Category Archives: History

WTC Remembrance: TWIN TOWERS, TWIN MEMORIES By Chris Matthew Sciabarra

America, History, Homeland Security, Islam, Terrorism

Writes my dear friend, Dr. Chris Matthew Sciabarra:

Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001, which, nearly two decades later, continues to affect our lives as New Yorkers, as well as the lives of those who were killed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and in Washington, D.C. My annual series returns this year with a poignant installment: Zack Fletcher: Twin Towers, Twin Memories. It is a profile of Zack Fletcher and his twin brother Andre, both of whom were FDNY first responders on that fateful day. I can’t thank Zack and the Fletcher family enough for having provided us with a riveting memoir, in words and photos.

ZACK FLETCHER: TWIN TOWERS, TWIN MEMORIES
By Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Fraternal twins, Zackary and Andre Fletcher, were born on February 25, 1964, to Lunsford and Monica Fletcher, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Zackary (or Zack as he prefers to be called) was a mere two minutes older than his brother. Those two minutes did nothing to dull the depth of their connection to one another. “Andre and I were the epitome of what defines twins,” Zack recalls. “Although we were brothers, there is a special bond and connection that only twins can understand. We are actually closer than the typical brother and brother, sister and sister, or brother and sister. There is this magical, unseen connection that only someone who is a twin can understand. There would be times when I would be singing a song in my head and he would start whistling the very same song. There would be times when we’d try to figure a solution to a problem and we’d come up with the same exact solution without any spoken word. It was all thought processes.”

Zack has a large family—a big contingent of cousins that still live in Jamaica, the West Indies, and throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. But from the earliest moments of their childhood, their very special familial bond took shape; the twins were inseparable and followed parallel paths. They both attended Junior Academy, a private school located in Brooklyn, from kindergarten to eighth grade. Zack went on to Brooklyn Technical High School in 1978. Andre would later join Zack and they graduated together from Brooklyn Tech in 1982. Upon graduation, Zack attended the New York Institute of Technology for a year, studying Architecture, but eventually took some time off to work—before transferring to SUNY at Old Westbury to study Computer Science. In 1994, on the precipice of graduation, Zack was called to join the New York Police Department (NYPD) as a Police Officer as well as the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) as a Firefighter. “I ultimately decided to choose the FDNY, which is a choice that I have never ever regretted.” He is currently employed with the New York City Fire Department Bureau of Fire Investigation (FDNY-BFI), with the rank of Arson/Fire Investigator (also known as Fire Marshal). “In essence, the Bureau of Fire Investigation is the Law Enforcement Division of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) and it is responsible for conducting and investigating the origin and cause of fires that occur in the City of New York.”

Writer David Kohn tells us (in an October 4, 2001 CBS News story, “One Twin Waits“) that the brothers had expressed their dual desire to join the fire department from the time they had graduated kindergarten. As it happened, Andre would join the FDNY first in January 1994, a full seven months prior to Zack’s hiring. Andre was stationed on the northern tip of Staten Island, near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, as a member of Rescue 5. Zack was stationed at a Lower Manhattan firehouse, Engine 4, Ladder Company 15.

Competitive as both youngsters and young adults, they were practically inseparable. They did almost everything together. Each bought motorcycles and, later, each purchased cars at police auctions, which they lovingly restored. And as they grew to maturity—at 6′ 2″ tall and glowingly handsome—they were even approached by a talent scout, who was convinced they’d make it in Hollywood. It led to a photo shoot, where each wore the jersey of their choice (see the final photo below). In fact, each of them played on both the FDNY football and baseball teams; in football, each of them served as both Defensive Backs and Wide Receivers. And Andre went so far as to become the president of the FDNY baseball team!

But being in the fire department was certainly not all fun and games. And so it was on this date in 2001, that the parallel paths of two loving brothers took a unbearably jarring turn.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Andre was not scheduled to work the Day Tour, but ended up working an Overtime Tour. Zack was scheduled to work but switched tours with a co-worker who was slated to retire within the year. His co-worker owed him a tour shift, so Zack made sure to call it in so as not to lose it. It didn’t matter, of course, because before the day was out, every able firefighter in New York City was called to duty to attempt to save the lives of thousands of people who were in the Twin Towers, struck by terrorists who had turned passenger jets into weapons of war. Sadly, Zack’s co-worker, Thomas W. Kelly, on the verge of retirement, would be among those lost at Ground Zero.

The events of the day began rather unceremoniously given that Zack had the opportunity to sleep in, expecting a day off. He was with his girlfriend at the time, and when they turned on the TV in the morning, they recognized that some kind of “big incident” was unfolding in lower Manhattan. The North Tower of the World Trade Center had been struck by some kind of plane. Within moments, the South Tower suffered a similar fate. Reports were coming in via television and radio broadcasts “that all off-duty firefighters and police officers were being recalled to duty and to report to their Commands.” Ironically, Zack’s girlfriend at the time was a New York City police officer. So “upon getting notification regarding the recall, we both made our way via her vehicle to Manhattan where our work Commands were located, which were approximately one mile apart from each other.” But virtually all of New York City’s roadways were locked down; they were only able to get into Manhattan “by piggybacking … closely behind the convoy of Emergency Vehicles. … Upon arriving at the road entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, we saw that there was no vehicle traffic being allowed to cross.” Showing their IDs, they were able to get access to the bridge, and Zack made his way to the firehouse.

When he arrived, he realized that both units of the firehouse were already gone, having been called down to the Twin Towers. “Upon arriving there, I realized that both units were out of quarters and must have been down at the scene of the incident.” Engine 4, Ladder Company 15 was approximately three-quarters of a mile away from the World Trade Center. Zack donned his firefighting gear and began to walk down to the scene. Just as he was about to leave, an FDNY Fire Captain, who was not assigned to his unit or his station, grabbed some gear assigned to one of the fellow members of the station and put it on. He followed the Fire Captain, but as they started moving toward the scene, a walk that would take at least fifteen minutes, Zack realized about five minutes in, that they “should probably grab a few extra Air Breathing Tanks in the event that they were needed.” The Captain agreed, and Zack returned to secure some tanks. Eighteen years later, Zack can recall the moments almost minute-by-minute: He remembers that it took him about five minutes to head back to the firehouse, another three minutes to gather the tanks and to devise a way to carry three or four of them, “by procuring a small hose strap and tying the bottlenecks together.” He made his way back to the Captain, which took him another 8 minutes—and the Captain assisted him in carrying the air bottles. They were nearing the immediate area, still blocks away from the Towers; the clock ticked toward 9:59 a.m.

“As we were walking down what I believe was Dey Street toward the North and South Towers, we heard an ungodly sound like the onrush of a freight train. We were being accompanied by a few police officers in the area and upon hearing the sound, which seemed to be coming toward us, we all dove into the side entrance of a building that I believe was the Century 21 Building. It appears that that decision … probably saved our lives—as all we saw rushing by was debris … [coming] from the collapsing [South] Tower.” …

…READ THE REST. “ZACK FLETCHER: TWIN TOWERS, TWIN MEMORIES” By Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Christianity And White Guilt

Christianity, English, History, Race, Religion, The West

White guilt is a Christian affliction. Not for nothing did Edward Gibbon saddle Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon is the genius who wrote the 12 volumes that make up “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” [1776]. ( I read the 1943 version, which was “condensed for modern reading.”)

Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of Dr. Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”

And indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of criminals and women.

Willson Whitman—he wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version—remarks on how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity … Among these reason [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance [his words]—in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.”

I wonder: If to go by Gibbon, can Christianity be called the Social Justice movement of its day? Gibbon seemed to suggest so.

UPDATED (7/6): NEW COLUMN: A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration

America, Founding Fathers, History, Nationhood, The West

“Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.”—Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019

WND: By Ilana Mercer

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment, “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

For the edification of libertarians prone to vulgar individualism, the Declaration of Independence is at once a statement of individual and national sovereignty.

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©By ILANA MERCER

* Image courtesy of WND.

UPDATE (7/6/019):

Thanks, punjabijoe @ WND:

“She is brilliant!

Many a radio host intimidated by her writing and brains. Otherwise she would be on many shows.”

And to Judith Harding @ WND:

“What an inspiring, informative, patriotic, reasoned, accurately historical article is this! I learned a lot, especially from the British end of things. Much gratitude for this substantial article — and admiration for its able writer! God bless you and yours…”

NEW COLUMN: How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?

Africa, History, Race, Racism, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN IS “How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Donald R. Morris’s epic tome, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation, is the all-time PIG (Politically Incorrect Guide) to Zulu history.

In it, Morris notes correctly that the Bantu, like the Boers, were not indigenous to South Africa. They “dribbled south” from some “reservoir in the limitless north,” and, like the European settlers, used their military might to displace Hottentots, Bushmen (his archaic terminology), and one another through internecine warfare.

Indeed, there was bitter blood on Bantu lands well before the white settlers arrived in South Africa.

Westerners have committed the little San people of Southern Africa, the “Bushmen,” to folkloric memory for their unequalled tracking skills and for the delicate drawings with which they dotted the “rock outcroppings.”

The San were hunters, but they were also among the hunted. Mercilessly so. Alongside the Boers, Hottentots and blacks “hunted down Bushmen for sport well into the 19th Century.”

In “the book to end all books on the tragic confrontation between the assegai and the Gatling gun,” Morris places Cape Town’s founder and Dutch East India Company official J. A. Van Riebeeck, on landing at the Cape in 1652, 500 miles to the south and 1,000 miles to the west of the nearest Bantu. Joined by other Protestants from Europe, Dutch farmers, as we know, homesteaded the Cape Colony.

No doubt, the question of land ownership deeply concerned the 19th century trek Boers, as they prepared to decamp from the British-ruled Cape Colony and venture north. Accordingly, they sent out exploration parties tasked with negotiating the purchase of land from the black chieftains, who very often acted magnanimously, allowing Europeans to settle certain areas. Against trek Boers, it must be said that they were as rough as the natives and negotiated with as much finesse.

Still, the narrative about the pastoral, indigenous, semi-nomadic natives, dispossessed in the 17th century of their lands by another such people, only of a different color—this is as simplistic as it is sentimental.

When Boer and Bantu finally clashed on South Africa’s Great Fish River it was a clash of civilizations. “The Bantu viewed the land as entailed property that belonged to the clan. A chieftain might dispose of the right to live on the land, but he could not dispose of the land itself.” The European mind in general could not grasp the concept of collective ownership and “regarded a land transaction as a permanent exchange of real property.”

As Morris observes in his matter-of-fact way, “The Bantu view insured European encroachment and the European view insured future strife.”

South Africa has since reverted to “The Bantu view.” It is thus perhaps inevitable that 21st-century land claims or “restitution” in South Africa are not dominated by individual freehold owners reclaiming expropriated land, based on title deeds kept on record.

Rather, a group of blacks scheming on a particular property will band together as a “tribe,” and pool the taxpayer grants, which its members have received gratis, for the purpose of purchasing occupied land.

No sooner does this newly constituted “tribe” (or band of bandits, really) launch a claim with the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, than related squatters—sometimes in the thousands—move to colonize the land. They defile its grounds and groundwater by using these as one vast latrine, and terrorize, even kill, its occupants and their animals in the hope of “nudging” them off the land.

The latest victim of this guerrilla warfare is a wine farmer, Stefan Smit of blessed memory, gunned down on his Stellenbosch estate, in the Western Cape. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?“, is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.