Category Archives: History and Historiography

What Really Caused the Violence of Partition? Reply

by • History and Historiography

Inter-tribal warfare is really not a good plan.

By Guneeta Singh Bhalla, The Diplomat

“I still don’t know what happened,” remarks Ranjit Kaur toward the end of our interview.

“Why did we have to move?” she softly asks, staring at me, then through me, as her voice trailed off. Her gaze turned down toward her folded hands and she paused. She is genuinely perplexed, I can tell.

More than 70 years have passed and she hasn’t been able to reconcile Partition in her mind. Her family was attacked by a mob in their ancestral village in Narowal district, West Punjab, when they fled. She looked up at me again and her gaze hit me like a bolt. A lump began to swell in my throat but I fought it back. So many thoughts streamed through my mind: How unfair was this history? How could she live her full life in exile still wondering, seven decades later?

But this isn’t Kaur’s story alone. As she reminds me, “The only consolation was that millions of us were in this together.”

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“Soldiers, Anarchs, and Ideologues” Reply

by • History and Historiography, Left and Right

I have a contribution to this titled “Nietzsche vs. Hitler: Anti-Nazism on the German Revolutionary Right.”

Copies of SOLDIERS, ANARCHS & IDEOLOGUES: HEROES OF THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION are 175 pages in length and cost just 20 EUROS with free postage to anywhere in the world. The PayPal address is blackfrontpress@yahoo.co.uk and you can find more details below.

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Two decades after the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’, experts fear graver election threats Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, History and Historiography

By Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian

In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped.

The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. A recount of ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision.

In 2020, fears are growing that the US could see an unwanted sequel to the Brooks Brothers debacle – but with more violent participants.

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Election violence in November? Here’s what the research says Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography

By Ore Koren, The Conversation

After Kenya’s 2007 election, as incumbent President Mwai Kibaki declared victory, the opposition alleged the election had been rigged.

A wave of protests, riots and ethnic violence followed. As many as 1,500 citizens were killed and another 600,000 forcibly displaced.

As the U.S. presidential election draws near, many have expressed concern that a similar scenario may unfold here. Some envision President Donald Trump’s supporters using misinformation to mobilize vigilante militias to clash with leftist protesters. Others envision that groups on the left will refuse to accept the results and mobilize, leading to violence and deaths across the country.

Having a contested election in times of crisis, however, is by no means a guarantee of violence. The front-runners in the 2017 French presidential election, for example, were as politically polarizing as their U.S. 2020 counterparts, with centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron calling right-wing leader Marine Le Pen’s party racist and xenophobic and Le Pen charging that Macron was “the candidate of savage globalisation.”

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The Lost Forest Gardens Of Europe: Reclaiming Ancestral Food Cultivation w/ Max Paschall Reply

by • Environment, Health and Medicine, History and Historiography

By Max Paschall

Listen here.

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In this episode, I speak with writer, arborist, and professional horticulturist Max Paschall. We discuss his essay ‘The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe,’ published at the Shelterwood Forest Farm website.

In addressing the ever-increasing, ongoing impacts anthropogenic climate change is having on food production and land management, for those of us that descend from European colonizers in North America, what can we learn from the past? What relationship did our ancestors have with the lands they were indigenous to, and how did they adapt to rapid climatological and ecological shifts throughout the millennia? In Max’s fascinating and illuminating essay ‘The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe,’ the answers to these questions come more into focus.

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War Crimes Committed by the Union Reply

by • History and Historiography

One thing that the supposedly anti-imperialist left has never come to terms with is that the Civil War was the cornerstone of the building of the American empire.

By Stratton J. Davis

While being perhaps the most famous war in America History, the Civil War is one of the most misunderstood conflicts in all of history. Specifically, the view of the Union is that they were virtuous heroes who fought to free enslaved men. This could not be farther from the truth; the Civil War was fought to preserve the union. More importantly, the Union army gave birth to the barbaric military tactics that have been used by the Nazis, the Red Army and the American military. They attacked private property, economic strongholds, and left the fear of rape in women throughout the South forever. To start, Lincoln was already launching a war of aggression when he started the Civil War. The The10th Amendment of the US Constitution is concerned with States Rights, and one of which was the right to secede. However, the corruption of Lincoln and the war crimes birthed by the Union army is more layered than this.

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Seeing Like an Anarchist Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, History and Historiography

By Jesse Walker

Reason

Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti, by Johnhenry Gonzalez, Yale University Press, 302 pages, $40

“In media and popular consciousness, Haiti has become identified with hunger,” Johnhenry Gonzalez observes in Maroon Nation. But in the 19th century, after the revolution that drove out the French slaveowners and before the invasion that brought in a U.S. occupation, the country saw “a free system of decentralized, small-scale agriculture that allowed for unprecedented demographic growth.” In the century that followed Haiti’s 1804 declaration of independence, the country’s population more than quintupled. This, Gonzalez tells us, was “the steepest and largest instance of demographic expansion in Caribbean history” to that point.

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Beyond The Official Narrative with Richard Kary, September 29, 2020 Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, History and Historiography, Left and Right

An interview I did earlier today discussing current events.

Listen to the interview here.

Richard is joined by guest Keith Preston to discuss domestic politics and recent geopolitical developments. Keith is the managing editor of AttacktheSystem.com, an analyst at Press TV, author at Black House Publishing, online podcast host, and former instructor of sociology.

America is the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century Reply

by • American Decline, History and Historiography

This is an insult to the memory of the Holy Roman Empire.

By Ryan Cooper

The Week

Germany is today a first-rank power: rich, strong, and efficiently governed. But just over 200 years ago, most of its current territory was a shambolic mess — part of the Holy Roman Empire, which even at the time was recognized as an anachronistic political fossil. More than a thousand years old at that point, the empire was a patchwork of hundreds of different duchies, electorates, principalities, kingdoms, church lands, and so forth, some of them just a few dozen acres (Liechtenstein is one of these relics which still survives), with an exceptionally complicated and illogical tangle of legal institutions overlaying them all. Surpassed by history, the confederation was ripe for the picking by an opportunistic tyrant.

The United States today bears an uncomfortable similarity to that doomed empire. The American Constitution is the oldest in the world still operating, and has been obviously out of date for well over a century. Half the basic mechanics of government are either malfunctioning kludges or a gross betrayal of its own founding principles. Countries that fail to maintain themselves to this degree often do not survive.

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The True Story Of Gloria Steinem, From The CIA To ‘The World’s Most Famous Feminist’ Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, History and Historiography

The more I study US political history in the 20th century, the more I come to the view that Antony Sutton was correct that the rise of communism and fascism internationally was made possible only with the assistance of Western capitalism. And the more I come to the view that postwar domestic opposition movements, such as the New Right and the New Left, were merely controlled opposition and/or fronts for the intelligence services. Is it any coincidence that both William F. Buckley and Gloria Steinem were former employees of the CIA or that Herbert Marcuse was an employee of the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS? This raises the question of to what degree surface-level opposition movements of today are being instigated or manipulated by external forces?

By Natasha Ishak

All That’s Interesting

Before Gloria Steinem was the face of second-wave feminism, she was an anti-communist operative for the CIA and went undercover with Playboy to expose their misogynistic practices.

Gloria Steinem is a journalist and activist who rose to prominence as the stylish frontwoman of the women’s liberation movement in 1970s America.

As she turns 86 in 2020, the soft-spoken orator remains one of the most recognized feminist leaders today. Here’s how she became the face of second-wave feminism.

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The Worst Purges Come From the Right Reply

by • History and Historiography, Left and Right

One of the problems with “movement conservatism” of the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan axis was that it was never anything more than a means of providing ideological cover for the military-industrial-complex and American empire-builders, which is why the isolationists have always been the main group that has been unwelcome in “conservative” circles, followed anti-cosmopolitans who are offensive to the uber-imperialist neocons.

By Paul Gottfried

Chronicles

Recently C. Bradley Thompson responded obliquely to my critical comments in Chronicles about his book and subsequent observations on the American Founding. Contrary to Thompson’s asides on Facebook and Twitter dismissing my criticism, I did read some of his tome, The Revolutionary Mind, and even commented on it—but I found its discussion of our state-builders so tendentious and unscholarly that after a few chapters I gave up. His attribution of recognizably Randian, agnostic, or atheistic views to the Founders was a bit much.

In any case, my critical analyses of Thompson’s writings are supposedly reducible to “smears” and even more ominously, to my identification with what he called the “TradCon reactionary Right.” Those on Thompson’s right remain unfit to mention, let alone deserve serious discussion from the conservative establishment, which supposedly praises Thompson as a brilliant researcher. Who am I to belittle anyone who has earned an interview on “The Dave Rubin Show” and whom National Review treats as a clubbable thinker?

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Marxism: Its Historic Role and Intellectual Legacy Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, History and Historiography, Religion and Philosophy

By Keith Preston

An Overview of Marxist Theory

During the middle part of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined a comprehensive theory concerning how human societies evolve over time, and the factors that shape the character of particular societies. According to Marxist theory, human history is the history of the rise and fall of different kinds of economic systems, and it is the economic relationships that human beings enter into that determine every other aspect of their society at any particular time. A new economic system emerges when an older system has exceeded its historical purpose. New economic systems (“modes of production”) develop within the context of the system they eventually replace. Feudalism developed out of primitive societies, and capitalism developed out of feudalism. Marx and Engels believed that communism would develop out of the conditions created by capitalism.

The emergence of each new economic system, or mode of production, comes about as a result of conflict. The conditions of the older economic system give rise to the newer one, and the two systems eventually come into conflict with one another with the rising economic forces supplanting the declining ones. However, this conflict is not something that human beings deliberately choose to engage in. Instead, human consciousness and thought is shaped by the material conditions human beings find themselves in. The ideas that dominate the intellectual life of a particular period in history are determined by the existing set of economic relationships, and the dominant mode of production. Marx and Engels believed that culture is an outgrowth of the material forces that shape the economy.

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The Struggle for Bottom Unity in an Age of Division Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Strategy • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.”

-Karl Hess

“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”

-Fred Hampton

Solidarity is a bitch when everyone who can afford a knife is slitting each other’s throat. That’s the nasty little limerick that keeps playing on repeat in my skull like a mantra as populist grassroots uprisings devolve into bitter proxy wars between roaming tribes of bitter proles, killing each other over which oligarch’s name they have scrawled across their battle flags. Everyone wants to pick sides. Everyone is trolling for convenient scapegoats. I just see poor people killing poor people while two sick rich candidates arrange their corpses into clever platforms to stand on and promote more war from. The splintering of the George Floyd Uprisings into partisan turf warfare doesn’t just rip up my already bleeding heart because I had so much hope for the revolutionary potential now being squandered. It kills me because I have people on both sides of these gorey shenanigans and they should both be on the same damn team. All poor people should be, regardless of race or even politics.

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Not Weimar America, But Dark Times All the Same Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography, Left and Right

Are we reliving Weimar…or Bleeding Kansas?

By Matt Purple

The American Conservative

There’s a scene in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin where the author goes to visit Bernhard Landauer, the owner of a prosperous department store in Germany. The year is 1933 and Bernhard shows Christopher a vicious message he’s received, threatening to kill him and all his fellow Jews. Bernhard shrugs this off but Christopher insists he go to the police: “The Nazis may write like schoolboys,” he says, “but they’re capable of anything. That’s why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment…”

Here in America, it’s been easy to laugh at those who have threatened political violence over the past four years, and even at those who have carried it out. Their rogue’s gallery can look like something out of a campy video game: ninja-like black masks who run through the streets LARPing revolution? Mostly white college students screaming “black lives matter”? I still haven’t figured out exactly what a boogaloo boy is supposed to be. Even after the horror in Charlottesville, the white supremacists yodeling about “the Jew” on their way back from the latest Wolves of Vinland potluck come off as more sad than dangerous. It’s easy to laugh at these people, to dismiss them as dorks and thumbsuckers; it’s easy to laugh until it isn’t, until your cities are burning, until you look down and realize you’ve been dancing on a volcano.

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