Monday, July 14, 2008

Why I Feel Absolutely No White Guilt

Father Pfleger epitomizes those Caucasians who regard their history with scorn. Here's why I don't join in the self-flagellation

by Bernard Chapin

Like practically everything else involving Barack Obama, outrage over his association with Father Michael Pfleger quickly dissipated. The subsiding furor over the incident evidenced once again that the mainstream media loves the Democratic frontrunner in an unsavory fashion. It also illuminates the way in which Obama's past clashes resoundingly with who he claims to be. To our elites, forgiveness is the perpetual rule in regards to the Illinois senator. They may soon dismiss those who mention the clergymen's demagoguery with charges of "that's so May 2008? or "get a life."

Well, most of us have a life but for those who have "moved on," please recall Father Pfleger's sweltering Memorial Day weekend sermon at Trinity United Church, with theatrics so unusual that they got posted all over the internet. His antics appeared to have long-term implications as they led to Obama parting ways with his racialist church. Additionally, they resulted in a suspension for the St. Sabina's pastor. This sounded promising initially but the hierarchy of the Catholic Church soon reinstated him. Once again there are "no restrictions" on his speech. The Chicago Sun-Times effused - in a peppy and triumphant dispatch - over the priest's return to his congregation. The reporter covering the event compared him to Rocky, celebrated his "pugilistic resistance," and concluded that "what didn't kill him seems to have made him stronger."

Alas, if only that were true for his fellow citizens. The racism of Pfleger and his ilk debilitates the nation on a daily basis. Independent of his link to Obama, the Pfleger imbroglio remains topical because it highlights the sick phenomenon of Caucasians regarding themselves and their history with scorn. Journalists scrutinized only his derogatory comments about Hillary Clinton and ignored the more inflammatory portions of his spoken word performance. In the sentences that preceded the well-known segment, Pfleger lobbied for universal white guilt:
. honest enough to address the one who says, "Well, don't hold me responsible for what my ancestors did." But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because your daddy and your granddaddy and your great-granddaddy, unless you're willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation cause you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy! We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head. I said before I don't want this to be political because, you know, I'm very unpolitical.
Of course, practically every word of the diatribe was false, but it is essential for white Americans to respond to calumny and vindicate their names and heritage. Those who do not take Pfleger's brand of defamation seriously are doomed. The left has gained the moral high ground, perception-wise, over the last forty years due to the right having vacated it. The lies disseminated about conservatives are completely specious; however, a multitude of voters believe these falsehoods due to the Republican Party's ineffectual responses.

The GOP will be very dead should their politicians continue to deem themselves "above" the fray. To succeed in politics one must do battle and emerge victorious. Turning the other cheek allows pseudo-liberals to write a societal narrative wherein we are the scourge of humanity and the eternal enemies of "social justice," the ecosystem, and civil rights. We must defend ourselves.

Therefore, there's no reason to move on in regards to Father Pfleger. His entire monologue consisted of nothing more than slander. Obviously, had my ancestors committed wrongs I would not be responsible for them, but, as is true for millions of my fellow citizens, my antecedents oppressed no one. Before 1910, more than four decades after the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, not one relative of mine dwelled on these shores. Thus, the priest's allegations are not only absurd but are no more applicable to me than a directive from the head of the Lindsay Lohan fan club.

Just as with countless readers, my ancestors were thoroughly impoverished in Europe, which caused them to trade in their trinkets and buy passage to the new world. Had the old world esteemed my family members then they would have never boarded those boats.

One of my grandfathers migrated to Detroit in the 1920s from Ireland via Canada. His hands were needed in the fields so he became a second-grade dropout. The woman he married was the brains of the family because she was fortunate enough to have received nine years of formal education. She bore him eight children as he toiled at Ford Motor Company. Granddad never accepted promotion because he feared losing his union membership. My mother was the only of his offspring to attend college. Her enrollment was made possible by a marching band scholarship rather than dividends from a trust fund. Upon death, my grandfather left medical bills as opposed to ownership in a company or the riches of a 401k account.

My other grandfather hailed from Russia. Unlike American blacks who, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, received a segregated and inferior education, my father's father received no education whatsoever. He never attended a day of school in his life. He passed through Ellis Island and maintained a thick Russian accent until dying at age 88 (he attributed his longevity to giving up cigars at age 75). When I was a kid my grandfather used to send me birthday cards with a signature alone affixed to them. How literate he was I cannot say. When he passed away he left my father absolutely nothing. Over the course of his life, his economic output was inconsistent and often illegal. He married three times and departed the earth as financially barren as he was upon entering it.

In lieu of our antecedents, from what insurance policy did my mother and father benefit? The one person who definitely cannot answer that question is Father Michael Pfleger. When he gazes upon his countrymen he sees only theoretical constructs in a lowbrow postmodernist parlor game that he assembled. Did Pfleger ever meet any men like my grandfathers? Does he even know that such people existed?

He is wrong about everything as there is no "white privilege" in the United States of America. If there were, programs like affirmative action would never have received the imprimatur of the state because they teach the young that discrimination is totally acceptable should it oppress the right kind of citizen - white citizens as of 2008.

Further, political correctness would have no power or sway were Caucasians to be truly advantaged. PC involves treating "the other" as a holy relic and deferring to them; conversely, the majority population is regarded as former functionaries of the Khmer Rouge. Lastly, we know that white privilege is a lie because Asians outperform Caucasians on almost every single measure of societal success.

Both of my grandfathers would have found the notion of white privilege very perplexing. That they shared the same skin color as upper-class WASPs meant nothing in 1920. The Brahmins of our society wanted nothing to do with either of them. My Russian grandfather was such a low-status male that he changed his overly ethnic name to match one held by a local celebrity. Regardless of elite opinion, both men enjoyed their lives and felt indebted to their new homeland. They lived in the present and did not dwell on crimes of the past which English kings or Russian tsars may have committed against them. Resentment was not a language they could comprehend.

Yet it is resentment that allows Father Pfleger to ascend the rungs in society's vile church of victimology. It is a disgrace that the Catholic Church - via their employment and protection - continues to enable his race warfare. According to his supervisors, Father Pfleger has served his penance, but should Barack Obama become our next president it will be the general population's turn to serve.

Source



Crime pays: Getting away with terror at British taxpayers' expense

Pictured: Smiling preacher of hate Abu Qatada enjoying an 800,000 pounds home and a life of benefits


The Daily Mail refers to Abu Qatada, the "preacher", as Al-Qaeda's "ambassador to Europe." As if al-Qaeda was a diplomatic service. You're looking at Bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe.

Of course he's smiling. Look at what he's getting:
1. He can't be extradited to Jordan "because his human rights would have been breached."
2. He lives in a $1.6 million house.
3. He receives $100,000 in (British) government benefits.
4. He's under house arrest but meanders freely.
5. Supposedly he's on disability receiving $300/week for a back injury but can carry a knapsack in public. He's not worried that anyone would jail him for fraud.
6. His "45-year-old wife is said to be entitled to child benefits, income support, housing and council tax credits which exceed œ800 each week." (that would be approx. $1600.) Plus, "The family is also said to pick up around œ210 in income support."
7. AND he gets a tax break: "the couple is exempt from paying the œ2,283 yearly council tax bill on their home."

This photograph of the smiling al-Qaeda operative telescopes to the rest of the world the message that the UK officially has signed a suicide pact.

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Jungle beasts

It's never too late to get a real job, so here's one that the Reverend Jesse Jackson should consider in the wake of his embarrassing anti-Barack Obama moment: city lifeguard. A spate of violence - in one case lethal - has wracked the public pools in Los Angeles's Watts area this summer. Trying to keep order from his lifeguard station, Jackson would have a splendid opportunity to test his claim that what inner-city black youth need is more "government-based policy," rather than fathers who stay around long enough to raise them.

Watts public pools have a history of anarchy. Last year, Los Angeles city officials hired armed guards and installed video cameras at the 109th Street Swimming Pool in order to protect children and pool staff from out-of-control youth. The 109th Street pool lies between two infamous housing projects and the warring gangs which control them. Many neighboring families avoid the recreational facility, driven away by the local gangbangers' aggression.

But the usual disorder turned even scarier on the second day of the pool season this June. The pool manager had had the temerity to ask swimmers to clear the pool for cleaning, its water having been rendered dangerously dirty by people jumping in with their clothes on or refusing to shower before entering. In response, up to 30 young men went on a rampage. They overpowered two armed guards and six pool workers, punched the manager as he was trying to escape to his office to call 911, and threw the manager, a lifeguard, and locker attendant into the water. This was not a case of adolescent hijinks: The men were in their twenties and thirties. They were simply unable to tolerate any authority over their own. The police reaction was delayed as officers responded to a report of a man with a gun at another city pool, a report that this time proved unfounded.

The 109th Street pool stayed closed for the next two days, depriving local children of watery recreation during a heat wave. It reopened only after the Los Angeles Police Department agreed to station two armed police officers there, and the city recreation department hired six residents, mostly ex-gang members, to help patrol the pool. Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks observed the charming modus operandi of these community peace-keepers: one "lightly . . . whacked" a boy on the head who did not get out of the pool quickly enough. After the pool had closed and the security force had gone home, teens and kids were still jumping into the filthy water with clothes and shoes on, Banks reported.

A nearby Los Angeles County pool facility saw an even more egregious outbreak of violence last Saturday. Three men tried to rob a 60-year-old man who was sleeping outside the pool at the Ted Watkins County Park, which borders Watts. They beat James Hurst unconscious with a blunt object; he died the next day in a hospital from his injuries. In reaction, the county will station eight additional county police officers at pools in South Central Los Angeles ten hours a day through the summer.

It is striking how quickly elected officials in the inner city call on the police when things go wrong. These are the same "racial profilers" who, according to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a host of local loudmouths, pose as much threat to the black community as criminals. Turns out that the threat from the allegedly racist police disappears from view whenever they are needed to protect inner-city residents from the real danger in their midst - criminal males. Jackson was one of the first publicity hogs to fly down to Jena, La., the site of a trumped-up media fable about a supposedly racist criminal justice system and its victims - six black high-school students who without provocation viciously beat a white student unconscious. Had Jackson been a guard at Watts' 109th Street Pool or the Ted Watkins County Park, the chances are high he would have dialed 911 for the cops as desperately as anyone there.

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Moscow Hangover: Soviet Communism no longer enslaves Russia, but the West has yet to exorcise Lenin's ghost

by Peter Hitchens

What a pity it is that there will be no new Cold War. How useful it would be for the cause of freedom if we could once again hang the Kremlin and the Gulag round the radical Left's neck. But we cannot. The Kremlin is now swept clean of dogma, the Gulag is gone, and Russia is just another sordid despotism.

And so, freed from embarrassing associations with Lenin, Stalin, five-year-plans, purges, famines, and the KGB, the world's radical reformers are far stronger, and far harder to resist, than they used to be. As long as the words "progressive," "Communist," and "Socialist" brought to mind images of Soviet oppression, Soviet shortages, and Soviet intolerance, millions of people were inoculated against them.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to complain that the Iron Curtain kept everything out of Russia except what he called the "liquid manure" of Western trash culture, which somehow seeped beneath the barriers. In a strange and subtle way, it also prevented the spread of revolution in the advanced world.

It is an interesting lesson in real power to see how much mightier left-wing ideas and movements have become since they lost the support of all those Russian tanks. Far from helping the revolutionary cause, the columns of T-72s showed to the dimmest observer that socialism is not a gentle, kindly thing but an arrogant, ironclad, goose-stepping bully, which answers doubts with bayonets as soon as it has the power to do so. There was never any need to ask how many divisions the Communist Party had because it was so anxious to show them to us.

I watched the last proper Soviet tank parade as it thundered across Red Square on Nov. 7, 1990. There were red flags, rigid salutes, slanted faces, jackboots, and lush, totalitarian music. Just behind me and to my right, a shifty and diffident Politburo huddled on top of Lenin's tomb in the harsh wind. The thing they were uncertainly celebrating was called the Glorious October Socialist Revolution, that colossal failure that would have killed idealism off for good if we ever actually learned anything from history.

They were not enjoying themselves much because they knew just how bad everything was and suspected their days were almost over. I was enjoying it immensely because, in those days, I harbored the vain idea that the world might learn something useful from the unmitigated disaster of the Soviet Utopia. For thousands of miles in every direction, undeniable and no longer denied, lay the rusting, leaking, sagging evidence that this revolution had failed and that international socialism was a discredited, bankrupt idea.

A couple of months later, I saw some of the same tanks snarling down a midnight highway in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, which was then battling to regain independence from Moscow. I was in a group of journalists following them, until they swung their barrels toward our taxi in a way that seemed to lack a sense of humor. Earlier that day, Soviet soldiers had opened fire on civilians, so we thought it wise to drop back. We caught up with them later and also with the corpses they had caused, officially classified as "traffic accidents." They were part of a little known and failed attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to seize control of the city while the world was distracted by the first phase of the recapture of Kuwait.

I saw the tanks for the last time in August 1991, when a squadron of them trundled up my Moscow street in the early morning sunshine, part of a fumbled KGB putsch against Gorbachev. The drunken collapse of this coup ended the Soviet Communist Party forever. All over Moscow, the trashcans were full of half-burned Communist Party membership cards. This was not a temporary setback but the death of an ideology. Soviet Communism had made a fool of itself and had gone. After that, of course, there could be no more Red Square parades, no more anniversaries of Glorious October, though they had one more excursion, in 1993, shelling the Russian parliament on behalf of Boris Yeltsin.

Oddly, the Communist Party, or rather its bewildered true believers, survived. No normal person continued to belong, but these rather touching, rather serious old people-far from contemptible, often incorruptible and serious, frequently decorated veterans of war-could not abandon the faith they had been brought up with. For one brief moment, when millions had their savings wiped out and were thrown out of their jobs, they seemed about to recover. But it passed, and now they linger as a sort of echo, useful to the regime as a harmless, impotent opposition.

Then it was announced that the tanks were coming back. As part of the inauguration of President Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian army would once again be allowed to drive its armor through Red Square. Had the clock really been turned back 18 years? There had been-and still is-much chatter of a return to the old hostilities.

Russia has certainly discovered that it can use its energy power to threaten its neighbors and buy Western politicians. It snarls, with good reason, over the West's strange anti-Serb policy in Kosovo. It intervenes blatantly in the politics of Ukraine. It menaces former Soviet republics, now nervously independent, on the Baltic coast and in the Caucasus.

And Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, has effectively suffocated political and press freedom, suppressing serious dissent in parliament, banning unwelcome independent candidates from running for office, and creating a creepy mass youth movement and a creepier personality cult.

The mysterious murder of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the still stranger murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and the rigged trial and imprisonment of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkhovsky are seen by most people as signs of the ferocious intolerance of the new regime, which officially maintains that Khodorkovsky's trial was fair and denies any connection with the two deaths....

Partly thanks to us, partly thanks to the horrible moral consequences of totalitarian socialism and the near extermination of God by systematic commissars, the new Russia is a lawless snake pit. It is dominated and populated by men stripped of morality by more than 70 years of cynical Leninism. But though the new rulers are the products of Marxism, they lack its driving purpose-or any real purpose except the gaining and keeping of wealth and power.

So Moscow, once the sacred heart of world Communism, has become a sort of Babylon, the most exhilarating, tasteless, and expensive city in the world, where you can procure anything for money and the nasty negative charisma of gangsters and spivs is on constant display. I cannot think of any other advanced capital in which you can see, side by side, all the manifestations of modern civilization and the symptoms of anarchy-ostentatious bodyguards, fenced-off compounds.

As a former resident from 18 years ago, I view the transformed city with seriously mixed feelings. It is thrilling to see the restored beauty of the churches and monasteries, sparkling with gold leaf and carefully tended, when all too recently they were semi-ruins, deliberately desecrated as reformatories for teenage louts or tatty warehouses for unwanted junk. It is a delight to stroll in the 19th-century lanes just south of the river, painted and cherished for the first time in 90 years, revealing a gracious and light-hearted Russian streetscape that was previously only visible in old prints and faded photographs.

The cleanliness of the air, compared with the brownish substance that we used to have to breathe, is another joy. Windows are washed, sidewalks are free of sudden chasms and open manholes, rats no longer sport around the entrances to the railway stations. The ambulances are no longer encrusted with dried blood, and the police, though still menacing, manage to be a little less slovenly. Even the great gloomy Stalinist skyscrapers, scrubbed and floodlit by night, seem to have turned into truthful historical monuments of the era that conceived them.

On a fresh May morning, surrounded by all these pleasures, it is hard to remember that a squalid and repressive state is in charge, that corruption is commonplace, and that one chilly pygmy-in spirit as well as in actual size-has just been succeeded by another as president....

But there is one huge, important difference. Private life is now free. You may say and think what you like and nobody will put you in a camp or claim that you are insane and pump you full of mind-altering drugs. Only if you offer a direct, open challenge to authority will you be troubled-and then generally by the tax police or the fire authorities who would rather put you out of business than into jail....

And I remembered coming back to the West, full of optimism, in 1992. And then I remembered seeing, year by year, in my own country and the U.S., new versions of all these subtle horrors: the "children's rights" movement that encourages denunciation and sets children against their parents, the shoving of infants into daycare from an incredibly early age, the need for two salaries to pay the basic bills, the epidemic of divorce, the pandemic of abortion, the growing spiteful rage against faith. I saw all around me the construction of a system of thought that dismissed conservative, individualist points of view as intolerable and pathological. I saw public servants, academics, and broadcasters having their careers ruined-and in Britain being questioned by the police-for expressing incorrect opinions. Private life, in the modern West, is now becoming significantly less free than it is in post-ideological Moscow.

I have begun to suspect that the bacillus of revolution, once confined inside the borders of the USSR, did not die with Communism. On the contrary, it adapted itself and escaped in a new form. Now it rages busily in a world where, instead of storming the Winter Palace, the post office, and the railroad station, the enemies of freedom infiltrate the TV studio, the college campus, and the school. There is a new Cold War after all, but it is being fought inside our borders, without tanks or missiles.

More here

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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