Assad's Day of the Rope

As most readers know, Amnesty International issued a report which claimed that Assad has hanged 13,000 Syrians at a Damascus jail since the Syrian civil war began in 2011.

The Amnesty report said an average of 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in the four years after a popular uprising descended into civil war, it said.

"The victims are overwhelmingly civilians who are thought to oppose the government," the report said.

"Many other detainees at Sednaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care."

There seems to be some substantial evidence for it:

The executions were carried out secretly and those killed were buried in mass graves outside the capital, with families not informed of their fate, it said.

The report was based on interviews with 84 witnesses including former guards and officials, detainees, judges and lawyers, as well as experts.

It followed a report issued a year ago by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria, whose war crimes investigators said they had documented a high number of deaths in Sednaya military prison.

"Amnesty's findings are almost completely in-line with our 'Death in Detention' paper," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the U.N. panel, told Reuters.

"We mentioned the executions in Sednaya and have extensive details on the systematic details of the regular ceremonies they have to conduct hangings in front of an audience of public officials. It is one of the clearest instances of a systematic practice that we had and based some of the key findings upon."

Assad has become a practioner of Nuremberg-style trials - and executions:

The prisoners, who included former military personnel suspected of disloyalty and people involved in unrest, underwent sham trials before military courts and were sometimes forced to make confessions under torture, Amnesty said.

The executions were carried out secretly and those killed were buried in mass graves outside the capital, with families not informed of their fate, it said.

As Holocaust deniers, we should be prima facie wary of atrocity stories. But the problem with the Holocaust tales is that they nearly always contain an element of absurdity which undermines them. See, for instance, the massacre at the ravine in Babi Yar, when 80,000 Jews were massacred by firing squads and mobile gas chambers: the Germans disposed of all the bodies - every single one - on bonfires or in mobile bone-crushing machines. That seems scarcely credible to me. But the Amnesty report on Assad's mass executions seems perfectly credible: it may be false, for all I know, but it seems common-sensical, unlike the story of the Babi Yar massacre, and what's more, one can verify its claims through forensics. The Assad regime, if it wanted to disprove the report, could easily open its Sedanya jail - and the mass graves nearby - to inspection.

Assad has become the worst mass murderer the Arab world has ever seen - at least in recent times. Yet many on the Far Left and Right support him. Some of them, no doubt, would justify the killings - they are what I call the 'tough nuts'. Their stock response will be: those people deserved to die, they were 'Terrorists', 'Zionists', 'Muslims', 'Islamists', [insert x here]... But if Israel had hanged 13,000 Palestinian 'terrorists', the Americans 13,000 Iraquis or Afghanis: you would hear a terrible outcry from the same tough nuts; Arab and Muslim life suddenly becomes sacrosanct. The strange thing is that the tough nuts abominate ISIS for killing and torturing so many Arabs and Muslims; but the evidence will show - after this war is over - that Assad has killed and tortured many, many more Arabs and Muslims than ISIS and is worse than ISIS in that regard.

Those on the Far Right who have invested in Assad, and invested heavily, have made a terrible mistake. To support the worst Arab mass murderer of perhaps all time has proven to be, to put it euphemistically, 'bad optics'. The Assadists will find themselves in the same position as those communist groups which, in the late seventies, supported Pol Pot and the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea: the crimes of their hero will return to haunt them.

You've got to be joking

See here for source.

Assad fighting for 'secularism' against 'Islamism'? The Assadists need a new narrative.

Why the Neocons should shut up about Munich

Many commentators in Bush 43 era objected to the neocons because of the role they played in fomenting the Iraq invasion and in propping up the Bush administration, ideologically, during the period of the 'War on Terror'. They took umbrage with Bush, the neocons and the 'War on Terror' on mainly humanitarian grounds: it was wrong, unethical, to kill and blow up so many Arabs and Muslims.

Moving forward to 2016, the neocons can't really be castigated for that reason: quite a few of these critics of the neocons now approve a 'War on Terror' - as it is waged by Assad; they approve the torture, kidnapping, bombing and murder of Arabs, so long as Assad, and the 'progressive', 'secularist' forces of Russia and Iran are doing it. The Syrian war is shaping up to be the most devastating conflict in the Arab world's recent history, and Assad will prove to be much worse than Bush 43. So, on this point, we should cut the neocons some slack.

I find the neocons - Krauthammer, Kristol, Podhoretz, Stephens, Kagan and the rest - fairly agreeable up to a point; they don't really differ all that much - especially since the election - from Steve Sailer, Hunter Wallace, VDare - in their criticisms of immigration, political correctness, the Democratic Party, Black Lives Matter... They are obsessed with Obama's Iran deal, but I could take or leave Iran.
As for their other obsessions - Israel, the Palestinians, the settlements in the West Bank - not being an Arab or Jew, I don't have a dog in the fight on that one either. I agree with the neocons when they make the charge that American foreign policy has been weak and unassertive, not to mention criminally irresponsible, since Obama - that's true enough. So I often experience, when picking up the National Review or Commentary or Weekly Standard, the strange sensation of reading through one of their articles and finding it not so objectionable after all - at least, not as much as I had anticipated. 'Maybe the neocons aren't as black as they're painted', I say to myself.

Then I come to the one stumbling block which prevents full agreement: Munich. Hitler. WWII. Analogies to Neville Chamberlain's deal with Germany at Munich in 1938, and to an alleged Chamberlain appeasement policy, have been made countless times in neocon propaganda; the neocons just can't keep away from the topic.

Let's take a look at the latest piece by the classicist Victor Davis Hanson, one of the few goyish neocons out there (and incidentally a big opponent of illegal immigration into California, his home state). It attacks the Obama administration for its many failings, including its lamentable foreign policy and its neglect of the fundamental truths of statecraft:

Throughout history, it has not gone well for powerful leaders when they have been perceived as being both loudly sanctimonious and weak (read Demosthenes on Athenian reactions to Philip II), as if the nation’s strength enervates the leader rather than empowers his diplomacy. Worse still is when a leader aims to loudly project strength through rhetoric while quietly fearing to do so through ships and soldiers.

So far, so good. I haven't read Demosthenes on Philip II, but when it comes to that subject, I'm willing to take Hanson's word for it. I'm no classicist.

But then, here it comes:

Think again of Neville Chamberlain at Munich, who gave Hitler everything — including lectures on proper international behavior. Anthony Eden remarked at the time that British statesmen thought Hitler and Mussolini were like typical British elites with whom they could do business; the British diplomats mistakenly believed they could appeal to the dictators’ reason and common interests, and thus they were bound to be sorely disappointed.

This is wrong in so many ways.

From 1938 to 1939, Czechoslovakia was breaking up, in the same way that Yugoslavia was to nearly six decades later. The 1938 partition deal, in which Germany, Poland and Hungary got pieces each of Czechoslovakia, wasn't enough to forestall the inevitable.

Here's what John Mosier - not a Hitler fan - has to say in his Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine, 1918-1945 (2006):

On November 22, the Czecho-Slovak Republic officially became a confederation of Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians, each group to have considerable local autonomy in its local areas. But by then the Slovaks were beginning to panic. Negotiations with Hungary had broken down, and on November 2, representatives from Germany and Italy met in Vienna and readjusted the boundary between Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary; the latter thus got back the roughly 600,000 ethnic Hungarians who had been stuck inside the Czech Republic at Versailles. Teschen was restored to Poland, and Germany acquired a small piece as well. The Slovaks, who had been hapless bystanders with no say in the foreign policy of the republic, saw that at this rate, they would end up again under Hungarian domination. ('Bloodless victories, or nearly so: toward a Greater Germany, 1935-1939')

The Slovaks then upset the applecart by demanding independence - a demand which entailed the breakup of Czechoslovakia:

While some Slovaks sought real independence, as far as the Czechs could make out, the Slovak idea of autonomy was, for all practical purposes, de facto independence. Thus in February 1939, as the Spanish civil war slowly came to a bloody end, the Czechs drew up a plan to occupy Slovakia. The plan was so secret that neither the Czech prime minister nor his minister of defense knew about it; it nonetheless existed. On March 10, a version of the plan was put into effect, and Prague attempted to name a new Slovak government. On the thirteenth, the Slovak leaders went to Berlin, because Hitler had agreed the day before to guarantee the new state’s independence (as it were). Without Slovakia, there was obviously no more Czecho-Slovak Republic, so events happened quickly: by March 15, German armored cars were in the streets of Prague. On that same day, the Ruthenians declared their independence, only to see Hungarian troops invading the country, with the tacit approval of Warsaw. (Ibid)

Perhaps the US, and Britain, should have gone to war, like Lincoln in 1861, and Serbia in 1992, to keep the country together? In the view of the neocons, yes: this would have 'stopped' Hitler. But Mosier injects a note of realism:

Although it soon became established in the West that Hitler had orchestrated all these events, the motivating tensions predated Hitler’s rise to power by decades. Considered from the point of view of diplomatic history after 1918, Hitler’s decision was harmless. The Slovaks had always (post–1918) wanted their own country, they were as entitled to one as anyone else, and Germany had every right to guarantee its existence and to insist that Hungary and Slovakia settle their differences peacefully. Hitler would insist on the same thing with Hungary and Romania, embellishing his credentials as a man who had unified Germany peacefully and had reversed the injustices of the Versailles and Trianon treaties without a shot being fired. From the point of view of the Germans, the Poles, the Slovakians, most Hungarians—and some Ruthenians—this was a perfectly logical development, and one probably viewed favorably (in private at least) by a good many foreign ministries in the West as well. For the French and the British public at large, however, the dismemberment of the Czecho-Slovakian Republic was the last straw. Again the complexities of Central European ethnicity were, for most people, not merely abstractions; they were daunting abstractions of the sort that only the professional diplomats of the previous century understood. The disappearance of an entire country, though, was concrete enough. It was rendered all the more so by the defiant “come and get us” speeches that Hitler had been making through the fall of 1938. (Ibid)

Germany, then, prevented war by acting as it did -  a war which Roosevelt and Churchill so dearly wanted.

The neoconservatives will counter this by pointing out that the Czechs lost any independence and self-determination as a result of the Slovaks getting theirs - (what later became) the Czech Republic was annexed to Germany and became Bohemia and Moravia. I agree in principle that's a bad thing when a country loses its independence and ceases to exist. But then I remember another the fate of another country - Palestine - which disappeared in 1948: what happened to it?

We know the answer: in 1948, Jews took over most of Palestine and forced the original inhabitants - who had been there for far longer than these newly-arrived Jewish 'settlers' from Europe - to leave; at the same time, they attacked Palestine's neighbours with a numerically superior army. They won, and literally overnight, Palestine became Israel. All traces of the original Palestinian nation were wiped out; the nation was replaced with a new, synthetic, Hebrew-speaking one.

Now, in 2016, the neocons - and Israel - are outraged with Obama's abstention on the UN resolution on settlements: they find the notion that Israel should be censured for taking whatever scraps of land that the Palestinians have left deplorable. When it comes to the Palestinians - and the ethnic minorities who lived in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and who were oppressed by the Czechs - all the neoconservative principles of liberalism, freedom, fairness, decency, 'moral clarity' and the rest go out the window.

It's here that the anti-Semites step in and accuse neoconservatism of being a Jewish thing; the only real principle the neoconservatives by is, 'Is it good for the Jews?'. The neocons oppose National Socialist Germany because of its anti-Semitism; likewise, they support the state of Israel, and the dismemberment of Palestine, because they believe in old Talmudic prophecies to the effect that the founding of the Jewish state shall lead to the return of the Moschiah (the messiah) and the dominion of the Jews over all life on Earth...

The destruction of Palestine in 1948, and the ethnic cleansing of the Germans by the Czechs from Sudetenland from 1945 to 1948, happened a long time ago. It's the 21st century, and I'm prepared to let them go. But the neocons - and Jewish intellectuals in general - keep on bringing the past up again and again; worse, their ethnic self-interest, which can be barely restrain itself for a moment, keeps on appearing again and again, and inserting itself into the discourse.

Some of my nationalist friends believe that we shouldn't talk about the war; nor should we talk about Jewishness. I see their point: we shouldn't live in the past, and we shouldn't be taking up the worldview of the obsessive anti-Semites David Duke and Kevin MacDonald either. But what happens when the neocons and the Israel lobby - two extremely politically powerful groups - won't shut up about the two topics of the Hitler era and the State of Israel? When they have bent the most powerful man in the world - Donald Trump - to their will?

It's almost as though we can't escape the Jewish question. Perhaps Hitler's doctrines represent inescapable truths - even in this day and age.

A Christmas Gift from the Commies: Racist Anti-Semitism on the 'Left'

The phenomenon of left-wing anti-Semitism raises a few interesting questions. Number one, how real is it? We know that Jews habitually exaggerate anti-Semitism; they are often prone, for example, to conflating criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism, even Nazism. Only today Jewish actress Roseanne Barr compared Obama to the Nazis because of the abstention on the UN anti-settlement vote.

Ah, Roseanne, if only that were true!

Question number two: who's behind it? You could be forgiven for thinking that the left-wing anti-Semites are white -  and that the Far Left has been infiltrated by the Far Right, and by Jew-baiters of the Julius Streicher type. But the racial and ethnic composition of the Left has changed since twenty years ago, especially in America and the UK. Muslims and other non-whites now predominate, and we know that anti-Semitism is acceptable in the Muslim world, and that blacks - especially Afro-Americans - are partial to it as well.

Which brings me to the blog of Andrew Coates, a left-winger from Britain. I'm not sure whether he's Jewish or not, but he certainly doesn't like left-wing anti-Semitism. He found this splendid image on a British Labour Party supporter Facebook group and it was not to his liking:

It was posted by a Muslim, Abdul Mansur.

An Ian Leask added:

From his Facebook profile, we can determine Leask is a Briton - not a Muslim.

Doesn't Leask sound like Oswald Mosley? Arnold Leese? The British fascism of the 1920s and 1930s originated on the Left - I don't care what the likes of Coates say - and perhaps a new fascism in Britain will emerge, organically, from today's British Left. One can only hope.

But we should be cautious. The British Left at present is divided up into two: on one side, the George Galloways, Tariq Alis, Seamus Milnes and all the rest of the neo-Stalinist, Assadist, Putinista and Islam-sympathising gang; on the other, the likes of Andrew Coates - men who won't countenance the Assads, Ghaddafis, Putins and other dictators and who shouldn't, unlike the first group, be viewed as agents of influence for the Iranian, Russian and Syrian Arab Republic states. As you may have guessed, the anti-Semites of the British Left belong to the first faction - unfortunately. Any Red-Brown alliance between anti-Semites of the Left and Right, then, is doomed to fail, because both the Far Right and Far Left members of such an alliance would only end up serving the interests of a Russia or China or Syria or Iran; they would not be agitating for a truly independent Europe outside of American and Russian influence - the Europe Yockey and other post-war fascist theorists wanted.

The liberal Far Left faction - the Coates faction - haven't thought things through. They don't understand that, when you renounce politics, you become the victim of someone else's politics. Those who in the 19th century anarchist and liberal tradition relinquish the state will end up being captured by a state. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

In addition, politics entails (what 19th century idealists) regard as nasty things: taxes, conscription, secret police, executions - and war. Certain schools of socialism once preached that these would disappear once capitalism was abolished and true socialism achieved. Marx and Engels prophesied that, after the advent of true communism, the state would 'wither away'. But the heirs of Marx and Engels - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro - proved to be the most warlike, brutal and oppressive of men. But they got to where they were, not through any 'revolution', but through force of arms, and once having seized power, they were prepared to fight - and kill - so as to keep that power.

The liberal Marxists of the Coates school would find my understanding of politics abhorrent - and fair enough. But it puts them in an interesting position. The likes of Putin, Ghaddafi, Assad can only be beaten, as a last resort, through the application of military force. But the only state actor which would use that force against them is - the United States. The liberal Marxists, then, must end up in bed with the liberal interventionists, the neoconservatives, the more hawkish of the Republicans and Democrats...

I myself would welcome an armed confrontation between Russia and the United States; I would like Russia to experience a military humiliation similar to the one it suffered at the hands of the Japanese in 1905. That would destabilise the Putin regime, and perhaps a discombobulated Putin would stop his incessant interfering in Western Far Right and nationalist politics. We on the Far Right would get the breathing space we need, to form our own 'Third Camp' which is neither US nor Russian.

The prospects for a recruitment drive for the Far Right from the Far Left look good. It's interesting to note that it's Jewry which has driven the likes of Ian Leask to take up what I would characterise as a Mosley-esque or Leese-esque position. We on the Far Right always assumed that it would be mass non-white immigration which would make the Far Left see the light; but, as things turn out, it's the Jews...

I've lost respect for Styxhexenhammer666 - over Syria

I just lost my respect for Styxhexenhammer666.

He's evidently swallowed the Putinist and Assadist propaganda on Syria, hook, line and sinker - propaganda which has infected the Far Right, the Alt Right, and the Far Left, in Australia and abroad.

The truth of the matter is this. Ba'athist / Arab nationalist dictator, Hafez al-Assad, had ruled Syria, a backwards country, from 1970 to 2000. Assad showed himself to be a wily politician and one who possessed great political skill, as evinced by the fact that he survived in office for so long, just like other long-lived dictators Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. And like Castro and Mugabe, he was a butcher. During the 1976-1982 Syrian civil war against the Muslim Brotherhood, he massacred tens of thousands of his own people. After his death in 2000, power was handed to his son Bashar. In 2011, Syrians revolted against Bashar as part of the Arab Spring. As his counterpart Ghaddafi did in Libya, Bashar responded with massacres. Any liberal, secular and moderate Syrians - few as they were - were killed off, and the uprising became a civil war, with Islamists predominating.

Bashar is repeating history, and following his father's tactics, by reducing Syria's cities to rubble and massacring civilians (as Hafez did in Hama in 1982). Contra Styxhexenhammer666, Bashar caused the current 'refugee' crisis plaguing Europe. Had Bashar been deposed in 2011, or had he stood down, and had not Putin supported him to the hilt, there would be no refugee crisis.

Styxhexenhammer666 has fallen for the Bashar and Putin con. These two men, along with their Islamic supporters (i.e., the Mullahs in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon) and the many pro-Putin and pro-Assad Marxists such as our own Communist Party of Australia and John Pilger, claim to be rebels against a 'globalist elite', but in fact form part of that elite themselves. They are only interested in perpetuating their own power - even if that power is confined to their own little niche movement (and contemporary leftism is one such movement). In the case of the Syrian and Russian and Iranian elite, it comes down to money: they became rich under the patronage of their respective dictators, and they want to stay that way - hence their desire to stay in the saddle.

Bashar may end up remaining king of Syria, but he'll be a king of pile of rubble. He'll have lost all legitimacy as a ruler. Yes, the Ba'athist Bastard Brigade are tough blokes, all right - but no-one likes a bastard.

I can't be bothered with Styxhexenhammer666 any more. The same with the Daily Shoah at the RightStuff.Biz. Once I heard host Mike Enoch (a few episodes ago) declaring that Assad, in bombing the hapless civilians of Aleppo, was 'bombing ISIS', I switched off.

We on the Far Right, or Alt Right, or whatever, are a feeble-minded bunch whose knowledge of history doesn't extend further than 2001; as such, we are easily duped by Putinist and Assadist propaganda. We've been taken in.

Yockey examines, in Imperium, the subject of Culture Distortion, and how one Culture (e.g., the Jewish-Islamic-Semitic) may overlay, suppress and distort another (e.g., the Western). In Imperium, Yockey was concerned with the Jewish element of the Arabic-Semitic Culture most of all. But, were he alive today, he would be concerned with the Arabic: after all, Zionism is Jewish nationalism, Ba'athism is Arab nationalism, and the latter has begun to infect the West at the level of fringe politics at least. Yockey himself championed Arab nationalism and Nasserism in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, we on the Far Right went further still and made a fetish of Palestinian nationalism. As if the Palestinians - or any other Arab group - had any bearing on the white racial cause.