Who died and made him God?

2:00 PM, JUNE 26 2013

The Errors of Edward Snowden and His Global Hypocrisy Tour

by Kurt Eichenwald

[Well at least Bradley Manning did it to show off for his tranny boyfriend.]

My tolerance for Edward Snowden has run out.

The former contractor with the National Security Agency who divulged classified secrets about domestic surveillance programs has undertaken what can only be depicted as the global hypocrisy tour. A man outraged by American surveillance and who advocates free expression toodles happily to Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China? Then off to Moscow? Then tries for Ecuador (and, in some accounts, Cuba)?

And along the way, Eddie decided to toss out classified information about foreign-intelligence surveillance by the United States in other countries. For the Chinese, he was quite a spigot of secrets. He revealed documents showing that the N.S.A. had obtained text messages from the Chinese by hacking into some of the country’s telecommunications networks, engaged in computer espionage activities at Tsinghua University, and hacked into systems of Pacnet, an Asian provider of global telecommunications service.

Now, before I get into the specifics of Snowden’s China leaks, I want to stop for a minute. I know that, from the time he disclosed classified documents about the mass collection of Americans’ telecommunications data, there have been plenty of debates about whether Snowden is a whistle-blower or a traitor. And I can understand that disagreement when it comes to the data-mining program that slurps up e-mail and phone data of American citizens. But what, exactly, is Snowden attempting to prove with his China revelations? That countries engage in espionage? That the United States listens in on communications of countries with which it maintains often tense and occasionally volatile relations?

The existence of electronic espionage seems to be his beef. In an interview with the South China Morning Post—in which he admitted that he took a job as a systems administrator with an N.S.A. consultant, Booz Allen Hamilton, for the purpose of stealing classified documents—Snowden laid out his bizarre and egomaniacal philosophy: he would decide what information to pass on in countries around the world.

“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.”

I’ll have to assume that Snowden is on this fit of self-righteous arrogance because he thinks there is something wrong with what he’s seen of United States surveillance in other countries. But to decide that standard espionage activities are improper is a foolish, ahistorical belief.

N.S.A. surveillance has been beneficial repeatedly in American foreign policy. Although most instances remain secret, we already know that the N.S.A. listened to Soviet pilots during the 1983 shooting down of a South Korean airliner; used intercepted diplomatic messages to track a 1986 Berlin disco bombing to Libya; and used the cell phones’ SIM cards to track terrorist suspects after the 9/11 attacks.

But let’s take a more important example. In 1937—at a time when the United States was declaring neutrality in the emerging global tensions that fueled World War II—the Japanese government created a cipher for its military messages using a device called the “97-shiki O-bun In-ji-ki.” The Americans code-named it “Purple.”

The United States military was able to intercept Japanese communications (the very reason that Tokyo needed a code) but couldn’t decrypt the information sent through the Purple machine. William Friedman, the first American cryptography expert who tried to break the code, made some progress before suffering a nervous breakdown. Using that initial information, others managed to break more of the code. Once cracked, the United States could track Japanese naval-troop movements and even intercepted communications containing plans for the Pearl Harbor attack—information that was not properly used.

Would Snowden have been outraged that the United States was intercepting Japanese data at a time when the countries were not at war? It took years to crack the Purple code—would Snowden think the United States should have waited until after Pearl Harbor to tap into Japanese communication lines, and only then begin the arduous effort to break the code? And if not, then what is his point in turning over these kinds of secrets to the Chinese? All I have to say is, thank God Snowden was not around in 1937, four years before the United States joined the war—Lord knows how many Americans would have died if he had acted with whatever arrogance, or self-righteousness, or narcissism, or pure treasonous beliefs that drove him to his espionage on behalf of the Chinese.

Now for a closer look at the specific details Snowden turned over. In trying to understand this, I reached out to an individual I know who spent much of a lifetime in the intelligence world, including some related to parts of Asia. While he specifically stated that nothing he discussed would be based on classified information, he was able to offer a number of educated explanations why the United States would be involved in the activities in China that Snowden revealed.

Take the actions involving Tsinghua University. There are many reasons the N.S.A. would be interested in communications and computer activities at this Beijing-based school. For example, beginning in the past decade or so, university programs on arms control have played an important role in the Chinese government’s efforts to administer export controls on sensitive items. (For those wishing to know more, this is well detailed in a book published by the Rand Corporation called Chasing the Dragon: Assessing China’s System of Export Controls for WMD-Related Goods and Technologies.) Now, perhaps the most prominent university program in China on arms control is at—you guessed it—Tsinghua University. So, do you think there might be a reason why the N.S.A. would want to know about any communications on arms control that might take place between the Chinese government and Tsinghua?

The importance of China in global arms-control issues is hard to understate, even in American negotiations with Russia over proposals on nuclear-arms reduction. As Richard Weitz, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Political-Military Affairs at Hudson Institute, wrote last year:

China’s continued absence from strategic nuclear arms control negotiations is already impeding U.S.-Russian progress in this area. Beijing has traditionally resisted participating in formal nuclear arms control agreements. . . . Whereas U.S. officials want the next major nuclear arms reduction agreement to include only Russia and the United States, Russian negotiators want China and other nuclear weapons states to participate. In particular, Russian representatives insist they cannot reduce their major holdings of nonstrategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons without considering China’s growing military potential. Involving China in certain U.S.-Russian arms control processes could facilitate progress between Moscow and Washington in these areas and yield ancillary benefits for related issues.

[Just this week (6/25/13) the Russians started a series of tests of a new model missile of this class.]

Is this the reason for the N.S.A.’s activities at Tsinghua? My intel friend held it out as a good, educated guess, but then made a broader point. Contrary to the depictions in movies, the N.S.A. does not engage in foreign surveillance as part of some James Bond–ian plot to take over the world. Decisions are based on the national-security needs of the United States. Actions at Tsinghua are not arbitrary; there is a national-security reason they are being done, whether about arms-control policies in China, something else altogether, or both.

As for the N.S.A. gaining access to Pacnet, the best answer is: no kidding. Snowden has expressed seeming outrage both at this and at the fact that Britain, through the Government Communications Headquarters, had tapped into undersea fiber-optic cables. Pacnet operates EAC-C2C—the leading fiber-optic submarine cable network in Asia, connecting Hong Kong, China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and Singapore. In other words, international communications between Asian nations have a good chance of going through the Pacnet cables.

And, what apparently shocks Snowden but what any fool has known for years, the advent of fiber-optic technology has required the N.S.A. and other allied intelligence services to get into the business of cable-tapping. They had the choice: either tap cables or, in some fit of childish, Snowden-like horror at the demands of international security operations, surrender access to intelligence that the West has depended on for decades.

This problem was discussed in a top-secret, hush-hush, “no one can ever see it” public report by the Congressional Research Service on—get ready—January 16, 2001. This 12-year-old document explains not only the reason for expanded international surveillance, but also the need to tap cables:

In the past decade, two important trends have combined to change the nature of electronic surveillance efforts. The end of the Cold War meant policymakers and military officials had a wider range of countries that they were concerned with and placed much greater emphasis on “non-state actors”—terrorist groups and narcotics smuggling organizations that have come to be seen as genuine national security threats. These links are not necessarily easy targets given the great expansion in international telephone service that has grown by approximately 18% annually since 1992. Intelligence agencies are faced with profound “needle-in-a-haystack” challenges; it being estimated that in 1997 there were some 82 billion minutes of telephone service worldwide. The technologies used in civilian communications circuits have also changed; in the past decade reliance on microwave transmissions (which can be intercepted with relative efficiency) has been increasingly displaced by fiber optic cables. Fiber optics can carry far more circuits with greater clarity and through longer distances and provides the greater bandwidth necessary for transmitting the enormous quantities of data commonplace in the Internet age. Inevitably, fiber optic transmissions present major challenges to electronic surveillance efforts as their contents cannot be readily intercepted, at least without direct access to the cables themselves.

Please note, this document is pre-9/11, from a government analytical group outside of the intelligence agencies, discussing the need to tap cables for the purpose of aiding in the surveillance of terrorist groups and narcotics smugglers. (Asia, anyone?) This is not some excuse for what was done in the aftermath of the al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington.

But the most important sentence in this report is this: Intelligence agencies are faced with profound “needle-in-a-haystack” challenges. And that is the point of all of this Snowden-esque controversy. In the past, it was comparatively easy to snap up national-security intel—set up a microwave interception system targeting Soviet officials and agents, or some such. America could identify those who posed the national-security threat. Now, not so much.

To hunt for needles, the N.S.A. needs a global haystack that can be used for data mining. That is what the data collection is all about; no one has any interest in listening in on innocuous calls or reading pointless e-mails. This is all about using computers—massive, massive computers—and using complex models and algorithms to find the needles, rather than hoping to guess how to keep Americans safe, just in case the Ed Snowdens of the world might get upset with more intelligent approaches.

Which brings us back to Snowden’s global hypocrisy tour. I think nothing has more thoroughly damaged Snowden’s “whistle-blower” persona than his bizarre—and, I would say, cowardly—decision to rely on some of the countries with the greatest history of oppression to help keep him out of the American’s hands. (Usually, when people engage in civil disobedience for a cause—which Snowden seems to want people to believe he is doing—they accept the punishment that will accompany their decision. Snowden, instead, has acted like a spy, fleeing to countries with deeply strained relationships with the United States.

The irony of someone purportedly dedicated to privacy and human rights aiding the Chinese government grew even starker while Snowden was in Hong Kong. Last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report condemning a massive surveillance campaign undertaken by the Chinese government in Tibetan villages, which results in political re-education of those who may question the Communist regime and the establishment of partisan security units. “These tactics discriminate against those perceived as potentially disloyal, and restrict their freedom of religion and opinion,” Human Rights Watch wrote.

But hey, that’s just real life, not the Internet privacy that concerns Snowden. And, of course, the level of the Chinese government’s surveillance and control of their citizens’ use of the Internet is almost an art form. Just six months ago, China’s legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, adopted the “Decision to Strengthen the Protection of Online Information.” The new rules, which Human Rights Watch says “threaten security and privacy of internet users,” require telecommunications providers to collect reams of personal information about customers who sign up for Internet, landline, or cell-phone service. The law also requires for the providers to insure they have the ability to immediately identify the real names of people who post comments under pseudonyms. Guess why? “In the days following the decision,’’ Human Rights Watch reported, “several well-known online activists found that their weibo micro-blogging accounts had been shut down.’’

As for Russia, the crackdown on public activism has intensified in recent months, which, again, has led to Human Rights Watch issuing a report just a few weeks before Snowden landed in Moscow. “The crackdown is threatening civil society,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The EU has spoken out strongly in recent months, but now is the time to directly call on Russia’s leadership to revise restrictive laws and stop the harassment of independent groups.” Primarily, the Russians are going after hundreds of rights groups and related activist organizations as part of a massive campaign to force them to register as foreign agents. “The authorities are seeking to define ‘political’ so broadly as to make any involvement in public life that is not controlled by the government off-limits,” Williamson said. “They are also trying to tarnish groups with the ‘foreign agents’ label, which in Russia can only mean ‘spy.’”


And what about Ecuador? Why, just two weeks ago, this country that is apparently on Snowden’s list of possible future homes passed new rules that impede free expression. The statute, called the Communications Law, prohibits anyone from disseminating information through the media that might undermine the prestige or credibility of a person or institution (you know, like revealing a government-sponsored surveillance program). The law also places burdens on journalists, making them subject to civil or criminal penalties for publishing information that serves to undermine the security of the state (you know, like revealing a government-sponsored surveillance program).

The takeaway from all of this is perplexing. Perhaps Snowden is so impaired by his tunnel vision about America’s espionage techniques that he doesn’t understand he has made himself an international fool by cozying up to some of the world’s less-admirable regimes on issues of human rights. And there is another thing to bear in mind: Since Snowden seems keen on turning over secret American information to repressive governments, will he be, in the end, acting to aid that repression? Will whatever information he yields be the missing thread that these authoritarian governments need to oppress their citizens more?

I don’t know. Neither do you. And, in the most horrible reality of all, neither does Edward Snowden.

The Celebration of Murder as the Road to "Liberation"?

Why Is FBI Going After Assata Shakur Now?

By: Peniel E. Joseph

Posted: May 3, 2013 at 12:38 PM

The first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorists list is exiled in Cuba. That may be a key reason. [Or maybe there’s just no statute of limitations on murder.]

(The Root) -- The FBI's recent addition to its Most Wanted Terrorists list has reopened long-dormant wounds from America's racial past. Assata Shakur's (formerly Joanne Chesimard) distinction of being the first woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List evokes the triumphant and tragic legacy of the black power movement. [Triumphant? Dr. Joseph’s gonna have to go pretty far to find that legacy. Let us join the cakewalk, shall we.]

It was during an era whose high point, between the mid-1960's and mid-1970's, witnessed the exhilarating highs of Stokely Carmichael's defiant declaration of "black power" and the street-swaggering bravado of the leather-jacketed Black Panthers, as well as the low points of fratricidal violence among militants. That violence was aided and abetted by illegal surveillance of law-enforcement agencies, most notably the FBI's notorious Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. [And the amazing stupidity, arrogance and bloody minded thirst for violence of Huey Newton’s drug dealing Panthers and Maulana Ron Karanga’s United Slaves, AKA US. From all of this grew the street gangs that we know today The Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Kings and the syndicate in Chicago known as The Black Stone Rangers.]

For almost 30 years, Shakur has resided in an undisclosed location in Cuba. She is recognized by its government as a revolutionary fugitive in exile, even as U.S. authorities have sought to extradite her as a cold-blooded cop killer. [Notice the masturbatory revolution fantasy? Young Joanne, in a leather jumpsuit, AK-74 at the ready; yum, I’m getting hard already! It’s a shame she’s ballooned up to 200 lbs., and that’s on the light side. Gotta watch those rice and beans honey.] Shakur's life in Cuba has been marked by a tenuous duality: She is at once venerated by supporters -- including the Cuban government, which contributes to her living expenses -- and increasingly vilified by U.S. officials, who have placed a $2 million bounty on her head. [That wouldn't be the same Cuban “government” that has no problem sending out gangs of thugs to beat up The Women in White when they ask for the status of their disappeared husbands, sons and loved ones in peaceful street demonstrations. And isn’t it strange how so many of these women and the prisoners they care about are black? But you ask, “How can that be JimG33, when so many supporters of the Castro dictatorship in Amerikkka are African-American?” Just a quote on that point---“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his torment. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.” --- Eusebio Peñalver a black Cuban who spent 29 years in Castro’s gulag. Just sayin’.]

To understand Joanne Chesimard's evolution from a doe-eyed black teenager living in Queens, N.Y., to the black revolutionary named Assata Shakur, accused of murder, requires going back more than 45 years to an era of national civil unrest marked by anti-war protests, campus strikes and deteriorating relations between blacks and whites that had liberals and conservatives openly discussing the possibility of a race war. [The only people calling for a race war were Chesimard and the other knuckleheads who believed that crap, I’m pointing at you Malcolm the Tenth.] (Assata was part of the New York City Panthers, some of whom took the surname "Shakur." The group's members included Afeni Shakur, mother of rapper Tupac. Assata is also Tupac's step-aunt.)

By the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s April 4, 1968, assassination, race relations in America had reached bottom, highlighted by waves of urban riots that militants characterized as "rebellions" and government bureaucrats called "civil disorders." The Black Panther Party emerged from the burning embers of urban unrest at the vanguard of a revolution that would, paradoxically, be fought with guns and butter. The organization patrolled the streets of Oakland, Calif., brandishing legal weapons, and simultaneously established free breakfast programs, health clinics and anti-poverty measures that made it perhaps the era's most pragmatic revolutionary group. [When the Panther’s accountant, white, had discovered how much of that “free breakfast” money had ended up in the pockets of Huey and the boys, and had been used to finance their coke business, she ended up face down in the Golden Gate (check out Destructive Generation by David Horowitz for this story). And the legal guns, they were for two reasons (1) to push out the Mafia from the drug business in Oakland, (2) to hunt and kill police.]

The Panthers wrestled with this dual identity, with advocates of armed revolution breaking off into the Black Liberation Army, an entity inspired by the early writings of Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as well as successful guerrilla revolts in the developing world, most notably Cuba. [Just what every little Amerikkkan black boy wants to grow up to be, a domino playing unemployed nobody on the decaying streets of Havana. Well they could whore themselves out to the touristas.]

It's within this historical context that Chesimard became a black power activist, member of the underground BLA and convicted felon after being convicted accused of killing a New Jersey state trooper after a traffic stop gone [really] bad in 1973. Ironically, Newton, the Black Panthers' minister of defense, had been similarly accused of murdering a police officer six years earlier. The subsequent "Free Huey" movement galvanized the New Left radicals and black power activists, eventually leading to Newton's release in 1970. [By 1980 he had “earned” a PhD in The History Of Consciousness, the kind of degree that guarantees a life of “You want fries with that?” On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot in West Oakland by 24-year-old Black Guerrilla Family member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson shortly after Newton left a crack house. He must have been lecturing on consciousness in the Middle Ages. Why else would he be in such a place.]

Shakur's daring escape from jail in 1979 [She’s a regular Jimmy Cagney in White Heat!] and the publication of her gripping autobiography, Assata, in 1987 turned her into an icon, elevating her to the status of revolutionary cult figures such as former Panther/taxi driver Mumia Abu-Jamal. [Another cop killer who should have ridden Ole’ Sparky decades ago.] Their supporters remain as convinced of their innocence as their detractors are of their guilt.

Over the past quarter century, Shakur has intermittently made headlines, with former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman vowing to pursue her case. Shakur has become a kind of totemic figure, with young aspiring revolutionaries seeking her out as a living repository of an era they find both inspiring and confounding. [The era is only confounding to those who still don’t get why the USSR, and every other Marxist dictatorship, collapsed or is living on life support from the guilty West.]

Although the FBI has characterized Shakur as a domestic terrorist, it's important to note that BLA members defined themselves as revolutionaries in the mold of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and (in certain instances) George Washington and the soldiers in the American Revolution who engaged in asymmetrical warfare against a superior enemy. [That is a boldfaced lie of moral equivalence. Washington met the enemy in the field with an army and the political backing of the Continental Congress; he didn't set coach bombs in London, or even in British occupied New York.]

However ill-advised their vantage point, Shakur and hundreds of other "underground" soldiers of this era (including the Weather Underground, a violent offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society) viewed themselves as participants in a domestic war for liberation that was less about skin color and the fear of a race war and more about institutions (such as law enforcement and the federal government) that they found to be authoritarian, oppressive and therefore illegitimate. [And yet every year there are elections in Amerikka, power is peacefully passed from politician to politician. We have the dance of the parties and only people like the ones presented here throw bombs and murder people. And why, so we can live under their ”liberation” like the Marching Morons of The People’s Republic of North Korea?]

Cuba, not surprisingly, plays a central role in this drama. Its improbably successful 1959 revolution [Cuba went through a series of revolutions since their liberation from Spain in what we call The Spanish American War. For some reason, and I suspect it has to do with the Latin American allergy to the concept of personal liberty, these “revolutions” continued till Fidel and his party ended the bloody dance, and the politics of Cuba were frozen.] became a North Star for civil rights radicals and black power militants who, both before and after the State Department's travel ban, visited the island and praised its government's seeming commitment to racial equality. [Another lie. The deep seated racism of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and by extension, Fidel Castro should be better known. Some examples---. "We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing."   "The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."  "Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians." "Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn," The final example was his Bolivian adventure in which he didn't have time to learn Qitchwa, the language of the Inca still spoken by the local Indians. He actually expected them to rise up in revolt when the superior white man told them to. After all he was from Argentina where the Indians had been destroyed long ago, and I don’t mean moved onto reservations.]

Fidel Castro responded in kind, providing safe harbor for black fugitives Robert F. Williams and Cleaver, vowing to protect Carmichael from the reprisals of the U.S. government and offering a haven for representatives of the black liberation struggle that seemingly had no expiration date. [This had to do with the Revolution; otherwise they would have been just another set of uppity niggers to the Cuban ruling elite.]

That is, at least until now. The declining health of Castro and the advancing age of his brother Raúl have triggered rampant speculation that Cuba's socialist experiment is poised to conclude, or at least change dramatically. [Hell the Army and the Party have a deep bench, I guess, just hope they can move on when Fidel and Raul slip the mortal coil. But maybe there’ll be a civil war, who the fuck knows.] By announcing Shakur's new status, the U.S. government is perhaps throwing out a trial balloon to test the contemporary strength of past commitments. Fidel Castro's Cuba, on principle, would never give up Shakur to what it views to be an imperialist U.S. government with plans to imprison her. However, this is not Castro's Cuba. [How did he figure that out?] Indeed, the easing of travel restrictions is only one example of the ongoing thaw in Cuban-American relations.

Whether or not Shakur will be used as a sacrificial lamb to ensure further progress remains to be seen. For now her reappearance in national media headlines (including on the Internet, which did not exist during black power's heyday) reminds us of the ways in which our complicated racial past continues to inform our imagined post-racial present. [When it comes to an intellectual like Dr. Joseph, who has so much invested in the continuation of segregation such bloody minded “scholarship” will continue passing as, well, scholarship. Otherwise he would also face a life of “Do you want fries with that?]

Peniel E. Joseph is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and a professor of history at Tufts University. He is also the Caperton Fellow for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His biography of Stokely Carmichael will be published next year by Basic Books. He can be reached online at penielejoseph.com. Follow him on Twitter.

There is one feeling that people living in non-totalitarian countries are unable adequately to understand: a feeling of fear in a country without law and without justice. This feeling of fear could be read in the eyes and faces; it could be heard in voices and speeches. The feeling of fear destroys the process of communication between people. They say what they do not mean. They hear in other people’s words what is not meant. Who creates this atmosphere of fear? Who requires it? Can it be kept under control? To what extent does this feeling of fear alter the whole nature of a person? --- Yuri Glazov in The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death, 1985

Barry Goldwater and desegregation in Arizona before 1954.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE      

Desegregation, before Brown

Barry Goldwater and the forgotten campaign in Phoenix

By Kevin D. Williamson

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is one of the great landmarks of American history. It is also a good example of the fact that the law is not about the law. Maybe one in 500 college students ever has read the decision, and probably very few Americans could tell you much about the legal questions involved in Brown, but the moral question at the heart of the case — whether an apartheid regime of “separate but [formally] equal” would be allowed to stand in these United States — is well understood. It was well understood by the Court at the time, too: Remarkably, that contentious issue was settled in a unanimous decision. Even Hugo Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan named to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, was on board — but, in all fairness, Justice Black had not joined the Klan because he hated blacks: He had joined the Klan because he hated Catholics.

In any case, unanimity was the order of the day. Justice Felix Frankfurter thought that a unanimous decision was vital, even though a mere majority decision would have been just as legally binding — a fact to keep in mind the next time somebody tries to convince you that the Court is something other than a political body. It was not enough to have a decision in favor of desegregation: The country needed a mandate against segregation. It was in all likelihood death that made that unanimity possible: Chief Justice Fred Vinson, appointed by Democrat Harry S. Truman, had been hostile to overturning segregation without an act of Congress calling expressly for that. He died before Brown was decided. His replacement, Earl Warren, appointed by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, was eager to repeal segregation: He had been involved in fighting segregation in the California schools for some years, and as governor had signed the repeal of the last of the state’s segregation statutes.

Brown could hardly have been more symbolic. Third-grader Linda Brown had to walk six blocks to the bus stop and then ride a bus for a mile to her all-black elementary school, while there was another elementary school — an all-white one — just seven blocks away. Had it not been for segregation, Miss Brown would have attended Sumner Elementary, named for the great abolitionist Republican; instead, she was consigned to a segregated school named for Virginia slaveholder and proto-Democrat James Monroe. Sumner Elementary would later be closed by Topeka’s authorities — as part of a legally mandated desegregation plan necessitated by post-Brown litigation.

Everybody knows what happened in Topeka. Nobody knows what happened in Phoenix. And that is both odd and unfortunate.

When Earl Warren was working to undermine segregation in California, a number of his legal colleagues fanned out across the Southwest hoping to challenge segregation both in the courtroom and in the statehouses. We often forget that segregation was not for the most part something cooked up by wicked proprietors of theaters and restaurants (though there were those, too, to be sure), but was in the main something imposed on them by state and local governments. California had attempted to liberalize segregation by adopting a law making it voluntary, its enforcement optional. While that law would later be ruled unconstitutional, it was popular for a time as one possible model for letting a little daylight into the darkness of American race relations. One of the places were that was tried was Phoenix.

Here, Barry Goldwater enters the story. Goldwater was a department-store proprietor and a member of the Phoenix city council. He was a very conservative Republican, something that was not at all at odds with his membership in the NAACP, which was, in the 1950's, an organization in which Republicans and conservatives still were very much welcome. The civil-rights community in Phoenix, such as it was, did not quite know what to make of Goldwater. It was already clear by then that he was to be a conservative’s conservative and a man skeptical of federal overreach; while he described himself as being unprejudiced on what was at the time referred to as “the race question,” the fact was that he did not talk much about it, at least in public. His family department stores were desegregated under his watch, though he was not known to hire blacks to work there. But when the Arizona legislature was considering making segregation voluntary in the public schools, Goldwater was lobbying for it behind the scenes. And, perhaps more important, he organized a group of well-known white conservative leaders to do so as well. He did so on the advice of his friend Lincoln Ragsdale.

Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale were the first couple of civil rights in Arizona at the time. Lincoln had joined the Tuskegee Airmen in 1944, but the worst injury he ever got during his time in the service was a near-lynching at the hands of a gang of Alabama police officers after he was insufficiently deferential to a white gas-station clerk. One of the cops had intended to kill him, but the others objected on the grounds that he was wearing a military uniform. (Alabama had a very strange sense of patriotism at the time.) Lincoln was kind of a bad-ass: When he and his wife moved into a white neighborhood in Phoenix, vandals painted the word “NIGGER” in two-foot-high letters on the front of his house. Rather than paint over it, Lincoln left it there for all to see: “I wanted to make sure that the white folks knew where the nigger lived,” he later explained. Neighbors offered to buy him out, sparing him and the neighborhood the friction of his presence. He stayed put. In his Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West, Matthew C. Whitaker writes that pulling over Lincoln Ragsdale’s Cadillac sedan to harass the driver was a “rite of passage” for the local police.

The Ragsdales worked with the NAACP and the Arizona Council for Civic Unity/Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity to fight segregation in restaurants, theaters, and other public places in Phoenix, but the schools were the biggest target. When Lincoln was working to raise money for the NAACP for a lawsuit to integrate the schools, he turned to every possible source he could think of, including the conservative city councilman Barry Goldwater. To his surprise, Goldwater responded with a large check. What surprised him further was that Goldwater became a personal friend and political colleague of the couple, a “great inspiration,” in Lincoln’s words. The Ragsdales, Lincoln said, became the people to whom Goldwater brought “questions about how we felt about certain things, and we’d try to give him a very honest appraisal of it.” Goldwater supported most of the civil-rights legislation that preceded the famous 1964 act, which he opposed as unconstitutional. But as Ragsdale points out in Race Work, he also “helped make Tuskegee airman Chappie James a four-star general while he was in the Senate,” funded the school-integration lawsuit, and raised money to keep the Urban League solvent when it was on the verge of dissolution.

But funding the lawsuit may have been the most important thing Goldwater did in his civil-rights career. As the historian Quintard Taylor of the University of Washington puts it: “Most historians characterize the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education as the death knell for de jure public school segregation. Yet a little-known legal victory by . . . the Arizona NAACP before the Arizona State Supreme Court in 1953 provided an important precedent for the ruling by the highest court in the land.” The NAACP had not been getting very far suing on behalf of black students, but it had made some progress with suits on behalf of Mexican-American students: A 1951 decision had outlawed segregating Hispanic students in the Tolleson School District, and Phoenix refused to comply with the new legal standard, so it was targeted for a lawsuit, too: one that would have ended racial discrimination against any student. At times, it must have seemed as if segregation in the schools was the cornerstone upon which all segregation stood: Lincoln Ragsdale thought so, and Taylor relates the sentiments of a Phoenix businessman who said: “As long as they attend separate schools, I won’t let them drink in my bar or sit in my theater.” With the support of Goldwater and others, the NAACP sponsored a series of rallies, protests, and fund-raising efforts in support of its litigation.

The NAACP’s federal lawsuit went nowhere. Federal judge David Ling, another FDR appointee, threw the case out on the grounds that the state courts rather than the federal courts were the proper channel for the challenge. New litigation was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, seeking an end to racial discrimination against any student, and in 1953 — a year before Brown — segregation was declared illegal in Phoenix, with the presiding judge declaring: “A half century of intolerance is enough.” But Phoenix was the last major city in the west to end segregation of its own accord.

Barry Goldwater was not the most important opponent of racial segregation in Arizona, nor was he the most important champion of desegregating the public schools. What he was was on the right side: He put his money, his political clout, his business connections, and his reputation at the service of a cause that was right and just. While he was doing all that, his eventual nemesis, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a low-rent practitioner of the most crass sort of racist politics, was gutting anti-lynching laws and assuring Democrats that he would offer those “uppity Negroes” “just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

For more than a century, the Republican party had been the party of civil rights, of abolition, of emancipation, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the NAACP did not represent a break from that tradition, but a continuation of it.

It was a masterpiece of politics that allowed the Democrats to convince the electorate that they were the party of civil rights, that they had not until the day before yesterday been the party of lynching — even as that very same cabal of segregationist Democrats that had tried to block or gut every single significant piece of civil-rights legislation for decades, still led by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, remained comfortably entrenched in the Senate. To hear the story told today, you would almost think that it was the Republican Barry Goldwater, not the Democrat George Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door shouting “Segregation forever!” Goldwater believed that Title II and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were unconstitutional. How many Americans even know what is in those sections? About as many as understand the legal arguments surrounding Brown.

The problem for Republicans is that reclaiming their reputation as the party of civil rights requires a party leadership that wants to do so, because it cherishes that tradition and the values that it represents. It is not obvious that the Republican party has such leaders at the moment. The Party of Lincoln seems perfectly happy to be little more than the Party of the Chamber of Commerce. We should not turn our noses up at commerce — though Napoleon meant it as an insult, it was Britain’s glory to be “a nation of shopkeepers” — but it was not commerce alone that freed the slaves or built the nation.

—Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent. His newest book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, will be published in May.

Welcoming the New Gods.

Works and Days

by Victor Davis Hanson

America in the Age of Myth

April 1st, 2013 - 10:44 pm – on PJ Media

We live in a mythic age — but mythic in the sense of made-up.

The Coastal Aristocrat

In the last thirty years, I have probably spoken 200 times at a coastal university of some sort, most of which were on the Eastern seaboard. I spent eight years at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford. I go to Palo Alto every week to work, and often lecture or teach in southern California.

So I know the Bay Area and Los Angeles almost as well as I know the San Joaquin Valley and the culture of the Eastern seaboard. I talk sometimes with the media, academics, foundation heads, a few in entertainment, and some politicians. All are coastal-based. Here is what I've learned over the last three decades about the mythologies of our national oligarchy.

There is a liberal coastal aristocrat, but he is really not very liberal, at least in the sense of his regressive life not matching his progressive rhetoric. His views are mostly conditioned on his education, salary, and material circumstances. Put the coastal aristocrat in charge of a 7-Eleven in Stockton, and his therapeutic view would turn tragic quite quickly. And that fear is why he rarely goes to either a 7-Eleven or Stockton.

Let me give a few examples.

Fracking is seen as mostly bad, not because of any firsthand knowledge, any in-depth reading of the literature, any quid pro quo, or any cost/benefit analysis of the effect of more oil and gas production on the lives of the poor, but largely because the coastal aristocrat senses that he 1) has quite enough money and job security to ignore the price of gas, 2) does not drive all that much in comparison to the red-state interior Neanderthal, and 3) receives enormous psychological comfort and social acceptance from the fact that he is opposed to carbon emissions. Why, he wonders, do the poor on the way to work drive those gas-guzzling used Yukons, when a second-hand Prius would work just as well?

Illegal immigration? The Palo Alto aristocrat’s position is predicated on two realities: his hardworking nanny, yardman, and cook are often rather recent arrivals from Mexico, and he most certainly does not wish his children to attend school anywhere near Redwood City. Thus he is for “comprehensive immigration reform,” with the understanding that the benefits are his, and for others the downside.

Taxes? They are the cost of a utopian worldview, a mordida necessary to live in Cambridge or Santa Monica. For the aristocrat making over $500,000 a year, a few extra thousand dollars a year is a price worth paying, at least for the psychological guarantee that the distant food-stamp recipients, who mostly go to Safeway rather than Ralphs or Whole Foods, are content to live their happy lives as they do. Pay up the penance and be done with the guilt is the creed.

Guns? For the coastal elite, who do not hunt, who do not live in a dangerous neighborhood, and who believe the Bill of Rights are sacrosanct to the degree they support progressive change and fluid when they do not, guns more or less should just go away. Of course, the celebrity, the CEO, and the politician may need “security,” but no one much asks what hides inside the coats of the husky men at their sides.

Education? Public unions are saintly. Charter schools and vouchers are satanic. But the aristocrat, who knows best what is good for the masses, prefers and can afford the private school, and feels no guilt in his choice because his version is liberal while the more low-brow alternative is often crappy and not that much better than the public offering. (E.g., if you wish to duck out of the public school system, at least have the class to do it with style rather than on the cheap: a Castilleja or Andover rather than First Christian Academy.)

In lieu of the traditional aristocrat estate, peerage, or title, the outward manifestation of aristocracy is an Ivy League brand or a West Coast Stanford version. The proper campus is one’s lifelong entrée. The right quad is where your kids meet the right mate and receive a bumper sticker that opens the right doors. Such university snobbery is inconsistent with classical liberalism, but not with liberal aristocratic values, which are based on exclusionary criteria. For the NBC anchor, or the Massachusetts senator, or the Google executive, the key is to get your kid into the right prep school, as requisite for the even more correct Ivy League, where the perfect spouse and Facebook founders-like coterie are found. It is not just that junior will emerge with correct ideas about gay marriage, abortion, green power, the U.S. role abroad, and the poor, but that he will be seen, by virtue of his degree, as having the right ideas.

Apartheid is the unifying theme of coastal aristocracy. Without it, reality would disabuse the grandee of his worldview. Take any tenured Berkeley professor of environmental studies and make his existence hinge on squeezing a daily profit out of a Selma Stop-N-Go, and this gentle brontosaurus would turn into a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a nanosecond.  Therefore exclusion of all sorts from the underbelly of America is an essential.

One associates with mostly fellow one percenters. One picks and chooses friends on the basis of where they work and where they were educated and the views they hold. A Chevron field job, a University of Idaho degree in sports journalism, a strong aversion to abortion — all this is impermissible. In some Frankenstein-like laboratory, an evil genius cooked up Sarah Palin, whose looks, accent, background, views, and style were designed to enrage the coastal aristocracy.

I used to think that the coastal aristocracy was just hypocritical in matters of race, but as I age I fear I have become more cynical: it is not white guilt that explains why the coastal elite seek gestures of progressive caring (how else would an anti-Semitic, race-baiting provocateur like Al Sharpton be given his own show? Or an unaccomplished Touré rate over the accomplished Dr. Carson?), but a real aversion to mixing with unlike kind. On matters of race, the liberal worldview of affirmative action, busing, amnesty, and vast entitlements is a psychological mechanism for conniving to get your own into Princeton, for ensuring they are not schooled in fourth grade with a bused-in student body, and ensuring that you are not in the evening line at Save Mart as the only English speaker or privately racially profiling the two scary people who just lined up behind you at the convenience store checkout stand. An alien from Mars who studied the liberal aristocrat would conclude that he is a segregationist of the first order.

The Iconic UFW

Another myth. I opened my Easter Sunday Google browser and did not find a Christian icon on the page, but instead a (badly done) romantic rendition of a youthful Cesar Chavez, apparently our age’s version of a politically correct divinity.

Yet I wondered whether the mid-level Googilites who post these politically hip images knew all that much about Chavez. I grant in this age that they saw no reason to emphasize Christianity on its most holy day. But there is, after all, Miriam Pawel’s 2010 biography of Chavez still readily accessible, and a new essay about him in the Atlantic — both written by sympathetic authors who nonetheless are not quite the usual garden-variety hagiographers.  To suggest something other than sainthood is heresy in these parts, as I have discovered since the publication of Mexifornia a decade ago.

I grew up in the cauldron of farm-labor disputes. Small farms like ours largely escaped the violence, because there were five of us kids to do the work in summer and after school, and our friends welcomed the chance to buck boxes or help out propping trees or thinning plums. Hired help was rare and a matter of a few days of hiring 20 or so locals for the fall raisin harvest. But the epic table grape fights were not far away in Parlier, Reedley, and down the 99 in Delano. I offer a few impressions, some of them politically incorrect.

First, give Chavez his due. Farmworkers today are more akin to supposedly non-skilled (actually there is a skill required to pruning and picking) labor elsewhere, with roughly the same protective regulations as the food worker or landscaper. That was not true in 1965. Conservatives will argue that the market corrected the abuse (e.g., competition for ever scarcer workers) and ensured overtime, accessible toilets, and the end to hand-held hoes; liberals will credit Chavez — or fear of Chavez.

But that said, Chavez was not quite the icon we see in the grainy videos walking the vineyards with Robert Kennedy. Perhaps confrontation was inevitable, but the labor organizing around here was hardly non-violent. Secondary boycotts were illegal, but that did not stop picketers from yelling and cursing as you exited the local Safeway with a bag of Emperor grapes. There were the constant union fights with bigger family growers (the 500 acre and above sort), as often demonstrators rushed into fields to mix it up with so-called scabs. Teamsters fought the UAW. The latter often worked with the immigration service to hunt down and deport illegals. The former bused in toughs to crack heads. After-hours UFW vandalism, as in the slashed tire and chain-sawed tree mode, was common.

The politics were explicable by one common theme: Cesar Chavez disliked small farmers and labor contractors, and preferred agribusiness and the idea of a huge union. Otherwise, there were simply too many incongruities in an agrarian checkerboard landscape for him to handle — as if the UAW would have had to deal with an auto industry scattered among thousands of small family-owned factories.

For Chavez, the ideal was a vast, simple us/them, 24/7 fight, albeit beneath an angelic veneer of Catholic suffering. In contrast, small farmers were not rich and hardly cut-out caricatures of grasping exploitation. Too many were unapologetic Armenians, Japanese (cf. the Nisei Farmers League), Portuguese, and Mexican-Americans to guarantee the necessary white/brown binary. Many had their own histories of racism, from the Armenian genocide to the Japanese internment, and had no white guilt of the Kennedy sort.  I cannot imagine a tougher adversary than a Japanese, Armenian, or Punjabi farmer, perched on his own tractor or irrigating his 60 acres — entirely self-created, entirely unapologetic about his achievement, entirely committed to the idea that no one is going to threaten his existence.

The local labor contractors were not villains, but mostly residents who employed their relatives and knew well the 40-acre and 100-acre farmers they served. When there were slow times on the farm, I picked peaches for two summers for a Selma labor contractor, whose kids I went to school with. He was hardly a sellout. The crusty, hard-bitten small farmers (“don’t bruise that fruit,” “you missed three peaches up there on that limb,” “you stopped before it was quite noon”) who monitored personally the orchards we picked looked no different from the men on ladders.

In contrast, Chavez preferred the south and west Central Valley of huge corporate agribusiness. Rich and powerful, these great captains had the ability by fiat to institute labor agreements across hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Chavez’s organizing forte was at home in a Tulare, Delano, Shafter, Mendota or Tranquility, not a Reedley, Kingsburg or Selma. In the those days, the former were mostly pyramidal societies of a few corporate kingpins with an underclass of agricultural laborers, the latter were mixed societies in which Mexican-Americans were already ascendant and starting to join the broader middle class of Armenians, Japanese, and Punjabis.

Chavez was to be a Walter Reuther or George Meany, a make-or-breaker who sat across from a land baron, cut a deal for his vast following, and then assumed national stature as he doled out union patronage and quid-pro-quo political endorsements. In that vision, as a 1950's labor magnate Chavez largely failed — but not because agribusiness did not cave in to him. Indeed, it saw the UFW and Chavez as the simple cost of doing business, a tolerable write-off necessary to making all the bad press, vandalism, and violence go away.

Instead, the UFW imploded by its own insider and familial favoritism, corruption, and, to be frank, lunatic paranoia.  The millions of dollars Chavez deducted for pension funds often vanished. Legions of relatives (for a vestigial experience of the inner sanctum, I suggest a visit to the national shrine southeast of Bakersfield) staffed the union administration. There were daily rumors of financial malfeasance, mostly in the sense of farm workers belatedly discovering that their union deductions did not lead to promised health care or pensions.

Most hagiographies ignore Chavez’s eerie alliance with the unhinged Synanon bunch. In these parts, they had opened a foothill retreat of some sort above Woodlake, not far from here. (I visited the ramshackle Badger enclave once with my mother [I suppose as her informal "security,"], who was invited as a superior court judge to be introduced to their new anti-drug program in their hopes that county officials might save millions of dollars by sentencing supposedly non-violent heroin addicts to Synanon recovery treatments. Needless to say, she smiled, met the creepy “group,” looked around the place, and we left rather quickly, and that was that.)

I don’t think that the Google headliners remember that Charles Dederich (of rattlesnake in the mailbox and “Don’t mess with us. You can get killed, dead” fame) was a sort of model for Chavez, who tried to introduce the wacko-bird Synanon Game to his own UFW hierarchy.  No matter, deification of Chavez is now de rigeur; the young generation who idolizes him has almost no knowledge of the man, his life, or his beliefs. It is enough that Bobby Kennedy used to fly into these parts, walk for a few well-filmed hours, and fly out.

When I went to UC Santa Cruz in September of 1971, I remember as a fool picking a box of Thompson seedless grapes from our farm to take along, and soon being met by a dorm delegation of rich kids from Pacific Palisades and Palos Verdes (a favorite magnet area for Santa Cruz in those days) who ordered me not to eat my own grapes on my own campus in my own room. Soon I had about four good friends who not only enjoyed them, but enjoyed eating them in front of those who did not (to the extent I remember these student moralists, and can collate old faces with names in the annual alumni news, most are now high-ups and executives in the entertainment industry).

Obamism

Our greatest legend is Barack Obama. Liberals believe that he is still the fierce anti-Cheney civil libertarian of 2008, as he institutionalized the idea that drones could target U.S. citizens (as they did in Yemen) and expanded or embraced renditions, preventative detention, tribunals, wiretaps, and intercepts. In our secular bible, Obama still shuns money from Wall Street sorts like Goldman Sachs, follows campaign-financing reform laws, vacations as a man of the people, and has squeezed out of the exploiting classes millions of new jobs for minorities.

There were not 50 consecutive months of 7.8% unemployment (until last month, no one month of the Obama administration saw unemployment lower than in any one month of the Bush administration). What about sluggish GDP, record debt, chronic deficits, unheard of zero interest, vast numbers on food stamps and unemployment and disability insurance? Bush did it.

We all know how this Paul Bunyan legend will end up. The next president, be it Hillary or Marco Rubio or Joe Biden or Rand Paul, will not embrace Obamism. They cannot and have the nation still survive. The federal saddlebags are empty. We will not follow the Obama trajectory to 70 million on food stamps or $30 trillion in debt. Even a President Hillary Clinton would not lecture us that we didn't build that. We cannot keep printing a trillion dollars through quantitative easing. Interest rates will climb. I don’t think Rand Paul will tell the Tea Party “to punish our enemies” or Hillary Clinton “to get in their faces.”

You see, Obamism is an emotional flight from reality, completely unsustainable to the degree it is a paradigm for anything. It is mythical, this notion of borrowing vast amounts of money to grow government and subsidize a new cadre on government support, or demonizing millions as suspect for their success, or assuming that foreign nations react best to apologies, contextualization, and sermons, or wish to join in the cultural adulation of an American president. Putin could care less. Ditto the North Koreans.

In short, in this mythical age, we all know that Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize, but none of us quite know what for.

Such is what passes for reality in our age of myth.