Blog – Page 5 – Before We Were White

Cultural Genocide by Paperwork

2 October 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Jeanette Campbell – no Scots-Irishwoman

In US history, it’s called “genocide by paperwork”.

An Indigenous woman becomes consort to a frontier settler or wealthy planter.

She is given a “Christian” name – maybe that of a neighbor or local preacher.

Her husband/partner calls her “white” in census records to protect the rights of his mixed-ethnic children.

Later historians scan records, see the surname “Campbell”, and see the entire household enumerated as “white”.

And just like that, another piece of Cherokee, Pamunkey, Catawba, Tuscarora, Choctaw, or Shawnee history is “disappeared”, tallied as yet another “white Scots-Irish pioneer woman” of the American frontier.

Most Americans today have no comprehension of the society-induced shame and self-loathing which led generations of people to destroy photos attesting to their “non-white” family’s past.

Unambiguous, testifying photos are treasures, scarce as hen’s teeth.

Loss of language and customs, changing of name and religion, inaccurate census descriptions, destruction of photographs, and non-inclusion in the official story of “white” settlers.

Cultural genocide by paperwork is real.

Image: attributed as Jeanette Campbell, born 1817

#papergenocide #indigenouswomen #history #appalachia

Haiti and Hate

2 October 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

US Marines during occupation of Haiti, 1915

Inspired in part by the success of the American Revolution, enslaved Haitians rose up against their French colonial oppressors in 1791.

And won.

Many Haitians had hoped and even expected that the new USA would recognise their independence – after all, many free Black Haitian “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” had fought alongside American militias against the British only a decade earlier…

Under the ever-classy Thomas Jefferson, the USA withheld recognition, choosing to isolate the new Caribbean nation, fearing that Haiti would become a beacon and example to enslaved peoples in the USA.

What’s more, the USA would enforce a trade embargo on the nascent Haitian state, an embargo which signalled the start of two full centuries of US colonialist interference, including the brutal occupation of Haiti by US Marines in 1915.

Way back in 1825, French gunboats had already returned to Haiti, demanding financial “compensation” for the loss of French slaveholders’ “property” during the recent revolution.

Failure to comply would have resulted in the French government refusing to recognise Haitian claims of independence, and almost certain renewed war.

With no help forthcoming, Haiti had no choice but to accept these terms.

Economically isolated and financially crippled, Haiti was forced to take out more and more additional loans to service this “independence debt”.

Shortly before WWI, the US “acquired” Haiti’s national treasury, and after WWI, Haiti’s remaining “debt” was moved onto the books of US investors such as the National City Bank of New York (later known as Citibank).

During the U.S. occupation of Haiti, more than seven percent of Haiti’s land was given or sold to U.S. companies.

Interest which had accrued on loans taken out by Haiti between 1825 and 1875 was not finally paid-off to US investors until 1947, shortly after the end of WWII…

From the establishment of the first European settlement of La Isabela by Christopher Columbus in 1493 – right up to the present day – Indigenous and African peoples on the island once called Quisqueya or Ayiti have been victims of slavery, colonialist exploitation, international capitalism, and the violent puppet regimes supported or enabled by outside interests.

And this is why 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians can end-up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio in 2024, willing to work LEGALLY in factories owned by shameless multi-national conglomerates like Dole, PLC., a company which cut its teeth by overthrowing Indigenous leaders and taking-over much of Hawaii in order to turn it into a vast pineapple plantation, manned by field workers from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal.

Pineapples are not native to Hawaii, by the way. But then again, nor are American capitalists…

It’s all part of the game called “Global Capital”, and the winners under this system don’t give a solitary f**k what people at the bottom – Black, White, Haitian, or American – think about it.

Until they need a vote, that is.

Then the mess caused by greed and neoliberal economic theorists (like Ohio-born Arthur Laffer) can be blamed on cat-eating Haitian “unhumans” by racist, misogynistic dungsacks like J. D. Vance.

Hi! I’m Kristi!

1 October 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Images: Noem embraces former President Donald Trump; Redfox family with Lutheran minister M. B. Ordahl [1929]

Hi! My name is Kristi Noem.

You probably already know me. I’m the governor of South Dakota, where we like living right and being free.

This great ol’ state was built by decent Christians like my great-grandpa Edward Arnold, who arrived in South Dakota in 1887 with his daddy in a boxcar on the brand new railroad into Indian country.

These heroes of the Old West were poor immigrants from the Old World, living-out the American Dream. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps by courageously squatting on some land just taken from the Isanti Dakota people – non-Christians who totally deserved to lose their land, by the way…

Don’t think for a minute that getting free land gave my great-grandpa any advantages in life!

Anyways, there ain’t a day I don’t thank my grandparents for handing-down the traditions which made this country great.

Like hard work, or knowing when to wear a cowboy hat or wave a gun for press photographers.

And not being afraid to make tough decisions.

Like knowing when a puppy is just so dang disobedient, the best thing is to drag it on out to a gravel pit and put a bullet through its stupid little head.

Well, I suppose The Lord has His reasons for why some will thrive while others must perish.

And look how good things turned-out in the end for the Indians!

Don’t you ever question American decency, whatever them coastal Commies say in the Lib-run media.

We Dakotans still sent missionaries out to save Indian souls, even though their grandparents LITERALLY tried to shoot our brave pioneer forefathers!

That’s true Christian forgiveness right there.

We built nice Indian Boarding Schools, where they could learn to speak a normal, civilized language, and even learn to do figgers.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people who’ve been given a reservation AND the gospel (with baptisms thrown in!) still keep standing in the way of progress and arguing about oil pipelines.

Anyhow, gotta run now. Still waiting on a phone call from Donald…

C’mon there, Grasshopper. Heel! I said heel, dammit!

#history #satire #beforewewerewhite

History, Sex, Power, and the American Underclasses (whew)

1 October 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

William Conway Day with wife Nancy Parks [Cherokee]

Humans like sex.

It’s why there are over 8 billion of us on the planet now.

So far, so blazingly obvious.

Men, women, and folks in between have never been particularly picky or finicky in terms of “race”, ethnicity, or skin color in selecting sexual partners.

This is the reason almost every population group outside of Africa shares some DNA with the now extinct Neanderthal people. It’s hard to believe there could have ever been a taboo on inter-ethnic sex in ancient times, when even INTER-SPECIES sex was clearly widespread. We’ll probably never know the exact social dynamics involved – was this a case of free association, did Homo sapiens women take a fancy to muscular Neanderthal men, or were Neanderthal women taken captive and “integrated” by male Homo sapiens?

As far as sex in American history goes – 40,000 years later – there is a centuries-long pattern of interpersonal and social dysfunction surrounding this most natural of human needs.

BUT ONLY AMONG THOSE WHO ASPIRED TO SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY.

The aristocracy and elites have almost always been careful to maintain a public façade of “respectability”, while proceeding to do whatever they damn well pleased when out of the public eye – and often in flagrant view of the public, too, if their rank allowed them to get away with it. Mistresses, consorts, courtesans, downstairs maids, you name it.

The truly poor also tended to do whatever the hell they wanted. As people of “no account”, they were often exempt from social expectations, or at least largely ignored.

Social respectability has traditonally always been a particularly nagging problem for the “middling classes” aka “petit bourgeois” who simultaneously sought to distance themselves from the underclasses while attempting to climb the social ladder and find acceptance (or maybe even a place) among elite society.

I’m rambling.

My point is this. Whatever the attempts to patrol sexual behavior by the religious or wider society, there has always been licit and illicit sex between willing (and often unwilling) partners in American history, and such sex crossed all ethnic boundaries.

Hannah Bonney, daughter of a humble shoemaker in Puritan-run Massachusetts, was charged with “fornication and bearing the child of a negro” named Nimrod as early as 1685.

But what most people today will not be able to wrap their heads around, after 400 years of entrenched racism, is the idea that Puritan society was far more obsessed with “class”, than with “race” or ethnicity.

What would have shocked Hannah Bonney‘s contemporaries far more than the color of her lover, was the idea that she would consort with someone from the ENSLAVED CLASS – WHILE OUT OF WEDLOCK!

It is only the development of a “racial caste system” over many decades during the late 1600s and early 1700s that would cause “enslaved” and “Black” to become almost synonymous in the minds of most free people.

Once a society is poisoned by the concept of “castes” – based in gender, religion, or “race” – then sex itself becomes polluted by a disturbing dynamic.

Power.

When sex is no longer a consensual frolic in the hay between willing partners, it becomes performative, in a social sense.

Who is watching to see if we are married? Are we of equal social status? What are people saying? Cheap? Masculine? Coquettish? Powerful? Slutty? Dominant?

In a society with free “White” males at the top of the social hierarchy, women, as underlings, cannot be allowed to freely choose their partners.

For a “White” woman to choose a “Black” man was (and among some weirdos still is) the ultimate rejection of the “White” patriarchy – BECAUSE ALL WHITE WOMEN SHOULD BE SUBSERVIENT TO WHITE MEN, AND MUST BE THEORETICALLY “AVAILABLE” TO ANY WHITE MAN AHEAD OF ANY BLACK MAN.

For a White female to choose ANY Black man for a partner – however talented, handsome, hard-working, or successful – was tantamount to telling every White male – poor, middling, or elite – that they were not above Black people, or indeed, not even above WOMEN.

This dysfunctonal “racial” and sexual politics has always been about power and control, and it is why conservatives in the USA are still often obsessed with controlling women’s bodies.

This is also why a much, much higher percentage of the mixed-ethnic children born in America over the past four centuries tended to be born to women of color and “white” men.

Within a “white” patriarchy, almost ALL women, of any “race”, color, or ethnicity must be potentially “available” to “white” men.

It was also the case that children born to a white man and a woman of color had a better chance of eventually “passing for white” than children born to a Black man and a white woman.

Think about it. With men usually controlling property and the purse strings, imagine being a half-Cherokee woman from Western North Carolina in 1830.

Marry a white man, and your children would most likely be able to attend school and church, buy cheap land in Tennessee or Kentucky, inherit property, carry a gun, and vote.

Marry a man within the Cherokee Nation, and things were looking precarious.

Marry a Black man, and all bets were off…

This socio-sexual situation is almost certainly why a huge percentage of Appalachian families share folklore about a distant grandmother who was a “Cherokee princess”.

She wasn’t a “princess”. She was a tough woman who made some tough choices.

The reason Southern Appalachia, The Ozarks, parts of The Deep South, and a few other places have often been described by “respectable society” as being home to “white trash”, is because for centuries these places harbored people who had been intermixing since the 1600s. In being profoundly mixed-ethnic, such people were already so far down the social scale that there was little or nothing to be gained in playing by the rules of “respectable” society.

Places like Southern Appalachia made their own rules – about justice, about sexual relations, about honor. It seems to have never occurred to outsiders that when they chose to view mountain people unfavorably through the lens of their own “respectable society”, they were being bigoted and ignorant of the many “ways of being” which were correct and entirely proper for people descended from Indigenous Americans, Africans, Romani, and the many other “brown peoples” who intermarried or simply co-habited with incoming European settler-colonizers.

It shouldn’t need saying, but how people have sex and with whom is nobody else’s damn business, as long as no one is being hurt.

I’ve Got a Name

1 October 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Anglo-American surnames: unreliable historical narrators

Like the pine trees linin’ the windin’ road

I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name

Like the singin’ bird and the croakin’ toad

I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name

And I carry it with me like my daddy did

But I’m living the dream that he kept hid…

Jim Croce [1973]

*****

Who Changed or Modified Their Names in Colonial Times in North America?

Most people see their surname as almost immutable evidence of their ancestry or ethnic heritage, yet the Americas and Caribbean were colonized in part by non-Anglo people who often changed their names to “fit-in”.

Other non-Anglo groups who were not colonizers – indigenous peoples and the enslaved – often assumed an English name or had one foisted upon them. This might occur upon enslavement, emancipation, conversion to Christianity, or as a simple attempt to assimilate into the dominant culture.

There were many other groups of people with reason to change their names:

Adoptees
Bandits, Criminals, Outlaws, and Pirates
Illegitimate or “base-born” children
Orphans
People hiding from family or creditors
Spies
Traders

*****

Listed below are some non-Anglo ethnic groups who rarely kept their original names. Even when they attempted to do so, their names were almost always modified or corrupted by English-speaking record takers:

Free dual- or multiple-identity ethnic groups (Métis, “half-breeds”, Melungeons, et al)

Free indigenous North American peoples (Lenape, Iroquois, Shawnee, Catawba, Tuscarora, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Yuchi, Pamunkey, and hundreds of other tribes, bands, and nations)

Free indigenous South American and Caribbean peoples (Arawak, Taino, and any number of other tribes, bands, and nations)

Enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples of African, Malagasy, indigenous, and mixed ancestry.

South Asians (free and unfree, including Lascars and Portuguese Goans)

Gaelic speaking people (Scots, Manx, Irish)

Welsh speaking people (including speakers of Breton from Brittany in NW France)

Jewish people (Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and other Jewish groups including Black Jewish of South America, West Africa, and Caribbean)

Romani people (especially Eastern European Slavs, French Manouche, Iberian Calé/Gitanos/Ciganos, Welsh Kale, and German Sinti)

Also:

Armenians
Azore Islanders
Basques (from Basque Country now in both France and Spain)
Czechs (including Bohemian Jews at Roanoke Colony in 1585!)
Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes
Dutch (including those from New Amsterdam, Dutch Suriname, Dutch East and West Indies and Flemish speakers)
Finns
French speakers (including those from Switzerland, Belgian Walloons, and French Caribbean)
German speakers (including those from Austria, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and the various regions of Germany itself)
Greeks
Hungarians
Italians (including Waldensians)
Minorcans, Majorcans
North Africans (Arabs, Berber/Amazigh, et al)
Poles
Portuguese (including Creoles from various Portuguese colonies)
Sami (formerly known as Laplanders)
Spanish
Turks

All of the above non-Anglo peoples have been documented as being present in pre-Revolutionary British Colonial America – and there were no doubt other ethnic groups less well-documented.

*****

Many people assume that formerly enslaved people of color invariably took the surnames of their former enslavers, but the story is far more complex.

Many of the formerly enslaved (and particularly those not of exclusively African heritage) had remembered histories and names from the period before enslavement.

While the enslaved of primarily African heritage were often wrenched from a homeland thousands of miles distant, with little hope of maintaining any meaningful cultural continuity in the Americas (due to the intentional break-up of their ethnic communities), there were many, many others held in bondage who experienced slavery in close proximity to the still nominally free members of their local cultural community.

For example, an enslaved multi-ethnic person in Alabama or Mississippi with known free Choctaw ancestors might have chosen to use an English or Spanish family surname first assumed during the 1600s and 1700s when the Choctaw first traded with Europeans. These earliest “borrowed” surnames often have more to do with respect for a local priest/clergyman, or intermarriage with a trader, than anything to do with a slaveholder.

This makes the respect and study of such surnames important as a potential source of clues regarding historical ethnic mixing and migration in colonial times.

White Intelligence, LLC.

12 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Vance and notes to his book “Hillbilly Elegy”

It’s only after various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are in place that we can begin to see some semblance of a picture.

When I first wrote about J. D. Vance a few years ago, it was out of simple anger.

Anger that a man who had managed to become wealthy would take the time to write an ideological piece disguised as a “memoir”, the now infamous “Hillbilly Elegy”.

Anger that a man clearly the descendant of mixed-ethnic Appalachian Americans would portray himself as a “Scots-Irish Hillbilly”.[1]

Anger that this man used his ignorance of his own ethnic roots to construct a dumb “Scots-Irish Culture Theory” [2] to explain Southern Appalachian social problems and poverty.

Anger that a film director of Ron Howard‘s standing would buy the entire story wholesale, amplifying Vance’s fake backstory [3] to a wider and credulous American audience.

But most of my anger was reserved for the way Vance essentially blamed social dysfunction, substance abuse, and what HE perceives as a lack of ambition, on the people themselves.[2]

Not just on individual people and their individual choices, mind you. He blamed widespread social malaise on something INNATE to these people. Something in their culture.[2] Something in their GENES.

If this had been the extent of his nastiness and ignorance, it could have been dealt with in short order.

First, J. D. Vance is not “Scots-Irish”. Not by descent, and not by culture.[1]

He is like a kid – a very human kid – who wins a medal in the long jump in high school, and then proceeds to explain that his grandparents were in fact kangaroos.

And the only reason no one else in his family ever won a long jump medal, was because they all kept insisting on hopping across busy roads, and getting run over.

They’re very proud kangaroos, you see, and won’t be told where they can or can’t hop…

*****

Once our friend J. D. decided to run for the Senate, I began to suspect there was something more sinister afoot.

When riches aren’t enough and someone begins to crave POWER, it is worth asking what they would like to achieve with a greater level of personal and political power.

I’ve written elsewhere about how, during his time at Yale Law School, Vance and his future wife Usha Chilukuri jointly organized a discussion group focusing on “social decline in white America”.[3]

I’ve also written elsewhere about how Vance’s political ambitions have been deeply-backed financially by ultra-Libertarian tech barons like Peter Thiel [4], who specialises in Big Data mining.

I’ve pointed-out how Vance’s wife contributed to the senate election campaign of Blake Masters in Arizona [5]. I explained how Masters is an open and avowed fan of the late white supremacist “philosopher” Sam Francis [6].

I wrote that Masters has also worked for and received millions of dollars in backing from the aforementioned Peter Thiel [7].

Once we had all of these “border pieces” of the jigsaw in place, we could begin to work toward the interior.

And the emerging picture looks a bit like an Hieronymus Bosch painting…

*****

Remember those guys at school who were always trying to join “Mensa”, the weird club for people with a need to feel intellectually elite?

The socially maladroit guys who openly believed that having a high IQ score made them superior to those around them?

The ones so deep inside the cult of “intelligence”, philosophical thought experiments, IQ scores, tech, science and science fiction that they begin to believe that they are above accountability to anyone outside their exclusive technocracy? People who seem to be skirting the outer edge of a way of thinking not entirely dissimilar to the social and moral “transcendence” of the child killers Leopold and Loeb in the 1920s USA?

The ones who adore statistics (any statistics) which can be manipulated to underpin their belief in their own oh-so-rare-and-special transcendant superiority?

The ones who eventually begin to find a reason for their financial success IN THEIR VERY GENETIC SUPERIORITY?

Vance is being propped-up by exactly those guys, who are now middle-aged, wealthy, and powerful. They have also donated millions to current GOP candidate Donald Trump [8].

The connections between groups like Mensa and the alt. right have been commented upon and documented elsewhere [9].

But Peter Thiel appears to have been in direct communication with members of extremist white supremacy group members back in 2016 [10].

People like Elon Musk and his former partner Grimes have been open and simultaneously disingenuous in their support of “White Pride” [11].

The admirers of high IQ scores among extreme Libertarians and the alt. right are also the ones most likely to subscribe to the thinking behind books like “The Bell Curve” [12], which presented a deeply flawed analysis of data suggesting that intelligence is highly heritable, and that IQ itself varies greatly across “racial” groups at birth (basically suggesting that poverty among certain people of color is an unsolvable problem, due to fundamental differences in intelligence levels).

A distant Vance cousin of our friend J. D. noted this week on her social media page that J. D. Vance actually felt brazen enough to offer a blurb to a book published this year called “Unhumans” [13], which is essentially a brownshirt fascist call to arms against “enemies” of the alt. right. The book has also been praised by such “luminaries” as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Jr., and Tucker Carlson [14].

A final piece of this jigsaw landed in my hand this week via a brief comment left by a follower of this very page. A reader pointed-out that the alt. right, white supremacist nature of Vance and his backers was sitting there, hiding in plain sight, in the list of notes on the final page of Vance’s grubby springboard to fame, his 2016 faux memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” [1].

Note No. 1 cites a 2012 article called “The Scots-Irish as Indigenous People”, written by none other than Bangladeshi-American animal genomics specialist Razib Khan [15].

Don’t bother looking for the article online, though, unless you’re prepared to dig deep. The article has been removed from the website of Discover Magazine, where it was first published. The article has also been removed from Mr. Khan’s own website [16]. I just happened to have an old PDF of it lying around the recesses of my trusty PC.

Why is it gone? Probably because it’s a pile of poorly informed, pseudo-scholarly claptrap.

Which should probably come as no surprise, as Razib Khan is quite the busy little bee in the field of “New Eugenics”. Not heard of “New Eugenics”?

You’re probably not a regular reader of far right blogs like Taki’s Magazine [17], VDARE, or the Unz Review [16].

You would need to follow such blogs to be up-to-date on the new racialist obsession with HBD [18] – “human bio-diversity”, which is essentially racism in search of a scientific underpinning.

This jigsaw isn’t finished, but we can see enough now to have an understanding of the man on Trump’s ticket. A mixed-ethnic Melungeon in denial, who wants to play with the “white” Übermenschen.

*****

[1] beforewewerewhite.com/2024/07/24/sometimes-i-forget-myself/

[2] harperacademic.com/book/9780062300553/hillbilly-elegy/

[3] imdb.com/title/tt6772802/

[4] forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/07/19/here-are-jd-vances-biggest-billionaire-donors/

[4] ft.com/content/408fb864-5831-4b1d-beef-fd1966b3beed

[5] washingtonian.com/2024/07/18/6-things-to-know-about-usha-vance-the-potential-next-second-lady/

[6] mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/blake-masters-endorsed-white-supremacist-writer-who-said-country-should-oppose

[7] politico.com/news/2022/07/22/peter-thiel-arizona-senate-campaign-00047536

[8] reuters.com/world/us/who-are-mega-rich-donors-backing-trump-2024-04-26/

[8] latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-26/elon-musk-and-peter-thiel-backed-trump-and-vance-to-what-ends

[9] newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/jamie-loftus-the-comedian-who-infiltrated-mensa

[10] splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/03/18/white-nationalist-who-met-peter-thiel-admired-terroristic-literature

[10] nytimes.com/2021/09/21/books/review/the-contrarian-peter-thiel-max-chafkin.html

[11] theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964160/elon-musk-antisemitic-x-post-ibm-ads

[11] consequence.net/2023/12/grimes-white-culture/

[12] intelltheory.com/intelli/the-bell-curve/

[12] archive.org/details/whatitmeanstobel00char

[13] skyhorsepublishing.com/9781648210860/unhumans/

[14] usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/08/jd-vance-support-book-unhumans/74687296007/

[15] forward.com/opinion/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/

[15] pinkerite.com/2022/01/the-appalling-race-pseudoscience-career.html

[15] undark.org/2017/02/28/race-science-razib-khan-racism/

[16] unz.com/gnxp/the-scots-irish-as-indigenous-people/

[17] takimag.com/

[18] brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/9780815732884_ch1.pdf

The Invention of New Hebrews

12 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Places of origin and original surnames of prominent Zionists

Many people watching the news coming out of the Near East would presume that Hebrew has been the language spoken by Jewish people throughout history.

But for nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was as dead as Latin – and much like Latin, was spoken fluently by only a tiny percentage of educated people, and then used mostly in a religious context.

People of the Jewish faith were spread over much of the world, and usually spoke the language of their country of birth – just as Catholics could be found speaking Spanish, Gaelic, Italian, French, German, and dozens of other languages.

Other than specialist scholars, only Catholic priests tended to have a good grasp of Latin, and only rabbis tended to have a good grasp of Hebrew.

Over many centuries, the Sephardic Jews of Iberia spoke languages including Arabic, Old Spanish, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Ladino – the latter also known as Judaeo-Spanish.

The most well-known language spoken by many Jews past and present is “Yiddish”, a name which is more or less a dialectical variation on the German word for “Jewish” (“Jüdisch”, in which the German “J” is pronounced like an English “Y”).

Yiddish is essentially German, with a smattering of words from Slavic and Romance languages, along with a sprinkling of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other loan words from the many countries through which the Ashkenazi Jews had passed over the centuries.

The actual Hebrew language spoken by Israeli politicians in contemporary news bulletins is a language brought back from the dead – mostly by 19th and 20th century Zionist settler-colonisers of Palestine.

And all of the Israeli leaders and politicians of the 20th century with names like Netanyahu, Ben-Gurion, Shamir, etc. represent a Zionist ideological desire to carry names which harken back to an ancient time (2,000 years ago) when land and language were still together under the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

Apologists for Zionism and Israel’s illegal settlements claim ceaselessly that “Jews are indigenous to Israel, we cannot be colonisers in our own land”.

This is an absurd and illogical argument.

Something equivalent would involve millions of Irish-Americans today claiming a birthright to colonise and settle the entire island of Ireland – Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – while basing their claim on the territory held by High King Brian Boru in 1014 CE.

Political and demographic changes have occurred in the 1,000 years since Brian Boru‘s armies won the Battle of Clontarf. The original Irish remain, but the island has also endured invasions of Normans, Elizabethans, Scottish, English, and Welsh settler-colonisers, and absorbed many other immigrant peoples including Flemish, Palatine Germans, French Huguenots, members of the Quaker community, and of course Jewish and Romani people.

The Irish have witnessed and taken part in sundry rebellions, uprisings, and wars in the three hundred years since some of their ancestors emigrated to places like France and America.

Imagine the UK becoming embroiled in a war somewhere, and they take their eye off the ball in Northern Ireland. Imagine a couple of million Catholic Irish-Americans from Chicago and Boston rocking-up in County Antrim tomorrow, saying “This belonged to the O’Neill family 500 years ago. All non-Catholics and non-Gaels out.”

Ridiculous, right? People from thousands of miles away, steeped in USA culture for decades and even centuries, now ordering people who’ve lived in a place for 400 years to get the hell out based on a territorial claim made by a king centuries ago…

Imagine these Irish-Americans from Chicago and Boston then clearing entire towns and villages all over Ulster through ceaseless campaigns of violence and terrorism? Violence and terrorism directed not only at the Irish Protestant community, but at ANY group daring to oppose their “return to the homeland”?

Imagine the entire American military machine (along with billions upon billions in American and Irish-American funding), being put at their disposal as they bulldoze Belfast and rip up crop fields.

Imagine them giving themselves Gaelic names…

Behold the son of Eire, Frank Gillespie of Chicago. Oops. I mean Proinsias Mac Giolla Easpaig.

“Netanyahu” my arse.

I’ll leave you, dear readers, with the text of an open letter sent to The New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other prominent, decent, and admirable Jewish people in 1948, the year in which Israel unilaterally declared its independent statehood. Just three years after the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, these people had the moral courage to speak out when they saw wickedness and injustice being perpetrated by their own people.

*****

TO THE EDITORS OF NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ,
HANNAH ARENDT,
ABRAHAM BRICK,
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO,
ALBERT EINSTEIN,
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.,
HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D.,
H.H. HARRIS,
ZELIG S. HARRIS,
SIDNEY HOOK,
FRED KARUSH,
BRURIA KAUFMAN,
IRMA L. LINDHEIM,
NACHMAN MAISEL,
SEYMOUR MELMAN,
MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D.,
HARRY M. OSLINSKY,
SAMUEL PITLICK,
FRITZ ROHRLICH,
LOUIS P. ROCKER,
RUTH SAGIS,
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY,
I.J. SHOENBERG,
SAMUEL SHUMAN,
M. SINGER,
IRMA WOLFE,
STEFAN WOLFE.

New York, Dec. 2, 1948

Protection from Harm

12 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

“Protecting from harm” in the Middle East, while hospitals close in Wheeling, WV.

“Harm” = mental or physical injury

They say the taxes spent on the US military are essential for “protecting freedoms” and keeping Americans safe from harm.

The leading cause of “harm” in the USA is poverty, not the actions of foreign powers.

The lowest rates of premature death in the USA are in wealthy northeastern states like Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The highest rates of premature death in the USA are in poor Appalachian and southern states like West Virginia and Mississippi.

*****

If government believes it has a role to play in keeping Americans safe from harm, then taxes should be spent on education, the alleviation of poverty, a healthy, clean environment, and the provision of universal health care.

The powers-that-be will insist that a vast taxpayer-funded military for “protecting” Americans is essential, while calling taxpayer-funded higher education and health care “radical socialism”.

Yet a taxpayer-funded military is “socialism for the rich”, because the corporatocracy uses this military to prop-up corrupt regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere – TO THE BENEFIT OF WEALTHY ELITES.

Trillions of taxpayer dollars are diverted into government contracts for the armaments industry.

Between 2001-2021, Pentagon spending was over 14 TRILLION dollars – one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors.

But a children’s hospital in Mississippi, or an addiction treatment center in West Virginia?

You gotta be joking.

How is that going to fill-up someone’s offshore bank account?

Second Amendment Redux

12 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Slave patrol – a well regulated militia

I have written elsewhere about the Second Amendment of the US Constitution having its roots in two or three major aspects of USA history.

On 15 Dec 1791, the second (of an initial ten amendments) was appended to the US Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Nowhere, in not one single instance before the 21st century (2008), was this amendment taken by any court as a federal guarantee of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

A federation of “states” such as the USA – without a monarch at its head – had never been formed in quite this way.

The US Bill of Rights was based loosely on an English Act of Parliament passed in 1689. A parliament had been convened largely in opposition to the deposed monarch (and convert to Catholicism) James II, with a majority of the English parliament having invited the Protestant William of Orange and his queen Mary (an Anglican daughter of James II) to become replacement sovereigns of England.

The 1689 Bill of Rights essentially laid-out the conditions for this invitation, outlining the rights which had been infringed by James II. It was basically saying to William III “You can be King of England instead of James, but only if you honour these rights”.

This English Bill of Rights included a provision that “Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law…”

It is without doubt that this right was a product of the recent English Civil War, and the Wars of Religion in Europe, in which Protestants had suffered persecution at the hands of the Catholic Church-supporting aristocracy in many lands.

As students of history, we must realise that the writers of this Constitution were only two or three generations removed from these events in England.

The framers of the US Constitution were seeking to balance the power of the federal executive with the rights of states as a way to prevent the Presidency and Congress from morphing back into an over-reaching monarchy and elitist House of Lords in all but name.

Their worries were largely conjectural – the USA was in deep, deep debt post-Revolution and in no position to create a standing army large enough to be a danger to state governance anyway.

Perhaps even more important, by sub-contracting the formation of militias to individual states, the US government was relieved of a huge cost burden.

Finally, slave state economies simply could not function or exist without well-armed militias (aka slave patrols). If the US government had attempted to remove slave states’ “…right of the people to keep and bear Arms…” as part of a “…well regulated Militia…”, there would have been uproar, and it is almost certain that the Bill of Rights and US Constitution would not have been ratified.

Anyone who doubts the centrality of slavery to American gun culture should read carefully the contemporary correspondence of men like Patrick Henry, he of the “Give me liberty or give me death” quote so beloved of Junior High School history teachers. “Liberty” was clearly not a concept meant to extend to all humans. After all, our hero Patrick held dozens of slaves in bondage his entire life. Mr. Henry was explicit in his worry that if an individual state’s right to maintain a standing militia were superceded by a centralised federal army, this federal army (full of potential abolitionists) might fail to arm or deploy itself sufficiently or act with the necessary severity needed to maintain the white supremacist status quo.

Once the USA realised and accepted that it was an empire in all but name, both states and federal government soon got over their queasiness about maintaining a national standing army. St. Clair’s Defeat at the hands of a Shawnee/Miami/Lenape Confederation in 1791, and the US failure in its attempts to invade and annex Canada during the War of 1812, made the transition from irregular militias to a professional army an urgent imperative.

So let’s read this sacred amendment one more time…

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The words “well regulated militia” and “state” are not there by accident.

If it had been written with anything contemporaneously akin to AR-15s and teenage boys weaned on Call of Duty in mind, it would have stated simply that:

“The right of an individual to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

A degree in history should be mandatory as part of all higher law degrees.

Many members of the US Supreme Court are supremely lacking in both a sense of ethics, and a sense of historical context in their decision-making.

(Author’s note: I am not anti-gun ownership, although I find the widespread availability and fetishisation of military style firearms disturbing and “weird”. I have owned a fine old handmade double-barrelled 12 gauge shotgun most of my life, and cannot imagine what use I could make of an AR-15. If the apocalypse comes, I’ll be more worried about seed potatoes than anything else.)

Picking a Version

3 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Battery E, 1st Artillery who took part in massacre at Wounded Knee

Attempting to understand and decipher history – real history – is hard.

We read, we question, we read some more, we check our sources for ideological bias, we read someone else’s revision of canonical sources, we sniff around for hidden motivations and contingencies…

And when we think we’ve got to the deepest level of interpretation, there is always another angle to consider.

Consider the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.

For those unfamiliar with this piece of American history, the bare bones of what happened is this:

The US government had signed treaties with the Lakota, primarily to protect colonisers passing through Lakota territory on the Oregon Trail to the American Northwest. The government of the US of America undertook to enforce a restriction on US citizens settling on Lakota territory.

The government of the US of America did not honor its undertakings as per treaty.

The discovery of gold in the Dakotas led to a mass influx of ruffians, squatters, and miners.

The introduction of forts and railroads on and over treaty-protected Lakota territory led to further conflict.

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US encouraged and facilitated the shooting to extinction of the Great Plains bison, which were the main source of sustenance for Indigenous peoples of the Plains.

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US allowed the mass settlement of Scandinavian immigrants in the Dakotas.

Under-employed veterans from the Civil War and newly enlisted men were sent west to put down Lakota resistance.

These early military expeditions against the Lakota and their allies were failures.

But “Custer’s Last Stand” is probably the worst name for any historical event in US history. It really should be called “The Lakota’s Last Stand”, for their battlefield victory at Little Big Horn would see the US throw its full weight behind neutralising the Lakota – the last self-governing group of Indigenous people in the lands now called the USA.

The Wounded Knee Massacre came at the tail end of various “mopping-up” operations by the US military, as remnant bands of Lakota were being rounded-up and forced onto small reservations.

Put simply, while force-marching a band of Lakota to a reservation, a roughneck bunch of green army recruits attempted to collect all firearms from the people being force-marched.

What happened next – the death of scores of Lakota people including women and children – is a perfect example of history which has been told from multiple angles…

1) Murica hoo-hah! version

Decent army boys (thank you for your service) just doing their job, and those darn “Injuns” went crazy, and we had to shoot the shit out of them in self defence.

2) Vietnam era hippy version

Gentle nature-worshipping people meaning no harm are brutally slain by colonialist oppressors.

3) Historian No. 1 version

Americans already inured to violence by the Civil War, along with recent immigrant recruits eager to “prove their worth”, are only too happy to fight wars against people they see as “savages”.

4) Historian No. 2 version

This mass shooting was a tragic escalation, in which army recruits already on edge due to their misunderstanding of the meaning of the “Ghost Dance” religious movement, saw danger in every aspect of Lakota behavior.

*****

There is something wrong with every one of these versions.

And only by digging, digging, digging can we hope to get a proper picture of such terrible events.

American “hoo-hah!” apologists for Manifest Destiny will point out that the Lakota were themselves a warlike people. After all, the original homeland of the Lakota was around the Great Lakes, and they were only in Dakota Territory recently, having taken those hunting grounds from the Crow people through warfare.

The hippy version also ignores the warlike nature of the Lakota.

The “proper” historical versions have their own specific angles of interpretation.

Every version seeks to blame, excuse, demonise, explain or justify.

No humans are saints. None are innocent “Children of God”.

But whoever we see as our enemy, there is a crystal moment of clarity when we can choose to do wrong, or try to do right.

There is no historical interpretation which will ever make it right, that men turned machine guns on women and children crouching for cover, terrified, in a deep ravine in mid-winter South Dakota.

And to those who insist that Wounded Knee was a tragic mistake?

On the shared image, you’ll find a piece of doggerel poetry.

People ashamed of a “tragic mistake” do not proudly pose for photos, and write such things.

Pick your version(s).