The Guardian reported on Jan. 2, 2011:

“The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has lost his high court appeal against extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations.

Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Ouseley on Wednesday handed down their judgment in the 40-year-old Australian’s appeal against a European arrest warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors after rape and sexual assault accusations made by two Swedish women following his visit to Stockholm in August 2010.”

Ron Paul Dominates The Iowa Youth Vote, Nextgen.com

“At Tuesday night’s Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney won by a narrow eight votes over Rick Santorum, but Ron Paul dominated among the youth. In fact, of the 18,000 Iowans under the age of 30 who participated in the GOP Caucuses last night, Paul earned the support of 48%, according to data collected by CIRCLE. Rick Santorum came in second with 23%, while Romney gathered just 14% support.

According to those numbers, roughly 8,800 young people caucused for Ron Paul last night. And while that’s still far less than the estimated 30,000 young Iowans who supported Barack Obama in the 2008 caucus, it’s very substantial. Young voters supported Ron Paul in a much higher percentage than any other age group supported any candidate.”

Comment:

I think this confirms quite thoroughly my long-held suspicion that one of Ron Paul’s largest bases is young people. It’s only natural. Young people are still young enough and idealistic enough to be attracted by purist consistency and repelled by the nature of war. And, of course, the economic situation they inherit has the largest effect on their lives for the longest time.

Nothing wrong with that.

However, it does mean that if Ron Paul wants to win over more adult voters, he has to make a more persuasive case than he’s made so far that he would be able to roll-back empire without playing into the hands of those who have an agenda to undermine the country, not merely limit government/empire.

At LRC blog, support by Pimco’s Bill Gross for Ron Paul, is being taken as a good thing, because, supposedly, it shows he’s changing the establishment. My response to that is a bit more circumspect. Hmmm. There are some people you’d rather have opposing you, so extensive is their history of carrying water for the establishment.

Likewise, Paul’s uncritical support for Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and  OccupyWallStreet, probably brought him a lot of support among young anarchists and gave him a boost in visibility. But just as likely they lost him the support of more cynical adults who don’t see these leakers, hackers and occupiers (trendy masks, anarchist rhetoric and all) as quite the unadulterated forces for good the media deems them to be.

It’s the embrace of facile positions like these, among other things, that have made me distinctly ambiguous about Paul since 2008.

Only the passage of the horrible NDAA has made me change my stance, although none of my misgivings. Even so, I wonder at the timing of the NDAA – its coincidence with the sudden discovery of chat logs that prove that Assange helped Manning hack into military computers….and some other coincidences I’ll not mention for now.

There are layers of deception here. Let’s just say there are no messiahs on white horses, even in the case of this likeable southern gentleman-politician.

And then, there’s the rigidity of thinking that frequently goes along with naivete of perception.

Not that I think non-interventionism, or, if you prefer, isolationism, is necessarily a naive position. Not at all. Far better to stick with what you know and avoid meddling in matters you know nothing about. But that’s not the situation that presents itself in American foreign policy at this point. We have already meddled...and meddled…and meddled. The real question now is how to successfully extricate ourselves both from our meddling and from the consequences of our meddling. That is an entirely different thing, both analytically and morally.

But in a time and place where appearances count for everything and people are eager to hear what they want to hear, I don’t expect anyone to either note such nuances or care much about them.

More’s the pity.

Butler Shaeffer:

“Ron [Paul] is doing quite well for a candidate who, one statist  twit warns us, only opposes federal policies because he wants to establish, at the state level, a male dominated religion that will stone gays to death!”

Mike Whitney in Counterpunch:

“It’s a question of priorities, right? So, what’s more important; ending the bloodletting or some potential threat to Social Security?

Paul will stop the killing. We should use our vote to do the same.”

Neo-Hindu medical guru Deepak Chopra:

“The highest form of intelligence you can have is to observe yourself. Let it go at that. You don’t need to judge, you don’t need to analyze, you don’t even need to change. This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically.”

“The worst thing you can do is be a conformist and buy into conformity. It’s the worst possible thing. It’s better to be outrageous…better to hang out with the sages, the people open to possibilities, even the psychotics. You never know where you’ll find the geniuses of our society.”

WHAT RON PAUL REALLY MEANS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS

This is a clip from 2008, but the reasons she cites have only multiplied and become more powerful:

Ending the war on drugs – Ending the war on guns – Ending the prison-industrial complex – Returning the schools to the people – Ending welfare dependency – Ending unjust foreign wars – Truth – Freedom – Coming together.

Ron Paul Brings People Together
(while the media divides them)

Speaker (African-American woman who supports Ron Paul):

Black people, African Americans, people of color, whatever you want to call yourself, don’t be afraid. We cannot vote for people based on the color of their skin. We cannot vote for people based on their gender. We have to look at the truth.

This war on drugs is killing our children, it’s killing our families, it’s killing our communities.

This war on guns is killing our children, it’s killing our families.

There are too many of our men sitting in prison.

There are too many black women without husbands because young black boys are struggling in school.

We need the education system turned back to the states. And we need to get rid of these federal (not clear).

So we can build our families back, and love each other and take care of each other.

Don’t be afraid. Take a stand. Believe in the truth.

I just heard Barack Obama is going to send a 100,000 more troops.

He said that I think in March. I am really against the war. I have a 12 year old son who is brilliant. I come from a family of veterans so I have no problem with people fighting for your country.

But we need to fight in just wars.

Nobody matches Ron Paul in telling the truth as they know it.

I don’t want to call them liars. We want to be tasteful here.

But freedom is popular.

Freedom is truth and truth is power.

James Bacque, author of “Other Losses” and other works of revisionist history about WW II, describes extensive Wikipedia manipulation of accounts of his work in “Why Is Wikipedia Censoring Me?”

“In 1989, I published the first in a series of books about the Second World War and its aftermath. The first, Other Losses, showed the tremendous atrocities committed against enemy prisoners in the prison camps of the US and France after 1945. The next, Just Raoul, was a biography of a hero of the French Resistance who saved many refugees from Nazi death camps. The next, Crimes and Mercies, described the full extent of all allied crimes against Germans, plus the wonderful charity work of Canada and the USA in saving 800 million people, including Germans, Japanese and Italians, from starving to death in the hungry years after 1945. The next, Dear Enemy, illuminated the attitudes of the western allies to Germany from 1945 to now.

J

Wikipedia reviews and criticizes only Other Losses, and in such a biassed way, that I finally tried to correct their many errors. Starting in March, 2006, I tried repeatedly over many weeks to correct the errors, but found that within a day at first, then within hours, and finally within minutes, some Wikipedian editor had expunged my corrections, replacing them with ever more hostile and denigrating allegations. Friends of mine tried also to correct the flawed Wikipedia article, but found the same situation. Finally we decided that Wikipedia was deliberately censoring my contributions, and that it was pointless to continue trying to present the facts on Wikipedia. After Serendipity (already acquainted with censorship at Wikipedia) heard of this situation I was offered the chance to publish the real story, which appears below.

——————————————————————————–

Wikipedia quotes Stephen E. Ambrose as saying that Other Losses is “… spectacularly flawed …” without saying that Ambrose also wrote that “You have made a major historical discovery which will … span the oceans and have reverberations for decades, yea centuries to come. You have the goods on these guys …”

Wikipedia does not say that Ambrose changed his mind only after he was retained by the US Army to lecture at the War College in Pennsylvania. Nor does Wikipedia mention that in his attack on me in the New York Times, he admitted that he had not done the necessary research to reach the conclusions that he published in that same article. Wikipedia fails to mention that the Ambrose it cites as an authority admitted that he had plagiarized several other authors. Wikipedia does not concern itself with the accusations that Ambrose stole work from a graduate student which he published as his own.

Wikipedia ignores my book, Crimes and Mercies, which goes far towards balancing the record of western actions after World War Two. The book shows the great charity extended by the western allies, chiefly Canada and the USA, towards the starving around the world after WW2, including the Japanese and Germans. Saying that the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject my work, and citing as an authority one historian who has never worked in this field, Wikipedia ignores the support given me by the eminent US Army military historian Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, a former Senior Historian of the US Army Center for Military History, Washington. Fisher, a professional historian for decades, wrote the official US Army history of the campaign in Italy. He assisted me for months in researching documents in the US National Archives, wrote the Introduction to my book Other Losses, and has supported me with public statements for the seventeen years since its first publication. He helped me for many months researching in the archives.

Wikipedia does not mention the expert editing, research help and public support given me by the eminent epidemiologist and biostatistician, Dr Anthony B. Miller, former head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Toronto.

Wikipedia also casts aside the support given my work by Richard Overy, King’s College, University of London; Otto Kimminich, University of Regensburg; Dr Alfred De Zayas, author of many books on postwar German history; Prof. Dr. Peter Hoffmann, McGill University, author of the most expert books on the German resistance; Prof. J. K. Johnson, Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Ralph Raico, University of Buffalo; Prof. Ed Peterson, University of Wisconsin; Prof Ralph Scott, University of Iowa; Prof. Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of Seattle; Prof. Dr Richard Mueller, former head, Department of English, University of Aachen; Prof. Hans Koch, University of York and many others.

Among writers who have approved my work and supported me are Julian Barnes; Nikolai Tolstoy; John Fraser, Master of Massey College, Toronto; John Bemrose of Toronto; Robert Kroetsch, Winnipeg; and many others. My work has been published around in the world in ten languages by Macmillan, Little, Brown, Prima, Ullstein, Editions Sand, McClelland and Stewart, New Press, and many many others.

Finally, the most glaring omission is that the massive and detailed KGB Archives in Moscow have millions of documents whose evidence completely confirms the statistical work in Other Losses. The math is simple: about 1.5 million German prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home, nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the International Red Cross or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by anyone. Thus when Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect Other Losses was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for a total of 450,587.

This astonishing discovery is not mentioned in Wikipedia, nor by any other of the “professional historians.” Except one, Stefan Karner, who went to the KGB archives, saw the evidence piled up in enormous quantities, and said he did not believe it. Instead, he preferred to publish his own “estimates,” which confirm the conventional view. “

The African libertarians who fought for freedom are described in this piece in Le Monde Diplomatique by Elikia M’bokolo.

“Africans, like all other peoples, had no particular liking for slavery. Slavery was generated and maintained by a specific system. While the revolts of black slaves during the Atlantic crossing and in America are well documented, there is much less awareness of the scale and diversity of resistance to slavery within Africa. Both to the Atlantic slave trade as such and to the slavery in Africa which it induced or aggravated.

One long neglected source is Lloyd’s List. It throws unexpected light on the rejection of the slave trade in the African coastal societies. It is packed full of details of damage to vessels insured by the famous London company from its foundation in 1689. The figures show that in more than 17% of cases, the damage was due to local rebellion or plundering in Africa. The perpetrators of these revolts were the slaves themselves, assisted by the coastal population. It is as if there were two separate interests at work: the interest of states that had allowed themselves to become incorporated in the slavery system, and the interest of free peoples who were under constant threat of enslavement and were moved to act in solidarity with those already reduced to slavery.

As for slavery within African society itself, everything appears to indicate that it grew in parallel with the Atlantic slave trade and was reinforced by it. It similarly gave rise to many forms of resistance: flight, open rebellion, and recourse to the protection afforded by religion (attested in both Islamic and Christian countries). In the Senegal valley, for example, the attempts by certain monarchs to enslave and sell their own subjects gave rise, at the end of the 17th century, to the Marabout war and the Toubenan movement (from the word tuub, meaning to convert to Islam). Its founder, Nasir al-Din, proclaimed that “God does not permit kings to pillage, kill or enslave their peoples. He appointed them, on the contrary, to preserve their subjects and protect them from their enemies. Peoples were not made for kings, but kings for peoples.”

Further south, in what is now Angola, the Kongo peoples invoked Christianity in the same way, both against the missionaries, who were compromised in the slave trade, and against the local powers. At the beginning of the 18th century a prophetess in her twenties, Kimpa Vita (also known as Doña Beatrice), turned the slave traders’ racist arguments on their head and began to preach that “there are no Blacks or Whites in heaven” and that “Jesus Christ and other saints are black and come from the Congo”. Similar appeals to religion are still a feature of demands for freedom and equality in various parts of Africa. Clearly, the slave trade was far from marginal. It is central to modern African history, and resistance to it engendered attitudes and practices that have persisted to the present day.

A continent of “savages”

The ideas of abolitionist propaganda, which certain ways of commemorating the abolition of slavery tend to reinforce, should not be accepted uncritically. The desire for freedom, and freedom itself, did not come to the Africans from outside, whether from Enlightenment philosophers, abolitionist agitators or republican humanists. They came from internal developments within the African societies themselves. Moreover, from the end of the 18th century, merchants in countries bordering on the Gulf of Guinea, who had mostly grown rich on the slave trade, began to distance themselves from slavery and send their children to Britain to train in the sciences and other professions useful for the development of commerce. That is why, throughout the 19th century, African societies had no trouble responding positively to the inducements of industrialized Europe, which had converted to “lawful” trade in the produce of the land and was henceforth hostile to the “unlawful” and “shameful” trade in slaves.

But the Africa of the 19th century was very different from the continent which Europeans had encountered four hundred years earlier. As the Trinidadian historian, Walter Rodney, has tried to show, Africa had been drawn by the slave trade down a dangerous path, and it was now well and truly underdeveloped (6). The racism rooted in the slave-trade era blossomed anew in these propitious circumstances. European discourse on Africa now centred on the “backwardness” and “savagery” of the continent. On the basis of such value judgements, the West was postulated as a model. African upheavals and regression were attributed, not to real historical developments in which Europe had played a part, but to the “innate nature” of the Africans themselves. Emergent colonialism and imperialism cloaked themselves in humanitarian garb and invoked “racial superiority” and the “White Man’s burden”. The former slave-trading states now spoke only of liberating Africa from “Arab” slavers and the black potentates who were also engaged in slavery.

However, once the colonial powers had carved up the continent between them, they took great care not to abolish the slavery structures they had found in place. Any change would have to be gradual, they argued, and “native” customs had to be respected. Slavery thus persisted within the colonial system, as we can see from the League of Nations surveys conducted between the two world wars (7).

Worse still, in order to drive the economic machine, they created a new type of slavery in the form of forced labour. “Whatever it is called, nothing can disguise the fact that forced labour is de facto and de jure simply the reintroduction and promotion of slavery (8).” Here again, to look no further than the French example, the impulse for freedom came from Africa. It was due to the efforts of the African deputies, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Léopold Sédar Senghor, that forced labour was at last abolished in 1946.”

M. V. Kamath in Hindu Existence describes how several states have been looting Hindu temples, taking over their lands and selling them, to pay government debt, and in some cases, endowing churches and mosques, with hardly anyone aware. Many Hindus are intimidated from expressing outrage because of the pervasive demonization of Hindu activism as “extremist” by the westernized and largely Marxist English media outlets that set the tone of debates and carry far greater influence and power at the national and international levels.

“A charge has been made not by any Temple authority, but by a foreign writer, Stephen Knapp in a book (Crimes Against India and the Need to Protect Ancient Vedic Tradition) published in the United States that makes shocking reading.

Hundreds of temples in centuries past have been built in India by devout rulers and the donations given to them by devotees have been used for the benefit of the people. If, presently, money collected has ever been misused (and that word needs to be defined), it is for the devotees to protest and not for any government to interfere. This letter is what has been happening currently under an intrusive law. It would seem, for instance, that under a Temple Empowerment Act, about 43,000 temples in Andhra Pradesh have come under government control and only 18 per cent of the revenue of these temples have been returned for temple purposes, the remaining 82 per cent being used for purposes unstated.

Apparently even the world-famous Tirumala Tirupati Temple has not been spared. According to Knapp, the temple collects over Rs 3,100 crores every year “and the State Government has not denied the charge that as much as 85 per cent of this is transferred to the State Exchequer, much of which goes to causes that are not connected with the Hindu community”. Was it for that reason that devotees make their offering to the temples? Another charge that has been made is that the Andhra Government has also allowed the demolition of at least ten temples for the construction of a golf course. “Imagine the outcry” writes Knapp, “if ten mosques had been demolished”.

“It would seem that in Karanataka, Rs. 79 crores were collected from about two lakh temples and from that, temples received Rs seven crores for their maintenance, Muslim madrassahs and Haj subsidy were given Rs 59 crore and churches about Rs 13 crore. Very generous of the government. Because of this, Knapp writes, “25 per cent of the two lakh temples or about 50,000 temples in Karnataka will be closed down for lack of resources”, and he adds: “The only way the government can continue to do this is because people have not stood up enough to stop it”. Knapp then refers to Kerala where, he says, “funds from the Guruvayur Temple are diverted to other government projects denying improvement to 45 Hindu temples”. Land belonging to the Ayyappa Temple, apparently has been grabbed and “Church encroaches are occupying huge areas of forest land, running into thousands of acres, near Sabarimala”.

A charge is made that the Communist state government of Kerala…. wants to pass an Ordinance to disband the Travancore & Cochin Autonomous Devaswom Boards (TCDBs) and take over their limited independent authority of 1,800 Hindu temples. If what the author says is true, even the Maharashtra Government wants to take over some 450,000 temples in the state which would “supply a huge amount of revenue to correct the state’s bankrupt conditions….” And to top it all, Knapp says that in Orissa, the state government intends to sell over 70,000 acres of endowment lands from the Jagannath Temple, the proceeds of which would solve a huge financial crunch brought about by its own mismanagement of temple assets.

Says Knapp: “Why such occurrences are so often not known is that the Indian media, especially the English television and press, are often anti-Hindu in their approach, and thus not inclined to give much coverage, and certainly no sympathy, for anything that may affect the Hindu community. Therefore, such government action that play against the Hindu community go on without much or any attention attracted to them”.