A reflection on Metropolis

Fritz Lang was a Futurist by default, as was his wife, Thea von Harbou, and by default, fascists, but Lang "rehabilitated" himself in the end, while Von Harbou died of shame like a lot of Germans in the aftermath of WWII...

The inherent clean energy opportunity in Japan

This is not meant as any kind of a cynical-jab at the Japanese people, looking at them as some tool for change. The earthquake and subsequent nuclear accidents that are unfolding are a horrific reminder of how tenuous modern life is: in a matter of just five minutes, everything on the Japanese mainland changed forever.

At this point, we have no idea how many people have died or will die as a result of what's been reported as an 8.4 to 8.9 scale earthquake, possibly the worst in their entire recorded history.

The most recent one on roughly the same scale occurred in 1923, killing as many as 140,000 people. But the Japanese were better prepared for a recurrence...except that you can never truly prepare for one when it comes to a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power will always be vulnerable to natural disasters, social upheavals, and most certainly, inevitable social collapse since all civilizations end one day.

The half-lives of most radioactive byproducts of nuclear power will far-exceed the lifespan of any civilization, reason enough to begin a general decommissioning of all existing plants, the neutralization of the waste ("byproducts," and to the best of our abilities), and a rapid conversion over to a constellation of clean or cleaner energy sources, mainly natural and renewable ones. This nuclear disaster hasn't even played-out yet, but I see very real opportunities that need to be grasped, and immediately, by the Japanese public as well as the world community, outside of the corridors of power.

As the Japanese people and their rescuers from their government and from around the world are exposed to radioactive contamination, we need to realize that we have yet another opening here: the outrage that's inevitably coming on the mainland--perhaps even from neighboring countries--is going to be profound. As always, there are cultural, and therefore, historical reasons for this.

For those with a short memory, it should be remembered that the Japanese are the only nation on earth to have atomic weapons directed upon them. They have not forgotten this by a long-shot, and the terrible irony of this catastrophe-upon-a-catastrophe will not be lost on them as it surely is on most Americans, willfully, since we're the ones who dropped two atomic bombs on them in 1945.

We tend to forget about our own war crimes here in the United States, our victims however, do not.

There will be a very loud cry indeed in Japan to decommission these nuclear plants because they have failed every test. The plants themselves were already strongly opposed, but as it usually happens, times were better and they public will was more neutral and the opposition's warnings were ignored. There was, after all, a lot of money to be made, and power demands were growing and still are. That's fine and well, but events have a way of changing things, and catastrophes borne out of both natural disaster and human incompetence and corruption lead to a perception of misrule. As often is the case, that perception is usually accurate.

Prediction: there will be a major groundswell coming against further development and operation of nuclear power on the Japanese mainland. A call for major, wide-scale investment in clean and renewable sources of energy will be heard throughout the island nation. If it reaches the level of mass-production, it will have a global impact since Japan is the third largest developed economy in the world, one of the world's skilled "workshops," like Germany.

Even with this disaster, Japan could be poised to lead the way towards a new and decisive direction, towards the real world implementation of alternative energy sources that are well outside of the box. With China in close-proximity, production in both nations could point to very affordable solar technologies, as just one example.

This is all a wait-and-see, to be sure, since we don't know how bad this nuclear disaster is going get. But I think there are great opportunities here for Japan and the world, coming out of their worst period since WWII, their (and our) greatest challenge. As fate would have it, Wikileaks has uncovered and released one of the cache of American State Department cables, and they purport to contain a passage of Japanese government officials discussing cover-ups of previous nuclear accidents. When-and-if the smokes clears soon, the Japanese people will learn of this; there will be a wide demand for explanations, with the predictable outrage, perhaps even riots.

All we lack is the will since an outraged citizenry that won't have it anymore is an irresistible social force that cannot be held back any longer.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) review

Where in the world does one begin with Mr. Tarantino's new opus? Let me say first, that he's got a winner on his hands here, hands-down, and that Inglourious Basterds is going to woo even the hardest hearted Tarantino hater, it's that good, that funny.

In 1983, I had the pleasure to see the original "Inglorious Bastards" (1978), directed by the great Italian action director, Enzo Castellari on cable television. It became a kind of legendary movie for me and my friends over the years, and like Tarantino and his crew, we used the short-hand of "Inglorious" when were referred to it. The reason it became a kind of legend to us has a lot to do with the availability of movies almost thirty years ago: there was literally no other way to see this film over the years, and occasionally, I would see an article or a blurb about it, even meeting others who had seen it, but no dice, it eluded me on home video for over two decades.

Finally, belatedly, the word was out that Tarantino was directing his "homage" to the movie and many other war films and the original was re-released onto DVD in 2008 by Severin-Films. How times change. Now you can find the most obscure movies ever lensed, and easily, even cheaply. I assume Tarantino somehow saw the original "Inglorious" either the same way (TV), or through his job with Roger Avary (now in deep doo-doo over...you don't even want to know) at that legendary video store he was once a mouthy but knowledgeable clerk at. It must have been one hell of a well-stocked video store, that's all I'm saying. The critics are already weighing-in that this is a tale of revenge, and it is, but that's if you take the surface-level of the film with the utmost seriousness which is losing the entire point with his movies. Yes, Tarantino goes to incredible pains to create a convincing cinematic reality, and yes, this is based on Castellari's original tale in some very basic areas (like the title, and the fact that it takes place in occupied France during WWII), but that's about where it ends; this is about movie reality and the homage once again. You either like the director's writing and directing style, or you don't, and I'm with the former.

Recall that Castellari's original 1970s "rip-off" of The Dirty Dozen (1968) is really more an homage to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), a story about another group of scoundrels that you end up at least respecting by the end of the film because they do something good to redeem themselves. To cut it short, Inglourious Basterds isn't even a revenge film or a revenge fantasy at all as some critics have written. It's more and less than that because it's not really about WWII directly but about the cinema before, during, and after the war, the cinema surrounding the rise of National Socialism and its demise, and the movies made about it after-the-fact. Once again, this is a movie about movies, so just enjoy the ride.

If you really wanted to reduce a good part of the movie itself to its fundamentals, you could equate it with someone talking about WWII cinema and the nature of the movie business in the 20th century, which when referring to Hollywood means that the subject of Jews in the business is inevitably going to come up (and not necessarily in a negative-light). It's not a political film, but it does have some interesting political implications to it; one way of describing it is that it's WWII through the movies, even being "won" by the end through cinema, film itself, quite literally, as part of the plotline. Fortunately, that's not giving away too much. As with most Tarantino movies, we get the famous chaptering. The very first scene is very reminiscent of the style of Sergio Leone and many parts of the film could be compared to a Spaghetti Western with faces serving as landscapes, and landscapes serving as faces; and as you might expect, many of the characters are "stock" ones grabbed from other WWII films. There are even occasional nods to the great war movies of Sam Fuller.

But then, we get a lot of references to the cinema of the 1930s--mostly German and French, a little American--like the references to Leni Riefenstahl, who as a Teutonic heartthrob of their "mountain films" wowed German audiences and had a certain sex appeal among the Nazi cadre. Riefenstahl had other talents that would flourish under National Socialism. She later went on to direct the most well known Nazi propaganda film, "Triumph of the Will" (1935) and "Olympiad" (1937). But then, we also hear about G.W. Pabst ("Pandora's Box" with the sultry Louise Brooks), and even Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (1943). This is all going to be over the heads of most moviegoers when they go to see Tarantino's new work, but it adds to the experience and cinematic richness nonetheless.

And then there is the violence: it's not nearly as graphic as many reviewers are painting it, and it's not present in much of the film. I'm sure some Jewish members of any given audience watching this movie might view it as a revenge story of some sort, and to some extent it is, but so is Death Wish with Charles Bronson. Everything is a prop in Inglourious Basterds, used by Tarantino to drape his dialog and vignettes on. I think that's about as deep as Tarantino wanted to get into that aspect of his tale, a story that could be seen as autobiographical in some strange way. There's not much that I can say that's bad here; from the production design that's right out of Tinto Brass's "Salon Kitty" (1976), to the musical-stings by Ennio Morricone copped from several Italian classics of the 1970s, and even to the use of David Bowie's "Putting Out Fire With Gasoline," this is about style, and little else. There's nothing wrong with that.

There is gore (a couple scalping scenes are probably referencing William Lustig's "Maniac," not even a war movie), there is violence, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Tarantino decided to place Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs in the midst of WWII, but it's all very deadpan, very funny material. The comic timing itself is pretty impressive and the dialog is up to the writer's normal standards. Perhaps what's most impressive is that Quentin Tarantino has forced American audiences to sit through a roughly 3 hour motion picture where 3/4's of it is subtitled, no mean feat. I predict a hit here. There is no real political message to Inglourious Basterds anymore than there was in a lot of the WWII genre, and if there was, it was unintentional and purely a product of the times they were made in. With the ousting of an "ugly American" president in George W. Bush, there is at least for this brief moment that one thematic-thread that runs through most of the postwar WWII genre: the mutual-ties between the former allies and their cultures, their people. Even Star Wars reads like a retelling of WWII, but Inglourious Basterds could read like a retelling of the movie industry after it. So far, Europe has been "liberated," conquered at Cannes.

In a telling scene with comedian Michael Myers and a character actor playing Winston Churchill, the British high command wants a briefing on German cinema under the Nazis from one of their officers. The look is right out of the films of Michael Powell and even Lindsay Anderson. The Myers character brings-up the fact that "Goebbels has gotten the Jews under control" in their motion picture industry. Churchill chimes-in: "We need to find-out how they did it." An enigmatic statement if ever there was one, but a funny one; Inglourious Bastereds is a knuckleheaded flick for cineastes, a must see, and almost as funny as 1984's "Top Secret."

W-W-II, a satire of the American mind

T'was back in W-W-II, when Columbus crossed the ocean blue.
"Seriously, who wants to go hunt for bigfoot with us in the Sierra Ancha Mts.? " said
the social networking status update.

Wouldn't you? If it was true.

For years and years nobody thought the Japanese and Germans were funny--
were I kidding--but it's true.
But read haikus,
you'll get the news.

I decided to write a murder ballad about bigfoot in the shower,
a daunting task sure to bring derision.
But that was my right,
my decision.

"That was nobody but some Mexicans," said the Colorado naturalist,
but no one would listen.
We murdered the neanderthals,
and they haunt us with precision.

Wouldn't you? You know it's true. It wouldn't do.
Someone might sue, but I paid my dues.
Because back in W-W-II,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I believe it because I want to.

Why did the IRS bust Swiss Bank UBS?

"Perhaps what we need is to go back to the first Bretton Woods, to go back to discipline. It's absolutely clear that financial markets need discipline: macroeconomic discipline, monetary discipline, market discipline.'' --European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, October

Washington D.C./Zurich, Switzerland--This isn't a difficult question to answer. We're seeing a reinstitution of some of the principles of the Bretton Woods system that was crafted primarily by US and UK officials (at the core of the process were economists John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White) during WWII, laying-out the foundations for what the postwar reconstruction and the resulting economic order would look like and how it would function. Why Bretton Woods?

Western leaders didn't want to repeat the same mistakes that created the Great Depression and that definitely played a major hand in taking the world to war in the middle twentieth century. American and British financial leaders crafted an economic blueprint that--in its overall scope--was to leave the United States in charge as the world's banker of a generally global form of capitalism (whatever that means), but with other elements addressing the domestic fronts of participating nations that emphasized state intervention in those economies through the strict regulation of capital flight.

What is capital flight? There are several definitions, but there is a general agreement on its core features. Tax Justice Network, a federation of international and academic economists notes some of the basic features of capital flight:

• Flight capital is domestic wealth permanently put beyond the reach of appropriate domestic authorities. Much of it is unrecorded due to deliberate misreporting;
• Because no (or little) tax is paid on wealth that is transferred as capital flight, it is associated with a public loss and private gain.
• Because tax evasion is illegal and subject to criminal sanction in most countries, the management of flight capital is a form of money laundering. Offshore secrecy arrangements play a crucial part in the laundering process by enabling the origin and ownership of the capital to be effectively disguised. ("Illicit Capital Flows and the Offshore Economy, Tax Justice Network, 2008)

Simply put: capital flight is the illegal transfer of enormous wealth to other financial markets to avoid legitimate and lawful taxation, to exchange one currency for another when one currency's value tanks (speculation), and occurs in the countries that the capital originates from over to the "receiving" nations. In short, capital flight is illegal money laundering. Under the current economic crisis where investment capital is lacking--even in the United States at this writing--the negative effects for development can become acute and long term.

This, surely, is a major factor in why the Obama administration's IRS are going after UBS Bank and 250-300 American tax cheats holding illegal accounts at the Swiss institution. Going after these depositors heralds an action that would never have occurred under Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, let alone Bush II. That it's happening at all suggest that there is no longer any choice but to enforce laws covering capital flight--with the caveat that the Swiss courts have been "pushing-back," undermining Keynes's original proposals that debtor and creditor nations do the enforcing and even be willing to alter their behaviors and laws to do so. Nothing succeeds like failure.

The UBS bust also signals that things are especially dire--even desperate--in the international financial markets thanks to decades of mismanagement that metastasized under Republican governance. There is worse: nationalist-based noncompliance by a "receiving" nation like Switzerland is possible, and is occurring right now.

A Swiss tribunal has barred financial regulators from handing over information of UBS bank clients to the United States Justice Department, which is attempting to break the country's banking secrecy laws. UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, reached a settlement with the US authorities on Wednesday. It agreed to pay 780 million dollars and reveal the names of between 250 and 300 US clients.

On Thursday, UBS rejected a new US lawsuit asking for the disclosure of the identities of some 52,000 US customers suspected of evading taxes. The populist Swiss People's Party has protested against what it describes as "foreign blackmail". ("Swiss court blocks bank data disclosure," Radio Netherlands, 02.21.2009)

The Great Depression lasted roughly twelve years, and we could be in for a similarly long run if things play-out the same as they did in the 1930s, namely from protectionism and general economic warfare. The next-step would likely be another world war. The recent developments in Switzerland do not bode well, but it's likely that Zurich will ultimately comply in the release of additional account information.But will other money laundering nations comply?

Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf travels to Washington on Monday for talks with her new US counterpart, Eric Holder, during which the UBS controversy is high on the agenda.
The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, has defended banking secrecy, arguing on Swiss television on Tuesday that it did not stand in the way of punishing those who committed criminal offences. ("Pressure on UBS continues to weigh heavy," Swissinfo.ch, 02.24.2009)

Before the New Deal and Bretton Woods, regulation of America's economy under the Republican Party (with Democratic enabling, like now) was generally nil. Additionally, the idea of an international monetary system was entirely new in 1944 when the meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire occurred.

The advantage we have now is that we at least have these precedents, but the warnings went unheeded thanks to various forms of market extremism that have lost their lustre in the face of reality, sunlight. This is another plus, but some are going to hang onto these extremist beliefs to their detriment. Some of the keys to solving the economic crisis will be limiting the effects of these false values to their holders through the enforcement of existing laws. The Justice Department's February 19th release (here-in-full) undescores the problem of capital flight and why it's harmful to the interests of the nation:

United States Asks Court to Enforce Summons for UBS Swiss Bank Account Records

WASHINGTON - The government filed a lawsuit today in Miami against Swiss bank UBS AG, the Justice Department announced. The lawsuit asks the court to order the international bank to disclose to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) the identities of the bank’s U.S. customers with secret Swiss accounts. According to the lawsuit, as many as 52,000 U.S. customers hid their UBS accounts from the government in violation of the tax laws.
The government alleges in the lawsuit that of those 52,000 secret accounts, about 20,000 contained securities and about 32,000 contained cash. According to a UBS document filed with the lawsuit, as of the mid-2000s, those secret accounts held about $14.8 billion in assets. Court documents allege that U.S. citizens failed to report and pay U.S. income taxes on income earned in those secret accounts.
According to the lawsuit, Swiss-based bankers actively marketed UBS’s services to wealthy U.S. customers within the United States. UBS documents filed with the lawsuit show that UBS bankers came to the United States to meet with U.S. clients nearly 4,000 times per year, in violation of U.S. law. According to court documents, the government alleges that UBS trained its bankers to avoid detection by U.S. authorities. Court documents further assert that many U.S. contacts occurred through UBS-sponsored sporting and cultural events, designed to appeal to extremely wealthy Americans.
The lawsuit alleges that UBS engaged in cross-border securities transactions in the United States that it knew violated U.S. security laws. The lawsuit also alleges that UBS helped hundreds of U.S. taxpayers set up dummy offshore companies, to make it easier for those taxpayers to avoid their reporting obligations under U.S. tax laws.
"At a time when millions of Americans are losing their jobs, their homes and their health care, it is appalling that more than 50,000 of the wealthiest among us have actively sought to evade their civic and legal duty to pay taxes," said John A. DiCicco, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Tax Division. "It is time for those who are trying to hide from the IRS to rethink their actions. The Department of Justice is committed to do all that it can to aid the IRS in locating those who would seek to hide behind secret accounts and in holding them accountable under the federal tax laws."
"We are committed to moving forward with the summons enforcement process. This action sends a strong signal to taxpayers hiding their money offshore. The IRS will be aggressive in pursuing people who shirk their obligations under the tax law. These people owe it to their fellow citizens to pay their fair share of taxes," said IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. "As Commissioner, I am committed to bringing to bear the full arsenal of IRS resources to pursue egregious offshore tax abuse. International tax issues are a top priority, and we will continue to aggressively pursue people hiding assets offshore. For people who are hiding money offshore, this serves as a wake-up call that they need to get right with their government. Taxpayers should talk to a tax professional and come forward under our voluntary disclosure process. Having the IRS find you could mean a much heavier price than coming forward on your own." ("United States Asks Court to Enforce Summons for UBS Swiss Bank Account Records," DOJ Release, 02.19.2009)

And today, it's practically a foregone conclusion that capital flight is going to be found to be a significant underlying factor in the current global economic crisis. It already has. That the Justice and Treasury Departments are currently pushing for the records of 52,000 other American depositors is a very dramatic development and practically unprecedented in economic history. Corruption and rampant criminality in the financial sectors of the world are the untold story of the economic crisis, (not) brought to us courtesy of the best mainstream media that money can buy. Reform at the FCC can address this problem, partly through legislative remedies.

Sound minds have been calling for reform of IMF and World Bank policies in these matters for decades, but what have we heard since at least as early as Ronald Reagan? That, "Government isn't the solution--it's the problem." But how else are the markets to be regulated to prevent economic catastrophes that lead to a worldwide conflagration like WWII? Even now, according to most American Libertarians and Republicans, there should be little-or-no state intervention in the financial and business sectors, it's amazing and stunning in its irrationality.
 

"Bretton Woods System" (happy reading):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

"Stop this timidity in ending tax haven abuse," Financial Times, 04.04.2008: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/63cdb642-ea03-11dc-b3c9-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Google's Bretton Woods Timeline (BEWARE: right-wing think tank links): http://www.google.com/archivesearch?hl=en&q=Bretton+Woods&um=1&ie=UTF-8&scoring=t&ei=0FakScDjAYzVnQf2msmYBQ&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&resnum=12&ct=title

"Swiss court blocks bank data disclosure," Radio Netherlands, 02.21.2009: http://www.radionetherlands.nl/news/international/6186235/Swiss-court-blocks-bank-data-disclosure

"Illicit Capital Flows and the Offshore Economy, Tax Justice Network, 2008: http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=101

"Pressure on UBS continues to weigh heavy," Swissinfo.ch, 02.24.2009: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news_digest/Pressure_on_UBS_continues_to_weigh_heavy.html?siteSect=104&sid=10373856&cKey=1235504307000&ty=nd

The WWII-era mass grave in Malbork could have been a specific historical statement

Malbork, Poland--Polish workers digging in a WWII bomb crater at the base of the Teutonic Knights fortress last October have found what appears to be a mass grave containing the bodies of 1,800 ethnic Germans of the town that was once called "Marienberg" under German rule, now Malbork under the Polish. The discovery is both shocking, and raises more questions so far than it answers.

The original inhabitants of Marienberg from that era have been missing since those murky last days of WWII when Red Army troops shelled the town in their push to Berlin. After the war, the town was repopulated with Poles driven-out of areas of Poland claimed as Russian territory by the Soviet regime. Until recently, nobody has had any idea what happened to them. Millions of civilians went missing in the chaos of WWII and have never been found. The discovery was made on the site of a proposed luxury hotel where there had been some exploratory digging before construction.

It's unknown whether the construction of the proposed hotel will proceed or not, but more official excavations by Polish authorities are planned to continue until there's more certainty that these are the missing inhabitants of Marienberg from over sixty-years-ago. By all accounts, they are. Since the end of WWII, 1,840 German citizens of the town have gone missing, so the numbers are very closely matched at this writing.

There is every reason to believe that the victims were slaughtered by Red Army troops. More than a few of the bodies had been shot in the back of the head in an execution-style that echoes the victims of the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of the Polish officer corps, begging the question of whether Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH) or the NKVD also had a hand in the killings. After April 6, 1918, the Red Army was accompanied by "political commissars," generally appointed by the Communist Party's hierarchy, separate from the military's. After 1942, political commissars were referred to as a "politruk"(политру́к).

Until 1991, every military leader in the Red Army's hierarchy had a political counterpart. Both officers would have to agree on an order or action for it to be "legally"expedited by troops on the ground. In other words, the Communist Party had to be part of the decision to execute the surviving citizens of Marienberg after the initial shelling of the town. According to Der Spiegel, one-in-ten of the bodies recovered so far had been shot in the head; all the dead were then buried naked without any belongings, not even shoes or identification papers.

There is the possibility that Stalin was indirectly or directly part of this decision--and many others of its kind--as he was intimately familiar with the political commissar structure. Stalin had been a political commissar during the Russian Civil War. The phantom of Katyn and other massacres of that era haunt the Marienberg event, the vagaries of war aside.

In the final days of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev revealed in 1989 that the NKVD had in fact expedited the slaughter at Katyn under Stalin's orders and that there were three killing-and-disposal sites located in the forest outside of Smolensk. Numbers of the murdered in this one instance hover at around 25,000. While the numbers slaughtered by totalitarian regimes during the 20th century were unprecedented, there is a long history of this kind of activity in the Baltic region, and there are clues in the historical record that point to the possibility that the killings in the then-Marienberg were symbolic and meant to send a message to ethnic Germans.

The location of the mass grave was certainly convenient, but it's placement before a Teutonic Knights fortress could be very telling.

700 years before the slaughter in Marienberg, the Teutonic Knights had invaded Russia at Novgorod, then were defeated by Russian Prince Alexander Nevsky and his troops at the "Battle of the Ice" ( Ледовое побоище) on April 5, 1242 at Lake Peipus. The Teutonic Knights were part of a coalition of Swedish, German Livonian and Teutonic orders, and Danish forces sent under the auspicies of the Vatican (Pope Gregory the IX) to subdue pagans and Eastern Orthodox ruling structures throughout the Baltic region in the "Northern Crusades." Outside of the expected killing incurred during warfare, liquidations occurred in the name of spreading the Catholic faith and monarchial influence, while extinguishing the pagan and Eastern Orthodox ones. The Iron Cross comes from the Teutonic Knights.

Was the Red Army contingent sending a historically-tinged message to Germans? Perhaps. German resistance in Marienberg had been especially vicious, so any vengeance message pointing-out a historical-parallel might have been accidental on the part of the Red Army contingent: Marienberg had been founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1274 when it was part of conquered pagan Prussia, just a little over thirty years after the Battle of the Ice. After its founding the town was the seat of the Teutonic Order, and it controlled access to the Baltic, levying tolls on the merchant shipping of various nationalities. Similar ambitions arose during the 20th century.

It was well known during WWII that Himmler's SS had consciously patterned themselves after the Teutonic Knights, with their own racialist and anti-communist rhetoric of "godless" Slavic enemies being barely distinguishable from their Medieval Catholic counterparts. The parallels between the SS system and the Teutonic Knights' expansionist feudalism, enslavement, their network of castles, and their own purges of civilian populations, are eerily similar.

Stalin and his NKVD (later, the KGB, now the FSB) had similar aims and utilized the same terror tactics, and on a comparable scale. Soviet troops had plenty of reasons to want payback that had nothing to do with crimes committed 700 years earlier, but it might have been a factor in their actions. Soviet archives could answer most of these questions. The Teutonic Knights still exist, with their seat in Vienna since 1809. History has a way of repeating itself, negating the necessity for reincarnation.

"Katyn Forst Massacre-Polish Deaths at Soviet Hands": http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/

"Malbork Massacre: World War II Mass Grave Unearthed in Poland," Der Spiegel, 01.08.2008: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,600216,00.html

Bush ruminates on the failure of 60 years of GOP excesses at NYC's Federal Hall

Wall Street--Meeting at the venerable Federal Hall where the Bill of Rights he's despoiled as much as he and his vice president could get away with was penned and debated, soon-to-be ex-President George W. Bush made some remarkably stupid comments that are only going to cement his legacy as our era's Herbert Hoover.

One imagines that you could cut the irony with a butter-knife: "I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown,""It would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success," and the capper of, "It is true that this crisis included failures, by leaders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." The final quote is paradox-ridden.

Do any of these statements jibe with each other at all? Maybe if you're comatose. Does he even know what the hell he's saying? Did he ever? Do economists? Does the lame duck president sound like he knows what he's talking about? Does the Treasury Secretary or the Fed chair? No to all of them, but bozo is on his way out anyway and there will be investigations into the corruption of his administration regardless of how many pardons he hands-out. Why? The public's going to scream for it in-the-midst of general strikes and rioting that will not be quelled. Nobody can pacify a sociological explosion.

Whenever the Democrats fail to achieve that coveted 60 seat, filibuster-proof majority, the Republicans have had the opening they've needed to obstruct a social-dividend, being the traditional minority party of obstructionism. They should be good at it: they remained in the minority after the Great Depression for good reason for over 50 years. You get good at being the minority under those conditions, and they're going to get more practice again. What was happening 60-years-ago? It was when the Republican Party began their endgame against the New Deal and progressive politics in-general, sweeping into the Halls of Congress, ultimately bringing us such friendly lights as Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, and Joseph McCarthy (he sneaked in during the 1946 elections). Would we all be where we are now without the tragic-results of the 1948 national elections?

Barry Goldwater would enter the Senate in 1953. McCarthyism--a misnomer since HUAC was formed before his entry into Congress--grew to monumental proportions during the 1950s, and thousands of lives were wrecked. The "Eisenhower era" is synonymous with repressiveness and secrecy, just like this one, and free-thinking was discouraged. Conglomerates and the interstate highway system were created during this period, thanks to the GOP and the Eisenhower administration.

The postwar "economic miracle" smothered dissent with a runaway consumerism that's finally crashing. Rather than blaming Americans for the global recession, Europeans and the rest of the developed world should be happy--they now have an opening to escape concentrated American capital, and they should take it. People with differing opinions tended to keep them to themselves. Nearly everyone in Washington was running amok, but the Republicans took center stage, eventually pushing Truman into military action in Korea by implying he and his party were "soft on communism" and "pink." It's amethod that has now run out of steam, along with race-baiting. Gay-baiting and the attacks on rationality, science, and secular culture, are now losing any of their sting. "Sixty-years-ago," is a distant past, an antique of another era. Who were some of its architects? Right in-front of your face, even today.

The Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the rest of the American business and financial community, did their best trying to crush any remaining dissent through the red-baiting of the "McCarthy era," and through every single communications medium available at the time. The same methods achieved the Vietnam war, a more bipartisan affair than is normally acknowledged. Any notion of JFK pulling-out troops from Vietnam permanently is a political mythology that flies-in-the-face of the now declassified internal record. Yet, it all fits-into a false narrative--a false consciousness that has been fostered for decades--that the two party system represents the will of the American people. It does not.

A massive propaganda campaign selling what we know today as the postwar "American Dream" was concocted and sold beginning in the late-1940s. Some of the key to this was to detach the American people from a consciousness of their history, of their past. A consumerist culture reflects this drive where the individual is stripped of any past...or any future, only a perpetual present. In Europe, the Marshall Plan was beginning, and it entailed the same aims towards pacification: to impose American-style capitalism on a freshly-radicalized Continent that was definitely disposed towards heading left politically and economically. Now do you understand the anti-Americanism of the postwar era? I thought not. America offered the carrot-and-the-stick in George Marshall's rebuilding program and in the creation of paramilitary groups and CIA intimidation of legitimate domestic political parties, acting suspiciously as the Nazi occupiers had.

My own grandfather watched in horror as his own superiors--U.S. Army officers--were ordered to reinstall a Nazi Burgomeister (it's like a mayor) in a German village they were occupying under General George S. Patton's 3rd Army. A lot of WWII veterans experienced these things and saw them as a betrayal just as my grandfather did then and for the rest of his life. "What the hell were we fighting for?" he asked me. "Big business," I replied. He agreed. Never underestimate the intelligence of the average man, and heed their warnings. The warning-sings were boldly apparent in the shattered ruins of postwar Europe.

The joint CIA-Mafia crushing of the dock strikes in the Port of Marseille in 1947 (and later in 1950), the destruction of the Communist Army (also former anti-Nazi partisans) in Greece that same year, the assassinations of Communist Party leaders in Sicily and Italy, and the assassinations of former partisan leaders throughout the rest of Western Europe were the opening-shots of a campaign of violent pacification by American power. The State Department revived international organized crime and and their drug smuggling operations to facilitate this.

Many of the individuals these operatives and criminals tortured, murdered, and intimidated had been part of the resistance movements under German occupation, and were frequently their leadership. In France, Italy, Germany, and other European nations, former fascist politicians and judges were reinstalled into their former positions of power. Such are the origins of the "Christian Democrats." The natural political-shift that was to alter Europe into a more leftist model was blunted considerably, but not entirely.

The wheel turns, and history and its forces will not be denied forever, and Europe blaming us for this mess is ultimately appropriate. This is how the current international economy came into being.

The 1950s was an unusually repressive decade, thanks mostly to the GOP. Loyalty oaths had to be signed, religion was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance (and still there!), and the hunt for essentially nonexistent "fifth columnists" continued in-earnest until HUAC was laughed down in the mid-1960s. Enough has been written and stated on the criminal behavior of the GOP during the 1960s-70s, but can be summed-up in the name of one man: Richard M. Nixon. If it weren't for the creation of a Republican majority in the Senate in 1948, it's doubtful that the last sixty years would have played-out quite the way they did, and that would be just fine.

"Sixty years of success" was their success and the success of the two party monopoly over our political system; but it was big business and finance that truly won, the real power behind the throne, the faceless dictatorship. But without the Democrats, they couldn't have done it. Make no mistake about it: these bastards will do anything in their power to preserve their position--just as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, the Hollenzollerns, and the Romanovs did, giving us the war that ruined the entire 20th century, WWI. If they have to drag us all down into hell to do it, they'll make the attempt. The key is knowing this and consciously refusing to serve their interests. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but the alternatives are far worse--we could just continue-on like before, finally reaching that real catastrophe that's been awaiting us.

The market system never worked, and it was much closer to Marxist-Leninist forced production, with both the Soviet and American approaches embracing Frederick Taylor's "scientific management."

Really, they were just two-sides of the same coin of an authoritarianism poised to extinguish humanity from the earth. The Soviet Union and its order fell leaving the U.S. without a viable enemy, so we created as many of them as possible throughout the world to feed the war machine that maintains our hold on the seaways and markets of the world. This was a forced arrangement more than it was a natural one, and still is.

This crisis is the end of Empire, which gives hope to those who desire life in a real democracy; but it doesn't mean the powerful are going down without a fight. That's what the war on terrorism is for, and it's not going to work. All the last eight years have done is to erode American power in the world, and to isolate us diplomatically. The economic part is coming soon, maybe tomorrow.

George W. Bush didn't make this postwar order, he was just instrumental in wrecking it. Thanks George, our first Socialist--on-accident, mind you--president. I've been wondering when two generations of business domination were going to end. It truly is a new day in America, a time for the working man (and woman) to seize unique historical opportunities and to take all that concentrated power and wealth away from a class of privileged criminals who have used violence to get and keep what they stole from the rest of us. If the American public don't start using their heads, we're going to see another world war, it's coming otherwise.

Breaking news (OK, it's old): "Obama girl" for Nader and ruminations on the Cult of Personality

The Campaign Trail of Hope(?)--Obama girl has changed her mind on Barack over the last few months, and she's not alone.

Neither major party candidate is addressing the current financial crisis in any substantial or concrete terms, just more of the same. For this reason and all the numerous others, it's time to build a strong third party movement in America, and it has been a long time coming.

Though attempts at this during the Great Depression didn't pan-out, the voice of the people was heard loud and clear through the protest vote. The message remained clear, even after being filtered through the tragically flawed "pundits" and "Populist" leaders of that time, like the Catholic Father Charles E. Coughlin, Huey Long, and Dr. Francis E. Townsend.

Coughlin was a Catholic priest who preached a kind of peculiar social liberation gospel out of Northern Michigan and had a radio show from which he railed against Wall Street after the great crash of 1929. Long was an utterly corrupt Governor of Louisiana (though he did deliver social programs better than most states, even bettering the federal government's) who was dead by an assassin's bullet by 1935, and Dr. Townsend was a retired Doctor who found himself 66 and destitute during the Great Depression. After a long period of lecturing for aid to the elderly, Townsend actually had some real success with the creation of Social Security for the elderly. Millions listened to his radio broadcasts on the economic crisis and the government's inaction, and sent his organization large amounts of money as they did with Long and Coughlin. But these weren't perfect men by any means.

The others succumbed to their own egos in some way or another and became what is commonly known as "demagogues," which is much like accusing someone of yelling fire in a crowded theater. You might cause a stampede. But were they rabble rousers trying to fan the flames of hysteria in-the-midst of the Great Depression and the government's inaction under Herbert Hoover? Yes and no, though--like everything else--it's down to one's political opinions and persuasion where you come down on their methods and rhetoric. The fact is, people were angry and confused just as they are today and wanted some voice of reason, or any voice, that echoed their concerns and offered proposals to fix the economy. Not being genius material, these very famous men were really just channels for the feelings and ideas of the public during hard times, lifted-up by the masses to address and convey what the public wanted.

After all, here are no supermen coming to save us, and the public is the solution. As then, we're trying hard not to learn this, but we might succeed despite ourselves in improving our lives when this all blows over. When we no longer need them, we discard the so-called "strong men," because we should.

Predicably, Coughlin tended to go with whatever the trends of the day happened to be at the moment on his radio show, a program that was heard by as many as 40 million at its peak. In some respects, the "radio priest" whose broadcasts and sermons originated out of Royal Oak, Michigan, resembles today's Michael Moore who uses the mainstream media to spread the message of a socially progressive agenda. But that's where the comparisons end. [Ed., 10.25.2008--Both men have roots in Canada. Coughlin was originally from there, while Moore has Canadian relatives.]

Charles E. Coughlin was the same kind of disappointing blend of Jew-baiter and hypocrite as many of the Populists of the 1890s had been (my own great-great grandfather possibly being one). To be certain, the radio priest was a reactionary fascist who made a fortune from his radio broadcasts against Wall Street and the rest of big business--and then promptly invested in it. The irony is that without much of his agitating--and the agitating of the other Populists and the Left--against the Roosevelt administration and Congress, a number of important pieces of social legislation might never have gone anywhere. Bad times open-up these kinds of opportunities, and nothing comes from power without a demand, even when the messengers are wrong-headed boobs.

Coughlin, who claimed to have confronted the KKK for their acts of anti-Catholic violence degenerated into--or was revealed to be--a rabid anti-Semite and a hypocrite, finally embracing Hitler and National Socialism in Germany by the late-1930s. He was far from alone in this, and shared this opinion of fascism with that of the business class of his day. One of them was the grandfather of George W. Bush. After Pearl Harbor, nobody wanted to listen to the radio priest anymore. His Union Party and the Populist convention that converged in 1936 couldn't agree on much, his popularity was waning due to revelations of his own large-holdings on the Wall Street he railed against, and with the assassination of Huey Long, the momentum for a viable Populist Party had stalled once again (an 1896 attempt had also failed). But then, there's the fact that change sometimes occurs on-accident, but that's life. Long was larger-than-life.

As should be clear by now, Huey Long ran the state of Louisiana like a dictator. Yet Long began what was the template for massive public works programs in the state and went as far as to levy heavy taxes on the oil companies drilling off the shores of the Gulf state. Imagine a politician doing this today, because you're going to have to. At one point, Long was both the governor and a senator of and to Louisiana. Many in and out of Louisiana thought he was a run amok demagogue who had to be stopped.

To say that Huey Long was flamboyant would be an understatement, and the governor used the medium of radio and speechmaking as well as Coughlin and FDR, if not better. Eventually, his growing power and fame would put him in an adversarial position with the president and many others. Ironically, the Louisiana governor was a longtime supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but his own aspirations for the White House severed the ties between them. In 1934, Long created the "Share-our-Wealth Society," a political organization that was supported by tens-of-millions like Coughlin's and Townsend's own groups. When Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama mentioned the term "share-our-wealth," he was referring to Long in an oblique way.

Long stated in an April, 1935 radio address:

Now in the third year of his administration, we find more of our people unemployed than at any other time. We find our houses empty and our people hungry, many of them half-clothed and many of them not clothed at all.
Mr. Hopkins announced twenty-two millions on the dole, a new high-water mark in that particular sum, a few weeks ago. We find not only the people going further into debt, but that the United States is going further into debt. The states are going further into debt, and the cities and towns are even going into bankruptcy. The condition has become deplorable. Instead of his promises, the only remedy that Mr. Roosevelt has prescribed is to borrow more money if he can and to go further into debt. The last move was to borrow $5 billion more on which we must pay interest for the balance of our lifetimes, and probably during the lifetime of our children. And with it all, there stalks a slimy specter of want, hunger, destitution, and pestilence, all because of the fact that in the land of too much and of too much to wear, our president has failed in his promise to have these necessities of life distributed into the hands of the people who have need of them. (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5109/)

It all sounds very familiar, even timely to our present crisis. Long was dead not long after the broadcast, and it had been hoped that he would be part of a coalition with Townsend, Coughlin, and other progressive groups fighting for social programs to fix a broken nation and economy. With the exception of Huey Long, none of these men ever held public office and were generally off the public stage by the end of the 1930s. Their dreams--and the dreams of the tens-of-millions of Americans who backed them--of a unified national Populist Party--were dashed on the rocks.

Yet, things changed in the several of the directions they had pushed, and they influenced the public dialogue for a badly needed social agenda during an unprecedented economic crisis. It wasn't just FDR or Congress that created the New Deal. It was the American people, speaking through these horribly imperfect men, who achieved the Social Security programs, the public works programs that brought people out of widespread unemployment and poverty, who created progressive taxation, who unionized the workplaces of predatory and exploitative employers, and who helped civilize this society in ways their ancestors would have thought unthinkable.

But where does Ralph Nader fit into this? Why should he run at all if he doesn't have much of a chance of winning?

Things change, and contexts change. We're in a threshold moment in our history where things are never going to be the same ever again. These moments hold incredible opportunities that must be acted on by the public if they want them to go in a constructive direction for all. Some of the infrastructure is already here with the internet, but we must begin rebuilding social-networks based on trust and friendship. The day of "me first, and only me" is coming to a crashing end, and only by banding together and helping one another will we come out the other end with a nation worth living in and defending.

"Obama girl" isn't a girl at all, but a woman. She's grown-up and understands that the two party system is going to fail us without some very hard shoves. For this reason, she--like myself and many others--will be supporting our most responsible public citizen, Ralph Nader. Because, you don't always have to "win," but you have to pressure the people in Washington endlessly to do what you want them to do for the good of everyone. Hint: you don't ask. Trust is important, foster it in yourself and others. Have someone else's back. Smile. Make a friend. Open a door for an old lady. Give people the right-of-way. Treat others as you would like to be treated. That's the social contract, and it's time to retake the political process in this country. Why Nader? Why not? People like Ralph Nader are here to push the politicians to serve the public.

The myth is that Nader's the "spoiler" of the 2000 election, which is a lie and holds an anti-democratic attitude that deserves no quarter. Democrats should remember that the Republicans are working hard to attempt stealing this election as they have done so for a very long time. But there's a catch: it has to be close. That's also not Ralph Nader's fault, but the fault of the electorate for choosing poorly, especially when they vote Republican, truly the party of crime and corruption.

Vote with your heart and your mind, but also with your conscience. Don't ignore the warning-signs of a candidate, and remember that you're going to hold them accountable once they're in office. The last eight years is the cost of apathy and indifference in these areas.


Postscript, 10.25.2008: The best thing to remember with Nader is that he's also a person-of-color, an Arab-American, and one of the finest examples of the positive-effects of immigration for America. His parents were Lebanese. I will be voting for another historically unprecedented candidate besides Obama. Who's done more for America? Obama or Ralph Nader? It wouldn't matter who it was--don't listen to me--a voter--and you're going to be out. That includes Ralph Nader, or anyone else.

My favorite photo, and the turning of the wheel...

This is a photograph of my mother and grandfather. He'd just returned from WWII, from the European theater, having served under that nut General George "Blood and Guts" Patton. My mother looks so thrilled to see her daddy coming home. WWII was necessary.

Military-style fascism had to be crushed in Germany and Japan and all of the occupied territories. But this same fascism still infects America, and it must be crushed. Luckily, it's extinguishing itself.

My grandfather never fully recovered from his experiences in the war. For the rest of his life, he was very nervous man with a hair-trigger temper. He couldn't connect very well with my mother because she had been born in 1944, after he'd left to serve in the Army. He wasn't a dumbass, he was drafted, he didn't enlist. I respect him for this greatly. He had sense. When he came back, the economy was far worse than it is right now (just wait). What can I say? He was a good man who found it hard to express his feelings to his family, but we loved him just the same.

Today, I dug-out some of these old photos to show to my three-year-old niece, Zofia, to show her what her grandma looked like as a baby (exactly like Zofia, since we have non-recessive genes). She's a precocious little baby with a big heart and a mostly peaceful temperment. She rarely cries. She's a joy. When I showed her this and other photos and told her "This is grandma," she said, "No--this is Zofia!"

Rollie and Billie, father and daughter, finally united--it was 1946, and the Cold War had yet to be invented by the politicians (mainly the utterly corrupt GOP). When the wars have ended, when tyranny has been smashed, when people finally learn to live amongst one another in relative peace, and when we realize that we're all a family, we'll have the same moment of love that Rollie and Billie lived 62-years-ago. That moment was--and is--love. Love for ourselves and each other, because it really is that simple. The circle is unbroken.

OK Indiana, you upset my expectations with the primaries, but I was still right.

Indiana's 2nd District--Say what you want, but Indiana and my own voting district has miraculously made me proud. OK, it wasn't all that miraculous: even racist Hoosiers know that Clinton isn't going to fix anything, and that we're going to get more of the same from her and the McInsane, that guy with a hair-trigger temper and a yen for making Beach Boys songs into hymnals for bombing Iran. The difference between George W. Bush, Hilliary Clinton, and John McCain is: nada, zip, zero.

The good news:My own district, and the county I live in (St. Joseph) voted predominantly for Barack Obama. That's saying something, as this isn't a particularly enlightened region--Michiana--but we've got the nuts outnumbered, an obverse to the 19th century when Abolitionists who ferried runaway slaves through here were the minority. Attitudes have changed significantly, and we're moving in a better direction. It hurts to write this again, but we're improving as the WWII generation dies-out. So the wheel turns, the real meaning of "revolution."

Predictably, National Socialist (GOP) candidate Tony Zirkle (see article below) lost in the primary race, but received an appallingly-high vote of nearly 6,000. It takes a very motivated racist to vote for someone as clearly insane as Zirkle, but we have them outnumbered. They're a fringe-phenomena, and it's enjoyable to watch the candidate waste his own money with his personal lost-cause of theocratic white supremacy.

Emigrantes mexicanos, tengai cuidado! Tony Zirkle es un abogado que no actuará en el mejor de vuestros intereses, el es contra los emigrantes!

Hilliary Clinton received just a barely 2% margin-of-victory over Barack Obama, which is considerably less than her "victory" in Pennsylvania. It's not going to be enough for her to prevail. We can thank her and the mainstream media for the paltry 2%. They hammered-home the Rev. Wright story again-and-again, going well beyond "heavy rotation." If it seemed like the GOP echo-chamber, that's because it was.

The Indiana count: At this writing, candidate Clinton holds 643, 442 votes (51%), while candidate Obama holds 629, 029 (49%). Clinton has garnered 37 delegates, while Obama has earned 33, but today Obama received the superdelegate endorsement of George McGovern. This comes from CNN, with 99% reporting. That's hardly a victory for Senator Hillary Clinton at all. It doesn't help her overall, and today we're hearing that she's dipping into her massive savings for $5.6 million as a "loan" to her campaign.

How does one loan oneself money, and is she good for it? Thank heavens for stupid girls, because stupid girls vote Clinton everyday. We're the state of Eugene Debs and New Harmony. It's just that we keep trying to forget. How did I vote? Obama. Rep. Joe Donnelly got no vote, and never will again for standing with President Bush on Iraq, and for helping block impeachment.

Donnelly needs to go, but there's no viable Democratic or third party candidates running against him (take that, Steve Francis). The one Republican who was for a withdrawal from Iraq (his name was Roush) lost along with Tony Zirkle. I would have voted for Mr. Roush over Joe Donnelly any day.

Indiana's Election results as of 3:38PM: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/state/#IN

Ken Russell Extravaganza!

"I have two more breakthrough films on the stocks – Porn-Again Christian and A Chink in the Curtains. Each one lasts just one minute, including credits." --Ken Russell, December 14th, 2007.

Russellmania--That wonderful enfant terrible of cinema has been writing an often hilarious and always thoughtful column for The Times. Ken Russell also has a new film entitled 'A Kitten for Hitler,' and it's free, online for all you deadbeats: http://www.comedybox.tv/index.aspx . Ken gives a bit of a synopsis at Comedy Box when he states that:

This story concerns Lenny, a naive little Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who reasons that Hitler wouldn’t be so bad if he were treated like a human being instead of a monster. Accordingly, he risks life and limb to cross war-torn Europe to deliver to "Uncle Adolf" a placatory Christmas present in the shape of a cuddly kitten [Ed.-I think we should try this with the president, don't you?]. Moved to tears, the Führer hands him a swastika-shaped bagel from the Christmas tree, whereupon Lenny pulls up his shirt, revealing an almost identical birthmark. What happens next I leave to your imagination– likewise the moving payoff.

Here's to extremely bad taste done on-the-cheap!And this is just one of a few other films of Ken's that are available, free, and online to all you cheap bastards out there.

Ken's newest article at The Times (UK): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3074343.ece

The Forgotten Genocide: Stalin's Purges

Russia/Central Asia--Why don't we hear about this more often? Why are we constantly inundated about the Shoah/Holocaust, but not the liquidation of tens-of-millions of ethnic and dissident groups and individuals under Stalinism?

The answer should be pretty obvious, and saddening: they don't have advocacy groups with the resources, they are history's losers without any voice because they were powerless then and are today.

In this world, the weak are to be scorned, if remembered at all. During the Cold War, our government used these victims of Stalin as propaganda, a secondary abuse and exploitation of their lives (and deaths). Did we ever care? Of course not, the State Department of the United States of America didn't care at all, and welcomed the rise of a 'strong man' in Russia just as they did in Germany around the very same time.

Historians estimate--though we will never truly know--that somewhere around 20 million human beings were murdered under Stalin's orders by the NKVD/KGB. Today, we're hearing that it was all about "ideology," which is partly true, but what it was really just a human disaster. The West not only didn't care, but was responsible for some of the depredations and couldn't be bothered to intervene (there are no humanitarian invasions), let alone to stop the slaughter indirectly.

Yes, today, we're being told it all began in 1937, but it's not true. The slaughter's beginnings were significantly earlier if one considers Lenin's and Trotsky's use of 'the terror' against all enemies of Bolshevism--even the Soviet councils in the cities, as they were the first to be targeted by Lenin and his gangsters. The terror began during the Russian Civil War in which millions died, and even more would perish during the collectivization programs in the Ukraine during 1932-1933.

Grain was taken from the peasants and sold on the international market to pay for a disastrous process of rapid industrialization. Western nations had no problem accepting the transactions of grain for equipment and other resources. Estimates for this particular period are six-to-seven million dead alone, and it was most certainly "systematic."

The murdering would continue, with entire villages disappearing into the night until the invasion June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Some of these victims are finally being discovered, sometimes in mass graves in public parks, with the numbers in the tens-of-thousands at just one location. By now, any fool should know that this happened, but few care or want to learn from it. FDR's attitude towards the Soviet Union merely echoed that of the rest of political and economic class he was a part of. Rhetoric is meant to be deceiving.

Even after 1933 (the year of Soviet Russia's recognition by the US State Department) there would be a continuation of mass murder during the years of Stalin's reign of terror. Was it all on Stalin and his accomplices? Yes and no. WWI devastated the Russian Empire, and Tsar Nicholas II's decision to command the army during the war--and subsequently losing it--left a power vacuum in the region. The legitimacy of the Tsar was forever tarnished, and what infrastructure there had been in Russia was destroyed and social networks were fragmented. Chaos ruled. This created a very fertile soil indeed for anyone who claimed to have answers and who showed sureness, decisiveness, and who offered order and certainty.

But once you make extreme violence part of your approach, it's almost impossible to end it, it continues-on and spreads like a plague. Weep for the dead, they were like us.

Because of the ubiquitous uncertainty gripping Russia, and the divisiveness of the Civil War, few people trusted each other. A culture of informing on one another began to catch like a wildfire, and one's loyalty to the State under the control of the Bolsheviks became the central contention: did you support order or not? A chain reaction took-hold. History isn't simply about "bad guys" and "good guys," and people do terrible things when they're desperate. If you want a good analogy, imagine a society eating itself from the inside out, just as Germany was also doing at the same time. Both nations were socially and economically devastated thanks to WWI, the war that ruined the 20th century. Our options become radically limited once we have unleashed extreme violence on others. Consider this when reflecting on our current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Great Purge' of 1937-38 (with the subsequent "show trials") was a purging of the Communist Party's inner circles. Stalin was finishing the job of his consolidation of power, and like Hitler, he enjoyed pitting others against each other. What's unfortunate is that this purge is probably going to be confused as being the overall purge that continued unabated from Lenin and Trotsky, into Stalin's bloody-hands. Stalin was just following in their footsteps, and it's not hard to fathom that many of the millions-of-deaths also occurred simply because he was incompetent and had no idea how to rule a nation at all.

Lenin surely didn't know how to rule either, and as crazy as it sounds, he probably died of stroke brought-on by too much paperwork. We focus too much on these acts of destruction as being a sign of "power," when more often they're a sign that a Stalin's or a Hitler's reign are really bumbling tragedies of those clearly unfit to rule. Strong leaders avoid such calamities, and understand the art of compromise, the give-and-take. Destruction doesn't always mean power, but it can mean the avoidable deaths of millions. At least Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this.

Kenneth D. Ackerman's "Young J. Edgar" (review)

Reading Kenneth D. Ackerman's book, one has to wonder why the "Palmer Raids" weren't called the "Hoover-Caminetti Raids." It's unlikely that there will be a better telling of the Palmer Raids--and by his almost central role in them--the early-years and rise of J. Edgar Hoover within the bureaucracy of the Department of Justice. Few have ever achieved the power that Hoover did at such a tender age (a mere 24 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer tapped him to run the new Radical Division in that fateful year of 1919), and Mr. Ackerman's keen eye for important anecdotes, social scope, personal details, and the importance of key-documents serves this book well.

It's more than just important historiography, it's an accessible treatment on our history, and is required reading for those of us who value our liberties and eschew the politics of the "strong man" and frontier justice.

Most of the book covers the Palmer Raids (late-1919-to-late-1920) themselves, but we learn a number of things about J. Edgar Hoover's early-years that appear to have escaped some authors: his mother's stern authoritarianism and emotional coldness, the emphasis on punishment in Hoover's psychology and behavior that emerges early in his youth (Hoover loved attending lurid trials), a possible African-American ancestor, the effects of his father's mental illness on his behavior at home, the demographics of Washington D.C. and his own neighborhood (Hoover's own during the early-part of the 20th century was populated with Blacks and Whites), the racism of the times towards immigrants (especially Russian, thanks to the October revolution in 1917), the working-class, and Blacks. Hoover--and most of his contemporaries in government--held these xenophobic views. They were very common in America at that time.

Like Hitler, Hoover's father was a government clerk, a functionary, and Hoover modeled himself as the ultimate apolitical bureaucrat over time. Ackerman brings the era Hoover grew-up in with a storyteller's skill and a historiographer's discipline. The years covering the Palmer Raids are brought to breathtaking life, and the parallels with our own war on terror are inescapable without any need on the author's part in citing them.

This serves the text well, as it never lapses into the pedantic or the fantastical, as many Hoover biographies tend towards. What we get is what we really know about the Palmer Raids--the attorneys and government bureaucrats who fought the illegal nature of the raids and subsequent detentions, their effects on people and their liberties, Hoover's role in them (a central one), the major events of 1919 that contributed to their creation, and their enduring legacy.

Was the threat as great as people thought at the time? One gets the feeling that some in the federal bureaucracy were still fighting WWI, a period replete with its own abuses of civil liberties and crackdowns under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, as well as the Immigration Act of 1918 that gave the Palmer Raids some of their dubious legal foundation. As with most postwar periods, a deep recession occurred, and labor violence was prevalent. So was fear of the American left and immigrant communities. Ackerman makes a good case that it certainly appeared revolution and chaos were nigh, and notes that the issues are the same now as they were then.

Context is everything. In January of 1919, Seattle was in a general strike that lasted around a week, while in March, the Third International was declaring an international revolution with communists (Bolshevism directed by Lenin) at its vanguard. Then, there were the "May Day" bombings that targeted J.P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Rockefeller, four cabinet members, and a commissioner of immigration. And there was more-to-come. A police strike in Boston, a national coal and steel strike (imagine the effect of 1 million going-on-strike in a crucial industry today), and more bombings throughout the nation, even as late as September of 1920 when the hysteria had already died down.

It's a minor-quibble, but another aspect of the raids (including those of the Lusk committee in New York City) and bombings could have been stimulated by real espionage, some of it by Russian operatives, double-agents, as well as informants and provocateurs working for Great Britain's SIS office. It's a little-known sidebar, and Ackerman does include American Military Intelligence in the picture, so he has some of it covered. Hoover was probably aware of this angle, and had files from Military Intelligence on one of the possible players in the September, 1920 bombing of Wall Street: Kurt Jahnke.
Hoover may even have known from existing-files from his friends at Military Intelligence of the possible involvement of Sidney Reilly (and many other players) in wartime profiteering, espionage, and the bombing of munitions dumps at the Black Tom Terminal in New Jersey, 1916. He might have been aware of Reilly's possible connections to some of the bombings of 1919 in the United States. New York City was a hub for international commerce and espionage--frequently the same thing--during the era, and most of the players were double and triple-agents. This is the lot of the informant/provocateur and secret agent. Jahnke also worked for Sidney Reilly. Again, a minor-quibble, and easily a subject for another book. This absence does nothing to impair "Young J. Edgar."

Jahnke is directly-linked to both Black Tom and the Wall Street bombings, as well as Reilly and various spy agencies at that time. The Black Tom bombing is usually ascribed to "German" saboteurs, but the event was also useful as one more action that pushed America into siding with Great Britain in WWI. The seizing of a Sinn Fein activist during the raids also tends towards these possibilities. British intelligence had been working overtime towards getting Americans involved in the Great War. With the war over, and Russia in a revolutionary stasis, British interests were eying the Baku oil fields, and wanted to dominate Russia economically.

They were hardly alone: so did the American State Department and sundry other business interests. One of them was J.P. Morgan. The 1920 bombing of Wall Street came at a propitious moment for Britain--it likely sealed the deportation of Ludwig Martens, then trying to gain recognition for the Soviet regime in America. Major banking and business interests were interested. The Red Scare killed any possibility for recognition for at least a decade. Then there's the war we almost had between Great Britain and Japan during the early-1920s...

In March of 1919, Hoover was made A. Mitchell Palmer's assistant at the Department of Justice, and would shortly head the Bureau of Investigation's Radical Division after June of that year. It's just one of several fateful mistakes made by appointed politicians in our nation's history, and one-of-many that would propel J. Edgar Hoover into a position of unchallenged power and authority for nearly fifty years. Much of this was dumb luck. Even a good number of Hoover's challengers during the legal fight against the raids seemed to underestimate his role, and he did as much as he could over the years to hide it. The truth is, he was practically the architect of the Palmer Raids, and his subsequent career almost plays like a rerun of them, even decades later.

Ackerman asks us an important question as citizens of a democracy: how do we balance public safety and civil liberties in a time of upheaval and unrest? We should be wary of those in public office who feel they know all the answers to these questions in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist attack or bombing. One has to wonder if the raids would have happened at all had a bomber not tripped on his way to Palmer's front-door the night of June 2nd, 1919. Attorney General Palmer wasn't the only person on the list of the terrorists. Nearly all were prominent politicians or businessmen. To most, it appeared that Bolshevik revolution was spreading throughout the globe and onto American shores in the form of immigration.

Today, we don't really know what the threat even constitutes, but the reactions have been not only similar to those during the years 1919-1920, they have gone much further. At the time of this writing, habeas corpus is still in-suspension by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that Mr. Ackerman astutely lists in his notes. With the Senate Judiciary hearings into the U.S. Attorney firing scandal (that's now being connected by committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy to the warrantless wiretapping programs of the Bush administration), we're finding that people of the same age as Hoover circa-1919 are being given unparalleled power at the Department of Justice and other sectors of the federal bureaucracy. We're only beginning to discover what they've done in the name of fighting terrorism, now that our current national hysteria has begun to abate.

Monica Goodling and several other appointees at Justice were being consciously culled from Regents School of Law in-the-aftermath of September 11th, 2001. We should be asking ourselves why. "Are we creating new Hoovers?" asks Kenneth Ackerman. We very well could be. Were it not for legal scholars and attorneys like Felix Frankfurter, Clarence Darrow, as well as men like Secretary of Labor William Wilson, or assistant Sec. of Labor Louis F. Post, the precedents of the Palmer Raids would have stood. Were it not for them--as Mr. Ackerman notes--our very concepts and legal traditions surrounding civil liberties would be as impoverished as they were in 1919. As in Hoover's day, the key to curing unaccountable power will be in finding the incriminating files.

5,000-10,000 human beings were shunted into detention centers in various locations throughout the country without access to legal representation, or even a working-toilet under the Palmer Raids. Hundreds of "radical aliens" were deported from Ellis Island in a horrible inversion of the American dream. Can it happen again? In various-forms under the war on terror, it already has.

J-7 would like to thank Mr. Ackerman and publicist Gene Taft for allowing us the honor of reviewing this very important book. "Young J. Edgar-Hoover, The Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties," is available now from Carroll & Graf, at $28.95. Ignore its message at your own peril.