Life at Fifty
Edmund Connelly
June 23, 2010
I am now in my third year of writing articles for this site, and they have added up: today’s is my 50th (review them here). Much of my writing here (and at The Occidental Quarterly print journal) has addressed the way Hollywood film has subtly and not so subtly attacked Whites, particularly White males.
One phenomenon I’ve focused on is the role reversal between Black and White male characters. In the old days, White were usually the heroes; now it almost seems evenly matched, despite White males outnumbering Black males by about seven to one.
Of course I don’t believe this is “just happening.” Rather, I think it is a conscious strategy employed by the Jews who dominate Hollywood, yet another part of their relentless culture of critique. I’ve argued that two African Americans — Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington — have been chosen to lead this image transformation. In other words, they have been used to create the mold for “The Numinous Negro.”
I should have been more on top of this development, but I wasn’t. Thus I was caught off guard when I read the excellent TOO article “Hijacked on the Way to the Apocalypse” by Penelope Thornton. In it, she discusses three new films and their White and non-White bearings.
First comes the Mayan doomsday story 2012, where Thornton observes that the U.S. President “elects to stay with the un-elect and disappears with the rest of us, under the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier as it flattens what's left of Washington DC. The image of the wise, altruistic Black president who, as a member of the elite could have saved himself but goes down with the ship is, one of the most striking images of the film.” (Unfortunately, Thornton identifies the actor as Morgan Freeman — “St. Morgan (aka America’s Spiritual Presence-in-Chief) for most of us” — but it is actually Danny Glover. Still, the visual message remains the same. The confusion is understandable: When Americans think numinosity, they think Morgan Freeman.)
She continues: “The political messages are interesting. We are led by a saintly Black president to our inevitable demise. The two structures that you see toppled completely are the U.S. Congress and St. Peter's in Rome. The United States of America and the Catholic Church have got to go?”
Ah, the old Jewish desire for revenge on Rome again. Remember when Steven Spielberg indulged himself by having a Catholic Church steeple tumble over in War of the Worlds? (Scroll down to the 1:20 mark.) Freud had the same fantasy, too.
Thornton outlines the plot and players:
The movie is pitched to White people, with the main characters, played by John Cusack and Amanda Peet, and their family life providing most of the human element of the story. But the Whites are living in a world where Indian scientists discovered the problem, the Chinese have the technology to escape the disaster, and there’s a Black president of the United States. Although they have a central place in whatever emotional pull the story has, in the big picture, they are bit players.
Next comes the film Legion, in which “Mother Mary who is with child is a slutty waitress. . . . And Mary is a whore, of course.” Sounds like modern Hollywood.
Finally comes The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington. Thornton describes his role in this movie as “a kind of Black Jesus Figure.” Why not, Morgan Freeman has twice played a Black God, first in Bruce Almighty and then Evan Almighty. Naturally, the bad guys are all vicious White men. As Thornton writes, “besides having a Black Christ figure, the Whites in the movie are uniformly subhuman, savage, and beyond salvation. To a man they are absolutely repulsive. No subliminal programming here! Hollywood's war on the White male continues unabated.”
Thornton sums up the message:
Denzel Washington wrote the movie with Joel Silver, a Jewish screenwriter and producer. Once again we are treated to a favorite theme: A noble Black man will lead us out of the darkness of the White man with the words of God's Chosen People. Jews and Blacks working together to destroy evil White men in the interests of producing a morally uplifting civilization.
As luck would have it, the story I read immediately after Thornton’s was a Los Angeles Times article called A Hollywood Whitewash? In this story, Asian Americans complain about Whites being cast as Asians in two of this year’s big films. Noah Ringer, for example, plays Asian martial arts savant Aang in The Last Airbender.
Then there’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The L.A. Times notes that “None of its principal cast members are of Iranian, Middle Eastern or Muslim descent. And playing Dastan, the hero and titular heir to the Persian throne in the $200-million tent-pole film, is none other than Hancock Park’s own Swedish-Jewish-American prince, Jake Gyllenhaal.”
That one’s got to gall Arabs and Persians/Iranians as well. Gyllenhaal’s mother is Ashkenazi Jewish, so according to Jewish law, he is Jewish. Given the Persian conquest of Jewish tribes over two thousand years ago, this is a nice little piece of cinematic revenge.
Asian Americans have been most active in challenging how they (and Asians) are portrayed. This issue gained exposure twenty years ago when the Madam Butterfly-derived Miss Saigon opened with White actors playing Asian roles. As Wikipedia tells us:
Originally, Pryce and Burns, white actors playing Eurasian/Asian characters, wore eye prostheses and bronzing cream to make themselves look more Asian, which outraged some who drew comparisons to a “minstrel show."
In the London production of Miss Saigon, Lea Salonga originally starred as Kim, with Jonathan Pryce as the Engineer. When the production transferred from London to New York City, the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) refused to allow Pryce, a white actor, to recreate the role of the Eurasian pimp in America. As Alan Eisenberg, executive secretary of Actors' Equity explained, "The casting of a Caucasian actor made up to appear Asian is an affront to the Asian community. The casting choice is especially disturbing when the casting of an Asian actor, in the role, would be an important and significant opportunity to break the usual pattern of casting Asians in minor roles.”
Despite being a far smaller and historically newer minority group in American than Blacks, Asian Americans have constructed a solid apparatus for critiquing images of Asians and Asian Americans. It is largely university-based and features such pioneers as Elaine Kim and Ronald Takaki. The L.A. Times article was over half a page long and there was no shortage of Asian American activists and groups to quote from. Can you name any such White activist groups that would get quoted defending White interests?
I suspect many college students still get exposed to the ritual accounts of endless Asian victimhood at the hands of racist Whites. The documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? probably still gets screenings on college campuses around the country. Then there is the critique of the feminization of Asian peoples, led by eroticization of Asian women. This can be seen in the films Slaying the Dragon and Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re)Educational Videotape.
Quite frankly, I sympathize with Asian Americans and their efforts to exercise a greater degree of control over how they are (mis)portrayed. Given the power and pervasiveness of modern media, all too often perception IS reality. In other words, images have consequences. And if your image if bad, your group is likely to suffer the consequences.
I am not aware of any specifically White groups that defend the image of Whites in our media — and get media exposure. David Duke, Michael Hoffmann, and your humble scribe have striven to raise the consciousness of Whites about the very deliberate campaign to paint us as evil racists. But of course we get only the exposure we ourselves generate.
Gone are the days when mainstream White Christian groups such as the Legion of Decency or the Breen Office could cow the Hollywood moguls by threatening boycotts. Today, William Donohue, the head of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Liberties, does some work toward defending the image of Catholics, but this is minor and only implicitly White.
I won’t make a call for the White masses to rally to their own defense because I know that will not happen under current conditions. Far too many Whites have internalized the images our “hostile elite” has created for them. This is unfortunate, for they are in grave danger indeed.
At best, the danger is one of White dispossession and replacement with non-Whites. This is happening apace and is nearing the point of no return. At worst, Whites may face persecution and massacre on a scale similar to that seen in Russia and Eastern Europe when Jews became a hostile elite there. This is a theme I’ve emphasized and written about unambiguously, so I’m reluctant to repeat myself. But our survival demands it.
As luck would have it, the TOO blog for June 21 has Kevin MacDonald writing on this threat as explicitly as he ever has. Called Jews as a hostile elite—again, it begins with a quote from VDARE.com’s founder Peter Brimelow: “Our political class may live in a fantasy world, but the motive for its immigration enthusiasm is all too real: a relentless hatred of the historic American nation.”
MacDonald then argues:
It really wouldn’t matter much that Jews have become an elite except for this relentless hatred and loathing. After all, all societies have elites. What is toxic is that such a substantial portion of our elite—especially that part of the elite that is ensconced in the media, the financial, and the academic world — hates (loathes, despises) the traditional people and culture they rule over.
We should never forget what happened when Jews were a hostile elite in the USSR. The loathing and contempt for the traditional people and culture of Russia was a major factor in the avid Jewish participation in the greatest crimes of the 20th century.
So the conclusion is that the Jews ... deposed the WASP elite by appealing to their guilt proneness to the point that the new Jewish hostile elite has carte blanche to displace them by importing a new people (opposition would be “racist”) . . . [T]he loss for the traditional people of America is incalculable. And given what happened in the USSR, White people should be very afraid of what the future may hold.
Since this is my 50th column, I’ll address the venue in which I’ve most consistently explored this Jewish hatred of European Americans: Hollywood film. Much of this writing appears in the print journal The Occidental Quarterly. (See here, here, here, and here, for example.)
In essence, the danger is simple to explain. Let’s start with a lie commonly propagated in American universities today. A professor begins a course by writing on the board “Power + Prejudice = Racism.” He then asserts that only White men have such power and prejudice, so racism is a White male problem, the unstated solution to which is eradication of White males.
The more accurate application of this formula would be this:
“Jewish Power + Hostility = Displacement of Whites”
Or, possibly:
“Jewish Power + Hatred = Eradication of Whites”
Limiting myself to Hollywood, this power is easily proved. For instance, take this August 1996 cover story from the Jewish magazine Moment:
What I have addressed in my writing is the “So What?” in this equation. Just like Asian Americans do not control the images created about them, and consequently have to deal with negative and harmful imagery, we Whites too have lost the power to control images of ourselves. This has allowed our enemies to destroy our self confidence, even to trigger altruistic punishment among Whites.
Further, it teaches non-Whites that they have been horribly victimized by Whites and have a moral right to exact revenge. Again, I’ve written about example after example of this. The narrative for Black revenge is already firmly in place, so now Hollywood has moved on to the fast-growing Hispanic population. See my “Machete”: A new front in the war on Whites for how this is being treated cinematically.
I can’t reverse this trend. At best, I can only provide these analyses with the hope that discerning readers will learn how to read the scripted racial codes appearing in so many movies. Once able to decipher them, the effect should be far less potent. I must assume non-Whites will continue to be influenced by the themes of racial revenge, however.
This is not a happy way to celebrate my fiftieth. But of course there is no reason to celebrate. We Whites have allowed this racial assault to go on for far too long. And now the bill is about to come due.
Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
Permanent Link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Film-Images-Whites.html
Edmund Connelly Archives
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
GENERAL McCHRYSTAL PRAISED BY ROLLING STONE.
GENERAL McCHRYSTAL PRAISED BY ROLLING STONE.
PRESIDENT OBAMA JUMPS TO MISCONCLUSION AGAIN.
Did you ever find out what General Stanley McChrystal said that caused President Barack Obama to fire him? The actual comments were hazy until the Rolling Stone Magazine hit the newstands Friday with a story by reporter Michael Hastings, who had been following McChrystal for a month.
This article mentions very little about the private barracks-room style banter of McChrystal and mostly by his staff that slightly criticized Obama and some advisors. This story actually portrayed McChrystal to be a heroic motivator whose outstanding leadership is respected by nearly all, so why did this reporter tell harmful scuttlebutt that was discussed in confidence.
We know that President Obama sometimes jumps to conclusions without reading the details. His presumption this time is costing us one of our most accomplished generals. I hope Obama will read the entire Rolling Stone article, overlook the typical G.I. grousing, then reconsider and find an important position for this great general. Obama should consider replacing the mentioned advisors.
Enclosed below is the entire story from Rolling Stone Magazine, edited only to remove the many profane words. It is necessary to show the entire long story so you readers can see that the anti-war news media has exaggerated facts because they enjoy destroying important people.
--REAL NEWS Editor thenewsman@ij.net
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THE RUNAWAY GENERAL
By Michael Hastings, reporter embedded a month with General McChrystal for Rolling Stone
This article appeared on newsstands Friday, June 25
"How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hotel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies -- to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies.
Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president, and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. "Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?" McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual -- blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks -- McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine."
The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable. Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've loused up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says. He pauses a beat. "Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it." With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the Ecole Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to upset almost everyone with a stake in the conflict.
Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted", saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut up, and keep a lower profile.
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner. "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan -- then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan -- and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government -- a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve.
The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take them out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops -- swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half -- we were in danger of "mission failure."
The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics -- a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks.
"The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile.
The biggest military operation of the year -- a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja -- continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer". In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history -- and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year.
The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm.
"It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit. Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority.
After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops".) McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York.
He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spent around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.
By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely plastered. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me, "I'd die for them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain.
This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal. In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shoddy about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985."
Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on anything."
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial -- and strained -- relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005, can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots.
He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill, a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so.
Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed -- a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner.
"He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson", as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream.
"It was pretty out of control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls "huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents, a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination, a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man."
One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The trouble-making almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious under-achievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular. As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career.
In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. "We really felt we were a peacetime generation," he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal."
So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime -- nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path. Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers.
Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism.
But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far, especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. "He was very focused," says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint-- overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force -- that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough -- a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.)
A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times.
But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape.
He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.")
He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who is that?' And it's Stan McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
"JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down -- often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military.
"The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey, you muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19.
"You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 -- a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it -- for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids.
He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" asks a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM, a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar, to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally -- at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops -- not some photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram, one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with, had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended -- they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command. But knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. "When I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our gun on," says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. "I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all loused up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're losing this thing."
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.
"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir," says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to mislead the men. "We are knee-deep in the decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative -- "but I don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight -- like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you." The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan -- and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975).
McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan.
Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest -- there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command -- both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties.
They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years -- in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed -- lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned -- talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked.
"They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory -- because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply loused up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big.
Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war, the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security". The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja.
"The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population."
When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over -- the Afghan people -- do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse.
"Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" -- a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
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PRESIDENT OBAMA JUMPS TO MISCONCLUSION AGAIN.
Did you ever find out what General Stanley McChrystal said that caused President Barack Obama to fire him? The actual comments were hazy until the Rolling Stone Magazine hit the newstands Friday with a story by reporter Michael Hastings, who had been following McChrystal for a month.
This article mentions very little about the private barracks-room style banter of McChrystal and mostly by his staff that slightly criticized Obama and some advisors. This story actually portrayed McChrystal to be a heroic motivator whose outstanding leadership is respected by nearly all, so why did this reporter tell harmful scuttlebutt that was discussed in confidence.
We know that President Obama sometimes jumps to conclusions without reading the details. His presumption this time is costing us one of our most accomplished generals. I hope Obama will read the entire Rolling Stone article, overlook the typical G.I. grousing, then reconsider and find an important position for this great general. Obama should consider replacing the mentioned advisors.
Enclosed below is the entire story from Rolling Stone Magazine, edited only to remove the many profane words. It is necessary to show the entire long story so you readers can see that the anti-war news media has exaggerated facts because they enjoy destroying important people.
--REAL NEWS Editor thenewsman@ij.net
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THE RUNAWAY GENERAL
By Michael Hastings, reporter embedded a month with General McChrystal for Rolling Stone
This article appeared on newsstands Friday, June 25
"How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hotel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies -- to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies.
Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president, and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. "Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?" McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual -- blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks -- McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine."
The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable. Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've loused up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says. He pauses a beat. "Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it." With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the Ecole Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to upset almost everyone with a stake in the conflict.
Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted", saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut up, and keep a lower profile.
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner. "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan -- then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan -- and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government -- a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve.
The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take them out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops -- swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half -- we were in danger of "mission failure."
The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics -- a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks.
"The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile.
The biggest military operation of the year -- a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja -- continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer". In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history -- and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year.
The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm.
"It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit. Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority.
After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops".) McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York.
He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spent around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.
By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely plastered. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me, "I'd die for them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain.
This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal. In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shoddy about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985."
Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on anything."
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial -- and strained -- relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005, can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots.
He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill, a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so.
Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed -- a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner.
"He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson", as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream.
"It was pretty out of control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls "huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents, a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination, a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man."
One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The trouble-making almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious under-achievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular. As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career.
In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. "We really felt we were a peacetime generation," he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal."
So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime -- nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path. Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers.
Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism.
But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far, especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. "He was very focused," says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint-- overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force -- that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough -- a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.)
A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times.
But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape.
He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.")
He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who is that?' And it's Stan McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
"JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down -- often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military.
"The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey, you muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19.
"You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 -- a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it -- for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids.
He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" asks a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM, a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar, to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally -- at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops -- not some photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram, one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with, had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. "Does that make any sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended -- they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command. But knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. "When I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our gun on," says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. "I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're all loused up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're losing this thing."
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.
"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir," says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to mislead the men. "We are knee-deep in the decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative -- "but I don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight -- like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you." The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan -- and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975).
McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan.
Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest -- there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command -- both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties.
They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years -- in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed -- lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned -- talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked.
"They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory -- because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply loused up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big.
Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war, the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security". The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja.
"The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population."
When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over -- the Afghan people -- do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse.
"Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" -- a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
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Sunday, 27 June 2010
Einstein a false god of science; copied relativity idea from Poincaré & Lorentz
Einstein a false god of science; copied relativity idea from Poincaré & Lorentz - C K Raju
Einstein got it wrong, and how!
C K Raju
12 June 2010
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1259
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32557667/Ckr-TGA-Acceptance-Speech
[Today, 12 June 2010, Dr C. K. Raju, Distinguished Professor and Director (Academic), Inmantec, receives the Gold Medal for the year 2010 from the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science, at the University of Pécs, in Pécs, a city in Hungary declared the European Capital of Culture for 2010. The award is being conferred on Prof. Raju, among other reasons, for pointing out a mistake made by Einstein and correcting it. The full citation is at
http://www.telesiogalilei.com/tg/index.php/academy-award-2010
In physics, he defined a product of Schwartz distributions, and proposed an interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the structured-time interpretation, and a model of physical time evolution. He also noted that every aspect of special relativity was published by Poincaré in papers between 1898 and 1905, and that Einstein made a mistake on which much of modern physics rests. He has proposed appropriate corrections. This award is in recognition of these deep insights into these areas of physics.
Prof. Raju played a key role in building India's first supercomputer Param, and is well known for his path-breaking work on mathematics and the calculus. His researches are described in several acclaimed books including Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer Academic, 1994; Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol. 65), The Eleven Pictures of Time (Sage, 2003), and Cultural Foundations of Mathematics (Pearson Longman, 2007). (See http://ckraju.net, for more details.) - Editor] *
Acceptance speech for the TGA Gold Medal Award, 2010
Dignitaries on the dais,
fellow Laureates,
friends,
I am indeed honoured to be here today to receive this award in this august assembly in this historic city and cultural capital of Europe.
Bernardino Telesio and Galileo Galilei are both symbols of resistance to authority. Therefore, it is apt that a key reason why the award is being given to me is for having pointed out Einstein's mistake, and for having corrected it—for Einstein is one of the greatest figures of scientific authority today.
At the outset I would like to state that the issue is not so much the special theory of relativity, which is a very fine theory, even though it is counter to Newtonian intuition. There is no doubt at all that the theory was the work of a genius. The question is who was that genius: Poincaré or Einstein? The second question follows naturally from the first: compared to Poincaré, a mathematician, did Einstein, a non-mathematician, even understand the full mathematical implications of the theory of relativity?
The third question brings us back to the large mass of people who blindly follow scientific authority: following in the footsteps of Einstein, have they fully understood the special theory of relativity? If not, how should its understanding be corrected today? And what possible practical value does that correction hold for us tomorrow?
Unfortunately, instead of approaching these questions in the spirit of scientific enquiry, people react to them emotionally. Einstein is, for them, the biggest symbol of scientific authority, and they want to somehow hang on to the story they have heard about him from childhood. The less they know about the theory of relativity and its history, the stronger their belief, and the greater their distress that this symbol of scientific authority is being attacked. The issues could be easily settled in many ways: for example, the historical issue could be settled by reading the papers of Poincaré, Lorentz, and Einstein.
Somehow, most people cannot or will not read those papers, and instead proceed in a roundabout way, by reliance on authority, and through dubious guesswork. They guess that scientific authority cannot make such a mistake, exactly as people in Galileo's time guessed that religious authority was infallible. They start questioning the motives of the critic, and so on.
Physics texts play their own role in propagating such myths. Most physics texts (fortunately, not all) maintain that the Michelson-Morley experiment proved the absence of ether. The simple fact, which anyone can check (but most do not) is that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed to discriminate between two ether theories: those of Fresnel and Stokes. The experiment came out in support of Stokes theory, which involved a mathematical absurdity, and was hence rejected by Lorentz. The whole myth of the Michelson-Morley experiment obscures the key point of relativity, which is that Newtonian physics never defined a proper clock; therefore it was impossible for the experiment to have measured the speed of light! Why Newtonian physics never defined a proper clock is another story, and I won't go into that here.
If we follow Poincaré's line of thought from 1898 to 1904, this point about the need to define a physical measure of time comes out with great clarity. Authoritative sources would tell us that Poincaré believed in ether or that he "waffled". However, those are plain falsehoods, as anyone can check by reading Poincaré, or even reading just the extensive quotes from him that I have provided in my books. It was Poincaré who coined the phrases "principle of relativity", and "Lorentz transform". In his celebrated 1904 paper he spoke of an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterized by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature can fall below absolute zero. That is the theory of relativity in a nutshell.
Could Einstein have arrived independently at the theory of relativity? Such claims of "independent rediscovery", just when a dependent discovery was possible, are a scandalous part of current history of science. However, let us look at Einstein's case on its individual merits. It is well known that Einstein had read Poincaré's work on relativity from 1898 until 1902 with great excitement, and had discussed it with his friends. The only question is whether he read Lorentz's 1904 paper and Poincaré's 1904 paper. He denied reading those. However, as Whittaker first pointed out, Poincaré used the word "relativity" for the first time in his 1904 paper (he had earlier used the term "principle of relative motion"). Since Einstein's paper contained no new idea or formula, and repeated that word, Whittaker concluded that Einstein had borrowed his ideas. I further pointed out that Einstein casually used the strange terms "longitudinal mass" and "transverse mass" introduced very circumspectly by Lorentz in the very paper Einstein later denied reading. Whittaker's arguments, and mine, have been met with great hostility by those in scientific authority, though no one so far could address the points raised.
Cases where one student copies from another, but denies it, are commonplace for a teacher. The simple way to resolve such cases is to test the understanding of the students verbally. The one who does not understand has copied. One cannot thus interrogate the past, but mistakes are proof of lack of understanding. If a person claiming "independent rediscovery" shows lack of understanding through a mistake, that is proof of copying according to my "epistemic test". That is exactly what happened in this case: Einstein failed to understand what Poincaré, the mathematician, understood: namely, that relativity changes also the character of the equations of physics. They can no longer be the ordinary differential equations of Newtonian physics, but must be functional differential equations (which, Poincaré took for granted, must be retarded). Einstein never understood this aspect of relativity till his death. That settles the matter: Einstein published later, his claims of "independent rediscovery" are seriously suspect, and he never fully understood the implications of relativity. Possibly as a patent clerk he realized that he could copy ideas from frontline thinkers, for there is no legal patent on ideas. For almost a century now, it would seem, people have worshipped a false god of science.
There is a saying that people who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. In 1994, I pointed out, in my book Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer), that the use of functional differential equations led to a shift away from the Newtonian paradigm of ordinary differential equations, going beyond textbook relativity. For example, the century old contradiction between Newtonian mechanics and the entropy law of thermodynamics could be easily resolved with functional differential equations. In 2004, exactly a century after Poincaré's seminal paper on relativity, I published the first solutions of the functional differential equations of retarded electrodynamics, in a significant physical context—that of the classical hydrogen atom. And, in 2005, exactly a century after Einstein's paper on relativity, and in a lecture intended to commemorate that event, Sir Michael Atiyah, a person regarded as the leading mathematician in the world, repeated my claim, first made in my 1994 book, that the use of functional differential equations could also explain the puzzling features of quantum mechanics. Atiyah claimed "independent rediscovery", and even after he was personally informed of my work, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society ran a prominent article on his lecture, in June 2006, crediting Atiyah with the suggestion to use functional differential equations in physics, and referring to it as "Atiyah's hypothesis". My earlier work was credited only after a long correspondence, in a short and difficult-to-spot letter in the Notices of the AMS in April 2007.
I pointed out that such a belated acknowledgment, without an apology, was worth little. I again applied my "epistemic test" and pointed out that "Atiyah's hypothesis" involved a serious mistake. Functional differential equations are a natural consequence of relativity, their use requires no hypothesis, so the claim about "Atiyah's hypothesis" involved a conceptual mistake, apart from a historical mistake in crediting Atiyah. I wrote a letter to the journal, along these lines. The journal however refused to publish it, preferring to leave the mistake uncorrected. Although many prominent scientists from India and abroad signed a petition that the letter should be published, and the matter debated publicly, the Editor of the Notices and the American Mathematical Society ignored the petition and hung on to the decision to suppress the matter. This is how scientific authority functions at the highest level. One can well imagine how it functions at lower levels, and how much it misleads us about the truth. Those who place their trust in it deserve what they get: they and their progeny can continue to believe science is all about implicitly trusting those in positions of scientific authority. As for me, I am not in the business of mobilising popular opinion, or winning a popularity contest: my aim was to find the truth, and I have found it—the truth both about science, and about scientific authority. Knowledge was what I sought, and I have found it. That is reward in itself.
On the pleasant side, there are a number of interesting possibilities that can be explored with the new technique of functional differential equations. As I argued in my 1994 book, if we make absolutely no hypothesis, and drop even the traditional hypothesis of causality, then the functional differential equations of physics must be of mixed-type, and not retarded, as Poincaré had thought. This leads to a number of interesting consequences, for quantum mechanics on the one hand, and for biological organisms on the other. The qualitative consequences are already startling, for this physics is non-mechanistic, and leads to a structure of time, as I have explained in my books and papers. The further quantitative consequences I hope to explore in future. Apart from these fundamental areas, there are many other practical areas to which functional differential equations could apply—areas ranging from quantum computers, biological macromolecules, controlled fusion, the galaxy, and even the stock market. Such applications would be a fitting answer to those who worship scientific authority.
I thank the Academy once again for the honour it has conferred on me, and hope that it will succeed in its mission to promote reliance on open debate, rather than trust in authority, as more appropriate to science.
Thank you!
C. K. Raju
Einstein got it wrong, and how!
C K Raju
12 June 2010
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1259
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32557667/Ckr-TGA-Acceptance-Speech
[Today, 12 June 2010, Dr C. K. Raju, Distinguished Professor and Director (Academic), Inmantec, receives the Gold Medal for the year 2010 from the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science, at the University of Pécs, in Pécs, a city in Hungary declared the European Capital of Culture for 2010. The award is being conferred on Prof. Raju, among other reasons, for pointing out a mistake made by Einstein and correcting it. The full citation is at
http://www.telesiogalilei.com/tg/index.php/academy-award-2010
In physics, he defined a product of Schwartz distributions, and proposed an interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the structured-time interpretation, and a model of physical time evolution. He also noted that every aspect of special relativity was published by Poincaré in papers between 1898 and 1905, and that Einstein made a mistake on which much of modern physics rests. He has proposed appropriate corrections. This award is in recognition of these deep insights into these areas of physics.
Prof. Raju played a key role in building India's first supercomputer Param, and is well known for his path-breaking work on mathematics and the calculus. His researches are described in several acclaimed books including Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer Academic, 1994; Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol. 65), The Eleven Pictures of Time (Sage, 2003), and Cultural Foundations of Mathematics (Pearson Longman, 2007). (See http://ckraju.net, for more details.) - Editor] *
Acceptance speech for the TGA Gold Medal Award, 2010
Dignitaries on the dais,
fellow Laureates,
friends,
I am indeed honoured to be here today to receive this award in this august assembly in this historic city and cultural capital of Europe.
Bernardino Telesio and Galileo Galilei are both symbols of resistance to authority. Therefore, it is apt that a key reason why the award is being given to me is for having pointed out Einstein's mistake, and for having corrected it—for Einstein is one of the greatest figures of scientific authority today.
At the outset I would like to state that the issue is not so much the special theory of relativity, which is a very fine theory, even though it is counter to Newtonian intuition. There is no doubt at all that the theory was the work of a genius. The question is who was that genius: Poincaré or Einstein? The second question follows naturally from the first: compared to Poincaré, a mathematician, did Einstein, a non-mathematician, even understand the full mathematical implications of the theory of relativity?
The third question brings us back to the large mass of people who blindly follow scientific authority: following in the footsteps of Einstein, have they fully understood the special theory of relativity? If not, how should its understanding be corrected today? And what possible practical value does that correction hold for us tomorrow?
Unfortunately, instead of approaching these questions in the spirit of scientific enquiry, people react to them emotionally. Einstein is, for them, the biggest symbol of scientific authority, and they want to somehow hang on to the story they have heard about him from childhood. The less they know about the theory of relativity and its history, the stronger their belief, and the greater their distress that this symbol of scientific authority is being attacked. The issues could be easily settled in many ways: for example, the historical issue could be settled by reading the papers of Poincaré, Lorentz, and Einstein.
Somehow, most people cannot or will not read those papers, and instead proceed in a roundabout way, by reliance on authority, and through dubious guesswork. They guess that scientific authority cannot make such a mistake, exactly as people in Galileo's time guessed that religious authority was infallible. They start questioning the motives of the critic, and so on.
Physics texts play their own role in propagating such myths. Most physics texts (fortunately, not all) maintain that the Michelson-Morley experiment proved the absence of ether. The simple fact, which anyone can check (but most do not) is that the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed to discriminate between two ether theories: those of Fresnel and Stokes. The experiment came out in support of Stokes theory, which involved a mathematical absurdity, and was hence rejected by Lorentz. The whole myth of the Michelson-Morley experiment obscures the key point of relativity, which is that Newtonian physics never defined a proper clock; therefore it was impossible for the experiment to have measured the speed of light! Why Newtonian physics never defined a proper clock is another story, and I won't go into that here.
If we follow Poincaré's line of thought from 1898 to 1904, this point about the need to define a physical measure of time comes out with great clarity. Authoritative sources would tell us that Poincaré believed in ether or that he "waffled". However, those are plain falsehoods, as anyone can check by reading Poincaré, or even reading just the extensive quotes from him that I have provided in my books. It was Poincaré who coined the phrases "principle of relativity", and "Lorentz transform". In his celebrated 1904 paper he spoke of an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterized by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature can fall below absolute zero. That is the theory of relativity in a nutshell.
Could Einstein have arrived independently at the theory of relativity? Such claims of "independent rediscovery", just when a dependent discovery was possible, are a scandalous part of current history of science. However, let us look at Einstein's case on its individual merits. It is well known that Einstein had read Poincaré's work on relativity from 1898 until 1902 with great excitement, and had discussed it with his friends. The only question is whether he read Lorentz's 1904 paper and Poincaré's 1904 paper. He denied reading those. However, as Whittaker first pointed out, Poincaré used the word "relativity" for the first time in his 1904 paper (he had earlier used the term "principle of relative motion"). Since Einstein's paper contained no new idea or formula, and repeated that word, Whittaker concluded that Einstein had borrowed his ideas. I further pointed out that Einstein casually used the strange terms "longitudinal mass" and "transverse mass" introduced very circumspectly by Lorentz in the very paper Einstein later denied reading. Whittaker's arguments, and mine, have been met with great hostility by those in scientific authority, though no one so far could address the points raised.
Cases where one student copies from another, but denies it, are commonplace for a teacher. The simple way to resolve such cases is to test the understanding of the students verbally. The one who does not understand has copied. One cannot thus interrogate the past, but mistakes are proof of lack of understanding. If a person claiming "independent rediscovery" shows lack of understanding through a mistake, that is proof of copying according to my "epistemic test". That is exactly what happened in this case: Einstein failed to understand what Poincaré, the mathematician, understood: namely, that relativity changes also the character of the equations of physics. They can no longer be the ordinary differential equations of Newtonian physics, but must be functional differential equations (which, Poincaré took for granted, must be retarded). Einstein never understood this aspect of relativity till his death. That settles the matter: Einstein published later, his claims of "independent rediscovery" are seriously suspect, and he never fully understood the implications of relativity. Possibly as a patent clerk he realized that he could copy ideas from frontline thinkers, for there is no legal patent on ideas. For almost a century now, it would seem, people have worshipped a false god of science.
There is a saying that people who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. In 1994, I pointed out, in my book Time: Towards a Consistent Theory (Kluwer), that the use of functional differential equations led to a shift away from the Newtonian paradigm of ordinary differential equations, going beyond textbook relativity. For example, the century old contradiction between Newtonian mechanics and the entropy law of thermodynamics could be easily resolved with functional differential equations. In 2004, exactly a century after Poincaré's seminal paper on relativity, I published the first solutions of the functional differential equations of retarded electrodynamics, in a significant physical context—that of the classical hydrogen atom. And, in 2005, exactly a century after Einstein's paper on relativity, and in a lecture intended to commemorate that event, Sir Michael Atiyah, a person regarded as the leading mathematician in the world, repeated my claim, first made in my 1994 book, that the use of functional differential equations could also explain the puzzling features of quantum mechanics. Atiyah claimed "independent rediscovery", and even after he was personally informed of my work, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society ran a prominent article on his lecture, in June 2006, crediting Atiyah with the suggestion to use functional differential equations in physics, and referring to it as "Atiyah's hypothesis". My earlier work was credited only after a long correspondence, in a short and difficult-to-spot letter in the Notices of the AMS in April 2007.
I pointed out that such a belated acknowledgment, without an apology, was worth little. I again applied my "epistemic test" and pointed out that "Atiyah's hypothesis" involved a serious mistake. Functional differential equations are a natural consequence of relativity, their use requires no hypothesis, so the claim about "Atiyah's hypothesis" involved a conceptual mistake, apart from a historical mistake in crediting Atiyah. I wrote a letter to the journal, along these lines. The journal however refused to publish it, preferring to leave the mistake uncorrected. Although many prominent scientists from India and abroad signed a petition that the letter should be published, and the matter debated publicly, the Editor of the Notices and the American Mathematical Society ignored the petition and hung on to the decision to suppress the matter. This is how scientific authority functions at the highest level. One can well imagine how it functions at lower levels, and how much it misleads us about the truth. Those who place their trust in it deserve what they get: they and their progeny can continue to believe science is all about implicitly trusting those in positions of scientific authority. As for me, I am not in the business of mobilising popular opinion, or winning a popularity contest: my aim was to find the truth, and I have found it—the truth both about science, and about scientific authority. Knowledge was what I sought, and I have found it. That is reward in itself.
On the pleasant side, there are a number of interesting possibilities that can be explored with the new technique of functional differential equations. As I argued in my 1994 book, if we make absolutely no hypothesis, and drop even the traditional hypothesis of causality, then the functional differential equations of physics must be of mixed-type, and not retarded, as Poincaré had thought. This leads to a number of interesting consequences, for quantum mechanics on the one hand, and for biological organisms on the other. The qualitative consequences are already startling, for this physics is non-mechanistic, and leads to a structure of time, as I have explained in my books and papers. The further quantitative consequences I hope to explore in future. Apart from these fundamental areas, there are many other practical areas to which functional differential equations could apply—areas ranging from quantum computers, biological macromolecules, controlled fusion, the galaxy, and even the stock market. Such applications would be a fitting answer to those who worship scientific authority.
I thank the Academy once again for the honour it has conferred on me, and hope that it will succeed in its mission to promote reliance on open debate, rather than trust in authority, as more appropriate to science.
Thank you!
C. K. Raju
Israeli rabbi backs killing non-Jews
Israeli rabbi backs killing non-Jews
New book gives licence to kill goyim who "threaten" Israel
New book gives licence to kill goyim who "threaten" Israel... this is an interesting book... and the non-critical coverage it gets by the Haaretz is even more interesting. Does Rabbi Yizhak Shapiro or the Haaretz imagine that this book could somehow justify or legitimize illegal Israeli war crimes in Gaza or "neutralize" the Goldstone report? Maybe Rabbi Yizthak Shapiro has something else in mind. After all, we should remember what happened exactly November 14 years ago when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for his commitment to sign peace agreements with the Arabs which yeshiva rabbis adamantly refused and condemned. His assassin, "Yigal Amir, is a talmudic scholar who was trained in a yeshiva that inculcated its students to believe that this violence committed by rabbis over a lengthy time period was in accordance with God's word."
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110923§ionid=351020202
Israeli rabbi backs killing non-Jews
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:15 GMT
Israel's three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip last year killed at
least 1,350 people, many of whom children, and injured thousands more.
An Israeli rabbi has supported the murder of non-Jewish babies who pose a threat to Israel in his recently released book The King's Torah.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva religious school in the occupied West Bank, says Jews are allowed to murder even non-Jewish babies and children if they pose a threat to Israel, Haaretz reported.
Shapiro said Jews are allowed to kill 'those who, by speech, weaken our sovereignty'.
"It is permissible to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote.
Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have also recommended the book to their students and followers.
During the Israeli three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip last year, some leading rabbis issued a ruling which gave permission to kill civilians in the coastal enclave.
“It is permitted, according to Jewish Law, to fire shells and bombs at the firing sites, even if they are populated by civilians," read a ruling issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe and Rabbi Meir Mazuz.
The ruling gave a free hand to Israeli commanders to attack civilian population during the war in the Gaza Strip in which at least 1350 people, including women and children, were killed.
SB/AKM
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1126890.html
West Bank rabbi: Jews can kill Gentiles who threaten Israel
By Haaretz Service
Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book "The King's Torah" that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.
Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.
"It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote, adding: "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments - because we care about the commandments - there is nothing wrong with the murder."
Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/11/09/1009034/rabbis-book-says-jews-can-kill-gentiles
Rabbi’s book says Jews can kill gentiles
November 9, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A West Bank rabbi has written a book that says Jews can kill non-Jews who threaten Israel.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar released the book Monday.
Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, also said in "The King's Torah" that it is permissible to kill children if they pose a threat, Ha'aretz reported.
The book is based on Bible quotations to which Shapira has added his own opinions.
"The King's Torah" was released shortly after the announcement of the arrest of an alleged Jewish terrorist who admitted to killing Palestinians and attacks on messianic Jews and left-wing Jews.
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/article.php?p=41807
Rav Yitzchak Shapira’s Sefer Makes Headlines in Eretz Yisrael
November 9, 2009
The publication of a sefer entitled Toras HaMelech (The King’s Torah) written by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, the rosh yeshiva of Ohd Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar, has become an item in the news in Eretz Yisrael on Monday, with the book explaining one is permitted in accordance with halacha to kill goyim who threaten Eretz Yisrael. The sefer enjoys approbations from HaGaon HaRav Dov Lior Shlita, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, and Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh. It is important to point out that while the media is having a field day with the sefer, it is written that the sefer discusses theoretic halachic principles, and in no way calls for the murder of goyim, “Arabs” or “Palestinians” as the media seeks to imply. The sefer goes as far as to state “one may not take the law into one’s hands” and that the sugyot discussed as strictly halachic interpretations for the sake of learning and understanding halacha and not chas v’sholom a license to kill, the words used for the bold daily Maariv headline (see photo).
The sefer adds that killing a non-Jew who has violated the Seven Mitzvos given to non-Jews because we care about torah and mitzvos, then this is acceptable. It stresses the importance of Eretz Yisrael, the halachic requirements of the land, and living within a torah framework, quoting passages from Tanach and the Rambam, citing sources for the halachic ruling.
Back in 1996, Rav Ido Elba published a 19-page kuntris on halachic guidelines regarding when one may kill a non-Jew, a publication that was also a halachic discourse, not a handbook for murder chas v’sholom. He was indicted for publishing the sefer and found guilty by the Jerusalem District Court. He appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court and lost. The court rejected the fact that the sefer deal with theoretic halachic matters, not an actual license for murdering goyim. He served a two-year jail term.
With Israel’s retreat from Shechem in 2001, the yeshiva which was established in 1982, located in the Kever Yosef complex was expelled, forced to relocate, setting up its new home in Yishuv Yitzhar. Rav Shapira, the rosh yeshiva, is a long-time resident of Yitzhar, a Chabad chossid, and a talmid of Rav Yitzchak Ginsburgh who is a known authority on kabala and runs the Gal Eini Institute.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
New book gives licence to kill goyim who "threaten" Israel
New book gives licence to kill goyim who "threaten" Israel... this is an interesting book... and the non-critical coverage it gets by the Haaretz is even more interesting. Does Rabbi Yizhak Shapiro or the Haaretz imagine that this book could somehow justify or legitimize illegal Israeli war crimes in Gaza or "neutralize" the Goldstone report? Maybe Rabbi Yizthak Shapiro has something else in mind. After all, we should remember what happened exactly November 14 years ago when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for his commitment to sign peace agreements with the Arabs which yeshiva rabbis adamantly refused and condemned. His assassin, "Yigal Amir, is a talmudic scholar who was trained in a yeshiva that inculcated its students to believe that this violence committed by rabbis over a lengthy time period was in accordance with God's word."
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110923§ionid=351020202
Israeli rabbi backs killing non-Jews
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:15 GMT
Israel's three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip last year killed at
least 1,350 people, many of whom children, and injured thousands more.
An Israeli rabbi has supported the murder of non-Jewish babies who pose a threat to Israel in his recently released book The King's Torah.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva religious school in the occupied West Bank, says Jews are allowed to murder even non-Jewish babies and children if they pose a threat to Israel, Haaretz reported.
Shapiro said Jews are allowed to kill 'those who, by speech, weaken our sovereignty'.
"It is permissible to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote.
Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have also recommended the book to their students and followers.
During the Israeli three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip last year, some leading rabbis issued a ruling which gave permission to kill civilians in the coastal enclave.
“It is permitted, according to Jewish Law, to fire shells and bombs at the firing sites, even if they are populated by civilians," read a ruling issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe and Rabbi Meir Mazuz.
The ruling gave a free hand to Israeli commanders to attack civilian population during the war in the Gaza Strip in which at least 1350 people, including women and children, were killed.
SB/AKM
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1126890.html
West Bank rabbi: Jews can kill Gentiles who threaten Israel
By Haaretz Service
Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book "The King's Torah" that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.
Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.
"It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote, adding: "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments - because we care about the commandments - there is nothing wrong with the murder."
Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/11/09/1009034/rabbis-book-says-jews-can-kill-gentiles
Rabbi’s book says Jews can kill gentiles
November 9, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A West Bank rabbi has written a book that says Jews can kill non-Jews who threaten Israel.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar released the book Monday.
Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, also said in "The King's Torah" that it is permissible to kill children if they pose a threat, Ha'aretz reported.
The book is based on Bible quotations to which Shapira has added his own opinions.
"The King's Torah" was released shortly after the announcement of the arrest of an alleged Jewish terrorist who admitted to killing Palestinians and attacks on messianic Jews and left-wing Jews.
http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/article.php?p=41807
Rav Yitzchak Shapira’s Sefer Makes Headlines in Eretz Yisrael
November 9, 2009
The publication of a sefer entitled Toras HaMelech (The King’s Torah) written by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, the rosh yeshiva of Ohd Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar, has become an item in the news in Eretz Yisrael on Monday, with the book explaining one is permitted in accordance with halacha to kill goyim who threaten Eretz Yisrael. The sefer enjoys approbations from HaGaon HaRav Dov Lior Shlita, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, and Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh. It is important to point out that while the media is having a field day with the sefer, it is written that the sefer discusses theoretic halachic principles, and in no way calls for the murder of goyim, “Arabs” or “Palestinians” as the media seeks to imply. The sefer goes as far as to state “one may not take the law into one’s hands” and that the sugyot discussed as strictly halachic interpretations for the sake of learning and understanding halacha and not chas v’sholom a license to kill, the words used for the bold daily Maariv headline (see photo).
The sefer adds that killing a non-Jew who has violated the Seven Mitzvos given to non-Jews because we care about torah and mitzvos, then this is acceptable. It stresses the importance of Eretz Yisrael, the halachic requirements of the land, and living within a torah framework, quoting passages from Tanach and the Rambam, citing sources for the halachic ruling.
Back in 1996, Rav Ido Elba published a 19-page kuntris on halachic guidelines regarding when one may kill a non-Jew, a publication that was also a halachic discourse, not a handbook for murder chas v’sholom. He was indicted for publishing the sefer and found guilty by the Jerusalem District Court. He appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court and lost. The court rejected the fact that the sefer deal with theoretic halachic matters, not an actual license for murdering goyim. He served a two-year jail term.
With Israel’s retreat from Shechem in 2001, the yeshiva which was established in 1982, located in the Kever Yosef complex was expelled, forced to relocate, setting up its new home in Yishuv Yitzhar. Rav Shapira, the rosh yeshiva, is a long-time resident of Yitzhar, a Chabad chossid, and a talmid of Rav Yitzchak Ginsburgh who is a known authority on kabala and runs the Gal Eini Institute.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
Friday, 25 June 2010
Goyim refuse to worship at Jewish shrines
Shock
Goyim refuse to worship at Jewish shrines- perhaps we should ask Jews to visit Gulag camps organised by Jews where millions of Russians died.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/iranian-delegation-rejects-german-invitation-to-visit-nazi-camp-1.298140
Published 19:06 24.06.10
Latest update 19:06 24.06.10
Iranian delegation rejects German invitation to visit Nazi camp
Delegation from Shiraz, Iran, a twin city to Weimar, Germany, refuses to make trip to Buchenwald concentration camp.
By DPA Tags: Nazi Iran Holocaust
An Iranian delegation upset its German hosts by refusing to tour a concentration-camp memorial, the city council of Weimar in eastern Germany said Thursday.
The Buchenwald concentration camp, where Nazis killed tens of thousands of political prisoners and people from minorities through disease, exhausting work and executions, is located near the city.
Visitors usually pay their respects to the dead at the memorial and visit the museum. But the group from Shiraz, Iran - a twin city to Germany's Weimar - refused to make the scheduled trip on Wednesday, civic officials said.
Mayor Stefan Wolf condemned the decision, saying it was inconceivable that a friend would try to ignore the pain caused by the Nazi camp. Local newspapers said the city council refused to meet the Shiraz delegation because of the canceled visit.
Berlin has regularly protested against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and his calls to wipe the state of Israel off the map. Denying that the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews is a criminal offence in Germany.
Germany established the Shiraz-Weimar connection to keep people- to-people links alive while the governments were at odds.
--
Goyim refuse to worship at Jewish shrines- perhaps we should ask Jews to visit Gulag camps organised by Jews where millions of Russians died.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/iranian-delegation-rejects-german-invitation-to-visit-nazi-camp-1.298140
Published 19:06 24.06.10
Latest update 19:06 24.06.10
Iranian delegation rejects German invitation to visit Nazi camp
Delegation from Shiraz, Iran, a twin city to Weimar, Germany, refuses to make trip to Buchenwald concentration camp.
By DPA Tags: Nazi Iran Holocaust
An Iranian delegation upset its German hosts by refusing to tour a concentration-camp memorial, the city council of Weimar in eastern Germany said Thursday.
The Buchenwald concentration camp, where Nazis killed tens of thousands of political prisoners and people from minorities through disease, exhausting work and executions, is located near the city.
Visitors usually pay their respects to the dead at the memorial and visit the museum. But the group from Shiraz, Iran - a twin city to Germany's Weimar - refused to make the scheduled trip on Wednesday, civic officials said.
Mayor Stefan Wolf condemned the decision, saying it was inconceivable that a friend would try to ignore the pain caused by the Nazi camp. Local newspapers said the city council refused to meet the Shiraz delegation because of the canceled visit.
Berlin has regularly protested against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and his calls to wipe the state of Israel off the map. Denying that the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews is a criminal offence in Germany.
Germany established the Shiraz-Weimar connection to keep people- to-people links alive while the governments were at odds.
--
Monday, 21 June 2010
Kevin MacDonald: The Jews turn on Turkey
Kevin MacDonald: The Jews turn on Turkey
Kevin MacDonald: Well, that didn’t take long. Turkey’s involvement in the flotilla and its support for the Palestinians has now made it an enemy of the Israel Lobby, with all that that entails. All in all, it’s a good example of Jewish power and moral particularism. After long opposing any resolution on Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress, suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.” He and “a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”
Berman suddenly found his moral bearings, along with the organized Jewish community. The neocons are naturally leading the charge, summarized byJim Lobe who quotes from a report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:
“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from [NATO],” suggested the group.
[JINSA's] board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.
What’s interesting here is the proposal to eject Turkey from NATO. It wasn’t long ago that Turkey was being assured that it could become a member of the EU. Turkey’s exclusion from Europe is widely seen as a big factor in its change of foreign policy. Thomas Friedman: “After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations — which the Erdogan government systematically did — the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: ‘Oh, you mean nobody told you? We’re a Christian club. No Muslims allowed.’ The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”
And that’s the good news. The neocons and the organized Jewish community were big supporters of Turkey’s bid to join the EU–which would have meant that 71 million Turks would have the right to move anywhere in Europe. This would mean the end of Europe as having any defining culture or biological coherence — obviously not a concern to Jewish activists like Friedman.
It’s worth remembering that Jewish activist organizations regarded the admission of Turkey to the EU as a way of civilizing Europe and ensuring cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism — precisely the policy proposals that the Jewish community has advanced in all Western societies, particularly since the end of World War II. In 2002, at the height of the push for Turkey’s admission to the EU, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) had this to say in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:
Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President [d'Estaing], you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East. (See here; the statement has presumably been removed from the SWC website.)
Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel. I rather doubt that we’ll be seeing this sort of thing anymore. The chances of Turkey being admitted to the EU now are less than zero.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Turkey has no place in Europe is just as valid against admitting any Muslims to Europe. Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process compared to what would have happened had Turkey been admitted, perhaps allowing enough time for Europe to waken from its slumbers.
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39 Responses to “Kevin MacDonald: The Jews turn on Turkey”
1.
Someday says:
June 18, 2010 at 9:59 AM
In reality doubt the Euro elites would have dared let Turkey become a full member of the EC; it would be difficult to disguise such a fateful step.
The elites tend to avoid obviously drastic changes for ones which are more easily downplayed.
2.
Chris Moore says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:12 AM
‘After long opposing any resolution on the Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress, suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.’
So why did the Jewish nationalist occupation in Congress, including Berman, turn a blind eye for decades? These Jewish nationalists are so shamelessly and transparently self-serving and opportunistic, its a wonder that they have any friends whatsoever. That so many politicians and Americans dance to their tune with a grin on their faces just goes to show how corrupt and decayed our society has become.
“Those that bless the Jews are blessed by God,” so the saying goes. Like so many other phenomenon revolving around organized Jewry, it appears up is down and black is white in this case, too — meaning its more likely that those that bless the Jews are touched by Satan.
I’m not a superstitious person, but it seems to me America has been under a darkening shadow since Jewry’s ascension to the helm.
3.
Chris Moore says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:37 AM
Additionally, let’s not forget the reports that many of the Young Turks who engineered the Aremenian holocaust were themselves crypto-Jews. In fact, there are a couple of books about the Dönme — Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam but maintained their secret Jewish identity and associations. Here’s a passage from a magazine article that encapsulates the history and the books called The Other Secret Jews from the Jewish magazine Tablet.
“Most important, several Dönme were leading members of the Committee for Union and Progress, the revolutionary party known as the Young Turks, who in 1908 forced the Sultan to grant a constitution. The Dönme, like Jews and Freemasons, sympathized with the CUP’s scientific, reformist program, though Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party. Even so, some prominent Young Turks were Dönme, including the editor of the Party’s newspaper and the finance minister in the new CUP government.”
Funny how Jewish conspirators love to brag about prominent roles played by Jews who organized as Jews in plots for revolutionary upheaval that end in mass murder, but deny that Judeofascism plays any role whatsoever in their murderous outcomes.
It’s also interesting that these diaspora Jewish revolutionary groups demand constitutions supposedly guaranteeing equal rights for all, but then implement governments that end up securing special rights and privileges for Jewish cliques that go on to carry out mass murder of non-Jews (and Jewry then professes to believe that history has been so rough on the Jewish people simply because they are different.) And in the case of Israel, the Jews refuse to write and implement a constitution at all because the articles of the state already grant special favoritism to Jews, hence a constitution of rights for all citizens would water down Jewish privilege.
Given all these facts, it becomes clear that not only are Gentile supporters of Judeofascism helping to set up Jewish-supremacist societies the world over, but they are also helping to cut the throats of their own progeny by doing so. I guess certain kinds of trash will do anything for money, power and temporal luxuries.
From:
http://www.judeofascism.com/2010/02/for-opportunistic-zionists-recognition.html
4.
Whites Unite says:
June 18, 2010 at 12:39 PM
“nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”
Now if only he’d admit that nothing justifies Jews turning a blind eye to the reality their role in East European Communist crimes against humanity.
5.
Tanstaafl says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:49 PM
From Brief History of Turkish Jews:
Since 1492, through five centuries, the Ottoman sultans and the modern day Turkish Republic, welcomed the Jews and offered them a safe haven from persecution in the European countries. The Ottoman Empire at its zenith became one the largest empires in World History covering most of Mediterranean basin region extending from North Africa to Eastern Europe. It has been suggested that one of the characteristics that extended the domination of the Ottoman Empire was its allowance of religious freedom for the different nationalities and minorities under its rule. While many European nations expelled, persecuted or tried to convert the Jews under their dominion, the Turkish people of the Ottoman Empire, remained as an outstanding example of tolerance of different nationalities with different religions.
The presentation above sometimes sounds unusual to strangers who may have heard Turkey only in the context of conquests of the Ottoman Empire.
When I first ran into this page several months ago it was entirely positive – “the jews” and Turks, bestest friends forever. Now it begins with a bitter disclaimer, citing the flotilla fiasco and ending like so:
These pages were titled “Turkish-Jewish Friendship Over 500 Years”. Erdogan government has put an end for this friendship. So this title was removed from this site.
The next step is emach she’mo – May His Name Be Erased.
6.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:55 PM
In reality doubt the Euro elites would have dared let Turkey become a full member of the E
But it would have happened anyway because, at the time it would have been ‘good for jews’ now that it no longer is, it will not..
The selfishness and hypocrisy is stunning.. stunning.
7.
Tanstaafl says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:58 PM
Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process
The question has never been put to popular referendum. Like mass immigration and “hate” laws it is imposed from above by people who expect to profit. It is a genocidal dynamic, not suicidal.
8.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:06 PM
the Young Turks who engineered the Aremenian holocaust were themselves crypto-Jews.
and as with multiculti programs here and in bolshivik russia -the curious result: a competing ethnic group is knocked out and easy to control inferiors are brought in.
9.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:24 PM
I’m not a superstitious person, but it seems to me America has been under a darkening shadow since Jewry’s ascension to the helm
there is something deeply disturbing about their particular brand of ‘evil’ – i think its almost ‘archetypal’ ”evil’ – their behavior, actions and appearance resonate with our folk and religious depictions of evil – ie – the troll, the witch, the devil – look at traditional depictions of evil and compare them to prominent askanazi – you can practically use the current jewish elite to illustrate a grims fairy tale book’s evil characters.
10.
Anonymous says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:26 PM
This is not new in relation to the Gaza blockade and Israeli slaughter of the flotilla. The JTA story linked is dated March 2010. According to information from Thomas.LOC.gov for H.Res. 252, Berman signed on as a co-sponsor on March 17, 2009, when the bill was introduced. The only members to sign on as cosponsors recently are Dean Heller of Nevada on June 10 and Michael Michaud of Maine on June 17.
11.
admin says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:42 PM
@Anonymous: Good point. The troubles between Israel and Turkey began some time ago. The famous incident with the Turkish ambassador was a big deal:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/peres-humiliation-of-turkey-envoy-does-not-reflect-israel-s-diplomacy-1.261381
This article in Salon also emphasizes the turnabout on the genocide issue:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/06/16/israel_lobby_genocide_armenia
What to make of the rush of Jewish leaders — from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington to a city councilman named Jack Weiss in Los Angeles — coming forward in the past few weeks to divulge their role in genocide denial?
“Frankly, [it] was not becoming for Jews, given that we have likewise been victims of genocide,” Weiss wrote in an inelegant piece in the Jewish Journal.
How to account for these sudden confessions? A pang of remorse? A cleansing of the soul? I’m afraid not. These aren’t confessions, at all. Rather, they are reminders of the debt Turkey owes Israel — and they come with teeth bared.
12.
TGD says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:45 PM
I don’t think that the previous generation of Israeli leaders would have discarded Turkey as a friend and ally so readily. This new generation of Zionist leaders and their US lackeys have no qualms at all about denigrating the Turks and gleefully rubbing in the contempt by broadcasting that stupid parody of “We are the World.” Before the flotilla incident, the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, deeply humiliated the Turkish ambassador to Israel by seating him on a couch much lower than the Ayalon’s chair while he scolded the ambassador about a TV program produced by a private Turkish company. The old inhibitions that once moderated Jewish behavior in the gentile world have gone by the wayside.
Have you seen the movie Midnight Express about conditions inside a Turkish prison? Any European who still feels that Turkey should join the EU should be made to watch it.
13.
HA says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:58 PM
Re: “No Muslims allowed,” it seems Albania is well on the way to EU accession, and then the Mafia enclave known as Kosovo, already in effect an EU protectorate. What isn’t Friedman telling?
14.
Whites Unite says:
June 18, 2010 at 4:59 PM
Lets review some Turkish actions, and some Jewish responses to those actions:
1821 – The Patriarch of Constantinople, the Eastern Orthodox equivalent of the Pope, is murdered by the Turks. A mob of Jews drags his dead body through the streets of Constantinople and dumps it in the Bosporus.
1822 – The Turks almost completely wipe out the Greek population of Chios, killing 20,000 and enslaving 50,000. Jewish slave traders buy Greek slaves at bargain prices.
1876 – Turkish irregular troops massacer up to 60,000 Bulgarians. When the Russian send troops to liberate Bulgaria, Prime Minister Benjamin D’Israeli threatens to go to war against Russia.
1894 – Turks massacer 100,000+ Armenians. Jews and Donme of Thessalonika and Constantinople stay loyal to the Ottoman Empire through it all.
1915 – Turks massacer 1.5 million Armenians. Donme occupy important positions in the government responsible, Constantinople Jews stay loyal to the Ottoman Empire until the very end.
1974 – Turks invade Cyprus, force 180,000 Greek Cypriotes to flee their homes. “Kissinger exerted himself very strongly to protect Ankara from any congressional reprisal for this outright violation of international law, and promiscuous and illegal misuse of US weaponry.” (London Gaurdian, 2/26/01)
2010 – Turks send food and medicine to Gaza. “Erdogan government has put an end for this friendship.”
15.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 7:44 PM
Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcom
Notice:
a. they don’t mention WHY they were being expelled.. the implication here is it was bad to expel jews because they were jews, no matter what they did.
b. Muslim “turkey” – eg the Ottman Empire, was brutally supressing Christians, enslaving them, forcing women to be sex slaves, stealing children from famlies for the Jannisaries and slave trade.. but THAT doesn’t matter – the ottoman empire was good because they treated jews well.
angry jew if you are reading : this more than anything illustrates mainstream organized jewish community hostility towards the christian west and utter indifference to our well being
16.
Amazed says:
June 18, 2010 at 11:45 PM
We must remember that this sort of tac is not taken on a whim. There will be a strategy behind this move .Probably to remind Turkey that in a coming war in the Middle East , be careful or we will clobber you with the full force of the our American controlled military.The parasite maneuvers the host.
17.
kirk says:
June 19, 2010 at 2:12 AM
“Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies… ”
(Not so) Ironically, for the SWC, european history is all about the Jews, who expelled them, who catered them, who helped them, who didn’t help them etc.etc.
18.
THM says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:19 AM
Generally the Western Mainstream Media suppresses news of the vicious oppression of Christians in Islamic countries (but gives endless coverage of any real or imagined slights to Muslims in European ethnic countries).
Here is an exception to that — a Sixty Minutes report about how the Turkish government is treating Patriarch Batholomew and Orthodox Christians):
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6001717n&tag=api
19.
James O'Meara says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:31 AM
Chris Moore says:
“These Jewish nationalists are so shamelessly and transparently self-serving and opportunistic, its a wonder that they have any friends whatsoever. ”
Oy veh, goiische kopf!
“Sincerity” is for stupid Aryan squareheads.
The Judaic Two-Step, as I call it, the positioning of Jews in positions of power ON BOTH SIDES is what allows the Jew to win every time.
Ever notice how the leaders of every “political movement” are Jews?
Sure, the liberals and Democrats. But don’t forget the Republican “Neo-cons.” Even the American Nazi Party [David White, nee Weiss]
And if not Jews, then don’t forget the Jew Within. Dead Jew Worshipping Christian Zionists, for example. And only three Jews on the Supreme Court? Guess again: So-called “Catholic” Scalia worships the Talmud as “the basis of our American law,” and of course Thomas is his hand puppet, so make that 5 Jews; game over.
20.
Junghans says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:42 AM
Europe is not so much ’slumbering’, as it is anaesthetised by the overwhelming liberal/Marxist Jewish victory of 1945. Ditto in spades for the English speaking White world.
21.
Someday says:
June 19, 2010 at 7:59 AM
Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel.
The democratisation the the EC insisted on loosened the grip of the Kermalists. (All in all rather similar to Algeria where European advice to have elections took no account of the actual level of support Islamist parties would have if allowed to organize.) Europeans’ demand for democratisation made the profound social changes, like the emancipation of women very difficult to achieve and hence was in practice a barrier to Turkey being admitted to the EC.
Israel’s alliance was with the Kermalist generals but the power of the generals has been broken. Paying price for EU follies The author is correct to doubt that the EU leaders were sincere about letting Turkey become a full member in the forseeable future ( as already said I suspect that’s because they don’t dare, not because of any principle of religious or ethnic defence).
Some say the Turkish ’secularist’ elite is heavily larded with the descendants of Jews: The Dönme
22.
omop says:
June 19, 2010 at 8:37 AM
What is the blind spot that keeps “non-jews” from acknowledging and adjusting to the following ideology/rational of all Jews? And which has been articulated over the past 4000 years, as “La Difference”.
“The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
23.
TicTac says:
June 19, 2010 at 9:54 AM
Hey guys, did you see the illegal aliens rioting after Lakers win in LA ?
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel#p/u/3/z9lYdmobSrk
24.
TicTac says:
June 19, 2010 at 10:06 AM
Alex makes a few good points.
Imagine if the Tea Party behaved like that.
Or a BNP gathering.
The media would have condemned them as violent thugs.
But because they`re a protected group -a minority, the media says nothing.
25.
me says:
June 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM
for the SWC, european history is all about the Jews, who expelled them, who catered them, who helped them, who didn’t help them etc.
One curious aspect of this – the monarchs they consider ‘good for jews’ were often the most corrupt and hostile to commoners – and the monarchs they considered ‘bad’ for Jews – like Isabel of Spain – were good for commoners, the people and the country and usually anti-corruption…
26.
Chris Moore says:
June 19, 2010 at 1:36 PM
@ me says: June 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM: “One curious aspect of this – the monarchs they consider ‘good for jews’ were often the most corrupt and hostile to commoners – and the monarchs they considered ‘bad’ for Jews – like Isabel of Spain – were good for commoners, the people and the country and usually anti-corruption…”
Hence it follows that today’s organized Jewry in America love the elitist, Statist-Corporatist neocon Right and the limousine liberal Left, and fear and loathe the middle American “rubes.”
This is why Jewish nationalism/elitist Jewry doesn’t fit or belong in America or any other democracy: they hate and fear the People and their traditions and customs, thus they hate the concept of People’s rights, free speech and equal representation. Deep down, they believe if the People take power, the first thing they will do is persecute the Jews (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy/cycle manifesting from Jewry’s own attitudes and behavior.)
Thus, the way they have subverted democracy in America is to seize and buy off the elites and their institutions, using the mainstream media to create a false consciousness in the masses that they are still indeed living in a democracy, even as it is closer to a plutocracy/kleptocracy largely run by organized Jewry, ideological Zionists, Judeophile lefties and Judeo-supremacist neocons/Bushcons (my shorthand for all: “the Judeos”) for Jewry’s benefit and the benefit of its corrupt partners.
Today, and throughout history, what’s good for the Judeos is bad for the People, and what’s good for the People is bad for the Judeos.
This is why to my mind it is inevitable that sooner or later, the Judeos will lose. The only question is how much suffering and loss we will have to endure before they taken down and put on trial for treason, or packed off to Israel.
27.
me says:
June 19, 2010 at 2:15 PM
Today, and throughout history, what’s good for the Judeos is bad for the People, and what’s good for the People is bad for the Judeos
Think of a candidate who is ‘good for the people’ – what would they do?
stop immigration
adapt an America first foreign policy
pursue a sound fiscal policy.
All these things are disasters for organized jewery. Thus, they label candidates ‘anti semitic’ despite not overtly doing anything ‘anti jewish’
28.
Matthias says:
June 19, 2010 at 4:51 PM
It seems the lesson of history is “What’s good for Jews, is bad for mostly everybody else”. Hence the inverse is also true. As Gentile fortunes wax, Jewish fortunes wane. Here is a brilliantly concise summary that speaks volumes in few words:
THE JEW IN EUROPE
Even The Coins Were Jewish
We find the first Jews filtering into Europe some time before the Christian era, particularly in the region of Greece. The ancient Greeks spoke of these Asiatic invaders with considerable bitterness. Very quickly they spread throughout the Roman Empire and into Europe proper. The Jewish merchant, artisan, and slave trader appear on the Roman scene with increasing frequency after the second century A.D. and there can be no doubt that their position in the Roman world was one of growing importance even as the Empire drifted to destruction. Under Justinian, says the Jewish Encyclopedia,
“They enjoyed full religious liberty, in return for which they assumed all a citizen’s duty toward the state; minor offices were also open to them. Only the synagogues were exempt from the duty of quartering soldiers. The trade in slaves constituted the main source of livelihood for the Roman Jews, and decrees against this traffic were issued in 335, 336, 339, 384, etc.”
[Funk & Wagnall's Jewish Encyclopedia, page 460, vol. 10]
Seneca, in his writings, bitterly assailed the Romans of his day for aping the Jews, and some historians (notably Gibbon in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) have ascribed the downfall of Rome to their corrupting influence. Nero’s wife, Poppaea, was a converted Jewess. As Rome reeled into decline and final collapse, and as the Dark Ages descended over Western civilization, we find the Jew taking a strangle-hold over what remained of European commerce. Says Encyclopedia Britannica:
“. . . there was an inevitable tendency for him to specialize in commerce, for which his acumen and ubiquity gave him special qualifications. In the dark ages the commerce of western Europe was largely in his hands, in particular the slave trade, and in Carolingian cartularies Jew and merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms.”
[Encyclopedia Britannica, page 57, vol. 13—1947.]
This hold over European commerce finally became so utterly complete that few gentiles engaged in trade at all; it had become almost entirely a Jewish monopoly. In Poland and Hungary, the coins bore Jewish inscriptions …
Throughout the Medieval period, ["Dark Ages," "Medieval Period," and "Middle Ages" are synonymous terms used to describe the period of decline which characterized western civilization between 500-1300 A.D.] which lasted from 500 A.D. to 1300 A.D., the Jew merchant was dominant all over Europe (except Scandinavia, where he was never permitted to enter) and this dominance included control over the eastern trade routes to the Levant. There was to be no relief from this situation until the Jews were evicted from Europe in the century directly preceding the Renaissance.
(…)
Expelled
The Fourth Lateran Council restricted Jewish commercial advantage but it did not end the Jewish problem. Beginning in the latter part of the 13th century, one European country after another expelled its Jewish population as the only final solution to the problem. First to take the step was England which banned them in 1290. Fifteen years later in 1306 the French followed suit. In steady succession the various states of Europe emulated this example with Spain being one of the last to enforce the ban in 1492. The situation in Spain is worth noting. Says Encyclopedia Britannica: [page 57, vol. 13 - 1947]:
“… The 14th century was the golden age of their history in Spain. In 1391 the preaching of a priest of Seville, Fernando Martenez, led to the first general massacre of the Jews who were envied for their prosperity and hated because they were the king’s tax collectors.”
Ferdinand and Isabella, after uniting Spain and driving out the Moors turned their attention to the Jewish problem, with the result that they were evicted completely in 1492. In 1498 Portugal evicted its Jewish population also.
(…)
Back to Poland
By 1500 all of Western Europe except northern Italy, parts of Germany, and the Papal possessions around Avignon, had been rid of the Jewish invasion. For a while, at least, Europe was free of the Jews; not until 1650 did they return in any numbers. Says Encyclopedia Britannica: [page 57-58, vol. 13 - 1947.]
“The great mass of the Jewish people were thus to be found once more in the East, in the Polish and Turkish empires . . The few communities suffered to remain in western Europe were meanwhile subjected at last to all the restrictions which earlier ages had usually allowed to remain as an ideal; so that in a sense, the Jewish dark ages may be said to begin with the Renaissance.”
THE RENAISSANCE
As the Jew Departed …
The period marked by the evictions—1300 to 1650—also marks the period of the Renaissance which broke over Europe as the Jews departed. Starting at first in the trading cities of northern Italy in about 1300, there began a great rebirth of culture and learning which at first was based almost entirely on the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Very quickly this renascent culture spread over Europe and when the age had ended, in about 1650, Europe was by comparison with her former status, enlightened and civilized. Quite obviously all this could not have taken place had it not been for a great upsurge of commercial activity which occurred simultaneously with, and as an adjunct of, the Renaissance. Not until the nations of Europe had wrested commercial control from the ghetto did this rebirth of western civilization occur.
…”Behind Communism”, Frank L. Britton, 1952.
What is most striking at least to me is that European history has a distinct biological component; once her parasites were expelled, the host’s labours became entirely devoted to its own interests and the organism’s health returned.
The Jewish Golden Age was Europe’s Dark Age; the Jewish Dark Age was Europe’s Renaissance. From no less an authority than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Let us all work together to usher in our next Renaissance.
29.
GSX-R750 guy says:
June 19, 2010 at 7:58 PM
A metaphor is like a simile.
Sent from my Android phone
30.
Walter Duranty says:
June 20, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Anything which further isolates Israel from the rest of the civilized world is a good thing. Maybe Turkey can read the writing on the wall, with regards to the death throes of Zionism, and doesn’t want to associate itself with a country marked for death and destruction?
31.
James says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:10 AM
Raising the issue of the Armenian genocide,
one of the great crimes of the 20th century,
is very important as it may offer at last the
opportunity to shed light on that terrible
event in history and maybe give mankind an
opportunity to learn such lessons as are
impregnated in the truthful details of that
very sad history.
Luckily, the magnum opus on this historical
horror, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians,
is waiting patiently in the shadows for just such
a movement, at last, toward interest in
frankly delving into just what did happen,
how and why:
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians
by Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Let the light shine in on this thorn in the side
of human history. Justice is no longer possible
for the Armenian victims; but the delayed light
of justice can benefit us, the living, and illuminate
our future course. Like ripe nuggets left too long
on the tree of knowledge, the truth about the
Armenian genocide is ripe and ready to be picked.
see:
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians
By Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Enlarged Second Edition
Complete 575 page book is available
free online pdf:
http://www.jewishracism.com/Jewish_Genocide_Enlarged.pdf
from: author Bjerknes’ website: http://www.jewishracism.com
Kevin MacDonald: Well, that didn’t take long. Turkey’s involvement in the flotilla and its support for the Palestinians has now made it an enemy of the Israel Lobby, with all that that entails. All in all, it’s a good example of Jewish power and moral particularism. After long opposing any resolution on Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress, suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.” He and “a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”
Berman suddenly found his moral bearings, along with the organized Jewish community. The neocons are naturally leading the charge, summarized byJim Lobe who quotes from a report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:
“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from [NATO],” suggested the group.
[JINSA's] board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.
What’s interesting here is the proposal to eject Turkey from NATO. It wasn’t long ago that Turkey was being assured that it could become a member of the EU. Turkey’s exclusion from Europe is widely seen as a big factor in its change of foreign policy. Thomas Friedman: “After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations — which the Erdogan government systematically did — the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: ‘Oh, you mean nobody told you? We’re a Christian club. No Muslims allowed.’ The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”
And that’s the good news. The neocons and the organized Jewish community were big supporters of Turkey’s bid to join the EU–which would have meant that 71 million Turks would have the right to move anywhere in Europe. This would mean the end of Europe as having any defining culture or biological coherence — obviously not a concern to Jewish activists like Friedman.
It’s worth remembering that Jewish activist organizations regarded the admission of Turkey to the EU as a way of civilizing Europe and ensuring cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism — precisely the policy proposals that the Jewish community has advanced in all Western societies, particularly since the end of World War II. In 2002, at the height of the push for Turkey’s admission to the EU, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) had this to say in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:
Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President [d'Estaing], you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East. (See here; the statement has presumably been removed from the SWC website.)
Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel. I rather doubt that we’ll be seeing this sort of thing anymore. The chances of Turkey being admitted to the EU now are less than zero.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Turkey has no place in Europe is just as valid against admitting any Muslims to Europe. Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process compared to what would have happened had Turkey been admitted, perhaps allowing enough time for Europe to waken from its slumbers.
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39 Responses to “Kevin MacDonald: The Jews turn on Turkey”
1.
Someday says:
June 18, 2010 at 9:59 AM
In reality doubt the Euro elites would have dared let Turkey become a full member of the EC; it would be difficult to disguise such a fateful step.
The elites tend to avoid obviously drastic changes for ones which are more easily downplayed.
2.
Chris Moore says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:12 AM
‘After long opposing any resolution on the Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress, suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.’
So why did the Jewish nationalist occupation in Congress, including Berman, turn a blind eye for decades? These Jewish nationalists are so shamelessly and transparently self-serving and opportunistic, its a wonder that they have any friends whatsoever. That so many politicians and Americans dance to their tune with a grin on their faces just goes to show how corrupt and decayed our society has become.
“Those that bless the Jews are blessed by God,” so the saying goes. Like so many other phenomenon revolving around organized Jewry, it appears up is down and black is white in this case, too — meaning its more likely that those that bless the Jews are touched by Satan.
I’m not a superstitious person, but it seems to me America has been under a darkening shadow since Jewry’s ascension to the helm.
3.
Chris Moore says:
June 18, 2010 at 10:37 AM
Additionally, let’s not forget the reports that many of the Young Turks who engineered the Aremenian holocaust were themselves crypto-Jews. In fact, there are a couple of books about the Dönme — Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam but maintained their secret Jewish identity and associations. Here’s a passage from a magazine article that encapsulates the history and the books called The Other Secret Jews from the Jewish magazine Tablet.
“Most important, several Dönme were leading members of the Committee for Union and Progress, the revolutionary party known as the Young Turks, who in 1908 forced the Sultan to grant a constitution. The Dönme, like Jews and Freemasons, sympathized with the CUP’s scientific, reformist program, though Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party. Even so, some prominent Young Turks were Dönme, including the editor of the Party’s newspaper and the finance minister in the new CUP government.”
Funny how Jewish conspirators love to brag about prominent roles played by Jews who organized as Jews in plots for revolutionary upheaval that end in mass murder, but deny that Judeofascism plays any role whatsoever in their murderous outcomes.
It’s also interesting that these diaspora Jewish revolutionary groups demand constitutions supposedly guaranteeing equal rights for all, but then implement governments that end up securing special rights and privileges for Jewish cliques that go on to carry out mass murder of non-Jews (and Jewry then professes to believe that history has been so rough on the Jewish people simply because they are different.) And in the case of Israel, the Jews refuse to write and implement a constitution at all because the articles of the state already grant special favoritism to Jews, hence a constitution of rights for all citizens would water down Jewish privilege.
Given all these facts, it becomes clear that not only are Gentile supporters of Judeofascism helping to set up Jewish-supremacist societies the world over, but they are also helping to cut the throats of their own progeny by doing so. I guess certain kinds of trash will do anything for money, power and temporal luxuries.
From:
http://www.judeofascism.com/2010/02/for-opportunistic-zionists-recognition.html
4.
Whites Unite says:
June 18, 2010 at 12:39 PM
“nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”
Now if only he’d admit that nothing justifies Jews turning a blind eye to the reality their role in East European Communist crimes against humanity.
5.
Tanstaafl says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:49 PM
From Brief History of Turkish Jews:
Since 1492, through five centuries, the Ottoman sultans and the modern day Turkish Republic, welcomed the Jews and offered them a safe haven from persecution in the European countries. The Ottoman Empire at its zenith became one the largest empires in World History covering most of Mediterranean basin region extending from North Africa to Eastern Europe. It has been suggested that one of the characteristics that extended the domination of the Ottoman Empire was its allowance of religious freedom for the different nationalities and minorities under its rule. While many European nations expelled, persecuted or tried to convert the Jews under their dominion, the Turkish people of the Ottoman Empire, remained as an outstanding example of tolerance of different nationalities with different religions.
The presentation above sometimes sounds unusual to strangers who may have heard Turkey only in the context of conquests of the Ottoman Empire.
When I first ran into this page several months ago it was entirely positive – “the jews” and Turks, bestest friends forever. Now it begins with a bitter disclaimer, citing the flotilla fiasco and ending like so:
These pages were titled “Turkish-Jewish Friendship Over 500 Years”. Erdogan government has put an end for this friendship. So this title was removed from this site.
The next step is emach she’mo – May His Name Be Erased.
6.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:55 PM
In reality doubt the Euro elites would have dared let Turkey become a full member of the E
But it would have happened anyway because, at the time it would have been ‘good for jews’ now that it no longer is, it will not..
The selfishness and hypocrisy is stunning.. stunning.
7.
Tanstaafl says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:58 PM
Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process
The question has never been put to popular referendum. Like mass immigration and “hate” laws it is imposed from above by people who expect to profit. It is a genocidal dynamic, not suicidal.
8.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:06 PM
the Young Turks who engineered the Aremenian holocaust were themselves crypto-Jews.
and as with multiculti programs here and in bolshivik russia -the curious result: a competing ethnic group is knocked out and easy to control inferiors are brought in.
9.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:24 PM
I’m not a superstitious person, but it seems to me America has been under a darkening shadow since Jewry’s ascension to the helm
there is something deeply disturbing about their particular brand of ‘evil’ – i think its almost ‘archetypal’ ”evil’ – their behavior, actions and appearance resonate with our folk and religious depictions of evil – ie – the troll, the witch, the devil – look at traditional depictions of evil and compare them to prominent askanazi – you can practically use the current jewish elite to illustrate a grims fairy tale book’s evil characters.
10.
Anonymous says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:26 PM
This is not new in relation to the Gaza blockade and Israeli slaughter of the flotilla. The JTA story linked is dated March 2010. According to information from Thomas.LOC.gov for H.Res. 252, Berman signed on as a co-sponsor on March 17, 2009, when the bill was introduced. The only members to sign on as cosponsors recently are Dean Heller of Nevada on June 10 and Michael Michaud of Maine on June 17.
11.
admin says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:42 PM
@Anonymous: Good point. The troubles between Israel and Turkey began some time ago. The famous incident with the Turkish ambassador was a big deal:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/peres-humiliation-of-turkey-envoy-does-not-reflect-israel-s-diplomacy-1.261381
This article in Salon also emphasizes the turnabout on the genocide issue:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/06/16/israel_lobby_genocide_armenia
What to make of the rush of Jewish leaders — from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington to a city councilman named Jack Weiss in Los Angeles — coming forward in the past few weeks to divulge their role in genocide denial?
“Frankly, [it] was not becoming for Jews, given that we have likewise been victims of genocide,” Weiss wrote in an inelegant piece in the Jewish Journal.
How to account for these sudden confessions? A pang of remorse? A cleansing of the soul? I’m afraid not. These aren’t confessions, at all. Rather, they are reminders of the debt Turkey owes Israel — and they come with teeth bared.
12.
TGD says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:45 PM
I don’t think that the previous generation of Israeli leaders would have discarded Turkey as a friend and ally so readily. This new generation of Zionist leaders and their US lackeys have no qualms at all about denigrating the Turks and gleefully rubbing in the contempt by broadcasting that stupid parody of “We are the World.” Before the flotilla incident, the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, deeply humiliated the Turkish ambassador to Israel by seating him on a couch much lower than the Ayalon’s chair while he scolded the ambassador about a TV program produced by a private Turkish company. The old inhibitions that once moderated Jewish behavior in the gentile world have gone by the wayside.
Have you seen the movie Midnight Express about conditions inside a Turkish prison? Any European who still feels that Turkey should join the EU should be made to watch it.
13.
HA says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:58 PM
Re: “No Muslims allowed,” it seems Albania is well on the way to EU accession, and then the Mafia enclave known as Kosovo, already in effect an EU protectorate. What isn’t Friedman telling?
14.
Whites Unite says:
June 18, 2010 at 4:59 PM
Lets review some Turkish actions, and some Jewish responses to those actions:
1821 – The Patriarch of Constantinople, the Eastern Orthodox equivalent of the Pope, is murdered by the Turks. A mob of Jews drags his dead body through the streets of Constantinople and dumps it in the Bosporus.
1822 – The Turks almost completely wipe out the Greek population of Chios, killing 20,000 and enslaving 50,000. Jewish slave traders buy Greek slaves at bargain prices.
1876 – Turkish irregular troops massacer up to 60,000 Bulgarians. When the Russian send troops to liberate Bulgaria, Prime Minister Benjamin D’Israeli threatens to go to war against Russia.
1894 – Turks massacer 100,000+ Armenians. Jews and Donme of Thessalonika and Constantinople stay loyal to the Ottoman Empire through it all.
1915 – Turks massacer 1.5 million Armenians. Donme occupy important positions in the government responsible, Constantinople Jews stay loyal to the Ottoman Empire until the very end.
1974 – Turks invade Cyprus, force 180,000 Greek Cypriotes to flee their homes. “Kissinger exerted himself very strongly to protect Ankara from any congressional reprisal for this outright violation of international law, and promiscuous and illegal misuse of US weaponry.” (London Gaurdian, 2/26/01)
2010 – Turks send food and medicine to Gaza. “Erdogan government has put an end for this friendship.”
15.
me says:
June 18, 2010 at 7:44 PM
Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcom
Notice:
a. they don’t mention WHY they were being expelled.. the implication here is it was bad to expel jews because they were jews, no matter what they did.
b. Muslim “turkey” – eg the Ottman Empire, was brutally supressing Christians, enslaving them, forcing women to be sex slaves, stealing children from famlies for the Jannisaries and slave trade.. but THAT doesn’t matter – the ottoman empire was good because they treated jews well.
angry jew if you are reading : this more than anything illustrates mainstream organized jewish community hostility towards the christian west and utter indifference to our well being
16.
Amazed says:
June 18, 2010 at 11:45 PM
We must remember that this sort of tac is not taken on a whim. There will be a strategy behind this move .Probably to remind Turkey that in a coming war in the Middle East , be careful or we will clobber you with the full force of the our American controlled military.The parasite maneuvers the host.
17.
kirk says:
June 19, 2010 at 2:12 AM
“Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies… ”
(Not so) Ironically, for the SWC, european history is all about the Jews, who expelled them, who catered them, who helped them, who didn’t help them etc.etc.
18.
THM says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:19 AM
Generally the Western Mainstream Media suppresses news of the vicious oppression of Christians in Islamic countries (but gives endless coverage of any real or imagined slights to Muslims in European ethnic countries).
Here is an exception to that — a Sixty Minutes report about how the Turkish government is treating Patriarch Batholomew and Orthodox Christians):
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6001717n&tag=api
19.
James O'Meara says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:31 AM
Chris Moore says:
“These Jewish nationalists are so shamelessly and transparently self-serving and opportunistic, its a wonder that they have any friends whatsoever. ”
Oy veh, goiische kopf!
“Sincerity” is for stupid Aryan squareheads.
The Judaic Two-Step, as I call it, the positioning of Jews in positions of power ON BOTH SIDES is what allows the Jew to win every time.
Ever notice how the leaders of every “political movement” are Jews?
Sure, the liberals and Democrats. But don’t forget the Republican “Neo-cons.” Even the American Nazi Party [David White, nee Weiss]
And if not Jews, then don’t forget the Jew Within. Dead Jew Worshipping Christian Zionists, for example. And only three Jews on the Supreme Court? Guess again: So-called “Catholic” Scalia worships the Talmud as “the basis of our American law,” and of course Thomas is his hand puppet, so make that 5 Jews; game over.
20.
Junghans says:
June 19, 2010 at 6:42 AM
Europe is not so much ’slumbering’, as it is anaesthetised by the overwhelming liberal/Marxist Jewish victory of 1945. Ditto in spades for the English speaking White world.
21.
Someday says:
June 19, 2010 at 7:59 AM
Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel.
The democratisation the the EC insisted on loosened the grip of the Kermalists. (All in all rather similar to Algeria where European advice to have elections took no account of the actual level of support Islamist parties would have if allowed to organize.) Europeans’ demand for democratisation made the profound social changes, like the emancipation of women very difficult to achieve and hence was in practice a barrier to Turkey being admitted to the EC.
Israel’s alliance was with the Kermalist generals but the power of the generals has been broken. Paying price for EU follies The author is correct to doubt that the EU leaders were sincere about letting Turkey become a full member in the forseeable future ( as already said I suspect that’s because they don’t dare, not because of any principle of religious or ethnic defence).
Some say the Turkish ’secularist’ elite is heavily larded with the descendants of Jews: The Dönme
22.
omop says:
June 19, 2010 at 8:37 AM
What is the blind spot that keeps “non-jews” from acknowledging and adjusting to the following ideology/rational of all Jews? And which has been articulated over the past 4000 years, as “La Difference”.
“The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
23.
TicTac says:
June 19, 2010 at 9:54 AM
Hey guys, did you see the illegal aliens rioting after Lakers win in LA ?
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel#p/u/3/z9lYdmobSrk
24.
TicTac says:
June 19, 2010 at 10:06 AM
Alex makes a few good points.
Imagine if the Tea Party behaved like that.
Or a BNP gathering.
The media would have condemned them as violent thugs.
But because they`re a protected group -a minority, the media says nothing.
25.
me says:
June 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM
for the SWC, european history is all about the Jews, who expelled them, who catered them, who helped them, who didn’t help them etc.
One curious aspect of this – the monarchs they consider ‘good for jews’ were often the most corrupt and hostile to commoners – and the monarchs they considered ‘bad’ for Jews – like Isabel of Spain – were good for commoners, the people and the country and usually anti-corruption…
26.
Chris Moore says:
June 19, 2010 at 1:36 PM
@ me says: June 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM: “One curious aspect of this – the monarchs they consider ‘good for jews’ were often the most corrupt and hostile to commoners – and the monarchs they considered ‘bad’ for Jews – like Isabel of Spain – were good for commoners, the people and the country and usually anti-corruption…”
Hence it follows that today’s organized Jewry in America love the elitist, Statist-Corporatist neocon Right and the limousine liberal Left, and fear and loathe the middle American “rubes.”
This is why Jewish nationalism/elitist Jewry doesn’t fit or belong in America or any other democracy: they hate and fear the People and their traditions and customs, thus they hate the concept of People’s rights, free speech and equal representation. Deep down, they believe if the People take power, the first thing they will do is persecute the Jews (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy/cycle manifesting from Jewry’s own attitudes and behavior.)
Thus, the way they have subverted democracy in America is to seize and buy off the elites and their institutions, using the mainstream media to create a false consciousness in the masses that they are still indeed living in a democracy, even as it is closer to a plutocracy/kleptocracy largely run by organized Jewry, ideological Zionists, Judeophile lefties and Judeo-supremacist neocons/Bushcons (my shorthand for all: “the Judeos”) for Jewry’s benefit and the benefit of its corrupt partners.
Today, and throughout history, what’s good for the Judeos is bad for the People, and what’s good for the People is bad for the Judeos.
This is why to my mind it is inevitable that sooner or later, the Judeos will lose. The only question is how much suffering and loss we will have to endure before they taken down and put on trial for treason, or packed off to Israel.
27.
me says:
June 19, 2010 at 2:15 PM
Today, and throughout history, what’s good for the Judeos is bad for the People, and what’s good for the People is bad for the Judeos
Think of a candidate who is ‘good for the people’ – what would they do?
stop immigration
adapt an America first foreign policy
pursue a sound fiscal policy.
All these things are disasters for organized jewery. Thus, they label candidates ‘anti semitic’ despite not overtly doing anything ‘anti jewish’
28.
Matthias says:
June 19, 2010 at 4:51 PM
It seems the lesson of history is “What’s good for Jews, is bad for mostly everybody else”. Hence the inverse is also true. As Gentile fortunes wax, Jewish fortunes wane. Here is a brilliantly concise summary that speaks volumes in few words:
THE JEW IN EUROPE
Even The Coins Were Jewish
We find the first Jews filtering into Europe some time before the Christian era, particularly in the region of Greece. The ancient Greeks spoke of these Asiatic invaders with considerable bitterness. Very quickly they spread throughout the Roman Empire and into Europe proper. The Jewish merchant, artisan, and slave trader appear on the Roman scene with increasing frequency after the second century A.D. and there can be no doubt that their position in the Roman world was one of growing importance even as the Empire drifted to destruction. Under Justinian, says the Jewish Encyclopedia,
“They enjoyed full religious liberty, in return for which they assumed all a citizen’s duty toward the state; minor offices were also open to them. Only the synagogues were exempt from the duty of quartering soldiers. The trade in slaves constituted the main source of livelihood for the Roman Jews, and decrees against this traffic were issued in 335, 336, 339, 384, etc.”
[Funk & Wagnall's Jewish Encyclopedia, page 460, vol. 10]
Seneca, in his writings, bitterly assailed the Romans of his day for aping the Jews, and some historians (notably Gibbon in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) have ascribed the downfall of Rome to their corrupting influence. Nero’s wife, Poppaea, was a converted Jewess. As Rome reeled into decline and final collapse, and as the Dark Ages descended over Western civilization, we find the Jew taking a strangle-hold over what remained of European commerce. Says Encyclopedia Britannica:
“. . . there was an inevitable tendency for him to specialize in commerce, for which his acumen and ubiquity gave him special qualifications. In the dark ages the commerce of western Europe was largely in his hands, in particular the slave trade, and in Carolingian cartularies Jew and merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms.”
[Encyclopedia Britannica, page 57, vol. 13—1947.]
This hold over European commerce finally became so utterly complete that few gentiles engaged in trade at all; it had become almost entirely a Jewish monopoly. In Poland and Hungary, the coins bore Jewish inscriptions …
Throughout the Medieval period, ["Dark Ages," "Medieval Period," and "Middle Ages" are synonymous terms used to describe the period of decline which characterized western civilization between 500-1300 A.D.] which lasted from 500 A.D. to 1300 A.D., the Jew merchant was dominant all over Europe (except Scandinavia, where he was never permitted to enter) and this dominance included control over the eastern trade routes to the Levant. There was to be no relief from this situation until the Jews were evicted from Europe in the century directly preceding the Renaissance.
(…)
Expelled
The Fourth Lateran Council restricted Jewish commercial advantage but it did not end the Jewish problem. Beginning in the latter part of the 13th century, one European country after another expelled its Jewish population as the only final solution to the problem. First to take the step was England which banned them in 1290. Fifteen years later in 1306 the French followed suit. In steady succession the various states of Europe emulated this example with Spain being one of the last to enforce the ban in 1492. The situation in Spain is worth noting. Says Encyclopedia Britannica: [page 57, vol. 13 - 1947]:
“… The 14th century was the golden age of their history in Spain. In 1391 the preaching of a priest of Seville, Fernando Martenez, led to the first general massacre of the Jews who were envied for their prosperity and hated because they were the king’s tax collectors.”
Ferdinand and Isabella, after uniting Spain and driving out the Moors turned their attention to the Jewish problem, with the result that they were evicted completely in 1492. In 1498 Portugal evicted its Jewish population also.
(…)
Back to Poland
By 1500 all of Western Europe except northern Italy, parts of Germany, and the Papal possessions around Avignon, had been rid of the Jewish invasion. For a while, at least, Europe was free of the Jews; not until 1650 did they return in any numbers. Says Encyclopedia Britannica: [page 57-58, vol. 13 - 1947.]
“The great mass of the Jewish people were thus to be found once more in the East, in the Polish and Turkish empires . . The few communities suffered to remain in western Europe were meanwhile subjected at last to all the restrictions which earlier ages had usually allowed to remain as an ideal; so that in a sense, the Jewish dark ages may be said to begin with the Renaissance.”
THE RENAISSANCE
As the Jew Departed …
The period marked by the evictions—1300 to 1650—also marks the period of the Renaissance which broke over Europe as the Jews departed. Starting at first in the trading cities of northern Italy in about 1300, there began a great rebirth of culture and learning which at first was based almost entirely on the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Very quickly this renascent culture spread over Europe and when the age had ended, in about 1650, Europe was by comparison with her former status, enlightened and civilized. Quite obviously all this could not have taken place had it not been for a great upsurge of commercial activity which occurred simultaneously with, and as an adjunct of, the Renaissance. Not until the nations of Europe had wrested commercial control from the ghetto did this rebirth of western civilization occur.
…”Behind Communism”, Frank L. Britton, 1952.
What is most striking at least to me is that European history has a distinct biological component; once her parasites were expelled, the host’s labours became entirely devoted to its own interests and the organism’s health returned.
The Jewish Golden Age was Europe’s Dark Age; the Jewish Dark Age was Europe’s Renaissance. From no less an authority than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Let us all work together to usher in our next Renaissance.
29.
GSX-R750 guy says:
June 19, 2010 at 7:58 PM
A metaphor is like a simile.
Sent from my Android phone
30.
Walter Duranty says:
June 20, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Anything which further isolates Israel from the rest of the civilized world is a good thing. Maybe Turkey can read the writing on the wall, with regards to the death throes of Zionism, and doesn’t want to associate itself with a country marked for death and destruction?
31.
James says:
June 20, 2010 at 11:10 AM
Raising the issue of the Armenian genocide,
one of the great crimes of the 20th century,
is very important as it may offer at last the
opportunity to shed light on that terrible
event in history and maybe give mankind an
opportunity to learn such lessons as are
impregnated in the truthful details of that
very sad history.
Luckily, the magnum opus on this historical
horror, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians,
is waiting patiently in the shadows for just such
a movement, at last, toward interest in
frankly delving into just what did happen,
how and why:
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians
by Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Let the light shine in on this thorn in the side
of human history. Justice is no longer possible
for the Armenian victims; but the delayed light
of justice can benefit us, the living, and illuminate
our future course. Like ripe nuggets left too long
on the tree of knowledge, the truth about the
Armenian genocide is ripe and ready to be picked.
see:
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians
By Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Enlarged Second Edition
Complete 575 page book is available
free online pdf:
http://www.jewishracism.com/Jewish_Genocide_Enlarged.pdf
from: author Bjerknes’ website: http://www.jewishracism.com
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