In the post below, we explained that the revolutionary left has claimed to act in the name of aims and ends that most people agree with. To do this was one of the tactics taught by SAUL ALINSKY, the left revolutionary whose disciples, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are now President and Secretary of State respectively. His instructions required them to work their way to power through the institutions, not to flaunt their radicalism but to ‘cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within’; to start with ‘community organizing’, the role of the organizer ‘or master manipulator’ being supremely important.

A full account of his ‘blueprint for revolution’, which ‘he and his disciples euphemistically refer to as "change”’, can be found here.

President Obama now has a very big community to organize, the entire United States of America. Its citizens can only benefit by being informed about their organizer’s master and his theories. 

If you don’t know about SLAVOJ ZIZEK of Slovenia, you should, because he is dangerous.

He’s a passionate communist who thinks Lenin was the greatest hero in history. The man he seems to hate most is the former (good, courageous, altogether admirable) Czech president, Vaclav Havel.

At home in Ljubljana, Zizek is no more than a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, but further west he is more highly valued with a professorship at the European Graduate School and an appointment as international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London. Despite the extreme hostility he expresses towards the United States – or because of it – he has been a visiting professor at Princeton and numerous other American universities including Chicago, Columbia, Minnesota, Michigan, and UC Irvine.

He ran for the presidency of Slovenia in 1990, but failed. It is not, however, as an active politician that he is immediately dangerous, but as one of those intellectuals whose pernicious influence on fellow academics, and consequently on rising generations of students, do profound harm by subverting freedom and supporting tyranny. Typically, he derives pleasure from rebelling and shocking, in the irresponsible spirit of a perpetual adolescent. His fans, safe in their well-funded ivory towers, applaud him with the hideous glee of spoilt children. He is the darling of media chat shows and organs of the left such as The Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker. A characteristic ‘look at me how daring I am’ statement on TV last year in New York was: ‘Everybody in the world except US citizens should be allowed to elect the American government.’

In the style of the enfant terrible he likes to invert the values of civilization. By doing so he appears to his admirers as heroic, witty, original and profound. He is none of those things. He is brutal, blind of imagination, emotionally stunted, vicious, arrogant, and stupid in the specially obscurantist way all leftist professors of philosophy and sociology are stupid.

His chief intellectual influences – in addition to Marx and Lenin – have been members of what I call the French pandemonium, such as Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. (A pandemonium is a gathering of all demons.) Their repulsive ideas, enthusiastically endorsed and handed on by academics in America, have been given a new lease of life by late-comer Zizek, whose country had been sleeping for decades under the spell of communism. Most East Europeans woke happily in the dawn of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, and have brought new vigor to the decadent spirit of the West. But here is an intellectual who lived under the oppression of communism and yet is nostalgic for it; who idealizes cruelty and suffering, and abominates freedom – while making use of it to build a lucrative reputation as its implacable enemy.

His stardom in the academic firmament is due to his wishing even worse evils upon us than did Lacan – whose psychoanalytic therapy consisted of trying to drive his patients insane; or Foucault – who wrote of ‘the joy of torture’, longed to carry out human sacrifice, and taught that cruelty should be a perpetual condition of existence, so that life would be the experience of unmitigated pain, hate and aggression.

Zizek writes in the customarily opaque language of the left. (I think they hope that unintelligibility will be mistaken for profundity. As Nietzsche – another spreader of evil but one who could write better – once said: ‘They muddy the waters that they may seem deep’.) For example:

‘To put it simply [!]: If we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals are “living” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled with this richness; this original void, this lack of symbolic structure, is the subject.’ (The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London 1989, pp174-175.)

The only meaning I can extract from this is that if you take everything out of something, it will be empty. For this we need a philosopher?

Zizek’s appalling political ideas can with effort be discerned in his writings. They are consistent with what he admires in the acts of individuals: extreme sadism, terrorism, motiveless murder. Crime is his delight. Only crime, he feels, is ‘authentically ethical’, because it subverts the coercion of law. But this is not mere antinomianism. Zizek revels in the suffering of other people; so the more horrific the crime is, the better. He adores suicide bombing. He loved the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11; they gave him such as aesthetic thrill. America he calls ‘the enemy’. Anyone – any state, any terrorist, any traitor – who acts against America is laudable. He wants all people everywhere to live in fearful obedience to totalitarian despotism. Voluntary subordination to an ’authentic Leader’, he preaches, is ‘the highest act of freedom’. (Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, London 2001 pp246-247.)

So if you are free, the best use you can make of your freedom is to choose to be unfree. This sort of nonsense is common among academic writers of the left. But Zizek is praised for his fresh originality. In what does it lie – apart from his being even more evil than his philosophical models? It is said to be in his allusions to popular culture, especially films, and such sub-philosophical phenomena as chocolate eggs with toys in them; but Rolande Barthes (another of the French demons) did that sort of thing too. In this way they make themselves seem less esoteric; philosophers for the common man. Yet – like Lacan, who tried to be as impenetrable to his readers and audiences as possible – Zizek strives not to be understood, so that he can counter any criticism by maintaining that the critic was too dumb to grasp what he meant. He contradicts himself frequently. For instance, while he holds that torture is a splendid thing, Americans ‘torturing’ Iraqis at Abu Ghraib is deplorable.

Thinkers have been the guiding lights of civilization, but in the 20^th and 21^st centuries the intellectuals of the left have been preaching against it. Until now they claimed a pretext for doing so, insisting that the subversions they practiced, the revolutions they encouraged, the oppressions they excused, were heroic efforts on behalf of the wretched of the earth: the poor, the colonized, the dispossessed, workers, women, lunatics, prisoners, aborigines… They pretended it was all for the eventual happiness of the human race: iron heartlessness in the cause of compassion. Multitudes received their message indirectly; and because they believed in the pretext, they followed them. The evil has soaked our culture. That is why Europe is letting itself be raped by Islam; why millions cheer for Hamas and hate Israel; why the media in the US suppressed the information that a presidential candidate had spent his whole political life among communists, terrorists, and America-haters; why George W Bush was loathed for overthrowing an Arab tyrant; why universities oppose free speech; why the Greens threaten us with hellfire on earth.

But now the pretext has been dropped. Now, with Zizek, the sheath is off, the naked truth revealed. Zizek and his flock are against freedom. They are against reason. They are against happiness. They want us in anguish. They want us in chains. Thrilled by their own daring, and out of malice and egotism, they would light our way to subjugation and suffering without end.

We must grasp what Zizek is saying, however he fudges it. ‘Don’t take him seriously – he doesn’t really mean it,’ is often heard from commentators on the left when his assertions make them feel uneasy. But it is urgent and necessary that we do take him seriously, attend to his message and all that it implies for every one of us, because he is speaking for this age.

Jillian Becker

January 2009

 A report from Chad:

N’DJAMENA, 16 January 2009 (IRIN) – A government ban on charcoal in the Chadian capital N’djamena has created what one observer called “explosive” conditions as families desperately seek the means to cook. 

“As we speak women and children are on the outskirts of N’djamena scavenging for dead branches, cow dung or the occasional scrap of charcoal,” Merlin Totinon Nguébétan of the UN Human Settlements Programme (HABITAT) in Chad, told IRIN from the capital. “People cannot cook.” …

Unions and other civil society groups say the government failed to prepare the population or make alternative household fuels available when it halted all transport of charcoal and cooking wood into the capital in December in a move, officials said, to protect the environment. 

 From Power Line:

In 2007 the Islamic Society of North America was identified by the government as one of the unindicted co-conspirators of the Holy Land Foundation. (So was CAIR.) The government identified ISNA as an entity that is or was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

HLF was of course the chief fundraiser for Hamas in the United States. The government closed down HLF in the aftermath of 9/11. This past November it was convicted along with its principals of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization…

ISNA president Ingrid Mattson [a convert to Islam from Catholicism] is scheduled to join clerics offering prayers for the new president and his family during the Obama inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington…

Exhibits introduced at trial established ISNA’s intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee that devoted itself to supporting Hamas, and the HLF defendants. The prosecutor advised the court that ISNA was intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to Hamas… 

In a sense, the Obama inaugural’s inclusion of Mattson represents continuity with the Bush administration. While one arm of the government has blown the whistle on leading American Islamic groups including CAIR and ISNA, other arms of the government have treated the groups as respectable members of civil society. This is one area where change is actually called for and the status quo obtains. Mattson’s participation in the prayer service makes out that willful blindness remains the order of the day.

The chair of the United Nations Development Program, UNDP, has been taken over by – – Iran.

Claudia Rosett, who writes often and incisively to expose the evils of the self-disgraced UN, asks in a Forbes article: 

In what universe does Iran’s oil-based tyranny qualify to chair this board?

In the rest of her article, she gives reasons why Iran is not qualified to occupy this powerful position.  But in fact these are the very reasons why Iran ‘qualifies’ for it, in the world as it is today. 

Iran’s ascent to the chairmanship of the UNDP’s 36-member executive board took place last Friday, over the protests of the U.S., which broke with the U.N. custom of consensus decision-making to call for a vote. Iran won, 22 to four, with five abstentions and several board members apparently absent.

In response to my queries about this, a U.S. delegate to the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, Ambassador T. Vance McMahan, said in an e-mailed statement: "The U.S. called for a vote on the chairmanship of UNDP because we believe that Iran is not a responsible member of the international community, and should not be given a leadership role at a major UN program, even if the position is a largely ceremonial one."

But this is no purely cosmetic post. The UNDP’s own Web site includes an "Information Note," detailing the substantial responsibilities of its executive board, which oversees not only the UNDP, but also the U.N. Population Fund, or UNFPA.

The board is tasked to receive information and give guidance to the heads of these agencies, monitor performance, approve programs, decide on administrative and financial plans and budgets, recommend new initiatives and submit yearly reports to the General Assembly’s Economic and Social Council…

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran’s main entrepreneurial growth industry has been terrorism–witness Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and a bloody trail of bombings, mayhem, infiltration and subversion, from Beirut to Argentina to today’s Iraq.

At home, along with forcibly veiling its women and jailing and torturing its opposition, Iran–according to New York-based Freedom House–"is a world leader in juvenile executions."

Iran’s "development" goals include the avowed desire of its president to wipe Israel off the map and Tehran’s evident plan to develop the nuclear weapons to do it–even if that means violating five U.N. Security Council resolutions to date and seeking ways around U.N. and U.S. sanctions.

Iran takes up the UNDP gavel at a sensitive time, both for a tumultuous world and for the UNDP itself. At its first regular board session next week–while most eyes are on Obama’s inauguration in Washington–the UNDP plans to forge ahead with re-opening its office in North Korea.

That office was shut down in March 2007, as a result of the so-called Cash-for-Kim scandal, which flared up after the U.S. Mission to the U.N. raised persistent questions about UNDP misconduct in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea.

It turned out the UNDP’s Pyongyang office, in violation of its own rules, had been funneling hard cash to Kim Jong Il’s regime, storing counterfeit $100 banknotes in its office safe and, with North Korea then on the UNDP board, was using development funds to buy business class tickets for North Korean officials to attend board meetings in New York.

A report last June from a panel authorized by the UNDP itself finally confirmed–well after the fact–that the UNDP had provided North Korea with scores of dual-use technologies, meaning that equipment shipped in under the U.N. label of "development" could also be turned to military use.

A Senate subcommittee investigation, led by Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin, further discovered, as disclosed in aJanuary 2008 report, that the UNDP in North Korea had transferred funds to North Korean front entities involved in arms and nuclear proliferation networks…

 

From Zomblog:

On January 10, the war between Israel and Hamas became a global conflict. No longer confined to the Gaza Strip, the fighting spread to cities around the world: what were billed as “anti-war” demonstrations from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and beyond were in fact overtly pro-Hamas demonstrations, and on Saturday, January 10 there was an unprecedented eruption of violence and extremism in dozens of European and American cities, surpassing anything seen at anti-war rallies in recent years:

¤ In London, protesters physically attacked police officers with unrestrained abandon and no fear of arrest;
¤ In Copenhagen, Hamas supporters screamed in public that they want to kill all Jews;
¤ In Calgary, neo-Nazis marched alongside leftists and Muslim extremists, in a grand coalition of anti-Semites;
¤ In Los Angeles, a car full of Israel-supporters barely escaped serious harm when an enraged mob tried to attack them;
¤ In Duisberg (Germany), police broke into a private home and tore down a flag displaying a Star of David, to appease stone-throwing protesters;
¤ In Belfast, an Israel-owned mall kiosk was surrounded and menacingly harrassed;
…to name just a few, as you will see in the reports listed below.

One wonders: Why January 10? Was the aggression somehow coordinated among the various far-left and Islamic groups which organized the protests in each city — an attempt to “Globalize the Intifada“? Or did the simultaneous outbreak of violence and anger in several places occur naturally? We may never know. But for some reason, this particular moment in the seemingly endless battle between Israel and its neighbors has tipped the scales, and the fighting now happens not just in Gaza, but wherever in the world Hamas supporters come face to face with anyone they deem an opponent (whether those be Israel supporters or police officers). The Hamas supporters will claim that the reason for the fresh anger now is that Israel has gone too far this time, allowing too many civilian casualties and unleashing a disproportionately large response. But what seems disproportionate this time around is not the nature of the fighting in Gaza but the extent to which the media buys into the Hamas narrative, and the unchallenged propaganda coming out of the war zone.

In any case, this post is meant to be a comprehensive roundup of the many anti-Israel protests that happened on January 10, 2009. And what makes these reports especially noteworthy is that they were almost all produced by citizen journalists: In just about every city, the mainstream media failed to cover the incidents thoroughly or honestly: As protesters waved Hamas flags and screamed “Long Live Hitler,” bloggers stepped in to do the job the media wouldn’t do.

Below is a list of the outbreaks of protest violence and extremism in each location: A few videos and photos are posted here, but most of the documentation is to be found in the various links provided…

Read the rest here.

 Again the Czechs delight us.

Czech artist David Cerny has produced a work depicting his view of the member countries of the ghastly EU which should have all Europe laughing at itself, and the rest of the world laughing with it. Some are laughing, but it has aroused official fury.

Bulgaria is the angriest because it is shown as a Turkish toilet.

Holland is under water with minarets sticking out of it.

Britain is happy because it is left out.  

Read all about it here.

 From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Hollywood’s Sundance Kid is hurting poor people.

So say some East Coast ministers and conservative activists, who took to the streets in front of a downtown Salt Lake City theater on the eve of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival to accuse the actor of holding down low-income Americans with his opposition to oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah.

The protesters, led by the Congress of Racial Equality’s national spokesman Niger Innis, suggested Redford should "relinquish his wealth" and live like a poor person. They complained that the filmmaker’s anti-drilling stance could lead to higher energy prices for inner-city residents, forcing them to accept a lower standard of living.

The clergymen prayed for Redford "to see the light" and linked his environmental activism with racism.

 

 This from Canada Free Press:

Citigroup has become the principal beneficiary of the $350 million that has been spent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The megabank, thus far, has received $45 billion from Uncle Sam – – $20 billion in November and $25 billion in October. And now the firm is crying out for an additional transfusion of billions more in order to become financially solvent.

Sure, it’s nice for Americans to help Americans and to take preventive measures against a full-scale depression.

But the $45 billion shelled out to Citigroup may do little to aid the plight of Main Street Americans.

The firm is not owned by U.S. bankers and businessmen but rather by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth consortium of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, who gained control of the megabank in November 2007. Presently, the largest single shareholder is Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

 Green outside, red inside – that describes Obama’s pick for a ‘czar’ of climate and energy policy, Carol Browner.  Greener and redder than a czar ever was, she’d be better described as the climate and energy ‘commissar’.