest?â Iraqis ask as they come together for tea and sympathy in these times of hope and uncertainty. And there is always someone who answers by reporting the discovery of a new mass grave where the victims of Saddam Hussein were buried.
According to the latest estimates, the remains of more than 200,000 people, the fruit of the 35-year-long rule of his Arab Socialist Baath Party, have been found in this ever expanding archipelago of death.
And yet, as the fallen dictatorâs trial opens today, he faces only one charge: the massacre of 143 men, women and children in the village of Dujail in 1982. With him in the dock will be his half-brother Barzan al-Takriti, who headed his regimeâs secret services, and Taha al-Jizrawi, who commanded the partyâs so-called Popular Corps, an army of cut-throats.
The notorious Anfal (âSpoils of Warâ) campaign, in which 180,000 Kurds were massacred, the Halabja tragedy, in which 5,000 people were gassed to death, and the week-long killings in southern Iraq in 1991 have been set aside for the time being.
Lawyers at the special Iraqi tribunal, where Saddam and his seven co-defendants will be tried, say that the Dujail case, in which all victims were Shia, was chosen because it was easier to find witnesses and amass evidence for prosecution. Saddam and his supporters, including Roland Dumas, the former French Foreign Secretary, who heads the fallen despotâs team of lawyers, claim that the Dujail case represents an attempt by Iraqâs Shia majority to exact revenge. The lawyersâ strategy is to transform Saddam from one of the most brutal rulers in history into a victim of rough justice.
It is, therefore, imperative for the Iraqi authorities to make it clear at the outset that the Dujail case is one of a series to deal with the crimes committed by Saddam and his cohorts.
Millions of those who suffered at the hands of the regime would be glad to see Saddam punished as quickly as possible. Kangaroo courts have a long history in Iraq, starting with the televised murder-express trials presided over by the notorious Fadhil al-Mahdawi under Colonel Abdul-Karim Qassem in 1958. The typical al-Mahdawi trial lasted 15 minutes, often ending with a death sentence. When Saddam seized power he reduced that time by two-thirds and added a new feature: the accused were shot on live television by their former comrades.
Liberated Iraq should show that things are different under the new democratic system. There should be no hurry to send Saddam to the gallows. Investigators have already collected 40 tonnes of documents, more than 10 million pages of sworn testimonies, and forensic reports from more than 297 mass graves. To these could be added the mass of evidence collected in Iran and Kuwait, both of which suffered from Saddamâs aggression.
What is at stake is more than the fate of a despot and his entourage. Iraq and, beyond it the Arab world, where the remnants of pan-Arabism regard Saddam Hussein as their champion, need a prolonged, dispassionate, and judicially impeccable lesson in history and political ethics.
Saddam may try to present himself as the champion of Iraqâs Sunni Arabs, who account for 15 per cent of the population. The fact is that Sunni Arabs were as much a victim of his as any other community. (As far as its elite elements are concerned, Saddam was responsible for the death of more Sunni Arabs than Shia or Kurds.) Next, he may try to appear as the champion of the Baath and its claimed ideals of socialism and Arab unity. But more Baathists were killed under Saddam than any other ruler since 1947 when the party arrived in Iraq. When it seized power in 1968 the Baath had an 18-man politburo. By 1988 he was the only one still alive and in power.
Saddamâs trial should also expose the foreign powers that helped to set up and sustain his murderous regime, and the banquet of corruption at which scores of politicians, diplomats, intellectuals and businessmen, some from Europe and the United States, supped with the devil. An Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations has resigned after being charged with receiving illegal kickbacks from Saddam. One of Franceâs most senior diplomats is in prison on a similar charge. A former French Home Secretary, several members of the Russian parliament and a dozen Arab media figures have also been exposed.
In the three decades that Saddam dominated Iraq he had almost $200 billion in oil revenues not only to finance three large-scale wars and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but also to buy influence in the West. Part of that investment may be bearing fruit as the chorus of his admirers, led by the French, raises its voice.
Saddam is enjoying what he denied his victims: a public trial with defence lawyers of his choice and the rule of evidence taking into account the principle of reasonable doubt. Here a new Iraq, based on the rule of law, will be trying the old Iraq of cruelty and corruption. The Arabs will watch and decide which they would rather live under. The rest of the world should also watch to decide which side to support in the struggle for Iraqâs future.
Frontpage Interviewâs guest today is Ryan Mauro, the 19-year-old author of Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq and the youngest hired geopolitical analyst in the country. He is a volunteer analyst for Tactical Defense Concepts and Northeast Intelligence Network and is the owner of WorldThreats.com. He will be speaking at the 2006 Intelligence Summit on his work in open-source intelligence. Interview at link.
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10/21/2005 07:03 ||
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With the backing of the Arab-dominated government of Sudan, nomadic Arab militias have been committing genocide against the mainly Muslim tribes people of Darfur since 2003. An editorial in the Washington Post on August 12, 2005, titled "Arabian Shame," criticized wealthy governments throughout the world for not properly giving aid to Darfur - while America had given 53% of all donations.
The editorial was especially critical of oil-rich Arab countries: "This Arab indifference is shameful. The victims of Sudan's worst crisis, in Darfur, are Muslim, and aid to non-Muslim southern Sudan is essential. ... Arabs have every reason to care about Sudan, and yet they have done far less than remote non-Muslim countries."
...
While some Arab writers have denounced the Arab indifference to Darfur, others have spread conspiracies surrounding it. On the Saudi government TV Channel 1, on February 3, 2005, Saudi journalist Suheila Hammad stated: "By Allah, this is a conspiracy. [The Americans] say so... There is a conspiracy in Sudan - Sudan is being divided so that Darfur will become a secular state, independent from Sudan, the south will become a Christian state..."
It should not be surprising that the Iranian press has also spread conspiracies about Darfur. In the Tehran Times of July 13, 2005, Hassan Hanzadeh, wrote: "The war in southern Sudan and the Darfur crisis have caused serious economic and political problems ... In the region, neighboring countries, with the help of the Zionist regime, which is trying to weaken African Muslim countries by triggering civil wars, tried to dismember the great African Islamic country of Sudan by arming the Sudanese rebels. Their main objective is to create a Christian country on the banks of the Nile in order to end the domination of Egypt and Sudan over the world's longest river." Rest at link.
Posted by: ed ||
10/21/2005 06:54 ||
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#1
Hassan Hanzadeh, wrote: ". . . In the region, neighboring countries, with the help of the Zionist regime, which is trying to weaken African Muslim countries by triggering civil wars, tried to dismember the great African Islamic country of Sudan by arming the Sudanese rebels
#2
Its not suprising at all once you consider that, in Islam (and according to the Koran and Prophet Mohammed (MHRIH)), Blacks (as in Darfur) have the 'heart of a Donkey' and are good for nothing but slavery.
While arabs are holier then others. Islam is a very racist cult.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
