This author is mistaken about the history of black people in California. From before the Gold Rush the African-American population of California was about 2%. These people tended to be fully integrated into the population and contributing members of society, sometimes important contributors. This was more the case in Northern California than in Southern, and black-white race relations in Southern California deteriorated over time because a higher proportion of “white” immigration there was from the American South and Southwest. By the Civil War there was support there for the Confederacy.

In the SF Bay region the important transportation line between the quicksilver mines in New Idria and New Almaden was owned and operated by Isaiah Williams, of San Juan Bautista and San Jose. Davis St. in San Francisco is named for an important merchant of the pre-Gold Rush and Gold Rush era, the son of a free black Boston sailor and a Hawaiian princess. An important East Bay physician, a Berkeley resident, was African-American. You can find a photo on line of the 1916 San Jose High School Graduating class of 18, one black, all otherwise indistinguishable in dress, manner, and apparent mutual friendship and respect. This was typical of middle class black-white relations in San Jose up until the 1960s.

The character of Northern California’s black population and, to some extent, of black-white relations in the area, was transformed in the 1940s when the Kaiser shipyards attracted immigration of workers, especially from Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Their “ghetto cultures” were and are centered around the (now gone) shipyards at Marin City, Richmond, West Oakland, Hunters Point and East Palo Alto. This population brought with it the black-white hostility of their former residences and white worker immigrants from the same areas brought theirs, and here we are.

Today in the Bay Area black-white relations are a remarkably various crazy quilt. The percentage of blacks and whites is about the same but relations vary widely. Native blacks and native whites often enough form enduring lifelong friendships unpoisoned by the Great American Illness — while the descendants of shipyard workers who preserve the segregated ghetto culture tend to preserve the inherited culture of racism and hostility, which, in the Bay Area, is typically more often black-on-white than the other way around.

Mr. Slavsky is quite right to point out that corruption (or racketeering) — the control by business and wealth of government in their own interest and against the interest of the public at large and the “republic” (“commonwealth”) — has been a basic fact of American government since before 1900. That insulin costs ten times here what it does in Canada is one of literally millions of obvious examples that can be cited. This basic fact is kept out of public awareness and political discussion by the collaboration of media, publishing, education, and “private-sector think tanks” and foundations — all of which are totally controlled by this same business class of organized wealth that represents the one tenth of one percent –one in a thousand — who own 30% of America, including all key entities and the great share of property in land. “Feudal?” “Robber barons” you say? Why, you dirty commie!

If I understand Michael Hudson correctly, the excellent Ms. Brown is mistaken linking the costs of LBJ’s ‘Great Society’ with overseas military expenditures as a cause of the breakdown of the dollar in the Vietnam Era. Hudson says that the dollar’s trade deficit and collapse was entirely attributable to military expenditures overseas. Domestic expenditures circulate domestically and do no factor in to foreign trade deficits in the same direct way, but only indirectly, if at all. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex and International Finance are what is killing our country and have been throughout all our lifetimes.

Speaking of documentation you don’t supply any for your assertion that Castro expelled Jews from Cuba. Would you please?

Actually Warburg and Baruch backed Wilson. TR’s big financial backers were Morgan partners, WASPs. Other Morgan partners “backed” Wilson (also) and Taft. Wall Street split the 1912 race three ways to prevent the re-election of Taft, which was otherwise in the cards — because Taft, though conservative, believed in law and practiced enforcing it, including anti-trust, child labor, safe food and drugs, an eight-hour day. The commie! He had to be done away with, and the populist progressive surge behind LaFollette had to be diverted by TR’s patrician pretend progressive hijinks — all talk and no walk at home, and the dawning imperial big stick overseas.

A transcript is a FAR MORE EFFICIENT method of transmission, for people who are able to read at typical intelligent adult rates. You can read a transcript three or four or five or more times as fast as you can listen to the talk.

Far the most pointed and penetrating comment on the Treaty of Versailles (and prediction of its consequences) is not to be found in Keynes’ book but in Thorstein Veblen’s review of it, collected in his Essays In Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (1934, rpr. 1964).

Thanks Linh Dinh for remarking on the crazy blind n****r hunters of Unz Review, the best victims divide-and-conquerors ever had. Hate hate hate! It’s its own punishment.

Jim Crow racism was invented in the South in the last quarter of the 19th century to keep black and white tenant farmers and share croppers at each others’ throats while the local 1% supervisorial ruling class throttled them both into perpetual debt peonage to absentee lenders headquartered in New York City — just like their plantation-slave owning forebears — only now, instead of mortgaging slave bodies to Manhattan banks, they mortgaged land and retail trade (credit for groceries etc.).

It worked, and, to judge by this essay and these comments and much else on Unz.com, it still does.

Read the history of Taiwan on wikipedia. It says it all (until censored).

first ya gotta understand what they’re saying
which a combination of dumbness, ill-will and smart-ass
makes harder,
doncha know?

MH, you need a copy editor like, really bad. Your writing is so lucid, so penetrating, so permeated with precise analysis — and the typographical flubs are so … avoidable. All it takes is a sharp-eyed reader. Just one.

Other than that, nothing but gratitude & praise.

Michael, the idiom is “hissy fit”, with an ‘h’.

Something must have gone wrong. Maybe the plane that was supposed to hit WTC-7 didn’t make it. Maybe this was the plane that “crashed” without leaving wreckage?

But WTC-7 needed to come down anyways. Maybe because that’s where the SEC’s records of investigations of unprosecuted Wall Street crimes of the previous decade were stored?

But there’s no need to get too distracted with such speculations. The key fact — that’s still a non-fact in the non-fact world of this Official National Fib — is, WTC-7 fell down “all by itself.” Maybe it was fairy-dust.

You’re right about the free pass for Israel in Scott’s work, and this is troubling and problematical. But what I mentioned him for, and one thing I find his work useful for, is his tracking of continuity of personnel from Dallas to Watergate to the “Continuity of Government” activities involving Cheney and Rumsfeld during and after Ford’s peculiar presidency, to the October Surprise to Iran-Contra to 9/11.

Your comments about LBJ are off-topic, or on a different topic, but cogent. Briefly, my own sense is that he had to be a compliant (probably terrified) cooperator after the fact, but probably not a participant in the actual plot before the fact.

There’s only one way to engage persons — one by one.

Please post an internet address to link up with this when it comes around. Thanks.

The article by Alan Sabrosky linked above, Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake, is spectacularly good. It should be made permanently visible and available on this site.

It appears to me that your discussion of this matter is, in fact, entirely ignoring Peter Dale Scott’s extensive and densely detailed (and referenced) analysis. If (as it would appear) you haven’t read him in extenso, you need to.

The first link to a Sabrosky item (“publicly declared”) does not work.

The youtube link does not work.

“Why do journalists favor the government version so fiercely? The sheer vitriol of their attacks on Truthers reflects deep personal anger; clearly no Deep State maven stands over them dictating their articles.”

Um …

Fortunately all Michael Hudson’s current work is published on his own website, which is itself a useful resource.

Thanks. Bryant is a useful source — as your link shows.

That being said, it’s something more than a shame to see this discussion diverted from the substance of Michael Hudson’s talk — which is of major importance to our present situation and possible futures — onto this obsessive topic of a few vociferous obsessed diversionaries.

Thank you. This is spot on.

Can you please reference this:

“During the Hyperinflation, as much as 1/3 of the Germany had been bought up by foreign speculators.”

I don’t doubt it one bit, but, a cite would be nice. Sarah Gordon’s 1984 U Princeton book is full of similar indices, solidly documented — one third of Berlin real estate, for example.

Thanks again.

It’s not a disaster for its beneficiaries.

Thank you Israel Shamir & Paul Bennett, for the sanest sanity in a l o n g time.

And what were the number of German casualties on the Eastern Front in 1914? And cite your source.

The literature of American “Revisionist Historians” of the First World War spans 20 years (1919-1939) and comprises many dozens of books and hundreds of journal articles. It was extensively published, popular, widely accepted and influential among the American people at large. Important publications by these historians include:

Harvard Prof Sidney B. Fay, “New Light on the Origins of The World War (I, II & III), American Historical Review (July & Oct. 1920, Jan, 1921) — seven years later collected, developed and expanded as:

Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (NY, 1928):

John Kenneth Turner, Shall It Be Again (B.W. Huebsch, NY 1922). A forceful early presentation of the unvarnished facts.

Harry E. Barnes, Genesis Of The World War (New York, London, Knopf, 1927, new & rev. ed. 1929)

C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York, Vanguard Press, 1929)..

M.H. Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914 (1931)

H.C. Englebrecht & F.C. Hanighen, Merchants Of Death, A Study of the International Armament Industry (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934).

Walter Millis, Road to War, America 1914-1917 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes To War (Boston, Little, Brown and company, 1938)

Matthew Ware Coulter, The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death (Greenwood Press, Contributions in American History, No. 177, Westport, Connecticut, 1997).

H[orace].C[ornelius]. Peterson, Propaganda For War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914-1917 (U Oklahoma, Norman, 1939)

H.C. Peterson, Opponents of War 1917-1918 (Madison, U Wisconsin, 1957).

These later books usefully confirm and extend Peterson’s discussion:

Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How The United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918 (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland & Co, 1996);

William H. Thomas, Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s covert campaign to suppress dissent (Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2008).

*

The Revisionsit History of the Second World War has been much more constricted and slow to emerge and vilified when it does. Three key texts, concerned with the manner of America’s entry, were published early:

Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the coming of the war, 1941; a study in appearances and realities. (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1948.)

Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War: a study of secret power politics, 1937-1941 (New York, Devin-Adair, 1951).

Charles Tansill, Back Door To War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933-1941 (Regnery, Chicago, 1952)

The arrival of most has been slower. Four watershed books of major importance are:

A.J.P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (London, Hamilton Hamish, 1961)

David L. Hoggan, The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed (Costa Mesa, Institute for Historical Review, 1989) — published in German in 1961 but blocked in English for 18 years — quite a testimonial. (Despite the flatulent vituperations of the usual vituperators there is not a word of “anti-semitism” in it.)

Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York, Free Press, 2000). “Conspiracy theory,” according to official sources — 70 pages of documentary evidence in reproduction notwithstanding (ignored).

Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II (Anapolis, MY, Naval Institute Press, 2008). Just starting to get traction with the academic rank and file.

*

The animus against Harry Elmer Barnes results from more than his revelation of the actual sequence of causes of the First World War in Genesis of the World War. Around 1947 Charles Beard, at the time by general acclamation the pre-eminent American historian of America, wrote a letter which The Saturday Evening Post published, pointing out and objecting to the way in which the military establishment and the Truman Administration, their backers and their academic servitors were conspiring to limit scholarly access to the government’s documentary record of the just concluded war to a very small number of academic historians carefully selected for their adherence to the official view (itself the creation largely of FDR’s Office Of War Information). Prominent among these select official historians was (CIA, later) Harvard Prof William Langer, who went on to write the most touted summary official history and become a key enforcer of its orthodoxy.

Alerted by Beard, American historians made enough of a fuss that the powers involved agreed to grant access to a few select other historians who were not publicly associated with the Administration’s official line. Charles Tansill, eminent in his field, was one, Frederic Rockwell Sanborn another — and both produced important books — that were obscurely published and consigned to official oblivion by American academic institutional historiography.

This happened because persons in a position to do it reached the conclusion that it would be unwise to let the same thing happen in America after the Second World War as happened after the First — that is, the factual exposure of the realities of the war brought about by the so-called “Revisionist Historians” — whose work during the 20s and 30s was widely read, well-circulated, well-received, widely accepted, respected and praised, appearing in dozens of books and mainstream periodicals — magazines like Readers Digest and the American Mercury as well as the likes of Nation and scholarly journals. Its books sold well; some became best sellers. The Merchants of Death is an especially prominent example. The net result of the publication of this history was the strong conviction of the overwhelming majority of Americans in the 20s and 30s in favor of neutrality, non-intervention, arms limitation and disarmament, international arbitration, peace.

Accordingly, to prevent the reformation among the people of such sentiments tending to impede the metropolitan imperial project, promptly at the end of the Second World War, with the Rockefeller Foundation prominent in the enterprise (along with others less visible), funds and influence were applied in the colleges, publishing, and the press to encourage the production, publication and publicity for accounts voicing official views, and to discourage others, firmly. The result was that, although truthful factual accounts did emerge, they tended to be obscurely published, little reviewed and discountenanced by academic institutional authority in the colleges and by publishers and editors and publishers in the press This campaign was very effective on the whole.

In the early 50s, Harry Elmer Barnes, like Charles Beard and Charles Tansill, a highly respected senior figure among historians, one who knew many of his colleagues among historians who were struggling to provide a factual account and one who understood from decades’ experience the obstacles they were facing, published a series of pamphlets and booklets adressing this emergent historiography and the campaign to suppress it. Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace and The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout are the two best known titles. (They also include important reviews of A.J.P. Taylor, of William Langer, of David Hoggan, and others.) These writings were collected and republished in 1972 by Arno Press as Seleted Revisionist Phamplets.

And this is why Harry Elmer Barnes — who in 1940 was highly esteemed in his field (like Charles Beard) — is now reckoned a very very bad man — among people who do not share the values his work manifests.

I should have mentioned that the French wanted to go to war with Germany seeking revenge for their defeat by German 40 years earlier in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) — which France started and promptly lost. And Britain wanted to go to war with Germany both to thwart Germany as the fastest rising rival of her world commercial empire and in pursuit of her “Balance of Power” foreign policy, invented by Thomas Cromwell for Henry VIII in the early 1500s, which dictates that the proper foreign policy for England vis-a-vis the European continent is to form coalitions with other nations to gang up on the biggest — to keep the biggest from getting bigger.

There is, however, another aspect of this subject that is quite distinct from the issue of the causes and conduct of the war in Europe — and one of greater moment for Americans — namely, how Americans were dragooned into participation in it, and by what means, and by whom, and why.

For this, look first to Tansill’s book and the two by Peterson, and Ross’s, and Coulter’s discussion of the Nye Committee’s evidence. Coulter’s presentation of the Committee’s findings is understated but faithful. He states the facts plainly enough, but he doesn’t probe into or dwell much on their significance and implications. The 12-volume of the Committee’s report are included in libraries that hold copies of The Congressional Record and are a treasure trove of scandal and grief. To genuine patriots. Those extinct creatures.

In 1966 CBS decided, instead of running live overage of Sen. Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam, to run I Love Lucy re-runs instead. Fred Friendly, head CBS News, resigned.

And we’ve come a long way since then baby.

It’s who’s doing the containing and why and how that is revealing, and for whose benefit the terms of the Treaty were written, and how they conceived benefit and envisioned its operations, etc. The use of Veblen’s essay — his typical use — is to strip the object of analysis bare of delusive paraphernalia. It’s not his fault if the naked truth of “our” socio-economic political arrangements look like a plucked duck.

Veblen points out — 120 years ago — that the net effect of advertising is zero among products “competing” in the modern commercial market of which it forms a feature. Its presence as a factor in the market merely forces the costs of advertising on all “competitors” so that its “influence,” insofar as there might be any, approximately evens out. Since these “markets” mostly function to eliminate serious (so called “cut-throat”) competition anyways, the cost of advertising is doubly wasted — but still borne by the “consumer” — which is the whole point anyways.

The one thing advertising does do is raise the basic cost of doing business, which favors larger producers and distribution networks and concentrations of investment, as against that almost mythical creature, the small business and local entrepreneur. One factor Veblen didn’t live long enough to ponder is the contribution of systemic advertising to the creation of a truly Orwellian manufactured pseudo-public domain of mass delusion — the all-pervading flood of “little” lies on which the big battleship lies get floated and in which the spirit of the republic (res publica — common wealth), the spirit of mutual respect among citizen — gets drowned.

Replying to Ron Unz in #306:

“Germany’s War Aims”, in Fischer’s terms, means German war plans. The “documents” McNally refers to derive from general staff strategic planning. This has no bearing on the issue Barnes investigates in Genesis of the World War, which focuses on the chronology of the conflict events and the underlying diplomatic arrangements, mostly secret, which were exposed when the Bolsheviks published the Czar’s diplomatic archives in 1919, to the scandal of all concerned. This is what precipitated the so-called “revisionist history” of which, in America, Barnes and Fay. This history is “revisionist” insofar as it revises the propaganda versions of events concocted by (mostly) British publicists — by debunking them with the indubitably evidenced facts. The kind of discourse people like McNally pursue is essentially diversionary and evasive of these facts. (McNally, incidentally, gives no sign of having read Barnes, let along grasped his argument.)

To understand the actual bearing of “war plans,” start with Newbold (above) who discusses the military and industrial-economic planning that HAD TO take place on ALL sides for the WWI to have happened at all, and which on his showing was already evident to all participants five years and more before August 1914. Knowledgeable observers, five years before the event, expected the war to start that summer. And it did. If this were purely Germany’s doing, it could not have happened. Patty-cake requires at least two to play.

All countries in this kind of game make war plans. The US Navy made the plans they eventually executed to seize Manila five years before the declaration of the Spanish American War. The US Marines practiced amphibious landings in the Caribbean against Japanese targets in 1924. The pre World War One war plans of BOTH England and France (as well as Germany) anticipated violating Belgian territory to move troops in the opening stages of conflict. It’s just that, as things turned out, Germany beat them to it, and then the propagandists of Great Britain and France (and later in America, picking up their tune) jumped up and down and screamed and shouted and pointed “Off sides!! Off sides!!! Penalty! Bad Germans”! (and circulated manufactured atrocity stories) — as if that one “misstep” somehow explained and accounted for and set the terms of evaluation of — the entire war and its industrial mobilization ON ALL SIDES over nearly the previous decade — not to mention the decade of secret diplomacy revealed by the exposure of Czar’s diplomatic archive. (These documents were discussed internationally by scholars and historians intensely on all sides and published on in several languages. Barnes and Fay are distinguished as being among the first American historians who had the sense of a duty to fact and reason and truth and the courage to act — to write history rather than jingoist propaganda.

As Barnes demonstrates, as a matter of indubitable evidence, what did, in fact, precipitate the actual conflict as a “world war,” — that is, a multi-national conflict (as distinguished from the local two-party conflict between the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and its refractory client state Serbia) — was the mobilization of the Russian Army on Germany’s eastern frontier. Conditions of industrial warfare are such that it takes several days to get an army actually rolling into invasion (as well as years of preparation) — so that seeing this Russian mobilization in progress confronted Germany with a simple choice: roll over and get plowed under, or put your counter move in motion. Which Germany did, and in the process executed its war plan, which was, if confronted with a two front war, to attack first on the other front. So they did.

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles claimed to be based on the exclusive war guilt of Germany — “they started it.” Barnes ironclad evidence-based analysis shows that, in fact, in those terms, the Czar, the “ally” (with many secret codicils) of Britain and France, “started it.” Further evidence shows that he did so at the urging and prompting especially of the French, both diplomatically and through the great power French investors and banks exercised over the Czar’s finances — holding huge swaths of his national bonds and with major investments in Russian industry and involvement in Russian finance, etc. Lotsa pull.

Fischer’s subject, Germany’s war plans and war aims, as written up before August 1914, reflect their background in a military-minded officer-diplomatic corp prompted by industrial and financial interests eager for power and a glory-addled Kaiser. And exactly the same can be said about the war plans of Britain and of France. And behind all three, the less visible international networks of industry, trade, and finance — and the weapons trade (“The Merchants of Death”) — without the close and diligent cooperation of which no five-year mobilizations are possible.

It’s at this point that we are starting to talk about actual historical processes and realities — as contrasted with the purely hypothetical realm of “war plans” and “war guilt” — discussed, moreover, as if Germany was the only country that had them.

The KEY analysis of the Treaty of Versailles — and a good place to begin a reality-based consideration of the facts of the Great War — is Thorstein Veblen’s review of Keynes’ 1920 book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” — which appeared first in the Political Science Quarterly, vol. 35 (Sept. 1920), and is reprinted in a posthumous selection of Veblen’s journal publications edited by Leon Ardzrooni, Essays In Our Changing Order (1934 rpr 1964) p. 462-470.

If you get around to looking into the origins of the First World War you will find the distortion and falsification of historical facts in the contemporary “official version” at least as grossly and egregiously fraudulent as the “official version” of the Second World War. If you do look into it (I did, at length, 20 years ago — it was my big eye opener into the Orwellian realities of the Lie Factory) I would suggest you start with these:

J.T. Walton Newbold, How Europe Armed For War (1871-1914) (London, Blackfriars, 1916)

Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis Of The World War (1929, new & rev. ed.)

Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (1928 — this originally appeared as a series of three articles in American Historical Review 1920-21))

Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes To War (1938)

Matthew Ware Coulter, The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond The Merchants of Death (1997)

Colin Simpson, The Lusitania (Boston, 1972)

Patrick Beesly, Room 40, British Naval Intelligence 1914-18 (London, 1982)

Patrick O’Sullivan, The Lusitania: Unraveling The Mysteries (Cork, 1998)

This literature is large and utterly conclusive; I mentioned several other works above. Tansill had the advantage of writing late in the game and after the revelations of the Senate Munitions Investigation chaired by Gerald Nye (which Coulter discusses) — it’s evidence and findings are published in 12 big volumes of the Congressional Record — so Tansill serves (well) as a summa of the discussion as it bears on America and American entry.

Another important book, for the American side of this story is H.C. Peterson, Propaganda For War : The Campaign Against American Neutrality (1939). Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda For War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918 (Jefferson, N.C., 1996) is also useful on this subject. Peterson’s later book, Opponents of War 1917-1918 (Madison, U Wisconsin, 1957) focuses on the vast apparatus of repression deployed by the Wilson administration, which imprisoned on the order of 20,000 Americans.

This is all just bosh. Barnes’ case in The Genesis of the World War is based on indubitably established facts. It’s settled beyond refutation. Stuff such as P.M. posts here either represents unfamiliarity with these facts, incapacity to grasp them, or refusal to confront them. The effort to substitute blather that does not address these facts, but rather ignores and evades them and blots out their consideration and discussion with blizzards of diversionary blather — speaks for itself and disgraces the author in the eyes of anyone familiar with the facts of the case — which is what the blizzard of blather aims to prevent. This is disreputable on the face of it. And reflects on its author exactly that. Disrepute.

You are either ignorant of Barnes’ actual work (and that of dozens of others), or misunderstand it, or misrepresent it. It was not remotely dependent on “German managers”. The documentation on which it was founded was published and discussed and analyzed by numerous historians in several countries from 1919 forward. Your comments are either based on incomprehension or intend to mislead by indirection. They are based on ignoring evidence or pretending to. Either way, enough.

The same kind of problems vitiate your discussion of the run-up to WWII and Roosevelt’s role in it. One-sided reading doesn’t serve or lead to legitimate historiography, it serves propaganda and delusion. Starting out from the conclusions one wishes to endorse is not research. It’s delusion, of self and/or of others. There’s no purpose served in pointing you to evidence or informative sources, since your comments indicate that you don’t respect evidence and only read the “side” of the subject you wish to. That’s not intellectually or morally respectable, in my opinion.

The assertion that “Roosevelt had nothing to with setting off the crisis which led to WWII” is a key matter that is at issue in the J.P. Kennedy story, and in his Diplomatic Memoir, such was we can surmise it, and also in the Tyler Kent case. Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed is another text where this matter is at issue. You effort to dismiss the whole subject as if long settled is not supported by an informed acquaintance with the subject and its evidences.

No, you are mistaken and misled. Barnes’ scholarship on the origins of the First World War is solid documentary historiography, evidence based, with plenty of concurrent witnesses and analysts — Harvard Prof. Sidney B. Fay, Origins of the World War, Charles Tansill, America Goes To War, John Kenneth Turner, Shall It Be Again, C. Harley Grattan, Why We Fought, M.H. Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914 are five examples of a wide range of evidence based studies in French, German and Italian as well as English, and British as well as American. What’s scandalous is the effort of exponents of official history’s falsified version of these events to ignore very solidly established facts and attack and suppress historians who respect them and state them. These people do not respect facts, they respect power. See Julian Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals on the character and consequences of their proceedings.

I am acquainted with the attack on Barnes as ostensibly “in the pay of” and “parroting” the German view, but this narrative runs counter to the chronology attested in his scholarly publications. Barnes evidence-based proof that the “German guilt” theory of the “cause” of WWI, on which the Versailles Treaty is based, is totally falacious, was established and published in his scholarship, and in others’ (e.g. Fay above), several years before it came to the attention of German historians, which happened in 1924 ff. But Barnes published scholarship on the subject dates back to 1919, as does Fays’, and others. (The discussion of these emergent facts was international.) The Germans of course welcomed his evidence, and publicized it. But they did not pay for it or shape it, as Barnes’ attackers claim. His thesis was already shaped, by facts, when it was first heard of in Germany. The people who twist these basic facts in order to attack Barnes for exposing important matters they want suppressed, are either ignorant of the historiography they slander, and of the facts it establishes, or traitors to historiography, betraying both facts and truth to motives of authority and power. On this, see Benda.

A smear is not a reply. It’s just a smear, and, as such, reflects only the behavior and ethics (sic) of the smearer.

It interests me that the topic of this article, Joseph P. Kennedy, whose story bears considerable import as a witness and participant in a truly fateful passage of American history, one that is still very much with us and very much hanging in the balance, has been entirely lost most of the ensuing discussion, buried under an avalanche of obsessive niggling over matters that pertain hardly even tangentially to the (very serious) subject of the article, though apparently quite dear to their several obsessive exponents. The net result is diversion, confusion, obfuscation, obstruction. Is that also the motive? Or merely an inadvertent consequence of ranters ranting? Does it make any difference?

One difference it makes is that when, for instance, someone like Observator offers his quotation from Harry Elmer Barnes (that saint of American historiography), a quotation that bear in hard on the crux of the matter — it gets lost entirely in the barrage of bullshit. Is this also an inadvertent consequence? Or something else?

Observator, could we get a specific citation for the Harry Elmer Barnes quotation please?

JPK played an important role in swinging the 1932 Democratic nomination to FDR, particularly as liaison with Hearst. So FDR ‘owed’ him. JPK was looking for a cabinet post. FDR fobbed him off with Chair of the Maritime Commission (BFD) and then of the new Securities & Exchange Commission (a bigger slice). His help with the 1936 election added weight to the scale.

Of Coughlin Nasaw writes (230) “the Detroit radio priest … advocated higher taxes on the wealthy, a guaranteed annual wage, the nationalization of public utilities, protection of organized labor … [but] Roosevelt’s most dangerous rival in 1932 was … Sen. Huey Long, … with mailing list of 7.5 million Americans and a profound understanding of how elections were fought and won.”

He also writes that “Morgenthau noted in his diary [that] the president had agreed with him that Kennedy was ‘a very dangerous man.’” (275). Given the thoroughgoing treacherousness of Morgenthau and FDR’s habit of ingratiating interlocutors with meaningless agreement, this could mean anything.

My comment makes no such claim (“uniquely hard”) and draws no comparisons with other cultures. Besides poor reading comprehension, yours displays ignorance on both scores. And a fixation with Ruskis, too. Three strikes. See ya.

America used to drive her poets to suicide — Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, Weldon Kees — or into exile — H.D., T.S. Eliot — or first into exile and then dragged back and imprisoned in a madhouse — Ezra Pound. Now, thanks to the front foundation funding and academic bureaucratic machinations of the same old usual suspects, America has instead whole kennels crammed with College Writing Program AWP-MFA-POBIZ adjunct professors — their soi disant poetry confined to belletristics, coterie jargons and pseudo-intellectual gangster cant and chained to a Sisyphean treadmill rag-trade fashion cycle — their audience limited (by terminal boredom) to fellow professionals (and scarcely that), their subjects restricted to the private personal domestic inconsequential currently fashionable innocuous uncomprehending incomprehensible for the moment permissible bland blank: Professionally trained Poodle Poets paraded on leashes by their Pimp Masters, muzzled, gelded, with perfect hair.

There’s an Italian joke that the Albanians have the patience to wait for them build their roads — first Caesar Augustus, then, later, Mussolini.

Your desire will remain unsatisfied since post-modernists don’t write blank verse and wouldn’t know it if they heard it anyways.

I don’t mean to dismiss all (italicized) Hersh’s assertions out of hand, but as I said, I do not trust him. I sense that his accounts are shaped by other motives besides, and in some cases superseding, pursuit of facts for truth’s sake. In this respect his omissions are perhaps more telling than his inclusions — I mentioned his ignorance or suppression of Costello’s strong and revealing evidence on the Tyler Kent case, his suppression of mention of Mary Pinchot Meyer, and his in one crucial matter diversionary account of My Lai. These aren’t the only matters in Hersh that arouse my distrust of him, but they are salient cases easy to pin down.

For these and other reasons I distrust Hersh categorically, his large media presence notwithstanding. Chomsky presents a similar case on an airier plane. Whether Hersh is right or not about the Kennedys’ mob connections or their extent, doesn’t concern me that much.

More, there are such strong motives for smearing the Kennedys, father and sons, on the part of various strongly biased powers, that all smears require extra-sceptical evaluation. Obviously these interested parties include Hersh’s sources. And, refresh my memory, does he cite any of them by name?

And it is also important — much more important, in fact — to recognize, and take into account, the obvious case that all smears are inherently diversionary. What elicits hostility to the Kennedys on the part of their attackers, isn’t the mob associations or philandering or the sources of their wealth and power, but how they employed it — in particular, Joseph Kennedy’s “isolationism” (to employ the smear term coining by British Intelligence for the purpose of manipulating American public opinion in their interest), JFK’s turn toward peace and resistance to Wall Street plunder abroad and at home, his advocacy of social welfare and civil rights initiatives, his opposition to Israeli bomb-making and Zionist aggression, and his understanding, informed by what he and RFK saw and learned on their world tour of 1954, that wars of national liberation were (are) often exactly that, and waged on much the same basis as our own country’s, and RKF’s assumption of his assassinated brother’s goals. The much suppressed evidence is nevertheless now clear that JFK was in the process of trying to bring an end to the Cold War and the Atomic Weapons Race — that is, to modify the predacious course of Wall Street World Empire. This tells us both why and who.

A little more on Hersh. Seymour Hersh made his national name (so to speak) as a journalist by his “exposure” of the “My Lai Massacre.” It seems clear, however, that the net effect of Hersh’s reporting of this matter was to deflect blame for the incident onto the military and to depict it as an aberration, whereas in fact it was a (perhaps excessive) result of widely employed tactics and strategy which did not originate with the military. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Secrets: My 25 Years in the CIA (Sheridan Square, 1983), especially pages 129-134, and Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (ret.), The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies (Prentice Hall, 1973) support this view of the tactical and strategic situation in Vietnam, and Fletcher’s account of the similar character of the compilation and release of the Pentagon Papers is also suggestive.

At the very least, Hersh’s ignorance of Costello’s fundamental and extremely revealing research on the Tyler Kent case, and of the very interesting case of JFK lover Mary Pinchot Meyer (which Ben Bradlee mentions in his 1995 memoir — since then three books have been published) discredits his abilities as a researcher. But in my view the tend to suggest something else.

I don’t regard Hersh as trustworthy. Two examples of why: In Dark Side of Camelot he avidly catalogs JFK’s philandering — with the quite remarkable exception of Mary Pinchot Meyer. And Hersh’s account of the Tyler Kent case in the same book (1997) does not jibe with the evidence presented in John Costello, Ten Days To Destiny (1991).

I’m not much concerned whether JPK was or wasn’t a bootlegger. I only say that I haven’t seen convincing evidence of it (whereas — for instance — it’s admitted on all sides that FDR’s grandparents imported opium to China). I don’t regard Lansky as a reliable witness and I do regard it as silly that some present him as such — not to speak of the evident biases of his Zionist biographers. Your comment, Ron, offers no evidence — only guilt-by-putatitve-association arguments. (And for that matter JPK could have made his putative mob acquaintances as easily in Hollywood.) What gives me pause about the bootlegger story is that JPK appears to have been making good money in “business” during the 20s — he didn’t need to get involved in bootlegging. And his Scotch liquor franchise appears to be accountable otherwise.

Also, note that Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010) debunks the JPK bootlegger story at some length p. 366-371.

None of this, in any case, is nearly so important to the concerns of American history as the story of the railroading of America into the Second World War, in which JPK played a significantly telling role. In this regard I repeat that his “Diplomatic Memoir” should be published. It’s withholding represents a signal disservice to American historiography.

And Hersh, I think, on further grounds than those mentioned here, is NOT to be trusted. He consistently gives me the impression of someone who is serving an agenda other than pursuit of the all pertinent facts for truth’s sake.

I wrote “Smith writes that there is no evidence to support the legend of his bootlegging [xx]. Claims otherwise in other books, when tracked to their putative sources, turn out to be “based” on claims made by unreliable interested parties.”

As you can see, this does not, as you mistakenly write, “dismiss this charge as a fabrication.” It doesn’t even mention Lansky, but Lansky is the only putative “source” I’ve seen sited in support of this claim. If you regard Lansky’s evidence as trustworthy, that reflects on your judgment. I certainly don’t.

You ostensible critique of Nasaw’s sentence quoted from p. 80 does not address his comment. This kind of non sequitur vituperation, also, is discreditable.

Sorry for the sloppy misattribution of “scurrilous” — which your piece makes clear is Irving’s. Does he indicate whether, where or how he got access to the memoir? I’ve read the magnificent 2 published volumes of his Churchill but don’t own them — and they are difficult to access, and the concluding volume has apparently been conclusively suppressed by British authorities in a vile blow to the Calliope, Muse of History.

Joseph P. Kennedy is a fascinating and compelling character and a pivotal figure in 20th century American history and the transformation of the American republic into a planetary empire.

There have been at least four biographies of Joseph P. Kennedy published. The latest and far the best is David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, Penguin, 2012).

In 2001 an edition of Joseph Kennedy’s letters and related documents was published edited by his (adoptive) grand-daughter Amanda Smith: Joseph P. Kennedy, Hostage To Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, ed. Amanda Smith (New York, Viking, 2001). Besides copious selections from JPK’s letters and a few from his non-family correspondents, this includes a good number of letters to him from his wife Rose and many of his children, notably and at greater length, Joe, Jr., Kathleen (Kick), and JFK — also RFK.

Smith also prints fairly extensive passages from his diary (also Rose’s) and excerpts from the “Diplomatic Memoir” — the memoir that Guyenot here calls “scurrilous” — on what basis is not clear. About this memoir, Smith writes (page numbers in brackets):

Joseph P. Kennedy “documented his ambassadorship initially with an eye to his legacy for posterity, but eventually, as his relations with the administration deteriorated, his writings became an effort to detail what he felt was its dishonesty regarding the intervention abroad and misuse of its ambassador for his anticipated self-vindication.” [xxxv]

“More than a decade after Ambassador Kennedy’s angry return from London, after his relationship with the president had ended in mutual recrimination, and after his eldest son had been lost in a war that he had devoted all of his energies to preventing the United States from entering, he would rework his account of the farewell meeting in Hyde Park for a third and final time. Between 1949 and 1955, under his supervision, his old friend and former SEC associate James Landis would refashion the ambassadorial diaries, diplomatic dispatches and correspondence into the memoir that the former ambassador had long intended to write [herein called the “Diplomatic Memoir”]. [225]

“The manuscript would also chronicle the president’s quiet movement away from neutrality while the American public remained uninformed. Although never published, the completed ‘Diplomatic Memoir’ would highlight in particular the ideological rift that was to develop between the ambassador and the president over the issue of intervention. ‘Peace above all,’ the ambassador’s stand and the source, he felt, of much of the eventual public outcry against him, had not only been his unwavering conviction from the outset of his tenure in London, but also, he woud insist, his presidential mandate as well.” [226]

“The ambassador was aware of the secret correspondence between the president and the first lord of the Admiralty that had begun in 1939, long before Churchill’s ascendancy to the post of prime minister, largely because it had fallen to him, as ambassador, to deliver and retrieve the exchanges.” [229]

Regarding the Tyler Kent case, “Suspecting the American ambassador’s possible involvement in the passage of classified embassy documents (including the president’s and prime minister’s now-famous secret correspondence) to fifth columnists [sic] in London, M15 and Scotland Yard would delay for some months the arrest of the code clerk responsible in order to keep the American Embassy and its ambassador under surveillance.” [232]

“By 1955 Landis had finished ghostwriting the diplomatic memoir that had been in the works in one form or another since 1938. The result chronicled not only the ambassadorship, but also presented an account of the president’s duplicity both to his ambassador and to the American people on the issue of neutrality.” [521]

THIS MEMOIR MOST CERTAINLY SHOULD BE PUBLISHED AS A FUNDAMENTAL DOCUMENT OF AMERICAN HISTORY.

Smith writes that there is no evidence to support the legend of his bootlegging [xx]. Claims otherwise in other books, when tracked to their putative sources, turn out to be “based” on claims made by unreliable interested parties.

The three other biographies of Joseph P. Kennnedy are:

Richard J. Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, New American Library, 1964). This was written while JFK was president and meant to be published during is administration. It is respectful, comparatively discrete and not bad under the circumstances. Page 388 prints a long discussion by JPK of Jews and Anti-semitism which JFK insisted be cut from another book which it was originally included in, slated for publication during the campaign. The statement is cogent, clear, unflinching. It scores activist Jews for using anti-semitism as a weapon and to force others to fight zionist battles instead of their own.

David E. Koskoff, Joseph P. Kennedy, A Life and Times (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1974): This is a hostile biography (the hostility veiled but plainly visible, like its philo-semitism) but it is dense with details, many intended by the author as damning (but only from his point of view). It’s “history” (sic) of WWII is the Shirer kind — philo-zionist pseudo-history.

Ted Schwartz, Joseph P. Kennedy, The Mogul, The Mob, The Statesman, And The Making of an American Myth (Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, 2003): This is a gross smear job by a Zio-Kennedy-hater. It contains lots of tabloid dirt not mentioned by Richard Whalen, not all of it mentioned by David Koskoff, and some of it possibly with a basis in fact.

In any case David Nasaw’s biography supersedes all three of these — deeply researched and remarkably even-handed given the extreme propaganda of political opprobrium with which the ruling American Establishment targets its subject, his views, and the history in which he figures.

Herbert Hoover was another member of America First — and (I’m not positive but) I think he was also a member, with JPK, of that committee investigating CIA activities in the Middle East

Smear smear smear.

No connection at all with the matter under discussion — rather, a diversion from it.

What does this suggest about the motives of the smearer?

What does it tell us about his ethics?

Thanks Linh Dinh. Excellent, just excellent. That you can quote Orwell and stand up beside him — quite the credential.

George Bush (senior) used the phrase “useless mouths” several decades ago, I believe in the context of a discussion of global birth control.

Dinh Linh asks: “Even at Unz, I see commenters using their stupidity as a weapon. Do you see this dumbing down as deliberate.”

Name-calling, ranting shout-downs, inane bluster, flagrant disregard of fact and reason, stark illogic — are all so pervasive that I incline to think that’s what’s being modeled in the schools, as elsewhere.

The result is to render serious informed discussion impossible, and without that, democratic society and governance are impossible.

So, is this the objective?

Yes, four indisputable facts in four sentences. A perfect score. Expect a blizzard of bigoted ignorance in reply.

Yes but the big investors and senior management of the manufacturers made millions and offshored the plant.

History shows — but you have to dig for it to learn it — that the biggest beneficiary of Southern plantation slavery was WALL STREET. From before 1800 the South’s export economy was controlled by and operated for the primary benefit of MANHATTAN import-export merchants and bankers. NEW YORK CITY bankers wrote mortgages on slaves’ bodies and on slave plantations and often foreclosed on both and operated them as absentee owners. NEW YORK CITY merchants bought, shipped and re-exported the South’s cotton crops and imported and wholesaled the merchandise of its domestic economy. The 1% investor class of the South owned the South’s plantations and slaves, but only insofar as they weren’t owned by NORTHERN mortgage investors. NORTHERN traders (traitors) and investors controlled and had the primary benefit of the business. Four primary sources on this subject are William C. Wright, The Succession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (1973), Brother Basil Lee, F.S.C., Discontent in New York City 1861-1865 (1943), Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants (1941), and Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time On The Cross (1974).

Muchas gracias, Steven Yates.

Parenthetically, abundant history suggests that the instigators of violence in 2019 are likely to have been locals allied with the “forces of order” — agents provocateurs.

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It’s a rare pleasure to see a “libertarian” begin to get a clue about socio-economic realities such as these:

ALL property and property relations are contrived and established in law and enforced by the state. “Private” is a hoax. Without the state, “private” property of every kind has no status at all.

Private capital beyond a certain margin above median (say five times) serves no good purpose and no purpose at all besides enabling economic vampirism and bullying and and socio-psychological abuse (status bullying).

The notion that individual rewards are proportional to individual merits or ability or performance is — in the real world — blithering nonsense.

Every human achievement stands on the shoulders of over 100,000 years of accumulating craft. The idea that any performance or achievement is truly “individual” is more blithering nonsense.

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Your definition of “populism” is admirable. Consider further: A republic is “populist” by definition. That’s what the word means: “res publica” — the “commonwealth,” the “business” of the “people,” the “public,” the “populace” as a whole. A “republic” that is not in fact, in action, in policy and in behavior, “populist,” is not a republic. Usually, as in America, it is an oligarchy in a quasi-constitutional mask.

Originally (in Aristotle’s Politics, Polybius, and others) the term is defined by a specific contrast with other forms of government control and decision making about “affairs” (res) which are by nature “public” — in particular monarchy and oligarchy. Among Greek city states in the pre-classical and classical era, the age of kingship was over and their governments typically trended back and forth between democracies (“populist” by definition — rule by the demos, the populi) and oligarchies (rule by the “few” — hoi oligoi — always gangs of the wealthy, mostly hereditary, frequently but not always with pretensions to “aristocratic” birth (old money, that is).

Often oligarchies met their end at the hands of what conservative, oligarchic historians and theorists called “tyrants”. “Tyrants” by definition were populists. Their role was to rally the demos (the people) against the oligarchs to terminate their rule (that is, they were, by definition, “demagogues” — ‘leaders of the people”). Usually the first result was democracy. Sometimes it was a long term of rule by a “tyrant” which tended only to survive as long as he served popular interests. Sometimes the “tyrant” turned out to be the representative of an alternate gang or faction of oligarchs, who soon enough installed themselves in power (this scenario is a frequent feature of Latin American history).

*

But I digress. Thanks again, Steve. More would be welcome.

Wolves don’t predate on wolves, regarding each other as members of the same species.

Cicero predates Christianity and criticizes the behaviors and civic bullying of the Roman Jewish population. If “anti-Semitism” is by definition criticism of Jews, then Cicero is an “anti-Semite” by definition. If, on the other hand, this definition amounts to pseudo-logical bullying, then he isn’t. In around 80 BC when the Romans took Rhodes in the course of their war against Mithradates they found a vast sum of silver stashed in a temple there by Jewish tax farmers (of Roman taxes) whose depredations on the population of the area had precipitated the war. Who’s the “anti-Semite” there? In the third century BC a Jewish regime seized power in Libya and slaughtered tens if not hundreds of thousands of Libyans. Presumably this made the Libyans feel fairly “anti-Semitic.”

Is an aversion to Nazis “anti-Germanic” or is it an aversion to Nazis?

Abraham Seidenberg, “The Ritual Origin of Geometry,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences (1962) 1:488-527 and “The Origin of Mathematics,” ibid (1978) 18:301-342, demonstrates conclusively that ancient Egyptian geometry and math derived from much older Vedic geometry and math.

The “Indus Civilization” remnants that are dated to 3300 BC are not the beginnings of a civilization but planned urban constructions displaying antecedent technological and social heritage of very great antiquity. Vedic calendrics date from the 6th millennium BC or earlier.

The weights and measures used at Bahrain by the incipient Sumerian civilization in the 3rd millennium BC were Indus Valley weights and measures — demonstrating the antiquity of trade between Mesopotamia and Vedic India and in which direction the cultural flow flowed.

Sumerian historical mythology says that their culture was founded by “gods” who arrived in the Persian Gulf from the south.

The great rise in sea level between 10,000 BC and 6,000 BC drowned vast tracts of coastal land on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent. Looking for the “cradle of civilization”? Look there.

You prefer a creed of hate over a creed of love.

But the jews of Israel are not intent on keeping “their land” (as you write). They are intent on keeping Palestinian land, seized by force, connivance, deceit, and terror. Which fits a creed of hate and vice versa.

There is evidence (inscriptions) that people writing an early form of Hebrew fought as mercenaries in Egypt around 1200 BC. This meshes with suggestions that Hebrew tribes were nomadic brigands in that era.

Leaving aside the mythic ornaments (the miracles, the resurrection), which are peripheral and inessential, the four canonical Gospels and the apocryphal texts (notably the Gospel of Thomas) present a consistent account of a coherent philosophy. The thought and preaching of Jesus originate as and constitute a profound and fundamental critique of Jewish ethics and contemporary practice. Foremost, it opposes the Hebrew “ethics” of retribution (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”) with an ethics based on forgiveness, healing, compassion, mutual understanding, consensus, and it opposes the Hebrew emphasis on exclusivity and formalized rectitude with a humanitarian sense of the equality of all souls. In Jesus’s view humanity is not divided into Chosen and Goyim. He ministers to Samarians as well as Jews. Jesus’s preaching particularly targets the predatory social and economic arrangements by which the Jewish elite of his day oppressed and exploited the great mass of Jews in violation of the dictates of the Torah law. (A key explication of this aspect of his preaching is William R. Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech.) Much of his preaching amounts to what, today, would be called “political economy.” Notably, the only time Jesus displays anger and acts on it is in scourging the money-changers out of the Temple — on the first day of Holy Week, according to the frame story, this is the act that precipitated his execution at the instigation of the Rabbinate — closely allied, then and for centuries before and ever after, with the “money-changers.”

Jesus’s preaching was twisted, subverted and betrayed, in the first place evidently by Paul, from a concern with life as lived among men to a “religious” concern with extra-worldly concerns. The course of patristic discourse elaborated this curse, notably in the work of Augustine, who re-imported the Jewish obsession with retribution under the guise of “sin.” (The concept of “sin” is entirely missing from the Gospels; the Greek word mis-translated as “sin,” hamartia, means ‘missing the mark,’ ‘making a mistake’). Thus Christianity as a whole came to represent a perversion, a betrayal, and a reversal of Jesus’s teaching. This continued into the mainstream “protestant” tradition basically unaltered — Luther was schooled in an Augustinian seminary — although some “radical,” marginalized sects have tried — some still try — to practice Jesus’s preaching uncontaminated by the “Old Testament” poison Jesus tried to counter. And God bless them for it.

Hart Crane committed suicide because a decade of extreme alcoholism left him incapable of writing and he could find no workable mode of livelihood in America that would not require the surrender or perversion or prostitution of his poetic vocation and his humanity. Crane’s “disgraceful” drunken behavior in the fo’c’sle and his morning after shame over it were merely the trigger. America and its favorite (and worst) drug, alcohol, loaded the gun.

You are so right, Linh Dinh, about the re-emergence of the local as our only cultural hope.

It’s important, though, to understand what we’re up against. Predatory absentee “investment” money managed from Wall Street is buying up local homes, businesses, land, resources, and talents with its bank-created bogus paper legalized counterfeit funny money at a tremendous rate and colonizing local communities with “chain” businesses, absentee landlords and credit and such like vampire filth. They’re even importing foreign vampires to help enserf and enslave Americans.

Besides sucking the life-blood out of local communities into the pockets of hedge fund parasites, this has the effect of making it much more difficult and much more expensive to create local culture. It costs a quarter of a million dollars to open a coffee shop. To open a restaurant you have to be prepared to “compete” with the cheapo sawdust pseudo-food, slave labor and absentee backing of the likes of McDonalds, and this situation obtains across the board. Real culture costs nothing. It costs nothing to write a poem or sing a song. It’s the interface with society where the parasite sticks in his sucker. The reason concerts cost so much isn’t that the musicians are making out. The landlord and the insurance companies get “their” money first, and take the major share of it. And so on. Publishing is even worse, and ALL the major NYC publishers are owned by the same conglomerate.

And then, most poisonous of all, the mass media mind-rot Lie Factory.

One best hope is that some of the young manage to keep the bullshit detectors we are born with into adulthood. That’s what Education, Inc., and the Lie Factory are intended to prevent, thwart, divert, poison, terminate. It’s safe to say that no society in human history has drowned itself in anywhere near so many, so all-pervading, so toxic LIES.

Hope you are starting to feel better. I like your eye-witness accounts better than your lit crit (no offense). Keep on keepin on.

Noble America, importing Chinese to wash dishes — that is, to keep down the wages of dishwashing and other grunt labor. But fair is fair, if you’re a Chinese millionaire, having wrung much yen out of your neighbors, you can bring it to America and buy up mortgages and rental properties — that is, American mortgage serfs and rent slaves — and there’s even a special visa to help you do it. Isn’t capitalism great! A real service to humanity all around.

I’m mixed up, and hoping for enlightenment. In 1853 when France, Britain and their allies, in their Crimean War with Russia, attacked the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, were they all really just confused and it wasn’t Russia at all but really it was Ukraine? And in 1945 when Stalin, FDR and Churchill met at Yalta in the Crimea, where Stalin was their host, were they all just confused, and it wasn’t Russia at all, but really Ukraine? And if it was Russia then, when and how did it come to be Ukraine now?

It goes without saying that the myriad social contexts throughout the Americas were fluid before Columbus. There’s also evidence to suggest that transitory contacts before the arrivals of first settlers had already introduced European diseases — fisherman on the Grand Banks landing in New England to cure fish, Cabrillo’s contact with Chumash sailors in the Channel Islands, Drake’s with Pomo at Point Reyes. But all these factors weigh lightly compared to the impact of European settlement progressing westward, the Spanish missionaries in California, and the Hudson Bay and other trappers in the Willamette Valley in Oregon and the Central Valley in California — who introduced smallpox in the 1820s that wiped out their dense Indian populations.

My typo for “Earlier THAN You Think” — obviously. Carter’s book remains a useful window on the character of some of the evidence for earlier-than-orthodox human presence in the New World (and incidentally on the unscientific behaviors of academic enforcers of orthodoxy). Carter is also, unlike nearly all people in this field, a fine writer who gives his readers a hands-on feel for the nature of the evidence, the fieldwork, and the analysis. He is also especially enlightening about factors of paleogeography implicated in this discussion — including the history of Beringia, sea-levels, Ice Age climate change, coastal and desert lake geography, etc. A good read.

I think you should hunt up the PDF and read it for yourself. I find it convincing. So does Jett. It is necessary in all this to be aware that there is an academic orthodoxy in place and strongly enforced that refuses all evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact (except Viking) and that there is also a scholarly literature reaching back 80 years and more that exposes evidences for such contacts, which the defenders of the orthodoxy merely ignore or dismiss out of hand — as in the work you reference. The scholars involved in this work and the evidence they expose are reputable and convincing. The enforcers of orthodoxy, in their refusal to confront basic facts and their anti-intellectual bullying, are, often, not.

My impatience with Neihardt’s epic was with its pre-modern form of discourse. It’s mode is essentially Victorian. This is partly a generational prejudice but maybe also partly informed by a valid judgment in poetics. However, if you want enjoy it, far be it from me to dissuade you. But for me, I did try, and was not compelled to continue.

Tracking this string of comments backwards shows otherwise. F.O.

I don’t think anybody hypothesizes “mass” movements. For one thing there weren’t “masses” of humans anywhere on the planet 20,000 years ago. But current thinking begins to understand that people of those times and earlier were far more capable, as far as living skills, than previously imagined. A big factor to take into consideration is that there technology was not metal based or stone based, but wood and textile based — which doesn’t survive in the records. Stone tools which do survive were effectively mostly “industrial tools” — that is, tools for making useful objects of wood and fiber.

Walking is a very effective mode of transportation. Twenty miles a day is entirely possible but even three miles a day five days a week makes 750 miles in a year. A population wave moving forward at a mere 10 miles a year can progress from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in 600 years. Travel along coasts in boats can move much faster.

Stephen Jett’s Ancient Ocean Crossings (2017) is a first-rate compendious survey of its subject. Trans-oceanic contacts are evidenced over the period of the last 5000 years but probably didn’t figure in the initial settlement of the New World.

Just recently positive evidence of a Chinese exploring presence in New Mexico and Arizona about 2500 years ago has been published: John A. Ruskamp, “Two Ancient Rock Inscriptions,” Pre-Columbiana vo. 6 no. 204 (2115, 2116, 2117). You can find a PDF on line.

I’m a big admirer of Black Elk Speaks but I found Neihardt’s five-part epic pretty much unreadable.

The idea that urban environments are typically or inherently “civilized” is biased. It’s a telling demographic fact that life expectancy always goes down in urban situations compared to their rural “hinterlands,” along with quality of life for the many, diet, social welfare, etc.

Taking the Aztecs or the Inca as exemplars of “civilized” values ignores, notably, their penchant for mass human sacrifice, including child sacrifice.

The oldest continuously inhabited village in America is Old Oraibi. The Hopi are genuinely civilized. They don’t go to war, they don’t survive by predating on their neighbors or each other. They live in balance with nature and with their environment. They respect it and each other. Compared to them, Americans at large are vicious depraved savages.

I didn’t mention any “millions of disappeared Siberians.” You are raving and to be ignored henceforth.

The history and character of the human diaspora into the New World is entirely unsettled. There are theories and counter-theories and a paucity of facts, often inscrutable, and academic orthodoxies defended with blind authoritarian ferocity. The orthodoxy has it that there was one main migration into the New World across Beringia around 20,000 years ago and that it moved south in an “ice-free corridor inland. But current thinking is starting to take cognizance of the fact that sea-levels were as much as 100 meters lower, that the coastal route was more likely, that pleistocene peoples were more capable travelers than hitherto imagined and that any and all archeological evidence of their coast travel is now underwater. DNA evidence is now showing an Australasian component in the Amazonian genome. Evidence of a human presence in South America is now granted, even by the academic orthodox hard=core, dating to circa 17,000 BP. Some sites are dated much earlier, but their dating is disputed. One theory has it that another strand of the same leading wave of the human diaspora that settled Australia around 50,000 BP followed around the Pacific littoral and reached Tierra del Fuego by 30,000 BP. A usefully instructive antidote to the orthodoxy is George F. Carter, Earlier Tan You Think. Among much else Carter reviews the paleogeography of Beringia and shows that the dryland passage from Siberia was open intermittantly from 125,000 BP if not earler. We are also starting to better understand the capabilities of Pleistocene mankind to navitage oceans — including to settle Austrailia across water by 50,000 BP or substanially earlier.

Your knowledge and understanding of the relevant ethnography are shallow and your conclusions are mistaken. Behaviors and circumstances varied widely and are not susceptible to the kinds of generalizations you make. Tribal warfare and massacres were not typical events nor were seizures of territory. There is no ground whatsoever for viewing them as characteristic of Indian cultures and behaviors in general. Moreover, all quasi-factual accounts of conditions among Indian tribes relate (necessarily) to a period when social and inter-tribal life had been destabilized.

And you are not grasping the essential distinction between land tenure by use and absentee land ownership by legal title. A hunting ground is based on usufruct. It is a tribe’s right to hunt a given territory. These societies were living in balance with their environments. They had no need for, and no use for, and no ability to use, or wish to use, extensive new territories. All these arrangements were radically destabilized and disrupted by white incursions with a wave of disturbance moving west well in advance of settlement, just as the wave of diseases did, with similarly destabilizing effects. There’s no dispute about all this in the ethnographic literature — as contrasted with cartoons about all-pervading savagery or hippie bliss. The underlying issue was land tenure and radically different practices.

A telling fact which there will never be enough evidence to develop a nuanced view of, but telling even so, is that there were, throughout the history of the frontier, numerous white renegades who went over to the Indians — “squaw men” was a pejorative — because there were things about Indian social life that won them over. There are also fairly numerous accounts of “whites” who were kidnapped or saved from death in warfare and raised from childhood among Indians and, when the chance to return arose, refused. This was true also of blacks, especially in Louisiana and Florida and the West.

To clarify, Cook and Diamond are places where the facts of the decimation of New World populations by Old World diseases are addressed. There is no serious question about these facts among serious informed investigators.

The overall pre-Columbian population of the New World is not susceptible to fact-based demonstration and is widely debated with estimates ranging over one or two orders of magnitude.

You might think it but you’d be wrong. There’s no question about the evidence, or about your apparent ignorance of it.

Two fundamental facts need to be added to this discussion:

The conflicts with the Plains Indians after the Civil War ensued from a process that commenced over two centuries earlier culminating in the “Trail of Tears” of the 1830s during which the Indians remaining on the east side of the Mississippi were driven west of it, killing half of them in the process. Moreover before they arrived there — largely in the “Indian Territory” which finally became Oklahoma — numbers of the tribes on the west side of the Mississippi were peoples who had sought refuge there after displacement from their native territories east of it by encroaching settlement and who, arriving there, found themselves in conflict with the tribes whose lands they were intruding on. The Sioux are a notable example.

Another telling case are the Indians of the old “Northwestern Territory” (that became Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) who sold their lands to the Federal Government and either moved west or settled on “reservations” (concentration camps) where they were guaranteed (supposedly) rations to live on. They were persuaded to do this because their lands were no longer viable for their lifeways, having been trapped out and hunted out in trade for, mostly, guns, gunpowder and liquor from the Manhattan fur trade (Astor is the best known operative) — so thoroughly that by 1800 the peltries of the entire north were extinguished east of the Mississippi with the trappers and their trade perforce moving west into the Rockies. Henry Schoolcraft, one of the founders of American anthropology, provides an eyewittness account of these doings.

Underlying all this was a fundamental difference in the ideas and practices of land tenure between European settlers and American Indians. The Indians, like all primary peoples worldwide, practiced land tenure by use and usufruct. Land was not owned, it was used by its users for the duration of its use. Homes were the property of the people who dwelt in them, usually in extended families or clans or tribes, usually matrilinear. Most Indians east of the Mississippi practiced horticulture as well as foraging and hunting; their gardens were the property of the gardener and their harvests belonged to the persons who planted and tended and harvested them. European ideas about land ownership, which establish an ostensible legal “right” for one person to “own” another person’s home and extract a toll from him, and to “own” someone else’s garden and extract a “share” of his harvest, arose in 4th millennium BC Mesopotamia and until the 20th century were the practice only of a relatively small minority of humankind. Michael Hudson is the regnant master of the scholarship underlying these origins. Their quite limited range of practice, historically and globally, is an undisputed fact of ethnography.

As Crazy Horse said, “one does not sell the earth the people walk upon.” European settlers had other ideas, and enforced them with violence and, by force of arms and numbers and “superior” technology, “won.”

But throughout the history of settlement, on both sides of the Mississippi, what drove the process of dispossession was not settlers creating farms but speculators buying up vast tracts in square mile “sections” and holding them for a speculative rise in prices. American land laws were set up to facilitate this process and to hinder purchases by settler farms who did not need 640 acres and could not afford to buy subdivided sections at speculative prices without mortgages to usurers. The “closing of the frontier” in the 1890s did not mean that there was no more land to be farmed but that most of the arable land was taken under ownership, and most of it was not being farmed but held as speculative investment by absentee owners. Paul W. Gates is the regnant expert in this field. In California, the 1971 study, Power and Land In California, is a revealing source.

All these facts are very well attested and documented and proven in the relevant scholarship. They are “non-controversial” as facts. Anyone sufficiently acquainted with the relevant fields of investigation knows them to be true. And of course they are fundamental to understanding the history that culminated (symbolically) at Wounded Knee. That most Americans are entirely ignorant of them tellingly displays the character of American education and ideology.

Sherburne F. Cook, UC Berkeley epidemiologist, was among the most important instigators of this line of research, which he started publishing in 1943. He is a scientist of the first rank and his writings are rigorously documented, often based on his own archival researches. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel includes a more recent and global view of this discussion, one written for a more general intelligent audience.

Frankly, to anyone even marginally familiar with this subject, your comments reveal rank ignorance along with a willingness to make wild claims in the absence of even marginal knowledge. Feh.

I suggest you read the book before commenting on it.

Most post-Columbian Indian deaths in America, which according to some estimates amounted to 90% of their populations, were due to exposure to European diseases to which they had no immunity at all — measles, mumps, chicken pox, and worse. There is no question about this fact which is well established and universally accepted in the demographic and epidemiological literature and has been for decades.

Also firmly established in the literature — in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and many before and after, and brilliantly contextualized ethnographically in Christopher Boehm’s masterpiece, Hierarchy In The Forest (1999), is that Indian societies typically embodied a degree of LIBERTY, of egalitarianism, of individual mutual respect based on non- and indeed anti-authoritarian social ideals and behaviors, that were utterly unexampled in “civilized” Europe for two thousand years before Columbus. The experience, on the frontier, of this genuine freedom, this genuine liberty, and its powerful appeal, was the most important single inspiration of American ideas about liberty — still almost totally unperceived, let alone acknowledged.

It’s a reasonable surmise that what finally underwrites the rabid ignorant hatred so pervasive in these comments if an infantile fear of freedom and a hatred of liberty — that is, of what’s best in American tradition, and nearly dead.

In America we have “organic” produce. That is, if you want your vegetables without the poisons, you have to pay extra.