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Libertarian Censorship Antiwar, Neo-Cons And My Resignation From Pravda
2/21/02 10:51:11 AM Discuss this story in the forum Column By Bill White
My Column -- My Column -- "Effective immediately please recognize my resignation as corporate officer for Pravda in the USA. I expect my name to be struck from all relevant material. As is clear from the letter I've just sent you . I am discontinuing my column with Pravda ..."
And with that February 18, 2002, letter, I left my brief four month jaunt as Washington Correspondent for Russia's largest English-language news publication. In that short time, I had written more than three hundreds pages - somewhere around 86,000 words - enough that the collection of my columns that I am planning for a book (and actively seeking a publisher for) is more than enough material to meet the need. But why did I leave? I hadn't been "forced out", as some have stated, but I was asked to tone things down. As my editor, Inna Novikova, wrote:
"If you are ready to inform us about ALL WIDE POLITICAL life in USA and present ALL points of view, ALL positions as a balanced journalist, you are welcome. If you want to use PRAVDA.Ru as a tribune for your ideas, we can not afford to lose our image and to post your articles ."
This coming from an organization run by a National Bolshevik third-positionist tendency within the Russian Communist Party, who told me, on my retainer, that they were a "red-brown" "communist-fascist / communist-nationalist" organization that wanted to promote anti-imperialism, libertarianism and Constitutionalism in the United States in order to weaken the US role as imperial superpower. Though I didn't agree with their personal politics, their program for America - limited government, an end to war, and the restoration of civil rights and the Constitution, sounded fine to me - and I agreed to write for them on the condition that I would have editorial discretion and there would be no interference in my expression of my personal political ideas. They agreed - and I agreed to do it without a salary (Russian journalists make $300 a month. I make $2000 a week from my 40-hour day job. I told them to save the cash.)
So I wrote - 4000-ish words a week - ballooning up to 6500 words for my last article, on Stephen Schwartz - and my column quickly became the most popular item on the Pravda.ru website - and the most popular item among the American readership I brought with me. Of their 1.5 million monthly visitors, between 200,000 and 250,000 people - only slightly more than regularly visit my website, http://www.overthrow.com -- were reading my column weekly. And much to the distress of neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and neo-libertarian organizations (and why not "neo-" libertarian, since "neo-" before a political name seems to generally denote Jewish or "Judaeo-Christian"?), my column was building a bridge - being read by the left and the right - and causing serious difficulties for groups like Anti-Racist Action, talking heads like David Horowitz and Stephen Schwartz, and hack writers like Kevin Coogan and Michael Reynolds, all of whom were finding that the pap they tried to spread, from conspiracy theories about Wahabbi Muslims to conspiracy theories about an alleged Nazi-Black Block alliance, were starting to be met with the laughter and derision they deserved.
But one of the things about challenging the ruling class, and the people whom the powerful are using to achieve their ends, is that there's a reason they call these people "ruling" and "powerful" - they can make your life hard when you do it. They can't make my life hard, mind you - I am personally pretty isolated against their power plays - but they can barrage a publication that carries me with letters and with threats - though in the case of Pravda, the threats had to be pretty vague, as the biggest advertiser was the People's Daily, English-language newspaper of the Chinese government, and I doubt (seriously doubt) the Chinese would pay much attention to a neo-con demand to pull that account.
Libertarian Censorship
So what happened was that Pravda was barraged by angry, whiny letters from folk like Antiwar.com's Eric Garris, who, after telling me that Justin Raimondo was one-quarter Jewish and asking me to include it in my article on the Center for Libertarian Studies (of which he was given a draft copy beforehand for approval), had the audacity to write to Novikova, stating:
"[Bill White] is saying, that because I and my colleagues are Jewish, that non- Jewish White readers are alienated. In fact, we do not push our religion. In order to prove his point, he even states that some of our non-Jewish members [like Raimondo] are Jewish."
But when asked to comment on the draft, Garris had written to me to say:
"I don't really have a problem with being identified with a significant Jewish influence"
and, more to the point
"Also, our current assistant Webmaster, Sam Koritz, is Jewish. We have just hired a second assistant, Jeremy Sapienza, who is half-Jewish (Jewish law would say all Jewish, since his mother is). Justin is also one-quarter Jewish"
So you can imagine my shock when I saw his letter.
Soon Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo were joining in, bombarding my editor with hate-filled, angry letters threatening doom and destruction if Pravda didn't pull my pieces. As my editor, Justin Cowgill, wrote to me just before I resigned:
"I must inform you that various "libertarian" groups have been putting pressure on Inna regarding your columns. Eric Garris will no longer cooperate with us. Raimondo and Rockwell have written very angry letters. I imagine that this has something to do with Horowitz."
Horowitz?!? Yes, David Horowitz. Having lost the battle against me on the Center for Libertarian Studies article, the CLC had decided to put aside their long-standing feud with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, National Review, and the Weekly Standard, and write several letters on behalf of both David Horowitz and Stephen Schwartz, both of whom had been targets of my recent columns. In a published response to a column Horowitz had written about me and circulated without a title by email (I entitled it "Bill White is an Asshole") I had stated:
"Note that [Horowitz's] response is a typical Jewish method of argumentation. He asserts his position, without evidence, provides evidence which generally contradicts his position, asserts that there is no contradiction, and then insults people he perceives as disagreeing with him."
And in my column on Schwartz I'd written:
"[Schwartz] is alone the stereotype of what has happened to America's publishing and media industry as it has collapsed under the weight of Jewish censorship and Israeli lobby interests - any Jew, no matter how wacky, is being allowed to print any insane and degrading nonsense he pleases, while all non- Jews, no matter how reasonable and well-researched their arguments, are being denied a platform for their principles."
So what had Raimondo and Rockwell objected to, since Raimondo himself has repeatedly printed columns denouncing Schwartz as wacky - columns which I cited repeatedly in my article? Their objection was that their criticisms of Schwartz and Horowitz were the only legitimate criticisms, and that criticisms stating that Schwartz's and Horowitz's Jewish identity was a factor in their beliefs were by definition not legitimate. In short, they stated that their role in society is to be a controlled opposition to the alleged "excesses" of the neo-conservatives – that they were ideological guardians who make sure that illegitimate criticisms which threaten their collective interests as members of the Jewish ethnic-cultural construct, are not heard. To them, this role as guardian of the public morals is more important than any other political objective they held, up to and including discrediting and disrupting the influence of the war-mongers.
My ideology of Libertarian Socialism - a radical decentralization and spiritual renewal that stands in stark contrast to their atomizing and destabilizing dogmatic individuation (and not individualism) - is something they had never understood. Garris, I know, often referred to me as a "collectivist", a term which of course applies to me not at all but to those who, like Garris, put the interests of their collective ethnic construct above all other concerns.
As Evola stated in his Men Among The Ruins:
"Freedom must be understood and defended in the same qualitative and differentiated manner as the notion of "person[-hood]" … everybody enjoys the freedom he deserves ... libertas summis infimisque aequanda, freedom out to be equally distributed above and below. ... There is no general, abstract freedom, but there are articulated freedoms conformed to one's own nature . The freedom for doing something that is connected to each one's own nature ... signifies the power to actualize one's potential and to achieve one's particular perfection . It is characterized by the Classical saying 'be yourself.'"
What Evola says is that freedom is essentially the freedom to express one's inner nature, and not a negative abstraction or limitation on the powers of government. That a man born to be a merchant for instance, who will never do anything but handle money in pursuit of profit, is not a man who is suited to be a President, a Congressman, or a leader -- and thus to give him the freedom to be such is to condemn society to be ruled by the money power; better to allow a different kind of man, one who is not concerned with material wealth, to have the freedom to rule, and leave the businessman to his business.
Such a doctrine, of course, is anathemic to the essentially alienated and dogmatic ideologies of the faux libertarian movement - whose purpose appears more and more to be staging an opposition rather than actually fighting for a renewal of principle. So rather than continue the battle on the plane of dogmatism and debate within a set of pre-approved boundaries, I did some research, and got from my readers a lot of neat stories about the CLC and what moves and has been moving them for the past decade.
Censorship, Semitism, and CIA Fronts
I am not the first, and probably will not be the last, writer that the Center for Libertarian Studies has tried, or succeeded, in silencing - though the other two were their direct employees. One of the many voices that stand out among the quieted is Gregory Pavlik, author of the infamous piece "Neo- Conservatism: A CIA Front".
Pavlik wouldn't talk to me about his relationship with Rockwell, but he came to my attention when Lew Rockwell, in a first and only move, demanded that I take Pavlik's essay off of my website, under threat of lawsuit on copyright violations. Since then several readers have sent me letters saying they are suspicious that Rockwell canned Pavlik and has tried to suppress redistribution of Pavlik’s pieces. And despite our disputes, neither Rockwell nor any other CLC member has asked that I remove any one of the other dozens of anti-war.com and lewrockwell.com articles that I have reposted and emailed out over the past two or so years. Neither have they claimed a general copyright privilege. It was only my distribution of Pavlik's piece which incensed them - though I have heard they have made similar maneuvers towards websites that have reposted Joe Sobran's "How I Was Fired By Bill Buckley."
Pavlik started his career in writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he used his newspaper column to write controversial material de-constructing black racial nationalism and its use by PC liberalism to achieve totalitarian goals. As Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate wrote in "The Shadow University":
"Pavlik described the civil rights movement as an assault against property and individual liberty, and he attacked King's political and personal ethics, seeing the latter, in particular, as a betrayal of the obligation of Christian clerics to "set a moral standard as consecrated ministers of God" … He claimed that the Onyx Society, an exclusively black honors organization, had hazed its blindfolded initiates in the residential Quadrangle at 2:30 A.M. and had thrown eggs at Quad windows … Members of Onyx [had] hurled threats, eggs, and anti- white slogans at the awakened residents of the Quad. The University, Pavlik charged, had treated the event as an outrageous act of bigotry against blacks, instead of punishing the Onyx Society for hazing and for violations of the code of conduct -- standards to which white fraternities were held."
Pavlik stirred controversy with his remark. As The Shadow University tells us:
"Pavlik's columns elicited an outpouring of both substantive criticism and assaults upon his character ... Pavlik [was denounced] as "racist," and they pronounced "his written attempts to discriminate" intolerable. "Hiding beyond the delicate laws of freedom of speech" gave him no right "to slander, demean, harass, and incite violence in those who don't share a Eurocentric upbringing." The words were carefully chosen, because "harassment" and "demeaning" individuals on grounds of race constituted violations of Penn's judicial code ... On March 2, the JIO, the target of his critical editorial of February 25, had awakened Greg at 9:00 A.M., by telephone, to inform him that he was under investigation for thirty-four student-initiated charges of "racial harassment" by means of his editorial columns."
But the complaints didn't get very far.
On April 1, [the University] finally wrote to Pavlik, "to inform you officially that, in light of my investigation of thirty-four complaints of possible racial harassment against you, the circumstances do not indicate that there was violation of any policy of the University. Accordingly, the investigation of the complaints against you is concluded and subsequently dismissed."
And Pavlik moved on - to the Center for Libertarian Studies and the related website free-market.net. However he became a bit too controversial there, publishing pieces such as "Ethnic Cleansing and the Germans" where he said:
"The US government bills Serbian actions in Kosovo as the worst ethnic cleansing since World War II, by which we are meant to understand the German genocide against the Jews. As we shall see, targeted persecution on the basis of ethnicity was not confined to Germany during the war, nor is Serbia guilty of the worst of offenses since the Nazis by a long margin. ... At the close of the Second World War, the Allied powers expelled fifteen million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. More than two million died as a result. The remainder were crowded together in a decimated Germany, which the Allied powers proceeded to deindustrialize, as put forward in the notorious Morgenthau plan. "
He then goes to say some things that, not surprisingly, would make the Semitically-correct hotheads at the Center for Libertarian Studies uncomfortable. And while that essay was published in 2000, Pavlik had been writing similar material since at least 1999, when excerpts from his book "Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays by John T. Flynn" were published on Ernst Zundel's Z-gram. Though what exactly occurred is not known, it seems that a break has occurred, and that Rockwell and the crew may well have worked to shut Pavlik down. Pavlik was last seen writing, politically, for V-Dare, the white-racial-interest inclined commentary site that features the works of individuals such as Sam Francis and Jared Taylor.
But regardless of the facts of the Pavlik-Rockwell dispute, which are blurry, the silent dismissal from Anti-War.com of columnist George Szamuely is much better documented. As one financial backer of the Center for Libertarian Studies, who wished to remain anonymous, told me:
"[Raimondo] said [in a conversation with my source] he planned on purging Szamuely ... Raimondo -- despite [Antiwar.com] getting serious hacking off of KLA and Nato sources when the air assaults were in full swing -- insisted on condemning Milosevic along with the war. Szameuly's line was to the effect that the people slated to replace Milosevic were all US Grade A chumps. Since the war on Milosevic had two prongs -- military AND political, it was inconsistent to push for an ouster of Milosevic, thus helping Nato's political aims -- while also condemning the war. Raimondo clearly took this personally and said quite a few demeaning things about Szamuely. He also planned to use the funds he'd free up if he got Szamuely out to pay Cockburn for his Left Coast pieces."
Cockburn (who, it has to be admitted, your humble correspondent hasn't cared for since he dismissed a friend of mine from his Counterpunch magazine), of course, who wrote bi-weekly and then monthly for Antiwar over a six month period, hasn't produced a column for Raimondo since September 20, 2001. Szamuely, a writer for the London Observer and the New York Press, filed his last column May 5, 2001. In a September 29, 2001 polemic against Szamuely, Raimondo wrote:
"But George Szamuely, far from being a dummy, is one of the best writers that we have. His columns have been a highlight of Antiwar.com, and I have personally been one of his biggest fans. Yet the degeneration of his style … is undeniable. Who, after all, uses words like "parrots" and "toadies" these days, unless they are trying to parody Pravda's polemics, circa 1933?"
And I hadn't even started to work for Pravda at the time!
Szamuely's crime had been to pen the sentence:
"It is entirely appropriate that US policymakers, their British parrots, and assorted NATO toadies are already debating the future course of Yugoslavia."
And then go on to state that NATO and Britain, under the guidance of the US, had falsified the Belgrade elections to install Kostunica and remove Milosevic - - a statement that is not on its face unreasonable, particularly given the investment they have made in the Milosevic show trial they are holding in Brussels right now.
So it is clear that Raimondo and company, known to many of their political allies as "hot heads" who fly into rages at slight provocation, have censored before - often over trite and tiny matters of political difference, in imitation of the behavior of other organizations, such the various vanguardists that compose modern Trotskyism, who often use the slightest difference in doctrinal interpretation as cause to split, in the manner of the People's Party of Judaea and the Judaean's People's Party, into infinitesimally small fractions and tendencies.
Anti-Racist Action And My "Meanness"
Unfortunately, while we were in the middle of this dispute, the group Anti- Racist Action, infuriated at my negative portrayal of their recent actions, such dragging white people at random from their cars and beating them during the York, PA race riots, circulated an essay by Mark Salotte claiming that I was a "racist" and "Nazi" threat that should be treated as a future victim of their sociopathic crime wave. As Salotte wrote:
"Despite Bill White's apparent organizational and ideological independence from the neo-Nazi movement, he should be seen and treated as an integral part of their scene."
What that means for an organization who believes they have a right to commit crimes against "neo-Nazis", is that because I have written material criticizing the anti-white racist violence they engage in, they believe they have the right to use violence to suppress my words.
Now of course this essay was met with an immediate libel suit, which I filed in Montgomery County's District Court the same day. It wasn't just the threats that were involved, but the entire material was wrapped in a phony "biography", claiming I was a child molester and accusing me of crimes that had never occurred, complete with alleged quotations, fabricated out of whole cloth, asserting that I believe in and support violence against Jews and members of racial and religious minorities. As I told the press the next day:
"What they are saying, that I advocate violence against anyone based on their membership in a religious or racial minority, is such a negation of who I am and what I believe that I cannot understand the depth of malice required for someone to print such a lie. The very idea of such a thing is abhorrent to me as a human being."
But the release was badly timed, and was circulated on the Internet, complete with detailed personal information on another person named Bill White, who apparently was barraged with phone calls at his work accusing him of being a "racist", leading to a flood of emails to Pravda from ARA at the same time that the Horowitzim and the CLC were barraging my editors with materials threatening to pull my columns. I guess when you make enough enemies, they all have to come together at some point. In any case, my Pravda editors where overwhelemed -- and apparently believed the anonymous, and mis-informed, assertions that I was "secretly" working with the National Alliance and the Ku Klux Klan (does the Ku Klux Klan even exist any more?") to take over Pravda and do -- well, whatever it is that evil folk do. I got the aforementioned letter, from Inna, responding to the ARA article (which she didn't mention to me – allowing me instead to discover it on my own), and stating:
"We do not want PRAVDA.Ru to be mentioned in your discussions about with your friends and opponents. We are a foreign newspaper and it looks extremely strange that we have so radical position on the questions of domestic political movements in your country."
But it was only day after I filed my lawsuit, naming Mark Salotte, the Claustrophobia Collective, and Anti-Racist Action as co-defendants, when I received the following email from Salotte's comrade Chuck "Chuck0" Munson, webmaster of Infoshop.org, admitting the report was a deliberate series of lies which were justified because I am “mean.” According to Munson's email, entitled "I Hate You":
"Why do you have to be so MEAN to people? . Why do you think Mark told those lies about you? He's tired of you making fun of him, just like I am! Why can't you try being NICE to people for once in your life! I'm tired of you and your crap .. You need to leave me and my friends alone ... Don't even THINK of showing this to anyone."
Of course, they can drag people from their trucks and cars, hit them with bricks and sticks, start riots and generally trash entire towns, but when I criticize them for doing so, I become the “mean” one, while they are perfectly innocent.
But the key there is that Salotte lied - and even Munson, who "hates" me, has to admit it. No serious person think that I'm a "racist" or a "Nazi", or that I want to inflict violence against Jews or blacks or anyone else, but when I hurt these white, petty bourgeois, middle class people’s feelings, because they have hurt other people and other people’s property, their self-absorbed narcissistic life-of-comfort ethics demand that anything that disturbs them becomes free game for any outrageous act of libel, violence, or destruction that they can invent. It is an imitation of the moral principle that defines their privileged lives of comfort and decadence in the ruling class system, and is a mimicry of the unethical behavior of the ruling class -- the ruling class sees entire countries whose leaders they dislike, and feels justified in destroying them; their children in ARA see entire ways of thinking, and do the same thing.
And when called on it, how did they respond? Columbus ARA, in their youthful hubris, stated that I "would never" be able to sue them because:
"Where does Mark Salotte live? Where are you going to go to hand them their summons? What monetary damages has this 'slander' cost you?"
But of course placing someone in danger of being a victim of a crime is tortable, and a summons has been sent, so Salotte must not be as invisible as he seems. Columbus ARA, in similar hubris, then threatened me on Indymedia.org, knowing the entire time that I was only defending myself against deliberate lies. They stated:
"In order to strengthen Mark's defense, we will use discovery motions to bring everything you have ever written in front of the court. That means that Sherriffs deputies will come to your house with shotguns and warrants and take your filing cabinets and computers to our lawyers office. I wonder what we will find in them. You could always refuse to turn over this information, but the then the suit will be dismissed. "
Putting aside the fact that, for a variety of not-so-technical legal reasons, such as that discovery and pre-trial motions are barred in small tort cases of the type I've filed, the statement was a just a continuance of the same kind of "we can do what we like and you are not ALLOWED [stamp foot] to argue" type of temper tantrum-throwing mentality that underlies ARA's politics. Is the law, for ARA, just another aid for them to use in their campaign of violence against their political opponents? And should ARA be reveling in the thought of using police-state terror to enforce their political will? But of course inflicting state-like terror and violence, while shouting ridiculous and hypocritical slogans about "revolution" and "the workers" to make them appearanti-statist, seems to be all ARA is about.
Conclusions
What we are seeing, from the allegedly most "extreme" elements of the libertarian and anarchist movements, is the same kind of censorship, hatred, and smear campaigns that characterize the bourgeoisie and the current rule enforced by the powers that control the federal government. Though both the Center for Libertarian Studies and Anti-Racist Action like to talk about the "freedom" and "liberty" they defend, ultimately what each one of them seeks is their freedom and privilege to live in a world where ideas, associations, politics and people who upset them can be driven out and shut down through extra-legal violence, political pressure, and economic threats. As Evola says, in discussing "libertarian" ideas:
"This kind of freedom could approximately be realized in the system in which the social question is resolved in such a way as to guarantee special privileges for a small group, at the cost of total subjugation of everybody else. If carried to its extremes, the figure of a tyrant would then be the most perfect concretization of this concept or ideal of formless freedom."
But of course, if we look at where these political movements emerge - from the political aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie and the disaffected, but subservient, children of the middle class - we can see how, in the name of their freedom, these rootless intellectuals and their malignant children can take to the streets to strip real freedom away from everyone else. In their world, the cops and the courts play a dual role - they are opponents when these so called "anarchists" and "libertarians" see them restraining their freedom to directly apply physical violence to others - but they are a necessary protector when their opponents decide to directly apply physical violence to them.
It is a shame that the staff at Pravda fear that "something" might happen to them if these people, who are quick to proclaim their self-importance, continue to be upset by that "mean" writer who exposes them for the frauds they are.
With a history of censorship and a desire to create a state-besides-the-state founded on demagoguery and mob rule, these elements, by subverting the revolution and turning it into an essentially counter-revolutionary force, mislead the masses of the people and create a situation where the ideals they pretend to stand for became tarnished by the evil acts of their morally insufficient representatives. As Evola writes:
"[A tactic of the occult war] is the deliberate misidentification of a principle with its representatives. When the representatives of a given principle become unworthy of it, the criticism of them extends immediately to the principle itself and is especially directed against it."
And what is endangered by continuing to allow such men to dominate commentary is that the principles they stand for themselves may become as degraded as they are, just as the principle of socialism was forever tarnished when appropriated by the Bolsheviks and used to implement tyrannical and anti-working class governments in Russia, then Asia, then Africa, and Eastern Europe. What is needed instead is for men to stand up among the ruins and to begin to stand for the true manifestation of the principle, in opposition to its lesser representatives, and to simply refuse to cooperate, collaborate, or negotiate with the principles of subversion, despite the potential negative material results they may be threatened with.
What will be discovered is that nine times out of ten the subversives are too weak to achieve what they want except by manipulating those who stand outside them. When they run out of those others to manipulate, they are as impotent and rotten as their politics suggest.
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