TBR News January 16, 2017

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. January 16, 2017: “”In a few days Donald Trump will become the President of the United States.

Between the finalization of the election and his inauguration, the business and political controlling oligarchies in this country have displayed what can only be called juvenile hysterical rage over Trump’s defeat of their badly flawed candidate.

Fake official reports, highly negative press reports stuffing the shallow columns of the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post and even the Guardian in England have constituted a drumfire of frustration and fear.

In earlier times, this sort of childish screaming did have an effect on public opinion but in current times, the American public has grown tired of crude manipulations, blatant and even cruder propaganda and worse, has come to view the bloated government and its paid allies with distrust and, in many cases, disgust.

Once sacred Israel has been put down by the UN and Fat Bibi’s roars of rage sound like a three year old child with filled diapers.

Israel is not an important country but her co-religionists have a great deal of influence in the legislative halls because of their control of the print media and threats to slander and harass anyone who dares to frustrate their needs.

The oligarchs have been using Putin’s Russia as a whipping boy and attempt to stir up a thoroughly disinterested public into a supportive force for their constant warfare and attempts at global economic domination.

It is, after all, the kicked dog that yelps.”

 

Table of Contents

• Trump Versus the Deep State
• The Trump Dossier Is Fake — And Here Are The Reasons Why
• Israel, Palestinians warned against solo steps harmful to peace
• Trump’s offer to Putin: an end to sanctions for nuclear arms cut – London Times
• An Inauguration Day Surprise?
• Why Is Obama Expanding Surveillance Powers Right Before He Leaves Office?
• Complaints Describe Border Agents Interrogating Muslim Americans, Asking for Social Media Accounts
• Donald Trump slams Angela Merkel’s refugee policy
• Where Did Modern Man Come From? Not Out of Africa
• The Strange Evangelical View of Cro-Magnon Man
• New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America
• ‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 11

 Trump Versus the Deep State

January 13, 2017

by Eric Margolis

The Unz Review

As President-elect Donald Trump fights off fierce assaults by the massed national security apparatus, Democrats, the neocon Praetorian Guard, and a host of other political foes, I am feeling a sharp sense of déjà vu.

Trump claimed that these attacks were like ‘living in Nazi Germany.’ Not so. The president-elect could have found a much better analogy: Moscow in August, 1991.

I was in Moscow, Central Asia and the Caucasus covering the Soviet Union’s last days and meeting with senior KGB leaders. What a dramatic and exciting time it was. In fact, on my first night in Moscow a Russian friend and I, fired from drinking potent Georgian moonshine, managed to wake up the then director of KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, at two am by playing very loud music under his apartment. He kept stamping on the floor. My Russian-Georgian friend said, ‘just ignore the old fool.’

Two years later, another old Soviet fool, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, tried to overthrow the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A so-called ‘gang of eight’ of senior Communist Party officials, intelligence bigwigs and military men secretly formed to overthrow party leader Gorbachev.

Reformist Gorbachev was trying to remake the Communist Party, end its brutal policies, stop the stalemated war in Afghanistan, and allow restive nationalities, like the Baltic peoples, to edge away from the USSR. Gorby also wanted to cut way back on military spending – then almost 40% of GDP – that was bankrupting the Soviet Union. He sought good, peaceful relations with the West.

These policies enraged Moscow’s security agencies, its hardline Communist elite (‘nomenklatura’) and vast military industrial complex. Gorby’s proposed budget cuts would have put many of them out of business. So they decided to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev to save their own skins. The coup utterly failed and its drunken, bungling leaders jailed.

We are observing something similar today in Washington, hence my sense of déjà vu. Trump has suggested he may reduce the bloated CIA and 16 other US intelligence agencies that spend over $70 billion annually, not including ‘black’ programs, on who knows what? Tapping communications and assassinating assorted Muslims from the air no doubt.

Trump has called for an ‘even-handed’ approach to the question of Palestine, enraging neocons who fear Israel’s headlock on Congress and the White House may be loosened. The neocon press, like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and Washington Post, have been baying for Trump’s blood. Not since World War II has the media so dramatically dropped its mask of faux impartiality to reveal it true political agenda.

Adding to his list of foes, Trump is now under attack by religious fundamentalists in Congress for his sensible attitude to Russia. The vast military industrial complex is after Trump, fearing he may cut the $1 trillion annual military budget and efforts to dominate the globe. Members of Congress under orders from the pro-war neocons are trying to undermine Trump.

They are all using Russia as a tool to beat Trump. The hysteria and hypocrisy over alleged Russian hacking is unbelievable and infantile. Sen. John McCain actually called it a grave threat to American democracy, thus joining the Soviet old fools club. Of course Russia’s spooks probe US electronic communications. That’s their job, not playing chess. The US hacks into everyone’s commo, including leaders of allied states. It’s called electronic intelligence (ELINT)

But don’t blame the wicked Moscovites for revealing how Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Committee rigged the primaries in her favor against Sen. Bernie Sanders. That cat was well out of the bag already.

It’s not Russian TV (for whom I occasionally comment) that is undermining America’s democracy, it’s the nation’s neocon-dominated media pumping out untruths and disinformation. Ironically, Russian TV has become one of the few dissenting voices in North America’s media landscape. Sure it puts out government propaganda. So does CNN, MSNBC and Fox. At least RT offers a fresher version.

Watching our intelligence chiefs and Sen. McCain trying to blacken Trump’s name by means of a sleazy, unverified report about golden showers in a Moscow hotel, is particularly ignoble.

It’s also a laugh. Every one who went to Moscow during the Cold War knew about the bugged hotel rooms, and KGB temptresses (known as ‘swallows’ -after the birds) who would knock on your door at night and give you the old Lenin love mambo while hidden camera whirled away. I asked for 8×10 glossies to be sent to my friends. But sadly for me, the swallows never came though I did meet some lovely long-legged creatures at the Bolshoi Ballet. So-called honey traps were part of the fun of the cold war.

Humor aside, it’s dismaying to hear senior US intelligence officials who faked ‘evidence’ that led to the invasion of Iraq and used torture and assassination attacking Donald Trump. Of course their jobs are at risk. They should be. The CIA, in particular, has evolved from a pure intelligence gathering agency into a state-sanctioned Murder Inc that liquidates real and imagined enemies abroad. The KGB used to do the same thing – but more efficiently.

Our intelligence agencies are a vital component of national security – which has become our new state religion. But in true bureaucratic form (see Parkinson’s Laws) they have become bloated, redundant and self-perpetuating. They need a tough Trump diet and to be booted out of politics. This past week’s display of the deep state’s grab for power – a sort of re-run of one of my favorite films, ‘Seven Days in May’ – should remind all thinking Americans that the monster police state apparatus created by President George W. Bush is the greatest threat to our Republic.

The Trump Dossier Is Fake — And Here Are The Reasons Why

January 13, 2017

by Paul Roderick Gregory

Forbes

A former British intelligence officer, who is now a director of a London private security-and-investigations firm, has been identified as the author of the dossier of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald Trump’s activities and connections in Russia, according to the Wall Street Journal. A Christopher Steele, a director of London-based private intelligence company, Orbis, purportedly prepared the dossier under contract to both Republican and Democratic adversaries of then-candidate Trump. The poor grammar and shaky spelling plus the author’s use of KGB-style intelligence reporting, however, do not fit the image of a high-end London security company run by highly connected former British intelligence figures.

The PDF file of the 30-page typewritten report alleges that high Kremlin officials colluded with Trump, offered him multi-billion dollar bribes, and accumulated compromising evidence of Trump’s sexual escapades in Russia. That the dossier comes from former British intelligence officers appears, at first glance, to give it weight especially with Orbis’ claim of a “global network.” The U.S. intelligence community purportedly has examined the allegations but have not confirmed any of them. We can wait till hell freezes over. The material is not verifiable.

President-elect Trump has dismissed the dossier’s contents as false as has the Kremlin. Trump is right: The Orbis dossier is fake news.

I have studied Russia and the Soviet Union professionally since the mid-1960s. I have visited Russia as a scholar, as the head of a multi-year petroleum legislation project, and as a business consultant close to one hundred times. My first visit was in 1965 shortly after Nikita Khrushchev’s removal. I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in Russia, and I follow the Russian press regularly. I personally witnessed the creation in the early 90s of Russia’s giant energy concerns in the offices of the oil minister. I met with St. Petersburg officials in the early 90s but do not remember meeting then deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin. I have written and co-authored reports for the State Department, Congress, and the intelligence community; so I sort of know how these things work.

With the brief exception of the early to late 1990s, Russia has had a non-transparent system of rule that deliberately reveals little about itself. Both insiders and outsiders must look for subtle signs and signals. Russians and Russian experts are gossip junkies. They recite their tales of who is up and who is down to those foolish enough to listen. Outside researchers must grasp for flimsy straws to write their scholarly articles and books. Despite the greater openness of contemporary Russia, we are back to Kremlinology to learn how Putin’s kleptocracy works.

The Orbis report makes as if it knows all the ins-and-outs and comings-and-goings within Putin’s impenetrable Kremlin. It reports information from anonymous “trusted compatriots,” “knowledgeable sources,” “former intelligence officers,” and “ministry of foreign affairs officials.”  The report gives a fly-on-the-wall account of just about every conceivable event associated with Donald Trump’s Russian connections. It claims to know more than is knowable as it recounts sordid tales of prostitutes, “golden showers,” bribes, squabbles in Putin’s inner circle, and who controls the dossiers of kompromat (compromising information).

There are two possible explanations for the fly-on-the-wall claims of the Orbis report: Either its author (who is not Mr. Steele) decided to write fiction, or collected enough gossip to fill a 30-page report, or a combination of the two. The author of the Orbis report has one more advantage: He knew that what he was writing was unverifiable. He advertises himself as the only Kremlin outsider with enough “reliable” contacts to explain what is really going within Putin’s office.

As someone who has worked for more than a decade with the microfilm collection of Soviet documents in the Hoover Institution Archives, I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who follows the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports, in particular the practice of capitalizing all names for easy reference. The report includes Putin’s inner circle – Peskov, Ivanov, Sechin, Lavrov. The anonymous author claims to have “trusted compatriots” who knew the roles that each Kremlin insider, including Putin himself, played in the Trump election saga and were prepared to tell him.

The Orbis report spins the tale of Putin insiders, spurred on by Putin himself, engaging in a five-year courtship of Donald Trump in which they offer him lucrative real estate deals that he rejects but leaves himself open to blackmail as a result of sexual escapades with prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (the famous “golden shower” incident). Despite his reluctance to enter into lucrative business deals, Trump “and his inner circle have accepted regular intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” according to the Orbis report.

This story makes no sense. In 2011, when the courtship purportedly begins, Trump was a TV personality and beauty pageant impresario. Neither in the U.S. or Russia would anyone of authority anticipate that Trump would one day become the presidential candidate of a major U.S. political party, making him the target of Russian intelligence.

The Orbis report claims, that as the election neared (July 2016), Igor Sechin, Putin’s right-hand man and CEO of Rosneft (Russia’s national oil company) offered Trump a deal that defies belief. I quote:

“Speaking to a trusted compatriot in mid-October 2015, a close associate of Rosneft President and PUTIN ally Igor SECHIN elaborated on the reported secret meeting between the latter and Carter PAGE, of US Republican presidential candidate’s foreign policy team, in Moscow in July 2016. The secret had been confirmed to him/her by a senior member of staff, in addition to the Rosneft President himself…Sechin’s associate said that the Rosneft President was so keen to lift personal and corporate Western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”

This story is utter nonsense, not worthy of a wacky conspiracy theory of an alien invasion.

To offer Trump either the entirety of, or a brokerage commission on, the market value of 19.5% of Rosneft shares—even a 6 percent commission on $12 billion worth of Rosneft shares would amount to an astonishing $720 million—would deplete the cash that Putin desperately needed for military spending and budget deficits, all in return for a promise to lift sanctions if—and what a big “if”—Trump were elected. Rosneft, as a public company, would have to conceal that the U.S. president was a party to this major transaction. This remarkable secret-of-secrets seems to be bandied about to an Orbis “trusted compatriot,” a senior member of Sechin’s staff, and disclosed by Sechin himself. I guess there are a lot of loose lips in Rosneft offices.

The story of the purported bribe was picked up by the Russian liberal press directly from the Orbis report without comment but with a big question marks in the title “A 10.5 billion Euro bribe? Putin and Sechin gifted Trump 19.5% of Rosneft shares? This story has given Putin’s weak opposition the chance to accuse him of wasting national treasure on a stupid bribe.

The huge bribe for (perhaps) lifting the sanctions makes Nikita Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes—for which he was fired—look eminently reasonable.

One of the few verifiable facts in the Orbis report is the key role played by Trump’s “personal lawyer” Michael Cohen. Cohen purportedly took over the negotiation of the Sechin deal, and, when the Kremlin got cold feet over its hacking campaign, it turned to Cohen to cover up the operation, meet with the Kremlin’s Presidential Administration, and make illicit payments to shut up and move the hackers to Bulgaria. A key meeting was held in Prague in August of 2016 with Cohen accompanied by three colleagues. The meetings took place in the offices of a Russian quasi-state organization, Rossotrudnichestvo.

Cohen has denied any such meetings with the Kremlin Presidential administration and claims never to have visited Prague. According to the Orbis report, Cohen engaged in potential criminal activities, such as illicit payoffs to hackers and the buying of their silence. I doubt that he will let such accusations pass.

Another noteworthy claim of the Orbis report is that Vladimir Putin personally directed Russia’s intervention in the 2016 campaign: “The TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Its aim was to sow discord both within the U.S. itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance.”  The Orbis report claims that Putin personally controlled the dossier compiled on Hillary Clinton and held by his spokesperson, Peskov. He ordered that any disposition of the Clinton file would be decided by him personally.

I have picked out just a few excerpts from the Orbis report. It was written, in my opinion, not by an ex British intelligence officer but by a Russian trained in the KGB tradition. It is full of names, dates, meetings, quarrels, and events that are hearsay (one an overheard conversation).  It is a collection of “this important person” said this to “another important person.” There is no record; no informant is identified by name or by more than a generic title. The report appears to fail the veracity test in the one instance of a purported meeting in which names, dates, and location are provided. Some of the stories are so bizarre (the Rosneft bribe) that they fail the laugh test. Yet, there appears to be a desire on the part of some media and Trump opponents on both sides of the aisle to picture the Orbis report as genuine but unverifiable.

After reading the Orbis report I got the queasy feeling that it may have influenced the intelligence community’s unclassified report.  Leaks of classified bits by NBCNews and the Washington Post suggest the findings were, in part, based on British intelligence and spies. I wonder if the reference is to Putin’s role, which the intelligence report characterized as direct. This is a matter the new administration must look into.

We have reached a sad state of affairs where an anonymous report, full of bizarre statements, captures the attention of the world media because it casts a shadow over the legitimacy of a President-elect, who has not even taken the oath of office. For example, the Trump dossier is tonight’s lead item on German state television and on BBC. False news has become America’s international export to the world media.

 Israel, Palestinians warned against solo steps harmful to peace

January 15, 2017

by John Irish, Lesley Wroughton and Marine Pennetier

Reuters

Paris-Some 70 countries reaffirmed on Sunday that only a two-state solution could resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and warned against any unilateral steps by either side that could prejudge negotiations.

The final communique of a one-day international Middle East peace conference in Paris shied away from explicitly criticizing plans by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to move the U.S Embassy to Jerusalem, although diplomats said the wording sent a “subliminal” message.

Trump has pledged to pursue more pro-Israeli policies and to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, all but enshrining the city as Israel’s capital despite international objections.

Countries including key European and Arab states as well as the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council were in Paris for the conference, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected as “futile”.

Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were represented.

However, just five days before Trump is sworn in, the meeting was seen as a platform for countries to send a strong signal to the incoming American president that a two-state solution to the conflict could not be compromised on and that unilateral decisions could exacerbate tensions on the ground.

The participants “call on each side … to refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of negotiations on final-status issues, including, inter alia, on Jerusalem, borders, security, refugees and which they will not recognize,” the final communique said.

A French diplomatic source said there had been tough negotiations on that paragraph.

“It’s a tortuous and complicated paragraph to pass a subliminal message to the Trump administration,” the diplomat said.

REAFFIRMING RESOLUTION 2334

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters it would have been inappropriate to include the issue of moving the U.S. embassy, it being publicly debated in the United States.

Relations between the United States and Israel have soured during President Barack Obama’s administration, reaching a low point late last month when Washington declined to veto U.N. resolution 2334 demanding an end to Israeli settlements in occupied territory.

Paris has said the meeting did not aim to impose anything on Israel or the Palestinians and that only direct negotiations could resolve the conflict.

The final draft did not go into any details other than reaffirming U.N. Security Council resolutions, including 2334. Diplomats said that had been a source of friction in talks.

“When some are questioning this, it’s vital for us to recall the framework of negotiations. That framework is the 1967 borders and the main resolutions of the United Nations,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters.

Kerry, who abandoned his efforts to broker peace talks in April 2014, told reporters that the meeting had “moved the ball forward.”

“It underscores this is not just one administration’s point of view, this is shared by the international community broadly,” he said.

France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities, has tried to breathe new life into the peace process over the past year and argued that it should not play second fiddle to the war in Syria and the fight against Islamic State militants.

FOLLOW-UP MEETING?

The final statement said interested parties would meet again before year-end.

But Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that “this conference is among the last twitches of the world of yesterday … Tomorrow will look different and that tomorrow is very close.”

Britain added its criticism on Sunday. A Foreign Office statement said the Paris conference risked “hardening positions” given Israel had objected to it and that the U.S. administration is about to change.

Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a sharp rebuke on Israel last month to its U.S. ally when she scolded Secretary of State John Kerry for describing the Israeli government as the most right-wing in Israeli history. The criticism aligned her more closely with Trump.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who said on Saturday that moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem would kill off the peace process, said the Paris meeting would help at stopping “settlement activities and destroying the two-state solution through dictations and the use of force.”

(Additional reporting Lesley Wroughton in Paris and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Trump’s offer to Putin: an end to sanctions for nuclear arms cut – London Times

January 16, 2017

by Guy Faulconbridge and William James

Reuters

LONDON-U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will propose offering to end sanctions imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea in return for a nuclear arms reduction deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he told The Times of London.

Trump, in an interview with the newspaper published online on Sunday, was deeply critical of previous U.S. foreign policy, describing the invasion of Iraq as possibly the gravest error in the history of the United States and akin to “throwing rocks into a beehive”.

But ahead of his inauguration on Friday as the 45th U.S. president, Trump raised the prospect of the first major step toward nuclear arms control since President Barack Obama struck a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia in 2010.

“They have sanctions on Russia — let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia,” the Republican president-elect was quoted as saying by The Times.

“For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part of it. But Russia’s hurting very badly right now because of sanctions, but I think something can happen that a lot of people are gonna benefit.”

The United States and Russia are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers. The United States has 1,367 nuclear warheads on deployed strategic missiles and bombers, while Russia has 1,796 such deployed warheads, according to the latest published assessment by the U.S. State Department.

Trump has vowed to improve relations with Moscow even as he faces criticism he is too eager to make an ally of Putin, a former KGB spy who rose to the top of the Kremlin in 1999.

The issue has faced renewed scrutiny after an unsubstantiated report that Russia had collected compromising information about Trump.

The unverified dossier was summarized in a U.S. intelligence report presented to him and Obama this month that concluded Russia tried to sway the outcome of the Nov. 8 election in Trump’s favor by hacking and other means. The report did not make an assessment on whether Russia’s attempts affected the election’s outcome.

Trump accused U.S. intelligence agencies of leaking the dossier information, which he called “fake news” and phony stuff.” Intelligence leaders denied the charge.

RUSSIAN RELATIONS

In the interview with The Times, Trump was also critical of Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, which along with the help of Iran, has tilted the conflict in President Bashar al-Assad’s favor.

Trump said Putin’s intervention in Syria was “a very bad thing” that had led to a “terrible humanitarian situation”.

The war has killed more than 300,000 people, created the world’s worst refugee crisis and aided the rise of the Islamic State militant group.

On NATO, Trump repeated his view that the military alliance was obsolete but added it was still very important for him.

“I took such heat, when I said NATO was obsolete,” Trump told The Times, speaking of comments during his presidential campaign. “It’s obsolete because it wasn’t taking care of terror. I took a lot of heat for two days. And then they started saying Trump is right.”

Trump added that many NATO members were not paying their fair share for U.S. protection.

“A lot of these countries aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying, which I think is very unfair to the United States,” Trump said. “With that being said, NATO is very important to me. There’s five countries that are paying what they’re supposed to. Five. It’s not much.”

Trump also said he would appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to broker a Middle East peace deal, urged Britain to veto any new U.N. Security Council resolution critical of Israel and criticized Obama’s handling of the Iran nuclear deal.

On Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, Trump said: “Brexit is going to end up being a great thing” and said he was eager to get a trade deal done with the United Kingdom.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

 An Inauguration Day Surprise?

Obama laying down landmines for Trump administration

January 16, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

Is the Obama administration out to provoke a military conflict with Russia in the days before Donald J. Trump takes the oath of office?

In July of 2014, the US announced the start of “Operation Atlantic Resolve” in response to the vote by Crimea – which took place nearly three years ago — to rejoin the Russian Federation. Now the Obama administration has announced that 6,000 more US troops will be deployed, initially in Germany and Poland, and eventually fanning out to Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, and Slovakia. Accompanying them will be 144 Bradley fighting vehicles, 87 M1A1 tanks, heavy artillery, and aircraft.

Europe hasn’t seen such an increase in the US troop presence since the fall of the Soviet Union. Coming as it does with mere days left in Obama’s term of office, this action invites all sorts of speculation: however, one need not speculate as to whether this is a political move. Clearly it is: the idea is to box in President-elect Trump, who has expressed his desire to improve relations with Russia.

The mere expression of such a view has provoked a storm of abuse from the War Party, and a relentless campaign of calumny orchestrated by the CIA to the effect that Trump is “Putin’s puppet.” The deranged Democrats, looking for some way to excuse why their weak and widely disliked candidate lost the election, have explained it all away by claiming that a Russian conspiracy “stole” the White House from Hillary Clinton by revealing truthful and embarrassing information via Wikileaks. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence for this contention: in alliance with anonymous “US officials,” spooks, and “journalists” who believe everything the CIA tells them, this has become the elite consensus.

This sets the stage for what may be Trump’s first foreign policy crisis. If President Trump, upon taking office, withdraws the troops, the anti-Russia hysterics will scream bloody murder. If he doesn’t, the risk of an “incident” occurring on the border with Russia increases – as does the risk of an all-out conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary.

This underscores the recklessness of the Obama administration and the NeverTrumpers: they are willing to risk World War III in order to sabotage Trump’s peace agenda. Despicable is too mild a term to describe their actions.

In an editorial decrying this precipitous move, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette avers that “The deployment of U.S. personnel and military assets should not be used by anyone as a domestic political tool.” That’s a nice sentiment, but one that betrays an alarming degree of naiveté: not only this administration, but practically every administration in our history has formulated US foreign policy almost exclusively in response to political pressures, both domestic and foreign. Facts on the ground have little if anything to do with how and why policy is made.

This decoupling of policymaking from the facts of reality not only increases the danger of war – it makes conflict virtually inevitable. By either failing to see or deliberately ignoring what is actually occurring, rather than what their propagandists would like us to believe is happening, the warlords of Washington run the risk of accidentally sparking World War III.

So what are the facts on the ground in Eastern Europe?

As thousands of US and NATO troops mass on the Russian border with Poland, the Russians have deployed S-400 anti-aircraft missiles around Moscow and also in Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave that borders Poland and Lithuania. In response to the development of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe — which could quickly be converted into offensive cruise missiles — the Russians earlier reinforced Kaliningrad with nuclear capable Iskander missiles. These have a range of 440 miles – enough to hit Berlin.

The injection of thousands of US troops into the volatile Balkans region could easily lead to a conflict with Russian troops in, say, Transnistria, a breakaway province of Moldova, which borders Ukraine. A slice of territory between Transnistria and Ukraine could be the tripwire that catapults US troops – hundreds of whom are in Ukraine on a “training” mission – into action against the Russians.

The Ukrainians, who actively intervened in the US election to prevent Trump from taking the White House, have every reason to cause trouble, and every opportunity to do so. They continue their covert operations in Crimea, sabotaging infrastructure as well as escalating their attacks on the rebellious eastern provinces. A provocation on Kiev’s part could easily throw the whole region into crisis mode and greet incoming President Trump with the prospect of a runaway conflict set into motion before he even takes the reins in Washington.

The CIA, with its long tentacles stretched out into every hotspot on earth, is engaging in open warfare with the President-elect. Is it really impossible to imagine that they would arrange for a nice little crisis to “celebrate” President Trump’s inauguration?

These people are reckless, treasonous, and utterly without conscience. They are, in short, capable of anything. With four days left until Trump becomes the forty-fifth President of the United States, the threat of war has never loomed larger. UN Ambassador Samantha Power, on her Twitter feed, declared: “We are not going gently into the night.” We may be in for an Inauguration Day surprise.

Why Is Obama Expanding Surveillance Powers Right Before He Leaves Office?

It could be to prevent Trump from extending them even more

January 13, 2017

by Kaveh Waddell

The Atlantic

On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized new rules that allow the National Security Agency to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

With the new changes, which were long in the works, those agencies can apply for access to various feeds of raw, undoctored NSA intelligence. Analysts will then be able to sift through the contents of those feeds as they see fit, before implementing required privacy protections. Previously, the NSA applied those privacy protections itself, before forwarding select pieces of information to agencies that might need to see them.

The updated procedures will multiply the number of intelligence analysts who have access to NSA surveillance, which is captured in large quantities and often isn’t subject to warrant requirements. The changes rankled privacy advocates, who oppose a broadening of surveillance powers—especially on the cusp of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump and Mike Pompeo, the president-elect’s nominee for CIA director, have made it clear that they think overzealous civil-liberties protections should be cleared away in favor of stronger surveillance laws.

But while the changes may subject more Americans to warrantless surveillance, the last-minute timing of the announcement actually might have been designed to cut future privacy losses. Susan Hennessey, a Brookings fellow and the managing editor of Lawfare, says firming up the changes before Trump takes office makes it harder for the incoming president to encroach even further on civil liberties.

I spoke with Hennessey, who was previously an attorney in the NSA general counsel’s office, about the lasting effects of the new intelligence-sharing procedures. A transcript of our conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Kaveh Waddell: First off, what do these changes mean for the intelligence community? Has a lack of information-sharing among agencies been holding back investigations?

Susan Hennessey: The origin of these changes dates back, honestly, to just after 9/11. There was this identified issue of “stovepiping”: Intelligence wasn’t being shared frequently or fast enough. Some modifications have already been made throughout the years.

Under Executive Order 12333 as it previously existed, NSA analysts had to make an initial determination and apply a set of privacy rules before sharing raw signals-intelligence information with other parts of the intelligence community. After this change, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an NSA analyst that makes that determination—that information can be shared with other parts of the intelligence community.

So it doesn’t change the substantive rules, it doesn’t change the scope of collection, it doesn’t change the types of protection, it doesn’t change the possible uses; it essentially just broadens the group of people who can apply those protections to the raw intelligence.

Waddell: And by extension, it broadens the group of people who get to see raw intelligence, before those rules are applied?

Hennessey: Yes. This is something that has been at the forefront of privacy and civil-liberties advocates’ minds when they’ve expressed concern with this type of collection. But it’s not accurate to say the rule change means it’s a raw signals-intelligence free-for-all, that anybody can get signals intelligence.

Intelligence agencies other than the NSA will have to provide justification for why they need access to that data. It can only be for foreign intelligence, or other enumerated purposes. So it’s not that those agencies will just be able to see whatever they want—it’s that they will be able to request, with particular justifications, access to more raw signals intelligence than they had before. Then, they will need to apply those minimization procedures for themselves.

The civil-liberties concern often surrounds the use of incidentally collected information. Under the new rule, the FBI could not obtain access to or search raw intelligence information for ordinary criminals in an ordinary criminal investigation against a U.S. person. However, if the FBI incidentally seized evidence of a crime, they are allowed to use that information. So that tends to be where the tension is for people who are concerned with the potential impacts that this change could have on U.S. persons.

Waddell: The fact that more Americans could potentially be subject to warrantless searches, just by virtue of being caught up in the raw signals intelligence that’s shared—is that something that concerns you?

Hennessey: No. Look, I think it’s important to understand that these minimization procedures are taken very seriously, and all other agencies that are handling raw signals intelligence are essentially going to have to import these very complex oversight and compliance mechanisms that currently exist at the NSA

Within the NSA, those are extremely strong and protective mechanisms. I think people should feel reassured that the rules cannot be violated—certainly not without it coming to the attention of oversight and compliance bodies. I am confident that all of the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community will discharge those very same obligations with the same level of diligence and rigor, adhering to both the spirit and the letter of the law.

That said, there are potentially broader reforms that might be undertaken. I don’t think that they necessarily need to be linked to the sharing of data. But it’s reasonable to at least engage in a conversation about whether or not it’s appropriate to have particular post-collection reforms, like for example imposing an obligation for law enforcement to obtain a warrant in particular circumstances.

That’s a long way of saying that nothing about this particular rule change exposing Americans to additional privacy risks. However, that doesn’t mean that there are not still reasonable and responsible reforms which might take place.

Waddell: I found it interesting that you said the change could, in one way, actually be viewed as a “huge source of comfort.” I think you were referring to the timing of the change. Why is that?

Hennessey: These changes have actually been in process for eight or nine years. One of the things that I think individuals who had insight into intelligence activities and were concerned about the election of Donald Trump—specifically, some of the statements he’s made about adherence to the rule of law—a lot of those people’s minds went very quickly to these procedures.

It’s important to understand the distinction between Executive Order 12333 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: One very oversimplified way to think about it is that FISA is a statute that governs collection that takes place within the United States, but that is aimed at a foreign target; 12333 collection is aimed at a foreign target, and takes place outside the United States. That’s shorthand that glosses over some technical and legal nuance, but those are the broad buckets people should be thinking about.

FISA is a statute, so you’d need congressional action to change those rules, and you have a built-in check there. But 12333 is not constrained by statute; it’s constrained by executive order. In theory, a president could change an executive order—that’s within his constitutional power. It’s not as easy as just a pen stroke, but it’s theoretically possible.

Executive Order 12333 requires that this series of protective procedures exist and are adhered to. The procedures are kind of where the rubber meets the road on privacy. They’re the details, the nitty-gritty: What can you actually see? What can you share? What do you have to minimize? So they’re really, really important in terms of what the relationship between U.S. citizens and the intelligence community looks like.

When they were in rewrites, they were sort of vulnerable. There was the possibility that an incoming administration would say, “Hey! While you’re in the process of rewriting, let’s go ahead and adjust some of the domestic protections.” And I think a reasonable observer might assume that while the protections the Obama administration was interested in putting into place increased privacy protections—or at the very least did not reduce them—that the incoming administration has indicated that they are less inclined to be less protective of privacy and civil liberties. So I think it is a good sign that these procedures have been finalized, in part because it’s so hard to change procedures once they’re finalized.

Waddell: Is that why we just went through an eight- or nine-year process to get here?

Hennessey: Exactly. For questions both of genuine complexity and just government bureaucracy, the time horizon here is longer than a single term of the presidency.

So I don’t think that it’s necessarily true that the intelligence community or the Department of Justice was rushing to get these procedures passed; if anything, they’re a little bit late. But I think the bottom line is that it’s comforting to a large national-security community that these are procedures that are signed off by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and not by the DNI and attorney general that will ultimately be confirmed under the Trump Administration.

Waddell: Is there anything else we should be thinking about with these new changes?

Hennessey: People sometimes focus on the top-line stuff and end up missing the things that aren’t necessarily the symbolic expressions of privacy—the things that make us feel good—but are the functional elements of privacy and civil liberties. What rules do people apply day-to-day and how? There’s going to be a need moving forward to have disciplined conversations about the legal protections that really matter.

If there is a silver lining to some of the anxieties that the incoming administration has produced, I think it’s the potential to move the conversation into a much more productive place. But that opportunity will end up being lost if the responses are the same old same. That’s my last shred of optimism, and I’m hanging on to it

Complaints Describe Border Agents Interrogating Muslim Americans, Asking for Social Media Accounts

January 17, 2017

by Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept

Customs and Border Protection agents have been invasively questioning Muslim-Americans at U.S. border crossings about their political and religious beliefs, asking for their social media information, and demanding passwords to open mobile phones, according to a set of complaints filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

In one case, a 23-year old American citizen alleges that he was choked by a CBP agent after declining to hand over his phone for inspection while crossing the border back from Canada.

The complaints deal with the cases of nine people who have been stopped at various U.S. border crossings, eight of whom are American citizens, and one Canadian. They were filed to the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice.

The allegations come in the wake of The Intercept’s report that CBP agents have been working with the FBI to pressure Muslims entering the U.S. to become informants. Reports of racial profiling at the border have been endemic in recent years. In 2015, The Intercept also reported on portions of a questionnaire used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents that included invasive questions about religious practices and beliefs.

In recent years a number of lawsuits have been filed over alleged incidents of discrimination and racial profiling at border crossings. In 2014, the U.S. Attorney General’s office announced rules intended to prevent racial profiling by federal law enforcement agents. Those measures excluded Department of Homeland Security agencies like CBP, however, leaving the door open to continued abuses. And while warrants are normally required for federal authorities to search cellphones, this requirement does not apply at border crossings.

The complaints filed by CAIR allege that CBP agents have been asking travelers questions including, “are you a devout Muslim”, “what do you think of the United States”, and “what are your views about jihad?” The complaints also say that people have reported being asked whether they attend a mosque and what their opinions are about various terrorist groups.

The complaints also allege that border agents have asked American citizens to provide their social media information at the border. A report in Politico last December indicated that some foreign travelers would soon be asked for social media information, but did not mention possible implications for American citizens.

One of the cases in the complaints involved Akram Shibly, a 23-year-old American citizen from Buffalo. He told The Intercept that he had been detained at the border during two separate incidents in early January, including one where he says agents physically assaulted him when he declined to give them his cellphone.

During the first incident, while driving back to the United States from Canada on New Year’s Day, he and his fiancée were pulled aside, searched and interrogated by border agents. Shibly said that he and his fiancée’s cellphones were confiscated and taken into a back room out of view. They were given forms to fill out that asked for passwords to unlock their devices, as well as for their email addresses and information about their family backgrounds — requests that they complied with.

“They told us that if you don’t have anything to hide, give us your phones and give us your passwords,” Shibly said.

During his interrogation, agents asked Shibly about his travel history and some religious practices, as well as his work as a filmmaker. (Shibly operates a YouTube channel where he posts recorded discussions on a variety of subjects.)

After being detained for roughly an hour and a half, Shibly and his fiancée were given their phones back and let go.

A few days later however, driving back from Canada on another trip, they were stopped again. After being taken aside for questioning and asked for his cellphone once more, this time Shibly declined.

“I had already regretted letting them go through my personal information a few days earlier, and this time I told them I do not feel comfortable giving you my phone,” Shibly said.

At that point, three CBP agents physically accosted him as he sat in a chair next to his fiancée, with one grabbing him from behind by the neck, another pinning his legs down, and a third agent reaching into his pocket to grab his phone, he said.

“I was sitting down, I wasn’t violent, I wasn’t yelling or charging at them, but they treated me like I was a violent criminal,” Shibly said. “I told them I’m an American citizen and was born and raised here, and one of the agents told me: ‘We don’t know if you’re really an American citizen, we’ll let you know when our investigation is complete.’ ”

After being detained for about 45 minutes, Shibly and his fiancée were let go. He said that before they left, another CBP officer apologized for his harsh treatment.

But Shibly fears more harassment in the future.  “I honestly feel very traumatized. I love to travel, but now I feel like every time I come home I’m going be harassed and treated like a criminal for no reason,” he said.

When reached for comment, a spokesman for CBP said that the agency is, “aware of the allegations made by Mr. Shibly and they are currently being investigated by another agency.” The spokesman added that they could not comment further due to the ongoing investigation.

Warrantless confiscation and search of personal electronics at the border has become a major civil liberties issue, due to the wealth of personal data stored on such devices. According to DHS guidelines on border searches, CBP agents not only have the power to seize electronics, but can also “copy the contents of [an] electronic device for a more in-depth border search at a later time.”

A 2010 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop such practices was dismissed in 2013, allowing the CBP to continue what the group criticizes as “intrusive searches of Americans’ laptops and other electronics” at ports of entry. These searches remain a “contested legal issue” today according to the ACLU. But the group also notes that, although they may suffer delays, “U.S. citizens cannot be denied entry to the United States for refusing to provide passwords or unlock devices.”

Civil liberties groups fear that harassment at the border will intensify during the Trump administration. Trump has suggested that Muslim immigrants may be subject to “extreme vetting” at the border or even outright bans from entry, depending on their immigration status. Any directives that encourage racial profiling are likely to have adverse effects for communities that are already facing racial profiling issues under President Obama.

Shibly says that despite being physically accosted by CBP agents, he would not have given them access to his phone if he had known that they could not bar him from entry for refusing.

“They are taking advantage of people’s ignorance of their rights at the border and are using that to pry into our personal life,” he says. “But now there is a real risk for us, because officers are not only demanding our personal information but are getting violent if we don’t provide it.”

Donald Trump slams Angela Merkel’s refugee policy

US President-elect Donald Trump labeled German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s stance on refugees a “catastrophic mistake.” He said the policy would lead to even more countries leaving the European Union after Britain.

January 15, 2017

DW

President-elect Trump heavily criticized Chancellor Merkel’s open-door policy on refugees in a joint interview published on Sunday with German tabloid newspaper “Bild” and British newspaper “The Times of London.”

“I think she made one very catastrophic mistake and that was taking all of these illegals, you know, taking all of the people from wherever they come from,” he said.

“And nobody even knows where they come from. So I think she made a catastrophic mistake, very bad mistake.”

In 2015 about 900,000 migrants, many coming from Syria, entered Germany after Merkel opened the country’s doors, famously saying “we can do this.”

The bilionaire businessman said Germany had “got a clear impression” of the consequences of her policy from a Berlin terror attack that killed 12 people in December.

Trump insisted he had “great ­respect” for Merkel and would start his presidency trusting the “fantastic leader,” but that his trust might not last long.

Brexit deal

Trump promised he would offer the United Kingdom a trade deal within weeks of taking office to help make Brexit a “great thing”.

“We’re going to work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly. Good for both sides,” Trump said.

“I will be meeting with [British Prime Minister Theresa May]. She’s requesting a meeting and we’ll have a meeting right after I get into the White House and it’ll be, I think we’re going to get something done very quickly.”

May said on Saturday she would lead the country towards a “hard Brexit.”

Others will leave

Trump warned that other countries in the 28-member EU would follow suit after Brexit because of immigration.

“I think it’s very tough,” he said. “People, countries want their own identity and the UK wanted its own identity.”

“If refugees keep pouring into different parts of Europe … I think it’s going to be very hard to keep it together because people are angry about it.”

He said the mass arrivals in 2015 were “the last drop that made the barrel overflow” in convincing British voters to back leaving the bloc in a June 24 referendum.

“If they hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees, so many, with all the problems that it… entails, I think that you wouldn’t have a Brexit. This was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

He further said the European Union had become “a vehicle for Germany”.

Nato obsolete

Trump described the NATO alliance as an “obsolete” organization.

“I said a long time ago that NATO had problems. Number one it was obsolete, because it was designed many, many years ago,” he said.

He insisted that NATO remained “very important to me,” but that some NATO allies weren’t paying enough.

“We’re supposed to protect countries. But a lot of these countries aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying, which I think is very unfair to the United States.”

“With that being said, NATO is very important to me. There’s five countries that are paying what they’re supposed to. Five. It’s not much,” he added.

US contributions to NATO accounted for about 70 percent of spending by the bloc’s nations.

Taxes for BMW

He threatened German carmaker BMW with a border tax of 35 percent on cars that it planned to build at a new plant in Mexico and export to the US.

He told the German daily that BMW should instead build its new car factory in the US because this would be “much better” for the company.

A BMW spokeswoman said a new plant in San Luis Potosi would build the BMW 3 Series starting from 2019.

Merkel, who is facing elections later this year, criticized Trump’s protectionist policies on Saturday, and earlier said there was no guarantee of cooperation between the two countries.

“From the point of view of some of our traditional partners – and I am thinking here as well about the transatlantic relations – there is no eternal guarantee for a close cooperation with us Europeans,” Merkel told an audience in Brussels.

On Friday the outgoing US ambassador to the EU warned against Trump supporting the bloc’s breakup, saying it would be “sheer folly.”

Trump was interviewed for “The Times of London” by prominent Brexit campaigner and conservative British member of parliament, Michael Gove; and for “Bild” by its publisher and former editor Kai Diekmann, a prominent German journalist who will soon depart the business.

Where Did Modern Man Come From? Not Out of Africa

January 16, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

 

It has been formerly postulated by paleontologists that the so-called Neanderthal man morphed into the Cro-Magnon man, and that Cro-Magnon man was the progenitor of human beings as we know them today.

However, there are serious problems with the assumptions about when modern human types actually appeared on this planet.

Even if we take the evolving scientific view of the present day, we find that the Cro-Magnon man was something altogether different from other humanoid types extant on earth.

The Cro-Magnons existed in Europe, Scandinavia and western Russia between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. They were virtually identical to modern man, being tall and muscular and slightly more robust than most modern humans.

The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years before the present era.

Cro-Magnons were muscular in build and powerful physically. The body was generally solid with a strong musculature. The forehead was straight, with slight browridges and a tall forehead. Cro-Magnons were the first humans (genus Homo) to have a prominent chin. The brain capacity was about 1,600 cubic centimetres (98 cu in), larger than the average for modern humans.

In point of fact, the Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other “anatomically modern humans” i.e. the Neanderthal tribes around him, practically a superman. They were skilled hunters, toolmakers and artists, famous for the cave art at places such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira.

They had a high cranium, a broad and upright face, and cranial capacity “about the same as modern humans”.

The males were as tall as six feet.

They appeared in Europe in the upper Pleistocene, about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago and their geographic origin is still unknown for certain but it now appears that they originally came from the mouth of the Volga River by the Black Sea.

Their skeletal remains show absolutely no difference from the bone structure of modern humans. Of course, the “out of Africa” theory advocates suggest that Cro-Magnon came from Sub Saharan Africa and a temperate climate and that, “they would eventually adapt to all extremes of heat and cold”. This is their explanation of the differences between Cro-Magnon skeletons and those of the Neanderthal.

Cro-Magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology, characterized by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the first) and harpoons. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow. They invented shafts and handles for their knives, securing their blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a hooked groove used for adding distance and speed to spears.

They also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey. The Cro-Magnon type man was also the “originator” of such abstract concepts as “time”. They marked time by lunar phases, recording them with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these “calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations.

In the relatively recent past, tool industries diversified.

The Gravettian industry (25 to 15 thousand years ago), characterized by ivory tools such as backed blades, is associated with mammoth hunters. One type of brief industry was Solutrean, occurring from 18 to 15 thousand years ago and limited to Southwest France and Spain. It is characterized by unique and finely crafted “laurel leaf” blades, made with a pressure technique requiring a great skill.

It is becoming evident that elements the Solutrean culture migrated to North America around 12,000 thousand years ago.

Cro-Magnon people lived in tents, and other man-made shelters, in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials.

They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial.

They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals, such as the wold horse, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years ago).

They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting, fertility or other types of sympathetic magic.

Re-evaluations have put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history.

They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves.

Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer.

At Lascaux, France, are the famous caves of upper Paleolithic cave art, dated to 17 thousand years ago, and even older, in some cases, by many thousands of years.

Try as the “We are all out of Africa” proponents would, there is simply was no way to prove that Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa or the Levant and then moved to Europe.

But then, how to explain what happened in any reasonable terms?

What the archaeological record shows is that in Europe, after millennia of almost no physical or cultural progress at all, suddenly human culture seems to have taken off like an explosion with the appearance of the Cro-Magnon man.

Not only does cultural development explode, but also new ways of doing things, new styles and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately preceding them, suddenly appear.

From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying racks, temperature controlled hearths, and complex dwellings.

The most amazing part of all of it is the art.

Art, like Minerva, suddenly springs onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual development; no signs of childish attempts preceding it. A piece of ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as realistic as anything turned out by the most accomplished carver of the present day.

The Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal.

The only explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human appeared on the earth’s stage.

When we consider the difficulties of believing such an event, in terms of “evolution”, we find that this presents a huge difficulty in our understanding.

First of all, we still have the problem of a 60,000-year time lag between the appearances of the sub-Saharan (or African) man, called the Neanderthal man, who was on the scene with no evolving improvements in his technology for that length of time.

If the Cro-Magnon man evolved in Africa, why isn’t there a continuous record of his incremental developments?

By the same reasoning, if he evolved only after crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, why isn’t there also a continuous record of incremental developments?

The most effective and popular way that science deals with this socially unacceptable situation, that all mankind stems from a common source,  is to either ignore it, deny it, or to seek to twist the facts to fit the most acceptable socially and politically proper theory.

This theory, supported by pliant academics and presented to the public in the captive media, is that humans are all the same and that all of us originated as some form of advanced simian in Africa.

And therefore, all of current humanity is derived from a common source, in Africa of course, and that, obviously, all mankind are brothers.

Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being from Africa. They propose a “second biological event” to explain this, regardless of the fact that it left no tracks in any skeletal uncovered remains.

Nowadays, the idea is to suggest that the other “modern men” of sub-Saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were “near-modern”. Thus, Africa is preserved as the origin of all mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the African lineage, a “neurological event” that allowed this “new man” to develop all these new cultural behaviors overnight, so to say.

What this amounts to is saying that the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic times did not happen earlier because other modern men didn’t have the brains to make it happen.

Unfortunately, the support for this idea amounts only to circular logic. What’s more, it seems that if it were a “neurological event”, it would start in a small place and spread outward.

But what seems to have happened is that art exploded in a lot of places at once: from Spain to the Ural mountains in Russia! And in fact, the Middle East is the last place where art appears.

The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, and they are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later, the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe.

It is important to note that the Neanderthals did not have art. What’s more, there was essentially no change whatsoever in the making of their stone tools for 100,000 years.

Some people suggest that the impetus for culture was the sudden development of speech. But that idea doesn’t hold much water either. If we were to look at some of the aboriginal societies of Australia and New Guinea, they are certainly Neanderthal like in their stone tools. But they think and communicate in languages that are as rich as ours, and they construct myths, stories and cosmologies with these languages. They just don’t seem to be much interested in technology.

There is another very strange thing about this explosion of homo intellectualis technologicus: it seems to have sort of “lost its steam” around 12,000 years ago.

We have already noted the pottery making of the Jomon. Even more startling is the fact that twenty-six thousand years ago the residents of Dolni Vestonice were firing ceramics in kilns. But you don’t read that in archaeology textbooks. In the standard teachings, the emergence of ceramics is linked to the functional use of pottery which supposedly did not appear until the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period some 12,000 years after the kilns at Dolni were last used.

This brings us to another curious thing about Neanderthal man: He never seemed to go anywhere. He always made his tools out of what was locally available, and he never seemed to travel at all. What was made where it was made, remained there.

Nobody traded or shared among the Neanderthal groups.

But it seems that right from the beginning, Cro-Magnon man was constantly moving to other areas and sharing and exchanging not only goods, but technology amongst themselves.

If there was a better form of stone somewhere else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had some of it. Distinctive flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the south. Slovakian radiolarite of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to the east or its origins. Later in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty miles from its origins.

Naturally, these rocks didn’t transport themselves on their own violition. Human legs carried them. And that leads us to our next little problem with Cro-Magnon man: You see, his legs were too long.

One of the sacred laws of evolutionary biology is called “Allen’s Rule”.

This rule posits that legs, arms, ears, and other body extremities should be shorter in mammals that live in cold climates, and longer in mammals of the same period who live where it is hot. This is because having short arms and legs conserves heat. This is supposed to explain why Eskimos and Laplanders have short legs. It also is supposed to explain why Bantu people are leaner, and the Maasai are extremely long and lean in their tropical open country.

The only people who seem to be mocking Allen’s rule are Cro-Magnon men.

They just refused to adapt. They all have much longer legs than they ought to. Of course, this is pounced upon as proof that they came from Africa. The only problem with this is that it is hard to imagine people from a warm climate migrating to a cold one by choice. Then, on top of that, to remain long-limbed for over a thousand generations? Keep in mind that, during that time, the thermometer kept going down and, at the glacial maximum, 18,000 years ago, it was like the North Pole in northern Europe!

By whatever means they arrived in Europe, we ought to take note of the fact that their presence there may be related to the fact that Europe and other nearby locations are literally blanketed with megaliths. Indeed, it may be so that the megaliths came long after the appearance of Cro-Magnon man, but the connection ought not to be discarded without some consideration.

We have still another problem here, and it has to do with dating.

Analyzing mitochondrial DNA data to reconstruct the demographic prehistory of homosapiens reveals statistical evidence of explosive population growth around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Is there a connection between this DNA evidence and the appearance of Cro-Magnon man?

If so, it would mean that the DNA is dated to twice the age that archaeology confirms.

Instead of assuming that the archaeological dates are correct, perhaps we ought to ask the question: could something be wrong with the dating? From a morphological point of view as well as judging by their industry and art, these highly evolved humans who coexisted with Neanderthal man represent a mutation so enormous and sudden as to be absurd in the context of evolutionary theory.

Given these postulations, how can the Out of Africa proponents deal with this problem?

One could exhaustively describe the endless books and papers that seek to explain it away; to account for it, to marginalize it, and even ignore it. But at the end of it all, the fundamental problem still remains: a new kind of man appeared on the planet, seemingly from nowhere, and he was smart, artistic, and however he got here, he landed in a lot of places simultaneously.

One must not forget that annoying problem of the Asian vs. African origins of the “first mother” that has been so deftly dealt with by deliberate avoidance.

What do all of these factors, taken together, suggest?

They suggest hybridization. But that would imply somebody doing the hybridizing. Further, we might wish to make note of the range of this culture that suddenly appeared in Europe: from Spain (and a small region of North Africa) to the Ural Mountains which are at the border of Central Asia.

The steppes of Central Asia, just north of Turkmenia, are a difficult environment for agriculture. Goats and sheep and cattle bones are found there that date to about 4000 BC. Later, the camel and horse came into domesticated use.

These cultures spoke Indo-European languages and their members were Caucasoid.

At some point the Caucasoid nomads of the Central Asian steppes immigrated to Europe, to include Germany, Scandinavia, European Russia, Spain, Switzerland, northern Italy, France and England.

The same peoples also migrated into what was Persia, India and Pakistan.

It is now believed that these people also travelled across the glacial ice, westward to the eastern coast of the United States.

The socially acceptable thesis that humanity has a common, African, ancestor may warm the hearts of many but it is, like the Christian fundamemtalist view of mankind coming from a single couple 6,000 years ago, self-deluding and a pathetic fiction.

Here we attach, taken directly from Christian publications, the official Christian view of the development, and origins, of modern man.

And there are also those who believe in the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis hiding, skating rinks, gas stations, apartment houses and all, in the depths of Lake Erie or of the existence of large cities with highly advanced technology lying buried for thousands of years under the huge icecaps of Antarctia.

Or that Admiral Byrd discovered that the planet was hollow.

And, of course, we must not ignore those who claim Planet X is bearing down on this planet at two miles a year, or that giant lizards control the American government.

We ought not to ignore these entertaining creations but we can most certainly laugh at them.

And dare we discuss the factually reported (‘scientists have proven it’) appearances of the Giant Celestial Easter Bunny to many upright citizens, especially after drinking quantities of whisky-spiked egg nog?

Or the continual belief found in some circles that Jesus will suddenly reappear after a 2,000 year lapse, to fill us with joy, probably somewhere in Texas?

The Strange Evangelical View of Cro-Magnon Man

 The Bible recounts the sweep of human history, from the first man, Adam, to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and finally, Jesus Christ. In this panoply of amazing people, places, and events, where do the fossils and artifacts of “early man” belong?

When a couple of German quarry workers stumbled upon a Neanderthal fossil in a cave in the Neander Valley, back in 1856, paleoanthropology (the study of early humans) vaulted into the limelight. And popular interest has never died down.

As the findings of early human fossils and artifacts continue to pile up, the story has become even more interesting and complicated. Remains from hundreds of different individuals have been discovered so far. They range from the southern tip of Africa to Russia’s frigid Siberian mountains and the tropical islands of Indonesia.

The chart shows the sequence that these human remains are found in today’s post-Flood surface layers, and the following pages have maps showing where these remains occur. Most paleoanthropology books show charts and maps similar to these. So how do creationists explain the timing and location of these early human remains from a biblical perspective?

The earliest human remains are found in Ice Age deposits near Babel. (Babylon) By the middle of the Ice Age, however, human remains were scattered over three continents. New variations eventually appeared in different regions, such as Neanderthals in Europe. But by the end of the Ice Age, most of these variations disappeared. It is only at this late stage in the Ice Age that we find human remains in the Americas.

Time of “Cavemen”

Let’s first consider the timetable of these early fossils. The Bible gives invaluable clues.

First Cavemen After Babel

First, we know that the entire human race consisted of eight individuals at the end of the Flood, around 2350 BC. This was one “family,” but four were women who married into Noah’s line. So the maximum number of family lines who brought their genes onto the Ark was five (four potentially unrelated women, and one line of men).

Furthermore, we know that all humans who settled the planet after the Flood were descended from Noah’s three sons: “These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated” (Genesis 9:19). According to Genesis 11, they had many sons and daughters, including Canaan, whose descendants eventually founded the Canaanite cities where Abraham later sojourned.

Noah’s growing family eventually moved en masse to the plain of Shinar (in modern Iraq), where they decided to build a city.

No cavemen yet.

The dispersion from this first city, Babel, sets the oldest time limit for the humans whose remains occasionally appear in caves. The Bible does not give a specific date for this event; but it does say that the earth was “divided” in the days of Peleg, five generations after Noah; and presumably this is a reference to Babel. If the dispersion from Babel occurred at Peleg’s birth, the earliest date would be one century after the Flood, around 2250 BC according to the Masoretic text.

Last Cavemen Before Abraham

The dispersion from Babel explains when humans first spread over the continents. But at what point in biblical history did the men and women known as Neanderthals and their kin disappear?

Solving that mystery is a little more complicated.

An important clue is that all these humans are found in surface deposits associated with the post-Flood Ice Age (conventionally labeled as the Pleistocene). Their bones appear buried alongside extinct Ice Age animals, such as mammoths and stegodons.

The book of Genesis does not specifically mention this relatively brief era of worldwide climate change, but glaciers left grim reminders of their destructive power throughout northern Europe, Asia, and North America, as well as the mountainous highlands of Africa, South America, and South Asia.

The Ice Age began after the Flood and eventually came to an end. Again, the Bible provides us with important clues to establish rough dates. By Abraham’s day, around 2000 BC, cities had cropped up throughout the Middle East. None of the Neanderthals and their Ice Age cousins are found associated with any of these cities. Nor do we find any remains of Ice Age animals associated with these settlements.

In fact, any charcoal from Ice Age deposits consistently dates earlier than anything from the cities. For instance, ten Neanderthals were found in an Iraqi cave north of Babel (Shanidar Cave), dating before any city in this region. Similarly, Neanderthal fossils are found in caves of Israel, such as Skuhl Cave at Mount Carmel, but the remains date before the earliest Canaanite cities, such as Jericho.

One basic relative sequence in the successive post-Flood surface layers is not disputed: the Ice Age preceded the warmer period we are in today. Since the remains in all known cities postdate the Ice Age and have no Ice Age remains, it appears the effects of the Ice Age had waned before the establishment of the cities where Abraham sojourned.

Location of Human Fossils

The Bible gives the time frame for the spread of early humans. But what about the location of their remains?

Genesis does not give many details about the geography immediately after Babel, but it is not hard to fill in some of the gaps. At the height of the Ice Age, so much water was bound up in ice that the ocean level plummeted 330 feet (100 m) below today’s level. The earth’s landscape was very different from today. The best spots for raising a family were much different than they are now!

Compounding the problem of establishing permanent settlements was the shifting climate, heavy rains, and unstable earth in the years after the global Flood cataclysm. The geology from this era indicates that massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions still rocked parts of the earth, dwarfing any local catastrophes we observe today.

It is easy to imagine why the early human populations kept migrating.

As Noah’s children overspread the earth, they needed temporary shelter. We can see why they might have sometimes needed to stay in caves for convenience.4 Caves would also be an excellent place for them to preserve the bodies of their loved ones.

Early Fossils Near Babel

Yet the families survived, as we can see in the record of Genesis 11. So we would not expect to find a trail of bodies from Babel to their new destinations. Instead, we would expect to find humans and artifacts suddenly cropping up at destinations all around Babel.

And that’s what we find in the fossil record. Except for a few stone tools and some footprints left in volcanic ash in East Africa, we do not find human remains in any post-Flood deposits until suddenly they appear in multiple regions in the same relative level of the Lower Pleistocene

The earliest human fossils are found in regions around Babel. They are similar in appearance, often labeled Homo erectus.

By the middle of the Ice Age, families were scattered across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Fossils and stone tools in East Africa and Central Asia have been dated from the same general time period. In fact, these fossils are so close in time that experts debate which came first. Specifically, human fossils were discovered in the mountainous region north of Babel (the Republic of Georgia) and appear to be as old as anything found in East Africa.

These human fossils—and their stone tools—are strikingly similar everywhere they are found in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene layers5 These people had large brow ridges, small chins, and receding foreheads. Although experts sometimes give the fossils different names in different regions, they recognize the similarities and agree they could be called by one name.(They usually call them Homo erectus.)

Later Variation Among Fossils

In upper deposits (Upper Pleistocene), a fascinating variety appears among Noah’s descendants. These human remains are located in a much greater range of places at the very farthest reaches of Europe, South Africa, and East Asia .

The fossils also show a great variety of physical features. The Bible hints that God created the human body capable of a wider variety of forms than we see today. The giant Goliath, for instance, stood over 9 feet (3 m) tall. But these Ice Age deposits show us still other possibilities in God’s design, such as the 3-foot-tall (1 m) “hobbit” (Homo floresiensis) humans found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

While it is difficult to distinguish family resemblances just from bones, some seem pretty clear among the later Ice Age fossils of each region. In European sites we find the first human families with Neanderthal features, while in Africa we find another family variation with high foreheads and protruding chins (like us today). Meanwhile in Asia, the fossils generally have the pronounced brow ridges and other features associated with the earlier Homo erectus fossils.

Neanderthals’ compact body shape would have made them well suited for cold weather, similar to the Inuits (sometimes called Eskimos) of North America’s Arctic regions today. As hunting ranges in Europe were covered in ice, it would have made sense for the Neanderthals to move south into the Middle East, even if it meant displacing other people there. That might explain why Neanderthals are found buried at certain soil levels in caves in Israel, with other people found in layers before and after them.

Interestingly, the human remains at the end the Ice Age display only one variation of the human physique: people with protruding chins and high foreheads like ours. In Europe, these people are known as Cro-Magnon, but the difference between them and us is inconsequential.

End of the Ice Age

Not a single Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or hobbit fossil has ever been found in the topmost layers. They only appear with Ice Age plants and animals, which are now extinct.

The last Neanderthal fossils are found in locations in southern France and Gibraltar, while Cro-Magnons appear in the more recent layers, above them. The same pattern is repeated elsewhere. Apparently, Neanderthals and their cousins died off about the same time that the Ice Age ended.

Genesis then picks up the human narrative with Abraham. Even in his day, caves still were in use. Genesis mentions that Lot fled to a cave to avoid God’s judgment (Genesis 19:30), and Abraham bought a cave to bury his dead (Genesis 23:8–20). Their function may give us a clue about the role of caves among post-Babel migrants. Caves were temporary hiding places or convenient places to preserve the bodies of loved ones, but they were not normal living spaces.

By Job’s day, cave dwellers had earned a bad reputation. “Civilized” folk did not live in caves. “Cavemen” tended to be oppressed people who had lost their homes (Job 24:4–8) or bandits and loners who had left civilized society and behaved like wild animals (Job 30:3–8).

While we still have a lot to explain and understand, the overall picture is clear. The two hundred years or so after Babel (over 300 years after the Flood) was a chaotic transition in world history. The Bible gives us only a brief glimpse into that time and place, but the fossils hint at a grim tale.

Thankfully the human story does not end there. Indeed, the Bible passes over this transitional period with only a brief mention, and then picks up with God’s promise to Abraham—to bless all peoples through His promised seed, the Savior Jesus Christ. And that promise includes every sinner and outcast—ultimately every one of us.

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

February 28, 2012

by David Keys

The Independent/UK

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analyzed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book – Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

However, the seasonally shifting zone where the ice ended and the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources – migrating seals, sea birds, fish and the now-extinct northern hemisphere penguin-like species, the great auk.

Stanford and Bradley have long argued that Stone Age humans were quite capable of making the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic ice – but till now there was comparatively little evidence to support their thinking.

But the new Maryland, Virginia and other US east coast material, and the chemical tests on the Virginian flint knife, have begun to transform the situation. Now archaeologists are starting to investigate half a dozen new sites in Tennessee, Maryland and even Texas – and these locations are expected to produce more evidence.

Another key argument for Stanford and Bradley’s proposal is the complete absence of any human activity in north-east Siberia and Alaska prior to around 15,500 years ago. If the Maryland and other east coast people of 26,000 to 19,000 years ago had come from Asia, not Europe, early material, dating from before 19,000 years ago, should have turned up in those two northern areas, but none have been found.

Although Solutrean Europeans may well have been the first Americans, they had a major disadvantage compared to the Asian-originating Indians who entered the New World via the Bering Straits or along the Aleutian Islands chain after 15,500 years ago.

Whereas the Solutreans had only had a 4500 year long ‘Ice Age’ window to carry out their migratory activity, the Asian-originating Indians had some 15,000 years to do it. What’s more, the latter two-thirds of that 15 millennia long period was climatologically much more favorable and substantially larger numbers of Asians were therefore able to migrate.

As a result of these factors the Solutrean (European originating) Native Americans were either partly absorbed by the newcomers or were substantially obliterated by them either physically or through competition for resources.

Some genetic markers for Stone Age western Europeans simply don’t exist in north- east Asia – but they do in tiny quantities among some north American Indian groups. Scientific tests on ancient DNA extracted from 8000 year old skeletons from Florida have revealed a high level of a key probable European-originating genetic marker. There are also a tiny number of isolated Native American groups whose languages appear not to be related in any way to Asian-originating American  Indian peoples.

But the greatest amount of evidence is likely to come from under the ocean – for most of the areas where the Solutreans would have stepped off the Ice onto dry land are now up to 100 miles out to sea.

The one underwater site that has been identified – thanks to the scallop dredgers – is set to be examined in greater detail this summer – either by extreme-depth divers or by remotely operated mini submarines equipped with cameras and grab arms.

  ‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 11

January 16, 2017

There have been a number of translations of Hitler’s seminal book. Most have been heavily editited so as to promulgate disinformation about Hitler’s views and remove passages that might offend the sensitive.

The Murphy translation is considered to be the most accurate and is being reprinted in toto here.

Our next publication of this work will be the unexpurgated original German edition.

German officialy- approved historians have recently released a highly doctored edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ that is selling very well in Germany.

Perhaps a free copy of the unredacted original work would do better in the same marketplace. Ed

 

VOLUME II: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

 

CHAPTER I    WELTANSCHAUUNG AND PARTY

 

On February 24th, 1920, the first great mass meeting under the auspice of the new movement took place. In the Banquet Hall of the Hofbräuhau in Munich the twenty-five theses which constituted the programme of ou new party were expounded to an audience of nearly two thousand people and each thesis was enthusiastically received.             Thus we brought to the knowledge of the public those first principles and lines of action along which the new struggle was to be conducted for the abolition of a confused mass of obsolete ideas and opinions which had obscure and often pernicious tendencies. A new force was to make its appearance among the timid and feckless bourgeoisie. This force was destined to impede the triumphant advance of the Marxists and bring theChariot of Fate to a standstill just as it seemed about to reach its goal.             It was evident that this new movement could gain the public significance and support which are necessary pre-requisites in such a gigantic struggle only if it succeeded from the very outset in awakening a sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers, that here it was not a case of introducing a new electoral slogan into the political field but that an entirely new WELTANSCHAUUNG, which was of a radical significance, had to be promoted.             One must try to recall the miserable jumble of opinions that used to be arrayed side by side to form the usual Party Programme, as it was called, and one must remember how these opinions used to be brushed up or dressed in a new form from time to time. If we would properly understand these programmatic monstrosities we must carefully investigate the motives which inspired the average bourgeois ‘programme committee’.             Those people are always influenced by one and the same preoccupation when they introduce something new into their programme or modify something already contained in it. That preoccupation is directed towards the results of the next election. The moment these artists in parliamentary government have the first glimmering of a suspicion that their darling public may be ready to kick up its heels and escape from the harness of the old party wagon they begin to paint the shafts with new colours. On such occasions the party astrologists and horoscope readers, the so-called ‘experienced men’ and ‘experts’, come forward.             For the most part they are old parliamentary hands whose political schooling has furnished them with ample experience. They can remember former occasions when the masses showed signs of losing patience and they now diagnose the menace of a similar situation arising. Resorting to their old prescription, they form a ‘committee’. They go around among the darling public and listen to what is being said. They dip their noses into the newspapers and gradually begin to scent what it is that their darlings, the broad masses, are wishing for, what they reject and what they are hoping for. The groups that belong to each trade or business, and even office employees, are carefully studied and their innermost desires are investigated. The ‘malicious slogans’ of the opposition from which danger is threatened are now suddenly looked upon as worthy of reconsideration, and it often happens that these slogans, to the great astonishment of those who originally coined and circulated them, now appear to be quite harmless and indeed are to be found among the dogmas of the old parties.             So the committees meet to revise the old programme and draw up a new one.             For these people change their convictions just as the soldier changes his shirt in war–when the old one is bug-eaten. In the new programme everyone gets everything he wants. The farmer is assured that the interests of agriculture will be safeguarded. The industrialist is assured of protection for his products. The consumer is assured that his interests will be protected in the market prices. Teachers are given higher salaries and civil servants will have better pensions. Widows and orphans will receive generous assistance from the State. Trade will be promoted. The tariff will be lowered and even the taxes, though they cannot be entirely abolished, will be almost abolished. It sometimes happens that one section of the public is forgotten or that one of the demands mooted among the public has not reached the ears of the party.             This is also hurriedly patched on to the whole, should there be any space available for it: until finally it is felt that there are good grounds for hoping that the whole normal host of philistines, including their wives, will have their anxieties laid to rest and will beam with satisfaction once again. And so, internally armed with faith in the goodness of God and the impenetrable stupidity of the electorate, the struggle for what is called ‘the reconstruction of the REICH’ can now begin.             When the election day is over and the parliamentarians have held their last public meeting for the next five years, when they can leave their job of getting the populace to toe the line and can now devote themselves to higher and more pleasing tasks–then the programme committee is dissolved and the struggle for the progressive reorganization of public affairs becomes once again a business of earning one’s daily bread, which for the parliamentarians means merely the attendance that is required in order to be able to draw their daily remunerations. Morning after morning the honourable deputy wends his way to the House, and though he may not enter the Chamber itself he gets at least as far as the front hall, where he will find the register on which the names of the deputies in attendance have to be inscribed. As a part of his onerous service to his constituents he enters his name, and in return receives a small indemnity as a well-earned reward for his unceasing and exhausting labours.             When four years have passed, or in the meantime if there should be some critical weeks during which the parliamentary corporations have to face the danger of being dissolved, these honourable gentlemen become suddenly seized by an irresistible desire to act. Just as the grub-worm= cannot help growing into a cock-chafer, these parliamentarian worms leave the great House of Puppets and flutter on new wings out among the beloved public. They address the electors once again, give an account of the enormous labours they have accomplished and emphasize the malicious obstinacy of their opponents. They do not always meet with grateful applause; for occasionally the unintelligent masses throw rude and unfriendly remarks in their faces. When this spirit of public ingratitude reaches a certain pitch there is only one way of saving the situation. The prestige of the party must be burnished up again. The programme has to be amended. The committee is called into existence once again. And the swindle begins anew. Once we understand the impenetrable stupidity of our public we cannot be surprised that such tactics turn out successful. Led by the Press and blinded once again by the alluring appearance of the new programme, the bourgeois as well as the proletarian herds of voters faithfully return to the common stall and re-elect their old deceivers. The ‘people’s man’ and labour candidate now change back again into the parliamentarian grub and become fat and rotund as they batten on the leaves that grow on the tree of public life–to be retransformed into the glittering butterfly after another four years have passed.             Scarcely anything else can be so depressing as to watch this process in sober reality and to be the eyewitness of this repeatedly recurring fraud. On a spiritual training ground of that kind it is not possible for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to carry on the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they have never seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary quacks who represent the white race are generally recognized as persons of quite inferior mental capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that they could not seriously entertain the hope of being able to use the weapon of Western Democracy to fight a doctrine for the advance of which Western Democracy, with all its accessories, is employed as a means to an end. Democracy is exploited by the Marxists for the purpose of paralysing their opponents and gaining for themselves a free hand to put their own methods into action. When certain groups of Marxists use all their ingenuity for the time being to make it be believed that they are inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it may be well to recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same gentlemen snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote, as that principle is understood by Western Democracy. Such was the case in those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental shortsightedness, believed that the security of the REICH was guaranteed because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own hands, backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters and Jewish dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in which so many parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous parliamentary wizards who represented bourgeois democracy could have believed that the brutal determination of those whose interest it is to spread the Marxist world-pest, of which they are the carriers, could for a moment, now or in the future, be held in check by the magical formulas of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism will march shoulder to shoulder with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in securing for its own criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds are nationally orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate. But if the Marxists should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this witch’s cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered nto enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat Marxism, then the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end.             Instead of appealing to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers of the Red International would immediately send forth a furious rallying-cry among the proletarian masses and the ensuing fight would not take place in the sedate atmosphere of Parliament but in the factories and the streets. Then democracy would be annihilated forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now be successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the exasperated proletarian masses–just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow they would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking that the Jewish drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed by means of Western Democracy.             As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of binding himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving his own interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no longer useful for his purpose.             All the parties that profess so-called bourgeois principles look upon political life as in reality a struggle for seats in Parliament. The moment their principles and convictions are of no further use in that struggle they are thrown overboard, as if they were sand ballast. And the programmes are constructed in such a way that they can be dealt with in like manner. But such practice has a correspondingly weakening effect on the strength of those parties. They lack the great magnetic force which alone attracts the broad masses; for these masses always respond to the compelling force which emanates from absolute faith in the ideas put forward, combined with an indomitable zest to fight for and defend them.             At a time in which the one side, armed with all the fighting power that springs from a systematic conception of life–even though it be criminal in a thousand ways–makes an attack against the established order the other side will be able to resist when it draws its strength from a new faith, which in our case is a political faith. This faith must supersede the weak and cowardly command to defend. In its stead we must raise the battle-cry of a courageous and ruthless attack. Our present movement is accused, especially by the so-called national bourgeois cabinet ministers–the Bavarian representatives of the Centre, for example—of heading towards a revolution. We have one answer to give to those political pigmies. We say to them: We are trying to make up for that which you, in your criminal stupidity, have failed to carry out. By your parliamentarian jobbing you have helped to drag the nation into ruin.             But we, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a new WELTANSCHAUUNG which we shall defend with indomitable devotion. Thus we are building the steps on which our nation once again may ascend to the temple of freedom.             And so during the first stages of founding our movement we had to take special care that our militant group which fought for the establishment of a new and exalted political faith should not degenerate into a society for the promotion of parliamentarian interests.             The first preventive measure was to lay down a programme which of itself would tend towards developing a certain moral greatness that would scare away all the petty and weakling spirits who make up the bulk of our present party politicians.             Those fatal defects which finally led to Germany’s downfall afford the clearest proof of how right we were in considering it absolutely necessary to set up programmatic aims which were sharply and distinctly defined.             Because we recognized the defects above mentioned, we realized that a new conception of the State had to be formed, which in itself became a part of our new conception of life in general.             In the first volume of this book I have already dealt with the term VÖLKISCH, and I said then that this term has not a sufficiently precise meaning to furnish the kernel around which a closely consolidated militant community could be formed. All kinds of people, with all kinds of divergent opinions, are parading about at the present moment under the device VÖLKISCH on their banners. Before I come to deal with the purposes and aims of the National Socialist Labour Party I want to establish a clear understanding of what is meant by the concept VÖLKISCH and herewith explain its relation to our party movement. The word VÖLKISCH does not express any clearly specified idea. It may be interpreted in several ways and in practical application it is just as general as the word ‘religious’, for instance. It is difficult to attach any precise meaning to this latter word, either as a theoretical concept or as a guiding principle in practical life. The word ‘religious’ acquires a precise meaning only when it is associated with a distinct and definite form through which the concept is put into practice. To say that a person is ‘deeply religious’ may be very fine phraseology; but, generally speaking, it tells us little or nothing. There may be some few people who are content with such a vague description and there may even be some to whom the word conveys a more or less definite picture of the inner quality of a person thus described. But, since the masses of the people are not composed of philosophers or saints, such a vague religious idea will mean for them nothing else than to justify each individual in thinking and acting according to his own bent. It will not lead to that practical faith into which the inner religious yearning is transformed only when it leaves the sphere of general metaphysical ideas and is moulded to a definite dogmatic belief. Such a belief is certainly not an end in itself, but the means to an end. Yet it is a means without which the end could never be reached at all. This end, however, is not merely something ideal; for at the bottom it is eminently practical. We must always bear in mind the fact that, generally speaking, the highest ideals are always the outcome of some profound vital need, just as the most sublime beauty owes its nobility of shape, in the last analysis, to the fact that the most beautiful form is the form that is best suited to the purpose it is meant to serve.             By helping to lift the human being above the level of mere animal existence, Faith really contributes to consolidate and safeguard its own existence. Taking humanity as it exists to-day and taking into consideration the fact that the religious beliefs which it generally holds and which have been consolidated through our education, so that they serve as moral standards in practical life, if we should now abolish religious teaching and not replace it by anything of equal value the result would be that the foundations of human existence would be seriously shaken. We may safely say that man does not live merely to serve higher ideals, but that these ideals, in their turn, furnish the necessary conditions of his existence as a human being. And thus the circle is closed.             Of course, the word ‘religious’ implies some ideas and beliefs that are fundamental. Among these we may reckon the belief in the immortality of the soul, its future existence in eternity, the belief in the existence of a Higher Being, and so on. But all these ideas, no matter how firmly the individual believes in them, may be critically analysed by any person and accepted or rejected accordingly, until the emotional concept or yearning has been transformed into an active service that is governed by a clearly defined doctrinal faith. Such a faith furnishes the practical outlet for religious feeling to express itself and thus opens the way through which it can be put into practice.             Without a clearly defined belief, the religious feeling would not only be worthless for the purposes of human existence but even might contribute towards a general disorganization, on account of its vague and multifarious tendencies.             What I have said about the word ‘religious’ can also be applied to the term VÖLKISCH. This word also implies certain fundamental ideas. Though these ideas are very important indeed, they assume such vague and indefinite forms that they cannot be estimated as having a greater value than mere opinions, until they become constituent elements in the structure of a political party. For in order to give practical force to the ideals that grow out of a WELTANSCHAUUNG and to answer the demands which are a logical consequence of such ideals, mere sentiment and inner longing are of no practical assistance, just as freedom cannot be won by a universal yearning for it. No. Only when the idealistic longing for independence is organized in such a way that it can fight for its ideal with military force, only then can the urgent wish of a people be transformed into a potent reality.             Any WELTANSCHAUUNG, though a thousandfold right and supremely beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become the rallying point of a militant movement. And, on its own side, this movement will remain a mere party until is has brought its ideals to victory and transformed its party doctrines into the new foundations of a State which gives the national community its final shape.             If an abstract conception of a general nature is to serve as the basis of a future development, then the first prerequisite is to form a clear understanding of the nature and character and scope of this conception.             For only on such a basis can a movement he founded which will be able to draw the necessary fighting strength from the internal cohesion of its principles and convictions. From general ideas a political programme must be constructed and a general WELTANSCHAUUNG must receive the stamp of a definite political faith. Since this faith must be directed towards ends that have to be attained in the world of practical reality, not only must it serve the general ideal as such but it must also take into consideration the means that have to be employed for the triumph of the ideal. Here the practical wisdom of the statesman must come to the assistance of the abstract idea, which is correct in itself. In that way an eternal ideal, which has everlasting significance as a guiding star to mankind, must be adapted to the exigencies of human frailty so that its practical effect may not be frustrated at the very outset through those shortcomings which are general to mankind. The exponent of truth must here go hand in hand with him who has a practical knowledge of the soul of the people, so that from the realm of eternal verities and ideals what is suited to the capacities of human nature may be selected and given practical form. To take abstract and general principles, derived from a WELTANSCHAUUNG which is based on a solid foundation of truth, and transform them into a militant community whose members have the same political faith–a community which is precisely defined, rigidly organized, of one mind and one will–such a transformation is the most important task of all; for the possibility of successfully carrying out the idea is dependent on the successful fulfilment of that task. Out of the army of millions who feel the truth of these ideas, and even may understand them to some extent, one man must arise. This man must have the gift of being able to expound general ideas in a clear and definite form, and, from the world of vague ideas shimmering before the minds of the masses, he must formulate principles that will be as clear-cut and firm as granite. He must fight for these principles as the only true ones, until a solid rock of common faith and common will emerges above the troubled waves of vagrant ideas. The general justification of such action is to be sought in the necessity for it and the individual will be justified by his success.             If we try to penetrate to the inner meaning of the word VÖLKISCH we arrive at the following conclusions:             The current political conception of the world is that the State, though it possesses a creative force which can build up civilizations, has nothing in common with the concept of race as the foundation of the State. The State is considered rather as something which has resulted from economic necessity, or, at best, the natural outcome of the play of political forces and impulses. Such a conception of the foundations of the State, together with all its logical consequences, not only ignores the primordial racial forces that underlie the State, but it also leads to a policy in which the importance of the individual is minimized. If it be denied that races differ from one another in their powers of cultural creativeness, then this same erroneous notion must necessarily influence our estimation of the value of the individual. The assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is nothing but the application–effected by the Jew, Karl Marx–of a general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith; but in reality that general concept had existed long before the time of Karl Marx. If it had not already existed as a widely diffused infection the amazing political progress of the Marxist teaching would never have been possible. In reality what distinguished Karl Marx from the millions who were affected in the same way was that, in a world already in a state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. But all this was done in the service of his race.             Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of the mentality which underlies the general concept of life to-day. For this reason alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against Marxism. For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same poisons and its conception of life in general differs from Marxism only in degree and in the character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois world is Marxist but believes in the possibility of a certain group of people–that is to say, the bourgeoisie–being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews.             Over against all this, the VÖLKISCH concept of the world recognizes that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind. Therefore on the VÖLKISCH principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the VÖLKISCH concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth that the principle underlying all Nature’s operations is the aristocratic principle and it believes that this law holds good even down to the last individual organism. It selects individual values from the mass and thus operates as an organizing principle, whereas Marxism acts as a disintegrating solvent. The VÖLKISCH belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost forever.             On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the earth.             To undermine the existence of human culture by exterminating its founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the eyes of those who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human existence.             Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.             Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord with Nature’s will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth and will be free to work in every domain all over the world and even reach spheres that lie outside the earth.             We all feel that in the distant future many may be faced with problems which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a race destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have at its disposal the means and resources of the whole world.             It is evident that such a general sketch of the ideas implied in the folk concept of the world may easily be interpreted in a thousand different ways. As a matter of fact there is scarcely one of our recent political movements that does not refer at some point to this conception of the world. But the fact that this conception of the world still maintains its independent existence in face of all the others proves that their ways of looking at life are quite difierent from this. Thus the Marxist conception, directed by a central organization endowed with supreme authority, is opposed by a motley crew of opinions which is not very impressive in face of the solid phalanx presented by the enemy. Victory cannot be achieved with such weak weapons. Only when theinternational idea, politically organized by Marxism, is confronted by the folk idea, equally well organized in a systematic way and equally well led–only then will the fighting energy in the one camp be able to meet that of the other on an equal footing; and victory will be found on the side of eternal truth.             But a general conception of life can never be given an organic embodiment until it is precisely and definitely formulated. The function which dogma fulfils in religious belief is parallel to the function which party principles fulfil for a political party which is in the process of being built up. Therefore, for the conception of life that is based on the folk idea it is necessary that an instrument be forged which can be used in fighting for this ideal, similar to the Marxist party organization which clears the way for internationalism.             And this is the aim which the German National Socialist Labour Movement pursues.             The folk conception must therefore be definitely formulated so that it may be organically incorporated in the party. That is a necessary prerequisite for the success of this idea. And that it is so is very clearly proved even by the indirect acknowledgment of those who oppose such an amalgamation of the folk idea with party principles. The very people who never tire of insisting again and again that the conception of life based on the folk idea can never be the exclusive property of a single group, because it lies dormant or ‘lives’ in myriads of hearts, only confirm by their own statements the simple fact that the general presence of such ideas in the hearts of millions of men has not proved sufficient to impede the victory of the opposing ideas, which are championed by a political party organized on the principle of class conflict. If that were not so, the German people ought already to have gained a gigantic victory instead of finding themselves on the brink of the abyss. The international ideology achieved success because it was organized in a militant political party which was always ready to take the offensive. If hitherto the ideas opposed to the international concept have had to give way before the latter the reason is that they lacked a united front to fight for their cause. A doctrine which forms a definite outlook on life cannot struggle and triumph by allowing the right of free interpretation of its general teaching, but only by defining that teaching in certain articles of faith that have to be accepted and incorporating it in a political organization.             Therefore I considered it my special duty to extract from the extensive but vague contents of a general WELTANSCHAUUNG the ideas which were essential and give them a more or less dogmatic form. Because of their precise and clear meaning, these ideas are suited to the purpose of uniting in a common front all those who are ready to accept them as principles. In other words: The German National Socialist Labour Party extracts the essential principles from the general conception of the world which is based on the folk idea. On these principles it establishes a political doctrine which takes into account the practical realities of the day, the nature of the times, the available human material and all its deficiencies. Through this political doctrine it is possible to bring great masses of the people into an organization which is constructed as rigidly as it could be. Such an organization is the main preliminary that is necessary for the final triumph of this ideal.