“racaille” dit par sarkozy = propagande gauchiste

orphans on trial

JULY 13, 2004

LIAM SCHEFF
ORPHANS ON TRIAL (Source)

WHEN CHRISTINE MAGGIORE TESTED HIV-POSITIVE IN 1992, HER DOCTOR TOLD HER TO GET READY TO DIE. BUT SHE WASN’T INTERESTED IN DYING.

Maggiore was told that the AIDS drugs would make her sick, so she skipped them, instead relying on natural methods to support her health. A year and a half later, she was so healthy that her doctor said there was something wrong and she should retest.

She did retest, several times. The tests came back negative, indeterminate and positive. Maggiore investigated the medical literature and learned that HIV tests are highly inaccurate. She also discovered that there are gaping flaws in the HIV hypothesis itself.

Believing that this is the sort of thing people should know, she founded Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a resource for people who, like herself, want to make fully informed decisions about their health.

Since testing positive, Maggiore has had two children. Her kids, two and six years old, have never been tested. They’ve been raised on organic food, with a naturopathic approach to health. They’re both intelligent and active. They don’t take AIDS drugs. And they’re not in the least bit sick. They regularly see their pediatrician, who has no medical complaints about their well-being.

And they’re not alone. There are thousands of healthy HIV-positive people who don’t take the drugs, who rely on natural regimens to support their immune function.

It was through Maggiore that I met Mona, whose children, Sean and Dana, have tested HIV-positive. By the state’s definition, they’re not actually her children; Mona is their great aunt and legal guardian. Her niece, a long-time drug user, was unable to act as a responsible mother, so Sean and Dana were remanded to state foster care. Mona took them back to raise as her own.

When I first spoke with Mona, she was stressed and nervous. Sean had twice been sent to the Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC), a “home for HIV positive children” located in Washington Heights. First, as an infant, then again four years ago. And Dana was there until June.

“Why did they take her?” I asked.

“They said I was a negligent parent because I didn’t want to give the drugs.”

She’d been taking them to a naturopath, and the children were healthy, but it didn’t matter. When city agencies found out that the children weren’t on the drugs, they took them away for mandatory treatment at a clinic and then transferred them to ICC. There, they were locked up and pumped full of drugs day and night.

“What drugs?”

“AZT, Nevirapine, Epivir, Zerit. All kinds of drugs.”

To read through the list of drug studies either currently underway or recently concluded at IC—studies sponsored by government agencies such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and huge pharmaceutical companies such as Glaxo, Pfizer, Squibb and Genentech—is to take a trip through the nightmare world of pediatric drug research.

For example, the study called “The Effect of Anti-HIV Treatment on Body Characteristics of HIV-Infected Children” is looking for the causes of “Wasting and Lipodystrophy [fat redistribution]“—by using drugs known to cause wasting and lipodystrophy.

Or consider “The Safety and Effectiveness of Treating Advanced AIDS Patients between the Ages of 4 and 22 with Seven Drugs, Some at Higher than Usual Doses.” The seven drugs in the study are all known to cause debilitating, potentially fatal side effects, yet they are administered at “higher than usual doses” in four-year-olds.

Then there’s a study with “Stavudine…Alone or in Combination with Didanosine.” Stavudine plus Didanosine has killed pregnant women.

Or the vaccine study to be administered to children “12 months to 8 years” using “live chicken pox virus,” even though one of the consequences of a live virus vaccine can be the disease itself.

Another measures “HIV Levels in Cerebrospinal Fluid.” Cerebrospinal fluid can only be gathered from a spinal tap, a dangerous and invasive procedure.

There’s even a study on HIV-negative children born to HIV-infected mothers that uses an experimental HIV vaccine.

Mona was never informed that Sean had once participated in clinical trials at ICC.

“But they’re always changing the children’s medications,” she said.

I asked Mona how the children tolerate so many medications.

A lot of them don’t, she told me. “The ones that can’t are drugged through a tube…in their stomachs. If a child refuses drugs too many times, they take them away for the operation. I’ve seen it happen to children who refuse the medication.”

INCARNATION CHILDREN’S CENTER is a foster home administered by the Catholic Home Bureau under the Archdiocese of New York. According to the ICC website, it was established in 1987 “to deal with the boarder baby crisis.” Boarder babies are children abandoned at the hospital.

In 1992, “an outpatient clinic for HIV-positive children was established” and, with funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is a subdivision of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), “the clinic became a subunit of the Columbia University Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Unit.”

That’s when ICC went from being a home for children of impoverished, drug-addicted mothers to a recipient of funds for allowing the NIH to use these HIV-positive orphans as test subjects.

The ICC webpage listed dozens of trials with AZT and Nevirapine conducted through the late 90s. The NIH site recently listed “[f]ive studies currently recruiting for drug trials,” and “27 studies ongoing or recently completed”—all on children at ICC—as well as more than 200 at Columbia Presbyterian, ICC’s parent hospital. The studies are sponsored by NIH subdivisions; many are cosponsored by the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs being tested. The studies use the standard AIDS drugs: nucleoside analogues, protease inhibitors and Nevirapine.

Nucleoside analogues, like AZT, work by stopping cell division. They stop the formation of new blood in the bone marrow, in some cases causing anemia and bone marrow death. They’ve caused death in pregnant mothers, spontaneous abortion, birth defects, liver failure, pancreatic failure, muscle wasting, developmental damage and death in children and adults. They also may cause cancer.

Protease inhibitors interfere with the body’s ability to build new proteins. Since we’re made of protein, protease inhibitors have pronounced effects on physical appearance and organ function. The side effects can be bizarre, grotesque and often fatal: wasting in the face, arms and legs, fatty humps on the back and shoulders, distended belly, heart disease, birth defects, organ failure—and death.

Almost all of this is found on the warning labels.

The first AIDS drug, AZT, was designed in the 60s as a chemotherapy drug for cancer patients, but it was never approved. Critics declared it too toxic even for short-term use, yet in 1987 it was pushed through for lifelong use in HIV-positive people. Although its trials were later revealed to be fraudulent, AZT remains on the market.

Finally, there’s Nevirapine, which also interferes with normal cell function. In test trials, Nevirapine has caused severe liver damage and death in dozens of patients. Most die from organ failure due to drug toxicity. Nevirapine can also cause a violent skin disorder called Steven-Johnsons Syndrome—a horrifying condition in which the skin blisters and ruptures or peels off in large swaths, leaving bloody, exposed flesh.

Despite causing so many serious medical issues in the course of treatment, AIDS drugs don’t even claim to work. Every AIDS drug label bears a version of this caveat:

“This drug will not cure your HIV infection… Patients receiving antiretroviral therapy may continue to experience opportunistic infections and other complications of HIV disease… Patients should be advised that the long-term effects are unknown at this time.”

So why do people take the drugs? Because they test HIV-positive. But as Christine Maggiore learned, HIV tests are highly inaccurate.

Most HIV tests are antibody tests, which means that they can cross-react with normal proteins in human blood. There are nearly 70 commonly occurring conditions—as listed in the medical literature—that are known to make the tests come up positive. These include yeast infections, colds, flus, arthritis, hepatitis, herpes, recent inoculations, drug use and pregnancy.

The remaining HIV tests, called viral load tests, can produce dozens of conflicting results—even from the same blood sample.

HIV tests are so unreliable that they all bear a disclaimer: “At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood,” or “The AMPLICOR HIV-1 MONITOR [Viral Load] test is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection,” or “Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosis of HIV-1 infection” (Abbott Laboratories HIV Test, Roche Viral Load Test and Epitope, Inc. Western Blot Test, respectively).

And the kicker: Positive test results can occur due to “prior pregnancy, blood transfusions…and other potential nonspecific reactions” (Vironostika HIV Test, 2003).

In short: In the 90s, drug companies like Glaxo Wellcome and Abbott Labs began recycling old chemotherapy drugs for the new AIDS drug market. This market consisted of gay men who weren’t told that the HIV test was a nonspecific antibody test. They were told, however, that AIDS was an unavoidable outgrowth of testing positive on this test, and that HIV was a fatal condition.

If you look in the medical literature, you’ll find that neither of these assumptions is true.

MONA’S SON SEAN has lived in a virtual coma his entire life. He was put on AZT in infancy. The drug made him so sick that he couldn’t swallow solid food and, as a result, he ate through a tube in his nose until he was three. He had no energy. He was constantly ill. He couldn’t play or even walk without becoming exhausted. Sean got sicker every time Mona gave him the drugs, so she cut down the doses. His energy level began to improve. She continued to wean him off the drugs and started taking him to a naturopath.

“For the first time in his life,” she told me, “he became a normal boy. He could play with the other children, he could walk, he could run. He smiled and laughed. He was normal.”

This would’ve been good news, except that Sean was born to a mother who once tested HIV-positive. Sean, the recipient of his mother’s antibodies, also tested positive.

The Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) came down hard on Mona for not drugging him. She was sent to a new doctor, an AIDS specialist at Beth Israel, who put Sean on a “miracle drug,” Nevirapine. Within six months, he was on life support due to organ failure.

That’s when ACS decided that Sean should be put into ICC. They said he’d be there for four months; he was there for more than a year. Mona had to get a lawyer to get him out.

Mona showed me Sean’s medical records. They told the same story: AZT, Nevirapine, the ICU.

“Now they have Dana on the drugs.”

Mona introduced me to Sean on a basketball court near their home. He was a cute kid. His jacket was too big for him, and he walked with a little shuffle—and a little wariness. He was small. I have a picture of myself at four years old—oversized denim jacket, swinging my legs a bit as I walked—and I was about the same size as Sean. Except Sean was 13. He weighed 50 pounds and was about four feet tall. An AZT baby. Stunted, his cells damaged from the inside out

INCARNATION CHILDREN’S CENTER is housed in a four-story brick building, a converted convent with barred windows. At the entrance, there are glass panes on either side of a large, solid door with a camera above it. The day I went to ICC, there were children pushing up against the glass beside the closed door looking at me.

I walked through the door and into a waiting room with a wide steel elevator door at the far end. I signed in as a family friend of Mona’s. The nurses eyed me suspiciously but didn’t stop me from entering.

Beyond the reception area was a large, dark room with stained-glass windows on the far back wall. Children were grouped around folding tables.

The kids ranged from a couple years old to almost adult. Except for a few Hispanic kids, they were mostly African-American. A number of the children were in wheelchairs. There was a boom box playing in the background. Somebody had brought in pizza in cardboard boxes. A young woman in sweatpants sat on one of the chairs. She looked at me and seemed embarrassed; it was her 18th birthday party. A few bored, pale teenagers sat around in the corners, watching with detached, vague expressions. They were volunteers, coming to do community service for the AIDS children.

The wheelchair-bound kids were being fed or drugged, or both, with a milky-white fluid dispensed through tubes coming out of hanging plastic packs. The tubes disappeared beneath their shirts. Their eyes were vacant, pained, focused at a point in the distance that I couldn’t see.

I walked down a short hall into another room. There was a boy, maybe 10 years old, who had a bloated, water-logged appearance. He waved and shouted, motioning for me to come play with him. A childcare worker said his name sharply, like a warning, then looked at me sternly.

Back in the hallway, another little boy approached me and held out his arms. I picked him up, and he squealed and squirmed playfully. As I tried to get a better grip, my hand hit something hard—plastic. There was a piece of plastic covering a hole in his abdomen. I went cold and put him down carefully. Again, the nurses stared at me.

Getting ready to leave, I noticed a girl with a bloated stomach. She was probably 12 or 13 years old. I looked down—there was a clear, hollow plastic tube curling out of her sweatpants.

The thick, stale air was overwhelming, and it’s then that I realized the windows were not only barred, but shut.

“If they were open,” Mona would later tell me, “the kids would try to get out.”

As I left, I again noticed the massive steel elevator door. According to Mona, it led to the clinic.

“That’s where they give them the drugs. Upstairs. They used to do it down here, but they didn’t like the other children seeing them give the drugs.”

DR. DAVID RASNICK is a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley whom I worked with on a series of articles examining the AIDS debate. When I told him what I’d seen at ICC, he was disturbed—but not entirely surprised.

“AIDS doctors always assume their patients are going to die,” he said. “Nobody ever asks if an AIDS patient is actually sick from drug toxicity, because they never considered that the person had a chance anyway.”

Last September, I requested an interview with an ICC official. A nurse told me that no one could come because “the children all have chicken pox.” I remembered the live chicken pox vaccine.

I showed up anyway. They wouldn’t let me in, but they gave me a brochure. It was filled with black and white pictures of patients, exactly like the children I’d seen—drugged, damaged, with tubes hanging out of them.

In the middle of the brochure was a two-page photo of a drug tray filled with syringes. The drug schedules read, “8 am, Valium, Lasix, Prednisone, Bactrim, Epivir, Colace, Nystatin, Ceftriaxone.”

There was a caption below the photo: “Medicine, medicine, medicine, medicine. The medicines give you a clue of how complicated HIV disease in childhood is. Ironically, years ago, one of my old professors told me that any patient who’s put on more than four drugs should find a new doctor.”

In the back of the brochure, there was a photo of a man handling a small white coffin, and another of a child’s coffin in the front seat of a hearse. In the back seat, an infant sat on a woman’s lap. There was no mention of drug toxicities. When these children die, they just call it AIDS.

Rasnick had told me about a nurse, Jacqueline Hoerger, who’d worked at ICC in the early 90s and had an experience similar to Mona’s.

Hoerger had tried to adopt two little girls from ICC to raise and care for with her husband. She administered the drugs “by the book” for about a year, and watched as the girls got sicker. She started researching the AIDS drugs. After much consultation with an open-minded M.D., she decided to give the girls a permanent “drug holiday.” To her relief and amazement, the girls improved remarkably. She documented their improvement with her doctor.

When it was revealed to the adoption agency that she wasn’t drugging the girls, New York Administration for Children’s Services took them away and returned them to foster care. It didn’t matter that they were better. It only mattered that they took the drugs.

IN OCTOBER 2003, I contacted ICC’s executive director, Caroline Castro. She told me to write out my questions and send them in an email, which I did.

Where do the kids come from?

What’s the current protocol for treating HIV-positive children?

I read on your website that you’re participating in clinical trials. What kind of trials?

What kind of funding do you get for participating?

Castro replied: “ICC appreciates your interest in our services but regretfully declines to participate in your project.”

I called her anyway and asked her about the clinical trials. She said that ICC wasn’t participating in clinical trials. When I noted that the NIH website lists ICC as a participant, she yelled at me.

“Why do you have to write about ICC?” she asked. “Don’t write about us. You should write about somebody else.” Then she hung up.

I called ICC’s medical director, Dr. Katherine Painter. I got lucky—she agreed to speak with me. Evidently, she and Castro weren’t sharing emails that day.

I interviewed Dr. Painter for about an hour. Painter responded to my questions in extremely cautious, academic language.

When I mentioned the toxicity of AZT, she agreed that there had been some problems. But, she assured me, the new drugs had solved them.

According to Painter, the “biggest problem facing families with HIV-positive children is adherence.” Adherence is a code word for people who don’t want to take the pills. It doesn’t mean illness; it means obedience to a drug regimen.

I asked her if ICC participated in clinical trials.

“Many of the clinics that refer to us are participating in clinical drug trials. Children participating in a drug trial undergo monitoring, testing and supply of an experimental drug through their outpatient clinic and we maintain that treatment here.”

Had Castro lied to me? Clearly, the Incarnation Children’s Center was participating in clinical trials. The kids may be enrolled at various area hospitals, but they’re housed and drugged at ICC—which sounds an awful lot like participation.

I noted that the NIH clinical trial database listed hundreds of drug studies using children.

“There are loads and loads of trials going on in children,” she replied.

As for adherence among the young patients, Painter noted that the drugs have a “significant, lingering, bitter taste.” So they mix the pills or powders in chocolate or strawberry syrup.

But “for some cases,” she said, “it’s better administered through a g-tube.” That’s the stomach tube.

According to the director, a surgeon cuts through the child’s abdomen, “through the abdominal wall musculature, and then through the stomach.” A very small hole, about a quarter inch, is made, through which a small tube is placed. “From the outside you can connect a syringe or feeding tube.”

I asked why ICC insisted on drugging children in this manner when there are thousands of HIV-positive individuals who aren’t sick, or who are pursuing naturopathic regimens with great success.

Painter admitted that she knew about these people—she used the industry term, LTNP (long-term non-progressors). This is a title used by AIDS academics to dodge the fact that even the Center for Disease Control & Prevention agrees that the majority of people with HIV aren’t sick. Most AIDS patients are given the diagnosis because of a T-cell count rather than an actual illness.

The LTNPs I know are involved in health-supportive regimens, they avoid immune-damaging practices, foods and substances—including the AIDS drugs.

“In treating AIDS,” I asked, “why aren’t we looking at supporting the immune system? Why are we giving people who are already sick drugs that kill the lining of the intestines and cause liver failure? Look at the adverse effects of any of these drugs—”

She interrupted. “Yes, of course, drugs have adverse reactions. But the risk/benefit of any medication must be weighed.” She was becoming irritated. “May I remind you that untreated HIV infection is a terminal diagnosis.”

And there it was, exactly what Dr. Rasnick had said: “AIDS doctors always assume that their patients are going to die.”

But Painter had already agreed that wasn’t true. There were the LTNPs. If they weren’t dying and they tested positive, then her statement was incorrect.

She began to lecture me about the progression of the disease. First positivity, then, 10 years later, sickness, then inevitably, death.

“Fine,” I said, “let’s say that someone who tests positive is indeed ill. The kids in ICC, besides being drugged all the time, are children of chronic drug abusers. Isn’t that a good reason to be sick?”

“No,” she said.

“But HIV tests cross-react with antibodies produced from drug abuse.”

“No,” she protested.

“Yes, they do,” I said. “Drug abuse, hepatitis, there are about 70 recorded conditions that make the test come up positive.”

In reporting on the AIDS debate, I’d never met an HIV researcher or doctor who told me that HIV tests were even close to 100 percent accurate. Even the lab technicians I’ve met accept that the tests can be inaccurate and unreliable.

I ask again: “Why are we treating AIDS patients with drugs that kill their immune systems? Shouldn’t we be helping them build their immunity? Shouldn’t we be saying—anything that works in the treatment of AIDS is valid?”

Painter said that there was room for “supplementary therapy, including nutritional support” but, she reiterated, “antiretroviral therapy has been the leading intervention that has significantly reduced morbidity and mortality in HIV infection.”

I looked at my pile of papers: dozens of drug studies in which patients have died, in the researcher’s own estimation, specifically because of the drugs. I looked at the warning labels: heart attack, organ failure, wasting, bone loss, anemia, birth defects, skin loss, bloody rashes, deformation and death.

Painter was in charge of at least 20 kids at a time, many of them orphans taken from their homes for the purpose of having a drug regimen enforced. She knew or was willing to admit less about HIV tests and HIV drug toxicity than almost any medical professional I’d ever spoken with. I thanked her for her time, and hung up.

INSIDE INCARNATION CHILDREN’S Center, the children in wheelchairs stared ahead, unable to focus. I wanted to take them all outside, into the fresh air. It was a bright sunny day, and they were locked up in this room, a girl’s 18th birthday party under stained glass.

I approached one of the children in a wheelchair, a boy about 12. There was something strange in his face—his head was oddly shaped. It was a bit squashed, with the eyes spaced widely. His limbs and torso were slightly warped, shortened and weak-looking. This is what happens to AZT babies.

I looked at the other children. Same arms, same legs, same faces. One boy on half-crutches tried to dance to the music. His legs dangled beneath him, his feet at odd angles to the ground. I knelt by the boy in the wheelchair. He made a slight sound, like a panic deep inside trying to get out. I didn’t want to alarm him, so I got up.

I met a boy named Amir who was sitting at one of the tables. He was about six years old. Amir had a stomach tube. He had also undergone multiple plastic surgeries to remove “buffalo humps”—that’s what the AIDS doctors call the large, fatty growths from the necks and backs of people who take protease inhibitors.

I walked over to him, and he smiled broadly. His head was in that same squashed shape, and his back and shoulders were oddly rounded. He grabbed onto my shirt. I knelt down and he put his arms around my neck for a hug. There were large round discolorations on his neck where the lumps had been removed. After a couple minutes, I tried to get up, but he held on. I took his hands gently in mine, held them for a moment, then carefully let go.

Five months later, Mona saw Amir in the hospital. “My stomach is swollen; it got big,” he told her. “They cut me, they cut me.” He pointed to an incision on his side.

“I think it’s the tube,” Mona told me. “I think it’s infected.”

When I asked Dr. Painter how they decide that the stomach tube should be used, she told me, “When other interventions to help a child take the medication by mouth have failed.”

Something certainly failed with Amir. Two weeks after Mona saw him in the hospital, he was dead.

Volume 17, Issue 28

© 2007 New York Press

THE CHASM: TWO ETHICS THAT DIVIDE THE WESTERN WORLD

© 2003 by G. Edward Griffin, Revised 2003 June 22

WORDS WITHOUT MEANING
There are many words commonly used today to describe political attitudes. We are told that there are conservatives, liberals, Libertarians, Right-wingers, Left-winger, socialists, Communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Fascists, Nazis; and if that isn’t confusing enough, now we have neo conservatives, neo Nazis, and neo everything else. When we are asked what our political orientation is, we are expected to choose from one of these words. If we don’t have a political opinion or if we’re afraid of making a bad choice, then we play it safe and say we are moderates – adding yet one more word to the list. Yet, not one person in a thousand can clearly define the ideology that any of these words represent. They are used, primarily, as labels to impart an aura of either goodness or badness, depending on who uses the words and what emotions they trigger in their minds.

For example, what is a realistic definition of a conservative? A common response would be that a conservative it a person who wants to conserve the status quo and is opposed to change. But, most people who call themselves conservatives are not in favor of conserving the present system of high taxes, deficit spending, expanding welfare, leniency to criminals, foreign aid, growth of government, or any of the other hallmarks of the present order. These are the jealously guarded bastions of what we call liberalism. Yesterday’s liberals are the conservatives of today, and the people who call themselves conservatives are really radicals, because they want a radical change from the status quo. It’s no wonder that most political debates sound like they originate at the tower of Babel. Everyone is speaking a different language. The words may sound familiar, but speakers and listeners each have their own private definitions.

It has been my experience that, once the definitions are commonly understood, most of the disagreements come to an end. To the amazement of those who thought they were bitter ideological opponents, they often find they are actually in basic agreement. So, to deal with this word, collectivism, our first order of business is to throw out the garbage. If we are to make sense of the political agendas that dominate our planet today, we must not allow our thinking to be contaminated by the emotional load of the old vocabulary

It may surprise you to learn that most of the great political debates of our time – at least in the Western world – can be divided into just two viewpoints. All of the rest is fluff. Typically, they focus on whether or not a particular action should be taken; but the real conflict is not about the merits of the action; it is about the principles, the ethical code that justifies or forbids that action. It is a contest between the ethics of collectivism on the one hand and individualism on the other. Those are words that have meaning, and they describe a chasm of morality that divides the entire Western world.

The one thing that is common to both collectivists and individualists is that the vast majority of them are well intentioned. They want the best life possible for their families, for their countrymen, and for mankind. They want prosperity and justice for their fellow man. Where they disagree is how to bring those things about.

I have studied collectivist literature for over forty years; and, after a while, I realized there were certain recurring themes. I was able to identify what I consider to be the six pillars of collectivism. If these pillars are turned upside down, they also are the six pillars of individualism. In other words, there are six major concepts of social and political relationships; and, within each of them, collectivists and individualists have opposite viewpoints.

1. THE NATURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The first of these has to do with the nature of human rights. Collectivists and individualists both agree that human rights are important, but they differ over how important and especially over what is presumed to be the origin of those rights. There are only two possibilities in this debate. Either man’s rights are intrinsic to his being, or they are extrinsic, meaning that either he possesses them at birth or they are given to him afterward. In other words, they are either hardware or software. Individualists believe they are hardware. Collectivists believe they are software.

If rights are given to the individual after birth, then who has the power to do that? Collectivists believe that is a function of government. Individualists are nervous about that assumption because, if the state has the power to grant rights, it also has the power to take them away, and that concept is incompatible with personal liberty.

The view of individualism was expressed clearly in the United States Declaration of Independence, which said:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men….

Nothing could be more clear than that. “Unalienable Rights” means they are the natural possession of each of us upon birth, not granted by the state. The purpose of government is, not to grant rights, but to secure them and protect them.

By contrast, all collectivist political systems embrace the opposite view that rights are granted by the state. That includes the Nazis, Fascists, and Communists. It is also a tenet of the United Nations. Article Four of the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights says:

“The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize that, in the enjoyment of those rights provided by the State … the State may subject such rights only to such limitations as are determined by law.”

I repeat: If we accept that the state has the power to grant rights, then we must also agree it has the power to take them away. Notice the wording of the UN Covenant. After proclaiming that rights are provided by the state, it then says that those rights may be subject to limitations “as are determined by law.” In other words, the collectivists at the UN presume to grant us our rights and, when they are ready to take them away, all they have to do is pass a law authorizing it.

Compare that with the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. It says Congress shall pass no law restricting the rights of freedom of speech, or religion, peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms, and so forth – not except as determined by law, but no law. The Constitution embodies the ethic of individualism. The UN embodies the ethic of collectivism, and what a difference that makes.

2. THE ORIGIN OF STATE POWER
The second concept that divides collectivism from individualism has to do with the origin of state power. Individualists believe that a just government derives its power, not from conquest and subjugation of its citizens, but from the free consent of the governed. That means the state cannot have any legitimate powers unless they are given to it by its citizens. Another way of putting it is that governments may do only those things that their citizens also have a right to do. If individuals don’t have the right to perform a certain act, then they can’t grant that power to their elected representatives. They can’t delegate what they don’t have.

Let us use an extreme example. Let us assume that a ship has been sunk in a storm, and three exhausted men are struggling for survival in the sea. Suddenly, they come upon a life-buoy ring. The ring is designed only to keep one person afloat; but, with careful cooperation between them, it can keep two of them afloat. But, when the third man grasps the ring, it becomes useless, and all three, once again, are at the mercy of the sea. They try taking turns: one treading water while two hold on to the ring; but after a few hours, none of them have enough strength to continue. The grim truth gradually becomes clear: Unless one of them is cut loose from the group, all three will drown. What, then, should these men do?

Most people would say that two of the men would be justified in overpowering the third and casting him off. The right of self-survival is paramount. Taking the life of another, terrible as such an act would be, is morally justified if it is necessary to save your own life. That certainly is true for individual action, but what about collective action? Where do two men get the right to gang up on one man?

The collectivist answers that two men have a greater right to life because they outnumber the third one. It’s a question of mathematics: The greatest good for the greatest number. That makes the group more important than the individual and it justifies two men forcing one man away from the ring. There is a certain logical appeal to this argument but, if we further simplify the example, we will see that, although the action may be correct, it is justified by the wrong reasoning.

Let us assume, now, that there are only two survivors – so we eliminate the concept of the group – and let us also assume that the ring will support only one swimmer, not two. Under these conditions, it would be similar to facing an enemy in battle. You must kill or be killed. Only one can survive. We are dealing now with the competing right of self-survival for each individual, and there is no mythological group to confuse the issue. Under this extreme condition, it is clear that each person would have the right to do whatever he can to preserve his own life, even if it leads to the death of another. Some may argue that it would be better to sacrifice one’s life for a stranger, but few would argue that not to do so would be wrong. So, when the conditions are simplified to their barest essentials, we see that the right to deny life to others comes from the individual’s right to protect his own life. It does not need the so-called group to ordain it.

In the original case of three survivors, the justification for denying life to one of them does not come from a majority vote but from their individual and separate right of self-survival. In other words, either of them, acting alone, would be justified in this action. They are not empowered by the group. When we hire police to protect our community, we are merely asking them to do what we, ourselves, have a right to do. Using physical force to protect our lives, liberty, and property is a legitimate function of government, because that power is derived from the people as individuals. It does not arise from the group.

Here’s one more example – a lot less extreme but far more typical of what actually goes on every day in legislative bodies. If government officials decide one day that no one should work on Sunday, and even assuming the community generally supports their decision, where would they get the authority to use the police power of the state to enforce such a decree? Individual citizens don’t have the right to compel their neighbors not to work, so they can’t delegate that right to their government. Where, then, would the state get the authority? The answer is that it would come from itself; it would be self-generated. It would be similar to the divine right of ancient monarchies in which it was assumed that governments represent the power and the will of God – as interpreted by their earthly leaders, of course. In more modern times, most governments don’t even pretend to have God as their authority, they just rely on swat teams and armies, and anyone who objects is eliminated. As that well-known collectivist, Mao Tse-Tung, phrased it: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

When governments claim to derive their authority from any source other than the governed, it always leads to the destruction of liberty. Preventing men from working on Sunday would not seem to be a great threat to freedom, but once the principle is established, it opens the door for more edicts, and more, and more until freedom is gone. If we accept that the state or any group has the right to do things that individuals alone do not have the right to do, then we have unwittingly endorsed the concept that rights are not intrinsic to the individual and that they, in fact, do originate with the state. Once we accept that, we are well on the road to tyranny.

Collectivists are not concerned over such picky issues. They believe that governments do, in fact, have powers that are greater than those of their citizens, and the source of those powers, they say, is, not the individuals within society, but society itself, the group to which individuals belong.

3. GROUP SUPREMACY
This is the third concept that divides collectivism from individualism. Collectivism is based on the belief that the group is an entity of its own, that it has rights of its own, and that those rights are more important than the rights of individuals. If necessary, individuals must be sacrificed for the benefit of the group, and the justification is that this is for “the greater good of the greater number.”

Individualists on the other hand say, “Wait a minute. Group? What is group? That’s just a word. You can’t touch a group. You can’t see a group. All you can touch and see are individuals. The word group is an abstraction and doesn’t exist as a tangible reality. It’s like the abstraction called forest. Forest doesn’t exist. Only trees exist. Forest is the concept of many trees. Likewise, the word group merely describes the concept of many individuals. Only individuals are real and, therefore, there is no such thing as group rights. Governments cannot derive authority from groups, because groups don’t have any to give. Only individuals have rights. Only individuals can delegate them.

Just because there are many individuals in one group and only a few in another does not give a higher priority to the rights of individuals in the larger group. Rights are not based on a head count. They are not derived from the power of numbers. They are intrinsic with each human being.

When someone argues that individuals must be sacrificed for the greater good of society, what they are really saying is that some individuals are to be sacrificed for the greater good of other individuals. The morality of collectivism is based on numbers. Anything may be done so long as the number of people benefiting supposedly is greater than the number of people being sacrificed. I say supposedly, because, in the real world, those who decide who is to be sacrificed don’t count fairly. Dictators always claim they represent the greater good of the greater number but, in reality, they and their support groups comprise less than one percent of the population. The theory is that someone has to speak for the masses and represent their best interest, because they are too dumb to figure it out for themselves. So collectivist leaders, wise and virtuous as they are, make the decisions for them. It is possible to explain any atrocity or injustice as a necessary measure for the greater good of society. Totalitarians always parade as humanitarians.

Because individualists do not accept group supremacy, collectivists portray them as being self centered and insensitive to the needs of others. That theme is common in schools today. If a child is not willing to go along with the group, he is criticized as being socially disruptive and not being a good “team player” or a good citizen. Those nice folks at the tax-exempt foundations had a lot to do with that. But individualism is not based on ego. It is based on principle. If you accept the premise that individuals may be sacrificed for the group, you have made a huge mistake on two counts. First, individuals are the essence of the group, which means the group is being sacrificed anyway, piece by piece. Secondly, the underlying principle is deadly. Today, the individual being sacrificed may be unknown to you or even someone you dislike. Tomorrow, it could be you.

REPUBLICS VS DEMOCRACIES
We are dealing here with one of the reasons people make a distinction between Republics and Democracies. In recent years, we have been taught to believe that a Democracy is the ideal form of government. Supposedly, that is what was created by the American Constitution. But, if you read the documents of the men who wrote the Constitution, you find that they spoke very poorly of Democracy. They said in plain words that a Democracy was one of the worst possible forms of government. And so they created what they called a Republic. That is why the word Democracy doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution; and, when Americans pledge allegiance to the flag, it’s to the Republic for which it stands, not the Democracy. The bottom line is that the difference between a Democracy and a Republic is the difference between collectivism and individualism.

In a pure Democracy, the concept is that the majority shall rule; end of discussion. You might say, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, there could be plenty wrong with that. What about a lynch mob? There is only one person with a dissenting vote, and he is the guy at the end of the rope. That’s pure Democracy in action.

“Ah, wait a minute,” you say. “The majority should rule. Yes, but not to the extent of denying the rights of the minority.”

That is precisely what a Republic accomplishes. A Republic is simply a limited Democracy – a government based on the principle of limited majority rule so that the minority – even a minority of one – will be protected from the whims and passions of the majority. Republics are characterized by written constitutions that spell out the rules to make that possible. That was the function of the American Bill of Rights, which is nothing more than a list of things the government may not do. It says that Congress, even though it represents the majority, shall pass no law denying the minority their rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms, and other “unalienable” rights.

These limitations on majority rule are the essence of a Republic, and they also are at the core of the ideology called individualism. And so here is another major difference between these two concepts: collectivism on the one hand, supporting any government action so long as it can be said to be for the greater good of the greater number; and individualism on the other hand, defending the rights of the minority against the passions and greed of the majority.

4. COERCION VS FREEDOM
The fourth concept that divides collectivism from individualism has to do with responsibilities and freedom of choice. We have spoken about the origin of rights, but there is a similar issue involving the origin of responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities go together. If you value the right to live your own life without others telling you what to do, then you must assume the responsibility to be independent, to provide for yourself without expecting others to take care of you. Rights and responsibilities are merely different sides of the same coin.

If only individuals have rights, then it follows that only individuals have responsibilities. If groups have rights, then groups also have responsibilities; and, therein, lies one of the greatest ideological challenges of our modern age.

Individualists are champions of individual rights. Therefore, they accept the principle of individual responsibility rather than group responsibility. They believe that everyone has a personal and direct obligation to provide, first for himself and his family, and then for others who may be in need. That does not mean they don’t believe in helping each other. Just because I am an individualists does not mean I have to move my piano alone. It just means that I believe that moving it is my responsibility, not someone else’s, and it’s up to me to organize the voluntary assistance of others.

The collectivist, on the other hand, declares that individuals are not personally responsible for charity, for raising their own children, providing for aging parents, or even providing for themselves, for that matter. These are group obligations of the state. The individualist expects to do it himself; the collectivist wants the government to do it for him: to provide employment and health care, a minimum wage, food, education, and a decent place to live. Collectivists are enamored by government. They worship government. They have a fixation on government as the ultimate group mechanism to solve all problems.

Individualists do not share that faith. They see government as the creator of more problems than it solves. They believe that freedom of choice will lead to the best solution of social and economic problems. Millions of ideas and efforts, each subject to trial and error and competition – in which the best solution becomes obvious by comparing its results to all others – that process will produce results that are far superior to what can be achieved by a group of politicians or a committee of so-called wise men.

By contrast, collectivists do not trust freedom. They are afraid of freedom. They are convinced that freedom may be all right in small matters such as what color socks you want to wear, but when it come to the important issues such as the money supply, banking practices, investments, insurance programs, health care, education, and so on, freedom will not work. These things, they say, simply must be controlled by the government. Otherwise there would be chaos.

There are two reasons for the popularity of that concept. One is that most of us have been educated in government schools, and that’s what we were taught. The other reason is that government is the one group that can legally force everyone to participate. It has the power of taxation, backed by jails and force of arms to compel everyone to fall in line, and that is a very appealing concept to the intellectual who pictures himself as a social engineer.

Collectivists say, “We must force people to do what we think they should do, because they are too dumb to do it on their own. We, on the other hand, have been to school. We’ve read books. We are informed. We are smarter than those people out there. If we leave it to them, they are going to make terrible mistakes. So, it is up to us, the enlightened ones. We shall decide on behalf of society and we shall enforce our decisions by law so no one has any choice. That we should rule in this fashion is our obligation to mankind.”

By contrast, individualists say, “We also think we are right and that the masses seldom do what we think they should do, but we don’t believe in forcing anyone to comply with our will because, if we grant that principle, then others, representing larger groups than our own, could compel us to act as they decree, and that would be the end of our freedom.”

One of the quickest ways to spot a collectivist is to see how he reacts to public problems. No matter what bothers him in his daily routine – whether it’s littering the highway, smoking in public, dressing indecently, sending out junk mail – you name it, his immediate response is; “There ought to be a law!” And, of course, the professionals in government who make a living from such laws are more than happy to cooperate. The consequence of this mindset is that government just keeps growing and growing. It’s a one-way street. Every year there are more and more laws and less and less freedom. Each law by itself seems relatively benign, justified by some convenience or for the greater good of the greater number, but the process continues forever until government is total and freedom is dead. Bit-by-bit, the people, themselves, become the solicitor of their own enslavement.

THE ROBIN HOOD SYNDROME
A good example of this collectivist mindset is the use of government to perform acts of charity. Most people believe that we all have a responsibility to help others in need if we can, but what about those who disagree, those who couldn’t care less about the needs of others? Should they be allowed to be selfish while we are so generous? The collectivist sees people like that as justification for the use of coercion, because the cause is so worthy. He sees himself as a modern Robin Hood, stealing from the rich but giving to the poor. Of course, not all of it gets to the poor. After all, Robin and his men have to eat and drink and be merry, and that doesn’t come cheap. It takes a giant bureaucracy to administer a public charity, and the Robbing Hoods in government have become accustomed to a huge share of the loot, while the peasants – well, they’re grateful for whatever they get. They don’t care how much is consumed along the way. It was all stolen from someone else anyway.

The so-called charity of collectivism is a perversion of the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan who stopped along the highway to help a stranger who had been robbed and beaten. He even takes the victim to an inn and pays for his stay there until he recovers. Everyone approves of such acts of compassion and charity, but what would we think if the Samaritan had pointed his sword at the next traveler and threatened to kill him if he didn’t also help? If that had happened, I doubt if the story would have made it into the Bible; because, at that point, the Samaritan would be no different than the original robber – who also might have had a virtuous motive. For all we know, he could have claimed that he was merely providing for his family and feeding his children. Most crimes are rationalized in this fashion, but they are crimes nevertheless. When coercion enters, charity leaves.

Individualists refuse to play this game. We expect everyone to be charitable, but we also believe that a person should be free not to be charitable if he doesn’t want to. If he prefers to give to a different charity than the one we urge on him, if he prefers to give a smaller amount that what we think he should, or if he prefers not to give at all, we believe that we have no right to force him to our will. We may try to persuade him to do so; we may appeal to his conscience; and especially we may show the way by our own good example; but we reject any attempt to gang up on him, either by physically restraining him while we remove the money from his pockets or by using the ballot box to pass laws that will take his money through taxation. In either case, the principle is the same. It’s called stealing.

Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive re-distribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people’s money; which, of course, is why it is so popular.

One more example: The collectivist will say, “I think everyone should wear seatbelts. That just makes sense. People can be hurt if they don’t wear seatbelts. So, let’s pass a law and require everyone to wear them. If they don’t, we’ll put those dummies in jail.” The individualist says, “I think everyone should wear seatbelts. People can be hurt in accidents if they don’t wear them, but I don’t believe in forcing anyone to do so. I believe in convincing them with logic and persuasion and good example, if I can, but I also believe in freedom of choice.”

One of the most popular slogans of Marxism is: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That’s the cornerstone of theoretical socialism, and it is a very appealing concept. A person hearing that slogan for the first time might say: “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that the essence of charity and compassion toward those in need? What could possibly be wrong with giving according to your ability to others according to their need?” And the answer is, nothing is wrong with it – as far as it goes, but it is an incomplete concept. The unanswered question is how is this to be accomplished? Shall it be in freedom or through coercion? I mentioned earlier that collectivists and individualists usually agree on objectives but disagree over means, and this is a classic example. The collectivist says, take it by force of law. The individualist says, give it through free will. The collectivist says, not enough people will respond unless they are forced. The individualist says, enough people will respond to achieve the task. Besides, the preservation of freedom is also important. The collectivist advocates legalized plunder in the name of a worthy cause, believing that the end justifies the means. The individualist advocates free will and true charity, believing that the worthy objective does not justify committing theft and surrendering freedom.

There is a story of a Bolshevik revolutionary who was standing on a soap box speaking to a small crowd in Times Square. After describing the glories of Socialism and Communism, he said: “Come the revolution and everyone will eat peaches and cream.” A little old man at the back of the crown yelled out: “I don’t like peaches and cream.” The Bolshevik thought about that for a moment and then replied: “Come the revolution, Comrade, you will like peaches and cream.”

This, then, is the fourth difference between collectivism and individualism, and it is perhaps the most fundamental of them all: collectivists believe in coercion; individualists believe in freedom.

5. EQUALITY VS, INEQUALITY UNDER LAW
The fifth concept that divides collectivism from individualism has to do with the way people are treated under the law. Individualists believe that no two people are exactly alike, and each one is superior or inferior to others in many ways but, under law, they should all be treated equally. Collectivists believe that the law should treat people unequally in order to bring about desirable changes in society. They view the world as tragically imperfect. They see poverty and suffering and injustice and they conclude that something must be done to alter the forces that have produced these effects. They think of themselves as social engineers who have the wisdom to restructure society to a more humane and logical order. To do this, they must intervene in the affairs of men at all levels and redirect their activities according to a master plan. That means they must redistribute wealth and use the police power of the state to enforce prescribed behavior.

The consequence of this mindset can be seen everywhere in society today. Almost every country in the world has a tax system designed to treat people unequally depending on their income, their marital status, the number of children they have, their age, and the type of investments they may have. The purpose of this arrangement is to redistribute wealth, which means to favor some classes over others. In some cases, there are bizarre loopholes written into the tax laws just to favor one corporation or one politically influential group. Other laws provide tax-exemption and subsidies to favored groups or corporations. Inequality is the whole purpose of these laws.

In the realm of social relationships, there are laws to establish racial quotas, gender quotas, affirmative-action initiatives, and to prohibit expressions of opinion that may be objectionable to some group or to the master planners. In all of these measures, there is an unequal application of the law based on what group or class you happen to be in or on what opinion you hold. We are told that all of this is necessary to accomplish a desirable change in society. Yet, after more than a hundred years of social engineering, there is not one place on the globe where collectivists can point with pride and show where their master plan has actually worked as they predicted. There have been many books written about the collectivist utopia, but they never happened. The real-world results wherever collectivism has been applied are more poverty than before, more suffering than before, and certainly more injustice than before.

There is a better way. Individualism is based on the premise that all citizens should be equal under law, regardless of their national origin, race, religion, gender, education, economic status, life style, or political opinion. No class should be given preferential treatment, regardless of the merit or popularity of its cause. To favor one class over another is not equality under law.

6. PROPER ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
When all of these factors are considered together, we come to the sixth ideological division between collectivism and individualism. Collectivists believe that the proper role of government should be positive, that the state should take the initiative in all aspects of the affairs of men, that it should be aggressive, lead, and provide. It should be the great organizer of society.

Individualists believe that the proper function of government is negative and defensive. It is to protect, not to provide; for if the state is granted the power to provide for some, it must also be able to take from others, and once that power is granted, there are those who will seek it for their advantage. It always leads to legalized plunder and loss of freedom. If government is powerful enough to give us everything we want, it is also powerful enough to take from us everything we have. Therefore, the proper function of government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens; nothing more.

THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM
We hear a lot today about Right-wingers versus Left-wingers, but what do those terms really mean? For example, we are told that Communists and Socialists are at the extreme left, and the Nazis and Fascists are on the extreme right. Here we have the image of two powerful ideological adversaries pitted against each other, and the impression is that, somehow, they are opposites. But, what is the difference? They are not opposites at all. They are the same. The insignias may be different, but when you analyze Communism and Nazism, they both embody the principles of Socialism. Communists make no bones about Socialism being their ideal, and the Nazi movement in Germany was actually called the National Socialist Party. Communists believe in international Socialism, whereas Nazis advocate national Socialism. Communists promote class hatred and class conflict to motivate the loyalty and blind obedience of their followers, whereas the Nazis use race conflict and race hatred to accomplish the same objective. Other than that, there is no difference between Communism and Nazism. They are both the epitome of collectivism, and yet we are told they are, supposedly, at opposite ends of the spectrum!

There’s only one thing that makes sense in constructing a political spectrum and that is to put zero government at one end of the line and 100% at the other. Now we have something we can comprehend. Those who believe in zero government are the anarchists, and those who believe in total government are the totalitarians. With that definition, we find that Communism and Nazism are together at the same end. They are both totalitarian. Why? Because they are both based on the model of collectivism. Communism, Nazism, Fascism and Socialism all gravitate toward bigger and bigger government, because that is the logical extension of their common ideology. Under collectivism, all problems are the responsibility of the state and must be solved by the state. The more problems there are, the more powerful the state must become. Once you get on that slippery slope, there is no place to stop until you reach all the way to the end of the scale, which is total government. Regardless of what name you give it, regardless of how you re- label it to make it seem new or different, collectivism is totalitarianism.

Actually, the straight-line concept of a political spectrum is somewhat misleading. It is really a circle. You can take that straight line with 100% government at one end and zero at the other, bend it around, and touch the ends at the top. Now it’s a circle because, under anarchy, where there is no government, you have absolute rule by those with the biggest fists and the most powerful weapons. So, you jump from zero government to totalitarianism in a flash. They meet at the top. We are really dealing with a circle, and the only logical place for us to be is somewhere in the middle of the extremes. We need government, of course, but, it must be built on individualism, an ideology that pushes always toward that part of the spectrum that involves the least government necessary to make things work instead of collectivism, which always pushes toward the other end of the spectrum for the most amount of government to make things work. That government is best which governs least.

SUMMARY OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COLLECTIVISTS AND INDIVIDUALISTS
1. A collectivist believes that rights are derived from the state. An Individualist believes that rights are intrinsic to each human being.

2. A collectivist believes the state may perform acts that are forbidden to individuals. An individualist believes the state may do only what individuals have a right to do.

3. A collectivist believes individuals may be sacrificed for the greater good of the greater number. An individualist believes individuals must be protected from the greed and passion of the greater number.

4. A collectivist believes coercion is the best way to bring about positive effects in society. An individualist believes freedom-of-choice is the best way to bring about positive effects in society.

5. A collectivist believes laws should apply unequally to benefit one group over another. An individualist believes laws should apply equally to all groups so that everyone is treated the same.

6. A collectivist believes government should be an aggressive force for solving problems, providing sustenance, and directing human activities. That government is best which governs most. An individualist believes government should be a defensive and protective force, limited to safeguarding the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens. That government is best which governs least.

THE CREED OF FREEDOM

INTRINSIC NATURE OF RIGHTS

I believe that only individuals have rights, not the collective group; that these rights are intrinsic to each individual, not granted by the state; for if the state has the power to grant them, it also has the power to deny them, and that is incompatible with personal liberty.
I believe that a just government derives its power solely from the governed. Therefore, the state must never presume to do anything beyond what individual citizens also have the right to do. Otherwise, the state is a power unto itself and becomes the master instead of the
servant of society.

SUPREMACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

I believe that one of the greatest threats to freedom is to allow any group, no matter its numeric superiority, to deny the rights of the minority; and that one of the primary functions of just government is to protect each individual from the greed and passion of the majority.

FREEDOM-OF-CHOICE

I believe that desirable social and economic objectives are better achieved by voluntary action than by coercion of law. I believe that social tranquility and brotherhood are better achieved by tolerance, persuasion, and the power of good example than by coercion of law. I believe that those in need are better served by charity, which is the giving of one’s own money, than by welfare, which is the giving of other people’s money through coercion of law.

EQUALITY UNDER LAW

I believe that all citizens should be equal under law, regardless of their national origin, race, religion, gender, education, economic status, life style, or political opinion. Likewise, no class should be given preferential treatment, regardless of the merit or popularity of its cause.
To favor one class over another is not equality under law.

PROPER ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

I believe that the proper role of government is negative, not positive; defensive, not aggressive. It is to protect, not to provide; for if the state is granted the power to provide for some, it must also be able to take from others, and once that power is granted, there are those who will seek it for their advantage. It always leads to legalized plunder and loss of freedom.
If government is powerful enough to give us everything we want, it is also powerful enough to take from us everything we have. Therefore, the proper function of government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens; nothing more. That government is best which governs least.

Source: do a web search or download the full .pdf file here on my files site.

There you’ll get the whole gamut of which the file above is only one among 7.

A Continent of Losers

Source : Gates of Vienna

Monday, June 04, 2007
by Baron Bodissey

Interview: A Continent of Losers

While the European populations are shrinking and the best-qualified young people are leaving, we continue to allow mass immigration of unqualified Muslims, who will soon make our welfare states collapse. Add to this the fact that the Muslim world has built up a “youth bulge”, which according to experience will lead to mass murder and whose effects cannot be offset by foreign aid. The originator of these bleak predictions is the German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, who believes that the game is over for Europe.

By Lars Hedegaard

Authorised translation from the Danish by Sappho

Gunnar Heinsohn BREMEN: If the leaders of the American-led “Coalition of the Willing” had known Gunnar Heinsohn’s research, they would most likely never have left their troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. They would quickly give up any thought of intervention in Sudan’s Darfur province. They would tell the Palestinian 10-children families that the West will no longer pay for their unrestricted childbirths. Western opinion-makers and politicians would also abandon their pet theory that virtually any act of violence in a belt from Northern Africa to the Philippines – in addition to miscellaneous acts of terror all over the world – are caused by the unsolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And worst of all seen from the prevailing political consensus in the West: Heinsohn does not believe for a second that economic aid and hunger relief in countries with large youth populations can prevent wars, social unrest, terror or killings. On the contrary he is convinced that in some cases material aid may start the killings. This is because starving people do not fight, they just suffer. However, if you give a lot of young men enough to eat and a certain education in a society where there are too many young men so that not all can get the recognition and positions that they feel entitled to, it may lead to violence.

The 63-year-old sociology professor at the University of Bremen published his findings in his sensational and politically incorrect book Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Domination: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], published in 2003. The book became widely known and discussed after the prominent German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk had characterised it as being as groundbreaking as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Sloterdijk thought that the book might pave the way for a new realism within a field that might be labelled “Demographic Materialism”.

Heinsohn is not concerned with the absolute size of populations, but rather with the share of teenagers and young men. If this share becomes too big compared to the total population, we are facing a youth bulge. The problem starts when families begin to produce three, four or more sons. This will cause the sons to fight over access to the positions in society that give power and prestige. Then you will have a lot of boys and young men running around filled with aggression and uncontrollable hormones. And then we shall experience mass killings, until a sufficient number of young men have been eradicated to match society’s ability to provide positions for the survivors.

According to Heinsohn, 80 per cent of world history is about young men in nations with a surplus of sons, creating trouble. This trouble may take many forms — a increase in domestic crime, attempts at coups d’état, revolutions, riots and civil wars. Occasionally, the young commit genocide to secure for themselves the positions that belonged to those they killed. Finally, there is war to conquer new territory, killing the enemy population and replacing it with one’s own.

But, as Heinsohn emphasizes again and again, the unrest and the violent acts caused by youth bulges have nothing to do with famine or unemployment. In his book he describes it as follows: “The dynamic of a youth bulge — it cannot be emphasized too often — is not caused by a lack of food. A younger brother, who may be employed as a stable hand by the first-born son and who may be well fed and perhaps even fat, does not seek food but position, one that can guarantee him recognition, influence and dignity. Not the underweight but rather the potential losers or the déclassé are pushing forward” (p. 21).

In recent years the West has been facing a gigantic youth bulge in large parts of the Muslim world. This bulge is created by a Muslim population explosion. Over the course of just five generations (1900-2000) the population in the Muslim countries has grown from 150 million to 1 200 million — an increase of 800 per cent. As a comparison the population of China has grown from 400 million to 1 200 million (300 per cent). The population of India has risen from 250 million to 1000 million (400 per cent).

Sappho has visited Gunnar Heinsohn at his office at the University of Bremen, which awarded him a life-long professorship in 1884.

Youth bulges and violence

-What is the definition of a youth bulge?

“There is no commonly accepted definition. The Frenchman who first used the term in 1970 said that a youth bulge existed when 30 per cent of the men in a population were between 20 to 24. I changed it to 30 per cent between 15 and 29. This means that if you take 100 males from a country, then 30 of them will be between 15 and 29.”

“But remember that this 30 per cent group of young men will not pose any danger if they are hungry or lack education. To be dangerous they must be in good physical and mental shape.”

Heinsohn emphasises that there are lots of wars and killings in history that do nor emanate from youth bulges. The Hitler movement and the Mussolini movement in the 1920s can be explained as youth bulge phenomena. The early Nazis and Fascists had an average age a bit below 30. The Bolshevik movement in the period around the 1917 Revolution can be described in the same way. But by the time Hitler started WWII, many German families were down to only one son. So Hitler’s attack in 1939 was not a youth bulge phenomenon. Neither was the Holocaust. The killing of the Jews was not caused by young German men wanting to take their positions, even though there are theories that make this claim.

Nor do the killings organised by the later Marxist-Leninist regimes — that may have killed 100 million people — have anything to do with youth bulges. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was driven by millions and millions of farmers’ sons without land — that was a youth bulge event. Stalin’s Gulag, however, does not fall into this category.

- What about Mao’s killings in China?

“Again, in the 1930s Mao’s movement was carried by a youth bulge, but when he took power in 1949 and started his great purges by killing landowners, the youth bulge was already gone.”

- So the predominant ideology of the West, namely that we can fight war and violence by alleviating hunger and creating jobs in the third world, is wrong?

“Every year the five German peace research institutes publish a report, and every year it has the following conclusion: If we win the struggle against hunger, we have defeated war. On the contrary —youth bulge research shows that if you are successful in eliminating immediate material poverty and hunger in a country with a youth bulge, violence starts to escalate.”

“In Europe we have just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Rome Treaty and in all the newspapers we could read that this treaty ended war in Europe. This is absolutely wrong. If the Germans after 1945 had reproduced as they did between 1900 and 1914, then we would have had a German nation of almost 500 million citizens, and we would have had about 80 million German men between 15 and 29. In reality we have 7 million. And we may well ask ourselves whether these 80 million would have been as peaceful as the present 7 million, or would have been detonating bombs in Breslau or Danzig.” (These former German cities – now called Wroclaw and Gdansk – were ceded to Poland following Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, ed.)

Demographic capitulation
- – - – - – - – - -
“This brings me to something that I call ‘Demographic Capitulation’. It has a very simple definition: Take all the men aged 40-44 and compare them to the boys aged 0-4. Demographic capitulation is when you have 100 males aged 40-44 compared to less than 80 boys aged 0-4. In Germany the numbers are 100/50, in the Gaza Strip they are 100/464. I have compared some numbers for you, and these show that Denmark is on the verge of Demographic Capitulation. Your numbers are 100/80.”

Heinsohn’s statistical overview shows that if Denmark had reproduced at the same rate as the Gaza Strip (from 240 000 to 1.4 million between 1950 and 2006), then we would not have had a population of 5.5 million (compared to 4.3 million in 1950), but 25 million – more than New Zealand and Australia combined. In that case the median age of Danish males would have been 15 (in reality it is 39), and there would have been 3.6 million men of battle-ready age (15-29), whereas the real number is only 470 000. (Median age must not be confused with average age. A median age of 15 means that there are as many people below 15 as there are above 15, ed.).

Whereas such countries as Germany and Japan have capitulated demographically, other countries are characterized by “Demographic Armament”. Apart from Gaza this is situation in among others the three Muslim countries Afghanistan (100/403), Iraq (100/351) and Somalia (100/364). It is no coincidence that they are marked by widespread and extreme acts of violence and will be for several more years into the future. This also holds true for Gaza and the Palestinians in general.

- So you do not believe that the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is realistic?

“No, and the main reason is the big mistake that was made in Oslo in 1991, when the secret negotiations between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin started. The error was that nobody took any notice of the Palestinian population explosion. The Palestinian population has multiplied almost 6 times within the last 50 years. We should have done two things: Israel should have stopped its settlements, and the world community should have said to the Palestinians: Every child in Palestine will be fed by the world community as before, because by accepting that every Palestinian child is a refugee, the world community has a responsibility for the number of children born. But from January 1st 1992 you will have to pay for your newborn children, just as a woman does in Lebanon, in Tunisia and in Algeria. That is what they should have told the Palestinians. Why am I mentioning these three countries? Because in those societies a women has fewer than two children on the average. Had we done that 15 years ago, we would have seen a generation of young Palestinian men with few reasons to commit violence against each other or against the Jews. But we did not, and therefore I do not believe in the peace process, even if Hamas should decide to sign everything. Their young men will tear such agreements to pieces.”

Heinsohn points out that it is the USA and the EU, and particularly the Scandinavian countries, that pay for the enormous Palestinian child production. We must cease this support, so that the Palestinians pay for the children they bring into the world after a certain point in time.

- Why cannot the Palestinians just work like everybody else and earn their own keep?

“Palestine is a special case. They never had any chance of developing because they have always been on international support.”

Poverty and religion

- From your book one gets the impression that youth bulges create poverty, whereas we in the West have regarded youth bulges as a result of poverty?

“If a youth bulge changes a state into a failed state, then one will see a breakdown of the market and of production, and this will lead to poverty. If we look at current examples of countries with increasing violence — Pakistan and Bangladesh — we can see that both have managed a steady increase in the average income per capita — and even a significant growth. Thus we have created the primary conditions for making the young men both well fed and well educated, which leads to them becoming unruly. If these young men successfully destroy the country’s infrastructure, it will result in poverty. I have followed this process closely in the West African state of The Ivory Coast. Here they have had a system of seven children for every woman, at the same time as the average income has increased. When the killings started, the average income fell.”

- How do you explain the fact that the Muslim Middle East was deeply underdeveloped before there was any sign of a youth bulge, even before the Europeans — who get the blame for most things — had set foot on its soil? Is it not necessary to add religion to the explanation?

“Let us look at the small countries in Europe that were capable of conquering and colonising large parts of the world from around 1500, starting with Portugal and Spain. Our explanation is usually that there was a pressure on resources because of overpopulation. The opposite was the case. When Spain started its conquests in 1493 with Columbus’ second expedition, Spain had a population of six million, but in 1350 it had had nine million inhabitants. Spain was not overpopulated. There was, however, a sudden a growth in childbirths because in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had decreed that birth control was punishable by death, which caused an immediate explosion in births. In the middle ages the average number of children per family was 2-3; now it was suddenly 6-7. That caused the median age in the population of six million to be 15, whereas the nine-million population of 1350 had had a median age between 28 and 30. So there was no lack of land or food. However, there was a sudden scarcity of positions. Previously there had been one or two boys in the family. One could take over the farm and the other might become a tenant somewhere else. Now you had three sons who had food but no positions, and these boys started the conquests and the colonising. It was quite telling that the Spaniards called then secundones, the second sons.”

“Where does religion enter the picture? These young men — 95 per cent of them — were normal, good boys and saw it as a sin to kill or mistreat the conquered populations in the colonies. They knew the difference between themselves and psychopaths or common murderers. So when they went into action, they had religion to tell them that they were not murderers, but people who would kill the infidels, the sinners and the unjust with a clean conscience. People who executed orders from a higher power as they would not want to be seen as disobedient.”

“For this reason I do not call these conquerors and colonisers — Spaniards, Englishmen and Danes — Christian, but Christianists. The same distinction as with a Muslim and an Islamist. These young Spaniards were not Christian, but Christianists, who needed this ideology to justify their terrible killings.”

New religions arise in no time

Heinsohn is also hesitant to ascribe to Islam a core from which one may deduce later actions or patterns of action. As an example he mentions the movement of 1968, to which he himself belonged.

“When the time is ripe, new religious pamphlets and books will be written on the spot and in no time. From your holy books — the Koran, the Bible, The Communist Manifesto etc. — you take what fits your purpose. You know that you are going to use violence but want a justification. For you are a righteous person. But when the youth bulge is spent, the books that were distributed in millions of copies cannot even be sold in second-hand bookshops. Everybody knows that they are full of rubbish. But while the movement is on, these young men are impervious to arguments. So the false ideas do not arise from holy scripture. They are generated by the young men themselves because they need wrong ideas to justify their actions. Consequently you cannot stop them by explaining that their ideas are wrong. The movement is not created by wrong ideas. On the contrary, the wrong ideas are created by the movement. Islam does not create Islamism, young Muslims do.”

According to Heinsohn’s calculations there will be approximately 300 million young Muslim men in 2020, but not all of them will be angry. A growing number of Muslim nations — Algeria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Turkey and the rich Emirates — have all fallen under the demographic replacement limit. Iran now has a fertility rate of 1.7. That is the same as in Denmark, but less than in France. These countries still have a youth surplus from earlier, but in a few years they will no longer have any youth bulges that make them pose any danger.

Consequently he does not believe that the Iranian masses will set the whole region alight. This scenario is a projection of the situation immediately before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and during the war between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988, when Iran could send hundreds of thousands of boys and young men out into the minefields. These teenagers are no longer there.

A class of losers

- Would it not be a solution to let the superfluous sons come to Europe?

“What happens in Europe is that all the countries — there are no exceptions — are ageing nations that do not fully reproduce themselves. Thus they have embarked on a process where they eat each other’s talents. Why are they not looking for talent in Africa, where the population has grown from 100 million in 1900 to an estimated 2 billion in 2050? Why not in Islam, where we have a similar population explosion? Why is America looking for talent in Germany, why is Denmark looking for Poles? Because the third world countries do not have the educational level that is needed in the developed countries that can only maintain their position through innovation. For that purpose they need young people who have grown up in a high-tech society. It is not because Africans or Muslims are not as intelligent as others, they are just not socialised in a way that makes them useful in our societies.”

- In Demark we now have a number of highly educated immigrants and their descendents from Muslim countries — doctors, lawyers etc. But many of them are as unintegrated as are many of the uneducated. They remain as extremist and as Islamicist as if they had not received a higher education?

“I will leave the evaluation of Danish conditions to the Danes. However, we experience the same phenomenon in England. There we have a population within the population, namely the Pakistanis, who have the highest birth rate in the country, and who are most dependent on social transfers. In the Western countries we have a social system that is hardly being used by the local population. On the other hand there is an immigrant population whose women cannot compete in the local workforce. For Danish and German women the welfare benefits are too low to be attractive. Not so for the immigrants. So what we see in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands are immigrant women who take low-paid jobs which they supplement with public benefits. It is not a fantastic income but sufficient for them. And this creates a career type for women only, which their daughters carry on.”

“But the sons do not have this option. They grow up on the bottom of society without the intellectual skills needed to improve their social position. It is these boys who burn Paris, who burn parts of Bremen. Some of them make it to university and become leaders of the others — not poor, but young men with low status who believe that they are oppressed because of their Islamic faith, but in reality it is the welfare state itself that has created this class of losers.”

“If, on the other hand, one goes to Canada, where I have lived part of each year for the last 20 years, they have a completely different policy. They say: Our immigration policy has a simple base. Every newborn Canadian and every new Canadian who comes from abroad has to be more intelligent than those who were here before. Because only through innovation can we keep our position in world competition. Therefore I want my son to be smarter than me. And believe it or not: Of 100 adult Canadian immigrants, 98 have better professional qualifications than the Canadian average. In Germany and France the corresponding number is 10 per cent. So we went for quantity, and they went for quality.”

“And why? In Germany because people were afraid of being called racists, and it looks like all European nations suffer from the same fear of making choices.”

The Fifth Village

- Might some of it also be explained by the leftist parties importing their own voters?

“In France we have seen that Africans and Algerians have voted for Ségolène Royal. Add to that another phenomenon that we can observe in Germany among other places. Here some of the ‘ethno-Germans’, as we are now beginning to call them, and who make up 85 per cent of the German population, are starting to emigrate. Annually about 150 000 Germans leave the country, most of them for the Anglo-Saxon world. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are ready to receive 1.5 million well-educated immigrants yearly, and they are doing everything to ease the way for them.”

“It is no wonder that young, hard-working people in France and Germany choose to emigrate. It is not just that they have to support their own ageing population. If we take 100 20-year-olds, then the 70 Frenchmen and Germans also have to support 30 immigrants of their own age and their offspring. This creates dejection in the local population, particularly in France, Germany and the Netherlands. So they run away.”

“Europe has just finalized its immigration principles in January 2007. And they are quite different from the Canadian ones. Our first criterion for letting people into the EU is whether they have been victims of discrimination. Next principle: If the person already has family in EU, he has privileged access. Third principle: People who are already illegally in Europe should be legalized. And finally, only in fourth place do we have the Anglo-Saxon principle that the immigrant should fit into our labour market.”

“The purpose is to make Europe look stronger than the Anglo-Saxons when it comes to ‘soft power’.”

“I am very pessimistic about the future. Europe’s situation reminds me of the principle that is called ‘The Fifth Village’ in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, who have experienced population decline. So four villages are being abandoned and the remaining population is moved to the fifth village. However, that does not increase the birth rate in the fifth village. And after some time the fifth village will also be populated by old people, and there are no young people in the vicinity to work for their pensions.”

“The same will happen to the approximately 40 nations between Brittany and Vladivostok. Some of them will become Fifth Villages and will have a new lease on life, others will just implode. I predict that all the Slavic nations will implode. Same thing with the three Baltic states and all of the Balkan states. The question is whether Germany and France will become Fifth Villages. I see Scandinavia as a Fifth Village. The same thing with the Iberian Peninsula and with Ireland and England. But I am not sure the rest of the continent will make it.”

The young are leaving

- But will we even deal with nations in the future? If Europe gets a Muslim majority, it is not certain that Danes, Germans, Frenchmen etc. will bow to sharia law. Might the result be that the indigenous populations will withdraw to their own enclaves, from where they will try to defend themselves, as we have seen in Bosnia?

“That is of course a possibility, but one must ask oneself who is it that will stay and fight? I might because I am more or less forced to stay here. But if I were an 18-year-old ethnic German, done with high school, then I would do like most others are already doing. I would want to study in the Anglo-Saxon world and then I would emigrate. I would not want to stay and fight. The Anglo-Saxon world needs 50 million well-qualified immigrants within the next 30-40 years, so well-qualified young people from Western Europe will have every incentive to go there instead of staying and fighting.”

“A possibility is to aim for Chinese immigration. If we in Germany had the same number of Chinese immigrants as they have in Canada, we would have 3 million. But immigration from China has not even been considered in Europe.”

“China is the fastest ageing nation in the world after Germany, Japan and South Korea. We usually view China as a sleeping giant. I on the other hand see China as a source from where the Western nations will skim the best. And they will get them. Currently, rich Chinese are preoccupied with moving their riches to Switzerland because with the few children being born in China, people in their 40s have no chance of ever getting a pension. China is down to a fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman. The country is already losing 500 000 of its best every year. The young see no hope of ever being able to build a pension plan in their home country. Therefore they settle in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada etc.”

“In East Germany they have just decided to demolish an additional 400 000 apartments. There are no people for them, and the empty apartments ruin the banks by depressing the rents and the prices of housing. In West Germany we are also losing population. We have to stop taking the least suitable immigrants. To attract young and competent people, we might give them a house. That was the way Brandenburg secured the French Huguenots in the 17th century. But I doubt it will work today.”

Demographic rearmament?

- Would it be possible to imagine that Europeans might suddenly start to multiply as a moral obligation to maintain the people and the culture? It was what happened after the British had conquered French Quebec. The Catholic priests put pressure on the French families to put up to 15 children into the world, and this demographic effort was successful?

Gunnar Heinsohn does not give much of a chance to such a strategy. It would require draconian measures, which the Europeans would not accept. Promises of money will not work except for people with little education and low status — which just makes the situation worse.

“Look at the Polish people,” says Heinsohn — who was born in 1943 in the city now known as Gdansk, but which he still calls Danzig, the son of a German submarine captain who lost his life near Newfoundland five months before his son was born. “Here is a nation with proud traditions. Poland saved Europe from the Mongols, the Turks and the Bolsheviks and ended up bringing down Communism. And yet they have a lower birth rate than the Germans. They are down to 1.2 children per woman. In addition, over the last 15 years they have already lost 2 million of their best people. Perhaps emigrants tell their parents that they are coming back, but they won’t. That is why I am saying that countries such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are doomed. They have no attraction for immigrants. The same thing is happening with Russia. Who wants to move to Russia? And look at the newest members of the EU, Bulgaria and Romania. Romania is the first country in the world where there are more retirees than active workers, and we let them in. The same with Bulgaria, which has the world’s fastest-dwindling population. The young are moving out, and with a clean conscience, because they believe that tomorrow Brussels will pay for their parents. So the EU has accepted 27 million people who wanted to get inside to secure their pensions. And in the European centre they are still overjoyed to have attracted millions more than the USA. That will make us strong, they believe.”

“So I see few possibilities. However, in my book I cite the example of California, which experienced a turn-around around 1990, which meant that even the white population — excluding the Latinos, who have a much higher birth rate — went from 1.3 to 1.8 children per woman. It is not full reproduction but a significant change nonetheless. It was a huge surprise because California is the world’s most advanced region. By the end of the 1980s the prognosis was that the birth rates would continue to fall, but in the beginning of the 1990s new studies found that Californian women were no longer satisfied with just working, and shortly afterwards the birth rates went up.”

“In Europe it was dismissed with the explanation that Americans are so conservative, but that is not true in California, which has in many ways been the pioneer of the West. However, I cannot see a similar change in Europe. Of course France has 2 children per woman, but out of five newborns, two are already Arabic or African. In Germany 35 per cent of all newborns already have a non-German background, and non-Germans commit 90 per cent of violent crimes. As I have said — mothers are paid to put children into the world and so are their daughters, whereas the men take to crime.”

“Or take the Tunisian example. A woman in Tunisia has 1.7 children. In France she may have six because the French government pays her to have them. Of course, the money was never intended to benefit Tunisian women in particular, but French women will not touch this money, whereas the Tunisian women are only too happy to.”

- So we need to discriminate?

“That will not work. It is too late. The moment you start discriminating, you will be dragged into each and every international court in existence. This is what the Anglo-Saxon world has escaped by discriminating at the border. Not based on race or ethnicity but based on qualifications. They are discriminating against the unqualified. Yet they reject them with a friendly piece of advice. When a person has been refused entry in Ottawa or Canberra, friendly immigration authorities will advise him to go to Germany. Because they have a different system there.”

The end of the welfare state

- How do you see the political situation in Europe in twenty years? No welfare state, no democracy?

“Concerning the European continent apart from Scandinavia, Ireland and England, I believe that even the pessimistic population prognoses will turn out to be too optimistic. They assume that the young people will stay in Europe and bring up their own children, but that will not happen. A study from 2005 showed that 52 per cent of the Germans between 18 and 32 wanted to leave. They might not mean it but they are entertaining the thought. The really qualified are leaving. The only truly loyal towards France and Germany are those who are living off the welfare system. Because there is no other place in the world that offers to pay for them. America, Canada and Australia count on receiving our best qualified youths, and they will get many of them. That will put an end to innovation and put a damper on economic growth in Europe. In Germany we are already forfeiting billions upon billions in revenue because we lack qualified people to take on the jobs. We have two million jobs that we cannot fill – and a welfare-dependent population of six million, and the two do not meet. The welfare group grows each year because of new babies, but the vacant job slots are not filled.”

“It is a case of two nations that are closed off to each other. The welfare state cannot continue. We cannot hope to cover the demographic holes through immigration from China either, since the Chinese do not want to emigrate into a welfare system where they will have to pay for an ageing population’s pensions in addition to a welfare population of millions.”

“We have to say that there is only one category of people who can count on help from the government and that is the mentally or physically handicapped. Nobody else should expect help. This sounds cold and cynical but our welfare states were founded the 19th century when families had 10 children. When their father fell to his death from a scaffold, somebody had to look after the family. This is not the situation we are facing today.”

“If you go to Australia, you will not be paid to have children. You may get a slight tax relief. On the other hand a citizen of Australia can keep 80 out of every 100 dollars he earns.”

- How could it go so wrong in Europe that had this grandiose vision of peace, cooperation and progress and unlimited trust in its own abilities?

“It started to go wrong around 1980. But the great turn in Germany came as late as 1990. That was when we opened the gates for a mass immigration of roughly speaking unqualified people. Between 1990 and 2002 Germany allowed an immigration of 13 million. At almost the same time it started to go wrong in France. We can only avert this burden on the welfare state through legislation. We have to pass a bill to the effect that new children born after a certain date will have to be paid for by their parents. It will be a revolution. But it is not even being discussed here in Europe.”

Clinton’s social reform

“But let me point out what happened in the USA. During the election campaign of 1992 Bill Clinton, in a famous phrase, promised to ‘end welfare as we know it’. In 1935 the USA had passed the ‘Aid to Dependent Children’-act (from 1960 known as ‘Aid to Families with Dependent Children’, ed.), which guaranteed every mother with small children help from the state. Again it was a question of the father who had fallen from the scaffold, and very few received support because of this law. However, in 1965 morals had changed. Until then it would have been unthinkable to a mother — whether she was white or black — to become pregnant, hide the identity of the father and then let the public pay for her kids. Now she did not even have to push the father out of a tall building. This caused an explosion of the number of welfare-dependent American families. From 1965 to 1995 their share rose to 10 per cent of all American families and 15 per cent of the children. That was the reality Clinton had to face.”

“Most of these welfare dependents were blacks, and that made racists claim that the problem was in the black genes. But the Republicans and the Democrats worked together on a new law, ‘Temporary Assistance for Needy Families’, which was a smart law. It told American women: We will give you welfare up to five years. You decide whether it should be five years straight, or whether you want to divide the five years into shorter periods. The new law was passed in 1996 and took effect on January 1, 1997. It caused several top officials in the Clinton administration to walk out in protest stating the law was a racist attack on the weakest — single mothers and their children. They had predicted that by 1997-98, the number of adversely affected would have grown from 12 to 14 million. As it turned out, it was these well-meaning people who were the racists. The black girls were smart enough to go on the pill with the result that the welfare-dependent population shrank from 12 million to 4 million. It was the most successful social reform in history.”

“In Europe we have not even begun to discuss such a reform.”

Leave the youth bulges alone

- Lately there has been a discussion as to whether we in the West can accomplish anything in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan or with populations such as the Palestinian. Why not let them fight it out among themselves?

“Some American strategists are beginning to question whether the USA, with its one-son families, ought send out troops to fight populations with many sons. That is the mistake we have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you have to go in because you have been attacked, then you must do it, but as soon as the danger has been defeated, it is necessary to withdraw. It is up to the Iraqis and the Afghans themselves to ensure that there is a balance between the size of the population and the number of positions society can offer. And as far back in history we look, we can see that this balance has been maintained by young men killing each other. We have done it in Europe, and it has happened elsewhere. We cannot allow them to send their young men over the borders to kill others.”

“My personal view is that when faced with a youth bulge, we should allow it to play out with the consequences we know. We should stay away. If we interfere, we cannot avoid siding with one party and help killing that party’s opponents. Then the population will se us as doing the dirty work for one side or another. Instead might arm the most sympathetic side, which was what the French did in Algeria after the Islamists started killing the secularists in 1992. France sent weapons aid to the secularists. Back then nobody said that we ought to send money and food to the families of the Islamists, as they do in Palestine.”

Baron Bodissey | 6/04/2007 10:01:00 AM

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

By JULIAN DIBBELL, New York Times (restricted to subscribers)

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

Robbie Cooper

The end of a 12-hour shift at Donghua Networks in Jinhua, China.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game’s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

The market for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, known as M.M.O.’s, is a fast-growing one, with no fewer than 80 current titles and many more under development, all targeted at a player population that totals around 30 million worldwide. World of Warcraft, produced in Irvine, Calif., by Blizzard Entertainment, is one of the most profitable computer games in history, earning close to $1 billion a year in monthly subscriptions and other revenue. In a typical M.M.O., as in a classic predigital role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, each player leads his fantasy character on a life of combat and adventure that may last for months or even years of play. As has also been true since D. & D., however, the romance of this imaginary life stands in sharp contrast to the plodding, mathematical precision with which it proceeds.

Players of M.M.O.’s are notoriously obsessive gamers, not infrequently dedicating more time to the make-believe careers of their characters than to their own real jobs. Indeed, it is no mere conceit to say that M.M.O.’s are just as much economies as games. In every one of them, there is some form of money, the getting and spending of which invariably demands a lot of attention: in World of Warcraft, it is the generic gold coin; in Korea’s popular Lineage II, it is the “adena”; in the Japanese hit Final Fantasy XI, it is called “gil.” And in all of these games, it takes a lot of this virtual local currency to buy the gear and other battle aids a player needs to even contemplate a run at the monsters worth fighting. To get it, players have a range of virtual income-generating activities to choose from: they can collect loot from dead monsters, of course, but they can also make weapons, potions and similarly useful items to sell to other players or even gather the herbs and hides and other resources that are the crafters’ raw materials. Repetitive and time-intensive by design, these pursuits and others like them are known collectively as “the grind.”

For players lacking time or patience for the grind, there has always been another means of acquiring virtual loot: real money. From the earliest days of M.M.O.’s, players have been willing to trade their hard-earned legal tender — dollars, euros, yen, pounds sterling — for the fruits of other players’ grinding. And despite strict rules against the practice in the most popular online games, there have always been players willing to sell. The phenomenon of selling virtual goods for real money is called real-money trading, or R.M.T., and it first flourished in the late 1990s on eBay. M.M.O. players looking to sell their virtual armor, weapons, gold and other items would post them for auction and then, when all the bids were in and payment was made, arrange with the highest bidder to meet inside the game world and transfer the goods from the seller’s account to the buyer’s.

Until very recently, in fact, eBay was a major clearinghouse for commodities from every virtual economy known to gaming — from venerable sword-and-sorcery stalwarts EverQuest and Ultima Online to up-and-comers like the Machiavellian space adventure Eve Online and the free-form social sandbox Second Life. That all came to an official end this January, when eBay announced a ban on R.M.T. sales, citing, among other concerns, the customer-service issues involved in facilitating transactions that are prohibited by the gaming companies. But by then the market had long since outgrown the tag-sale economics of online auctions. For years now, the vast majority of virtual goods has been brought to retail not by players selling the product of their own gaming but by high-volume online specialty sites like the virtual-money superstores IGE, BroGame and Massive Online Gaming Sales — multimillion-dollar businesses offering one-stop, one-click shopping and instant delivery of in-game cash. These are the Wal-Marts and Targets of this decidedly gray market, and the same economic logic that leads conventional megaretailers to China in search of cheap toys and textiles takes their virtual counterparts to China’s gold farms.

Indeed, on the surface, there is little to distinguish gold farming from toy production or textile manufacture or any of the other industries that have mushroomed across China to feed the desires of the Western consumer. The wages, the margins, the worker housing, the long shifts and endless workweeks — all of these are standard practice. Like many workers in China today, most gold farmers are migrants. Li, for example, came to Nanjing, in the country’s industry-heavy coastal region, from less prosperous parts. At 30, he is old for the job and feels it. He says he hopes to marry and start a family, he told me, but doesn’t see it happening on his current wages, which are not much better than what he made at his last job, fixing cars. The free company housing means his expenses aren’t high — food, cigarettes, bus fare, connection fees at the local wang ba (or Internet cafe) where he goes to relax — but even so, Li said, it is difficult to set aside savings. “You can do it,” he said, “but you have to economize a lot.”

This is the quick-sketch picture of the job, however, and it misses much. To sit at Li’s side for an hour or two, amid the dreary, functional surroundings of his workplace, as he navigates the Technicolor fantasy world he earns his living in, is to understand that gold farming isn’t just another outsourced job.

When the night shift ends and the sun comes up, Li and his co-workers know it only by the slivers of daylight that slip in at the edges of the plastic sheeting taped to the windows against the glare. As Li clocks out, another worker takes his seat, takes control of his avatar and carries on with the same grim routines amid the warrior monks of Azeroth. On most days Li’s replacement is 22-year-old Wang Huachen, who has been at this gold farm for a year, ever since he completed his university course in law. Soon, Wang told me, he will take the test for his certificate to practice, but he seems in no particular hurry to.

“I will miss this job,” he said. “It can be boring, but I still have sometimes a playful attitude. So I think I will miss this feeling.”

Two workstations away, Wang’s co-worker Zhou Xiaoguang, who is 24, also spends the day shift massacring monks. To watch his face as he plays, you wouldn’t guess there was anything like fun involved in this job, and perhaps “fun” isn’t exactly the word. As anyone who has spent much time among video-gamers knows, the look on a person’s face as he or she plays can be a curiously serious one, reflective of the absorbing rigors of many contemporary games. It is hard, in any case, for Zhou to say where the line between work and play falls in a gold farmer’s daily routines. “I am here the full 12 hours every day,” he told me, offhandedly killing a passing deer with a single crushing blow. “It’s not all work. But there’s not a big difference between play and work.”

I turned to Wang Huachen, who remained intent on manipulating an arsenal of combat spells, and asked again how it was possible that in these circumstances anybody could, as he put it, “have sometimes a playful attitude”?

He didn’t even look up from his screen. “I cannot explain,” he said. “It just feels that way.”

In 2001, Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University and at the time an EverQuest player, published a paper in which he documented the rate at which his fellow players accumulated virtual goods, then used the current R.M.T. prices of those goods to calculate the total annual wealth generated by all that in-game activity. The figure he arrived at, $135 million, was roughly 25 times the size of EverQuest’s R.M.T. market at the time. Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova’s results suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today’s virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia’s, Albania’s and Nepal’s.

Not quite the big time, no, but the implications are bigger, perhaps, than the numbers themselves. Castronova’s estimate of EverQuest’s G.D.P. showed that online games — even when there is no exchange of actual money — can produce actual wealth. And in doing so Castronova also showed that something curious has happened to the classic economic distinction between play and production: in certain corners of the world, it has melted away. Play has begun to do real work.

This development has not been universally welcomed. In the eyes of many gamers, in fact, real-money trading is essentially a scam — a form of cheating only slightly more refined than, say, offering 20 actual dollars for another player’s Boardwalk and Park Place in Monopoly. Some players, and quite a few game designers, see the problem in more systemic terms. Real-money trading harms the game, they argue, because the overheated productivity of gold farms and other profit-seeking operations makes it harder for beginning players to get ahead. Either way, the sense of a certain economic injustice at work breeds resentment. In theory this resentment would be aimed at every link in the R.M.T. chain, from the buyers to the retailers to the gold-farm bosses. And, indeed, late last month American WoW players filed a class-action suit against the dominant virtual-gold retailer, IGE, the first of its kind.

But as a matter of everyday practice, it is the farmers who catch it in the face. Consider, for example, a typical interlude in the workday of the 21-year-old gold farmer Min Qinghai. Min spends most of his time within the confines of a former manufacturing space 200 miles south of Nanjing in the midsize city of Jinhua. He works two floors below the plywood bunks of the workers’ dorm where he sleeps. In two years of 84-hour farming weeks, he has rarely stepped outside for longer than it takes to eat a meal. But he has died more times than he can count. And last September on a warm afternoon, halfway between his lunch and dinner breaks, it was happening again.

The World of Warcraft monsters he faces down — ferocious, gray-furred warriors of the Timbermaw clan of bearmen — are no match for his high-level characters, but they do fight back and sometimes they get the better of him. And so it appeared they had just done. Distracted from his post for a moment, Min returned to find his hunter-class character at the brink of death, the scene before him a flurry of computer-animated weapon blows. It wasn’t until the fight had run its course and the hunter lay dead that Min could make out exactly what had happened. The game’s chat window displayed a textual record of the blows landed and the cost to Min in damage points. The record was clear: the monsters hadn’t acted alone. In the middle of the fight another player happened by, sneaked up on Min and brought him down.

Min leaned back and stretched, then set about the tedious business of resurrecting his character, a drawn-out sequence of operations that can put a player out of action for as long as 10 minutes. In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker’s job at risk. And in shops where daily wages are tied to daily harvests, every minute lost to death is money taken from the farmer’s pocket. But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them. As Min returned to his corpse — checking to make sure his attacker wasn’t waiting around to fall on him again the moment he resurrected — what hurt more than the death itself was how it happened, or more precisely, what made it happen: another player.

It isn’t that WoW players don’t frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like “vermin,” “rats” and “extermination”) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.

Min’s English is not good enough to grasp in all its richness the hatred aimed his way. But he gets the idea. He feels a little embarrassed around regular players and sometimes says he thinks about how he might explain himself to those who believe he has no place among them, if only he could speak their language. “I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game,” he said. “They are playing. And we are making a living.”

It is a distinction that game companies understand all too well. Like the majority of M.M.O. companies, Blizzard has chosen to align itself with the customers who abhor R.M.T. rather than the ones who use it. A year ago, Blizzard announced it had identified and banned more than 50,000 World of Warcraft accounts belonging to farmers. It was the opening salvo in a continuing eradication campaign that has effectively swept millions in farmed gold from the market, sending the exchange rate rocketing from a low of 6 cents per gold coin last spring to a high of 35 cents in January.

Of course, nobody expected the farmers’ equally rule-breaking customers to be punished too. Among players, the R.M.T. debate may revolve around questions of fairness, but among game companies, the only question seems to be what is good for business. Cracking down on R.M.T. buyers makes poorer marketing sense than cracking down on sellers, in much the same way that cracking down on illegal drug suppliers is a better political move than cracking down on users. (Only a few companies have found a way to make R.M.T. part of their business model. Sony Online Entertainment, which publishes EverQuest, has started earning respectable revenues from an experimental in-game auction system that charges players a small transaction fee for real-money trades.) As Mark Jacobs, vice president at Electronic Arts and creator of the classic M.M.O. Dark Age of Camelot, put it: “Are you going to get more sympathy from busting 50,000 Chinese farmers or from busting 10,000 Americans that are buying? It’s not a racial thing at all. If you bust the buyers, you’re busting the guys who are paying to play your game, who you want to keep as customers and who will then go on the forums and say really nasty things about your company and your game.”

The cost to farmers of being expelled from WoW can be steep. At the very least, it means a temporary drop in productivity, because the character has to be to built up all over again, as well as the loss of all the loot accumulated in that character’s account. Given the stakes, some Chinese gold farms have found that the best way to get around their farmers’ pursuers is to make it hard to distinguish professionals from players in the first place. One business that specializes in doing just that is located a few blocks from the gold farm where Min Qinghai works. The shop floor is about the same size, with about the same number of computers in the same neat rows, but you can tell just walking through the place that it is a more serious operation. For one thing, there are a lot more workers: typically 25 on the day shift, 25 on the night shift, each crew punching in and out at a time clock just inside the entrance. Nobody works without a shirt here; quite a few, in fact, wear a standard-issue white polo shirt with the company initials on it. There is also a crimson version of the shirt, reserved for management and worn at all times by the shift supervisor, who, when he isn’t prowling the floor, sits at his desk before a broad white wall emblazoned with foot-high Chinese characters in red that spell: unity, collaboration, integrity, efficiency.

The name of the business is Donghua Networks, and its specialty is what gamers call “power leveling.” Like regular gold farming, power leveling offers customers an end run around the World of Warcraft grind — except that instead of providing money and other items, the power leveler simply does the work for you. Hand over your account name, password and about $300, and get on with your real life for a while: in a marathon of round-the-clock monster-bashing, a team of power levelers will raise your character from the lowest level to the highest, accomplishing in four weeks or less what at a normal rate of play would take at least four months.

For Donghua’s owners — 26-year-old Fei Jianfeng and 36-year-old Bao Donghua, both former gold-farm wage workers themselves — moving the business out of farming and into leveling was an easy call. Among other advantages, they say, power leveling means fewer banned accounts. Because the only game accounts used are the customers’ own, there is much less risk of losing access to the virtual work site. For their workers, however, the advantages are mixed. Though there is a greater variety of quests and quarries to pursue, the pay isn’t any better, and some workers chafe at the constraints of playing a stranger’s character, preferring the relative autonomy of farming gold.

As one Donghua power leveler said of his old gold-farming job, “I had more room to play for myself.”

It may seem strange that a wage-working loot farmer would still care about the freedom to play. But it is not half as strange as the scene that unfolded one evening at 9 o’clock in the Internet cafe on the ground floor of the building where Donghua has its offices. Scattered around the stifling, dim wang ba, 10 power levelers just off the day shift were merrily gaming away. Not all of them were playing World of Warcraft. A big, silent lug named Mao sat mesmerized by a very pink-and-purple Japanese schoolgirls’ game, in which doe-eyed characters square off in dancing contests with other online players. But the rest had chosen, to a man, to log into their personal World of Warcraft accounts and spend these precious free hours right back where they had spent every other hour of the day: in Azeroth.

Such scenes are not at all unusual. At the end of almost any working day or night in a Chinese gaming workshop, workers can be found playing the same game they have been playing for the last 12 hours, and to some extent gold-farm operators depend on it. The game is too complex for the bosses to learn it all themselves; they need their workers to be players — to find out all the tricks and shortcuts, to train themselves and to train one another. “When I was a worker,” Fan Yangwen, who is now 21 and in Donghua’s main office providing technical support, told me, “I loved to play because when I was playing, I was learning.” But learning to play or learning to work? I asked. Fan shrugged. “Both.”

Fan himself is a striking case of how off-hours play can serve as a kind of unpaid R. and D. lab for the farming industry. He is that rarest of World of Warcraft obsessives, a Chinese gold farmer who has actually bought farmed gold. (“Sure, I bought 10,000 once,” he said, “I don’t have time to farm all that!”) When Fan shows up at the wang ba after work, it is a minor event; the other Donghua workers pull their chairs over to watch him play — his top-level warlock character is an unbelievable powerhouse that no amount of money, real or virtual, can buy.

What makes Fan’s dominance so impressive to his peers is that he achieved it in regions of the game that are all but inaccessible to the working gold farmer or power leveler. Therein lies what is known as the end game, the phase of epic challenges that begins only when the player has accumulated the maximum experience points and can level up no more. The rewards for meeting these challenges are phenomenal: rare weapons and armor pieces loaded with massive power boosts and showy graphics. And the greatest cannot be traded or given away; they can only be acquired by venturing into the game’s most difficult dungeons. That requires becoming part of a tightly coordinated “raid” group of as many as 40 other players (any fewer than that, and the entire group will almost certainly “wipe” — or die en masse without killing any monsters of note). Each player has a shot at the best items when they drop, and players must negotiate among themselves for the top prizes. These end-game hurdles have some subtle but significant effects. For one thing, they force the growth of “guilds” — teams of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of players who join together to hit high-end dungeons on a regular basis. For another, they shut farmers out from an entire class of virtual goods — the most marketable in the game if only they could be traded.

For a long time the Donghua bosses, Fei and Bao (known even to employees as Little Bai and Brother Bao), could do no more than nurse their envy of the raiding guilds’ access to the end game. But Fan’s prowess pointed to another way of looking at it: raiding guilds weren’t the competition, they realized; they were the solution. Donghua would put together a team of 40 employees. They would train the team in all the hardest dungeons. And then, for a few hundred dollars, the team would escort any customer into the dungeon of his or her choice. And when the customer’s longed-for item dropped, the team would stand aside and let the customer take it, no questions asked. Thus would the supposedly unmarketable end-game treasures find their way into the R.M.T. market. And thus would gold farming, of a sort, find its way at last into the end game.

When Brother Bao and Little Bai put their team together in April of last year, Min Qinghai, a veteran Donghua employee at the time, was among the first to make the roster.

“Before I joined the raiding team, I’d never worked together with so many people,” Min told me. They were 40 young men in three adjoining office spaces, and it was chaotic at first. Two or three supervisors moved among them, calling out orders like generals. A dungeon raid is always a puzzle: figuring out which tactics to use to kill each boss is the main challenge; doing so while coordinating 40 players can be dizzying. But members of the team raided just as diligently as they had power-leveled: 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, making their way through the complexities of a different dungeon every day.

There was a lot of shouting involved, at least in the beginning. Besides the orders called out by the supervisors, there were loud attempts at coordination among the team members themselves. “But then we developed a sense of cooperation, and the shouting grew rarer,” Min said. “By the end, nothing needed to be said.” They moved through the dungeons in silent harmony, 40 intricately interdependent players, each the master of his part. For every fight in every dungeon, the hunters knew without asking exactly when to shoot and at what range; the priests had their healing spells down to a rhythm; wizards knew just how much damage to put in their combat spells.

And Min’s role? The translator struggled for a moment to find the word in English, and when I hazarded a guess, Min turned directly to me and repeated it, the only English I ever heard him speak. “Tank,” he said, breaking into a rare, slow smile, and why wouldn’t he? The tank — the heavily armored warrior character who holds the attention of the most powerful enemy in the fight, taking all its blows — is the linchpin of any raid. If the tank dies, everybody else will soon die too, as a rule.

“Working together, playing together, it felt nice,” Min said. “Very . . . shuang.” The word means “open, clear, exhilarating.” “You would go in, knowing that you were fighting the bosses that all the guilds in the world dream of fighting; there was a sense of achievement.”

The end arrived without warning. One day word came down from the bosses that the 40-man raids were suspended indefinitely for lack of customers. In the meantime, team members would go back to gold farming, gathering loot in five-man dungeons that once might have thrilled Min but now presented no challenge whatsoever. “We no longer went to fight the big boss monsters,” Min said. “We were ordered to stay in one place doing the same thing again and again. Everyday I was looking at the same thing. I could not stand it.”

Min quit and took the farming job he works at still. The new job, with its rote Timbermaw whacking, could hardly be less exciting. But it is more relaxed than Donghua was, less wearying — “Working 12 hours there was like working 24 here” — and he couldn’t have stayed on in any case, surrounded by reminders of the broken promise of tanking for what might have been the greatest guild on Earth.

In the meantime, Min is doing his best to forget that his work has anything at all to do with play or that he ever let himself believe otherwise. But even with a job as monotonous as this one, it isn’t easy. On his usual hunt one day, he accidentally backed into combat with a higher-level monster. Losing life fast, he grabbed his mouse and started to flee. He hunched over his keyboard, leaning into his flight, flushed now by the chase. His boss, 26-year-old Liu Haibin, an inveterate gamer himself, wandered by and began to cheer him on: “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . go!”

Finally the monster quit the chase, and Min got away with no consequence more untoward than having to explain himself. “It’s instinctual — you can’t help it,” he said. “You want to play.”

Julian Dibbell is the author, most recently, of “Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot.” This is his first article for the magazine.

citation de franz bardon sur le pacte magique

“En conséquence, je précise à nouveau que le Mage doit avoir une idée
claire sur ce qu’il contacte, comment cette communication s’est faite,
quels en sont les inconvénients, etc… Je vais m’attarder encore sur
ce sujet.

Supposons qu’un ignorant réussisse vraiment à appeler un Régent d’une
Sphère donnée grâce à une forte tension mentale; si l’être évoqué est
de nature négative, il essaiera toujours d’emprisonner sous son
influence non seulement le psychisme mais aussi le mental de
l’opérateur de façon à rendre ce dernier totalement dépendant de lui.
Mais en général ce type de praticien réalise au cours de sa deuxième
ou troisième opération qu’il ne peut plus se mettre dans l’état de
transe qui a précédemment contribué à la manifestation de certains
effets. Cela suffit à faire naître en lui un malaise qui le conduit à
s’accrocher littéralement à l’entité négative afin de voir satisfaits
ses désirs. Toutefois, cette dernière ne répondra pas si elle constate
que le psychisme ou le mental du demandeur n’ont pas encore atteint un
développement suffisant pour ce qu’elle veut en faire et qu’en
conséquence cela ne vaut pas la peine d’essayer de les capturer. En
effet, cette entité négative ayant rang de Régent voit par quel
parcours karmique passé un opérateur a atteint le degré de
développement qui est le sien, tant en ce qui concerne l’intelligence
que la maturité psychique, et elle est alors sûre qu’il lui sera fort
utile après sa mort. Toul cela, l’entité le voit à partir de son
propre plan alors que le demandeur poursuit ses opérations. Si cela
présente donc quelque intérêt, une entité, en général de nature
négative, apparaîtra et essaiera de faire sien, et à tout prix, l’être
humain qui l’appelle. Suivant le caractère de ce dernier, l’entité
mettra en Oeuvre toutes les stratégies possibles car elle connaît très
bien le point le plus vulnérable de sa nature grâce auquel elle le
vaincra. Si, par exemple, le praticien est peureux, l’entité tentera
de l’effrayer pour le contraindre à lui obéir mais s’il a une
conscience suffIsante de ses capacités psychiques et mentales,
l’entité essaiera alors de le gagner en lui promettant qu’elle fera
ceci ou cela pour lui; toutefois, à ce moment là, pendant la promesse,
l’entité fera remarquer à l’opérateur qu’elle ne pourra agir sans son
consentement et lui fera miroiter en même temps les avantages d’un tel
pacte. Il appartiendra donc à ce praticien de résister à la tentation
et de s’opposer à l’entité. Alors un combat surgira en lui-même et
s’amplifiera jusqu’à devenir terrible car, en vérité, la conscience
d’un être humain est la forme la plus subtile qu’emprunte la Divine
Providence. Cependant, s’il refuse d’écouter les avertissements
divins, c’est à dire de suivre sa conscience, et qu’il réprime
celle-ci malgré ses multiples tentatives, il deviendra alors une
victime de cette Entité.

Ce sujet intéresse certainement tous les lecteurs mais je ne
l’aborderai que du point de vue de l’Occultisme. Pourquoi ce type
d’entité veut-il s’approprier le psychisme et le mental d’un être
humain? Plusieurs raisons président à cela. En premier lieu, aucun
être invisible, et surtout s’il est de nature négative, ne fera quoi
que ce soir pour un praticien spirituellement peu développé sans
garder l’espoir d’en obtenir une récompense. Ainsi le sorcier, après
sa mort, est-il obligé, en raison de son pacte, de ne pas séjourner
dans la Sphère astrale de la Terre; happé par le démon concerné, comme
le racontent si bien les légendes, il doit se rendre sur le plan
d’appartenance de cet être négatif et obéir à celui-ci en tant que
serviteur.

L’archidémon, avec qui le pacte a été signé, utilise généralement un
sorcier décédé en tant que messager sur les plans mental, astral ou
physique pour que ce dernier accomplisse, en son nom, quelque mission
correspondant à la nature de sa propre sphère démoniaque. Ce genre
d’entité négative veut pactiser avec un sorcier parce que celui-ci a
été créé à l’Image de Dieu, qu’il a en conséquence les Quatre Éléments
dans sa structure et donc beaucoup plus de possibilités d’action
qu’elle-même. En général, un démon servant un archidémon (et dans ce
cas, le sorcier décédé qui est devenu aussi un serviteur) a le rôle
d’un «spiritus familiaris » ou de «factotum» et est mis à la
disposition des sorciers vivant encore sur Terre. Pour assumer cette
fonction, le sorcier décédé-serviteur reçoit toute la puissance
énergétique appartenant à l’archidémon puisque, à partir de ce moment
là, il agit pour le compte de ce dernier. Ce transfert de pouvoir se
fait soit par Ankhour (à partir de l’archidémon lui-même ou d’un de
ses adjoints), soit en le mettant en accord vibratoire avec le plan
dont la force sera utilisée pour exécuter les ordres, soit par l’aide
ponctuelle et régulière d’un autre démon-servant, placé auprès de lui.
Cependant, il est difficile de savoir si ces démons-servant sont les
habitants légitimes de ce bas plan et, en tant que tels, de véritables
subordonnés de leur maître, ou s’ils sont des victimes humaines,
telles que celles-ci viennent d’être décrites, car l’ensemble de ces
serviteurs ne sont pas autorisés à parler à quiconque et à dire quoi
que ce soit qui les concerne en particulier. Il est également possible
que des pans entiers de leur mémoire et de leur conscience,
susceptibles de gêner, aient été effacés au moyen d’une formule
magique ou d’autres pratiques. Et c’est ainsi que le magicien noir,
malgré les qualités que lui donne sa nature quadripolaire, est
enchaîné au plan d’appartenance de cet archidémon, c’est à dire au
plan de son maître, ce qui l’empêche de se libérer et de suivre son
propre cycle de vie. Il devient un instrument dépourvu de volonté aux
mains de cet être négatif et il est obligé de faire tout ce que ce
dernier lui ordonne.

Une fois le contrat ou pacte signé, le sorcier ne peut plus
entreprendre un travail personnel en Magie et ce, pendant des semaines
et des mois. Pendant ce temps-là, en effet, l’archidémon lui enseigne
toutes sortes de pratiques et l’initie à une utilisation particulière
de ses facultés psychiques et mentales. La conclusion d’un tel pacte
ne diffère pas, en réalité, de ce que les grimoires rapportent.
Cependant, il existe un petit détail rarement connu: le pacte n’est
pas rédigé par l’archidémon mais par le sorcier lui-même, comme l’est
le Livre des Formules. Le texte du pacte est écrit avec une encre
ordinaire. Toutefois, une encre spéciale, correspondant au type de
rituel pratiqué, peut être utilisée mais là n’est pas notre propos. Le
contrat stipule clairement quels sont les services attendus par le
Sorcier et que l’entité doit rendre, quels sont les pouvoirs qui sont
octroyés au sorcier et beaucoup d’autres clauses que l’entité peut
remplir elle-même au nom de l’autre partie. Sur une autre page du
contrat sont écrits les devoirs que chaque partie a envers l’autre
(sorcier/entité). Enfin, est précisé le moyen occulte par lequel
l’entité sera appelée et si elle se manifestera de façon visible ou
invisible; est spécifié aussi le nombre de démons-servant mis à la
disposition du sorcier, etc… Le point le plus important de tout ceci
est la durée de validité de ce contrat car, à l’expiration de ce
délai, le sorcier est obligé de rejoindre la sphère de l’archidémon.
Le procédé par lequel le sorcier mourra et la manière dont il devra se
comporter sur cette sphère démoniaque, sont également précisés dans le
contrat. Toutes ces clauses sont soumises à l’agrément des deux
parties; l’archidémon généralement y dépose son sceau en utilisant la
main du sorcier comme médium; ce dernier signe aussi. Il arrive que
l’archidémon demande, voire insiste pour que le sorcier signe de son
propre sang mais des contrats ont été faits dans le passé et sont
toujours faits sans que cette condition y prévalût ou prévale.
Ordinairement, le pacte est rédigé en double, un exemplaire pour le
sorcier et un autre pour l’archidémon. Les livres traitant de cette
matière disent que l’entité démoniaque emporte les deux exemplaires
mais ceci est rare, en fait, et n’a lieu qu’avec une certaine
catégorie de démons. En général, le deuxième exemplaire est plié puis
brûlé par le sorcier. Le fait de brûler en Magie un papier signifie en
réalité que tout ce qui y est écrit est transmis à la Sphère subtile
concernée.

C’est suivant ces exigences, à quelques variantes près, que sont donc
signés les pactes, surtout ceux qui le sont avec les entités
négatives. Un tel contrat ne peut être rompu, ni par le sorcier, ni
par l’entité, et doit être inéluctablement exécuté. Mais il arrive que
la victime ne se rende pas bien compte qu’elle a signé un pacte si
horrible et elle pénètre dans la sphère démoniaque, après sa mort,
sans savoir qu’elle doit payer tous les services que l’entité
démoniaque lui a rendus sur Terre. Cependant, si le sorcier est saisi
de remords avant la date d’expiration du pacte et si, en conséquence,
il essaie de s’en libérer par tous les moyens, alors l’entité
démoniaque fera tout pour lui nuire et le tuer. Des procès de
sorcellerie furent la preuve patente de tout ceci: les sorciers qui,
pleins de remords, avaient tout fait pour se dégager de leur pacte,
eurent à expier durement cette rupture par un procès et un supplice
provoqués par l’entité démoniaque elle-même. De nombreux sorciers des
temps passés n’ont pu échapper au bûcher simplement parce que l’idée
de Dieu et la Parcelle Divine en eux avait vaincu le mal et leur avait
fait préférer la mort plutôt que de rester en contact avec le démon
concerné jusqu’à l’expiration du pacte. Au contraire, les sorciers qui
ont adhéré en tout point à ce pacte et ont accompli tout les devoirs
stipulés jusqu’à expiration, restèrent toujours sous le couvert des
forces ténébreuses et aucun pouvoir humain au monde ne put jamais les
molester. Ce sont donc ceux qui n’avaient pas respecté le contrat et
avaient regretté leur faute qui furent très durement persécutés à
l’instigation des entités démoniaques car celles-ci trouvent toujours
les moyens de mettre à mal leur ex-protégé.

Le type de contrat qui vient d’être décrit est celui qui est
habituellement usité; le sorcier essaie d’appeler un démon par la
Magie Evocatoire et de maintenir cette relation soit de façon directe
soit par l’intermédiaire d’un «spiritus familiaris» destiné à le
servir.

Le lecteur se demandera pourquoi un sorcier est condamné à servir un
démon pendant un temps si long. Répondre à cette question ne présente
aucune difficulté pour le Mage qui connaît bien les différentes
Sphères subtiles. Dès que le sorcier a pleinement payé les services
que le démon lui a rendus lorsqu’il était encore sur Terre — ceci
peut nécessiter, selon notre mesure du temps, des centaines d’années,
puisque le Temps et l’Espace n’existent pas sur ces sphères — la
conscience ainsi que sa nature quadripolaire, commenceront à s’é-
veiller lentement de nouveau et il se sentira petit à petit libéré de
cet esclavage puis, devenu libre, il pourra disposer de lui-même.
Toutefois, si à ce moment là, sa conscience, rétive à suivre la voie
du Bien, vacille, il restera alors dans ce plan démoniaque et, à
terme, il perdra sa quadruple polarité et finira par s’identifier à
cette sphère en s’assimilant à la vibration de celle-ci pour toujours.
Ainsi, se sera-t-il condamné lui-même. Il cesse d’être alors un être
humain, à l’Image de Dieu, pour devenir un démon lié à cette sphère.
C’est certainement la dégradation la plus basse que puisse connaître
un être humain et qui peut être appelée «la damnation», selon le terme
religieux, ou bien le véritable «péché contre l’Esprit».

Voilà donc comment on scelle un pacte avec un Être subtil de toute
Sphère. Si donc le sorcier suit la voix de sa conscience, il peut se
libérer du plan démoniaque et réintégrer l’astral lié à la Terre où,
ayant recouvré sa quadripolarité, il poursuivra son développement
spirituel. Dans ce cas, lorsqu’il devra se réincarner, cette
renaissance lui sera accordée sans difficulté car c’est dans le monde
physique que l’on se purifie le plus facilement et que l’on évolue à
l’instar de tous les hommes. Un sorcier qui se réincarne après cette
aventure est en mesure d’acquérir, sur Terre, un grand pouvoir occulte
du fait qu’il a déjà travaillé avec des forces subtiles, même si
celles-ci sont négatives. Cette catégorie d’êtres sont des
magiciens-nés car ils possèdent des capacités magiques innées et n’ont
pas besoin d’apprendre les rudiments de la Magie. Il arrive,
cependant, que cet ex-sorcier soit gagné par la tentation de mésuser
de ses pouvoirs et que le même archi démon rôde autour de lui à
nouveau, sous divers masques peut-être, afin de s’emparer de lui, son
ancienne victime, et de s ‘approprier sa personne encore une fois en
le saisissant, après sa mort, vers sa sphère. Toutefois un tel être
humain a ici-bas une plus grande volonté que ses semblables et peut
donc mieux résister à ces avances; sa conscience est également plus
aux aguets et celle-ci l’avertira de façon plus pressante, en
comparaison des autres hommes qui n’ont pas expérimenté pareil
périple. Ainsi arrive-t-il rarement qu’un ex-sorcier succombe une
deuxième fois; son expérience l’a, en général, tellement marqué qu’il
s’achemine sur le véritable sentier de la Lumière et qu’il est moins
enclin à chercher le contact avec des démons.

Cet exposé de faits véridiques est un avertissement à l’attention du
chercheur de ne pas suivre la voie de la sorcellerie car on peut
aisément comprendre maintenant, grâce à ce qui vient d’en être dit,
qu’un tel pas constitue une grande régression sur la ligne d’évolution
spirituelle et de développement fixée pour les êtres humains. Ce que
je viens de relater ne relève pas du fantastique mais est bien la
triste vérité que n’importe quel Mage, digne de ce nom, ne subira pas.
En fait, un sorcier qui s’est réincarné et qui a repris le chemin de
l’évolution normale, est beaucoup plus tenté que l’homme, d’évolution
commune, venant d’amorcer son développement spirituel, car le plan
démoniaque, qui l’avait tenu autrefois captif, essaie régulièrement de
le reconquérir, et ce, selon les procédés les plus subtils.

Je ne nommerai aucun signataire d’un tel pacte, que ce fût dans le
passé, ou que ce soit à une époque récente mais, mis à part les cas
qui sont généralement connus du public, comme celui du docteur Faust
et d’Urbain Grandier , il en existe d’autres que le grand nombre
ignore.

Un autre procédé de passation de contrat n’est connu que de très peu
d’Initiés et ceci est encore un avertissement à l’égard de ceux qui
tentent de contacter des Êtres subtils. Ce type de pacte n’est pas
signé à proprement parler mais se fait par l’intermédiaire du corps
physique d’un être humain. Le sorcier choisit donc lequel des deux
procédés est, à ce qu’il pense, le plus «avantageux». Cette méthode,
la moins connue donc, peut être préférée aussi bien par des défunts
que par des entités de la Sphère astrale de la Terre et même par des
Etres de plans plus élevés.
==========================================

Note: Les majuscules bizarres sont ajoutées par le traducteur de
l’original allemand vers le français.

citation de : franz bardon, “la pratique de la magie évocatoire”
la première partie du livre, d’où est issu cet extrait, est disponible
ici en pdf:
http://www.divshare.com/download/1002994-253

baudrillard sur le pen

Jean Baudrillard – Opposer à Le Pen la vitupération morale, c’est lui laisser le privilège de l’insolence. La conjuration des imbéciles.
Libération, mercredi 7 mai 1997, page 7, REBONDS

Les deux situations, aussi critiques et insolubles l’une que l’autre : celle de la nullité de l’art contemporain, celle de l’impuissance politique face à Le Pen. Elles s’échangent et se résolvent par transfusion : l’impuissance à opposer quoi que ce soit de politique à Le Pen se déplace sur le terrain de la culture et de la Sainte Alliance culturelle. Quant à la mise en cause de l’art contemporain, elle ne peut venir que d’une pensée réactionnaire et irrationnelle, voire fasciste…Que peut-on opposer à cette conjuration respectueuse des imbéciles ? Rien malheureusement ne peut corriger ce mécanisme de perversion intellectuelle, puisqu’il s’inspire de la mauvaise conscience et de l’impuissance de nos élites “démocratiques” à résoudre aussi bien l’impasse de l’art que l’impasse politique de la lutte contre le Front national. La solution la plus simple est de confondre les deux problèmes dans la même vitupération moralisante. La vraie question devient alors : ne peut-on plus l’”ouvrir” de quelque façon, proférer quoi que ce soit d’insolite, d’insolent, d’hétérodoxe ou de paradoxal sans être automatiquement d’extrême droite (ce qui est, il faut bien le dire, un hommage rendu à l’extrême droite) ? Pourquoi tout ce qui est moral, conforme et conformiste, et qui était traditionnellement à droite, est-il passé à gauche ? Révision déchirante : alors que la droite incarnait les valeurs morales, et la gauche au contraire une certaine exigence historique et politique contradictoire, aujourd’hui, celle-ci, dépouillée de toute énergie politique, est devenue une pure juridiction morale, incarnation des valeurs universelles, championne du règne de la Vertu et tenancière des valeurs muséales du Bien et du Vrai, juridiction qui peut demander des comptes à tout le monde sans avoir à en rendre à personne. L’illusion politique de la gauche, congelée pendant vingt ans dans l’opposition, s’est révélée, avec l’accession au pouvoir, porteuse, non pas du sens de l’histoire, mais d’une morale de l’histoire. D’une morale de la Vérité, du Droit et de la bonne conscience – degré zéro du politique et sans doute même point le plus bas de la généalogie de la morale. Défaite historique de la gauche (et de la pensée) que cette moralisation des valeurs. Même la réalité, le principe de réalité, est un article de foi. Mettez donc en cause la réalité d’une guerre : vous êtes aussitôt jugé comme traître à la loi morale. La gauche tout aussi politiquement dévitalisée que la droite – où est donc passé le politique ? Eh bien, du côté de l’extrême droite. Comme le disait très bien Bruno Latour dans le Monde, le seul discours politique en France, aujourd’hui, est celui de Le Pen. Tous les autres sont des discours moraux et pédagogiques, discours d’instituteurs et de donneurs de leçons, de gestionnaires et de programmateurs. Voué au mal et à l’immoralité, Le Pen rafle toute la mise politique, le solde de tout ce qui est laissé pour compte, ou franchement refoulé, par la politique du Bien et des Lumières. Plus se durcit la coalition morale contre lui – signe d’impuissance politique – plus il tire le profit politique de l’immoralité, d’être le seul du côté du mal. Quand la droite est passée du côté des valeurs morales et de l’ordre établi, la gauche n’a pas hésité, jadis, à défier ces mêmes valeurs morales au nom des valeurs politiques. Aujourd’hui, elle est victime du même glissement, du même dessaisissement : investie de l’ordre moral, elle ne peut que voir cristallisée ailleurs l’énergie politique refoulée, et se cristalliser contre elle. Et elle ne peut qu’alimenter le Mal, en incarnant le règne de la Vertu, qui est aussi celui de la plus grande hypocrisie. Le Pen, il faudrait l’inventer. C’est lui qui nous délivre de toute une part maléfique de nous-mêmes, de la quintessence de ce qu’il y a en nous de pire. A ce titre, on doit lui jeter l’anathème – mais, s’il disparaissait, pitié de nous, livrés à tous nos virus racistes, sexistes, nationalistes (notre lot à tous), ou tout simplement à la négativité meurtrière de l’être social. En cela, il est le miroir de la classe politique, qui exorcise en lui ses propres maux, comme nous exorcisons en elle toute la corruption inhérente au fonctionnement social. Même fonction corruptrice, même fonction cathartique. Vouloir extirper cela, vouloir purifier la société et moraliser la vie publique, vouloir liquider ce qui tient lieu du mal, témoigne d’une méconnaissance totale des mécanismes du mal, et donc de la forme même du politique. Les antilepéniens, jouant de la dénonciation unilatérale et ignorant tout de cette réversibilité du mal, en ont laissé le monopole à Le Pen, qui jouit ainsi, par son exclusion même, d’une position imprenable. La classe politique, en le stigmatisant au nom de la Vertu, lui assure la position la plus confortable, où il n’a plus rien d’autre à faire que rafler toute la charge symbolique d’ambivalence, de dénégation du mal et d’hypocrisie que produisent spontanément à son profit et comme à sa solde, ses adversaires se réclamant du bon droit et de la bonne cause. Son énergie lui vient de ses ennemis mêmes, qui s’empressent de détourner ses propres erreurs à son profit. Ils n’ont pas compris que le bien ne résulte jamais d’une éviction du mal, qui prend toujours alors une revanche éclatante, mais d’un traitement subtil du mal par le mal. Tout cela pour dire que si Le Pen est l’incarnation de la bêtise et de la nullité – certes – mais de celle des autres, de ceux qui en le dénonçant dénoncent leur propre impuissance et leur propre bêtise, en même temps que l’absurdité qu’il y a à le combattre frontalement, sans rien avoir compris à ce jeu de chaises diabolique – alimentant ainsi leur propre fantôme, leur propre double négatif dans un manque terrifiant de lucidité. Qu’est-ce qui commande à cet effet pervers, tel que la gauche est bloquée dans la dénonciation, alors que Le Pen garde le monopole de l’énonciation ; l’un tirant tous les bénéfices du crime, et l’autre tous les effets négatifs de la récrimination ; lui s’éclatant dans le mal et la gauche s’enferrant dans le victimal ? Une vérité toute simple : en séquestrant Le Pen dans un ghetto, c’est la gauche démocratique qui s’enferme, qui se désigne comme puissance discriminatrice et s’exile dans son obsession. Elle rend automatiquement à l’autre le privilège du déni de justice. Et Le Pen ne se fait pas faute d’arguer de cette légalité républicaine à son profit, mais c’est surtout dans le prestige illégal, imaginaire, mais très profond, du persécuté, qu’il s’installe, si bien qu’il peut jouir à la fois des bénéfices de la légalité et de l’illégalité. De cet ostracisme il tire une liberté de langage, une insolence de jugement que la gauche s’interdit à elle-même. Un exemple de cette pensée magique qui tient lieu aujourd’hui de pensée politique. On reproche à Le Pen le rejet et l’exclusion des immigrés. Mais ceci est une goutte d’eau dans le processus d’exclusion sociale qui est en cours à tous niveaux (1.). Et de celui-là, de ce processus complexe et inextricable de responsabilité collective, nous sommes tous complices et victimes. Il est donc typiquement magique de conjurer ce virus qui diffracte partout en fonction même de notre “progrès” social et technique, d’exorciser cette malédiction de l’exclusion et notre impuissance face à elle dans un homme, une institution ou un groupe exécrables, quels qu’ils soient, un chancre qu’il suffirait d’opérer par ablation, alors que les métastases sont déjà partout. Le Front national ne fait que suivre les voies frayées par les métastases, avec d’autant plus de virulence qu’on croit en avoir éliminé l’abcès et que les germes diffusent alors dans tout l’organisme. Sans compter que cette projection magique envers le FN en use exactement de la même façon que lui envers les immigrés. Il faut se méfier de cette ruse de la contamination qui fait que, par simple transparence du mal, le positif se change en un virus négatif, et l’exigence de liberté en “despotisme démocratique”. Toujours cette réversibilité, cet enroulement subtil du mal, dont l’intelligence rationnelle ne se méfie pas (alors que toute la pathologie moderne nous en apprend tant au niveau du corps physique, nous n’en tenons pas compte quant au corps social). Il faut, pour rester en politique, se garder de l’idéologie et voir les choses en termes de physique sociale. Notre société démocratique, c’est la stase ; Le Pen, c’est la métastase. La société globale périt d’inertie et d’immunodéficience. Le Pen est la transcription visible de cet état viral, sa projection spectaculaire. C’est comme dans les rêves : il est la figuration burlesque, hallucinatoire, de cet état latent, de cette inertie silencieuse faite d’intégration forcée et d’exclusion systématique à doses égales. L’espoir, dans cette société, de réduire les inégalités sociales s’étant (presque) définitivement éloigné, il ne faut pas s’étonner de voir le ressentiment se déporter sur l’inégalité des races. C’est la faillite du social qui fait le succès du racial (et de toutes les autres formes de stratégies fatales). En ce sens, Le Pen est le seul analyseur sauvage de cette société. Qu’il soit à l’extrême droite n’est que la triste conséquence qu’il n’y en a plus depuis longtemps à gauche ni à l’extrême gauche. Certainement pas les juges, ni les intellectuels – seuls les immigrés, à l’extrémité inverse, seraient aussi en position d’analyseurs, mais une certaine bonne pensée les a largement récupérés. Il est le seul qui opère une réduction radicale de la distinction droite/gauche – réduction par défaut, certes, mais la critique sans appel qui en a été faite dès les années 60, et en 68, a malheureusement disparu de la vie politique. Il récupère ainsi une situation de fait que la classe politique se refuse à affronter (elle fait même tout pour l’effacer par les élections), mais dont il faudra bien un jour tirer les conséquences extrêmes. Si un jour l’imagination politique, l’exigence et la volonté politiques ont une chance de rebondir, ce ne peut être que sur la base de l’abolition radicale de cette distinction fossile qui s’est annulé et désavouée elle-même au fil des décennies, et qui ne tient plus que par la complicité dans la corruption. Distinction évanouie dans les faits, mais que par un révisionnisme incurable, on s’acharne à ressusciter, faisant ainsi de Le Pen le générateur de la seule nouvelle scène politique. Comme si tout le monde était complice pour saborder ce qu’il reste de démocratie, sans doute pour donner l’illusion rétrospective qu’elle a bien existé.Y a-t-il une possibilité de tirer les conséquences de cette situation extrême (mais originale) autrement qu’à travers le médium hallucinatoire de Le Pen, c’est-à-dire autrement que par une conjuration magique où s’épuisent toutes les énergies ? Comment ne pas succomber à cette excroissance virale de nos propres démons, sinon en reprenant en compte, au-delà de l’ordre moral et du révisionnisme démocratique, cette analyse sauvage dont Le Pen et le FN nous ont en quelque sorte dépossédés ? .1. L’exclusion elle-même, en même temps que la fracture sociale, s’est trouvée exclue par le décret de dissolution de l’Assemblée.

video : what’s in a flu shot?

the israel lobby (edition pending)

source:
http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?pid=866543
Wednesday, November 08, 2006

World Leaders & Chabad Lubavitch – What’s the Attraction?
Chabad-Lubavitch and its influence over our government leaders
http://amalekite.blogspot.com/

Newt Gingrich’s back door to the White House. by Bill Berkowitz March 3,
2007
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=181

What’s Jewish about White House spectacle?
Friday January 30, 1998. Lisa Hostein
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/7954/edition_id/150/format/html/displaystory.html

Jewish virtual library: Jews in the Bush Administration
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/bushjews.html

Sharon to Peres: “Don’t worry about American pressure; we control
America”
Occupied Jerusalem: 3 October, 2001 (IAP News)
http://www.wrmea.com/html/newsitem_s.htm

Top White House posts go to Jews By NATHAN GUTTMAN
Apr. 25, 2006 10:21 Washington
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1143498911316&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

-
-
-
-
-
-
THE LOBBY
Comment fonctionne le lobby sioniste aux USA
par Comaguer
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=COM20060910&articleId=3203

Le Procès de l’AIPAC Par James Petras CounterPunch, 7/8 janvier 2006
http://questionscritiques.free.fr/edito/CP/James_Petras/AIPAC_080106.htm

Noam Chomsky et le Lobby pro-israélien : Quatorze thèses erronées. Par James Petras
http://www.palestine-solidarite.org/debat.James_Petras.040406.htm

3 minutes, docu sur l’aide financière offerte par les US à Israël. Chomsky apporte des chiffres.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wSZO8W2mGE
(“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”)

Zionism, ‘Anti-Semitism’, Israel and its US Lobby (references)
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/category.asp?ID=37

Peut-on défier le pouvoir du lobby juif ? Assurément ; voici ce qu’il est possible de faire – by James Petras 2006-10-04
http://mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3387

Le Lobby et l’invasion du Liban par Israël : leur version des faits, et la nôtre. Par James Petras 02-09-2006
http://www.ism-france.org/news/article.php?id=5406&type=analyse&lesujet=Sionisme

Pourquoi est-ce si important de condamner Israël et le lobby juif ?
James Petras, 24 décembre 2006
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=1841&lg=fr

Un nouveau lobby pro-israélien, en remplacement de l’AIPAC
Par Amiram Barkat. 13 octobre 2006
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BAR20061013&articleId=3472

Israël – sionisme et lobby – Vigile.net
http://www.vigile.net/spip/rubrique224.html?vue=458

-
-
-
-
-
-
JIMMY CARTER
Jimmy Carter defends his new book in press conference.
part1:

part2:

-
-
-
Jimmy Carter VS AIPAC et l’apartheid en Israël

-
-
-
-
-
-
ALAN HART
Alan Hart’s book ‘Zionism: the real ennemy of the Jews’ (lecture in
Manchester, nov. 2, 2006)

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
SCOTT RITTER

Scott Ritter describes Israel’s role in shaping U.S. Foreign policy

-
-
-
-
-
-
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT

Harvard paper: “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy ” march 2006
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011

version française :
Le lobby israélien, par John Mearsheimer et Stephen Walt
http://www.ism-france.org/news/article.php?id=4470&type=analyse&lesujet=Sionisme

Press Conferences:

C-SPAN
Part 1:

Part2:

Allison Weir interviews “Israel Lobby” authors Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer.
Originally aired on INN World Report on August 31 2006

Aug. 28, 2006, John Mearsheimer’s talk at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C

What the Israel lobby wants, it too often gets. Mearsheimer and Walt
http://foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506

A Dangerous Exemption. By Zbigniew Brzezinski
http://foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3510

Mearsheimer and Walt Respond
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/logi . policy.com

******
Nancy Pelosi is a Zionist Puppet
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . v2006.html
“I’ve heard her say numerous times that the single greatest achievement
of the 20th century” was the founding of the modern state of Israel…
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_art . f723c256ca
Her speech in 2005 to AIPAC is here:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=47885
Also, see this judicial-inc article: http://judicial-inc.biz/pelosi.htmà

******
Hillary Clinton, zionist.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nQpdNpQYUo

Senator Clinton’s Remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC)
http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statemen . ?id=268474

******

Harry Reid is a Zionist Puppet
Democrats selected him to be their leader in the Senate. The Israelis
boast that his ties to Israel are nothing new:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? . 2FShowFull
Long ago he was shown to be a customer of Abramoff,
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/09/D8FLR3380.html
And now his home state makes remarks about his dishonesty:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stori . 10857.html
Photo from 2005 AIPAC:
http://www.ou.org/ncsy/photos/2005/aipac65/AIPAC.htm
******

NEOCONS
Neocons and dual loyalists Jews in Washington D.C.
http://www.conspiracyworld.com/index0067.htm

Nouvel ordre mondial : Daniel Pipes, expert de la haine
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13765.html

Le site de Daniel Pipes (celui qui a inventé l’expression: “Tous les
Musulmans ne sont pas terroristes mais tous les terroristes sont Musulmans”)
http://fr.danielpipes.org/

March 6, 2007. “As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It Gets” Meet
Eliot Cohen, Condi’s New Deputy
http://insurreccion.org/index.php?q=node/7172
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp03062007.html

NEOCON IMPERIALISIM OR APOCALYPSE NOW?
Part one By Darren Owen – Copyright 2003
http://www.heavendwellers.com/hd_neocon . se_now.htm

Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement. Prof. Kevin McDonald, The
Occidental Quarterly
Monday, 27 November 2006 http://www.ziopedia.org/content/view/2419/58/

MK Orlev presents updated list of mortal enemies of Israel MK Zevulun
Orlev hints Sheikh Ra’ed Salah may be on list of present-day Amalekites,
whom Jews are obliged to wipe out Efrat

Weiss
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/Articl . 83,00.html

From Esther to AIPAC. 2007-03-06, Israeli culture and politics is a
strange amalgam of indecisiveness; a mixture of colonial empowerment
together with Galut’s victim mentality. Zionism

is a secular product of exilic culture that cannot mature into authentic
homegrown perception, says Gilad Atzmon.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=19865

Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism, by Max Blumenthal
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/n . an_zionism

John Hagee: Who is this man working for?
. Televangelist John Hagee plans a Christian pro-Israel lobby
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor . Id=5554303
. He advocates “support” of Israel. Does that mean we must support the
wars? The Israeli policies? The money we give Israel? What does he want us
to do with Palestians?
http://www.jhm.org/support-israel.asp

Zion’s Christian Soldiers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEASNeuCbyc

Les électeurs de Bush, de l’AIPAC, les liens de Cheney avec des
organisations sionistes et autres Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Daniel
Pipes, tous des ultra sionistes extrêmement

influents, sans parler des think tanks comme l’American Entreprise
Institute, CFR, etc.
http://reopen911.online.fr/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3540
http://reopen911.online.fr/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4185
http://reopen911.online.fr/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3981
http://reopen911.online.fr/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2136
http://reopen911.online.fr/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4130

Le projet d’un « Nouveau Moyen-Orient » Plans de refonte du Moyen-Orient
par Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
http://alterinfo.net/Le-projet-d-un-Nou . a4935.html

RÉSEAU VOLTAIRE
Le nouveau mouvement pro-israélien aux Etats-Unis. Le CUFI : 50 millions
d’évangéliques pour soutenir Israël. par Thierry Meyssan
www.voltairenet.org/article142972.html

Charles Saint-Prot : « Les services secrets et les néo-conservateurs
instrumentalisent les Églises évangéliques »
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13118 . che=israel

Construction du choc des civilisations – Les Églises évangéliques et le
jeu des États-Unis dans le monde arabe, par Charles Saint-Prot
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13068 . che=israel

Le Liban comme nouvelle cible : Les néo-conservateurs et la politique du
« chaos constructeur » par Thierry Meyssan
http://www.voltairenet.org/article142364.html

Un plan pour étendre l’hégémonie US : La « Guerre des civilisations »,
par Thierry Meyssan
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14101 . brzezinski

Préparation de l’apocalypse en Israël, par Thierry Meyssan
http://www.voltairenet.org/article10859 . che=israel

L’invention de l’ennemi. Choc des civilisations : la vieille histoire du
« nouveau totalitarisme » par Cédric Housez
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14329 . che=israel

De Jean-Paul II à Benoît XVI : L’Église catholique et le projet
états-unien de « guerre des civilisations » par Thierry Meyssan
http://www.voltairenet.org/article16943 . che=israel

Le président du groupe démocrate au Congrès serait officier de
renseignement militaire israélien
http://www.voltairenet.org/article144307.html

Le rôle stratégique de Noam Chomsky et du « Monde diplomatique » par
Daniel Rey
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13985 . che=israel

Le contrôle des dégâts : Noam Chomsky et le conflit israélo-israélien,
par Jeffrey Blankfort
http://www.voltairenet.org/article142491.html

Contrairement aux théories de Chomsky, les États-Unis n’ont aucun
intérêt à soutenir Israël,
par Jeffrey Blankfort
http://www.voltairenet.org/article143143.html

Comment Chomsky a occulté l’influence du lobby pro-israélien sur la
politique des Etats-Unis, par Jeffrey Blankfort
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14314 . che=israel

Les trois versions officielles des détournements d’avion du 11 Septembre
Par David Ray Griffin | 12 septembre 2005
http://www.voltairenet.org/article12783 . che=israel

115 mensonges sur les attentats du 11 septembre Par David Ray Griffin |
3 octobre 2006
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14369 . brzezinski

Christopher Bollyn : « La première expertise scientifique sur la
destruction du World Trade Center est sur le point d’être publiée »
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13119 . che=bollyn

Complot terroriste au Royaume-Uni : que se passe-t-il vraiment ?
Par Craig Murray | Londres (Royaume-Uni) | 18 août 2006
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14310 . che=israel

Londres : terrorisme fictif, guerre réelle Par Jürgen Elsässer. Berlin,
17 août 2006
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14308 . che=israel

Attentats de Londres : Tony Blair s’oppose à toute enquête judiciaire
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14169 . che=israel

“L’Histoire cachée des caricatures de Mahomet”: l’organisateur du
concours était un sioniste. C’était une provocation calculée. par Thierry
Meyssan. 13 février 2007.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article145219.html

Pour le Hezbollah, Al Qaïda est une fabrication des Etats-Unis
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14250 . che=israel

Hamas : « Israël et les États-Unis veulent pousser les Palestiniens à
s’entretuer
»
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13956 . che=israel

Israël serait impliqué dans plusieurs attentats en Irak
http://www.voltairenet.org/article17460 . che=mossad

Brzezinski confirms that the United States can organise attacks in their
own territory
http://www.voltairenet.org/article145515.html

Le journaliste Christopher Bollyn passé à tabac à Chicago
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14314 . che=bollyn

Général Ivashov de Axis for Peace.: « Le terrorisme international
n’existe
pas »
par Général Leonid Ivashov
http://www.voltairenet.org/article13246 . che=bollyn

Mordechaï Vanunu : « C’est parce qu’Israël détient la bombe atomique
qu’il
peut pratiquer sans crainte l’apartheid » par Silvia Cattori
http://www.voltairenet.org/article12962 . che=israel

Ariel Sharon, Premier ministre israélien« La présence musulmane qui ne
cesse d’augmenter en Europe met clairement la vie des Juifs en danger » Par
Israël | 24 novembre 2003

http://www.voltairenet.org/article11252 . che=israel

Des « éléments criminels » cherchent à prendre le contrôle du Likoud,
d’après
la ministre israélienne de l’Agriculture 5 JANVIER 2004
http://www.voltairenet.org/article11744 . che=israel

Des rabbins ultra-orthodoxes dénient à Ariel Sharon le droit de céder la
Terre d’Israël, 24 juin 2003 http://www.voltairenet.org/article10154 .
che=israel

Tension militaire entre les États-Unis et la Russie
http://www.voltairenet.org/article145407.html

La guerre du Liban prépare-t-elle celle de l’Iran ? par James Petras
http://www.voltairenet.org/article14340 . che=israel

Olmert révèle que les plans de la guerre du Liban ont été arrêtés quatre
mois avant le conflit
par L’Orient le Jour 9 mars 2007
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php? . cleId=5032

CHINE
« La plus grande peur des États-Unis se concrétise : la Chine est prête
à les défier ». Par Konstantin Asmolov, 15 juin 2005
http://www.voltairenet.org/article17260 . che=israel

The Sino-American Relationship in the 21st Century and the Spectres of
1776 (1) by Terry Boardman. “The world’s future in the first half of the
21st century will be profoundly affected

by the relationship of the Atlantean giants, China [1] and America.”
http://www.monju.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/EW11.htm

Robert D. Kaplan: How We Would Fight China
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan

IRAN-RUSSIE
Zbigniew Brzezinski lance une bombe politique : Bush cherche un prétexte
pour attaquer l’Iran par Barry Grey
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php? . cleId=4684

AIPAC demands “action” on Iran – 25 Feb 2007. By GARY LEUPP
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54 . id=3510303

AIPAC Speaker Hopes US Gets Nuked After Israel Provokes War With Russia
3-8-7 http://rense.com/general75/nukedd.htm

Israeli MP predicts attack on Iran Written by Paul Lungen. Friday, 09
March 2007
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/835

À Herzliya, Israël dévoile sa stratégie contre l’Iran [Voltaire]
http://www.voltairenet.org/article145047.html

Iran General blames 911 on US and Israel
from FPF-fwd. ISNA – Iran Focus -
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/a . oryid=8511

Israël, par la voix de Netanyahou, incite les États-Unis à attaquer
l’Iran- 2006-11-22
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrctKJncSgw

Iranian “Defector” Was Israeli-CIA Spy – Iran Attack Approaches Joe
Quinn Mon, 12 Mar 2007
http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/artic . Approaches

L’Iran dans la ligne de mire d’Israël James Petras
http://www.michelcollon.info/articles.p . og=invites

CONFÉRENCE TÉHÉRAN (IRAN) SUR L’HOLOCAUSTE & DAVID DUKE
David Duke le néo-nazi est invité à CNN pour parler de la conférence
iranienne sur L’Holocauste
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7bu_kKwHHQ
Why would Blitzer allow David Duke to expose him as a Zionist agent? You
can watch it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v2f-WC4cjo
Entretien de MSNBC avec Ahmadinejad sur l’holocauste. Il est très posé
et calme, ce qui rend ses répliques encore plus dévastatrices.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykd-syzZ4ZY

IRANIAN PRESIDENT & RABBIS AGREE : ZIONISTS ARE NOT JEWS
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3okoUPKSnE0

Reportage sur la conférence sur l’Holocauste à Téhéran, Iran, le 10
décembre dernier.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRSOhVfJPQ

D.DUKE (néo-nazi)
Jewish Extremists Seek to Cover Up Role in Coming Iran War
4/27/2006
http://www.davidduke.com/general/jewish . r_537.html

World War IV Advocate, Eliot Cohen, Jumps Into the Fray!
4/5/2006
http://www.davidduke.com/general/world- . y_520.html

Is Discussing Jewish Dual Loyalty Anti-Semitic?
4/2/2006
http://www.davidduke.com/general/is-dis . c_507.html

IRAK
Israeli officer sells weapons to terrorists in Iraq
Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:44:47
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=18 . id=3510202

War on Iraq: Not oil but Israel. Written by Stephen J. Sniegoski,
Monday, 05 March 2007
www.ziopedia.org/content/view/3416/1

The war for Israel (and you thought the oil was for the U.S.)
Written by NOGW Wednesday, 20 December 2006
http://www.ziopedia.org/content/view/2775/58/

The war on Iraq: Conceived in Israel. By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI, 2003
www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm

traduction française d’un article de SOTT D’Israël à Bush via la BBC :
attaquez l’Iran sinon.
http://alterinfo.net/D-Israel-a-Bush-pa . 0aaa9e0880

The Zionist Occupation of Iraq Is the “War in Iraq” by Christopher
Bollyn 10 January 2007
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Zio . -Iraq.html

Des services secrets israéliens impliqués dans l’occupation de l’Irak -
by Christopher Bollyn – 2007-01-15
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php? . cleId=4469

MOSSAD
Israel’s Mossad: Black Ops and False Flags
http://judicial-inc.biz/False_Flags_summary.htm

Israel, the Golden Triangle and the Kennedy Assassinationby Salvador
Astucia (Dec. 2003, 2nd edition) http://www.jfkmontreal.com/jfkpage.htm

***
Londres 07/07/05 : Encore la terreur sioniste?
http://judicial-inc.biz/London_bus.htm
Netanyahu and the Israeli Links to the London Bomb Attacks
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Netanyahu777.html

The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel in 1967. www.ussliberty.org
Israel says it was an accident. Interview with the author:
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . Ennis.html
The BBC exposes the attack on USS Liberty:
http://www.untilthesunstops.org/MP/Dead . iberty.avi
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentar . ater.shtml
Low quality Real Player
. Part1 http://sf.indymedia.org/uploads/libertypart1.ram
. Part2 http://sf.indymedia.org/uploads/libertypart2.ram
High quality torrent: www.mininova.org/tor/161976
Dec 22, 2005 Wayne Kyle, about the attack on the USS Liberty.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . _Kyle.html

Mossad complicit in 1995 OKC bombing?
http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=34436
http://truthpackagemachine.blogspot.com . ossad.html

Israeli spys and technology theft
http://www.washington-report.org/backis . 604014.htm

ISRAEL 9/11 et espionage du mossad
The Israeli “art student” mystery. By Christopher Ketcham. May 7, 2002
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature . ex_np.html

May 13, 2002 by Ha`aretz (Israel) Spies, or Students?
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0513-05.htm

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of
the 9/11 Attacks? By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
http://www.counterpunch.com/ketcham03072007.html

Fox News – 911 The Israeli Connection – Carl Cameron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAoe26MaTew
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf . le7545.htm

Israeli WTC Employees Warned of Attack: Odigo says workers were warned
of attack- By Yuval Dror
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShAr . sID=/has%5

THE ISRAELI ART STUDENTS AND MOVERS STORY By Wayne Madsen
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm

DARYL BRADFORD SMITH
Pourquoi croyons-nous que les sionistes sont le cerveau de l’attaque du
11 septembre ?
Christopher Bollyn
http://www.alterinfo.net/Pourquoi-croyo . a5296.html

9/11:Why do we blame Zionists?
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . mmary.html

Daryl Bradford Smith: videos exposing Zionism
http://www.iamthewitness.com/HowToHelp.html

Who are the Zionists?
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . repare.htm

All D.B.S. Audio interviews
http://www.iamthewitness.com/ByPerson.html

Rahm Emanuel’s Dirty Secret
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Emanuel.html

Exposing the criminal zionist network
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-ExposeThem.html

Netanyahu and the Israeli Links to the London Bomb Attacks
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Netanyahu777.html

televangelist John Hagee plans a Christian pro-Israel lobby to be more
powerful than AIPAC
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . r2006.html

attack on Christianity by Jews. Bush pictured with Jewish cap on top of
head
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . c2006.html

CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN
Récente entrevue audio avec Christopher Bollyn:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.a . w_id=14314

All Bollyn articles
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/columnist.asp?ID=6

Why Did Iron Boil in the Rubble of the World Trade Center? by
Christopher Bollyn 6 May 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-ProfCahill.html

Were DU Missiles used on the World Trade Center? by Christopher Bollyn
23 October 2004
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-DU-Missiles.html

Who put the thermate in the WTC? Bollyn
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Thermate-WTC.html

Les avions du 11 septembre sont rentrés directement dans les salles
informatiques sécurisées des deux tours par Christopher Bollyn
http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php? . cleId=4499
9/11 Planes Flew Directly into Secure Computer Rooms in Both Towers by
Christopher Bollyn 11 January 2007
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Fuji-WTC.html

Bollyn interviews Stanley Praimnath, a survivor of the 9/11 attack on
the 81st floor of the South Tower. Sunday, 28 Jan 2007 AUDIO
http://www.iamthewitness.com/mp3/Bollyn . imnath.mp3
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Sta . mnath.html

September 11th 5-year Anniversary Special with Christopher Bollyn and
Eric Hufschmid
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . p2006.html

9-11 Through the Eyes of an American Skeptic – Christopher Bollyn
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn_intro-to-911.html

Is MITRE Corp. the Trojan Horse of 9/11? 1 April 2005
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-MITRE.html

How Mossad Deceived the U.S. Military on 9/11 1 April 2005
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Ptech.html

Le lien au 911 du premier ministre d’Israel (Olmert), Christopher Bollyn
http://www.alterinfo.net/Le-lien-au-911 . a5275.html

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Connection to 9/11 – by Christopher Bollyn.
22 December 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Olm . c2006.html

Ehud Olmert’s Ties to 9/11. ChristopherBollyn 18 June 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Olmert-911.html

Le gang criminel du Likoud derrière le 9/11 et la guerre contre le
terrorisme.
Par Christopher Bollyn, le 23 décembre 2006
http://www.alterinfo.net/Le-gang-crimin . 8dcf054e22

The Likud Criminal Gang Behind 9/11 and the War on Terror – by
Christopher Bollyn. 23 December 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Olm . c2006.html

THE 9/11 GANG: Exposing the Criminal Zionist Network Behind 9/11 and the
“War on Terror”- by Christopher Bollyn. 7 December 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-ExposeThem.html

ARIEL SHARON – The Terrorist Mastermind Behind 9-11? by Christopher
Bollyn 13 January 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Ariel-Sharon.html

Daryl Bradford Smith interviews Christopher Bollyn: Bollyn exposes Rahm
Emanuel’s family as hard core Zionists. Rahm Emanuel belongs to a hard-core
Zionist family from Israel that was

part of the terrorist gang called Irgun.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . v2006.html

MOSSAD: The Israeli Connection to 9/11, by Christopher Bollyn. 7 April
2005
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-mossad-911.html

The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Kobi-Alexander.html

9/11: What Did Rupert Murdoch Know? By Christopher Bollyn Friday, 3
October 2003
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Mur . nyahu.html

9-11: Controlling the Message, Christopher Bollyn. 19 May 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-9-1 . ssage.html

The Zionist Network shaping how Americans view 9/11 Christopher Bollyn
25 May 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-9-1 . Media.html

Are Zionists Behind Banning of Truthful 9/11 Scientist? by Christopher
Bollyn. September 18, 2006
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? . cleId=3267

Revealing 9-11 Stock Trades Could Expose The Terrorist Masterminds. by
Christopher Bollyn, December 18, 2004
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL412B.html

9/11 and Chertoff: Cousin Wrote 9/11 Propaganda For Popular Mechanics.
By Christopher Bollyn
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Che . ousin.html

Bollyn exposes Michael Chertoff family as hard-core Zionists
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . v2006.html

Controlled Press Hides Chertoff’s Israeli Roots, by Christopher Bollyn.
4 March 2005
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Chertoff_roots.html

Netanyahu and the Israeli Links to the London Bomb Attacks – Who Is
Really Behind The London Terror Bombings? by Christopher Bollyn. 31 August
2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Netanyahu777.html

Israelis Hold Keys to NSA – Critical U.S. Government and Military
Computer Networks using Israeli “Security” Software. by Christopher Bollyn,
15 June 2006
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Israel-NSA.html

The Zionist Strategy To Balkanize Iraq. By Christopher Bollyn, 3 October
2005
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Balkanize_Iraq.html

The Zionist Occupation of Iraq Is the “War in Iraq” by Christopher
Bollyn 10 January 2007
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Zio . -Iraq.html

BOLLYN INTERVIEW WITH DARYL B. SMITH
Wednesday, 28 Feb 2007
Bollyn, on his arrest, and the infiltration by Zionists.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . b2007.html
Tuesday, 6 Feb 2007
Bollyn interviews Jack Monnett, about his book, Awakening to our Awful
Situation. http://www.iamthewitness.com/Bollyn-Jack-Monnett.html
Friday, 12 Jan 2007
Bollyn and Hufschmid on Iraq, thermite, the liberals, and the deception
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . n2007.html
Thursday, December 28
Bollyn, on the Israeli involvement with 9/11 and the Cleveland
connection. http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . c2006.html
Sunday, December 3
Christopher Bollyn, exposes Jeffrey Feltman and the Zionist plans for
“Balkanization”. http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . c2006.html
Wednesday, October 11
Hufschmid and Bollyn, on the suspicious reasons Bollyn was fired.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/Hufschmid_ . t2006.html
Wednesday, Aug 30
Christopher Bollyn, on the Israelis involved in 9/11.
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . g2006.html
Thursday, May 18
Christopher Bollyn, on how the Zionists are controlling the 9/11
message. http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . Simon.html
Thursday, May 11
Christopher Bollyn, on the news reports of Flight 93 landing in
Cleveland, and how Zionists are masterminds of 9/11
http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradf . ollyn.html

oct 31 2009 update:
Israelis at center of ecstasy drug trade

a foster parent speaks out

“What I experience is a system that is about power, control and hate”

a foster parent speaks out

Mary Callahan is an author of two books, an emergency room nurse, and a foster parent in Maine, a state forced to confront the failures of what was then its Department of Human Services (DHS) when five-year-old Logan Marr was taken from her mother, Christie, only to die in foster care, bound to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape. The foster mother was convicted of manslaughter.

As new leadership faced up to the problems in Maine, Mary Callahan became a respected voice for reform. Callahan was invited to give a presentation to an Advisory Commission working on restructuring human services in Maine. That restructuring now is complete, and there have been dramatic improvements since Callahan gave this presentation, on August 7, 2003. It is reprinted with permission.

_______________________________________________

My name is Mary Callahan. I am a mother, a foster mother, and a nurse. Some of you are already familiar with me from the opinion pieces and letters to the editor I’ve had in the papers. Some of you have even read the book I wrote on my experiences as a foster parent in Maine. And some of you are saying to yourself, “Here it comes again, Mary Callahan and more of her crazy stories.”
I know exactly how you feel. I felt the same way for the first two years I was doing foster care when I had to deal with the birth parents of Marie. Every time there was a case review, they would wait for me in the parking lot afterwards to plead their case.
It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. They tried to tell me that DHS lied about them, that DHS tricked them, even that DHS forced them to say things to their kids that they didn’t want to say. I wanted to tell them it was time to start taking responsibility for their own actions.
Then I found out they were telling the truth. The case worker, who was leaving his job, admitted to me that everything the parents said was true, and most of what I had been told about them was fiction, made up by the worker before him who hated the dad and was determined to see him lose his kids.
This would be bad enough if it stood alone. But I knew what had happened to Marie since she came into foster care. That’s when the real abuse began. For six years she lived in a foster home that I would describe as sadistic. She came to me malnourished and reading four years below grade level, thanks to the constant stress she was under. People outside the system are horrified by her story. The people I went to within the system looked blankly at me and waited for me to tell them something they didn’t already know.

That was my first clue that the Child Welfare System in Maine isn’t really about the welfare of children.
By the time I wrote my first letter to the editor, I was convinced of that. I wrote that the system should be torn down and rebuilt “from the vision on up,” and I still believe it. You may think their vision is to keep children safe. In reality the vision is to keep children safe from those horrible parents that we hate. Sometimes it is those horrible foster parents that we hate.
The emphasis on hating parents instead of caring about children was never clearer than at the foster parent workshop I attended where a speaker was introduced as The Terminator because of the record she had set in terminating parental rights. They didn’t say, “She freed this many children for adoption.” That might have been an even bigger, more impressive number. It was how many parents she had stuck it to. And the shocking part to me was that the audience applauded.
I would have thought, in a business as delicate as this one, where the stakes are so high, that great care would be taken to prevent the hating from becoming more important than the caring, that supervisors would be constantly on the lookout for workers who let their personal biases cloud their judgment or used the families to grind their own axes. Instead the contempt for families can be spoken out loud and even applauded.
The attitude is so pervasive that it trickles down to people on the periphery of the system, like mandatory reporters. I saw an example of that in the Emergency Room recently. A family brought in their 6-year-old son because they couldn’t control him any more. He had a mental health diagnosis and was on medications, but that day he was tearing the curtains down and threatening family members with kitchen knives. I took the family back to the crisis area where, I
thought, they would talk with a social worker and come up with a plan.
A few hours later that worker came up to the triage booth with a big grin on his face. “I think we’ve got ‘em,” he told me.” “Who?” I asked.
“Those parents. I’ve been sitting with them for an hour and I counted 14 times that the child bit himself, hard.” He demonstrated.
“The parents didn’t do anything. They just looked at him. It’s a total parent/child disconnect. I think I have enough to call DHS.”
The delight in that social worker’s eyes was the same delight I saw at that workshop in The Terminator’s eyes. He was so proud of himself, but what will be the end result of his actions? If those parents manage to keep their child, they will never come to the ER for help again. They will handle their problems themselves at home. And who knows what that might mean? We are creating real child abuse when we react with blame when asked for help.
Since I started speaking out, people have come to me with their own stories. I get e-mails, phone calls and letters, and they fall into two categories. They are either professionals who have seen what I have seen and don’t know what to do about it, or they are victims.
By professionals, I mean lawyers and psychologists, even social workers who have seen terrible suffering inflicted in the name of protecting children. An example is a police officer who e-mailed me to say that he accompanied a caseworker once when children were being removed only to hear the worker tell a complete fabrication in court about what they had found when they were at the home and how the parents reacted. I got this email from a foster parent, “Would anyone out there believe how bad the foster care system is in Maine if they were not involved in it? I set out with the desire to try to help a few children while I still had the energy to do it. I never knew I would be asked to lie, look the other way when some major mistakes were made, be part of a cover-up to hide the mistakes of those who were supposed to be protecting children. I watched my children’s medical needs not be met. My voice meant nothing at team meetings. I have had 8 families in my area leave foster care in the past two years. They are good, honest people and that was the problem. They are not willing to be a part of a team that doesn’t care about the children.”
Would any of these people go public with me? No. They don’t want to become DHS’s next victims.
When I talk to people who see themselves as DHS victims, I know I am only hearing one side of the story. But I also recognize that the same factors come up over and over again, and they are things I have seen for myself. Here are those factors:

1) Lying. Everyone claims the department lied about them. I don’t doubt it any more because they have lied about me. Just one example, a foster child asked to move back with me after his kinship placement failed and was told that I said no. Now I ask you to think how that must feel to a child to be rejected by his former foster parent. He is already in the system because we have rejected his parents, now he is being personally rejected. Only he wasn’t. I would have taken him back in a second, but his DHS worker didn’t like me, so she lied to him. His next placement was told not to let him contact me because I supposedly provided drugs and alcohol for him when he lived with me.

2) Divide and conquer. Just as Christie Marr was told to cut ties with her mother, many of the people who call me say they were forced to cut ties with someone important to them. One mother claims she had to cut her father out of her life when he was terminally ill. She never knew him to hurt anybody, but the department said he had, and made her choose between him and her children.

3) The set-up. “She said to call her if I had any problems, that she would be happy to help, and when I did call, she came out with the cops and took my kids.” I’ve heard that more than once. Another set up is the parenting evaluation. Parents are told if they take it and pass, that it will help them in court. What they are not told is that 95% of the people who take that test fail. They are really taking the test just so the department will have more justification for removing children. I call it the Kiss-of-Death Parenting Eval.

4) Disrespect. Yelling seems to be acceptable behavior. When a parent or grandparent tells me that the worker yelled at them in the DHS waiting room, I believe it because I have seen it happen. I’ve been yelled at on the phone. As a nurse, I don’t even yell back when a drunk berates me in the Emergency Room. I handle it professionally because that’s what’s expected of me. They don’t seem to have the same expectation at DHS.

5) Child removal on a whim. When foster parents contact me it is usually about some child who has been removed with no warning, and apparently no grasp at all on the part of the department of how painful this is for the child. Children are like pawns in a big game, moved more easily than we would move a pet from one household to another. One foster father said he had someone come up to him and ask why he hadn’t been to the transition meetings for his foster child. He didn’t know the child was moving. What he finally found out was that the caseworker’s best friend had become a foster parent and was interested in that particular child, so she was giving her the child like some kind of a gift.

At the center of any of these situations is a power struggle. Parents think they have a certain amount of control over the
circumstances surrounding their own children. DHS workers are determined to show them they are wrong. I think we saw that on The Caseworker Files on Frontline when the statement “They’re not taking me seriously yet,” kept being repeated, until the child was finally taken.
What I experience is a system that is about power, control and hate. But you know what never comes up? Love never comes up. The only time we talk about it, we use a euphemism. When we call kids attachment disordered, we are really saying they don’t love the new parents we have given them. And we send them to therapy to fix that. We even say it is caused by a lack of bonding in the first six months of life, another strike against the birth parents. Doesn’t it seem illogical to expect kids to love someone just because we have plopped them down in their home? And even if we have given them a half a dozen sets of really lovable foster parents, doesn’t it make sense that the kids would be afraid to take the chance of loving again and losing again?
And speaking of logic, how logical is it to take a child because the parent moves too much, as we are told the department did to Logan Marr?
No one moves more than a foster child and those moves are made alone. Again, we’re leaving out the love factor. Think of your own children.

What do you think would be harder on them, moving from place to place with you, the parent they love, or losing you and everyone else in your family, then spending the rest of their childhood waiting for you to come and get them, wondering what they did to lose your love, wanting to go back and find you and ask you why. Love doesn’t seem to count for anything in this system. I spend a lot of time with the families of my foster kids now. I see how easily they fall into each others arms, the way they finish each other’s sentences, the way they accept each other for who they are and forgive each other. I’ve gotten to know the parents myself and I like them. When I went into this business I never thought I would end up saying this, but these mothers who have lost their children to foster care are no different than me. They have just had harder lives. Much harder. Many of them grew up in foster care. And now they have broken hearts on top of it because they couldn’t save their children from the same fate.

This state is littered with broken hearts. I see it in my own foster kids and their families. I hear it in the voices at the other
end of the phone. I also see it in the Emergency Room when patients come to the crisis unit sobbing because they miss their children so much, children that DHS has taken. One man was actually psychotic in his grief over losing his children, hallucinating that they were still there, looking through the house as if they were just misplaced. And his children had been gone for years. I see it at my other job too, where I teach people to live with heart and lung disease. Three, so far this year, have shared with me their secret pain, that there is a grandchild out there that they may never see again because DHS took them. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have undertaken real reform, working to keep kids with their families in all but the worst of cases and to support those families while they are going through tough times. I’ve heard some encouraging things lately, things that give me hope that Maine might be going the same way.

The news coverage on the workshop that was held last week said the department was going to work on preventing child abuse instead of reacting to it, focus on a family’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. But they also said something that frightened me. Someone said they were going to be focusing on “children who don’t get enough attention.” I would have thought it was embarrassing enough when, on Frontline’s Caseworker Files, a Maine social worker said that she thought “not paying enough attention” to a child might be the worst abuse of all. This was an absurd statement, on a program about a foster child who had been duct taped to a chair and suffocated. As a mandatory reporter for as long as there have been mandatory reporters, I can tell you that ten years ago spankings and long timeouts were not reportable offenses. They are now. We shouldn’t be surprised when the number of child abuse reports goes up at the same time that the definition has been expanded. Reports will go up again if the public can be convinced that they should report children who don’t get enough attention. How do they expect to prevent child abuse deaths if they are busy sifting through those kinds of reports and possibly taking those children into foster care? I suggest that if you see a child who doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention, give him some attention!
Letting the people who make their livings off child abuse define it sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Imagine if the health care industry worked that way. Hospitals could mandate hospitalizations for cold symptoms and then reap in the bucks. Insurance companies would just keep paying and no one would listen to the occasional voice of reason saying that there were worse infections to be caught inside the hospital and this was doing more harm than good.
We are losing the distinction between child abuse and parenting we don’t agree with, just as we have long since lost the distinction between poverty and neglect. Pity the parents who have taken on two jobs to provide for their children, to avoid being accused of neglect, only to be accused of not paying enough attention to them. They might as well just give their children to the state at birth. They can no longer win, no matter what they do.
My greatest hope for the future in Maine is Paul Vincent and the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group. They have come here to introduce Family Team Meetings to Maine, a program that brings all the players to the table before a child removal to explore and possibly choose an alternative. Hopefully this is only the beginning. He has done wonderful things in other states. If he does here what he did in Alabama, I will have gotten my wish, the foster care system will be torn down and rebuilt from the vision on up.

But even then, I will have one remaining concern. What of those hearts already broken? I said in my book that “DHS means never having to say you’re sorry.” Will that remain true? Will the powers-that-be say, “It’s too late” as Marie’s worker said to me when I asked why she wasn’t returned to her parents after he took the job and realized what had happened to her? Will the grandparents have to go to their graves with their pain and the parents keep coming to the ER when they feel like dying? Will the children keep going to bed every night asking why somebody had to be paid to love them.

Mary Callahan is the author of “Memoirs of a Baby Stealer: Lessons I’ve Learned as a Foster Mother” (Pinewoods Press: 2003),

Reprinted with permission by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202), Alexandria VA, 22314, (703) 212-2006, www.nccpr.org, (snip)
Introduction revised, November 6, 2006

This article was posted On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:46:59 -0700, by fx on the alt.conspiracy newsgroup.

source:
www.nccpr.org/reports/fosterparent.doc

html version
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:7Kd-aw1zTQAJ:www.nccpr.org/reports/fosterparent.doc+”a+foster+parent+speaks+out”&hl=fr&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=fr&client=firefox-a
or as shortened url:
http://w3t.org/u/3mmz