Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
A few days ago a West African wrote to inform us that a certain London dance hall had recently erected a “colour bar”, presumably in order to please the American soldiers who formed an important part of its clientele. Telephone conversations with the management of the dance hall brought us the answers: (a) that the “colour bar” had been cancelled, and (b) that it had never been imposed in the first place; but I think one can take it that our informant’s charge had some kind of basis. There have been other similar incidents recently. For instance, I during last week a case in a magistrate’s court brought out the fact that a West Indian Negro working in this country had been refused admission to a place of entertainment when he was wearing Home Guard uniform. And there have been many instances of Indians, Negroes and others being turned away from hotels on the ground that “we don’t take coloured people”.It is immensely important to be vigilant against this kind of thing, and to make as much public fuss as possible whenever it happens. For this is one of those matters in which making a fuss can achieve something. There is no kind of legal disability against coloured people in this country, and, what is more, there is very little popular colour feeling. (This is not due to any inherent virtue in the British people, as our behaviour in India shows. It is due to the fact that in Britain itself there is no colour problem.)
The trouble always arises in the same way. A hotel, restaurant or what-not is frequented by people who have money to spend who object to mixing with Indians or Negroes. They tell the proprietor that unless he imposes a colour bar they will go elsewhere. They may be a very small minority, and the proprietor may not be in agreement with them, but it is difficult for him to lose good customers; so he imposes the colour bar. This kind of thing cannot happen when public opinion is on the alert and disagreeable publicity is given to any establishment where coloured people are insulted. Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it. Otherwise the tiny percentage of colour-snobs who exist among us can make endless mischief, and the British people are given a bad name which, as a whole, they do not deserve.
In the nineteen-twenties, when American tourists were as much a part of the scenery of Paris as tobacco kiosks and tin urinals, the beginnings of a colour bar began to appear even in France. The Americans spend money like water, and restaurant proprietors and the like could not afford to disregard them. One evening, at a dance in a very well-known cafe some Americans objected to the presence of a Negro who was there with an Egyptian woman. After making some feeble protests, the proprietor gave in, and the Negro was turned out.
Next morning there was a terrible hullabaloo and the cafe proprietor was hauled up before a Minister of the Government and threatened with prosecution. It had turned out that the offended Negro was the Ambassador of Haiti. People of that kind can usually get satisfaction, but most of us do not have the good fortune to be ambassadors, and the ordinary Indian, Negro or Chinese can only be protected against petty insult if other ordinary people are willing to exert themselves on his behalf.
George Orwell, “As I Please” Tribune, 1944-08-11.
August 30, 2019
QotD: Racism in London during WW2
July 18, 2019
The Allied Occupation of Germany After The Treaty of Versailles I THE GREAT WAR July 1919
The Great War
Published on 17 Jul 2019When the Allied armies marched into German territory in late 1918 under the terms of the armistice, they were surprised to see a relatively untouched land. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the Allied Occupation was made permanent and the troops settled in to stay in a country that did not want them there initially.
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Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018)
Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001).
Le Naour, Jean-Yves. La Honte noire (Hachette, 2004).
Schröder, Joachim, Watson, Alexander. “Occupation during and after the War (Germany)” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…
Roos, Julia. “Schwarze Schmach” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…
Godfroid, Anne. “Occupation after the War (Belgium and France)” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…
Pawley, Margaret. The Watch on the Rhine: The Military Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918-1930 (I.B.Tauris, 2007).
Hart, Keith. “A Note on the Military Participation of Siam in WWI.” Journal of the Siam Society (ndp): 133–136.
Lauter, Anna-Monika. Sicherheit und Reparationen. Die französische Öffentlichkeit, der Rhein und die Ruhr (1919-1923) (Essen: Klartext, 2006).
Krugler, Gilles. “Allemagne decembre 1918. Les premières heures de l’occupation“. In Revue historique des armées 254 (2009): 76-81. https://journals.openedition.org/rha/…
Mignon, Nicolas. “Boche, ex-ennemie ou simplement femme? Le point de vue des responsables politiques et militaires sur la question des mariages entre militaires belges et femmes allemandes pendant les occupations de la Rhénanie et de la Ruhr (1918-1929).” In Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire (2013) 91-4 : 1259-1283.»CREDITS
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July 12, 2019
The European Migration Crisis – WW2 – WaH 004 – June 1940
World War Two
Published on 11 Jul 2019When the Nazi German Reich invades western and northern Europe this creates a massive refugee and forced migration crisis all across Europe. In eastern Europe, The Nazis and the Soviets have already been forcing families out of their homes to be relocated, incarcerated and murdered for nine months by now.
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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
June 30, 2019
Chipping away at Martin Luther King’s reputation with new FBI surveillance revelations
Stephen Smith discusses the struggle of scholars specializing in the life and works of Martin Luther King, Jr. to cope with new revelations about the civil rights leader:
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.
Photo by Yoichi Okamoto via Wikimedia Commons.
These are difficult days for students of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man many of us have dedicated long months and years to researching, often out of a profound sense of respect, is facing an allegation of laughing and even offering advice while a fellow Baptist minister raped a woman in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1964.
The source of this explosive claim is a trove of newly released FBI surveillance documents unearthed by the dean of MLK historians himself, David J. Garrow, author of The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on King, Bearing the Cross.
Since the article detailing Garrow’s new findings came out at the end of May in the British magazine Standpoint, Garrow has taken more of a pounding in the press than King. No surprises there, perhaps. Like those now criticizing Garrow, I desperately want to believe that the 55-year-old allegation is a trumped-up product of the FBI’s “viciously negative attitude” toward King, as Garrow described it in “Solo” to Memphis — a book that earned him the Bureau’s enmity prior to its publication in 1981.
The record, however, is also pretty clear that King relieved the crushing stress of daily death threats and the insatiable demands of the civil rights movement with women and liquor. To his credit, King was the first to admit he was far from perfect as America’s “moral leader” — but this far?
Much of the criticism that Garrow is now facing over the article is focused on the validity of FBI evidence concerning King’s sexual activities, namely the bombshell assertion made by FBI agents spying on King in 1964 that he “looked on, laughed and offered advice” during the reported sexual assault (which, as Garrow has since underscored, the agents listening in did nothing to stop). This allegedly took place in two Washington, D.C. hotel rooms rented to King and four other Baptist ministers, although the controversial claim is made in a handwritten note appended to a summary of the FBI’s microphone surveillance.
Garrow argues that “without question” the handwritten annotation would have been added with both the original surveillance recording and a full transcript of the recording at hand. He adds that Justice Department investigators who reviewed both the tapes and transcripts in 1977 confirmed the accuracy of the FBI’s claims. The tapes and transcripts, along with the rest of the fruits of the FBI’s intensive electronic surveillance of King, were subsequently sealed by a court order until Jan. 31, 2027.
I know Garrow and I know his respect for the man he calls “Doc” runs deep, and this is not an allegation he would carelessly report. Some of his detractors have called him “irresponsible” for running with it without access to the original tapes and transcripts, but Garrow has at least 40 years of experience working with primary sources produced by the FBI’s intensive surveillance of King. If anyone can tell what smells off and what doesn’t, it’s him.
June 27, 2019
QotD: “Misandropologies”
… in the same manner that many white people who initially signed on to the whole “don’t be a racist” program because it seemed fair were eventually alienated by the escalating rhetoric of “justice won’t be achieved until the last evil melanoma-prone ice devil baby is smashed dead against a rock,” many men — and even women — who had no problem with ideas such as equal pay and female suffrage started to get grossly turned off by rhetoric and policies that viewed being born male as an original sin that demanded eternal punishment.
Even though black women live longer than white men in the USA … and even though women control more disposable wealth than men do … and even though women are snagging most of the college degrees these days … and even though the law and public sympathy heavily lean toward women in any dispute between the sexes … and even though the media portray men as either bumbling incompetents or bloodthirsty rape-monsters … and even though men are far more likely to commit suicide, die on the job, or be homeless than women … we’re still lectured by these bitter fat blobs and their testosterone-free male enablers that misandry isn’t real because men still benefit from certain mysterious “systemic” and “institutional” advantages that none of these assholes seem able to enumerate even when calmly asked to do so.
It’s a funny sort of “patriarchy” we inhabit.
To allege that women are capable of malice and violence and deception is only to allege that they’re human. To expect anything less of them would be dehumanizing and patronizing — which, ironically, shares a root word with “patriarchy.” When feminism ditched the “equity” rhetoric in favor of a menses-splattered pagan goddess religion that depicts men as irredeemable worker drones and women as innocent angels, men who weren’t entirely asleep or pussy-whipped realized that the rules had changed and that they were under attack. But even to notice that a lot of women openly exult in hating men gets you labeled a “woman-hater.”
Misandry is real, and those who seek to deny or justify it deserve a stern paddling. And even if you acknowledge that it’s real, don’t try to make excuses for it using some postmodern gobbledygook, because then you become a misandry apologist — a misandropologist. Just admit that women can be every bit as mean, nasty, horrid, foul, vile, shitty, and hateful as men. It’s part of the human condition.
Naïve as it may be, I envision an enlightened future where there is no longer any misogyny or misandry — only a beautiful, sweet, shared sense of misanthropy.
Jim Goad, “Confronting the Misandropologists”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-08.
June 17, 2019
“We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks”
Brendan O’Neill follows up on the disturbing story of two lesbians who were physically assaulted on a London bus:
Talk about ungrateful. Brits, and people around the world, offered empathy and solidarity to the two gay women who were battered by thugs on a London bus. And yet now one of the women has turned around and told us we only care about them because they are white. It’s only because they are “two attractive, white, cisgender women” that so many people and organisations gave a damn about them and tweeted about them, apparently. Thanks a bunch. We offer our human concern for your wellbeing and you tell us we’re being racist. We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks.
The woman in question, who goes only by the name “Chris”, has written a piece for the Guardian. Natch. The intro lets us know what we’re in for: “The photo of me and my date went viral – but only as we’re white, feminine and cisgender.” Translation: you racist, transphobic idiots wouldn’t have cared half as much if this had been two bloodied and bruised black women or trans women. The “commodification” of “my face” came at the “expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage”, says Chris.
What is most striking about her piece is that she flagellates herself for her privilege. Yes, this woman who last month was badly beaten allegedly on account of her sexuality is now beating herself up in the national press over her privileged identity. She says she has “evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation”. What a strange, self-hating mindset it must take to be victimised for your sexuality and then to say: “God, I’m SO privileged.”
Chris even does us the service of providing a list of people who are far less privileged than her and who us phoney empathisers should finally start noticing. It is “open season”, she says, on “people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants”. This is classic virtue-signalling. She is engaging in the Oppression Olympics while making it clear she doesn’t deserve any gold medals in said Olympics because she is white, educated, cisgender, etc. A masterclass in identitarian showboating.
June 3, 2019
The “Miss India” controversy
The Times of India published an image of the Miss India competition finalists that drew heavy condemnation on social media:
Tim Worstall explains at least some of the reasons why these young women don’t seem to resemble the majority of Indians:
To start with a question – doesn’t anyone read Jane Austen any more? For that is all that is needed to understand why all the finalists in this year’s Miss India contest seem to have the same rather pale and white complexion. Certainly, rather paler and whiter than the general run of the mill complexion seen across India.
We can also offer a Marxist interpretation – it’s a class thing, innit?
[…]
Yes, India does have that caste issue, it is true that higher castes are generally associated with lighter skins colours, lower with darker. There are even those who would insist that the caste system exists in order to maintain that dominance of the fairer skinned over the darker, something that has worked well in doing so for millennia.
And yet, Jane Austen. Apologies, the various heroines blur into a montage of Emma Thompson and Keira Knightley for me but then that’s just an expression of my masculinity, not bothering with chick flicks. But there is a scene where the sisters are fussing over their bonnets as they go out for a walk. Be careful – Lizzie? – or you might get freckles and then what man would want you? As one blessed with such melanin enhancement myself, finding it most attractive in others, why this obsession? Because a porcelain complexion was a signifier of social status.
Not because of the racial obsessions of the times – we are talking of an era when a thoroughly dark skin could make you a chattel slave, a white one not. But because a porcelain white skin was a signifier of social status therefore a porcelain white skin was a sign of social status.
70 to 80 percent of the population worked hard, outside. That meant being tanned. Only the rich did not need to do so. Thus only the rich were that pasty white which is the fate of the English gene pool when consistently out of the Sun. White was a symbol of social status not because it was white but because it meant “not farm labour”.
Of course, in the English and later European context, that dynamic started to change during the Industrial Revolution, as more and more “working class” work was done indoors and pale skin slowly declined as an indicator of wealth and privilege and instead tanned skin assumed that role (only the wealthy could waste time being outdoors, in the sun).
So, what will happen in India? Presently the country is what, still 50% of the people labouring in the fields? Something we know is declining as a portion and we expect to get to something like the English situation in a few decades, no? 6 to 8% compound GDP growth rates cause that sort of thing. 98% of all will be working under fluorescent strip lights, not under the Sun. Having both the leisure and the money to gain a tan will be a marker of social status and thus will be desired.
As to when this happens the switch really didn’t take that much time in England. Certainly in the 1930s that paleness was still highly desired. By the 1960s it was changing. Today tanning lotions sell in vast volumes, skin whiteners to the indigene English not a single drop.
When will we know the change is happening in India? It’ll not be airbrushed and photoshopped pictures of Miss India contestants that are that first marker. The day someone opens a tanning salon in an Indian urban centre and doesn’t immediately go bust will be that signifier that the great change is under way.
May 30, 2019
QotD: Wahhabism and the West
“You’re right,” he says, “it shouldn’t be different for Islam, but we make it different. Muslims fought for king and empire in both world wars. Muslims were the backbone of the Indian army. Ataturk’s Turkey was an example of Muslims functioning perfectly well in a modern democratic society — but Ataturk’s Turkey is going away. We don’t have that trust any more. It was a Wahhabi who assassinated the chief justice in British India, and that is more or less the only brand of Islam exported today — extremist Saudi-style Wahhabism. All these giant mosques you see going up in cities all over the world are not paid for locally, they’re paid for by Saudi Arabia. They’re trying to make it one-size-fits-all Islam, and a type of Islam that regards the West as its enemy, instead of the mom-and-pop Islam of the past.”
So you’re saying the problem is not Islam, the problem is Wahhabism?
“No! Wahhabism is the symptom. The problem is us. We don’t defend ourselves. If you are a woman living alone in a Muslim community in Europe, you do not venture out after 6 p.m. If there are sexual assaults by Muslims, and the allegations are made public by the victims, the accuser is inevitably accused of racism. Nobody disputes that it happened, but they’re held to a different standard because the victims are Swedes or Danes and the accused is from a Muslim country. It’s believed that it’s unreasonable to expect decent behaviour from an Afghan or an Iraqi — which is racist. You’re denying the humanity of these people. And so you surrender incrementally. You live in a citadel. You make ridiculous changes to your own culture. In Britain the banks don’t give piggy banks to children any more, because the “piggy” might be offensive. There’s a fetishisation of the burka, which should be regarded as what it is — a prison for women. Why should we abandon our own heritage to barbarism? I’m a nineteenth-century imperialist a hundred years past my sell-by date.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
May 14, 2019
QotD: Karl Marx, noted racist
For those who see Marx as their hero, there are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, dug them up for his 1979 book, Karl Marx: Racist. For example, Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Engels shared Marx’s contempt for Mexicans, explaining: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”
Marx had a racial vision that might be interesting to his modern-day black supporters. In a letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote: “It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like.” Engels shared Marx’s racial philosophy. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Lafargue had “one-eighth or one-twelfth nigger blood.” In a letter to Lafargue’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”
Marx was also an anti-Semite, as seen in his essay titled “On the Jewish Question,” which was published in 1844. Marx asked: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man — and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
Walter E. Williams, “What Do Leftists Celebrate?”, Townhall.com, 2017-05-10.
May 12, 2019
QotD: The British Army between the wars
In the nineteenth century the British common soldier was usually a farm labourer or slum proletarian who had been driven into the army by brute starvation. He enlisted for a period of at least seven years – sometimes as much as twenty-one years – and he was inured to a barrack life of endless drilling, rigid and stupid discipline, and degrading physical punishments. It was virtually impossible for him to marry, and even after the extension of the franchise he lacked the right to vote. In Indian garrison towns he could kick the “niggers” with impunity, but at home he was hated or looked down upon by the ordinary population, except in wartime, when for brief periods he was discovered to be a hero. Obviously such a man had severed his links with his own class. He was essentially a mercenary, and his self-respect depended on his conception of himself not as a worker or a citizen but simply as a fighting animal.
Since the war the conditions of army life have improved and the conception of discipline has grown more intelligent, but the British army has retained its special characteristics – small size, voluntary enlistment, long service and emphasis on regimental loyalty. Every regiment has its own name (not merely a number, as in most armies), its history and relics, its special customs, traditions, etc., etc., thanks to which the whole army is honey-combed with snobberies which are almost unbelievable unless one has seen them at close quarters. Between the officers of a “smart” regiment and those of an ordinary infantry regiment, or still more a regiment of the Indian Army, there is a degree of jealousy almost amounting to a class difference. And there is no question that the long-term private soldier often identifies with his own regiment almost as closely as the officer does. The effect is to make the narrow “non-political” outlook of the mercenary come more easily to him. In addition, the fact that the British Army is rather heavily officered probably diminishes class friction and thus makes the lower ranks less accessible to “subversive” ideas.
But the thing which above all else forces a reactionary view-point on the common soldier is his service in overseas garrisons. An infantry regiment is usually quartered abroad for eighteen years consecutively, moving from place to place every four or five years, so that many soldiers serve their entire time in India, Africa, China, etc. They are only there to hold down a hostile population and the fact is brought home to them in unmistakeable ways. Relations with the “natives” are almost invariably bad, and the soldiers – not so much the officers as the men – are the obvious targets for anti-British feeling. Naturally they retaliate, and as a rule they develop an attitude towards the “niggers” which is far more brutal than that of the officials or business men. In Burma I was constantly struck by the fact that the common soldiers were the best-hated section of the white community, and, judged simply by their behaviour, they certainly deserved to be. Even as near home as Gibraltar they walk the streets with a swaggering air which is directed at the Spanish “natives.” And in practice some such attitude is absolutely necessary; you could not hold down a subject empire with troops infected by notions of class-solidarity. Most of the dirty work of the French empire, for instance, is done not by French conscripts but by illiterate Negroes and by the Foreign Legion, a corps of pure mercenaries.
To sum up: in spite of the technical advances which do not allow the professional officer to be quite such an idiot as he used to be, and in spite of the fact that the common soldier is now treated a little more like a human being, the British army remains essentially the same machine as it was fifty years ago.
George Orwell, “Democracy in the British Army”, Left, 1939-09.
April 22, 2019
Internal challenges to Microsoft’s current discriminatory hiring practices
At Quartz, Dave Gershgorn looks at how Microsoft is facing internal dissent over their current hiring practices, which actively encourage discrimination against certain racial and gender groups:
Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella.
Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response.
“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees.
“I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department.
When contacted by Quartz, Microsoft pointed to comments by three company officials in the message-board threads. A member of Microsoft’s employee investigations team responded to the initial post in January, writing that the company does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. Another Microsoft staff member, who leads the team that helps the board of directors determine executive pay, explained the diversity-based compensation initiative. “Our board and executive leadership team believe diverse and inclusive teams are good for business and consistent with our mission and inspire-to culture,” she wrote. “Linking compensation to these aspirations is an important demonstration of executive commitment to something we believe strongly in.
April 7, 2019
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey
I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):
How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?
In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.
Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.
Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.
On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”
Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?
March 25, 2019
QotD: Village life
I hate rumor. Perhaps I hate it more because I grew up in a village.
The people who imagine villages are idyllic and every person in it loves the other like a brother or sister, have no knowledge of people — or reality. Sure, in many villages in isolated places, most of the people there are related to some degree. This was not true where I grew up, because the village was already in the process of exploding into a large-city suburb. It wasn’t visible to me as a child, because it was so slow, and newcomers still took years to integrate, but it it had been going on for so long that the appellation of “aunt” given to any grown woman by any child was just courtesy, not truth. Still, had we been all related, people who imagine that makes for harmonious living must have been only children and the children of only children.
No, never mind, I’m being silly. Those people are actually enormous racists and oikophobes. Hating their own home, they imbue places far away, particularly those inhabited by people who tan more than they do, with the qualities of heaven. They also in the process make those people-who-tan (or as I always think when I’m the object of this type of thought, and yes, I am, it’s what enables them to think themselves my intellectual superiors a-priori “Little brown peoples”) less than human. They (we) are not people with our own agency, and all the virtues and vices of mankind, but sort of little pets, perfect, well behaved and needing both the protection of our masters, the pale enlightened, and their pat on the head for how good we are. (Most of the left’s ideas on “defeating colonialism” envision themselves as benevolent colonial masters. In fact, the colonialism of Marxist ideas in Africa is what has made it hell on Earth, far worse than any colonial overseers could do. By turning their best and brightest into Marxist apostles at our “finest universities” they get to send these ideas back to Africa. There was some idea they would flourish there among people unsullied by greed and the wish to succeed individually (yes, it’s that racism again. It is inherent in the left’s contrived “celebration” of black people, Kwanza, which is really a celebration of socialist principles. And no, is in no way African. It was invented in the US. For one there isn’t such a thing as an “African” holiday. The continent is as or more varied than Europe (because transport was near impossible for most of its existence, tribes and villages were very isolated indeed.)) It didn’t. Instead it has made Africa worse than ever before. And this was done by turning its favorite sons, its brightest sparks into poison pills. Colonialist Marxism is appalling and responsible for the deaths of millions. As is Marxism everywhere.)
Sarah Hoyt, “Painted All In Tongues”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-20.
March 22, 2019
Debunking Stephen Jay Gould
Several years back, I linked to a David Friedman post on a study that contradicted a key argument in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man. While I’ve read a few of his books, it’s been nearly 15 years since I last read anything by him … by now I only have a vague recollection of what he wrote, but his works were quite popular at the time. Much more recently Russell T. Warne looked at different problems in Gould’s work that are much more damaging to his reputation:
Stephen Jay Gould, the famous 20th century paleontologist, published his most celebrated work, The Mismeasure of Man, in 1981. Gould’s thesis is that throughout the history of science, prejudiced scientists studying human beings allowed their social beliefs to color their data collection and analysis. Gould believed that this confirmation bias was particularly powerful when a scientists’ beliefs were socially important to them. […] The Mismeasure of Man provides a great deal of evidence that scientists’ pre-existing beliefs color their judgment — but not in the way he intended. Rather, the book is a perfect example of the sin it purports to expose in others. Gould’s Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals. Ironically, it was this allegiance to ideology over data that made Gould himself a classic examplar of a biased scientist.
[…]
Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man was confined to the recherché world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould’s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases.
This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton’s data and Gould’s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton’s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton’s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton’s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.
Though still unresolved, the debate shows that a critical analysis of specific sections of The Mismeasure of Man is warranted. After writing an article about Lewis Terman, an important developer of early intelligence tests, I decided that a 23-page section of The Mismeasure of Man would be a valuable section of the book to analyze. This section is Gould’s description and analysis of the Army Beta test, one of the tests that Terman helped create. The Army Beta was used in World War I to screen illiterate recruits for military service.
Having read some of the primary scholarly work about the Army Beta, I knew that some of Gould’s claims were inaccurate. However, I was unprepared for the level of pervasive deception that I encountered when I carefully checked Gould’s claims against the historical record. Moreover, I discovered overwhelming evidence that any pretense of Gould being “objective” — even if defined as “fair treatment of data” — is a farce. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould elevates his biases to the status of uncontestable facts and to great lengths to hide the truth from his readers.
February 5, 2019
QotD: Democracy and diversity
Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There’s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is separation: the country’s four ethnicities are mostly concentrated in their own cantons. Switzerland is a highly decentralized confederacy, where most political issues get decided at the canton level, which minimizes ethnic and regional tensions. The federal government in Bern is practically invisible; most Swiss can’t name their country’s president. This is not a model easily replicated.
The history of the United States does not convincingly prove that ethnic diversity is part and parcel with democracy. Ask a random man in the street of any blue-state city what the purpose of America is, and he’s likely to tell you that it’s immigration—though the word appears nowhere in the founding documents. The U.S. was, from its beginnings, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, and multilingual. But until recently, this background condition was not seen as the font of our national strength. Rather, for most of our history, it was a problem to be overcome through nation-building and assimilation, which America excelled at. By the early 1960s, United States had come close to creating its own unique national ethnicity, albeit one that starkly excluded African-Americans. But even this exception seemed to be moving rapidly toward resolution before the country gave up on nation-building in the late 1960s. One can make a strong case that the early Civil Rights movement was a product of the mid-century high-water mark of American nationalism. Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; it’s striking how classically nationalist it is, from its evocation of the country’s geographical features to the reaffirmation of its basic creed of freedom, equality, and individual rights, to its Old Testament rhetoric rooted in John Winthrop’s Puritanism.
E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.
