Category Archives: History

California’s Killer Eugenics Program Inspired The Nazis

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Ethics, Fascism, History, Individual Rights, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

Left-liberalism is illiberal. It doesn’t respect individual liberties, preferring that a custodial managerial class get to delimit and limit individual rights in the interests of the so-called greater good. Much like fascism, the essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that ought to be implemented by an all-powerful state. (Voltaire, a rather cleverer Frenchman, said that Rousseau is to the philosopher as the ape is to man.)

It thus comes as no surprise to discover that California ran so robust a program of forced sterilization in the 1930s and beyond—that the Nazi Party reached out for the state’s advice (and literature, in particular a book titled, “Sterilization and Human Betterment”). Both California’s Courts and the president of Stanford University supported the practice.

Also telling is the fact that, as CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen documents below,, California has yet to make restitution to the victims. On the other hand, a historically red state like North Carolina has compensated its far fewer victims.

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?

BAB's A List, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Islam, Jihad, The West

My good friend Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. I am always thrilled when Nebojsa finds the time to pen an exclusive editorial for Barely A Blog. (Click on “BAB’s A List” for Nebojsa’s articles archive.)

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?
BY NEBOJSA MALIC

In my Antiwar.com article last week, I mentioned the call to war in Syria sounded by WSJ contributor Fouad Ajami in early February. According to Ajami, B. Hussein Obama should follow the example of his Democratic predecessor, who launched proxy and air wars to “save” the “Bosnians” and “Kosovars.”

The quotation marks are absolutely necessary here. Because all three factions that fought in Bosnia were actually native Bosnians, the Western media applied the name solely to the Bosnian Muslims, who in 1993 deliberately adopted the name “Bosniak” to stake a claim on the country. At least they use that name for themselves; denizens of the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo don’t even bother with “Kosovar” – a nice, sanitized name bestowed upon them by sympathetic NATO propaganda – and identify themselves simply as Albanian.

Last, but not least, neither were actually “saved” by Clinton. The Bosnian Muslims started a civil war after being given assurances of U.S. support, but in the end settled for an arrangement worse than the one they rejected at Washington’s urging. In Kosovo, Washington embraced a terrorist, drug-running, organ-harvesting cabal of Nazi sympathizers, responsible for killing many more fellow Albanians than the Serb “oppressors,” who used the NATO air war to purge all rivals and set up a mafia “state” thereafter. Both the Bosnian Muslim leadership and the “Kosovo Liberation Army” have shown the most callous disregard for the lives of their kin, so long as their deaths furthered the cause. Whatever was required to mobilize the world opinion, it was provided: fake death camps, fabricated stories of mass rapes, marketplace massacres or “genocides”.

Horrific as it was, such behavior at least had some degree of logic behind it. If you are a weak local actor, the best way to reach power is to get a strong outside power to fight and win your wars; fourth-generation warfare at its most effective. But what had possessed the American Empire to go along? Brendan O’Neill explained it as a quest for meaning following the Cold War: by “saving” the fictitious damsels in distress in Bosnia and Kosovo, the U.S. could present itself as the White Knight, thus earning the everlasting gratitude of Muslims worldwide.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-KLA), a noted interventionist, validated this analysis in 2007, when he called on “jihadists of all color and hue” to take note of the U.S. creating another Islamic state in Europe. By that he meant Kosovo, Bosnia presumably being the first (though over half of its population is Christian).

Trouble is, the expected gratitude of worldwide jihadists manifestly failed to materialize. Washington’s white-knighting in the Balkans was followed by 9/11. “Bosnians” mocked international humanitarian aid efforts with a kitschy monument to canned beef. Albanians may have erected a gilded statue of Bill Clinton, but what is one to make of a stream of Albanian jihadists since the “liberation”? Meanwhile, the “nation-building” programs in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a complete fiasco. U.S. activists may have helped steer the Egyptian “revolution” but now find themselves on trial.

None of this is going to make the slightest dent in Washington’s reality-distortion field, unfortunately. Odds are there will be an intervention of some kind in Syria, on the pretext of “saving lives”, but definitely with the expectation of Muslim gratitude.

Ajami and his fellow interventionists are missing a key difference between Clinton and Obama. While Clinton embarked on white-knighting wars to cover up scandals at home and would do anything to be loved, Obama is a paragon of virtue in comparison, and treats adulation as his due. Remember, he got a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up, and a statue in Indonesia just for being a schoolboy there once. In other words, he has no need to prove himself now – not with the Republican establishment candidates being so absolutely inept, that Obama’s second Imperial mandate is all but guaranteed.

Then again, Obama didn’t really care about Libya, either. The three Valkyries ran that operation. They may yet do the same in Syria, hoping perhaps for statues of their own – and gratitude that will never come.

UPADTE III: The Jew Who Prosecuted Mandela: Percy Yutar Said He Was A South African Patriot

Democracy, Elections, History, Judaism & Jews, South-Africa

“Persecutor” is how my father—once a leading South African anti-Apartheid activist—used to refer to the man who “prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years).” (The Guardian)

But Percy Yutar was his real name. And “some Jewish leaders hailed him as a ‘credit to the community’ and a symbol of the Jews’ contribution to South Africa.”

“Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg’s largest orthodox synagogue.”

In the opinion of my father (Rabbi Isaacson), recent attempts to portray South Africa’s Jewish community at large as having a record of resistance to Apartheid are pure fiction. My father himself was censured many times by the Board of Deputies and other Jewish leaders—told to quit his anti-establishment activities or risk the loss of the rabbinate. Decamping to Israel, as our family did, was prompted as much by ideals as by the constant threats over the loss of a living.

While the leadership of the then-banned African National Congress was festooned with radical Jews, the truth is that most South African Jews (who have a proud and celebrated history in South Africa,) were not behind this noisy minority. If anything, I suspect them of supporting the Nasionale Party, which governed from 1948 until 1994, by the overwhelming consent of the white minority. Like it or not, white South Africans had a functioning democracy (with popular referenda conducted on most important national questions).

I came from a liberal family. Yet other than my father and my cousin (a Black-Sash activist), I hardly knew a Jew who did not vote National Party (NAT). American paloeconservatives have kibitzed about the South African Jewry’s liberalism. Where from? What do they know? Did they ever survey the community back in those days?

Online sources such as Wikipedia and The Virtual Jewish Library assert the community’s liberal voting patterns. They do not argue it. As far as I can see, they do not provide statistical support for this alleged liberal voting record. I’d like to see some substantiation of these so-called “enlightened” voting patterns.

I am convinced that these depictions are cunning, after the-fact attempts to portray the Jews as more liberal than they in fact were. Yes, Jews have always been socially altruistic, but not to the point of self-immolation. This was a community with vast wealth. Risking the riches they so richly deserved is what Goyim do; Jews not so much. UPDATED II: Risking the future of The Children: that’s not what Jews do. I bet you that, if they preached Progressive Party in public, the same Jews probably voted NAT.

Again, father and cousin aside, I did not know a Jew who did not support the Nasionale Party.

Some members of my family were business tycoons. The same family spawned pig farmers, Jews who lived on the land starting in the early 1900s. (Yeah, funny, I know; they farmed pigs, but didn’t eat ’em.) We’d get together for dinners, during which not even young, outspoken family members (invariably attending medical or law school) ever expressed dismay at the undemocratic nature of South African politics.

I recall vividly when my cousin, a land developer and a pig farmer, decided to emigrate to England after the son of his most loyal farmhand burgled the family homestead and attempted an attack on the family. My cousin was outraged. How could this young black man betray him so? (I could see a few reasons, not least of them the squalor in which farmhands and their families were housed. Free “housing,” yes, but not pretty. I would never have argued this in his company. It was just not done.)

The Jews I knew were what we called verkrampte. (Hard core)

Chris McGreal of The Guardian confirms my suspicions:

“The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel’s struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism. … The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was ‘the blacks this and the blacks that.'”

UPDATED I (Jan. 31): THOSE OF YOU who’ve read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” know that the book speak favorably about the strong Afrikaner-Israel connection, and that the book thinks Percy Yutar did just fine by putting the Marxist Mandela away for his crimes against civilians (for the most).

UPDATE (Feb. 1): Percy Yutar died age 90, in 2002. As this New York Times report tells it,

“According to many South African historians and writers, Mr. Yutar’s vigorous persecution of blacks in the 1960’s was linked to his Jewish background. Glenn Frankel, the author of ‘Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa,’ said that Mr. Yutar saw the trial as a patriotic opportunity, especially because some of Mr. Mandela’s co-defendants were Jews. … ‘Who better to prosecute Jewish traitors than a loyal Jew?’ Mr. Frankel wrote, describing Mr. Yutar’s thinking. ‘Who better than he to put things right and prove that not all Jews were radicals hell-bent upon overthrowing the government?'”

Mr. Yutar, one of eight children in a family of Lithuanian immigrants, was born in Cape Town on July 29, 1911. As a young man, his left hand was caught in an electric mincing machine when he was working in his father’s butcher shop, leaving his hand badly mangled.
He attended the University of Cape Town on a scholarship and was awarded a doctorate in law. Jews, however, were not welcome in the higher echelons of South Africa’s civil service, and Mr. Yutar settled for a job tracing defaulting telephone subscribers for the postal service. Still he persisted in his legal career and slowly moved up the ladder to junior law clerk and junior prosecutor. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general for the Transvaal Province and gained a reputation as an especially ambitious and energetic prosecutor.

UPDATED: Amy Chua’s Serbian Slant

BAB's A List, Communism, Democracy, Europe, History, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

I have only now gotten around to reading Amy Chua’s “World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.” In my own book, I merely referenced a secondary source on World On Fire. So far, I have found Chua to have an original, creative mind, a rare thing these days. Hers is truly an original thesis. But she goes wrong in many ways—not least in her error-filled, left-leaning, biased analysis of the history of South Africa’s “market-dominant minority” (chinglese for market-dominating minority). In World On Fire, Chua also claims that Croatians were a “market-dominant minority” that infuriated the less able Serbians, hence their so-called “aggression” against the Croats. Our friend Nebojsa Malic has something to say about that:

AMY CHUA’S SERBIAN SLANT

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Examples proving this old adage are legion. On this occasion, I’d like to mention two.

First, an ad-hoc group of European lawyers (the Badinter Commission) up and decided to wipe a country out of existence. Just like that, they declared the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia “in dissolution” – a concept reminiscent of what happened to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, on whose ashes Yugoslavia was first established. Next, in January 1992, the Commission decided that only Yugoslavia’s “republics” – administrative subdivisions created by the Communist government and given state-like powers had the right to seek recognition as independent states. It was this ruling that made the bloody Wars of Yugoslav Succession inevitable.

This decision is hardly mentioned in the mainstream narrative created subsequently in the West. According to the official story of Yugoslavia’s “dissolution” (rather, dismemberment), the evil nationalist Serbs suddenly decided to attack everyone else, motivated solely by bloodlust and bigotry, and it was only the belated intervention of the white-knighting “international community” that brought peace and justice to all.

Ten years after the Yugoslav tragedy began, Yale scholar Amy Chua published a book called “The World on Fire,” in which she argued that democratization and marketization brought resentment of majority populations against “market-dominant minorities” such as the Chinese or Jews. That ought to have been an easy argument to make. But Chua then reached to Yugoslavia for confirmation of her thesis, and made a mess.

Relying on the official narrative, she argued that Croats were the “market-dominant minority” resented by the Serbs, who went on a killing spree out of sheer frustration (see p. 172-75). Granted, Chua used all sorts of caveats, but her example was still completely and entirely wrong.

Here is the problem. Slovenians and Croats, whose separatism ignited the Succession Wars, were not “market-dominant minorities” at all. There was an economic imbalance between their republics and the rest of the country, but that was the result of the political arrangement created by the Communist regime of Josip Broz, a.k.a. Tito, rather than any inherent proclivity towards business or finance.

Resentment between Croats and Serbs was first nurtured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose plans for expanding into the Balkans were thwarted by the emergence of an independent Serbian state in the 19th century. While Austria-Hungary was still feudal, Serbia was a free principality of yeomen farmers and merchants. Furthermore, Serbs living in Austrian territories had been granted yeoman status in exchange for Military Frontier service as early as the 17th century. They were also Orthodox Christians, which annoyed the staunchly Catholic empire. Moreover, Croats’ national identity came to be defined entirely by Catholicism, and marked by vicious bigotry directed against the Serbs. Economics really didn’t figure much into it.

In 1914, given a pretext by the assassination of its heir by Bosnian revolutionaries, Austria-Hungary launched a war to obliterate Serbia. It failed. In 1918, having returned from the brink of extinction, the Serbs were determined to secure their freedom from Austria once and for all; their regent saw the solution in a union with “brotherly” Catholic and Muslim Slavs. He either did not know or chose not to care that Catholics and Muslims might have harbored a grudge against the Serbs for ousting the empires – Ottoman or Austrian – in which they had enjoyed privileges.

Yugoslavia never got a chance. In 1941, it was invaded and dismembered by the Axis. Within weeks of its establishment, the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia launched a program of mass murder against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies – in that order. The Serb-led Royalist resistance was eventually betrayed by London. The US and UK instead recognized the Communist resistance, led by Josip Broz Tito, as the new government.

Croat-Slovene in origin, Tito reordered the country according to a 1928 Communist platform, which eerily echoed the Nazi partition. No wonder: both sought to keep the Serbs (or “Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialists”) in check. Tito did it by creating “republics”: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. He also further divided Serbia, establishing two provinces, Vojvodina in the north, and the Albanian-dominated Kosovo in the south. Kosovo was initially supposed to be ceded to Albania, but the feud between Tito and Stalin (and Albania’s Enver Hoxha) interfered.

Under Tito, Slovenia and Croatia (not even all of it, but the area around Zagreb) treated the rest of the country as little more than the source of raw materials and cheap labor. While the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, one of Tito’s closest henchmen, ran experiments like “socialist self-management” on the rest of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was untouched. Though Yugoslavia was allegedly “Serb-dominated,” the majority of cabinet posts in the federal government were held by non-Serbs, as late as 1990.

The reform drive initiated in the 1980s by the Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic became popular not because of “nationalism”, but because it sought to reverse this colonial relationship within Yugoslavia. Milosevic, a banker with Western experience, clashed with the Slovenian leadership over the mercantilist set-up of the Yugoslav federation.

At that point, however, the Berlin Wall came down. That had two consequences: the collapse of Communism all over Europe (and eventually the breakup of the USSR), and the rise of Germany as an actual European power. Without the Soviet Union to keep them in check, and Yugoslavia’s neutrality no longer important, the American and European powers were free to interfere in Yugoslav affairs – and they chose to back the separatists.

Cut off from their resource base, however, both Slovenia and Croatia eventually withered on the vine. Slovenia initially managed to preserve its capital by rejecting the “shock therapy” transition strategies implemented elsewhere, but after joining the EU in 2004, their reserves ran dry. Croatia racked up $60 billion in foreign debt, and sold off most of its tourist capacities and agriculture to foreigners. Just last weekend, Croatians voted to join the EU, in desperation seeing the listing Brussels Titanic as a lifeboat.

Twenty years ago, the Badinter Commission’s decision made Yugoslav bloodshed inevitable. Ten years later, Chua’s reliance on official accounts merely undermined her thesis. In both cases, the problem arose from preferring the conjured narrative over actual facts.

****

Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: Chua has serious lacunae in her analysis of the “whites” of South Africa. She seems proud of the Chinese edge, though. Writing provocatively and intelligently as she does, and getting away with it to become a mainstream sensation—this demands certain obedience to what Nebojsa Malic calls the accepted narrative.