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Remembering Douglas Reed

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Douglas Reed

Douglas Reed (1895–1976), British author and journalist, was a penetrating and clear-eyed witness to the course of events in Europe and the West following the First World War. He served in the trenches in that war, and afterwards became a correspondent in the then-arising telephone news services. “I began to pick up the tricks of the journalist’s trade,” he writes in Insanity Fair, the book that made him famous. Insanity Fair was published April 1, 1938 and was a great success. Six months later Reed reported in a Postscript: “Now… on October 1st, I am sitting in Belgrade and read in my newspapers that the book is in its 28th edition and that it has been banned in Germany, and all around me is the tragedy that I have foretold you, the tragedy of faith betrayed… moving with gathering speed.”

There were few tricks either in his moral sense or his prose style. He possessed a rare capacity, seemingly extinct in journalists today, which was a refusal to be deceived. This is a character of the will rather than of the intellect. But he was intellectual astute and had a graceful and highly literary prose style. The titles of many of his works speak to this literary flair: Insanity Fair (1938), Disgrace Abounding (1939), A Prophet At Home (1941), Lest We Regret (1943), From Smoke to Smother (1948).

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Hitler, Ibsen, and Political Theater

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To what extent was the Nazi movement suffused with pure theater? What explains the fascina­tion that Nazi symbols and Adolf Hitler himself had for millions, then and even today? Classic theater in Europe, especially drama, has always been viewed as serious literature, and Germany to this day has more theaters than any other country in the world. During the National Socialist period the Nazi Party made great use of theatri­cal techni­ques to embellish Party events.

In Ibsen and Hitler, Steven F. Sage assesses the impact Henrik Ibsen’s plays had on the develop­ment of Adolf Hitler’s Welt­an­schauung and place in history.  Sage, who completed the book as a scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, must be read with caution because he moves rapidly from Hitler’s appreciation of Ibsen’s plays, especially Emperor and Galilean, which is factual and convincing, to what the author considers the dictator’s slavish obsession and identification with the playwright’s other plots and characters, which is far less convincing. Always mindful that this book has been written to further traduce the National Socialist leaders of the period, nonetheless much of the material intro­duced is new to the American reader and well worth examining.

Ibsen and Hitler argues that there are much more than coincidental similarities between the characters and plot lines in Ibsen’s plays and the policies and speeches of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, textual analysis of passages from Hitler’s speeches and passages in the plays reveals parallels that could hardly be accidental. The three Ibsen plays upon which Sage bases his study are: Emperor and Galilean, The Master Builder, and An Enemy of the People. Emperor and Galilean tells the story of Julian the Apostate, a nephew of the Christian emperor Constantine the Great, and his foiled attempt to reinstate paganism in the Roman Empire. Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his magnum opus. It was first published in Norway in 1873 and was translated into German in 1899. Read more

The Neocon’s Defeat in Iraq: On to Iran

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The Obama Administration’s announcement of a complete troop withdrawal from Iraq is a stunning defeat for the neocons. The neocon plan was an indefinite military presence in Iraq on the model of the continuing American military bases in Japan and Germany after WWII. Obviously, Iran is a big winner, at least for now, with an ally in the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq.

Of great interest is whether Iraq will maintain the democratic institutions established by the Americans. In the long run, I suspect that from the viewpoint of the neocons, the operation certainly bought time — the time needed for Iraq to rebuild and once again pose a danger to Israeli interests. Read more

Death on the Installment Plan

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The Dance of Death, 1474, fresco painting (Church of St. Mary, Beram, Croatia


(Translated from the French by Tom Sunic)

Ezra Pound, in his famous Canto XLV With Usura writes:

.. with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
Is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
 CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

The excesses of money lending were condemned in Rome, as was witnessed by Cato, who also wrote that if the thieves of sacred objects deserve double punishment, the usurers deserve quadruple punishment. Aristotle (Politics I, X) in his denouncement of the chrematistics, i.e. the obsession with money matters, seems to be even more radical.

There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural. Read more

Roosevelt’s Catos

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Winter in Germany, 1946-1947

Today we can hardly imagine that 65 years ago the victorious Allies were in the process of dismembering Germany, tearing down its economy and starving out its population. Older Germans remember the postwar winter of 1946/1947 as a dreadful hunger winter. In his book The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War (Milan 2008) Nicolas Lewkowicz notes that “Germany was given the most comprehensive treatment ever dispensed to a vanquished nation in the modern history of the international political system.” (p. 11) The question is how this treatment came to be and which forces played a pivotal role in these developments.

In 1942 the war was far from decided as German submarines were cruising the American Eastcoast and German tanks were relentlessly advancing in Russia and Africa. This did not stop (or maybe actually encouraged) Jewish exiles from dreaming about Germany’s demise after the war. Tens of thousands of Jewish exiles from Germany had found refuge in New York and even had their own newspaper —Aufbau (German word for ‘build-up’). They were not sitting idle awaiting the end of hostilities, but were active in canvassing the public opinion to lobby for imposing a hard peace on Germany. The most active and outspoken among them was Emil Cohn, better known under his German pen name Emil Ludwig. Read more

Robin Hood Belongs To Us

Robin Hood Belongs To Us

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Robin Hood Belongs To Us

Robin Hood Belongs To Us

White Advocates don’t necessarily share political views beyond the immediate scope of our common defense of our heritage and identity. Heck, we can’t even agree on which aspects of our heritage are worth preserving or how to define our identity. Some of us would be within the bounds of mainstream conservative discourse were it not for “the race thing”. Some of us aren’t even conservative or traditional at all. We more than compensate for our dearth of chromatic diversity with a diversity of ideas, attitudes, dispositions, and perspectives.

Our Hoosier Nation team recently attended the Indianapolis edition of the Occupy Wall Street event both in solidarity with frustrated Hoosiers and to learn as much as possible about the spirit and direction of this phenomenon. What we found was that the majority of the attendees are relatively ordinary White people who are frustrated about the same problems the typical Tea Party supporter is frustrated about. They trend a bit more liberal and there are a few more non-Whites in the crowd, but the radical anti-White Leftism was almost entirely limited to the self-appointed “leaders” at the microphone. Read more

Occupy Wall Street: Undertones of Anti-Semitism

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In my recent blog “Jews and the Occupy Wall St. Protests” I mentioned that popular Los Angeles-area radio talk host Bill Handel said he wasn’t upset with Wall St. because “my tribe controls Wall St.” Handel is happily continuing his lucrative career without any problems at all. But Patricia McAlister, a Black substitute teacher in the LA school system has been fired for saying that the  “Zionist Jews who run these big banks and the Federal Reserve … need to be run out of this country.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmXUtwTLcQ

Granted, McAlister went quite a bit beyond Handel in advocating that Jews be expelled, but I rather doubt that that is the issue. Simply pointing to Jews in the context of the financial meltdown would have been quite enough. Indeed, there has been quite a bit of comment about lone protesters like David Smith, a regular at the New York protest, who has gotten quite a bit of attention for his signs, including “Google: Zionist Jews control Wall St.”

JTA Caption: An Occupy Wall Street protester who says his name is David Smith holding aloft a sign in Zuccotti Park in New York that offers an overtly anti-Jewish message, Oct. 11, 2011. Protest organizers say his type is a fringe element of the movement. (neolibertariannet via YouTube)

The situation is similar to what happened during the first stages of the meltdown in 2008 when the ADL expressed concern about the “dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release was predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complains darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL’s favorite word is ‘canard’] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.” Read more