President Bush says he intends giving democracy to the Iraqis. Remember, he is President after a court disallowed 70,000 votes. Never has so much been said about democracy and never have we been so far from the ideal. How many of the governments supporting Bush are democratic? Among those claiming to be democratic how many listened to their own people or permitted open debate and voting in their parliaments? In Britain Tony Blair barely quelled a large revolt within his own Labour party over British participation in the Iraqi campaign. The British public clearly and overwhelming opposed the military action while Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary, resigned.
In Australia John Howard permitted a debate in the parliament only after he was sure there would be no dissent. He even said that Australian troops would be going to Iraq even if Parliament had voted against it. This is certainly an interesting type of democracy. After all, the Australian Constitution clearly states that the country cannot go to war except with the permission of its parliament. The Constitution also makes it clear that the Australian Governor-General, as Her Majesty's representative, is head of the armed forces. Somehow Prime Minister Howard was able to wave such little nuisances aside. Isn't that the very sort of arbitrary power that Saddam Hussein is condemned for exercising?

In just over three eventful weeks the US led forces took control of Iraqi. But what comes next. Occupying a country is a time-consuming and costly business. The irony of discussions about democracy in Iraq is that if any half-genuine elections are permitted those likely to be elected will be representatives or supporters of establishing an Islamic Shi-ite State. After years of suppression the Shi-ites have been able to openly express their religious fervour. Many of the Shi-ites take their cue from the Iranian Islamic revolution. This is an amazing irony. Through the 1980s the US backed Saddam in the bitter 10-year Iraqi-Iran war. Saddam maintained a secular Iraq and ruthlessly suppressed attempts by the Shi-ites and other Moslems to gain a political foothold. Religion was permitted but any fundamentalism was squashed. It was in fear of the fervour of the Iranian revolution spreading throughout the Moslem world that the major western powers backed Saddam against Islamic Iran. In toppling Saddam to protect the US dollar President Bush may have given an opening to a force that could later prove deadly to the Secular Humanists and Mammonites who presently rule the citadels of Western Power and insanely believe they can impose a colourless uniformity on the entire world.
A further significant factor may be the shear volume of often well-written and well-researched material distributed via the Internet. This completely bypasses the large media and yet still reaches millions of people.

It is clear that the Iraqi business has forced much more into the open the question of Israel and the dominance of the elitist Zionists and their Christian-Fundalmentist allies within the US government and media. Much of this exposure is coming from Jewish writers, particularly from Israel, making it clear that they want an end to the ill-treatment of the Palestinians and just solutions to other frustrations within the Arabic world. Even sections of the mass media are carrying statements that would have been unheard of a year ago. Here is an example from The Sunday Star-Times of April 13:
"The Middle East will continue to burn, and it will continue to threaten the world with terrorism, as long as Palestine continues to burn. Bush has done precious little to recognise the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians. The brutal fact remains that the modern state of Israel was founded on a massive injustice; the expropriation of Palestinian land. It is this that has led to decades of violence and war; it is this that lies behind the second intifada as it lay behind the first. Unless something is done about this injustice, the killing will never end. And the United States is the only country that can pressure Israel into decency."

The problem is that Bush's victory in Baghdad is all too likely to stoke his arrogance and his laziness. He has shown that he can win in the face of world opposition. He has shown that he can remove his enemies without significant help from the rest of the world (Tony Blair and John Howard being the exceptions that prove the rule). He is all too likely to think that victory in Baghdad is a licence for unilateralism.

"The Mammonites, as Jewish writer Uri Avnery calls the modern enemies of Humanity, will almost certainly find in time that they have bitten off more than they can chew. For the present they may yet cause a great deal more killing and destruction. Buoyed by his "win" against undefended Iraq President Bush and his unelected backers are already talking of invading Syria and other countries.

The Maid and the Ogre by Israel Shamir

A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At the last moment, a young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the monster. Her very sight, the sight of feminine innocence, vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of the right cause, stops the ogre in its tracks. The beast suffers her to tie her belt to his mighty neck and walks away, tamed.
It is the story of St Genevieve and of other beautiful and virtuous saints; a part and parcel of the human heritage, and the subject of many gorgeous tapestries and paintings. Courageous and noble maidens are still with us. They stopped the US Army trains with soldiers during Vietnam War, and they stopped Russian tanks in Prague 1968 and in Moscow 1991. Drivers of French, Russian, American and German tanks and trains knew: even a monster stops when a girl placidly places herself in his way. It is a biological law that we all are subject to.

Rachel Corrie was murdered by a monster from another tale. This young American girl, an ISM activist, tried to stop with her fragile body a Zionist bulldozer from ruining Palestinian homes. She could not imagine that the driver will look at her and calmly ride his ten-ton steel machine over her body, and back. Nothing in her life prepared her to the encounter with a monster born and bred in the Zionist labs, a monster that is totally alien and hostile to humans. She wrote to her parents: "no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it, tank-shell holes in the walls of their homes and the towers of an occupying army surveying the [Palestinian children] constantly from the near horizons".

Though she saw dead bodies of Palestinian children with their heads split by the Jewish sharp-shooters, she still had some illusions of "the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen". She was mistaken. Her country's President is about to send the US Army to destroy Iraq and turn the killers of Rachel into the undisputed supreme power of the Middle East. If Bush would be guided by America's interests, he would demand extradition of Rachel's killer. But the driver is not exclusive. The people behind the bullet-proof windshields of Caterpillars are the final product of Zionism.

At the beginning of [the] Zionist movement, its eugenic task was expressed in a poem: "Mi dam umi eza Nakim lanu geza"- "out of blood and sweat we shall breed a new victorious and cruel race", sang the Zionists. With [the] murder of Rachel Corrie the experiment came to its fruition. The "cruel race"is not a dream anymore, it is a new geopolitical reality. . . . Rachel's dreadful death should open America's eyes to the real danger to the world that grew in the Middle East. Her killers possess nuclear weapons, not only bulldozers. If Bush is so keen on a Middle East intervention and on removal of WMD, his troops could land here, on the shores of ar-Rafah, where [there] is a real threat to the world's peace, and forcibly remove all the weapons of mass destruction.

P.S. A friend of Rachel, an ISM activist Susan Barclay was deported a few days ago to the US by Sharon's regime, and now she is touring the US with lectures about the unfolding Palestinian tragedy. She can be contacted at stbarclay@yahoo.com (end of Shimar article)

Israel Shamir is a native of Siberia with wide experience as an author, translator and journalist. He has worked in many countries including Russia, the UK, Japan and Israel. He lives in Jaffa, Israel. His books include The Pine and the Olive and Travels in Japan, and has made translations of Joyce, Homer and Agnon into his native Russian. Stirred by the ill-treatment of the Palestinians by the blind cruelty of the political Zionist elites, and favouring humanitarian solutions to violence, he writes regular articles which can be subscribed to at shamireaders@yahoogroups.com/
His articles are gutsy and very well informed. He identifies the present ruling elites in the US and their fellow-travellers as Mammonites, perhaps the best description we have yet seen. In another of his articles, The Divine Wind, he pays tribute to Simone Weil "who was born into a Jewish family, joined Communists, fought in Spain, worked with the workers of Renault and followed St Teresa into the Church". He quotes her: "The strong are never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak. Those who have Might on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed. Might is as pitiless to the man who possesses it (or thinks he does) as it is to his victims. The second it crushes, the first it intoxicates."

He further quotes her: "The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered and conquerors. There is no refuge from fate; learn not to admire Might, not to hate the enemy, not to scorn the vanquished". These are potent words of wisdom and encouragement for us all, especially when the world presently seems dominated by the "Might is Right"philosophy.

In The Divine Wind Mr Shamir suggests everyone will be better off if much of the US Federal government's power is decentralised to the various States and its own role reduced to the functions of the US mail. This is along the lines of Solzhenitsyn's advice, pre-Glastnos to the Soviet leadership, that power must be decentralised and made more local. The Centralised Soviet Government over-extended itself and a clumsy and chaotic decentralisation followed. What will follow after the US Government over-extends itself?

Triumph of the Past

Triumph of the Past is the monthly journal of American Social Crediter and Distributist Michael Lane. Until now the journal has been available to overseas subscribers for $US22. As from the April 2003 edition Triumph of the Past can be subscribed via email at no charge. To receive the e-edition, send a note to triumphofthepast@aol.com To receive a plain-paper mailed edition the cost is $US20 which is only to cover the postage. This can be submitted by a personal cheque in equivalent New Zealand dollars, which is presently approximately $38, though we would suggest adding $5 or $6 to this to cover any bank fees. Order from PO Box 29535, Columbus, Ohio 43229, USA.

Michael Lane is the author of the two recent booklets, Charles Ferguson: Herald of Social Credit ($13) and Human Ecology & Social Credit ($11). We can supply both. "The state doesn't have to "provide" or "generate" work. Instead, free people with the dividend and let them surprise you. They'll come up with things the state could never dream of." - Michael Lane (email 24-4-03)

Road Deaths and Taxes

Death and taxes are humorously said to be two of the things we can't escape in this life. Certainly when it comes to the motorist the Government has struck a financial winner by combining the two. There are several hundred road deaths every year and certainly reasonable precautions ought to be taken to minimise these. But accidents have always happened. Before the advent of the motorcar some people were killed in horse accidents, from sinking ships and on derailing trains. Did these result in massive government concern? No, but then people had a little more freedom in those days and it was realistically accepted that "accidents do happen".
Also, presumably people then were able to resist more freely the incursion of government into every little corner of their lives.

By and large people and societies, wherever civilisation exists, learn from accidents and responsible people take more precautions. But the Government isn't particularly concerned about road safety except that by continually upbeating the issue it creates an atmosphere within which the motorist can be milked for all he is worth. While crime reigns virtually out of control almost the entire resources of the police have been directed against the motorist. The individual policeman is not to blame. He is also a victim. Most policeman are so demoralised they leave the force at the first opportunity. Many depart after just three years in the force.

Between the 1984-91 policy of the Lange Labour Government of early retirement of older experienced policemen and those who simply just leave it is now said that those with as little as six months on the job are "old school". They know that road policing is primarily now driven as a source of revenue, not road safety.

The comment of one Auckland sergeant, passed to us several months ago, was that "we will be busy on the roads for a while now otherwise there might not be any money to pay us at Christmas". The Police Department gets to keep a percentage of the revenue it collects. We know the Government is not really concerned about deaths on the roads. We know this because it isn't concerned about deaths that occur elsewhere. A number of murderers are walking free because of ridiculous legal technicalities and the Government does not seem to be concerned. The Government actually finances about 15,000 abortions a year. It entertains the idea of legalised euthanasia. At least 5000 known deaths occur each year in hospitals due to misdiagnoses or mistreatment, or the incorrect medication is used. Presumably if an excuse could be found to tax all those lucky enough to escape death in hospital then we would find new terms entering our vocabulary such as "the carnage in the hospitals". Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the motorist leads nearly everyone of us toward the Police State. The photo drivers license, which was introduced illegally by National Transport Minister Maurice Williamson is really a personal ID Card.

The Night After
by Uri Avnery, Israeli Author and Journalist (source Rense.com 18-4-03)

The Next War. It is now fashionable to talk about "the day after". Let's talk about the night after. After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will be faced with two decisive facts: First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat any people in the world, valiant as they may be. Second, the small group that initiated this war neo-conservatives almost without limits. The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger to the world, and especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the future of Israel.
Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people and especially the enemy of the Israeli peace camp. It does not dream only about an American empire, in the style of the Roman one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control of the extreme right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in all Arab countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences of which it is impossible to foresee.

Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological fervour and crass material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism and right-wing ionism. That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something of the spirit of Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans for changing the region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination, unbridled chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.

WHO are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers. For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered a right-wing agenda in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, they offered him advice on how to fight the Arabs. Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin Towers. The American public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely disoriented, unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. The neo-cons were the only group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only nine days after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder, Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting that it was not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin Laden, but that it was also imperative to "remove Saddam Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" against Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.
Following is a short list of the main characters. (If it bores you, skip to the next section). The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $10 million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons, including Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter [Commentary] magazine, and his wife, Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle. Perle is a central character in this play. Until recently he was the chairman of the Defence Policy Board of the Defense Department, which also includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the Jerusalem Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against the Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He is a leading member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign from his Defense Department position, when it became known that a private corporation had promised to pay him almost a million dollars for the benefit of his influence in the administration.

That Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the Iraq war. It was eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members of the group already firmly established in some of its leading positions. Paul Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department, where another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, responsible for the Middle East in the National Security Council, was connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, together with Michael Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. He advocates total war not only against Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are associated with the "Project for the New American Century", which published a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance this 'American peace' the world. Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name) is Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. She also writes for the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute that is, according to the London Guardian, connected with Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians with highly selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute, heading Middle East Studies. Mention should also be made of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years was in charge of the "peace process" in the Middle East.

In all the important papers there are people close to the group, such as William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New York Times and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle friend, Robert Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal. If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if they came from the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their speech writers, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.

The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. The founding fathers were Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present from Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports the settlers and their right-wing allies.

Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical ideology of the extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle between the Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children of Darkness (the Arabs and Muslims). By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have been published lately in dozens of articles, both in American and world media. The members of the group are proud of them. The Zionist general, the man who symbolizes this victory is General Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the civilian administration in Iraq. He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally. Garner is the ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons. Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers, a petition organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority," which is certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that "a strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and political leaders can rely on."
In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the Patriot missiles, which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in 1997, he became, not surprisingly, a defence contractor specializing in missiles. It was alleged that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts. This year he obtained a defence contract for $1.5 billion, as well as a contract for building Patriot systems in Israel. Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job of chief of the civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when contracts for billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be handed out, to be paid for by Iraqi oil.

A new Balfour Declaration. The ideology of this group, that calls for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel, reminds one of bygone days. The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism (among whose adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist movement), the father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British to crowd out their French competitors and take possession of Palestine, which was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route to India. Now the same thing is happening again.
Last year Richard Perle organized a briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the world's oil heartland. Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications for this design is the need to defend Israel.

To bet on our life? Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the centre of world power. But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler, who bets all his money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse with no current competitor, but still one horse. The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the Arab and Muslim world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding of Arab realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand the test, only brute force saved their undertaking. Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain here. We have to live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers our future. Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal, Zionist and America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures may well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will threaten our very existence.
The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists may engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the next election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf War, this whole gang will be thrown out.

The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied on the then world power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces in the east, Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of Judea: "Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it." (II Kings 18, 21). Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole future on this?

OLagrangian point

". . . The sun, as an enormous solar system object, appears to possess an insurmountable gravitational advantage over the comparatively tiny earth, exerting many times the gravitational pull of our planet. But there is a point, about a million miles from the earth, where the gravitational pull of our little earth equals that of the gigantic sun. Astronomers call this equalising spot, the OLagrangian point.
I believe there is a similar point in history and geo-politics which marks the spot where the force exerted by the vast, thundering herd misled by counterfeit Israel, becomes level with the force exerted by our comparatively tiny party of Truth; and that this point is not as far off as some may imagine." - Michael Hoffman (18-4-03), author and former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the American Contemporary Radio division of ABC News. His columns are distributed online by hoffman-info.com Copyright 2003.

The Problem of Social Credit by Anthony Cooney

In Warning Democracy Douglas tells us bluntly that "Modern taxation is legalised robbery, and it is none the less robbery because it is effected through the medium of a political democracy." He goes further, "It would be both simple and practical to abolish every tax in Great Britain, substituting therefore a simple sales tax on every description of article."
Does this not suggest a strategy to Social Crediters?

Our ultimate objectives are the payment of a National Dividend and the institution of the Just Price by means of a National Discount, but the passage from Warning Democracy reminds us that these objectives are related by juxtaposition to taxation and its philosophy. There is a further passage in Warning Democracy which is germane to any strategy which we might devise for the achieving of our prime objectives:
[There is] "A lack of knowledge only paralleled, unfortunately, by the confidence with which the existing system is regarded by those who do not understand it. It is, in fact, one of the most astonishing experiences which comes to anyone who seriously interests himself in these matters to find the perversity with which intelligent people will put forward any explanation, on earth or off the earth, from sun spots to the viciousness of human nature, for the economic misfortunes which attack nations and individuals, rather than question or allow to be questioned the practical perfection of the money system."

In short a campaign to demand a National Dividend would be, and in fact was, met by public incredulity and hostility. A campaign for a National Discount would be met by public incomprehension. Social Crediters must accept, however difficult it may be to do so, that the poor, as much or even more than the well-off, worship money. They do not want to be told that their money is "created out of nothing," is in fact of itself, worthless. How then, do we persuade people to want Social Credit? For until people want it we will not have it.

What is suggested is that a campaign for a change to a simpler and fairer system of taxation would, in the present climate, gather considerable support especially if it proposed to lift the burden of taxation from the vast and overwhelming majority of the population. What is the likelihood of success a campaign for the abolition, not of all taxes replacement of income tax and V.A.T. by a tax on all sums passing through the bank clearing houses, payable by the Bank of England from the creation of new credit paid into the Treasury's account, debt and interest free? It has been suggested that a rate as low as 2.5 % would yield the Treasury the same amount as presently yielded by Income Tax and VAT, however the actual rate is unimportant once the principle is established.

It is suggested that the abolition of Income Tax, with a "Negative Income Tax" for the lower paid, would have the same effect as a National Dividend. Admittedly it would benefit some more than others, though it is often pointed out that the very rich do not pay Income Tax anyway, and once the system was established there would have to be some adjustment. It is also suggested that the abolition of V.A.T. (currently 17.5 %) would have the same effect on a range of prices as would a National Discount.

Whilst the British Government no longer has the competence to abolish V.A.T. it could reduce it to point one of one percent and leave it to firms to calculate their liability and remit their tax themselves. There would of course be an immense saving of the revenue and resources presently devoted to collecting taxes. Such a campaign, led by Social Crediters would almost certainly draw in a wide spectrum of supporters. This is a fairly sketchy outline, sufficient, it is hoped, to provide a ground plan for action.

The Origins of Political Correctness

An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind, Director of the Centre for Cultural Conservatism Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AlA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University. The movement's website is www.academia.org

Where does all this stuff that you've heard about this morning, feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it. For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Where does it come from? What is it?

We call it "Political Correctness." The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it's deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious. If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I.

If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious. First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted "victims" groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges star-chamber proceeding future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, 'Wait a minute. This isn't true. I can see it isn't true," the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good, (women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favour of a black or Hispanic who isn't as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don't get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principal tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it's Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it's deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxist that we're familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness. But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing.

The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down. Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments, workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn't happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong. Marxists knew by definition it couldn't be the theory.

In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn't spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn't support them. So the Marxists had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Grainsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, "Who will save us from Western Civilization?" He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kim government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the "latest thing."

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism. And he says, "What we need is a think-tank."
Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways.
He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it's a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research. Well it is very clear about his goals.

In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principal book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, "I wanted the Institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.

The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer's views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They're still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they're effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn't us, and we're not going to bless this."

Horkheimer's initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes,
"If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society's socio-economic substructure," to the Frankfurt School, I'm not reading from a critic here - "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."

The stuff we've been hearing about this morning, women's studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you're tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticise. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're living under repression order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression.

What Critical Theory is about is simply criticising. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that's the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm's view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections "of 'essential' sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. "Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral.
"The theme of man's domination of nature," according to Jay, "was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years." "Horkheimer's antagonism to the fetishisation of labour, (here's where they're obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness."

In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favourably, for his "protest. . . against asceticism in the name of a higher morality." How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today?

The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was re-established there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society.
There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood. These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn't just get out there and say, "Hell no we won't go." They had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital.

Classical economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adomo in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there student rebels come into Adorno's classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States. One of Marcuse's books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here and it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of 'polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s!

They're students, they're baby-boomers, and they've grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn't require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing." "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work". By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war."

Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official State ideology enforced by the power of the State. In "hate crimes" we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It's exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it's coming here. And we don't recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it's not funny, it's here, it's growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

Was there really life before Occupational Safety and Health?

For those born before 1979 - I Can't Believe You Made It - Was there really life before Occupational Safety and Health? The erstwhile bureaucrats at OSH and some other government departments would like to outlaw every conceivable thing they perceive as dangerous. A farmer told us he'd heard that it may soon be compulsory to wear a seatbelt while driving a tractor. There is no doubt some regulation against giving a small child the thrill of his life sitting on a knee on a tractor at half a mile an hour. Farmers are supposed to keep visitors, presumably including his wife and children, away from the shearing shed during shearing. There are such a host of regulations that even the most informed bureaucrats are unaware of all of them. Auckland Council apparently has a regulation insisting that homeowners must erect scaffolding before they can paint their roof, and a council boffin must inspect the scaffolding before it can be used. Fortunately most people just go ahead and paint their roof quite oblivious of the fact they are breaking some silly law.

The following was emailed to us: . . . Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have. . . As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. (Not to mention hitch-hiking to town as a young kid!), and riding on the running board. What's a running board? Our baby cribs were covered with bright coloured lead based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. . . We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember accidents?
We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda but we were never overweight. . . we were always outside playing. We shared one grape soda with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games at all, 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms. . . we had friends. We went outside and found them.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Imagine such a thing. Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian. How did we do it?
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment. . . Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. . . Tests were not adjusted for any reason. Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. No one to hide behind. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law, imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years has been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. . .

Science and Money
from "Artist Among the Bankers", by Will Dyson.

J.M. Dent & Sons, 1933. Pg 125-128) ". . . The truth is that scientific production cannot continue without its financial corollary may be bought. For science is, productively, a science of human cost elimination. That can be done only by making the price to humans less than the cost, by that amount of the total cost which is distributed to machines and not to men, who are the only cost-paying element in the transaction. Unless this is done the cost can never, never, never be recovered in accountancy, and the goods can never, never, never be totally sold, in fact.

"The cost-saving applications of the discoveries of science have been greedily encouraged by Money. Greedily, and at a rate that was neither good for the sobriety of science nor the welfare of a society called upon to adapt itself with breathless haste to the money-inspired, material intoxication of Science. But of the marriage of Money to Science there has been born a child that one day may be the death of one or even both its parents. The hope of the world is in the hope that Plenty may destroy our greed for money, by destroying scarcity in the things that money buys. It is in the hope that Plenty will kill the Money Assumption before Money kills the modern world, and kills with it Science itself.

If it be to the interest of Money to kill Science, it will do it without a pang. It kills or nourishes all things that grow, as and when the killing or the nourishing are of profit to itself. The death of Science would be merely another of the cyclic mutations that make its history was a boom engendered by man's intelligence, hastened by the instigation of money. Money will kill the science and if need be the intelligence, when, by the very defective reasoning of Finance, that boom itself is completely and finally ripe for the killing science, if money is not curbed.

It is a danger for Money that it is so closely allied to the most successful and fruitful of all men's talents, the talent of the mind applied to the hand. Under the terms of that alliance honest man has perfected his first love, the tool, into a Science tool that has struck a blow at the very heart centre of Money. It has made goods so plentiful that there is a revolutionary thought knocking, knocking, knocking for admission into the mind and the heart of man. It is the thought that if goods are easily come by, should not money be come by as easily is the arithmetical symbol of the goods?
It is the thought that if Science, which is man, can make goods so easily, cannot man, who is Science, make 'money' with as little effort?

It is the disturbing, the perplexing, the embryonic thought, that Money is perhaps after all not a 'natural' phenomenon. The thing that gives money its frightful power of it Money is a natural phenomenon Now, once a suspicion that this is not a fact finds tenancy in man's mind, the Money Power of today is in danger, unless, of course, Money succeeds again as in the past in the establishment of a financial inquisition frightful enough to terrify man out of his heresy.

The situation produced by the activity of Science is that there are too many men for the making of the goods, but too few for the consuming of them when made. There are too many men to do the producing. Discard them! But when they are discarded it is found that there are too few consumers. Insoluble dilemma! At least, so modern man thinks. Intelligent men, scientific men think so.

Confronted with that irreconcilability, their intellectual pride falls from them in a sweat of terror, their chins drop and their knees tremble. The doctrine of the supremacy of the intelligence is jettisoned. The cutting down of the number of humans is mentioned. The old famine produced starvation, the new one is to produce abortion.

Such men as Dean Inge, who have commandeered the language of intelligence without acquiring the intelligence itself, advocate the control of birth to meet the problem of the lessened need of man's co-operation in mankind's affairs. This is the final act of capitulation to money. It says that the quantity of money in the world shall determine the quantity of men. It springs at its worst (as in the case of the man Inge) from an ingrained loathing of man. At its best it is a quite fatuous belief that the scarcity of money is due to a plenitude of men. The truth is that if there were only ten men in the world, five of them would be redundant under present conditions of production. Birth-control is a very lily-livered application of the theory of redundant manhood. . ."

Open Letter to Health Minister

We have lifted the following open letter to New Zealand's Minister of Health and Food Safety from the website of U.K. health researcher Phillip Day. It has also appeared in the monthly Healthy Options. Interested readers might like to ask Mrs King for a copy of her reply to the writer, Mr Ron Law. Letters to MPs don¹t require a stamp:

Dec 2002. Dear Minister, Research into causes of death in New Zealand presented at the recent NZ Society for Risk Management Conference at Te Papa, stemmed from my membership of the Ministry of Health's Sentinel Events Project Working Group. It quickly became very evident that empirical data exists to give concerns about systemic dysfunction within the Ministry of Health; especially with regard to development of policy and policy advice. It seemed incongruent that on the one hand officials select and rabidly support certain public health policy initiatives that seem insignificant in the context of the big picture, yet quickly reject and even deny, to the point of data stripping, major public health issues.

In this month's column in New Zealand's top "people's" health magazine, Healthy Options, I'm taking the liberty of raising a series of questions and offer you the opportunity to respond via this column. I will donate $150 to a charity of your choice if you take up the offer. Did you know that highly preventable medical injury is the number three cause of death in New Zealand following all-cancer deaths and vascular disease? Have you been advised that highly preventable medical injury resulted in 43,385 potential years of lost life (PYLL) in 1998 - second only to vascular disease? Traffic related deaths resulted in 23,196 PYLL and meningococcal meningitis deaths 1,000 PYLL. Have your officials explained to you why they removed all reference to medical injury related admissions to hospitals in their policy report "The Burden of Disease and Injury in New Zealand"? (BDINZ) This is really puzzling as in the Ministry's own 306 page publication, "Selected Morbidity Data for Publicly Funded Hospitals 1998/99," (SMDPFH), upon which the BDINZ report was based, 35% of injury related admissions to hospital are due to medical injury - versus 25% for falls, and only 6.6% for traffic accidents. Have your officials told you that for every hospital bed taken up with a patient with a traffic injury, 5 beds are taken up with medical injury related patients? Can they explain why they stripped such important public health information from a document that claims to provide the basis for policy advice to the government? This is not only puzzling, but I'm sure you agree it is very concerning.

Page 34 of BDINZ refers to "Unintentional injuries and adverse effects of health care" and page 36 notes "Adverse effects (surgical, medical, pharmaceutical)." Yet, despite giving the perception that they are included, officials left all of the data out and adjusted the number of injury related admissions accordingly. I'm sure you agree that if your officials have deliberately stripped the third leading cause of death in New Zealand, the second leading cause of PYLL and the leading cause of death in under forty five year olds, something is terribly wrong. Words like malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, or simply downright incompetence spring to mind. Either way, do you agree that an inquiry is in order?

Can you explain to the readers of Healthy Options why the Government has committed $200 million to subsidise research and pharmaceutical interests in attempting to develop a vaccine with only a 50% chance of success to reduce about 15 deaths per year due to meningococcal meningitis (MOH estimates) when your own Ministry of Health officials have blocked efforts to get Professor Peter Davis' research team funded to continue their wonderful work on documenting the carnage due to medical injury? Minister, it simply does not make sense. We are talking about $200 million being championed and committed on a 50/50 chance of reducing 15 deaths per year or 1,000 PYLL, versus apparent deliberate data stripping and rejection of requests for $50 million to target the reduction of more than 1,500 highly preventable medical injury deaths (43,000 PYLL). We're talking about committing $2.66 million per potential life saved over five years - yet refusing to commit a dime to targeted funds to reduce the highly preventable carnage in our publicly funded health system. Minister, does this make sense to you?

Another example of the Ministry of Health's apparent dysfunctional approach to policy making relates to cot deaths. The British Medical Journal has just published further research pointing out that second hand mattresses have a strong relationship with cot death. This fits with earlier research showing that 2nd, 3rd, 4th born children are at increasing risk of succumbing to cot death. On the other hand, New Zealand research shows that over 25% of all babies are sleeping on thick polyethylene sheets in line with Dr Jim Sprott's recommendations. Not a single cot death has been recorded amongst these babies whereas one would have expected over 100 such deaths. Simple logic concludes that all cot deaths in New Zealand occur amongst babies not sleeping on thick plastic under sheets. Minister, regardless of the spin that your advisors might put on this evidence, a Ministry that rabidly invokes the 'precautionary principle' when it suits them should be advising all mothers to utilise such a stunningly simple and cheap public health initiative. Why do your officials continue to deny the facts? 100,000 plastic sheets saving 100 lives equates to a few thousand dollars per saved life paid for from private funds. Minister, your advisers' myopic policy advice is perplexing to say the least. It simply defies logic. One could even suggest it is criminal.
There are many other discrepancies that I could document, such as criminal folic acid advice, but space does not permit.

Highly preventable medical injury impacts on the economy to the tune of more than $4 billion per year. I would recommend a $50 million capital injection, $5 million of that to go to Professor Peter Davis's research team to monitor progress via annual safety audits of randomly selected patient records. You'll receive howls of protest from your advisors; such a strategy would not fit with their fashion-based approach to setting policy which includes systematically stripping unwanted data from official reports. It would, however, go a long way toward reducing the 1,500 plus extra empty seats at the Christmas dinner table each year and might even stave off a Royal Commission of Inquiry. After all, Cave Creek only resulted in 14 deaths and the Gisborne debacle in a similar number. Quality Ministers can only make quality decisions it they are provided with quality advice. Healthy Options readers look forward to your response in the New Year.
Have an enjoyable festive season., Ron Law.

Help Stop the GATS Betrayal

Auckland's "North Shore City Council wants the Government to be more upfront about its negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)", reports the North Shore Times Advertiser (15-4-03).

The Council is unhappy with what it regards as the Government's "secretive handling" in dealing with others in the World Trade organisation and the consequences for local government. Tony Holman, chairman of the Council's strategy and finance committee says it's "inappropriate that local authorities be constrained by an agreement to which we're not a party to and which puts into question our mandate to carry out policies and programmes for which we were elected by the community."

GATS means that local bodies could be required to put a wide range of services up for tender, including libraries, transport, water supply, planning and building controls and waste disposal. Not only this but they may be required to always offer the contract to the lowest bidder. Tenders not only from the other end of the country but from anywhere in the world will have to be treated equally. If a local company was given a contract in favour of a foreign one because it had, for example, local knowledge and had done a good job in the past, but the foreign tender had quoted a couple of dollars lower, the council could be sued. It is important that other local bodies demand greater openness over GATS, and preferably its complete rejection by the Government. A few letters to local papers and to mayors and councillors could go a long way toward exposing this betrayal and having it stopped.

Faith Unity Against Debt Slavery
by James Gibb Stuart, Prosperity, September 2002

In the Coronation Oath there is a Latin phrase, Fidei Defensor, which has customarily been rendered in English as Defender of the Faith. Prince Charles has shown that the Latin is ambiguous when he chooses to translate it as Defender of Faith. That subtle shift in interpretation should be seen as highly significant by the millions of Muslims who have chosen to remain as loyal citizens of the Commonwealth within which they and their forebears were born. It is faith that has been enshrined, not just the Christian faith of Britain's heritage, but in a wider sense, the devotions, moral standards and disciplined lifestyles of those other millions who look upwards and outwards to a Supreme Being. In an increasingly secular world, dominated by malign forces that defer much less to God than to Mammon, believers of whatever creed or denomination should feel impelled, as never before, to stretch out the hand of friendship and fellowship across the oceans and the continents towards peoples of diverse races and cultures with whom the only common bond may indeed be faith itself.

Despite centuries of suspicion, strife, antagonisms and bloodshed instigated by errant followers of both great religions, the Muslim and the Christian faiths have in their more tolerant doctrines all the elements of a benign co-existence. Today there is a new urgency for relationships to be based upon mutual appreciation and understanding, for the whole of modern society is threatened by a greedy and hedonistic philosophy which exerts its power through international capital markets, and bids to destroy governments and peoples who try to stand in its way. When Mahathir Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, spoke out indignantly against the international speculators who had been attacking his country's currency, threatening inflation and a collapse of living standards, he was promptly assailed by George Soros, whose chief claim to celebrity status was when he mounted a multi-million dollar speculation against the British pound. [See, Prosperity, Sept '01] The inference was clear ­ that governments and prime ministers are no longer in charge of their national affairs where such issues clash with the speculative aims and objectives of the IMM, the International Money Mafia.

There is an answer to all this - and the Muslim World should not endure its hurt and humiliation in resentful silence, for within the Christian West there is growing opposition to the irresponsible power-play that was turned against Malaysia, and is being turned against Islam, and with it comes a perception that people of faith should stand together. How often has a Muslim thinker told me that his co-religionists are pathetically divided? How often, because of such divisions, have Western multinational companies and financiers profited from their outrageous schemes to control and manipulate Muslim resources? To what extent can it be said that the critical factor which is currently holding the debt and usury-driven finance system in place is the compliance or ignorance.

For sure, a military threat exists. The terrible firepower which was brought to bear against Iraq, and which is being threatened again, showed that what has come to be known as the military-industrial power complex will not readily be countered by military means alone. Those who express their resentment by guerrilla tactics of urban terror, by attacks upon Western installations and even upon civilian populations, are pursuing courses which must in the end prove counter-productive, making it easy for the propaganda machines to create fear and animosity between nations and cultures, thus laying the groundwork, should the global interests which are fast taking over the planet, decide the time is ripe for another war.

I have argued before in my writings that after the rapprochement of the main European powers within the proposed EU, followed by the collapse and subsequent dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, the warmongers who profit from international conflict may just be running short of traditional adversaries. An armed and largely disaffected Islam, smarting from its rebuffs and humiliations at the hands of a technologically superior West, might just be persuaded to create a situation in which it could be portrayed by skilful and inflammatory propaganda as "the last enemy of civilisation". This seems to be happening now. If that sombre hypothesis is even a remote possibility, then Muslims must talk to Christians with mutual respect and frankness, so that there can never be a 21st century re-run of the mediaeval crusades.

Muslims & Christians Unite Against Debt Slavery
And the ground upon which they can unite their faiths and their principles is an enlightened understanding of the finance-driven global power structure which threatens to impose economic enslavement on Christian and Muslim alike. Its most potent weapon is debt, the creation of an international climate in which it was once seen to be modern and progressive for the technically backward nations to borrow heavily from Western bankers, allegedly to provide finance for their infrastructures, develop their resources and improve the living standards of their peoples. Generally the results have been the opposite of what was intended. They have left many of those developing economies crippled with the requirements of the loan payments. Governments have lost their freedom of action and sense of independence. They have adjusted their policies so as to make the bankers' dues a first charge upon their national revenues, and their peoples have suffered in consequence.
Even as observant Muslims, they have become the servants and dependants of their lenders.

The Holy Quran tells them it is wrong, yet for years they have done it, and gone on doing it, because they felt there was no alternative if they wanted to share the benefits of Western technology. By now they should know better. Western technology is real. It has been acquired and consolidated by two centuries of industrial and scientific development. But it has been welded into an instrument of domination and coercion by the very financial stratagem that both Christ and Muhammad condemned, yet which so many of their errant followers have accepted as the Holy Writ.
The illegitimate creation of almost all our new money as an interest-bearing debt by the Western banking system!

The virtual enslavement of entire populations by the enactment of massive dollar loans! The misery, poverty and degradation that has ensued! These are matters of common concern to peoples of all races and cultures. So let Christian and Muslim speak of them together. For there truly is an answer ­ one of which both the Holy Prophets would mightily approve.

[Napoleon and Islam, translated from the original French by James Gibb Stuart is available for £12 payable to Ossian at 268 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4JR.]
The above is from the September 2002 issue of Prosperity: Freedom from Debt Slavery - a 4 page monthly, dedicated to the proposition that the State should create a supply of debt-free money which should be spent, not lent, into the economy. Subscriptions are £15 payable to Prosperity, at 268 Bath Street, Glasgow, Scotland, G2 4JR. Tel: 0141 332 2214; Fax: 0141 353 6900; Email: admcc@admcc.freeserve.co.uk www.ProsperityUK.com

Will Tax Revolts Occur?

In 1215 the English King John was forced at Runnymede to put his signature to Magna Carta.
Essential Christian Heritage writes: "When the Caesar of the day, King John, attempted to combine both power and authority in his own person, he violated constitutional principles which had grown out of the climate created by the Christian Church. There were three sovereignties represented at the historic event on the isle of Runnymede: The Crown, the Church, and the Barons, who claimed to speak for the people. Although the Barons provided the physical sanctions, these in turn were modified by the spiritual sanctions of the Church, which in the person of Archbishop Langton, played a decisive role in formulating Magna Carta. Here was the Christian Church insisting, not that complete power should be taken from one man and given to another group of men, but that power should be divided and subject to God's laws."

On the question of the relationship of the individual to the state Magna Carta stands as a great beacon hard-pressed taxpayers and citizens might turn for an answer. Unlike violent revolutions that lead to decades of dictatorship and bloodshed Magna Carta simply restated in no uncertain terms that even the State is subject to the higher universal laws of the Creator. The State has a right and duty to exercise its authority concerning the legitimate functions of the nation but its role is that of giving service to the members of society.

In the absence of suitable sanctions today's governments claim unlimited power. Among the features of Magna Carta were the limits placed on how much taxation the State could claim, and if desired a taxpayer had the right to offer to pay in kind or by offering his service. Imagine today's pork producer delivering a load of bacon to the local IRD office!

Today's taxation rates are much higher than any mediaeval king ever imposed and it is resulting in little pockets, here and there, of revolt or talk of revolt. In the last On Target we quoted from Michael Lane's description of American author Otto Skinner's successful defence against income tax demands by the US Inland Revenue Service. Mr Skinner describes in his book, A Defence Against Arbitrary Taxation,* how to do this and the advice has been successfully adopted by others. Michael Lane suggests that there may be no reason why the same technique cannot be applied successfully in other common law countries. And it is within the law.

"Skinner¹s persuasive argument", wrote Lane, "is that not only the letter but also the spirit of the law are on your side. The long and the short of his argument is that there simply is no statute in the U.S. Tax Code that imposes a tax on the income-producing activities of the ordinary American! . . . Skinner proposes a defence so simple it is profound: simply make the government prove its case. To do so, it must say what law you violated."

In the meantime we have received an email concerning a class action being mounted in the United States against the IRS. This action is being formally launched during May, 2003. Those interested in following the action can contact the following websites: www.irsclassaction.com and www.irscodebusters.com

Timid souls who worry that any major tax revolt would result in a government being unable to pay pensions and welfare etc., should rest assured. It is unlikely to ever come to that. In any nation with reasonable material infrastructure and a degree of social stability any significant tax revolt is more likely to force legislators to re-examine the whole question of money, and then ask themselves what is it and where does it come from. If people are able to sufficiently gather themselves together to revolt against arbitrary taxation they will surely be able to raise an effective protest against any policy that imposes poverty amidst plenty.

Governments do not usually initially raise taxes in order to "pay" for wars. Where do these previously non-existent billions come from? Most people don't willingly want to impose starvation and deprivation on others the necessities of life now made easily possible by the modern production system. But we also want freedom. Welfare is a mess of porridge in exchange for giving up some of our freedom.

Much of today's taxation merely goes in debt servicing and these debts were created by the private banks who have now mortgaged the entire globe. After WWII the post-war German War Debt was written off by mutual agreement of the banks and interim government, while British taxpayers were forced to shoulder a trebling of their already burdensome public debt. Much of today's debt could likewise be written off at the stroke of a keypad. Imagine what true progress could be made if the Church, as in John's day, got its act together and added its moral authority to the tax revolters who are campaigning against usury.!

*The Biggest "Tax Loophole"of All is available from Otto Skinner, PO Box 6609, San Pedro, Ca 90734, USA, for US$44.95 (as advertised in 1997)

Christian Zionism

The Christian Zionist movement holds that the return of the Jews to the land of ancient Israel is the fulfilment of Biblical prophesy. Taking Puritanism to its ultimate lengths Christian-Zionist advocates have not been content just to keep silent over the brutal treatment of the Palestinians, including 50 years of living as refugees and second class citizens, but they advocate a militant Zionist Israel. Their support for a Greater Israel, extending from the Euphrates to the Nile, often goes even further than many Jewish Zionists are prepared to state.

This brutal interpretation of Scripture has not a scrap to do with the holy mission and teachings of Christ. People of goodwill everywhere, including Christians, Jews and Moslems, have spoken out against the abuse of the Palestinians and the insane goals of the Zionist-Christian Fundamentalist nexus. But how did large numbers of Christians get sucked into supporting such a violently cruel objective?

An outstanding twentieth-Century journalist, author and investigator, Douglas Reed devoted many years to researching and documenting how the modern Christian world came to let itself get dragged into a Puritanical sludge pond and elevating the God of Wrath while demoting the God of Love and Mercy. In his The Controversy of Zion (1985) Reed extensively covers over 2500 years of history revealing the historic battle between the two philosophies of freedom and Collectivism.

Another valuable study is Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (1987). We can supply both titles for $25 and $17 respectively.

An aspect of the Christian-Zionist movement is the heavy emphasis on the "Jesus was a Jew' claim. Whether He was or not the idea behind this promotion is to get Christian support for the political ambitions of Zionism. It might be equally legitimate to say "Jesus was a Palestinian"or 'an Arab', but the argument could become puerile and detract from what He did and who He was spiritually. There is a fascinating book The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge, 1996) by Keith Whitelam, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. During earlier work on the history of Israel and its association with Christian-European history Professor Whitelam came to feel that a distortion had occurred, and that the history of Palestine and the Palestinians may be more relevant to Christian-European history than that of Israel. The book may be available in some libraries. Here are a couple of extracts, supplied to us by an English friend:

". . . Invented in the image of its inventer" (Gorman 1961). . .the dominant discourse of biblical studies has masked the means by which the term Palestine has been divested of spatial and temporal significance. Palestinian history has become one of the many excluded histories, divested of significance in terms of world history and relegated to pre-history. Europe, and later Zionism, has rescued the historical significance of the region. . . in its search for ancient Israel: a search for its own cultural roots which has silenced Palestinian history. It is this invention to which we much now turn in order to illustrate the ways in which the dominant discourse of biblical studies has achieved this in the name of objective scholarship."

And: "This work has been a long time in the making. . . I began work on it in late 1984. . . and have continued whenever time has been available. . . It was only during the last period of sabbatical leave that the work took on its present shape, changing from an attempt to produce a history of ancient Palestine to an exploration of how such an enterprise was hindered by political, social, and religious influences. . ."

Another most interesting study concerning the question of how the Christian world may have come to get some of this wrong is provided by Michael Lane in his lengthy review of the late Thomas Robertsons' Human Ecology: The Science of Social Adjustment. This review is presented in an attractive booklet and was published only a few months ago. Called Human Ecology: The Legacy of Thomas Robertson, the posted price for the booklet is $11. Robertson contended that within the European political and Church structures too heavy an emphasis was placed upon the Hellenic Greek Classical idea, resulting in a tendency to favour systems of arbitrary power and to downplay the importance of giving expression to the individual human spirit. This helped cause the unfortunate and artificial separation of the material and spiritual worlds, at least in our minds, and theological circles. Robertson wrote favourably of the Baconian-Inductive method of investigation as did C.H. Douglas which makes room for the intuitive and instinctive facilities as legitimate and vital expressions of the human spirit, but which the Classical approach tends to downplay and sometimes even regard as aberrations. Douglas' discusses this matter in his Social Credit, originally published in 1924 ($16 posted).

Dumping the Dollar for Gold Dinars

Compliments of The Guardian Bulletin (Democratic Party), 26 Warren St, Oamaru
A report by Colin Whitmill on the International Conference on Stable and Just Monetary Systems, Kuala Lumpur 19-8-02:

This year three Muslim countries intend to trade amongst themselves using gold dinars. The gold dinar will not exist in physical form, it will merely be defined in terms of gold. This is their way of releasing the stranglehold which the IMF has over them. More Muslim countries are expected to follow suit when feasibility aspects have been resolved. This proposal resulted from the International Conference on Stable and Just Monetary Systems held in Kuala Lumpur last August. It was attended by over 300 male academics and bankers who heard Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yakcop Minister the International Financial System". He said Dr Jory Huffschmid, writing in the January-February 2001 issue of Development and Cooperation under the heading of 'Learning from Malaysia', drew two important lessons from Malaysia's success. First, even a small country can implement measures to defend its interests which go against the prevailing opinion of economists and institutions. Second, such measures can in fact function in economic terms.

It was not entirely a Muslim conference. Peter Challen and Rodney Shakespeare from the Christian Council for Monetary Justice three Christian adherents present proposals for beneficial change made their book Seven Steps to Justice. The audience of 300+ there to hear them was boosted to 450 by a large number of women who had been attracted by the emphasis in the book on the rights of women and the basic income for all.

Peter Challen pulled no punches. He told his audience that he had not heard others mention in the Conference how poverty would be tackled in new structures of justice; of how rich/poor divisions would be ended; how the world's women would find a place of equal dignity in the world; how the planet's capacity would be preserved and enhanced; of basic incomes both social and economic guaranteed for all; of how country after country, sold out in the 'new world order', would be restored to economic and social sanity.

Despite this shock criticism, both were invited to visit a new university where many women sought clarification of their proposals and information about a basic income. In addition they were invited for discussions with Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yakcop. All of the Conference papers to be sent to Islamic centres as part of an education process.

Re-inventing the Pyramids
Book Review by Anthony Cooney

"The Satanic ideology of work, employment. . . is not an ideology of achievement. . . It is an ideology of sabotage, destruction, corruption and decay." (C.H. Douglas in The Big Idea)

There is endless speculation about How the pyramids were built but the question never asked is Why? The answer is "To solve the unemployment problem " "Gold" was, we are told, "like dust in Egypt. The fertile Nile Valley with its two harvests per year could have been a paradise of ease and leisure, but surely one could not allow all these people to hang around doing nothing, except for a little leisurely gardening and wild-fowling? Better that thousands and tens-of-thousands be fully employed dragging blocks of limestone around! Hard, laborious work is no more "natural" to Man than racing is to horses. No horse will "race" unless it has a man on its back making it do so, or it has, over many generations, been bred into a running machine bearing little resemblance to a natural horse, and requiring feeding with high protein grains rather than the wild grasses upon which its ancestors browsed.

And so from blocks of limestone to Magnus Mills' "UniVans." We are introduced to "The Scheme" by one of its participants:
"The Scheme for Full Employment was the envy of the world; the greatest undertaking ever conceived by men and women. It solved at a stroke the problem that had beset humankind for generations. Participants had only to put the wheels in motion, and they could look forward to a bright, sunlit upland where idleness and uncertainty would be banished forever. Planned to the finest detail by people of vision, The Scheme was watertight, and could not possibly go wrong." But what is The Scheme?

Mills only slowly reveals the details in a flat, understated prose reminiscent of the verse of the Movement poets. Its most obvious manifestation is the "UniVan," a state of the art delivery van which can be taken apart or re-assembled in a day. The long lines of uniVans leaving their depots each morning and travelling up and down the main roads are the visible sign of the success of The Scheme. We see it working through the eyes of the narrator, a UniVan driver. He arrives at his base, Blackwell depot, at 8am and collects the keys of his UniVan, his co-driver, George; and his load of crates for Long Reach depot. An unexplained detail is the dozen cakes, baked by his wife, which George delivers during the course of the morning, collecting orders for the next day as he goes along. We assume that this is a harmless perk of the job. The UniVan drivers work from 8.00 to 16.30 hours, though they seldom have enough journeys to occupy the whole day.

Several Old Spanish Customs have crept in, the first of these is innocuous, permitting the drivers to start handing in their keys at 16.20 hours so that everyone will be "clocked off" by 16.30. This is known as "Ten off the Eight." The second poses a more serious threat to The Scheme. Drivers who have completed their schedules by mid-afternoon "knock off" by getting a supervisor to sign their cards and take their keys. This is known as an "Early swerve". These Old Spanish Customs have led to some friction between the drivers. On the one side are the "Early Swervers" who maintain that once they have completed their schedule of collections and deliveries they should be free to go home. On the other are the "Flat Dayers" who maintain that "swerving" is a threat to the scheme and should be banned. The "Flat Dayers" are in turn divided between those who accept the "Ten off the Eight" custom and the "Extremists" who insist that clocking off should not begin until 16.30. A slight complication are the "Enthusiasts" who congregate at road junctions to collect UniVan numbers.

The mystery of what The Scheme is, and how it works, is revealed to the increasingly puzzled reader, when the Narrator explains it to a trainee driver, Jonathan, who asks: " 'So what exactly's in all these crates?' 'You must know. Didn't they tell you during training?' 'No, they just said the contents were very important.' 'Oh, they're important alright. The whole Scheme depends on them. . . presumably they told you that these UniVans were custom built: specially designed with interchangeable parts. . . Well that's what's in the crates. . . Wheels, panels, mudguards, mirrors, lamps, not to mention all the engine components It's self-perpetuating. We move the parts from one depot to the next, and it keeps us all in work'." Insanity however knows no end. Under pressure from the "Flat Dayers," "Swerving" is banned, and then, after long negotiations, permitted "with conditions," so the "Flat Dayers" strike, "To protect the Scheme!"

The "Extremists" block the depots with their UniVans, but this does not involve any financial hardship since one of the provisions of The Scheme is "Strike payx"! The "Enthusiasts" enter the fray by volunteering to drive the UniVans around the country. When the strike finally ends road users object, and become hostile to the return of the UniVans and their utterly pointless journeys. Sanity finally asserts itself and The Scheme is closed down, the "Enthusiasts" eagerly buying the UniVans at knock-down prices. As the Narrator explains: "There's a difference between full employment and being fully employed. True, there is a lot of spare capacity in The Scheme, but it's better for people to be paid to do very little than have no job at all.

The Scheme for Full Employment is described as a "satire" and it is a biting satire, but, for the sake of the impact of the satire of the pointless strike from pointless labour, it leaves out the factor which would have derailed "The Scheme" much earlier. All costs must be recovered in prices; a minuscule element of the cost of the Battle of Waterloo still lingers in the price of a loaf today. The total cost of The Scheme would enter all prices via the taxation necessary to fund it. In effect this means that the cost of living would be forever ahead of the wages of those involved in The Scheme The only way the detritus of past costs can be eliminated from prices is by the discounting of prices proposed by Clifford Hugh Douglas, and known as Social Credit. The obverse of the discount is the payment to men of the wages of the machine by means of a "National Dividend." You may take your pick what to do, or pay them for driving trucks around all day, from nowhere to nowhere, or even for dragging blocks of limestone around to build pyramids.

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