Review of “Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea”

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Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. Barbara Demick. Granta Books. 2010. Paperback. 317pp.

Los Angeles Times journalist Barabara Demick’s examination of life in North Korea won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize in 2010 and seemingly not without good reason. It takes you on compelling journey into the lives of different North Koreans who have managed to escape the isolated nation’s Communist tyranny to the relative freedom of South Korea. The book offers fascinating insights into what life is like in North Korea and the nature of North Korean culture and religious life.

Most readers will have an inkling that North Korea is a real life Orwellian 1984, but Demick, drawing upon in-depth interviews with escapees and her own observations in the show-capital Pyongyang, demonstrates just how eerily this is the case. North Korean totalitarianism includes, though goes far beyond, the neighborhood informers, labor camps and constant surveillance of regimes such as communist East Germany. As in 1984, the country is divided into a kind of caste system, whereby ‘party members’ are rigorously selected for loyalty; only they are permitted the best jobs or even to live in the capital city. Everybody must display in their house, and regularly clean, a painting of Kim-Il Sung, the eternal leader, and, since his death in 1994, his son and successor Kim Jong-Il. There are regular random inspections to make sure the pictures are up and cleaned and you might end up in a labor camp if they’re not. Forgetting to wear your Kim-Il Sung badge outside the house might result in prison; hair length and appropriate clothing are dictated from on high, and those who fail to cry sufficiently when the president dies are hauled away, suspected of harboring inappropriate thoughts. This is a country where, if you commit a serious crime resulting in execution (such as making a joke about the president), your entire family, including cousins, are hauled off to a labor camp to stamp out the ‘tainted blood.’ Read more

Obama’s Fundraising Triumph: Thank The Jews

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Vogue's Brit Anna Wintour: Performing A Cosmetic Function

Friday was Fundraising disclosure day for the Presidential aspirants – and the winner was Barack Obama. He won because of the Jews.

Reminding us that Rupert Murdoch’s injection of U.K. Tabloid style has its uses, The New York Post has the most succinct account: O’s pals pony up $68 mil by Geoff Earle July 16, 2011

Obama’s huge $68 million campaign-money haul in the last quarter came with a big assist from an array of big-money donors — 27 of whom raised more than $500,000 each for his re-election campaign…

The 244 big-cash bundlers raised at least $37 million, or more than half of Obama’s total fund-raising haul for the quarter…

By contrast, Mitt Romney, the top fund-raiser among GOP candidates, brought in $18 million…

The Obama campaign has released a list of these 244 “bundlers” – parties who undertake their own fund-raising efforts for a campaign. It is here.

By my count (which is still rising) 120 of these individuals are Jewish. No other ethnic or social group (such as the Gays) can be identified as supplying more than a handful.

Occidental Observer readers will be interested in my methodology. A number of these bundlers, like Chicago’s Penny Pritzker (“$100,000- $200,000”) or Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg (“$500,000+”) are very well-known. And a large number have obviously Jewish names (is it really necessary to spend much time, on, for instance “$100,000-$200,000” category bundler Israel Roizman of Lafayette Hill Pennsylvania?).

No doubt one or two of these Jewish-surnamed people will turn out to have inherited or converted to Christianity. In the context of supporting Obama, this may be less significant to evaluating Jewish influence than in other situations. But far more important, there are a considerable number of names not obviously Jewish which upon investigation turn out to be, in fact, held by Jews.

For example Mark Gilbert of Boca Raton ($500,000+) has been discussed by Mondoweiss for his demanding Zionism. And Marc Stanley of Dallas ($100,000-$200,000) is Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council and wrote Why Jews Overwhelmingly Support Obama for the Huffington Post back on March 25 2009. So far, I have found rather more than a dozen examples of this.

One of the pleasures of blogging for Occidental Observer is the frequency of constructive contributions by some of our commentators. Googling deep enough on a name often produces proof of ethnicity, but it takes time. I invite OO friends to look into the non-Jewish names on the Obama Bundler list and send me any interesting results.

After an initial celebration, Obama’s MSM friends are in Spin mode. Emphasis is being laid on the presence on the of some non-Jewish celebrities such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour ($500,000+) and of Gays (there are three male couples on the list and one of the $500,000+ bundlers is Democratic National Committee Finance Treasurer Andrew Tobias – who is of course also Jewish). A press kit has obviously gone out emphasizing the large number of Obama’s small donors (no surprise: there a lot of Jewish doctors and dentists out there).

But it is increasingly obvious that the 2012 is going to pit a coalition of colored voters, managed and financed by the Jews, against White America. Obama delights the Jews because they see his being President as a humiliating defeat of the ethnicity which built this country. Particularly if the Republicans nominate an explicit Christian like Michele Bachman (whose groveling to Israel will count for nothing) rage will explode and the coffers will open.

Jewish money is the poison of American political life. The pattern of Obama fund raising is going to make this difficult to hide.

Discrimination against Whites in Federal Employment

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Pat Buchanan’s recent column (“Black America versus Obama?“) has some amazing stats on Black employment by the federal government:

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.

When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.

There is no way that these percentages for Black employment could not happen without discrimination against Whites. I should think a lawsuit would be in order. Read more

Larry David on Some Jewish Stereotypes

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In looking around for inspiration on Larry David, I came across this in an article by Gilad Atzmon (whom I admire):

David spits on everything: you name it, he spits on it. It was David who exposes the Jewish fetish with body organs long before we all started to discuss Israeli organ harvesting. David ridicules the Shoa obsession, the Jewish and anti Wagner fetish [here’s the Wagner video]. David spits on every possible American value one can think of. He mocks the celebrity culture, materialism and greed. He exposes Jewish supremacy, ignorance and arrogance. Yet, he is doing it all by putting himself in the line of fire. He doesn’t just bring to light to Jewish ugliness, he often embodies this ugliness himself.

I can’t say that I have seen many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I happened to see the premier for the new season, and it definitely stepped on Jewish sensibilities. (But, as Atmon says, David offends everyone—here giving instructions to a teenage girl on how to insert a tampon. Probably a sign that he is a sociopath at heart.)

The main plot revolves around the fact that the divorce lawyer hired by David turns out not to be Jewish, but Swedish and Christian. David assumed that with a name like Berg and with Jewish religious paraphernalia ostentatiously decorating his office, that he must be Jewish. Berg also talks with a Jewish accent and liberally drops Yiddish words into his conversation. It turns out that he even hosts Hanukkah parties. David exclaims,  “I get a Swede lawyer. She’s going to get everything…. I got Sweded”—obviously a play on “Jewed” which plays on the stereotype of Jews engaging in sharp business practices/fraud.

(Another stereotype—which I think goes a long way toward explaining the attraction of Jewish men to non-Jewish women: the aggressive Jewish woman. While dining, a Jewish character casually says that if he ever gets divorced, he will be very equitable with the assets. His Jewish wife explodes with a torrent of hostility to the effect that if we ever get divorced, she will take him for every penny he has and nail his balls to the wall, etc. It’s like an earthquake. Everyone at the table sits in stunned silent for a while. Then it passes and things move on smoothly. We later see husband and wife very happy together.) Read more

Fools in Public Schools

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It seems like we can’t go more than three or four days without seeing a story about the foolishness that goes on at America’s public schools. I don’t mean the fights, the assaults, the murders, the gang activity, vulgarity, and the general mayhem perpetrated by students; but rather the lunacy carried out by teachers and administrators. It’s a subject to which we could dedicate a month’s worth of Political Cesspool broadcasts – and that still wouldn’t be enough time to catalog and discuss a month’s worth of shenanigans and outrages. Read on, for a sampling of what I mean from the past couple of days. Read more

Jewish Australian MP: Bring Israel’s African Immigrants to Australia

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Michael Danby, a Jewish MP in the Australian Parliament, has “enthusiastically agreed” to the idea of bringing to Australia thousands of Africans who have illegally immigrated to Israel (“Danny Danon: Send African Immigrants to Australia“; Jerusalem Post). The idea originated with Danny Danon, a Likud MP well known for his far right views. (Here he is in the NYTimes advocating that Israel annex the West Bank.)  Being a good rightist, Danon thinks that the immigrants are a threat to the Jewish identity of Israel: “The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state’s Jewish identity. … On the one hand, it treats the refugees and migrants in a humane way. On the other hand, it does not threaten Israel’s future and our goal to maintain a clear and solid Jewish majority.”

The implicit idea is that Australia, being a traditionally European society, has no identity at all except to abstract principles. So it’s not surprising that Danby wholeheartedly agrees with the plan. Being a good Jew in Australia means being an enthusiastic cheerleader for non-White immigration—long the policy of the organized Jewish community in Australia and throughout the Jewish Diaspora in the West.  Read more

Roger Scruton on Beauty

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A reader, Alan, pointed out that I did not call attention to this passage from Scruton:

There is a liturgy of denunciation here that is repeated all across Europe by a ruling elite that trembles in the face of ordinary loyalties. But the fact is that national sentiment is, for most ordinary Europeans, the only motive that will justify sacrifice in the public cause. Insofar as people do not vote to line their own pockets, it is because they also vote to protect a shared identity from the predations of those who do not belong to it, and who are attempting to pillage an inheritance to which they are not entitled.

Motivation is indeed worth pondering. The EU has no motivational power for Europeans because its an artificial construct with no historic cultural, ethnic or linguistic ties. Read more