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Saturday 9 July 2011

Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’ Communism, and Islam

Whittaker Chambers, Communism, and Islam

orgional poststing at Right Side News July 2011

By Andrew Bostom

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.
Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged [2] that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’ 1952 anti-Communist memoir, "Witness [3].” Mamet described [2] how reading Chambers’ opus inspired "the wrenching experience” of forcibly re-evaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed Leftist herd co-dependence. Echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks [3] in the 1950s on Chambers—whose allegations of Communist conspiracism have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona [4] cables [5]—Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings [6] March 10, 2011 on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly apoplectic [7], and equally unwarranted condemnation, even before [8] getting underway.

David Mamet’s invocation of "Witness,” and the repeated hysterical [9], if groundless objections to the second round [10] of hearings by Rep. King’s Homeland Security Committee (i.e., June 15, 2011, on Muslim radicalization in US prisons),  jointly, are fitting reminders that July 9, 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Whittaker Chambers’ death July 9, 1961.
Chambers was born April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia, and spent his childhood on the south shore of Long Island, in (then rural) Lynbrook. Upon graduating High School, Chambers left home and worked as a construction laborer on the Washington DC subway system, before drifting to New Orleans, and then returning to attend Columbia University between 1920-1924. Under the tutelage of Columbia English Professor Mark Van Doren (before Van Doren became an internationally known literary critic and poet), Chambers tried his hand at poetry, even completing a book of poems entitled "Defeat in the Village,” before realizing, "I never could write poetry good enough to be worth writing.” This apprenticeship, however, helped teach Chambers "the difficult, humbling, exacting art of writing,” and he would go on to become an exceptionally gifted writer of prose.  He joined the Communist Party in 1925, experiencing great success as a writer at The Daily Worker and as an editor at The New Masses, both communist-controlled publications. In 1932, Chambers was asked to join the underground movement of the Communist Party, and he served in the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. Recognizing Chambers’ intellectual prowess, the underground placed him with the Ware Group (a collection of communist cells consisting of government officials and journalists) in Washington, D.C. It was here, among other promising New Deal civil servants, that he encountered Alger Hiss. Chambers and Hiss, along with their spouses, had actually become close friends before Chambers renounced Communism.
During late 1938, overwhelmed by the horrific actions of the Soviet Communist Party, in particular the Stalinist purges, and forced starvation of Ukrainian peasants, and having rejected Communism’s militant atheism, Chambers left the Communist movement. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a watershed event for Chambers, realizing that much of the confidential information about the U.S. that he had forwarded to the Soviet Union could now be passed to Germany. Thus Chambers, now an ex-Communist apostate, decided to divulge his prior activities for the Communist underground to the federal government. Shortly thereafter, Chambers was able to meet with the head of security at the State Department, A.A. Berle. Although Chambers revealed most of his activities, he withheld the facts of espionage conducted by his cell, largely to protect others, including, notably, Alger Hiss. Regardless, it was not until 1948—nine years later—that the information he provided to Berle was acted upon by the government. Chambers was subpoenaed at that time by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley—the so-called "blonde spy queen”—who alleged that Soviet espionage was occurring within the U.S. government. Chambers corroborated Bentley’s allegations, supplemented them with his own, and confronted Alger Hiss on the first day of his testimony (eventually all twenty-one names that Chambers provided to HUAC were confirmed by subsequent Soviet archival research). In 1950, Hiss was convicted for perjury after two federal trials.
A naturally gifted linguist, particularly fluent in German, over the years Whittaker Chambers translated into English "Bambi,” "Dunant—the Story of the Red Cross,” and a number of children’s books.  Chambers joined Time Magazine in 1939, initially as a book reviewer, later as a writer and editor. He wrote many of Time’s cover stories during his tenure, including profiles of historian Arnold Toynbee, vocalist Marian Anderson, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pope Pius XII. Chambers, based upon his experience as a Communist, and intuitive grasp of history, displayed a remarkably prescient understanding of the "Cold War” conflict as an editor and writer for Time’s foreign news section. He also contributed seven brilliant essays to Life Magazine’s 1947-1948 "Picture History of Western Civilization” series. Compelled to resign from Time during the tumultuous Hiss trials, Chambers eventually became an editor and writer on the staff of National Review, from the latter part of 1957 to the middle of 1959. Throughout most of his journalistic career, Chambers continued to operate a farm in Westminster, Maryland, maintaining a dairy herd, raising sheep and beef cattle, and producing various crops.
This essay will explore what can be gleaned from Chambers’ witness-martyrdom in the struggle against Communism, sacrificing himself "a little in advance to try to win for you that infinitesimal slightly better chance,” and applied to the modern threat of resurgent Islamic totalitarianism.
First, Chambers’ own brief 1947 comparison of Communism and nascent Islam will be placed in the context of more extensive, independent contemporary characterizations (i.e., made from 1920-2001) by Western scholars and intellectuals who also juxtaposed these ideological systems.
Next, I will address Chambers’ searing critique of Communism—as an intimately knowledgeable ex-Communist true believer—and his related criticism of the West’s embrace of Godless secular humanism, rejecting its Biblical roots, in particular the belief in a Judeo-Christian God. Then I will elucidate how Chambers’ understanding that faith in the Judeo-Christian God was conjoined to Biblical freedom, and the antithetical conception of modern atheistic totalitarianism—epitomized by Communism—relate to Islamic doctrine regarding "hurriyya,” Arabic for freedom, and the God of Islam, Allah. The essay will conclude with a discussion of what Chambers’ apostasy from Communism—and the shared insights of contemporary apostates from Islam—can teach the West.
From the time of Chambers’ break with the Communist Party in late 1938, till his death nearly 23 years later, Chambers was consumed by the West’s self-abnegation of its own institutions—rooted for two millennia in a belief in the Judeo-Christian God—and their threatened active destruction by the votaries of mass secular totalitarian movements, notably Fascism and Communism. His December, 1947 Time Magazine book review of Rebecca West’s "The Meaning of Treason,” a series of penetrating reports on the trials of British World War II traitors, opens with these observations:
When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.
Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.
Modern man was challenged to choose between the traditions of a 2,000-year-old Christian civilization and the new totalitarian systems which, in the name of social progress, contended for the allegiance of man’s secular mind. The promise of the new ideas was as old as that serpentine whisper heard in the dawn of the Creation: "You shall become as gods”—for the first traitor was the first man.
The case of Dr. Alan Nunn May represented for Rebecca West the bottom of what Chambers characterizes as "a descent into the circles of a drab inferno.” Dr. May, a lecturer on physics at the University of London, was a longstanding Communist Party member. Ostensibly volunteering to serve his country, he became the senior member of the British atomic bomb project’s nuclear physics division during World War II. May took nefarious advantage of this position by transferring to Russia samples of uranium 233 and enriched uranium 235.
Chambers’ review of "The Meaning of Treason” also compared the violent fanaticism of the 20th century’s secular totalitarian systems adherents, to the votaries of Islam.  The modern totalitarians expressed "new ideas” which were "violently avowed,” and
the hallmark of their advocates was a fanaticism unknown since the first flush of Islam.
Does Chambers’ passing comparison have doctrinal and historical validity, and does it comport with other serious modern assessments?

Communism as the 20th Century Islam

Jules Monnerot’s, 1949 “Sociologie du Communisme,” was translated into English and published as “Sociology and Psychology of Communism,” in 1953. Monnerot elaborated at length upon a brief, but remarkably prescient observation by Bertrand Russell from his “The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,” published already in 1920.  Russell compared emerging Bolshevism to Islam, noting their shared fanaticism, impervious to reason. Despite his vaunted anti-Christian polemics, Russell further maintained that Christianity and Buddhism each possessed a spiritualism that contrasted starkly with the unspiritual aims shared by Islam and Communism—global conquest of mankind, and its subjugation to a single ruling order.
Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam… Those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide. Even if all the doctrines of Bolshevism were true, this would still be the case, since no unbiased examination of them is tolerated…Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism [Islam] rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.
Monnerot made very explicit connections between pre-modern Islamic and 20th century Communist totalitarianism. The title of his first chapter dubbed Communism as “The Twentieth Century Islam.” He elucidates these two primary shared characteristics of Islam and Communism: “conversion”—followed by subversion—from within, and the fusion of “religion” and state.
…There is a resemblance between the use made of Marxism by the present masters of the totalitarian world and the conversion of nomadic barbarians…such as the Turkish mercenaries Mahmud of Ghazna [Ghazni; modern Afghanistan], [and the Turcomen of Asia Minor] Togrul Beg, and Alp Arslan to the universal religion[s] of the civilization[s] they threatened, namely…Like Stalin’s Marxism, their conversion [to Islam] gave them the pretext for disrupting civilization from within]; as converts they were able to attack in the name of the true Faith the very societies which had brought the Faith to them. In the same way the Marxist chiefs of totalitarian Russia attack Western society from within, attempting to destroy the social structure of European countries for the sake of the socialism to which these countries themselves gave birth…Communism takes the field both as a secular religion [emphasis in original] and as a universal State [emphasis in original]; it is therefore…comparable to Islam…Soviet Russia (to use the name it gives itself, although it is a mis-description of the regime) is not the first empire in which the temporal and public power goes hand in hand with a shadowy power which works outside the imperial frontiers to undermine the social structure of neighboring States.
Monnerot’s compendious analysis  supplements these apposite examples from Islam’s enduring legacy of jihad [11]—the exploits of Sunni Muslims Mahmud of Ghazni, Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan—with additional jihad campaigns waged by the Fatimids of Egypt, and the Shiite Persian Safavids, whose efforts featured collaboration by Sufis [12].
The Islamic East affords several examples of a like duality and duplicity. The Egyptian Fatimids, and later the Persian Safavids, were the animators and propagators, from the heart of their own States, of an active and organizing legend, an historical myth, calculated to make fanatics and obtain their total devotion, designed to create in neighboring States an underworld of ruthless gangsters. The eponymous ancestor of the Safavids was a saint from whom they magically derived the religious authority in whose name they operated. They were Shi’is of Arabian origin, and the militant order they founded was dedicated to propaganda and ‘nucleation’ throughout the whole of Persia and Asia Minor. It recruited ‘militants’ and ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathizers’. These were the Sufis.
Monnerot invokes another relevant historical example of Islam’s paradigmatic fusion of religion and state—the Ottoman Empire, and its brutal jihad enslavement and forced conversion to Islam of subjected Christian children for the slave soldier devshirme-janissary system [11].
Islam has provided the type of society in which the political and the sacred are indissolubly merged. The law of the Koran was religious, political, and civil all in one; and an infidel could be no more than a tributary. In history and in law he appeared as an object, but not as a participating subject; and the Ottoman Empire was interested in the children of infidels only because they could be recruited as janissaries.
Citing Stalin (circa 1949) as the contemporary personification, Monnerot elaborated on this totalitarian consolidation (“condensation”) of power shared by Islam and Communism, and the refusal of these universalist creeds to accept limits on their “frontiers.”
During the great period of Islamic conquests the State, in so far as it existed in our sense of the word, participated in the sacred doctrine of the prophet [Muhammad] and was its embodiment and life. The companions of the prophet, partakers in the revolutionary legitimacy, did not constitute a Church; nor do the secular religions inherent in 20th century absolutisms, but the power of the prophetic elite (which is what the party’s ‘summit’ is at the moment when the new State is created) is all the more absolute for being, as it were, a condensation of the power of the whole society. And the leader represents the extreme point of condensation.
As rulers, their sympathies were recognized by other sovereigns in the same way that Stalin, head of the State, is recognized by other heads of States, and rightly, as the leader of world communism. This merging of religion and politics was a major characteristic of the Islamic world in its victorious period. It allowed the head of a State to operate beyond his own frontiers in the capacity of the commander of the faithful (Amir-al-muminin); and in this way a Caliph was able to count upon docile instruments, or captive souls, wherever there were men who recognized his authority. The territorial frontiers which seemed to remove some of his subjects from his jurisdiction were nothing more than material obstacles; armed force might compel him to feign respect for the frontier, but propaganda and subterranean warfare could continue no less actively beyond it. Religions of this kind acknowledge no frontiers. Soviet Russia is merely the geographical center from which communist influence radiates; it is an ‘Islam’ on the march, and it regards its frontiers at any given moment as purely provisional and temporary. Communism, like victorious Islam, makes no distinction between politics and religion…
Monnerot further observes that to those who did not accept their ideology, or self-proclaimed “mission,” Communism—and Islam before it—were viewed as imperialistic religious fanaticisms.
To an educated European or American, unless he is himself a communist, it appears that communists are religious fanatics in the service of an expansionist empire which is striving for world dominion. But communists see it differently: for them communism is what ought to be, and the whole of history, the whole past of humanity, takes its meaning from this future event…Communism is a faith, and it has in Russia a sort of fatherland; but such a fatherland cannot be a country like any other. Russia is to communism what the Abbasid empire was to Islam. Communism…is a religious sect of world conquerors for whom Russia is simply the strongpoint from which the attack is launched.
Finally Monnerot (invoking Ernest Renan [d. 1892]) underscores how incoherent Western intellectual apologists for totalitarianism—whether Communist or Islamic—promote the advance of these destructive ideologies.
Renan’s saying, ‘the principle of mythology consists in giving life to words’, applies literally to these ‘isms.’ Thus ‘communism’ may possess a vitality, a prestige, and an authority which do not depend upon the actions of ‘communists’. One has heard ‘sympathizers’ in all sincerity reproaching communists for being unfaithful to communism, and one might conclude that these ‘intellectuals’ attribute priority and superiority, or in any case primacy, to ‘essence’ over ‘existence’. Thus communism is no longer the sum or epitome of the morals and behavior and beliefs and customs of communists, but a sort of self-subsistent entity which can be known by contemplation and in the light of which the behavior of communists can be judged; so that the intellectual whose good intentions place him, in his own eyes, upon a pedestal, can remonstrate, ‘Communists, what have you made of communism?’”
A half century later, the esteemed French scholar of Islam, and ex-Communist, Maxime Rodinson (d. 2004), re-affirmed the essential validity of Monnerot’s comparison. Rodinson, during a September 28, 2001 interview [13] with Le Figaro, acknowledged that while still a Communist, he had taken umbrage with Monnerot’s assessment. But having long since renounced the Communist Party, Rodinson (circa September, 2001) conceded that there were “striking similarities [13]” between Communism and Islam, noting [13] that like Communism, contemporary “Islamic fundamentalism” promulgated
…an ideology that claims to explain everything, drawing on a vision of the world that is fiercely paranoid [and] conspiratorial.
Karl Wittfogel’s seminal 1957 analysis of pre-modern Eastern totalitarianism, Oriental Despotism — A Comparative Study of Total Power [14], contains insights on Islam that are especially illuminating, and ever-relevant to present-era tribulations deriving from the unreformed (and even unexamined) mandates of Islamic supremacism. Wittfogel’s views are of particular importance because like Chambers (and Rodinson, above, as well as Arthur Koestler, below), he had embraced and then abandoned the Communist movement. Indeed Chambers, an accomplished auto-didact linguist, and German to English translator, records in “Witness” he was briefly approached by a Communist party agent about his potential English translation of a study of Chinese agrarian problems Wittfogel had written in German.
Underpinning Islamic “absolutism,” Wittfogel notes, is the same Koranic injunction (Koran 4:59) — cited by Islamic legists from Mawardi (d. 1058) to Mawdudi (d. 1979) — as legitimizing the totalitarian caliphate system.
The Koran exhorts believers to obey not only Allah and his prophet, but also “those in authority amongst you.” In the absolutist states established by Mohammed’s followers, this passage was invoked to emphasize the importance of obedience in maintaining governmental authority.
Wittfogel’s candor extends to these unapologetic observations contrasting Ottoman and Medieval Western European regulation of guilds, and the nature of Islamic religious “tolerance” — more aptly, non-Muslim dhimmitude under Islamic law:
In Ottoman Turkey officials inspected the markets and controlled the prices, weight, and measurements, thus fulfilling functions which in the burgher-controlled towns of Medieval Europe were usually the responsibility of the urban authorities. Furthermore, the state, which in most countries of feudal Europe collected few if any taxes from the urban centers of strongly developed guild power, was able in Turkey to tax the guilds and, as elsewhere in the Orient, to employ its fiscal agents the headmen of these corporations, who distributed the tax-quotas of their members and who were personally responsible for their payment.
[F]ollowers of these creeds [Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism] had to accept an inferior status both politically and socially, and they were prevented from spreading their ideas. The laws forbade conversion from Christianity to Judaism or vice versa; and penalties for apostasy from Islam were severe. Christians were not permitted to beat their wooden boards (these boards were used as bells) loudly, or sing in their churches with raised voices, or assemble in the presence of Muslims, or display their “idolatry,” “nor to invite to it, nor show a cross,” on their churches. No wonder that the religious minorities — who during the Turkish period were set apart in organizations called millet– vegetated rather than throve. The head of the millet was nominated by the millet but appointed by the sultan; once in office he was given just enough power to enable him to collect the taxes imposed on his community by the state.
Nearly three decades earlier, another ex-Communist, Arthur Koestler, writing in Die Vossische Zeitung (6/7/1928), had compared the Wahhabi ascendancy in Saudi Arabia to the revolutionary triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.  Koestler contended that the “omnipotent Wahhabi brotherhoods of the Ikhwan,” with “iron support of the omnipotent party” were a source of danger and fear for the neighboring Arab states—just as Bolshevism was for the capitalist countries of Europe. He added,
What is new in this situation today, is that this danger no longer threatens, as previously, only from outside—from beyond the borders of the Arabian desert.  Rather, the Wahhabis have begun to proselytize among the Muslims of neighboring countries—onsets of, so to speak, a “Wahhabi Internationale,” which are already becoming noticeable
Koestler befriended Chambers in 1950, and the two shared a great mutual admiration. (Koestler described Chambers in a 1953 letter to Andre Malraux as “one of the most outstanding, most maligned, and most sincere characters whom I have ever met,” the victim of “a bizarre and symbolic 20th century martyrdom.” Whittaker Chambers’ biographer Sam Tanenhaus, in turn, notes that Chambers’ summer 1959 Austrian visit with Arthur Koestler was “a culminating moment,” because Koestler was “the contemporary he esteemed most.”)
Lastly, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of living Western Islamic scholars, in his 1954 essay “Communism and Islam,” expounded upon on the quintessence of totalitarian Islam, and how it was antithetical in nature to Western democracy, while sharing important features of Communist totalitarianism — most notably, global domination via jihad:
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition. … Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West. … In point of fact, except for the early caliphate, when the anarchic individualism of tribal Arabia was still effective, the political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. … [I]t was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. In the great days of classical Islam this duty was only owed to the lawfully appointed caliph, as God’s vicegerent on earth and head of the theocratic community, and then only for as long as he upheld the law; but with the decline of the caliphate and the growth of military dictatorship, Muslim jurists and theologians accommodated their teachings to the changed situation and extended the religious duty of obedience to any effective authority, however impious, however barbarous. For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”
Quite obviously, the Ulama [religious leaders] of Islam are very different from the Communist Party. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we find certain uncomfortable resemblances. Both groups profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth; the answers are different in every respect, alike only in their finality and completeness, and in the contrast they offer with the eternal questioning of Western man. Both groups offer to their members and followers the agreeable sensation of belonging to a community of believers, who are always right, as against an outer world of unbelievers, who are always wrong. Both offer an exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the infidel evil-doers. The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, two necessarily opposed groups, of which- the first has the collective obligation of perpetual struggle against the second, also has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. There again, the content of belief is utterly different, but the aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as “There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet” was laying his finger on a real affinity. The call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith — a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy — might well strike a responsive note.
Lewis here reiterates Chambers’ more direct, experiential understanding, as a former Communist, of the secular totalitarian creed’s mandate for eternal warfare. And in Communism’s ceaseless war, like Islam’s unending jihad, apostates are deemed the worst enemies. Chambers provides this explanation in “Witness”:
Communism exists to wage war. Its existence implies, even in peace or truce, a state of war that engages every man, woman and child alive, but, above all, the ex-Communist…In that war which Communism insists on waging, and which therefore he [the ex-Communist] cannot evade, he has one specific contribution to make—his special knowledge of the enemy.

Chambers on Communism, Christianity, and Freedom

Whittaker Chambers wrote a trenchant essay [15] for Time (“Communists: Dr. Crankley’s Children”) in February, 1948 commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Chambers was particularly intrigued by the success of Marx’s ideas despite historical developments which disproved Dr. Crankley’s assumptions:
He assumed, for example, that the spectacular poverty of industrial workers of his day would spread and deepen. The capitalist philosophers, who predicted rising living standards, were right.
Adapting German philosopher G.F. Hegel’s “dialectical method,” and respect for the state, Marx saw history as class conflicts (“thesis and antithesis”) whose final “synthesis” would result in a classless society. The life and character of Marx, Chambers argued, contained the “ingredients”—pity, hate, desire for power—of Marxism’s emotional force. Reflecting the “morals” of Marx’s atheistic dialectic, Chambers notes [15], fronts and purges soon followed.
Marx created the first Communist front organization. When the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, he organized a workers’ club in Paris whose agitators had instructions not to mention Communism, but to emphasize democracy. Later, Marx sent 300 agents into Germany with instructions to organize Communist cells but to appear as good, hard-working liberals. In 1848 Marx himself revived the old Rheinische Zeitung; its masthead now proclaimed it an “organ of democracy.” Admitted Marx: “It was in reality nothing but a plan of war against democracy.” Marx also conducted the first Party purges. He denounced anyone who disagreed with him as an “unscientific socialist.” The usual instrument of execution was slander, from stories that the accused had embezzled workers’ funds to rumors that he had gonorrhea.
Marx despised the slow progress of “sentimental socialism.” Eventually he began to speak [15]
… more and more of the necessity of “capturing” the state (with its police power) rather than of “destroying” the state, as other socialists hoped to do. Toward the end of his life he wrote the words “dictatorship of the proletariat” to describe the post-revolutionary period which was to precede the classless society. That phrase had always been buried in Marx’s thought; he had in fact used it in conversation. Written down, it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.
Chambers described Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—Lenin—as the leader of that “most terrible in the Marxist brood…who inherited the cold, disciplined logic necessary for the pursuit of power.” Lenin made this pathognomonic comment on religion in a November 1913 letter [16]:
Every religious idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness…of the most dangerous kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds acts of violence and physical contagions…are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest “ideological” costumes…Every defense or justification of God, even the most refined, the best intentioned, is a justification of reaction.
A Lenin dictum, Chambers observes [15], was: “The people themselves do not know what is good or bad for them.” Predictably, in 1917, he kidnapped the Russian state, and carnage ensued.
When the Russian people, without his help, snatched at democracy, he snatched it away from them. Like Father Marx, he knew what was best. He organized riots that weakened and, finally, a coup that overpowered the Kerensky government. He organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a disciplined little gang of power monopolists)…In his name…more men have been slaughtered than in Attila’s.
When Chambers broke with the Communist Party just before Christmas, 1938, he offered [3] this litany of “political mistakes and crimes of the Communist Party” to his then collaborator in Soviet espionage, Alger Hiss, as justification:
…the Soviet Government’s deliberate murder by mass starvation of millions of peasants in the Ukraine and the Kuban [Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta, and the Caucasus]; the deliberate betrayal of the German working class to Hitler by the Communist Party’s refusal to cooperate with Social Democrats against the Nazis; the ugly fact that the German Communist Party had voted in the Reichstag with the Nazis against the Social Democrats; the deliberate betrayal of the Spanish Republican government, which the Soviet Government was only pretending to aid, while the Communists massacred their political enemies in the Spanish prisons. This gigantic ulcer of corruption and deceit had burst, I said, in the great Russian purge when Stalin had consolidated his power by massacring thousands of the best men and minds in the Communist Party on lying charges.
Chambers soon came to understand [3] that even the internecine violence of the Stalinist purges was consistent with the horrific logic—and quintessential evil—of Communism:
The human horror of the Purge was too close for me to grasp clearly its historical meaning. I could not have said then, what I knew shortly afterwards, that, as Communists, Stalin and the Stalinists were absolutely justified in making the Purge. From the Communist viewpoint, Stalin could have taken no other course, so long as he believed he was right. The Purge, like the Communist-Nazi pact later on, was the true measure of Stalin as a revolutionary statesman. That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly. In that fact lay the evidence that Communism is absolutely evil. The human horror was not evil, it was the sad consequence of evil. It was Communism that was evil, and the more truly a man acted in its spirit and interest, the more certainly he perpetuated evil.
Stalin, Chambers reiterates [3], simply personified worse evil—“the greatest of fascist forms”—Communism:
The point was not that Stalin is evil, but that Communism is more evil, and that, acting through his person, it found its supremely logical manifestations. The important point was not the character of Stalin, but the character of Communism, which, with an intuitive grasp that was at once the source of his strength and his mandate to power, Stalin was carrying to its inevitable development as the greatest of fascist forms.
Indeed, “despite occasional pious statements to the contrary,” Chambers explained [3], the Communist Party functioned as a terrorist organization.
Its disclaimers are for the record. But its record of kidnappings, assassinations, and murders makes the actions of the old Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party [the underground brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party which carried out political assassinations in the early 20th century] look merely romantic. No argument can reach the Communist Party unless it sees in it some self-serving advantage. It respects only force. Only terror terrifies it.
When Chambers, as an ex-Communist, met former Soviet spy General Walter Krivitsky, who by then had also renounced Communism (and was assassinated not long afterward), Krivitsky asked him, “Is the Soviet Government a fascist government?” Chambers, despite “…all the emotions that had ever bound me to Communism [which] rose in a final spasm to stop my mouth,” answered, “Yes—the Soviet government is a fascist government.” Krivitsky believed [3] that an early turning point had occurred—the internal revolt during the Bolshevik Revolution by sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, “sons of peasants” embodying the Russian people’s “instinctive surge for freedom”—Communism then “morphing” by its brutal repression of the uprising, into a malevolent fascism.
When they [the sailors] saw that Communism meant terror and tyranny, they called for the overthrow of the Communist Government and for a time imperiled it. They were bloodily destroyed or sent into Siberian slavery by Communist troops led in person by the Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky, and by Marshall Tukhachevsky, one of whom was later assassinated, the other executed, by the regime they then saved.
But Chambers saw [3] still deeper origins:
The fascist character of Communism was inherent in it from the beginning. Kronstadt changed the fate of millions of Russians. It changed nothing about Communism. It merely disclosed its character.
Chambers, in “Cold Friday [17]”, a collection of writings composed after “Witness”, till a few weeks before his death, returns to the discussion of “the crux of Communism”—dialectical materialism—which he maintains the West fails to understand, at its peril.
This is the fact which absolutely sunders the mind of the Communist from the traditional mind of the West—which makes him in the mass a new breed in history. For our breeds, in this sense, are defined by the view we hold, unconsciously or not, of the world and its meaning, and the meaning of our lives in it. Obviously, a breed of men who hold that everything is in violent flux and change, moving by laws and in a pattern inherent in matter, and having nothing to do with God—obviously, that breed of men is different from the rest of mankind.
Unable or unwilling to perceive this profound difference, Chambers argues [17], the West engages in “puzzling,” if not “merely stupid” cultural exchanges with Communism, “which in the next breath it condemns as a barbaric and criminal force,” harboring the illusion that Communism and its votaries
…are about to undergo a change of mind (or heart) so that henceforth they will no longer act like Communists; they will be like us.
Chambers then elaborates [17] what he believes is Communism’s “chief power in the West”—not Fifth Column subversion, as dangerous as that remains—but
…the power of Communism to manipulate responsive sections of the West to check, counteract, paralyze, or confuse the rest. Those responsive sections of the West were not Communist, and never had been. Most of the minds that composed them thought of themselves as sincerely anti-Communist. Communism manipulated them, not in terms of Communism, but in terms of the shared historical crisis—peace and social justice being two of the workable terms. They were free to denounce Communism and Communists (and also anti-Communists) after whatever flourishes their intellectual innocence or arrogance might choose. Communism asked no more. It cared nothing, at this point, about motives. It cared about results.
Chambers recognized [17] the burgeoning of Communist power as being inexplicable
…except as Communism appeals to the divided mind of the West, making each of its advances exactly along the line of the West’s internal division, paralyzing each effort of the West to cope with it by touching some sympathetic nerve. The success of Communism…is never greater than the failure of all other faiths.
Through an involuntary process, borne of despair, Chambers ultimately rejected as illusions the Communist “mirage of Almighty Mind and its power to plan human salvation.” Chambers memorable description of this epiphany in “Witness [3]” makes plain that from the outset his concerns extended beyond simply rejecting Communism.
What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step…What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man.” The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.
But even in the midst of this deeply religious experience, Chambers acknowledges [3] his own indebtedness to reason—evident in the brilliant works he produced during the 23 years after renouncing Communism.
…[T]he torrent that swept through me in 1937 and the first months of 1938 swept my spirit clear to discern one truth: “Man without mysticism is a monster.” I do not mean, of course, that I denied the usefulness of reason and knowledge. What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail—the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God. Thus, in pain, I learned the distinction between wisdom and knowledge—knowledge, which however exalted, is seldom more than the making of careful measurements, and wisdom, which includes knowledge, but also includes man’s mystery.
Chambers cites [3] a casual occurrence—focusing his gaze on the “delicate convolutions” of his young daughter’s ear—which in turn begot an “involuntary and unwanted” thought that led him, ultimately, away from Communism’s fanatical atheism, to a  religious acceptance of belief in God.
…those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.”
While all ex-Communists would agree they renounced Communism to be free, for Chambers, freedom [3] itself is a manifestation of divinity.
Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.
And when Chambers made his dramatic assertion to an inquisitorial panel of largely hostile journalists, during a live August 27, 1948 radio broadcast of Meet The Press, that, “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be one,” he recounts [3] in “Witness”:
I like to believe that some who heard it, heard at the same instant, its inward meaning. That meaning was that God, Who is a God of Mercy, is also the God of Whom it is written: “The God Who made iron grow—He wanted no slaves.”
Chambers was convinced [18] that man’s most worthy imperative was the ceaseless endeavor to know God.
[M]an is driven by the noblest of his intuitions—the sense of his mortal incompleteness—and by hard experience. For man’s occasional lapses from God-seeking inevitably result in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action.
In this latter conviction, he shared [18] Dostoevsky’s Weltanschauung, dramatized, as Chambers remarks, on a “titanic scale” as tragedy in “The Brothers Karamazov” and “The Idiot”, and comedy in “The Possessed”.
Against liberalism’s social optimism (progress by reform) and the social optimism of the revolutionary left (progress by force), Dostoevsky asserted the eternal necessity of the soul to be itself. But he discerned that the moment man indulged his freedom to the point where he was also free from God, it led him into tragedy, evil and often the exact opposite of what he had intended. In human terms there was no solution for the problem of evil.
Chambers personal practice of religion was nonconformist and eclectic, true to his own assessment, characterized in a September, 1954 letter [19] to William Buckley:
I stand within no religious orthodoxy. The temptation to orthodoxy is often strong, never more than in an age like this one, especially in a personal situation like mine. But it is not a temptation to which I have found it possible to yield.
Although baptized in an Episcopalian Church (i.e., the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) after abandoning Communism, Chambers worshipped as a Quaker, but rejected the Quaker’s pacifism. Nonconformism aside, the salient features of Chambers personal religiosity were his Christian pantheism, philosemitism and accompanying intolerance of racial bigotry, and, however brooding, hope.
Rebecca West’s June, 1952 Atlantic Monthly review of “Witness,” despite her obvious ambivalence about Chambers’ behaviors and beliefs, extolled the autobiography:
…so just and so massive in its resuscitation of the past…Chambers writes as writers by vocation try to write, and he makes the further discoveries about reality, pushing another half-inch below the surface, which writers hope to make when they write
Although expressly disinclined towards mystics and mysticism, West accurately represents the mystical tendencies in Chambers’ religious belief:
He now owns and works a large and productive farm in those parts [Westminster, Maryland], and his account of the sacrifices that he and his family have made to acquire that farm, and the joy they find in working it, reveals that he belongs to a certain well-recognized order of man. He believes that nature is an aspect of God, and that to grow crops and tend herds is a means of establishing communication with God…He is, in fact, a Christian mystic of the pantheist school…
Witness [20]” includes Chambers’ own beautifully evocative description of his “Christian pantheism,” captured in this lasting childhood recollection:
One day I wandered off alone and found myself before a high hedge that I had never seen before. It was so tall that I could not see over it and so thick that I could not see through it. But by lying flat against the ground, I wriggled between the provet stems. I stood up, on the other side, in a field covered from end to end, as high as my head, with thistles in full bloom. Clinging to the purple flowers, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches—little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps. They did not pay the slightest attention to me, as if they had never seen a boy before. The sight was unexpected, the beauty was so absolute, that I thought I could not stand it and held to the hedge for support. Out loud, I said: “God.” It was a simple statement, not an exclamation, of which I would then have been incapable. At that moment, which I remembered through all the years of my life as one of its highest moments, I was closer than I would be again for almost forty years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to my life—the intuition that God and beauty are one.
Chambers’ December, 1946 Time cover essay [18] on the nonpareil American black contralto, Marian Anderson, reveals how his Christian religious belief was philosemitic, and as a corollary, rejected the prevalent racial prejudice of that era.
At Salzburg, backdropped by magical mountains, where Austria’s great musical festivals were held before the war, and where he first heard Marian Anderson sing, Arturo Toscanini cried: “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years.” Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people—probably the most God-obsessed (and man-despised) people since the ancient Hebrews. White Americans had withheld from Negro Americans practically everything but God. In return the Negroes had enriched American culture with an incomparable religious poetry and music, and its only truly great religious art—the spiritual. This religious and esthetic achievement of Negro Americans has found profound expression in Marian Anderson. She is not only the world’s greatest contralto and one of the very great voices of all time, she is also a dedicated character, devoutly simple, calm, religious. Manifest in the tranquil architecture of her face is her constant submission to the “Spirit, that dost prefer before all temples the upright heart and pure.”
Almost eleven years later, commenting on the Soviet Union’s cynical Middle Eastern policy of exploiting Arab Muslim hatred and paranoia, Chambers re-affirmed these sentiments in an October, 1957 essay [18] for The National Review:
…Communism advances that disruptive master piece. We all know what it is, though no one likes to mention it. It is the State of Israel. At once, it becomes necessary to define our intentions clearly. A filthy anti-Semitism afflicts many minds in the West. Nothing is gained by denying it. So let us say flatly: in Christendom, no mind can claim to be civilized and, at the same time, be anti-Semitic, any more than an American mind can claim to be civilized and be anti-Negro. For all Christians, regardless of creed, the Vatican has defined the position once for all: “Spiritually, we are Semites.” Moreover, an immense compassion—mere goodwill is too genderless a term—before the spectacle of the Jewish tragedy in our century, must move our hourly understanding of what the State of Israel means in terms of hope fired by such suffering. Let us be quite sure we know this. For it is also necessary to look at Israel in terms of Middle East reality. Communism may lose friendly Egypt or Syria; it will look for purchasable pawns elsewhere. It is Israel, as an enemy, that Communism cannot afford to lose. [Chambers’ sobering assessment maintained only “…that the situation is hopeless…,” as he wrote in a November, 1957 letter [21] to William Buckley. The letter also includes a sardonic reference to the enraged—and witless—reaction to this essay by pro-Arab ex-Communist Freda Utley: “Yet here is ben (sic, bint) Utli, frothing like a dervish…”]
Chambers’ relentless pursuit of truth in all matters, was prone to despairing conclusions. Yet his ultimate vision—imbued with religious faith—was one of hope. As a patient with chronic coronary artery disease (“angina”), Chambers sustained several non-fatal myocardial infarctions (“heart attacks”), prior to his July, 1961 death from a fatal heart attack. While recuperating from a November, 1952 heart attack in Baltimore’s St. Agnes Hospital, Chambers encountered a Passionist monk, Father Alan, whom he sensed was a kindred spirit. Seeking truth “greedily,” since “truth alone is felt to offer one austere, stripped hand-hold across a chasm,” Chambers decides to “cut through the careful irrelevancies of our talk,” query Father Alan, and gauge [22] who he was.
I asked: “Father, what am I to answer those people who keep writing me that I was wrong to write in ‘Witness’ that I had left the winning side for the losing side? They say by calling the West the losing side, I have implied that evil can ultimately overcome good.” Father Alan studied his hands, which were lying in his lap. Then he glanced at me directly and asked: “Who says that the West deserves to be saved?”
Acknowledging the objections to such “unreasonably bleak” views, Chambers penultimate essay in “Cold Friday [22]” sees hope—on his terms—in the mid-to late 1950s Eastern European revolts against Communist oppression.
In this age, hope is something that must be taken by the throat. That is to say, hope, to be durable and real, must begin with things exactly as they are, not as we suppose they were (even a few tranquillizing months ago), or as we wish they might be…The terms of hope are not to delude ourselves about this in order not to suffer in the shattering spins of fear that casts out hope…The deadly enemy of hope, its smiling murderer—is illusion…They [Eastern Europeans revolting against Communism] judge that hope for you (as it has been for them) can truly begin only when complacency has been eaten off as by an acid bath, consuming the temptation to illusion.
And Chambers concludes [22], appositely, with this stirring mystical vision of religious hope.
Put out of your mind so far as you can—at least in the way that a judge instructs a jury to put out of its mind a scrap of testimony that it has, nevertheless, plainly heard—what weighs and presses on us. The political revolution which reaches out for us. The scientific revolution. Put out of your mind for a moment the thermonuclear fear, the rocketry and the terrors that lie beyond. Under this appalling, dwarfing mass that troubles us—troubles us all the more because most of it we see the way an animal’s eye sees us at night, as shapeless patches of the darker dark—under this leaning overhang lives man: people in our undifferentiated millions, bounded by our household cares and happinesses, the fathers and mothers of children, grandfathers and grandmothers of grandchildren in whom we see the continuation of a pulse that began with the Creation.
Hurriyya Versus Freedom and Allah Versus the Judeo-Christian God
Major twentieth century scholars of Islam who were devout Christians, such as Father Louis Gardet, and Sir Hamilton Gibb, shared Chambers’ fears of an irreligious West succumbing to Godless materialism, in particular Communism. Prone to Islamic apologetics, they viewed Allah-fearing Islam, and its pious Muslim votaries, as a potential bulwark against the spread of Communist totalitarianism in the Middle East, Asia and Africa—but with important caveats. The modern Jesuit apologist for Islam, Gardet, acknowledged [23] that Islam’s conception of liberty, even “in the ideal Muslim polity,” was not,
…the liberty for which one dies, that gives life its value and engages the dignity of man made in the image of God.
Moreover, Hamilton Gibb admitted [24] that Islam’s sacralized rejection of equality for non-Muslims aside,
Not even the theoretical equality of all Muslims, though supported by several texts of the Koran, is enough to prove its religious democracy.
Gibb added [24] rather caustically,
The main argument advanced in favor of this claim—the existence of a shura, or consultative council, in the primitive caliphate—no more proves the democracy of Islam than it does of Hitler.
The Orientalist Gustave von Grunebaum, a contemporary of Gardet and Gibb,  dutifully interpreted Islam from the perspective of a Westerner steeped in the best of his own civilization. He argued that there was indeed no alternative way of making the study of Islam meaningful for non-Muslims, professional scholars and educated non-specialists alike, than dispassionately measuring it by the most demanding and universally valid Western standards devised for assessing intellectual and ethical worth. Von Grunebaum provided this lucid and unapologetic warning of how the geostrategic paradigm of “Islam as a bulwark against Communism”  would run amok, in his 1955 review of writings by the immensely popular Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Muhammad Al-Ghazzali .
We concern ourselves with the compatibility or otherwise of Islam with communism and regardless of the conclusion in which we acquiesce, we are apt to overlook the fact that the Muslim circles most emphatically opposed to communism are at the same time potentially if not actually the most formidable stronghold of hostility to the West. Ghazzali’s tirade against American Democracy with its warning “against the spreading American ways,” with its condemnation of “the domestic as well as foreign policy of America” as “actually a systematic violation of every virtue humanity has ever known” should make us aware that the Muslim “extremists” will be with the West not because of any recognized affinity but merely out of momentary political considerations. Ultimately, the self-conscious world of Islam would wish to consolidate into a power center strong enough to set itself up by the side of the Russian and the Western blocks, strong enough to determine for itself what its primary political concerns should be, and strong enough perhaps to be no longer compelled to westernize for the sake of survival. The hot-headed half-truths of Ghazzali must not delude us into considering absurd the aspiration of those who feel that for its revival Islam needs less rather than more gifts of the West.
Hurriyya, Arabic  for “freedom,” and the uniquely Western concept of freedom are completely at odds. Hurriyya “freedom” — as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the  lionized “Greatest Sufi Master”, expressed it — “being perfect slavery.” And this conception is not merely confined to the Sufis’ metaphorical understanding of the relationship between Allah the “master” and his human “slaves.”
The late American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal (d. 2003) analyzed [25] the larger context of hurriyya in Muslim society. He notes the historical absence of hurriyya as  “…a fundamental political concept that could have served as a rallying cry for great causes.”
An individual Muslim
…was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior…
Thus politically, Rosenthal concludes,
…the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed…In general, …governmental authority admitted of no participation of the individual as such, who therefore did not possess any real freedom vis-a-vis it.
Bernard Lewis, in his analysis of hurriyya for the venerated Brill Encyclopedia of Islam [25], discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a few “cautious” or “conservative” (Lewis’ characterization) reformers and their writings, Lewis maintains,
…there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary….
Lewis also makes [25] the important point that Western colonialism ameliorated this chronic situation:
During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after.
Lewis concludes [25] with a stunning observation, when viewed in light of the present travails of the so-called “Arab Spring,”  and throughout the Muslim world, delusively optimistic assessments  notwithstanding:
In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.
Writing in 1979, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh noted (from her essay, “Three Remarks on Islam and Western Political Values”) that the traditional Arabic term to denote people or citizen, which is usually ‘abd (plural ibad), meaning “the slave or servant of God,” was antithetical to the Western democratic worldview.  She further described the perverse phenomenon—borne of complete Western rejection—that nevertheless caused an “amalgamation” of Islamic and Western values in the warped political language of Islam’s contemporary theocrats—the Muslim Brotherhood, being a prime example—then, and now. Thus,
When calling for an Islamic totalitarian Republic, wherein the ulama hoped to restore God’s will in history, they used Western concepts of democracy, liberty, equality etc.,…All of these contemporary religious leaders in Islam were raised and nourished by the literary activity of the Modernists who consciously blurred the differences between East and West. Hence we may understand the unintelligible phenomenon of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, talking about Islamic democracy and freedom while cultivating a vision of an Islamic State, which is certainly a far cry from any Western democracy.
Lazarus-Yafeh’s analysis includes this frank Muslim Brotherhood December, 1976 articulation (from the Brotherhood publication Al-Dawa) of their timeless vision of Islamic democracy and freedom:
We demand an Islamic nation, living a true Islamic life in politics, society, economics, education, culture and every other sphere of life. Islamic law does not restrict itself to the cutting of hands or flogging criminals. To neglect prayer is also a criminal act, and to eat in public during Ramadan is a criminal act and so is the refraining from giving alms, taking interest, drinking, selling or transporting wine, opening public entertainment places and accepting taxes from these places, broadcasting (secular) songs on the radio and showing cheap exotic movies on the television, letting women dress indecently, and print heretic ideas in books and newspapers…We shall not be deceived any more. The Muslim people have a clear goal and will not settle for less than complete victory.
This is the context in which to understand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s use of the term “Hurriyya” (Horeya) in a brief late February, 2011 announcement [26] describing the new political party it has created:
Egypt’s largest political opposition the Muslim Brotherhood, has confirmed that it is preparing to establish a political party calling it the Freedom and Justice Party, or Horeya and Adala.”
As former Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Muhammad Akef recently told the NY Times [27] (in a statement published 6/20/11):
Our preliminary platform will be shown through the Freedom and Justice Party. But our full platform will not be disclosed until we are in complete control and take the presidency as well.
The 1976 Muslim Brotherhood statement quoted by Lazarus-Yafeh, above, articulates that “full platform.”
Ultimately, hurriyya is but a requisite extension of Allah’s dominion, antithetical to the Western conception of freedom derived from belief in the Judeo-Christian God.
William Gifford Palgrave (d. 1888), journeyed through the Arabian peninsula from 1862-63, disguised as a Muslim physician, recording his detailed observations in a renowned travelogue. Palgrave, who developed an intimate understanding of Islam, in both theory and practice, has provided us with a timeless, clear-eyed characterization of Allah, elucidating [28] the origins of the irreconcilable difference between hurriyya, and Western freedom.
The sole power, the sole motor, movement, energy and deed is God (i.e., Allah); the rest is downright inertia and mere instrumentality, from the highest archangel down to the simplest atom of creation. Hence in this one sentence, ‘La ilaha illa Allah’ [‘There is no god but God’], is summed up a system, for want of a better name, I may be permitted to call the Pantheism of Force, or of Act, thus exclusively assigned to God, who absorbs it all, exercises it all, and to Whom alone it can be ascribed, whether for preserving or for destroying, for relative evil or for equally relative good. I say relative because it is clear in such a theology no place is left for absolute good or evil, reason or extravagance; all is abridged in the autocratical will of the one great Agent…
…One might at first sight think that this tremendous Autocrat, this uncontrolled and unsympathizing Power would be far above anything like passions, desires, or inclinations. Yet such is not the case, for He has with respect to His creatures one main feeling and source of action, namely, jealousy of them, lest they should perchance attribute to themselves something of what is His alone, and thus encroach on His all-engrossing kingdom. Hence He is ever more ready to punish than reward, to inflict pain than to bestow pleasure, to ruin than to build. It is His singular satisfaction to make created beings continually feel that they are nothing else than His slaves, His tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better acknowledge His superiority, and know His power above their power, His cunning above their cunning, His will above their will, His pride above their pride; or rather, that there is no power, cunning, will or pride save His own. But He Himself, sterile in His inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save His own and self-measured decree, without son, companion or counselor, is no less barren for Himself than for His creatures; and His own barrenness and lone egoism in Himself is the cause and rule of His indifferent and unregarding despotism around.
…In fact, every phrase of the preceding sentences, every touch in this odious portrait has been taken to the best of my ability, word for word, or at least meaning for meaning, from ‘the Book’ [the Koran], the truest mirror of the mind and scope of its writer. And that such was in reality Mahomet’s mind and idea is fully confirmed by the witness-tongue of contemporary tradition.[i.e., Islam’s other foundational texts, especially the canonical hadith, as well as the most esteemed Koranic commentaries] Of this we have authentic examples: the Saheeh [the two most important canonical hadith collections by Muslim and Bukhari], the [Koranic] commentaries of Beidhawi, the Mishkat-el-Misabih [another caonical hadith collection] and fifty similar works afford ample testimony on this point.
James Freeman Clarke (d. 1888), America’s first, and arguably still one of her greatest scholars of comparative religion, expounded upon Palgrave’s analysis of Allah in his 1871 treatise, “Ten Great Religions—An Essay in Comparative Theology.” Clarke sees in Islam’s conception of Allah—“that which makes of God pure will…divorced from reason and love”—a regression from the Judeo-Christian God.
Comparing Islam to Judaism, Clarke observes,
Goodness does not consist in obedience to divine will, but in conformity to the divine character. This is the doctrine of the Old Testament and one of its noblest characteristics…Mohammedanism is a relapse [from Judaism]…for it makes God only an arbitrary sovereign whose will is to be obeyed without any reference to its moral character.
Moreover, Clarke notes, Islam’s Allah was
…abstracted from matter, and so not to be represented by pictures and images; God withdrawn out of the world, and above all—in total separation.
In contrast, Judaism conceptualized God as being
with man, by his repeated miraculous coming down in prophets, judges, kings; also with his people, the Jews, mysteriously present in their tabernacle and temple.
Christianity, Clarke maintains, added the notion of the God “in us all,” a strong pantheistic tendency, likely derived from the converted Greeks and Romans, and distinctly evident in Whittaker Chambers’ theology.
The New Testament is full of this kind of pantheism,—God in man, as well as God with man. Jesus made the step forward from God with man to God in man,—”I in them, thou in me.” The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is this idea, of God who is not only will and power, not only wisdom and law, but also love; of a God who desires communion and intercourse with his children, so coming and dwelling in them. Mohammed teaches a God above us; Moses teaches a God above us, and yet with us; Jesus teaches God above us, God with us, and God in us.
Clarke concludes that Islam’s alternate “central idea concerning God”—its conception of Allah—has not been salutary for Muslim societies.
Its governments are not governments…It makes life barren and empty. It encourages a savage pride and cruelty. It makes men tyrants or slaves, women puppets, religion the submission to an infinite despotism.
This uniform tendency towards a steely authoritarianism in Islamic states has long been understood.
Jacob Burckhardt (d. 1897), an iconic figure in the annals of Western historiography, believed it was the solemn duty of Western civilization’s heirs to study and acknowledge their own unique cultural inheritance. Moreover, while Burckhardt affirmed the irreducible nature of freedom, and upheld equality before the law, he decried the notion—a pervasive, rigidly enforced dogma at present—that all ways of life, opinions, and beliefs were of equal value. Burckhardt argued that this conceptual reductio ad absurdum would destroy Western culture, heralding a return to barbarism. And contra the Western legacy—epitomized by freedom—Burckhardt referred to Islam as a despotic, or in 20th century parlance, totalitarian ideology.
All religions are exclusive, but Islam is quite notably so, and immediately it developed into a state which seemed to be all of a piece with the religion. The Koran is its spiritual and secular book of law. Its statutes embrace all areas of life…and remain set and rigid; the very narrow Arab mind imposes this nature on many nationalities and thus remolds them for all time (a profound, extensive spiritual bondage!) This is the power of Islam in itself. At the same time, the form of the world empire as well as of the states gradually detaching themselves from it cannot be anything but a despotic monarchy. The very reason and excuse for existence, the holy war, and the possible world conquest, do not brook any other form.
The strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam is the fact that it has been able to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to it. It accomplished this only by instilling into them a new religious arrogance which was stronger than everything and induced them to be ashamed [emphasis in original] of their past.
Perhaps the initial reference to Islam as a totalitarian system, specifically (Burckhardt had used the most comparable 19th century term, “despotism”), was made in 1937 by Charles R. Watson, the Cairo-born first head of the American University at Cairo. Watson noted,
In the case of the Mohammedan world, religion has seemingly affected every detail of life with its prescriptions and requirements…[N]o other religion, as it conquered new territory, has so completely and quickly wiped out even the culture of the conquered people and imposed upon their total life new ways and customs, often a new language, as has the Mohammedan religion.
Islam can truly be described as totalitarian. By a million roots, penetrating every phase of life, all of them with religious significance, it is able to maintain its hold upon the life of the Moslem peoples.
Subsequently, in 1950, G.H. Bousquet [29], one of the pre-eminent 20th century scholars of the Sharia (Islamic, or Mohammedan Law), described Islam as “as a doubly totalitarian system,” which, via the timeless institution of jihad war [30],
…claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Mohammedan law…to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer.
What Apostates from Communism and Islam Can Teach the West
According to polling data released April 24, 2007 the preponderance of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, share the goal of re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate. A rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey [31] of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians, revealed that 65.2% of those interviewed—almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”—desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate.” The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict application of Sharia law in every Islamic country.”
Publication June 7, 2011 of the landmark “Sharia and Violence in American Mosquesstudy [32] provides irrefragable evidence that 81% of this nationally representative sample of US mosques—consistent with mainstream Islamic doctrine, practice, and sentiment since the founding of the Muslim creed—are inculcating jihadism with the goal of implementing Sharia here in America. These mosque data represent another manifestation of institutional American Islam’s jihadism expressed clandestinely 20 years ago in a Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991, written by an acolyte of Brotherhood “Spiritual Leader” Yusuf al-Qaradawi [33]. Entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,”  the document [34]—uncovered during the Holy Land Foundation trial—is indeed self-explanatory.
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated  and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Whittaker Chambers offered these insights from “Witness” that explain how American Muslims could rationalize such seditious behaviors—consistent with Islamic doctrine—and why this phenomenon remains largely incomprehensible to non-Muslim Americans, despite its existential threat to them.
What went on in the minds of those Americans…that made it possible to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as problem of conscience, but a problem of operations…
The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it. It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.
Chambers pellucid formulation of the Communist threat—whether covert or overt—was rooted in his thorough doctrinal and experiential understanding of Communism. Elsewhere in “Witness” he states,
No one knows so well as the ex-Communist the character of the conflict, and of the enemy…For no other has seen so deeply into the total nature of the evil with which Communism threatens mankind.
But for all his ambivalence—at times, verging on despair—about the trajectory of Western civilization, Chambers was motivated by a burning desire to preserve what he loved about the West, and its institutions. Chambers’ ongoing, deep affection for the civilization of the West was perhaps most evident in his celebratory, luminous seven part essay series, “The History of Western Culture,” published in Life Magazine between April, 1947 and June, 1948. His opening essay on the Middle Ages, while acknowledging that “life for the mass of medieval men was hard and often brutal,” also recounts how medieval man
…was the creator of arts and master of a craftsmanship that has never since been equaled. He wove Europe’s most superb tapestries. He made stained glass of a beauty that modern man has failed to imitate. His book-making excelled anything that 20th century book designers and manufacturers have done. His hymns, like Adam of St. Victor’s hymns to the Virgin, are still unexcelled. The universities, a medieval creation that the classical world had never known, have come down to us in the same form. In countless ways modern man is the heir of the Middle Ages.
In the last centuries of the Middle Ages medieval mind burst into creativity in its three ultimate glories: the Gothic cathedrals, the philosophy of Aquinas, the poetry of Dante.
Not unexpectedly, Chambers sees medieval man’s “supreme craving” as one for light, ultimately directed, in hope, toward God.
Light had been the supreme craving of medieval man—light after historical darkness, light in ignorance, light in human despair, light as God. It was given to Dante to see this light in Heaven: “O supreme Light, Who liftest Thyself so high above mortal thought, lend me again a little of that which Thou didst seem; and give my tongue such power that it may leave even a single spark of Thy glory to all men to come.” Medieval man could do no more. And as he looked back, in the evening of the Middle Ages, at the darkness from which he had come and the heights which he had achieved, he could say with Dante, climbing out of the pit of hell: “And thus we emerged again to see the stars.”
Ever skeptical of rationalist excesses, Chambers’ essay “The Age of Enlightenment,” opens with a humorous anecdote that parodies the “supremacy” of reason.
Mademoiselle de Coigny kept a corpse in her couch. The Age of Reason was dawning in France—it was the 18th Century—and there were otherwise just not enough minutes in those days of wonderful Enlightenment for mademoiselle to pursue, like other dedicated bluestockings, the fascinating study of anatomy. But with corpse handy and her scalpel as keen as M. de Voltaire’s wickedly witty mind, she could, while rattling over the Paris cobbles, slice and eviscerate in daily officiation at the new faith whose deity was reason, whose ritual was science and whose high priests were the philosophes, the new order of literary skeptics.
Yet Chambers also pays unequivocal tribute to the living legacy of the Enlightenment’s vision—Western freedoms, including those embodied in America’s Bill of Rights.
The vision of the Enlightenment was freedom—freedom from superstition, freedom from intolerance, freedom to know (for knowledge was held to be the ultimate power), freedom from the arbitrary authority of church or state, freedom to trade or work without vestigial feudal restrictions. This vision was embodied in the American Bill of Rights (for 18th century America was also part of the Enlightenment)…
Mirroring the ex-Communist apostate, Chambers, vis a vis Communism, Ibn Warraq, the contemporary Muslim apostate, combines a highly informed, profound appreciation for his adopted Western civilization, with a deep understanding of the doctrinal and historical threat Islam poses to the West.
Warraq’s books and essays have critically examined Islam’s origins [35], tenets [36], and history [37]. His scholarly 2003 analysis of apostasy [38] in Islam—illustrated by extensive, poignant testimonies from modern Muslim apostates—remains a landmark work documenting this unresolved global human rights tragedy. More recently. Warraq produced an expansive, breathtaking overview [39] of the West’s contributions to art, literature, and philosophy, which was combined with a sound debunking of post-modern, anti-Western charlatanism, epitomized by the sorry “oeuvre” of Edward Said. During a debate with the duplicitous Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Tariq Ramadan, Warraq offered this passionate defense [40] of the West:
In the West we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live the lives of out choosing. The notion of human rights, and freedom were, I believe, there at the dawn of Western civilization, as ideals at least, and further developed during the Enlightenment…It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for the abolition of slavery did not resonate even in black Africa, where the rival African tribes took black prisoners in the West. By contrast, stoning to death someone for adultery is a clear violation of the human rights of the individuals concerned; punishments. Laws concerning inheritance, and the rights of women prescribed by the Sharia, Islamic law, also flagrantly violate the rights of individuals. Under Islamic law, women are not free to marry men whom they wish, homosexuals are killed, apostates are to be executed. The Koran is not a rights-respecting documenting. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness defines succinctly the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization. We are free, in the West, to choose; we have real choice to pursue our desires; we are free to set the goals and contents of our own lives; the West is made up of individuals who are free to decide what meaning to give to their lives. In short, the glory of the West is that life is an open book, while under Islam, life is a closed book. Everything has been decided for you: God [Allah] and the Holy Law set limits on the possible agenda of your life. In many non-Western countries, especially Islamic ones, we are not free to read what we want; in Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity and Christians are not free to practice their faith—all clear violations of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…A [Western] culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the classical music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Schubert; the paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael, and Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel.
While Chambers defense of the West hinged on deep religious faith, he respected, within severe limits, the Enlightenment legacy of reason, particularly its role in shaping American freedom. Conversely, Ibn Warraq, although profoundly skeptical of “revelation,” pays homage to Judeo-Christian religious ethics (from the forthcoming “Why the West is Best [41]”):
Judeo-Christianity introduced the ethical concepts of love, compassion, and forgiveness, expressing a new sensibility, a new responsiveness to human suffering , and a refusal to accept the normalcy of evil.  Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount [Matt.5-7] exhorts each person to take responsibility and assume all consequences for human suffering, even though he is not the original cause. Christian love demands each individual to go the extra mile for the neighbor, a timely reminder that  we are responsible for bearing the cares of the world, that we have a debt to acquit, and must act accordingly to fight evil on behalf of all humans for as long as suffering exists. Our humanity lies in our responsibility for others
Whittaker Chambers ex-Communist colleague Arthur Koestler, famously told Richard Crossman, editor of “The God That Failed [42],” an anthology of essays written by apostates from Communism,
You hate our Cassandra cries, and resent us as allies—but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it is all about.
Crossman added this germane observation [42] to the anthology’s introduction, after studying the diverse experiences of the ex-Communist contributors:
Silone [Ignacio Silone, author and former head the Italian Communist Party underground] was joking when he said to Togliatti [a close friend of Silone, and former secretary of the Italian Communist Party] that the final battle would be between the Communists and ex-Communists.. But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy and Communists as political opponents can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.
Ibn Warraq synthesized and updated these observations to highlight their urgent relevance to Islam’s resurgent modern jihad against the West. Barring the very dubious prospect that “a reformed, tolerant, liberal kind of Islam” emerges imminently, he warned [38]
[P]erhaps the final battle will be between Islam and Western democracy. And these former Muslims, to echo Koestler’s words, on the side of Western democracy are the only one’s who know what it’s all about, and we would do well to listen to their Cassandra cries.
We ignore Warraq’s plea—repeated by legions of Muslim apostates—at our existential peril.

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[12] featured collaboration by Sufis: http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/05/sufi_jihad.html
[14] Oriental Despotism — A Comparative Study of Total Power: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/493804&referer=brief_results
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Friday 8 July 2011

EU Policies Will Destroy Europe, Shocked Liberals told

EU Policy Will Destroy Europe, Shocked Liberals told

It will be impossible for European manufacturers to compete with the emerging economies of China, India and others, unless European wage levels fall to their levels. Andrew Brons MEP told a stunned Constitutional Affairs Committee meeting this week.
Speaking in a debate with the Polish Secretary of State For Foreign Affairs, Mikloaj Dowgielewicz on the current Polish Presidency of the Council, Mr Brons referred the assembly to the EU’s own declared priorities of “growth, security and openness.
“With regard to growth, can we hope for long term growth when the EU is committed to Globalism?” Mr Brons asked.
“It will be impossible for European manufacturers, especially Western European manufacturers, to compete with the emerging economies of China, India and others, unless European wage levels fall to their levels.
“The jobs of people in member states either individually by member states or collectively — I would prefer individually — must be protected from disappearing under a tsunami of cheap goods,” the MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside continued.
“Would the security of Europe not be improved if we stopped enraging Muslims at home and abroad by waging wars in their countries?
“With regard to openness, access to EU documents must be allowed but it is only valuable if a reasonably intelligent bystander, without prior knowledge or further explanation, could understand them. They seem to be written in impenetrable language that does not help access,” Mr Brons said.
“In case you think that I am criticising the translation service, I am not. Even documents originating in my own language, English are very difficult for members of the public to understand.”
Referring to Lib Dem MEP Andrew Duff’s comments about the possibility of referenda in Britain on EU matters, Mr Brons added that he (Mr Duff) “need not worry about the UK legislation providing referendums on treaty changes.
“The Cameron Government will break its promise on this, as it did on its promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.”
At first Mr Dowgielewicz did not know what to say, and after a short pause, muttered words to the effect that he “would not be as pessimistic on Mr Brons with regard to growth.”

Thursday 7 July 2011

Orwells 1984 Britain 2011: 2,000 Children in Scotland Reported for ‘Hate Crimes’

Big Brother Britain: 2,000 Children in Scotland Reported for ‘Hate Crimes’

Almost 2,000 children in Scottish schools and nurseries were reported for ‘hate crimes’ in the last three years, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.
The children were reported to their local education authorities for ‘hate speech crimes’ including homophobia, racism and ‘sectarian bigotry’.
The number comes on top of the nearly 30,000 children in England and Wales accused of similar ‘crimes’ in just one year.
The majority of the alleged offenders were primary school children, and some were even toddlers at nursery.
The figures reveal that a total of 1,913 incidents of ‘discriminatory or prejudicial behaviour’ were reported in Scottish nursery, primary and secondary schools in the three-year period.
The vast majority were for racism, and 1,150 involved children at primary school. Out of the 539 incidents logged in Glasgow, almost two-thirds were in primaries, while nine involved toddlers at nursery schools.
The 1,913 total is likely to be even higher, as five councils either refused to respond to the request for information or did not do so in the six weeks they are legally allowed to take.
In nearly all the instances reported, the ‘offending’ child's parent, parents or legal guardians were informed, while in others, pupils were suspended or excluded. In a handful of cases, the police were called in.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said the Equality Act 2010 places a duty on local authorities to actively deal with inequality.
In England, following the introduction of the Race Relations Act 2000, schools were placed under a duty to report all ‘racist’ incidents to their local authority.
Racist incident forms were created that required teachers to name the alleged perpetrator and victim and spell out what they did and how they were punished. Schools can keep these details on file.
In Scotland, it is left up to individual councils to decide what to so, but the Scottish Government ‘encourages’ councils to record the information.
Many authorities, including the biggest, Glasgow City Council, record only allegations of racist abuse. Others ask schools for reports on racist as well as sectarian and homophobic confrontations. One council, North Lanarkshire, does not record the data.
In January 2011, an FOI request for England and Wales showed that teachers and nursery school staff had reported an incredible 29,659 ‘hate crimes’ by children in 2008/09. They included pupils using phrases such as ‘white trash’ and ‘gaylord’.
One of the ‘crimes’ involved a five-year-old girl who was told off and had her parents contacted when she refused to let a black girl join in a game.
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Also see this item 
from an independent Blog  http://townofshame.com/archives/1182

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Lies About Fascists or National Socialists in the English Defence League

 

NO! Fascists or National Socialists in the English Defence League?

EuropeNews July 2011
By Henrik R. Clausen

For people dealing seriously with the threat of Islamism in the West, two of the most common slurs are those of being either “Fascist”, “Nazi” (National Socialist) or “Extreme right-wing”. The English Defence League, probably the broadest based and most influential anti-Islamism movement in Europe today, certainly had their share of those, on top of extensive government harrassment
Now, if one pauses for a moment, these frequently repeated slurs are quite puzzling. Before we examine each of them, let us take a clip from the EDL Mission Statement:


Promoting Democracy And The Rule Of Law By Opposing Sharia The European Court of Human Rights has declared that “sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy”. Despite this, there are still those who are more than willing to accommodate sharia norms, and who believe that sharia can operate in partnership with our existing traditions and customs. In reality, sharia cannot operate fully as anything other than a complete alternative to our existing legal, political, and social systems. It is a revolution that this country does not want, and one that it must resist. Sharia is most definitely a threat to our democracy.
That's a pretty clear pro-democracy statement, and one may wonder how one could sanely oppose a purpose like this? One obviously interested party is the Islamists, whose intention to implement Islamic law anywhere possible would be seriously impaired by opposition. Another is those who do not understand the real intention of Islam in its fundamental form, to submit as much of the world as possible to Islamic rule. That would include people who are so joyfully naïve that they cannot imagine such sinister intentions to be possible.
Another clip from the EDL Mission Statement reads:

The EDL is therefore keen to draw its support from people of all races, all faiths, all political persuasions, and all lifestyle choices. Under its umbrella, all people in England, whatever their background, or origin, can stand united in a desire to stop the imposition of the rules of Islam on non-believers.
That would address slurs of 'racism' and other stuff. Note the “all political persuasions” bit – the EDL is not a political party with an agenda of “Big Government” or “Small Government”. What matters is countering religious – specifically Islamic – intimidation. Most Westerners would find the notion of forcing Sharia law upon anyone in the West that by default they'd be fine with any move to oppose it. Still the EDL is subject to much slander, explicit or implicit, as in this Guardian article.
And further:

Working In Solidarity With Others Around The World The EDL is keen to join with others who share our values, wherever they are in the world, and from whatever cultural background they derive.
This is an internationalist outlook, not a British supremacist one. Any concern that the EDL might secretly the return of the glory days of the British Empire should be put to rest by this.
Now, talk can be cheap, missions statements deceptive, and it could turn out that these sane-sounding intentions are really a cover for something sinister. This is where you have investigative journalists examining things undercover, like Sigurd Ericson did with the English Defence League. In his report published at EuropeNews, he gave them a clean bill of health with regards to racism, fascism and violence-prone. Talking to both leadership and the rank-and-file of the EDL, he found that it consists of straight English citizens concerned with the threat of Sharia in Britain, and working in line with the EDL Mission Statement to counter it.
In any case, it is good to know the substance of what the EDL is being accused of promoting:
First Fascism, an ideology out of post-WWI Italy: Fascism is totalitarian, in that it regulates every aspect of the citizens' lives. It is single-party, in that the “perfect” system needs no dissent. It is authoritarian, believing in the wisdom of one supreme leader. It is violent, in that its adherents freely apply violence to implement it, then later war to glorify it. Finally, it forbids any opposition to the fascist state.
Mussolini, the head of the original Italian fascist movement, was an active socialist before World War I, but was expelled from the socialist party for his pro-war attitude. Originally devised as a total welfare state (thus the term 'Totalitarian'), the fascism turned out not to viable in practice, degenerated into opportunism, and eventually disgraced itself entirely through the alliance with the National Socialists of Germany.
Since fascism is explicitly anti-democratic and the EDL explicitly pro-democratic, blaming the EDL for being 'fascists' fails a simple “Check the facts” test. Anyone making that charge should back it up with extensive and detailed evidence, not merely personal opinions and judgements.
Next up is “Nazism”, or more correctly, “National Socialism”, an ideology out of post-WWI Germany. In contrast with fascism, which has been emulated in a variety of forms both before WWII and later, National Socialism doesn't really transplant well, neither in space or in time, from Weimar Germany to anywhere else. If one studies the circumstances of Weimar Germany, for instance in the excellent book When Money Dies (whose prime concern is the hyperinflation), the inapplicability of National Socialism under any other circumstances becomes quite clear. The anti-Capitalist sentiment of National Socialism in Germany might have some resonance with the extreme left in some places, but largely comes across as a confused and incoherent, including a profound misunderstanding of capitalism, as this quote from an original National Socialist flyer (propaganda nausea alert) shows:

What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.
The English Defence League has pre-empted any slurs about Nazi sympathies through creating an explicit Jewish Division. That should send any self-respecting National Socialist scrambling for the exit, and cause any allegations about such sympathies within the EDL to vanish in a puff of logic and laughter.
However, having an explicit Jewish branch opens the door to a different class of problems, that of Jewish supremacists, who are more interested in defending Israel than in defending England. While obviously unrelated to the idea of a National Socialist agenda, this can be difficult in itself:
Just recently, the leader of the EDL Jewish Division, Roberta Moore, quit the position, quoting that “she had been offered work on "an international level" elsewhere”, complaining that the EDL ”had been hijacked by elements who wanted to use it "for their own Nazi purposes". ”, and posting the subtle slander ”"I sincerely hope that the leaders will get the strength to squash the Nazis within,"”
These are serious allegations, but fortunately they fly in the face of common sense. Not only has the EDL made quite a few moves (racial inclusiveness, Jewish Division, pro-Israel rallies) that would scare away any self-respecting Nazi. It also makes no sense that Britain, who carried out the heaviest lifting during World War II would be home to any meaningful pro-Nazi sentiment.
Also, given the fact of the Holocaust and the endorsement of the Holocaust by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, it makes little sense to accuse an anti-Sharia movement of having sympathies for the National Socialists. Doing so incurs a burden of proof to lift, or the allegations become libel – and in the case of the National Socialists, even blood libel. Failing to provide adequate evidence for allegations as severe as these constitutes intellectual dishonesty. Further, internal disagreements as to how much the EDL should concern itself with the plight of Israel should never degenerate into drawing the Nazi card inside an organisation that has already distanced itself solidly from Nazi ideology.
Third up is the most mysterious and intangible of allegation, that of “right-wing extremism”, which is a really badly defined epithet.
  1. One interpretation is that this means National Socialism, but given the details above, that does not make the remotest of sense.
  2. Another interpretation, looking at the origins of “Left” and “Right” in the French Revolution, is that it means adherents of the “Ancién Regime”, protecting the special rights of royalty and nobility. But while the EDL is likely to have its share of monarchists in its ranks, there is no evidence to support this idea.
  3. A third interpretation of the “Far right” label routinely applied to the EDL is that it means dismantling the welfare state and revert to a minimalist state, in line with what Ron Paul is promoting in the US. Since the EDL spans all political orientations, that is nonsensical as well.
In short, the slur “Extreme right-wing” makes no sense and should simply be disregarded. In recent days, the situation in the EDL has drawn a bit of commotion in the blogosphere. The latter of these articles is woefully uninformed, as the concerns raised there have been addressed a year ago, including on this video The John Snowy Shaw Show. Some of these articles are superficial, some are an avalanche of details of questionable relevance. One can pore over these for hours, trying to figure out who did Right and who did Wrong. But quite honestly:
Why waste your time nit-picking when the house is on fire? For as Reagan is often quoted for:

The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.
The bottom line: The English Defence League is the broadest and most effective anti-Jihad and anti-Sharia movement on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. It has achieved much in a mere two years, and continues to operate in spite of government harassment and systematic slander from the establishment. The EDL deserves emulation – the highest form of flattery - not vilification.

Tory Lies on “Human Rights Act” as Third World Invasion of Britain Speeds Up under ConDem Government

More Tory Lies on “Human Rights Act” as Third World Invasion of Britain Speeds Up under Coalition Government

The Tory election promise to completely repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) has been formally thrown out of the window as new official statistics show that the immigration invasion of Britain has actually speeded up since the coalition government took power.
The latest trick by the Tories has been to “announce” via a leak to one of their lackey newspapers that a “consultation paper [is] to be launched within days will open up a debate on the future of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees ‘the right to a family life’.”
In the Conservative Party’s general election manifesto, David Cameron said quite specifically that to “protect our freedoms from state encroachment and encourage greater social responsibility, we will replace the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights.”
Note that nowhere was it said that a “portion” of the HRA would be removed. The promise to revoke the entire act and replace it with a Bill of Rights has, like every other election promise made by Mr Cameron and his gang, simply been broken and ignored.
To make matters worse, the Section 8 part of the HRA which the Tories are now claiming to want to “review” is in reality merely a reflection of European Union law in this regard.
Britain, by virtue of its EU membership, is therefore obligated to enforce EU regulations, no matter what UK law on the topic actually says.
In other words, a person in the UK who makes an asylum appeal on the basis of a “right to life” will only have to appeal to the EU’s judicial arm for a ruling, instead of the UK court system.
Because Britain’s legal system has been completely undermined by the Tory-Labour-LibDem policy of being in the EU, revoking Section 8 of the HRA without withdrawing from the EU is pointless chicanery on the government’s part.
* Meanwhile, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed that Britain’s population was 62.3 million in mid-2010, up 470,000 on the previous year. This is the highest annual growth rate since mid-1962, the ONS report said, inadvertently revealing that despite Mr Cameron’s pledges to the contrary, the immigration invasion has continued unabated since the coalition government took power.
The ONS report went on to reveal that “natural change” accounted for an increasing proportion of total population change since 2002. This “natural change” is the birth rate.
- In 2005, the ONS issued a separate report which said that 36 percent of all births in England and Wales were not “white British” (“Birthweight and gestational age by ethnic group, England and Wales 2005: introducing new data on births”, Kath Moser, Office for National Statistics).
- This 2005 birth rate figure does not include births to second and third generation immigrant mothers. Figures released by the ONS in January 2009 revealed that the Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years. Their population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society (“Muslim population ‘rising 10 times faster than rest of society’”, the Times, 30 January 2009).
- An August 2008 ONS population report stated that, on average, ‘foreign’ women have 2.5 children each, rising to 3.9 for those from Bangladesh and almost five for Pakistani women (“Most children of British mothers born out of wedlock”, Telegraph, 11 July 2008). When these figures are added in, the immigrant birth rate is estimated to be around 50 percent of all live births in England and Wales.
- The majority of the ‘new immigrants’ are not from Eastern Europe, as is often widely claimed. According to the ONS figures, immigrants from Eastern Europe had 25,000 children in Britain in 2009 — an absolute minority of the just over 700,000 live births (“Number of foreigners in UK hits record 6.7m”, BBC, 8 December 2009).
- According to the Birmingham City Council, 61 percent of all primary school children in greater Birmingham are of Third World origin (“Asian pupils outnumber white children in Birmingham primary schools for the first time”,Birmingham Mail, 26 Jan 2010).
- Over 300 languages are currently spoken in London schools. Some of the most established of these are Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin and Hokkien (“Languages across Europe”, BBC).
- Some 150 languages are spoken in schools in Reading, an indication of the extent of the invasion in Berkshire (“150 different languages spoken in Reading schools”, Reading Post, 8 February 2010).
- A 2007 report from Manchester University predicted that white British people would become a minority in Leicester this year (2011) and that white people would be a minority in Birmingham by 2027.
Ludi Simpson, a social statistician at Manchester University, said the Pakistani population in Birmingham was likely to double by 2026, but with two-thirds of this increase due to the younger age profile of Pakistanis, rather than increased immigration — in other words, the birth rate of immigrants already present in Britain.
- David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, warned in November 2010 that white British people will become a minority in their own country by 2066.
He said that white indigenous British people will make up half the population by then, and immigrant birth rates mean white British children will be in a minority of youngsters even sooner.
Writing in Prospect magazine, Prof Coleman warned the huge numbers of foreigners landing on our shores will “transform” the UK. He said official projections estimate the UK’s population will rocket to 77 million by 2051 – and 85 million by 2083.
“On those assumptions the ‘white British’ population would decline to 45 million (59 per cent of the total) by 2051.
“Were the assumptions to hold, the ‘white British’ population of Britain would become the minority after about 2066. It’s a milestone that would be passed much earlier in younger age-groups.”
Even if the number of immigrants was cut so that new arrivals matched the number of Brits who left (the so-called ‘balanced migration’ policy), the white British population would still fall below 50 per cent by the end of the century.
All these statistics taken together show that the non-British ethnic population is increasing in number exponentially, and given current immigration and birth rates, will utterly overwhelm the indigenous population of Britain well within the next 50 years, and more likely within 30 years.
Britain’s future as a First World nation will thus be decided within the next 20 years. Now, more than ever, the British National Party is needed to provide the political leadership whereby the oncoming catastrophe is to be avoided.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

BIG MONEY & WALL STREET FINANCIERS AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

ESSENTIAL READING

WALL STREET
AND THE
BOLSHEVIK
REVOLUTION

Since the early 1920s, numerous pamphlets and articles, even a few books, have sought to forge a link between "international bankers" and "Bolshevik revolutionaries." Rarely have these attempts been supported by hard evidence, and never have such attempts been argued within the framework of a scientific methodology. Indeed, some of the "evidence" used in these efforts has been fraudulent, some has been irrelevant, much cannot be checked. Examination of the topic by academic writers has been studiously avoided; probably because the hypothesis offends the neat dichotomy of capitalists versus Communists (and everyone knows, of course, that these are bitter enemies). Moreover, because a great deal that has been written borders on the absurd, a sound academic reputation could easily be wrecked on the shoals of ridicule. Reason enough to avoid the topic.
Fortunately, the State Department Decimal File, particularly the 861.00 section, contains extensive documentation on the hypothesized link. When the evidence in these official papers is merged with nonofficial evidence from biographies, personal papers, and conventional histories, a truly fascinating story emerges.
We find there was a link between some New York international bankers and many revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks. These banking gentlemen — who are here identified — had a financial stake in, and were rooting for, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Who, why — and for how much — is the story in this book.

Antony C. Sutton 
Chapter I
THE ACTORS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY STAGE



Dear Mr. President:

I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the Russian people...

Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from William Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp.; director, American International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York


The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in 1911 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and writer who doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled by prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded, beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked under his arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P. Morgan, Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt — prominently identified by his famous teeth — in the background. Wall Street is decorated by Red flags. The cheering crowd and the airborne hats suggest that Karl Marx must have been a fairly popular sort of fellow in the New York financial district.
Was Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was on firm ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street and Marxist socialism. The characters in Minor's cartoon — Karl Marx (symbolizing the future revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller — and indeed Robert Minor himself, are also prominent characters in this book.
The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under the rug of history because they do not fit the accepted conceptual spectrum of political left and political right. Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or unfortunate errors. Modern history possesses such a built-in duality and certainly if too many uncomfortable facts have been rejected and brushed under the rug, it is an inaccurate history.
On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist. The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and the international socialist (for example, the Communist) both recommend totalitarian politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the monopolists — under the name of the public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.1 Howe, by the way, is also a figure in the story of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and politico-economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of individual freedom versus the degree of centralized political control. Under such an ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at the same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of society can have different labels while owning common features.
Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists — to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians — with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?
Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the revisionists, historians have not been alert for such a combination of events. Historical reporting, with rare exceptions, has been forced into a dichotomy of capitalists versus socialists. George Kennan's monumental and readable study of the Russian Revolution consistently maintains this fiction of a Wall Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.2 Russia Leaves the War has a single incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan firm and no reference at all to Guaranty Trust Company. Yet both organizations are prominently mentioned in the State Department files, to which frequent reference is made in this book, and both are part of the core of the evidence presented here. Neither self-admitted "Bolshevik banker" Olof Aschberg nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is mentioned in Kennan yet both were central to Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in minor yet crucial circumstances, at least crucial for our argument, Kennan is factually in error. For example, Kennan cites Federal Reserve Bank director William Boyce Thompson as leaving Russia on November 27, 1917. This departure date would make it physically impossible for Thompson to be in Petrograd on December 2, 1917, to transmit a cable request for $1 million to Morgan in New York. Thompson in fact left Petrograd on December 4, 1918, two days after sending the cable to New York. Then again, Kennan states that on November 30, 1917, Trotsky delivered a speech before the Petrograd Soviet in which he observed, "Today I had here in the Smolny Institute two Americans closely connected with American Capitalist elements "According to Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who these two Americans "could have been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act Alexander Gumberg was Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in Russia on November 30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were more than likely Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder, and Thompson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Bolshevization of Wall Street was known among well informed circles as early as 1919. The financial journalist Barron recorded a conversation with oil magnate E. H. Doheny in 1919 and specifically named three prominent financiers, William Boyce Thompson, Thomas Lamont and Charles R. Crane:

Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.
Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If you believe in democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is the poison that destroys democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all. Socialism holds out the hope that a man can quit work and be better off. Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if you will read the interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of January that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German sympathizers, Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of the college professors in the United States are teaching socialism and Bolshevism and that fifty-two college professors were on so-called peace committees in 1914. President Eliot of Harvard is teaching Bolshevism. The worst Bolshevists in the United States are not only college professors, of whom President Wilson is one, but capitalists and the wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they are talking about. William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet convert Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is Charles R. Crane. Many women are joining the movement and neither they, nor their husbands, know what it is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and so are most of those one hundred historians Wilson took abroad with him in the foolish idea that history can teach youth proper demarcations of races, peoples, and nations geographically.3
In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but a story that departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach of capitalists versus Communists. Our story postulates a partnership between international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this alliance has fallen upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the individual American. Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the world has been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of these monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.
This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The tsars and their corrupt political system were ejected only to be replaced by the new powerbrokers of another corrupt political system. Where the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to bring about a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized tsarist Russia or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia. And the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the underlying and, so far, untold history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.4


Footnotes:
1"These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you: and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, lot its exploitation" (Chicago: Public Publishing, 1906), p. 157.
2George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (New York: Atheneum, 1967); and Decision to Intervene.. Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).
3Arthur Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, They Told Barron (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), pp. 13-14.
4There is a parallel, and also unknown, history with respect to the Makhanovite movement that fought both the "Whites" and the "Reds" in the Civil War of 1919-20 (see Voline, The Unknown Revolution [New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1953]). There was also the "Green" movement, which fought both Whites and Reds. The author has never seen even one isolated mention of the Greens in any history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the Green Army was at least 700,000 strong
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