History

9/11 Plus Seven Years

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(This is basically a rerun of my post from this day in 2006. Some new links added this year are at the bottom of the post.)

I am increasingly worried about our prospects for success in the battle against those who would destroy our civilization. America and the other democracies possess great military, economic, and intellectual strengths–but severe internal divisions threaten our ability to use these resources effectively.

Within days of the collapse of the Towers, it started. “Progressive” demonstrators brought out the stilt-walkers, the Uncle Sam constumes, and the giant puppets of George Bush. They carried signs accusing America of planning “genocide” against the people of Afghanistan.

Professors and journalists preached about the sins of Western civilization, asserting that we had brought it all on ourselves. A well-known writer wrote of her unease when her daughter chose to buy and display an American flag. Some universities banned the display of American flags in dormitories, claiming that such display was “provocative.”

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Vote Harvesters

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From Creation Myths:What Barack Obama won’t tell you about his community organizing past [h/t Instapundit]:

Kellman had hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago’s South Side…Roseland and the northern edge of Riverdale, the neighborhoods to which he was assigned, had been decimated by the collapse of the steel industry…    “His assignment was to operate in the classic style,”…

Community-Organizers come from outside of the community. An outside organization hires,trains and dispatches (assigns)  them to a community in order to mobilize the community to seek the kind of solutions that the organization wants.  Communities  don’t ask for these people to be sent, they show up and start taking over. Ultimately, the organization seeks to harness the political power of a community for the elitists’ own ends.  

The article sugarcoats Alinsky’s ideology and  methodology. Alinsky advocated a ruthlessly  pragmatic  model  which sent “community organizers”, modeled on the communist concept of agitators, into local  communities  to  exploit  local concerns to build a political movement that would eventually destroy the old order.  

Even without Alinsky’s philosophy, it’s clear that community organizers represent a foreign influence on a community. They do not represent the people of a community coming together to solve problems or petition the government. They represent a tool by which a radical elite harvests votes and power from  vulnerable  communities.  

They represent the antithesis of traditional American bottom-upward political actions.  

We Did Not “Carpet Bomb” Hanoi!

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G*damit! So, I’m listening to the Republican convention in passing and in the little video revealing McCain’s life story, they say that McCain’s father ordered the “carpet bombing” of Hanoi.  

Jeebus! Where to start. First of all, McCain’s father was an Admiral and any wide-area  saturation  bombing would be carried out by the Air Force. [update: see first comment]

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Thatcher’s Economy

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[T]he British economy began its long boom, combining economic growth with price stability. Loss-making industries were closed down or reduced in size. Manufacturing industries shed labor, often while increasing output, as they restructured to meet foreign competition. New companies or entrepreneurs from academic and non-industrial backgrounds established new industries in the financial services, information, and high-tech sectors. Privatization transformed inefficient state-owned industries into dynamic private sector enterprises. New financial instruments allowed entrepreneurs to take over sluggish low-earning companies and put their assets to more profitable uses.
 
In general, Thatcher’s British economy, like Reagan’s revived U.S. economy, was characterized by change, profitability, growth, the better allocation of resources (including labor), and the emergence of new industries—indeed of an entirely new economy—based on the information revolution.

John O’Sullivan. RTWT.

We are so far into the era of the Big Lie about Mrs. Thatcher and what she accomplished, that it is good to refresh our recollections from time to time.

Post-war East Germany was no safe place for Jews

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As an exhibition in Berlin earlier this year demonstrated, Jewish Communists returning from exile to the Soviet occupied part of Germany were confronted with prejudice and suspicion and sometimes even had to fear for their lives. The exhibition was located in the rebuilt Neue Synagogue (New Synagogue) and curated by the Centrum Judaicum Foundation, in cooperation with the historian Andreas Weigelt, who is attending to the documentation center for the former concentration camp Lieberose.

Called “Zwischen Bleiben und Gehen” (“Between Staying and Going”), the exhibition documented the lives of 10 Jewish men and women in the post-war Soviet occupied zone, later East Germany:

Nelhans’ fate was especially tragic. Having survived the war underground in Berlin, he helped found a Jewish community in East Berlin in late 1945, only to be arrested in 1948 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service – allegedly for helping Jewish Red Army soldiers escape to Palestine.

Jailed for 25 years by a military court, he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1950, aged 51. Some 47 years later the Russian military authorities conceded Nelhans had been falsely convicted and ordered his posthumous rehabilitation.

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The East-West propaganda battle began immediately after the war. The Communist Party loudly trumpeted its view that East Germany was innocent of the evil Nazi past.

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Stalinist party purges in Eastern Europe, accompanied by anti-Semitic show trials in Prague and Budapest sparked fear among Jews in East Berlin.

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Jews who were communist party members often found themselves accused of being “Zionist agents” or “Jewish nationalists” at a time when the communist Eastern bloc was supporting Arab states in their conflict with Israel.

The website of the Centrum Judaicum itself currently has no information on this exhibition, but here is some English language information on two other past exhibitions: Pioneers in Celluloid: Jews in Early Cinema and Relatively Jewish. Albert Einstein Jew, Zionist, Nonconformist.

Some more pictures of the Neue Synagoge can be found here.