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Have No Jews Ever Been ‘Money-Grubbing’? Oh, Gimme a Break!

Never Say “Jap”!

The Irrepressible Rothbard
Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

By 

Poor Marge Schott! This lovably eccentric lady, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, is the latest American to fall victim to the piranhas of Political Correctness, Thought-Police division. One slip, her blood is in the water, and the rest is only a grisly mopping-up operation.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases. The fact that she committed these sins in private, and not even as the public television comments that brought down Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek Snyder, apparently makes no difference. The Constitution may be held to guarantee the right of privacy in the bedroom, but never for Hate Thoughts. Then you’re finished. Sports commentators, who lead the jackal pack, assert that a huge fine and suspension from baseball, would not be enough; apparently no punishment meted out to Marge would be sufficient. They are backed by such as Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who has no known connection with baseball, but who chimed in that Marge had “tainted and sullied baseball.” How about this, fellas: How about a public drawing-and-quartering of Marge on TV, accompanied by “We Shall Overcome”? Would that be enough?

What terrible criminal deeds did Marge commit? She either agrees, or does not deny, that she has, on occasion, used the words: “nigger,” “Jap,” and, about certain people, “money-grubbing Jews.” She also acknowledged keeping a swastika armband in her drawer at home. And that’s IT! Enough for capital punishment, right?

How did these terrible Hate Thoughts come to light? It seems that one Tim Sabo, who is neither black nor Jewish nor Japanese, was fired by Schott as the controller for the Cincinnati Reds. Sabo had the nerve to sue Schott for $2.5 million – nerve because Ohio is, fortunately, an “at will” state that allows an employer to fire any employee as he sees fit. (And why not? Why should anyone have a legal obligation to pay money to anyone else for a service the former no longer wants?) The suit was thrown out of court, as surely Sabo’s lawyers knew it would be. But, and here’s the kicker, part of Sabo’s suit claimed that one reason he was fired is because he disliked Marge’s “racial and religious slurs.” Poor sensitive soul, ethnically altruist to the core!

Obviously, the idea was to bulldoze Marge Schott into settlement, on the threat that her Political Incorrectness would emerge from the deposition that she was forced to make to answer Sabo’s vindictive charges. But, she didn’t bite, and as a result, her deposition, by some magic process, hit the public media like a firestorm. Her blood was poured into the water.

Poor Marge never realized what her deposition would get her into. “Nigger” was a joke term, she said, and she vigorously denied calling two of her players “million-dollar niggers,” because she admires and loves them. She denies being anti-Semitic, since one of her managers is Jewish and he “is like a son to me.” As for the swastika armband, she explained that she got it as a gift from one of her employees who had “taken it off a dead German” soldier during the war. As she explained: “It’s what they call, what, memorabilia? It’s no big deal. I keep it in a drawer with Christmas decorations.”

Poor Marge. All of these explanations, perfectly sensible as they are, would have been totally acceptable not too many years ago. Why aren’t ethnic slurs “joke terms,” especially if not made to the people involved? How indeed can one be anti-Semitic while having Jewish friends? Have no Jews ever been “money-grubbing”? And what’s wrong with keeping memorabilia of wartime? Do you mean to tell me that all those millions who have purchased virtually every book ever published about Hitler are all secret Nazis, worshiping the icons in private?

A final charge emerged during the process, as the bloodhounds descended upon Marge for interviews after her deposition was leaked to the press. Asked about Germany in the 1930s, where Marge’s family resided at the time, Marge opined: “Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far.” This statement is supposed to wrap it all up, and to warrant shipping her off to the guillotine. But after all, what’s so terrible about this sentence? Those who are unfortunately Keynesians might well state that Hitler, at the beginning, put the unemployed back to work, brought about prosperity, etc. And weren’t Hitler’s worst deeds committed in the latter part of his reign? It was during World War II that left-liberals at Columbia University told me that “we should learn from Hitler” about government planning of the economy.

There are, of course, no longer any “joke terms” that violate the increasingly rigid canons of Political Incorrectness. Left-liberals are a crew as serioso and humorless as Robespierre or some KGB administrator of a Gulag. The only “humor” permitted now is nasty insults directed at white Christian males.

Indeed, left-liberals have managed to redefine “obscenity,” urging taxpayers to subsidize art that used to be called obscene, while substituting a new category of the Verboten. In the late 1960s, a young libertarian graduate student, now a distinguished investment newsletter editor, formed the Filthy Speech Movement, an offshoot of the Free Speech Movement, at Berkeley. The height of his radicalism came when he challenged the obscenity law as follows: getting up in public in the outdoor political speech area on campus, and starting, slowly and portentously, uttering words on a spectrum of titillation, each one increasingly closer to the obscene. Finally, when he uttered a word that Went Too Far, he was hauled away by the polizei to the pokey. He had made his point about the silliness of words being a jailing offense.

So that’s what we should do with the new Hate words. Start, for example, with the French “negre” (for Negro). Then “Negro.” Still OK? Then “ni-gra.” And then, finally, the ultimate shiver: “nig-ger.” Oooh, wow! Many years ago, the militant black comic Dick Gregory, taking his cue from Lenny Bruce, published a book entitled Nigger, explaining that anyone who used the word from then on was advertising his book. How about treating the whole trumped-up issue with humor?

But the most idiotic charge of all against poor Marge is that she habitually uses the word “Jap.” As in: gifts that she had received from “the Japs” while touring Japan with some Reds players. As the serioso sports reporter Ira Berkow wrote wonderingly in a lengthy piece on Marge in the New York Times (Nov. 2), “she made the comment (about gifts from the “the Japs”) without a seeming concern or understanding of its pejorative implications.” Marge insisted that she didn’t mean to insult the Japanese, that she loves and respects them. Berkow deserves to explain to us further; just why is “Japs” pejorative? Tell us, Ira.

Because here the PC brigade has Gone Too Far: they are interfering with a practice that every American stubbornly considers as his birthright: contraction. The American contracts: he doesn’t say “Pep-si Co-la”; he says “Pepsi.” He doesn’t insist on “Bud-weiser,” he says “Bud.” And now he can’t say “Jap”? You mean he has to dutifully say “Ja-pa-nese”? Rubbish. They’ll never get away with it. On “Japs” they lose one.

Back to the Negro Question. The PC blacks have been leading us a merry chase for many decades. Every ten or twenty years we have to learn a new term, because the older one has suddenly become “racist” and “Uncle Tom.” When I was growing up, the good people of my parents’ generation all referred to them as “the colored.” (I don’t know what the Bad Guys, the racists, called them in those days, since I had never met one: perhaps, after all, “nigger.”) But us younger progressives regarded “colored” as racist and Uncle Tom, for some reason that I’ve never grasped: we used the Good word “Negro.” No sooner had “Negro” swept the boards, however, and “colored” been vanquished, when the radical blacks of the late 60s denounced the good old word “Negro” as racist and Uncle Tom and insisted on the word “black.” (Although, oddly enough, in older decades, “black” was considered terribly racist and pejorative, referring as it did to color.) Finally, after a sharp but short fight, “black” was triumphant, and “Negro” sent to the brig, beyond the pale of civilized people.

From the point of view of the average American, the word “black” had a great advantage: it has only one syllable. But, a couple of years ago, the black leadership put their heads together and decided that “black” was now racist and Uncle Tom, and that the only satisfactory term is “African-American.” No guys, no way. No way that a word of seven syllables “Af-ri-can A-mer-i-can” is going to replace a word of one syllable. Never. There are still some verities that the average American holds to with great firmness; and contracting syllables is one of them.

I see signs on the horizon that “African-American” might already be obsolete, and that a new phrase is coming onto the horizon. Get this, it’s: “people of color.” So: after a hundred years of putting us through the hoops the upshot is almost the same phrase with which we started, oh so long ago. Except that for the two syllable “col-ored” we now have the five-syllable “people of co-lor.” I suppose some would call that “progress.”

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Machon Shilo: Aspiring to a Full and Authentic Expression of Torah

Machon Shilo: Interview with R’David Bar-Hayim

machon-shilo

 

 

 

My final interview for the week was with Rabbi David Bar-Hayim, the founder of Machon Shilo, a center of Jewish learning in Jerusalem dedicated to the exposition and dissemination of Torath Eretz Yisrael, the Judaism of the Land of Israel.

Rabbi Bar-Hayim defines his vision as “laying the groundwork for a restatement and reconstitution of Jewish thought and practice, based on the Written Law and the Oral Tradition (Tora ShebiKhtav and Tora SheBa’al Pe), in order to facilitate the realization of the Jewish nation’s divinely mandated purpose and duty to establish “a nation of priests, a holy people” (Exodus 19:6).

For Rabbi Bar-Hayim the crucial issue of our day is the reconstitution of the Jewish Nation. “In order for the Jewish people to realize its true potential and destiny and live up to HASHEM’s expectations of His people, it is crucial that we cease to define ourselves as Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Moroccan, Tunisian or Yemenite Jews…and begin to see ourselves simply as Jews. Or more precisely: as Jews privileged to dwell in our ancestral homeland in which we aspire to live according to a full and authentic expression of Tora.”

Rather than relying exclusively on the traditions of Rabbinical authorities in the Exile who studied and lived Judaism within the historical context of a minority residing in a foreign land under non-Jewish sovereignty, R’Bar-Hayim’s school encourages the study and implementation of the traditions and rulings found in the ancient sources of Land of Israel. For instance, Machon Shilo tends to privilege the methodology and rulings of the Talmud Yerushalmi, compiled in Tiberias in the 4-5th centuries, rather than the Talmud Bavli, compiled by rabbinic authorities in Babylon some 200 years later.

One aspect of this approach explains Rabbi Bar-Hayim, is the reintroduction of Nusah Eretz Yisrael, the format of prayer and liturgy used by the Jews of the Land of Israel until the first Crusade (1096-1099), at which time most of the Jewish population of Eretz Yisrael was either massacred or fled the country. This calamity, explains Rabbi Bar-Hayim, sealed the fate of Torath Eretz Yisrael, with the result that by the 12th century the Halakhic rulings, customs and liturgy of the Babylonian Jews had become the norm throughout the Jewish world. It should be noted that the liturgies in current use – the Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Yemenite rites – are all based on the Babylonian custom and liturgy.

R’Bar-Hayim asserts that there is a qualitative difference between the study and practice of Judaism in Eretz Yisrael as opposed to the Galut (exile), a fact stressed in several Talmudic sources. While many of the ancient and contemporary rabbinic authorities also assert such a difference, he takes them rather seriously. What is needed at this juncture of history, he argues, is a reconstituted Halachic Judaism which is in step with and complements the modern reality of the sovereign Jewish people living in their ancestral land.

Here the Rav explained to me that there is no such thing as Judaism without a halachic system at its base; that Judaism only exists in its present form today because of this system put into place 2500 thousand years ago by chazal (the foundational rabbinic authorities). From this perspective, both Reform and Conservative Judaism are flawed concepts from the outset. The former because it was founded on a rejection of Halachah as a basis for religious practice, and the latter because of its efforts to pick and choose Halachic interpretations as convenient for social integration into the diasporic milieu.

However, Orthodox Judaism too is flawed, according to Rabbi Bar-Hayim, as it was by definition a response to the rise of Reform Judaism in the early 19th century. Responding to the Reform movement’s complete disregard for traditional practice and established religious jurisprudence, the new and reactionary “Orthodox Judaism” (a previously unknown term) adopted an extreme and opposite approach, viz. that the Ashkenazi Jewish practice which had evolved in Europe until that time should be enshrined, denying the possibility of any change whatever, even where such change is mandated by the Torah itself.

In this sense, the anti-Zionist approach of the most Haredi sects like the Satmars who reject the legitimacy of the state of Israel is in fact the most orthodox of all. It was their forefathers’ custom to not live in the Land of Israel or to seek redemption of the land through human efforts. So too will they not engage in the building of the state or its society. They simply take the logic of orthodoxy as originally formulated to its most logical conclusion. As such, orthodox Jewry of today is fighting the “war” of religious practice in Israel today using the weapons of 200 years ago.

This is not and never was the intent of Halachic Judaism. The Rav argues that the rabbinical authorities of the past, Chazal, the Geonim, and the Rishonim, always understood the need and were willing to take stock of the realities of the present, to allow changes for the better. They were always redefining and reinventing certain elements of halachah, even changing well-established practices to suit the different circumstances and needs of the Jewish people in their times.

Now, with the creation of the State of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people and a territory under its political sovereignty, there is a need for just such an adaptation. Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the first chief rabbi of the State of Israel, understood this concept well, arguing that a newly reformulated, updated, and refreshed halachic system must be put in place in Eretz Yisrael. This as a means to become “more Jewish and more able to connect to Torah in Eretz Yisrael in the present historical context.” This need may not be pressing for those Jews who still live in galut, but he believes it is absolutely necessary for those who have returned to the land.

Why are we here? One of the reasons that the Jewish people who live in Israel need R’Bar-Hayim to complete and publish a Siddur Nusach Eretz Yisrael (a Jewish prayer book based on the liturgy and customs of Eretz Yisrael), suggests one of his students, is because we do not have a picture of our own reasons for living in the land. As long as Ashkenazi Jews continue to follow the customs that came from 12th century Germany and Sephardi Jews do the same with traditions from Spain, there will exist a psychological barrier between who they are and who they aspire to be.

As for the sources on the basis of which Nusach Eretz Yisrael can be reconstructed, R’Bar-Hayim explains that many snippets of the nusach are quoted in the Talmud Yerushalmi, Midrash Bereshit Raba, Vayikra Raba, Siphre, etc. In addition, the many thousands of manuscripts found in the Cairo Geniza towards the end of the 19th century, many dating from the 9th -12th centuries, have provided a wealth of material from a community where the nusach was still in use as recently as two or three generations ago.

Following the argument that a different form of Jewish practice is needed in the Land of Israel, we discussed what is religiously required of Jews in terms of taking control of the land. R’Bar-Hayim explained that there are three concepts which are of primary importance: kibbush eretz yisrael, yishuv eretz yisrael, and yeshivat eretz yisrael or in English, inheriting/conquering the land, settling the land, and residing in the land. While the second two obligations are individual in nature, the first is necessarily collective. Yet all three are intertwined.

To engage in kibbush requires that the land itself be already substantially Jewish in character. In order for the Jewish people to achieve sovereignty in their land, it is essential that the Jewish population first achieve a certain critical mass. This can only be achieved through both yishuv and yeshiva. This is precisely how, in practice, the Zionist movement laid the foundations for the eventual state.

To engage in yishuv, settlement, is primarily a concept of property ownership. A Jew can fulfill the mitzvah of yishuv eretz yisrael simply by buying property in the land, even if that individual never resides in or develops that property. The importance here is to increase the amount of property in the land which is under Jewish control. This was long the primary mission of the Jewish National Fund, which in the pre-state British Mandate, collected funds from abroad for purchase of land in Israel. Arguably organizations like Ateret Cohanim, who buy property from Arabs in Jerusalem, are engaged in the same practice.

So important is this mitzvah that the Talmud declares (Talmud Bavli Gittin 8b, Bava Qama 80b) that should a Jew be approached on Shabbat, when financial transactions are forbidden, by a non-Jew wishing to sell him land in Israel, certain Rabbinical prohibitions are waived. Specifically, the Jew may turn to a gentile and ask him to write up the contract and conclude the deal to guard against the seller changing his mind.

To engage in yeshiva, however, requires that an individual physically relocate his life and livelihood to the Land of Israel, preferably on a permanent basis. The Halakha does not obligate a Jew who visits Eretz Yisrael to remain. Similarly, a Jewish resident may visit countries outside Eretz Yisrael. It is, however, true that a Jewish resident of Eretz Yisrael is not permitted to uproot himself and move to another country on a permanent basis unless certain extenuating circumstances apply (see Rambam’s MT Melakhim 5:11 seq.).

Both mitzvot incumbent upon the individual are necessary preconditions for the fulfillment of the collective mitzvah of kibbush eretz yisrael, the conquest and control of the land. When there are sufficient numbers of Jews living here who own sufficient property to establish institutions of state and society, only then would they would have the capacity to exercise complete control over the land. This is the purpose of secular Zionism as understood by early religious Zionists like R’Kalisher and later R’Kook. Once Jewish control in a significant part of the land was achieved, strength could be built to serve the complete redemption of the land, as in the vision of R’Tzvi Yehudah Kook and the Gush Emunim movement. “Unfortunately,” notes the Rav, “the Gush Emunim movement, and R’Tzvi Yehudah Kook, did not correctly assess the task before them. This is a long discussion in itself.”

From a kabbalistic (Jewish mystical) and arguably haredi perspective, the moshiach (messiah) will come appointed by heaven to lead the Jewish people back to the Land of Israel and herald a prophetic end of days. From the perspective of many religious Zionists, R’Bar-Hayim, and even of the Rambam, this is not the vision of moshiach. The moshiach, R’Bar-Hayim suggested, is someone who will be the political leader of the Jewish people and who will succeed in his aims. If this person does not achieve the central aims of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, then he cannot be moshiach.

Political leadership of any kind, let alone Jewish political leadership, does not exist in a vacuum. There cannot be a king without a nation behind him and so too there cannot be a moshiach without a people ready to go into battle, literally or figuratively, for the cause for which he fights. This “realist” perspective of redemption has important political implications for a religious understanding of the fulfillment of the promised biblical borders of the Land of Israel.

Continue reading…

From Ariel Zellman, here.

War Propaganda REALLY Works…

Propaganda During World War I: An Illustrated Account

By Terje Maloy
GlobalResearch.ca

November 15, 2018

These stories are not unique cases from a remote war. The same methods are constantly rinsed and repeated, the mentality in our ruling elites is the same, and the risk of a major conflict is as great today as in 1914.

These examples concentrate mostly on British/American perception management and propaganda. First of all, because they are masters of the art, and secondly, as victors they still dominate the narrative.

Arthur Ponsonby and Falsehood in Wartime

After the Great War came a huge backlash of disillusion and revulsion. Calmly analysed, most of what had been told in the war turned out to be lies and half-truths. «» was the title of a book published in 1928. Written by Arthur, Ponsonby, it discussed 20 instances of lies in wartime.

The contents of the book can be summed up in the Ten Commandments of War Propaganda:

  1. We do not want war.
  2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
  3. The enemy is the face of the devil.
  4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
  5. The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
  6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
  7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
  8. Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
  9. Our cause is sacred.
  10. All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.

The Enemy Is the Face of the Devil

The perception of German atrocities in World War 1 has had is up and downs during the decades.  They ‘Huns’ were indeed quite ruthless, and freely executed several thousand suspected franc-tireurs and hostages when they invaded Belgium and Northern France in 1914.

However, the theme of barbaric, nun-raping, baby-bayonetting Huns was so carried to excess by the Entente propaganda machine that there came a backlash in public opinion after the war. By the 1920s, the disillusionment with the war and its aftermath was so great that all of these stories were dismissed as atrocity propaganda, which again would backfire in 1939, when there was reluctance to believe stories of – this time real – massive German atrocities.

The same theme was used more recently, with the infamous tale of «Iraqis ripping babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals», in the warm-up to the Gulf War in 1990. Before the US Congress, a young woman in tears testified how she as a nurse in Kuwait witnessed Iraqi soldiers ripping prematurely born babies out of their incubators, leaving them to die on the floor. The story was later repeated by an equally moved President George HW Bush.

The public later found out that the woman was in fact not a nurse, but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, and the story was concocted as part of the propaganda effort by the PR-Agency Hill & Knowlton.

Mussolini Changes His Mind — Italy Should Join the War

Italy at first stayed neutral, then chose to join the Entente. This turned out to be a really bad decision, killing a generation of young men, and with not many gains to show for it in the peace treaties.

The decision was partially helped by subsidies from English and French intelligence to the Italian press. The Italian journalist Benito Mussolini (picture: in white coat, arrested during a scuffle with police in 1914) had a change of heart, and went from a leading socialist and war opponent to a fierce advocate of Italy joining the war.

According to a note written in November 1922 by the French secret services in Rome, Mussolini (who was described in another note from the same service as «an agent of the French Embassy in Rome») had in 1914 collected ten million francs «to support Italy’s war alongside the allied powers». In 1915, he was one of the founders the Fascist movement, which later took power in 1922.

The Difference Between Declared War Aims and Real Ones

In August 1914, when an almost unanimous German parliament voted yes to war, it was presented to the German public as a defensive Schutzkrieg against conniving enemies. With the exception of one member, Karl Liebknecht, the entire 110-member delegation from the Social Democratic Party bowed to the war euphoria and voted yes to war loans.

The perception presented to the public during the first few years of fighting, was of a Germany fighting a defensive war for survival, not a scheme for imperial aggrandizement. But in reality, already in September 1914, in the first few weeks of the war, a secret plan for an extensive redrawing of Europe’s borders was prepared for Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, the Septemberprogramm (see map).

After the Brest-Litovsk separate peace with the Bolsheviks in 1917, the eastern part of these war aims were achieved, where Germany occupied or created puppet governments in Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Baltic areas, and created a dependent state in Finland.

Although a victory, this led to great disillusionment in the German liberal-left, which so far had supported a war to preserve the country. Now he myth of a defensive war was exposed as a lie, and the treaty showed it to be a war for imperial expansion.

The Sinking of the Lusitania

In May 1915 the British Government was in trouble. The European war was not going well. Instead of reacting to aggressive British blockades by begging for mercy, Germany was sinking more and more British ships with her U-boats.

The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on Friday May 7 1915, 12 miles off the coast of Ireland, killing 1198 people. The ship was running at two-thirds speed and in a straight line, rather than the recommended zigzag used to avoid torpedoes. The passengers were mostly US citizens (including millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt).

No members of the press even considered asking why Lusitania had been steaming so slowly and in a straight line, or why the British Admiralty had chosen to withhold the usual naval escort.

The numerous travel warnings posted by the German government in US newspapers, warning people they traveled on British shipping into British waters at their peril, was left out of the narrative. The German explanation, that the Lusitania was a legitimate target because she carried armaments, was dismissed out of hand.

And totally forgotten was the aggressive policy of starving Germany to its knees that had prompted the U-boat campaign in the first place. After the war began in 1914, Britain immediately began a naval blockade of Germany. Since even food was classified as “contraband,” the Germans had to ration food. By all estimates, several hundred thousand people ultimately died of starvation due to the blockade.

The sinking of the Lusitania was one of the main causes that brought the United States into the war, saving the war for the British

In July 1915, Pope Benedict XV published the apostolic exhortation «To the Peoples Now at War and to Their Rulers.» Two years later, in 1917, this became The seven-point plan, a peace note presented to the warring parties. It was based on a peace linked to justice rather than military conquest, cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, international arbitration, and Belgium restored to independence and guaranteed «against any power whatsoever.» (But it tacitly implied that Germany would gain some territory in the east).

The decision to reject any proposal from the Vatican was already decided in 1915. The threat was that a peace mediation from someone like the Pope might create so much pressure from a war-weary populace that it might just gather enough momentum to force the powers to accept.

The secret Treaty of London (1915), committing Italy to the Entente (Britain, France and Russia) contained a clause, article 15, where Italy is given carte blanche to do whatever is deemed necessary to silence the Church: «France, Great Britain and Russia shall support such opposition as Italy may make to any proposal in the direction of introducing a representative of the Holy See in any peace negotiations or negotiations for the settlement of questions raised by the present war» .

From Women’s Liberation to a Tool for the State

There is nothing new about liberal social reformers falling into lockstep when the country goes to war.

British Emmeline Pankhurst was the most prominent member in the Women’s Suffrage movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1902. After a remarkable and highly radical campaign for women’s rights, including hunger strikes, arson and window smashings, the group changed from a reformist program to a hard right reactionary nationalism as soon as the war broke out.

In 1914-15, bands of women roamed the cities of England handing out white feathers of cowardice to men wearing civilian clothes. The ‘White Feather Brigade’ was established by admiral Charles Fitzgerald, a war hawk who wished to see Britain institute mandatory military service. The campaign spread through the country with astonishing rapidity.

Not unconnected, the WSPU successfully carried out secret negotiations with the government, and on the 10th August 1914, the government announced it was releasing all suffragettes from prison. After receiving a £2,000 grant from the government, the WSPU organised a pro-war demonstration in London. Members carried banners with slogans such as «We Demand the Right to Serve» and «Let None Be Kaiser’s Cat’s Paws».

Pankhurst founded the Women’s Party in 1917. Excerpts from the program:

(1) A fight to the finish with Germany.

(2) More vigorous war measures to include drastic food rationing, more communal kitchens to reduce waste, and the closing down of nonessential industries to release labour for work on the land and in the factories.

(3) A clean sweep of all officials of enemy blood or connections from Government departments. Peace terms to include the dismemberment of the Hapsburg Empire.

(8) Irish Home Rule to be denied.

In the Suffrage Movement’s defense, many members chose a different and more honorable stance, like her daughter Sylvia Pankhurst. In 1915, Sylvia gave her enthusiastic support to the International Women’s Peace Congress, and she later became a leading international voice in the resistance to Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia.

Edith Cavell – Nurse (And a Hundred Years Later, a Spy After All)

Few incidents created bigger outrage in the First World War than when the British nurse Edith Cavellwas executed by firing squad for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium. In the trial, she admitted to leading a people smuggling network.

But the German charges also claimed that Cavell was a spy, sending sensitive intelligence through the same network, a claim which was strongly denied by both Cavell and the British government.

The government’s insistence on her innocence was taken as implicitly true in Britain, and she became a symbol for victims of Hunnic habitual cruelty. This perception also had great impact on public opinion in the still neutral United States. The implicit presumption of innocence lingered for a many years, and was a useful propaganda tool for many decades.

In a BBC-program in 2015, a hundred years after Cavell’s death, Stella Rimington, former head of the MI5, revealed that she had discovered documents in Belgian archives indicating that Cavell was in fact a spy.

This is of course a limited hangout. MI5 would have known this all along, being Cavell’s boss, but naturally chose to keep quiet about it, since the idea of her innocence was so convenient.

Rimington said her evidence showed «that the Cavell organisation was a two-pronged affair» and that espionage was the other part of its clandestine mission.

The documents included an account by Herman Capiau, a young Belgian mining engineer who had brought the first British soldiers to Cavell in 1914 and was an important member of her network.

He wrote: «Whenever it was possible to send interesting intelligence on military operations, this information was forwarded to the English intelligence service punctually and rapidly.»

Capiau referred to information about a German trench system, the location of munitions dumps and the whereabouts of aircraft.

Since she was in fact guilty, it would make her case similar to the famous spy Mata Hari, who was unceremoniously executed by the French in 1917, without any international outcry. Of course, Cavell’s case is worse, since she used a humanitarian cover for her activities, putting all medical personnel under suspicion.

Most of Our Opinions Are Formed by Men We Have Never Heard of

After the United States joined the war in 1917, president Wilson founded a government agency, The Committee on Public Information, to drum up support in public opinion for the US Crusade for Freedom©.

A young man, Edward Bernays,  started working for it, and quickly learned his trade there. He later became known as «the father of public relations», and a pioneer in the modern PR-industry, where he, among other things, arranged the media part of the CIA-regime change operation in Guatemala in 1954. The full quote from him is as follows:

«The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.»

The Invasion of 1910 — A Book Commissioned to Tell the Public Who the Next Enemy Is

Describing an imagined German invasion of England, the book  was written by William le Queux on commission from the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialized in his newspaper the Daily Mail in 1906. After the detente with France and friendlier relations with Russia, British elites circles agreed on who the next likely enemy would be. But the British public still wasn’t ‘with the program’, and a large campaign was started to prepare them mentally. In the years 1906-1914, a torrent of books and articles on the terrible Hun menace poured out from a number of authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle.

Bits by Bits a War Memorial Day Gets a New Meaning

World War 1 was a bloody affair for the Commonwealth countries. Most Australian country towns or even small villages have a cenotaph or monument with a shockingly long list of local men lost in WW1. ANZAC-day  (on 25th of April, the anniversary of the Anglo-French campaign to conquer Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, where Australia played a part) was decided as a holiday in 1921 to commemorate these war dead, in a rather sombre spirit. The holiday and ceremony was a quiet affair for most of last century, apart from the usual right-wing forces trying to capitalize on it. It reached it’s nadir in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam war.

A marked change started in the 1990s, with a concerted and very well funded campaign from the government to militarize Australian history. Now the ceremonies are huge, military-political events, full of pathos, cant and sentimentality.  By spending huge sums to connect the public idea of Australianness to a glorification of its military glory, it seems Australian participation, like in 1914 by choice, in the next bloody world war is inevitable – nothing learned Down Under.

Neutral Countries Are the Winners

This Swiss cartoon by Karl Czerpien, is captioned «The wooing of the Neutrals», where orators from the warring countries are trying to entice neutrals to join them. The different alliances spent large efforts to tangle neutral countries into their imperialistic intrigues (see the case of Italy above). For smaller neutral countries, war between the great powers is always a dangerous time, but by trying to stay neutral, they are rather better off than by joining an alliance. A lesson for our time, when small countries in Europe seem very eager to get the honor of being the battlefield in the next war.

1924 — The Pacifist Ernst Friedrich Shows the Real Faces of War

In 1924, in the book War against War, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich breaks a taboo in war reporting, by showing real war injuries. Such horrific pictures were – and still are – generally very rarely shown in war reporting, both in the corporate media and in anti-war literature.

This unwillingness contributes, intentionally or just because the pictures are too shocking to handle, to an almost idealized image of war, where our dead are always beautifully serene and the wounded well wrapped in bandages.

This article was also published on the author’s blog site: Midt i fleisen.

Reprinted with permission from GlobalResearch.ca.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.