Hungary Sets Up a State Authority to Rewrite History

Nearly half of Hungary’s Jews are actively considering emigration because of the unmitigated rise anti-Semitism

by Thomas Ország-Land

The physical destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has been probably the most thoroughly documented disaster in all human history. A huge proportion of the eyewitness accounts, expert analyses and artistic depiction of that catastrophe pertains to the organized murder of close to 600,000 Hungarian citizens of Jewish birth perpetrated by the Hungarian state in collaboration with Nazi Germany. This happened at the close of the Second World War when an Allied victory was already obvious.

Randolph L. Braham, the doyen of Holocaust studies and once a youth survivor of a Hungarian slave-labour camp, has assembled and classified the thousands of books and articles generated by the Hungarian Holocaust and made them accessible through an invaluable bibliography. It is accompanied by a magisterial encyclopaedia, edited by Braham and introduced by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, chronicling the wartime fate of thousands of ravaged Jewish communities. Both authors are enormously influential American historians of Hungarian origin well disposed towards

These books are likely to prove useful for university courses in Holocaust studies and European history as well as political science, literature and sociology. They are being published at a critical moment.

Fearing a significant setback in national elections widely expected in April, Hungary‘s ultra-Conservative, populist government has set about courting the resurgent far-Right by denying in its new constitution the country’s enduring responsibility for the Holocaust. The government has also included several anti-Semitic authors in the national school curriculum, tacitly encouraged demands by anti-Semitic nationalists for the official rehabilitation of the WW2 leader Miklós Horthy and, in the worst tradition of East European authoritarianism, it has just announced plans for the establishment of a state historical research foundation clearly intended to rewrite official history.

This has contributed to mounting safety concerns by the surviving Jewish community. Authoritative research results just published by the Vienna-based Fundamental Rights Agency suggest that nearly half of Hungary’s Jews are actively considering emigration because of the unmitigated rise anti-Semitism. Theirs is the highest proportion of Jews to entertain such plans in the eight countries surveyed where Europe’s largest Jewish populations live. Braham’s books comprise a treasure house of meticulously assembled research findings exploring the background to the unfolding social crisis.

The three-volume geographical encyclopaedia is an exhaustive research and teaching aid chronicling the tragedy of hundreds of well established East European Jewish communities deeply loyal to the indigenous society that enthusiastically participated in their destruction. Illustrated by many historic photographs, the work is organized alphabetically by county, each section prefaced with a map and a contextual history describing its Jewish population up to and into the fateful year of 1944.

Entries track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession, ghettoization and eventual deportation to slave-labour and death camps. It provides both panoramic and microscopic views of the destruction of most of the Jews of Hungary, until then the last significant surviving Jewish community within Nazi-occupied Europe.

Most individual entries are set out in a common format, detailing the first available records of local Jewish settlement; employment patterns; synagogues and other community buildings and their ultimate fate; the names of rabbis and other leaders; shifts in the local Jewish population from the beginning until the Holocaust; references to Jewish-Christian relations; Zionist organization; the implementation of anti-Jewish measures; the deportation of Jews; survival statistics; Jewish demographics up to the present; and whether there is a Holocaust memorial in the town today.

The bibliography is an indispensable guide through the maze of source material quantifying the tragedy. It includes close to six thousand annotated references to independent and periodical literature published in many countries and in many languages on all aspects of the recorded history of Hungarian Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust. References to works in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish are rendered in English translation. Each entry is provided with a succinct annotation when its title is not indicative of its content. Supplied with author, name, and geographic indexes, the book is easily usable.

It lists a wealth of little known but valuable material as well as work that has come to shape our view of the Holocaust. Its authors include such outstanding witnesses and commentators as Miklós Radnóti, probably the greatest poet of the Holocaust whose collection of poetry has just been publicly torched in an orgy of book burning at a rally of Hungarian racists. There are also such authorities as György Konrád, the sociologist and best-selling novelist, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, professor of Holocaust studies and literature at Texas University in Dallas, and Paul Lendvai, a much revered foreign correspondent based in Vienna and lately also in Budapest, who is bitterly loathed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The book faithfully represents the views of some academic apologists of Holocaust deniers as well as the treatment they sometimes manage to provoke from eminent historians. For example, one article listed by the book, originally published in the Budapest Népszabadságnewspaper by Géza Jeszenszky, a Rightist politician turned historian, defends the new Orbán constitution by minimizing the responsibility of the state for the Holocaust crimes of the Horthy era. And his argument is accompanied by a brilliant rebuttal by Professor István Deák, a highly respected Hungarian historian at Columbia University, New York, in the context of a wider discussion of Orbán’s undemocratic legislative programme.

The government’s new constitution muscled through parliament in the absence of cross-party support came into force in 2012. It denies not the occurrence of the Holocaust but Hungary’s culpability for the Holocaust murders during the rule of Admiral Horthy, by shifting all blame on his German Nazi allies. Teachers throughout the Hungarian school system departing from this line face dismissal.

And the administration is about to set up a historiography authority operating under government control to clarify remaining controversial issues of the past. It will be called the Veritas Institute of Historical Research and open in 2014, the election year that the government has also just devoted to Holocaust remembrance. The purpose of the institute, according to the official Gazette, is “to strengthen national cohesion” by generating popular awareness of “the true nature of the fateful political and social developments” in the country’s recent history “interpreted correctly and free of distortion.”

 Read the rest at:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/142291/sec_id/142291

Caligula in Pyongyang

This is high-IQ craziness, calculating and devious—Caligula with nukes and missiles

by John Derbyshire

You remember Caligula. John Hurt played him with creepy malignity in the old BBC production of I, Claudius. Caligula was the third emperor of Rome on a strict count (which doesn’t include Julius Caesar), the fourth of the Twelve Caesars written up by the historian Suetonius.

At age 24 Caligula succeeded his great-uncle Tiberius, the second emperor. “Some are of the opinion,” says Suetonius (ut quidam opinantur) that Caligula poisoned his great-uncle, then held a pillow over his face to make sure of the deed.

Whether or not this is true, Caligula made a grisly show of being emperor during his four years on the throne. He killed his adopted son, his brother, two cousins, and possibly also his grandmother. He banished his wife, boinked his sisters, and tried to make his horse a consul. Suetonius:

He assumed various titles: “Pious,” “Child of the Camp,” “Father of the Armies,” and “Greatest and best of Caesars”….He forbade the celebration of [his great-grandfather, the Emperor Augustus’s] victories by annual festivals….He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons….

When Caligula was dispatched by a joint army-senate conspiracy in January of 41 AD, the historian tells us that:

One may form an idea of the state of those times by what followed. Not even after the murder was made known was it at once believed that he was dead, but it was suspected that [Caligula] himself had made up and circulated the report, to find out by that means how men felt towards him.

One scary guy. Here’s another.

“I have no more idea than anyone else what’s going on in Pyongyang’s corridors of power, but I watch these events with fascination.”

Kim Jong-un attained supreme power in North Korea at age 28, and Caligula parallels are not hard to find. He definitely has the titles: “Supreme Leader,” “Great Successor,” “Sun of the 21st Century,” and a raft of others.

Kim’s father and grandfather are still celebrated by name, but the official records of their lives have been purged from the archives of the Korea Central News Agency website. And yes, if Kim’s regime executes you—as they did one of the Great Successor’s old girlfriends recently—your parents are forced to watch before being hustled off to labor camps.

Most recently we hear that Kim has offed his uncle Jang Song Thaek. Kim didn’t do the offing personally—this is a modern despotism, for heaven’s sake—but there can’t be much doubt he ordered it and approved of the exceptionally vituperative reports of Jang’s “crimes” put out by the state news agency.

Jang Song Thaek was married to the sister of Kim’s father, North Korea’s previous dictator Kim Jong-il, who died two years ago. Jang is said to have groomed Kim for the succession, just as Tiberius groomed Caligula.

Read more at:

http://takimag.com/article/caligula_in_pyongyang_john_derbyshire/print#axzz2nvJFP43g

Culture of Death

Belgian Senate Approves Child Euthanasia

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Yesterday the Belgium Senate approved, by a vote of 50-17, a bill allowing terminally ill children to opt for euthanasia. As long as the child meets the normal Belgium standards for euthanasia (terminal; in great pain; conscious of this decision; has parental and medical approval), there will no longer be any age limit on the practice. The BBC has more:

During the Senate debate, supporters of the bill said it would empower doctors and terminally-ill children to make a difficult decision.

“There is no age for suffering and, next to that, it’s very important that we have a legal framework for the doctors who are confronted with this demand today and for the minors, for the capable minors, who are suffering today, and who I think should have the freedom to choose how they cope with their suffering,” said Senator Jean-Jacques de Gucht, of the Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats.

This story shows just how quickly allowing limited mercy killing for terminally ill adults can lead to wider political and social consequences. It’s now common knowledge that euthanasia cases skyrocketed in Belgium after it was legalized for adults—the number of cases increased by 25 percent from 2011 to 2012—and that legality manufactures demand. It’s less often acknowledged that legalizing euthanasia can give cover to people who want to pressure relatives into it for financial or other reasons.

Consider the Netherlands, where doctors are never prosecuted for euthanizing children under age 12, even though that is still legally forbidden. There the illness doesn’t have to be terminal—just very painful—and the Royal Dutch Medical Association says the pain doesn’t even have to be physical.  That same association has recently come out in favor of euthanizing infants and newborns, a practice which has already been goingon for several years.

But never fear. While both Belgium and the Netherlands are busy allowing euthanasia for people who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex by their own laws, the Royal Dutch Medical Association has launched another campaign: stamping out circumcision, which is a “violation of children’s rights.”

Unarmed Man Goes On Shooting Rampage

If this flies in New York, then there is no law

By Mark Steyn

A mentally disturbed man is wandering through traffic outside New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Naturally, the New York Police open fire. They miss the guy. However, the sidewalks being full of people, they manage to hit two female pedestrians, one of them already using a walker, which comes in handy when the coppers shoot you in the leg.

So the DA charges the guy with assaulting the women:

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

Ah, yes: the “situation” injured the innocent bystanders. If you outlaw guns, only situations will have guns.

The defendant is looking at 25 years in jail for the crime of provoking law enforcement into shooting random citizens. If this flies in New York, then there is no law. 

The Science of Hatred

What makes humans capable of horrific violence? 

BY TOM BARTLETT, WITH PHOTOS BY TARIK SAMARAH AND MATT LUTTON

The former battery factory on the outskirts of Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia, has become a grim tourist attraction. Vans full of sightseers, mostly from other countries, arrive here daily to see the crumbling industrial structure, which once served as a makeshift United Nations outpost and temporary haven for Muslims under assault by Serb forces determined to seize the town and round up its residents. In July 1995 more than 8,000 Muslim men, from teenagers to the elderly, were murdered in and around Srebrenica, lined up behind houses, gunned down in soccer fields, hunted through the forest.

The factory is now a low-budget museum where you can watch a short film about the genocide and meet a survivor, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s who has repeated the story of his escape and the death of his father and brother nearly every day here for the past five years. Visitors are then led to a cavernous room with display cases containing the personal effects of victims—a comb, two marbles, a handkerchief, a house key, a wedding ring, a pocket watch with a bullet hole—alongside water-stained photographs of the atrocity hung on cracked concrete walls. The English translations of the captions make for a kind of accidental poetry. “Frightened mothers with weeping children: where and how to go on … ?” reads one. “Endless sorrow for the dearest,” says another.

Across the street from the museum is a memorial bearing the names of the known victims, flanked by rows and rows of graves, each with an identical white marker. Nearby an old woman runs a tiny souvenir shop selling, among other items, baseball caps with the message “Srebrenica: Never Forget.”

This place is a symbol of the 1995 massacre, which, in turn, is a symbol of the entire conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. The killings here were a fraction of the total body count; The Bosnian Book of the Dead, published early this year, lists 96,000 who perished, though there were thousands more. It was the efficient brutality in Srebrenica that prompted the international community, after years of dithering and half measures, to take significant military action.

While that action ended the bloodshed, the reckoning is far from finished. Fragments of bone are still being sifted from the soil, sent for DNA analysis, and returned to families for burial. The general who led the campaign, Ratko Mladic, is on trial in The Hague after years on the run. In a recent proceeding, Mladic stared at a group of Srebrenica survivors in the gallery and drew a single finger across his throat. Around the same time, the president of Serbia issued a nonapology apology for the massacre, neglecting to call it genocide and using language so vague it seemed more insult than olive branch.

Standing near the memorial, surrounded by the dead, the driver of one of those tourist-filled vans, a Muslim who helped defend Sarajevo during a nearly four-year siege, briefly drops his sunny, professional demeanor. “How can you forgive when they say it didn’t happen?” he says. “The Nazis, they killed millions. They say, ‘OK, we are sorry.’ But the Serbs don’t do that.”

Some Serbs do acknowledge the genocide. According to a 2010 survey, though, most Serbs believe that whatever happened at Srebrenica has been exaggerated, despite being among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history. They shrug it off as a byproduct of war or cling to conspiracy theories or complain about being portrayed as villains. The facts disappear in a swirl of doubts and denial.

A new Bosnian film explores how that refusal to face the truth can become bizarre, like a hallucination. In the film, one actress plays multiple characters, each a different Serbian woman with a different reaction to Srebrenica. One character, a fast talker in a white blazer, suggests the story has been manufactured. Another, wearing hoop earrings and an animal-print blouse, doesn’t deny the killings occurred but won’t discuss them either. “Money, how you live, where you vacation, that’s what we should worry about,” she says. Yet another character—again, the same actress, this time with chopped blond hair—seems weirdly pleased to broach the morbid topic. “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk about guilt,” she says.

Listening to those women is an actor playing a Srebrenica survivor, who gently prompts them to move past their superficial banter. At one point, late in the film, he reveals his own obsession: “I often think about a particular moment, a situation. When mass killings are happening and you are tied up, and when they are taking you to the pit where they throw in the dead bodies, and when you see them killing people and you know it’s your turn next, at that second, that moment right before you are killed, what do you think about?”

Some to Misery Are Born

Life at the bottom

by Theodore Dalrymple

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

The first couplet of Blake’s verse seems to me a good deal more certain than the second because happiness and misery, while opposite, are not in the least symmetrical. I count myself to have had more than a usually fortunate life (except for a wretched childhood), and I think I have been in the top one percent of humanity where luck is concerned, but still I would not say that I had been born to sweet delight, even if I cannot take the credit for my good fortune. 

The problem is that sweet delight, as the Buddha knew, contains within itself the seeds of its own decay, unlike misery which has within it no inherent tendency to change into its opposite and can last a lifetime. It is impossible to remain ecstatic for very long. Anyone who says that he can and does is either lying or mad. Happiness is like the blush of a grape, and consciousness of it is like the finger that destroys that blush. But there are many people whose misery is continuous and unremitting and seems from birth to have been predestined.

I have spent quite a lot of my professional life as a doctor among such people, and recently I was asked by the courts to examine a woman charged with murder whose deed was terrible and reprehensible but whose life, it seemed to me (and I am generally no determinist), had led, if not quite inexorably to murder, at least to constant disaster.

Her father and uncle sexually abused her from the age of eight, and when she told her mother, a cocaine addict, her mother beat her for being a “dirty” girl. Her father and uncle were alcoholics. Her father invited men into the house to have sex with her mother in return for money. He was violent if she refused and sometimes if she accepted. 

Her mother soon left her father and had a succession of lovers to live in with her. All of them were drug addicts or alcoholics, and practically all were violent. She (the woman whom the courts asked me to examine) began to take drugs and drink, at her mother’s instigation and with her encouragement, at the age of twelve or thirteen. By the age of fifteen she was pregnant by one of her mother’s lovers, who more or less forced himself upon her with her mother’s consent. Her mother meanwhile had several children by different men. Suffice it to say that life did not improve for her thereafter.

She was not intelligent and her school did nothing to prepare her for life in a modern economy, let alone provide her with anything recognizably like a liberal education. She could read, just about, but could not add six and seven and could not multiply five by four (though she knew, she told me proudly, her two times table). This, after a state education costing $100,000! A miracle of incompetence and dereliction of duty! Her few jobs did not last long, were unskilled, and paid very little, giving her an income no larger than that provided by the state, the latter increasing with each of her successive children (by different men, of course). In all, she had worked but a few months in her life, the rest given over to childbearing. Everyone around her lived the kind of life she had led, or to which she had been led.

When political correctness trumps human lives

A very dangerous game

By Thomas Sowell

New York City police authorities are investigating a series of unprovoked physical attacks in public places on people who are Jewish, in the form of what is called "the knockout game."

The way the game is played, one of a number of young blacks decides to show that he can knock down some stranger on the streets, preferably with one punch, as they pass by. Often some other member of the group records the event, so that a video of that "achievement" is put on the Internet, to be celebrated.

The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as "hate crimes."

Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this "knockout game" has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews -- the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry.

Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called "Polar Bear Hunting" by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white. The main reason for many people's surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the "knockout game" or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified "teens" or "young people" against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims -- and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own "achievement."

Despite such pious phrases as "troubled youths," the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing "knockout game," the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, "white girl bleed a lot."

That phrase -- "White Girl Bleed A Lot" -- is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.

Chapter 2 of the 2013 edition is titled, "The Knockout Game, St. Louis Style." So this is nothing new, however new it may be to some in New York, thanks to the media's political correctness.

Nor is this game just a passing prank. People have been beaten unconscious, both in this game and in the wider orchestrated racial attacks. Some of these victims have been permanently disabled and some have died from their injuries.

But most of the media see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. In such an atmosphere, the evil not only persists but grows.

Some in the media, as well as in politics, may think that they are trying to avoid provoking a race war by ignoring or playing down these attacks. But the way to prevent a race war is by stopping these attacks, not trying to sanitize them.

If these attacks continue, and continue to grow, more and more people are going to know about them, regardless of the media or the politicians.

Responsible people of all races need to support a crackdown on these attacks, which can provoke a white backlash that can escalate into a race war. But political expediency leads in the opposite direction.

What is politically expedient is to do what Attorney General Eric Holder is doing -- launch campaigns against schools that discipline a "disproportionate" number of black male students. New York City's newly elected liberal mayor is expected to put a stop to police "stop and frisk" policies that have reduced the murder rate to one-fourth of what it was under liberal mayors of the past.

Apparently political correctness trumps human lives.

Providing cover for hoodlums is a disservice to everybody, including members of every race, and even the hoodlums themselves. Better that they should be suppressed and punished now, rather than continue on a path that is likely to lead to prison, or even to the execution chamber. 

Man Dies In Jail Cell After Misdemeanor Pot Offense

Today's Drug War Outrage

By Radley Balko

Today's story is part drug war, part police indifference and callousness, part police cover-up. It comes by way of a lawsuit filed by the family of Michael Saffioti.

Saffioti failed to make a court date on a misdemeanor charge for pot possession. In July of last year, he surrendered himself to Snohomish County, Washington authorities, who promptly jailed him. (The streets of Snohomish County were a little safer that day.) When it came time for breakfast the following morning, Saffioti is seen on video having a conversation with a guard while holding his tray. Presumably, he was inquiring about any dairy products in the meal. Saffioti had a severe allergy. He's then seen taking a few bites of some oatmeal. (You can watch the video here.)

The awfulness that followed is detailed by KIRO TV.

Within a few minutes, Saffioti was back at the guard desk, using his inhaler.

According to the legal claim, he asked to see a nurse.

Instead, he was sent to his cell.

Over the next half hour, the video shows other inmates looking in Saffioti's cell as he jumped up and down.

The legal claim says he pressed his call button and was ignored.

It also alleges that the guards told him h was "faking."

About 35 minutes after he ate, a guard found Saffioti unconscious in his cell. The guard called for help and Saffioti was dragged out.

Nurses arrived and performed CPR. Everett firefighters took over and rushed Saffioti to the hospital where he was pronounced dead a half hour later.

Then the coverup began. County officials stonewalled Saffioti's mother's attempts to obtain video of the events leading to her son's death, first by denying its existence. After Saffioti's family discovered the police had lied about that, they turned over only non-incriminating portions of the video. The family was eventually able to force them to hand over the entire thing. So far, attorneys for the family have also been barred from interviewing jail staff or responding medical personnel.

Welcome to the United Police States of America

There comes a time when silence is betrayal

By John W. Whitehead

No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is unusual is our lack of outrage, the relative disinterest of our elected representatives, the media’s abysmal failure to ask questions and demand answers, and our growing acceptance of the status quo in the United Police States of America—a status quo in which “we the people” are powerless in the face of the heavy-handed tactics employed by the government and its armed agents.

However, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s all part of the larger police state continuum. Thus, with each tragic shooting that is shrugged off or covered up, each piece of legislation passed that criminalizes otherwise legal activities, every surveillance drone that takes to the skies, every phone call, email or text that is spied on, and every transaction that is monitored, the government’s stranglehold over our lives grows stronger.

We have been silent about too many things for too long, not the least of which is the deadly tendency on the part of police to resort to lethal force. However, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

Drone Wars

When it comes to national security, can we trust our public officials ?

by Richard A. Epstein

Right now, the United States and the larger international community is caught in a difficult debate over the use of drones against enemy combatants. Domestically, there is an odd confluence of views. The Obama administration’s policy on drones has been congenial to the conservatives, who oppose him on domestic issues; but his liberal allies, like the American Civil Liberties Union, are dismayed by what they perceive as his administration’s overuse of drones in Pakistan from 2004 to 2012. Has the United States pushed its drone attacks too far or not far enough? Have too many potential targets escaped attack because of an undue fear of excessive “incidental” or collateral damage to the lives and property of innocent non-combatants?

In this debate, the place to start is with libertarian thought, because it puts the use of force front and center. The root premise of libertarian theory is that no individual is allowed to use force or fraud, alone or in combination, to advance his personal interests over those of others—except in self-defense. The same basic rule is also a bedrock principle of international law. That one indispensable but pesky exception of self-defense complicates both domestic and international affairs. The domestic issues are hard; the international ones, almost impossible.

Self-Defense and Just War Theory

The jurist Hugo Grotius, in his 1625 masterpiece De iure belli ac pacis (On the law of war and peace), sought to apply a natural law approach to the problem of just war. Key to his inquiry is the need to reconcile the personal imperative of self-preservation with the due recognition of the like rights of other individuals, without which human society cannot survive.

Che, Macaulay and other anti-fascists

Meet Univ. of Florida Professor Emeritus Neill Macaulay, who gloated louder about murdering innocent Cubans

 By Humberto Fontova

From Che Guevara Feb. 1957:

"I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his (peasant Eutemio Guerra's) brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died. His belongings were now mine.”

From Univ. of Florida Professor Emeritus Neill Macaulay's, A Rebel in Cuba, 1970:

"The first Batistiano was a tall handsome mulatto. He stood blindfolded before the paredon'. his hands bound in front of him. "Muchachos," he said calmly, "The only crime you are going to commit is to kill me, because I am innocent."

I stepped into the field shouted: "Ready!..Aim!--FIRE!"...the man went down and I went up to him immediately, commanding the firing squad to order arms as I walked. There were bullet holes in his shirt and he seemed dead, but I wasted no time in putting the automatic to his head and pulled the trigger. It made a neat round hole.

Next Batistiano to die was a Negro who was hauled kicking and screaming to the paredon'..I told the jailers to throw him up against the wall and get out of the way...the condemned man froze in terror when he saw his executioners arrayed before him."

"READY!" My command jolted him out of his trance.

"NO!--NO!" he cried. "Do NOT Get ready." He tried to climb the wall.

"NO!" he yelled while trying to hide behind one of the execution stakes, but the gun muzzles tracked him relentlessly.

"FIRE!" He turned his head and ducked just as the guns went off. Most of the bullets struck him in profile, tearing his nose, lips, chin and most of his cheeks. His face was transformed into a raw, red mass of flesh and bone that contrasted sharply to the smooth black skin bordering it. He lay on his back with what was left of his face turned to the firing squad. Anyone that hideously blasted , I thought, had to be dead...well" I commented to the firing squad, "it is not necessary to give to give him the tiro de gracia.

"Yes, Americano!" shouted one of my men. "He still lives! Give him the shot!" His arms and legs were twitching. His movement ceased only when a bullet from my pistol entered his skull.

Other fascinating items from professor Macaulay's memoirs:

"Escalona introduced me to Fidel as "the man who is training the firing squads." Fidel threw his head back and roared with laughter. As I stretched out my hand, he grabbed me by my shoulders and gave me a bear hug. Everybody was happy. At the University he was known as Bola de Churre. To me, however, he was very attractive."

Fidel says to give the Americano what he wants. So I selected a plot of about sixty-five acres from an immense plantation that had been jointly owned by some friends of Batista. The INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria) gave me virtually unlimited credit...there was no house on my land so I chose as a residence the former country home of Pepe Fraga, Batista's former chief of parking meters in Havana. Late in Jul my wife and infant son joined me there.

Folks, these items are not from a novel. An American mercenary joins Castro's criminal band, executes (murders, actually) Cubans without trial, steals the property of Cubans at gunpoint. Then he serves for decades as Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at University of Florida, apparently with nobody batting an eye.

UF is a state college, so there's a good chance his salary was paid partly by his victims families. And again apparently nobody bats an eye.

Upon Macaulay's death in 2007 (some suspect from suicide) Leftist professor and documentarian Glenn Gebhard wrote: "He (Macaulay) was not a socialist or a communist, and he left (Cuba) after he realized he couldn't make a living...He was a man of action and really smart."

Che, whatever else we can say about him, seemed to actually believe in the Communist holy book. Macaulay apparently murdered Cubans for fun and profit.

You will be interested to learn that among Professor Neil Macaulay's final academic duties was to hail a book by Julia Sweig as: "the best book ever written about Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement."

Didn't prof. Macaulay have any Cubans in his classes during 20 years teaching Latin American Studies at UF?! Didn't any of them object??!!!

Can you imagine, say, a professor of Ukranian ancestry who was discovered to have served as an auxiliary Nazi executioner in 41-42, or, say, a professor of Chilean background who was affiliated with the Pinochet regime, or a professor of South African ancestry who....Oh you know what I'm getting at!

The Boy Who Starved to Death In Public

Daniel Pelka’s death raises troubling questions about the state of social solidarity

By TIM BLACK

In March 2012, four-year-old Daniel Pelka, having been beaten and starved for months by his mother Magdalena Luczak and her boyfriend Mariusz Krezolek, was left, as he always was, in the unheated box room of his Coventry home. And it was there, on his urine-stained mattress, that he spent the final 33 hours of his miserable, short life.

This week, following the life sentences dished out to Luczak and Krezolek in August, a serious case review of Pelka’s death was published. What emerges from that document, and the case in general, is a disturbing conclusion: a young boy died in plain sight. The starvation, the visible bruises, the broken bones - none of this happened behind the mythical ‘closed doors’ of endless child abuse-awareness-raising campaigns. No, it happened in full view of teachers, nurses and other adults. He was starving to death in public. And no one seemed to have the wherewithal even to give him some food.

Taken together, the indications that something was wrong should have prompted someone in his social milieu to do something. This was the boy who came to school with a broken arm one week, black eyes the next. This was the boy who had been caught scavenging for food by teachers. This was the boy who was seen pulling a muddy, grit-peppered pancake out of a school bin, the boy who was seen retrieving the remains of a pear from the playground and desperately gnawing on it, the boy who used to try to steal food from other children’s lunchboxes. This was the boy who had become so thin by February 2012 that, in the words of one teacher, his ‘clothes were hanging off him’. And yet despite the signs that something was seriously wrong with Pelka, the adults with whom he was coming into contact with at school and at home failed to respond spontaneously, intuitively. In the words of Peter Wanless, chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children: ‘No amount of training or form filling or processes in the world can replace the fact that when a grown adult, especially one in a position of trust… sees a skinny child scavenging for food in a bin, alarm bells need to ring and action needs to be taken. It’s simple common sense. But people didn’t trust their instincts…’

Wanless has it right: people did not trust their instincts. What should have been common sense – to see that there was a problem and help Pelka – was confounded. What should have been near enough spontaneous – to check what was wrong with the child eating sand – was stymied. And this indicates something rather profound: a breakdown in social solidarity. The adults here, from teachers to neighbours, were not responding to the sight of an emaciated child starving before their eyes, instinctively; they were not recognising their own humanity in a child who, it seems, was clearly suffering.

Pro Death Progressives and the Born Alive Act

Killing babies is the ultimate progressive 'right'

By Noemie Emery

Liberals' view of rights is that they are and they ought to be ever-expanding, and so they are proving to be.

First, the Declaration of Independence spoke of the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," for women (and others). Then Roe v. Wade gave them the right to abortion, then the right to late-term abortion, and then, the right to a dead baby afterward.

This last was asserted by then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, who opposed the Born Alive Act, which would have mandated medical treatment for abortion survivors on the grounds it would have negated the intent of Roe. v. Wade.

The idea was when a woman chose an abortion, she signaled her wish to have a dead baby, and so it should be.

Later, brave souls made attempts to expand this still further, with Barbara Boxer saying a baby had rights when it came "home from the hospital," and bioethicist Peter Singer proposing a right to abort one's postnatal children.

In this sense, Kermit Gosnell, now on trial on multiple charges of homicide, was perhaps the ultimate civil rights activist, pushing women's rights up to the ultimate level, beyond even feminists' dreams.

In the spirit of Boxer, Obama and Singer, Gosnell excelled in helping women so that, when inspectors finally arrived at his clinic, they found fetal parts everywhere, clogging the toilets, hands and feet saved as tokens, in boxes, in jars.

The “doctor” will see you now

Dr. Mengele, I Presume

Josef Mengele

by Michael Walsh

As you can read here, I’ve been following the horrific tale of “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell, the alleged Butcher of Philadelphia, ever since the story broke last year. In fact, in the guise of my crazy-lefty character, David Kahane, I wrote a big piece, “The Charnel House of Blackmun,” about it shortly after the grand jury issued its stomach-turning report on this latter-day Mengele‘s crimes. An excerpt:

For us, a day without an abortion somewhere in this great land is like a day without a sermon on climate change: The world is a drab and bitter place, in which the cheery hosannas of the unborn dead cannot be heard, praising the glory of a Gaian world they will never pollute with their presence. Forget that Baudelaire dude and the gimp, Verbal Kint: The Master’s greatest trick was not convincing the world he didn’t exist, but persuading women that it was morally affirmative to murder their own children. Medea, take a bow!

Now, you may quibble that Medea killed children who were, you know, actually ambulatory, but to us and Peter Singer, that is a small matter, a mere detail, a bagatelle of a bump in the road on our way to a more perfect nihilism. Which is why I’m here to celebrate a great American named Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., a man who was standing up to the forces of bigotry and intolerance and unreasoning pedophobia by providing abortion services at his Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia — until, unaccountably, the state of Pennsylvania arrested him… 

Well, one man’s “baby charnel house” is another man’s monument to the House that Blackmun Built, and surely reasonable men and women of good conscience can agree to disagree, even if Roe is long-since settled law and if you troglodytes so much as try to touch one hair of its sacred little head, we’re coming after you with scissors, suction, a pair of pliers, and a blowtorch… Once you accept the proposition of abortion pretty much on demand, including post-“birth,” this seems to us a distinction without a difference, but there’s no accounting for the lengths to which you Christianist Javerts will go in order to hunt down innocent women’s-health specialists.

While it’s true that the alleged details of Dr. Gosnell’s practice can make you squeamish right-wingers uncomfortable, our brave women are made of sterner stuff. They know the parasitic clumps of cells in their wombs — punishment-by-“baby” for the simple, innocent, joyous act of sexual intercourse — are being eliminated for a higher, nobler cause than mere Christianity. We progressives don’t believe in the afterlife, unless we’re trying to fake some sort of “faith” on television, but we do believe in, shall we say, an eternally resonating resonance that proclaims to the universe: We were here. We lived. We killed. Mission accomplished.