Monthly Archives: March 2016

The Grand Inquisitor of the Ivory Tower: A Paradox of Freedom 7

by • Education, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Aleksey Bashtavenko

“And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew, 18:13

“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

https://i1.wp.com/hrp.bard.edu/files/2014/10/here-lies-academic-freedom.jpg

In the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, America was in for a drastic change. In stark contrast to the 1940s and 50s that were characterized by order and respect for authority, the cultural revolution raged on through the 1960s. Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded Kennedy and energetically responded to the public demand for social change by legislating the Civil Rights of 1964, effectively de-legalizing segregation. Galvanized by Martin Luther King’s fiery oratory, the Black community aggressively challenged institutions they viewed as racist and oppressive. College students rallied against the Vietnam war and the authoritarian formalism of campus administrators.

Echoing the tumultuous spirit of the times, student activist Mario Savio urged his peers to put their bodies upon “the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” and “to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”. Contemporaneously, the seditious spirit reigned in Eastern Europe as Soviet forces quelled the Prague Spring and less than a decade ago, the Warsaw Pact subdued the Hungarian uprising. Even the USSR underwent a period of “De-Stalinization” under Kruschev’s leadership.

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Robert Stark interviews Paul Gottfried about his book Fascism: The Career of a Concept 1

by • Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Listen Here!

https://i2.wp.com/www.starktruthradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fascism-The-Career-of-a-Concept.jpg

Robert Stark and co-host Alex von Goldstein talk to Professor Paul Gottfried about his latest book Fascism: The Career of a Concept

Topics include:

How Fascism is used as a pejorative to describe any opposing political movement
Defining Fascism and how most people who use the term cannot define it
Mussolini’s Italy as the truest form of fascism
How Hitler was not a generic Fascist and that Franco in Spain was not a Fascist at all
Ernst Nolte‘s Fascism In Its Epoch and his view that fascism was a counter-revolutionary movement to socialism
Non European movements influenced by Fascism such as Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and the Hindutva movement in India
The de-Nazification process in postwar Germany and how it had a delayed effect
The Frankfurt School(Cultural Marxist) who have used anti-Fascism to shape the political discourse
Cultural Marxist versus Traditional Marxist and how the former abandoned economic issues
How mainstream conservatives also miss use the term(ex.Eco-fascism, Islamo-Fascism, Liberal Fascism)
The myth that fascism was on the left
How conservatives have adopted the values and rhetoric of the left

Paul Gottfried’s article Will a Trump Victory Actually Dislodge the Neocons?

Among the Rubble of the Freedom Agenda Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy
By Jon Basil Utley
The American Conservative
Orlok / Shutterstock.com

Orlok / Shutterstock.com

“We might survive a communist occupation, but not another American liberation,” I heard a Frenchman say in 1948 when I first visited Paris. I thought he must just be a leftist; I was a child and so innocent. My mother was working in occupied Germany as a correspondent for Reader’s Digest and had taken me to Paris for a few days of sightseeing.

Years later I learned what he meant—any resistance, even a single man shooting from a village, would have the American Army pull back and call in the artillery and Air Force to flatten the area until it was rubble. There could be a case that saving one American soldier’s life is worth destroying some foreign town. But are we justified in doing it to serve the interest of one Arab tribe against another? Do the “liberated” foreigners then thank us?

Reading a New York Times report that the so-called Iraqi Army, backed by American bombers, would soon liberate the city of Mosul, I searched for the results of other “liberated” cities. Reuters describes the “staggering” destruction of Ramadi. The city, which had a half a million population, now “liberated from ISIS” with American bombers’ “help,” is in total ruins and deserted—no water nor electricity grid, unexploded bombs and ruins everywhere. “The fighting saw Islamic State bomb attacks and devastating U.S.-led coalition air strikes,” according to Reuters. Similar almost-total destruction was wreaked upon the Syrian town of Kobane in 2014 by the American air forces helping to liberate it.

Keith Preston: Feeling threatened by Daesh, US backpedalling on past policies Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized

Press TV. Listen here: http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/26/457712/US-Daesh-Syria-Russia-Obama-Preston

“The US would rather have a victory in Syria than for the Assad government to retain power,” Preston says.

US President Barack Obama’s pledge to step up intelligence cooperation against the Daesh Takfiri terrorists signals America’s serious concerns about the terror group which was once viewed by Washington as a “weapon” against Syria’s legitimate government, says an American political analyst.

In his weekly address from the White House on Saturday, Obama expressed his condolences to the families of the victims of the recent attacks in the Belgian capital of Brussels, noting that the US is working to prevent similar attacks against America and its allies in the future.

Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, has told Press TV that this marks a significant departure of previous US policies against Daesh.

“The United States was hesitant to take their strong actions against ISIL in the Middle East, because they view ISIL as a destabilizing force,” Preston said Saturday. “A force that can be used to destabilize regimes in the Middle East that the United States is opposed to.”

He noted that Washington deems Daesh as a weapon in Syria that can be used to topple the country’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Washington has for long claimed that Assad hinders any solution to the five-year-long Syrian conflict that has claimed more than 470,000 lives.

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Prohibition and Gun Control: The Hypocrisy of Supporting Gun Rights and the Drug War 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

By Ryan Ramsey

S.D. Liberty

When conservatives or libertarians point out that lowering tax rates increases revenue, liberals scoff. You can show them proof, and they won’t listen because they are too vested in their ideology to slow down and accept that sometimes things work a little different than they seem.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2012/10/15/do-tax-cuts-increase-government-revenue/#263f8a0a48a3

If the policy discussion shifts to the drug war, however, most people on the right develop a case of cognitive dissonance, and it develops quicker than you can trigger a social justice warrior at a Donald Trump rally. We must be very careful not to lower ourselves to the level of the Marxist left wing that murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century. Their goal was equality, but the methods used to achieve it had the opposite effect. Inability to admit they could be wrong about their approach resulted in mass murder across the globe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

I want to see drug use lower, but the current policy is a failure. The war on drugs has cost over a trillion dollars, with lackluster results.  Use rates haven’t seen any significant changes, but the damage to our civil liberties has been catastrophic. Particularly troubling, is the number of gun rights supporters who are against decriminalizing marijuana, even for the sick and injured. Every single gun control act was in response to a post prohibition crime wave. There would be no need for the NRA or Florida Carry Inc. without drug prohibition. It is a bold statement, but I ask that you bear with me, and let the facts, rather than your emotions, determine your response. Below is an article and graphs showing the use of drugs has increased, despite our best efforts.

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A Short Word on Libertarian Redistribution Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

By Chris Shaw

There seem to be two prevailing views on the particular outcomes of a truly free market mechanism. In the case of right-libertarians, such as Hoppe, we see a belief in a natural tendency toward inequality, where outcomes vary and there will be discrepancies in wealth and capital ownership[1]. With the left-libertarians, such as Carson, we see a belief in much more equal outcomes arising from market exchange, and that the reason this isn’t so is due to massive historical theft by the state and the continued subsidisation of most of the capitalist economy today[2].

Now I think both views are right and wrong. On the point of a natural order arising from market exchange, this may certainly occur. No equality of outcome is guaranteed and there will be losers who can’t keep up innovation relative to demand. However, left-libertarians are correct in saying that the level of inequality would be significantly dampened if the subsidy of history created by states and plutocrats were corrected through different mechanisms of redistribution. The real question then becomes how would this redistribution mechanism work and what would it achieve.

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Confronting the New Right? Reply

by • Left and Right, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized

Perhaps everyone should just go their own way?

Gods and Radicals

1280px-Antinazi-antifa-graffiti

The New Right is a Anglo-European intellectual, political, social, and cultural movement gaining influence within Paganism, Polytheism, Heathenism, and the Occult communities. Generally called either ‘proto-fascists’ or ‘crypto-fascists,’ their ideology mirrors many aspects of what we might call ‘traditional’ Fascists, though only a few on the New Right claim that identity.

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The Slow, Inevitable Collapse Of The Two-Party System Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized

A step closer to the emergence of the pan-secessionist meta-party. ATS is so ahead of its time, lol.

Zero Hedge

Submitted by Russell Whitehouse via OrientalReview.org,

In this election year, it’s clear that a seismic political shift is rumbling through America.  Widespread discontent for the status quo is surfacing from both the left and right.  A year ago, it would have been impossible to envision a card-carrying socialist and a pre-WWII style populist mounting legitimate presidential campaigns (much less without Super PACs).  Now, far-left and far-right sentiments are emerging from the underground as perfectly palatable options to Middle America.  Establishment darlings like Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush & Marco Rubio have faced extreme pressure from the New Normal in their respective political tents.

It has become clear that the traditional 2-party system in America is starting to erode.  Sanders’ supporters view Clinton as too untrustworthy & beholden to Big Business.   Meanwhile Trump’s blue-collar base has rejected rank-and-file Republicans as being too unsympathetic to their economic concerns, while his surprising chunk of the evangelical contingent is refuting the Bush-flavored puritanism of Ted Cruz.  Conversely, Clinton’s supporters reject Sander’s bold platform as delusional and Cruz’s base is increasingly being filled by #NeverTrump neocon purists and Romey-ite country club Republicans.

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Libertarian Failure: The Paradigm that Never Shifts 1

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

By Dr. Sean Gabb

Libertarian Alliance

Here in Britain, the main effect of the Brussels bombings will be to speed passage of the Investigatory Powers Bill. This will require communications service providers to store all our Internet activity for a year, and to make it available to the authorities in circumstances that will not always require a warrant. I will say, for the avoidance of doubt, that I regard this as a very bad Bill, and I will briefly outline my objections to it.

1. In the 1970s and 1980s, we faced a serious – indeed, an existential – threat from Sinn Fein/IRA. It raised an insurrection within part of the United Kingdom for the purpose of detaching part of the United Kingdom. In shootings and bombings, mostly in Ulster, but also in the mainland United Kingdom, it killed thousands of people. The authorities responded with firmness, but made few changes to the normal course of law enforcement. Those changes made were contained in the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, which had to be renewed annually, and the powers granted fell with the lapsing of the Acts.

Islamic terrorism has killed few people so far in this country. Taken as an average since 2000, around five people a year have been killed. Yet the response is to make everyone in the country into a permanent terrorism suspect.

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After Brussels Attack, Will Response Be More War or a Look at the Root Causes of Terrorism? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

To ask the question is to answer it. See this discussion at Democracy Now.

Western countries have looked the other way while their “allies” among the Gulf states have fueled Islamic extremists. At times, the West has directly or indirectly sought to fuel Islamic extremists as a weapon against independent secular nationalist regimes that repressed Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The West has also propped up regional dictators that serve to create sympathy for radical Islamic movements. The West has also sought to topple regimes that were a bulwark against more extreme forms of Islamism. The West has consistently provided economic and military aid along with political and diplomatic support to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Western military intervention in the region has escalated regional wars and created millions of casualties and dislocated refugees which in turn fuels Islamic extremism. Most of this is done for the purpose of monopolizing the petroleum trade, abetting Israeli expansionism, or exercising political hegemony. So, yes, much of the Islamic terrorism problem is a result of what intelligence specialists refer to as “blowback.“

Donald Trump persuading Republicans, but would lose to Hillary Clinton, polls suggest Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

According to this analysis, Hillary will beat Trump, and Sanders would have an even better chance against Trump. Read the article Eric Grenier’s of CBC News here.

What seems to be happening now is something that I have been thinking for a while would happen. I always thought that as the demographic groups that normally vote Republican continued to shrink in size and lose power politically, they would become more militant and try to go down with a fight. I figured that at some point the Repugs might actually adopt what has been called the “Sailer strategy” and essentially become the party of “white nationalism lite” (like the Euronationalist parties in Europe, e.g. Front National, Sweden Democrats, etc).

It seems to actually be happening now with the Trump phenomenon, and it’s happening quicker than I thought it would. I suspect if the GOP becomes the party of Trumpism on a permanent basis the neocons will go back to the Democratic Party, since they came from there originally, and join the Hillaryites, or whoever succeeds her. I think this would largely guarantee Democratic dominance in national politics and the US would be essentially a one-party state. The GOP would be a fringe party, and it might split into two fringe parties, one the party of Trumpism and one the party that attempts to continue the old Reagan coalition. Meanwhile, the Democraps would be faced with an insurgency from the left in their own ranks. It’s happening now with Sanders, and it may take on a more radical form in the future.

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Camille Paglia on the Trump/Hillary Deathmatch Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized

By Camille Paglia

Salon.Com

This week’s horrific terrorist attacks on the Brussels airport and metro raised the pressure in the already tight U.S. presidential campaign. Candidates of both parties were instantly measured against voter expectations of how a president could and should behave in a similar crisis. Meanwhile, it was jarring to see a beaming President Obama relaxing at a Cuban baseball game, while grisly photos of the wrecked terminal and dazed, bloodied victims in Belgium were on steady media feed all over the world.

Given that most people, sequestered at their workplace, were unable to monitor the full range of responses throughout the day, the candidate who emerged on top was almost certainly Donald Trump. Despite his alarming enthusiasm for waterboarding and torture, Trump’s central campaign theme of securing the borders and more stringently vetting immigrants was strengthened by the events in Brussels, a historic city whose changing demographics he had already controversially warned about. Trump’s credibility would be enhanced if he treated the vital immigration issue in general policy terms rather than divisively singling out specific groups (Mexican, Muslim), the majority of whom are manifestly law-abiding.

Hillary Clinton’s Brussels response was basically boilerplate, calling for solidarity with Europe and playing chess with Trump to paint him as a greenhorn and hothead. Bernie Sanders (whom I support and contribute to) had little to say, beyond conveying condolences to the Belgian people, because foreign affairs have unfortunately remained a sideline for him. Neither Sanders nor Martin O’Malley ever went after Hillary’s disastrous record as Secretary of State with the tenacity that they should have—a failure of strategy that has proved costly in the long run.

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Donald Trump Could Be the Military-Industrial Complex’s Worst Nightmare Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized

Has Donald Trump opened the door for non-interventionist foreign policy views to enter the mainstream?

By William Greider

The Nation

Let’s admit it. As political provocateur, Donald Trump has a dizzy kind of genius. He feints to the right, then he spins to the left. Either way, the hot subject for political chatter becomes Donald Trump.

This week, while people everywhere were fretting over his violent talk, the candidate came to Washington and dropped a peace bomb on the neocon editorial writers at The Washington Post and the war lobby. Trump wants to get the United States out of fighting other people’s wars. He thinks maybe NATO has outlived its usefulness. He asks why Americans are still paying for South Korea’s national defense. Or Germany’s or Saudi Arabia’s.

“I do think it’s a different world today and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” Trump said. “I think it’s proven not to work. And we have a different country than we did then. You know we have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting probably on a bubble, and, you know, it’s a bubble that if it breaks is going to be very nasty. And I just think we have to rebuild our country.”

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Keith Preston on Totalitarian Humanism at C-Realm Podcast 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized

The full transcript of my recent interview with the C-Realm podcast.


KMO: You are listening to the C­Realm podcast. I’m your host, KMO. And I’m speaking with Keith Preston of Attack the System. Keith, welcome to the C­Realm podcast.

Keith Preston: Thank you for having me.

KMO: I have been listening to your podcasts. I live in New York city. My children live near Baltimore, and I drive there every now and again to visit them. And so, I have a lot of time to listen to big chunks of people’s podcast archives. So, just recently I listened to probably 3 or 4 of your shows over the course of a couple of days. And they’re pretty dense, I have to say, and erudite. Very impressive. And I feel like I have been enriched by those drives.

Preston: Oh. Well, thank you.

KMO: You have a great turn of phrase that I want to get around to, and that is “totalitarian humanism.” But rather than dive right into that, I would like to invite you to just say more about your general project of the work that you do with podcasting and writing.

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Former Pat Buchanan Adviser Prepares Third Party Vessel For Donald Trump Reply

by • Activism, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Meanwhile, the neocons are planning a third party strategy of their own.

If either of these two third party schemes were to become a permanent reality, it would essentially render the Red Tribe incapable of gaining a national electoral majority, which would ensure permanent Blue Tribe dominance. However, the Blue Tribe would increasingly be faced with dissension, division, and insurgency within its own ranks. The goal of the Grey Tribe should then be to build a critical mass using the libertarian-populist tripartite strategy that ATS has formulated. The goal is to grow all anti-state and anti-stystem movements everywhere, along with the overarching strategic concept of pan-secessionism, until they collectively become the majority and a consensus develops for pan-decentralization.

By Alex Pfeiffer

Daily Caller

A former Pat Buchanan adviser has launched a petition that threatens to launch a new political movement if the Republican Party fails to nominate Donald Trump.

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Anarchists Without Adjectives: The Origins of a Movement Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

An interesting new paper from Carson.

Center for a Stateless Society

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 21 (Spring 2016)

Introduction

Errico Malatesta

Joseph Labadie

Dyer Lum

Voltairine De Cleyre

Max Nettlau

The Question of Anarcho-Capitalism

Conclusion

The “anarchism without adjectives” designation (the phrase, at least — the concept, as we shall see below, may have originated with Malatesta) was originally the work of two Spanish anarchists, Ricardo Mella and Fernando Tarrida del Marmol. Mella and Tarrida del Marmol worked out their theory in response to doctrinal disputes within the European anarchist movement between the collectivism of Bakunin’s followers, and the communism that was supplanting it, that was tearing the movement apart in the 1880s.

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Barry Cooper: Never Get Busted! 1

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

A former narc who became a genuine enemy of the state.

Jeff interviews ex-cop turned freedom fighter Barry Cooper of Never Get Busted, topics include: smoking pot as a cop, changing your life through psychedelics, Ayahuasca, the end of the war on drugs, two million people caged in the us, 80,000 in solitary confinement which is torture, growing up in East Texas, stinging the cops, escaping the US as a wanted man, asylum in Brazil, Mexico, getting people out of jail, 30 years for marijuana seeds, Marc Victor, self ownership, being a nice person, compassion and kindness, creating an alternative to government…

Never Get Busted: http://nevergetbusted.com/

Marc Victor: http://attorneyforfreedom.com/

The Dollar Vigilante: http://dollarvigilante.com/

Anarchast: http://anarchast.com/

Why Libertarians Should Champion Social Freedom Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Uncategorized

The case for liberaltarianism. One of the great benefits of pan-anarchism, pan-secessionism, and pan-decentralism is that many different approaches to social organization can be accommodated.

By Jerry Taylor

Niskanen Center

My argument last week about why freedom is advanced by preventing private racial discrimination created a bit of a stir in some libertarian circles. That is no surprise. Many libertarians are firm adherents of the non-aggression principle. From that perspective, marshaling the government to combat discrimination is naked aggression. It entails employing force to tell me with whom I must associate. It is, many libertarians believe, flatly immoral no matter how well-intentioned or worthwhile the consequences might be. Ends do not justify means.

I’m skeptical, however, that there are really that many people who judge the merits of public policy based solely on its adherence to otherwise compelling ethical rules. How many of us would really embrace a social order, no matter how intellectually compelling, regardless of how much suffering or deprivation that social order produced? In short, I suspect—if pressed—we would all agree with John Rawls: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account when judging rightness. One that did not would be irrational, crazy.”

So let’s think hard about the consequences that follow from ignoring social freedom. This week, economics professor Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan did exactly that. He leads with an arresting quote from Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a campaigner against the truly horrific social discrimination against the Untouchables in India. “So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.”

Prof. Kimball reminds us that Ambedkar’s observation was powerfully argued 157 years ago by none other than John Stuart Mill, one of the great patron saints of libertarianism. In Chapter 1 of On Liberty, Mill wrote:

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