IS THE MEXICAN BORDER THE AMERICAN TIENANMEN?

THE HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON: CHINA'S SECRET STRATEGY TO

REPLACE AMERICA AS THE GLOBAL SUPERPOWER

(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2015)

BY MICHAEL PILLSBURY

Rev. by Hugh Murray

Pillsbury has written an informative book about Sino-American relations from his youth in the 1960s up to the copyright date of the 2015 volume. Unfortunately, he fails to raise questions pertinent to his topic, and these I shall discuss later in my review. Because Pillsbury knows Mandarin and is seeped in Chinese culture, he writes about various Chinese texts on strategy, which the Chinese war-hawks often cite, but these ancient writings reveal no more about general strategy than applied by players of games Risk or Diplomacy and which are implicit in regular common sense.

At the outset of Pillsbury's career, he writes: “Throughout Mao's tenure, American intelligence...[generally] viewed the Chinese as a reclusive, almost primitive people being led by a collection of radicals.”(p. 20) It saw China as unable to challenge the Soviet Union, much less the United States.(20-21) Was there a possible split between the S.U. and China in the 1960s? Pillsbury describes the contradictory information coming from Soviet defectors, like Yuri Nosenko, who came to the West in 1964. Interestingly, Pillsbury never mentions how vibrations of that split were already evident in 1962 among the separate groups organizing to attend the World Youth Festival that summer in Helsinki (not just the pro-Westerners, but the pro-Chinese factions distinct from the pro-Moscow ones).

In 1969 while the 24-year-old Pillsbury was working for the UN Secretariat, he also agreed to work as a spy for the US government.(24) Thereafter, he would hold various posts and provide information, analysis, and opinion to American leaders. A Soviet representative at the UN told Pillsbury that “the Soviet Union had essentially built the modern Communist Chinese state,(25) but now China “planned to use the Americans as they had used the Soviets – as tools...while pledging cooperation against a 3^rd rival power.”(27)

Pillsbury contends that it was not Nixon who sought to open up China, but “...the Chinese military secretly designed China's opening to America.”(54) Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy was also quietly making overtures to Beijing, and Nixon, when told of his Democratic rival's initiative, the President felt pressured to finally plunge ahead with high-level meetings with the Chinese. Nixon also asked the Chinese not to invite any American politician to Beijing before him.(57) Because China was deemed a basket case, Nixon and Ford provided gifts to the Chinese, which were hidden from the American public for over 30 years. These included eliminating aid to the Dalai Lama and canceling naval patrols in the Taiwan Straight.(69) About this time, Pillsbury was advising to increase aid to China and to build Sino-American military ties against the USSR.(69) He writes that the Chinese were trying to use the US against its Soviet rival, but clearly the US was also attempting to use China against the same rival. In these types of agreements, each nation hopes to use the other for its own benefit.

After opening, the US and China cooperated, not only where the US provided China with early warning systems near the Soviet border, and help in nuclear affairs,(73) but in military operations: 1) against the Soviets in then-occupied Afghanistan, 2) in support of the anti-Vietnamese genocidal Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and 3) against the joint Soviet-Cuban groups fighting in Angola.(72, 74) China, which had felt itself surrounded by an increasingly hostile USSR and its allies, even went to war against Vietnam in 1979, following that nation's long wars with France and the USA. Basically, Pillsbury, and most others, would agree that Chinese-American cooperation helped topple the Soviet Union, the Kremlin crumbling that might not have happened without such joined ventures.

Then, in spring/summer 1989 there were student demonstrations in China. Pillsbury contends that US intelligence at that time greatly misread events in China. American leaders thought that Deng Xiaoping led the reform faction among China's leaders, but Pillsbury now believes this was a critical mistake. The student protests began with the mourning and funeral of a real reformer Hu Yaobang, who died 15 April 1989, These collective gatherings grew in size and spread throughout the nation. In Tienanmen, it became a love fest of the young Chinese for America, with an imitation Statue of Liberty (Goddess of Democracy) in the huge square and ever more people joining the continuing demonstrations. Dan Rather, anchor of the CBS Evening News flew to Beijing's Tienanmen to focus America's attention on the faraway events. While Pillsbury and others usually portray these protests beneath a halo, there were reports at the time that elsewhere in the country the demonstrators were beating Black students studying in China. How widespread was this, I do not know, and it may have been a reaction to special privileges afforded to foreign students by the Communist government. Pillsbury writes that at the time America's China experts tended to dismiss the protests, concerned more that they might cause problems for the “reform” faction led by Deng Xiaoping. Pillsbury later admits one of the great failures of American intelligence was in misunderstanding that the real reformers then were Zhao Ziyang and the late Hu Yaobang, while dominant Deng prepared to throw his weight to lead the anti-reform faction.

Deng and his allies ordered the crackdown. 300,000 troops were ordered to Beijing. Most of us recall the student who stood alone against an advancing tank, halting the military occupation of Tienanmen – for a short time. And then more orders were given, shots were fired, and blood of students flowed through the square, and into the streets nearby, and even up in the neighboring balconies when troops shot up into onlookers. Many regular citizens of Beijing had been killed trying to stop the troops from entering the city. Some were run-over by military vehicles, others shot with bullets meant to expand in the victim and cause more damage, others simply beaten. And many were arrested. This was happening before the army got to Tienanmen.

According to Pillsbury, Deng was horrified that Chinese youths should look to America as a model for China's future. From the early 1970s, when Mao met Nixon, the Chinese had portrayed America favorably. Deng now determined: - that must stop. So, history was suddenly rewritten and the media would popularize the new “view” of the past. Beginning with US President John Tyler and the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia (which gave most favored nation status in tariffs to the US, and which provided extraterritoriality; the treaty would remain in effect until 1943), America sought to follow Britain's imperial path and exploit China. Lincoln, Wilson, on to Truman and beyond, America was out to undermine and exploit China.(104-05) That would be the new outline for presenting the role of the US in China's sphere.

After the crackdown, China hands, and even former Pres. Nixon, urged Pres. George H. W. Bush not to allow the Tienanmen suppression to disrupt the improving relations with the US. Those relations were not disrupted.

Missing from the Pillsbury volume is any discussion of another series of demonstrations that also began in 1989. Outside the St. Nickolas Church in Leipzig, the second largest city of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Monday night demos began quite peacefully asking for more democratic reforms and the right to travel. In nearby Hungary (also part of the Soviet bloc), some GDR citizens were allowed to cross into the West without obtaining permission of the GDR authorities. Dissatisfaction and protests were growing. GDR leader Erich Honecker asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to crack down. Instead, he demanded a softer approach, more in line with the Perestroika then unfolding in the USSR. Soon, he removed Honecker, and Egon Krenz was installed as the new leader of the GDR. Protests grew in size, and spread to the capital, East Berlin. But Leipzig remained the hub of the trouble. Special troops were called up to meet the crisis. What would they do? A repeat of the suppression in Germany that occurred in 1953? Would the authorities have the courage to do as the tanks in Tienanmen did to restore order, even if it meant mass killings? In the end, they did not fire on the crowds. The government sought to ease the situation by transmitting that the border would be open; but what did this mean, was the government really opening the wall? All was confused with masses suddenly gathering at Brandenburg Gate, and then, actually passing through the GDR barriers into West Berlin. The wall was eroding, and with it, the GDR. By 1991 the GDR had ceased to exist, and so had the USSR. If the troops had not brutally shot and killed and later imprisoned the protestors in Tienanmen and round that nation, would the People's Republic of China still exist? Pillsbury fails to ask this essential question.

So soon after the Chinese Communist Party reasserted its physical authority in China, rounding up reformers, keeping some reform leaders under house arrest for years, and for the small fry, prison, and possibly worse. The education/propaganda machine now portrayed America as an enemy of China's natural aspirations. And a most crucial point – the glue that held the Sino-American cooperation together, the fear of the mighty USSR, was removed with the disintegration of that Communist creation. Pillsbury maintains that while the China hands and experts in America continued to think that the cooperation would continue as before, the Chinese, freed from any renewed threat of Soviet encirclement, could now aim to grow and surpass the US, so that China could become the world's dominant power by 2049. But China would not show its true hand until ready, until sure it could defeat the Americans. Until then, it would play the part of the backward nation that required scientific, technical, and other assistance. And to win this assistance, China would continue to pretend to be moving toward democracy, toward a free market economy, while it announced its peaceful intentions to all other nations. To achieve these fine, acceptable goals, China might require America's help, in gaining admission to the World Trade Organization, and in dealings with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Thus, China needed America's help on these issues so it could continue progress toward a democratic and free-market economy, which would improve the standard of living for the average Chinese and make for a more peaceful world. So, American experts did indeed help China achieve WTO membership, which made China eligible for loans from the World Bank and the IMF. Experts from Goldman Sachs and other firms provided vital information to Chinese officials so they could present papers to international bodies promising to act like any other nation in international trade and finance. The Chinese were delighted to receive the memberships, but they had no intention of abiding by the terms of these treaties. Other Western experts were advising the Chinese on how to reform China's banks, so they could infuse funds into the stumbling state owned enterprises (SOEs), trimming them, making them financially muscular, rebuilding old state corporations and promoting new, promising ones.

However, there were also signs that China was testing a new policy with the US. In the wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia, the US, in alliance with Western Europe, sided with the opponents of Serbia. America flew planes in to bomb Serbian targets. On one mission, the night of 7 May 1999, apparently by mistake, US aircraft bombed the Chinese Embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, killing 3 and injuring 20. The US quickly apologized. However, this was insufficient for the CCP nationalists and hawks. Massive demonstrations outside the American Embassy in Beijing basically entrapped the Ambassador in part of the enclave. Phone calls for help, both from the Embassy and from the US to authorities in Beijing were essentially evaded or ignored. At this point, no large demonstrations could occur in Beijing without the tacit support of the regime, especially when goaded to do so by the Chinese media to rouse the crowds. Deng had already begun the de-emphasis on Marx and the promotion of patriotism and nationalism; now he could combine that in an open way to test the reaction of the Americans to see how or if the superpower would respond to the humiliation of its Ambassador. The new China policy was not afraid to annoy or threaten the prestige of the USA.

Pillsbury contends that China's Marathon depends on the good-will of the US.(115) But China was now assuming it could retain that good-will even while holding the American Ambassador as a hostage. How would China keep good-will in America, and indeed throughout the world? In 2004 the Confucius Institute was created by CCP front groups. Like the British Council, and the Goethe Institute, the Confucius Institute's purpose is to make the homeland look good to the rest of the world. It would stress the pacific nature of Confucius, of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation. Pillsbury writes that it may also provide cover for “industrial and military espionage.”(125) The Confucius Institute will sign contracts with universities, and even high schools, to provide teachers of Mandarin and Chinese culture. But part of the agreements, - there can be no hostile research or discussion of Tienanmen, Tibet, or an independent Taiwan. A university with a Confucius Institute that allows a department to invite the Dalai Lama to lecture may find its funding cut. What most Westerners would deem “objective” research in “sensitive” areas is discouraged or rejected.

The Chinese can use the financial lever because of the enormous growth of the Chinese economy, and Pillsbury maintains the US is largely responsible for the Chinese economic miracle.(159) How can he assert this? The economy under Mao was a disaster, and Pillsbury relates that from 1958-61 some 30 million died of famine.(162) He provides no figure on how many were killed during the Cultural Revolution and other Maoist “reforms,” but under Mao's communism, consumerism was clearly another casualty. After Mao's death and the ensuing struggle for power with the Gang of 4 and others, Deng surfaced as the most powerful leader inside the CCP. He was determined to change the economic policies that he was convinced had held China back. Marx and the other saints of Communism would still be honored, but China would now aim for socialism with Chinese characteristics. And what did that mean precisely? The collapse of the Soviet Union witnessed a rush by the government to sell off the huge state operating enterprises (SOEs), operations that were usually heavy on bureaucracy and weak on producing quality goods. These dinosaurs were quickly bought by men with insider information, insider contacts, and skill who soon became known as the new Russian oligarchs. Should China follow the same path? Some suggested that this would be the fastest way to become a capitalist, free market economy, and China would then be prosperous. But Deng listened to alternative proposals. Some suggested that the CCP should rebuild, modernize, and innovate the old dinosaur SOEs. If this could be done, at least with some SOEs, then they could be subsidized by the state and Party in many ways. State banks could force mergers of stronger and weaker state corporations, force very weak ones into bankruptcy, aid others with tax incentives, with curbs to diminish and destroy foreign competition in the home market using ever more stringent regulations against the foreign companies; harassment. The objective of the CCP using these methods was for the dinosaurs to evolve into national champions, SOEs and new CCP-government favored corporations capable of competing with any foreign corporation. Pillsbury notes that in the 1960s, the only internationally known Chinese brand was Tsingtao Beer. Today, Huawei is only one of the most famous in the news.

Pillsbury presents a graphic example of how China's new wealth, accumulated in part by cheating, has influenced the globe. In the 2013 film “Gravity,” with Sandra Bullock, the star faces death in space because the Russians have, without any notification, blown up a satellite, and the fragments spinning through space, endanger anything in neighboring orbits including Bullock.(198) The film is fiction. The Russians had not exploded a satellite on purpose; but the Chinese had! And for the American film to gain access to the huge Chinese market, the film executives knew it had better not blame the villainy in the script on China. So they decided to assign that role to the Russians instead. Thus, the Russians became the bad guys. Money talks. And because of America's trade and other policies with China, that nation has gained lots of money

.

The People's Republic of China has used its newly acquired wealth to pressure nations to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan, as the PRC does not view the island as an independent nation but only a rogue breakaway province that must be returned to the mainland. It should be stressed that for over a century, Taiwan has been connected to Beijing for at most 5 years, and probably less. In 1895, as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan took the island calling it Formosa, and it remained Japanese until the end of WWII, 1945. It was then given to the officially recognized government of China, led by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. As his forces lost to the Communists on the mainland, Chiang had to evacuate his troops to the island where he continued as head of the Republic of China, recognized by the US and some other nations until the 1970s. Mao's government had no power over Taiwan, though the PRC claimed it. When the US finally recognized the PRC as the official government of China, it then recognized Taiwan as a separate Chinese entity, as did many other nations allied with the US.

In recent years, China uses it wealth to pressure smaller nations to cut ties with Taiwan. If they want Chinese investment, Chinese help in building roads, infrastructure, then they should rid their capitals of any Taiwan embassy. So, some African and Latin American nations have severed diplomatic relations with the island, tending to isolate it from the international community. The mainland has been offering both the carrot and stick to Taiwan, itself. Taiwanese were allowed to invest in mainland areas, hiring large numbers of mainland workers at low wages, and producing products for the international market. Firms like Foxconn built huge factories on the mainland with conditions so oppressive that nets had to be installed below workers' dormitory windows to reduce the suicide rate. Taiwanese business men have done well in the PRC. And the CCP has invested in Taiwan, not so much in factories, but in politicians. While some politicians speak of declaring Taiwan an independent nation, others openly promote reunion with the mainland. But the PRC policy is not all carrots. Thus 1 April 2019 ABC New reported: “ Taiwan said Monday its planes warned off Chinese military aircraft that crossed the center line in the Taiwan Strait, and called China's move a provocation that seeks to alter the status quo...”

It was not only in Taiwanese politicians that the PRC was investing. In the 1996 Presidential campaign the Chinese indirectly funneled money to the campaign of then Pres. Bill Clinton. When the GOP sought to investigate, the pro-Democratic major media discounted Sen. Fred Thompson's efforts, but the Democratic National Committee would eventually be required to return $2.8 million in illegal and improper contributions from foreign nationals – some with connections to the Chinese military.(National Review, John Fund's piece, 16 July 2017). Pillsbury notes that the Chinese were caught paying into Democratic coffers in the 2000 Presidential campaign.(121) Since it was the Democrats, there was no years'-long investigation of collusion by a Mueller-type Special Counsel. We now know that the husband of Senator Diane Feinstein (Dem.-Cal.) won lucrative deals with Beijing, while she often voted for improved relations with the PRC. From 2009-2017 she chaired the Senate Committee on Intelligence, and was an important member of the committee even when the Democrats were not the majority. And at the time of the hearings for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the US Supreme Court before the Judiciary Committee, on which Feinstein is the leading Democrat, it was revealed that Feinstein's chauffeur of over 2 decades was a spy for the Chinese Communists.

Pillsbury notes that a Chinese spy inside the CIA was convicted in 1985, but he had been plying his trade since 1945.(p. 53) This is one of the weaknesses of Pillsbury's book. He writes that for most of his time working for the US government, he was a “panda huger,” sympathetic to the PRC and urging cooperation and aid to that nation. Their operatives described him as part of the Red Team. But by around 2000, he questioned his former positions. He was becoming a panda slugger. However, aside from a sentence about a Chinese spy in the CIA going back to 1945, Pillsbury ignores the earlier Red Teams in the US government, ones that were probably far more influential in promoting Chinese Communism and in changing the world. The pro-Red Teams long preceded Nixon and the opening of China. They were in place during WWII.

WWII began in Asia with the 2^nd Sino-Japanese War, an escalation of an incident on the Marco Polo Bridge between Chinese and Japanese soldiers just outside of Beijing on 7 July 1937. The Japanese pressed south, taking Shanghai, and then Chiang's capital, Nanjing. The Imperial forces were so brutal it was called “the rape of Nanking.” By December 1941 Chiang had retreated to a capital in the south west, Chungking (Chongqing). Manchukuo had been carved from several provinces of China that had been home to the minority Manchus. The Japanese satellite nation was established in the early 1930s and headed by Pu Yi, a Manchu, and the last emperor of China. By 1941 most of the northern and central coast of China had been conquered by the Japanese. Mao and his Communists had been thrust from the Nationalist coalition government in the 1920s, and after a long march, were located closer to the Mongolian border (with possible help coming from the USSR). After several years of retreat, Wang Jingwei and others who had been close to Dr. Sun Yat Sen (he had led the rebellion that overthrew the Chinese dynasty in 1911), decided the best role for the Nationalists was to stop the war, and join as junior partners with Japan. He left Chungking, flew to Hanoi, and thence to Japanese occupied areas. He would lead a Nationalist collaborationist government, which had 600,000 troops in its military, and under which many more Chinese lived than under Chiang's anti-Japanese Nationalist government, or in the small areas under Mao.

In summer 1939 the USSR and Japan had a short, undeclared war near the borders of their satellites – (Soviet) Mongolia vs. (Japanese) Manchukuo. The Japanese lost badly. But the 2 nations wanted peace so they could test their warriors elsewhere. The USSR was one of the few nations to recognize Manchukuo. And after June 1941 when Hitler invaded, Stalin had little time to aid Mao. Chiang hoped for American aid after Pearl Harbor. But his Nationalist forces were isolated. All the coast that was not Japanese, was Japanese waters. Indo-China was Vichy French, working with the Japanese, Thailand was soon a Japanese ally, as was Burma. Only by flights over the hump of Tibet with supplies from British India, or through the vulnerable Burma road, could Chiang get supplies. American advisor, General “Vinegar” Joe Stilwell treated Chiang as a “peanut,” the nickname he used to mock the Chinese leader. Stilwell also abused Nationalist China, treating it as a satellite rather than as an ally.

Initially, the media were sympathetic to Chiang, but as the war went on, his image changed. As did the image of Joseph Stalin. FDR's Administration asked Hollywood for films to portray the Soviets in a favorable light. One such film, “Mission to Moscow,” was dubbed by those who knew better as “Submission to Moscow.” In some segments of the media, Chiang was now seen as corrupt, unwilling to fight the Japanese, while the agrarian reformers under Mao Zedong seemed idealists and determined to oppose the Japanese invaders. Washington began to press for a coalition government, of Nationalist and Communist to oppose both the Japs and Wang's collaborationist Nationalism. Chiang kept finding ways to reject these proposals.

Washington desperately wanted the Soviets to enter the war against Japan. Stalin promised to do so 3 months after the end of the war in Europe. Invasion of the Japanese home island might cost 2 million lives. The Japanese were ready to surrender and asked the Soviets to convey that message to the Americans. However, Stalin did not want the war to end until he could enter and receive the goodies Roosevelt had promised him. Stalin did not relay the Japanese message about surrender. Three months after the Nazis surrendered, the US dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND the Soviets entered the war, easily sweeping through Manchukuo (where much of China's industrial belt was located, and which was denuded of Japanese troops as they were still occupying vast territories). Japan sued for peace. Almost by chance, the Soviets and Americans were to share the Korean peninsula, divided about half for each. For one week's war, the Soviet's did extremely well.

The Soviets prevented the Chiang government soldiers from quickly occupying Manchuria. The Soviets took as much of the industrial hardware as it could, but what to do with the left-over Japanese weapons? Should these go to the official government of China led by Chiang? Chiang did make mistakes. He tended to treat many of those who lived under the occupation government as traitors. But soon there was fighting between Nationalists and Communists.

The civil war continued. When Chiang was finally getting the upper hand by the spring of 1946. American General George Marshall, a good friend of Gen. Stilwell, came to arrange for a cease fire between the conflicting camps. The cease fire halted Chiang's offensive. Meanwhile, the Japanese weapons confiscated by the Soviets were given to the Chinese Communists. For Chiang to receive weapons from the Americans, Marshall demanded that he bring the Communists into his government. Chiang refused. So while Mao was being supplied with Japanese weapons seized by the Soviets, Chiang was denied weapons by the Americans. Then, for some bewildering reason, events on the battlefield began to change. Chiang's Nationalists began to lose, and lose. With the election in the US of the heavily Republican 80^th Congress in November, it voted a large sum to help Chiang, but the Treasury Department included those sympathetic to the Communist cause like Harry Dexter White, who sabotaged these funds. The war kept getting worse for Chiang. When finally the Americans decided to restore military aid to Chiang, rifles would be received, but no bullets, and other means of cripple his efforts. Meanwhile, secrets from the State Department were published in a left-wing Asian journal. The Deep State had employed many whose sympathies and actions favored the communist cause. Eventually, Chiang had to flee to Taiwan to survive. And in October 1949 Mao in Beijing declared victory and the establishment of the PRC, Would he have been able to do so without the help of Stalin and the pro-communist elements in the US? When Republicans asked, “Who lost China?” there was more to this question than liberals cared to admit. The elite of both parties still decry McCarthyism and believe he was rightly censured by the US Senate. But McCarthy alleged there were Red Teams in the US government, Teams that were far more influential than the FDR crowd and its successors (the academedia complex) would ever admit.

While Pillsbury mentions the Korean War on a few pages of his book, he never tries to relate the antics of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to Chinese-American relations. Clearly, there were and are links between North Korea and the PRC. As Gen. MacArthur's UN troops approached the Yalu River, wiping the DPRK off the map, the PRC responded with masses of “volunteers” whose numbers overwhelmed the American-led armies. MacArthur was surprised by the Chinese intervention, and wanted to use nuclear bombs. Truman knew the UN, under whose flag we were fighting, would never agree. And Truman undoubtedly thought it a bad idea or he might have done it. So the UN troops fell back and the war continued with no sign of victory for either side. Truman's unwinnable war was one reason Republican Dwight Eisenhower ended a 20 year drought and brought the GOP back to the White House in 1952. He had promised to end the war, and a cease fire was concluded (though, still no peace treaty).

What is the relation between North Korea and China today? When North Korea does something the US dislikes, the US may ask for diplomatic help from the PRC. If China does intervene on behalf of the American request, what does China get in return from the US. Might China ever goad North Korea to do something it knows will upset Washington in order to gain a concession? But if China is not involved at the time, and American diplomats come for help because of some outrageous act by North Korea, China can plead impotence, or refer the US to another nation bordering the DPRK, the USSR (or later Russia). China-Korea can play a low-level extortion game with the US. What is Pillsbury view of this? He never alludes to it in his book.

Finally, one of the many disasters of the Obama Administration was to allow the PRC to build up tiny islands in the South China Sea, and then militarize them. The Chinese claims to the area were denied by the International Court in the Hague, but the new aggressive Chinese leadership cares nothing for such court rulings. Instead, it proclaims it has old maps showing the waters were once Chinese. Of course, it might also have maps laying claim to Siberia, but this is not the time to dust those off. The Chinese military presence in the South China Sea is a threat to Vietnam, Taiwan, Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and indirectly, Singapore. It is also a threat to all shipping nations. By taking such a surprise and powerful stand, and with no real opposition from Obama's appeasing White House, China shows it is aiming for bigger things, just as Pillsbury has written.

Pillsbury contends that the Chinese Communist leadership plans to become the dominant world power by 2049, the anniversary of Mao's victory in their civil war. Mao came to power with the help of the Soviets, AND with help from American Communist sympathizers in high-level posts, who may have given bad advice to some non-Communists like Gen. Marshall. The result was to effectively disarm Chiang Kai Shek and allow Mao's forces to defeat him. Within a year, Mao was strong enough militarily to snatch victory from the US in Korea. However, Mao's internal economic “reforms” set China back 30 years, in Deng's view. Many millions starved, and then thousands or millions were killed. The military pushed for an opening with the USA which occurred under Nixon. China, fearing encirclement by the Soviets, and the US, still in a Cold War against the Soviets, had a common foe in Moscow. The US and China worked together in Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia. But beginning in 1989 with protests, nations took different paths. The Soviet East Bloc chose not to crack down, and their systems collapsed. The Chinese under Deng did crack down and determined that never again would Chinese youths look to America for inspiration. Chinese history was rewritten, making America into just another imperialist nation intent on distorting and exploiting Chinese aspirations. China would pretend to be moving to democracy and a free-market economy, while building SOEs into national champion industries in a mercantilist trade system of cheating and stealing.

China had altered the result of the Korean “police action” in 1950. It won a short war with India in 1962, and an undeclared one with the Soviets in 1969. A decade later it had another one with Vietnam. Now it tries to isolate, strangle, and bribe Taiwan. Its new presence in the South China Sea makes it the bully of the neighborhood. Pillsbury writes that the US is still aiding the Chinese.(216) Whether this is true under Trump, is questionable. Pres. Trump has surely sought to shed the image (and reality) of Obamappeasement. Pillsbury makes a strong case that the US is now in a competitive race with China for world leadership, and that the freedoms we take for granted in the West may disappear in a “harmonized” world under Chinese leadership. Most Westerners still reject the harmony of the ant hill, preferring instead to retain the freedom, to fall or soar, instead.

There is another point, not directly related to China but to the competition Pillsbury describes between China and the US in the Middle Kingdom's marathon of the century. When protests rose in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the GDR leader asked Gorbachev to crack down, the Soviet leader declined. He wanted a softer approach, and more reform. The crowds in Germany grew, as did tensions. The troops were there with weapons. But they did not fire. The TV indicated the government would open the border. Masses went to the border points in Berlin, and they were permitted to leave the GDR for West Berlin! Suddenly, everything was in flux. In two years, the GDR ceased to exist; and so had the USSR. Somewhat earlier in 1989, in Tienanmen Square, growing masses of demonstrators demanded a more democratic China, symbolized by the students' version of the Statue of Liberty. Days went by, with the demonstrators growing in number. Finally the CCP leadership decided to end it. Like the GDR, where guards for the wall in Berlin were usually Saxons, not natives Berliners, Deng brought in Chinese troops from outside Beijing to shoot to kill those protesting against the nation's Communist leadership. And the crack-down continued, so that even today discussion of Tienanmen is blocked on the Chinese internet. Deng was brutal, but the CCP is still in power 30 years after Tienanmen.

These incidents have a relation to the US. In February 2019 some 75,000 invaders entered the US through the southern border with Mexico, and it's forecast that the number in March will be 100,000. Millions are already here. “Experts” on mainstream media announce that really nothing can be done to stop this. However, in the 1950s under President Eisenhower, Operation Wetback rounded up about a million illegals and deported them back over the border. (Now, with left-wing gatekeepers of language, we are no longer supposed to even use the word wetback.) America has laws on the books to apprehend and deport illegal entrants, yet whole cities, usually run by Democrats, openly announce their defiance of the law under the term “sanctuary” cities. Lawless cities would be more appropriate. Pres. Trump, whose signature issue was stopping illegal immigration – an issue that led him to victory over a dozen professional politicians in the primaries for the Republican nomination, and then led Trump to carry some blue-collar states to win the 2016 Presidential election over Hillary Clinton. He still orates against the invaders, but whenever he tries to build a wall or make it more difficult to enter, Trump is handcuffed, either by liberal judges, by Congress, or by the bureaucracy.

I ask, how will a wall stop the invaders when all they have to do is utter a few words and they will be home in the US where they will receive free schooling, welfare, healthcare, and other economic incentives. We live in a nation under stress: one major party supports open invasion of the nation. And some of the Republicans are just as bad. Even going back to the 1990s and the era of Pres. Bill Clinton, he gave a speech and announced that by the year 2050 whites would be a minority in the United States, and the audience applauded and cheered. Can you imagine Xi Jinping announcing that in 50 years the Han people will be a minority in China, and the Chinese cheer? Inconceivable! Or Prime Minister Modi making a similar comment about Indians being reduced to a minority in India. No Indian would cheer such an announcement.

To prevent an invasion of people who speak a foreign language with foreign customs, entering our country to take from the wealth of American citizens, a wall may help, but it is not sufficient. Those who say the caravans cannot be stopped are warped in their thinking (and some support the invasion). How do you stop an invasion? You use armed troops, border patrols, or regular army, or create a special force. They should have electronic speakers to make simple announcements in English first, and then Spanish. “This is the border. This is no entry point. If you want a visa, get it in the American Embassy in the capital city of your country. If you try to enter, you will not be permitted in. If you try to cross the border here, you may be shot.” If they ignore the announcement, first, shoot in the air. If they continue coming, shoot to stop or kill. It is probable few would need to be shot before the mob turns around and runs the other way. Do not interfere with the leftwing media as it films any killings. It will show to the world that America is determined to preserve itself and its borders. If only one invader is killed, the caravans would soon turn south to their points of origins. Those who hate America would hate it even more. Those who love America, will be grateful to know that the invasion has been halted by our government and American can continue to exist. Indeed, America could be great again.

If people are not willing to fight for their country, it will go under. But it is insufficient just to fight. When invaders try to cross the border, the defenders must be willing to shoot and kill. That way a nation survives and can continue to thrive. The invasion today is our Tienanmen, our Leipzig. The Germans learned the lesson: no border, no country. Will we have the courage to defend our borders and save our way of life? Even if we have to kill to do so? If we fail to stop the flood of invaders, America will soon join the Soviet Union in history's dustbin.

ANN COULTER - No Job, Mob, Rob, Lob a head, Sob

DEMONIC: HOW THE LIBERAL MOB IS ENDANGERING AMERICA

(New York: Crown Forum, 2011) by ANN COULTER

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            As usual, Coulter defends the Republican Party in an informative and challenging read that counters the pro-Democratic bias of academia.  However, Coulter also distorts history, squeezing it into a Republican Hosanna.  For example, Coulter asserts there has never been a Right-wing assassin of American Presidents.(p. 108)  She places John Wilkes Booth on the Left.  This is absurd; Booth was pro-Confederate.  When he heard Lincoln’s 2^nd Inaugural address, and a speech shortly thereafter, in which the newly re-elected President spoke of permitting some Negroes to vote, Booth was incensed.  For over 4 years Democrats had portrayed Lincoln as a “Black Republican,” and now his words fueled the fears of the white supremacists.  Booth and his fellow conspirators were people of the Right, not the Left.  Coulter also follows the conclusion of the Warren Commission in identifying Lee Oswald as a lone gunman and Communist – a man of the Left.  But for decades, the Warren Report has been challenged, including Oswald’s political affiliations and even if he was really an assassin.  I do concede, however, that most of the assassins and attempted assassins of American Presidents have come from the Left of the political spectrum.

            Coulter rightly notes that Republicans, not Democrats, often led the political struggle for Black civil rights from the Abolitionist movement before the Civil War to demands for civil rights laws during Reconstruction up to the 20^th century until 1964.  There were apparent exceptions.  Thus, Democratic President Harry Truman in 1948 issued an Executive Order to integrate the armed services, but this was little more than a campaign expedient – and once issued, Truman did little to enforce it.  Not until Republican Eisenhower became President was the American military really integrated.(178)  She notes that it was Ike who sent troops to Little Rock in 1957 to remove the obstacles to integration created by liberal Democratic Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus, who had deployed his state’s National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Central High.  Eisenhower then nationalized the Ark. National Guard, thus removing it from Faubus’ command; Ike also sent federal troops to Little Rock to assist and protect the admission of the Black students to the high school.  This was the first time American troops had been sent South to aid Black civil rights since Reconstruction.  No Democratic President would have dared to do that.  Coulter adds that in the late 1950s Eisenhower sought a strong civil rights bill, but Democrats controlled the Senate.  Dem. Sens. Lyndon Johnson and Sam Ervin knew they had to “give something to the n____s,” but removed the teeth from the civil rights proposals.  Coulter does present a neglected, glowing account of GOP efforts for Black civil rights.(177-79)  But there are omissions.  When Eisenhower first ran for President in 1952, the Republicans sponsored a half hour major television ad.  This ad is now neglected, overshadowed by the half-hour VP Candidate Richard Nixon gave to save his place on the ticket, his famous Checkers speech.  But the other ad was also quite important.  Actually, there e were 2 separate, different GOP ads running at the same time.  The one in the South featured Democratic officials who had endorsed Ike: Gov. Shivers of Texas, Gov. Kennon of Louisiana, and Sen. Thurmond of South Carolina (though my memory of the 3^rd official may be inaccurate.)  Unlike the Northern ad, the one shown in the South avoided the issue of civil rights.

            Coulter rightly attributes affirmative action (AA) to Nixon.  Indeed, the Nixon Administration had to lobby the NAACP to win support for the Philadelphia Plan – the precursor to national AA.  Yet, some academic like Hugh Davis Graham interpreted things differently.  Aware that when Nixon’s Labor Secretary, George Shultz, pushed the Phila. Plan, which would require racial quotas in the building trade unions, Graham also viewed it as a cynical attempt to drive a wedge between two major constituents of the Democratic Party – Blacks and the trade unions, composed largely of white ethnics.  Ironically, Nixon and the Republicans pushed AA and quotas for Blacks (later extended to Hispanics, women, etc.) but failed to win the Black vote. Meanwhile, many white ethnics would abandon the Democrats to vote for Nixon in 1972, and become Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.  While Democrats have embraced AA quotas in ever-expanding ripples throughout society, few Republicans have challenged AA on the national level.  Reagan gave speeches criticizing the concept, but did nothing to end the practice or revoke the Executive Orders that provided some justification for such discriminatory practices.  Worse, under Reagan “race norming” was implemented so that  scores on employment examinations were graded by race, and only the percentile by that individual’s race was shown.  The effect was to give the employer the false impression that many Blacks and Hispanics had scored higher than whites, which was untrue.  It was cheating.  Eventually the government was supposed to end such anti-white practices, but the bureaucracy that cheated remained in place.

            When California Gov. Pete Wilson ran for the Republican nomination, he attacked AA; but failed to win the nomination.  Pres. George Herbert Walker Bush was presented a pro-AA “civil rights” bill, but refused to sign it in 1990.  Like his pledge of no new taxes, however, Bush reversed himself and signed the 1991 “civil rights” quota bill.  In 1994 when Newt Gingrich enunciated a “Contract with America,” he too attacked AA, and the GOP won the House of Representatives for the first time in ages.  But then Gingrich dropped the subject.  Late in his run for Pres. in 1996, Sen. Bob Dole finally declared his opposition to AA and quotas, but Dem. Bill Clinton was re-elected.  Liberal Republican Pres. George W. Bush did not end AA quotas, and Democratic Pres. Obama expanded them.

            The main reason the GOP began national Affirmative Action and avoids challenging the practice (along with supporting illegal immigration, amnesty, and trade policies that decimate parts of the American economy) is that global corporations generally support these policies.  Immigration supplies cheap labor, some trade agreements may help the global corp. while it hurts the smaller, national firms; and larger corporations can more easily hire some unqualified AA workers than can smaller ones.  So a significant sector of the GOP, especially when it comes to raising funds, often supports policies deemed “liberal,” which in the public mind are more associated with the Democratic Party.

            But Big Business does not support The Mob.  Coulter is right to link the Left, the Democratic Party, and “the mob.”  She describes the mob as “irrational, childlike, often violent…Intoxicated by messianic goals, and the promise of instant gratification…mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction…leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.”(4)

            Coulter maintains that American hostility toward mobs changed with the Civil Rights Movement. (CRM)(150)  Yes, and no.  The early days of what we call the CRM – like the sit-ins at lunch counters in the Deep South – actually reinforced America’s antipathy toward mobs.  In the early 60s, civil rights demonstrators were urged to dress well, remain polite, non-violent even in the face of threats, spits, and beatings.  The Black and white participants were shown on TV as non-violent supplicants asking for simple reforms like the right to have a coffee while seated at a counter.  The mobs were white, angry, shouting insults, sometimes spitting, even punching.  Even earlier, in 1957 Little Rock, the Black students seeking to enter Central High were quiet, polite, respectful – facing a large, hateful mob of whites.  In some CR campaigns of the early 60s, the Blacks remained generally polite, but in some areas the “mob” was actually led by white police and sheriffs and police dogs.  IT WAS BECAUSE MOST AMERICANS still remained antagonistic to mobs that the CRM gained support.  So I disagree with Coulter’s assessment that Americans altered their view of mobs during the civil rights struggle.  That struggle reinforced their fear and hatred of mobs.  The angry white mobs were shown on TV, and the segregationists consequently lost national support.  Coulter condemns Martin Luther King for using tactics to rouse the white mob, but he was also raising national opposition to these white mobs and winning support for civil rights.  Instead of King, Coulter praises long-time NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall because he eschewed mass demonstrations and relied on the law for reform and change.  (150)  Coulter ignores Marshall’s comment that summarized his philosophy once he was ensconced as a Justice of the US Supreme Court.  Marshall asserted, “It’s our turn now.”  Marshall was not interested in justice; he wanted revenge.

            Coulter fails to recognize the great contrast between the CRM of the early 1960s: non-violent, often integrated, first attempting to negotiate change, giving the appearance of middle-class values – and the total rejection of these means and ends with Black Power,  Black Nationalism, and Black racism.  These latter efforts inspired the justified the riots that ravaged ever more cities beginning in 1965.  These are often mislabeled as civil rights activities, but they were mobs, Black mobs, that openly rejected the ideals of the CRM.  Add to this the mainly white anti-Vietnam war protests, which also began as a bourgeois, non-violent protest in the mid-1960s, but later in the decade developed into angrier mob confrontations with police.  Though not as violent as the ghetto riots, these could be violent, and can be illustrated by the transformation of SDS from early 1960s forums for ideas into a very radical group.  Eventually the organization imploded in the late 60s, to re-emerge as the terrorist Weather Underground.  Had most Americans really become sympathetic to the mobs of the late 60s, the Black rioters and the Weathermen, Hippie, whatever confrontationists?  Clearly not.  In 1972 Nixon, praising law and order, scorning and unyielding to the mobs, carried 49 of 50 states.  The Democratic Party, badly defeated, did however, become ever more sympathetic to and aligned with the rioting protestors.  In that sense, Coulter is correct.  But the Democrats then were a minority.

            An important segment of Demonic is devoted to the French Revolution.  I am no authority, but her portrayal is frightening – the cruelty, the bloodiness, yes the terror which Jacobin leader Robespierre proclaimed necessary for the success of the revolutionary venture of virtue.  Coulter discerns that this as the pattern for future attempts to remake societies: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, et al.  One incident that she includes may provide a lesson in dealing with the many mobs massing in Obama’s America.  In August 1792 a mob chased the French Royals from a palace to the National Assembly.  King Louis XVI, apprehensive about military confrontation with gun and cannon fire, then ordered his Swiss Guards, who were protecting him, to surrender.  The Guard’s commander thinking the order a mistake, went to the king in person.  The commander assured the monarch that the order was senseless for “The rabble are on the run!  We must aggressively pursue them!”  Louis vacillated, and hoping to appease the “people,” finally repeated his order to surrender.  The king’s order was obeyed, and consequently, “more than 600 Swiss guards were savagely murdered.  The mobs ripped them to shreds and mutilated their corpses…Children played kickball with the guards’ heads.”(107)

            Coulter states that mobs are conservative concerning science.  Yes and no.  One recent invention became an icon of the Revolution.  Dr. Guillotine proposed a more humane method of execution, and the National Assembly adopted his proposal.  The contraption soon was named after the doctor.  And it was used to decapitate the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier and several other scientists among the thousands of victims.  (Of course, about the same time, the British chemist, Joseph Priestly had his home and laboratory wrecked by a God and country mob, and he had to flee to the new United States for safety.)  In 1793 the French Revolutionary government abolished the Royal Academy of Sciences.  Yet the French attempt to rationalize weights and measures by creating the metric system has spread to most of the globe because it is easier than older measuring systems and is used by the scientific community even in the United States.  Coulter mocks the one major failure of the metric innovation.  The French abolished the Christian calendar with a 7-day week and replaced it with a 10-day week.  This reform was not too popular, for workers would have only one day off in ten, rather than every 7^th.  Unlike most metric reforms, the new calendar was short-lived.  Coulter notes that during the French Revolution and its assault on Christianity, the cathedral of Notre Dame was converted into the Temple of the Goddess of Reason.  Robespierre was active in promoting the new religion.  Strangely, the Englishman who did so much to inspire the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, was in France in this period, but even he fell out of favor.  Though not executed, he was imprisoned during the French Terror, and wrote his famous attack on the Bible, The Age of Reason, while incarcerated.  But Coulter’s point is taken – the American Revolution was far more religious, far less grisly, far less a mob induced resurrection.  To Coulter, the French Revolution is driven by the mob, murderous, terroristic, “demonic.”

            But is Coulter fair?  In his The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza attributes the abolition of slavery to Christianity.  Wilberforce in Britain, Quakers, Unitarians, and eventually most mainstream Protestants came to condemn slavery.  In America they formed and organized the Republican Party in the 1850s to fight against “the peculiar institution.”  But in the 1790s, long before Lincoln, Robespierre and the Jacobins of the French Revolution were composing the motto, “liberty, equality, fraternity.”  Questions rose in the Assembly about how this would  affect slavery in a major French colony.  Haiti was then a rich colony and the sugar and coffee crops depended on Black slave labor.  When the radical Jacobins in Paris spoke against slavery, their words reached Haiti.  The Declaration of the Rights of Man, stating that all men were assured certain rights stirred Haitians, and by 1791 a rebellion had begun there.  The Paris Convention under Robespierre’s leadership, voted to abolish slavery on 4 February 1794, and gave Black men the same rights as whites.  It also granted citizenship to Jews and Protestants, while it was simultaneously conducting domestic wars against many French Catholics.  Perhaps 50,000 were executed for various reasons during the Terror.  When Robespierre himself was beheaded, the Terror subsided.  But in Haiti, Black Jacobins would become a new mob in an anti-slavery revolution.  It was “a mob,” but was it “demonic”?

            With the fall of Robespierre’s head into the basket beside the blade, the dictatorship of virtue relaxed, and people began to go back to their old ways.  Napoleon, a military genius who began to defeat many of the enemies of France, swiftly rose in popularity and became  Emperor of France.  In addition to conquering much of Europe, he began to dream of a French Empire in the New World.  He pressured his brother, whom he had made king of Spain into returning Louisiana to France.  But before he would occupy the Mississippi River basin of North America, he would retake Haiti from the rebellious slaves.  In 1801 Napoleon sent a large, well-seasoned army of 40,000 to recapture the island, an army that had experience fighting in the many wars in Europe.  Within two years, Napoleon had to withdraw what was left of his forces.  Disease and the Blacks under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture had defeated the French troops and shattered Napoleon’s dream of empire.  He now viewed Louisiana as vulnerable to naval attack from Britain, and decided to sell it to the new United States.  The Americans were already negotiating to purchase the city of New Orleans, but suddenly were offered the massive Louisiana Territory.  America bought it, and doubled its size.

            Napoleon’s government sought to institutionalize some of the changes brought by the French Revolution.  Law was rationalized so that there would be one law in France, not changing from one department and town to another.  This rationalization, the Napoleonic Code would influence many lands beyond France.  For example, where Napoleon’s armies conquered, Jews could now leave the ghettos.  In the Nap. Code, Jews could be equal citizens.  Homosexuality was decriminalized.  Divorce was permitted (girls going with the mother, boys with the father), etc.  Many of these reforms spread, even to Louisiana.  But not all approved of these changes and in 1940 some hoped to overturn the legacy of 1789.  When Marshall Petain gave himself to lead France after its humiliating defeat by Nazi Germany, the elderly hero of WWI enunciated the new ideals.  No more liberty, equality and fraternity.  The motto of France of the National Revolution (Vichy France) would be “Work, Family, Homeland.”  Liberty would exist, but only in an ordered social structure.  Not all people are equal, as there is a natural hierarchy, and human fraternity can occur only within the confines of family and homeland.  The Roman Catholic Church was restored to its favored place, and traditions were respected.  With the defeat of the Axis powers, however, Petain was tried as a traitor and executed.  His attempt to overthrow the heritage of the French Revolution failed.  Bottom line – the French Revolution is a most complex subject.  Meanwhile, today there are two nations that have as their motto, “liberty, equality, and fraternity” – France and Haiti.

            Without Robespierre and the radical Jacobins in Paris, would there have been a Toussaint and the Black Jacobins in Haiti?  Without Toussaint, would there have been a Wilberforce in Britain or a Lincoln in the United States to abolish slavery?  Are all mobs demonic?  Are the consequences of all mobs demonic?

            The most depressing, yet essential, parts of Demonic are where Coulter recounts for readers the horrors of Black racism and liberal appeasement.  In 1991 Rodney King was arrested in Los Angeles following a high-speed chase.  A video showed police attempting to subdue King, a large Black man on drugs and out on parole, beating him with batons until he obeyed their orders.  The other Blacks in his car who did obey, were unharmed.  In 1992 when a jury acquitted the police of brutality, the rioting began.  Another video was horrifying.  When the riots began, a white trucker was driving his rig through a Black neighborhood, perhaps unaware of local events.  Reginald Denny was dragged from the driver’s seat, beaten, and lay in the middle of the street.  Then Damian Williams took a heavy brick and smashed on the head of the motionless Denny.  The video then shows Williams performing a victory dance over his white victim.  “The attack on Denny broke facial bones in 91 places and resulted in brain damage.  A jury acquitted Williams of all charges except simple mayhem…”(43)(When it comes to Black racism in the courts, the OJ jury was clearly not unique).  Left-wing Democrat Representative Maxine Waters visited Williams’ house shortly after the attack to offer help to rioter Williams, adding there was “righteous anger” in her district, and she was just as angry as they were.  One hopes Mrs. Waters never carries a brick into Congress!  (After his attack on white Denny, Damian Williams brutally attacked an Hispanic driving through the same intersection, but I’ve not seen the video where Williams painted that man’s genitals black.  Perhaps, Representative Waters thought of Williams as an artist.)  Meanwhile, “Reginald Denny will never again be able to drive a truck or operate heavy machinery.”(45)

            A more grievous example of our legal system falling apart, failing to defend the rights of whites in the liberals’ attempt to placate violent Black racists occurred on the East coast.  A major culprit was Al Sharpton, the Black racist who frequents Obama’s White House.  Sharpton first rose to national prominence in promoting the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been raped by a white official and placed in a garbage bag.  In New York City this was page-1 story for about a year, and it was also big news nationally, until the story collapsed, Ms. Brawley changed her name and left for college.  Sharpton later roused anti-Jewish mobs in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which culminated with the stabbing of Yankel Rosenbaum.  Before he died, he identified his assailant, Lemrick Nelson, and a bloody knife was found in Nelson’s pocket.  Was Nelson convicted of murder for killing a white?  Again, think OJ.(47)

            While the media spotlights cases of white on Black crime, Coulter seeks to put the media distortions in perspective: “According to FBI statistics – since the 1970s, approximately 15.000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by Black men every year, while, on average, 0 black women are raped by white men.”  In Department of Justice language, 0 translates as fewer than ten.(72-73)

            Yet, one of the worst cases of injustice began with a simple “wilding” incident in New York’s Central Park, 19 April 1989.  Wilding is that euphemism for the robbing and beating of whites and Asians by “youths” (i.e., young Blacks and Hispanics) who roam in informal gangs in search for easy marks.  The term wilding may change over time and place, but this is a common way for minority young people to have fun, express themselves, and gain valuables.  Until 1989, the most famous example of this had been the July 1983 free concert of Diana Ross in Central Park’s Grand Lawn, which attracted 450,000 fans.  The 95 degree day was only slightly cooler at 6pm when the music began.  A sudden thunderstorm and downpour caused a quick conclusion to the show.  Many whites were drenched, and then as the exited the park vicinity, were robbed by “youths.”

            In April 1989 wilders robbed and beat people on their jaunt through the park, culminating near its northern edge with the rape and near murder of a 28-year-old investment banker who had been jogging.  They did not use a cinder block on her head, but she was left for dead after multiple rapes and slugs.  When the police found her, around 1:30 am, she had lost 3/4s of her blood, and few expected her to survive.(226)  About a year later, 5 minority teens were convicted of the crime “based almost entirely on the defendants’ detailed, videotaped confessions.”(227)  Multi-ethnic juries convicted them!  Convicted and jailed.

            Then, some years later, a jail-house confession by someone who would not incur more punishment for his perjury, claimed that he alone had committed the crime.  The liberal Democratic Dist. Atty, Morgenthau, and the liberal media, began a campaign to free the “boys.”  Coulter writes: The DA’s report exonerating the five defendants was a conclusion in search of evidence.”(240)  The convictions were in due course vacated.  The young men who had years before confessed to the crimes, now sued New York City for $250 million!  The monsters who had confessed to horrible crimes, not only walked, but might walk out with huge sums.  To liberals, this is “justice.”  To most Americans, this is an outrage.

            Coulter provides a service in her book by including some of the transcripts of the taped confessions of the Wilders.  It is sickening to read this and then learn that the criminals walked out free.  Even more sickening, that they may be rewarded with a jackpot of money.  Worse, one must recognize that this rewarding criminality is the end result of the liberal Democrats long-term policy of appeasing the mobs.

            Coulter concludes by marking the trend that even Republicans are caving to the mob, even allowing a Code Pink professional agitator to enter the GOP National Convention and disrupt the televised speech by Sarah Palin.  Are we coming to the point of Weimar Germany where political parties must have their own police, their own troops, their own militias to fend off the mob?  But then, the Democrats may already have their troops - it is “the mob.”     

OBAMA’S WIN, AMERICA’S LOSS: FOR AMERICA 2012 – LOST OPPORTUNITY, LAST OPPORTUNITY?

            The re-election of Barack Obama will be a disaster for the United States.  Though I opposed many of his polices, I shall discuss only one here.  Yet, 1) this is an important topic for all Americans; and 2) it is an issue that saddens me personally on an emotional level.

(1) The Political

            In the fall of 2012 the United States Supreme Court took up, once again, the issue of racial preferences and affirmative action.  There is little doubt that the Left of the Court, Bader-Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan will vote to continue affirmative action.  Two have already done so in the Michigan cases of 2003, and Sotomayor and Kagan have made clear their support for the policy.  On the Right, Thomas and Scalia voted against the policy in 2003, and Alito will probably join them.  Roberts was assumed to be in the Right camp, but after his decision this fall upholding Obama Care as a tax, one cannot be sure of his vote.  Most commentators thought Justice Kennedy was undecided on this issue.  So, on the affirmative action issue the line-up is 4 for, 3 against, 2 undecided.

            Had the Republican ticket of Romney-Ryan won the Presidency in November 2012, it MIGHT have sent a message to the US Supreme Court.  I am aware that the Supreme Court is supposed to be above the fray of mere election campaigns, but someone long ago asserted that the Supreme Court follows the election returns.  A Romney victory might have been followed by a 5-4 high court decision disallowing racial preferences.  Romney, like most wealthy Republicans, would attempt to side-step the issue (as he did in the campaign).  But as one more willing to follow the law, his administration might have begun the machinery to dismantle the massive affirmative action bureaucracy.  It is a large, ideologically committed bureaucracy, which would obstruct any attempt to prevent it using racial quotas, preferences, and privileges.  (For an example of their destructive tactics, recall how Mary Frances Berry refused to yield the chair of the Civil Rights Commission when her term ended and an opponent of affirmative action had been appointed to replace her.)  The politically correct bureaucrats would scream that ending affirmative action is racist; they would be interviewed daily on main-stream media, with protest marches on every campus (mainly by the unqualified students who do not belong there in the first place, and who are there only because of affirmative action).  Dismantling the institutionalized discrimination called affirmative action would be difficult, but, with the Supreme Court and possibly the President and Congress behind the move, America could begin to use merit, testing, ability examinations, even IQ tests to admit students award scholarships, hire, promote, and give small business loans – rather than racial quotas as is the case under affirmative action.

            That was the OPPORTUNITY that would occur with a Romney win.  He lost.

            Now, what happens with the Supreme Court?  It is now less now likely that the Court will gather 5 votes to end race preferences and affirmative action.  The Court is not blind to the election.  So the vote on affirmative action will probably be 5-4 in favor of continuing race preferences.  However, suppose the Court ignores the 50% of Americans who re-elected Obama and decides instead to end affirmative action, by a slim 5-4 decision?  Who would enforce the ruling?  Obama is an affirmative action President.  Michelle Obama as a student was writing in favor of the a-a system that gave her privileges.  Professor Barack Obama openly supported affirmative action and preferences for Blacks and other racial groups.  Obama’s Attorney General Holder even sued schools that suspended Blacks at a higher rate than whites (there should be racial quotas for suspending students, according to the Obama Administration.  It fails to note that the unruly students who are so bad they need to be suspended may not fit into the Dept. of Justice’s racial quota categories.)  So even if the Supreme Court decided that all American citizens deserved equal opportunity, even if it decided to abolish a-a racial preferences, Obama would first denounce the decision and the Court, and then he would refuse to implement it.

            Of course, on this issue Obama is a total hypocrite.  And liar.  In numerous speeches in 2012, in his State of the Union speech, in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination in summer 2012, in at least one of the debates with Romney, and in various campaign speeches, he has used the phrase, “We (the Democrats) favor the system in which we all play by the same rules.”  He lies.  Affirmative action MEANS we do NOT play by the same rules.  Whites play by one set (and receive negative action), Blacks by another (and receive affirmative action), Hispanics by another, Amerindians, etc.  Unfortunately, Romney and the Republicans never called Obama on his lie and his hypocrisy.

            That Obama includes that phrase in his speeches indicates that most Americans still believe in the ideal that all should play by the same rules.  But Obama lies to the people.  Obama would do everything to prevent us from playing by the same rules.  He will do everything to prevent a system that requires equal opportunity for all citizens, including whites.

            Elsewhere I have pointed out that the result of affirmative action is that one hires NOT the best qualified, but the quota person.  It is prescription for decline.  And America has been in decline since this system was instituted under Republican President Richard Nixon.

            A Romney victory might have given this nation a chance to turn things around – to hire the best qualified, no matter their race; to admit to university the best qualified, no matter their race; to award the scholarship to the best qualified, no matter their race, etc.  Romney’s defeat probably means a lost chance to make America the best by hiring the best.  Romney’s defeat probably means a lost chance to have all American citizens play by the same rules.  Romney’s defeat probably means a lost chance to end the legally required institutionalized racism of affirmative action.  Romney’s defeat is a lost chance.  Is it the last chance?

(2) The Personal

            I am a native of the South; I was born and grew up in what was then the largest city of the South, New Orleans.  I opposed the legally required institutional racism called segregation.  As a young man I participated in the first lunch counter sit-in in New Orleans.  I was arrested with six others.  My parents, who did not agree with me, began to receive terrible phone calls at all hours day and night.  There were threats to blow up their residence.  My father had to borrow a gun and bullets.   My relatives and many friends were unable to understand my motives.  How could I do such a terrible thing?  My defense, equal opportunity – that it was right that everyone have equal opportunity, that we all play by the same rules.  The slogan of the era was simple, “We should treat all without regard to race, color, or creed.”  Therefore, segregation was wrong.  We simply wanted equal rights for all.  The segregationists responded, that that is not what will happen.  They responded that the Blacks would soon have more rights than the whites; that segregation was needed to prevent crime against whites and keep things fair.  I disagreed.

            It seemed as if I won the argument.  In 1963 at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King declared in his “Dream” speech that he awaited the day when all would be judged by the content of their character and NOT by the color of their skin.  In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed to guarantee equal opportunity, with no hiring on preferences and no hiring for racial balance and quotas were illegal.  (I have detailed the debates and contests of the Civil Rights Act elsewhere).  There was a period of victory.  No more segregation!  No more race preferences!  America would be a land of equal opportunity, and even the bureaucracy established to enforce the new law was the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  Unfortunately, the victory was pyrrhic.

            There were ominous signs, even early on.  These were the type where one feels uneasy, but remains quiet, for the good of the cause.  For example, on the day I was arrested with six others in the first New Orleans sit in, at Woolworths on Canal Street, we were taken first to the Rampart Street station, then to the main Parish lock-up, and then back to Rampart Street.    Bail was posted for us, and we were out by about 10 pm.  Because of the transfers, we were not fed; and none of us had eaten all day.  Archie, a Black who had been one of us arrested, Carlos, an Hispanic who was a member of our CORE group but who was an observer that day, and myself then went to a Black restaurant that night.  The waiter came to our table and announced, “I can serve you (to Archie), but not you two.”  Then he looked again at Carlos, “Well, I’ll serve you also, but not him (me).”  I was stunned.  Should we have a 2^nd sit-in on the same day?  Should two of us arrested at Woolworths now be arrested for not being served at a Black restaurant?  We were all in shock.  Neither Archie nor I wanted to return to jail, so we all left – the night of the first sit-in a Woolworths in New Orleans.

            In the 1970s I submitted a chapter of my autobiography about my experience in segregated New Orleans during the 1950s and culminating with the events at Woolworths AND the Black restaurant.  I was pleased when the J. of Ethnic Studies published most of it, but somehow the last part, about the Black restaurant refusing us service for food, was deleted.  Reality that was not politically correct, was usually censored by the individual; but if not, by the media, the academic community, the politicians.

            I was quite active in New Orleans CORE during its first year of existence, summer 1960-1961.  I was one of the first members of the organization.  I attended the CORE training institute in Miami during the summer of 1960, at which some of our teachers were baseball legend Jackie Robinson (who was openly supporting Republican Nixon), and Martin Luther King (who was then quietly for John Kennedy).   Through that first year about half the CORE activists were white students, often Southerners.

            In 1962 I was no longer active in CORE, for I had to try to make a living as a convicted felon.  (It would take a few years before the NO cases would reach the Supreme Court.)  Some of my white Tulane friends were still in the group when I learned that all the whites were expelled from the local CORE chapter.  Interracial dating was the excuse, but this was the beginning of a purge of whites in all the CORE chapters round the nation and then the SNCC chapters too.  Other cities CORE groups would find other excuses, but the result was the same – the whites were kicked out.  This was Black Nationalism rising.  By 1966 “Black Power” was the slogan.  “We Shall Overcome” was smothered by the fires of “Burn, Baby Burn!”  Non-violence yielded to riots and massive crime rates.  SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee became the Student National Coordinating Committee.

            With ever rising rioting and crime rates, the Left blamed the police and “institutional racism.”  The Leftists in the EEOC subverted the law they were mandated to enforce.  Using stealth, bureaucratic regulations, and political pressures, they turned civil rights into preferential rights, equal opportunity to the denial of equal opportunity, a ban on quotas, to quotas by another name: goals and timetables, racial balance, diversity.  The Left thus created institutional anti-white racism.  Republican President Richard Nixon’s Labor Dept. promulgated regulations that made this national policy.  And so we have had the racial quotas and preferences of affirmative action since 1970.  America has been in decline since then.

            Affirmative action can do little more to harm me personally.  I am now in my 70s and rarely seek new employment.  When I hear liberals justify affirmative action, as I did last week on Wisconsin Public Radio, that whites are still economically above Blacks and Hispanics, I cringe.  I do not care if every CEO in this nation is a white male, that is no reason to discriminate against poor and middle class whites.

            I struggled for equal rights in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s – and paid a price.  Worse, my relatives probably paid a higher price.  But by the 1970s poor and middle class whites have been denied equal opportunity, denied their chance to rise, denied their chance to contribute to the creativity and wealth of American society.  Admittedly, I had no high hopes for Romney on this issue, for he never called Obama’s lies about playing by the same rules.  Yet, I hoped a Republican victory might allow the Supreme Court to make an historic decision voiding affirmative action, and the beginnings of dismantling this institutional racism could begin.  With Obama’s victory, institutional anti-white racism will become ossify making it harder to overturn later.  It means more discrimination against better candidates; more hiring of the incompetents.  It means more decline.  And on the personal level, I must always wonder now, were my relatives right, after all? --------Hugh Murray       

COLLISION COURSE - THE ELITE VS. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

COLLISION COURSE: THE STRANGE CONVERGENCE OF

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND IMMIGRATION POLICY IN AMERICA

 (Oxford University Press, 2002), paperback

By HUGH DAVIS GRAHAM

Rev. by Hugh Murray

                    Why was I disappointed with this book?  True, it is not a light read.  Describing debates to enact laws, the laws as enacted, the agencies to enforce those laws, the pressures by lobbyist organizations to construct “satisfactory” regulations of the laws, all this can be tedious.  My disappointment comes from his predictions however – Hugh Davis Graham, an expert on civil rights and immigration policy, in a book published in 2002, in his qualified, academic manner (one as interrupted as this sentence), implies the demise of affirmative action and mass immigration BECAUSE of the contradictions in the convergence of these two reform programs.

            This is also a disturbing book for it illustrates how little power American citizens have over our government.  Graham describes the combined effects of two major reforms of the mid-1960s – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965.

            As a consequences of these reforms, by the year 2000 some 26 million immigrants from Latin America and Asia immediately qualified for affirmative-action (hereafter AA) preferences over native-born white citizens.(p. 195)  That is, foreigners of color were given preferred chances at university admissions, scholarships, jobs, promotions, small business loans, and contracts over native-born white citizens.  The book was published in 2002, so today the number of foreign immigrants is even higher who receive these privileges that may be denied to American citizens.   Worse, in 2012 President Obama declared his semi-amnesty for illegal aliens who arrived when they were young, are under 30, etc.  The result of this Presidential edict will be not only that some million illegals jump to the front of the immigration line; they jump to the front of the employment line due to AA preferences for persons of color.

            In his introduction, Graham asks, “Why did immigrants qualify for AA benefits at all?”(11)  Though he goes into great detail, often wearisome recounting laws, court cases, lobbying groups, and although he is honest at depicting some of the negative results of these policies, overall his answer to his question is unsatisfactory.  “The primary fault lay not with the lobbyists but with a shortsighted, horse-trading system of policymaking grounded in the dynamics of client politics and the imperative of incumbent reelection.”(188)  This cumbersome answer is inadequate.

            Graham, an expert on civil rights policies, is aware that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not require hiring for racial balance in the work place, quotas, or for this policy’s more modern title, “diversity.”  Indeed, the 1964 law made quotas illegal, and hiring for racial balance was also illegal according to the bill’s spokesmen enunciated during the debates in Congress prior to passage.  A major reason for enactment of the 1964 law was to destroy the system of legalized segregation then prevalent in the South.  In employment, discrimination was to be eliminated by hiring on merit and not intentionally rejecting someone because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or even sex.  Merit hiring was to be the solution to the problems of segregation and discrimination.  The passage of the legislation was the culmination of the decades’ old struggle by liberals to treat people “without regard to race, creed, or color” (a phrase that epitomized the ideal, and even used by the NAACP from its early days and remained on its website long after the organization scorned that ideal).  This is why, prior to passage of the law, at the 1963 March on Washington Martin Luther King in his “I Have a Dream” speech spoke of a time when his children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  Passage of the 1964 law was meant to enshrine that ideal and make it possible to achieve.

            After passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, one problem quickly rose: for many jobs, Blacks were not as well qualified as whites.  The bottom line was that many Blacks were incapable of competing with whites for jobs “playing by the same rules.” (This phrase was used by President Obama in 2012 in his State of the Union address, in his Democratic Party convention speech, and in the first debate with Republican candidate Mitt Romney.  Obama is a staunch extender and enforcer of AA, which insures that we do not play by the same rules; there being different rules for different groups.)  There were different explanations for the Blacks’ failure.  Some blamed it on poor schooling, some on poverty, some on “cultural deprivation,” others on genetics and low IQs.  The excuses were numerous, but the reality was that Blacks as a group were failing in qualifications and failing to be hired as they had hoped.

Though in the South, Black segregated schools were materially inferior to those of white pupils (as Southern schools, in general, were materially inferior to Northern ones), things were often quite different in the North, where even in the 19^th century W. E. B. Du Bois had attended the same schools as did the whites, and this would be true in the 20^th century for prominent figures like Malcolm Little – Malcolm X.

            Prior to 1964 in many Northern states with Fair Employment Policy panels, new problems were already surfacing.  Some Blacks who were not hired for certain positions believed the reason was racial discrimination.  However, employers could point to examinations, on which Blacks often performed poorly, or background checks revealing problems such as failures in school, truancy, even criminal records, all making these applicants objectively less qualified than the whites who were hired.  The discrimination these Blacks complained of was rational rather than racial.  There seemed to be no doubt that as a group, Blacks were not doing well academically, even in Northern schools.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic Senator for New York, wrote: “…the New York City school system, which had ‘transformed two generations of Jewish immigrants into the intellectual elite of the world’s most powerful nation, [was not]…able to bring its black students,…up to grade level’”(Graham, The Civil Rights Era, pp. 310-311).

            Interestingly, Moynihan was also one of the speech writers for President Lyndon Johnson, who in 1965 gave the first national presentation in his address at Howard University to justify racial preferences for Blacks.  In that address Johnson asserted: “…freedom is not enough…You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.’”(Convergence, 77)

            While in the legally segregated South, many civil rights protests had been non-violent, or had sparked violence that originated with white protestors, white mobs, and white sheriffs, in the North Black protest suddenly morphed from peaceable to violent to riotous.  Beginning in 1965 with the riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Black riots soon spread throughout the North.  By 1968 riots left 250 Blacks dead, 8,000 wounded, 50,000 arrested in more than 300 riots in which an estimated half million Blacks had participated in burning and looting,

            The unquestioned assumption of the liberal ideology has been that since all people are basically equal, and all groups of humans are basically equal, then all should be hired in all professions at about an equal rate.  When Blacks are not so employed, there must be something wrong.  Blacks and their allies in the media and academia demanded answers as to why they were not hired in proportional numbers.  Suddenly, scholars were forbidden to maintain that the reason for Black failure might be genetic (those who made such claims, including a Nobel laureate and other prominent figures, were quickly isolated, denounced, and occasionally physically assaulted inside the academedia complex).  Meanwhile, the liberals, including a judge in an important case, maintained that the reason Blacks could not compete was because they were “culturally deprived.”  I recall a Black colleague sneering at that explanation – what do they mean, “culturally deprived”?  Blacks certainly had their own culture.  They may not have known as much about white culture, or they may have consciously rejected it.  But they were hardly culturally deprived.

            Other excuses abounded.  The 18-year-old failed a test because his great, great, great grandfather had been a slave; or someone had called him a n_____; or “Amos n Andy” were his only television role models, or whatever.  Under Democrat President Carter, EEOC leader Eleanor Holmes Norton had her own solution to the problem – Blacks could not pass the examinations because the exams were racist.  She began a war on testing, and used the full power of the federal government to prevent tests from being used in hiring for most positions.  She would allow tests only if Blacks could pass at the same percentage rate as whites, so exams had to be so diluted to the point that only idiots would fail.  As almost everyone would pass, then all were by definition “basically qualified,” and the government could force employers to then hire by quotas or face huge fines for discrimination.  The objective ceased to be to hire the best qualified, but to hire instead the “basically” qualified (or unqualified) minority or woman.  Because more Blacks than whites had failed high school, or had criminal records, the EEOC also sought to prevent employers for most positions from inquiring into the backgrounds of applicants, for that too might have a disparate impact on hiring Blacks by quota.

            When the federal government required that firms hire by racial quota, Blacks were hired.  Some were good workers.  But some were only “basically qualified” or less, frequently absent, on drugs, lazy, bullying, or even violent.  Hiring such workers demoralized the rest of the workforce and production declined.  City factories closed or moved to the suburbs or to other countries.  In the suburbs, there were fewer Blacks, and infrequent public transportation made such employment opportunities often inaccessible to inner-city residents.  So fewer Blacks were hired.

            Meanwhile, the same liberals who had assured Americans that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a quota bill, had also assured Americans that the Immigration Act of 1965 would not result in massive increase of newcomers nor would it change the basic ethnic character of the nation.  Yet, rather quickly, there was a decline in immigration from Europe, the ancestral home of most Americans in 1965.  In 1960, before immigration reform, America was roughly 90% white and 10% Black (Info Please: 88.6% white; 10.5 Black; 0.9 others).  After the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, millions of immigrants began to enter the US from Mexico, Latin America, the West Indies, and Asia.

            In the debate over the immigration bill in 1965 Democrat Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina had warned that the proposed law was a mistake and would result in a major shift in America’s population, but a year earlier Ervin had, like almost all Southern Democrats, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, warning that the civil rights law would result in quota hiring and anti-white discrimination.  Even though Sen. Ervin was to be proven right on the quota issue, his warnings on immigration were dismissed by the academedia complex as rantings of a Southern racist.  Sen. Ervin proved all too prescient on quotas and open border immigration.  Yet, aside from his role in the Watergate hearings (where liberals approved of his investigation into Nixon’s cover-ups), Ervin disappeared from history, which, after all, it is written by liberals.

            Unlike the erudite Prof. Graham, I do not believe that America simply stumbled upon the policies of AA quotas and open-border immigration.

          While Graham guardedly assumed that the AA and open immigration policies, when conjoined, are so unjust that it “poses a mortal danger to existing civil rights policy.”  The word quoted are from a blurb on the back cover of Graham’s Oxford U. Press paperback edition.  Was it the case that AA for Blacks was then in danger as a result of immigration?  Is it the case today?

            Because of his death as he was preparing a tour to promote this book shortly after publication, Graham would not have known about the US Supreme Court decision upholding AA in 2003.  What is most striking about that case is the list of friends-of-the-court briefs filed urging the court to retain AA policies and its race and other preferences.  Who filed these briefs?  Major corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, 3 M Corporation, General Motors; several prominent military figures, and various universities, as well as “civil rights” organizations of the Left determined to retain legal the discrimination against whites.  In reality, the military-industrial complex announced to the Supreme Court its decision: we want AA to continue.  This pressure on the Court had its effect.  The majority decision was composed by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, an appointee of “conservative” Republican Pres. Ronald Reagan.  Day O’Connor was so moved by some of the liberal friends-of-the-court briefs that she quoted from one in her majority decision.

            Despite the false assertions of the Left, the Establishment in America is often quite liberal.  The military sought to continue AA.  Big corporate America wanted to continue AA.  The academic administrators and star professors wanted to continue AA.  And though the media may not have filed the friends’ briefs, they were clearly delighted with the Court’s ruling upholding AA.

            In the next major AA case to reach the US Supreme Court, in 2012, the same scenario occurred.  The military-industrial complex again filed friends-of-court briefs contending that race and other preference procedures were essential in the military, in industry, in education, in America.

            Graham is astute in noting the contrast in the manner of achieving the reforms of the 1960s.  “Whereas civil rights reform was driven by mass—based social movement and was characterized by intense controversy, polarized voting blocs, regional tension, and high media visibility, immigration reform was primarily an inside-the-beltway effort, engineered by policy elites largely in the absence of public demand or controversy.”(9)

            The contrast in methods is clear, but it should not obscure the general unity of the Establishment on both issues.  What was the civil rights movement of the 1960s?  This was the collaboration of the civil rights activists, including those willing to be arrested, with the national media (and in some cases, with federal authorities) to expose the injustice of the system of segregation.  Langston Hughes mentions that he engaged in a restaurant sit-in in North Carolina in the 1920s.  Carl Bernstein as a child sat-in a restaurant with his mother and other members of the Progressive Party in Cold War Maryland.  We know of these because both participants were authors.  Surely there were other individual assaults on segregation, but they are not usually included in the “civil rights movement” because they were small or isolated events lacking national publicity.  Similarly in 1947 there was a Journey of Reconciliation, a precursor to what in 1961 would be known as a Freedom Ride.  Jim Peck partook in both journeys, was jailed in 1947 in Carolina, and badly beaten in the 1961 ride through segregated Alabama and Mississippi.  In Cold War 1947, the effort to integrate interstate buses was generally ignored; in 1961 it was both national and international news.  What had changed?  The South was still the South.  The integrationists were still integrationists.  What had changed?

            To some, the answer was simple: television.  When average Americans could see in their homes on the TV how peaceable protestors were being beaten by hateful, foul-mouthed, uncontrollable, over-the-top, violent thugs, some of whom wore police or sheriff’s uniforms, that so swayed people that by 1964 popular opinion supported passage of the Civil Rights Act and overwhelmingly defeated Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater who had voted against the legislation.  There is some truth to this interpretation.

            But more must be considered.  The first “televised” Olympic Games occurred in Berlin in 1936.  Although television was still a novelty, there were small theaters where patrons could view the screens.  Even though these were summer games, television was new, and some of the Olympic events on TV were displayed with a great deal of snow.  The point is that German television was advancing in the 1930s.  Suppose some Jews had staged a sit-in at a park where they were “unwelcome” or a swim-in at a pool reserved for Aryans.  Would that have been featured on a television channel, one that began its day with a young, attractive blond girl, outstretching her arm to greet the audience with “Heil Hitler”?  And in 1960 when the sit-ins were national news in the US, how would Soviet television have portrayed any protestors inside the USSR?

            The civil rights protestors could strive to overturn the segregationist legal system of the South because the protestors had the support of the liberal elite that controlled the national television networks, the major magazines, the major newspapers.   The protests would not be ignored.  The jailed would not be forgotten.  Even if local newspaper or media were hostile (WLBT in Jackson MS refused to carry national news and documentaries when they criticized segregation), the local elites did not have the clout of the national elites.  True, in the 1960s the elite that controlled the national television networks and the other media had been much the same as that which had dominated the radio networks of the 1930s and 1940s, so why didn’t the civil rights movement occur earlier?  In 1935?  1945?  Radio may have been less effective at stirring the emotions of the audience (though Orson Wells’ Martian invasion on the CBS Mercury Theater surely frightened a massive audience.)  Television may have made the violent images more vivid than any merely audio ones.  I have argued elsewhere that there was another more salient reason for the delay in the development of the civil rights movement, - many of the earlier radical racial protests movements had been linked to the Communist Party.  By the late 1940s especially, Communism was deemed the main enemy, and the elites did not want to promote any cause affiliated with Communism.  Thus, the very important civil rights struggles in the South in 1948 swirling around the Henry Wallace Progressive Party were either ignored or derisively reported by the mainstream media. 

            My general point is that the means to achieve the two major reforms discussed in Graham’s book may have been different; nevertheless it was the liberal elites, the Establishment, that supported both reforms.  Furthermore, there came a point when the Establishment and its supporters in government used their power in bureaucracy to change the Civil Rights Act into the quota law.  Graham is honest in writing history, but he fails to draw the logical conclusions from the facts he assembles.  In his Civil Right Era, Graham wrote impartially how AA, i.e., the quota system of hiring for racial balance, and granting preferences to the groups that could not compete fairly, developed in the bureaucracy despite the clear text and meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

            Originally, the civil rights reform endorsed by the elite did not include quotas or hiring for racial balance – not at first.  Recall, the 1964 Civil Rights Act actually forbade quota hiring.  But by the late 1960s, as it became clear that if everyone played by the same rules, Blacks as a group were unable to compete with whites, then ever more Blacks made it clear they did not care about “the same rules,” or any rules, and indulged themselves in violent riots and the slow-motion riots called violent crime.  (Graham notes that few such riots occurred in the South during this period as the walls of segregation were crumbling and life for Blacks was visibly improving.  But in the North, and Graham does not raise this question – had Blacks endured that much discrimination in the North?  That which they encountered, was it racial or rational discrimination?  And some Blacks in the North were actually receiving preferences prior to the Civil Rights Act and AA.  A young, Black graduate student at Boston University received his doctorate in theology even though he had plagiarized much of his dissertation.  Had he been white, would he have been awarded that degree?  Yet, today, we call him Dr. Martin Luther King.

            As Blacks were raising crime-rates and rioting, causing damage to property in major cities, the elite decided to appease the Blacks.  The government would crack down on some, especially those who opposed America’s foreign policy and the war in Vietnam, or who openly carried weapons.  So Black Panthers and Martin Luther King and others faced persecution and elimination.  But the NAACP, which had patriotically fired a founder, W. E. B. Du Bois in 1948 when he endorsed the Henry Wallace Progressive Party rather than Democrat Harry Truman, could be relied on, and other Black leaders might be bargained with.  What would be the bargain?  Scrap the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or rather retain its words but subvert it, and replace it with quota policies and preferences.  The elite in America chose to appease the violent Blacks by violating the rights of poor and middle-class whites.  Blacks would gain preferences and get jobs; whites would be denied equal opportunity and, if they grumbled,  ridiculed by the media as racists.

            It is at this point that the methods used in both the immigration and AA reformers merged.  Now, behind closed doors, the bureaucrats who changed immigration would change racial policy to require quotas.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was subverted, equal opportunity was denied, quotas were required.  How?   By bureaucrats and unelected judges, with collaboration from the media.  The academedia complex has been so effective in distorting history that most educated people believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 commanded quotas and racial balance in hiring. 

            And with the Ford Foundation, one can trace the overlap of the elite with the convergence of both AA and massive open-borders immigration policies.(115-17, 213)  Ford created and for some years subsidized La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.  These groups would do much to destroy the importance of citizenship and of assimilation into America.  At the same time, the Ford Foundation was seeking to tear America apart in other ways, funding the anti-white, anti-Jewish radical elements in Ocean Hills, in the fight against traditional teachers and curriculum.  Ford helped establish counter schools that stressed Black studies, and hired many Black nationalist teachers.   When the experiment folded, pupils from these schools usually performed worse on standardized tests than those who were taught by the traditionalists.  Ford was fomenting conflict between Anglos and Hispanics in Texas and conflict between Jews and Blacks in New York.

            While it is not Graham’s primary purpose, The New Leviathan a 2012 book by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, provides far more information on the Ford Foundation and the other massively financed Left-wing foundations that have supported AA, massive immigration, and the numerous other “reforms” aimed at destroying and displacing the white working class in the United States.  Despite the conventional wisdom, much of the big money available for political causes in the US is spent to foster the goals of the political Left.

Once this background is absorbed, one can more readily accept the words of Scott Farris, in Almost President, concerning the Republican Nixon Administration, “The Nixon administration [1969-75] was the last truly liberal administration of the twentieth century.  That legacy is obscured by liberal antipathy toward Nixon because of his history of Red-baiting, his policies in Vietnam, the Watergate Scandal, and Nixon’s conservative rhetoric.  But the words were not matched by deeds.  As liberal congressman Hugh Scott, a Dewey ally, said of Nixon’s administration, ‘The conservatives get the rhetoric, we get the action.’”(Farris, 147)

Moreover: “Under Nixon, wage and price controls were implemented, the EPA was created, the food stamp program was begun, affirmative action was put in place, and tax reform essentially freed the poor from having to pay income tax.  Nixon even called for comprehensive national health insurance, though he pursued the idea half-heartedly.”(Farris, 147)

Graham details the role of Nixon in making AA national policy in The Civil Rights Era, and he provides a summary account in Convergence.  His Civil Rights Era did not cover the Reagan era, but in Convergence Graham writes:  “The shift to diversity-based employment practices marked a fundamental transition in American business…It was this change, the embrace of affirmative action by American big business, that dismayed conservatives when the Reagan administration declined to rewrite the affirmative action executive order in the early 1980s.”(156)  And even after Reagan, when in 1994 the GOP won the House of Representatives for the first time in decades with Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, “Congress under Republican control showed little enthusiasm for passing legislation to curb race-conscious affirmative action.”(Convergence, 171)

            Slighted in his discussion of AA for Blacks and immigrants is the very popular defense of AA constructed on the notion of white male privilege.  According to this view, all whites, even the poorest, receive advantages denied to non-whites, and therefore all non-whites deserve AA preference to compensate for the privileges heaped upon all whites, even the most down-trodden.  Those who espouse this view – a most popular one promoted by universities, government, and big business human resources diversity training and workshops, is to expose the privileged position of whites, especially white men, in American society.  At such sessions they expose how many CEOs, the prominent doctors, scientists, celebrities, in short the rich, are most often white men.  White men earn more than the rest of us, the trainers assert.  White men are over-represented among the elite.  They have more than their “fair share.”  AA is one method to reduce and curtail this injustice.

            Graham does include a table in Convergence relevant to this discussion: the median family income of ethnic groups in the US in 1969. (144)  the national average was of course 100%; Blacks earned a mere 62%, so the white-Black gap was 38%.  Yet, in the same survey, Jews earned 172% of the national average.  They Jewish-gentile gap was 70%.  The Left demanded AA for Blacks to close the relatively small Black-white gap.  But who demands AA to close the much larger Jewish-gentile gap?  The TV networks?  The New York Times or Washington Post?  What leading academic?  On the larger gap, there is utter silence?  While there are government sponsored work-shops on white male privilege, and articles and books on the same, where is there information in the main stream media about Jewish privilege?  Or a demand to close the gap with gentiles?  On this topic, the academedia complex is not simply silent, it would be horrified if anyone raised this issue.

            Jews were especially important in subverting the Civil Rights Act into the quota law.  Personnel is policy, and one should examine some of the personnel involved in making the decision which in fifty years would drastically alter the nature of America.

            Many of the Fair Employment Policy laws forbid discrimination, not only regarding race and ethnicity, but also on religious grounds.  Indeed, religion was also incorporated into the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Yet, when the agency set to enforce the Civil Rights Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), came under the leadership of Alfred Blumrosen, he set about not to enforce, but to subvert the law.  (Graham’s CRA titles a subsection of that book, “The EEOC as a Subversive Bureaucracy,” (190)  For example, the law required that his agency not send certain questionnaires to businesses in states with FEP commissions, but he defied the law anyway.  And his questionnaire asked employers about the race of their employees.  (Until then, the objective of many liberals had been to remove the racial designations of employees).  Then, the EEOC went after those who employed lower percentages of Blacks than the EEOC determined that they should hire.  Although the law forbade quota hiring or hiring to achieve a racial balance, that is precisely what Blumrosen, and his colleague Sonia Pressman did.  They were joined in their push for quotas by bureaucrats from various agencies, Labor’s Laurence Silberman, and the EEOC’s Stephen Schulman and, via the Anti-Defamation League, Herman Edelsberg.  Quite simply, Jews were prominent in developing the quota plans for the US, and in making certain that the quotas would not apply to Jews.  Under President Nixon, the quota program for Blacks embedded in the Philadelphia Plan was extended into a national policy and extended further to include Hispanics, Amerindians (I was born in the US, so I am a native American), women, and some Asians.  Of course, the federal agencies were demanding data from corporations regarding their workforce’s composition, and then demanding racial, ethnic, and sometimes sexual balance, despite the clear wording and meaning of the law.  Why no questions about religion?  Why no religious balance?

            Graham writes that the religious issue did arise concerning Small Business minority set-asides, but nothing came of it because of the Constitutional provision of separation of church and state.(Convergence, 147)  This is a sleight-of-hand response.  After all, in his address to the nation on civil rights, 28 February 1963, President John Kennedy declared that the American Constitution is “color blind.”  Then, why was the EEOC inquiring about color and race and ethnicity?  That assertion did not prevent Blumrosen, Pressman, et al from demanding information about race and ethnicity so they could impose racial quotas and AA preferences.  I would suggest that the real reason that Blumrosen and company did not inquire about the religious composition of the workforce, is because they did not want to expose the overrepresentation of their coreligionists in certain lucrative fields.  This had little to do with the Constitution, and everything to do with the religious backgrounds of those in charge of the bureaucracy.

            Yet, the elite is not simply Jewish.  Horowitz and Laksin have done a superb job in exposing the vast wealth controlled by foundations.  Though the money came originally from business men, who were often conservative, like Henry Ford and H. John Heinz III, the foundations they created often drifted after their deaths to the far Left.  I suspect many Protestants are involved in doling out millions of conservative-earned dollars to Left Wing causes from these foundations.  And the Roman Catholic Church has been quite influential in the struggle for open-door immigration, especially as many of the illegals are Roman.

            Over the past five decades white American citizens have been displaced from jobs, driven as refugees from their old neighborhoods by racist, violent criminals, bullied and beaten from many public schools, mugged, and even when they were the best qualified, they were denied admission to university, denied scholarships, denied jobs, denied promotions, contracts, small business loans, - all because they were white.  And all of these injustices performed in the  name of “equal opportunity.”  Preferences went to lesser and unqualified Blacks, Hispanics, or others.  And the immigrants keep coming?  If you were a person of color, why not?

            The vast majority of Americans never wanted these policies – even Graham concedes that.  Yet, as the Democrats have become the official non-white and (covertly) anti-white party, the Republicans make speeches against AA and against open borders.  But once elected and in power, most Republicans followed their big-business contributors who want AA and cheap labor.  The elite make the policies for both parties.  The rhetoric differs, but the policy that few Americans want remains the same.  Meanwhile, the heirs of the Americans of 1950 face ever growing discrimination, displacement, and dispossession.