Note the new address for Aaron's Rantblog. His old address has gone to that great blogspot in the sky where blogspot sites do sometimes go. Warning: Aaron puts up lots of good graphics so his site is slow-loading unless you have a high-speed connection. Aaron's current project is to get Hillary Clinton rather than George Bush as the No. 1 link returned by Google in response to the search-term "Miserable Failure". A fun project, it seems to me. He has got an amusing photo of her up on his "failure" site.

Reason to believe - by Michael Jacobs

Summary:

Over the last quarter of a century something very large, and not entirely understood, has happened to politics in western Europe. It is a commonplace that labour and social democratic parties - not least New Labour - have become more moderate, and more accommodating to capitalism. But a change much deeper than merely one of policy has occurred. It's a cultural, indeed a psychological, shift. A kind of spirit has been extinguished writes Michael Jacobs.

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When Max Weber analysed the way in which the post-Enlightenment processes of rational thought gradually permeated European consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries, he described the world as becoming 'disenchanted.' The religious world view which the Enlightenment largely destroyed had made the world an enchanted place, filled with the magic and mystery of gods and God. But cold, hard rationality killed them off. Even for those who remained religious, Weber observed, the world ceased to be magical. It was subject to physical laws which were knowable through science. God did not die, but he no longer inhabited the everyday world.

In the last 20 years, something similar has happened to left-of-centre politics in European societies. Up to the 1980s, politics on the left was enchanted-not by spirits, but by radical idealism; the belief that the world could be fundamentally different. But cold, hard political realism has now done for radical idealism what rationality did for pre-Enlightenment spirituality. Politics has been disenchanted.

There are many who welcome this process. But it is equally possible to argue that it has been profoundly damaging, not just for the causes of progressive politics but for a wider sense of public engagement with the political process.

It is true that the British Labour party was always pragmatic in office. But there is something that Labour has lost, which it used to have-an ideology of social transformation. Until at least the mid-1980s most members of the Labour party, in common with its sister parties throughout Europe, believed in a different kind of social and economic order, with institutions and social relationships founded on morally superior values. This was socialism, and belief in it infused the whole of left-of-centre politics.

Socialism was not merely the end-point towards which those on the left believed themselves to be working. For large numbers of activists and politicians, it was an animating force in their lives. People were socialists in the way that others (sometimes the same people) were Catholics or Jews: it was part of their identity. 'Socialist' did not just describe a set of views you had. It was something you were.

This was true of the moderates as much as the revolutionaries. It is easy to forget this now, so accustomed are we to politicians who aim for nothing more than their pragmatic policy positions. Prior to the mid-1980s, the most mainstream Labour politicians talked often and without embarrassment about socialism. Here is Tony Crosland, Labour's principal revisionist of the 1950s and 1960s, writing about the central socialist value of equality in a 1975 Fabian pamphlet: 'By equality we mean more than a meritocratic society of equal opportunities... we also mean more than a simple redistribution of income. We want a wider social equality embracing the distribution of property, the educational system, social class relationships, power and privilege in industry.'

The Fabian tradition is often thought of as the moderate end of socialism, but Fabian pamphlets from the Webbs through to the 1980s were full of statements such as this. This was how all Labour people thought. There were deep divisions between those believing in rapid change and those favouring a more gradual approach. But the transformative ideals of this ideology ran right through the party.

Today all this has gone. No one speaks about socialism: the word sounds quaint. But it is more than semantic. New Labour no longer seeks to transform society, even as an ideal. Of course Labour wants change; it sees many things wrong in society and wants to improve them. Two of its goals, if achieved, would be genuinely far-reaching: the eradication of child poverty and the target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education. But Labour politicians no longer claim that it is possible to change the structures which perpetuate inequality. We hear no visions of moral improvement, personal liberation, or the ability of humans to live more fulfilling lives than those offered by consumer capitalism. Even in its rhetoric-where most of this used to lie-New Labour's aims have become managerial, about the better administration of society, rather than about its transformation.

Tony Blair emphasises the continuity of his values with Labour's past. But the values are vague: "equal worth, opportunity for all, responsibility, community." They are not translated into concrete ends, a vision of different kinds of institutions and relationships in society. Indeed, as Robert Skidelsky has pointed out in Prospect, Blair's mantra of 'eternal values, modern means’ is not true. Labour values-equality and the favouring of the public/collective over the private/individual-have been abandoned. The idea that one might have principles about means, or that different kinds of social institutions might be ends in themselves, is rejected as dogma. The third way is not an ideology. It provides neither a guide to policy-making, nor a vision of the society towards which social democrats aim. New Labour is left with no more than piecemeal social reform.

Electorally, of course, this has been very successful. But within the Labour party it has had a devastating effect. This has gone largely unnoticed by those outside. But inside the party it is visible and widespread. It is not that the government's policies are too moderate-party members are used to this. Some of the policies in fact command widespread support, particularly now that they come with higher spending and taxation. It is the loss of ideology which creates the sense of alienation. It is the abandonment of the party's historic commitments to equality and to radical social change. Talk with any group of longstanding party members, especially those over 40, and this sense of alienation will come up, and not only among leftists. If anything it is the old moderates of the party, the people who would once have been called right-wingers, who feel most confused. It was they who won the fight to reclaim the party after the aberrations of the 1980s. Now they find that the party's rhetoric has carried on marching right past them.

Membership figures tell a tale: down by 130,000, nearly one third, in five years. For some, there's a moment which tips them over the edge-vouchers for asylum seekers, the promotion of selective schools, the prospect of war with Iraq. For others, it is a dull sense that there is no longer much point. When Labour wanted to change society, it was, at heart, a campaign: it needed members. But if it just wants to manage things better, why bother?

And for every member who leaves, there are many more who cannot bring themselves to do so, but whose commitment to the party barely rises above the payment of a membership fee. Look at the rates of activism: the attendance at meetings, the numbers of canvassers. The party is not quite in crisis, because for many the bonds of loyalty remain strong, and there are newer members who are not disillusioned because they never had illusions in the first place. But there can be little doubt that something profoundly corrosive has been happening to it.

In fact, the trauma runs deeper than this. It is not just about the party leadership. The truth is that most people on the left no longer know what they believe. They still think that gross inequality is immoral, they dislike competitive individualism and argue that capitalism generates social evils. What they don't know is what to replace it with. Once it was socialism. The trauma of left-wing politics is that the third way is not enough-but it is not clear what else there could be.

What happened to radical idealism? What was the political equivalent of Weber's Enlightenment rationality? The answer, in part, is the fall of the Berlin wall. There had been signs of ideological collapse from the early 1980s. But it was after 1989 that socialism as an animating spirit began properly to disintegrate. In many ways this was paradoxical, because the vast majority of people on the left welcomed the end of communism. They had always felt that the Soviet system was a burden, an actually-existing version of socialism used to discredit them. What they hadn't realised was its powerful symbolic effect. Communism was hateful, but it did prove that capitalism was not inevitable.

Then into this new world stepped Francis Fukuyama. His 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man was rubbished by left-wing critics at the time (more rubbished than read). Socialists above all were at pains to deny that liberal capitalism was the end-point of history. Yet it was among the left that Fukuyama's thesis planted itself most deeply. Almost imperceptibly, they felt their self-confidence draining away. People who were once convinced of their prescription for change suddenly found their idealism disappearing.

It wasn't only the resurgence of global capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s which had this effect. Socialists had lived through previous eras of capitalist triumph before, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't last. What happened in the 1990s was at an intellectual level. As the last dregs of actual alternatives-from building societies to Vietnam's resistance to American multinationals; from worker co-ops to the control of international finance capital-were sluiced out of sight by the onrushing tide of liberal capitalism, the idea that all this could be turned back came to feel more and more unrealistic. The insidious thought developed: maybe this is it. Maybe there is nothing more now than piecemeal social reform.

For the strategists of New Labour, this new political realism was a liberation. No longer did they have to pretend to believe in something which they were patently not aiming to achieve. For most of the rest of the party, it was a traumatic shift.

The debate over Clause IV in 1994-95 revealed this starkly. For the leadership and their younger followers, Labour's old commitment to 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange' was self-evidently absurd. For their opponents on the left, it was just as obviously fundamental. But for the huge majority of party members it was neither. The words of Clause IV were old, but they symbolised the party's commitment to a different kind of society. Everyone knew that the party was not trying to achieve such a society in practice. But the words kept the spirit alive. They affirmed the party's radical idealism. This was why there was such reluctance among the members to give them up. The New Labourites won, of course, because exposed to the cold light of day the mystery of socialist ideology could no longer be supported. But the effect on the party - and on the whole of progressive politics - was more profound than was realised at the time.

People outside progressive politics might shrug and say 'so what?' What does it matter if some people have grown up and realised that they cannot change the world, something everyone else accepted long ago? Socialism had not been a realistic political alternative in the west since the 1930s; its final intellectual demise was belated and is not to be mourned. Many others from within progressive politics will also say 'good riddance'. There is a strong case to be made that socialist ideology was a profoundly damaging force for the decent politics of reform.

There are many things wrong with today's capitalism, this argument runs, but the alternatives are worse. Fukuyama was right. Market democracy is the best system of ordering social and economic institutions, not only producing the most happiness, but also the most liberty, and possibly the most equality, for the greatest number. Naturally it is not perfect; but that is why modern social democracy exists. Capitalist societies need ameliorating, but they do not need replacing by some other system which social democrats can no longer identify.

This makes politics dull, but that is how it is. New Labour looks technocratic and uninspiring because that is what politics is now like-incremental, managerial amelioration. We should be grateful to live in such uneventful times, not resentful. In any case real politics is increasingly about negotiating dilemmas between competing values which are no longer expressed as simple conflicts between good and bad or elites and masses.

One of the reasons that socialist ideology flourished in the past was that it fitted the tribalism of a class society. Ideologies which came as whole packages of belief attached themselves easily to fixed, collective identities. But people's identities today are more fragmented, looser, more malleable; and by and large this is a welcome form of personal liberation. It is unsurprising then if belief systems are also not taken on as a whole, if people pick and choose their political views as they try to create their sense of self.

This is why New Labour abandoned socialist ideology. The voters didn't believe in it. Moreover, it created a gap between the party's rhetoric and the realities of its policies which led to constant conflict between leadership and activists. The ideology also put off many voters who might otherwise have supported it. By abandoning the ideological pretence, New Labour has at last buried the lie at the heart of the old Labour party and has been able to achieve some historic goals: a minimum wage, devolution, huge investment in the NHS, among others.

The arguments against ideology are powerful. In these circumstances, can there be a defence of radical idealism? I think there can. Indeed, without a renewal of radical conviction the Labour party, and possibly modern politics as a whole, is in serious danger of atrophy.

Such conviction cannot be a return to socialism. There is now no alternative "system" which is imaginable as a replacement for liberal capitalism. But there does not need to be. Radical idealism does not require a belief that modern economies and societies could be run under fundamentally different principles, merely that the present system could be made to generate fundamentally different outcomes. For its root is a very simple impulse. It is the feeling that many people must surely have when looking at the world: that too much in the present order is morally wrong. A billion people living in absolute poverty, species and habitats being wiped out, many groups subject to systematic violence and discrimination, some people consuming vast amounts while others starve. The impulse is not complex, nor does it carry self-evident prescriptions. It simply says: the world does not need to be like this.

As such, today's transformative ideal stands between two opposite but equally debilitating claims. On the one hand, it escapes the comforting complacency of belief in wholesale system change, where real-world problems did not need addressing because all would be different 'under socialism.' On the other, it rejects the paralysing (and almost always self-serving) assertion that significant change is impossible because the present order of things is the only one available. It is not an argument against liberal capitalism per se, but is an argument against the fatalism of political action that now generally accompanies it.

This is why it is inevitably ideological in form. Idealism envisages a better kind of world and makes this its political goal. It does not seek a simple leap from here to there: it must engage with the present order and seek a feasible path of change. But it does allow political vision to extend beyond present constraints. It permits the politician to say, 'this is all we can do now, but here is what we are aiming for in the future.'

And this is just the objection that many have to it. For New Labour strategists, it was the gap between rhetoric and policy which damaged the party in the past, frightening voters with radical aims which were not even on the agenda. Why go back to that?

There are three different answers. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is pragmatic. It is that without a clear ideology, political parties are electorally vulnerable. Their support may grow wide but remains shallow, and may be swept away. Ideology gives a government roots. In providing voters with a strong sense of a government's purpose, it gives them something to grip on. Policies are often weak instruments for attracting public support. They are complex; they must be designed to satisfy different, even conflicting, interests; they can take a long time to have visible effect; they sometimes fail. A clearly articulated philosophy can not only explain the aim of policy to the public, it reassures them that the government has a purpose and direction when its policies are not making this evident. This was why Margaret Thatcher placed so much emphasis on ideology in her speeches. As the slow pace of Labour's improvements in the public services becomes plainer, a clearer sense of vision-of what it is trying to do, even if it is not yet doing it-may help this government similarly.

Paradoxically, this role for public philosophy in underpinning electoral support may become more necessary as society becomes more fragmented and less tribal. When people are no longer voting according to class tradition, they need more reasons to choose one party over another. Most people's understanding of specific policies is small, and often people don't know exactly what they think. In these circumstances, as opinion polling shows, leadership becomes highly prized. Voters want leaders with a clear sense of purpose and direction. Values alone do not provide this: they sound too vacuous. What does is a vision of a better society: a description of how things will work-how people will be-in the world the politician is striving to create. Ideological clarity inevitably reduces the breadth of public support. But it makes that support deeper and more reliable. New Labour has not yet been tested by this thesis, since it has faced no serious Tory challenge since 1997. But the way in which the opinion polls swung so rapidly against it during the only period when it faced concerted opposition-the fuel protests-suggests that it does apply. The great lack of enthusiasm for the government revealed in qualitative surveys reinforces the sense that its support is weaker than poll numbers indicate.

But this argument goes beyond New Labour. The second case for political ideology is that it can help to fire interest in politics more generally. The bigger problem of the managerial form of politics is its failure to capture the public's attention. There are many reasons for the decline in election turnouts over the last decade. But one of them may well be that politics isn't interesting enough. If all that the parties are offering are alternative management prospectuses, it is perhaps not surprising that public engagement with politics has fallen.

Does this matter? On one account of modern politics, no. If contemporary capitalism is genuinely the best sort of society there can be, then as long as it is not managed too badly, we should neither expect nor want politics to be that important to the public.
But here we arrive at the real issue. The third argument for political ideology stems from deeper questions about the role of politics in human nature. The "managerial" view of politics sees it as instrumental. Politics is not an end in itself but a means to the good administration of society. The less politics required to achieve that administration, the better. But there is another view. It stems from Aristotle's claim that "man is a political animal." Today that claim is often interpreted negatively: that human nature is argumentative and power-seeking. But for Aristotle it was a claim of virtue. Humans are political because they are sociable. Politics is an expression of our inescapable involvement with the strangers amongst whom we live.

From this perspective, an interest and involvement in politics is part of what it means to live a good life, to be a fully developed human being. This cannot be just any involvement in politics.

Political activism designed only to benefit oneself and one's narrow social group carries no particular ethical value. What gives politics its claim to virtue is its orientation towards others. It is when we care enough about the wellbeing of other people to want to make the world a better place-for them and ourselves-that politics finds its proper moral expression.

We have particular reason to value that expression today. As western societies have become more individualistic, people's sense of social connectedness has declined. This is difficult to measure, but reductions in rates of voluntary activity and charitable giving appear to indicate a reduction in people's orientation towards others. Sociologists note the decline in "social capital": the bonds of trust and collective activity that bind communities together. A kind of hedonism pervades popular culture. Most young people don't seem interested in political causes; most of them seem barely interested in the world. It is hard to escape the sense, however inchoate, that we are more selfish, more self-oriented, than we were.

This is why radical idealism is still important. Belief in the possibility that the world could be different, and the desire to act politically to make it so, is a vital expression of an outward orientation. We should want more people to feel their identity and purpose in life bound up with the wellbeing of others. Of course this can be overdone. A rounded person also needs self-awareness, self-deprecation, a sense of fun. But it is good to feel inspired to act, to want to change the world. We need that sense of magic, the enchantment of belief.

This is why so many people have felt sympathy for anti-globalisation protestors, even without necessarily agreeing with their aims. In the summer of 2001, when thousands of protestors surrounded the G8 summit in Genoa, Tony Blair dismissed them as a rabble circus. But to the astonishment of the mainstream media, public opinion was on the side of the protest. The public saw young people who cared enough about the world to want to do something.

Throughout history it has been the pressure of a critical mass of people expressing radical idealism of this kind which has pushed mainstream politics, including that of the Labour party, towards reform. Without it the lobby for the status quo is too strong.
It is difficult to look at the world today and not feel that such idealism is needed. It may be harder to find the great causes in domestic politics than it once was: the result of the successful idealism of an earlier generation of welfare state socialists. Enlarging the consumption of the already comfortable is not a goal to make the political heart beat faster. Yet it does not take much understanding of British society to feel motivated by the cause of eradicating poverty or of giving deprived young people the chance to realise themselves-or even by the desire to improve the quality of life of those caught on the treadmill of overwork, stress and meaningless consumption.

And once one's gaze extends to the world as a whole the causes are plain. It is not surprising that the real energy in British politics today comes from the environmental and global justice movements. Here is genuine inspiration to be found: the hope of profound change to large wrongs. Reading about the present and likely future suffering highlighted at the sustainable development summit in Johannesburg, who can say we do not need radical idealism today?

Labour's ministers came back from the summit claiming to be pleased with the final agreement. In doing so, they illustrated what is wrong with the present state of social democracy. It presents a fatalistic resignation about what is achievable which robs politics of its moral ambition. The idea that "there is no alternative" has long been a powerful weapon of conservatives. It is the infection of left-of-centre thought by this idea that has been the most damaging consequence of the post-1989 order. And it is why politics needs re-enchanting now. Of course politics is the art of the possible. But only by pushing at them will we discover where the boundaries of the possible lie.

In this sense, the re-enchantment of politics today will be the reverse of the Enlightenment. Then humanism-the belief in the capacity of human societies to determine their own destiny-was the agent of disenchantment. Now political humanism is on the side of the spirits. In the face of both the terrible material conditions still affecting so much of the world, and of those voices arguing that they cannot be fundamentally changed, the spirit of moral idealism is no less than a reassertion of human will. Without it, it is difficult to see how politics today will inspire a new generation to make a difference.

Michael Jacobs is General Secretary of the Fabian Society. This article first appeared in the September 2002 issue of Prospect Magazine

BLIND HATRED

By Ann Leslie

SO IT'S all George W. Bush's fault. President Bush is responsible for the death of British Consul General in Istanbul Roger Short, leaving his wife and three children utterly bereft. Bush killed Mr Short's secretary Lisa Hallworth who, like the consul, was blown to pieces by Thursday-'s bomb.

Bush is the reason why a busy shopping street was suddenly drenched in blood, scattered with severed hands and heads and the limbs of innocent passers
Bush is the reason why Muslin: mothers, fathers, sons and daughters are still desperately scanning hospital lists to see if their loved ones have been slaughtered like sacrificial cattle by fellow Muslims, who acted in the name of a bizarre and mutant version of Islam.

The world would obviously be much safer if Bush didn't exist; 60 per cent apparently consider him to be a danger to world peace.

Are we now so unhinged by global terror that we're actually going slightly mad? We have long ago abandoned the idea that each and every rape victim somehow "asked for it"; we regard as deeply uncivilised the idea, prevalent in some societies, that, by being raped, a woman has brought "dishonour" on her family, and therefore that she - rather than the rapist - must be punished for the crime committed against her.

Yet we say that we, and especially President Bush, because of our "provocative" actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have "asked for" the carnage in Istanbul.

And that Muslim Turkey with a moderate Islamic government has, by being an ally of the West, also somehow "asked for" this carnage.

Frankly when I, as a Londoner, heard "my" Mayor Ken Livingstone declaring before the president arrived that Bush "is the greatest threat to life on this planet that the world has probably ever known", I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or simply be deeply embarrassed

One young woman, carrying a mass-produced placard with a portrait of Bush beneath the slogan ''The World's No. 1 Terrorist". was asked how she could accuse Bush of "terrorism" when it was bin Laden's disciples who were causing innocent people to die in the streets of Istanbul. She replied confidently: 'They're dying because of him!"

No, dear lady. they're dying, not because of Bush. but because a small and highly organised group of Islamic fascists chose to kill them. Islamic fascists have been murdering fellow Muslims for decades, long before Bush came to power.

Newspaper columns, written by journalists much younger than me, describe Bush as "the most vilified US president in history". Sorry, boys and girls, but most of you were still at school when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. He, too, was denounced as an affable but dangerous nincompoop.

(About 37 per cent of the British apparently believe "Dubya" Bush is "unintelligent" - but then they, unlike myself and others who have actually spent time with Bush one-on-one, have been deluded by the lazy media caricatures.)

You young things don't remember the uproar occasioned by Reagan's frank description of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" (which, of course, it was).
You don't remember how, in the British House of Commons in 1982, he also gave a speech whose sentiments almost exactly mirror the speech given by President Bush on Wednesday.

Reagan said then: "I've often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for those ideals that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world."

He was accused of "cultural imperialism" by stating that so-called Western values were, in fact, basic human values, and that people - whatever their culture or history - did actually want freedom whenever they were offered it: ''it would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy."

Today, similar "experts" denounce Bush for his refusal to believe that the Arab Muslim world is not culturally, or genetically, suited to freedom, democracy or the rule of law.

When Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided there was no 'moral equivalence" between the Soviet empire and Western democracy and that Western democracy had to be defended, they were denounced as warmongers, just as Bush is now.

To this week's protesters, Bush's "crimes" were, by implication, equivalent to those committed by Saddam Hussein. Bush, indeed, has his faults but, as far as I know,
America does not contain the mass graves of 300,000 innocent people who oppose the president; he does not cut out the tongues of those who criticise him; he does not order his army to massacre whole families, including small children who are tossed into their graves still clutching their toys; he has not gassed his own people; he has not caused the deaths of about a million of his co-religionists in order to remain in power.

Bush's vision will be vindicated in the long run, as Reagan's has been.
This vindication by history will not -- as Bush admits, and as Reagan did before him - come about easily or overnight. And yes, even in these dark and terrifying days, there is already a slim glimmer of hope.

China's Chairman Mao once declared that "the guerilla fighter is like a fish in water; and the water is the people". The more that the mass of ordinary people in the Muslim world (even those who resent the power and wealth of the West) realise that they - as much as we - are victims of Islamic fascism, the more they will turn against the "guerilla fighters" who pretend that they speak and act in their name.

We cannot, as the 'peacemongers" insist, negotiate our way to a quiet life.
The demands of those who slaughtered the innocents in Istanbul are utterly non-negotiable - because their stated aim is to destroy Western civilisation itself.
Taking refuge in trivial, self-regarding, self-deluding stunts like pulling down the effigy of Bush in Trafalgar Square will simply play into the terrorists' hands.


Excerpts from Page 64 of “THE SUNDAY MAIL” (Brisbane, Australia) of November 23, 2003

FRANCIS BELLAMY, EDWARD BELLAMY & BIGOTRY & RACISM

Pledge of Allegiance, Looking Backward

By Rex Curry


The dogma behind the Pledge of Allegiance included bigotry and racism. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was a bigot.  His cousin and cohort Edward Bellamy was also a bigot.

The pledge itself was inspired by xenophobia and bigotry toward immigrants.  The United States had long been a melting pot, but the 1880s brought increased immigration, especially from countries in eastern and southern Europe. Bellamy, whose family was not native American-Indians, joined similar Americans who feared that these "new" immigrants did not have the same education and skills of those from northern European countries.  They also worried about another difference: Most of the new immigrants were Roman Catholic and Jewish.

"The hard, inescapable fact is that men are not born equal. Neither are they born free, but all in bonds to their ancestors and their environments...," Francis wrote .

As editor of the magazine "The Illustrated American," he wrote editorials denouncing immigrants from southern Europe. "A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world," he wrote in 1897. "Where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock ... there are other races (e.g Irish, Jews, Italians, Latins) which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard."

Other Bellamy quotes: "The leaders of the negroes have been unendurable, more than the negro voters themselves ... So ... (all parties) make common cause ... for the disenfranchisement of the negro"

"peon ... a shiftless and unreliable kind. The native Mexican works only that he may ... live for a month on the rewards of a week's work."

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by people who belonged to fraternal organizations that were racist and were segregated by race and sex. Francis Bellamy was a Mason in Little Falls Lodge No. 181, in Little Falls, NY.

Francis Bellamy was assisted in writing the pledge by James Bailey Upham, a Mason in the Converse Lodge in Malden Massachusetts.  Within the Masonic order, Upham was a Knights Templar, the most esteemed and discriminating order.  The word “discriminating” is a double entendre in that the Knights Templar is the only Masonic order that excluded (and still excludes) non-Christians (people they classify as Jews, Muslims and atheists) according to the book “To the Flag” by Richard J. Ellis.  The Masons also exclude women and there is a separate “auxiliary” organization for women called the “Order of the Eastern Star.”

Francis Bellamy promoted a government take over of schools, in an effort to eliminate all of the better alternatives, and the government schools imposed racism and segregation through WWII and even the 1960's.  It was the same segregation described in the book "Equality" by Edward Bellamy (Francis' cousin) where blacks are allowed to participate in Edward Bellamy's "industrial army" but kept separate from whites. http://rexcurry.net/pledgetragedy.html

Here is a quote from Edward Bellamy's book "Looking Backward," a fantasy of totalitarian socialism "....the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions."

Here is another quote from "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy "Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and mortal improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race but a profound moral sentiment has come to it's support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction and duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex."

The bigotry of the Bellamys explains their desire for socialism, government schools and a collective robotic recitation of the same "Pledge of Allegiance" every day upon the government's cue.  Socialism and Government schools are inherently racist and bigoted in that they are used to destroy individuality, individual liberty, and are used for regimentation, and to create a homogenous society where people are taught the same things in order to think, dress and behave the same.

As in all socialist dogma, the spokesmen were terrified of "foreigners stealing or destroying local jobs" either in person by immigration or by international free trade. Under socialism, the state is obligated to prevent family fathers and mothers from becoming unemployed because 'Fremdarbeiter' (German for "foreign workers") are taking away their jobs by working for "low wages."

Of course, the only way socialists try to achieve "equality" is by making everyone equally poor, bringing everyone down to the lowest level, and even that won't work. Ultimately they have to make everyone equally dead.

"Equality" was/is a euphemistic excuse for socialism's hate-spewing radical paramilitary "industrial army" in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (62 million killed), the Peoples' Republic of China (35 million killed) and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (21 million killed) etc.  http://rexcurry.net/socialists.html  Those socialists achieved "equality" for 62 million, 35 million, 21 million people respectively.   It explains the military-socialism complex. http://rexcurry.net/pledge_military.html  

Other motivations for the pledge of allegiance included anxiety about creeping materialism, which is a form of bigotry based on envy and jealousy toward anyone who is perceived as being "better off."  At that time the Bellamys and the Knights Templar and Masons in general lamented what they called capitalism’s crass commercialism, selfish materialism, and excessive individualism.

When a socialist says he wants "equality" he is saying that he doesn't like you and doesn't like the way you are, and wants to change you and he wants to use government force to do it.  He is saying that he dislikes all people because they are "different" and have different possessions, incomes, clothes, cars, property, families, ideas, educations, successes, cultures,  languages, interests, entertainment, etc.  He is saying he wants you to believe that changing everyone is a good idea.

That is why he supports government schools, as a way to use government to force change and stop differences and make everyone a cog in an "industrial army."

It is all spelled out in the novel "Looking Backward" and its description of the totalitarianism that Francis Bellamy promoted.

Francis Bellamy wrote in ways hauntingly similar to Hitler, as evidenced by Bellamy’s words in the Illustrated American in 1897:

"The hard inescapable fact is that men are not born equal. Neither are they born free, but all in bonds to their ancestors and their environments . . . . The success of government by the people will depend upon the stuff that people are made of. The people must realize their responsibility to themselves. They must guard, more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood. . . . A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world. Where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. . . . There are races, more or less akin to our own, whom we may admit freely, and get nothing but advantage from the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes."


Some people make a to do about Francis Bellamy's remark that he wanted to include "equality" with "liberty and justice for all" but that Bellamy believed that "equality" was too much of an advanced concept for society. That is because Bellamy's concept of "equality" was backward socialism. Undermining Bellamy is the proper concept of non-socialist equality that was already an established part of American history. How different would our society be today if, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, schoolchildren (in private or home schools, of course) were required, each day, to read or recite this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence:”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”What if, instead of starting every day being marinated in the language of submission (to pledge “allegiance,” after all, is to proclaim one’s status as a vassal bound in service to a feudal lord, or “liege”), youngsters were taught, on a daily basis, the principles of self-responsibility, individual liberty, and principled rebellion? If that kind of thing were to become common, politicians and other Bellamy-supporters would simply criminalize the Declaration. They’ve done it before, and they would be more than happy to do so permanently.The sobering truth is that, due to the cultivated docility of the American populace, Jefferson’s document, much like the Constitution created eleven years later, poses no threat to the designs of socialists today.

http://members.ij.net/rex/pledgebigot.html

Controversial study gives food for thought

Excerpts from an article in “The Times” [London] of 10 November, 2003

BY GLEN OWEN

ONLY the bravest academics dare to embark on the study of comparative intelligence, a field fraught with social, racial and sexual sensitivities. Professor Richard Lynn, a fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence and Personality & Individual Differences, has often provoked controversy. Despite being described by colleagues such as Oliver James as “kindly and unbigoted”, his findings have led some students to boycott his lectures.

In 1996 he annoyed feminists by concluding that more men were winning first-class degrees because their brains were about 80 cu cm (5 cu in) larger than women's, so that more men had IQs above 130 (which he calculated was needed for such degrees). He believes that males are innately more intelligent than females by about five IQ points from the age of 21 onwards.

Two years later he enraged social reformers by arguing that the tendency for intelligent people in good careers to delay having children and to have fewer of them — compared with the average — will knock half an IQ point off the average score in each generation.

His co-author, Tatu Vanhanen, the father of Matti Vanhanen, the Prime Minister of Finland, specialises in the study of democracy, in particular the social and economic preconditions necessary for its existence.

The longest shadow hanging over psychometrics — the measurement of intelligence — comes from The Bell Curve, the 1994 book on genetic influences written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It claimed that blacks in Western countries scored on average 15 points below the average white IQ of 100, and that a "cognitive elite", led by Ashkenazi Jews with an average IQ of 115, would come to lead developed societies. Opponents said the statistics were flawed and called the book racist.

IQ tests are nearly a century old. They were first used in France in 1904 to identify intelligent children, but adapted in the First World War to decide who should be promoted and who would remain in the ranks

IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is not a measure of general knowledge but instead how your mind thinks. It measures different aspects of the brain's skills, including verbal and non-verbal reasoning, visual abilities and mental arithmetic

The link to the full article from which this excerpt was taken is here

LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA

Brazilian blogger Luis Afonso blogs in Portuguese so he has sent me this English language summary of his present concerns about Latin America:

Some worrying news from Latin America... The events in Bolivia have flashed an alarm...

We didn’t notice that while we were worried about Brazil-Venezuela-Cuba connection, a newer link arose: Bolivia and its future cocaine-planters-defender president Evo Morales.

Morales is not yet the president, but the way he manipulated the poor population (of the poorest country of Latin America) to remove Lozada from the presidency suggests that the same thing will happen with the vice-president, until Evo himself reaches the presidency...

What was terrible was the international silence about this "coup détat". Here in Brazil all newspapers claimed that "peace" returned to the country...

Other bad news for us is that the accusations about connection between Cuba and Brazil (which Lula da Silva denied during the election race last year) are true: Brazil is sending money from our National Investment Fund to Cuba... I think Brazil (despite our poor situation) is going to be Cuba´s savior (like USSR once was..)

It´s depressing... I hope we may be better some day but I think Latin America is drowning....

A Rose on the Crematorium

By Arlene Peck

Describe Krakow? That's easy. It's a city full of cobblestone streets, interesting yet dismal buildings and a feeling that time stopped in 1955. Walking down the narrow streets, it's easy to get a feeling of deja vu. Krakow reminds you of the back lot from a Hollywood set, as your mind goes back to all those old movies on the television.

The same feelings were felt from the train that I caught from Warsaw to Krakow, where I sat with five others in a private compartment watching the countryside move swiftly by. My hotel, the Copernicus was a 15th century building with huge rooms that was truly amazing. President Bush had stayed there recently; my suite was large enough to land a plane in!

However, on the last night I moved to the Eden Hotel, which is located in the heart of the Old Jewish Quarter, and it is the only hotel with kosher food in Krakow. What I found interesting about this place is that while it is a kosher assessable hotel and most of the guests were orthodox from New York, there is another side to the hotel, which was absolutely fantastic. In the evenings, in another section of the hotel is a karaoke bar, held two or three times a week, where the local kids congregated.

The owner, Allen Haberberg was probably the most informative and helpful person who informed me about the Jewish community or, what's left of it. A community that once consisted of 75,000 Jews has been reduced to a community of only 120 Jews. Sadly enough from what I can see, there is not much leadership or education or much of anything from the ones that are left. At least in Warsaw I saw a slight resemblance of a typical Jewish community, although very slight.

Not so in Krakow, where I traveled to Casmir which was once the heart of the Jewish community. I traveled to three of the seven of the synagogues that are still remaining, but they are being used for museums now. Some have been rebuilt while the others are closed. I observed some of the Jewish restaurants that were on many of the street corners; deceptively called "Jewish style", but in fact, they were not really Jewish or kosher. They were all filled with Jewish art, mostly depicting Jewish scenes and I couldn't help but wonder where they acquired the paintings. Alan took me to several of these Jewish restaurants. None were owned or operated by anyone slightly Jewish. At one, which was named "Noah's Ark," I spoke with the owner and asked him why he opened up such an establishment and was told that he admired Jewish traditions and food.

This was virtually the same answer that I received from nearly all of the Jewish stores that were catering to the non- Jewish clientele. I had to restrain myself from shouting out to the German group that was eating in there how they sickened me. But I was totally appalled when I went to the Center for Jewish Culture, and again, there was nobody Jewish present with whom I could speak. The man working there he told me that before the war one out of every four residents in the town was Jewish. When I asked why they even had such a building he answered, "To protect the Jewish culture" Too bad they didn't think of that before their mass slaughters.

Next, I was taken to the "Seat of Jewish Community Center" and yet again, the same story. It was close to lunchtime and I was told about a Jewish 'soup kitchen' which was supposed to serve the elderly in Krakow. I was hoping to finally meet someone there who was Jewish and spoke English. I was wrong on both counts. Several Polish employees were working there but none of them were Jewish. In addition, they were incredibly rude. I then began to wonder if the Jewish community paid their salaries and, if so, why?

These people were starving. Not for soup kitchens or a lack of food, but for assistance from the outside. In fact, where is the aid from the Polish government? When I went to Auschwitz, I was told that they had four guides who spoke English for a fee of $50.00 which included a tour of the camp. This is incredibly expensive for Poland. I stopped for lunch and had a delicious lunch of soup, salad, fish potatoes, vegetables, desert and tea for a mere $3.00.

When I mentioned to the woman working at Auschwitz that the government should supply funding for such things she seemed truly surprised at my statement. I commented had it not been for many of her countrymen there wouldn't have been an Auschwitz.

I spoke with Rabbi Edgar Gluck, who is a member of the Presidents Commission for the Preservation of America Heritage, and I told him that he had his hands full. Starting with Poland. Rabbi Gluck told me "This is my 19th year of serving the Jewish community of Poland. Most of which were spent in Krakow during the High Holy days. I have also traveled almost the width and length of the former Jewish Poland reconstructing grave sites and 'ohels' which are small houses built at the site of a father grand rabbi tomb. Many of which have been burned and desecrated."

As bad as I found the situation in Warsaw, it seemed to me even worse in Krakow. The few Jews that are there, as in Warsaw are in dire need. I had a marvelous dinner with the rabbi, and even attended his Shabbat service at the only functioning synagogue, which was situated near the Eden Hotel. The service was Orthodox, however, they had no books, onag Shabbat or any of the 'perks' that we Jews typically take for granted. And, despite my liking of the man, we still differ in our attitude as to what should be the fate of the Jews of Poland. He is against conversion and feels most of the people who are looking to find their Jewish roots are not 'really Jewish" Perhaps he is right. However, in a situation like the present one in Krakow, or, even Poland, this is not the time for "us vs. them." The fledging resurgence of Jewish civilization should be helped in their efforts.

The rabbi is proud that he just spent his 19th year serving the Krakow Jewish community. He is getting assistance and was telling me how LOT airlines had helped him so much in cooperating in helping to bring kosher food to the entire community for the Jewish holidays. However, there is so much more that is needed. We discussed how he must get on the case of the Polish government and working with the American Embassy in rebuilding the desecrated synagogues and cemeteries on Polish ground. So much more needs to be done. The Jews of Warsaw and Krakow are Jews who should be salvaged.

Mostly I find a mixed crowd with many who were young and held the desire to be "Jewish." Sevyron Askonizy in Warsaw has taken over an enormous job of rebuilding the Jewish community of Warsaw. However, it cannot be a one-man show. Where is the outside help in giving them the organization that they need? The Progressive synagogue has no rabbi. The Orthodox rabbi, from what I gathered, travels to New York twice a year and raises funds for his salary. It would be a better situation if there were a combined effort to help the Jewish community as a whole. Both communities appeared to be in dire need of books, and many more of the necessities that we in the States take for granted.

The community, in my opinion, should be run as a business. There should be a governing board with outside checks on where the money ultimately ends up. Under this, their duties should be delegated. These duties should include education, membership and fund raising, directors assigned with committees under that, such as classes in Jewish history, political heritage, Hebrew language, Israeli dance, etc. This should include anything that comes under the realm of education. And, that includes the badly needed books in both English and Hebrew that are now missing. The same sort of committees should come under the director of membership, fundraising etc. And finally, the Rabbi and cantor should be paid a salary along with the outside employees who have been brought in to operate and manage the synagogue and surrounding grounds.

Fundraising for salaries has no place being done representing a group. At this point in time, the issue should be to realize that the Jews of Poland haven't left as a whole and probably will not. These are for the most part young people who are looking for leadership, managerial skills and education. Thank G-d for the Ronald Lauders and Sevyron Ashkenazi's but that's not enough. Who is going to send the Rabbis who not only make them feel accepted but also have personalities and knowledge to keep them interested within the fold? If there are going to be Jewish restaurants, clubs, Cultural committees, bookstores, synagogues, and Jewish community centers, better they should be manned by Jews and not Polish employees, as is the case now. Money must be raised to pay their salaries.

I wanted to buy a Kiddush cup, Shabbat Candlesticks... anything in the synagogue in Krakow and found absolutely nothing available to purchase. Worse, nobody working there even knew what I was talking about. At Auschwitz I was appalled to learn that there were only four guides who spoke English and there was not one on the premises who spoke Hebrew. Why is the Polish government not picking up the slack in simple remedies like this? When I mentioned this to the guide I had arranged, she responded, "Why should the Polish government pay anything? They had nothing to do with it." I answered, "Maybe they should take some of the billions of dollars that they stole from the homes they confiscated?" She seemed truly surprised and said "Oh no, that was the communist. The Poles had no choice. They were assigned where to live."

The Germans in their maniacal efficacy were so devious in the building of these death camps that I remember thinking while traveling through Majandak Concentration Camp in Lublin a few days earlier how in another place, or another time those peaceful looking wooden barracks could have been Camp Barney Meditz where I went to summer camp outside of Atlanta, Georgia as a child. Driving into the camp I passed lovely scenery and picturesque houses. I couldn't help wonder what memories or better yet, nightmares the residents living in them have. Nothing can prepare one for the rare barbarianism and cruelty, which these people have done. I will never be able to look at a German or even some Poles without feelings of contempt and disgust.

And finally, speaking of Auschwitz. I can describe Krakow but Auschwitz is beyond description. As much as the mind can envision, the life under these animals, the Nazis, was unspeakable. However, after traveling to Prague and Lubin and also visiting places such as Thereseinstadt, Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka by the time I got to Auschwitz I thought I had become desensitized. That is, until I walked inside a lone barracks building looked in the semi darkness and looked down the long rows of shelves where these poor souls slept and saw one long stem red rose lying there. Shortly after, I walked down the path to the crematorium and saw two more of the long stem roses placed gently on top of the oven. That's about the time I lost it.

MUSSOLINI AND THE JEWS

Some excerpts from an article by Andrew M. Canepa published in “Patterns of Prejudice” 1979, 13 (6), 18-27.

The Fascist racial laws of 1938 surprised and shocked Jewish and non-Jewish Italians alike. Even after the so-called "Manifesto of the Race" of 14 July, Italian Jews still thought that the storm of government-inspired antisemitic rhetoric would pass, as in the past, without leaving traces in the legislation of the Kingdom or in the basic attitude of the Regime. This, at least, was the impression gathered on the spot by the distinguished American-Jewish journalist Martin Agronsky, shortly after the fond hopes of his Italian coreligionists were belied by the racialist decrees of September and October. According to another contemporary foreign observer, Sir Andrew McFadyean, the 50,000 Jews of the peninsula were struck dumbfounded by the unexpected laws, "like people stupefied by a bad dream from which they had not yet awakened." The reaction of Gentile Italians, most Fascists included, was not dissimilar. The secret reports of local Fascist Party officials testify to widespread dissent and opposition throughout the Kingdom, and, according to the historian D. A. Binchy, the majority of the population greeted the antisemitic campaign with "resentful shame." Indeed, students of the period now argue that the racial laws of 1938 marked the first major break between the Italian people and the Regime, ended the so-called "years of consensus," and sounded the death-knell of Fascism.

Given the context of modern Italian history, the feelings of perplexity and resentment shared by Jews and Gentiles were natural. Emancipation in Italy, extended to the whole of the peninsula in 1870, had been a unique success, in both its positive and its negative aspects: in the security, opportunities and acceptance accorded Italian Jews, and in the progressive erosion of their Jewish identity. The genuineness of Jewish equality in Italy has been attested to by informed and not uncritical sources such as Cecil Roth, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann and the late Italian Zionist leader Dante Lattes. Jews were fully integrated into Italian society and politics and had access to careers in diplomacy and the military, careers generally closed to them elsewhere in the West. In this light, it is no mere coincidence that both the first Jewish minister of war and the first Jewish prime minister in Europe, respectively, Giuseppe Ottolenghi (1902-03) and Luigi Luzzattt (1910-11), were Italians. Until at least 1936, antisemitism on the peninsula was a marginal phenomenon isolated from the mainstream of Italian life. To be sure, after unification, there had been fleeting instances of anti-Jewish polemics in anarcho-syndicalist, in nationalist, and even in liberal circles. However, even the only consistent current of antisemitism in pre-Fascist Italy, the clerical campaign from the early 1880s to the turn of the century, was an exception which proved the rule. That is, far from being an asset, the Judeophobia of Catholics served only to further isolate them from the politics of the Kingdom, and as clerical forces finally became integrated into the Italian political system under Giovanni Giolitti, they concurrently muffled their anti-Jewish polemics. Nor did the favourable situation of Italian Jewry change with the transition from the Liberal to the Fascist State. Indeed, as we shall have occasion to discuss, during the first fourteen years of the Regime - the "honeymoon period," as Meir Michaelis calls it - a symbiosis developed between Fascism and the Italian Jews, and in certain respects (though not in others) their legal status was actually enhanced.

The Jews of Italy, for their part, were more than grateful to the beloved patria for the equality and opportunities accorded them and were anxious to express this gratitude......

During the "honeymoon period" - which, as far as the Regime's official attitude is concerned, could be extended to 1936 - not only were relations between Mussolini and the Jews (both Italian and foreign) cordial, but to some extent an actual symbiosis developed between Fascism and Italian Jewry. In the decade following the March on Rome, the religious and civil rights of Italian Jews were respected and safeguarded; the Duce issued a series of antiracialist and warmly philo-Semitic statements; the government even encouraged (up to a certain point) the activities of the Italian Zionist Federation. Italian Jewry, for its part, because of the favourable attitude of the Regime and because of its own largely middle class makeup, on the whole accepted Fascism and the Fascist State. By 1933, 7,300 Jews had enrolled in the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista); and, though there were numerous Jews in the anti-Fascist camp, until 1938 there was no specifically Jewish opposition to the Regime. The symbolic highwater mark of cordial relations was reached in the spring and summer of 1932, when Mussolini made his most noted denunciation of antisemitic racialism in an interview with Emil Ludwig and, as a confirmation of his convictions, appointed Guido Jung as Minister of Finance.....

Similarly, the facilitated entry to Italian universities (reduced rail fares, cancellation of fees, scholarships), accorded in the 1920s and '30s to thousands of Jewish students from Central and Eastern Europe hit by the numerus clausus at home, was granted with an eye to creating a generation of professionals who would presumably spread admiration for Italian culture and Fascist institutions abroad. As late as 1942, Fascist officials still viewed Italian citizens of Jewish "race" residing in Tunisia and Rumania as the vanguard of Italian economic penetration in those areas, and accordingly sought to protect them against the German forces of occupation....

....the basic elements of the Duce's thought in relation to the Jewish question. One of these constants was Mussolini's personal rejection of the doctrine of biological racialism, an unfeigned conviction which he repeated to intimates and family members even after the promulgation of racialist legislation. Paradoxical as this may seem, it only serves to underscore the dictator's cynical opportunism (an attitude not limited, of course, to his policy vis-a-vis the Jews)....

The beginnings of a reorientation in Fascist policy towards the Jews coincided with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. For the following three years, until the summer of 1936, Mussolini performed a "balancing act" between Hitler and the West, antisemitism and philo-Semitism. It was during this transitional phase that the evolution of the Jewish policy of the Regime became intimately linked to Italian foreign policy in general and to German-Italian relations in particular.....

After the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss by pro-Nazis in July 1934, the Italian dictator temporarily switched back to his previous tactic of exploiting the Jewish issue (and Jewish grievances against Germany) for political and propagandistic gains. Thus, for example, in a September 1934 article for the official Party organ, Il Popolo d'Italia, Mussolini ridiculed the "Aryan" myth and contended that the vaunted racial purity of the Germans led only to congenital idiocy, citing as evidence the statistics of mental illness in the Reich. A month later, in the course of a meeting with Nahum Goldmann, the Duce called Hitler an idiot and a good-for-nothing and declared himself a Zionist ready to back the formation of a true Jewish State, "not the ridiculous National Home that the British have offered you." What's more, in this case, Mussolini's sympathetic declarations were accompanied by promises of diplomatic action which he in fact honoured: Italian support for the evacuation of Jews from the Saar in the face of impending German occupation, and opposition to the revision of the minority rights guarantees of the peace treaties, with specific reference to the status of the Jews in Poland.

The growing Italo-German rapprochement, though, did not prevent Mussolini from keeping his options open and issuing statements which were as much bridges to the West as they were reassuring overtures to the Jews. Thus, in autumn of 1935, the Duce reaffirmed the equality enjoyed by Italian Jews and even claimed that "Italian and Jewish ideals are fully merged into one. It should be noted that, indeed, during the entire transitional period surveyed above, irrespective of the attitude of the Fascist press (for which the dictator was fully responsible), no alteration in the favourable legal status of Italian Jewry was either effected or contemplated, and no anti-Jewish measures, official or unofficial, were taken by the Regime.

Ironically, the Duce's final break with the Jews was to some extent conditioned by Fascism's earlier, diametrically opposed policy towards them. For, as Michaelis incisively argues, the existence of Jewish generals and admirals, of Jewish government and party functionaries, which the Duce's previous stand had encouraged (or at least facilitated), was now inadmissible in light of Italy's new alignment in world politics. On the one hand, even convinced Fascist Jews could not be expected to maintain wholehearted loyalty to an alliance with the Reich; while, for his part, Hitler would never agree to collaborate with his ally's Jewish servants. The way out of this dilemma Mussolini found in the adoption of a discriminatory criterion which would eliminat the embarrassment and inconvenience posed even by "exception Jews":

In these circumstances the Fascist dictator felt the need for an ideology which would allow him to rid himself not only of the "disloyal Italian Jews" (who were being eliminated anyhow), but also of the "loyal Jewish Italians" (who had hitherto been regarded as a definite asset). This ideology was racialism. However, though side by side, the two allies never marched in step, and this was again reflected during the course of the war in the field of Fascist Jewish policy. Because Mussolini remained committed to the Axis until the bitter end, and because of Italian military dependence on the Germans, the Duce would not back away from his antisemtic legislation, nor could he mitigate the official racialist ideology of the Regime. On the other hand, the Jewish question outside Italy served the Fascist authorities as a means of asserting what little freedom of action from their Nazi senior partners they were able to maintain. Together with genuine expressions of spontaneous humanitarianism, this eminently political consideration explains why the zones of Italian military occupation in France and the Balkans became havens of refuge where Jews were unmolested.....