We need a global government. Really.

The Doomsday List

Getting pre-2012 jitters? Me too! But consider these other dates given for the End of the World...

∆ Around 30 AD:
Taking the New Testament literally, this is the time-frame Jesus gave for The Second Coming. Matthew 24:34, "...This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." The date is based on the life-expectancy in that era, thirty years.

∆ 500 AD:
Hippolytus of Rome, a 3rd-century theologian, predicted world will end on this date, and uses evidence from the Bible (including the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant) to prove his point. The belief that the world would end in 500 AD was popular at that time, and Hippolytus's opinion was shared by fellow theologians Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenus.

∆ 1000 AD:
The first big "End Times" craze. Mass panic. Christians giving away their possessions. Christians fighting with Pagans, trying to convert as many as they could before Christ came back. You can only imagine what would have happened if they had the Internet back then, with those little "1000 AD: Apocalypse" YouTube videos.

∆ 1033 AD:
The Christians who predicted the end of the world in 1000 AD realized that they forgot to add in Jesus's age. Oops.


∆ 1186 AD:
Around 1184 certain prophecies began to talk of an impending "New World Order," instructing the citizens to run to the caves and hide because of all the famine, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that were to follow. Stop me if you heard this one before.


∆ 1284:
Pope Innocent III came up with this date by adding 666 years since the founding of Islam.

∆ 1346 AD and afterwards:
Black plague sweeps across Europe, killing 1/3 of population, scaring the hell out of everyone else. At least this one had something to really back it up.

∆ 1496 AD:
1500 years after the birth of Jesus, this was another popular End Times date for the eschatological set.

∆ 1669 AD:
Fearing the return of the Antichrist on this date, 20,000 Old Believers in Russia burned themselves to death between 1669-1690. That'll show the Antichrist.


∆ 1792 AD:
A date believed to be the end of the world by some Shakers. By now, every group seemed to have their fave date for the Apocalypse.

"Because it makes them happy"

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

by Steven Hayward

As you've probably heard, the world is going to end about 48 hours from now. Or the beginning of the end, or something. Or so says Harold Camping, an evangelical broadcaster who has been spending big bucks on newspaper and billboard ads to let us know so we can sort out our sock drawers in time. (I assume the newspapers and outdoor advertisers asked for up-front payment for the ads, just in case.) Camping's calculations are based on complex arithmetic that sound a lot like Louis Farrakhan's obsession with the number 19 back in his famous (half) Million Man March in the 1990s. No doubt if the end indeed comes to pass, the Washington Post will report "Women and Minorities Hardest Hit: Reagan Policies Blamed." Of course, the good Mr. Camping predicted before that Judgment Day was at hand--September 6, 1994. This time he means it, and his math is better now. "It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful day," Camping told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.

This last comment gets at the difference between religious apocalypticism and secular kinds, especially the environmental type. At least the religious versions of the end of the world come with a promise of redemption for man and nature. The secular apocalypse is usually without hope. Yet they share one larger thing in common: the deep, passionate commitment that the end is near. And when the end doesn't come, instead of relief, there is disappointment. Fundamentalist preachers and environmental prophets-of-doom react the same way every time: they d go back over their math, and offer new predictions for the end. The preachers end up with dwindling congregations and radio audiences; the green prophets get appointed science adviser to the president.

People often ask me why environmentalists tend always to incline to apocalyptic conclusions about the state of the planet. "Because it makes them happy," is my standard response. This is not tongue-in-cheek. There is something about certain kinds of personality types that derives a frisson of delight from contemplating the end of the world. And if you point out that the end of the world is not at hand, it makes environmentalists very unhappy, in part because it deprives them of the opportunity to play savior to the world.

The folks at LiveScience.com have a nice piece up this week discussing this trait, featuring comments from Lorenzo DiTommaso, a Canadian academic working on a book entitled The Architecture of Apocalypticism. From the brief description here, it sounds like DiTommaso's book will explore the way in which apocalyptic belief perversely reinforces the view some people have that "there is something dreadfully wrong with the world of human existence today." He could be describing Al Gore, who liked to cloak his global warming worries inside a larger indictment of our "dysfunctional civilization."

The deep strain of true belief is one reason why environmental arguments are seldom susceptible to factual argument or logical reasoning, and is also why people who hold such beliefs should be kept as far away from political power as possible. At least the preachers just want us to repent. The green prophets want to run our lives; they'll start with light bulbs and toilets, but it won't end there.

Another quote of the (next) month

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”


by Frank Zappa

Quote of the month

“Once a society reaches the point where common courtesy must be legislated, they’ve really just about admitted that they’ve failed.”


by anonymous

"Τhe Great Men of the Permanent Governing Class cannot be bound by the rules they impose on the rest of you schmucks."

The unzippered princeling and the serving wench

By MARK STEYN

Back when he was still the officially designated Next President of France and not an accused rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was glimpsed at the annual IMF soccer tournament wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "YES, WE KAHN!" (Monsieur le directeur was not participating in the game: The field he likes to play requires more horizontal exertions, as even the deferential and protective French media have begun belatedly to acknowledge.) In consciously mimicking the slogan of another and very successful presidential candidate, the IMF boss and Socialist Party candidate improved upon it – or, at any rate, made it more accurate. "Yes, We Can"? Er, no, actually, you can't. But yes, he Kahn!

A man is innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M Strauss-Kahn's suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that's he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid – although, if that's the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I'd be inclined to suggest he's the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn't do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. "We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization," sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was "not like other men" and wondering why "this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion." Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America's "absurd" justice system, not to mention this ghastly "American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other."

Well, OK. Why shouldn't DSK (as he's known in France) be treated as "a subject of justice like any other"? Because, says BHL (as he's known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world "avoid the worst." In particular, he has made the IMF "more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable." What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. "At the end of the day," said Sen. Evan Bayh, "he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people." The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted's penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne – or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, "She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live." Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign's eye or anything else he's shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men's trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that's no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner's defense is that she wasn't asking for it – or, if she was, he couldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!

Capitalists Vs The Free Market

Capitalists Who Fear Free Markets

By FLOYD NORRIS

Capitalism is supposed to produce losses on bad investments.

But all too often it has not.

In Tokyo this week, corporate executives were outraged when a Japanese government official suggested that banks might have to take losses on loans to the company that produced a nuclear catastrophe.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, had the temerity to say “the public will not support” the injection of government money into Tokyo Electric Power, also known as Tepco, unless banks share in the pain. Tepco says it would like to pay compensation to victims, but needs government cash to do so.

The president of Japan’s largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, was shocked by the very idea that a bank should lose money if it lent to a company that could not meet its obligations. Mr. Edano’s remarks “came out of the blue,” said the executive, Katsunori Nagayasu. “I felt there was something wrong about them.”

To Yasuchika Hasgawa, the chief executive of the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and chairman of the Japanese Association of Corporate Executives, the idea violated basic tenets of society. Mr. Hasgawa said he “cannot help but question how this country’s democracy can be made to work with free-market-based capitalism.”

His definition of “free-market-based capitalism” seems to assume that lenders should escape without pain, at least if they are lending to major institutions. It is an idea that has become remarkably pervasive.

“We consider banks and Tepco systemically important institutions,” wrote Tetsuya Yamamoto, a Moody’s analyst based in Tokyo. “Debt forgiveness undermines the systemic importance of the bank and utility sectors in the national economy.” These are, he added, “developments we did not anticipate.”

Another short-term patch job.

by Robert Wenzel

The International Monetary Fund said in a statement it has approved a 26 billion euro ($37 billion) loan for Portugal. It said it would immediately disburse 6.1 billion euros to ease investor concerns over the country's debts.
"The financing package is designed to allow Portugal some breathing space from borrowing in the markets while it demonstrates implementation of the policy steps needed to get the economy back on track," the IMF said in a statement.
Translation: It will be difficult for Portugal to borrow in the markets, since market participants recognize Portugal is a basket case. But the banksters must be paid, so the IMF will provide the money, which comes from IMF members who either tax it away from their citizens directly or through monetary inflation.

The End is Near

S&P Downgrades Credit Agricole, To A+ From AA-, Due To "Greek Exposure"

by Robert Wenzel

How serious are bankster exposure to PIIGS debt? Here is a hint.
S&P has Downgraded the largest French retail banking group, Credit Agricole, to A+ From AA-, because of their exposure to Greek debt.
Says S&P: 

We consider that French banking group Crédit Agricole (GCA) has a significant sensitivity to Greece's creditworthiness and economic prospects, primarily through subsidiary Emporiki's funding needs and exposure to local credit risk. The downgrades reflect our view that reduced creditworthiness of the Greek sovereign puts pressure on GCA's financial profile, given its exposure to the troubled Greek economy, mostly through its subsidiary Emporiki Bank of Greece (not rated). The downgrade reflects our view that persistent deterioration of the Greek economy induces negative prospects for the local banking sector, which could translate into further material credit losses at Emporiki and/or a sharp decrease in its customer deposits

Of course, Crédit Agricole is not the only bankster outfit holding Greek paper. Further, Fitch has downgraded Greece to B+, with a negative watch.
And then we have the report that according to Swiss journal NZZ,  Norway is going to stop all further financial aid payments to  Greece. The reason is that Greece has not fulfiled its austerity obligations, said, the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store before the Norwegian Parliament.
At some point, serious money printing will have to occur to bail the PIIGS out, or the entire structure collapses. Money printing, the most likely scenario, would be very inflationary, on the other hand a major collapse is just that, a major collapse. 
The end is near.

Death by a thousand cuts

When did the Girl Scouts get so political? 

by MEREDITH JESSUP

Remember the old days when the Girl Scouts stuck to its motto: On my honor, I will try: To serve God and my country, To help people at all times, And to live by the Girl Scout Law? Nowadays it seems the organization is putting God and country aside and picking more politically charged fights.

Take for instance this WSJ article out today which outlines the battle between the organization and two of its teenage members. Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva are now at odds with the Girl Scouts because the group’s famed cookiesare made with palm oil, harvested from areas where orangutans live:

The girls, who have been scouts since they were five, have rallied troops across the country. Scouts sold 198 million boxes of cookies last year, but now some say they’re done. Scouts and leaders have criticized their nonprofit organization on Facebook and Twitter.

“My troop is up in arms,” says Nicole Bell, a Lansing, Kan., leader and former scout. “They do not want to sell cookies next year.”

The Girl Scouts organization says its bakers have told them there isn’t a good alternative to palm oil that would ensure the same taste, texture and shelf life. “Girls sell cookies from Texas to Hawaii and those cookies have to be sturdy,” says Amanda Hamaker, product sales manager for Girl Scouts of the USA.

In another case of Girl Scouts up in arms, two Texas teenagers are criticizing the organization for working with Planned Parenthood and the United Nations to produce a “very offensive” brochure outlining global “reproductive rights.”

It was difficult to accept that this corrupt behavior was of Girl Scouts, whom we both trusted and honored, but after communicating directly with witness, Sharon Slater, and seeing the post on the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) website advocating for “affordable, accessible, safe abortion”, it was clear to us that Girl Scouts was far from trustworthy or honorable and that we wouldn’t, couldn’t, support the group in name or financially any longer.

When did being a Girl Scout get so complicated?

Obama to Israel : "Let me be clear. My words mean nothing"

HMM. WHY WOULD NETANYAHU BE DISTRUSTFUL?

By David Harsanyi

This tidbit from a New York Times story about the relationship between the president and Netanyahu caught my eye.

Mr. Netanyahu, as the leader of Israel’s conservative Likud Party, was far more comfortable with the Republican Party in the United States than with Mr. Obama, the son of a Muslim man from Kenya whose introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict was initially framed by discussions with pro-Palestinian academics.

So you see, Netanyahu has a built in prejudice against “the son of a Muslim man from Kenya” (if it were true, and it most probably isn’t, this would be an irrational bias) which made the relationship uncomfortable from the start. Obama, though, just wants peace.

Obama also asserts that he believes Netanyahu won’t make the concessions necessary for “peace” and, on top of that, he’s not too “bright.” Jeremiah Wright is bright. Robert Malley is bright. Netanyahu is not. Probably because the MIT and Harvard graduate was “introduced” to the Arab-Israeli conflict by his brother Yoni, an elite commando killed in Entebbe, or his father a historian and former Cornell University professor, rather than a terror enthusiast like Rashid Khalidi orSusan Rice.

Oui, the People

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the downfall of France’s elites.

BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was not just rich and powerful. He was also, until last Saturday, the likely next president of France. So commanding was his lead that rumors had been flying since April that Martine Aubry, his chief rival for the Socialist nomination, would soon drop out of the race. 

Even if the idea of Strauss-Kahn as their head of state is something the French were only trying on for size, no people can be comfortable seeing their potential leader marched around as an accused rapist, particularly under the customs of an alien legal system. The French are indignant at the “perp walk,” the tradition of marching an arrestee before the video cameras that is former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s contribution to American show business. The French see it as an act of vanity by publicity-seeking prosecutors and a potential harm to the presumption of innocence. On both counts, they are correct. 

There are two ways to look at the anger that rose up in the French press after Strauss-Kahn, disheveled and humiliated, was photographed after his arrest. The first is to see an understandable discomfort with an act of lèse-majesté. The other is to see a public grown servile and sycophantic. The French press may have been worried about seeing Strauss-Kahn’s name dragged through the mud, but it was quite content to print the name of his alleged victim. Then there’s the increasingly notorious defense of Strauss-Kahn by his friend Bernard-Henri Lévy, who writes: 

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

The letter smacks of the assumption that people of the cleaning lady’s class are there for the convenience or delectation of people of Lévy’s class—“les people,” as the glitterati are called in French gossip columns.

From Marcel Duchamp to what ?

Where Have All the Paintings 

Gone?

"A cleaner (janitor) at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emanual Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm gallery on Wednesday morning."

by Leo Segedin 

Anyone who has read about or visited exhibitions which survey the latest trends in contemporary art, or who has read reviews of recent gallery exhibitions in NY art galleries in the New Yorker, might conclude that artists are no longer making paintings. If the 2008 Whitney Museum's Biennial - advertised as "the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States today" - is any indication, paintings now exist only as part of installations. Installations in this exhibition were made of such materials as plywood, mirrors, Plexiglas, metallic paper, drywall, and found fabric. Since as late as the middle 1960s, a national exhibit would have consisted of almost nothing but oil paintings and, perhaps, a few carved, cast or constructed sculptures made of wood, stone or metal, obviously, great changes have occurred in the contemporary art world during the last four decades.
Here are descriptions of some of the artworks in the 2008 Whitney Biennial from an article by Gillian Sneed reviewing the exhibition.

Patrick Hill's constructivist Between, Beneath, Through, Against combines constructivist slabs of glass and concrete embedded with fabric, while the wood, Plexiglas, and metallic paper constructions of Alice Konitz recall Bauhaus furniture design. William Cordova's wood beam structure based on the footprint of the house where two Black Panthers leaders were killed in a Chicago police raid in 1969. Lisa Sigal's The Day Before yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow composed of drywall, wallpaper, house paint and plaster combine painting, sculpture and installation practices Mike Rottenberg's a kind of rickety wooden chicken coop structure containing several monitors playing Cheese, a film synthesizing Rapunzel with farm imagery including long-haired milk maids, goats, cows, chickens and other farm animals.

"Only in government…"

 Chris Christie wonders why NJ pays people for not being sick

Can they both loose ?

How the burqa became a symbol of freedom

by Josie Appleton 

In a speech defending his ban on full-face veils, French president Nicolas Sarkozy lamented that such face coverings keep women ‘isolated from social life’ and ‘deprived of personality’. Since the ban came into force on 11 April, dozens of these supposedly isolated and deprived women have taken to the streets in rather assertive acts of protest.

On 11 April itself, several niqab-clad women staged protests outside Notre Dame and other key Parisian monuments (one appeared to be resisting arrest). A couple of weeks later, a young veiled woman stood in front of the National Assembly, in a protest that was also a provocation for a fine (which she was annoyed she didn’t get).

According to the minister of the interior, ‘27 or 28’ women have been punished for wearing the face-veil so far. These are not all Saudi Arabian visitors or deferential Muslim wives – a woman fined in Nice a few days ago was both a convert and a single mother.

These fines are sparking spontaneous scuffles and support for the women concerned. A teacher from a private Muslim school in Toulouse was stopped and fined €150 for wearing her niqab; when a technician started filming the scene he was promptly arrested, and a spontaneous demoformed outside the police station demanding his release.

Now a new battle line has formed in schools, with headscarf-wearing mothers protesting against their exclusion from accompanying their children on school trips. These mothers wear a simple headscarf rather than a niqab, yet an increasing number of schools judge that their headwear makes them unfit ‘representatives’. On 2 May, reported Le Monde, a group of mothers rallied outside a school in Montreuil, ‘not defending a religious cause but fighting against injustice’.

It is striking that these protesters put their case in terms of Republican values, such as liberty. The main Muslim organisation opposing the burqa ban is called ‘Hands Off My Constitution’, and the mothers defending their right to wear veils on school trips call themselves ‘Mothers All Equal’. In these face-offs between veiled women and police, it seems, the line between the state and public freedoms is being contested.

To English eyes, these are strange scenes indeed. There is no UK government legislation on the veil, and while teachers can wear the headscarf, mothers (and many employees) can wear the niqab without raising many eyebrows. It is the peculiar severity of the French state’s attack on the veil – in the country with the largest Muslim population in Europe – that has turned Islamic headwear into such a key libertarian issue.

The French war on headscarves started in 2004, with a ban on pupils wearing headscarves to school. As the French sociologist Olivier Roy observes in his book Secularism Confronts Islam, there was a particular focus on the Islamic headscarf, which was seen as causing problems that the Sikh turban and Jewish skullcap did not. This was less to do with the inherent qualities of the headscarf, than the way it became an emblem for the French state, as a kind of anti-Republican symbol. Politicians of all parties lined up to support the ban in 2003, waxing lyrical about how the law would establish the ‘permanence of our values’ and be ‘constitutive of our collective history’, a ‘principle factor of the moral or spiritual unity of our nation’, a ‘founding principle of our republic’ and so on and so on (1). Suppressing the headscarf became the supreme Republican act, the primary way in which law-makers could make a grand statement of principle.

Incentives for Failure

Welfare’s Next Vietnam

by Heather Mac Donald

Disability will soon surpass AFDC and become the nation’s second-biggest welfare program. It is producing AFDC-sized problems too.

By decade's end, the public may well discover that the great welfare reform debate of 1995 addressed only half the problem. The Rivera family of Boston illustrates why. Eulalia Rivera came from Puerto Rico in 1968 and proceeded to raise a welfare dynasty. Her 16 surviving children (the 17th was shot) and their 89 progeny collect $750,000 to $1 million a year in government benefits. Their main form of support, however, is not AFDC, the program for single mothers and children that has been targeted for reform: it is federal disability payments. 

Not that the Riveras suffer from crippling physical illnesses or injuries. Most of the family's disabled members collect benefits for their "nerves." As Eulalia's son Juan, a divorced father of five, told theBoston Globe: "I have a nervous condition. . . . There is no way I could work." He pointed to his hands, which were shaking. "Look at this," he said: "I'm having an attack right now."

The Riveras represent the future of public assistance. While AFDC costs have grown 23 percent since 1980, the costs of the federal government's two disability programs have more than doubled. By 1998, they will reach $80 billion a year. In 1993, they already enrolled a total of 8.2 million Americans—more than 3 percent of the population. Disability for the poor is the nation's fastest-growing welfare program, about to surpass both AFDC and food stamps as the main form of support for the non-working poor. Workers' disability is ballooning as well: the Social Security disability trust fund will go bankrupt in 1995 and will be bailed out with money from the Social Security retirement fund.

Preserving Freedom

Paranoia Is Good for You

by Wendy McElroy

"I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business." — that's how I want my tombstone to read.

What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every thing you demand to know from me is something I don't want to tell you.

Privacy is the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. Privacy rests on the assumption that — in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including the government) to mind their own damned business. This is a presumption of innocence. It is also the bedrock of civil society.

The act of slamming your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres. The private sphere consists of the areas of life in which an individual exercises authority and into which the government or other uninvited parties cannot properly intrude; traditionally, the home or family is offered as a prime example of the private sphere. Thus, historically, privacy has stood as a bulwark between the individual and government, between freedom and social control.

No wonder privacy is under vicious and sustained attack.

Totalitarianism requires total information, and today's government is intent on achieving the complete identification of everyone, like taking an inventory of belongings to be taxed and controlled: national ID, biometrics, "your papers please!"

At every juncture, it seems, we are being asked to fill out a form, to answer invasive questions, to submit our bags for a search, to shut up or speak out on command, and to raise our arms to be wanded while we're at it.

In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott commented on the role played by one form of inventory — census data — in the rise of the modern state:

How Assimilation Works

—and how multiculturalism has wrecked it in California

BRUCE S. THORNTON

California is a concentrated example of the time-honored idea that America is an immigrant nation. From its beginnings as a territory through the twentieth century, California comprised a riotous variety of ethnic groups, nationalities, and religions. The whole world, it seemed, was coming and contributing to the state’s ethnic tapestry: Mexicans, Irish, Australians, South Sea Islanders, Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Armenians, Volga Germans, Filipinos, Hmong, Laotians, Punjabis, Vietnamese. And for a long time, immigration worked, because everyone was expected to assimilate, more or less, to the American paradigm.

For an example of how that assimilation took place, consider the rural San Joaquin Valley, where I grew up. Since it offered plenty of opportunities to own farmland and to find agricultural work, the valley became a place where the theory of assimilation met the practice. Assimilation didn’t mean that an immigrant had to discard his native culture or language. Indeed, most immigrants took pride in their origins, as evidenced by fraternal organizations, religious guilds, holidays, festivals, recipes, native costumes, and scores of other ways of honoring their homelands. Some, like my Italian grandmother, kept their native tongues and never became fluent in English. Some, like my wife’s Volga German grandfather, never even became citizens. Yet whatever the degree of assimilation, most accepted a fundamental truth: that whatever affection they had for their homes, for their native tongue, or for their old ways and customs, those cultures had in some significant way failed them. Thus they had made a difficult, costly choice: to become Americans. If America’s core principles—such as individual rights, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and religious tolerance—conflicted with those of the old country, then the latter had to be modified or abandoned.

Non-trials

Ivan Demjanjuk, is this not a man too?

by Angus Kennedy

This is not the first time that Demjanjuk has been found guilty of Nazi war crimes. Convicted in Israel in 1988 for having been the infamous prisoner/guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka, another of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps in eastern Poland, he was sentenced to death but released five years later when new KGB evidence showed it to be a case of mistaken identity. The Israeli court acted with the utmost legal scruple: freeing him on grounds of reasonable doubt despite his having been identified as Ivan the Terrible by survivors.

Demjanjuk returned to the US where, almost immediately, new charges were levelled against him – this time of having been a guard at Sobibor and Majdanek camps – and, after losing his US citizenship, he was finally extradited to Germany in late 2009 to face trial there.

Demjanjuk is the lowest-ranking person to be tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes. A Ukrainian born in 1920, he had fought for the Red Army, was taken prisoner by the Germans in the Crimea and held in a Nazi camp. He then volunteered for the SS to escape it. The key piece of evidence against him was an ID card from the 1940s showing that he had been at the Trawniki SS forced labour camp where the SS trained Ukrainian volunteers as guards. He ended up in 1943 in Sobibor, an extermination camp where 250,000 Jews were gassed; the vast majority of them were killed immediately on arrival and maybe fewer than 100 people survived.

The Ukrainian volunteers, known as Hiwis, are well known to have behaved sadistically and undoubtedly murdered Jews themselves. As Demjanjuk’s judge, Ralph Alt, said: ‘Every Trawniki man knew that he was part of a well-oiled and smoothly operating apparatus that had no other goal than systematically murdering Jews… the accused was part of that extermination machinery… His participation in the killing process included the unloading of the wagons, forcing the prisoners to undress and accompanying them to the gas chambers.’

Untold stories

Unless candour prevails, reconciliation remains elusive

Seventeen years after the death of apartheid, we hear a lot – maybe even too much – about coming clean; about acknowledging collective white guilt for the crimes of apartheid and the lingering misery of black South Africans. It weighs on the collective black soul, and it means a black vote for the DA is not out of faith and trust in that party, but as a wake-up call to the ANC.

by Xhanti Payi

I was 15 when Winnie Mandela appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 to answer to charges of murder and torture, among others.  I remember the day well. It was big news, and the media were everywhere.  It must have been a tough and humbling, if not humiliating day for her. 

In the end, with witness after witness having accused her taking part in kidnapping, torture and murder - and Winnie denying all as fabrication - Archbishop Desmond Tutu tearfully pleaded with her, ''You are a great person and you don't know how your greatness would be enhanced if you were to say: 'Sorry. Things went wrong, forgive me.' I beg you.''

I believe it was necessary for Winnie Mandela, a leader and a champion among the people, to admit that under her hand, and many times in her name, horrible things had been done to people. Those words were necessary for the people affected to have their loss acknowledged by someone who always had more power than them. The mother of the nation, with a great deal of support from the masses, was there in her classic self. Dressed in a floral suit, with a pearl necklace and glittering spectacles, she would hold her stern posture which she had maintained through the trials of apartheid, upright and innocent of the accusations which she said were “ludicrous”.  She was the embodiment of power even as she embraced the woman whose son had been killed.

So, she conceded, ''I am saying it is true, things went horribly wrong. I fully agree with that. And for that part of those painful years, when things went horribly wrong, and we were aware of the factors that led to that, for that, I am deeply sorry.''

The Night Watchman

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

- Tacitus