America Lost the Civil War With The Lincoln War State

[eyeno]

One can easily imagine that that some Nazi/Klan types would be happy with a white homeland in the U.S.' northwest just as some black nationalists have advocated- and fought- for a separate homeland in the state of Mississippi.

Really? White folk and black getting together for a pow wow? Didn't know that. Got a cite for that? I'd like to read it. I bet its interesting...

The above doesn't relate to any sort of pow wow- just "black" and "white" nationalists pursuing parallel agenda.

So a black nationalist doesn't like white people? And white nationalists don't like black people? And they intend to fight it out to the bitter end over the territory of the country until they both get what they want? You be pullin my leg for sure?

[Cedars of Overburden]

AD, I hoped you would think about what I said, but I wanted Publius to think about it even more.

[Searcher08]

The people with the greatest need and the most self-evident right to secede tend to be brown or black.

Who establishes which needs are greatest? and to secede from what?
If a right to secede is self-evident, how are there degrees ('most') of being self-evident?
'tend to be' - based on what observation?


I think this is a very very tricky and difficult issue.

What if governance can be a choice?

I don't think in any period before this would human society have had the technical means to do this, but I think we are getting rapidly to a point where we do. We are getting to the point where we could (at least theoretically) be able to participate as citizens in a MUCH more hands on way - e.g. in regard to voting in real time local decisions about finance allocation, rather than have 'local government' bureaucrats do it.

Three problems
1) People are only focused on which political party a person comes from, not on whether they have integrity as a person and a desire to be of service to the community. This can lead to an Analysis Paralysis, where basically you could put forward 'convincing cases' for any old crap, counter-arguments ad infinitum. This has it's roots in the utterly failed mode of right / wrong Aristotelian binary thinking. Proof is often nothing more than a lack of imagination.

2) I do not want to have my taxes go to paying for a war machine, thank you very much.
Fred next door doesn't want his taxes to go into a universal health care system; I do
Why shouldn't both of us have our wishes respected, given the technical means to do so?

3) Society is being systematically dumbed down - how does society in general develop the level of focus needed to grapple with complex, interconnected systemic issues in an inclusive, needs addressing way, when more people are interested in the Kardashians or Katie Price than in global sea level rise? If we were presented with an easy to use, self-organising mobile web based local governance system, would anyone actually USE it?
Or would most people be too busy watching the X Factor?

[Cedars of Overburden]

Give Searcher a prize. It is a very very tricky issue. It's like saying "divorce is a good thing," until you think of all the people who haven't used it too well. And then you think of all the people who haven't used marriage too well either and then you start thinking marriage itself is the problem but then after a generation or three someone notices that in this particular culture doing without marriage isn't working all that great either and then and so forth and so on. Yeah, tricky is a good word for it.

Sticking to that analogy, Publius, using the CSA as your poster boy is like using Henry VIII as PR for your divorce rights campaign. Only thing is, much as Henry VIII sucked, the CSA sucked even worse. And even if you say this is about state rights and now about slavery, well, in this context it's really really hard for people not to think about slavery. They'd be kind of -- no, extremely weird if they knew anything at all about American history and didn't think about slavery in this context.

[American Dream]

Nationalism is clearly a double-edged sword but most deadly and destructive when used by people who want to impose Christian Dominance, White Supremacy, Homophobia, Patriarchal Rule and other such reprehensible values.

[publius]

I see Christianity failed to arrive in these United States. So many prefer the way of the sword, the holy crusade, the wrathful God of the Hebrews. Both the North and South claimed to be Christian. As did the belligerents of World War I.

Both wars relied upon abstraction to justify murder. 2 million dead in the Civil War. You justify this murder by reification. Propaganda for war works. Slavery was legal, odious and tolerated. It was not wage labor, but wage labor was not thought significantly better since the Prole was a kind of industrial serf. We know after the Civil War it required 100 years for some progress in race relations to move forward so clearly murdering 2 million people did not usher in Utopia. In fact, my opinion is that it did exactly the reverse: it ushered in Dystopia. To win the war the Constitution was dissolved into a War Dictatorship. This set the pattern that created a CORPORATE UNITED STATES. 3 Civil War amendments were not ratified. So the end justifies the means, if the end is noble. Bringing Democracy to Vietnam say. Freeing Iraq from Saddam. One could go on.

I do not think the admirers of pure force as a solution to political problems only stem from the Civil War, but Federal Fascism does. We do not know what the outcome of not killing two million, not tearing the country up, preserving prosperity and amity and accord between the two halves of the former United States would have been, it is true we do not know. We see the results from that war as Federal Fascism. I think not murdering and ripping up the nation would have been the least costly strategy for preserving a future for mankind.

[publius]

Another way into the thicket of Federal Fascism is to ask: Did the Civil War State of Exception truly end, or did it simply change it's shape? How can you have Constitutional government under Lincoln when there is no union? You can only have a War Dictatorship presided over by a former ruler of a former country. All though history, Civil Wars have been considered the worst fate for a country and for the freedom's enjoyed by the people of a country.

[American Dream]

No agenda here, none at all...


League of the South






“Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
— Jack Kershaw, League of the South board member, 1998


“[T]he Southern League supports a return to a political and social system based on kith and kin rather than an impersonal state wedded to the idea of the universal rights of man. At its core is a European population.”
— Michael Hill, essay on League of the South website, 2000



“If the scenario of the South (and the rest of America) being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. But to do this we must first rid ourselves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the other meaningless epithets they use against us. What is really meant by the [anti-racist] advocates when they peg us as ‘racists’ is that we adhere to ethnocentrism, which is a natural affection for one’s own kind. This is both healthy and Biblical. I am not ashamed to say that I prefer my own kind and my own culture. Others can have theirs; I have mine. No group can survive for long if its members do not prefer their own over others.”
— Mike Hill, Web essay



“We also encourage individuals and families to personally secede from the corrupt and corrupting influence of post-Christian culture in America. We call this ‘abjuring the realm,’ and it’s a real and dramatic first step all of us can take by simply withdrawing our support of and allegiance to a regime that has imperiled our future. … Once our Southern culture is re-established, then the political issues will begin to take care of themselves. Good leaders flow naturally out of a healthy culture; however, power-hungry, self-seeking politicians are all we can expect from the debased cultural climate we have today.”
— League website

[American Dream]

Ron Paul Was Implicated In Failed White Supremacist Island Invasion

Written by Casey Gane-McCalla, Lead Blogger on January 20, 2012



In 1981, a lawyer tried to subpoena Ron Paul to testify in the trial of Don Black, a Grand Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan who would later go on to found the white supremacist, neo-Nazi website, Stormfront. Black was charged along with two other Klansmen with planning to violently overthrow the small Caribbean country of Dominica in what they called “Operation Red Dog.” While a judge refused to subpoena Paul, Don Black would come back to haunt him many years later.

In 1981 a group of American and Canadian white supremacists lead by Klansman and mercenary, Michael (Mike) Perdue planned on taking over a small West Indian country called Dominica by overthrowing the government and Prime Minister Eugenia Charles and restoring its previous prime minister, Patrick Johns into power. The group planned to create an Aryan paradise in Dominica and make money through casinos, cocaine and brothels.

On the day the group of white supremacists were supposed to travel to Dominica, they were arrested by ATF agents and were found with over thirty automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, handguns, dynamite, ammunition, a confederate flag and a Nazi flag. The plan would be dubbed “The Bayou Of Pigs” after the failed invasion of Cuba.

The leader of the group, Michael Perdue, would plead guilty to planning the coup and turned state’s evidence. Perdue would testify that several other people helped organize and fund the coup and that two Texas politicians were aware of the plan. Among those Perdue implicated were infamous white supremacist, David Duke, former Texas Governor, John Connally and Congressman, Ron Paul whom he claimed knew about the plot. Connally was credited with helping Paul win his first congressional election.

A judge refused to subpoena Paul and Connally despite the fact that Perdue had claimed that both of them were aware of the plot. Don Black’s friend and fellow KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke was called to testify before a grand jury but claimed that he would take the Fifth Amendment and never testified. While Duke was never charged with a crime, several books points to Duke as the organizer who connected Perdue to the other mercenary Klansmen and the people who funded their endeavor. (1 2 3) Everyone else implicated by Perdue was charged with the plot.

Perdue implicated three men as funders of the plot, L.E. Matthews of Jackson, Mississippi, James C. White of Houston, and David Duke’s close friend and backer, J.W. Kirkpatrick. Kirpatrick would kill himself before he could stand trial and White and Matthews would be acquitted in court. Former Prime Minister of Dominica, Patrick Johns would be sentenced to 12 years in prison for his part of the plot. Michael Perdue, Don Black and seven other Klansmen would be sentenced to only 3 years in prison.

Ron Paul has never made a statement denying knowledge of the plot despite the fact that he was implicated by Perdue and almost subpoenaed. Two of the people involved in the plot, Don Black and David Duke have gone on to become two of the most prominent white supremacists of the modern era, and also two of Paul’s most controversial supporters.

Continues at: http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mc ... -invasion/

[publius]

AD, I think you miss the entire point. Federal power is Fascism and is the ur-Fascism. The facts of history are that the Civil War was fought and the victors of that war are not abstractions or sections of the country. In the 60's we called it Pentagonism, we may fairly see the outcome of the Civil War as Federal Fascism. Lincoln created and fought the War and ruled in the areas respecting the nation as the Dictatorship. This War Dictatorship survived Lincoln. None of this is a celebration of the South.

Not at all. It is a mourning for a land soaked in blood and Walt Whitman her great bard. I have suggested before Ron Paul, acting in the Federal psychological political structure is an archetype for Merlinus or Gandalf or both. Lincoln then as archetype is the Warrior Messiah shot and killed. Representing on Good Friday an all too human death.
.
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black, 35
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn; 40
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

[American Dream]

Publius, I can see no evidence whatsoever that you "get it" as far as slavery, white supremacy, institutional racism in general etc. etc. go!

Neither can I see much evidence suggesting that you have been very honest about your agenda here...

[American Dream]

http://laprogressive.com/political-issues/confederacy/

The Confederacy Must Be Destroyed

January 12, 2011 By Jonathan David Farley


Ku Klux Klan Founder Nathan Bedford Forrest


Imagine if German politicians, in order to bolster their chances of being elected chancellor, had to declare publicly that they could see nothing wrong with flying the swastika, Germany’s flag during the “War of British Aggression”.

Imagine if U.S.-born Jihadists seized WMD and killed 300,000 New Yorkers. But instead of executing the insurrection leaders after their capture, the government dedicated highways and holidays in their honor.

Welcome to the former states of the Confederacy, where the sesquicentennial celebrations have begun. Neo-Confederates will assault anyone who publicly opposes them, including that person’s family and employers.

In 2002, I criticized a taxpayer-funded statue of Nathan Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, that neo-Confederates had recently erected in Tennessee. The response? “I hope you are killed in the most violent, bloody way possible….” “I hope someone rapes and kills your White, race-traitor wife and/or girlfriend as well.” “…it is the niggers that should have been exterminated during the American Civil War. had that occurred, this nation would be a far greater and a nigger-Marxist free land.” A few dozen love letters like that, and about 800 slightly friendlier ones. Then it got bad.

I fled Tennessee, abandoning my job at Vanderbilt University.

Even talking about the tactics neo-Confederates employ, and their “thinly veiled support for white supremacy,” can bring down a hailstorm, as Princeton University historian James McPherson discovered when he made the above-quoted statement in 1999; after receiving angry mail, McPherson backpedaled, saying he should have “been thinking more carefully”.

In 2009 Arthur Dowdell, an Auburn, Alabama city councilman, removed four tiny, freshly planted Confederate flags littering a graveyard, and received “hundreds, if not thousands, of emails,” including “threats to burn crosses in his yard and to kill him and his family”. The city council threatened Dowdell with censure, removal and arrest. Dowdell apologized.

In 2002, Wallace Earl Cook threatened to “cut [the] heart out” of Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, Gordon Gee, because Gee tried to remove the word “Confederate” from the name of a dormitory. Henry Maston wrote that he hoped Gee would be “killed by the same worthless [racial slur] that kills Farley.” Gee eventually changed his tune from “Yankee Doodle” to “Dixie,” abandoning the attempt to change the dorm’s name, trying to placate the people who attacked him by calling them “old friends,” and having his spokesman, Michael Schoenfeld, say that my criticism of the Klan founder was “rightly offensive to, and rejected by, most people.” Terrorism works.

And don’t think African-American organizations will protect you: Fears of rough rope and the lash’s sting still paralyze them, although they won’t admit it. NAACP president Ben Jealous explained that chairman Julian Bond probably felt that I had “asked for” the Klan-supporter attack and so deserved no help. Jealous’s wife, Lia Epperson-Jealous, merely put me in touch with a lawyer she knew from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who did nothing. When I discussed how Tommie Morton-Young of the Nashville NAACP had failed to help me, Morton-Young libeled me.

The Vanderbilt Black Student Alliance did “announce that we support everything that Dr. Jonathan Farley wrote about the Confederacy,” but then someone wrote its president, Nia Toomer: “ignorant nigger whore. Go and see the movie ‘Gangs of New York’. ….Niggers are lynched and burned.” No black students, alumni, or faculty spoke up again.

Nor are liberals a match for neo-Confederates. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok wrote that my calling Forrest a treasonous war criminal “really was pretty harsh”. “That’s a debate I want no part of,” agreed Green Party national media coordinator Scott McLarty, “and I’m angry at Jonathan for potentially igniting it.” Ed Sebesta, currently finishing a book about Vanderbilt’s “Confederate” dorm, concluded, “The abandonment of…Jonathan Farley to the Neo-Confederate wolves…reveals the Green Party to be the white party after all.”

Neo-Confederates, by contrast, wield, or influence those in, power. Even Obama cowers. When Brit Hume mentioned me on Fox News Television, I recall getting 200 hate messages. Barrett Brown, in his new book, Hot, Fat, and Clouded, details how Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain targeted me. Rachel Maddow has called McCain a “white supremacist”; far from being ostracized, McCain recently interviewed the husband of Sarah Palin. Bill Clinton, as president, honored the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that made KKK postcards, that recommends books praising the KKK, and that asked “whether emancipation…has introduced evils…more terrible than slavery.” Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, accused me of committing a “hate crime”. As The Nation reported in “Trent Lott’s Uptown Klan,” the former Republican Senate Majority Leader was an “honorary member” of the Council of Conservative Citizens, even taking photos with its head, Gordon Baum, in Lott’s office. The CCC urged its members to “gather a mob” to get me, with Baum vilifying me on national radio.

The way to fight neo-Confederate Klan supporters is to return their fire: Take anyone who publicly supports the Confederacy, create websites with his contact information, conduct denial-of-service attacks on his sites, and barrage his employer and associates with emails, calls, and faxes. A Sons of Confederate Veterans newsletter listing Lunelle Siegel as editor says that Forrest “helped start the organization known as the KKK…to offset the oppression of the Southern people.” On the Sierra Times website, Siegel said the “KKK was created to protect women and children,” and provided contact information for the chairman of my department at Vanderbilt University: neo-Confederates were urging Vanderbilt to fire me. In letters to the editor, someone responded, “[Farley’s] words inflamed me such that I wanted to put a minie [bullet] down the barrel of my Enfield [rifle], hunt him down, and shoot him like the dog he is.” Yet Siegel and the other terrorists feel safe, and have jobs.

So let’s continue Sherman’s march into cyberspace, till they don’t. Only then can we exorcise the ghosts of monsters who raped women, murdered children, and executed prisoners of war.

Cleanse America of the Confederate putrefaction. The Confederacy must be destroyed.


Note: Professor Farley unsuccessfully petitioned America’s first black president not to honor Confederate veterans.



Jonathan David Farley

The BlackCommentator

[JackRiddler]

You all know there were slave states on Lincoln's side in that war, right?

So?

The people with the greatest need and the most self-evident right to secede tend to be brown or black.

I think I get this the way you mean it. Would have been truest in the era we're discussing. In fact, the fear that they would start doing so was a big factor motivating the Confederate secession.

[Searcher08]

http://laprogressive.com/political-issues/confederacy/

The Confederacy Must Be Destroyed

January 12, 2011 By Jonathan David Farley


Ku Klux Klan Founder Nathan Bedford Forrest


Imagine if German politicians, in order to bolster their chances of being elected chancellor, had to declare publicly that they could see nothing wrong with flying the swastika, Germany’s flag during the “War of British Aggression”.

Imagine if U.S.-born Jihadists seized WMD and killed 300,000 New Yorkers. But instead of executing the insurrection leaders after their capture, the government dedicated highways and holidays in their honor.

Welcome to the former states of the Confederacy, where the sesquicentennial celebrations have begun. Neo-Confederates will assault anyone who publicly opposes them, including that person’s family and employers.

In 2002, I criticized a taxpayer-funded statue of Nathan Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, that neo-Confederates had recently erected in Tennessee. The response? “I hope you are killed in the most violent, bloody way possible….” “I hope someone rapes and kills your White, race-traitor wife and/or girlfriend as well.” “…it is the niggers that should have been exterminated during the American Civil War. had that occurred, this nation would be a far greater and a nigger-Marxist free land.” A few dozen love letters like that, and about 800 slightly friendlier ones. Then it got bad.

I fled Tennessee, abandoning my job at Vanderbilt University.

Even talking about the tactics neo-Confederates employ, and their “thinly veiled support for white supremacy,” can bring down a hailstorm, as Princeton University historian James McPherson discovered when he made the above-quoted statement in 1999; after receiving angry mail, McPherson backpedaled, saying he should have “been thinking more carefully”.

In 2009 Arthur Dowdell, an Auburn, Alabama city councilman, removed four tiny, freshly planted Confederate flags littering a graveyard, and received “hundreds, if not thousands, of emails,” including “threats to burn crosses in his yard and to kill him and his family”. The city council threatened Dowdell with censure, removal and arrest. Dowdell apologized.

In 2002, Wallace Earl Cook threatened to “cut [the] heart out” of Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, Gordon Gee, because Gee tried to remove the word “Confederate” from the name of a dormitory. Henry Maston wrote that he hoped Gee would be “killed by the same worthless [racial slur] that kills Farley.” Gee eventually changed his tune from “Yankee Doodle” to “Dixie,” abandoning the attempt to change the dorm’s name, trying to placate the people who attacked him by calling them “old friends,” and having his spokesman, Michael Schoenfeld, say that my criticism of the Klan founder was “rightly offensive to, and rejected by, most people.” Terrorism works.

And don’t think African-American organizations will protect you: Fears of rough rope and the lash’s sting still paralyze them, although they won’t admit it. NAACP president Ben Jealous explained that chairman Julian Bond probably felt that I had “asked for” the Klan-supporter attack and so deserved no help. Jealous’s wife, Lia Epperson-Jealous, merely put me in touch with a lawyer she knew from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who did nothing. When I discussed how Tommie Morton-Young of the Nashville NAACP had failed to help me, Morton-Young libeled me.

The Vanderbilt Black Student Alliance did “announce that we support everything that Dr. Jonathan Farley wrote about the Confederacy,” but then someone wrote its president, Nia Toomer: “ignorant nigger whore. Go and see the movie ‘Gangs of New York’. ….Niggers are lynched and burned.” No black students, alumni, or faculty spoke up again.

Nor are liberals a match for neo-Confederates. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok wrote that my calling Forrest a treasonous war criminal “really was pretty harsh”. “That’s a debate I want no part of,” agreed Green Party national media coordinator Scott McLarty, “and I’m angry at Jonathan for potentially igniting it.” Ed Sebesta, currently finishing a book about Vanderbilt’s “Confederate” dorm, concluded, “The abandonment of…Jonathan Farley to the Neo-Confederate wolves…reveals the Green Party to be the white party after all.”

Neo-Confederates, by contrast, wield, or influence those in, power. Even Obama cowers. When Brit Hume mentioned me on Fox News Television, I recall getting 200 hate messages. Barrett Brown, in his new book, Hot, Fat, and Clouded, details how Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain targeted me. Rachel Maddow has called McCain a “white supremacist”; far from being ostracized, McCain recently interviewed the husband of Sarah Palin. Bill Clinton, as president, honored the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that made KKK postcards, that recommends books praising the KKK, and that asked “whether emancipation…has introduced evils…more terrible than slavery.” Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, accused me of committing a “hate crime”. As The Nation reported in “Trent Lott’s Uptown Klan,” the former Republican Senate Majority Leader was an “honorary member” of the Council of Conservative Citizens, even taking photos with its head, Gordon Baum, in Lott’s office. The CCC urged its members to “gather a mob” to get me, with Baum vilifying me on national radio.

The way to fight neo-Confederate Klan supporters is to return their fire: Take anyone who publicly supports the Confederacy, create websites with his contact information, conduct denial-of-service attacks on his sites, and barrage his employer and associates with emails, calls, and faxes. A Sons of Confederate Veterans newsletter listing Lunelle Siegel as editor says that Forrest “helped start the organization known as the KKK…to offset the oppression of the Southern people.” On the Sierra Times website, Siegel said the “KKK was created to protect women and children,” and provided contact information for the chairman of my department at Vanderbilt University: neo-Confederates were urging Vanderbilt to fire me. In letters to the editor, someone responded, “[Farley’s] words inflamed me such that I wanted to put a minie [bullet] down the barrel of my Enfield [rifle], hunt him down, and shoot him like the dog he is.” Yet Siegel and the other terrorists feel safe, and have jobs.

So let’s continue Sherman’s march into cyberspace, till they don’t. Only then can we exorcise the ghosts of monsters who raped women, murdered children, and executed prisoners of war.

Cleanse America of the Confederate putrefaction. The Confederacy must be destroyed.


Note: Professor Farley unsuccessfully petitioned America’s first black president not to honor Confederate veterans.



Jonathan David Farley

The BlackCommentator

Confessions of a minion of the military-industrial complex
Or how I learned to stop worrying about where my academic research funding came from and love Raytheon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... rchfunding

Jonathan Farley speaks a Raytheon-sponsored event in Washington

The author, Jonathan Farley, speaks at a Raytheon-sponsored event before the Capitol, with the late Senator Edward Kennedy, the late Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis, Congressman Silvestre Reyes and Raytheon Vice President Bill Lynn seated behind. Photograph: Jonathan Farley

If I were the secret service, I'd be investigating me about now. There is a 2006 photo of me sitting next to Senator Ted Kennedy, Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis and Congressman Silvestre Reyes. Two of these three are now dead.

We were at an event (pictured above) sponsored by Raytheon, maker of cruise missiles, 192 of which have stormed down on Libya recently, at a cost of $290m. And because American academics like myself want Raytheon's cash, few if any will criticise this war.

The April sky was blue, puffy white clouds hovering above the dome of the Capitol behind us. Raytheon Vice President Bill Lynn (now deputy secretary of defence) introduced Kennedy, who praised Raytheon's spending $2m to improve math education, since "84% of middle school students would rather eat their vegetables or clean their room instead of doing math". The politicians attended Raytheon's bash because they love numbers: Raytheon gave Congressman Reyes $10,500.

People used to invite me to speak at events opposing the military-industrial complex, like a demonstration in 2001 that British former cabinet minister Tony Benn discusses in his memoirs, mentioning my name. My fall began when, in the late 1990s, a colleague organised a conference at America's National Security Agency. Mathematician Lee Lorch, a victim of America's blacklist in the 1950s for refusing to testify to HUAC, refused to attend; but I felt I would be insulting my colleague if I declined the invitation.

Years later, I found myself facing the same forces that Lorch had fought 50 years before. All other doors closed, I made a compromise: I became a science fellow at Stanford University's centre for international security and cooperation. I would do counterterrorism research, just not for the Pentagon.

But the apple was sweet: I soon found myself doing deals with Lockheed Martin on border security and holding meetings with admirals and one Air Force general, including a four-person meeting with a future director of national intelligence, and coffee for two with a former deputy director of the CIA. (A nice guy, incidentally.) I accepted support from the US Army War College; I accepted invitations from the Joint Special Operations University; programme managers from the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Homeland Security contacted me about my work.

Don't judge: even peerless, pacific Einstein became shatterer of worlds.

I tried to escape, but no one gave me money to study why bees are disappearing, possibly threatening our food supply, or to help stop the spread of lethal infectious diseases. I still wrote essays criticising people like Iraq war co-conspirator Colin Powell, but, soon after I did so, a self-described former covert operative, who worked for an organisation that had invited me to speak, pointedly praised Powell in conversation with me. I never did get any more support from his group.

He was, I felt, sending me a message – one most American academics understand, whether they work for the military or not: saying Scipio Africanus Obama should start his second term in The Hague means losing your support: professional suicide.

This is why there will not be another Noam Chomsky: few leftwing American academics who have the ability to make themselves heard – such as professors at elite universities – do so. In 1996, I attended a rally in Berkeley, but the only speakers who were professors were sixties revolutionary icon Angela Davis and myself. The American academy tends to deny tenure to leftists who wear their politics on their sleeve, as many humanists must; and if a scientist slips through, he risks the money without which he generally cannot work, should he dare to speak.

Nor can he count on liberals' support. The liberal Nation magazine prefers someone like Juan Cole, who is frothing at the mouth for more missiles. The liberal Centre for American Progress prefers Lawrence Korb, who writes, "Obama has done [the Libyan war] just right." Did I mention Korb was a vice president of Raytheon?

And me? I now work on ways insurgents can use math to defeat "coalition" forces. If the secret service wants to stop my research, they could smash me one fine morning, or – my preference – buy me out: an application of the "bottom-line philosophy", to quote Lorch, that has bankrupted the human race.

I'll take euros.




I always think it's important to separate out the rat poison, isnt it?

[American Dream]

More on the "intellectual" milieu in which these kinds of ideas circulate:

The Ideologues

Who are the intellectuals who form the core of the modern neo-Confederate movement? And what exactly do they think?


By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok




Thomas DiLorenzo
Economics professor, Loyola College
BALTIMORE, Md.

The earliest apologists for the lost Cause of the South, writing in the first years of the 20th century, described Abraham Lincoln as a good and even great man, sorely misled by evil advisers who pushed a harsh Reconstruction policy. No more.

Thanks to Thomas DiLorenzo and others of his ilk, the 16th president is now viewed in neo-Confederate circles as a paragon of wickedness, a man secretly intent on destroying states' rights and building a massive federal government.

"It was not to end slavery that Lincoln initiated an invasion of the South," DiLorenzo writes in his 2002 attack on Lincoln, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. "A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession."

DiLorenzo is not a historian. With a doctorate from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, he has been since 1992 an economics professor at Baltimore's Loyola College. And most of his work has not been about history, focusing instead on libertarian and antigovernment themes.

His 10 books include Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, and, with writer James T. Bennett, The Food and Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies and Petty Tyrants (attacking organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth and Cancer Scam: Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics (both of which accuse nonprofits like the American Cancer Society of using public money to fund leftist "political machines").

DiLorenzo is also a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a hard-right libertarian foundation in Alabama, and teaches at the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History, a South Carolina school established by the League of the South to teach its unusual views of history (see also Little Men).

In 2003, LewRockwell.com, a Web site run by Von Mises Institute President Llewellyn Rockwell that includes a "King Lincoln" section, hosted a "Lincoln Reconsidered" conference in Richmond, Va., starring DiLorenzo. The conference has since become a bit of a road show, reappearing around the South and headlined by DiLorenzo.






Thomas Fleming
President, Rockford Institute
ROCKFORD, Ill.

Thomas Fleming came to neo-Confederate ideas early, co-founding and editing the first few issues of Southern Partisan, a hard-line "pro-South" magazine started in 1979.

Holding a Ph.D. in classics from the University of North Carolina, Fleming today is president of The Rockford Institute, a right-wing organization that says its aim is "the defense of fundamental institutions of our civilization" and "the renewal of Christendom."

In that post, Fleming edits the institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, where he argued in a 1990 article that "government-imposed civil rights" had been "an unmitigated disaster for everyone." Elsewhere that same year, he defended arch-segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace as having been "clearly on the right track," even if he was "mean-spirited," in resisting the federal government.

In the 15 years since then, Fleming's magazine has repeatedly returned to neo-Confederate themes, including a 1991 cover story on secession that featured his interviews with leaders of the immigrant-bashing Northern League in Italy. In 1994, Fleming became a founding member, and later served on the board, of the League of the South (the name was inspired by the Northern League), which has been listed since 2000 by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

The Rockford Institute distributes "The Regnery Lectures," named in honor of the late right-wing publisher, Alfred Regnery, who sat for many years on the institute's board. As president, Fleming also emcees the institute's annual gatherings of the John Randolph Club, a highly conservative group that increasingly seems concerned with racial matters.






Michael Andrew Grissom
Free-lance writer
WYNNEWOOD, Okla.

Although Michael Grissom holds only a master's degree from the University of Oklahoma, his books have become key texts of the neo-Confederate movement.

His first, Southern by the Grace of God, was published in 1988 and, Grissom claims, "is credited with starting the Southern resistance movement." The book actually lauds the role of Ku Klux Klan in rolling back Reconstruction, arguing, "Without it, we might never have shaken off the curse of the carpetbag/scalawag government which bound us hand and foot after the war." In a picture caption, he adds that the terrorist group "played a vital role in ridding the post-war South of brutal carpetbag rule."

In 1994, Grissom became a founding member of the neo-secessionist League of the South, and he would later become a board member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (which has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity").

Grissom has published books including When the South Was Southern, Can the South Survive?, The Southern Book of Quotes and The Last Rebel Yell. That last, published in 1994, argued, among other things, that "cultural and physiological difference[s]" between blacks and whites are "real."

Saying he had learned much about "negro character," the book also defended the break-up of slave families: "I suspect that such family separations did not really trouble them as much as I once supposed. The old-fashioned plantation negroes did not take much trouble to themselves about anything."

Grissom has also attacked the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended segregated schools, complaining it "forc[ed] the white Southerner to send his children into a school, the traditional institution that produces boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, now burdened with the added complication of the black factor."

With the help of the Council of Conservative Citizens and other groups, Grissom is now raising money for a pro-Confederate statue in his hometown of Wynnewood.

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