"Our Democracy" -- What is it Really?

“We need you to take this seriously. Our democracy is at stake. Elections matter. Voting matters.”  Barack Obama, November, 2017

From community organizer to President of the United States – now, back to community organizer. Obama cast these pearls of wisdom (above) before an adoring crowd in Richmond during a Virginia Governor election campaign stop. The ex-President continues to be a walking compendium of clichés of which he seems determined to flaunt as profundities. Vacuous they may be – nevertheless, they have served him well – to wit, the culmination of Obama deep thought –“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Unlike other ex-Presidents, he has eschewed dignified retirement, and so, given his relative youth, many years lie ahead for him to inflict on us the weight of his massive ego and the steady stream of flagrant banalities delivered with all the condescension of an obnoxious adolescent lecturing his captive elders about how to fix that awful mess they have made of the world.

But there is more to Obama’s public interventions than just the usual dispersal of vapid nostrums for consumption by the useful idiots. They still cannot seem to figure out why, after eight wonderful years of Hope and Change, a former real estate mogul and reality show host is now resting his jackbooted feet on the White House coffee tables. Not to mention that poor old Bill Clinton had to disappoint that bevy of future White House interns he had recruited from his flights with Jeffery Epstein on the “Lolita Express.” 

So, Obama is hitting the trail with the scary “Our democracy is at stake.” The former Golfer-in-Chief who defiled the White House with regular guests such as Al Sharpton and criminal rapper, Rick Ross, is the now the basso profundo in the chorus of Chicken Littles intoning the demise of our system of government. You see, “our democracy,” the one that elected him twice, has been mysteriously swept away with the tides of Trumpian Fascism. When you win, it’s democracy in action; when you lose, the sky is falling.

Members of this distinguished chorus are out and about. Recently, Our Revered Lady of Chappaqua waddled into a Toronto bookstore peddling “What Happened” and told the Canucks, now having to stomach the best Canadian Democracy has to offer – Justin Trudeau – that: “Democracy is under attack everywhere. It's not only my country….  But I also want a concerned world to recognize that democracy is under assault.”  Well, no doubt, when Hillary speaks, the “concerned world” wakes up and listens. She can keep her finger on the pulse of the concerned world or whatever other nebulous abstraction that pops into her head, but an ambassador and embassy staff under siege on her watch? What difference does it make, now?

Moving along then toward the immanent collapse of America, there is Former Attorney General under Obama, Eric “My People” Holder who recently told Rachael Maddow that “Our democracy is under attack.” For those with a short memory, Holder was a highly useful Clinton errand boy who helped secure Bill’s notorious pardon of Marc Rich when he was Assistant Attorney General around the time the Clintons were looting the White House on their way out. The quid pro quo? Bill Clinton got a half a million dollars for his Presidential Library from Rich’s ex-wife and Holder would be the new AG in an Al Gore administration. If there were a perfect fit for “deplorable” and “irredeemable” would it be the man who bought the pardon or the man who sold it? Perhaps Hillary could help us out with this dilemma.  From Slate:   

“Rich was a pioneering commodities trader who made billions dealing in oil and other goods. He had a habit of dealing with nations with which trade was embargoed, like Iran, Libya, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa. Rich also had a habit of not paying his taxes, to the point where one observer said that ‘Marc Rich is to asset concealment what Babe Ruth was to baseball.’ The United States indicted Rich in 1983, hitting him with charges—tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy—that could’ve brought life in prison. Rich fled the country.” 

These are the Clintons et al … making “our democracy” work for them. What greater opportunity for the most extravagant cynicism when people like this try to put us into a state of fecal incontinence by prattling about “the assault on our democracy.” This is post-modern politics at its best: every serious activity becomes (wink, wink) a parody of itself. Language is disconnected from reality, its meaning always temporized by the speaker’s relation to power.

The initial temptation is to say that if what we as citizens get out of “our democracy” are the likes of Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Al Franken, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, then perhaps “democracy” really means “kleptocracy,” and “our democracy” is just a euphemistic bouquet intended to cover the stench wafting up from the capitol city cesspool of corruption and decadence, a special place run by poseurs and hypocrites who devote their energies to self-enrichment by selling political influence to the highest bidder. Added to the injury of their shameless corruption is the insult of their arrogance and condescension, their pretense to wisdom, moral superiority, selflessness and compassion for the oppressed.  

  

Whatever a serious observer might wish to call what the average citizen gets out of participating in the American political process, a “democracy” is not what would first jump to his mind. Democracies, supposedly, “are states in which all sane adults participate in making political decisions.” (Minogue, Kenneth. The Liberal Mind, 2580-2581. Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.)  By a rough count, there are approximately 200 million registered voters, official participants, so to speak, in U.S. political decision-making. How many of them are sane (or stoned or literate or dead), of course, is anybody’s guess. So then, for each and every one of you, my fellow citizens, your participatory share of American democracy is about 1/200,000,000^th. Imagine being informed that you were named a distant heir to an estate worth $200,000,000, then your reaction to learn that you were in the will for a whole dollar. Well, that is how excited you should be about how much power you wield in American politics, or, how worried you should be the next time Obama (taking time out from proof-reading the ghost-writing of his $40 million memoir or Hillary now worth a hundred-plus million from her selfless devotion to women) tells you that “our democracy” is in great peril. 

A more accurate, prosaic description of American politics is that it is a client-patron system. The politicians compete to be patrons (elected officials who sell access to power) for clients (officially designated victim groups). The quid pro quo is obvious: the votes of the victims put the patrons in power; the victims get to be favored by the patrons over non-victims. “Favored” means rent-seeking privileges and political and legal support to leverage your official victim-status for social-professional-economic positioning. The patron also helps his clients with the stigmatization of the non-victims as bigots, those responsible for making the victims into the victims (best to ignore the irony at this juncture). Much of what now passes for political campaigning is simply a language game that separates the victims from the non-victims with code-words (“racist”, “sexist”, etc.) used by the patrons to secure and align their client coalitions and morally isolate the assigned bigots bearing their particular stigmata.

A client-patron approach to politics leads to an escalating state of “victim-inflation” because being a victim (a client) means you get to go to the front of the line. With no patron to advance your claims to victimhood, you to back of the line, if you are lucky to make it to the line at all. Client-patron systems, however, would seem to be highly entropic, moving toward completely disordered and chaotic end states like Venezuela and Detroit.

When Hillary tells her campaign audience that Trump supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she is not simply intending to insult a particular voting block. She is signaling prospective clients that she will be their devoted (vote-purchased) patron who will use her power to assure their protection and favor and to punish the “irredeemables” because punishment is what racists and other designated bigots most deserve. “You name it” is not, I repeat, not a throw away phrase. It is an open invitation for the not-yet-initiated to get in the game, to help themselves and help her to expand her client base – more victims, more favors, more votes, more power … then, more Marc Riches and Eric Holders – fewer deplorables. Welcome to “our democracy”, politics in 21^st century America.  If it is under attack, bring it on. Better late than never.

Islamophobobia and the Destruction of Hamtramck

Hamtramck, Michigan is a decrepit town of twenty-two thousand enveloped by Detroit. With forty-nine percent of its people below the poverty line, ancient, crumbling housing stock, and a crime rate that puts it at only 12% safer than all U.S. cities, why has it recently made the “We are the World” propagandists and virtue signalers so ecstatic? Here is a clue. Hamtramck in 2013, All the praises and thanks be to Allah, became the first majority Muslim city in the country with a majority Muslim city council. What better occasion for an edifying celebration of diversity (43 percent of residents born outside of the U.S. with twenty-seven languages in the public schools) and a stern rebuke for the naysayers and bigots who might wonder if the reproduction of Bangladesh and Yemen near the Motor City is a such a good idea?

But why not? Illuminati from the likes of The Nation, Politico and other champions of the voiceless and downtrodden over the past year or so have sojourned to this Mecca-in-the-making. They have seen the future, and have put their “diversity” stamp of glowing approval on it. After dispatching a few interviews, they report to their great relief that the locals are telling them that they are thrilled about this. The massive influx of Muslims, the erection of seven mosques (the most per capita in the U.S.)  and the call-to-prayer blasted out into the streets five times a day into what was once a ninety percent Polish Catholic community, is no big deal. 

Lianna Aghajanian of Teen Vogue (that’s right, Teen Vogue) tootled her way through Hamtramck last February and tells us that “[t]he city has been subject to a narrative full of inaccuracies, but the real story is just how quintessentially American it is.” Just when this crazy old world gets way too hard to understand, leave it to a savant from Teen Vogue to let us in on the “real story.” Now, when more of America becomes as “quintessentially American” as the new Hamtramck, Ms Aghajanian might want to pause a moment in her pursuit of the latest beach ware and think carefully about how the standard current fare in the hypersexualized fashion pages of Teen Vogue such as “Rihanna Responds to Fenty Beauty Fan’s Message About Trans Models” and, the monthly “Lovescope” will go down with the ascension of the Imams and the burka trendsetters.

A couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration a reporter from NPR interviewed some Hamtramck non-Muslim residents. Not everyone was gushing about the transformation of the city into “Hamtramistan,” the city’s new moniker.  “The Hamtramck they knew had changed. ‘It's now more like a Bangladeshi town, so, that's a different story,’ says [Alek] Fidler [a Polish American immigrant who came ten years ago]. ‘Seems like, you know, they were basically taking over.’ St. Florian's priest, Miroslaw Frankowski, recalls his first impression of this city when he arrived in Hamtramck about 10 years ago. ‘I’m almost like in Cairo,’ he says, ‘because you know, the call for the prayer — and people covered up under clothing typical for Middle East. Yeah, it seemed like I’m working in Middle East.’ In Hamtramck streets, it’s common now to see women fully veiled, with only their eyes exposed. The amplified Muslim call to prayer was a source of controversy here some years back, and still can raise hackles.” Religion invading the public square? Strangely, the lawyers from the ACLU are nowhere to be found. 

Tom Perkins, however, reporting for The Nation tells us that there is nothing much to report. “In reality, there’s not much tension worth mentioning in Hamtramck….  To the contrary, many of the city’s non-Muslim residents are proud to be a part of a historic first, and reports of tension and conflict are the work of those with an agenda or reporters capitalizing on a hostile national discourse.” Perkins, apparently, doesn’t think it is “worth mentioning” just why these non-Muslims are so proud, but we can take his word for it because we know that reporters from The Nation are far removed from “hostile national discourse” and never operate with “an agenda.”

Here, though, is the nub of Perkin’s non-agenda: “The Western world is experiencing a wave of Islamaphobia, and people want to know what life is like in an American city where Muslims are in charge. This is the first time in decades that the Polish Catholics haven’t run Hamtramck.” The Muslims haven’t been in charge here for very long, so let’s not jump to premature conclusions. Perhaps, however, it is not unreasonable to suggest that those inquiring minds who would like to know what life is like in any place where Muslims are in charge should look at what life is like in places like Mogadishu, Aden, and Dhaka where they have been in charge for a long time. These, I suspect, are not the sort of “model home” communities that exude tolerance, inclusivity and equality of women, the norms so prized by our betters at the Washington Post, NYT and Teen Vogue.

Let us grant for the moment that this wave of Islamophobia is washing over us (more on that in a bit), but does Mr. Perkins ever wonder, given this tsunami of fear and loathing experienced by Muslims in the Western world, why so many of them (by the millions) continue flocking to it? But let’s first get to the heart of his non-agenda, which is – a city in America, at last, “where Muslims are in charge.”   

Here exposed is the foundational premise of the cultural Marxism which is, of course, all about who should be in power (“in charge”) and who should not. The Polish Catholics, Perkins gloats, don’t get to “run Hamtramck” anymore. They might be unhappy about it, but who cares? Get over it! As Chuck Berry would put it: “Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Out with the old; in with the new. Polish Catholics were part of the problem – the old, oppressive, white, Eurocentric, Christian order – and the historically oppressed Muslims, so stylishly multi-cultural, now in charge, are the solution, the future. Diversity has arrived in rustbelt America, and it is where there is a mosque on every street corner, and all you are allowed to see of the ladies are their eyes.

Hamtramck is the picture of what today’s proud progressives call progress. Presumably, they would be happy to see America increasingly resemble Hamtramck and eager to celebrate the disappearance of an America that took its cultural heritage from Europe and worshipped at Christian altars. A couple of more Hamtramcks in Michigan would likely have put the state in Hillary’s electoral column last November.

As we are now supposed to understand, one form of resistance to “progress” is a pathology known as “Islamophobia” discovered by newspaper columnists, cable-TV talking heads, sociology professors, and Democrat politicians. Phobias, as we know, are diseases of the psyche, irrational thoughts, fears and impulses that turn those who harbor them into disordered and dysfunctional personalities. The consensus of the cognoscenti that “Islamophobia” is now a great affliction of the Western world would suggest that we all now must admit that the West itself is a diseased, pathological entity, and that the only acceptable moral future for West must be a surrender to the “Other,” the East, a Hegelian sort of historical moment. Hamtramck would seem to be a surrender in the miniature, but, certainly emblematic of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, portending the triumph of the crescent over the cross.

But not so fast. We are grappling with agitprop, not psychology. “Islamophobia” does not refer to a real disease or anything real for that matter, but is just a word with a clinical ring to it, contrived by the traducing ideologues firmly entrenched in our opinion-shaping institutions. It is a Shimpfwort, a word of abuse. Its purpose is to rationalize and dramatize their moral outrage and to demonize the subjects of that outrage. After a period of sufficient repetition by the right people, it firmly entrenches itself in the expanding vocabulary of victimhood (“transphobia” has recently made its debut) and sustains the orthodoxy of egalitarian politics with its relentless aggression against hierarchy and Christianity.  

How, in general terms, this “wave of Islamophobia” game of pin the bigot’s tail on the white Christian donkey is played was brilliantly described by the political philosopher, the late Kenneth Minogue over thirty years ago. “In ideological criticism … [there is] a kind of perverse-reverse logic, i.e., condemnation goes before explanation, or, rather the moral precedes the factual. A sort of intellectual show trial. Censure leads to theory rather than theory to censure. But then, of course this is problematic because it is better to discover something that brings condemnation, than to shop around for a theory to support your moral outrage.” (Kenneth Minogue: Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, St. Martin’s Press, 1985, 58) Stalin’s chief hit-man, Lavrenti Beria, put this concept in the most succinct of terms: “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Tell Beria who you want to be put in the dock, and he invents the charges. “Islamophobia” is another invention of our contemporary Berias, the “theory” they shopped around for that bolsters their moral outrage with the sins of the West, condemns the unrepentant (the “unredeemables”) and seeks their extinction.

The response to the Islamization of once Polish Catholic Hamtramck – ho-hum by much of America and hip-hip-hooray by the Social Justice Mafioso.  It is a very bad omen.

   

Democrats, Pronouns, and Muslim Immigrants

 

 “We go forward together. And we go forward stronger than ever. We're not going to let them win...We'll go about our business. Be New Yorkers. Live your life. Don't let them change us.”

Crocodile tears, Andrew Cuomo style. This was the New York Governor at a news conference shortly after Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant who came in 2010 on a lottery “diversity” visa from Uzbekistan, killed eight people and injured 14 others with his rented truck on bike path in the Big Apple.  It was no surprise to learn from ABC News that he was quite proud of it all.

                 

How well does your gag-reflex work these days? This is the sort of ass-covering drivel one expects from the likes of Cuomo, the kind that comes out when suddenly he has to interrupt his daily glad-handing, smiley shakedown routines, fake a somber visage for the cameras and reporters, and do a “Show’s over, folks – time to move along” shtick. It was a bizarre concoction of insult, misdirection and non-sequiturs, not to mention a curious display of the contempt Cuomo must hold for the intelligence of the New Yorkers who elected him.

 “We... we...we...” the Governor with this fake, weasel pronoun hoping to make the echoes of “Allahu Akbar” quickly disappear. So, who exactly is the “we ” going “forward together...stronger than ever”?   What “forward” means for eight of the “us,” the audience for this disgusting, patronizing riff, is a slab in the morgue and a cemetery plot, plus the grief and sadness that will long engulf the lives of their friends and families betrayed by the multi-culturalists who launched this on-going train wreck and then have to pretend that they care about the damage. “Live your life” pours obscenity on the wounds, making a mockery of innocent lives snuffed out in service to the corrupt ideology that Cuomo lives by. And “stronger than ever”? Who is he trying to con? Not likely in the cards for the fourteen broken bodies who survived this assault.

 

But before we curb our “Islamophobia,” resume the celebration of our diversity and, at the behest of the Governor, “go about our business,” let’s dumpster dive deeper and see where Andy’s fetid, pronoun shell game takes us. We’ve noted the fake “we…we…we”, but what is he up to with “them”?  “We’re not going to let them win.” Leftwing politicians like Cuomo, Obama and Hillary often speak in code, and so you should have your hermeneutical decoder ring handy and be ready to start twisting away. Who are the “them” who are not going to win, and how would we know if they did?  Cuomo can pretend not to notice, but unfortunately, there is already a clear winner, who happens to be Mr. Saipov, patched up from his wounds, celebrating the death of those eight infidels he ran over and enjoying, it seems, the anguish of their families, clearly the losers. So, in keeping with the Governor’s admonition to not let them win, somewhat might want to ask New York’s Chief Poseur, what should a pedestrian or bicyclist do the next time one of our imported jihadist is bearing down on him and his wife and kid in his truck? 

Don’t forget, however, those who designed, manage and promote the system that lets the sort of people into the country who enjoy killing and maiming their hosts. It is not as if there is not some recent history with markers that would reliably indicate what sort of folks they might be and where in the world they might be coming from. These deep thinkers apparently concluded that New York rather than Uzbekistan, with no infidels to speak of to irritate the faithful, was a more suitable place for a man whose given name, Sayfullo, translates as “Sword of Allah.” Are they winners or losers? Perhaps one of the Governor’s “diversity” advisors can shed some light on this. 

Finally, we need to decipher “Don’t let them change us,” one last slippery pronoun in this verbal smog to ponder as we twist the ring. Who does this man think he is talking to? Eight people, very much alive on a bike trail having a nice outing have already been permanently changed – into corpses by an angry Muslim in a rental truck. “Change” doesn’t get more profound and irreversible than this, and, as noted above, somebody, obviously, let this happen to us, somebody who should have grasped the obvious, that fewer angry Muslims in the U.S. means safer sidewalks and bike paths and, for those who care, less Islamophobia. How do we make sense of what seems to be apparent nonsense straight from the Governor’s mouth? 

What we learn from the decoder ring is that the “them” Cuomo is imploring us to resist are not the fanatics, completely open about what they are about, imported by the cult-Marxists to make us more tolerant and diverse. An occasional, unpredictable mass-murder is price of admission paid by the victims. The “them” are those millions of Americans who populate the “basket of deplorables,” the racists, Islamophobes and xenophobes who Hillary fingered last fall during her failed Presidential campaign. These are the folks who Cuomo is signaling are not going to be allowed to win. They recognize that Muslims in America are the left’s latest clients and need their protection as one more victim class, and hence are inclined to challenge their betters to justify the treachery they have put into place. Hence the invention of “Islamophobia” to create one more class of bigots to demonize and shut them up when they complain when they see people in their own country murdered by devotees of the religion of peace.  

Now the man makes perfect sense, ideologically speaking. Cuomo’s pronoun shell game is another artifice of the left. The “we’s”,  “us’s” and “them’s” are elusive and protean, very useful to confuse, distract and misdirect. They are the basic elements in the left’s “science” of attention management, the success of its practitioners measured by how well it augments their power and the extent to which the American people continue to embrace the illusion that they are free citizens rather servile (“irredeemable”) subjects and that their leaders can be held to account for their crimes.

Has the Spanish Civil War Ended?

“Spain on a knife's edge as Madrid seizes control of rebel Catalonia” (Madrid, AFP)   

Deja vu isn’t what it used to be. I am confused. Hasn’t the Spanish Civil War ended? Here is a clue from the first paragraph of the AFP news release under the headline above. “Spain was plunged into crisis Friday as Madrid seized power from independence-seeking Catalonia, the first curtailment of regional autonomy since the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco.” Yes, let’s keep “the brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco” front and center when we talk about contemporary Spain. Here we have the mass media slipping some virtue signaling into the mix to guide the reader, historiographically speaking, through dark, turbulent waters toward the safe harbor of cultural Marxist hermeneutics as he contemplates the current disorder.

AFP, by the way, stands for Agence France-Presse, an international news agency headquartered in Paris and the third largest news agency in the world, after AP and Reuters. Those who gaze at the world under the journalistic tutelage of the cognoscenti from AP, AFP and Reuters, should be aware that “brutal dictatorship” is one of their well-worn meta-political prescriptions, a de rigueur qualifier for right-wing dictators, living or dead. Rarely or ever do they apply it to the “liberators” of the left who grant free health care to their wards. In vein, you will scour AP or AFP coverage over the decades to discover “the brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro.” Rather, here is another recent piece of left-wing journalism (the NYT) rhapsodic over a different Latin caudillo.  “The Socialist-inspired movement of the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela led to gains in education and health care, but the country has sunk into hunger, unrest and dictatorship.”  This “hunger, unrest and dictatorship” seems to be quite the mystery.  Take note of how respectful this is – “the late President” … his “Socialist-inspired movement” and so many “gains.”

The Spanish Civil War remains the 20^th century prototype of the trending victim ideology. A lot of Franco’s victims were from Catalonia. Catalonia’s secessionist ambitions were a big part of the civil war, and it was, both materially and ideologically, the most vigorous region in opposition to the Nationalists. It was also an anarchist stronghold and the place where George Orwell observed for posterity in Homage to Catalonia the crushing of the non-Stalinist left (POUM) by Stalin’s NKVD. Today it offers an exotic fusion of hyper leftwing politics, academics and social justice activism. Visited now it would be sort of like a Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and San Francisco all rolled together in a beautiful Mediterranean setting.  Standing in front of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia you might think you had just dropped some acid. To see today’s left rapidly decomposing, debauched pathologies proudly on an in-your-face display, go to Barcelona – a depressing contrast to conservative, still-somewhat-Catholic, Madrid.

However, to answer the question posed above: Did the Spanish Civil War really end in 1939 when the Republicans surrendered and the shooting stopped?  No. Two separate thoughts apply here. First, it was a civil war and, unlike conventional wars where the losers sue for peace and the winners, content with the terms, go home, the victors and the vanquished (for the most part) have to live together – intimately in some cases. The victors take their revenge, daily, in ways big and small. For the vanquished, the experience of resentment that never ceases to fester and is passed through the generations. Moreover, resentment, if properly nourished and managed, can become a powerful political weapon. In Spain, it has. Flip Clausewitz and you have the current Spanish Civil War as conducted by the Marxists: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Second, is that the Spanish Civil War is, perhaps, unique in the 20^th century as a political rebellion where the forces of reaction prevailed against a well-organized, highly energized far-left terrorism supported by and aligned with the liberal and left-wing elites in politics, the universities and haute culture. Also unique is that the narrative of the Spanish Civil War that eventually triumphed was produced and widely promulgated not by the winners (Francoists) but by the losers (the left). Its success was due in large part to its simplicity as a tragic, but inspirational morality play. The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported and defended by the International Brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini.

This is the widely promulgated Manichean version of the Spanish Civil War – the forces of Good, advancing democracy, equality and freedom, confronting Evil in the form of fascism with its instinctive brutality, militarist atavism and racial bigotry. It is wonderfully free of any moral ambiguity – the losers as heroes and martyrs in opposition to tyranny and oppression, abandoned by the Western democracies; the winner, a cretin mediocrity who took his revenge, built his dictatorship and finally drifted into senescence.

In 2012, the British Marxist, Paul Preston, published a massive tomb, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. Just the title and sub-title alone are a vicious smear; of course, the Catholic Church meets Auschwitz. Preston, a prolific and erudite Spanish Civil War historian, is widely read and admired in Spain. His Spanish Holocaust, however, is in keeping with the left’s reductio ad hitlerum approach to modern history. In the Prologue he writes: “I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the sub-title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser but none the less, massive suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936—9 and for several years thereafter, I could find no other word that more that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’.” I also feel intense sorrow and outrage reading this book, but many words could be found to show how tendentious, dishonest and outrageous Preston’s choice for his title really is, but suffice it to say that he is entirely consistent in playing the left’s tiresome game of the brown smear and preserving the fiction of the Spanish Civil War as fascism crushing democracy.  

Relieved of its romantic For Whom the Bell Tolls mythology, however, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, thanks to the herculean labors of researchers like Burnett Bolloten and Stanley Payne, gives way in large part to the contemplation of communist (Stalinist) duplicity and treachery heavily cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, equality and freedom.  While contributing human and material assets to the Spanish Republicans ostensibly to resist the fascist rebels, Stalin’s NKVD agents were moving through Spain rounding up, torturing and murdering dissident communists, like Andreu Nin, taking control of the Army and insinuating themselves deeply into positions of governmental power. Stalin’s Trojan horse modus operandi in Spain was a dress rehearsal for how the communists would operate to support the unfolding of “democracy” in devastated counties like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland at the end of World War II, countries that we all know became models of social equality and so bursting with confidence, prosperity and opportunity that no one was allowed to leave.

During this civil war, Stalin’s assassins were also chasing his former revolutionary colleague, Leon Trotsky, around the globe and killing his family members until the Soviet-trained Spaniard, Ramon Mercader, murdered him in Mexico City in 1940. Mercader’s mother, incidentally, was Caridad del Río Hernández, an ardent communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and doubled as a Soviet agent.The Leon Trotsky of Stalin’s invention and dissemination was supposedly in league with Franco and the fascists. In historical retrospect, it is difficult to conceive how such a preposterous fiction could have taken hold with anyone, but Stalin’s dramaturgical skill in service to his jealousy and megalomania was second only to the eager gullibility of his acolytes and fellow travelers.

 

“Fascist” in Stalin’s lexicon was his preferred term of abuse for whomever at the moment he saw as a competitor for power, his enemy du jour. Stalinists reserve their resentment for those who compete with them for power. Inside the Soviet Union from 1936 through 1938, Stalin purged the bulk of the old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and the senior officer corps, men who, like Trotsky, were supposedly in league with the fascists. These were individuals, most of whom were deeply committed communists, revolutionaries from the early days of the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin feared and loathed them because he viewed them as competitors for his own power base within the party. Into Spain with the support of Santiago Carrillo and his Spanish communist followers, he exported his signature calumnies, purges, show trials with the accompanying tortures and executions. His agents moved against Francisco Largo Caballero and the socialists with a ferocity and ruthlessness that was directed against the forces of Franco in lesser proportions.  All of the non-Stalinist left in Spain at one time or another during the civil war were linked to or tarnished with the label of fascist.

    

With “fascism” being so protean and flexible, how absurd to try to render the Spanish Civil war as a battle of democracy against fascism when in many ways it more resembles a replay of French Jacobins against the ancien régime. However, the resemblance is imperfect. Franco did manage militarily to crush the Republicans and punish and purge all the Spanish leftists he could get his hands on. He also tried mightily to make 20^th century Spain into an earlier Catholic Spain, not exactly a strictly fascist sort of obsession, evidenced also by his marginalizing of the Falange. But his 36 year-long “brutal dictatorship” was largely a bust. The Spanish Jacobins came roaring back, literally. After Franco’s death in 1975, the legendary Spanish Communist and devout Stalinist, La Pasionaria, Deloris Ibárruri of “No pasarán” fame returned to Spain from exile in the Soviet Union and eventually took an elected seat in the Spanish Parliament.  General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) Santiago Carrillo also returned to Spain from the Soviet Union. Carrillo, a Stalinist errand boy and butcher, had supervised the Paracuellos massacres by a Republican faction in 1936. He also arranged for the murder of those Spanish communists who had incurred Stalin’s disapproval. Back in post-Franco Spain, Carrillo joined Ibárruri in Parliament. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2005. La Pasionaria and Carrillo, both very old, with bloody hands and unrepentant, died, so to speak, in the “odour of sanctity” in the crumbling remnants of Franco’s Spain.

Post-Franco, it seemed like only minutes before Spain joined the rest of secularist, consumerist, western Europe with all the once-forbidden goodies – liberated women, no-fault divorce, gay rights, abortion (eventually).  With the fading of a Catholic Spain and the Iberian embrace of secular hedonism, you might think that the Spanish Marxists would be happy. But, no. Leftists everywhere are unhappy and resentful.  Resentment brings victims (as subjects of political patronage) and targets victimizers (as objects of proscription and revenge). In the U.S. the victims are “people of color” and the victimizers are white racists, committed to the retention of their “privilege” and the pursuit of their “supremacy.” In Spain, the left has Franco as the great victimizer, having achieved, per Paul Preston, Hitler status.  When you have yet another Hitler in place, there are ample victims for consideration and no place to hide for those who cannot quite grasp the new reality. Franco, unlike Hitler, won his war, and the Spanish, unlike the post WWII Germans subjected to de-Nazification, have eluded a de-Francoization. But the left persists. In 2007 the Socialist Party passed the eerie sounding “Law of Historical Memory” which, formally condemned the Franco regime and began the process of the dismantling of all things Franco in Spain – statues, street names, etc.  – and someday, Franco’s memorial and tomb, Valle de los Caidos. The Spanish Civil War is not over, at least not for the left in Spain.

From Ted Kennedy to Harvey Weinstein, or, How the Lecher became the Lion

 

Let us cut to the chase. Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was one miserable, contemptible excuse for a human being. But dead he has been for eight years, so why bother now sifting through the sordid details, the mountainous offal strewn in the wake of his long and epically degenerate life? Two words: Harvey Weinstein. The recent outing of this bloated, debauched full-time Hollywood kingpin and moneybags man for Democrat politicians like Hillary and Obama and part time rapist raises the obvious question: how do they get away with it? The libertine, John Kennedy, splashing in the White House pool with prostitutes and shagging mob molls, still occupies his station in Camelot; yes, and Bill Clinton, a serial womanizer, sexual predator and suspected rapist who liked to fly on the“Lolita Express” with his “good buddy,” convicted, child rapist, Jeffrey Epstein.  Bill’s wife, who covered for him and attacked his victims (“slut”  and “looney tunes”), then gets rewarded with a carpet bag Senate seat, the 2016 Democrat Presidential nomination, and 66 million votes. 

So, while the left now is on a cultural rampage with our public spaces – the statuary, monuments, the names of buildings, schools, streets, etc.  – purged of any historical references, symbols or imagery that might offend the delicate sensibilities of social justice warriors, the assault and abuse of women by big shot men of the left, both living and dead, get written off as “weakness”and “addiction.”They are  quick to be forgiven because, as principal players in the ruling cult-Marx decadence of American culture, what they actually do is secondary to what they pretend to be – everything is the opposite of what it is said to be. The reality of Hollywood’s pretend superior virtue is the rampaging sodomizer of actresses, Harvey Weinstein; the reality of the Democrat’s pretend abhorrence of hatred and violence is Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, trying to gun down Republican congressmen.
   
How then does the defunct Teddy, “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy fit into this scene of ruinous hypocrisy where real victims get displaced by abstract ones? Ted Kennedy was the national standard bearer over a generation for left-wing profligates, a man who managed to set the bar lower than anyone could imagine. But this answer leads to a more complicated and fundamental question. How did he pull it off? How was this arch hypocrite, a man so intellectually mediocre, so personally dissolute and debauched able to rise to this pinnacle of political power, eulogized at his death as a champion of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, officially “lionized” as a great Senate statesman?  

Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician. The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man? A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in manslaughter from one of his countless alcohol fueled, philandering escapades. He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up. She could have been rescued, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers and the more important task of concocting a story to evade the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned. As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

He was never completely able to escape the shadows and shame of Chappaquiddick, but the voters of Massachusetts had to have a Kennedy in Washington, perhaps to keep the women in the Bay State safe, and with the passage of time and the crafting of a fashionable leftish championing-the-underdog image, his abandonment of Mary Jo to die became a mere peccadillo, collateral damage of the sort happily overlooked so as to keep a playboy with a magic name in a high place. Here then is the beginning of the answer to the question posed above: how did the lecher become the lion?
 
With gusto Kennedy positioned himself firmly on the left embracing its antinomian trends and leading the charge of American identity politics. Rewarded with the unconditional support of its pandered-to beneficiaries, he was thus in large part able to immunize himself from the sharper edges of the contempt he deserved. Teddy never came to endure what should have been an outpouring of disgust and repudiation for a man with the moral fiber of a bunko artist and the life-style of Caligula.

The easy life of a protected, rich wastrel and reprobate was, however, not enough for Teddy. He was, after all, a Kennedy, committed to what he liked to call “public service” a laughable, crude piece of unintended irony for someone wholly self-indulgent in his gross personal conduct and self-serving in his public role. A life devoted to beakers of Johnny Walker and whoring was not going to, as they say, “make a difference.” Kennedy needed to inflict himself on the nation. And so he did … make quite a difference. Two of his signature pieces of mischief, that pushed the country toward its current state of misery, deserve mention here.  First, his support and active selling of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which produced the opposite of what he promised.

From the Center for Immigration Studies
 Although the 1965 bill was intended only to end discrimination, some people feared a major increase in immigration and a change in the source countries of immigrants. Supporters of the measure assured doubters that this would not happen. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:
“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.” [emphasis added]

In the “final analysis,” we are talking about the word of Teddy Kennedy. Most apropos is a single phase – Kennedy “reassured his colleagues and the nation,” the same sort of reassurance, perhaps, he gave Ms. Kopechne in watery bowels of his Oldsmobile – “don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you out of here.” He lied with the verve of a true Bolshevik – “everything is the opposite of what I say it is.” The country was “flooded with millions of immigrants” who dramatically changed “the ethnic mix of this country.” America, thanks in large part to his man, has been transformed, ethnically, culturally, economically by this law. California, once a competitive and healthy two-party state is now because of the immigration influx unleashed after 1965 entirely controlled by a single party. Hillary Clinton’s margin of nearly three million votes over Donald Trump in the 2016 election came out of California, Democrat clients of Kennedy’s creation. Her plan, upon election, was to turn the rest of the country, politically, into California.
Catering to a burgeoning, resentment-laden set of victim classes and importing lots of needy people into the country along with the extraction and redistribution of resources from its largely middle-class citizens to support them creates a cultural and political backlash that threatens the power structure and its overseers. Thus, the second piece of the Teddy Kennedy’s nefarious legacy: “hate” legislation.  From a peroration in the Senate in 2007, “Standing Against Hate.” 

I'd like to speak … regarding the Hate Crimes Amendment -- at a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to act against hate crimes and send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate…..  Since the September 11th attacks, we've seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims, Sikhs, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent…..  Hate crimes are a form of domestic terrorism…. Like other acts of terrorism, hate crimes have an impact far greater than the impact on the individual victims. They are crimes against entire communities, against the whole nation, and against the fundamental ideals on which America was founded. [emphasis added]

What a vapid collection of useless abstractions and non-sequiturs from a man who ceaselessly preached but never practiced. “At a time when our ideals are under attack from by terrorists in other lands”? Terrorists do not attack “ideals”: they attack and kill defenseless people, which is what makes them so terrible. Not clear as well is why terrorists would be attacking our ideals in other lands, but this is Ted Kennedy talking, oblivious to minimal standards of evidence and coherence. Why, a rational person might ask, do we need to send this “message” to the world that “we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate”?  Since there was absolutely no evidence that we did tolerate such crimes, why was he talking like this? To distract people from the obvious fact that so much of the terrorism going on around the world was being done by people of “Middle Eastern descent,” and to hope people might not wonder why politicians like Kennedy were so eager to put more of them in their neighborhoods. No one in the political establishment from President Bush after 9-11 on down was speaking of Islam as anything other than the “religion of peace.”

One has also to ponder: how America had managed to stave off collapse until 2007 by ignoring these crimes, now morphed into “domestic terrorism” against, first, “entire communities,” then, “the whole nation” and then, yikes! America’s foundational “fundamental ideals.” Once again, we are supposed be traumatized by terrorists attacking those wonderful “ideals” – what specific ideals he doesn’t bother to say, but the more nebulous and vague the abstractions, the easier it was to keep his multicultural scam going. And the scam?  Import millions of third world people, many of whom are resistant to assimilation, some of whom are hostile to American norms. Then, stigmatize the resentment of the American hosts who bear the cultural, financial burden as “bigotry and prejudice.” Gotcha! Welcome to twenty-first century America where lechers are lions and where the politicians have christened half of the citizens as “irredeemable” racists, xenophobes and bigots because many of them believe that it is not a good idea to let anyone and everyone into the U.S. who simply wants to come.

The mumbo-jumbo of “Standing Against Hate,” late in a career of pretending to be a statesman was one of Teddy’s many signature incoherent episodes of Senate oratory. Since his death in 2009 it can be said in fairness to him that he did leave his mark; he did make a difference: to the American people he did figuratively what he did literally to Mary Jo Kopechne fifty years earlier.
 
Teddy was also a pioneer in the field of career advancement for left-wing politicians and “socially conscious” Hollywood celebrities who now so eagerly excoriate Trump and his bigoted supporters. The winning formula: affect a self-righteous persona that exudes compassion, pander to the right victim groups for support and adulation while smearing the opposition as racist, sexist, or, as Hillary Clinton whined, “you name it.” Lots of choices. Then … enjoy your escapades. No restraints should apply to those voices of the voiceless, and no one will give much thought or sympathy to the casualties of their making. They are merely collateral damage, just not the right sort of victims.