Catching up with Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio

In recent years, while many other major American cities have declined precipitously in quality of life, with crime statistics booming and workers and taxpayers fleeing to the suburbs, New York City has thrived. This is no coincidence. After the living nightmare of the 1970s and 80s that can still be seen in movies like Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) – a time when the subways and Central Park and whole neighborhoods seemed to have been taken over by criminal gangs and the police had been defanged by feckless, politically correct mayors such as John V. Lindsay, Abe Beame, and David Dinkins – Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) turned everything around by making vigorous use of the police department and city courts. Things kept running relatively smoothly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-13), although one could argue with his nosy nanny-state policies, such as attempts to control the consumption of soft drinks.

But then along came de Blasio. On the surface, his election made no sense. Giuliani had almost surely saved the Big Apple from fiscal disaster and civil disorder of the sort that has plagued cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. De Blasio, an out-and-out Marxist, was fiercely opposed to the kind of governance that had pulled New York back from the brink. He bought into the idea that heavily policing high-crime black neighborhoods is racist. In July 2015, we made note on this website of a proclamation he had recently issued congratulating The Nation, a far-left weekly published in New York, on its anniversary. The proclamation painting a glowing picture of The Nation, depicting it as a positive moral force that “mobiliz[ed] its readers to articulate and reaffirm their values and to take action in the name of progress (necessarily ruffling not a few feathers along the way).”

In fact, as we pointed out at the time, The Nation was the flagship publication of American Stalinism. Over a period of decades, it passionately defended (or minimized the significance of) Stalin’s Gulag and show trials, systematically demonized Stalin’s critics, and mocked and vilified American freedom. Nor did The Nation‘s insipid politics evaporate with the death of Stalin or the fall of the USSR. After 9/11, Christopher Hitchens, a longtime Nation columnist, quit the magazine because he was disgusted by its editors’ view that America had deserved what it got. He called The Nation “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” De Blasio’s praise for The Nation should have discredited him for all time in the eyes of every New Yorker who had lived through the city’s darkest day. But it didn’t.

Nor, bafflingly, have New Yorkers been put off in significant numbers by his various social and economic policies, which have changed New York’s course, heading it once again for that proverbial cliff. By ordering an end to the NYPD’s spectacularly effective “stop and frisk” strategy, which certain self-styled leaders of minority communities had criticized, de Blasio showed that he cared more about good relations with race hustlers than about the safety of New Yorkers. Similarly, by putting an end to an equally successful Muslim surveillance program, de Blasio showed that he was more interested in being praised by groups like CAIR than in protecting his city from another 9/11.

Cops turn their backs on de Blasio at funeral for slain colleague Wenjian Liu, January 4, 2015

Also, De Blasio repeatedly gave the impression that he viewed cops as racists. When two police officers were murdered during his term, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association blamed their deaths on de Blasio’s anti-cop rhetoric. Not long after, when he attended the funeral of a policeman who’d been killed in the line of duty, the police officers in attendance turned their backs en masse on the mayor.

One might have hoped and expected that some Democrat would have come along and mounted a serious challenge to de Blasio at the primary level, or that the GOP would have found a candidate capable of defeating him in the general election. But no – de Blasio sailed smoothly to re-election without much at all in the way of opposition. It’s not only one of the more puzzling chapters in recent American political history, but also a potential tragedy for the one American metropolis that has done the best job of weathering a decades-long tide of destructive political correctness in the nation’s City Halls.

Posted on November 27, 2017November 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Sunsara Taylor’s war on “the war on women”

We’re spending this week in the constantly agitating company of tireless activist Sunsara Taylor, a longtime member of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Over the years, she’s been the public face of a number of different groups purportedly dedicated to fighting different injustices. These days, as we’ve seen, she’s a spokeswoman for Refuse Fascism, which seeks to unseat President Trump (who, she argues, is worse than Hitler) and replace him with (who else?) Bob Avakian. Years ago, as we saw yesterday, she was involved in End Pornography and Patriarchy, a bold campaign to end America’s “war on women,” which, again, only Avakian could put a stop to.

Another group on Taylor’s résumé was “The World Can’t Wait,” which was active around 2007 and which was one of many organizations protesting America’s war in Iraq. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that the real point of “The World Can’t Wait” was to bring in members who were motivated by antiwar sentiments as a first step toward recruiting them into the RCP. Taylor “spoke at over 50 campuses” in an effort to “Drive Out the Bush Regime” and thus bring an end to the war. In connection with this antiwar effort, she and her colleagues also made a practice of shouting down politicians who were trying to deliver speeches. “The World Can’t Wait” made a good deal of noise during George W. Bush’s presidency but seems to have disappeared into the ether by the time Barack Obama took office.

But Taylor didn’t go away. After putting in a good few months trying to stop America’s wars in the Middle East, she shifted gears and threw herself, heart and soul, into an effort to rid the planet of religion. This movement was tied in with the publication of Avakian’s 2008 book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. Just as “The World Can’t Wait” seemed to be a transparent attempt to exploit the antiwar movement to gain RCP converts, so Away With All Gods and the attendant activism comes off as a painfully obvious effort to swell RCP ranks by piggybacking onto the then-hot atheism movement spearheaded by Christopher Hitchens, whose bestseller God Is Not Great had come out in 2007, and Richard Dawkins, whose The God Delusion appeared in 2008.

Last year found Taylor involved in yet another crusade. In the months prior to the election that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Taylor was busy helping to run the RCP’s “Get into the Revolution Organizing Tour.” Along with her RCP comrade Carl Dix, she traveled from campus to campus around the U.S., trying to convince students “to become communists and kill off America.” On to that triumph tomorrow.

Posted on March 30, 2017March 30, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Baader-Meinhof in film: celebration or indictment?

The 2008 movie The Baader Meinhof Complex runs two and a half hours, and it is as ambitious as it is long. It seeks to tell the history of the Baader-Meinhof Group, or Red Army Faction (RAF), as fully as possible – to include every act of terrorism and every important RAF personage. The production is fastidious: the filmmakers reportedly went out of their way to re-create events, whenever possible, in the very spots where they had taken place. The attention to period detail, and to other particulars, is remarkable, as is the effort to create rich, rounded portraits of the major figures of (at least) the RAF’s first generation.

The film – directed by Uli Edel from a script by himself and Bernd Eichinger, which is based on a book by Stefan Aust – was a huge hit in Germany. It was a nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. There was, however, much debate as to whether or not it romanticized the terrorists. Some felt it portrayed RAF members as “Bonnie and Clyde-style heroes.” One film critic objected that Edel had given Andreas Baader “what he always wanted. Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film.” Bettina Röhl called the film “the worst-case scenario – it would not be possible to top its hero worship.” The widow of banker Jurgen Ponto, who’d been assassinated by the RAF, protested the government’s financial support of the film by returning a Federal Cross of Merit. Michael Buback, son of a murdered federal prosecutor, complained that Edel had shown “little consideration…towards the family members” of the RAF’s victims.

Christopher Hitchens, however, praised the movie for not romanticizing the RAF. As he saw it, the film “interrogates and ultimately indicts (and convicts) the West German terrorists rather than the state and society which they sought to overthrow.” And Jorg Schleyer, son of another RAF victim, affirmed with admiration that Edel showed the RAF to be a “wantonly brutal band of murderers.”

BODY OF EVIDENCE, director Uli Edel, on set, 1993. ©MGM — Uli Edel

Well, which is it? On the one hand, the movie doesn’t stint on spelling out the main characters’ many flaws (including the fact that they’re cold-blooded killers). On the other hand, its use of cutaways to stock footage of the Vietnam War – bombings, terrified natives, etc. – seems to impute legitimacy to the RAF’s view of America as a cruel imperialist power. This impression is enhanced by the film’s almost total failure to remind the viewer that America was, in fact, at war with Communism, thanks to which East Germans were living under a totalitarian government under the thumb of the Kremlin. In the end, whether a particular viewer considers the characters in The Baader-Meinhof Complex sympathetic may depend mostly on that viewer’s own politics.

But the movie fails in at least one important, indisputable way: for whatever reason, it essentially omits the role of the Stasi in the history of the RAF. And without the Stasi, the film’s story, however crowded with accurate specifics, becomes a lie.

By contrast, consider Volker Schlöndorff’s 2000 movie The Legend of Rita. It’s the story of a well-off young West German woman, Rita Vogt (based in part on RAF member Inga Viett), who becomes involved in a RAF-like group because, as she puts it, “Riding horses, playing tennis or guzzling down salmon doesn’t interest me.” After she makes the front pages by killing a cop in France, she flees to East Germany. The Stasi’s RAF links are made clear from the start, and it’s the Stasi that gives her a new identity (and then yet another identity after the first one is blown).

There’s no doubt what Schlöndorff’s film wants us to make of Rita: she’s an oddball, as perversely happy with her new life in grim, oppressive East Germany than she was unhappy as an affluent citizen of the West. In the East, she’s grinning like a fool while everyone else is miserable. Ideology, clearly, is realer to her than reality. She doesn’t understand their attraction to the West: “Why do so many people want to leave here?” For their part, they mock the naïvete with which she contributes to a Sandinista solidarity fund: doesn’t she realize it’s a government scam?

When the Wall comes down, her colleagues’ newfound joy enrages her, and she lectures them about the value of what they’re losing: “This here was a great attempt at a revolution!” At the end, there’s no doubt about her utter foolishness. As a portrait of the RAF mentality, The Legend of Rita is shorter on documentary fact than The Baader Meinhof Complex, but scores far higher on moral clarity. Alas, one hesitates to say the same thing about its portrait of the Stasi mentality; to anyone familiar with the real Stasi, the consistent kindness of Rita’s Stasi contact is beyond improbable.

A third film merits mention here. Germany in Autumn (1978), the work of ten high-profile German directors, including Schlöndorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is a bizarre mishmash of images, staged scenes, documentary footage, and impromptu monologues and arguments, all directly or indirectly about the RAF; it concludes with the October 1977 funeral of Baader, Enslin, and gang member Jan-Carl Raspe, at which dozens of mourners raised their fists and screamed “Murderers!” at cops. The filmmakers obviously felt they were paying some sort of tribute to the RAF, or at least doing them the honor of tackling the issues they’d raised, but today the film serves mainly as a document in 1970s-era useful stoogery in West Germany, where for many members of the cultural elite democracy was fascism and Communism was liberation.

Posted on September 29, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

George Galloway’s accounting methods

George Galloway arrives for the funeral of former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn at St Margaret's Church, Westminster, central London. — Wide boy

In a 2005 article, the late, great Christopher Hitchens called George Galloway “a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a ‘wide boy.’” As Hitchens neatly put it, Galloway “has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods.”

You can say that again. When Galloway hasn’t been busy praising dictators or slandering lovers of freedom, he’s spent a lot of time participating in shady international money transfers, some of which involved fattening his own pockets, and some of which involved passing cash and merchandise on to terrorists and tyrants.

Christopher Hitchens, polemicist and frequent radio and TV commentator, debates with George Galloway, a member of the British parliament, in Baruch College in New York September 14, 2005. Galloway kicked off a tour for his new book "Mr. Galloway Goes To Washington, The Brit Who Set Congress Straight About Iraq" in Boston. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton — Christopher Hitchens

From 1983 to 1987, he ran a charity called War On Want. During his tenure, questions were raised about the organization’s less than transparent financial picture. Accused of having used the charity’s dough to “liv[e] the high life in dirt-poor countries,” as Hitchens put it, Galloway was forced to resign and to pay back a relatively small sum in “contested expenses.” There are those who believe that in this case, as in many others, the true dimensions of Galloway’s perfidy were covered up.

In 1998 he founded the Mariam Appeal, which purportedly aimed to provide medical help to people in Iraq. Galloway raked in huge sums from sheiks in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, among others. Again, questions were raised about his personal use of the organization’s funds. The group was investigated several times by the U.K.’s Charity Commission, which chided Galloway for not registering it as a charity and not reporting on its finances as required by law. When the commission asked to see the Mariam Appeal’s books, they turned out to have been shipped off to Amman and Baghdad, far from prying British eyes. The whole thing looked extremely fishy, but once again Galloway got off with a slap on the wrist. The Mariam Appeal shut down in 2003.

One of the Mariam Appeal’s big donors was Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman whom Galloway eventually put in charge of the operation. In 2005, Zureikat became a focus of a U.S. Senate subcommittee’s investigation into Saddam Hussein’s abuses of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, under which Saddam’s government, despite trade sanctions, had been allowed to sell oil to buy food and medicine. Galloway became a focus, too. Documents were reportedly uncovered showing that he, his then wife (Amineh Abu-Zayyad), and his campaign organization had all received shares of the illicit profits from Iraqi oil sales.

George Galloway - Elections...George Galloway with his wife Amineh after voting at Streatham in the in Local Goverment elections,London Mayoral election and European Parliamentary Elections. ... George Galloway - Elections ... 10-06-2004 ... LONDON ... UK ... PRESS ASSOCIATION photo. Photo credit should read: Michael Stephens/PA Archive. Unique Reference No. 1968245 ... — George Galloway and wife #2, Amineh Abu-Zayyad

Galloway admitted that some of the money made illegitimately through the exploitation of the U.N. Program had ended up in the coffers of the Mariam Appeal, but insisted that he hadn’t personally profited. So did his wife. (By the way, Galloway has been married four times and divorced thrice; his last three wives have been Muslims, whom he married in Islamic ceremonies.) Although the subcommittee sent reports detailing evidence of corruption on the part of both M. and Mme. Galloway to the U.S. Justice Department, to law officials in New York and the District of Columbia, to the ethics office of the British Parliament, and to the U.K.’s Charity Commission, no action was taken by any of these bodies.

George Galloway returns to his property on Ambleside Avenue, Stretham, with his new wife, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi. (please confirm Identity) 2/4/12 — George Galloway and wife #4, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi

To be sure, he hasn’t just taken cash from hooligans – he’s distributed it, too. When he took part in the 2009 Viva Palestina convoy, he transported a substantial amount of illicit cash and merchandise which he handed over to the Hamas rulers of Gaza. He denied having done this, even though video footage showed him presenting bags of cash to these creeps.

We’ve noted earlier that both Galloway and his wife (this would be wife #4, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi) are on the payroll of Putin’s English-language TV station. Galloway is also a paid employee of Iran’s state-owned TV station, Press TV, and of the pro-Hezbollah TV station Al Mayadeen. You’ve got to hand it to him. When in modern times has a member of any national legislature in the Western world had fingers that were at once so sticky and so filthy?

Posted on June 24, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

Saddam’s buddy

Over the course of his long career in the Commons, George Galloway has become a unique figure on the British political landscape. Describing himself as a “revolutionary,” he hates Britain, hates America, hates the West, hates democracy, hates capitalism. And he hates them all so very much that he seems to love every form of despotism that represents a challenge to these things. The worst day of his life, he has said, was the day the USSR fell. As Christopher Hitchens once noted, Galloway has been involved ever since in “the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland.” He found it in Saddam’s Iraq, gushing that “just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.”

While savaging leaders in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere in the West, Galloway was an unapologetic fan of Saddam, whom he visited twice in Baghdad. In a 1994 speech, he addressed the bloodthirsty tyrant directly, saying: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Galloway defended him, calling Kuwait – counterfactually – “clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole, stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion.” He also whitewashed Saddam’s massacre of Kurds and Shias, insisting that there was “massive violence on both sides.”

In 2002, the Mail published an “interview” Galloway held with Saddam, in which their chumminess comes through vividly. He also palled around with Saddam’s son Usay, known as “The Wolf,” whose own barbaric practices include the killing of thousands of people and the torturing of athletes who didn’t perform as well as expected. Recordings exist of George and Usay joking about weight loss and putting down the U.S. “I’d like you to know,” the Scots MP promised the Iraqi tyrant’s heir, “that we are with you till the end.”

If he was friendly with Saddam and son, he was even closer to Saddam’s deputy premier, Tariq Aziz. While Aziz was in power, Galloway counseled him on warfare: “Don’t stand in lines, or hunker down in trenches….You will be mown down or buried alive.” When fighting a superpower, he advised, stay in motion. “I brought Tariq Aziz all the writings of Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung on the arts of revolutionary war and he had them translated into Arabic,” Galloway later claimed. “Fight a war of movement, take the uniforms off, swim among the Iraqi people and whatever their views on the regime, they will undoubtedly provide deep aquifers of support for a patriotic resistance.”

gallowaypresentingsaddamwithpennant1994 — Galloway presenting Saddam with a pennant, 1994

In 2006, by which time Aziz had been taken into custody by U.S. forces, Galloway wrote him a letter of sympathy that began “Your excellency, dear brother, friend.” Describing Aziz’s detention as “cruel and unjustified,” Galloway told Aziz: “I have thought of you and of the long days and nights we spent in each other’s company….I have made many enemies in this struggle. They are your enemies also. They are my enemies because I am your friend.”

But Galloway’s Iraqi ties are only a tiny part of a very large and ugly picture. More tomorrow.

Posted on June 21, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

George Galloway, king of the stooges?

When Naz Shah, a Labour Party politician who represents Bradford West in Parliament, stood up last year to make her first speech to her fellow MPs, she broke with the custom of praising her immediate predecessor. And with good reason.

That predecessor was George Galloway – a man only a creep would eulogize. To be sure, because of his outsized personality, colorful language, rich Scottish brogue, and constant bluster, it’s tempting to dismiss him as a cartoon version of a useful stooge, someone who’s simply too far out there to take seriously.

As columnist Nick Cohen wrote recently, too many Brits have viewed Galloway indulgently as “a character,” a lovable clown who, whatever his foibles, is at least “passionate about his beliefs,” instead of being one of those “poll-driven, focus-group–tested on-message politicians, who speak in soundbites.” For years, complained Cohen, “Galloway was treated with an indulgence that, like a cardiogram, revealed the sicknesses at the heart of the liberal-left.” Sickness? Yes, because any man who’s enjoyed as much power and support as Galloway has, and who’s been such a faithful lapdog for the very worst of totalitarian tyrants, should be taken very seriously indeed. Galloway makes most other useful stooges look like half-hearted amateurs; he could give courses in licking the boots of international bullies, and in demonizing the virtuous and free.

Now sixty-one years old, Galloway was first elected to Parliament from Glasgow in 1987. In 2003, he was kicked out of Labour for supporting jihad against his own country’s troops and for championing the Baath Party “resistance” against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He then joined Respect – the Unity Coalition (later simply called the Respect Party) – described by Cohen as an “alliance… between the Trotskyist far left and the Islamic far right” and by Christopher Hitchens as an example of “[t]he servants of the one god finally meet[ing] the votaries of the one-party state” – and was sent back to Westminster as MP for the London neighborhood of Bethnal Green (which is 50% Muslim) and, later, beginning in 2012, for West Bradford (also heavily Muslim) in Lancashire.

In 2012, the Islamic Forum of Europe and Muslim Public Affairs Committee both took part in Galloway’s re-election campaign. Galloway publicly questioned the orthodoxy of the Muslim Labour candidate, Imran Hussain, telling “all the Muslim brothers and sisters” in his district that he himself was a teetotaler and wondering aloud whether that was true of Hussain. “I’m a better Pakistani than he will ever be,” Galloway told one audience. “God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.” In 2015, Galloway went even lower, despicably accusing his Labour opponent, Naz Shah, of lying about having been subjected to a forced marriage when she was a girl in Pakistan.

More tomorrow.

Posted on June 20, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 4

Sweden’s Communist crime writers

Some of Sweden’s most prominent useful stooges have been crime novelists.

Swedish crimer writers Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. ... Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. ... 04-04-2001 ... Stockholm ... Sverige ... Photo credit should read: SCANPIX/Unique Reference No. 6281139 ... — Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Maj Sjöwall (b. 1935) and her partner Per Wahlöö (1926-75), both Communists, invented the Swedish police procedural in the 1960s as a means of promoting their politics. As Wahlöö put it, he and Sjöwall sought to “rip open the belly of an ideologically impoverished society.” Why do this via crime fiction? Because, Sjöwall has said, “people read more mysteries than they do political pamphlets.”

Bruce_Dern_Walter_Matthau_The_Laughing_Policeman_1973-500x288_zps3f7fd67a — Bruce Dern and Walter Matthau in the 1973 film The Laughing Policeman, based on the novel by Sjöwall and Wahlöö

In their series of ten novels featuring detective Martin Beck, the two writers approached their propaganda effort in a very canny way: to quote Danish writer Niels Vestergaard, they used their first three volumes to “bait…the general crime reader”; in the next three, they gradually dialed up the social critique; in the last four, they pulled out all the stops, serving up full-fledged “Communist indoctrination.” Great admirers of the Soviet bloc, Sjöwall and Wahlöö are universally acknowledged today as the precursors of such Swedish crime writers as Jan Guillou, Stieg Larsson, and Henning Mankell – all of whom have also used their fiction to critique democratic capitalism and celebrate Communism.

Henning-Mankell-in-Visby--007 — Henning Mankell in the small town of Visby, Sweden, where his Wallander novels are set

When Henning Mankell died in October 2015, aged 67, Sweden lost one of its most famous writers – and one of its most useful stooges. In the 1970s, Mankell – who is most famous for his series of internationally bestselling thrillers about a police officer named Kurt Wallander – was active in a Maoist party in Norway. He’s expressed sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers. In 2010 he took part in the Freedom Flotilla, which sought to break the Israeli embargo of the Gaza strip.

Hardly any author of our time has been as successful as Stieg Larsson (1954-2004), whose posthumously published crime novels, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, have sold tens of millions of copies. He was also, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, an “old-shoe Communist.” He belonged to the Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers’ League) and edited a Trotskyisk periodical. In 1977 he went to Eritrea to teach female Communist guerrillas how to use mortars.

Larsson has been lavishly praised as a feminist, but British columnist Nick Cohen has noted that while Larsson “wrote with real anger about the oppression of women with white skins,” he denounced as racist those who

tried to do the same about the oppression of women with brown skins….Believe that western legal systems, for all their faults, were preferable to forced marriages, religious courts where the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man and the stoning to death of adulterous women and you were a “rightwing extremist,” carrying on the fascist tradition.

Then there’s Jan Guillou. Tune in tomorrow.

Posted on February 23, 2016February 23, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

De Blasio’s appalling proclamation

Bill_de_Blasio_11-2-2013 — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

Here’s a new item for our ever-growing files on The Nation – whose well-nigh nonpareil history of useful stoogery we’ve dipped into rather frequently since beginning this site – and on current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose participation in a City Hall tribute to Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe we’ve also taken note of. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the left’s Manhattan-based flagship weekly and the Big Apple’s stridently progressive mayor ended up in the same item. The convergence of the twain took place earlier this month, when de Blasio issued a proclamation declaring July 6, the magazine’s 150^th anniversary, “The Nation Day” in New York City.

Yes, politicians issue such proclamations all the time. And, yes, they rarely mean very much. Last year, after all, de Blasio himself declared August 20 “Al Roker Appreciation Day,” in honor of the Today Show weatherman’s 60^th birthday.

But the text of de Blasio’s proclamation about The Nation was not just the usual empty boilerplate. Recalling the magazine’s founding in 1865 by prominent abolitionists, de Blasio stated: “A century and a half later, the integrity and audacity of America’s oldest weekly magazine are still very much intact.” He went on:

New York has served as The Nation’s home and history-making partner through Emancipation, the Great Depression, two world wars, the civil rights movement, and into the age of technology. Whether taking politicians to task, exposing the lasting effects of war, profiling our state’s progressive labor movement, highlighting the intersection of economic justice and criminal justice, critiquing the rising cost of higher education, reporting on conflicts in Syria or South Sudan or outlining strategies for keeping hope alive, The Nation continues to shed light on the disenfranchised, mobilizing its readers to articulate and reaffirm their values and to take action in the name of progress (necessarily ruffling not a few feathers along the way).

This spectacular load of B.S. might have penned by editor Katrina vanden Heuvel herself. In pretending to sum up The Nation‘s history, it entirely omits, among much else, the magazine’s decades of vigorous Stalinist apologetics, of poisonous personal attacks on anti-Communists, and of enthusiastic support for enemies of America and of liberty. It ignores the magazine’s inflexible devotion to a far-left, freedom-hating ideology and its routine practice of blithely twisting or deep-sixing facts that make that ideology look bad.

17/11/05-CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS-Christopher Hitchens, a controversial British-born, U.S.-based journalist; former left-wing, now a conservative, was in Toronto on Thursday to speak at the Grano Speakers Series. He spoke to the Star in his hotel room in the morning.(Photo by Peter Power/The Toronto Star)pmp (Photo by Peter Power/Toronto Star via Getty Images) — Christopher Hitchens

Speaking of ideology, perhaps the most outrageous part of de Blasio’s proclamation was its opening: “Healthy debate. Consistent reflection. Diverse voices. Nuanced perspectives.” Right. Tell us another. We only wish the late Christopher Hitchens were alive to read this nonsense and comment on it. Hitchens, of course, was the longtime Nation contributor who, after 9/11, dared to dissent from what had instantly become the magazine’s party line about that atrocity – namely, that the U.S. had “asked for it” – and ended up quitting the staff in 2002.

In his last column for The Nation, Hitchens lamented that it was becoming “the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” Among the inhabitants of that echo chamber was (and is) Katha Pollitt, whose first response to 9/11, it will be recalled, was to write an article explaining why she wouldn’t let her daughter, in the wake of the atrocity, fly the American flag –that vile symbol of imperialism and oppression – from the window of their apartment, which was located only a few blocks from Ground Zero.

No city suffered more on 9/11 than New York. No American magazine showed less sympathy for the victims, and more “understanding” for the perpetrators, than The Nation. For the mayor of that city to issue an official proclamation congratulating that magazine on its anniversary – a proclamation in which he whitewashes its history and overlooks its disgusting reaction to the attack on the Twin Towers – is a disservice both to the truth and to the people of the city he was elected to serve.

Posted on July 7, 2015July 6, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Saint Naomi goes to Saint Peter’s

Naomi Klein at the Vatican

On July 1, the Vatican hosted Naomi Klein, the far-left Canadian author, at a conference on the environment. Both Klein and the current pontiff, it appears, are in strong agreement on the ills of capitalism and, in particular, the danger capitalism poses to the global climate.

Even Klein acknowledged, in comments to the press, that she was surprised – as a secular Jew – to be asked to take part in a Vatican event.

But Klein’s atheism and Jewish background are just the tip of the iceberg. The more closely one looks at her record, the clearer it becomes just how inappropriate it was for the Pope to invite her to his confab.

To begin with, Klein, who’s been called “the Left’s preeminent celebrity journalist,” is an outspoken and unequivocal enemy of the free market – and of freedom in general. Routinely, she’s identified capitalism with violence, communism with community. She’s an ardent foe of Israel and supporter of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Ronald Radosh has called her “this generation’s Noam Chomsky in women’s designer suits”; in David Solway’s view, she’s “a one-woman anti-Israeli bulldozer”; as the late Christopher Hitchens put it in 2004, she “offer[s] swooning support to theocratic [Islamic] fascists.”

The cover of Klein’s No Logo, notable for its very cool logo

A few career highlights.

In 1999, Klein published No Logo, a full-frontal assault on capitalism, corporations, and globalization that became a massive international bestseller. “Not since Vance Packard’s 1957 classic The Hidden Persuaders,” wrote The Economist, “has one book stirred up so much antipathy to marketing. Its author has become the spokesman for a worldwide movement against multinationals and their insidious brands.”

Chávez and friend

In fact she ended up becoming a one-woman symbol of the new, post-Soviet means of attacking free societies. If the undying war on freedom is a kind of religion, she became Saint Naomi, a woman who didn’t just despise the excesses of multinational corporations, but who hated freedom itself – and revered far-left tyranny. In a 2003 article, she shed tears for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez and charged his country’s “commercial media” (read: media not under his direct control) for criticizing the caudillo. Klein approvingly cited Andrés Izarra, a longtime chavista and two-time member of the “Bolivarian” cabinet, as saying (in her paraphrase) that independent media had “done so much violence to truthful information on the national airwaves that the four private TV stations have effectively forfeited their right to broadcast.” Rejecting complaints by the Committee to Project Journalists and Reporters Without Borders about Chávez’s threats to close down free media, Klein characterized Chávez as, on the contrary, benignly seeking to impose the “tough controls” needed “to ensure diversity, balance and access.”

Jesse Jackson and Fidel Castro

There’s more. The next year, when Chávez was facing a possible recall, Klein joined shakedown artist Jesse Jackson, batty House member Dennis Kucinich, veteran history-twister Howard Zinn, and far-left TV actor Ed Asner in sending Chávez a “letter of solidarity” that praised his nation – grotesquely – as “a model democracy.” (“The world knows,” they wrote, “that you are achieving something remarkable in Venezuela: you are investing your country’s vast oil wealth in ways that benefit everyone, not just small minority of well-connected elites.”)

In 2007 came Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, described by one critic as an effort to convince readers

that just about everything that has happened over the last 35 years, from the Chilean coup to Tiananmen Square, the Falklands crisis, the fall of the USSR, all the way to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Iraq, is all part of a movement to impose unfettered capitalism worldwide through a campaign based on electroshock therapy and deploying the full might of the U.S. military.

“With The Shock Doctrine,” opined Tyler Cowen, “Ms. Klein has become the kind of brand she lamented in No Logo. Brands offer a simplification of image and presentation, rather than stressing the complexity, the details, and the inevitable trade-offs of a particular product.”

Which brings us to last year, when Klein published This Changes Everything, in which she calls for radical worldwide social change in order to rescue the planet from ecological catastrophe. According to one critic, the book “rejects capitalism, market mechanisms, and even, seemingly, profit motives and corporate governance.” Even someone whom one might have expected to endorse the book, left-wing environmental expert Will Boisvert, savaged the book – calling it, in a long, thoughtful, and thoroughgoing takedown, “a garbled mess stumbling endlessly over its own contradictions.”

This, then, is the woman whom Pope Francis summoned to share her wisdom with him and his colleagues at the Holy See. No disrespect intended, Your Holiness, but this time around you screwed up.

Posted on July 4, 2015July 2, 2015 by usefulstooges 0

“Who cares?”

Even though many of Vladimir Putin’s Western apologists – notably Noam Chomsky – would surely identify themselves as ardent anti-imperialists, for them, as we’ve seen over and over again, the old imperial notion of “spheres of influence” is still very much alive.

Consider an exchange that took place on a German TV talk show early last year. A Ukrainian journalist who was standing up for her country’s right to freedom and self-determination told Klaus von Dohnanyi, a German Social Democratic politician: “I don’t feel particularly good about how you speak about Ukraine, as though the country didn’t even exist.”

She couldn’t have put it more correctly: Americans and Western Europeans who are eager to “understand” Putin’s motivations and his supposed feeling of insecurity over being “surrounded” by NATO are deplorably quick to reduce Ukraine – a nation of 45 million people – to a chess piece, a bargaining chip, a buffer zone without any rights or will or mind or its own.

(As we saw last time around, right-wing British opinion columnist Peter Hitchens – not to be confused with his late, great brother, Christopher – had a succinct answer to concerns about Russia’s moves on Ukraine: “Who,” he sneered, “now cares about squalid Ukraine….?” Back in 1938, certain British commentators wrote similar things about the Sudetenland.)

Dohnanyi’s response to the Ukrainian journalist was nothing short of disgraceful: “You can’t simply remove yourselves from a zone of influence,” he lectured her.

Has Dohnanyi forgotten that the eastern part of his own country was, until not very long ago, a part of the USSR’s “zone of influence”? As writer Ralf Neukirch put it in Der Spiegel, “the Ukrainians…are being sacrificed on the altar of sympathy for Russia.” Or, rather, sympathy for Putin, whom his midguided apologists see not as a tyrant but as a victim – even as they view 45 million Ukrainians as troublemakers whose very existence is a problem and whose longing for freedom only adds insult to injury.

Another such apologist for Putin’s designs on Ukraine is Atlantic Monthly‘s Russia columnist Jeffrey Tayler, who, in March 2014, argued that Putin was right to view with a gimlet eye U.S. aid to that country under the 1992 Freedom Support Act.

American efforts under this act, of course, have been aimed at helping a people liberated from Communism to develop democratic institutions; instead of lauding this noble goal, Tayler urged his readers to sympathize with Russians who see the program as insidious, and himself described these aid efforts as “aggressive steps…to reduce Russia’s influence.” By seeking to help Eastern Europeans develop free institutions and economies, the U.S., in Tayler’s view, is expanding its “hegemony” – and is doing so “at Russia’s expense.”

Some of us might suggest that what’s increased “at Russia’s expense” is the freedom and prosperity of its former subject peoples. But Tayler is less concerned about those millions of free people along Russia’s borders than he is about poor Putin, who, he maintains, is convinced – and quite reasonably so – that he’s “locked in a struggle not only for Russian dominance in its near-abroad, but for the future of his government — and even, possibly, for his life.”

Yes, his life. Tayler omits to mention the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and assassination of countless Putin adversaries, but he does raise the absurd specter of the US taking out Putin – for it’s apparently just a short step, in Tayler’s view, from mischievously encouraging the spread of liberty in Putin’s backyard to ordering his assassination.

In Britain, the Guardian is home to several scribes who, it appears, can see Ukrainian freedom only through Putin’s eyes. John Pilger calls the 2014 Ukrainian revolution “Washington’s putsch in Kiev”; for him, Putin’s Russia isn’t an anti-democratic menace but an innocent victim of “provocation and isolation” by a U.S. government whose actions against it are “right out of Dr. Strangelove.” Fellow Guardian writer Seumas Milne agrees, calling Putin’s invasion of Crimea “clearly defensive” and expressing satisfaction that, thanks to Putin, “the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.” Yes, you read that right: a columnist for the Guardian views NATO, not Putin, as a bully out to “swallow up” eastern Ukraine. Jonathan Cook, a former Guardianista, puts it like this: “Russia is getting boxed in by an aggressive Nato policy on its doorstep.” Again, everything’s upside-down: NATO’s the aggressor, Russia the prey.

Let’s wind up our overview of Putin’s apologists with a look at Daniel Larison, who’s been a regular contributor to the flagship paleocon journal American Conservative since 2004. Back in 2007, Larison published a piece in Taki Magazine (another paleocon sheet) entitled – no kidding – “Persecuting Putin.” In it, Larison – who was then a grad student in Chicago – condemned the “savage criticisms of Putin and his regime” by “putative” Western conservatives, whom he accused of a “lingering post-Cold War suspicion of Russia” and a “not-so-latent Russophobia.” If Westerners distrust Putin, Larison charged, it’s because “a relatively strong, assertive Russia poses an unacceptable threat to the ability of Washington and Brussels to dominate their desired spheres of influence in post-Soviet space.”

What about, um, the freedom of the countries in that “post-Soviet space”? Larison wrote so condescendingly about the spread of liberty to former Soviet republics and satellites that we found ourselves wondering exactly how old he is. We discovered that he got his Ph.D. in 2009. One suspects, then, that Larison is too young to remember the Cold War – too young to have ever set foot behind the Iron Curtain and experienced the genuine terror that was Soviet totalitarianism. Surely no American of conscience, we submit, could have lived through the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain and be able, in 2007, to write (as he does) about the freedom of Eastern Europeans as if it were simply a question of “spheres of influence” and of unsavory efforts by U.S. and European leftists to impose social democracy on people who belong, by nature, in the Kremlin’s orbit.

Larison, we’ll repeat, wrote that piece way back in 2007. He hasn’t changed his tune, however. Like his American Conservative colleagues Pat Buchanan and William S. Lind, he’s written one piece after another making it plain that he sees Putin’s Russia as a bastion of the “conservative” values that the U.S., in the paleocon view, has brutally betrayed. As James Kirchick observed last year in the Daily Beast, “Larison is a dependable Putin apologist no matter how egregious the Russian president’s behavior.”

Alas, that statement could be made about all too many of Putin’s useful idiots in the West, whose dependability is matched only by their moral dereliction.

Posted on May 5, 2015July 1, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Useful Stooges