Tag: history

At this point, “scientific” predictions might as well be coin flips given the way they so readily exchange one form of catastrophe for its opposite.

The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue.

The dire predictions, often repeated in the media, warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on climate change.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.

Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that “another ice age” was imminent. “Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century.” The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist’s claim that the world could be “as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”

One of the great advantages of age is that you can readily spot the liars, having been lied to by them before.

I’ve been reading Machiavelli’s History of Florence and it is intriguing to note the very different way in which he describes the events known as the Sicilian Vespers. Infogalactic has the conventional account provided by Stephen Runciman.

The event takes its name from an insurrection which began at the start of Vespers, the sunset prayer marking the beginning of the night vigil on Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, at the Church of the Holy Spirit just outside Palermo. Beginning on that night, thousands of Sicily’s French inhabitants were massacred within six weeks. The events that started the uprising are not known for certain, but the various retellings have common elements. The only town in Sicily not to join the rebellion was a small village called Sperlinga, which protected French soldiers in a castle excavated in sandstone.

According to Steven Runciman, the Sicilians at the church were engaged in holiday festivities and a group of French officials came by to join in and began to drink. A sergeant named Drouet dragged a young married woman from the crowd, pestering her with his advances. Her husband then attacked Drouet with a knife, killing him. When the other Frenchmen tried to avenge their comrade, the Sicilian crowd fell upon them, killing them all. At that moment all the church bells in Palermo began to ring for Vespers. Runciman describes the mood of the night:

To the sound of the bells messengers ran through the city calling on the men of Palermo to rise against the oppressor. At once the streets were filled with angry armed men, crying “Death to the French” (“moranu li Franchiski” in Sicilian language). Every Frenchman they met was struck down. They poured into the inns frequented by the French and the houses where they dwelt, sparing neither man, woman nor child. Sicilian girls who had married Frenchmen perished with their husbands. The rioters broke into the Dominican and Franciscan convents; and all the foreign friars were dragged out and told to pronounce the word “ciciri”, whose sound the French tongue could never accurately reproduce. Anyone who failed the test was slain… By the next morning some two thousand French men and women lay dead; and the rebels were in complete control of the city.

According to Leonardo Bruni (1416), the Palermitans were holding a festival outside the city when the French came up to check for weapons, and on that pretext began to fondle the breasts of their women. This then began a riot. The French were attacked, first with rocks, then weapons, and all were killed. The news spread to other cities leading to revolt throughout Sicily. “By the time the furious anger at their insolence had drunk its fill of blood, the French had given up to the Sicilians not only their ill-gotten riches but their lives as well.”

There is also a third version of the events that is quite close to Runciman’s, varying only in the minor details. This story is part of the oral tradition on the island up to the present time. This oral tradition cannot be verified, but is of interest to sociologists. According to the legend, John of Procida was the mastermind behind the conspiracy. It seems that he was in contact with both Michael VIII Palaiologos and Peter III of Aragon. They were all three later excommunicated by Pope Martin IV in 1282.

Machiavelli’s account is very different, and connects it to a similar anti-French uprising in the Emilia-Romagna around the same time, both of which were inspired by a Aragonese-Papal plot against Charles of Anjou, the younger brother of King Louis IX of France.

At this time Adrian died, and Nicholas III, of the Orsini family, became pontiff. He was a bold, ambitious man; and being resolved at any event to diminish the power of Charles, induced the Emperor Rodolph to complain that he had a governor in Tuscany favorable to the Guelphic faction, who after the death of Manfred had been replaced by him. Charles yielded to the emperor and withdrew his governor, and the pope sent one of his nephews, a cardinal, as governor for the emperor, who, for the honor done him, restored Romagna to the church, which had been taken from her by his predecessors, and the pope made Bertoldo Orsino duke of Romagna. As Nicholas now thought himself powerful enough to oppose Charles, he deprived him of the office of senator, and made a decree that no one of royal race should ever be a senator in Rome. It was his intention to deprive Charles of Sicily, and to this end he entered into a secret negotiation with Peter, king of Aragon, which took effect in the following papacy….

To Nicholas succeeded Martin IV, of French origin and consequently favorable to the party of Charles, who sent him assistance against the rebellion of Romagna; and while they were encamped at Furli, Guido Bonatto, an astrologer, contrived that at an appointed moment the people should assail the forces of the king, and the plan succeeding, all the French were taken and slain. About this period was also carried into effect the plot of Pope Nicholas and Peter, king of Aragon, by which the Sicilians murdered all the French that were in that island; and Peter made himself sovereign of it, saying, that it belonged to him in the right of his wife Gostanza, daughter of Manfred.

Remember, the one thing upon which we can rely is that the official story is seldom the true one. And in most cases, that which is claimed to be spontaneous is nothing whatsoever of the kind.

This is why methodically banishing gammas from your organizations and social circles is an absolute imperative. Mama’s Boys and Smart Boys are inevitably a serious challenge for any organization, because virtue-signaling on behalf of women is always their first and foremost priority.

On August 26, Women’s Equality Day honors the hard-fought victory of the women’s suffrage movement. But the holiday might not exist if one representative’s mother hadn’t convinced him to cast the deciding vote to pass the 19th amendment.

Women’s suffrage took nearly one century to fully realize, but time never moved as slowly as it did between the amendment’s passage in Congress in 1919 and its introduction as a federal law in 1920. It all came down to a single vote in the Tennessee legislature on August 18, 1920.

For amendments to pass then, three-fourths of the 48 states at the time needed to ratify it within their own governments. Tennessee, which would’ve been the 36th state to pass it, was gridlocked.

Harry T. Burn, a 24-year-old state representative, had planned to vote against the amendment. But in his pocket, he kept a letter from his mother Febb, who’d asked him to “be a good boy” and vote for the amendment that would grant her the right to vote for legislators like her son, according to the National Constitution Center.

So he did. And with his “Aye,” the 19th Amendment passed nationwide.

Their second priority, of course, is to prove they are a Smart Boy at all costs. One ignores these things at one’s peril.

This is why if one picks up even the faintest scent of gamma from someone with whom one is working on any project, one should immediately take action to move them away from any points of weakness and anything one considers to be mission critical. And one would also do well to be henceforth alert for any signs of rage-quitting, in order to eject them right away once they begin moving into their signature self-destructive burning-down-the-house stage.

The Epstein revelations are not exactly the first time a large-scale sex trafficking operation that involved high-ranking officials has operated for more than a decade, as evidenced by a massive sex trafficking ring that ran for eighty years until WWII:

The Zwi Migdal organization operated from the 1860s to 1939. In its heyday, after the First World War, it had four hundred members in Argentina alone. Its annual turnover was fifty million dollars in the early 1900s.

Unlike Epstein and Maxwell who allegedly recruited non-Jewish underage women, the Zwi Migdal specialised in trafficking Jewish women. “Most of the Jewish women and children who were kidnapped were taken from impoverished shtetls (Jewish small towns) and brought to Buenos Aires.”

The recently released documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein affair suggest that Epstein and Maxwell were to be charged with child sex trafficking, and as the alleged procurer of underage girls. It seems none of that is really novel in the Jewish world: “The Zwi Migdal Society lured decent girls and young women from Europe in many inventive and deceitful ways. A very well-mannered and elegant-looking man would appear in a poor Jewish village in places such as Poland or Russia. He would advertise his search for young women to work in the homes of wealthy Jews in Argentina by posting an ad in the local synagogue. Fearful of pogroms and often in desperate economic circumstances, the trusting parents would send their naïve daughters away with these men, hoping to give them a fresh start.”

Many commentators on the Epstein affair are amazed by the incapacity of America’s law enforcement, legal system and federal agencies to bring justice to Epstein’s victims and its failure to lock him away. Once again, that is not new. The JCACA writes of the Zwi Migdal criminality: “These activities went on undisturbed because they were frequented by government officials, judges, and reporters. City officials, politicians, and police officers were paid off. The pimps had powerful connections everywhere.”

Now that Muslims have entered the West, we’re seeing the same pattern playing out repeatedly across the UK, and almost certainly, the USA. And it’s often done through organizations disguised as those nominally intended to help the very victims being preyed upon:

The Contra Costa County Department of Children and Family Services (CFS, or CPS) in California appears to have a problem with the sexual abuse of children.

The Epoch Times interviewed whistleblower parents, children, and a mental health professional in the county who say children are being sexually abused within a system that is meant to protect them.

In July, a father–son duo, Simon Mendoza Chavez, 64, and Simon Magana Chavez, 31, in the Contra Costa County city of Antioch were arrested on charges of committing multiple crimes during their years-long tenure as foster parents, according to a little-publicized police department release.

“On 6-13-19, members of the Antioch Police Department began investigating an extensive sexual abuse case. The abuse involved several minors that were victimized by a father and son who provided foster care for the children from 2011 through 2017,” the Antioch police department stated in the release.

It’s really astonishing to read the perspicacity of Hillair Belloc regarding the centuries-old challenge to civilization posed by a single pre-Western tribe to the nations of the West in his landmark book, The Jews. Belloc not only predicted both the Holodomor and the Holocaust, but even observed that the latter would take the form of a violent large-scale reaction to Bolshevism in Russia, 20 years before the Wannsee Conference. Regardless of whether you are a clueless Christian Zionist, a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-semite, a wickedly subversive neoclown, or a proud Sabra, I would highly recommend reading Belloc’s book due to the way in which it lays out the repetitive past as very probable prelude.

Now these causes of friction permanently present tend to produce what I have called the tragic cycle: welcome of a Jewish colony, then ill-ease, followed by acute ill-ease, followed by persecution, exile and even massacre. This followed, naturally, by a reaction and the taking up of the process all over again.

In our own time we have seen, quite lately, the succession of the second to the first of these stages; we have passed from welcome to ill-ease. That passage threatens a further passage from the second to the third; from the third to the terrible conclusion.

We feel quite secure to-day from the last extreme of this cycle. We are certain it will never come to persecution: that is still inconceivable. But it is not inconceivable everywhere: and no society is free from change. Some now alive may live to see riots even in this quiet polity and worse in newer or less settled states.

Such a catastrophe is to be avoided by every effort in our power and a solution to the problem presented must imperatively be sought. But in passing we should note, for the consideration of those who may doubt the acuteness of the problem and the immediate practical necessity for a solution, the presence of a phenomenon which amply proves that it is acute and that the solution is necessary….

The real interest in the Jewish revolution in Russia, to which is now permanently affixed the name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more than the Russian for “whole-hogger”), lies in these two points: first, the continued propaganda of Communism throughout the world (which propaganda in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents); secondly, and much more important, the effect of the Jewish revolution in producing hostility to the Jews throughout the world… The other effect of the Jewish revolution in Russia—the peril into which it has put the Jews themselves—is permanent and is of the first magnitude.

Besides Thucycides’s famous chapter on civil war, there is no other historical work that reads as if it was written just last week instead of nearly a century ago. It is highly relevant today because the process of the tragic cycle that Belloc describes playing out in the continental European context has observably moved from the first to the second stage in the United States, and from the second to the third stage in the United Kingdom.

The important difference between then and now is that Israel now exists as a state as well as a nation, so for the first time in the history of Western civilization there exists a peaceful and civilized solution that does not involve Jews massacring a nation or a nation massacring Jews. Hazony notwithstanding, that is the real virtue of nationalism, and one which finally renders unnecessary the endless subversions and inversions of the Shapirus and Pragers of the world.

Like me, Mark Steyn we can have confidence in Boris Johnson’s desire to be regarded as a Man of Destiny and a historical figure of note:

Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot …and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

Does that make him a philosophical Brexiteer? Doubtful. In the 2016 referendum, he considered the Leave and Remain choices in terms of what served his interests. To favor Remain meant supporting David Cameron, the de facto leader of the cause, and consigning himself to being a mere gentleman of the chorus. Whereas, if he chose the other side, his star power would make him the face of the campaign. He expected the Remain guys to win, and himself to have done himself a world of good with the Tory base come the next leadership election. Instead, and at least partly because of him, Leave won, and the chaos of the last three years began.

Something of a similar head fake is going on right now. A threatened “no deal” departure on October 31st is supposedly being touted by Boris just to force the EU into re-negotiating Theresa May’s floppo “withdrawal agreement”. So M Barnier and his backstop boy Leo Varadkar are insisting that’ll never happen, and it’s the May deal or nuthin’. Let them huff on. My view is that the whole re-negotiation thing is a feint, and Boris actually wants to leave with no deal. He wants a clean split – and the UK reborn as a sovereign nation, no ifs or buts. Whether he wants it because that’s his preferred public policy or because it cements his place in history is unimportant if you happen to believe, as I do, that that’s in the best interests of the United Kingdom.

Greatness beckons, Boris.

As Alan Mendenhall notes, it simply doesn’t exist, because it has never existed:

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.

The Difference Between a Country and a Nation

Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

The United States is not a nation, it is an empire. But the formerly dominant American nation that it contains is, despite its self-disbelief, nevertheless still a nation. And its national self-interest is naturally opposed to the self-styled “nationalist conservatives” who are neither nationalists nor conservatives, but rather, neoclown imperialists in nationalist clothing.

Mendenhall observes: “The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.” And that, of course, is precisely the point.

Britain’s disaster of an ambassador resigns his post:

Sir Kim Darroch has resigned as the UK’s ambassador to the US after Donald Trump vowed to no longer deal with him over bombshell comments he made in leaked diplomatic memos.

Sir Kim said he wanted to ‘put an end’ to the speculation over his future after his heavily critical comments about the Trump administration sparked an all-out diplomatic war between the US and Britain.

The leaked documents revealed Sir Kim had called Mr Trump ‘inept’ and described the current White House as ‘uniquely dysfunctional’.

They prompted the US President to launch an unprecedented attack on Sir Kim and Theresa May as he called the former a ‘pompous fool’ and the latter a ‘disaster’.

It was a rather spectacular own goal that serves as a fitting capstone to one of the more disastrous prime ministerships in British history. I recently finished reading Charles Oman’s A History of England and there have been very few Prime Ministers as epically inept as Theresa May.

While it is true the ambassador fell victim to a leak, only a complete fool would ever have put such gravely insulting words about the leader of his country’s most important ally down in writing in the first place. The level of ineptitude that is the most obvious hallmark of modern life makes one feel embarrassed for our historical epoch.

Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary and Mr Johnson’s leadership rival, had promised not to replace Sir Kim if he became PM. 

See what I mean? When Boris Johnson is legitimately the most competent candidate for leadership, you know the UK is in trouble.

I was comparing the 1918 and 1958 editions of the first volume of the Collier Junior Classics, and one of the first things I noted was that the Introduction by Harvard University President Charles Eliot had been replaced with one by William Neilson, the former President of Smith College. I strongly suspect the following two paragraphs will suffice to explain why it was replaced:

The right selection of reading matter for children is obviously of high importance.  Some of the mythologies, Old Testament stories, fairy tales, and historical romances, on which earlier generations were accustomed to feed the childish mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous, perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children’s minds, generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race.  The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who gave her children dirty milk or porridge, on the theory that the children would not assimilate the dirt?  Should we be less careful about mental and moral food materials?  The Junior Classics have been selected with this principle in mind, without losing sight of the fact that every developing human being needs to have a vision of the rough and thorny road over which the human race has been slowly advancing during thousands of years.

Whoever has committed to memory in childhood such Bible extracts as Genesis i, the Ten Commandments, Psalm xxiii, Matthew v, 8-12, The Lord’s Prayer, and I Corinthians xiii, such English prose as Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, Bacon’s “Essay on Truth,” and such poems as Bryant’s “Waterfowl,” Addison’s “Divine Ode,” Milton’s Sonnet on his Blindness, Wotton’s “How happy is he born or taught,” Emerson’s “Rhodora,” Holmes’s “Chambered Nautilus,” and Gray’s Elegy, and has stamped them on his brain by frequent repetition, will have set up in his mind high standards of noble thought and feeling, true patriotism, and pure religion.  He will also have laid in an invaluable store of good English.

What has happened to the former “Junior Classics” in the last 100 years is both a prelude and a microcosm of what has happened to the West as a whole. It’s something that can be seen in everything from the transition of blasphemy laws to hate speech laws and the musical descent from “The Hallelujah Chorus” to “Christmas in Hollis”. First, the Christian influence was pushed to the side, then it was removed and replaced with a focus on secular aesthetics, then the aesthetics were abandoned and the original purpose of the institution was entirely lost.

Ron Unz observes an intriguing anomaly in his review of a Jewish historian’s account of anti-semitism in US military intelligence:

Oliver’s peremptory dismissal of the standard Holocaust narrative led me to take a closer look at the treatment of the same topic in Bendersky’s book, and I noticed something quite odd. As discussed above, his exhaustive research in official files and personal archives conclusively established that during World War II a very considerable fraction of all our Military Intelligence officers and top generals were vehemently hostile to Jewish organizations and also held beliefs that today would be regarded as utterly delusional. The author’s academic specialty is Holocaust studies, so it is hardly surprising that his longest chapter focused on that particular subject, bearing the title “Officers and the Holocaust, 1940-1945.” But a close examination of the contents raises some troubling questions.

Across more than sixty pages, Bendersky provides hundreds of direct quotes, mostly from the same officers who are the subject of the rest of his book. But after carefully reading the chapter twice, I was unable to find a single one of those statements referring to the massive slaughter of Jews that constitutes what we commonly call the Holocaust, nor to any of its central elements, such as the existence of death camps or gas chambers.

The forty page chapter that follows focuses on the plight of the Jewish “survivors” in post-war Europe, and the same utter silence applies. Bendersky is disgusted by the cruel sentiments expressed by these American military men towards the Jewish former camp inmates, and he frequently quotes them characterizing the latter as thieves, liars, and criminals; but the officers seem strangely unaware that those unfortunate souls had only just barely escaped an organized mass extermination campaign that had so recently claimed the lives of the vast majority of their fellows. Numerous statements and quotes regarding Jewish extermination are provided, but all of these come from various Jewish activists and organizations, while there is nothing but silence from all of the military officers themselves.

Bendersky’s ten years of archival research brought to light personal letters and memoirs of military officers written decades after the end of the war, and in both those chapters he freely quotes from these invaluable materials, sometimes including private remarks from the late 1970s, long after the Holocaust had become a major topic in American public life. Yet not a single statement of sadness, regret, or horror is provided. Thus, a prominent Holocaust historian spends a decade researching a book about the private views of our military officers towards Jews and Jewish topics, but the one hundred pages he devotes to the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath contains not a single directly-relevant quote from those individuals, which is simply astonishing. A yawning chasm seems to exist at the center of his lengthy historical volume, or put another way, a particular barking dog is quite deafening in its silence.

I am not an archival researcher and have no interest in reviewing the many tens of thousands of pages of source material located at dozens of repositories across the country that Bendersky so diligently examined while producing his important book. Perhaps during their entire wartime activity and also the decades of their later lives, not a single one of the hundred-odd important military officers who were the focus of his investigation ever once broached the subject of the Holocaust or the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But I think there is another distinct possibly.

As mentioned earlier, Beaty spent his war years carefully reviewing the sum-total of all incoming intelligence information each day and then producing an official digest for distribution to the White House and our other top leaders. And in his 1951 book, published just a few years after the end of fighting, he dismissed the supposed Holocaust as a ridiculous wartime concoction by dishonest Jewish and Communist propagandists that had no basis in reality. Soon afterward, Beaty’s book was fully endorsed and promoted by many of our leading World War II generals, including those who were subjects of Bendersky’s archival research. And although the ADL and various other Jewish organizations fiercely denounced Beaty, there is no sign that they ever challenged his absolutely explicit “Holocaust denial.”

I suspect that Bendersky gradually discovered that such “Holocaust denial” was remarkably common in the private papers of many of his Military Intelligence officers and top generals, which presented him with a serious dilemma. If only one or two of those individuals had expressed such sentiments, their shocking statements could be cited as further evidence of their delusional anti-Semitism. But what if a substantial majority of those officers—who certainly had possessed the best knowledge of the reality of World War II—held private beliefs that were very similar to those publicly expressed by their former colleagues Beaty and Oliver? In such a situation, Bendersky may have decided that certain closed doors should remain in that state, and entirely skirted the topic.

Translation: just about everything you think you know about 20th century history is wrong.