Hitler and the problems of National Self-determination

"The most believing Protestant could stand in the ranks of our movement next to the most believing Catholic, without ever having to come into the slightest conflict of conscience to his religious obligations." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The idea of national self-determination is closely linked to American President Woodrow Wilson and the post-World War I peace settlements. Nations are conceived of along ethnic, linguistic, racial and cultural lines. National self-determination provides that each group of people who constitute a definable nation has the right to their own national government.

The Democratic Party lauds Woodrow Wilson as a great President, a man of progressive (liberal) ideals who was also a man of peace and yet led the U.S. to its first great international war victory. A closer examination reveals a more complex picture, in which Wilson, a college professor turned politician, was a conservative racist who turned against his own idea of national self-determination as soon as he saw its global consequences, which did not sit well with his Aryan, racist agenda.

[Who's lying to you Litmus Test: if Woodrow Wilson was not a racist, why did racism remain legal in the U.S. after he had two terms as President?]

As I write this, ethnic and religious conflicts continue to escalate. Israel is bombing parts of Palestine it made into reservations for the natives when it got tired of its ethnic cleansing chore. Kurds are asserting their rights to recognition as a nation. The lines drawn by Wilson's colonial-era pals of the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires are still not working, largely due to their failure to correspond to natural national boundaries.

But there is another important consideration: the negative consequences of stressing ethnic cultures, religion, and nationalism.

After World War I Poland was created from former parts of Germany (and a bit of Russia). There was a substantial German-speaking population within the new Poland. The new Austria was German speaking, Roman Catholic, and highly anti-semitic.

Meanwhile, a lot of other cultural nations thought they should have the same rights as the Poles. Famously, Ho Chi Minh demanded independence for Vietnam, but he represented just one of hundreds of nations seeking self-determination. The Brits and French gave the right to self-determination to exactly one nation within their empires between World War I and World War II (the Republic of Ireland, but Britain kept Northern Ireland). The lesson was clear: only losers in wars might get dismembered into smaller nations with borders drawn on ethnic lines.

It should not be surprising that Hitler's Germany had strange allies in World War II (some in hostile neutrality, like Ireland). In almost every colony of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch empires there were groups hoping Hitler would win, and in many cases fighting against the British or French.

While Britain won the war (and the French empire was re-instated), the cost was so high it was unable to maintain much of its empire afterwards. National revolutions, often led by Communists, lined up much more of the world along lines of national self-determination.

Many of the new nations had sub-nations within them. Vietnam had Roman Catholics and Buddhists who did not like communism or each other. India had many sub-nations that had be be invaded by Mahatma Gandhi's tanks to persuade them that they were not to be allowed to exercise their own rights to self-determination. Most African nations had multiple rival tribal or clan groups arbitrarily thrown together.

And a whole bunch of European Jews who survived the Holocaust decided they needed a land of their own, the land their ancestors had abandoned almost two thousand years earlier. They invaded Palestine, kicked out most other Palestinians, and set up a racist state they call Israel.

The United States of America, for all of its legendary past faults (genocide, racism, etc.), meanwhile has developed a new model. I just call it the Modern state. It is not based on race or religion, though there is nationalism. It is based on ideals tempered with pragmatism: liberty of conscience, a semblance of equality under the law, and pragmatic good government: good roads, fair schools, and not too much air pollution, even a bit of a social safety net, as long as taxes are not too high.

But this modern America had advantages in developing. Not just a lot of resources that were easily stolen from the natives, but a population (excepting black slaves) who came here more or less voluntarily at an exceptional time in history. At a time when people were questioning revealed religions like Christianity and Islam. At a time when Republics were a reality and were moving in the direction of becoming Democracies. And when agricultural and industrial revolutions were getting underway that would raise the standards of living for almost everyone.

I believe people have a right to self-determination, but I believe they should be cautious with that right. The Nazis determined that no Jews, atheists, or communists would be allowed to live in Germany. Then they decided to greatly enlarge Germany. That is not the example I am hoping other nations will follow.

When a people has been deprived of their own nation for a long time, and has been treated poorly by the nation(s) they inhabit, I think they might benefit from setting up as a nation-state. Thus I favor Kurdish and Palestinian states, among others. But ... I hope they are modern states, or turn into modern states. I hope the people choose to join the modern world, with modern values: equality and justice for all. Not states based on religious or ethnic tests.

When there is equality and justice for all, it does not matter which government rules us, nor which ethnic group we descend from or identify with.

It is sad that America's leaders after World War II (mirroring the equally culpable leaders of the U.S.S.R.) sought to create a new commercial-imperial global system run from Washington D.C. America's making enemies so readily, and imposing our will when possible with bombs, assassinations, rigged elections and embargoes, marred our international image and robbed our modern system of moral authority (as did discrimination in the U.S. against non-whites, until around 1970).

Adolf Hitler was not a self-made man. Germany, Austria and Turkey surrendered at the end of World War I, after Woodrow Wilson and his allies had promised a just peace. Instead the defeated Central Powers  were treated to dismemberment and economic pillage. Hitler blamed this "stab in the back" on Jews and communists, and an angry nation elevated him to power. Nor were the Zionists who fought to create Israel in Palestine self-made: they were Hitler's creation. Hamas, in turn, was created by the Israeli Zionists.

We need the opposite chain-reaction. Self-determination based on nationalism or religion is not necessarily bad, but it is just as dangerous as imperialism. I hope when people assert their right to self-determination, they determine that they want equality and justice for all humans, not a new round of sectarian conflict.

Martin Luther King, Slavery and the Joseph Knight case

The American Revolution was as much about slavery (keeping it, not ending it) as anything else. I realized that as a young man back in the 1970's when I came across the Somersett Case*, a ruling by Lord Mansfield in England in 1772. Slavery could not exist on English soil, according to English law. Hence a Virginia slave who set foot on English soil became free. This led a bunch of slave owners in Virginia to set up their Committees of Correspondence to join in the independence movement started in Boston for other reasons.

Most Americans still have not heard of the Somersett case, but at least among academic historians the Mansfield ruling is better known, though of course many are still in denial about its role in motivating Washington, Jefferson and their crew.

I only recently learned (from How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, published in 2001) about a case ruling in Scotland (part of Great Britain, but with a separate legal system). In the year following the Declaration of Independence, 1777, Lord Kames and colleagues ruled that an African-born man, Joseph Knight, who had been a slave in Jamaica (then a British colony; sugar grown by slaves was a major source of British wealth) was free once he was brought to Scotland. The court wrote "The dominion assumed over the negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country to any extent."

It is important to distinguish between the Somersett ruling and the Knight ruling, although they both resulted in slaves being set free. Lord Mansfield made his ruling as a point of law: slavery (serfdom) had been abolished in English law. Since there was no basis in law for slavery, a slave coming from the Americas or elsewhere became free in England.

The Scottish notion was more radical. Due to work already done by Lord Kames and others, the judges believed that slavery was against nature and human nature. They believed that any law allowing for slavery was itself invalid. They prized justice and liberty over mere legal precedence and rulings by parliaments and kings.

Sadly, rather than learning from the Knight ruling (which the many lawyers who led the independence movement in the U.S. would have known about), the new ruling class in the former colonies allowed slavery to continue. When the U.S. Constitution was written, they wrote slavery into it.

Which leads us to the question of racism. Ethnic groups belief in their own superiority goes back to pre-history, but modern racism is a modern phenomena, and it was developed in the United States. Slavery was a product of greed and the use of force. Once the slaves became an essential part of the economy of the U.S., and of the owned wealth of the southern aristocracy, there was a an incentive to keep slavery in place. The flowery words of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the new Constitution indicated that the Enlightenment doctrines of liberty and equality were well known in the U.S.

To keep the slave system intact a new doctrine, an aristocrats' trump card, was needed. That was the inferiority of non-white humans; racial inferiority. In fact, the racist theory of southerners for the most part denied that Africans were human. They were at best sub-human. Hence they could not have human rights. Hence the reasoning of the Knight case could not apply in the U.S. Hence slaves were property, a theory confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Decision.

All the evidence to the contrary did not matter. It is important to keep in mind that when people have an economic interest at stake, they can become purposefully blind to questions or justice or even of factual reality.

The Democratic Party was founded explicitly as a racist, pro-Slavery party by the slave trader and eventually President Andrew Jackson and his friends. The party did not truly reject racist doctrines until after Lyndon Johnson became President in 1964.

After the Civil War and the anti-slavery amendments to the U.S. Constitution the myth of racial inferiority continued to damage people and society. Segregation of the races was substituted for liberty and equality.

When we celebrate Martin Luther King day it is important not to forget that many, many people fought to end slavery and racism. It was a process that started long before the American Revolution. It had many heroes and heroines, but in the long run what mattered was changing the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Americans.

The Somersett and Knight cases should be added to the texts on civics and history used in American public schools. As far as I know this has not happened, and it shows how false patriotism and phony history still misshape our society.

*not a consistent spelling; also mentioned as Somerset and Sommersett in texts and law books.

Professors Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, and Woodrow Wilson

This week Newton Gingrich has become the Republican Party Presidential primary candidate best positioned to beat front-runner Mitt Romney. Before he was a politician Newt was a History Professor. President Obama was a Law Professor before he became a politician. When you look at the history of American Presidents, college professor is not a very common occupation. The other exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Political Economy at Princeton.

While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).

There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?

Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.

While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.

In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.

For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.

Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.

For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.

Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.

The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.

He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.

I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.

Recognize Palestine

The United Nations (U.N.) is a funny place. And I don't mean ha-ha funny.

On the one hand it is as close as one can get to a recognizable global government. Therefore it makes sense for the Palestinians to ask the U.N. to recognize their existence as a nation.

On the other hand, it has most of the attributes of a bad government, and few attributes of a good government. Given its history, that should not be a surprise. The UN was, and remains, a profoundly racist institution, dedicated to maintaining the system of imperialist domination of the industrial, mainly "white race" nations over all others.

The UN had as its predecessor the League of Nations. In American history books Woodrow Wilson is almost always portrayed as the progressive peace-lover who worked to create the League of Nations, to promote world peace, only to see the U.S. Senate reject American membership in the body. That is not untrue. But Woodrow Wilson was one of the intellectual architects of racism in the United States, and the leader of the overtly racist Democratic Party. His Fourteen Points for world peace and international relations basically amounted to democracy for white people.

President Wilson effectively called for new nations based on ethnic majorities when those new nations had been part of rivals to the American, British, and French empires. For instance Poland, which did not exist as a state before World War I, was to be created out of parts of Russian and Germany. But he did not call for independent states to be carved out of any part of the American or British empire. Neither the Philippines nor Puerto Rico, both U.S. colonies, were considered nations capable of self-determination.

Japan was one of the few nations that had, at that time, escaped colonization by one of the imperialist nations (often referred to then as the Great Powers: the United States, Russia, Germany, France, the British Empire, and perhaps Italy). During negotiations Japan raised the idea that Asian peoples had a right to self-determination. That would mean the U.S., Britain, France and Holland giving up their colonies (Germany's were taken from it for losing the war). Woodrow Wilson, chairing the committee that considered that proposal, killed it. He really truly thought that only people of European descent were capable of self-government. Instead of a peaceful withdrawal of imperialists from Asia in 1920, the issue led to the Asian Anti-colonial War (always lumped by U.S. historians into World War II, to confuse the issue) and then to a series of national liberation struggles lasting into the 1970s, including the Vietnam War. [See also: The U.S. War Against Asia]

Palestine, after World War I, was not allowed national self-determination. It was removed from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire and places in the British Empire. The British, in order to receive Jewish financial backing during World War I, had promised to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). While there were (fluctuating degrees) of Jewish immigration into Palestine before World War II, the British never official created a Jewish state or region in Palestine.

The United Nations was a reboot of the old League of Nations, with most of its flaws. It did not call for the abolition of colonialism. It was designed expressly to give the appearance of global backing to the new British-American alliance. It was not democratic in any reasonable sense of the term, as the one-person one-vote guideline was subverted by the colonial system and other un-democratic structures. Where independent nations had been established in Asia, the UN allowed them to be re-colonized. In particular when Korea tried to become an independent nation (the Korean War) the UN voted to attack Korea. Similarly, in almost every case where it has been involved, the UN has helped strong nations attack weaker nations.

Meanwhile, back in Palestine, the Jewish section of the population threw out the British and established a state by force of arms in 1946 through 1948. Unfortunately, this was not simply a matter of making reality out of the Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination. It was largely a land grab and instance of ethnic cleansing, for the native Palestinians were largely thrown out with the British, by the mostly European jewish invaders. The new state of Israel made further conquests in a series of wars, leaving the Palestinians with no territory of their own. Although at first reluctant to back the tiny new state and anger the Arab states in the region, in the U.S. Jewish votes in the key states of Florida and New York, along with a vast corruption of government through election campaign donations eventually made the U.S. government the primary military and economic backer of the state of Israel.

Despite their troubles, the Palestinians have retained their national identity and have created a culture of resistance to Israeli tyranny. This week the Palestinian National Authority petitioned the United Nations to recognize the Nation of Palestine.

President Obama is too worried about getting himself re-elected with American Jewish money and votes to support Palestinian statehood. Given the anti-democratic structure of the U.N., that means the Palestinian request will be blocked by its Security Council. Based solely on a military alliance that existed during World War II, five security council seats have permanent members (the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, France, and China) with permanent veto powers. Basically, the form of the United Nations is an oligarchy bordering on dictatorship.

However, a vote in the General Assembly is likely to show that the majority of the nations of the world want to recognize Palestine as a nation, and that implies they want to see justice done for the Palestinian people.

Americans should support democracy and national self-determination, including for the nation of Palestine. The United States government should voluntarily relinquish its veto power in the U.N., along with the other permanent Security Council members.
Further, the United States of America should recognize the Palestinian state, regardless of the outcome in the United Nations. President Obama should be ashamed of his self-serving following in the footsteps of that architect of racism, Woodrow Wilson.

The Dutch East Indies, Racism, and World War II

You usually don't hear much about the Dutch East Indies during World War II. There is a good reason for that, and it is not that the fighting in the Dutch East Indies was particularly significant or insignificant.

The Dutch East Indies serves as a litmus test. On the one side you had the U.S. claim that it was an entirely innocent nation fighting against the evil, undemocratic, imperialistic, militaristic, godless Buddha-worshipping transgressors, the Japanese.

On the other hand you have the claim by the Japanese that they were not conquering Asia but liberating it from centuries of domination and exploitation by European nations and the United States of America. This is a claim of which most Americans today are unaware. It was not well advertised to Americans during World War II, either, except to the GIs in the Pacific Theater who heard the likes of Tokyo Rose. After World War II a large number of Japanese were hung for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A puppet government was installed by the U.S. in Japan, then enlisted to join the U.S. in its Cold War against the communist and socialist movements. No scholar who was willing to examine Japanese war time claims objectively could keep a job in academia in either country.

Things have cooled off a bit, over six decades after Pearl Harbor and the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It should be possible to get a bit of objectivity on the subject, even in the United States of America.

I ask, does the situation of the Dutch East Indies, before, during, and after World War II support either the Japanese claims, or the American claims?

Japan can certainly claim that it was at peace with the world in the 1850's brought American war ships to its harbors, eventually ushering in an era of modernization, militarization, and westernization [See The U.S. Bullies Japan in the 1850's]. It can claim (dubiously) that its attack on China was by invitation from prominent nationalist Chinese who wanted to liberate China from Western domination, and in particular from the incompetent rule of U.S. puppet Chiang Kai Shek [See Notes from Chiang Kai-Shek by Hollington K. Tong] Certainly the French held Indochina in slavery until the Japanese arrived. Certainly the U.S. had committed genocide in the Philippines and still held the islands as a colony when Japan invaded them shortly after Pearl Harbor.

But the U.S. war propaganda may have had some substance to it. The Philippines were allowed a quasi-independent status after World War II. Truman did not accede to General MacArthur's demand to drop a-bombs on Communist China. Maybe the Japanese "liberation of Asia" was no different than Hitler installing General Petain in France or the U.S. installing any of a number of dictators in Latin American nations over the centuries.

As you might have guessed, the Dutch East Indies was a Dutch colony, or colony of the Netherlands (aka Holland). Its colonization began through trading activities of the Dutch East India Company in the 1600's. In 1800, when the company went bankrupt, it formally became a colonial empire of vast extent claimed by government of the Netherlands. Its many islands and independent tribes and principalities were brought under firmer Dutch control in the 1800s. Throughout this period and into the 19th century there were numerous rebellions against the Netherlands. [See also Dutch East Indies]

When the Japanese invaded in 1942 they dismantled the colonial government. Although Japanese occupied the top of the new government, natives filled most of the positions. For the most part the United States and its allies did not contest these islands during the war, so the Japanese and natives were still in possession when Japan surrendered. [See also Japanese Occupation of Indonesia]

The Indonesians, as they are now referred to, were ready to set up an independent government. If the U.S. was fighting Japan for good reasons, it would insisted that a native, democratic government to be set up in Indonesia.

Instead The Netherlands was allowed to use military force to try to re-establish its colony. The United States gave no aid to the Indonesian independence fighters. After three years of fighting, in 1949 The Netherlands conceded defeat and recognized the independence of Indonesia. This was one of the earliest successful fights for independence in Asia.

If the Japanese had not crushed the Netherlands' military in Indonesia, it is likely that the struggle for independence would have taken much longer. Even to the extent that the Japanese gloss of Pan Asian independence was a cover for Japanese nationalism, it still had the long term effect of liberating the nations of Asia.

The U.S. role in World War II in Asia, in contrast, was motivated only by commercial greed, imperialist pretensions, and racism. The Dutch East Indies litmus test tends to support the thesis that the U.S. went to war with Japan to protect the Euro-American colonialization project in Asia.

Weeks before Pearl Harbor the U.S. had given Japan an ultimatum amounting to an unofficial declaration of war. The U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor was intended to invade Asia and provide for another century of white racist exploitation of the nations of Asia. The destruction of that fleet by the Japanese Navy was a legitimate act of defense that targeted military installations. In contrast, the U.S. fire bombings of Japanese cities, followed by the annihilation of the civilians of Hiroshima nd Nagasaki, were war crimes and crimes against humanity of the highest order.

This does not excuse the bad behavior of the Japanese military establishment before and during World War II. But as an American, my primary aim is to correct American behavior. We have to admit to our government's war crimes and to our history of racism and imperialism. We also have to admit that most of these war crimes were carried out by the Democratic Party, which is a war-crimes organization that needs to be disbanded along with its sister Republican Party.

Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson

Barack Obama was not the favorite Democratic Party primary candidate of the hard-core peace advocates within the Democratic Party (and duly noting that most serious peace activists are outside the Democratic Party). Hillary Clinton, who looks to be the next Secretary of State, had voted for the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan back before Barack made it to the United States Senate. She was the presumed winner, and so kept a moderate stance on continuing the wars in order to be ready to go up against the Republican nominee. Barack kept saying "hope" and "change," and pointed to his not voting for beginning the wars (he did vote regularly to continue funding them). When he became the nominee, he not only assumed the Clinton "moderate" position but promised to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to make sure, by slaughtering even more Afghanis on their own soil, that our puppet government in Kabul would hold onto power.

But, so far, he can't claim to be as bad as Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson is one of the Presidents we are usually told was a "great" President. During his presidency the U.S. joined the great imperialist powers France and Great Britain in defeating Germany in World War I. We are told this was a victory for Democracy, even though Great Britain was demonstrably less of a democracy than Germany at that time.

U.S. historians, even those who might better be called propagandists, do not fail to mention that in the 1916 campaign Wilson sought re-election on the basis of having "kept us out of war," but then pushed our nation into the war (See Woodrow Wilson and the Lusitania [December 4, 2006]). In contrast the U.S. government is already slaughtering the innocents of Afghanistan, and note Barack Obama never promised to get us out of Afghanistan.

But there are lesser known aspects of Woodrow Wilson that will be interesting to compare with Barack Obama, the first non-white to be elected President of the United States. Notably, Wilson was a racist. A tried and true racist. Not a gun-toting, Ku Klux Klan racist, but very clear on the idea that Europeans were a superior people and that non-Europeans did not deserve full citizenship status under law. For instance, "The federal government showed little or no interest in civil rights, and indeed, Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner by birth, was only too eager to promote segregation in Washington, D.C." [p. 525, Lawrence M. Friedman's A History of American Law, Third Edition]

Moreover, Wilson's alleged love of peace is usually "proven" by his promotion of the League of Nations. While Wilson was too busy in Europe to devote America's energies to the War Against Asia, he did manage to remind the Japanese (and all Asians) that the Europeans did not consider them to be fully human. The Japanese were U.S. allies in World War I (because they wanted to grab German colonies in east Asia). They had defeated both China and Russia in earlier wars. They felt they were as civilized and capable as Europeans. The Japanese delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the Preamble to the Covenant include a declaration for "the principle of equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals." Which, if it had passed, might have meant a gradual end of colonialism, and a peaceful Japan.

Woodrow Wilson was chairman of the committee hearing the proposal. Wanting to defeat it, he ruled that the motion could only be approved by a unanimous vote. Eleven of the seventeen nations on the committee voted for the proposal, six against, with the U.S. and the "democracy" of Great Britain not voting for it. So the League of Nations was an openly imperialist, racist organization. [Meribeth E. Cameron et al, China, Japan and the Powers, The Ronald Press Company, New York. Pages 377-379]

In short Woodrow Wilson was a disgrace. And the history of the Democratic party is disgraceful.

You can argue the Barack Obama situation two ways. Democrats like the idea that the past is no concern of theirs, that the party is what they say it is today. Forget about all those votes for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; forget the lack of protest against the U.S. paying allies to trample on the sovereignty of Somalia. Hope for a new, brighter future in which even black men, as long as they are inoffensive and have two parents with graduate degrees and somehow get themselves a degree from Harvard Law School, can become President.

Or you can ask: why would Barack Obama devote himself to the Democratic Party when he knows it is the primary racist institution in the United States? If you are going to forget the past and reform a war crimes organization, why not work within the Republican Party, which at least has the merit of having opposed slavery and segregation?

Of course, what Barack and the Democratic majority in Congress do in the next four years will at least define the true, honest, current state of the Democratic Party. Maybe it will turn out better than I think.

If this democratic republic still exists a century from now, with the same system of two-party rule, rest assured that American citizens will be told that Barack Obama was a great President. Just as they will be told that George W. Bush was a great President. No matter what Barack does or does not do in office.

Goodbye Senator Clinton

The Senator from New York State, or as I have called her the Senator from Wall Street, was unable to manage a comeback of significant enough magnitude to win the Democratic Party's nomination for President. In her underdog role, however, she looked good. She came very, very close to becoming the first woman to win the nomination for the highest political office in the United States from a major political party.

Mrs. Clinton, according to news sources, was raised in a Republican family, but then went to a liberal, pro-Democratic Party college in the 1960's. The 60's did not radicalize her, but events did push her left of center. Apparently she decided to become a Democrat only after attending the Republican Party nominating convention in 1968, which nominated Richard Nixon. She believed the Republicans were racists. Which is pretty funny, in retrospect. The Democratic Party was founded explicitly as a slavery party by a man who traded slaves (and exterminated native America Indians) for a living. It was the party of the Confederacy during the civil war. It worked with the Klan to eliminate civil rights for African Americans after the civil war and then was the party of Segregation Forever until, well, 1964. Not that the Republican Party was great on civil rights issues after the Radical Republicans lost power in 1880, but if you had to pick a year that was an anomaly it was 1968. White working class Americans were mad, and the Republicans wanted their votes, especially in the southern states. Richard Nixon whispered some racist code words to win the election, but as President continued the good work on civil rights that he had begun as Vice-president in the 1950s.

There is still racism in our society, and even more important, the results of centuries of racial and economic discrimination against non-whites still affect many people in a negative way. This is the year that Democratic Party voters decided to compensate for past crimes by nominating a half-African American, well-educated son of well-educated parents, to lead the nation. It is not a bad thing, but it means we won't have a woman President. I think women will continue to be marginalized because of this.

Hillary Clinton was part of a team with Bill Clinton. They captured the White House in 1992, but I suspect Hillary would have done better if she had become, say, the state Senator from Arkansas and then ran on her own steam.

I disagree with Ms. Clinton on many, many issues. She nods towards environmentalism when the nation needs a fighter. Same with most issues.

If Barack Obama wins the White House, I hope there is a role for Hillary Clinton. She would make a good Secretary of State, or of Health and Human Services. "Good," meaning good within the allowable spectrum of U.S. politics at present. I'd put Green Party members in every cabinet post, and the Presidency, if I could.

Meanwhile, you can still vote for a woman for President. Cynthia McKinney looks set to take the Green Party nomination. Cynthia is speaking in my neighborhood tomorrow, and I look forward to that.

Elections: 2008 and 1960

There are a lot of candidates in the field hoping to be elected President of the United States of America in 2008, or at least to feed on campaign contibution and media attention in the mean time. No one stands out and there are many wild cards both within the "major" parties and outside. Michael Bloomberg, billionaire mayor of New York may run. I hear the Green Party may have a very attractive, non-Nader candidate. If former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani is the Republican nominee there will almost certainly be an independent, ultra-right candidate. And never underestimate the Libertarian Party.

Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, just like those of us who do study history. I have been rethinking basic interpretations provided by the corporate media and academic thinkers (who are seldom as far apart as they like to pretend) and want to share some thoughts on the 1960 elections. Usually 1960 is cast as the victory of a liberal Democrat, John F. Kennedy, over a conservative Republican, Richard Nixon. But a lot of actual facts don't fit that neat picture. Just for instance Nixon was a Quaker, a group often associated with radical left politics, and Kennedy was a Catholic, usually a group associated with conservative to fascist politics (with many exceptions, notably Catholic Worker and Liberation Theology). Here is a map of who won the 1960 electoral college votes, state by state:

What is that strange Byrd thing? Why, it is the 15 electoral college votes that went to Harry Byrd, who was not even a candidate. Certain unpledged electors could stomach neither the Republican Nixon nor the Catholic Kennedy, so they gave their votes to Byrd. Kennedy ended up with 303 electoral votes to 219 for Niixon, so even if Nixon really won Illinois, as is widely alleged, Kennedy would still have won the election.

The key thing to see in this map, that most people have been taught not to see, is that Kennedy was the candidate that white racists voted for. It was not just a marriage of convenience. President Eisenhower, pushed by Vice-President Nixon, had been implementing the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in the South. Kennedy, as a Democrat, was part of a long standing agreement to support segregation to get votes in the South.

John F. Kennedy was an astute student of rhetoric, but a bad President (unless you are a racist, nationalist, and militarist). He did less than Eisenhower and Nixon about civil rights: he had to if he wanted the Southern electoral college votes again in 1964. He was a war criminal who okayed the invasion of Cuba; the fact that the invasion was repulsed by the people of Cuba hardly lessens his guilt. He was the son of a rapacious capitalist; he had been a supporter of the Red Scare when it was politic; he said Eisenhower was not tough enough on Communism. His only lasting legacy was the space program, which was mainly about regaining military supremacy over the Soviet Union while putting the expenses outside the military budget.

The truly sad thing is that Nixon turned to the dark side between his defeat in 1960 and his election in 1968. He inherited a war with Vietnam from Johnson. (Before Lyndon Johnson, American troops in Vietnam were primarilly for advising and training the South Vietnamese army that was going to defeat the commie terrorists. Every American President since James Buchanan in 1856 has inherited the War Against Asia, however.) He became a war criminal by invading Cambodia and Laos as well as by continuing attacks on civilians.

I think the ultimate solution to fixing American politics would include returning the President to the position intended by the Constitution: an administrator who carries out policies made by Congress. But that won't be one of the choices in 2008. Ladies and gentlement, if you have money place your bets; if you don't, you are still allowed to vote in the primaries and general election.