Saturday, August 18, 2012

Genocide looms for white farmers

Via Cousin John


The eyes of the world were on South Africa two decades ago as the apartheid era came to an end and Western governments helped bring the communist-backed African National Congress to power.

Last month, however, when Genocide Watch chief Gregory Stanton declared that white South African farmers were facing a genocidal onslaught and that communist forces were taking over the nation, virtually nobody noticed.

Few outside of South Africa paid attention either when, earlier this year, the president of South Africa began publicly singing songs advocating the murder of whites.

The silence is so deafening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t even publicly mention the problems when she was there last week. Instead, she was busy dancing, pledging billions of dollars and praising the ruling government.

“I find that quite disturbing, as if Afrikaner lives do not count for the Obama administration,” Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, PRAAG, told WND.

He says the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

Genocide Watch, a highly respected U.S.-based nonprofit organization led by arguably the world’s foremost expert on genocide, has been sounding the alarm on the genocidal onslaught facing South Africa for a decade. The world media, however, has barely uttered a word about it.

Over those 10 years, thousands of white South African farmers, known as Boers, have been massacred in the most horrific ways imaginable.

Experts say the ongoing slaughter constitutes a clear effort to exterminate the whites or at least drive the remaining ones – now less than 10 percent of the population – out of the country. In other words, South Africa is facing a genocide based on the United Nations’ own definition.

More @ WND

Operation Phoenix


WRSA
VERBATIM POST

Recommended, along with this thesis paper.

If one ever had to resist a Communist takeover of one’s country, there would be much to gained by studying and identifying not only key materiel and communications nodes of the conquering forces, but also the political infrastructure by which the Communists obtained and maintained power.

Resistance efforts could then be focused at not only interdicting directly and indirectly those nodes and human terrain elements, but causing the occupying regime to dedicate resources as force protection to their cadres which otherwise would be deployed against friendly forces.

Thanks be to Lee Greenwood, such a contingency can remain only the fantasy of alternate history majors.

From his NYT obit, General Loan was quoted regarding the execution:

***
…Mr. Loan later suggested that the execution had not been the rash act it might have appeared to be but had been carried out because a deputy commander he had ordered to shoot had hesitated. ”I think, ‘Then I must do it,’ ” he recounted. ”If you hesitate, if you didn’t do your duty, the men won’t follow you.”

Vo Suu, a cameraman at the scene for NBC News, recalled that immediately after the shooting the general had walked over to a reporter and said, ”These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.”
***

Resist.

After the Storm

Via Jack

With all the study and thought that are required to make sense out of how the Great Unraveling will play out, we seldom take time to think of what it will be like on the other side. Those of us who are, by nature, long-term thinkers and/or optimistic, have a vague picture in mind of a rebirth of libertarian thinking, and a vibrant economy. However, we tend not to think too much more about these hopes than that, because we are caught up in the Great Unraveling itself - a very time-consuming topic.

The other day, an associate whom I like to think of as having a decent, if not holistic, view of the present depression, commented to me, "I wish we could just have the crash tomorrow and everything that goes with it, so that, next year, we can get back to normal."

Oops ... maybe his expectations are a bit more simplified than I thought. And, if others share his view, possibly the topic needs a bit of fleshing-out. While it may not be ready to be a prime topic of the ongoing conversation, possibly an outline of what may happen after all the fireworks have gone off would be in order.

Ten Years Down and Ten Years Up

Economic wizard (and favourite 'Uncle') Harry Schultz stated back in the early 2000's that what he anticipated was "ten years down and ten years up." At the time, many thought that his projection was extremely prolonged. I didn't think so. People do commonly seem to take the view that, once the various crashes have taken place, we simply walk out into the sun, brush the dirt off the knees of our trousers, and, with a spring in our step, walk into the bright new day.

However, a depression is not at all like that. It is more like a town after a hurricane has hit. The storm may have been swift, but the recovery is not. Power lines are down. Roads are blocked. Homes and stores have been destroyed. Having personally been highly involved in the reconstruction of a small country after the devastation wrought by a category five hurricane, I can attest that, even if the population is hardworking and motivated (which they were), the task of rebuilding is monumental, and the time period required to achieve it is prolonged.

I see the period after the various crashes very differently from those who anticipate immediate recovery symptoms. This is not because I imagine myself a visionary; my view is based on history. If we look at the economic collapses of the past, (inclusive of their possible knock-on effects, such as hyperinflation and destruction of the currency), from the fall of the Roman Empire to Weimar Germany, to Argentina and Zimbabwe - take your pick - the pattern is extremely similar.

So, let's have a look at that pattern and ask ourselves if the present situation might not play out much the same (except far worse and more prolonged, as the conditions that led to this particular depression have been more extreme). The various stages are likely to be a given, but the various factors within each stage are a bit more uncertain. In every major economic collapse, some combination of these factors takes place.

Also, consider that the stages themselves are like dominoes - they almost always fall in order. The reason? Details change in history, but human nature remains the same. The same knee-jerk reactions by people will repeat themselves over and over. (As an example, we are now experiencing a decline in exports from the First World. I believe that a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of the 1930's will be passed in America, which undoubtedly would trigger increased hardship for Americans.)

Stages of The Crash

The stages are laid out below. The first three have already occurred.

More @ International Man

One Account of Sherman’s Raid in North Carolina:

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial Commission"



Severely wounded in Virginia and forced to resign from service, Colonel Robert H. Cowan of the 18th North Carolina Regiment became president of the Wilmington, Charlotte and Rutherfordton Railroad Company in the spring of 1863, and removed his family to a home about 5 miles from Laurinburg in Scotland county, and about twenty miles from Cheraw, South Carolina. From here he oversaw railroad operations for the remained of the war.

His daughter Jane Dickinson DeRosset was a young girl at that time and recalled the following:

“I shall never forget when Sherman’s army reached [Cheraw, and opposed primarily by General Wade Hampton’s cavalry forces, under General Joseph E. Johnston], during the first week of March in 1865. We sat and listened all day to the booming of the cannon, with aching hearts and fervent prayers that the enemy might be driven back – the utter desolation when we knew that Johnston’s Army had passed by and we were left alone to face the dreaded foe!

Late that afternoon I sat on the front steps at my father’s feet trying to comfort him and to receive comfort from him, for we were in the deepest distress, our whole country devastated, our dear Southern boys retreating, but contesting every inch of ground, falling by the wayside, gladly giving up their life-blood for the land they loved so well. The brave, noble remnant struggling on, overpowered by numbers, yet full of faith and trust in their leaders, striving to reach Lee and join forces. Then all would be well.

Besides this the angel of Death lowered over our house. My youngest sister (now Mrs. Junius Davis) and brother had been ill for weeks with scarlet fever, and our physician had that day given up all hope of saving them. The burden seemed greater than we could bear.

Every minute we expected [my sister and brother] to leave us and the Federal troops to be upon us. Once we heard the tramping of horses [for as the] day broke I looked out the window and from every direction the hated blue uniforms were coming. They seemed to spring out of the ground and in a few seconds our house was full of them.

They were everywhere, upstairs and downstairs, rummaging through closets, trunks, bureaus, wardrobes, anywhere, until every piece of silver, jewelry, clothing and everything else, including food, was gone. We spent the whole ay without one mouthful to eat. Our [black] servants came crying and saying they tried to bring us something, but the [Northern] men would snatch it from them.

My mother had a spoon in which she was mixing medicine for her sick children snatched from her, and she was obliged to mix it in her hand and put it into their mouths with her finger. They pulled the rings from her fingers as she was holding in her lap, and kicked the cradle in which the other one was lying, with the remark, “That one is dead already.”

One of the soldiers engaged in this indignity had meanwhile stood with his loaded musket beside the chair in which my mother sat. They were yelling, cursing, drinking, pitching trunks and boxes from the attic down two flights of stairs to the first floor, breaking them open and putting all that could be carried in that way about their persons, piling up the rest and making bonfires of them.

We had trunks of valuables belonging to General [William H.C.] Whiting, which he had sent us for safe-keeping when the city of Wilmington had fallen into the hands of the foe; also had all that Bishop Watson, who was at that time rector of Saint James Church in Wilmington, had saved when the town of New Berne, N.C., fell.

One of them rushed into the room where we were all gathered together, dressed in the Confederate uniform of my uncle, Captain John Cowan, and going up to my grandmother, slapped her face with Confederate money which he had found somewhere about the house, grabbed at her watch guard, which she thought she had hidden, and pulled it with the watch from her neck.

I was thankful my father was then out of the room, but he soon came in with a Federal soldier, who had promised him to protect us; though he really had no authority in doing so (this man we found afterwards was a North Carolinian and a deserter from the Confederate army).

There were five watches taken from us at that time. Another [soldier] came up to me, a girl of sixteen, and told me to give him a ring, which I did not have. My younger sister…said that if he would leaves me alone she would give him one, and as he took it, he threw his arms around her saying he was a Philadelphia boy and had just come out of the penitentiary, which we could well believe.

My father sprang forward….[and] I thought we would all be killed, but Providence watched over us. I saw a [soldier] put a pistol to my father’s head and another knock it aside just as it went off. We had begged father the night before to leave us and go into the woods with our brother and uncle, for we were afraid he would be killed, but he would not go.

[My father] had been in the [Secession] Convention of 1861, which had carried the State out of the Union, and the soldiers had found one of his speeches and had fastened it up on the wall where it could be read by all, and when our uncle, Dr. McRee, asked for a guard for our house and told the officers how outrageously their men were behaving, they answered that they did not care what they did at our house, for they had heard of Colonel Cowan all through South Carolina.

As night came, the [deserter] guard told my father he must take his family out of that house….[and that] when the rest of the army came up that night he would not answer for the consequences, so after dark we stole quietly through [the enemy] camp to an old temperance hall about a quarter mile away. It had been roughly fixed up as a dwelling for Dr. McRee’s family, and in that old shanty we remained for a week (while the Union Army was passing), with nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nothing to look forward to but death.

Sometimes our servants would steal a chicken or turkey from the soldiers and bring it to us, and we would hold in with our hands over the fire until it was cooked enough for us to eat, and that would be all we would have for a day or two.

At last one afternoon the Negro regiments were coming up and they surrounded the old hall yelling that we had gold hid and they were going to have it. I certainly thought then, as we looked out on that sea of black faces, that our time had come, and that death or worse was near. We barred the doors and windows, and my father got out and walked through those regiments until he found a general, who after hearing him, ordered the Negroes away, and with his staff spent the night in the lower part of the old hall. [They enjoyed] a good supper, we upstairs had not tasted food all day….[and the Northern] general sent a few pieces of dry baker’s bread….

The next day the last of Sherman’s army left us, and we started back to our home, which the troops had tried to burn down, but our servants had saved for us. We had nothing but the clothes we had on and a few articles of clothing for the children, and we came to an empty house. The heavy furniture which could not be carried off was there, and Bibles, Prayer-books and pictures, torn, broken and covered with mustard and molasses.

We had no food but the corn their horses had dropped while eating, which we picked up, washed and ground, and a few potato slips, nothing else. When we found a room that was not full of feathers from the beds that had been torn open [looking for valuables], we threw ourselves down and rested, thanking God that we were alive and had a roof over our heads.

My father told his servants to try to get to Wilmington, where they were known, and could make a living, for he did not know he would get meat and bread for his own family and could not help them, though he would do what he could for those who remained with us.”

Jane Dickinson DeRosset

(Richmond County, North Carolina Genealogy website www.ncgenweb.us


One Account of Sherman’s Raid in North Carolina:

The Eye of Sauron: Something New Under the Sun



Fred On Everything
VERBATIM POST

The pieces come together. Within the last week I have read:

1) New software, associated with Google, will recognize customers in stores so as to offer them discounts; having your photos uploaded to allow this service will (for now) be voluntary.

2) A new surveillance system in New York will store footage from cameras in, for example, the subway, so that when an unattended package is discovered, the police can look back in time to see who left it.


3) TSA is perfecting a laser that will allow detection on travelers of trace amounts of drugs, explosives, and doubtless a wide variety of other things.

4) The government is moving toward mandating black boxes on cars to record information thought to be useful in ascribing blame in crashes.

5) Various police departments are beginning to use “drone” aircraft to monitor the population.

These are recent pieces of the coming world. They have not yet all been completely deployed and linked. Some are voluntary, for the moment. Others are in development. All are coming.

Add the now-routine tracking of passports, cameras that read every passing license plate and record the time, NSA’s automated monitoring of email, Google’s and therefore the government’s knowledge of your searches, GPS tracking of cell phones, detailed records of bank transactions, and so on. Not all of these are instantly accessible by the police. They can easily be made accessible, and they move in that direction.

In short, the technology exists for a detailed, unblinking, unforgetting watchfulness of the entire population beyond anything imagined, or perhaps imaginable, a few decades ago. This is not Fred-drank-too-much-coffee. It is happening.

The capacity of hard drives is now essentially without limit, the power of computers to sort and search infinite, and the speed of the internet no longer a bound. Almost microscopic cameras, wireless concealable microphones, face recognition, voice recognition, recording GPS: You can buy all of this in consumer stores. The government has far better.

People speak of the onrush of the police state. I think that many do not understand how fast it comes, or how thorough it will be.

The political framework falls rapidly into place. Few or no safeguards exist, and probably few are possible. A growing authoritarianism rapidly erodes what protections we had. The courts allow random searches of passengers of trains and subways without probable cause. Warrantless tapping of personal communications is rampant, or done with secret warrants from a secret federal judge. TSA has Viper squads that stop cars at random for searches. In many places it is against the law to video the police, who everywhere become more militarized and less accountable. For practical purposes, citizens have no recourse.

At a higher level of generality, America is no longer a democracy. If you think this a rash assertion, ask yourself whether you have the slightest influence over policies that matter to you. Suppose that you want to end the wars, shrink the military, end affirmative action, genuinely change education, or reform a hostile and unworkable bureaucracy. Who do you vote for? Important policies are made in faceless bureaucracies immune to public influence. National politics employs a sort of political price-fixing, in which you are permitted to choose among a number on indistinguishable candidates and told that you are having an election.

None of this is going to stop.

Why is it happening? Some suspect a vast conspiracy to Sovietize the country. I doubt it. Don’t look for a conspiracy when human nature is an adequate explanation. Presidents never want to suffer the restraints on constitutionality, the agonizing slowness of a congress that often has little understanding of the issues; if presidents can do things by fiat, or secretly, they will.

We have now had twoconsecutive presidents with less than normal respect for the constitution, one a brown Plantagenet but with little grounding in European civilization, the other a privileged rich brat of limited intellect and schooling. Such as they will take any shortcut they can get away with, and there is no longer anyone to tell them no.

Men grab power when they can. Once grabbed, it stays grabbed. A police operation like DHS will always try to grow. People in power always think they know best. When a federal department has money, industry rushes to sell it things. In the case of TSA, this means new and more advanced scanners, then upgrades, and maintenance contracts, training contracts, and then a new kind of scanner, and the process repeats.

The people doing all of this are not thinking of installing totalitarianism. They are thinking dollars, promotions, power, ego, and perks.

The FBI? NSA? Federal officials in general? They know best. They are, they think, just fighting crime, terrorism, maintaining national security, what have you, and the more power they have, they better they can do this. Further, intimidating people is pleasurable. If citizens have nothing to hide, say all these cops, they have nothing to fear. If you torture terrorists, or those you think may be terrorists, well, the real world is like that. Do you want more terrorism?

A conspiracy would be preferable. You can crush a conspiracy. Human nature, which inherently drifts toward corruption, is a far tougher nut.

What difference will it make to live in a country in which the government knows everything whatever about everybody, and few safeguards against abuse exist? For most people, at first, probably not much. At first. But for people the government doesn’t like, a lot. Reporerters, writers, whistle-blowers, activists, dissidents.

And we are all vulnerable. Knowledge, as someone said, is power. Few of us have spotless lives, or want them. Did you once check into a cheap motel with someone else’s spouse or a lady of the night? What do the porn sites you visit say about you? If you are, say, a politician, do you want these things to come out? Have you written compromising emails about shady deductions on your taxes, or about your boss (“a weasely dickhead and probably a latent girly-boy”)? You have bar bills or liquor purchases of $300 a week? What if you show positive on a marijuana scan at the airport, which becomes justification for a full search of your house, or dismissal from work?

Things have already reached the point at which writers of my acquaintance, who do not have the power of the Washington Post behind them, have stopped criticizing the government. Whether they are in fact in any danger of persecution—I don’t think they much are yet—almost doesn’t matter. The mere knowledge that your email can be read is intimidating, like being closely followed by a police car even when you are doing nothing wrong. We are daily being followed by more police cars, both literal and figurative.

Mine Strike Mayhem Stuns South Africa as Police Open Fire

Via Knuckledraggin' My Life Away



The police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here on Thursday, leaving a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality.

More @ The NYT


Geraldo Asks if Napolitano Has Let A 'Lesbian Cabal' Take Over DHS

VERBATIM POST

Friday morning on Fox and Friends Geraldo Rivera wondered out loud if Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano has let a “lesbian cabal” engage in a “same sex takeover” of the Department.



How Did Harry Reid Get Rich?

Via Cousin Bill

Try this thought experiment. Imagine that someone grows up in poverty, works his way through law school by holding the night shift as a Capitol Hill policeman, and spends all but two years of his career as a public servant. Now imagine that this person’s current salary — and he’s at the top of his game — is $193,400. You probably wouldn’t expect him to have millions in stocks, bonds, and real estate.

But, surprise, he does, if he’s our Senate majority leader, whose net worth is between 3 and 10 million dollars, according to OpenSecrets.org. When Harry Reid entered the Nevada legislature in 1982, his net worth was listed as between $1 million and $1.5 million “or more,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. So, since inquiring minds inquire, let’s try to figure out how Reid’s career in public service ended up being so lucrative. He hasn’t released his tax returns, which makes this an imperfect science, but looking at a few of his investments helps to show how he amassed his wealth.

In 2004, the senator made $700,000 off a land deal that was, to say the least, unorthodox. It started in 1998 when he bought a parcel of land with attorney Jay Brown, a close friend whose name has surfaced multiple times in organized-crime investigations and whom one retired FBI agent described as “always a person of interest.” Three years after the purchase, Reid transferred his portion of the property to Patrick Lane LLC, a holding company Brown controlled. But Reid kept putting the property on his financial disclosures, and when the company sold it in 2004, he profited from the deal — a deal on land that he didn’t technically own and that had nearly tripled in value in six years.

More @ NRO