Social Democracy Now

Today, February 28, 2006, social democrats all over the world mourn the assassination of Olof Palme, the last of the great Swedish social democrats and probably the last real social democrat ever to hold the top job in any country until the unexpected and still astonishing rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Do we know who murdered Palme? Perhaps we do. A petty criminal and longtime drug abuser, Christer Petterson, who died in 2004, confessed to the murder in 2001. He was identified as the assassin by Palme's wife, Lisbet, who was herself shot during the attack. Then, on February 24, 2006, Pettersson's close friend Roger Östlund claimed on his death bed that he had actually seen Pettersson shoot Olof Palme. (SOURCE)

BELOW: Christer Petterson:



Two motives have been offered for the murder. In 2001, Petterson's friend, Swedish journalist Gert Fylking, told the BBC that Petterson had had no grievance against Palme personally, but that while he was in prison, he had met someone who had. So after being released from prison he murdered Palme to avenge the other man's grievance. (SOURCE)

A marginally more plausible motive surfaced this week, when Östlund claimed that Petterson had mistaken Palme for a drug dealer: 'Östlund, who is now dying in hospital, says that Palme was simply the victim of mistaken identity - the real target was amphetamine dealer Sigge Cedergren, whom they had intended to attack as part of a turf war among drug dealers. Östlund says he and another man had planned to attack Cedergren together with Pettersson, but did not know that Pettersson had a gun. Friends of Östlund told Expressen that he has not spoken out before because he was afraid of being killed.' (SOURCE)

Although it's always nice to have a perp, a great deal about the assassination still doesn't make sense. Although he had murdered someone before - in 1970 - there is no evidence Pettersson ever owned a gun. The 1970 murder weapon had been a bayonet and in the other violent incidents in which he was involved, a knife had been used. Östlund says that he did not even know that night that Pettersson had had a gun. The obvious questions, therefore, are: how did Pettersson get the gun? And are either motives plausible?

Superficially, this looks a textbook case of assassination by a 'lone nut,' and perhaps it was always meant to look this way. But can we really believe that Pettersson just happened to be looking to kill a drug dealer at the exact same time and in the exact same location that the Swedish prime minister happened to be out without his bodyguard? And on a cold (minus 7 degrees) February night? Why would Petterson have expected to see Cedergren on the street at around midnight on such a cold night?

The fact that Pettersen had a gun on him and fastened on Palme as his victim suggests the possibility that he was somehow manipulated into committing the crime. There is overwhelming evidence that something unusual was afoot on the night Palme was murdered. Palme's behaviour was by no means normal that night, leading to speculation that he was supposed to meet somebody, and there is also overwhelming evidence of police complicity in the crime. (SOURCE)

At the time Palme was murdered, he was a very unpopular figure indeed with three interlocking sets of actors: the governments of South Africa, Israel and the United States. The same nexus of rightwing South Africans which was linked to the assassination in 1996 just happens to have included in its web Jack Abramoff, the Republican party operative currently embroiled in corruption scandals, whose connections back in the 80s went from South Africa to both the Reagan White House and Israel. It would seem a fair bet that Abramoff knows why Palme was killed: after all, he was the intermediary figure between Palme's three main groups of enemies.

There is something all too convenient about Palme's assassination that makes me sceptical about the new theory that he was just a victim of mistaken identity. Not only was Palme a forthright opponent of apartheid, he was pro-Palestinian and closely associated with 'the leading personalities of the non-aligned countries, for example Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.' (SOURCE) Isn't it interesting that he was assassinated less than eighteen months after Indira Gandhi? With the deaths of Indira Gandhi and Olof Palme, two of the most important leaders of the non-aligned world were removed from the scene: it's not hard to see that the decapitation of the non-aligned movement fitted in very nicely with the interests of the Reagan White House, then absorbed by Reagan's obsession with cranking up the Cold War.

What's more, by the 1980s, with Thatcherism and Reaganism in the ascendant, social democracy was being roundly dismissed by mainstream commentators as passé. Yet Palme was one of the leaders of 'the so-called Socialist International, consisting of Social Democratic Parties, which underwent a resurgence from the early 1970s onwards, engineered above all by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky' and himself. (SOURCE) That the 1980s saw the eclipse of social democracy and the invasion of neoliberal economic lunacy was in no small part due to the loss of such a formidable social democrat as Palme.

Are there reasons to suspect American involvement in the Palme assassination? Yes, if you consider former CIA agents reliable sources. First, according to former CIA agent Gene 'Chip' Tatum, Palme 'was murdered on behalf of a hidden organization, the OSG, which had a certain colonel Oliver North in a leading role. North's ultimate superior was Vice President George Bush.' In early 1999, a Swedish-American investigator obtained a snippet from a 1997 interview in which Tatum 'disclosed how Palme had been set up and murdered.' (SOURCE) A short part of the interview can be heard here. That Tatum disappeared in 2000 and hasn't been heard of since seems an indication that after he left the CIA he made too many inconvenient disclosures for his own good.

Second, an Italian investigation has established that the matter was related to Iran-Contra:

'In late June-early July ... interviews with [former CIA agents Richard Brenneke and Ibrahim Razin] were broadcast in four parts by [Italian state television] TG1. The most explosive element of what they said, was that three days before Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated, Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the Propaganda 2 (P-2) Freemasonic lodge, had sent a telegram to Republican Party representative Philip Guarino, an intimate of George [H. W.] Bush, announcing that "the Swedish tree will be felled.'' In his sequence, Razin claimed that the text of the telegram exists in the archives of the National Security Agency, and that the FBI has opened an investigation into this. Razin added that he knew of the existence of such a telegram from a high representative of the American mafia, and that Palme was assassinated because he knew about the illegal weapons trade in connection with the Iran-Iraq war. As Brenneke put it, Palme had become a "fly in the ointment'' for those responsible for the dirty doings.' (SOURCE)

The latest revelations about the Palme assassination therefore do not close the book on the case by any means. It is the question of the murder weapon that ensures that the case still cannot be regarded as solved. Although Petterson confessed to the crime and has furnished at least two motives for doing so, he has never said anything about the gun: where it came from, why he happened to have it on him that night, and what happened to it afterwards. This implies that at the very least a second person was involved - someone who supplied the weapon, manipulated his movements that night, and who disposed of the weapon afterwards. The only logical reason why Petterson never addressed the matter of the gun is that he refused to implicate one or more other people.

If Östlund was really there - and I don't know of any witnesses who say they saw a second person lurking around with the gunman - he surely would have to know the answers to these questions. Isn't it a little too convenient that Östlund says he didn't know anything about the gun? So let's consider the possibility that while Östlund was dying, persons unknown approached him and made it worth his while to issue a bogus statement confirming that he had seen Petterson shoot Palme, thereby confirming Petterson's earlier confession. This would be a perfect way to shut down suspicions of a conspiracy, wouldn't it? Most people would be inclined to say, well, that clinches the matter! So while I am convinced that Petersson was the gunman, I strongly question whether Östlund's deathbed confession should be accepted at face value. Its timing too - just days before the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy - is also a little hard to swallow.

BELOW: The crime scene:



Further reading: Trowbridge Ford, "Assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme (Operation Tree)" here, and Dean Andromidas, "The Palme Murder" here.

NOTE: This is the conclusion of the previous entry, that seems to have been too long for Blogigo software. It doesn't make any sense on its own, so please read the previous section first! The entry begins here.

BELOW: Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney's History Department: an example of the kind of academic hack under discussion. (For an excellent critique of Moses's disingenuous treatment of Holocaust revisionism, see here.) Moses reportedly refers to people who think there ought to be evidence for the Holocaust as 'crazed positivists.' Who would want to study history with this guy?



In short, whether or not the Holocaust took place, the historiography of the Holocaust is a house of cards: it is a vast edifice constructed on the precarious foundation of mere transcriptions of documents which have never been examined by those who cite them and whose authenticity has never been and probably never can be established. One wonders how many academics have been honest enough to share this information with their students.

Given the powerful challenge mounted to Holocaust orthodoxy by revisionism, the documentary status quo seems remarkable. You would think that by now academic historians would be demanding free and unfettered access to original documents for the purpose of using them to refute revisionist opponents. You would think that the numerous websites that have proliferated in recent years aimed at refuting revisionism would be bristling with scanned images of original documents, which would make mincemeat of the doubting Thomases.(8) Yet every such website of which I am aware - and every book which follows the same agenda - aims to persuade by means of mere transcriptions.(9)

Clearly, academic historians are only interested in historical truth so long as it does not upset any of the central dogmas of the modern political religion. To affirm that religion, they enthusiastically write the history of WWII using documents of doubtful authenticity and entirely disregard revisionist writings, even though the latter constitute the only form of independent quality control in the field of Holocaust studies. (You don't think peer review exists in any meaningful sense in Holocaust studies, do you? How could it, in such an atmosphere of intimidation and persecution?)

As both a credentialled historian and a member of the interested public I must say that I find myself heartily sick of the appalling state of academic historiography today. Because they show a disgraceful disregard of issues such as the provenance of Holocaust documents, academic historians deserve to be dismissed as handmaidens of a monumental hoax rather than devotees of the truth.

The current generation of academic historians seems to me to consist of crooks, liars and gullible fools - and I would not hesitate to apply the latter accusation to several prominent academic historians I know personally who have published on the subject of the Holocaust (including one who maintains, quite seriously, that Elie Wiesel's farcical Night is by the far the best book on Auschwitz).

But what else can we expect, when professional history is in the service of a dogmatic religion rather than historical truth?

(1) http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/annec/HIST3926W/Outline.htm

(2) The biggest academic controversy in recent years took place in 2001-2 and concerned a book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael Bellesiles, who was at the time Professor of History at Emory University, Atlants, Georgia, U.S. However, this controversy concerned trivial offences against historiographical conventions which are committed routinely by all historians writing large books, especially ones on subjects which have not been extensively researched before; the controversy was really nothing more than a rightwing beat-up. In most such cases, even when the work is considerably sloppier, views are challenged and modified over the years as the historiography of the subject grows and becomes more sophisticated. As for iconoclasm, the closest to an iconoclastic academic historian I can think of is Professor Justin McCarthy professor of history at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, who argues convincingly that the alleged Armenian holocaust is a fabrication.

(3) For Hayward's overview of the affair, see http://www.joelhayward.com/myoverviewoftheaffair.htm

(4) John Costello, Mask of Treachery, Pan Books, 1989, p. xvii.

(5) Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, New York, Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 108, cited in Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the '‘Holocaust‘', Capshaw, Alabama [U.S.], Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001, p. 19.

(6) http://www.cwporter.com/g3803ps.htm

(7) http://www.cwporter.com/d2.htm

(8) From this point of view, the best exerminationist website is Mazal.org, which currently offers photographic reproductions of 25 original documents, including 23 from the Auschwitz State Museum concerning the construction of the crematories. (Although this is only 23 pages out of at least 88,000 pages of Auschwitz Central Construction Office documents that were captured by the Red Army in 1945, it is better than nothing.) Although a number of additional documents on Mazal.org are represented as 'German Original' documents, this is a deception. The documents so identified are all inscribed in English as 'certified true copies,' meaning that they are postwar creations. They are not authentic Nazi-era documents but belong to the class of documents that were prepared for the Nazi war crimes trials by the Documentation Division of the OCC in Paris.

(9) Here are a few examples of the websites to which I refer:

The Nizkor Project A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust

Documentary Resources on the Nazi Genocide and its Denial

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Jewish Holocaust 1933-1945

Historians sometimes think of themselves as truthtellers and iconoclasts. One Canadian historian, for example, places the following quotation from Khrushchev as an epigraph at the head of her website:

'Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.'(1)

Yet this is only true of real historians, those who are prepared to tell the truth about the past without fear or favour. It is doubtful that more than a handful of such historians have appeared in any given century.

Certainly, there is little reason to attribute to academic historians today either truthtelling or iconoclastic potential. Indeed, it is hard to think of a single academic historian who has ruffled a politician's feathers in a very long time, let alone one who has rocked a political establishment.(2) The risks of genuine scholarly independence, such as loss of tenure, the loss of prestige, professional and social ostracism, and the loss of a means of livelihood are so great that they ensure that most academics conform to the expectations of their peers and the heads of their institutions.

One only has to be aware of the trials and tribulations of New Zealand historian Joel Hayward, whose 1991 M.A. thesis gave a fair, and in certain respects sympathetic assessment of Holocaust revisionism, to appreciate the fact that an historian who upsets things has no future in academia.(3) In 2002, Hayward was forced by the pressure of the controversy over his M.A. to resign his tenured position as a Senior Lecturer in Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University, Canterbury, N.Z. Although Hayward is now employed again (apparently by a British military college), his website trumpets the fact that he is a 'NON-REVISIONIST scholar.' In short, if Hayward is working as an historian again today, it is only because these days he flaunts his non-revisionism and his philo-Zionism. (He maintains, for example, that 'Israel clearly has a right to exist within its current borders.') Given that his latest book is about Lord Nelson, it also looks like a condition of his current employment is that he stays well away from WWII-related subjects.

The result for Hayward is probably the BEST that could be expected for any academic who shows even the slightest objectivity in relation to the Holocaust. Today, academic historians are the zealous watchdogs of orthodoxy, the political religion of post-WWII liberal democracy. Subscribing to this religion is now mandatory - we are talking about an orthodoxy that is as rigidly enforced as any in any historical period, not excluding under dictatorships such as those of Hitler and Stalin.

Although this political religion lacks a name, its dogmas - which comprise the core of what most ordinary people think they know about modern history - include the following:

1. The Nazi regime was the most evil which has ever existed.

2. Hitler was the most evil man who has ever lived.

3. Hitler and the Nazis cannot be viewed negatively enough because they perpetrated the most evil crime ever perpetrated, the Holocaust. This was an evil plan, the most evil ever devised, to exterminate the Jews. The plan was the fruit of Hitler's radical anti-semitism.

4. WWII was a good war because it led to the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazis. It doesn't matter an iota how many people were killed in the war, because the removal of the Nazi regime was a good at any price.

5. Winston Churchill is one of the greatest men in history because only he realized how truly evil the Nazis were. If it wasn't for him, England may never gone to war with Germany and the Nazi regime might not have been overthrown, with consequences too terrible to even think about.

6. Stalin was nearly as bad as Hitler, but at least he didn't try to exterminate the Jews and at least he helped overthrow the Nazis. However, he did confine many of his political enemies to gulags, which were pretty much the same things as concentration camps, so he was still very, very bad.

7. Hitler and Stalin headed totalitarian regimes of right and left respectively.

8. Because both leftwing and rightwing totalitarianism are so bad, the only viable political alternative to either is liberal democracy.

9. Because liberal democracy overthrew Hitler and the Nazis, it proves just how virtuous and benevolent it is.

10. You cannot say anything good about Hitler. If you do, it means you are a crypto-Nazi and therefore as bad as Hitler yourself.

11. It is not permissible to say anything that would suggest that Nazi crimes were not as bad as historians maintain. If you do, it means you are seeking to 'minimise' Nazi crimes. Anyone who seeks to 'minimise' Nazi crimes has to be a crypto-Nazi. On the other hand, you are allowed to say that Nazi crimes were even worse than historians previously maintained. While it is not permissible to 'minimize' Nazi crimes, it is permissible, indeed actually encouraged, to maximise them, even if you're lying.

12. It is not permissible to say anything bad about Jews, who have always and everywhere been totally innocent and unfairly persecuted. To criticise Jews is to engage in anti-semitism, and no matter how different the circumstances may be anti-semitism always has the potential to trigger another Holocaust.

13. Under no circumstances can you say that WW II was fought for the benefit of the Jews. You have to say that it was fought for 'democracy.'

14. Since the Allies' aim was to overthrow the Nazi dictatorship, nothing the Allies did during the war, no matter how heinous, and whether it was done to the Germans or to someone else, can legitimately be construed as a 'war crime.' To describe an act of the Allies as a war crime is to suggest that there is no inherent moral difference between Allied acts and Nazi acts. To even suggest that the Allies could have committed war crimes is a sign of crypto-Nazism.

15. The Nuremberg trials were a massive leap forward for human moral development, as war criminals were prosecuted as such for the first time.

Of course, academic historians do not teach these dogmas in the same open and honest way that, say, a Catholic priest teaches the dogmas of the Catholic church. Rather, because students come to University already steeped in the modern political religion academic historians are free to assume them and their writings constitute large-scale elaborations of them. The dogmas are perpetuated not by being taught explicitly, but by ensuring that they are the only conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from history.

Of all the dogmas I have just described, the only one which might be regarded as open to debate is whether Hitler was worse than Stalin. Some people would insist that Stalin was worse, since his regime killed many more people. However, the idea that the Holocaust is the most evil crime ever perpetrated tends to reinforce the conclusion that Hitler was worse, although the obvious implication - that Jewish lives are worth more than Russian lives - is left unuttered (because drawing attention to the fact that Jewish lives are to be regarded as more important than other people's lives is something that you would only do if you were motivated by anti-semitism).

Of all the dogmas of the political religion whose caretakers academic historians have become, by far the most important - perhaps because it's also the least defensible - is dogma #3: that Hitler and the Nazis implemented a programme for the extermination of the Jews.

Academic historians are complicit in the perpetuation of this political dogma mainly by omission - that is to say, by neglecting to do their jobs properly. They 1) overlook the fact that there is no material evidence to support the Holocaust hypothesis and 2) take for granted the authenticity of the documents which they cite, in lieu of material evidence, as proof that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews.

Let me expand on these two points:

1. The utter disregard of material evidence

Academic historians normally treat material (i.e., physical) evidence as conclusive (unless, of course, it is subsequently proven to be inauthentic). For example, if a Roman map did not show a city in a certain location, but archaeologists discovered Roman-era ruins at this location, historians would conclude that there had been a city there in Roman times, not that the city could not possibly have been there because it wasn't mentioned in Roman documents. Conversely, if a town was drawn at an identifiable location on a Roman map and archaeologists had failed to turn up so much as a potsherd at that place, most historians would conclude that the mapmaker had made a mistake, not that the mapmaker was right and that all traces of the settlement had been obliterated by the ravages of time.

Yet in the case of the Holocaust, the dearth of material evidence for the existence of large-scale extermination programme is not perceived as significant. It is assumed that the Nazis destroyed their vast death machinery so thoroughly as to preclude all possibility of postwar detection. It is not permissible to express doubts as to whether the Nazis could really have eliminated all material evidence so completely, including making the ashes of six million people vanish from the locations at which they must have been interred. To think such doubts is to engage in thought crime; and to verbalize the doubts, hate crime.

It is therefore more acceptable for academic historians today to assume that the Nazis had magical powers - that is, the ability to make material evidence disappear beyond hope of recovery, even by means of the most sophisticated modern technology - than it is to conclude that the lack of material evidence supports the allegations of Holocaust revisionists.

2. A cavalier attitude towards documentary evidence

Given the non-existence of material evidence, documentary evidence is obviously critical to reasoned belief in the Holocaust. While the majority of the public seems happy to accept eyewitness testimonies as a sufficient basis for their exterminationist beliefs, for scholars 'the faintest ink is usually a more reliable foundation for historical analysis than the strongest memory.'(4)

Holocaust scholars seem to be divided on the question of whether documents exist that refer to the alleged Nazi programme for the extermination of the Jews. In Harvest of Hate (1979), Léon Poliakov specifically avers that with respect to this programme 'no documents have survived, perhaps none ever existed.”'(5) Yet on the back cover of Steve Hochstadt's Sources of the Holocaust (2004), the author Judith Magyar Isaacson is quoted as saying that that Hochstadt's collection 'documents [the Holocaust's] perpetration with painstaking accuracy.'

Although Isaacson is clearly exaggerating here - if there were such documents it is hard to see how Poliakov could not have been aware of them - there does seem to be a growing tendency to assert that a corpus of Holocaust documents exists which, while far less complete that we would like, is nonetheless adequate for the purpose of affirming the existence of a Nazi extermination programme.

Unfortunately, academic historians have failed to concern themselves with the question of the authenticity of the documents they cite as evidence for the Holocaust. They neglect such crucial matters as the provenance of the documents, the accuracy with which they have been translated, and whether their meanings are being construed fairly.

A striking but never discussed fact about Holocaust historiography is that its key documents are all of unproven authenticity. Most of the documents academic Holocaust historians have taken to citing are, in fact, no more than mere transcriptions. By far the majority appeared for the first time during the Nuremberg trials, and were prepared for the court by the Documentation Division of the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel (OCC) in Paris, an organization that subsumed the OSS's Evidence Collection and Analysis Section in London. In other words, many if not most of the documents used in the Nuremberg trials originated with the OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA.

Very little is known about either the OSS's Evidence Collection and Analysis Section or the OCC's Documentation Division. Matters such as the provenance of the documents cited at Nuremberg are apparently of little interest to historians generally. To my knowledge, no historians go beyond the transcriptions which were used during the postwar war crimes trials to seek out original documents - something which would be inexcusable in almost any other avenue of historical enquiry.

To be sure, one reason for this is that in most cases it is impossible to say where the originals are held today, if indeed they exist at all. Carlos Whitlock Porter, an American-born professional translator who apparently today lives in Germany, is the only person I know of who has looked into this matter, and he has established that no institution acknowledges possessing any original documents:

'The standard version of events is that the Allies examined 100,000 documents and chose 1,000 which were introduced into evidence, and that the original documents were then deposited in the Peace Palace at The Hague. This is rather inexact. ... The Hague has few, if any, original documents. The Hague has many original postwar "affidavits," or sworn statements, the Tribunal Commission transcripts, and much valuable defense material. They have the "human soap," which has never been tested, and the "original human soap recipe" (Document USSR-196), which is a forgery; but apparently no original wartime German documents. ... The National Archives in Washington ... claim that the original documents are in The Hague. The Hague claims the original documents are in the National Archives. The Stadtsarchiv Nurnberg and the Bundesarchiv Koblenz also have no original documents, and both say the original documents are in Washington. Since the originals are, in most cases, "copies," there is often no proof that the documents in question ever existed.'(6)

The reality, therefore, is that the bulk of the 'evidence' for the Holocaust derives from a corpus of documents that was expressly manufactured by the OSS and OCC in 1945-46 for the purpose of incriminating the leaders of the former German government at Nuremberg. The procedure went roughly along these lines: the Documentation Division in Paris created 'copies' (in English only), certified them as true, and sent them to the prosecution in Nuremberg, while the original documents (if they ever existed) were never seen or heard of again. German translations of the original English texts were then prepared and sent to the defense in Nuremberg, where they arrived as late as possible so that the defense had insufficient time to worry about such matters as their authenticity.

Few professional historians can be unaware that original documents and only original documents qualify as evidence. Without access to the original of the document it professes to transcribe, there is no way for an historian to tell whether a given transcription is accurate. Transcriptions may conceal interpolations and excisions, while translations can involve interpolations, excisions, misleading translations and even the fabrication of entire passages. Many Holocaust documents can legitimately be suspected of being wholesale fabrications.

Although many documents were certainly fabricated, the Documentation Division in Paris seems rarely to have been required to forge documents. The procedure followed at Nuremberg, which assigned evidentiary value to mere 'copies,' avoided the need for original documents. The defence, on the other hand, had no power to insist that original documents be used.

The real problem was the risk of authentic documents coming to light which would contradict the fabricated documents. We can assume that as the Nuremberg trials proceeded authentic documents that had the potential to create conflicts with forged documents were secreted away in inaccessible locations. Given the fact that an extremely large proportion of the total corpus of Nazi documents remains inaccessible to historians even today - historians have probably never had access to more than a small sample of the documents captured by the Allies in the closing stages of the war - we can safely assume that most original documents that would resolve questions concerning the Holocaust are destined never to be made public. Many may even have been destroyed in order to ensure the enduring success of the hoax. (If it was a hoax, of course. A theoretical possibility is that genuine documents had to be suppressed for another reason, perhaps because they point to the complicity of the U.S. corporations that worked hand in glove with the Nazis during the war.)

Another potential problem was the appearance of individuals associated with the Nazi regime who would have had the ability to expose the OSS/OCC documents as fabrications. The need to prevent this from ever happening would explain why, starting in May 1945 with the alleged suicides of SS-General Hans-Adolf Prützmann, SS head Heinrich Himmler and SS-General Odilo Globocnik while in British captivity, there followed a bizarre string of murders of individuals associated with the Auschwitz concentration camp. (These were perpetrated by a Jewish hit squad known as the DIN.) As Joseph Bellinger, author of a new book on Himmler's murder, points out, within six months or so of the war's end practically any one who could have shed light on the Jewish policy of the Third Reich was murdered!’(7) This, it must be said, was extremely convenient for the prosecution at Nuremberg.

So we therefore encounter a striking paradox. Although the Holocaust is considered by many historians to be the central event of the 20th century and also one of the most important events in history, the standards which are applied to the study of the Holocaust are lower than those which would apply in, for example, a minor property dispute in a local court. Yet if the Holocaust is to be elevated to its present status as central event of the 20th century, it is obvious that it must meet a higher standard of proof, not a lower one.

To be blunt: if historians are going to tell people that the Holocaust is one of the most important events in history, they better have overwhelming evidence to back up their extraordinary claims. So far, though, they have not lived up to their responsibility. Despite the gravity of the subject, which demands the greatest scrupulousness, they remain suspiciously cavalier about documenting the Holocaust, as though it were the one historical event that transcends the historian's craft.

In the case of the rush to impute to the Nazis a programme for the extermination of millions of people which has implausibly left no material traces, all the normal rules of historiography seem not only to have been suspended, but to have been violated over and over again. Historians routinely cite documents from secondary works like Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) or from printed collections of documents, such as Robert Wolfe's Holocaust: The Documentary Evidence - but they never cite original documents.

NOTE: This entry seems to be too long for Blogigo software and it has been truncated more or less at the this point. For this reason, the remainder of the entry is posted as a separate entry above. - SDN.

The right-wing Jyllands-Posten, the paper at the centre of the Danish cartoons affair, is an organ with a somewhat unsavoury past. Not only was it a forthright supporter of fascism during the interwar period, actually calling for the imposition of a dictatorship in Denmark in 1933, it is one of the main organs in an increasingly irrational Denmark for the dissemination of Islamophobia.

That the furore over caricatures of Mohammed centres on Jyllands-Posten (by the way, the name means 'The Jutland Post') is no accident. There is evidence that, unbeknownst to the English-speaking world, the paper has been engaged in cranking up the 'clash of civilizations' for some years now. What's more, the impunity with which it has been allowed to do so is tantamount to proof that Denmark, at least in matters of the mind, is now Zionist-controlled territory.

Back on August 11, 2002, Jyllands-Posten published a story written by a contracted freelancer, Stig Matthiesen, claiming that a militant Muslim group had launched an 'intifada' against Denmark by announcing a few days earlier that it would offer a 250,000 Danish kroner bounty for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews. A Danish blogger who read the story - which appears to have been pulled from Jyllands-Posten's website - points out that Matthiesen neither revealed his sources, nor the names of any of the individuals allegedly threatened by this unnamed Muslim organization. (SOURCE)

To my knowledge, this story was scarcely noticed outside Denmark; it appeared in English only in a single version, "Islamic group in Denmark targets Jewish leaders" by Nina Gilbert, which ran on page 3 of the Jerusalem Post on August 20, 2002. (SOURCE) In this report, Gilbert stated that an extremist Islamic group thought to be Hizb-Ut-Tahrir (HT, 'the Islamic Party of Liberation'), had created a hit list of 15 prominent Danish Jews, including Rabbi Bent Melchior, a leading Danish rabbi and father of Israel's then Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, and Oslo accords-architect Dr. Ron Pundak, Director-General of the Peres Center for Peace in Israel, who is son of Herbert Pundak, a former chief editor of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken, a paper which is politically at the other end of the spectrum from Jyllands-Posten.

The Jerusalem Post is a leading Israeli propaganda sheet whose board of directors includes the neocon pope, Daniel Pipes. It is no surprise, therefore, that Pipes helped insinuate this story in the American media, using it as the departure point for an article he co-wrote with a Danish anti-Muslim crusader Lars Hedegaard on Danish-Muslim tensions that was published in the New York Post on August 27, 2002. (SOURCE)

In an effort to find out more about this overlooked story, which would help fill in some of the background to Jyllands-Posten's role in the Prophet Muhammed cartoons affair, I emailed Nina Gilbert, and, while she proved reluctant to talk about the story in any detail (sign of a guilty conscience?), she revealed that her source had been Michael Melchior, not the original Danish publication. What's more, when I pressed her on the content of the story, she stated that she has no doubt that the story is true, because Melchior is a credible source.

Ms. Gilbert's response has certainly opened my eyes to the way the Zionist media machine works. She did not bother to obtain a copy of the original Jyllands-Posten story and made no independent effort to verify the information contained in it before writing her own report. Nor did she ask herself any questions about the inherent implausibility of the story. It was apparently enough for her that Michael Melchior had told her about it.

Whether Michael Melchior is a credible source is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps to an Israeli reporter, Israel's deputy foreign minister is a credible source, but for those of us with no respect for the Zionist regime something called evidence is required. At the very least, the story ought to have been evaluated in terms of its overall plausibility.

So let's ask the difficult questions that Nina Gilbert never saw fit to ask. The one circumstance in the story's favour is that HT, the Islamist group Gilbert implicates in the story, actually exists - indeed, it is an international organization with a reasonably large membership. Its aim is the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, a programme which is treated by most commentators as so incredibly radical that it's insane, but is really no more radical than the project for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine that was started by English Christian Zionists like Lord Shaftesbury back in the 1840s.

HT's Danish branch got into trouble after handing out leaflets on the streets of Copenhagen in March and April 2002 in which a verse from the Koran was cited in such a way that it could be construed as a call to kill Jews. (SOURCE) By August 2002, Danish HT was embroiled in legal action over the leaflets and it is highly doubtful that it would have risked even greater unpopularity and perhaps also a total ban by launching an assassination campaign. There is, in fact, no evidence that HT or any other Danish Islamist organization issued death threats at this time.

Its vagueness is only the first problem of the story. It's also highly implausible. Matthiessen claimed that he had learned about the list through obscure 'Muslim connections.' The very idea that a radical Islamist group would prepare a 'hit list' that would just happen to get passed on to the most virulently anti-Muslim newspaper in the country is so preposterous that it is sufficient in itself to prove that the story was a hoax. After all, if they were convinced that there was a real threat, these mysterious 'Muslim connections' would have gone to the police rather than to a journalist. You'd only go to a journalist if your priority was to publicize the threat not prevent the commission of a crime.

Isn't it odd, moreover, that Matthiessen's 'Muslim connections' were in a position to convince him that a Muslim group had prepared a hit list against Danish Jews but unable to tell him exactly which organization they were referring to? For if they had identified the group by name, and he was convinced that their story was true, he had no reason to withhold the information from Jyllands-Posten's readers. It looks like the paper's readers were simply meant to assume that HT was the organization being referred to on account of the ongoing legal action over the controversial leaflets. In other words, this was a case of the manipulation of the public mind through innuendo.

For the record, HT denies the allegations to this day. HT's London office informed me this week, 'Hizb ut-Tahrir has never called for assassinations nor has it ever issued any hit lists. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a political party which ... does not adopt violence as part of its work. The reason why did not find anything on the internet about it [i.e., HT's reaction to the story], is simply because it is totally unfounded.'

However, what interests me is less what HT has to say about the matter now than the fact that there is no indication that back in August 2002 anybody even tried asking HT for its response to the story. A working assumption of the journalistic profession these days seems to be that you can accuse Muslim groups of absolutely anything you like and there's no obligation to provide them with the slightest opportunity to give their side of the story. You don't want to give the public the impression that there could be two sides to an anti-Muslim story now, do you?

As I implied above, no one involved in diffusing the story seems to have been concerned by its inherent implausibility. If Melchior was telling Nina Gilbert the truth when he told her that his father's name and that of Dr Ron Pundak were on the HT hit list, HT's choice of targets is unlikely in the extreme. Of the 15 Danish Jews allegedly featuring on the list, the names of only two have ever been made public, those of Melchior and Pundak. Since none of the other 13 names were ever made public, they might as well not have been on it at all; so for all practical purposes the list was directed at just two people.

But why Melchior and Pundak? According to Gilbert, the pair attracted attention 'when they joined forces to raise money for Palestinians.' This is a reference to a campaign launched by Dr. Pundak's father Herbert 'to support the purchase of a new ambulance for the Palestinian Red Crescent ... and support an organization known as Tayoush ... which is supplying equipment and support for Palestinian communities.' Pundak senior said that his aim was to 'do something to activate readers in support of Palestinian civil society after Jenin.' (SOURCE)

It is obviously straining credibility that the only two names on the HT hit list that were ever made public just happened to be those of Jews involved in an apparently sincere effort to help relieve the suffering of Israel's Palestinian community. But no Islamist group would target sympathetic Jews like the Pundaks, nor would a Danish Islamist group then undergoing legal action over another matter court additional negative publicity by threatening two of Denmark's most well-regarded liberal Jews with assassination. This would be sufficient not only to get the organization banned, but would also lead to the expulsion from the country of all members of the group involved in making the threats. I tend to suspect, therefore, that we are looking at an attempt to intimidate these two prominent pro-peace Jews.

It's not hard to find out who really hates Melchior and Pundak, and it's not Islamists - it's fanatical Zionists. The news that these two prominent Danish Jews were doing something to help Palestinians was greeted with considerable vitriol by many on the Zionist far right, which absolutely loathes the Peres Center for Peace, the Pundaks, and anyone even vaguely interested in giving peace a chance in the Middle East. Indeed, a Zionist hate site has placed both Pundaks, father and son, on its so-called 'SHITLIST' of alleged 'self-hating' and/or Israel-threatening' Jews. It scarcely seems a coincidence, therefore, that not too long after this particular website published it, Dr Pundak graduated from the 'shitlist' to a 'hit list.' (SOURCE)

BELOW: Dr Pundak's entry on the Masada SHITLIST.




My conclusion is that Jyllands-Posten wanted to implicate HT, perhaps as a means of pressing the Danish government to ban it outright, but was shrewd enough to do so in a way that spared it the risk of receiving a libel suit from HT. Jyllands-Posten therefore published a deliberately vague version of the story, leaving the details to be filled in later by a gullible hack at the Jerusalem Post.

I strongly doubt that Melchior and Pundak failed to discern the real message that Zionist extremists were sending them: raise money for Israel, not Palestine. If you persist in fundraising activities on behalf of Palestinian causes, you are gambling with your lives. Masada's SHITLIST - which implies that 'shitty' Jews deserve to be eliminated - is a far more real threat to pro-peace Jews like Melchior and Pundak than a thousand hit lists conjured up by Jyllands-Posten.

This story therefore tells us more about the modus operandi of radical Zionism than that of radical Islam. Its real point was to convey coded death threats to pro-Palestinian Danish Jews while making it look to the Danish public like Islamists are so fanatical that they even target Jews who want peace. Never go after one target when there's an opportunity to hit two at the same time!

One of the striking features of the Matthiessen affair is the way media organizations closed ranks to forestall the exposure of his tawdry little hoax. Despite some six interviews with the Danish Police Intelligence Unit (PET), he adamantly refused to divulge the sources for his improbable revelations. PET then began secretly tapping his phone and launched legal proceedings in an effort to learn what he was refusing to disclose voluntarily.

When PET's activities were revealed in late August 2002, a minor furore erupted within the media establishment, which passionately insisted on a journalist's right to protect the confidentiality of his sources. On August 28, 2002 Robert Ménard, Secretary-General of Reporters without Borders (RSF), wrote a letter of protest to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. 'The significance of this development cannot be understated,' he declared pompously. 'Denmark, which was formerly the most liberal European country in matters of the press, is now having recourse to the worst methods to force a journalist to reveal his sources: telephone tapping, intimidation and the threat of a prison sentence.' Ménard urged the prime minister to intervene to stop such forms of pressure and restore respect for the confidentiality of journalistic sources, 'the only guarantee of independent investigative journalism.' (SOURCE)

BELOW: Neocon whore Robert Ménard, who recently admitted that RSF is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the vehicle created by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for overthrowing governments the U.S. doesn't like. (SOURCE)



Although an enormous abyss yawns between 'independent investigative journalism' and the deliberate planting of a hoax, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) took the same line: 'This action by the police is not only an abuse of power, but it reflects the contempt that some senior officers have for the rights of journalists and media,' said the IFJ's General Secretary, Aidan White. (SOURCE) Ditto for the Danish media magazine Journalisten ('The Journalist') in articles on the episode written by Annelise Mølvig and Mette Gert. Ditto for the Danish communist party paper, Kommunistisk Politik, which got so hot and bothered about the threat to Matthiessen's freedom to tell lies than that it was oblivious to the likelihood that he was refusing to divulge his sources because he didn't have any. (SOURCE)

In the end, therefore, the furore over police pressure on the violations of Matthiessen's journalistic rights completely overshadowed 1) the public's right to know whether any Danish Islamic group really had a hit list of Danish Jews, a piece of information which would possess considerable importance in the context of the often tense relations between Denmark's majority whites and its Muslim minorities, and 2) the police's right to know whether there was verifiable information behind the story that would have obliged it to take action to protect the persons on the list and to punish those making death threats.

Predictably, given the sanctimonious, self-aggrandizing verbal diarrhoea emanating from the media lobby, the High Court in Copenhagen handed neocon faux journalism a victory over the PET on September 12, 2002, relieving Matthiessen of all obligation to reveal his sources. And so a mighty blow was struck for the Freedom of the Press that surely set a precedent for the recent abuses in relation to the Prophet Muhammed cartoons affair.

The victory of Big Media in that Danish courtroom meant nothing less than the defeat of the public interest, which it seems no one in Denmark believes in defending any more. To be sure, the public interest is advanced by the existence of a free press. But what the public interest requires is that the press be free to tell the truth, not free to tell lies. As a result of their arrogant, absolute, automatic belief in journalists' privileges - in other words, their privileges - groups like RSF and IFJ effectively colluded to prevent Matthiessen's hoax from unravelling.

If Matthiessen had been forced to divulge his sources - and, perhaps, in the end he would have admitted having made the whole thing up - the cause of the truth would have been advanced and the discussion of the Muslim question in Denmark would have emerged on a sturdier footing. But instead, the image of Danish Muslims was unnecessarily tarnished and the Danish journalistic establishment emerged with carte blanche to publish most anything it likes. We can be sure that the future of Danish journalism will see the publication of more and more stories with no verifiable basis, a trend which is well advanced in the United States where newspapers like the New York Times routinely deceive the American public in order to foster compliance to U.S. government objectives.

By way of conclusion, it's necessary to point out that the above argument does not depend on this author's conviction that Matthiessen's story was bogus. Jyllands-Posten has actually admitted that it does not know whether the story was true or not. 'The newspaper says it would have contacted the police if it had "concrete evidence that could have hindered a serious crime," and added that it wasn't even certain whether such a list actually exists.' (SOURCE)

The paper's admission that it had never properly checked out Matthiessen's story - which was overlooked by virtually everybody in the rush to defend the author's journalistic rights - effectively brought to an end a sordid neocon intrigue which saw a mere abstraction elevated so high that it lost all touch with the public interest. In Canada, Matthiessen and Jyllands-Postens would probably have ended up being charged under section 181 of the Criminal Code which forbids spreading 'false news.' In Denmark today, it seems, publishing false news is now a fundamental right. So long as it's false news that casts Muslims in a bad light, of course.

1. In September 2005, Flemming Rose, culture editor for the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which in April 2003 engaged in self-censorship by declining to publish drawings lampooning Jesus Christ on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers, ACTIVELY SOLICITED IMAGES OFFENSIVE TO MUSLIMS by asking 25 (or 40, it depends which account you read) 'cartoonists to draw images of the Prophet Muhammad, something that is proscribed by Islamic law as blasphemous. Spelling out the provocative and inflammatory aim of this exercise, the chief editor said its purpose was “to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues.”' (NOTE)

Commentary: Please note that Jyllands-Posten solicited images not texts. It could, for example, have asked 25 or 40 historians to write short pieces on Islamic topics. But it didn't solicit texts. Obviously, the idea was to ensure that Muslims would be inflamed, a goal that could only be achieved by means of images. (Texts wouldn't have worked, because they would have to be translated before most Muslims would understand them and in any case texts would not contravene any of Islam's central doctrines and so would be much less likely to precipitate violence.) It's almost superfluous to point out that the Danish media, like the media in almost every non-Muslim country in the world, indulges in extensive self-censorship when it comes to Jewish issues. So when do we get to see Jyllands-Posten test the boundaries of self-censorship in relation to, for example, the Holocaust?

BELOW: Flemming Rose, the man behind the Danish cartoons scandal. According to Christopher Bollyn, Rose 'has clear ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons behind the "war on terror."' He's apparently working in cahoots with key necon Daniel Pipes.



2. The newspaper proceeded to publish twelve of the drawings on September 30 causing a predictable uproar in Danish Muslim communities.

3. In October, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen 'refused to meet with the ambassadors of eleven predominantly Muslim countries who had requested a meeting to discuss their objections to the cartoons. Setting the tone for the ensuing developments, Rasmussen declared that the cartoons were a legitimate exercise in press freedom, and implied that there was nothing to discuss.' He added that he had no power - and wanted no power - to restrict freedom of the press in Denmark.

Commentary: Can you imagine Rasmussen not agreeing to meet with leaders of Jewish groups if, for example, Jyllands-Posten had published cartoons relating to the Holocaust suggesting that it was a hoax? Incidentally, Rasmussen does not seem to be very well-informed about Danish law. The Danish Constitution does indeed grant the right to free expression, but it does so on the basis that people are accountable for what they say or do. Here's section 77. It states: 'Any person shall be at liberty to publish his ideas in print, in writing, and in speech, subject to being held responsible in a court of law.' [My emphasis added.] What's more, the Danish Penal Code, Section 266b states: 'Any person who publicly or with the intention of dissemination to a wide circle of people makes a statement or imparts other information threatening, insulting, or degrading a group of persons on account of their race, color, or national or ethnic origin, belief or sexual orientation shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.'



4. In late November 2005, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, the leader of a radical Islamist group in Denmark, the Islamic Society of Denmark, toured the Middle East to publicize the images. In order to make sure that Muslims were duly incensed, he brought along with him three additional images, which Jyllands-Posten had not published and which, in fact, had not been published in any media source. Akhmad Akkari, spokesman of the Danish Muslim organisations which organised the tour, claims they were sent to him anonymously. 'Akkari claimed he does not know the origin of the three pictures. He said they had been sent anonymously to Danish Muslims. However, when Ekstra Bladet asked if it could talk to these Muslims, Akkari refused to reveal their identity.' The supplementary pictures can be viewed here.

Commentary: This is your smoking gun. Either someone at Jyllands-Posten sent Akkari the pictures in order to manipulate him or he's a willing accomplice in this operation, perhaps a tool of Danish intelligence.

5. In January 2006, the Swedish newspaper Expressen printed two of the drawings in conjunction with an article discussing the event and major newspapers in Norway had printed facsimiles from Jyllands-Posten and reproduced all the caricatures in their online versions. Then, on January 10, shortly after the U.S. government reprimanded a minister in the Norwegian government for speaking out in support of a boycott of Israeli goods and services, a Norwegian Christian evangelical [= Christian Zionist] magazine, Magazinet, decided to republish the Danish cartoons. All these media outlets - and Magazinet was actually the least important of them all - did so in full knowledge of the reality that the republication of the cartoons were likely to inflame domestic Muslim communities.

Commentary: It looks to me as though, by January 2006, those behind this particular psy-op (Rasmussen, Pipes and Rose?) were getting very pissed off indeed that the Danish controversy hadn't started any fireworks yet. Clearly, the idea was to spread the tinder around more widely in the hope that sooner or later there would come the spark necessary to start a conflagration.

6. A Norwegian man made death threats against Magazinet staff, but later claimed, when questioned by the police, that the threat had been a hoax.

Commentary: Who was this man, who was apparently not a Muslim (or he would have been identified as such)? And was his aim to ensure that the cartoons garnered more publicity than something published in Magazinet would normally deserve?

7. In late January, Saudi Arabia and Syria [one source says Libya instead of Syria] recalled their ambassadors from Denmark and the Saudi regime initiated a consumer boycott of Danish goods. (The boycott has since spread to include several other countries, including the Sudan.)

Commentary: Why the hell didn't the Saudis take this action when Denmark participated in the invasion of Iraq? Denmark's hostile intentions towards the Muslim world were already fully apparent then.



8. The Danish-Swedish dairy company Arla Foods, the second largest dairy producer in Europe, 'was badly hit by the boycott. The company, which had annual sales of some 480 million USD in the Middle East, saw its sales in the region plummet to nil as Muslim shopkeepers pulled Danish products off the shelves. "We have taken 40 years to build up a very big business in the Middle East, and we've seen it come to a complete stop in five days," company spokeswoman Astrid Gade Niels told the BBC. "Our sales in the Middle East have come to a complete stop - in all countries in the region," she said. "We have found ourselves in the middle of a game that we have no part in."'

Commentary: Too bad. In any case, you can bet your right leg that Arla Foods, like all big exporters, is a big supporter of the pro-big business Rasmussen government.

9. Much too late, the Danish government and Jyllands-Posten issued statements of regret. However, Rose remained unrepentant and had the audacity to compare himself to a rape victim.

10. Despite the intensifying controversy and the boycott of Danish goods, an Icelandic newspaper and a French newspaper whose chief editor is a Jew, Arnaud Levy, France Soir republished the cartoons. Other newspapers in France, including Le Monde and the (formerly liberal) Libération, followed suit.

Commentary: Who in France decided it was time to teach the Muslims a lesson in 'free speech'? Sarkozy?

11. Then newspapers and magazines in virtually every major European country decided to republish the cartoons! 'The German newspapers Die Welt [which is owned by Zionist and all-round ratbag Axel Springer], Die Tageszeitung, Tagesspiegel and Berliner Zeitung, the Dutch papers Volksrant, NRC Handelsblad and Elsevier, Italy’s La Stampa and Corriere della Sera, Spain’s El Periodico and two Dutch-language newspapers in Belgium were among those that published some or all of the cartoons' in the space of just a few days. 'In Britain, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all showed some of the cartoons on television news broadcasts.' Muslim anger surged in about half the Muslim countries. Scandinavians travelling in the Middle East, as well as other Europeans who look Scandinavian, found their lives at risk.

12. Attacks on Danish and Norwegian consulates take place in several Middle Eastern countries. Bizarrely, there is no shortage of Danish flags for the protestors to burn. Writing in the neocon propaganda rag the Telegraph, Charles Moore - who points out that Danish flags are not normally in plentiful supply in Gaza - quite rightly wonders where all the flags came from. 'It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking.'

Commentary: For once I agree with a Telegraph columnist! (The rest of the column is 'clash of civilizations' trash, though.) That said, the below photo of the Gaza protest does not show many Danish flags and the one that can be seen looks like it was cobbled together in about half an hour.



13. Improbably, the only government to issue a sensible statement concerning the cartoons was the Bush administration, one of the biggest enemies of free speech in the world: '“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims,” said a department spokesman, adding, “We fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”'

Commentary: Wow, what a sophisticated psy-op! Muslims come out looking bad, the most progressive countries in Europe come out looking bad and will henceforth less be trusted as intermediaries in Middle East conflicts, and the Bush administration emerges squeaky-clean! You really have to take your hat off to Rasmussen, Pipes and Rose over this one!

14. In Denmark, the penny finally drops: 'Now it has become more than a case about the drawings: Now there are forces that want a confrontation between our cultures ... It is in no one's interest, neither them or us,' Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said on Danish radio.

Commentary: Duh! How could a country have a foreign minister so dumb that he didn't know already that 'there are forces that want a confrontation between our cultures': What the fuck do you think the war in Iraq (in which Denmark's involved) is about, you goon!

15. According to a London neocon propaganda rag, the Danish cartoonists responsible for the offending cartoons are in hiding for fear of their lives.

Commentary: This is probably a load of bollocks. I'm sure Danish security is looking after them very well, thank you. However, sooner or later one of them is bound to get set up by Danish intelligence and beheaded. Then the Danish people will really have something to hate Muslims for! Stay tuned for the sequel story "Danish cartoonist hunted down in Roskilde today was skewered and kebabed by angry Turk."

16. The Danish cartoonists have decided to use all the money raised from the sales of the pictures to set up a foundation which will award an annual international prize for press freedom.

Commentary: Wouldn't it be a better idea, guys, to mend fences with the world's Muslims by giving the money to a Muslim charity or something? Perhaps for the victims of the recent earthquake in Pakistan? Funny how the idea of restorative justice no longer seems to exist. Well, it exists for Jews, who are still bilking Germany for Holocaust reparations, but not for Muslims or virtually anyone else.

17. Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based media monitor, loses all credibility after its secretary general, Robert Ménard, supported the publication of the cartoons saying, 'All countries in Europe should be behind the Danes and Danish authorities to defend the principle that a newspaper can write what it wishes to, even if it offends people. I understand that it may shock Muslims, but being shocked is part of the price of being informed,' he told The New York Times.

Commentary: I find it extremely offensive when someone decides that their freedoms can be pursued irrespective of its cost to others. This strikes me as the worst egotism. There's a big difference between, say, the right to fart (which I support) and the right to fart right in someone's face (which I don't). The first is fair enough, the second a hostile act. What this furore is about is really an incident comparable to the latter. It's also extremely hard to see how defamatory cartoons of Mohammed could be construed as 'information.' It's also an incredibly hypocritical position for Reporters without Borders to take since there are a great many topics the newspapers who've published these cartoons would never touch in a million years, for fear of offending their owners, or corporate and Zionist lobby groups. Apparently, it's only when Muslims are the targets that press freedom becomes absolute.

18. The Arab European League, a Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organisation, remains the only organization so far to take advantage of the new definition of 'free speech,' which has been broadened so that it now applies to deliberate attempts to insult people's most cherished beliefs, when it ran anti-Jewish cartoons on its website, including one showing Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. It is not known whether Jyllands-Posten has been approached to republish them.

19. In Sydney, Australia, blogger Social Democracy Now, who normally buys a good deal of cheese from Denmark, decides that from he will be boycotting Danish dairy products from now on. He sends an email to Jyllands-Posten inviting them to break through the wall of self-censorship that has attached to Zionism by actively soliciting cartoons recycling the old anti-semitic stereotypes that have suppressed in most parts of the West since the 1930s.

20. Flemming Rose persists in making disingenuous statements. '[A]s an editor, as a newspaperman, as long as I'm operating within the law, as long as I am not breaking any code of conduct in the Danish context, I cannot apologize for that.' (SOURCE)

Commentary: In fact, Rose and Jyllands-Posten have broken Danish law, specifically Section 266b of the Danish Penal Code, (See point 3 above.)

CONCLUSION: I tend to agree with Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones that 'The riots that are currently sweeping across Europe and the Middle East in response to caricatures of Mohammed that were originally printed in Danish newspapers are staged managed and are helping the Neo-Cons advance the "clash of civilizations" that they need to impose world order and imperial hegemony.'

NOTE: The chief sources for this chronology were 1, 2 and 3. Additional information was grabbed from all over the place and much too much trouble to try to list.

This gem of interpretation from the BBC today:

'The row over the Danish cartoons is yet another dramatic illustration of the huge gap between secular liberal values in the West and the predominantly religious outlook of Middle Eastern societies.' (SOURCE)

No, it's not. What the hell do you think would happen if large-circulation dailies like the Irish Times or El Pais or the Chicago Tribune published cartoons showing Jesus getting a blowjob from Mary Magdalene or Moses using the Ten Commandments as a dildo or snorting cocaine or something? [Use your imagination to think of offensive things Moses could be depicted doing.]

As for the West's liberal values, these have been dramatically revised in recent decades to the extent that in practice they only apply to Zionists and their allies. Ask the Holocaust revisionists - those currently incarcerated including Germar Rudolf, David Irving and Ernst Zundel - what they have learned from experience about the West's 'liberal values.'

Come to think of it, imagine if the Jyllands-Posten actually took on the West's REAL religion, the Holocaust. What kind of furore do you think would erupt if cartoonists depicted Auschwitz as one big sex orgy or the Warsaw ghetto as a pedophile utopia?

Can you seriously imagine the Danish prime minister telling Jewish lobby groups that Jyllands-Posten had the right to publish cartoons of starving and emaciated Jews having sex with three-year-olds or - even worse - not agreeing to meet with Jewish lobbyists to talk about the issue at all?

The furore over the Danish cartoons is, in fact, yet another dramatic illustration of the West's double standards.

Everything will be done to accommodate Zionist sensibilities and to placate Zionist demands - and to facilitate Zionism's war on Islam.

But nothing will be done to accommodate Muslim sensibilities or to placate Muslim demands.

Part III: Schwarzmann thinks the Cold War is still on!
NB: Part I can be read here. Part II is here)

In addition to his website Finland for Thought, Schwarzmann has hosted since September 2005 a Sunday night podcast entitled Radio Free Finland. (Programme archives here.)

The name of Schwarzmann's show offers, I feel, a fundamental insight into the nature of his political imagination. Can you think of anything more patronizing than an American going to Finland and setting up a radio programme called 'Radio Free Finland'? With its echoes of the Cold War era's 'Radio Free Europe,' the name suggests that Schwarzmann thinks of Finland as some kind of oppressed country whose people need Americans like himself to liberate them.

In my previous post, I suggested that Schwarzmann represents the latest manifestation of the 'Ugly American.' What I mean by this is that, whether he's entirely conscious of the fact or not, there seems to be a layer of the American imagination which cannot fully accept that non-Americans experience anything that can legitimately be called 'freedom.' Because they are excluded from real freedom by not being American, it would seem Finns can only experience freedom vicariously for the duration of his one-hour programme.

At this point, you could well object that the name of the show is just a joke. Yet, there seems to be a little more to it than that. Sounding like he's imbibed too much Cold War mythology, Schwarzmann reinforces the show's ersatz underground character when, at the beginning of each show, while soliciting phone calls and emails from listeners, he promises his audience that he will not identify anyone who contacts him by name, that it's OK for them to use pseudonyms.

This declaration of a willingness to preserve anonymity strikes me as rather odd. What kind of place does Schwarzmann think Finland is, exactly? Does he think that the Finnish government's intelligence agents are on red alert, ready to arrest all callers to his underground radio show as fast as they can identify them? Is Schwarzmann under the impression that the Finnish state maintains a gulag for its libertarian critics in some remote corner of the country?

In short, like the writings on his blog, Schwarzmann betrays in his radio show numerous indications of a deepseated psychological need for the welfare state as a device for preserving intact a simplistic (let's call a spade a spade and say 'moronic') Cold War worldview in which the planet is neatly divided between friends and enemies of freedom. Could it be that the welfare state has become the principle target to libertarians because, with communism gone, they desperately need a substitute for the vanished Soviet Union, and Europe's advanced welfare states are the next best thing to hate?

Schwarzmann's implicit assumption that Finland lacks freedom is a bit hard to take, when you consider that in virtually every meaningful sense of the word 'freedom' Finns are a great deal freer than most people living on the planet today. At the very least, according to Reporters Without Borders, Finland is one of seven countries with top ranking for press freedom; no English-speaking country - with the exception of non-Anglo-Saxon Ireland, which is also in first place - even comes close. (Australia's ranking on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index is a poor #31, and that of the U.S. is a dire #44.)

Then, as I pointed out in my previous post, Finns are free to educate themselves for most any profession they choose - without being crippled for years afterwards by debt, free to receive medical care when they need it, and the young, at least those of them who have to work for a living, are free to, well, pay the rent and eat and maybe even go out from time to time. None of these freedoms exist for very large proportions of the population in countries with relatively undeveloped welfare states like those of the English-speaking countries, and in many such countries it usually comes down to a difficult choice between them, which at the very least involves saying goodbye to anything even vaguely resembling a healthy diet.

If you attack the welfare state, as Schwarzmann and rightwing libertarians do persistently - do they really have any other target? - then you have to wonder what sort of 'freedom' it is they are talking about. What meaningful definition of freedom wouldn't include social freedoms such as the right to an education? Or the right to pursue a vocation of one's own choosing? Or economic freedoms, such as the right to an income that guarantees a minimum standard of living? What Schwarzmann and the rightwing libertarians don't tell you is that there's no place in their worldview for economic and social freedom. But if you take away the welfare state, all the freedom that's left is the freedom of the rich and powerful to tyrannize over the rest of us.

Conclusion: march of the cyber-uglies

'A man without education is not a complete person.' - Simon Bolivar.
'We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.' - Gerald W. Bracey, contemporary American education policy expert.

In this series of three posts you've been introduced to a contemporary manifestation of the Ugly American - the 'cyber-ugly' frothing and foaming at the mouth about the evils of the European welfare state and how oppressive countries are which have the fairest distribution of income and life opportunity in the history of capitalism. For some obscure reason, American libertarians are leaving their own country and heading to Scandinavia - normally Sweden, where there are now a considerable number of institutions funded by Swedish business groups co-ordinating their activities - apparently for the purpose of catapulting anti-welfare state propaganda.

The drift to Scandinavia strikes me as a curious development because I tend to wonder why, if you hate the welfare state as much as people like Schwarzmann explicitly say they do, would you want to go and live in one of the world's most advanced welfare states? Why not go somewhere where you can have more 'freedom'? Why not head for, say, Estonia, which despite a poverty rate of at least 20 percent (some say nearer 30 percent) seems to be the libertarian movement's current notion of a socialism-free paradise?

Maybe one day the exodus of Americans to Scandinavia will be revealed to have been a CIA project - in the light of the proliferation of rightwing thinktanks in Europe staffed very largely by Americans, it would seem that there is some sort of sub rosa co-operation going on between European conservatives and their allies in Washington - the possibility cannot be ruled out that all or most of the people referred to here are receiving paychecks from Langley for their efforts - but for now we will assume that the motivation is purely ideological. But what's behind this ideology?

Freerider Phil in Washington. Is this where his paychecks really come from?



Explaining the spreading mildew of American libertarianism over the far north means, first of all, understanding that its roots are in a country suffering from a near total collapse of the intellect. As Paul Craig Roberts - who back in the 80s held the office of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, which would presumably make it difficult to dismiss what he says as 'anti-American' - pointed out recently, 'Two recent polls, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll and a New York Times/CBS News poll, indicate ... [that] half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information. ... half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts.' [My italics] (SOURCE)

Even top members of the Bush administration cannot get their most elementary historical facts straight. Rumsfeld, for example, said at the National Press Club on February 2, 2006 that the rise of Hugo Chavez concerned him: 'Rumsfeld ... sought to portray Chavez as leading some sort of Axis-like alliance in Latin America, saying "He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally, and then consolidated power, and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales [the new populist President of Bolivia] and others. It concerns me".' (SOURCE)

However, as anyone who has looked into the subject of the rise of the Third Reich knows, Hitler was not 'elected legally' - he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, and all the steps he subsequently took to consolidate his power took the form of exploiting vulnerabilities in the Weimar constitution - in fact, he used more or less the same methods that another unelected leader, Supreme Court appointee George W. Bush, used to consolidate his presidency after 9-11. In Venezuela, on the other hand, the rise of Chavez has coincided with a process of constitutional reform which has strengthened democracy rather than Chavez's hold on power. (He is simply the first beneficiary of the strengthened democratization process, and in due course there will be others.) But Rumsfeld can get away with such erroneous statements because the general population, including much of the Washington press corps, has been so dumbed down that they are incapable of noticing when someone has told them a bald-faced lie.

You don't get a population that stupid by accident. The inability of so many Americans to absorb and process information is an intentional result of the American system for propagandizing its own population. As John Taylor Gatto shows at length in his remarkable book, The Underground History of American Education, which can be read online for free here, the [U.S.] educational system was designed to keep Americans 'uneducated and docile.' (For a brief introduction to this book, one of the most important historical contributions of recent times, follow this link.)

Gatto shows how, beginning a little over a century ago, elites intervened in American mass education for the purpose of ensuring that the country produced not intellectually-alert citizens, but worker drones. What worried them, firstly, was the possibility that a good education system would produce too many people capable of working in the better-paid and more fulfilling jobs; there were 'enough' lawyers, academics, journalists and novelists already. The need was therefore to ensure that the overwhelming majority of people restricted their ambitions to menial occupations. The elites' second worry was the growing socialist agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. They did not want their precious work of creating the world's first corporation-controlled society stymied by demands for such things as eight-hour days and minimum wages.

The educational dumbing down of America was therefore partly a strategy to inoculate American workers against the threat (to elites) posed by socialism; mass education was to bring about the artificial prolongation of childhood and perpetuate a permanent condition of political illiteracy. It is because the education system shaped by these principles has been in place for almost a century now that America has become the fountainhead for lunatic ideologies such as conservatism, libertarianism, Christian Zionism, fundamentalism and dominionism that virtually anywhere else wouldn't stand a chance of percolating into the mainstream.

The immense popularity enjoyed by such ideological movements in the U.S. is therefore best understood as a product of an educational system that has been designed to suppress freedom by keeping Americans 'corporate friendly.' No system, perhaps, can eliminate dissent entirely, but by this means America's elites were able to ensure that when dissent arose, it was a superficial kind of dissent that only served their ultimate purposes.

Recall how Finnpundit actually suggests that social democracy may be worse than communism because it's 'so benign'? Nothing could suit America's corporate elites better than the kind of convoluted thinking that condemns the use of government as a means of strengthening the freedoms of the many. (If Finland were run on the same quasi-totalitarian lines as Singapore, does anyone think Finnpundit or Schwarzmann would have the slightest complaint?)

Unfortunately, we don't know anything about Finnpundit's educational background - although if he really did migrate from Finland to the US when he was a child the process of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture would certainly have disrupted his educational development - Schwarzmann's CV, shows a purely vocational education. He's a Computer Science major. While that doesn't mean that his computer science studies are the only studies he's ever had, his mental horizons seem to consist almost exclusively of choice tidbits from rightwing websites.

What I tend to worry about is that people like Finnpundit and Schwarzmann who cherry pick the bits of information that prop up their ideologies and ignore everything else might begin to be taken seriously when they purport to evaluate complex social, political and economic systems. Libertarianism has a certain attraction to people in Scandinavia who (like 'TA' - see Part I on Finnpundit) are generally broadminded enough that they enjoy having their views challenged. (If they didn't, would Finland for Thought get 48,000 hits a week?)

On the one hand, all of us need our ideas challenged from time to time and it is a hallmark of an educated person, I think, to actively seek out challenging ideas as a means of keeping our brains alive and functioning. Unfortunately, though, there are too many cases when a well-intentioned, broadminded receptivity to outre ideas has gone well beyond a flirtation, and actually helped bring about their triumph, good examples being the rise of asceticism in the later Roman empire and the witch craze in early modern Europe. It would be little short of a tragedy if a similar fascination with the contrary and the perverse led to the demise of the Nordic welfare states - this would be a tragedy not just for the Nordic peoples, but also for those of us living in the ramshackle liberal economies who at present have no other beacon.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: FinnSense: The libertarian website Finland For Thought 'is run through with lots of poorly understood libertarian claptrap. Together with the possibly defunct Finnpundit, they seem to be members of the "find a problem in Finland from whichever news source and use it as proof that the Nordic model cannot work and that even if the US model sucks, so does the Nordic model but at least the US is really rich so there," school of propaganda.'