Jesus by Terry Eagleton

Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful.

Jesus thought that the end of the world was just around the corner and the morality he preached- not the kind one associates with chartered accountants or oil executives- was reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow.

The non-God or anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes and graven images of all kinds- gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies and the like. You shall know God for who he is when you see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent away empty handed. Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out to be not a matter of cult, law, ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, of slaughtering animals or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.

There is nothing heroic about the New Testament at all. Jesus is a sick joke of a savior. Messiahs are not born in stables. They are high-born, heroic warriors who will lead the nation into battles against its enemies. They do not reject weapons of destruction, enter the national capital riding on donkeys, or get themselves strung up.

Christianity is all rather disappointingly materialist, unglamorous and prosaic. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" is a notoriously enigmatic injunction; but whatever it means, it is unlikely to mean that religion is one thing whereas politics is another, a peculiarly modern prejudice if there ever was one. Any devout Jew of Jesus's time would have known that the things that are God's include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high-and-mighty. The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, Pharisees, and right-wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but flamboyantly unrighteous- who either live in chronic transgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not rub their noses in it.

For Christian teaching, God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed as the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the Law. Which is to say that those who are faithful to God's law of justice and compassion will be done away with by the state. If you don't love, you're dead, and if you do, they'll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety. Here is the fantasy and escapism that the hard-headed secularist pragmatist finds so distasteful.

Freud saw religion as a mitigation of the harshness of the human condition but it would surely be at least as plausible to claim that what we call reality is a mitigation of the Gospel's ruthless demands, which include such agreeable acts of escapism as being ready to lay down your life for a total stranger. Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable. The death is the consummation of the life, the place where the ultimate meaning of Jesus's self-giving is revealed.

The only authentic image of this violently loving God is a tortured and executed political criminal, who dies in an act of solidarity with the destitute and dispossessed- the shit of the earth- the scum and refuse of society who constitute the cornerstone of the new form of human life known as the kingdom of God. Jesus himself is consistently presented as their representative. His death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition.

What is a stake here is not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new- of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is even now striking into this bankrupt, depasse, washed-up world ( so characterized by the prevalence of greed, idolatry and delusion, the depth of our instinct to dominate and possess, the dull persistence of injustice and exploitation, the chronic anxiety which leads us to hate, maim, and exploit, along with the sickness, suffering and despair which Jesus associates with evil; what Christianity knows as original sin.) No middle ground is permitted here: the choice between justice and the powers of this world is stark and absolute, a matter of fundamental conflict and antithesis. What is at issue is a slashing sword, not peace, consensus and negotiation.

The Real New India by Arundhati Roy

It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire was called the Committee for Union and Progress. "Union" (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and "Progress" ( economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy possibly be poised on the verge of genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and at this point in time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and dying has already begun.


It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the government of India turned in its membership in the Nonaligned Movement and signed up for membership in the Completely Aligned, often referring itself as the "natural ally" of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common, all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint program to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage some noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India.

The Union project offers Hindu nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital, you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Union project has been largely entrusted to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal.

The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr. K.B. Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini's, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler, too, was and is an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Godwalker, who succeeded Dr. Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.

Then:

In Hindustan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation...

All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots...The foreign races in Hindustan...may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment- not even citizen's rights.

Then again:

To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of the country of the Semitic races- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.,.. a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.

(How do you combat this kind of organized hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.)


By the year 2000, the RSS had more than sixty thousand shakhas (branches)and an army of more than four million swayamsevaks (volunteers) preaching its doctrine across India . They include India's former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the opposition L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-time Gujarat chief minister Narendra Moi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, the judiciary, and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva- the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.

But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organizations at every level of society. The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing, a women's wing, student wing and economic wing. Its front organization Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organization in the nongovernmental sector. It has thirteen thousand educational institutions with seventy thousand teachers and more than 1.7 million students.

On June 11, 1989, prime minster Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the national executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodyha. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he crisscrossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won one hundred and twenty seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center.

Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Cross the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu bomb. In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide (two thousand Moslem men, women and children massacred-many burned alive- 150,000 driven from their homes). In the election that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an over-whelming majority, ensuring complete immunity for those who had participated in the killings... India has a great tradition of granting immunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.

While the "people" were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. A new regime of privatization and liberalization resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginatively wealthy upper class and growing middle class who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation.

The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the Supreme Court, which is rapidly become a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide- a prelude perhaps to genocide. And to criticize the court is a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment.

With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced thirty million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps, resettlement colonies where, cut off from the means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market...

Evacuating the Settlements by Ami Pedahzur & Arie Perlinger

Already in late 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon started to devise a plan for the evacuation of the Jewish settlement and IDF forces from the Gaza strip. The disengagement plan also included the removal of four settlements that were located in the northern part of the West Bank (northern Samaria). At his point, Israel was still embroiled in the Second Intifada, and Sharon, similar to many other Israeli policymakers, felt that Israel, along with its military offensive, should present conciliatory steps in order to break the deadlock between the two sides and also encourage moderate Palestinians to resist prolonging the violence.

In early May 2004, the disengagement plan was approved by the Israeli government, and on October 26, 2004, the Knesset ratified the resolution. As was the case in the early 80's with the Camp David Accords, as well as a decade later after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the main resistance to the evacuation came from the settler movement and various religious Zionist streams and groups. They had organized countless rallies, demonstrations, and assemblies against he plan in order to mobilize public support. Rabbis once again insisted that the plan was an intolerable violation of the Jewish heritage and rules of the Halakha (Jewish Law) and that the evacuation had no moral or other legitimacy. The called on IDF soldiers to disobey the orders of their commanders, and some of them even urged more extreme steps such as illegal resistance. In consequence, the protest increasingly began to involve illegal activities whose intent was to disrupt the public order, such as blocking the main highways by crowding them with demonstrators or by putting sharp nails on the road. However, some of the initiatives went a step further and eventually developed into terrorist activities.

The first act of organized terrorism in response to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria came to light in early May 2005. There were three members in the cell: Rabbi Mordeci Levinstein, his brother Elitzur and a yeshiva student Avraham Levkowitz.. They had intended to pack and douse vehicles with flammable materials and ignite them near a busy interchange on the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv. It was a simple but potentially lethal plan. During the same month another daring plot by two Orthodox militants to shoot anti-tank missile at the Dome of the Rock Mosque, attack police responding to the explosions with hand grenades and then commit suicide by means of a pistol shot to the head. Just a day later Eden Natan- Zada, an Israeli army deserter, boarded bus no. 165 going from Haifa to the Arab city of Shfaram and at the end of his journey shot four of his fellow passengers to death and wounded thirteen others.

Never-the-less, the determination shown by the Israeli government in the evacuation of the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria settlements, and the fact that disengagement opponents were not able to prevent the process but at most confronted soldiers and police several hours before their eviction, sideline the news of Zada's murder spree. The overall impression was that the evacuation of the settlements was completed in a calm fashion and that Jewish terrorism was not able to rear its head once again.

About a half a year later, the government of Israel engaged in the removal of the settlers who illegally occupied structures in the settlement of Amona. Against all expectations, the confrontations between the settlers and the police during this evacuation were far more violent than those during the disengagement from Gaza. By the morning of the evacuation, it was clear that the process would encounter difficulties. The security forces learned that during the night hundreds of youths had made their way to the outpost and occupied the roofs of the buildings earmarked for destruction. In the area of the outpost itself, dozens of youth accompanied by Israeli right-wing members of parliament gathered and also tried to protest the impending evacuation.

At 10:00 A.M., police officers on horseback armed with clubs began to force their way into the outpost. The people on the roof responded with a barrage of rocks, metallic objects, and water mixed with paint. The protesters on the ground tried to prevent the manned horses from advancing towards the structures by blocking them with their own bodies. The police, who were themselves surprised by the intense response, countered with equal force and determination. They began to club the protesters. As the result of the fierce violence, more than forty police officers and demonstrators were injured at this stage of the incident. Member of Parliament Effi Eitam was hit in the head with a truncheon, and Member of Parliament Arie Eldad's hand was broken after being struck by one of the horsemen. Although some of the demonstrators tried to lie down in front of the tractor that was about to raze the buildings, by noon the police forces were able to reach the structures. Next, with the use of cranes and ladders, Special Patrol officers climbed onto the roofs and began to forcefully remove the protesters who tried to stop them and threw rocks at them. After four hours, the evacuation of all the buildings was completed; however the price was high: More than 200 were wounded, and 80 of them were members of the security forces.

The Israeli public was shocked at the violence. A doctor from the emergency room at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, where most of the injured were taken, said, "I have been working for 20 years at the emergency room and I have never seen anything like this before in my life. Terrorists in Nablus are removed with less violence than that which I saw today. I saw 14-and 15-year-old boys beaten hard; it's a miracle that none of the people I treated were injured more severely." The comanders in the field were taken aback by the violence and the need to deploy thousands of police officers. The chief of the Border Police said that for years he had not seen such ferocity: "The violence they used against the police was unlike anything we had ever seen...the police who climbed the ladders were in genuine risk of their lives. They threw boulders, rocks and pieces of iron at them."

The message that the government received at Amona was sharp as a razor. The helplessness displayed during the Gaza disengagement took the settlers completely by surprise. Up to the very last days of Israeli control of Gaza, many believed that divine intervention would halt the process. Others were afraid to confront soldiers of the army in which they themselves had served or were destined to serve. They also realized that the organization of the resistance left a lot to be desired. They had put their faith in the leaders of the veteran settlers, who had disappointed them. The events at Amona reflected the trauma they had suffered in the summer of 2005 and the degree of hate that burned in their hearts towards the government, which had cleared out strips of land dearest to them.

The events further confirmed our observation in regard to the struggle against the disengagement plan: that in the last decade a large counterculture collective has taken shape that encompasses formerly different counterculture streams. This new counterculture collective is a combination of hilltop youth, radical Jewish Zionists holding near-Kahanist ideology, Rabbi Kahane followers themselves, and various ultra-Orthodox groups, primarily from the Chabad movement. This collective is gradually detaching itself from the state, alienating itself from its symbols, heritage, and institutions, and even willing in times of crisis to act against its legitimate proxies. Based on these developments and the scenes and voices broadcast from Amona in the winter of 2006, we estimate that the soldiers and police who will be sent to evacuate settlements in the future will run into a level of violence that the State of Israel has not yet seen.

Death of John Calvin by Alister E. McGrath

By the early spring of 1564, it was obvious that Calvin was seriously ill. His attendance at the weekly Consistory meeting had become increasingly infrequent in the winter of 1563-4, reflecting the decline of his health. From the list of symptoms which he described to a group of physicians at Montpelier that year, it is possible to infer that Calvin suffered from the symptoms consistent with migraine, gout, pulmonary tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, thrombosed haemorrhoids and irritated bowel syndrome. He preached for the last time from the pulpit at Saint Pierre on the morning of Sunday 6 February. By April, it was clear that he had not much longer to live. He found breathing difficult, and was chronically short of breath. Despite this, he managed to bid farewell to the ministers of Geneva on Friday 28 April.

The Discours d'adieu aux ministres is a moving document, at times verging on the pathetic. Calvin confessed that he was, and always had been, little more than a poor and timid scholar, who had been pressed into the service of the Christian gospel. One section of the document is of especial interest; in what might at first seem little more than rambling digressions, he catalogued some of the various disasters which had befallen him during his period in Geneva. People had fired their arquebuses in front of his door, and set their dogs on him. The significance of this portion of Discours d'adieu has not been fully appreciated; Calvin is clearly influenced by the 'catalogues of hardships' found in the writings of the classical period. He would have known this literary genre through two sources; the Corinthian correspondence in the New Testament- Rudolf Bultmann characterized 1 Corinthians 4:9-13 and 2 Corinthians 4: 8-9, 6: 4-10 as Peristasenkatalogen (catalogues of difficult circumstances)- and the writings of classical moralists, such as Seneca. Hardship seems to have been a constitutive element in Calvin's concept of his calling.

Calvin died at eight o'clock on the evening of 27 May. At his own request, he was buried in a common grave, with no stone to mark his own. There was to be no personality cult based upon him at Geneva. In death, as in life, Calvin proved self-effacing. Yet with his death, his influence upon the world proved to have only begun.

Mainstreaming White Nationalism by Leonard Zeskind

Although the Goldwater and Wallace campaigns had demonstrated the possibility of a mass racist revival in the post-Jim Crow world, the Nixon presidency acted as a brake on its transformation into an autonomous movement independent of the two-party system. After the 1968 election, Nixon effectively absorbed the Wallace vote within the Republican Party ranks, thereby diminishing the chances that Wallaceites would create a permanent bastion outside the party. As noted by journalists Thomas and Mary Edsall in Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, Nixon slowed the pace of federally mandated school integration and nominated ultraconservatives southern judges to the Supreme Court. He also championed "law and order," while Vice President Agnew attacked liberals with the same vitriolic lingo previously used by Governor Wallace. But Nixon also implemented programs such as minority set-asides in construction as well as affirmative action at the same time. Much as in his diplomatic opening to the People's Republic of China, which angered onetime supporters of a more McCarthyite, anti-communist Nixon, the president co-opted and the defanged any embryonic movement based on white racial resentments outside the Republican... For white supremacists, the years 1968 to 1974 proved to be an interegnum and even after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in 74, and the United States effectively lost the Vietnam war, those elements of the far right that had supported both the war and its prosecutor were left (temporarily) adrift...

It is virtually a truism among human relations professionals that one way to smooth over America's racial fault lines is for black people and white people- indeed people of every hue and description- to live together in the same neighborhoods, eat together in the same restaurants, attended the same houses of worship, go to the same schools, and vote in the same precinct houses. In David Duke's various campaigns, however, there is evidence to the contrary. White people tend to be "tolerant"- a mealymouth term- up to a certain point. At that time, when the percentages change and white people approach minority status, they tend to run. The sociological literature on housing segregation makes that point over and over. The question that emerges from Louisiana in 1990 and 1991: What is (at least one) electoral equivalent of "white flight"? The answer appears to have been: David Duke. With all other variables being accounted for, the higher percentage of black voters in a county or metropolitan area, the higher percentage of white voters who pulled the lever for Duke. ( Conversely, in those areas with lower percentages of proximate black voters, whites tended to vote for Duke's [ more racially tolerant] opponents.)

During the weeks before the primary in 1989, Duke campaigned the old fashioned way- by knocking on doors. When voters answered, there stood a pleasant-looking earnest gentleman wearing a sportscoat and a tie while talking their talk. No scowling bigot in a white sheet or swastika armband. Duke told voters he was for "equal rights" for whites. Could he have their supports? Once they said yes, the rarely changed their minds. Could he put a DAVID DUKE FOR REPRESENTATIVE sign in their yard? Enough people said yes that his campaign gave the appearance of momentum. Politics is, after all, the grandfather of performance arts. The appearance of momentum produced momentum itself. His signs popped up on front lawns and busy intersections like mosquitoes swarming in a hot Louisiana swamp. Soon he wasn't a pest at all, but a contender. Duke was for keeping the homestead exemption on property taxes, his opponent wasn't. Duke was really against crime and the "welfare underclass". His Klan credentials proved it. His opponent was "just another pretender." Duke won and for the next three years debates raged among campaign professionals, academics, journalists, and civil rights activists over the "real" nature of voters support for Duke.

Duke had his own answer. He had beaten the president of the United States (who came to Louisiana to campaign against him) and the whole political establishment because he had vocalized what white people had privately thought, but could not say. And during the campaign he had avoided talking about those parts of his belief system that he knew were still out of bounds...


As the British historian Eric Hobsbawn had noted, anticommunism was at the core of the American biography as well. As an ideology it enshrined values, such as free enterprise and individualism, which were older and more deeply embedded than the principle of individual liberty without regard to race.. In addition, anticommunism was broadly popular as a glue binding the American people together. As such anticommunism during the Cold War period both dictated foreign policy and constituted the cornerstone of national identity.

With the end of communism, and thus of anticommunism, the question was asked: What would become of the American identity? Louis Beam and other Aryans had a ready answer. " What will now be the issue of main concern for conservative, right wingers and nationalists in the United States?" he asked in his small circulation newsletter The Seditionist. For Beam the answer was self-evident. The enemy would become the federal government in Washington, D.C., headquarters of the New World Order. "The evil empire in Moscow is no more. The evil empire in Washington D.C. must meet the same fate."

As the presidential primaries of 1992 came into view on the near horizon, a number would be challengers appeared, each hoping to replace George H.W. Bush. The post Duke Populist Party candidate blustered his way along a route of super-patriot stops and survivalist fest flops. Ross Perot railed against establishment politics while readying his own millions for a third party independent run. On the Democratic side, seven contenders vied for the public's attention. In Republican ranks, Pat Buchanan formally announced his candidacy for president, reclaiming the party's right flank for his own anti-New World Order politics.

Just week before, Buchanan had urged Republicans to adopt David Duke's issues: "The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because Duke, as a teenager, parade around in a Nazis costume to protest William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke had the same phone number last year as the Ku Klux Klan. Everybody in Metaire Co. Louisiana knew that. The way to deal with Mr. Duke is the way the GOP dealt with the far more formidable challenge of George Wallace. Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles." Buchanan believed Duke's message was "Middle Class, meritocratic, populist and nationalist".

Buchanan quickly assembled a competitive campaign apparatus. As Willis Carto's The Spotlight newsletter pointed out: he became the nerve center of white nationalism in 1992. "Any hope that Duke had of mounting an effective challenge to George Bush ended with the entrance of Pat Buchanan into the Republican race. When Duke finally withdrew from the race, he endorsed Pat Buchanan; and endorsement Buchanan formally ignored. Touting issues such as white majority dispossession he received endorsements from throughout the (but not the entire) white nationalist movement, a fact studiously under-reported in the media.

David Duke Picks Up Where He Left Off by Leonard Zeskind

In April, 2004, after paying a $10,000 fine and serving a year in jail for mail fraud and tax evasion, David Duke picked up where he last left off. At a unity conference of white nationalists, his charisma and gift for public oratory set him apart from the other speakers. He cast adherence to the cause as the most selfless devotion to humanity, and he captured the gut anxieties of average racists like no other person of his generation. And when Duke introduced fifty-seven -year-old Sam Dickson, the acerbic attorney from Atlanta, it became obvious that both men felt they were preparing for the next generation.

Dickson revisited the white nationalist movement's underlying assumptions. "Our race needs a homeland where we can be by ourselves," he said, unpopulated by Muslims, Jews, those he called "Negroes" and other unspecified people of color. Liberals, specifically white liberals, stood in the way now. Then Dickson changed course and began listing reasons for hope in the future.

One was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They had lifted the lid on the "Jewish issue," he said. For the first time anti-Semites could talk openly. Racial liberalism among whites, he argued, with its "Camelot" and "hootenannies" and Peace Corps, was a thing of the past. Those people thought they were going to turn "Ghana into Norway".", he said in a quick turn of phrase, but "nobody believes it anymore." Public opinion polls may show white support for "diversity" and desegregation, he told the crowd, but polling is about "public opinion", what you are willing to tell a stranger over the phone. Actual, privately held beliefs are more evident in the way people live. And white people will "pay $300,000 for a $75,000 home, just so they can live with other white people. Deep down, he claimed with a certain glee in his voice, they all realize "black people are hopeless."

Racial egalitarianism, according to his analysis, had rested on the prospect of seemingly unlimited economic expansion during the decades following World War Two. But the good times were over. Now, he argued, "The worse the better, let the bad times roll." Other factors were also changing. Television had once given liberalism a "media monopoly" Now the Internet provided open access to ideas of every kind. The liberal monopoly had ended, he proclaimed.

The most important change he noted that day was generational. The war against Hitler had once led white people to associate what he called "normal racial values" with Nazis, and they had been America's enemy. "The World War Two generation is being gathered unto their fathers.", he declared in triumph. With their deaths, he believed, remembrance of the fight against Hitlerism would fade. The postwar period would finally and completely end. And after stating the case for a brighter whiter future, the attorney sat down to deep and grateful applause.

In his talk that day, Dickson succinctly summarized the white nationalist case (as they understood it) for the twenty-first century. After thirty years of grassroots organizing, they had learned several of the more unsavory facts about American life. A significant number of white people, for whatever reasons, continue to buy overpriced houses just so they can live in all-white neighborhoods. Survey respondents are often less than forthright, particularly when responding to sensitive questions about race-related matters. Some white people will use racial slurs and tell jokes when talking with other white people but will not use them when talking within earshot of black people. The terms of public discussion changed sharply after World War Two and the civil rights revolution, and racism and anti-Semitism were no longer considered socially acceptable. Throughout the events described in this book, white nationalists aimed at transforming this social (and racial) discourse. And to the degree already discussed, they partially succeeded. In sum, a number of white nationalist leaders had a fairly accurate sense of the future direction of a sector of the white populace. And from this group the mainstreamers of the twenty-first century will continue to develop.

At the same time, white nationalists consistently misunderstand the larger world around them. A significant number of white people remain determined to live and live happily in a multiracial, multicultural United States. And they do not regard themselves as "race traitors",. Perhaps even more significant, black people and other people of color are not the passive objects of history. They are historical subjects in their own right. African Americans in particular had changed American life at every one of its critical junctures since the advent of New World slavery. Ideological thinkers on the white-ist side of politics remain completely blind to this aspect of the twenty-first century. And from this failure, vanguardists and Aryan killers will continue to pop up, at odds with the direction of American life.

In the future prerogatives now accruing to majority status will be challenged, as black, brown and yellow faces increasingly populate the halls of economic and political power. The presidency of Barack Obama only confirms the white nationalists notion of dispossession. And in the decades to come, the next generation of activists will seek to establish a white nation-state, with definable economic, political and racial borders, out of the wreckage they hope to create ( or is created for them) of the United States. Some will kill and bomb and shoot their supposed racial enemies. Some will run for elected office and win. They will fight for local (white) control. Failing a complete victory, they will continue the cultural battle over symbols from the past and the history of the future. And they will draw on the legacy of those who resurrected white supremacy as an autonomous movement in the 1970s and brought it into the twenty-first century.

Know-how Was in the North by Chuang Chou

When Know-how was in the north at Dark River, he climbed Mt. Concealed Rise, where he met Perfect-freedom-behavior-utterance and said, "I should like to ask you three questions: Through what sort of thinking and reflection does one come to know God? Where and in what wise does one feel secure in God? Whence and via what path does one attain to God?" Utterance did not reply. It was not so much that he did not reply; he did not know how to reply.

Know-how, unsuccessful in his questioning, left and went south of White River and climbed Mt. End-of-doubts, where he espied Mad-abandon. Know-how explained what had happened and put the same questions. The answer was, "Oh yes! I know, and will talk with you about it." Then, right at that point, he forgot what he wanted to say.


Again unsuccessful, Know-how left and went to the emperor's palace, where he was received by the Yellow Emperor, to whom he put the questions. The Yellow Emperor replied, "Thought and reflection characterized by perfect freedom initiate a knowledge of God. Dwelling and dress marked by perfect freedom initiate security in God. Acceptance of perfect freedom and travel initiate attainment of God."

" You and I know this, but those two others don't. Who is right?"

The Yellow Emperor said "Perfect-freedom-behavior utterance is really right. Mad-abandon comes close. You and I are nowhere near it. True knowledge, you know, does not speak, and the speaker does not know. That is why the sages practice wordless instruction. God cannot be made to arrive. Perfect, natural action is not something one attains. To practice the human ideal is to give approval to calculated action. To practice propriety is to give approval to defects. Ceremony abets sham. That is why we have this saying: 'Having lost God one turns to perfect, natural action. When this has been lost one turns to the human ideal. When that is lost one turns to propriety, and after that to ceremony.'

"Ceremony is God in the minutest aspect; it is also the beginning of disorder. Hence the further saying 'The man concerned with God diminishes his artificialities more and more every day.' And after these diminishings are further reduced he attains perfect-freedom-action, after which everything gets done."

"Today", continued the Yellow Emperor, " something has been made, and if you wanted to return it to its roots, would it not be quite difficult? Ease in such an undertaking is only for God's man. Life is the companion of death, and death is the beginning of life, but who knows how to untangle the problem? The birth of a human being is an amassing of breaths. While the amassing exists life goes on; when it scatters death occurs. If death and life are companions, what have I to be anxious about? The conclusion is that all creation is one."

"The marvelousness in creation is what we praise; the stenches and decayings are what we dislike. But the stenches and decayings are again transformed into the marvelous, and this in turn is again transformed into stenches and decayings. The conclusion is that one breath pervades this world of ours. That is why the sages value unity."

But Know-how was still not satisfied.

"I put the questions to Perfect-freedom-action-utterance, but he did not reply. It was not so much that he did not answer me; he did not know how to do so. Then I put the question to Mad-abandon, who wanted to tell me but did not. It is not so much that he did not tell me, but right when he wanted to, he forgot what he wanted to say. Now I have asked you. You know the answer, so why are we not close to it?"

"The first one was perfectly correct," replied the Yellow Emperor, "because he does not know. The second resembles the truth because he forgot the answer. You and I are no way near it, because we know the answer."

When Mad-abandon heard about all this, he felt that the Yellow Emperor has expressed it well.