Last evening I attended the birthday party of a man who is one day older than me. We were each born just before the 2nd World War shattered Europe for a second time. He was born in what was then Germany (and is now Poland). I was born in England in a town which was heavily bombed by the Lutwaffe. His father and mine were soldiers on opposite sides. His home was destroyed in the war as was the one that had been my parents’ home when war commenced. His father was shot by Czech partisans in 1945 as the family tried to escape west to avoid the advancing Russians. My father, more fortunate, returned safely home. My German friend and his brother were sent back to Soviet occupied Germany but both later escaped to Austria and then to Canada. He met and married his wife – also a refugee from what is now Poland – in Canada and they moved (penniless) to California. I met him many years ago in California where he has built a thriving business. He still works a 6-day week and he and his wife have raised a law-abiding and successful family. When we meet we often talk about the war and post-war events and pull each other’s legs in a good-natured way. Like millions of other German and British people and despite two devastating wars within 30 years, we let bygones be bygones and have all moved on. This is in stark contrast to the Irish Republicans, the Palestinians and today’s African Americans, who all are determined to wallow festering in the past.
As regular visitors will know, on this website we set great store on anecdotal evidence, personal experience and common sense observation. We think these are more reliable than the propaganda that is spewed out by the Mainstream Media (MSM) and the brainwashing that now passes for education in public schools. We advise people mostly to trust their ‘lying eyes’ and totally reject the MSM’s insidious and dishonest outpourings.
And so we come to Ferguson, Missouri’s recent outbreak of racial violence, rioting and looting-and its aftermath. In this context, and for the record, my German friend arrived in the USA not only penniless, but homeless (having lost home and country), with little English and no skills, for his education was wholly disrupted by the war. For a time he lived in refugee camps. He had witnessed his father taken away to be shot, later lost contact with his mother and a sister and lived through a childhood of constant fear, violence and deprivation. Are those early experiences any less handicapping than those of today’s African Americans in Ferguson? At my friends’ birthday party there were several other Germans with similar life-stories and also a few from Hungary and Austria. Clearly he is not unique in his having carved success in the USA despite many handicaps.
The MSM has already succeeded in re-defining Ferguson’s orgy of greedy looting, reckless arson and countless other (unrecorded) crimes as a wholly understandable and justifiable protest against continual alleged police oppression. The looting and arson are now buried in the Media’s dismissive word ‘unrest’. The oft-referred-to (by the MSM and Leftist commentators) sanitizing context for the ‘unrest’ is the slavery that existed before 1865 and the following 90 years of injustice, deprivation and legal impediments that continued in the Southern States, coupled with the prejudice against Black citizens that surfaced in some Northern cities (Liberal Boston being a prime example) as a new wave of Blacks moved North for jobs. At least since the 1920’s many American Blacks were able to acquire living standards and opportunities denied to many White people in Europe and most people in Asia. There is substantial evidence that a Black middle class developed and that in the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s America’s Black citizens had a higher ratio of intact families (father and mother married with children) than Whites. The emergence of so many musically-trained Black musicians (frequently identified on this website-see ‘Music Choice’) in the 1940’s and 1950’s is proof of prosperous and motivated parenting.
Following the 1960’s, the major impediments to further peaceful Black advancement have been the welfare system of Johnson’s Great Society, the accompanying Leftist and Feminist doctrines that underpinned the Great Society and created feckless young women and even more feckless young men, and the later moral and cultural rot that has been spewed by the ascending Media Class. Black families were the first victims of ‘judgment-less’ welfare and dysfunctional Feminism but White families have also been casualties of Leftist economic and cultural theories that have spawned irresponsibility and fatherless families. The serial night-time looters of Ferguson were almost certainly the unskilled, ignorant, amoral (unemployable), envious products of fatherless ‘families’. They were most certainly able-bodied daytime sleepers and recipients of welfare checks funded by diligent citizens like my German friend. At least some of their victims were dark-skinned Asian shopkeepers who arrived in America penniless, had language problems, had to make large cultural adjustments and work long hours. We can assume that many Asians were driven here by poverty and historic Class oppression. It is likely that few, if any, of the other businesses that were destroyed or damaged were Black-owned but we welcome correction from Leftist website visitors.
The Asian shop-worker who was attacked and robbed by the ‘gentle giant’ Michael Brown, and who has lost his job and lives in fear as a ‘snitch’, is invisible to the MSM, the Leftist academics and Black apologists who have filled the newspaper columns with rage-filled (and outrageous) attacks on Ferguson’s police force. Not a single MSM reporter or commentator has looked for, or mentioned, the victims of the looting and arson. This should be an epiphany for all those Asian/Americans who assume that their natural home is on the Left, vote Democrat and allow themselves to be lumped in with the MSM word ‘minorities’. Asian/Americans are, of course, secretly despised by Leftists and Media people, for their ability to overcome many handicaps and become socially and economically prosperous wholly undermines the MSM/Leftist narrative that African Americans are helplessly condemned by skin color and poverty to the bottom rung in America. Consequently, in events like Ferguson Asian/Americans have to be rendered invisible. It is reprehensible that not one prominent Republican politician has dared to incur Media wrath by demanding that the mob victimization of Asian/American businesses be recognized and the looters punished. Nor has one Republican politician been outspoken on behalf of police officer Wilson, who has been grievously condemned and victimized without any supporting facts and without a trial.
The dispatch of some 40 FBI agents to Ferguson should also have led to publicly-expressed outrage by Republicans. Holder’s racist Justice Department has no Constitutional authority for interfering in the business of that town without an invitation from its local government. What is even worse is that the pretext for interference is not the many real crimes committed by rioters –that are seemingly going uninvestigated and unpunished- but the as-yet unfinished investigation of a policeman’s shooting of a criminal in a violent confrontation. The 40 FBI agents that Holder has unleashed on the town are not about to search for stolen goods, evidence against arsonists and ringleaders of rioting but are engaged in a racially- partisan quest for complaints against the police force. With MSM help, and the arrival of long-discredited race-hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton, the American public has been persuaded that nights of rioting and looting by mobs are evidence of police maleficence.
It has long been clear to this website that Holder’s Justice Department has become the Obama Government organ for acts of suppression and oppression and racial revenge. How brazen of this Revolutionary government that at a time when the threat of terrorism has law-abiding citizens lining up at airports to be strip-searched, borders are unguarded and the streets of major cities like Chicago witnessing open gang warfare, 40 FBI agents can be sent on a fishing expedition in Ferguson. Yet no elected Republican dares to protest for fear of being cast by the MSM as a racist. This is one more example that we are living in an Alice-in-Wonderland America of Revolution when commonsense and normal count for nothing.
The Obama Government has quite deliberately and blatantly stoked racial unrest, consequently any chance of progress of Black integration into the America mainstream is fast disappearing. The MSM and website articles by supposedly educated Black writers and leaders are depressing for their amazing inability to respect facts and be objective. The writers dismiss Michael Brown’s caught-on-camera brazen violent robbery as ‘shop-lifting’, and as of no consequence. Is this the way Black America’s educated people view crime? We might expect the riff-raff who loot and burn to view robbery as inconsequential, but surely not serious writers, some of whom are professors. Are they so racially prejudiced that they cannot rise above emotion and respect facts, due process etc, for they are revealing either prejudice or ignorance for the rest of us to see? None of them even acknowledge the criminality of burning and looting by the people they are defending. Several report as fact that Brown was surrendering when shot, when as yet there is not a jot of evidence that this was so. None find it remarkable that no other American racial group commits a similar number of crimes per head, or riots, burns and loots. Another recurring theme in their writing is that Brown is one more harmless Black young man, along with Trayvon Martin and others from the past, who has been ‘executed’ by White policemen. This despite the fact that George Zimmerman was neither a policeman nor white and that a jury found him ‘not guilty’ of any crime. Indeed the evidence presented in Court indicated that Zimmerman was doing his job and was attacked and fighting for his life. Trayvon Martin, like Michael Brown, was clearly no poster boy for any cause seeking to prove unwarranted racial victimization.
Obama and Holder are revolutionaries representing a new governing revolutionary Class, so stoking racial unrest and undermining America’s social stability is their goal. On this website we suspect that they, many Leftist comrades and their Media Class masters, might welcome a social breakdown along race lines that would justify draconian measures by the Government, with Martial Law, disarmament of the people and an end to free speech, and all this before 2016. There are Black American citizens who are fully integrated and prosperous and they get little acknowledgment from the MSM for, like the Asian Americans who lost property in Ferguson they do not support the narrative of victimization. These are Black citizens who have intermarried, fled Black communities and would not dare to walk those streets at night.
There is much more that could be said on this website but though Obama calls for a dialogue on race relations between Blacks and all others, the latest Media uproar over some rational observations (not views but mere observations!) by the Jewish Atlanta Hawks owner, Bruce Levenson, shows the call is fraudulent. As Levenson gallops to sell his stake, grovels and prepares for re-education, we learn that his offence was that several years ago he wrote to some colleagues in private that he thought the absence of White (and other races presumably, though not said) fans on the terraces and in the bars was because the fan-base was overwhelmingly Black. Presumably if some public figure mentioned, in private, that the streets of Detroit are avoided by Whites at night, he would be pilloried and rendered unemployed for making such a rational remark. Levenson’s sniveling apology is a blow, not only to America’s free speech (for if the hugely wealthy cannot express a rational view in private, what chance the rest of us?) but actually a blow to race relations, for if honest expression and facts are forbidden what can stop the slide to inter-communal violence?
Global Warming (Climate Change) Check
The weather in the UK and the USA continues to be normal for the time of year. Sea levels at Starcross on the Exe Estuary in the UK remain unchanged according to a website visitor who visits.
Music Choice
[Grant Green – Blue Note Recordings]
Grant Green was an outstanding guitar player who followed on from the great Kenny Burrell at the Blue Note recording studios. The album “Idle Moments”, recorded in 1963 under Greens name featured a sextet of jazz masters. Besides Green the sextet featured Joe Henderson (tenor), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Duke Pearson (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass) and Al Harewood (drums). Recommended is the opening tune on the album, “Idle Moments”, which was composed by Pearson. This is a slow atmospheric, ‘bluesy’ tune that is a great vehicle for Green’s thoughtful and soulful style. Absolutely adult and as Michael Savage would say – to paraphrase – ‘musical nudity required’!