The Bomb Iran Lobby Gears Up for 2016

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“The Bomb Iran Lobby Gears Up for 2016: A tight-knit group of neocon dead-enders is pushing Iran to the forefront of the GOP’s foreign policy agenda“ by Sina Toosi; Foreign Policy in Focus

In a recent TV ad, a van snakes its way through an American city. As the driver fiddles with the radio dial, dire warnings about the perils of a “nuclear Iran” spill out of the speaker from Senator Lindsey Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The driver then steers the vehicle into a parking garage, drives to the top level, and blows it up in a blinding flash of white light. Words shimmer across the screen: “No Iran Nuclear Treaty Without Congressional Approval.” …

These think-tank gurus, special interest groups, and media pundits have peddled a plethora of alarmist narratives aimed at scuttling the diplomatic process — and they’ve relied far more on fear mongering than facts.

So who are these people?

A Close-Knit Network

Despite their bipartisan façade, these reflexively anti-Iran ideologues are in reality a tight-knit group. Many were also prominent supporters of the Iraq War and other foreign policy debacles from the last 15 years. They work in close coordination with one another and are often bankrolled by similar funders.

Four GOP super-donors alone — the billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman — keep afloat an array of groups that ceaselessly advocate confrontation with Iran, like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Other groups forming the core of this network include the neoconservative Hudson Institute  and the Foreign Policy Initiative, as well as more explicitly hardline “pro-Israel” groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Emergency Committee for Israel, The Israel Project, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

Several of these outfits also rely on right-wing grant-making foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Scaife Foundations, which together funnel millions into hardline policy shops.

Hardline Senators

Together these groups have established what amounts to their own echo chamber. They’ve built an anti-Iran communications and lobbying infrastructure that enjoys substantial influence in Washington’s corridors of power, particularly in Congress.

And if you think that this has nothing to do with Jewish money aimed at furthering Israeli interests, you are simply avoiding reality. It’s very difficult to see how a Republican candidate could win the nomination without the support of the Republican Jewish coalition. It’s yet another example where Jews pursue a top-down strategy that begins by dominating elite discourse,  shaping public opinion by having access to the elite media, and by the role of money in influencing politics at the highest level.  Of course, many non-Jews are involved in this movement, from well-paid foreign policy hacks who work at the think tanks mentioned, Senators (Toossi mentions Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mark Kirk, Kelly Ayotte, and John McCain),  to presidential candidates. As Lindsey Graham famously said,

“If I put together a finance team that will make me financially competitive enough to stay in this thing…I may have the first all-Jewish cabinet in America because of the pro-Israel funding. [Chuckles.] Bottom line is, I’ve got a lot of support from the pro-Israel funding.”

It’s not just Republicans who are in fealty to Jewish pro-Israel money. Hilary Clinton, who seems to be the inevitable Democratic candidate despite being little more than a grifter, depends on Haim Saban and the liberal Jewish establishment ensconced in Hollywood. Saban is totally on board with bombing Iran. Clinton also has close ties to Wall St. and has welcomed important neocons like Robert Kagan to her foreign policy team. War with Iran in 2017 seems almost a foregone conclusion.

Toossi’s entire article is well worth reading. He concludes:

Yet by so vigorously denouncing the Obama White House’s negotiations with Iran, these armchair warriors are pushing for a war that wouldn’t only be terrible for the region and the people who live there. It would harvest more lives and limbs from American soldiers, waste trillions more taxpayer dollars, and undoubtedly erode U.S. standing in the world even further.

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Groupthink in Sweden

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Sweden has become something of a paradigm of what’s wrong with the West, but one doesn’t expect light to be shed on the subject in an article on the false confessions of a Swedish man. However, this article has an interesting observation. The basic facts:

Sture Bergwall … confessed to 30 killings in the 1970s and 80s and to dismembering and eating some of his victims. In trials beginning two decades ago he was convicted and locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

But, in a story redolent of the darkest Nordic crime fiction, doubts continued to swirl around the case until an investigative journalist, the late Hannes Råstam, demonstrated that the confessions had no basis in fact. (“Lawyers blame groupthink in Sweden’s worst​​ miscarriage of justice“)

The false confessions have led to soul searching in the Swedish legal community and, as the title of the article indicates, the explanation is “groupthink.”

“In hindsight, it is easy to see mistakes in the Bergwall affair,” the commission in Stockholm said on Friday.

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Friends of Israel: Old and New Patterns in British Politics

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Two interesting patterns became apparent after the recent general election in Britain. One of them has been extensively discussed in the mainstream media. The other hasn’t been discussed at all. Why not? Because it involves Britain’s most powerful ethnic group and that group intends to maintain its stranglehold on British politics. Power that can’t be discussed is also power that can’t be challenged.

Key qualities of the left

First, let’s look at the pattern that could be discussed in the mainstream: the resounding success of the Scottish National Party, which held six of fifty-nine seats in Scotland before the election. Now it holds fifty-six. A huge Labour majority has evaporated in a single day. The fiasco is further proof that the left doesn’t understand the societies it wants to control. As I pointed out in “The Toxicity of Truth,” parties like Labour are interested in power, not in facts, logic or objective reality. But their insatiable greed for power is sometimes thwarted by another of their key qualities: their boundless incompetence.

Mini-Obama: Nicola Sturgeon

Mini-Obama: Nicola Sturgeon

Labour gave Scotland more and more autonomy in the confident belief that this would “kill Scottish nationalism stone dead.” They thought they were injecting cyanide into the SNP. In fact, they were injecting steroids. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP’s authoritarian, high-testosterone female leader, became a kind of mini-Obama during the election campaign. Just as millions of deluded narcissists in Europe wished they could vote for Obama in 2008, so thousands of deluded narcissists in England wished they could vote for Sturgeon in 2015. After all, she wants to put “equality and fairness” at the heart of Scottish politics, and she favours immigration and refugee policy that would only speed the Third Worldization of the U.K. What could be nobler than that? Read more

Excerpt from “My journey to race realism”: Reformers’ search to close “the gap”

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The following is the second of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

First Excerpt: The Burden of Brown

Before 2010, I was aware of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As mentioned, during the 1990s I began to read American Renaissance, and about the same time one of my chums from grade school and high school, a bank examiner named Gene Stelzer, bent my ear with comments about Darwinism.  Gene was also the first person to call my attention to The Occidental Quarterly, a journal I later came to regard as an indispensable guide to understanding White racial consciousness.  At the University of Delaware, education professor Bob Hampel kept me informed about some of the best recent books in his field, and social scientist Linda Gottfredson told me about gene-culture co-evolution.  But from mainstream historians I heard and read nothing about Darwinism or the interaction of culture and genes, and my own written work was still based primarily on archival research.  It was not until 2010, when I was laid low by lung failure and could no longer rummage through archives that I began to read deeply and to think seriously about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As it happened, at this time I was also thinking about the modern school reform movement, which since about 1990 had become, above all else, an effort to close the achievement gaps that show American Blacks and Latinos lagging behind Whites and Asians on standardized achievement tests.

In some ways, the reformers’ concern with test scores is surprising.  In recent international comparisons, African Americans have done better on standardized tests than Blacks in Africa or the Caribbean.  Hispanic Americans have done better than Hispanics in Latin America.  White Americans are doing better than students in other predominantly-White nations (except Finland).  And Asian-American students have done as well as most students in Asia — and better than those in Korea or Japan.  These results were achieved, moreover, at a time when an increasing proportion of American students were being reared in single-parent families and a growing proportion of parents did not speak English. Read more

Excerpt from “My Journey to Race Realism”: The Burden of Brown

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The following is the first of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

In the 1960s and 1970s I forged through the academic ranks.  My dissertation received favorable notice when it was published in 1970, and another book of 1975 received even better reviews.  At the age of 36, I was promoted to the rank of full professor at the University of Delaware, and I began to think about research for yet another book.  At that time, civil rights lawyers had brought a lawsuit seeking metropolitan busing for racial balance throughout the northern portion of New Castle County, Delaware.  From reading the local newspaper, I learned that the largest city in this region, Wilmington, had been one of the first five jurisdictions that the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), had ordered to desegregate its public schools.  Wilmington complied immediately, but desegregation led to inter-racial scuffles and a decline in cultural and academic standards.  This touched off White flight, and enrollment in Wilmington’s public schools tipped from 73% White to 90% Black.  I then learned that much the same had happened in three of the four other “Brown districts” — in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in Summerton, South Carolina, and in Washington D.C.  Only in Topeka, Kansas, where Blacks made up only 8% of the students, had the majority of Whites continued to patronize the public schools.  And desegregation had been problematic even in Topeka.[1]

In my best-known book, The Burden of Brown (1984), I told the story of how public education had fared in these five districts where desegregation began.  In the introduction and conclusion, and in a few statements that were interspersed in the text, I maintained that the misbehavior of Black students had created serious problems and that federal judges had made matters worse by redefining desegregation to mean something quite different from the original understanding.  When the implementation order for Brown was handed down in 1955, the Supreme Court defined “desegregation” as assigning students to public schools on “a racially non-discriminatory basis.”  Similarly,  in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress defined what “desegregation” meant and what it did not mean: “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”[2] Read more

Radical Egalitarianism vs. the Heroic Spirit of the West

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Related to Alain de Benoist’s interview on the Big Mother-Therapeutic state, I recently received an email commenting on a recent Red Ice interview where I talked about two of the major trends in European culture, the Indo-European heroic warrior culture of aristocratic-egalitarianism and the northern hunter-gatherer culture of individualist-egalitarianism. My correspondent writes:

It seems to explain many casual observations that I made.

For example: why  we can’t  rent a horse to run full gallop? And not only in California but also in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Apparently this is because of the disdain which herb gatherers feel for the nomadic horse which symbolizes oppression for them. One can retort that it is because of the lawsuits for injuries. But what motivates the lawyers? Mere greed? It could also be hatred for horse and horseman. And why do the people let it happen? I should add that the only place  in the USA where I could gallop was Tennessee. And you actually said in your interview that the South is different.
Why can’t we solo Mount Rainier? [Actually, it is possible to solo Mt. Rainier, but it requires written permission from the superintendent.] Messner soloed Everest. But in this great country on God’s green Earth we are not even allowed to solo Rainier. Genuine concern for our safety?  Or, perhaps, this is the wish of the duck hunters [egalitarian hunter-gatherer types] to pull down anyone who stands out? You spoke at length about this trait in your lecture.

And why was Snow Summit closed for downhill biking for over five years?  I could continue for an hour, but this may get boring.

I have written several articles on extreme sports as a context for implicit Whiteness (e.g., here and here). Putting this all together, the nanny state described by de Benoist and my correspondent has the effect of suppressing a critical aspect of traditional European culture — death-defying deeds in pursuit of personal glory. This restless Faustian spirit of the West is linked to exploration, invention, military exploits, and conquering the unknown.  Read more

Big Mother and the Therapeutic State

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Gustave_Doré-L'Enfance_de_Gargantua

‘Pantagruel  with his father Gargantua and mother Gargamelle” (watercolor); by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic.

Below is the interview Alain de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

******

Q: “Eat your five servings of fruit and vegetables every day!”; “Do some sport!”; “Quit Smoking!”; “Drink one glass, but not two!”; “Buckle up when driving!”;  “Do not eat too much fat!”; “Do the proper garbage recycling!” After Big Brother, have we now arrived at Big Mother?

A: Starting with the nineteenth century the welfare state has been progressively put in place in order to compensate for the disappearance of organic and community solidarities which, with the rise of individualist ideology, have become dissolved.  Today the welfare state it is morphing into a sort of “therapeutic state”— if we were to borrow an expression by Christopher Lasch. This therapeutic state can be defined as an unholy alliance of the medication process and the state, setting up all sorts of unjustified obstructions to our freedom. The authority is becoming more and more maternal, albeit maternal in a way of a possessive mother eager to maintain its subjects in total dependency. The unilateral relationship with the state replaces the ancient social bonds. This hygienic control augurs social control. Medicine itself, when taking part in the control of populations, becomes totalitarian.

Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist

The dominant human type of today is the immature narcissist, ignoring all realties other than his own, and who, above all, wishes to satisfy all his cravings. This infantile type of a human being, predictably of liberal-libertarian orientation, is perfectly in line with a system which, as Marx wrote, drowns everything “in the icy waters of egoistic calculation.” What follows is a therapeutic civilization centered on the “Me” only. Pierre Manent  rightly stresses that liberalism means primarily renouncing to apprehend human life in terms of its own good and its own finality. In a society ruled by the entertainment industry in which nobody asks himself about the meaning and significance of his presence in the world, body-care of the Self becomes the alpha and omega of human life.  Not only does it signify being of good health, but also “feeling good about oneself,” and thus forgetting one’s own finitude. While expecting immortality in this world, the dream of eternal youth grips all those who have never become adults, and who conceive now of their life as a maternal fusion defying any symbolic order, while thriving  in a culture of the present tense that has expelled any meaning of historical continuity. Henceforth society functions according to the principles of mimetic rivalry, as a form of “ego rivalry” (in Freudian terms), i.e., with  the Self  being stripped off of its “id” and its  “superego,”  convinced now it is the center of the universe. This only facilitates the war of all against all. Read more