By Nicholas Stix
At The Last Refuge.
“Not counting the crimes, crime is down.” Grand Rapids Anonymous
The principle underlines the ideological point – those doing the attacking cannot ignore their instincts, control their behavior or comply with laws.
FERGUSON • The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it is hosting a training session through Friday about fair and impartial policing for commanders of local departments, including Ferguson’s.
The effort is part of the Justice Department’s Collaborative Reform Initiative within the St. Louis County police that started after Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in August.
President Barack Obama then asked Attorney General Eric Holder to send the agency’s Community Oriented Policing Services director, Ron Davis, to work with police officials in Ferguson.
The two-day training includes command-level law enforcement leadership from St. Louis County, St. Louis, the Missouri Highway Patrol and Ferguson police, as well as local community members.
The training is designed to enhance officers’ understanding of how bias — including implicit or unconscious bias — affects officer behavior, and the impact that biased policing has on officers and the community. Subsequent sessions focus on educating first-line supervisors and police trainers as a way to integrate these concepts into day-to-day practices, according to a Department of Justice official. (read more)
[The training is designed to inhibit white officers’ reflexes, so that when they have a split second to act in a life-or-death situation, they hesitate, so that black perps can murder them.]
THE SAFARI PRINCIPLE – The hidden subtext could be construed as the following…
In modern America, a prudent citizen should know to remain in their vehicle, doors locked, windows up, when there are young black males known to be in the vicinity.
If you do not follow the rules... and a non-black person is shot, killed or attacked, the non-black is at fault for not following the rules the police and black grievance industry wrote for them on the Safari Park safety brochure. The principle underlines the ideological point – those doing the attacking cannot ignore their instincts, control their behavior or comply with laws.
What does this say about our society?Are we living in a drive through Safari Park? If we get out of our vehicles we deserve what we get, and we shouldn’t blame the predators, much less shoot them in self-defense?
#Ferguson thugs threaten to rape cops wife 10/22/14 at 8:36 PM CDT
Published on Oct 23, 2014 by Froggie Leggs.
Bassem Masri records as his thug friends threaten to rape a cop’s wife.
PROTESTERS IN #FERGUSON STOP AND SURROUND CARS AND BEAT UP PEOPLE POLICE WATCH #LIVE ( http://t.co/24QZpDM9Z6 ) http://t.co/HnqYCaIZtF
— Mike Napa (@RealMikeNapa) October 25, 2014
Introducing TLD
By NICHOLAS STRAKON
Editor-in-chief
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual....George Orwell, 1984
Politically and culturally, we are some of America's dead, huddling together here in The Last Ditch.
We're a jumbled bunch of old bones — defunct revolutionaries, shell-shocked reactionaries, failures of the regime's schooling system, American Dreamers who died hard, misfits all. There are even a few of us still dreaming who might protest — like the uncooperative plague victim in the Monty Python film — "I'm not dead yet!"
But we're dead, all right — because of the handful of values we hold in common. We're all individualists. We all love liberty. We all mourn the civilization of the West. And because of those things we have become ghosts in our own land.
Some of us are plain anarchists; others are constitutional republicans, minarchists who can imagine a properly ordered "night-watchman state." One or two of us might propose a slightly wider range of state action — but they won't propose it in TLD.
Some of us come out of the Objectivist tradition of Ayn Rand and stand in a regardful if critical relation to it now. Others nourished their individualism at quite different fountainheads.
Some of us are atheists; others are Christians.
Loyal as we all are to the culture of the West, some of us are skeptical whether a European-American ethnic consciousness can coexist with individualism. Others are sanguine.
We in TLD include "crypto-Copperheads" or flat-out Confederate sympathizers who abhor the outcome of the Late Unpleasantness; others are much more interested in the Present Unpleasantness. Some suspect the latter cannot be understood without reference to the former.
As for how we imagine the Future Unpleasantness, some of us — those reluctant to admit their demise and mount the dead-cart — are able to find hope. They would say, I suppose, that they are fighting in The Last Ditch.
Others — including me — are pessimistic. We consider The Last Ditch not a combat redoubt but just an observation post, from which we can study the mopping-up operations of our great and abominable enemies: totalitarianism and savagery.
This is what I mean by pessimism:
If Americans are very lucky, the entire system — leviathan state, fascized economy, poisoned institutions, brutalized society and all — will collapse in their lifetimes.
If Americans are not very lucky, they will collapse, and the system will survive into a dim gray future.
I think our people have about used up their luck.
In the lead article of this premier issue, Ronald N. Neff begins presenting his vision of "Polite Totalitarianism." It is the theory of the Permanent Regime — a state apparatus tending toward greater and greater power, and greater and greater subtlety, and therefore of indefinite life span. If not absolutely "permanent" — for no human institution is immortal — this regime, as Neff sees it, will likely survive long enough to fortify itself so that it is invulnerable to revolution, and long enough to finish destroying all American liberty. It will do so with the help of the American people, for that is the democratic way.
Neff's article is in four parts and will conclude in Issue 4.
"Polite totalitarianism" ran in the September, October, November, and December 1994 TLDs.
In Issue 2, I will begin a related speculation as to how our Permanent Rulers are engaged in exterminating the remnants of old bourgeois culture and reducing the productive middle class to no more than a deracinated, subservient Outer Party. Our rulers are doing so, I will hypothesize, in cooperation with the radical Left. Call it, if you will, the marriage of the Dark Suits and the Red Guards.
I expect that this article also will be in four parts, concluding in Issue 5.
"Dark Suits and Red Guards" ran in five parts, in the October, November, December 1994, and January and February 1995 issues.
These two pieces — Neff's and mine — will comprise the core assumptions of TLD's founders. Those assumptions are open to debate and revision by other contributors; and I would be happy to see one of our relative optimists prove them wrong.
But I'm pessimistic.
Until they are proved wrong, you will see no pieces in TLD lauding heroic entrepreneurs who, after a 14-year struggle, have managed to privatize garbage collection in Upper Lower Overshoe, Montana. You will see no interviews with "libertarian" technocrats who want [Janet] Reno's Ministry of Love to contract out the background checks of gun buyers. You will find nothing — nothing favorable, anyway — about the efforts of busy apparatchiki to win ballot status and some sort of dreadful "legitimacy" for the Libertarian Party.
What will you find instead? First, analyses about what is being done to us, who is doing it, what they get out of it, and how much pain we're likely to have to endure until they're satisfied. On this score, one is discouraged when he recalls the dream of the future that O'Brien, Winston Smith's torturer, savored: that of a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
However, TLD's founders don't intend to let strategic pessimism blind them to events on the tactical level. The Polite Totalitarians are brilliant and mighty — but they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. They may get ahead of themselves, in their haste and arrogance; they may quarrel among themselves; they may blunder in carrying out a given invasion of society. We'll report on the "battlefield situation" as we see it.
As we survey the battlefield, we may occasionally observe a few lovers of liberty and civility engaging in active, organized resistance. If we find their resistance interesting, we'll cover it — with a skeptical eye. If their resistance is genuine, we'll honor the rebels, despite their optimism.
We will explore the wrong turnings in Western history, and the extent to which flaws in the civilization we love proved fatal. All of us — anarchist and minarchist, Christian and atheist — will confront the remarkable fact that the civilization that gave the world the Industrial Revolution, individualism, the novel, and the symphony also created that behemoth of mass murder and slavery, the nation-state.
Our explorations may lead us to suspect that what we have taken to be a virtue of the West has in fact been an Achilles' heel. For example, of the major modern civilizations, the West has been distinctive in its hospitality toward the colors, fragrances, tastes, sounds — and practices — of exotic cultures. It's worth asking whether that trait invigorated the West with new blood, or poisoned it with tainted blood.
I expect our analyses and situation reports and explorations to be intrinsically interesting. But if TLD's founders consider political proposals and movement activism counterproductive, our culture extinguished, and our cause lost, what really is the point of our enterprise? Why should we bother preparing an Issue 2 of TLD? Why should you read it?
Because even in defeat we still have our lives to live. I'm sure all of us "dead Americans" want our "deaths" to remain metaphorical for a long time! We might prolong our haunting presence if we can find practical answers to some urgent questions:
• Can we avoid — evade — flee — hide from our conquerors for a while? Can we live relatively human, civilized lives while doing so?
• Clearly, for as long as our rulers permit us to do so, we must keep our children far from the government schools, where they would be taught totalitarianism by their teachers and savagery by their fellow "students." But then what should we teach our children to prepare them for living in their dark new world?
• Where can we look for consolation? I know what answer our Christians might offer. Does it lead to quietism? Where can TLD's atheists look? To the great art, music, and literature of the West? Does that lead to mere escapism?
• The theme song of a terrifying TV show — "Cops" on the Fox network — asks: "Whacha gonna do when they come for you?" What are we going to do when the regime's thugs come for us, or for our neighbors, friends, spouses — or, in the worst nightmare, for our children? Our rejection of activism in no way implies surrender in such circumstances — but the question is a thorny one, particularly if the choice is between risking martyrdom, whereby we would deprive our survivors of our aid; or submitting in hopes of protecting some of what we cherish.
We will seek answers for the above, but three matters are not in question.
First: we might as well forget about fomenting a cultural and intellectual revolution in our time. It's too late. Our adversaries are completing their revolution; we are out of time. But whatever happens to American civilization in the near term, people will go on inhabiting this land for centuries, even millennia. We must — in Orwell's words — "extend the area of sanity little by little," from individual to individual, in hopes of reaching out to that posterity. Those "post-Americans" — perhaps living under a regime weaker than ours — might derive a timely warning from our legacy, assuming it survives the memory hole of our regime. In any event, leaving such a legacy is an act of loyalty to the human future.
Second: whether anyone hears us or not, heeds us or not, joins us or not, we hold it an honorable mission to stand and witness as darkness falls. It's an act of loyalty to the good that our civilization once represented.
Finally: although we may think of ourselves as old bones, our rulers regard us as children — wayward, unloved, casually abusable children, at that. But we are adults. We are men and women who ought to be free. We must purge ourselves of illusions, lest we be children, as well as slaves. We must attempt to see and speak of our world as it is, in all its horror.
That is an act of loyalty to ourselves.
Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage. The decision will also have other important consequences. It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. E.g., ante, at 11–13. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.
Perhaps recognizing how its reasoning may be used, the majority attempts, toward the end of its opinion, to reas¬sure those who oppose same-sex marriage that their rights of conscience will be protected. Ante, at 26–27. We will soon see whether this proves to be true. I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.
The system of federalism established by our Constitu¬tion provides a way for people with different beliefs to live together in a single nation. If the issue of same-sex mar¬riage had been left to the people of the States, it is likely that some States would recognize same-sex marriage and others would not. It is also possible that some States would tie recognition to protection for conscience rights. The majority today makes that impossible. By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facili¬tates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turn-about is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.
Please remove this RACIST symbol from our country immediately...
#tcot #pjnet #WakeUpAmerica #lnyhbt #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/C9zkol1yCa
— Michael A Nöthem (@mikandynothem) June 26, 2015
They did it again.
The Supreme Court of the United States effectively rewrote the text of Obamacare to save the legislation.
By a 6-3 majority, the Court upheld the Fourth Circuit’s decision in King v. Burwell and decided that federal subsidies were available on state Obamacare exchanges, even though the text of the so-called Affordable Care Act said that such subsidies were only available on “State” exchanges.
The majority acknowledged that the word “State” was, at best, “ambiguous.” And it rejected the idea that an executive agency, in this case the Internal Revenue Service, could decide the meaning of that term.
Rewriting the law is evidently meant for the courts, not the administration–or Congress.
The majority–led, again, by Chief Justice John Roberts, who infamously interpreted a “penalty” as a tax to uphold Obamacare’s constitutionality in 2012–held that the “context” of the word “State” mattered more than the “most natural reading.”
And the context was that Obamacare had to be saved from itself. After all, Congress could not have meant to pass a bad, self-defeating policy, could it?
The dissent, by Justice Antonin Scalia, was blistering.
“Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State,'” he wrote.
“Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”
If a law was badly formulated, that was not the Court’s problem, he argued. It was up to Congress to rescue the subsidies for Obamacare, not the Justices. And if people did not like it, tough: that was why the Justices were meant to serve life terms. They were meant to be above politics.
Instead, Scalia noted, the Court had adopted a particular political bent.
He concluded:
We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.
Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years….And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.
You come because there have been stories…. And you hear of a place that wants none of that [“peace and togetherness.”] A place where white and black can’t live side-by-side in the rainbow nation.
And you wonder why such a place should exist at all.
And yes, it is true. In a country 80 percent black, there is a town that has made itself 100 percent white….
Mostly Orania taps into white fear…. In more rural areas, a panic has risen about what locals call “farm killings” in which young blacks have murdered a few Afrikaner farmers. The most notable was the killing of white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche…
ORANIA, South Africa – You come because there have been stories. Because around the World Cup the talk has been about peace and togetherness and the vanquishing of old racial wounds in the hope that the world’s arrival might stimulate new solutions. And you hear of a place that wants none of that. A place where white and black can’t live side-by-side in the rainbow nation. A place settled by the old South Africa who couldn’t cope with the new South Africa.
And you wonder why such a place should exist at all.
So you drive early one morning from Johannesburg, long before the sun climbs into the sky. You go past the flat-topped hills of mining country, through dusty towns and then across the long, open African savannah spotted with acacia trees until five hours later, near the banks of the Orange River, you find Orania.
More World Cup Stories:
On the surface, Orania seems like a normal village. It has a grocery store, a gas station and a small bookstore that sells town T-shirts. A woman at a desk in the bookstore smiles and asks you to sign a guestbook. The primary language is Afrikaans, not English. The town’s public relations director, a former physician named John Strydom, comes out and shows a video. On the screen, children ride bicycles and the narrator explains that “there is a place where children can still have a comfortable childhood” and “residents can walk without looking over their shoulder.”
And it is clear that without even mentioning the words, this is all about black and white.
Driving around Orania, Strydom points out all the sights: the new houses built with bales of straw for insulation and solar panels on the roofs, the radio station, the small but lavish hotel and gleaming spa that overlook the river. He also explains the criteria for buying a house in Orania: one must submit an application, promise to uphold the Afrikaner culture and be approved
by an administrative board.
“We can choose who lives here,” he says bluntly.
When asked if that was restricted by race he replied: “Most people in South Africa wouldn’t want to come here if they are black.”
Once the Afrikaners controlled South Africa, often brutally; this, despite the fact they were a white minority in a country that is predominantly black. [Carpenter’s implication is that the blacks ruling the world’s murder and rape capital since 1994 were gentle.] In the 1940s, they invented apartheid as an official form of segregation and ran the country almost as a dictatorship until black uprisings and the world’s scorn broke that rule. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, it was only a matter of time before Afrikaner rule was over.
This is when a missionary named Carel Boshoff, the son-in-law of Hendrick Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, banded with a group of 40 families to buy a mostly abandoned government construction camp and turn it into Orania. From the beginning, the idea was to separate. Orania had its own flag and its own currency (the ora, the first three letters of the town’s name) and set out to build something self-sustaining. Now, the 700 or so residents of Orania live as if it is their own country.
In fact, when asked who he considers to be his president, Boshoff’s son Carel (IV), who is now the community’s leader rambles for a moment, talking about how all people see government in different ways. When pressed on the question he finally says, “Right here,” and points to the ground at his feet. [Carpenter butchered the interrogation, such that it is unintelligible, because he didn’t want the reader to know his part in it. First, he shows his contempt for Carel IV, which he never would have done with a black racist, describing him as “rambling.” Then he says, in the passive voice, “when pressed.” Well, how did Carpenter press him?]
Carel (IV) is an intellectual man, with large glasses and wavy long hair. He could be a young radical in Amsterdam if he wasn’t here in this small farming town explaining why he wants an Afrikaner state. He likes to talk in concepts and enjoys the show about international politics he hosts every week on the radio station.
He picks his words carefully but the community’s philosophy spills out nonetheless. [Spills out? As if it were a dirty secret that the he was trying to hide?] Since the Afrikaner is white in heritage then the culture that is preserved must be white as well. The people of Orania don’t have anything against black people, he says, they just don’t share a culture. And if they don’t share a culture then they shouldn’t be living together.
Mostly Orania taps into white fear. Carel (IV) speaks a lot about how black rule has forced Afrikaners out of work because of Affirmative Action programs designed to get blacks jobs. An experienced white engineer could suddenly become a technical assistant to an inexperienced black employee, he says.
He also talks a lot about violence in other parts of South Africa. People in cities such as Johannesburg live behind giant walls and electric fences. In more rural areas, a panic has risen about what locals call “farm killings” in which young blacks have murdered a few Afrikaner farmers. The most notable was the killing of white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche, a man who has advocated for several white republics in the country and was beaten to death by two of his black workers over a wage dispute.
“Very few people coming here are not affected by crime,” Carel (IV) says. “They have been robbed or hijacked or something. It affects their mindsets.”
South Africa is quickly becoming a failed state, Carel (IV) says. Any thought the World Cup is going to bring unity and help people confront two decades of growing pains is ridiculous, he says. The country’s future, with what he calls “corruption” in the mostly black African National Congress, is bleak.
“There’s no reason a country as diverse as South Africa should be united and together,” he says.
The best plan, he adds, is to “stand out of the tension.”
And yet that is the misfortune of Orania, this fact it wants to step back from the fight to build South Africa. It is a beautiful town with imaginative people, like Carel (IV)’s nephew, also named Carel who is a student in Pretoria, who loves the idea of the World Cup and yet dreams of returning to Orania.
“We’re building something for ourselves here,” he says.
But why? Why not for the country? Why hide a spectacular hotel and a spa on the edge of the river and not share it with the rest of South Africa? All around the country there is growth and building, even among the “tension” as Carel (IV) calls it. Just a few days ago in the black Johannesburg township of Soweto, a group of black residents gathered at a restaurant for the monthly meeting of
their saving group. Together, they said, they give whatever money they want to put away to one member who deposits it in the bank. Then when enough has been saved to buy a car or a house or pay for school they can pull it out. The group serves as their support.
Imagine putting the saving group together with the Orania ingenuity that erected energy-efficient houses made with straw inside? What a country this could become.
On the drive back to Johannesburg and the World Cup that has come to be about unity, it was so easy to see.
The sadness as night fell and an autumn storm rumbled across the savannah was that Orania could not.
Les Carpenter is a feature writer and columnist for Yahoo! Sports. Follow him on
Twitter. Send Les a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
Updated Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010
Confederate memorial in St. Louis vandalized, its future now entangled in national debate over battle flag: http://t.co/jgZbjbwQv6
— Jesse Bogan (@JesseBogan) June 25, 2015
This has caused a predictable backlash from some conservatives who compare what is going on now to the rewriting of history undertaken by French revolutionaries, Russian Bolsheviks, and other radicals after seizing power — the kind of historical rewriting satirized in Orwell’s “1984.” I believe that these criticisms are wide of the mark.
No one is suggesting the rewriting of history — something that cannot be ordered by the government in any case, at least not in this country. [Sure, it can. Government teachers are constantly re-writing history, and forcing it down the throats of captive children in their classrooms.] Nor is anyone suggesting — at least I am not — removing the books of Mark Twain or William Faulkner from libraries because they contain depictions of racism. [Maybe not, but you’re helping gas up the prohibitionists, and doing absolutely nothing to stand in their way.] Heck, I’m not even suggesting that Amazon should stop selling bigoted, pro-Confederate tracts such as Thomas E. Woods’ crackpot Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Confederate flags can continue to be displayed in museums and Southerners can continue to go to Civil War cemeteries to honor the sacrifices of their ancestors who fought bravely in a bad cause.
[I have yet to read Woods’ book, but I’ve heard lectures he’s given, and I’ll take him any day, over Boot.]
But there is a big distinction to be made between remembering the past — something that, as a historian, I’m all in favor of — and honoring those who did bad things in the past. Remembrance does not require public displays of the Confederate flag, nor streets with names such as Jefferson Davis Highway — a road that always rankles me to drive down in Northern Virginia. Such gestures are designed to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who were responsible for the costliest war in American history — men who were traitors to this country, inveterate racists, and champions of slavery.
In this regard, honoring Jefferson Davis is particularly egregious, or, for that matter, Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. But I believe even honoring the nobler Robert E. Lee is inappropriate. True, he was a brave and skilled soldier, but he fought in a bad cause. Modern Germany does not have statues to Erwin Rommel even though he — unlike Lee — turned at the end of the day against the monstrous regime in whose cause he fought so skillfully. Thus, I don’t believe it is appropriate to have statues of Lee, or schools named after him, although I admit in his case it’s a closer call than with Jefferson Davis.
This is not “rewriting” history; it’s getting history right. The rewriting was done by Lost Cause mythologists who created pro-Confederate propaganda (such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) to convince their countrymen that the South was actually in the right even as it imposed slavery and then segregation. This required impugning those Northerners who went south after the Civil War to try to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They were labeled “carpetbaggers,” and their memory was tarnished while the actions of the white supremacists they opposed were glorified.
As Sally Jenkins recently noted in the Washington Post, “[I]n 1957, John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, in which he distorted and maligned the character of Union Medal of Honor winner Adelbert Ames, chased from the Mississippi governor’s office during Reconstruction by White Line terrorists, while instead lauding L.Q.C. Lamar as the more heroic figure. Lamar drafted Mississippi’s ordinance of secession and raised the 19th Mississippi Infantry Regiment.”
JFK was not especially racist by the standards of his time and place; he was just the victim of the Lost Cause mythology that made flying the Confederate battle flag appear to be a legitimate act of reverence for one’s ancestors. Southerners can continue to honor their ancestors, but doing so does not necessitate embracing the vile cause for which they fought — just as Germans can honor their ancestors without embracing Nazism and Japanese without embracing militarism.