Revolution in the 21st Century - A video lecture by Marxist theorist, the late Hans Heinz Holz, Nov 30, 2013

Hans Heinz Holz was a respected and influential German Marxist philosopher and Leninist theorist.
He was professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg (from 1971 to 1979) and from 1979 to 1993 at the University of Groningen.

This video is from the Communist University organised by the Communist Party of Britain.

On the [post-] modern euro-american tattoo fetish: Thou shalt not steal thy Neighbour's cultures, by Andrew Taylor, Nov. 30, 2013

After talking to the youth of our house about tattooing in the post-modern West this morning, I felt I ought to write down my reflections on the Western scarification(1)/ tattooing practises ...because something here seems crooked, perverse.

I think this modern Western art is, in part, a cultural reversion to pre-rational chthonic consciousmess. In analytical psychology, the term chthonic is used to describe the spirit of nature within the psyche; the unconscious earthly impulses of the Self, in analytic terminology Jung's anima and animus.


In Man and His Symbols Carl G. Jung explains:

"Envy, lust, sensuality, deceit, and all known vices are the negative, 'dark' aspect of the unconscious, which can manifest itself in two ways. In the positive sense, it appears as a 'spirit of nature', creatively animating Man, things, and the world. It is the 'chthonic spirit' that has been mentioned so often in this chapter. In the negative sense, the unconscious (that same spirit) manifests itself as a spirit of evil, as a drive to destroy."

In addition to the rejection of rationalized modernity, I think this phenomena is an inauthentic theft of Native and Animist traditional religions. As if colonialist Europe and America's material theft of Africa, Asia and the First Nations of the Americas was being re-enacted by an imperialist symbolic theft, an ersatz fetish . And so our children, the heirs of economic recession, a profound generational despair and a radical moral relativism have been led to a new zone of expropriation imprinting in their flesh Native American animal familiar spirits, Thai or Taoist or Chinese calligraphic Tattoos, and new tattoos reflecting the syncretism of Euro-American capitalist pop culture. But the new art-form contains its own secret: the narcissistic character of ostentatious display, a despairing quest for an identity through picking out signifiers from the smorgasbord of pop culture and other people's sacred communal rites.

But to the the Maori of New Zealand, to the warriors of the ancient Picts, for the Berbers of Tamazgha, the tattoo the tattoo was/is a sacramental~ an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace or protection. The drawing inscribed on flesh is to protect and guide within a specific spiritual and religious system. 

Another aspect to consider here is Prison tattooing: present-day US and Russian prisoners convey gang membership, code, or hidden meanings of origin or criminal deeds in their tatoos. This is a declaration within a distinct community of outlaw status, of difference, but prison tattoos also are sometimes 'borrowed' in the current pop culture. It should be noted that tatooing in prisons is illegal in the USA, the world's leading incarceration nation. Ironically, these signs too are chosen and bought in the tattoo market in complete legality.

When western tattooing fashion first became popular people in Europe and the Americas in the late 1980s most people seemed to want their tattoos to mean something or commemorate something, but aesthetic appeal is now clearly primary, extravagance and sensuality is central to the new Euro-American fetish of tattoos . Why does this appropriation of animism evoke in my mind an uneasy apprehension of the last days of the Weimar Republic just before another stolen ancient symbol became the fascist power's focal point of a mass-mesmerism ?

 

Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet. 

Notes

(1) scarification, the scratching, etching, burning / branding, or superficially cutting designs, pictures, or words into the skin as a permanent modification of the body.

(2) For an extended analysis see the excellent articles: (1)    Skin on the Internet: Tattooing, consumption and the Body Modification Ezine, by Erin Stark 2006 , and  Atte Oksanen and Jussi Turtiainen's  ‘A Life told in ink’: Tattoo narratives and the problem of the self in late modern society.

The Pope is right: the Left should unite within a multi-class alliance and fight against monopoly-capitalism, Andrew Taylor, Nov. 28/13

A thought arising from reading an ultra-left dismissal of Pope Francis' radical denunciation of the current economic system contained in Evangelii Gaudium "Some Challenges of today's World." (for example, see Michael Roberts Blog article "Ayn Rand, Pope Francis and the philosophy of greed.")

First, the ultras make the error of proclaiming immediate revolutionary demands in a non-revolutionary period. This current in the Left  fails to recognise the radicalism of the new pope's call for an anti-monopoly struggle for a society of people before profits.  To reject this platform is pure ultra-leftism that leads the people nowhere in the current global conditions .   

Second, the ultra-Left purists now dismissing the new pope's economic statements, show zero recognition that within the current stage of a rearguard fightback against the monopolies / neoliberalism, the communist parties are correct in advancing from the current defensive fightback to an offensive struggle by enlisting and exploiting allies in a multi-class front. A school for struggle exists for the party of the working-class through participation in the democratic struggles of the First Nations, LGBTQ, peace, anti-racist and ecological movements.

Today, given real global conditions, there is no possibility of an advance to socialist revolution without the Left joining with allies from 'the middle-class' in mass movements.This does not displace or replace participation in the overtly proletarian arenas of the labour class conflict, indeed, in our day, the fight for ecology and against Monopoly is intrinsic to the advancement of the class struggle.

Time for the ultras to think again about the inter-relationship between Reforms and Revolution, and the way forward to socialism. Revolution will NOT arrive because a few fringe independent radicals wish to jump ahead of existing global forces..

ALBERT EDWARDS: A Key Precursor For A Recession Has Now Fallen Into Place, Sam Ro, Nov. 27, 2013

http://www.businessinsider.com/albert-edwards-profit-margin-recession-2013-11

Societe Generale's Albert Edwards is one of many strategists who continue to warn that high corporate profit margins are unsustainable.

In his latest research note, he warns that the margin squeeze is on, and that's likely to be bad news for the economy.

"[A] recession seems a distant prospect in the minds of most investors," writes Edwards. "Yet one key precursor for a recession has now fallen into place. Slowing productivity growth means that unit labour costs are now running well ahead of output price inflation (see chart below). This means a margin and profits downturn is now about to unfold. That typically is a key precursor of recession."

Predicting recessions is an unpopular practice on Wall Street. So you rarely hear about them until it's too late.

"One thing that is axiomatic in this business: I have never ever seen the sell-side predict a recession," he said. "There are a number of reasons for that, but key among them is the personal career risk of calling a recession and being wrong. Both the sell-side and the buy-side tend to do much better when the economy and the markets are doing well, so who wants to be a party-pooper. That is the nature of the beast."

We are 55 months into the current economic cycle, which is a shorter duration than the previous three cycles.

But Edwards warns against think that that means this cycle can go on.

"Similarly, investors’ perceptions of the ‘normal’ length of an economic cycle are strongly influenced by their own working experience," he said. "In that context the last three economic cycles have been unusually lengthy, averaging 95 months from trough to peak (see chart below). But these cycles were perversions of the economic cycle, as the Fed manipulated the private sector credit cycle to extend the cycle which became known as The Great Moderation. The longer the cycle lasts, the more investors convince themselves that it has been abolished and lower their guard in relation to overpaying for cyclical investments (aka risk)."

According to NBER data, the average cycle has lasted around 36 months.

Edwards also notes that business investment has been slowing, which is an ominous indicator for the economy. The margin squeeze mentioned above only puts more pressure on businesses to reign in investment spending.

All of this looks very bad.

The 2009 Honduran Coup ~ Crisis for Obama, or, "Mr. President, Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining”, a Sept 15 2009 article by Andrew Taylor

In Sept. 2009 I wrote an article about the Obama administration's handling of the coup in Honduras. In light of the Honduran Election result I re-post it now without update.

(photo: AP.  Ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya)

In one of Clint Eastwood’s finest movies of  the Western genre, 'The Outlaw JoseyWales' (1976) the character 'Fletcher’ has a memorable line: “Senator: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.” The events following the 28 June coup in Honduras exposed the limitations of the Obama presidency as a "progressive" force for fundamental change in US foreign policy. Only the U.S. administration acting in support of the Honduran national resistance has the financial, political and military leverage to pressure the Honduran de facto government into retreating and allowing a return to democracy. Yet the Obama administration has not possessed the will or consensus needed to create real consequences on the military coup leaders and their political puppets. In light of the uninterrupted anti-democratic role of the United States in the history of Central America perhaps rational people shouldn't be surprised.1

However, the 'let-down' over the US role in the post-coup events has become very apparent in the more progressive section of the American electorate which offered the Obama candidacy its critical base activists.Perhaps it was one body-blow too many after Obama's Hi-Finance bailouts, the extension of the War in Afghanistan, and record unemployment. A number of  US progressives insisted that if Obama didn't impose full sanctions on the coup government and suspend all relations, as most other countries (but not Canada's) had done, the traditional US policy would remain in the hemisphere, the US conniving with coups that created results pleasing to the US ruling class.2 Contradictory cues and gestures proceeded from the different organs of policy information in Washington: the president denounced the action as illegal and so on- yet could not seem to decide whether call the 'act' an illegal coup. Meanwhile in the State Department Hillary Clinton chided the elected president Zelaya together with the coup plotters as equally guilty players. She was twice asked by the press whether restoring democracy in Honduras meant returning the elected president, and twice she refused to answer. 3

Republican and ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ legislators who were not required by their Office to show restraint were in celebration. It began to seem to some progressives that the bad smell exuded by the Bush-Cheney government was back in the Washington air. For all the eloquence and promise of the first African-American president of the USA, a leftist elected leader aligned with Venezuela had been disposed of in a manner continuous with US predatory complicity in Latin America coups under all other American presidents. Had not the Honduran Military brass that did the deed been trained in skullduggery and torture at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia? 4 In the weeks following June 28th it actually seemed as if the Obama balloon had been popped and the rhetoric of “Hope" and "Change" was under scrutiny.

And it also seemed just about then in mid-summer that the new Democrat president appeared to some friends as inestimable, dithering... As Obama gave ambiguous sound bites in Washington without unambiguously acting against the coup government, he lost credibility not just in Latin America, not only in Europe, but also among many US activists. The U.S role had become transparently ludicrous, and a well-coordinated White House spin was in a shambles. Eventually the US Ambassador on the scene agreed it was a military coup - though the State Department refused to call it that. It appeared there was a US federal law requiring the cut off of all aid if a coup was formally recognized, and that was obviously just what Barack and Hillary were not about to do.

As for President Manuel Zelaya, who was kidnapped in the middle of the night by the US trained chief general of Honduras, he was turning out to actually possess the support of the Honduran workers, the peasants, the poor, --" in other words the vast majority," according to the Cross-Border Network. 5
Is President Obama willing or able to confront the "permanent government" of America, that is the corporate military-industrial domination of the successive government’s? Is Obama tough as well as cool? Can he reduce American dominance in the world? Indeed, does he want to?

Meanwhile as summer played out and September arrived, Obama remained silent about the repression used by the coup against protestors. Demonstrators have been shot and killed, radio and TV stations shut down, and journalists jailed. This past week a trade union leader and a political activist were murdered. One thing is clear: the coup leaders will be emboldened in their repressive measures if Obama continues his silence about a coup government almost wholly dependent on the US for aid, commerce, political legitimacy, and survival

Notes:
1. The literature on US imperialism in Latin America is extensive. See surveys as in, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, and: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, by Eduardo Galeano.
2. For example see: Tom Hayden, “Obama vs. Clinton on Honduras?”, July 14, 2009 “Obama cannot long support both the OAS efforts at isolating the coup plotters and also tolerate Clinton-identified political consultants lobbying on behalf of the military-installed regime.”
3. "U.S. continues to train Honduran soldiers Coup that ousted president", didn't stop U.S. engagement in Honduras, By James Hodge and Linda Cooper, National Catholic Reporter, July. 14, 2009 .
4. "Secrets of the Honduran Armed Forces And More Secrets About the US Soldiers Stationed There", By Belén Fernández, The Narco News Bulletin, September 7, 2009.
5.  U.S. Chided for Aiding Honduras Despite Coup, One World Net, September 8, 2009.

Uncovering the truth about the JFK assassination. by John Bachtell, published in People's World, Nov. 21 2013

It's been 50 years since the shocking murder of President John F. Kennedy. Yet the nation still yearns for the truth of what happened that terrible day in Dallas.

For 50 years the "official" narrative has been based on the Warren Commission assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a disgruntled loner, a Marxist, acted alone.

http://peoplesworld.org/uncovering-the-truth-about-the-jfk-assassination/

The Warren Commission report

This version is being repeated as part of the current observances and is the subject of new books, television documentaries, articles and remembrances that also include the lie that Oswald was a member of the Communist Party USA. (Not only was he never a member of the party, there is also no indication in his checkered history that he was actually a "Marxist.")

Yet according to an NPR report 75% of the American people think JFK died at the hands of a conspiracy.

A steady stream of citizen investigators and researchers has refused to accept the Warren Commission conclusions.

Upon release, the commission's report was questioned by a chorus of critics including Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment), Harold Weisberg (Whitewash), Sylvia Meagher (Accessories After the Fact), and countless others, along with a skeptical public.

They have battled a powerful cover-up machine, including a CIA-style disinformation campaign employing influential journalists, some with ties to the CIA and other branches of the intelligence community.

The cover-up cited by the researchers includes destroyed evidence (including Kennedy's missing brain), altered and suppressed evidence, corporate media silencing of honest journalists, the killing of dozens of witnesses (and scaring into silence countless others) and the killing of many of the conspirators including some of the gunmen.

Nevertheless, this citizens' movement has poked giant holes in the Warren Commission report (most notably the magic "single bullet theory"), unearthed suppressed evidence and assembled the outlines of an "unofficial" narrative of what occurred, why and who was responsible for the assassination.

Files and evidence now available

In recent times, the body of research has been enriched by the release of U.S. government files in the 1990s and evidence and intelligence information made available from the Soviet Union after the 1991 collapse. One of the best studies of these documents is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass.

In addition the Cuban government has released evidence it has compiled of CIA and Cuban émigré terrorist plots to overthrow the revolutionary government, including information about suspected participants in the assassination. These were brought together in ZR Rifle: The Plot to kill Kennedy and Castro, by Claudia Furiati.

The evidence suggests that what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, was nothing less than a coup by powerful interests, executed and covered up using organs of the state and a compliant corporate mass media.

This evokes similar episodes in U.S. history including the attempt to organize a fascist veterans march to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the Bush-Cheney theft of the 2000 election, and most recently the government shutdown engineered by the tea party and right-wing Republicans to undo the results of the 2012 elections.

1960: A time of broad social change

Kennedy was elected president in 1960 in the midst of a broad social change beginning to sweep the country that challenged the fanatical Cold War anti-communist hysteria, Jim Crow segregation and attacks on democratic rights on university campuses. At the same time stormy global developments were challenging U.S. imperialist domination.

Kennedy inherited the Cold War policies of the Eisenhower administration that included a policy of nuclear supremacy, overthrow of the Cuban revolutionary government and deepening military involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Kennedy held contradictory views on foreign affairs. According to Douglass, while Kennedy's outlook was shaped by the Cold War, his thinking was also deeply affected by his combat experience in World War II and his Catholic faith. Kennedy supported the independence of Algeria and other colonial nations.

Ultra-right domination of the U.S. government

When he became president, Kennedy almost immediately came in conflict with fanatical anti-communist elements that dominated the institutions of government. The military-industrial complex, the national state security apparatus, powerful right-wing business interests, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-segregationists and other power centers all eventually coalesced into a hostile force opposing Kennedy.

Documents show that Kennedy began clashing with the CIA, which by law comprised an autonomous branch within the U.S. government, operating without accountability, and the right-wing military establishment who worked behind Kennedy's back to undermine his policies.

Records show that in 1961, the newly elected president was thrust into a trap orchestrated by the CIA to carry out the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, aimed at overthrowing the new revolutionary government. Kennedy had been assured the Cuban people would welcome the "liberators" and rise up.

While Kennedy went along with the invasion he warned the CIA that he would refuse to provide U.S. troops and air cover. The CIA thought once the invasion began the young president would be forced to respond.

When Kennedy refused to cooperate and the invasion turned into a debacle, the CIA, right-wing generals and anti-Castro Cubans were livid. They never forgave Kennedy for what they considered a traitorous surrender to socialism.

Documents show that Kennedy was equally contemptuous of what he considered efforts to bypass and undermine presidential authority. After the Bay of Pigs, he told one advisor, "I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." He quickly fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (who later became a key figure in the Warren Commission), Deputy Director Charles Cabell (brother of Dallas mayor Earle Cabell) and invasion architect Richard Bissell.

At a 1961 meeting of the National Security Council, Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA, Dulles presented a plan for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Kennedy listened, shook his head and remarked as he left the room, "And we call ourselves the human race." (JFK and the Unspeakable, Chronology)

Kennedy's thinking was especially affected by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. With the world on the brink of nuclear war, Kennedy refused to cave in to U.S. generals who were exploiting the crisis to provoke an invasion of Cuba and a massive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

In the end, Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a way out. But this experience left an indelible imprint on Kennedy, who, according to files that have been released, concluded the only path forward was through a policy of peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and normalization of relations with Cuba.

He deeply distrusted the Joint Chiefs, the intelligence community, State Department and many of his advisers. According to Douglass, this resulted in his opening a secret back channel to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and prior to his death, steps toward a secret dialogue with Fidel Castro.

Kennedy was also heavily influenced by the dying Pope John XXIII and his papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) published in April 1963. Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review and a leader of National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, the largest peace group at the time, describes in The Improbable Triumvirate how he helped develop a back channel for Kennedy with the Pope and Khrushchev.

Ending the nuclear arms race

Kennedy publicly made a break with the Cold War when he delivered a commencement address at American University on June 10, 1963, known as his "peace speech," which has been largely ignored by commentators. Kennedy called for an end to the nuclear arms race and declared a suspension of atmospheric testing.

By that summer the Kennedy administration successfully negotiated a limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union that outlawed atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing. Kennedy bypassed the military brass and opposition in the U.S. Senate, including among his own party. He turned to Cousins to organize an education campaign on the treaty that resulted in a dramatic change in public opinion and its ultimate adoption.

Following the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy had promised Khrushchev that the U.S. would abandon attempts to invade Cuba. However, unknown to Kennedy the CIA continued arming anti-Castro Cuban exiles and carrying out attacks. According to Douglass, when Kennedy learned of the operations, he moved to shut them down and close the training bases.

Vietnam

As Howard Jones writes in Death of a Generation, Kennedy also began having serious doubts about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He was convinced by Sen. Mike Mansfield and others that the U.S. was being drawn into a deepening conflict, which was impossible to win.

He took steps to begin the process of bringing U.S. military forces home, which was to be completed after the 1964 elections. However, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge secretly refused to carry out his orders.

Plots

According to the researchers, those who ordered and planned Kennedy's murder hoped that by attributing the assassination to a "sympathizer" of Castro, they could provoke an invasion of Cuba and overthrow of the revolutionary government or a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union or both.

The covert CIA program responsible for assassination of foreign leaders (code name ZR Rifle), especially Fidel Castro, and overthrow of the Cuban government, which employed Cuban exiles and the Mafia, was then turned over to the operation to kill Kennedy, the researchers report.

There were at least two and possibly three attempted assassination plots, including one in Chicago in early November (The Echo from Dealey Plaza, by Abraham Bolden). Perhaps it was no accident that the actual assassination occurred in Dallas, whose atmosphere had been poisoned by right-wing, anti-communist and pro-segregationist hysteria including from key figures in the city establishment, as described vividly in the new book Dallas 1963.

The hysteria resulted in the famed "mink coat" riot against then Sen. Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, during the 1960 election campaign, and the mobilization of a hostile crowd to greet UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson two weeks before the assassination, where he was spat on and hit with a sign.

The right-wing atmosphere and links to political officials made it easy for local law enforcement officials to cooperate in the plot.

Oswald and Ruby

Space doesn't permit the full unofficial "people's" narrative from being told here. However, some information about two key figures in the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, is enough to raise big questions about the credibility of the Warren Commission report.

The official history of Oswald rarely tells the full truth about his past.

Oswald joined the U.S. Marines and was assigned to a top-secret radar spying installation at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan under the supervision of the CIA.

In 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union as part of what Victor Marchetti (CIA and the Cult of Intelligence) believed was a program to send agents there posing as "defectors." Oswald lived and worked in Minsk but apparently was never trusted by the Soviets.

Oswald married a Russian woman, had two children and returned to the U.S. in 1962. He was never prosecuted for his defection and in fact his return was facilitated by the CIA.

Still only 24 years old, Oswald settled in Dallas where he worked for both the CIA and FBI, according to the researchers. The CIA began manipulating him in a way that left a "trail" to set him up as the assassin "patsy", and to especially leave the impression Oswald was a Marxist or connected to a Cuban and Soviet plot.

Oswald was assigned to New Orleans where he got job at a CIA-related company. Working under CIA direction, he established a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and organized a street provocation that got him on local television.

The Communist Party USA received a number of correspondences from a person who identified himself as Oswald during this time. And one of the first lawyers sought by Oswald after his arrest was CPUSA attorney John Abt (John Abt, Advocate and Activist). But the party regarded Oswald with suspicion and steered clear of him.

The CIA also cooked up an elaborate scenario to make it appear that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City to obtain visas to travel to both countries. The CIA evidently was clumsily trying to make it look like Oswald was participating in planning a plot to assassinate Kennedy concocted by the Soviets.

Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald inside Dallas police headquarters (!), was a member of the Chicago Mafia who was sent to Dallas to expand the mob's drug, casino and prostitution markets. In the late 1950s, Ruby was a gunrunner for the CIA to Cuba, where the CIA at the time supplied both Castro and dictator Fulgencio Batista, so as to hedge their bets, according to Douglass. When the revolution triumphed, Ruby supplied guns to the anti-Castro Cubans.

Ruby was integral to numerous aspects of the assassination plot. Eyewitnesses place Ruby in Dealey Plaza, the assassination site, on Nov. 22, including reportedly dropping off a team of assassins at the fence behind the grassy knoll. Ruby is believed to have been assigned to kill Oswald and easily gained access to police headquarters where Oswald was paraded in public twice.

The evidence unearthed by researchers and contradictions in the official story create grave doubts as to whether Oswald even fired a gun. Instead the finger points to trained snipers among the Cuban exiles and Mafia, overseen by CIA agents. Once their job was done, they were most likely whisked out from nearby Red Bird Airfield by airplane (Vendetta: the Kennedys, by Matthew Smith).

Names of those often associated with the assassination, including Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, David Sanchez Morales, Frank Sturgis and others, surface again during the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy and the 1972 Watergate burglary.

The desire to unearth the truth about this crime against democracy still burns 50 years later. In the end, it is interwoven with the broad people's movement to defend and expand our democracy and democratic institutions and to defeat right-wing extremism and corporate power that constantly seeks to undermine it.

Photo: Wanted for Treason." Infamous handbill circulated on November 21, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, one day before John F. Kennedy visited the city and was assassinated. Uncredited on original. Later investigation attributed it to Robert A. Surrey of Johnson Printing Co., Dallas. Wikimedia Commons

The Holocaust, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Identity: Challenges and Changing Perceptions, Lionel Steiman, Presented at the annual UJPO Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, April 2013

      This essay will first consider some academic challenges to the prevailing idea of the Holocaust as a unique event, caused primarily by anti-Semitism; the next, longer section will consider how the prevailing view of the Holocaust became central to Jewish awareness and identity; the conclusion will suggest what impact the academic challenges might have on Jewish identities and self-understanding.

The Holocaust is perhaps the single most written about event in history and certainly the best documented.  Books, articles, films, and other programs continue to be produced in record numbers.  Most academic scholars no longer regard the Holocaust as being the singular event that Jews believe it was; academic research no longer places the Holocaust outside or above the course of history and therefore so unique that it cannot be compared to any other event. 

The term ‘Holocaust’ itself did not become the accepted word for the destruction of European Jewry until well into the 1960s, but it quickly became the centre of Jewish awareness. With high rates of intermarriage, the decline of Jewish religious observance and cultural usage, Holocaust awareness, Israel, and concern about the enduring threat of anti-Semitism came to define for many Jews what it meant to be Jewish. 

At the same time, academic research had rejected both the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust and the idea that anti-Semitism was its most important cause. The Holocaust has been merged with genocide studies in general, which sees the murder of the Jews as one of many other instances of genocide that occurred at various times in history and in our own day.  The list of its causes continues to grow, with some scholars arguing that some of the most important causes had little to do with hating Jews. 

Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief “architects” of the Holocaust, was a “bureaucrat”, an “administrator” with no particular antipathy toward Jews, motivated primarily by the desire to do be the best he could at his job.   Such “bureaucrats” led researchers to focus on “bureaucracy” as a cause of the Holocaust.   And because “bureaucracy” and its culture of efficiency without ethics had become an intrinsic part of modern civilization, sociologists advanced the notion that “modernity” itself was the Holocaust.  Other researchers assigned a similar role to science, technology, medicine and other aspects of “modernity”.  These disciplines had become divorced from ethical constraints.  Their practitioners were driven solely by careerism and the logic of their science that felt no compunction in using the “opportunities” made available by Nazis Germany’s conquests.   
They weren’t necessarily anti-Semites or even Nazi.  

Recent scholars have also focussed on the geographic and political environment of German Occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where most of Europe’s Jews lived and where the Holocaust happened.  What they saw was a complex configuration of often overlapping and competing offices, agencies, and departments tasked with carrying out Germany’s conquest and colonization of lands with diverse populations and resources.  A “Master Plan for the East” was drawn up.  Its implementation required the removal, resettlement or killing of populations, and the re-allocation of their food and other resources to maintain the German military and security forces.  Economists, demographers, agricultural experts, industrialists, contractors, and the trades were all involved.  The various offices and agencies overlapped and competed, making it difficult to determine from their archives exactly which office or personnel did what and why as the populations were shifted around, ghettos established, Jews and others deported and resettled or killed en masse.  This apparent confusion led some scholars to argue that, far from being centrally planned and ideologically driven by Nazi anti-Semitism, the Holocaust was improvised haphazardly and piece meal, driven by the “structural” and “functional” dynamics generated by competition and rivalry inside the vast administrative apparatus that Nazi Germany had imposed on its conquered territories. 

These so-called “structuralist” or “functionalist” interpretations of the Holocaust threatened to eclipse the established “intentionalist” version, according to which the Holocaust was the implementation of a preconceived plan driven by Hitler’s hatred of Jews.  But no clear evidence of such a plan has been found, and neither has any written or other order for the extermination of the Jews been discovered.  This might appear to reinforce the credibility of the “structuralist” interpretations, but the problem with them is that they attribute agency to abstractions: it’s one thing to say that a particular bureaucrat did something, but you cannot show that “bureaucracy” made him do it.  By the same token, you cannot say that it was “technology” that caused the Nazis to advance from killing by bullets and mobile gas vans to stationery gas chambers with built-in crematoria.  And you can’t say—although some have said-- that it was “medicine” that caused the Holocaust because Auschwitz was run by doctors who prescribed mass killing as a “bio-medical” cure for the world’s ills.

The most can say is that the culture of bureaucracy—or medicine, other sciences or technology-- provided the context in which or the tools with which the Holocaust could evolve. But ‘modernity’ only provided the context; it did not generate the event itself.  What needs to be asked is what triggered the process, what generated the sustained program of mass killing that was the Holocaust?  For some historians, the most convincing answer is still Jew hatred: anti-Semitism was the trigger. Of course anti-Semitism was far from being an independent variable.  But the fact that every bureaucrat, technician, medical doctor, or other operative was well aware that making the disposition of Jews a priority was a sure way to advance his own interests suggests that anti-Semitism was indeed a central cause of the Holocaust.

****

In recent years the Holocaust has been examined from a global perspective, and this has resulted in a more serious challenge to the view that anti-Semitism was the cause of the Holocaust.  Programs in many universities have integrated the Holocaust with the study of genocide, the comparative study of which has become widespread.  This “global turn” reflects a transformation of history as a discipline.  Long Eurocentric in perspective and focussed primarily on the politics of nation-states, historians turned to focus more on everyday life and on global developments, in particular the emergence of the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas from the colonial rule imposed by Europeans.

It was striking that in some places both the initial colonization that began centuries ago and even subsequent decolonization had involved genocide.  In fact, some scholars argued that the murderous assault on European Jewry by the Nazis bore parallels to and was even inspired by the earlier projects of European colonization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.  The point of this research was not to “diminish” the significance of the Holocaust but to deepen our understanding of it by placing it in a broader context.  All the major European powers had a history of colonizing non-European peoples, whom they regarded as “savages” without any culture worth preserving; all Europeans subscribed to theories of race that ranked the earth’s peoples in descending order from white black.  The fact that a tiny number of British soldiers and administrators could conquer and rule a country of hundreds of millions was an example and inspiration to Hitler and other Germans in their colonial aspirations for the continent of Europe.  Earlier, between 1884 and 1915, the German colonial rulers of southwest Africa imposed race laws that foreshadowed those against Jews in Nazi Germany and against blacks in South Africa under apartheid.  Some historians have argued that later events such as the Jewish Holocaust were “not aberrations, but rather a logical outcome and continuation of colonialism”—and this despite the acknowledged differences between them.

The connection between colonialism and the Holocaust not only challenges the popular view that anti-Semitism was the most important cause of the Holocaust, but also has important implications today, where Israel is regarded as a colonial state, a settler society forcibly established by the declining great powers Britain and France.. In this view, opposition to Israel and its Zionist ideology is not anti-Semitism but justifiable opposition to colonial oppression, from which most of the world’s indigenous populations have been freed and for which they have received apologies—except for the Palestinians.  To what extent anti-Zionism is driven by or becomes anti-Semitism is difficult to assess.  The only point here is that their relationship is complex, and this complexity has made the usefulness of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ doubtful.  Primarily though not wholly because of the Middle East, Jew hatred is no longer rooted only in the theology and legends of Christian Europe, where the word ‘anti-Semitism’ was invented in the 1870s to distinguish modern opposition to Jews from that based on medieval religion and  superstition. The phenomenon itself however is global; but just as with ‘Holocaust’, there is no consensus on its meaning or appropriate application.  This should be borne in mind as we come to consider how “the Holocaust” came to be, for many Jewish North Americans, a defining element in their identity.

*****

Some years ago, the late University of Chicago historian Peter Novick wrote that “the Holocaust and Israel are the twin pillars of American Jewish “civic religion”: they are what bind American Jews together irrespective of differences regarding religion or politics.”  That remains largely true today, with the exception that as issues around Israel have become more complicated and more divisive, only the Holocaust retains the uncontested loyalty of Americans.  The expression “there’s no business like Shoah business” is a tribute to the Holocaust’s unfailing fundraising potential.  Does this mean, as some would have it, that the Holocaust has become a central element, perhaps the central element, in the identity of many American Jews?   With the decline of religious observance and the rise of cultural illiteracy, there indeed seemed little left beyond the Holocaust-- and the state of Israel to guard against its repetition by the “new” anti-Semitism.

It was not always like this.  For two decades after WWII the mass murder of European Jewry did not have a name.  The voiceovers in the grisly atrocity footage rarely mentioned Jews, who were simply merged with the other victims of Nazi barbarism. Only nationalities were mentioned; like Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, and so on.  The “scourge of the Swastika”, title of a famous English account, was not directed against Jews in particular.  The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were charged with war crimes and “crimes against humanity”, not with crimes against Jews.  Jewish survivors in the DP camps were just called DPs.  When they got to Palestine/Israel they were disdained—instead of building the Jewish homeland, they had “gone like sheep to the slaughter”; survivors of Auschwitz wore long sleeves to hide their tattoos, or had them surgically removed: they were badges of shame, not honour.  Although it is often said that survivors were too traumatized to speak, the truth is that few wanted to listen.  So in Israel, America, or Canada they kept quiet and kept to themselves.  Only much later would they be drawn out and accorded the title “survivor” and elevated to “secular sainthood.”   It is no disrespect to point out that the most respected accounts of Auschwitz tell us that survival was due not to character but to cleverness, physical strength, and luck.  Morality was irrelevant.

Prior to the trial Eichmann trial there had been no international pressure to accord any recognition of specifically Jewish suffering.  The Cold War was on: the Soviet Union was now the enemy; Communism eclipsed any serious concern with Nazism, its victims, or its vestiges.  All effort went into building a new Germany, America’s “democratic” ally.” The Jewish issue had to be side-tracked.   Only with the capture of Eichmann, and his trial in Jerusalem, was the word ‘Holocaust’ attached to the murder of European Jewry as an entity distinct from Nazi barbarism in general, and “survivors” gained their status as its indispensable witnesses. Soon “the Holocaust” “came to be regularly invoked in American Jewry’s struggles on behalf of the embattled, still fledgling state of Israel.  Israel’s success in the 1967 war solidified the closeness American Jews felt with their ancient homeland.  Many replaced time honoured Yiddish expressions with Hebrew equivalents: the Yarmulke became the Kippa, Shabbos became Shabbat, and bas mitzvah became bat mitzvah. 

Jews as military heroes offered a more attractive focus for Jewish identity than did the inhabitants of the shtetl, of whom Americans remained ignorant or, worse, informed only by the sentimentalities of Fiddler on the Roof.  After the Yom Kippur war in 1973 shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility, and launched the spectre a renewed Holocaust, in America there was talk of a growing “new anti-Semitism”.  This despite the fact that polls and other measures showed that anti-Semitism had declined to near insignificance and that Jews had gained acceptance at the highest levels of American society. Nevertheless, the remarks of a few black leaders and the sensationalism generated by the likes of Louis Farrakhan caused serious concern.  Meir Kahane founded his Jewish Defence League, and his party gained increasing numbers.  In Israel, the pop song at the top of the charts was “The Whole World is Against Us”; in the US, novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote, “All the World Wants the Jews Dead.”.  The plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, where anti-Semitism was thriving, and the heroism of prominent “refuseniks” like Sharansky broadcast the message that Israel was still the only safe haven for the world’s Jews.  Jewish leaders issued repeated warnings that the “golden age” for Jews in America was over. 

What may have been giving them greater cause for anxiety than the  “new anti-Semitism”, however, was the rate of intermarriage— well over 50% of Jews were marrying out; less than a quarter of those remained even nominally Jewish, and fewer still were giving their children any kind of Jewish education.  Leaders worried about the non-involvement of the young in Jewish affairs. This “thinning of Jewish identity”, as they called it, was a consequence of insufficient awareness of the Holocaust, which should have been “seared into their memory”. 

The solution was education.  Holocaust Courses and programs were mounted in colleges and universities and drew unexpectedly large enrolments; Holocaust memorials and museums were planned, with the greatest of them all to be situated on the Washington Mall.  This was all a far cry from the time when survivors’ attempts to place a monument to Europe’s murdered Jews in New York City were blocked by Jewish leaders opposed to publicizing Jewish weakness and humiliation. 

But things had changed since then: in the latter part of the 20^th century America entered the age of “identity politics”, when politics came to be determined by an individual’s identification with  interest groups based on ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, physical disability, or other post-colonial disadvantage . Group identity replaced political ideology.  Some groups defined themselves as historical victims and based their communal identity on their remembered victimhood.  The elevation of “victim” as a social category drove various groups to demand that their suffering be publicly acknowledged.  The phenomenal public recognition accorded the Holocaust encouraged other groups to seek similar recognition.  This generated what some have called a “culture of victimhood,” with competing victims claiming “moral superiority”. Whether they do so is debatable, but it is precisely this claim that some have accused Jews of making.

What members of many older ethnic groups have in common is their loss of touch with their ancestral languages, religious beliefs, customs, stories and histories.  These fade further away with each generation, leaving only a vague feeling of “identity” but nothing concrete with which members can identify.   While some rediscover the religion of their ancestors, or adapt it to a secular age, others might find the appeal of a shared victimhood more appealing emotionally and certainly less demanding.  For many Jews, the heritage of the Holocaust may be a way for them to express a connection to Jewish heritage in general. What other basis was there for a distinctive shared identity?  Neither religion nor culture suffices.  Support of Israel still has great attraction for many, but this depends on accepting Zionist claims about the founding of the state of Israel and its connection to the Holocaust.  And as these claims came under increasing scrutiny even by Israeli historians, the Holocaust as a unique event beyond history offered a symbol of infinitely greater moral clarity. 

More important than “moral clarity” was perhaps marketability. Perhaps the major reason for the Holocaust becoming the focus of identity particularly for young Jews was its sheer marketability.  Like so much else that made American culture globally attractive, the Holocaust is glaringly sensational, it appeals to our most basic (if not base) emotions and contrary impulses, and it immerses us painlessly in-- unimaginable horror.  Schindler’s List has been called “the ultimate feel food film.”  No other event or aspect of Jewish history has occasioned as much “interfaith dialogue” as the Holocaust; its museums and memorials are advertized as “the natural site for interfaith services.”  The Holocaust Museum in Washington has been called “the official address of American Jewry.”  At its official opening President Clinton stated that in dedicating this museum “we bind one of the darkest lessons of history to the hopeful soul of America.”  Jewish Americans could now blend their Holocaust-identity with their American souls.  The president added what he knew many of his listeners already believed, namely that the Holocaust “made certain the long overdue creation of the state of Israel.”

Keeping the Holocaust centred in American Jewish awareness hinges on maintaining its connection with the Zionist narrative of the creation of the state of Israel.  In that narrative of the thirties and forties, the Jews killed by the Nazis had been in the middle of their journey to Palestine.  The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem reinforces this by concluding its main exhibit with a huge picture of a boat carrying illegal immigrants to Palestine. The state of Israel thus presents itself as the culmination of an unfinished journey, its foundations laid by the millions who were murdered. But we know that many of the doomed Jews did not see their lives as a journey, nor did they think of the Diaspora as a temporary state.  They wanted to be accepted and allowed to live where they were—or go to America.

From the launching of plans to build the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, until well after its opening fifteen years later in 1993, controversy over content threatened to derail the project.  .  Scholars challenged the long assumed “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.  Board members resigned.  Proponents of uniqueness insisted that they were not claiming that Jewish suffering was worse than that of any other persecuted people.  When some of them charged that others—Armenians, Ukrainians-- were “stealing their Holocaust”, they denied that their complaint was about losing some presumed moral or other pre-eminence. 

Then what were they worried about?   What they felt slipping away was their Jewish identity: according to the pre-eminent scholar of Judaism, Jacob Neusner, all the talk about uniqueness “comes down to why the... [Holocaust] was “worse” than what the Armenians went through.”  He found it “intellectually vulgar” and even “grotesque” to be arguing with other ethnic groups that our Holocaust was worse than theirs.  “If you know who you are”, Neusner wrote, “you don’t have to make statements like that.”  Is it possible that many Jews don’t know who they are except insofar as they have a unique victim identity?  One can tour the sites of the death camps and learn the details of their operation, and come away knowing nothing about life of Polish Jewry. Critics have charged the “March of the Living” for not exposing its participants to the richness of the Jewish world that the Nazis extinguished.  A Jewish identity based on catastrophe is a Jewish identity owed to anti-Semitism, which is a pretty a slim identity. But Jews were not committed to their continuity merely because there were those who wanted to annihilate them.  They had created something that was, on its own terms, worth continuing and creating.  

In the last decades of the 20^th century the Holocaust moved from the margins to the center of how American Jews understand themselves as Jews, and how they represent themselves to others.  Has this Holocaust-centred identity been destabilized by the absorption of the Holocaust into Genocide Studies, and by the downgrading of anti-Semitism as a cause?  That’s hard to say. There is always a lag between academic discourse on any topic and what prevails in the general culture.  The continued merging of the Holocaust with Genocide Studies is bound to have some effect, even though it continues to be resisted by some prominent academics and by large segments of the Jewish public. It should also be noted that a number of Jewish scholars as well as lay folk promote the merger with Genocide Studies because such “universalizing” of the Holocaust, as they see it, really elevates its significance.  In any case, there’s no way of telling how many Jews ground their identity in the Holocaust and to what extent they do.  Whatever the number, there remains an over-riding factor: times have changed since identity was an inherited, non-negotiable fact of life.  In multi-cultural North America we are free to self-identify as we wish:  our self-identification can be variable, multiple, and malleable.  And in principle—bigots to the contrary-- it is a matter of choice.

                                               

Khalida Jarrar: Negotiating team resignation is an attempt to distract the Palestinian people. (PFLP) 18.11.13

 The resignation of the Palestinian negotiating team with the occupying power is an attempt to distract the Palestinian people on the subject of the negotiations themselves, said Comrade Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Furthermore, said Jarrar, it is clear that those who rely on negotiations have no alternatives to bring before the people.

http://pflp.ps/english/2013/11/jarrar-negotiating-team-resignation-is-an-attempt-to-distract-the-palestinian-people/
 
Jarrar demanded a complete and immediate end to the futile negotiations process and the development instead of an alternative national strategy for united resistance, ending all forms of security coordination, ending political arrests, and pursuing the occupier to hold its officials accountable in international fora such as the International Criminal Court.

Jarrar warned against secret negotiations happening behind the scenes as took place in Oslo, saying that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was clear when he referred to confidential negotiations about which no details have been released.

DOWN WITH BILL C-4: Statement by the Central Committee, Communist Party of Canada, Nov. 16-30, 2013 issue People's Voice

The Communist Party of Canada strongly condemns the new omnibus Bill C‑4 to implement elements of the March 2013 Conservative budget, changing many laws and containing an array of measures, including a fierce attack against the right to strike in the public service.

In particular, this bill now gives the government, as an employer, the exclusive right to determine which services, facilities or activities of the State it considers essential, depriving public employees of their right to strike. Currently, the determination of essential services is the result of negotiation between the employer and the union.

In addition, the bill provides that where the employer has said that at least 80% of positions are essential, the right to strike will be completely abolished and the dispute must be referred to arbitration. However, when the employer considers that less than 80% of services are essential, the employer will have a veto over the arbitration. The bill also provides that the arbitrator shall be required to place a preponderance of weight to employer demands.

Finally, the right to strike will be removed when the exercise, according to the Government, becomes a threat to the Canadian economy.

The Supreme Court will soon determine whether the right to strike is protected by the Constitution, following a disputed lower court ruling about a law similar to Bill C‑4 adopted by the Saskatchewan legislature in 2008.

In his book on the asbestos strike of 1949 in Asbestos, former Prime Minister Pierre‑Elliott Trudeau, who cannot be accused of being a Communist, wrote:

"In the present state of society, in fact, it is the possibility of the strike which enables workers to negotiate with their employers on terms of approximate equality. It is wrong to think that the unions are in themselves able to secure this equality. If the right to strike is suppressed or seriously limited, the trade union movement becomes nothing more than one institution among many others in the service of capitalism; a convenient organization for disciplining the workers, occupying their leisure time and ensuring profitability for business."

In fact, Bill C‑4 violates the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which provides that "everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests."

This bill confirms the special laws that the government imposed during its negotiations with Canada Post and Air Canada last year. It adds to a series of recent actions by the Conservative government against workers and their organizations, such as the phasing out of tax credits granted to people who subscribe to credit funds workers, the obligation imposed on trade unions to publicly disclose all their financial statements (C‑377), legislation to make union organizing more difficult by eliminating automatic "card check" certification (C‑525), and threats to remove Rand formula.

All those attacks against the labor movement aim to weaken and neutralize the labor movement, the main obstacle to establishing total domination of big capital and its austerity policies on Canadian society, constituting a serious threat to democracy itself in Canada.

The Communist Party calls upon the Canadian labor movement, particularly the CLC, to mobilize its members and prepare a concrete response against the anti‑democratic and anti‑worker Tory program.

                                                                        ***
(The above article is from the November 16-30, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

Ayn Rand: Sociopath Who Admired a Serial Killer? By Austin Cline. Nov. 21 2013. orig published: May 11, 2011. Source: AlterNet

http://atheism.about.com/b/2011/05/11/ayn-rand-sociopath-who-admired-a-serial-killer.htm

If you've ever had the feeling that there was something fundamentally sociopathic about Ayn Rand's philosophy, you may have been on to something. Apparently one of Ayn Rand's early "heroes" was a serial killer named William Edward Hickman. When he was arrested Hickman became quite famous -- the talk of the town, so to speak, but for the entire country. Rand took things a bit further than most, though, and modeled at least one of her literary characters on Hickman.

    The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation.

    Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

We shouldn't assume that Ayn Rand admired everything about Hickman. After all, it's not unreasonable to find the odd admirable quality in even the worst human being. On the other hand, those "odd admirable qualities" can be found more easily in people who are more admirable overall. The choice of William Hickman cannot be separated from the reasons for his notoriety -- and it does appear that what she admired in him was not something innocuous, such as being good to dogs, but rather precisely the qualities which made him a sociopath...

    What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

    This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)

It's one thing to be heedless of people who are simply negative and are trying to dissuade you from trying something new, but quite another to simply never "feel other people" and to ignore the very existence of "other people." That describes a sociopath, not an innovator. An innovator is heedless of opinions that are negative about their goals; a sociopath is simply heedless of everyone else because they lack the ability to muster any empathy for others.

What's worse is that others have come to idolize the same sociopathic tendencies precisely because Ayn Rand popularized them. Justice Clarence Thomas is just one of many...

    What's really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan." ..

    Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, "Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism."

Sociopathy is the opposite of morality, and promoting it as a core feature of democratic capitalism isn't a recommendation for either Ayn Rand or capitalism. I doubt we can expect people like Paul Ryan to comprehend the contradiction between sociopathy and morality because he isn't even able to comprehend the fact that Rand was less than a committed supporter of democracy...

    Except that Rand also despised democracy, writing that, "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom."

    "Collectivism" is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here is another Republican member of Congress, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, to explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs: "As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that's not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves."

To be fair, Ayn Rand's attacks on democracy are not entirely without some foundation. It's true that a majority can run roughshod over individual rights. Its' true that democratic governments can behave in a totalitarian fashion. It's true that even with a democratic system, people can lack sufficient freedom -- just take a look at America's own history of slavery and voting rights, all within democratic systems. Democracy is no guarantee of liberty or freedom for all.

At the same time, though, Rand doesn't seem to be simply pointing out democracy is less than absolutely perfect and thus needs to operate within some boundaries. She isn't arguing that there are possible negative outcomes to democratic systems, but rather that those negatives are inherent in democratic systems.

For example, she's not saying that people can be less that completely free in a democracy, she's denying that it's a "form of freedom" at all. She's not simply saying that democracy can have totalitarian tendencies, but rather that it is totalitarian. Rand's denunciation of democracy as a form of "collectivism" should tell us all we need to know about her opinion of democratic systems because "collectivism" in the Randian universe is the embodiment of everything that is base, evil, and wrong in any human society. It's like the label "satanic" in Christian systems.

I suppose democracy is a form of collectivism -- after all, the fundamental principle of democracy is that sovereign power is vested in all the people, collectively, rather than in a monarch, a god, an aristocracy, a priesthood, or anything else. Power is held by "the people," and "the people" is a collective term -- it's all of us together, making decisions together about what needs to be done. There's no "Superman" who is permitted to make decisions for us independent of our permission. There's no elite making decisions for everyone else.

Perhaps it's time to start promoting the value of "collectivist" political systems against those who are trying to argue for sociopathic, dictatorial systems run by their Supermen.