By Bo Sears

Yesterday the Observer, which is the Guardian in its Sunday best, published an article about Obama and white America by the journalist Paul Harris “in Williamson, West Virginia”.  Mr Harris saw ugliness everywhere he looked in Williamson.

Johnny Telvor was not happy about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Not happy at all.

... ‘We’ll end up slaves. We’ll be made slaves just like they was once slaves,’ he said. Telvor, a white Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton in West Virginia’s primary, said he planned to vote for Republican John McCain in November. ‘At least he’s an American,’ he added with a disarmingly friendly smile.

Such racist opinions are a rough antidote to the giddy optimism that has swept through much of America’s chattering classes over the past week ... The United States, they have argued, is finally prepared to elect a black president and absolve its historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But the uglier truth is that part of white America remains secretly - or sometimes openly - deeply distrustful of the idea of a black president.

... Was there anything Obama could say during the coming campaign to convince him? ‘Nope,’ Spence replied. Then he broached the one issue many Americans consider off-limits: the potential security threat to Obama. ‘Look, someone will kill him. Whoever Obama picks as running mate will end up being president.’  Spence’s ready smile and chatty manner on the thorny issue of Obama’s possible murder gave little clue as to whether he thought it would be a bad thing or not.

Often such sentiments are dismissed as the ramblings of a few diehards, carrying with them the prejudices of a by-gone age.

... Stanley Little laughed when asked if he could support Obama. ‘I will vote for McCain,’ he said. Little, a maintenance man for local offices, had one simple reason why he too was rejecting his long family history of voting Democrat. ‘McCain is one of us. Obama ain’t,’ he said, leaving little doubt as to who he meant by ‘us’.

... In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. ‘West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it’s not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,’ said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.

... Gillespie points out that recent studies have shown that white voters in US cities that have elected a black mayor for the first time prove far more willing to elect one for a second term. ‘They realise the sky has not fallen in. That life went on,’ Gillespie joked. If Obama does win the White House, that experience could be repeated on a national scale for all Americans. Few things could be more important in finally drawing the poison of racism out of American life.

But behind such optimism, another America looms. It is an America far from the headlines that have proclaimed Obama’s candidacy a revolution that will atone for a race-tinged history. This is the America where outrageous rumours that Obama is a Muslim are readily believed. It is the America where Telvor is able to voice a sentiment that ‘Obama might actually be the antichrist’ without apparent irony or fear of contradiction. It is a slice of America trapped in the dreadful history of race relations and the legacy of slavery and segregation.

On the streets of towns such as Pikeville and Williamson, and in the minds of people like Little and Telvor, that past lives on. It is kept in the present by poverty, joblessness and a fear of the different. It is also a powerful force that should not be underestimated. It could even decide who will be the next President. ‘McCain will beat Obama. There’s a lot of Democrats around here that will be switching side to vote for him,’ Little said. Behind him a white-washed message in the closed Obama Pikeville office read: ‘Vote Obama 08: change!’ In the brutal summer heat it seemed a forlorn hope. It was asking for the overthrow of generations of entrenched prejudice.

In answer to this entrenched anti-white prejudice Resisting Defamation mailed the following letter to The Observer:-

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By David Hamilton

City drugs turf war

DOZENS of extra police officers patrolled the streets of a Sheffield suburb last night after yobs from rival gangs armed with sticks and swords clashed in a drug-related turf war and a man was stabbed in the city centre.

The trouble between the Afro-Carribean and Somali gangs has been simmering all week but finally spiralled out of control when youths armed with sticks and swords fought on the streets of Broomhall on Thursday night and a man was stabbed outside Primark in Sheffield city centre yesterday morning.

Today Ch Supt Jon House, Sheffield district policing commander, said ... ““We now feel, following conversations with the leader of the council and the leader of the Labour Party, a more robust stance of stop and search must be taken to reassure members of the public.”

... Coun Mazher Iqbal, former Sheffield Council cabinet advisor for community safety, said the city centre stabbing followed problems starting last weekend. “It started as a dispute between Somali and Afro-Caribbean youths but has escalated and involves two gangs. We’ve had people carrying serious weapons, baseball bats, knives and pick-axes.

From yesterday’s Sheffield Star

The following article was published at

http://www.cdall.net/ on 2nd August 2007.

TAMING GANGS - THE SHEFFIELD SOLUTION

History is exciting narrative and can also guide us with contemporary problems. It does not repeat itself exactly but similarly and study can clarify present disorders. A major problem for decent people living their everyday lives is the take over of our towns and cities by violent gangs that have been allowed here by the authorities. A precedent 1920’s Sheffield, England, was terrorised by gangsters. They lived in cramped back to back houses in courtyards which sociologists use as the excuse. But joining a gang gives power, a sense of importance, of belonging to something, money, possessions, prestige and women offering themselves to you. It gives identity as most gangs are formed on Ethnic lines and based on a territory.

These gangs gambled. Bookies operated outside factory gates with “runners” inside collecting bets for them and one made £75 to around a £100 each day even though it was illegal. Another popular form of gambling was “pitch and Toss.” This was a simple form of betting that required no equipment to pack up and carry away. It was tossing 3 coins into the air with the two forefingers and betting on the proportion of, say, heads that turned up. The biggest and most profitable “Pitching” site was on “Sky Edge” a promontory that gives a panorama over the city and with well-placed lookouts or “Crows” raiding policeman could be spotted from afar.

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Today I came across a video slice of a Henry Kissinger interview about the troubled and troubling process of European integration.  The interview was conducted by Peter Robinson for National Review Online, and it’s dated 22nd April 2008.

Kissinger was an academic connected to the Council on Foreign Relations in the late 1950s while the Treaty of Rome was being planned.  His specialism was security, with reference to nuclear weapons.  Obviously, one of the major strands in the European project was the prevention of a third 20th Century war, so he may well have contributed to the CFR’s adumbrations on the subject, and the somewhat royal “We” he employs in the interview is more than likely justified.

In any event, at one minute in, the old thaumaturge relieves himself of the following remark:-

Did we make a mistake?  Probably not, because Europe was strained by two world wars, and the European nation state was no longer in a position to carry out the global responsibilities which used to be characteristic of Europe.  We over-estimated, however, what could be achievable.  We thought you could transfer the loyalties of the nation state to the greater organisation that was being created, and that has turned out to be wrong or not feasible.  So Europe, in a way, is now suspended between its past, which it has partially given up, and it’s future which it hasn’t yet reached - and maybe never reach.

Next Thursday 12th June, the Irish electorate will go to the polls as the only member nation of the EU to vote on the Lisbon Treaty.  Last week the Irish Times published an opinion poll which showed the swashbuckling “No” Campaign ahead for the first time:-

35% No (up 17%)
30% Yes (down 5%)
35% Don’t Know (down 12%)

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As a follow-up to a prior post:

At 3:05 into the above video, the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) Convention mentions “Jim Bowery” as the author of the resolution, that passes the convention, to require the House to formally declare war before committing troops.  That’s the plank passed by the Skamania Convention.  I strengthened the language for the resolution at the State Convention.

You can see the McCain delegates filing back in in response to the passage of that resolution, their gambit to disestablish a quorum having backfired.

I’m on some lists now for sure…

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“During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions.  “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country we imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?”

... During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.”  By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.

John Pilger explaining the power of journalism in the West to an audience at Columbia University in April 2006.

Pilger, now 68, has devoted his entire journalistic life to speaking for the (mostly Third World) exploited, degraded or slaughtered victims of the machinery of global power.  The precise targets of his withering fire are the Western governments, the Western political system, his so often supine fellow journalists and, most of all, the rapine corporate and financial elites.

The [US presidential candidates] are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.”

A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, They won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a new, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party, with the bonus of being a member of the black elite, he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

This is good stuff, from an essay published last week in the New Statesman.

Of course, Pilger cannot process the case for Western survivalism.  He stands politically, I think, with the global justice movement, which is an outcrop of the post-communist left.  But the older I get the more I realise that dissonance is not a good enough reason to accept the role allotted to us of endlessly quarrelling with the left.  There is no left and right in the harsh light of day.  There is plutocracy and there is victimhood everywhere that plutocrats reign.  There is knowledge and there is ignorance.  There is sleep and there is waking.  There is the capacity to discriminate human values and there is the absence of it (it’s absent in the left).

In so far as the left leaves us alone to state and restate our own values and to pursue our own cause, we should not quarrel with it for desiring to tend to the poor in the Third World.  Ultimately, both our concerns and theirs are just, and both flow from the same hearth of evil.

That’s the lesson I take from reading Pilger’s largely very good material.

Tom Sunic circulated an alert today to the appearance of a fresh volume of some 89 poems by Joe Pryce, titled The Mansions of Irkalla.  Pryce, a New Yorker, is a poet of the Promethean spirit, that long reclusive self of the mythic European past.

Tom wrote:-

In this important book of poems, Joe D. Pryce revives the traditions of 19th century verse of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Very much in the footsteps of the French symbolists, he depicts the horrors of the modern liberal system, thus adding his own poetic flavor to the cultural-political arsenal of modern conservative-revolutionary thought. His poems are an attempt to resuscitate American poetry and to realign it with a Euro-American giant, Ezra Pound. His unsurpassed sense of the English language, teeming with surreal metaphors and strange antediluvian imagery, guides the reader to that primordial quest for the meaning of time and being. Pryce’s poems are an invaluable contribution to the heritage of European Prometheism, which has lain dormant since World War II.

I thought I should reproduce a couple of Pryce poems.  They predate the new collection, but illustrate well what Tom is getting at.

Maidens & Guardians
We sing our lays
Of distant days
Of honeyed springtimes
In an Age of Gold.

But we the warriors work on in shadowy remoteness
Recollecting tragedy whilst forging treasures of the spirit
In a pensive pondering, anigh the maidens caroling
Through noontide’s mellow and yet vibrant gleaming
For an awesome advent is approaching
Gathering its might upon the heavy wings of autumn.

Still this dithyrambic choir of maidens,
Is rehearsing, warbling, for its festival.

An elaborately interwoven and precisely draughted world
Of slow and sweet decline
Its palette slightly muted as to color
Seems in our eyes slowly now to dim
And languish, as if knowing that
These sweet chansons accompany
Their dark avengers
As we forge our racks
And craft our fearsome Iron Maidens.

Sad, yet richly apprehensive
Of the wondrous wizardry of the declining,
Meltingly alluring world advancing ineluctably upon us.

More than merely Autumn slithers up the steep declivity, and so,
We now go off to deal out savage preludes
To unspeakable massacres beyond which we must
Deal out condign pain to many more who sha’n't tell aught of it.
For now is the bright hour of our returning come among us:
And we all are ready.

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The Work Foundation, an NGO at the confluence of internationalism and economism, has issued a press release titled, “UK must attract more highly skilled migrant workers”:-

Katerina Rüdiger, author of a new report, ‘Towards a Global Labour Market?’, says: “Global firms need more global people — not just to fill shortages, but for the sake of enabling firms to innovate.

“... At present, despite the hype, numbers are relatively low — only 167,000 high skilled workers came to this country on official figures from 2005. Politicians need to actively make the case for highly skilled migration. The new points based system in the UK will not be enough on its own. Talented people want career opportunities, the chance to expand knowledge by working with the brightest and best, good salaries, and the creation of diverse and exciting cities.”

This is the enemy in smooth and self-confident action.  Elsewhere on the site, in its advertising blurb to the Rüdiger report, it urges “policymakers” to:-

... do more to ensure the UK remains an attractive place for highly skilled migrants to want to come.In knowledge intensive sectors, human capital is as, if not more, important than labour cost.Highly skilled migrants are vital for organisations to be able to innovate, to gain ‘an international outlook’ and get round the problems of a purely native labour supply.

“The problems of a purely native labour supply.”  Quite outrageous.  I have searched the full report, and the “problem” is described there in the singular, and is an ageing native demographic.  But that’s not really it, because the report plainly states that the cause of skilled labour shortages in “IT, science, healthcare and technology fields” is the government’s success in promoting Britain “as a location for foreign investment”.

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You will find four radical resolutions at the end of this article, all of which were submitted to, and the first two of which were passed by the Washington State Republican Party 2008 Convention to become official Washington State Republican Party positions.

The status of these resolutions and their titles:

Official WSRP Position: Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives
Official WSRP Position: Repeal the 16th Amendment
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the Federal Reserve Act
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the 17th Amendment

The story behind their respective fates is illustrative of how the political process works at the state level.  I’m going to go into some details that may seem self-indulgent but they are also illustrative of what it actually took to get the first two resolutions adopted as official policy by the Washington State Republican Party.  Think of it as a flavor of war story.  The devil is in the details…

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