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From papadop@peak.org Thu Aug 10 13:37:57 2000
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 23:32:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: MichaelP <papadop@peak.org>
Subject: FISK on Holocaust and genocide
Article: 102206
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
X-UIDL: 8a64861e1ee7cf1bff60d045b4f09618
Holocaust and genocide
Robert Fisk, Independent (London), 5 August 2000
Why is it that only one of the great holocausts of the last century merits a capital 'H'? Here, Robert Fisk, who has spent many years researching the massacre of one and a half million Armenian Christians, argues that all acts of genocide deserve equal recognition
In the spring of 1993, with my car keys, I slowly unearthed a set of skulls from the clay wall of a hill in northern Syria. I had been looking for the evidence of a mass murder -- the world's first genocide -- for the previous two days but it took a 101-year-old Armenian woman to locate the river bed where her family were murdered in the First World War. The more I dug into the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth, bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold, wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The teeth were unblemished -- these were mostly young people -- and the bones I later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror.
In 1915, the world reacted with equal horror as news emerged from the dying Ottoman Empire of the deliberate destruction of at least a million and a half Christian Armenians. Their fate -- the ethnic cleansing of this ancient race from the lands of Turkey, the razing of their towns and churches, the mass slaughter of their menfolk, the massacre of their women and children -- was denounced in Paris, London and Washington as a war crime. Tens of thousands of Armenian women -- often after mass rape by their Turkish guards -- were left to die of starvation with their children along the banks of the Habur river near Deir ez-Zour, in what is today northern Syria. The few men who survived were tied together and thrown into the river. Turkish gendarmes would fire a bullet into one of them and his body would drag the rest to their deaths. Their skulls -- a few of them -- were among the bones I unearthed on that terrible afternoon seven years ago.
The deliberate nature of this slaughter was admitted by the then Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, in a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador in Constantinople, a Jewish-American diplomat whose vivid reports to Washington in 1915 form an indictment of the greatest war crime the modern world had ever known. Enver denounced the Armenians for siding with Russia in its war with the Turks. But even the Germans, Ottoman Turkey's ally in the First World War, condemned the atrocities; for it was the Armenian civilian population which was cut down by the Turks. The historian Arnold Toynbee, who worked for the Foreign Office during the war, was to record the atmosphere of horror which lay over the abandoned Armenian lands in the aftermath of the savagery. Men had been lined up on bridges to have their throats cut and be thrown into rivers; in orchards and fields, women and children had been knifed. Armenians had been shot by the thousand, sometimes beaten to death with clubs. Earlier Turkish pogroms against the Armenians of Asia Minor had been denounced by Lord Gladstone. In the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, Winston Churchill was the most eloquent in reminding the world of the Armenian Holocaust.
In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor, Churchill wrote in his magisterial volume four of The Great War. ... the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be ... There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. Churchill referred to the Turks as war criminals and wrote of their massacring uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians -- men, women and children together; whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust -- these were beyond human redress.
So Churchill himself, writing 80 years ago, used the word holocaust about the Armenian massacres. I am not surprised. A few miles north of the site where I had dug up those skulls, I found a complex of underground caves beneath the Syrian desert. Thousands of Armenians had been driven into this subterranean world in 1915 and Turkish gendarmes lit bonfires at the mouths of the caves. The smoke was blown into the caves and the men were asphyxiated. The caves were the world's first gas chambers. No wonder, then, that Hitler is recorded as asking his generals -- as he planned his own numerically far more terrible holocaust -- Who does now remember the Armenians?
Could such a crime be denied? Could such an act of mass wickedness be covered up? Or could it, as Hitler suggested, be forgotten? Could the world's first holocaust -- a painful irony, this -- be half-acknowledged but downgraded in the list of human bestiality as the dreadful 20th century produced further acts of mass barbarity?
Alas, all this has come to pass. When I wrote about the Armenian massacres in The Independent in 1993, the Turks denounced my article -- as they have countless books and investigations before and since -- as a lie. Turkish readers wrote to the editor to demand my dismissal from the paper. If Armenian civilians had been killed, they wrote, this was a result of the anarchy that existed in Ottoman Turkey in the First World War, civil chaos in which countless Turks had died and in which Armenian paramilitaries had deliberately taken the side of Tsarist Russia. The evidence of European commissions into the massacres, the eye-witness accounts of Western journalists at the later slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna -- the present-day holiday resort of Izmir where British sunbathers today have no idea of the bloodbath that took place around their beaches -- the denunciations of Morgenthau and Churchill, are all dismissed as propaganda.
When a Holocaust conference was to be held in Israel, the Turkish government objected to the inclusion of material on the Armenian slaughter. Incredibly, Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel withdrew from the conference after the Israeli foreign ministry said that it might damage Israeli-Turkish relations. The conference went ahead, but only in miniature form. In the United States, Turkey's powerful lobby groups attack journalists or academics who suggest the Armenian genocide was fact. Turkish ambassadors regularly write letters -- which have appeared in all British newspapers, even in the Israeli press -- denying the truth of the Armenian Holocaust. No one -- save the Armenians -- objects to this denial. Scarcely a whimper comes from those who would, rightly, condemn any denial of the Jewish Holocaust.
For Turkey -- no longer the sick man of Europe -- is courted by the Western powers which so angrily condemned its cruelty in the last century. It is a valued member of the Nato alliance -- our ally in bombing Serbia last year -- the closest regional ally of Israel and a major buyer of US and French weaponry. Just as we remained largely silent at the persecution of the Kurds, so we prefer to ignore the world's first holocaust. While Britain's massive contribution to the proposed Euphrates dam project in south-eastern Turkey was in the balance, Tony Blair was not going to mention the Armenian atrocities. Indeed, when this year he announced that Britain was to honour an annual Holocaust Day, he made no mention of the Armenians. Holocaust Day, it seems, was to be a Jewish-only affair. And it was to take a capital H when it applied to the Jews.
I've always agreed with this. Mass ethnic slaughter on such a scale -- Hitler's murder of six million Jews -- deserves a capital H. But I also believe that the genocide of other races merits a capital H. Millions of Jews -- despite Wiesel's gutlessness and the shameful reaction of the Israeli government -- have shown common cause with the Armenians in their suffering, acknowledging the 1915 massacres as the precursor of the Shoah or Jewish Holocaust. Norman Finkelstein in his angry new book on the Holocaust industry makes a similar point, adding that the Jewish experience -- both his parents were extermination camp survivors -- should not be allowed to diminish the genocide committed against other ethnic groups in modern history. Indeed, the very word genocide was invented for the Armenians in 1944 -- by a Polish-born Jew, Raphael Lemkin.
Nor can I myself forget the Armenian Holocaust. The very last survivors of that genocide are still -- just -- alive, and several of them live in Beirut where I am based as Middle East correspondent of The Independent. I have read extensively about and, occasionally, researched the Jewish Holocaust -- my own book about the Lebanese war, Pity the Nation, begins in Auschwitz, where I found frozen lakes filled with the powdered bones of the dead from the ashpits of Birkenau. But the Armenian Holocaust has been my story because it is part of the Middle East's history as well as the world's. Only this year, I interviewed Hartun, a 101-year-old blind Armenian in an old people's home in East Beirut who remembered how, in the Syrian desert in 1915, his mother pleaded with Turks not to rape her 18-year-old daughter -- Hartun's sister. As she begged them not to take my sister, they beat her to death, Hartun recalled. I remember her dying, shouting 'Hartun, Hartun, Hartun' over and over. When she was dead, they took my sister away on a horse. I never saw her again. Hartun -- after years of bitterness and longing for revenge -- was overcome with what he called my Christian belief and decided to abandon the notion of vengeance. When the Turkish earthquake killed so many people last year, he told me, I prayed for the poor Turkish people.
It was a deeply moving example of compassion from a man whose suffering those Turks will not admit and whose Holocaust we prefer to ignore. Stirred partly by Hartun's story, I wrote an article for The Independent in January of this year on the sublimation of the Armenian genocide, its wilful denial by US academics who hold American university professorships funded by the Turkish government, and the absence of any reference to the Armenians in the British Government's announcement of Holocaust Day. And, yes, I referred to the Armenian Holocaust -- as I did to the Jewish Holocaust -- with a capital H. Chatting to an Armenian acquaintance, I mentioned that I had given the Armenian genocide the same capital H which I believe should be attached to all acts of genocide.
Little could I have guessed how quickly the dead would rise from their graves. When the article appeared in The Independent -- a paper which has never failed to dig into human wickedness visited upon every race and creed -- my references to the Jewish Holocaust remained with a capital H. But the Armenian Holocaust had been downgraded to a lower case h. Tell me, Robert, my Armenian friend asked me in suppressed fury, how do we Armenians qualify for a capital 'H'? Didn't the Turks kill enough of us? Or is it because we're not Jewish?
There are no conspiracies on The Independent's subs desk; just a tough, no-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical house style and conform to what is called common usage. And the Jewish Holocaust, through common usage, takes a capital H. Other holocausts don't. No one is quite sure why -- the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over the world, although it has been the subject of debate in the United States, not least by Finkelstein. Harvard turned down a professorial Chair of Holocaust and Cognate Studies because academics objected to the genocide of other groups (including the Armenians) being lumped together as cognate. But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend. To have told him his people didn't qualify for a capital H would have been shameful and insulting.
A debate then opened within The Independent. I wrote in a memo that the word holocaust could be cheapened by over-use and exaggeration -- take the agency report last year which referred to the holocaust of wildlife after an oil-spill on the French coast. But I said that I still had no answer worthy of the question posed by my Armenian friend.
One of the paper's top wordsmiths was asked to comment -- a grammatical expert who regularly teases out the horrors of definition in an imperfect and savage world. He cited Chambers Dictionary, which stated that the Jewish Holocaust was usually capitalised. And, said our expert on the paper, It is in the nature of a proper noun to apply to only one thing. Thus there may be many crusades but only one Crusade (the Middle Ages one). There may be many cities but the City is London. Similarly the Renaissance.
There can be only one Holocaust, he wrote. Is the Holocaust really unique? Yes. It was perpetrated by modern Europeans. Its purported justification was a perversion of Darwin, one of the great thinkers of modern Europe. Above all, in the gas chambers and crematoria it manufactured death by modern industrial methods. The Holocaust says to modern Western man that his technological mastery will not save him from sin, but rather magnify the results of his sins. There have been acts of genocide throughout history and some of them have killed more people than the Nazis did, but we call the Nazi holocaust 'the Holocaust' because it is our holocaust.
Must we, our grammarian asked, commit grammatical faux pas and overturn an accepted usage for which there is ample justification? Finally, where does it end? Are, for instance, the crimes of Stalin against minority nationalities in the Soviet Union not just as bad as the Armenian slaughters? What of the Khmer Rouge? Rwanda? The Roman destruction of Carthage? Are these also to be 'Holocausts'? If not, why not?
Powerful arguments, but ones with which I disagreed. The Jewish Holocaust, I wrote back, should be capitalised not because its victims were European Jews, or those of any other race, but because its victims were human beings. Human values, the right to life, the struggle against evil, are universal -- not confined to Europeans or one ethnic or religious group, or involving those who distorted Darwin's theories of biological evolution. It was, after all, The Independent's editorial policy that the world must fight against all atrocities -- a belief which underlay our demand for humanitarian action in East Timor and Kosovo. This did not mean that I regarded Timor and Kosovo as holocausts, but that we should never accept the idea that one group of victims had special status over others. I spend hours telling Arabs that they must accept and acknowledge the facts of the Jewish Holocaust, but if we are now to regard this as a specifically European crime, as our crime, I have few arguments left. The Arabs can say it is none of their business.
As for the question, Where does it end? Yes, what about Armenia? And Rwanda? If Armenians are disqualified from a capital H because they only lost one and a half million, what is Rwanda's sin of exclusion? Religion? Race? Colour? When Armenians in Israel speak of their people's suffering, they use the Hebrew word Shoah -- which means Holocaust.
The Independent's editor suggested that we should debate these questions in an article in the paper -- this is the article -- but the issues, of course, remain unresolved. Common usage is a bane to all us journalists but it is not sacred. It doesn't have to stand still. My father fought in what he called the Great War -- common usage which was later amended, after 1945, to the First World War. Similarly, I believe, the Holocaust. In the aftermath of my January remarks on the Armenian genocide, The Independent published a denial of that same genocide by a Turkish Cypriot academic, in which we printed the word Holocaust with a capital H. The world did not end. The Turks did not complain. Nor did any members of the Jewish community. Indeed, only last year, a prominent academic at the Hebrew University's Armenian studies programme in Israel talked of the Armenians and Jews having suffered holocaust.
In the meantime, Holocaust -- or holocaust -- denial continues. President Chirac has declined to endorse the French parliament's acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and forthcoming Holocaust conferences have not invited Armenians to participate. Mr Blair doesn't mention the destruction of the Armenians. They don't count, literally. Common usage -- and our concern for Turkish sensitivities -- has seen to that, even though genocide is anything but normal. Germany dutifully acknowledges its historical guilt for the wickedness of the Jewish Holocaust. Not so the Turks. Armenians accept that a few Turks—courageous, outstanding men—risked their lives in 1915 to shelter their Armenian friends and neighbours, just as righteous gentiles did for the Jews of Europe. But Turkey cannot honour these brave men. Since the Armenian Holocaust supposedly did not exist, nor did they. A holocaust rather than a Holocaust helps to diminish the suffering of the Armenians. What's in a name? What's in a capital letter? How many other skulls lie beneath the sands of northern Syria? Did the Turks not kill enough Armenians?

Bosch/Bin Laden
by Dr. William Pierce
I was looking last night at some paintings by the 15th-century Flemish painter, Hieronymous Bosch. Interesting, but pretty weird stuff. Bosch was sort of a godfather to the Surrealist school of painters, who came along 450 years later: Salvador Dali and his limp clocks, for example.
I don't know much about Bosch's life, but he was a moralist, and his paintings, with their nightmare quality, reflected his concern for the moral condition of Dutch society in his time. I thought to myself as I studied his paintings, "My God, what would Bosch be painting if he were alive today in America?" I shuddered when I thought about it. This is indeed an age which lends itself to surrealist treatment. Public life today lacks some important elements of reality.

I was looking at Bosch's paintings right after having seen Bill Clinton on television preaching about his opposition to a tax-cut bill which the Republican Congress had just passed, and that's what made me think about what Bosch might have painted in the Clinton era. I mean, there was this unspeakable piece of filth up there at his lectern, this reprobate, this criminal, wagging his finger and moralizing about doing what's good for the American people, and no one was hooting him down or even laughing at him. All of the media people were taking him seriously and showing him respect: not even an expression of distaste on the news commentator's face or a hint of contempt in his voice. I could imagine millions of other television viewers around the country soberly watching this same newscast and seeing nothing amiss. I believe that Howdy Doody or Fred Flintstone could have been up there on the speaker's podium with the Presidential seal, saying the same things Clinton said, and as long as the media people treated it seriously the viewers would see nothing amiss.

I don't know what the moral condition of Dutch society was like in the 15th century, but it certainly couldn't have been worse than that of American society today. Actually, I guess it's not really the moral condition of the American public I'm complaining about. It's the surreal nature of public life in America today.

Barak Assassin

 

I'll give you an example of what I mean when I say that there's something which isn't real about our society. When Israel's new prime minister, Ehud Barak, was visiting the United States recently, he was treated with great respect by the media people. He was described as an Israeli "war hero" and as the man who might be able to bring peace to the Middle East. Now, to the Jews the term "hero" has a different meaning than it does to us. Let me tell you about one of Ehud Barak's "heroic" exploits. In 1973 Barak headed an Israeli assassination squad which was landed on a Lebanese beach near Beirut late at night by an Israeli submarine -- supplied, of course, by the United States. Israel and Lebanon were at peace at the time, but Israel always has had a policy of assassinating troublesome Gentiles, whether they are Islamic religious leaders or Egyptian rocket scientists or Palestinians who write patriotic poetry or anyone else the Jews don't like.

The excuse usually is that the victim was a threat to Israel. The threats which Barak's murder squad dealt with that night in 1973 when they landed on the beach near Beirut were two Palestinian political writers and a poet, living in exile in Lebanon after having been "ethnically cleansed" by the Israelis. Barak and two other members of his squad quietly picked the lock and let themselves into the house of Palestinian writer Kamal Edwan and his family in the Beirut suburb of Verdun at one o'clock in the morning. Using silenced submachine guns they slaughtered Edwan, his wife, and his daughter while they slept in their beds. Other members of Barak's murder squad killed the other two victims and their families. Escaping from Lebanon and returning to Israel as a "hero," Barak explained to journalists that it had been necessary to shoot all three members of the Edwan family because the women attempted to shield Kamal from the Jews' bullets. Well, the facts are that although the bullet-riddled body of Kamal's wife was found on the bed beside him, his daughter's bullet-riddled body was found alone in her own bedroom.

Now, all of the major media in the United States knew about this at the time of Barak's visit to the United States last month. These 1973 murders made headlines around the world at the time, and, as I said, Barak was treated as a hero when he returned to Israel from this murder mission. This sort of information is kept on file at the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and every major news agency. You can dig it up yourself from any major library. But there wasn't a word about any of this in the U.S. news media last month. Why not? Was it irrelevant after 26 years?

Imagine that it had been a senior statesman from Germany who was being entertained at the White House last month instead of the prime minister of Israel. Imagine that during the Second World War, in 1943, say -- that's 56 years ago instead of 26 -- the German statesman had been the head of an SS team which killed Jews, and the news media here knew it. Do you believe that they would have remained silent about the events of 56 years ago in order to avoid embarrassing our visitor or Mr. Clinton, or because they believed that the events of 56 years ago had become irrelevant after the passage of so much time? I mean, really, what do you think?

Let me help you: the Jews always get special treatment. They own the media, they control the Clinton government, they believe they're entitled to special treatment, and they get it. You know as well as I that it is inconceivable that any foreign official who had killed Jews, and the media knew about it, could be entertained at the White House while the media kept quiet about the official's past. But a Jewish official who has murdered Gentiles -- hey, that's different: no need to remind the public about that.

And of course, the murders of Palestinian families that Ehud Barak carried out under the cover of darkness in 1973 were not the end of his career as a cold-blooded murderer of women and children. The 1973 murders were among the few that made headlines around the world, but he kept on doing the same sort of thing. Nowadays, of course, he doesn't actually go out and shoot people himself; he just gives the orders to have people shot.

This year, the day after Barak took office as prime minister of Israel, his Mossad agents murdered a 27-year-old Lebanese nuclear physicist in his Paris apartment. The Jews believe that people who are likely to sympathize with their enemies, with people from whom they have stolen land -- with the Palestinians, for example -- should not be permitted to become nuclear physicists, because their enemies may benefit from the knowledge, from the expertise. And so the Jews arrange to have these people murdered whenever they can. They count on the media under the control of their kinsmen to cover for them and on crooked politicians who are in their pocket not to make a fuss. And the politicians who run France these days are approximately as corrupt as those who run the United States -- which means totally corrupt. So the Jews get away with this sort of behavior.

Well, that's Jews for you. And I really wouldn't waste much time worrying about the type of people they are or what they do if they were doing all of their dirty work over in the Middle East somewhere among their fellow Semites. But they're doing their dirty work over here, among us, and it concerns all of us. At least, it ought to be a matter of concern to all of us, because it certainly affects all of us.

I'll just recap what I've said so far: the mass media in the United States -- all of them, the TV network news programs, the national newspapers and news magazines such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report -- all of them knew about Barak's background when he was in this country recently, and they all covered for him. They all concealed his bloody past from the American people -- deliberately and knowingly concealed it and portrayed Barak as a "man of peace" -- so that Bill Clinton and the other politicians could suck up to him and promise him billions of dollars more from the U.S. Treasury -- our money -- without any protest from us. And the media did that because Barak is a Jew, because he is the head of the Jewish state, and they -- the media bosses -- also are Jews or are completely tied up in collaboration with the Jews.

Now that's a serious business, and it ought to concern all of us. It's not just that ordinary Americans, who depend on the mass media for everything they know -- or think they know -- about what's happening in the world are being deceived. One could argue that that's not important, because most ordinary Americans never understand anything anyway, whether they're being deliberately deceived or not, so what difference does it make whether it's the Jews or someone else who's deceiving them; they're just sheep; they don't count.

Now, that's not my position. I believe that we must have honest, accurate, and responsible mass media in the hands of our own people. I believe that ordinary Americans at least ought to have the information needed to understand what's happening in the world, whether they have the desire or the intelligence to take advantage of that information or not. But as I just said the problem is bigger than the fact that the public is being deceived. You know, there are a great many Americans who are not sheep and who are not so easily deceived: smart, wide-awake Americans who have the same access to information that I do, Americans who understand that their personal success and welfare depend on their knowing about what's happening in the world.

People like Bill Gates don't simply take at face value everything they see on their television screens. But Bill Gates doesn't speak out. He does nothing to counter the deception and plundering of his own people. Instead he knowingly collaborates with the Jews in the deception. His Microsoft Corporation is involved in a joint media venture with NBC.

And of course it's not just Bill Gates. No one who understands what's happening and who also has the resources to oppose it effectively is willing to do so. Everyone is looking out only for himself. Everyone is willing to collaborate with the Jews or with Bill Clinton or with any other evil and destructive group or person or policy so long as there's some personal advantage to doing so. No one is willing to stand up for what is true and right if there is no personal advantage for himself in doing so. There are not even ten righteous men of wealth and power in America to justify the continued existence of this nation, of this society. That is the nightmare quality of American society today which Hieronymous Bosch would be truly challenged to symbolize in his painting if he were here today.

Before I move on I want to state once more the point I've made here. First, Ehud Barak, the current prime minister of Israel, the man who was entertained in the White House by Bill Clinton last month and was promised billions of dollars more of our money, is a man who used to murder people that the Jews wanted murdered. He used to murder intellectuals whose ideas the Jews considered dangerous -- and their wives and children. He used to murder them personally and close-up, so that he got spattered with their blood and brains as they begged for mercy. He is a cold-blooded murderer. He is a terrorist. The 1973 murders in Beirut I described are a matter of public record, and you can check them out for yourself in any large library. Check using the key words Kamal Edwan.

Second, the mass media here all knew this, but they covered up for Barak. They would not have done that except that he is a Jew and it is in the interest of Jews to conceal his background from the American taxpayers who are supporting Israel. The Jewish media bosses do not want American Gentiles to know that the leading Jew in the world today, the Jew who is looked up to and admired by Jews in America as well as in Israel, is an assassin, a cold-blooded murderer of women and children. The media bosses do not want Americans to understand that that's the sort of man most admired by their Jewish neighbors.

Third, other knowledgeable people in America, knowledgeable Gentiles, rich and influential Gentiles, who should have been providing leadership and guidance to other Americans, also knew about Barak, but they remained silent rather than offend the Jews.

You know, you don't have to agree with me about what we ought to do about the Jews. You may believe that it's possible to live in the same country with Jews. You may even believe in equality or democracy or -- heaven forbid! -- diversity, but you cannot call yourself an honest man or a patriot if you were one of those who knew about Barak and remained silent. And of course, the concealing of Barak's murderous background from the public is only one of hundreds of similar moral failures I could cite, failures to speak out and provide the truth to the public on important issues when the Jewish media are deliberately concealing the truth. I've spoken myself about dozens of these issues on these American Dissident Voices programs: about the deliberate effort by the Jewish media to make the White public believe that most so-called "hate crimes" involve Whites attacking non-Whites, for example, by providing enormously inflated news coverage of the tiny minority of interracial crimes in which that is the case and completely suppressing the news of the majority of interracial crimes in which Whites are the victims. The public doesn't know about this deception, but many wealthy and influential White people do -- and yet they remain silent. You cannot call yourself a responsible American if you ignore the deceptions of the mass media, if you fail to speak out about these deceptions for fear of jeopardizing your career or your wealth or some business relationship you have with Jews -- but who is speaking out? I am listening. I hear no political leader, no religious leader, no business leader speaking out.

So what will become of a country in which there no longer are any men of wealth and power and influence who care about the country, who feel responsible for it? What will happen to a society in which the masses care only about their ball games and their welfare "entitlements," as they're called these days, and the rich care only about their personal wealth and power?

Well, let me tell you, it doesn't take a Hieronymous Bosch to look at this society and notice that it is profoundly ill. Ordinary men and women all around the world can see that. And while Hieronymous Bosch isn't here today to chastise us for our lack of morality, other men who care about morality are: men like Osama bin Laden, for example. And the fact that men like Bin Laden can look at America and see that it no longer has a soul, makes them infinitely more dangerous as our moral instructors. Bin Laden knows that the next time he blows something up a great many people will applaud him, both around the world and in America.

The people you see on the television screen won't be applauding, of course. Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton will be looking very grim and will be wagging their fingers and making threats about retaliation. The cameras will focus on the bodies being pulled from the rubble, and the TV commentators will be very serious and will have the couch potatoes everywhere feeling indignant toward Bin Laden and regarding him as a bloodthirsty terrorist who kills people without reason. But there will be tens of thousands of Americans who understand the situation and who will applaud Bin Laden in the privacy of their living rooms, and there will be tens of millions of people around the world who will applaud.

Let me reiterate: people like Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright would have you believe that a country doesn't need a soul in order to be healthy. Certainly, the couch potatoes, the lemmings, are not concerned about such things as the nation's soul. As long as the bread and circuses continue, as long as the ball games and the "entitlements" keep coming, they will believe that everything is all right. They really don't see anything amiss. They don't have any sort of moral compass inside themselves to tell them that things are very wrong in our national life. They simply believe what the media tell them, without even a twinge of misgiving. That's one of the surreal features of life in America today. The great bulk of the population -- the White population -- is marching happily toward national and racial extinction. That isn't natural. It doesn't seem real -- but it is happening.

And even though the couch potatoes can't understand this, there are people around the world who can and do. There are people who still are able to make moral judgments and who have the will to act on their judgments, in one way or another. Hieronymous Bosch is no longer with us, but Osama bin Laden is. And so are plenty of others who make manifest their moral judgments with weapons of mass destruction instead of with paint and canvas.

And of course, moral chastisement from without isn't the only consequence of our situation that we should anticipate. There will be a lot more craziness of one sort or another as people without moral guidance react in various ways to the stresses imposed by a disintegrating society: mass shootings, cult suicides, scandals and outrages of every sort, from the Oval Office to every corner of American life.

When a society no longer has any righteous men, men for whom righteousness counts more than profit or comfort or personal security -- righteous men who will stand up and make themselves heard in America -- then every member of our society will pay a price. No one will escape the craziness. Some Americans will applaud when they see evildoers struck down; other Americans will become fearful and call for more security from the government. But the craziness will continue, it will become worse as our society descends into chaos, and it will not become better until we once again have a society headed by righteous men.

© 1999 National Vanguard Books · Box 330 · Hillsboro ·WV 24946 · USA


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