Why the Left Doesn't Mourn Vaclav Havel's Passing

From Ron Radosh, at PJMedia, "How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing":

PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”

But now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.

The most egregious is the article in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”

Clark does not question that Havel was “a brave man” who stood up for his views. That he cannot deny. It is Havel’s views, and his anti-Communism, that he detests. For Havel, he writes, did not help make his country “and the world, a better place.” In particular, denying everything we know about the nature of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the repression, the bureaucracy, the lack of necessary consumer goods to lead a decent life, the ever pervasive secret police — he faults Havel for the following:

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Surely Mr. Clark must be kidding. Has he not read any of the scores of books revealing the nature of life under what his comrades then called “really existing socialism”? Does he not realize that all these so-called “positive achievements” were there mainly in the minds of the state and Party propaganda apparatus, and that the only people to have them were the Party’s apparatchiks? Does he really believe that communism put the needs of “the majority first”? What accounts, then, for the scores of brave crowds who swept Havel into office, and who openly taunted the regime’s spokesmen as liars and no different than the Nazis who ruled before them?

Clark does not stop with the above. In true Communistpeak, he attacks Havel as “the son of a wealthy entrepreneur,” in other words used by the Maoists of the day, a “capitalist roader.” How dare the son of a bourgeois merchant becomes a national hero? Havel, to Clark, as to the comrades who ruled for decades, had no right to power, since he came from the hated capitalist class.

Continue reading.

Also, from Darleen at Protein Wisdom, "Pining for the fjords Communism." Hammering Whoopi Goldberg's comments on communism, Darleen adds:

The base misanthropy of collectivist advocates is glaringly clear. From communism [international collectivism] to national socialism [national collectivism], these are anti-human systems that declare individuals are not sovereign beings with inherent rights, but units that live at the pleasure of the regime. A regime that decides what needs are to be met and who will be sentenced to fulfilling those needs.

Remember that as Obama and statist Democrats continue their attempts to fundamentally transform America.

Freakin' murderous asshats.

Occupy Wall Street and the Jews

Walter James Casper III has to answer for his ugly endorsement of the hate. Walter James Casper III has endorsed the anti-Semitism of the Occupy movement. Add this on top of his anti-black racist sentiments and the sponsorship of hatred at his blog under "free speech" pretenses, and it's beyond clear the depths of evil this man will go to destroy decent people, Jews and racial minorities especially, because they don't toe the collectivist line.

Here's Jonathan Neumann, at Commmentary:

Defenders and supporters of Occupy Wall Street have tried to downplay the extent of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility, but it was more prevalent than their initial denials suggested or their belated statements of concern conceded.

To begin with, any conspiracy theory that connects a tiny portion (in this case 1 percent) of the population with exploitative banking practices is susceptible to taking on anti-Semitic undertones. This is especially the case when the list of supporters includes the American Nazi Party, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan, white supremacist David Duke, Socialist Party USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hezbollah, 911Truth.org, International Bolshevik Tendency, and myriad other dubious organizations and individuals. With such comrades in arms, leaders of Occupy Wall Street ought to have been much on guard against anti-Semitic talk.

Nor was the hostility a matter of undertones only. The tone, very early on, was set in part by signs and messages that were overtly anti-Semitic. “Google: (1) Wall St. Jews, (2) Jewish Billionaires, (3) Jews & FedRsrvBank,” read one sign. Another: “Nazi Bankers Wall Street.” The man holding up a sign that read “Hitler’s Bankers,” upon being pressed by passersby to explain himself, replied “Jews control Wall Street.” He was then asked whether the Fox News Channel had asked him to hold up the sign, presumably to make Occupy Wall Street look bad, and he responded, “F— Fox News. That’s bulls—t. F—ing Jew made that up.” Another protester, upon being interrogated by a skeptical elderly passerby sporting a yarmulke, brushed him away saying, “You’re a bum, Jew.”

An Occupier who had traveled from Georgia explained his anti-Jewish animus to a reporter from the New York Post by stating that “Jews are the smartest people in the world,” that “they control the media,” and that nobody is willing to point out this simple truth because “the media doesn’t want to commit suicide by losing the Jewish advertisers.” Still another Occupier expostulated in a widely circulated video: “The smallest group in America controls the money, media, and all other things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers who control Wall Street. I am against Jews who rob America. They are one percent who control America. President Obama is a Jewish puppet. The entire economy is Jewish. Every federal judge [on] the East Coast is Jewish.”

Occupy Wall Street’s group page on Facebook was littered with images of the title page of Henry Ford’s notorious pamphlet, The International Jew, as well as a picture featuring the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei, lifted from the entrance gate at Auschwitz, with the accompaniment: “We don’t work for bad money.”

At Occupy Los Angeles, one sign explained, in remarkable detail: the “[The] satanic cult called the Illuminati…represents Masonic and Jewish bankers who finagled a monopoly over government credit….Thus the people who control our purse strings are conspiring against us.” (It went on to claim how this nefarious force funded the first two world wars and is planning a third.) Another sign read “Humanity vs. the Rothschlds” [sic] as a speaker further advanced this classic trope: “How many people know that the wars, in WWII, both sides, were funded by the Rothschilds? Those are the bankers. So banking and war is [sic] very intertwined.”

To highlight such talk is to invite one predictable retort: One cannot hold an entire movement responsible for the excesses of outliers. But, despite the assertions of its advocates, Occupy Wall Street was not in fact a movement. Its ranks never numbered more than a modest few hundred people in Manhattan—which made its anti-Semitic cohort statistically significant. Its lack of structure, moreover, and near inability to repudiate sentiments by its participants meant that even a fringe was no less part of the whole.

And Neumann illustrates how the widespread anti-Zionism at Occupy Wall Street showcases the ruthless anti-Jewish eliminationism of the global left's Israel extermination industry:

And what of anti-Zionism? Naturally, given the resonance of the word occupy in association with controversial Israeli policies toward the West Bank and Gaza, the protests were a word-association game waiting to happen. On a random visit to Zuccotti Park in October, three signs were observed by this writer that related to American foreign policy, two of which pertained specifically to Israel. One read: “Obama stop giving bunker buster bombs to an extremist Israeli regime. Stop being Israel’s hit-man. AIPAC will still dump you in 2012.” The second: “USA and Israel are criminal psychopathic nations, an axis of evil, mass murderers, financial predators if not stopped no one has a future! Hands off Iran.” A small table exhibiting books for purchase was dominated almost exclusively by Marxist and Communist literature. Among the offerings, the one seeming anomaly was a book on Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), an organization that seeks to isolate Israel on all fronts.

But the BDS book was no aberration; the policies and input of that organization seem to have been welcomed by Occupy Wall Street. On October 13, BDS issued a statement entitled “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine,” expressing solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and hailing the objectives of the two as analogous. After all, “Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war.” A month later, Adalah-NY, an organization that campaigns in New York for the boycott of Israel, relayed a message of support for the protests from the Palestinian Arab chapter of BDS and led a question-and-answer session at Occupy Wall Street on the ‘‘growing movement for BDS against Israel until it complies with international law.’’

Last summer mass domestic protests overtook Israel—protests that attracted hundreds of thousands rather than the scant crew down by Wall Street. When an organizer of those protests came to speak in Zuccotti Park, a member of the Occupy Wall Street outreach working group, Andy Pollack, decried the appearance of “Zionist racists.”

An anti-Israel group, If Americans Knew, sustaining the conspiratorial notion of an America-Israel corporate nexus, distributed fliers headlined “Occupy Wall Street…not Palestine!” and noted that “while people are losing jobs, homes, and hope, politicians—dominated by powerful special interests—are sending more of our tax money to Israel than to any other country on earth.”

On October 28, Zuccotti Park hosted “Kaffiyeh Day at Occupy Wall Street”—the kaffiyeh being the Arab headdress associated most famously with Yasir Arafat—and protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Free Palestine” and “Long live Palestine! Occupy Wall Street.”

Nor was this sort of thing confined to New York. At Occupy Oakland, anti-Zionist commentators were fixated on the allegation that the tear gas used by the police to break up their encampment was manufactured by the same American company that makes tear gas for the Israel Defense Forces. The left-wing Jewish poet Amirah Mizrahi wrote, “i was palestine in oakland,” and Max Blumenthal, an anti-Zionist blogger, insisted that, far from being a distraction from the essential economic concerns of the Occupy protests, the Arab-Israel issue had now become more difficult to avoid, as the protesters were being confronted with the very same weapons used against Palestinian Arabs.

No, it's not confined to New York at all.

And it is in fact a movement, and the radical extremists are working to leverage Occupy into a long-term program against the establishment. President Obama and Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed Occupy. Today's Democrat Party is infiltrated with neo-communists who wouldn't flinch at the sight of Israel going up in flames  amid a Middle East holocaust to rival the interwar years. This is the program of the radical left.

Neumann goes on with further examples, citing the organizing magizine Adbusters, which is known for its virulent anti-Semitism:

And are the two—anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism—so easily divided? To begin with, the protests were originally a response to a call issued by the virulently anti-Zionist magazine Adbusters, a publication most noted for a short 2004 article entitled, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” Speculating that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was carried out to serve the interests of Israel, the essay explored the close affinity of Jewish neoconservatives for the Jewish state and emphasized the Jewish identity of several prominent neoconservatives within and without the Bush administration. In so doing, was Adbusters being anti-Zionist or was it being anti-Semitic?

What about the protester at Occupy LA who said, “I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our federal reserve, which is not run by the federal government, I think they need to be run out of this country”? Was she being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or the Kaffiyeh Day participant at Occupy Wall Street who shouted ‘‘Occupy Yahudi!’’ and ‘‘Yahudi are kafirs!’’ (‘‘Occupy Jews!’’ and ‘‘Jews are infidels!’’) and whom the group refused to silence? Was he being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or a protester at Occupy Oakland who, reacting to a speech from a Palestinian Arab youth crying “down with Israel,” turned to his fellow attendee and commented: “F—ing Jews.” How about the aforementioned protester from Georgia at Occupy Wall Street who explained that “the reason the Arabs hate us” is because of “the Jews”? Or the founder of Occupy D.C., Kevin Zeese, who has a history of lamenting the power of the “Israel lobby” in the United States?

These do not begin to exhaust the extent or foulness of the sentiments toward Jews and Israel that emanated from the Occupy protests—sentiments so extreme as to compel even Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing magazine Tikkun, to share his ‘‘distress at the hatred toward Israel and/or toward Jews’’ on display in Oakland.

Continue reading.

Neumann explains how Jewish social justice activists became central organizers in Zuccotti Park --- and thus gave cover to those attacking the movement for its rampant anti-Semitism.

PREVIOUSLY: "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Also, "Continuing Lies by Cowardly Hate-Blogger W. James Casper in Left's Demonic Workplace Intimidation Campaign," and "Deranged Stalker Walter James Casper III Fires Up the Criminal Hate-Blogging for the Holidays."

'Home for the Holidays'

Via Darleen Click, at Protein Wisdom, "Obama sends out instructions on how to really annoy your family members at Christmas."

And it's not just about being obnoxious, although there's no shortage of that. No, parents might also realize that they wasted their lives bringing such stupid people into the world. Families can say to their kids, "Obama promised 'Hope and Change' in 2008. All he's delivered is debt and destruction of our most cherished values. Wake up dear ones before it's too late."

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 4

The series continues at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 4: MORAL REASONING (OR KANT VS. ARISTOTLE AGAIN)":

Here we come close to affirming the practical notion that the left and right need each other as a counterweight or completing factor. But on closer look their positions are asymmetrical: the postulates of liberalism will always make it the initiating force in political life, while conservatism will always be its cautionary handmaiden. While liberals are congenitally discontent with the pace and extent of reform, they always have a general sense of what should come next, best expressed in Samuel Gompers’ famous one-word policy: “More.” More reform, more legislation, more equality. Conservatives, by contrast, do not have a clear or uniform outline of the good society; instead, conservatives have serious divisions among themselves about what the good society should be. It is not simply a matter of opposing “less” to the liberals’ “more.” Conservatives have deep theoretical differences over the relationship of liberty and virtue, and while liberalism has a similar theoretical argument (between “communitarians” and individualists), it is not as pronounced and politically relevant as the split on the right. I’ll add here that the theoretical and practical tensions within conservatism are a source of the movement’s strength; conservatism’s infighting leads to a certain amount of self-renewal that is largely missing in liberalism.

Well, there's certainly some self-renewal in the left's practical politics in the post-Cold War age. Communism as a goal is pushed more aggressively than ever, among people who had normally been the institutional foundation of what previously was the mainstream liberalism of John F. Kennedy and others. That is, to the extent that the left is seeking a revival of the animating revolutionary ideologies of the early twentieth century, there appears certainly a renewal. Indeed, it's the resurrection of the most murderous ideological developments in the history of mankind. And now there's the added malevolence of the left's accommodation to fascism with its support for millenarian Islamist fanaticism and the shift of historic anti-Semitism from the right to the left of the spectrum in the manifestation of the "new anti-Semitism." These are developments that Hayward might want to address in his continuing iterations of the series.

My previous entries in the series are here.

The Death of Free Speech the 'Canadian Way'

I'm not really up on all of the personalities, but the realities of progressive attacks on political speech are all too real to me.

See Kathy Shaidle, "(Making Someone's Life a) Living Hell Is the Best Revenge."

I'll be checking Kathy's site frequently (or more frequently than I already do) with anticipation of her big announcement. Meanwhile, she links to this cowardly defense of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's "Section 13" --- which is the Canadian left's vile bureaucracy that's mounting a jihad against free speech up north by attacking and prosecuting conservatives who speak the truth, because as we all know, truth is the new "hate speech." See Bernie Farber and Marvin Kurz, "Hateful Words Can Hurt." And a key passage at the piece:

Another argument against Section 13 is that, unlike libel law, truth is no defence. But can it ever be “true” that victims of hate speech deserve hatred and contempt? Should someone be entitled to use a tribunal hearing to “prove” that, say African Canadians are inferior, that Jews are rapacious, or that all gays are pedophiles?

Truth is no defense? God, that's so pathetically f-king stupid it makes me wanna puke. Hello? It doesn't matter if the truth is painful or not --- it's still the truth. And notice how these idiots Farber and Kurz omit example of real conservative free speech. Did you point out that Islamists proselytize death to the Jews? Lock up that man for that, er, "hate speech"! These progressive asshats and their totalitarian minions will dictate what thoughts are acceptable. It's already happening, of course, all around us. The world is upside down, in a big way. The biggest lies in today's world are the inventions of the left. That the war in Iraq was a "debacle." That the science of climate change is "settled." That Israel, the Middle East's original democracy, is an "apartheid state." The list goes on. The common denominator is that progressives can't win debate on the merits, so they use totalitarian methods to attack their opponents and shut down debate --- despite their narcissistic chest-thumping to the contrary.

See also Closet Conservative, "OMGWords Caused the Holocaust AIYEEEE We're ALL GONNA DIE!!!," and Scaramouche, "The Ceej is Dead and Gone But Its Pro-Censorship Zombies Live On."

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 3

The next installment from Steven Hayward, at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 3: EQUALITY":

The Marxist-inspired radical who sees property as the ultimate illegitimate convention to be swept away need not concern us here. Of more interest and relevance is the moderate liberal who argues two related and compelling points: first, from a view harmonious with conservatism’s bias for social stability, large inequalities in wealth, or a static distribution of wealth, undermine society’s social cohesion. As a consequence, second, unequal wealth distribution should be measured by its utility to all classes (Rawls’ argument). Both of these concepts elude convincing and unequivocal empirical demonstration, let alone obvious policy responses. But one can observe the least amount of friction between left and right when policy choices regarding opportunity are on the table.

This leads inevitably to an important corollary of the right-left split over the nature of equality, concerning the efficacy of government itself, not only on direct distributional questions, but also on subsidiary matters regarding the “playing field” of opportunity. Liberals believe in using government—through regulatory and ameliorative means—to correct market failures, which liberals perceive as occurring on a wide scale. Conservatives are much more prone to wariness about government failure, often going so far as to attribute political intervention as the final cause of all market failures—often with good reason: the role of multiple government mistakes in bringing about the housing bubble and subsequent crash is hard to minimize. The arguments about the nature and reasons for both government failure and market failure are serious and extensive, but suffice it here to note that the extreme libertarian position ironically shares in common the same utopian expectation as Marxism: the belief in the possibility of the withering away of the state.

Again, it's a great discussion. My problem is that the idea of the "modern liberal" is a concoction of progressives to hide their statist, inherently totalitarian, ideological convictions. High-brow theory can explain all these minute nuances of theory and ideology, but in practice the deceit of left-wing politics always ends with the destruction of human agency and individual liberty. The left is the cancer of modern societies.

Occupy Wall Street: A Movement Custom-Designed to Make Democrat-Socialists Look Like a Bunch of Freaks

See Noemie Emery, at Weekly Standard, "Occupational Therapy":

"God, I love ’em,” wrote Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post not long after the glorious dawning of Occupy Wall Street, saying that the protests “arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target” to grow into something quite big. Apparently, the stench from McPherson Square (the Washington, D.C., equivalent of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan) had not yet wafted the two blocks north to the Post building, for he was back a week later to praise it again, along with his stablemate E.J. Dionne and many other liberals who read into the Occupy movement numerous virtues that never existed, while wholly ignoring the vices that are only too real. And why would these clean, polite, well-mannered people, for whom an overdue library book would most likely seem like a major infraction, embrace a collection of ne’er-do-wells who are causing a public-health crisis in the midst of their city? Because they and the rest of the left are desperate for any kind of jolt to jump-start their party, which has been in a coma since the air seeped out of Obamamania sometime in 2009.

So what if the occupiers have no idea what they want, and no plans for getting it? “Liberals need a tea party, damn it,” writes Jonah Goldberg, and thus “have embraced the movement in principle with the understanding that they’ll worry about the details later, if at all.” For similar reasons, labor and assorted left-wing organizations are also circling, hoping to connect to the “99 percent” the occupiers say they are speaking for. They hope to repeat the success of the civil rights and the Tea Party movements. But there are reasons this may not work out.
The problem with Occupy is that it involves occupation, which gets it off to a very bad start. The Tea Party asked people to show up for a few hours on weekends, march, listen to speeches, perhaps call upon members of Congress, pick up their trash, and go home. Occupy by contrast asks people to leave their homes (should they have them) and live in a tent in a park for an indefinite period, for goals that are hard to explain.

What kind of people move into a tent for an indefinite period? Those without strong connections to professions or to other people, without obligations, routines, and responsibilities; without children or clients or jobs. This self-selects against the 90 percent of the population that is productive and grounded, that supports itself and works hard, not to mention the part of the population that votes. Even before the camps were heavily infiltrated by homeless and/or criminal elements, the composition was tilted to those on the fringes, frequently by choice as well as necessity, which made it more like a cultural event such as Woodstock than like the Depression-age Hoovervilles, which were peopled largely by those who once had middle-class standing and were then down on their luck....

The civil rights and Tea Party movements addressed specific concerns—a cosmic injustice, and fiscal policies believed to be ruinous—that had means of redress through political remedies, which they pursued by legal, nonviolent means. The Occupy forces by and large have problems that do not admit of political solutions. The civil rights and Tea Party movements sprang from the middle of middle America; Occupy Wall Street from the fringe. Its happy embrace of a “communal”—and rag-tag and dirty—lifestyle was bound to alienate that much larger part of society that likes soap and water; clean clothes, sheets, and towels; indoor plumbing and sleeping in beds. The people who claimed to speak for the 99 percent who aren’t rich managed to repel the 98 percent who want order and cleanliness.

Emery mentions New York Magazine's John Heilemann, who published a piece about those holding out for a resurgence of Occupy in the spring and summer. Turns out there's some planning to occupy the national party conventions: "Yes, tent cities teeming with lice, rape charges, and piles of excrement (200 pounds of it in Santa Cruz, California) are just the thing to rally swing voters."

Yep, that's exactly the movement that James Walter "Occupy" Casper III endorsed with his exhortation: "Occupy wherever you are." Freakin' scumbag.

Criminal Hatesac3's even more stupid than the doltish union idiot at the video. Man, Cavuto reams her a new one. That's gotta hurt.

Winning!

Walter James 'Occupy' Casper Continues Campaign of Lies: Childishly Whines About 'McCarthyism' While Endorsing Anarchists and Anti-Semitic Communists

My criminal stalker Walter James "Occupy" Casper III, a.k.a. "Hatesac3", continues to harass me and this blog with comments --- on top of his recent cyber threats to my family --- despite being banned long ago. This post is to record some key evidence in Walter James "Occupy" Casper's continuing campaign to undermine the foundations of the country with a clandestine Marxist program of communist subterfuge.

To put it plainly, "Hatesac3" can't stand the fact that today's Democrat Party is a socialist party with a large number of members in government who have allied with --- and provided aid and comfort to --- real live communists in furtherance of an ideological agenda that continues to shift this country away from its founding as a classically liberal democracy.

After a long rambling post of incoherent denials about the fundamental anarcho-communism and anti-Semitism riddled throughout the Occupy movement, "Hatesac3" dumps out this groaner of pathetic smear-mongering:

A political science professor who is alleging there are communists in the House and Senate? Communists?!? Somebody call Joe McCarthy...

Joe McCarthy investigated communists in government. McCarthy was right. He may have gone overboard, but the facts show that real communists had infiltrated the United States government. They were directed by Moscow and they were causing real damage to national security. Again, not all those accused by McCarthy were deemed national security threats, but when progressives throw out the "McCarthyism" card they're deceptively and malignantly casting a smokescreen in front of their support for Marxist-Leninist ideologies and goals. This is sinister. And that is why Walter James "Occupy" Casper continues his attempts hide behind the "McCarthyism" smear while working underground to destroy his political enemies through multifarious smear jobs, campaigns of workplace harassment and threats to freedom of speech, as well as cyber threats to the families of his enemies. Jonah Goldberg speaks truth to "McCarthyism":

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Now, I'm sure many people are rolling their eyes at this point. "It's not the same thing!" say those who believe that the lost jobs of a few Hollywood writers and the loyalty oaths reluctantly offered by some unjustly accused union officials are the American equivalent of concentration camps. Maybe, maybe not. The argument over which was worse, Communism or Nazism, will never be settled. Nor should we expect it to be. But even if you firmly believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism, as even Robert Conquest does, you must concede that Communism was evil enough. If the sight of an American Communist screenwriter being forced to take the Fifth Amendment before Congress and have his "career ruined" still fills you with blinding rage, it's indeed curious why the forced slaughter of millions by Stalin seems like a trivial event to you. After all, there were plenty of men and women invoking their "rights" as their heels left lines in the dirt on the way to the gulag. Needless to say, their careers were ruined too. And if the American Communists had had their way, much the same thing would have happened here as well. But, yeah, Roy Cohn's the devil.

Regardless, wherever you come down on McCarthyism, Communism, and the rest is a matter of opinion. What is a matter of fact — unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact — is that there were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The Rosenbergs were guilty and got what they deserved. Alger Hiss too. Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Alfred Sarant, Joel Barr, and Harry Gold were all either pawns or lackeys of a foreign and evil foe. We know the Hollywood Ten were all Communists, but what else they were we can't know for sure, because they believed taking the Fifth was more important than protecting the country (and if you think it's unfair to cavalierly call people who devotedly followed the Moscow line for all their adult lives "Communists," I sure hope you don't ever call, say, President Bush a "fascist" on the basis of no evidence at all). The American Communist Party (CP-USA) was in fact a Soviet franchise.

In other words, you are free to describe McCarthyism as a witchhunt if and only if you are willing to concede that actual witches existed in our midst. The evidence — from declassified Venona transcripts, Soviet archives, memoirs, etc. — is still mounting, but what we have so far is plenty in itself. In 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote an essay for the Washington Post that caused no small amount of hysteria on the American Left, which has been milking its myths and denial for decades. McCarthyism was the product of the "paranoid style" in American politics. There were no witches — only zealots and brown-shirted bullies. The playwright Lillian Hellman declared: "The McCarthy group — a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators — chose the anti-Red scare with perhaps more cynicism than Hitler picked anti-Semitism."

Yet, as Hoffman reluctantly conceded, these assessments were in turn lies, myths, and carefully constructed distortions. The reality was that "in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much…

In other words, Walter James "Occupy" Casper III is ready to attack his enemies as "McCarthyites" while malignantly turning his eyes from the horrors of tens of millions killed in the name of the very ideology he's pushing.

And I've covered this ground before --- and repeatedly faced down all the denials by "Hatesac3" and his henchmen --- but here's David Horowitz on Representative Barbara Lee, "An Enemy Within":

REPRESENTATIVE BARBARA LEE, Democrat of Berkeley, was the only member of Congress who refused to defend her country under attack. The Los Angeles Times calls Barbara Lee a "liberal" and compares her to "anti-war" dissenters of the past, most notably Jeanette Rankin who cast the lone vote in the U.S. Congress against America’s entry into the Second World War and said after Pearl Harbor, "As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else." We are at war again, and it’s time to call things by their right names.

Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America’s enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America.

Continue at the link. And see Joseph Farah, "The truth about Barbara Lee."

Rep. Lee is just one of roughly nearly 100 members of the Democrat Party in Congress who are in fact communists in all but name. There's no need to keep going, since it's long ago been shown that Walter James "Occupy" Casper stands against all that is decent and good in America. I've chronicled his progressive hatred time and again. He's a stalking coward and an ideological snake. He has publicly endorsed the Occupy movement murderers, rapists, and anti-Semites. This is fact. And this is what Occupy is about. And I will continue to expose his deception because this is what today's left does. It's evil incarnate and people of decency have to expose these freaks to the light of truth.

Previously:

* "Comrade Repsac3: Racist Commissar of State Security, People's Commissariat for Internet Affairs?"

* "W. James Casper is a Coward, a Fraud, and a Liar."

* "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Also, at Zilla of the Resistance, "Stand Against Evil - Never Let it Win."

'The Israel Lobby' Continues to Poison Leftist Politics

(Note: When I place "The Israel Lobby" in quotes like that, I'm referring to the Mearsheimer and Walt smear thesis of a Jewish interest group section that dominates U.S. policy making toward Israel. I thought I'd put this up at top so there's no misunderstanding about my meaning at the title.)

There's a ferocious backlash against Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times column, "Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir."

Instapundit has the link to Jennifer Rubin's essay hammering Friedman, and see also Power Line, "Tom Friedman Goes Mearsheimer and Walt."

And still more from Jonathan Tobin at Commentary, "Thomas Friedman and the New Anti-Semitism-Part One":

The notion that the only reason politicians support Israel is because of Jewish money is a central myth of a new form of anti-Semitism which masquerades as a defense of American foreign policy against the depredations of a venal Israel lobby. This canard not only feeds off of the traditional themes of Jew-hatred, it also requires Friedman to ignore the deep roots of American backing for Zionism in our history and culture.

Friedman goes on to embarrass himself by contrasting the reception Netanyahu received on Capitol Hill to the one he might get at a center of leftist academia such as the University of Wisconsin. There’s little doubt he would not be cheered there. But the same would be true of most American politicians or thinkers who deviated from leftist Orthodoxy. The notion that liberal campuses are more representative of opinion about Israel than Congress is laughable. It is the sort of whopper one has come to expect from the liberal chorus on the Times op-ed page and shows Netanyahu may have a better feel for what Americans think than Friedman.

And continued here: "Thomas Friedman and the New Anti-Semitism-Part Two."

Meanwhile, check yet another installment of Mondoweiss thanking God for Mearseimer and Walt, "Why did it take 6 years to talk about the Israel lobby?"

My good friend Norm tells me that these people hate, that progressive especially hate Israel, and that it's not going away. But I can't stop shaking my head at the enormous chasm I see whenever I read this stuff. Mondoweiss (and I mean Phillip Weiss) argues that "The Israel Lobby" smear has now gone mainstream and that it's "safe" for journalists like Chris Matthews to come aboard the good ship anti-Semitism. I guess that it's just that I'd not realized how exterminationist is the left-wing project. So, I shake my head partly out of my own naïvity. There's a war going on, and it's fully enjoined on the question of the defense of Israel. Game on, I say. And give no quarter to these f-kers.

Anyway, more from Elliott Abrams, "Mr. Friedman’s Diatribe Against Israel."

'The Protester' is Time's Person of the Year

Well, at least they didn't give it to Obambi. Oh, I forgot. They did that already.

At Time, "The Protester." (Via Fausta, The Hill, and Memeorandum.)

Also, at Washington Post, "Why Steve Jobs isn’t Time’s Person of the Year."

And Daily Caller, "TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’ selection about as annoying as you’d expect."

PHOTO CREDIT: El Marco, "Zuccotti Utopia: Portraits of The New Revolutionaries."

Time for Jews to Wake Up to Renascent Bigotry and Hatred

From David Solway, at PJ Media, "Resisting the Obvious":

In much of my recent work — books and articles — I have addressed the issue of antisemitism in the contemporary world. That the beast is once again slouching, not only towards Bethlehem as in the Yeats poem, but towards Oslo, Paris, London, Stockholm, Malmo, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Washington, Toronto, Sydney, Caracas, Brussels, Amsterdam, and many other cities and regions around the globe, should come as no surprise. From biblical times to the present moment, in their own homeland or “scattered among the peoples,” Jews have never been safe. This is precisely what distinguishes the Jewish people from the rest of humanity, the specific nature of their “chosenness.” Wherever they may find themselves they are always at risk, whether actively or potentially, targeted for slander, exclusion, or extinction.

In developing this argument in such books as The Big Lie (2007) and Hear, O Israel! (2009), I have been condemned by a number of my critics, who accuse me of exaggeration, self-pity, or a sort of obsolescence, as if my gaze were fixed on the past at the expense of a more amenable or complex present. The fact that many of these detractors are themselves Jewish is only to be expected, for Jews have a long history of wilfully ignoring the signs and rejecting the self-evident. It is not only the JINOs (Jews in Name Only), the “non-Jewish Jews” flagged by Isaac Deutscher, or the apikorsim (“wicked sons” of Jewish public life) enamored of their enemies who are blind to the historical fatwa against them. It is also those whom I refer to as the “good Jews” and whom author and Sun Media columnist Ezra Levant calls the “official Jews” — that is, a significant number of Jewish communicants, as well as their secular counterparts — who refuse to read the writing on the wall even when it is in their own language, inscribed in block letters, and blazoned on every street corner.

These Jewish critics — I have in mind people like Richard Just, editor of The New Republic, éminence grise Clifford Orwin of the Hoover Institution, and Canadian poet Harold Heft, among others who share their inveterate myopia — assailed my analysis as, variously, hyper-inflated, unfair to Islam, scare-mongering, one-dimensional, and so on, as if I refused to align my perspective with the mores of the enlightened and democratic West.

But the enlightened and democratic West is no longer what it very intermittently was — or rather, it is certainly not what it presents itself as being. The legacy media, academia, the political class, and an alarming proportion of the public have made common cause with the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign of the growing Islamic hegemony in the realms of ideology and practice. This is especially true of Europe whose Jewish population is increasingly under threat. As French philosopher Guy Milliere observes in his new manuscript Dissident: Why Europe Is Dead and What It Means for America and the World (not yet published), “Almost everywhere in Europe, it is now dangerous for a practicing Jew to wear a yarmulke,” a development that he regards as a visible and repellant symptom “of a wider and more disquieting decay.” There is no doubt, he continues, “that there is something rotten in today’s Europe.”

God, that sounds awful, and worse because it's so objectively true.

But continue reading here.

West Coast Port Shutdown Planned for Today

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago: "New Direction for Occupy Wall Street?" Here's the latest from Occupy Oakland, "MONDAY PORT BLOCKADE: last minute info." And from Occupy Long Beach, "Occupy the Ports."

And while the San Francisco Chronicle has this, "Opposition grows to Occupy's port shutdown plan," the Occupy Oakland organizers are pushing back, "Longshore Workers Being Told to Not Cross the Picket Line." My hunch is that regular hard-hats want to stay on the job but the militants inside the union and out want confrontation with the 1 percent. That said, here's this from a self-described New Left radical at Firedoglake, "#Occupy Oakland: WTFWMD":

This morning’s SF Chronicle has the requisite Occupy concern-troll stories spread throughout several sections, including a lead story headlined “Opposition growing to shutdown of Port.” In addition to interviews with union members and truckers who are conflicted about supporting the shutdown, the story says that “some activists” have concluded that a port blockade is “too extreme” and so strongly disagree with confrontational tactics that they now call themselves “99 Percenters” instead of “Occupiers.” Various groups affiliated with Occupy Oakland have been holding trainings on diversity of tactics and non-violence strategies in anticipation of tomorrow’s events. On several Facebook forums there are very heated discussions involving rumors of peacekeepers who may be planning to “kettle” any comrades who do not comport themselves in whatever they deem to be an acceptable fashion.

As I read this, as always, I think: What the Fuck Would Mario Do?

Check that link. This lady's a freakin' communist. Sheesh. (Also at Lonely Conservative and Memeorandum.)

RELATED: From The Other McCain, "ACORN Returns as ‘Occupy’."

Wisconsin Union Thugs Launch Campaign of Harassment and Intimidation Against Pro-Walker Teacher Kristi Lacroix

The attack goons of the Wisconsin Education Association Council are attempting to destroy high school teacher Kristi Lacroix, who appeared in this pro-Scott Walker advertisement last month:

Greta Van Susteren interviewed Governor Walker on the developments, "Wis. Woman Allegedly Harassed for Criticizing 'Sour Grapes' Recall Movement on Gov. Walker":

VAN SUSTEREN: Now Kristi LaCroix said there is even an online campaign to get her fired. Law enforcement says there's been dangerous behavior from both sides of the recall effort. Governor Scott Walker joins us. Good evening, sir.

WIS. GOV. SCOTT WALKER: Good evening, Greta.

VAN SUSTEREN: Governor, do you have anything or would anyone within your close circle have anything to do with this ad or did the teacher come up with the ad herself?

WALKER: Actually it's our campaign that did the ad, but this teacher literally sat down in front of a camera like I am right now and just talked. She had no script. She just talked what was on her heart. We have another teacher starting with a similar ad today and we will have workers in the private sector and parents and grandparents.

But this woman just said what was on her mind. It's amazing to see how outrageous it is. That's what happens when you see so much influence coming in from outside of Wisconsin. That's not the way we do it in Wisconsin. We don't attack people because it's a difference of opinion. People came out to my home and attacked -- not attacked but harassed not only my family but my neighbors. They have been point to go people on Facebook and pointing to folks on my kids' Facebook site and they have said outrageous things about my family again today.

Again, it's one thing to inform a debate or another to distract or distort it. And nobody, whether they are for or against me, including those who oppose our recall, nobody should be doing things that cross the line like that.

VAN SUSTEREN: Explain something to me. When you ran for office you had a certain platform. When you got into office did you carry out that platform so that it was no particular surprise to the voters, or did you change and thus all of a sudden everyone gotten enraged and said Walker went much farther than he of told us? Or explain how that worked.

WALKER: No. And in fact, I talked very explicitly about the fact that I was going to balance the budget, one of the largest deficits we had of had, a $3.6 billion, and do it without raising taxes, do it without cutting core services. In fact a billion dollars more was added to the budget for Medicaid for needy families and children and seniors, and put resources more effectively like in the classroom to help the kids. We did all those things. Unlike states that raised taxes, laid off employees and did other things that damaged their states, we avoided that because we put reforms in that empowered our state and our local government to balance our budgets.

These are not normal people --- they're progressives, and they don't accept legitimate difference. They seek to demonize and destroy, nothing less --- and I can attest to that first hand.

More at Big Government, "Union Radicals Harass Teacher Who Dared to Support Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker."

RELATED: "Carl Salonen Libelous Workplace Allegations of Child Pornography and Sexual Harassment at Long Beach City College," and "Roundup on Progressive Campaign of Workplace Intimidation and Harassment."

Plus, "W. James Casper's Demonic Band of Progressive Totalitarians."

Charles Blow Attacks Newt Gingrich's Imaginary War on Children

I predicted this the other day when I wrote:

Newt will be hammered as the right's public policy Ebenezer Scrooge who's also an epic hypocrite adulterer with the moral backbone of a snail.

And barely 24 hours later, here's Charles Blow with an attack on Newt at the New York Times, "Newt’s War on Poor Children":

Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.

Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

On Thursday, at a campaign stop in Iowa, the former House speaker said, “Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” (His second “fact” was that every first generational person he knew started work early.)

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

I've taken after Charles Blow before for his truly epic mendacity. But I had no idea I'd forecast this idiotic attack so accurately. Ebenzer Scrooge is, of course, the tight-fisted old meany in Charles Dickens's 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. Being Christmas season that's the literary image that first came to me, but a variation of the Scrooge attack is inevitable if Newt manages to win the nomination. At that point I'll of course be putting aside any differences I might have with Gingrich. Indeed, I'll be bending over backwards for his victory over Barack Obama, who he has rightly hammered as "Legitimately and Authentically a Saul Alinsky Radical."

Meanwhile, check out this penetrating essay at William Jacobson's, "Don’t play the “baggage” game." And a key passage there:

The purest of personally pure candidates will be faulted for being a religious nut and not hip enough to be president, someone from the white bread 1950s. Policies advocating personal responsibility and empowerment will be portrayed as cruel and favoring the rich. Advocacy of treating people according to the content of their characters rather than the colors of their skin will be protrayed as racially insensitive or racist.

Exactly.

New Direction for Occupy Wall Street?

Check yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "Eviction pushes Occupy protesters in new directions."

Lots of folks are talking about how Occupy's causing a long-term shift towards reducing income inequality in American politics. I'm a bit skeptical about that. I expect mostly more violent agitation from the more radical Occupy mobs. Mentioned at the Times, for example, are plans for "national and regional coordinated actions" like "a Dec. 12 shutdown of West Coast ports."

I saw something on this the other day, and Occupy Oakland has this, "Support Grows For Occupy Movement’s Coordinated West Coast Shut Down On December 12th."

“We’re shutting down these ports because of the union busting and attacks on the working class by the 1%: the firing of Port truckers organizing at SSA terminals in LA; the attempt to rupture ILWU union jurisdiction in Longview, WA by EGT. EGT includes Bunge LTD, a company which reported 2.5 billion dollars in profit last year and has economically devastated poor people in Argentina and Brazil. SSA is responsible for inhumane working conditions and gross exploitation of port truckers and is owned by Goldman Sachs. EGT and Goldman Sachs is Wallstreet on the Waterfront” stated Barucha Peller of the West Coast Port Blockade Assembly of Occupy Oakland.

“We are also striking back against the nationally’ coordinated attack on the Occupy movement. In response to the police violence and camp evictions against the Occupy movement- This is our coordinated response against the 1%. On December 12th we will show are collective power through pinpointed economic blockade of the 1%.”

Sounds pretty militant, and no doubt some of these folks are dead serious, given the scale of unrest during the recent Oakland port shutdown. Anyway, more on this from Lee Stranahan, at Big Government, "Occupy Leader Says Union ‘Opposition’ to Planned 12/12 West Coast Port Shutdown Is ‘Just a Game’."

Tea Party vs. Occupy

Via American Glob:

Protesters Leave Behind 30 Tons of Debris at Occupy L.A.

Dirtbags.

And from Glenn Reynolds, "Remember how the Tea Party protesters left things neater than they found them? Which group is more likely to have a positive vision for America’s future?"

At Los Angeles Times, "Occupy L.A.: 30 tons of debris left behind at City Hall tent city."

Plus, "Occupy L.A.: Protesters march downtown past LAPD headquarters."

Police Clear Occupy Los Angeles

At San Francisco Chronicle, "Nearly 300 arrested in raid on Occupy Los Angeles," and KCAL 9 Los Angeles, "292 Protesters Arrested, ‘Occupy LA’ Ends Peacefully."

Maybe not so peaceful, actually. See Los Angeles Times, "LAPD too violent, some Occupy L.A. protesters allege."

Also, "Occupy LA: LAPD clears nation’s largest remaining Occupy camp."

'Tolerant' Progressives Ramp Up Death Threats Against Conservatives

At Zilla of the Resistance, "New Death Threats from Islamic Supremacists and their Islamoblow Enablers Show How Much They CAIR."

And following the links there to Atlas Shrugs, "SUPPORT PAMELA GELLER, GET DEATH THREATS," and Teresamerica, "An Islamofascist Threatened Me - I Continue To Support Pamela Geller in the Face of Threats."

I wouldn't be surprised if these freaks are tied to Walter James Casper III's band of neo-fascist progressive totalitarians. RACIST REPSAC3 put the hit out on Pamela last summer, in a blog post calling to "Investigate Pamela Geller!" And now RACIST REPSAC's holiday comment threads are making sexualized references to my wife. As noted previously, this is why I don't publish my wife's information, since these fuckers would hunt her down. They would rape her given the chance. I don't doubt it for a minute. Zilla calls out Walter James Casper:

Update: Last month I posted in support of my friend Donald Douglas who runs the American Power blog, who has, for years, been under relentless attack by hateful leftists who have even gone so far as to try to get him fired from his job - simply because they disagree with his political opinions. Donald has a new post up today describing the fact that the blog dedicated in its entirety to attacking him, could not even leave him alone on Thanksgiving Day. The comments section there includes some snide remarks about his marriage. How very sad that some people apparently have nothing better to do, on a day dedicated to reflecting on all of the things for which one should be thankful, than to pick at a man over every single thing he ever writes on his blog, and then bitch about it when that man discusses the relentless attacks. But then again, Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and gratitude is something expressed by people who actually have functioning souls, so I suppose this should not be surprising.

Let's set the record straight: RACIST REPSAC3 is a stalking hate blogger. RACIST REPSAC3 is lying. No one "attacked" him. I don't even link him. He stalks my blog like a troll. And the coward blows a fuse when his hatred and harassment are called out. The fascisitic vampire is kicked to the curb by my high standard of moral right. It's like a crucifix to evil. Recall the context to Zilla's update: I mentioned why I don't publish my wife's name at the blog. I indicated that Walter James Casper III and his horde of fascistic henchmen would threaten her, given the chance. These are the same people who published my workplace information, launched campaigns of workplace intimidation, alleged that I was a child pedophile --- the allegations going all the way to the California Attorney General's Office --- harassed me personally at my blog and by email, and now they're making sexualized references about my wife. Obviously, nothing good would come of them getting a hold of my wife's phone number (which they indicated they'd like to do) or her work information. They'd kill her if they could. That's what I believe, given the unreal campaign of hate and intimidation that's been sponsored already by RACIST REPSAC WALTER JAMES CASPER III and his fascistic band of progressive totalitarians.

The Rise and Demise of the Zuccotti Park Commune

I'm just now getting a chance to read this phenomenal photo-essay from El Marco, "Zuccotti Utopia: Portraits of The New Revolutionaries."

Grab a cup of coffee. The dude knows what he's talking about.

Zombie comments as well, "The entire Occupy movement summarized in one sign."