EMMETT TILL's LEGACY - MODEL FOR DISASTER

John Nolte on Breitbart.com wrote an article: “60 YEARS: EMMETT TILL’S MEMORY DESCERATED BY TRAYVON MARTIN/FERGUSON RACE HOAXERS.”(28 August 2015)  My comments and a reply follow.  HUGH MURRAY

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·         umura • 9 hours ago

Till was in the store to humiliate the young, married, white woman. He wanted to impress his Southern, and to him, backward, relatives. Till was the son of a man executed for rape during WWII in Europe. When the young Till was in the grocery, he was wearing the ring of his rapist father. Till was showing his Southern friends how they could go after white women. He was a bully, asking for trouble. The husband and friends of the insulted wife reacted to stop such aggression before it spread. They over reacted. On the other hand, the number of today's Black on white rapes is overwhelming.  (A day later this post was deleted from Breitbart - HM)

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foobar  humura • an hour ago

And here John Nolte says that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike brown have as much to do with Emmett Till as a ham sandwich.

Mr Nolte conveniently forgot to mention: white supremacists have a rich and proud tradition of defaming their victims, after their deaths, to seemingly justify their heinous acts. We're fortunate that readers such as humura are here to remind us of this shameful history.

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humura  foobar • a minute ago

Till was in the grocery to insult, show disrespect to a young married woman, and by implication, show how good he was and encourage his friends to follow his path of violating the rules of civilization in the future. And many have followed his path. This is why many urban schools are entered through metal detectors. Why test scores are abysmal. Why teachers are taunted and insulted (just like the Mississippi grocery clerk). This is why so often failure is the present and future for many young Black men.
Those who followed Till are evident - the druggie crook unarmed but dangerous Mike Brown in Ferguson, the aggressive suspended schooler (and possible thief) Trayvon Martin, Gray in Baltimore, et al. So long as Till is held up as a role model, Blacks will destroy civilized values.
And this is why the Black on white rape rate compared to the white on Black rate is perhaps 5,000 to 1.

TRIGGERING PEARL HARBOR - H. D. WHITE, or the WHITE HOUSE?

OPERATION SNOE: HOW A SOVIET MOLE IN FDR’S

WHITE HOUSE TRIGGERED PEARL HARBOR (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2012)

BY JOHN KOSTER

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            Koster has written an enjoyable, readable book.  His thesis is that a secret Soviet agent in the Roosevelt Administration “triggered” the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, getting the US into war and eliminating the Japanese option of striking north against the USSR.  Since the Japanese were thus occupied elsewhere, Stalin could safely move men and material from Asia to be sent to aid in the war against Hitler.  Presumably, without Harry Dexter White, America might not have entered WWII.

            The book is a good read, and Koster includes a chapter “cast of characters,” identifying many of those to be discussed in the volume.  Unfortunately, he does not include a chronology, which would have been most helpful to the reader.

            Using both recently released information from an NKVD operative and older sources, such as sworn testimony before the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Koster concludes there is no doubt that White was a Soviet agent.  And the logic of his book is also simple - Soviet agent Vitalii Pavlov in March 1941 urges White to foment war between Japan and the US.  According to Koster, the NKVD had its “own foreign policy,” and it believed that Hitler’s Germany would soon turn against its Soviet ally and there would be war between the two dictatorships.  Stalin did not accept this view.(pp. 1, 22, 108-09)  But on behalf of the NKVD, Pavlov sought to engulf Japan in a war with the US so it would not have the strength to also strike its northern neighbor.

            White agreed with Pavlov’s analysis, and though White was merely an Undersecretary of the US Treasury Department; Director of the Division of Monetary Research, “Behind the scenes, White was the brains behind Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Treasury Secretary), who in turn tried to be the brains behind Franklin D. Roosevelt.”(9)  In Koster’s view, Morgenthau was simply White’s “puppet.”(122)

            Koster writes fascinating history, some deemed too far afield to be discussed in most works.  In Japan, there were those who urged a strike north, against the Soviets, and others who thought it better to attack south.  Even before Pavlov had given instructions to White in spring 1941, Japan had already engaged in a strike north.  Disputed border areas between Manchukuo (ally of Japan) and the People’s Republic of Mongolia (a Soviet ally) resulted in an undeclared war between the Soviets and Japanese.  In May 1939 incursions escalated.  While at first the Japanese did quite well, Soviet Gen. Zhukov counter attacked with “the BT tank, the greatest in the world at that time,..designed in the United States by J. Walter Christie,…”(33)  This Nomonhan Incident was not an official war, but the Soviets lost 8,000 men and the Japanese some 9,000.  On 15 September 1939 both sides signed a cease fire, but both recognized that war in that quarter would be costly for both sides.  (In 2011 the South Koreans released one of their most expensive films, “My Way,” in which fighting around Nomonhan is a major feature of the movie.)  Only after the cease-fire with Japan was signed on 15 September did Stalin then join in the spoils of Poland.  The Germans had begun their blitzkrieg against Poland earlier in September, and Stalin waited till he was sure of peace in the east before he joined in the dismemberment of Poland on 17 September.(34)

            Koster records some of the political violence in depression Japan.  He almost justifies the hostility toward bankers and politicians, and even against the Emperor, by “young officers” who thought themselves the heirs of the samurai and defenders of the poor.  These officers attacked, assassinated, and attempted coups.  (Of course, FDR was nearly assassinated a month prior to his inauguration as President, 15 February 1933.)

            Koster’s description of the incident by the Marco Polo Bridge just outside Beijing is amusing.  Never the less, it led to the 2^nd Sino-Japanese War.  Koster also discounts what he believes are vastly inflated figures for the horrors of the “Rape of Nanking” – he thinks the most likely death count is 42,000.(29)  Even more heretical, he suggests Nanking may have been better off under the Japanese occupation than under the corrupt Nationalist government.

            In his discussion of the American Communist Party, Koster alludes to 2 incidents involving possible murders.  He states that Communist Joseph Katz lost favor when he refused to kill another American Communist, Elizabeth Bentley, because she had become an anti-Communist.  And one reason Whittaker Chambers defected from the Communist movement was when long-time American Communist Juliet Poyntz “disappeared” during party purges.  Were people killed in the US for splitting with the Communist movement?(7-8, 20)

            There is an interesting note on whistle-blowers under FDR.  A Korean who was involved in an anti-Japanese, pro-Korean underground alerted the US of a forthcoming attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.  He even provided the exact date of the attack.  His warning was ignored.  Ignored until AFTER the attack.  “That afternoon, Kilsoo Haan,…,received a telephone call from Maxwell Hamilton (US State Dept., Far Eastern Affairs).  If his (Haan’s) December 5 warning of an attack on Pearl Harbor were released to the press, Hamilton warned Haan, he would be ‘put away for the duration.’”(151)

            Koster includes the pressures to round up Japanese and Americans of Japanese origin and place them in concentration camps.  Liberal Pres. Roosevelt signed the order.  Both the CP, USA, and the ACLU supported this assault on civil liberties.  Republican conservative Sen. Robert Taft and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the round up.(160)  Strangely, Koster does not mention another strong proponent of the round up, then California Atty. Gen. Earl Warren, who is best known as a liberal Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.

            Clearly, I enjoyed much of the book.  Why do I demur?  “On Dec. 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler spontaneously declared war on the United States.  With the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, Russian morale was crumbling…Then hundreds of thousands of reinforcement and more than a thousand tanks arrived from Siberia and Mongolia, freed by the Japanese war with the United States.”(163)  The Germans had to retreat.  Pavlov’s order to Harry Dexter White, culminated with White’s memorandum that became the ultimatum causing Tokyo to decide on war and attack Pearl Harbor, thus saving Stalin and the Soviet Union.  But Stalin’s counter offensive began 5 December 1941, before the Japanese attacked Pearl.  Stalin had already shifted men and material from Asia to the European front.  German Communist Richard Sorge’s spying in Japan may have provided information of the planned attack on Pearl so Stalin believed he could win the gamble of shifting troops.  Still, Koster’s writing is deceptive on this issue, implying the shift occurred after Pearl.

            More troublesome is the utter absence from this volume of any mention of Robert Stinnett and his DAY OF DECEIT: THE TRUTH ABOUT FDR AND PEARL HARBOR, published in 2001 by Free Press, and made into a program shown on the History Channel.  Stinnett’s hypothesis was that FDR had decided on war with Japan and provoked it.  Because of advances in American code-breaking, Stinnett contended that FDR knew of the attack coming, and did nothing to stop it (indeed, Gen. Marshall is included among the do-nothings as I recall).

            Review some of Koster’s points.  The Hull Note of 26 Nov. 1941, based upon the memorandum of NKVD agent Harry D. White, was an ultimatum to Japan that it could not accept.  Japan’s late offer of peace, including withdrawing from most of China, were rejected by Sec. of State Hull and State Dept. expert on China, Stanley Hornbeck, neither of whom were sympathetic to communism.(125)  FDR was already risking war with Japan when in April 1941 he authorized American pilots who could fly for Chiang’s air force.(38)  Koster adds, “While Roosevelt himself had probably not actively conspired to provoke the Japanese, the Hull note had made war all but inevitable, and he had done little to interfere.”(153)  Even Koster concedes that code breakers and other warnings, like that from Kilsoo Haan, were ignored.  No one informed Admiral Kimmel or Gen. Short in Pearl Harbor of the approaching danger.  Koster writes: “Washington sat on the information – apparently because they wanted some sort of war but did not expect anything like what they got.(154)  FDR read a decoded message from the Japanese and stated, “This means war.”  Even Koster adds, “…why didn’t the White House or the War Department telephone Hawaii when the President decoded the message…”?(159)

            In some of his rhetoric, Koster seems to blame all the deaths at Pearl Harbor, and perhaps in WWII on Harry Dexter White.  White was a spy and a man of influence seeking to push America to advance the cause of Communism.  But Roosevelt was engaged in many war-like actions against Germany in 1940 and 41.  He was risking war with Japan too.  If Stinnett’s thesis is correct, FDR did not require Harry White to trigger Pearl Harbor.  It is sad that Koster decided not to consider the Stinnett view in this book.  While Koster presents a thesis that it was all the fault of Harry White, even his own quotations force one to question the actions of Roosevelt in the lead up to war with Japan in December 1941.     

DESTROY THE 1% ! ---- REALLY?

LEGAL AND ACADEMIC EQUALITY NONSENSE

The left's fruitless obsession with eliminating "racial disparities."

August 4, 2015

Walter Williams

A particular act or policy might not have a discriminatory intent, but that doesn't let you off the hook. If it has a disproportionately negative impact on so-called protected classes, it is said to have a disparate impact and risks being prohibited by law. The uninformed assumption made by judges, lawyers and academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex discrimination, we all would be distributed across occupations, educational backgrounds and other socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages in the population. Such a vision is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence, anywhere, at any time, that but for the fact of discrimination, there would be proportional representation among various socio-economic characteristics. Let's look at some disproportionalities, with an eye toward discovering the causes and then deciding what to do about them.

If one were to list the world's top 30 violinists of the 20th century, at least 25 of them would be of Jewish ancestry. Another disparity is that despite the fact that Jews are less than 3 percent of the U.S. population and a mere 0.2 percent of the world's population, during the 20th century, Jews were 35 percent of American and 22 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners. Are Jews taking violin excellence and Nobel Prizes that belong to other ethnicities? If America's diversity worshippers see underrepresentation as probative of racial discrimination, what do they propose be done about overrepresentation?

Overrepresentation may be seen as denial of opportunity. For example, blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 80 percent of professional basketball players and 65 percent of professional football players and among the highest-paid players in both sports. By stark contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL's professional ice hockey players. Basketball, football and ice hockey represent gross racial disparities and as such come nowhere close to "looking like America." Do these statistics mean that the owners of multibillion-dollar basketball and football operations are nice guys and ice hockey owners are racists? By the way, just because blacks are 65 percent of professional football players, let's not lull ourselves into complacency.

When's the last time you saw a black NFL kicker or punter?

There are even geographical disparities. Not a single player in the NHL's history can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Louisiana or Mississippi. Geographical disparities are not only limited to ice hockey. The population statistics for North and South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their population is black. In states such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented. When such racial disparities were found in schooling, the remedy was busing. I'll tell you one thing; I'm not moving to Montana. It's too cold.

Geographical disparities don't only apply to the U.S. Historically, none of the world's greatest seamen has been born and raised in a Himalayan nation, such as Nepal and Bhutan, or a sub-Saharan nation of Africa. They mostly have been from Scandinavia, other parts of Europe, East Asia or the South Pacific.

Being a man, I find another disproportionality particularly disturbing. According to a recent study conducted by Bond University in Australia, sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill men than they are women. Such a disproportionality leads to only one conclusion: Sharks are sexist. Another disturbing sex disparity is that despite the fact that men are 50 percent of the population and so are women, men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning, 82 percent are men. I wonder what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men.

Differences are seen by many as signs of inequality. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman put it best: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Equality in conjunction with the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty.  (End of article)

(I took this fine article by Walter Williams from frontpage.com.  For a long time now I have thought that one of the major issues of the 20^th century was that of overrepresentation, and, unfortunately, it appears to be a major issue of the 20^th.  Read the first part of this article again, and imagine that you are a German in the 1920s.  How can Jews be so prominent among the violinists?  It must be because the judges are Jewish.  Or are paid by Jews.  How else explain the overrepresentation if all people are equal.  If all are equal, then Jews, less than 1% of the population of Germany in 1930, must be manipulating the system somehow, through corruption, some way.  National Socialism was the attempt to restore equality for the 99%.  The Occupy-Wall-Street crowd with their attacks on the 1% were all too similar to the Nazi approach.  If you like the Williams article, I urge you to read my article, on this blog, as to why liberals cannot understand the holocaust.  See “What Caused the Holocaust?”  In 1930s Europe, the targets of the quest against the oppressive overrepresented, the 1%, the targets were the Jews, and they became the victims of the spirit of equality.  In multicultural America, the new targets are white men.---Hugh Murray)

Decline of D. West - Her latest book

THE REBUTTAL: DEFENDING ‘AMERICAN BETRAYAL’

FROM THE BOOK-BURNERS (Washington, DC: Bravura Books, 2013)

By DIANA WEST

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            A book should stand on its own merits, and by this criterion, Ms. West’s REBUTTAL fails. The book’s organization is chaotic; consequently, there is much repetition.  But the repetition does not necessarily lead to better understanding – just a retold version of events again and again, which by book’s end leaves the reader more confused.  West includes no index, so one cannot easily recheck to note slight variations in the retelling.  Worse, over 60% if the book is taken from the blogosphere, but in the book’s visual presentation of this net scape, it is often difficult to distinguish who is writing from whom they are quoting, for a blogger may include several paragraphs by another author.  These are serious drawbacks to any book.

            The reason for West’s REBUTTAL is to defend her previous book. AMERICAN BETRAYAL, from a series of scathing reviews beginning with that of historian Ronald Radosh on the FrontPage website of David Horowitz.  Horowitz actually pulled a favorable review of her book by Mark Tapson and replaced it with the lengthy attack by Radosh.  In her REBUTTAL, West notes some of the nasty, unacademic words that Radosh and other neo-conservatives used to denigrate her, such as “unhinged,” and “loon.,”  In the title of his review, Radosh indicates he is not a far-right conservative, “McCarthy on Steroids,” linking West to the Wisconsin Republican Senator.  Horowitz summarized his view of West’s AMERICAN BETRAYAL in one sentence, “This book should not have been written.”  Others smashed her book in reviews while admitting that they had not bothered to read it.  In short, the fault line seems to be, the more one adores Franklin Roosevelt, the less one thinks of Diana West’s work.  Her research led her to conclude that FDR’s Administration contained so many Soviet agents, Communists, and fellow travelers, that Washington was an “occupied” government.  Some of the disputes between her and her critics hinged on words like “occupied,” and “agent,” or whether Roosevelt’s close advisor Harry Hopkins was or was not Agent 19.  In this work West defends her critical view of the FDR leadership and Hopkins in particular.  She recounts an episode in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote Hopkins about FBI information that a Soviet embassy agent conferred with leaders of the Communist Party, USA.  Hopkins then warned the Soviet Embassy that the FBI was listening to some of its agents.  Agent 19 or not, Hopkins was revealing highly classified information to the Soviets and to the detriment of the US Government.

            West includes many tantalizing tidbits strung throughout her REBUTTAL, but they fail to generate a full argument.  Here are some:  US aided in Operation Keelhaul, returning escapees from Stalin’s workers’ paradise, forcing their return to the USSR to gulag and/or death (p. 40, 151); Soviet refusal to return to the US American POW’s captured by the Axis and then “liberated” by the Soviet’s advancing armies (44); Pres. Harry Truman’s promotion of Soviet agent Harry Dexter White at the same time his Dept. of Justice was considering charging anti-Communist whistle-blower Whittaker Chambers with perjury (59); The CPUSA paid for many of the expenses of participants in the 1968 Days of Rage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 (101); Gen. Sikorski, leader of the anti-Communist government of Poland may have been murdered by Soviet agents in Gibraltar in July 1943 - not a victim of a mere airplane malfunction (155-59); J. Robert Oppenheim may have been a secret member of the Communist Party (171).  These are all tasty crumbs, but where is the cake?  Unfortunately, not in this book.

            The saddest item in this work concerns the firing of a blogger who wrote approvingly of West’s AMERICAN BETRAYAL.  Clare Lopez was fired from her post at the Gatestone Institute’s website, allegedly for recommending West’s earlier book.  The new CEO of Gatestone at the time was former UN Ambassador John Bolton(135-38).  Too bad that conservatives cannot be more open-minded.

            Does West make her case in THE REBUTTAL?  Because of the acrimony, she probably could not reprint Radosh’s 10-page hostile review in full.  So the reader is left with only one side of the argument.  It is a rebuttal, but one should read the other side before coming to a judgment.
(I hope to have a review of her book AMERICAN BETRAYAL later this year.  Hugh Murray)