"'Anti-Semitic'? Well, it's a trick - we always use it"

Shulamit Aloni, a former Israeli government minister, implies that the Jewish establishment in the United States and in European countries, has divided loyalties between their country of residence, and Israel.

Furthermore, she states that accusations of "anti-Semitism" are a cynical ploy, "a trick" which Jewish supporters of Israel play on gentile critics of Israel, in order to put them on the defensive, and to induce spurious feelings of guilt for the suffering of European Jewry during the holocaust.

Are not accusations of "racism", levelled at those patriotic Europeans and Americans who object to their homeland being overrun by ethnic aliens, equally "a trick"? Is not the purpose of such accusations, often made most loudly by Jews, it has to be said, to induce a spurious sense of guilt in the minds of the indigenous peoples of European descent, over their natural preference for their own kind, in order to facilitate their dispossession of their birth-right? Is this natural preference for one's own kind not practised most openly, and most effectively, by the Jewish people? Does this not make the Jewish people vulnerable to the accusation that they are hypocritical over the issues of race and immigration, since, in their own terms, they are the biggest "racists" of all?

I submit that the answer to every one of these questions is a resounding "yes!"

If we look at France: its president is a mischling. Nicolas Sarkozy has Jewish blood, being one-quarter Jewish. If we look at Britain: the leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition, is a Jew. The British prime minister, David Cameron, is a mischling. He has Jewish blood, like Sarkozy, being one-quarter Jewish.

The state of Israel, unashamedly, has a very nationalistic, a very "racist", immigration policy. No-one is permitted to emigrate to Israel who is not either the child of a Jewish mother, or married to a Jew. Having only a Jewish father is not sufficient: one's application to settle in the country would be rejected. Consequently, Ed Miliband, his brother, David, and many another senior 'British' politician, and party donor, could each, should they so wish, at some point in the future, emigrate to Israel, and become an Israeli citizen.

In the light of these facts, is it any wonder that Britain's immigration policy is, in effect, an open, and standing, invitation to the ethnically alien, penniless hordes of Africa, Asia, and South America, to descend upon our country in their millions, and to loot its riches, via its welfare system, and jobs' market, all in the name of the Jewish ideologies of multiracialism (now euphemistically known as multiculturalism), political 'correctness', and 'anti-racism', which all, in effect, amount to anti-English racism?

England is worth fighting for

The Mole

Mole Special: A Stranger in My Own Land

ANONYMOUS

January/February 2011

I have just returned to London, where I have lived since I was 11. I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends. On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan't miss some locals' assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan't miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements. Yes, I am very glad to have left Britain's second city.

For four years, we lived in inner-city Birmingham, in what has been a police no-go area for 20 years. We know that because some plain-clothed cops told us when they asked to use our vicarage as a stake-out to bust drugs rings that pervade the area. Having heard a parishioner's tales of what his neighbours did to him when he was wrongfully suspected of having grassed up a cock-fighting ring, we refused, explaining that we had to live here, they didn't. Even during this time we saw the area change. When we arrived, the population was predominantly Pakistani. Now Somalis are there in equal number. Most of the run-down Irish pubs were turned into mosques during our time.

As a woman, it was difficult for me to gain many first-hand impressions of the Muslims. I was generally ignored by both men and women, and on the rare occasion that I had to interact, when for example a car was parked illegally and blocking my gate, I was addressed as if inconsequential. My husband, however, faithfully reported conversations which you may find somewhat alarming. One of our favourite dinner-party pieces is this: opposite our vicarage there is a "library" which has some computers, some burkas and occasionally tracts that say offensive things about Jews and Christians. My husband did his photo-copying there, and got on rather well with everybody. One day he was chatting to a man with a passing resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia, who had just arrived from Antwerp — one of an increasing number of Muslims who are arriving here with EU passports. He asked him why he had come to Birmingham. He was surprised at the question: "Everybody know. Birmingham — best place in Europe to be pure Muslim." Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose. It seems to be particularly easy to "disappear" if that is their intention. A parishioner once described a lorry pulling up outside his house, the side opening to reveal stacked mattresses full of sleepy, and presumably illegal, immigrants, who staggered out into broad Brummie daylight. We heard tales of how houses are exchanged for cash payments in our area. An untaxed car was once clamped by a frightened-looking official at 8am, but within hours the owner of the vehicle had organised the clamps to be sawn off, and he sped away.

Another instance of separation from the Western world is revealed in the following: my husband frequently chatted to a neighbour who could be described as one of the more questioning Muslims, and who has often provided an insight into the locals' mindset. Even this man, however, believes what the whole community thinks: the 9/11 planes were organised by Jews. Everybody knows there were no Jewish people in the World Trade Centre that day, as they had been tipped off. Oh, and the Mumbai terrorists had been kidnapped and brainwashed by Indian people. The tendency towards denial is strong. When my husband mentioned the "dirty white dogs" graffiti to a local Muslim, the response was, "One of your people did it." I have to say that the police's response was no better when the local Methodists complained about the same thing. They chose not to believe it had happened, since we had removed all sign of it with the buckets of anti-graffiti chemicals we had stocked since we arrived. They asked, somewhat pathetically: "Are you sure it was racist?"

To a London reader, born and bred with multiculturalism, I know that my stories may come across as outlandish and exaggerated, and that I must surely be a BNP voter — I have observed people's expressions as they have listened to my tales of life in Brum. When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew's football stadium for some months, her cry of "Can't you tell the police?" made me reflect how far many of our inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their stations and never venture in unless in extremis — they and ambulance crews have been known to be attacked — even the local Imam lives in a leafier area.

Only the priest remains, if you can get one — the thriving but clerically-vacant church down the road has had no applicant in two years. In their absence, we get stabbings that never make the news, dog- and cock-fighting rings, cars torched as pranks and cars used for peddling heroin. (One of the more amusing moments of our time came when a local lad provided one reason people often gave us stares when we drove past such deals: "Two white people wearing seatbelts — you've got to be cops.") In their absence, we simply have the witness of those who are unlikely to be heard, who, through a variety of unfortunate circumstances, have not been able to move out: the elderly, the infirm, the illiterate, the chronically poor. Indeed, some of the Muslim residents deeply regret the flight of the non-Muslim population. It is they who now have to live in a crime-ridden ghetto.

On holiday in Germany recently, we watched a TV documentary about how schools were coping with Essen's growing Muslim community, and how the community itself felt. When it was over, we turned to each other, and said simultaneously (a drawback of having been married for a while), "This could not have been made in Britain." At the moment, also in Germany, the whole country is debating Thilo Sarrazin's controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany abolishes itself"), in which the author — a former member of the board of the Bundesbank and the German Social Democrats — examines research about immigrant communities and then makes specific recommendations about the integration of the Muslim community. I have only seen scant reference to this in the British press, which usually dismisses it, wrongly and lazily in my view, as good old German racism. This has nothing whatsoever to do with race. The Muslim community in Birmingham, for instance, is made up of people from many continents and races, including Afghans, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Indians and Somalis.

There is no doubt in my mind that we need to have the same openness in discussing what is happening to many cities in Britain. If current demographic trends continue over the next few decades, the West Midlands, as well as other parts of the country, will become a predominantly Muslim area. Much more needs to be done to integrate the communities among whom I lived, and we need to be much less negligent of our own values too. Frankly, if we happened to walk down Broad Street on a Friday night, where mobs of identically undressed and mostly aesthetically unpleasing gals and lads were on the piss and pull, it was almost a relief to drive back to our ghetto enclave.

It is time to rub the rime from our eyes and to look clearly at the shape of Britain today. Everyone living here needs to be able to talk about what they see, without the lazy or fearful, but certainly paralysing, accusation of racism.

Standpoint

The BNP will solve unemployment

This is the kind of leader the BNP needs now.

Anti-white propaganda - and the truth

"FORREST OF FORT PILLOW"

April 10, 1864-April 13,1864

From Henry's book "Nathan Bedford Forrest, First with the Most"

A Great Read!

"ATROCITIES" were not an invention of the First World War propaganda organizations. American newspapers of the Civil War period, North and South, abounded in them. Southern newspapers described the savagery of the invading armies, charging that Northern soldiers, authorized and even ordered by their officers, made theft, assault and murder a part of their regular duties. Northern papers were no less lurid in their descriptions of the dishonor, infamy and ferocity of the Southern soldiers coming to a climax in a Boston paper's description of Robert E. Lee flogging a slave girl with his own hands and then rubbing brine on her bleeding wounds.

But Fort Pillow was the "atrocity" of the war. Forrest's men stormed the fort. Incompetent and blundering command of the defense brought extraordinary losses to the defenders. Bitter local animosities and racial antipathies added to the slaughter. A Congressional committee of inquiry made the "atrocity" official. Its report, of which 40,000 extra copies were printed, became a prime campaign document in the bitter election of 1864.

During the weeks and months in which Fort Pillow was being thus established in popular belief as a "massacre," neither Forrest himself nor the Confederate government made any corresponding effort to present the other side of the story to the people in either North or South. Forrest's reason for public silence, as expressed in a letter to Stephen Lee ten weeks after the affair, was that "as my official reports are in the hands of the Department at Richmond I did not, nor do I, consider that I have any defense to make, or attempt any refutation of the charges.... I have taken pains in my official report made to Lieutenant-General Polk, to place all the facts in the possession of the Government in order that they might meet any demands made by Federal authority.

The Confederate government was silent during these critical weeks because it had not received the report. After the death of General Polk during the Atlanta campaign the report was found among his papers by his aide, Lieutenant W. D. Gale, and forwarded to Richmond. On August tenth the President suggested to Secretary of War Seddon that "It would be well to have the report and accompanying papers published in refutation of the slanders promulgated by the Government of the enemy..." By that time, however, four months after the event, the "Fort Pillow Massacre" had become established, and so remains in most minds. In course of time the story was added to and embroidered by spurious "dispatches" supposed to have been sent by Forrest, and published as evidence of both his illiteracy and his ferocity.

Fort Pillow was erected originally by the Confederates in 1861, at the First Chickasaw Bluff of the Mississippi, forty miles north of Memphis in a direct line and twice that far by the meanders of the river. The original trace of the fort was a line two miles long at a distance of 600 or more yards from the river, enclosing the angle between the Mississippi on the west and Coal Creek on the north. Finding this work entirely too large for any available garrison to hold, Brigadier General Villepigue, subsequently commanding for the Confederates, built a second and much shorter line inside the original work. In the great Confederate retreat after the siege of Corinth in the early summer of 1862 the position was evacuated, and passed into Union possession. The new occupants built a third and still smaller work, only about 125 yards in length and enclosing no more than the high clay bluff in the apex of the angle between creek and river. The Villepigue trenches were retained as an outer line of rifle pits.

When Sherman was gathering up troops from small and isolated posts to make up the columns for the Meridian and the Red River expeditions, he removed the garrison from Fort Pillow. In a short while, however, the post was reoccupied by the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (Union), then being organized under Major William F. Bradford-an officer described by Major General Stephen A. Hurlbut, his commander, "as a very young officer, entirely inexperienced in these matters." To reinforce the garrison and to provide an experienced commander, General Hurlbut subsequently on March twenty-eighth sent up from Memphis four companies of heavy artillery and a section of light artillery, colored troops, under command of Major L. F. Booth, "an old soldier who had served in the regular army." Booth, in whom his general "had great confidence," reported that "he could hold the post against any force for forty-eight hours."'- With the arrival of Booth and his men the garrison consisted of 557 officers and men, of whom 295 were white and 262 colored, with an armament of six guns. In addition to the garrison of the fort itself the gunboat New Era, Captain James Marshall, was stationed offshore, to take part in the defense of the place.

To add to the tensions to be expected between Confederate soldiers and a garrison made up of Negro troops and white soldiers of the sort whom the Confederates called "renegades," "Tennessee Tories" or "homemade Yankees," the recruiting, scouting and foraging activities of the white Union regiment had been carried on with a rigor which, to the Confederate neighbors of Fort Pillow, appeared more as pillage and persecution. From the time that Forrest entered West Tennessee in March, therefore, there had come to him a series of reports from local citizens of outrages on property or persons ascribed to the Fort Pillow garrison. As early as April fourth Forrest had written to Polk that "there is a Federal force of five or six hundred at Fort Pillow, which I shall attend to in a day or so . . ." but it was not until a week later that the movement against the fort was actually started.

Orders for the movement went out on Sunday, April tenth, from Forrest's headquarters at Jackson to Bell's brigade, encamped at Eaton in Gibson County, and to McCulloch's brigade at Sharon's Ferry on the Forked Deer River, the whole force of about 1,500 men to be under the direct command of Chalmers. Bell, having seventy miles to go, marched at midnight Sunday, almost as soon as orders were received. McCulloch, with a shorter march of fifty miles to make, started Monday morning. Both brigades marched hard Monday and Monday night through drizzly rain over roads of deep mud and across weak bridges, with no more than brief halts for rest and feed, to arrive before Fort Pillow about 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, April twelfth. Pickets were driven in with a rush and by sunup the Confederates were inside the original works built in 1861. The early-morning fight was carried forward with skill and vigor under the command of Chalmers. Lieutenant Mack J. Leaming, adjutant of the regiment of Tennessee Unionists and during most of the day post adjutant of Fort Pillow, reports that by 8:00 A.M. two companies of skirmishers which had been thrown forward to hold the advanced rifle pits were "compelled to retire to the fort after considerable loss." With the defenders driven into the shrunken space of the fort proper, Lieutenant Leaming adds, "the firing continued without cessation, principally from behind logs, stumps, and under cover of thick underbrush and from high knolls, until about 9 A.M., when the rebels made a general assault on our works, which was successfully repulsed.

There is no mention of this general assault and repulse in the Confederate reports but it is plain that already, by midmorning, they dominated the situation. The "high knolls" mentioned by Lieutenant Leaming enabled them to fire into the fort at ranges of not more than 400 yards, while the logs and stumps left in the felling of the timber inside the original 1861 works gave shelter to the Confederate sharpshooters. "We suffered pretty severely in the loss of commissioned officers by the unerring aim of the rebel sharpshooters," Leaming reported, including the loss of the commanding officer, Major Booth, who was killed about nine o'clock, and his adjutant, killed shortly after. From that time on, indeed, the defense of the place was hopeless, for already the Confederate marksmen were in such position that they could take both faces of the fort proper in reverse and pick off the defenders even as they stood behind the heavy parapets upon which they relied.

These parapets, four feet thick at the top, rising eight feet high above a ditch which was itself six feet deep and twelve feet wide, were but one of the elements of the defense which had caused Major Booth to report that be regarded the place as "perfectly safe,"" and which were to lead his inexperienced successor in command, Major Bradford, to attempt to hold the place even after it was untenable. The other illusory element of strength upon which Bradford relied was the gunboat New Era, which throughout the morning engagement was noisily and ineffectively shelling the woods and the ravines as glimpses were caught of the gray-clad Confederates, first to one side and then the other of the fort.

Forrest himself came upon the field about ten in the morning, having ridden the sixty-five miles from Jackson in a day and night. Not long after his arrival McCulloch's men advanced with a rush to take possession of the rifle pits abandoned earlier in the morning by the advanced companies of the garrison-the time being fixed as about 11:00 A.M. in the reports of both Chalmers, for the Confederates, and Adjutant Leaming, who made the only comprehensive Union report on the operations of the morning.

Most significantly in the light of later allegations that the Confederates attained their positions close to the fort by improper use of a flag of truce during the afternoon, Adjutant Leaming says:

"At about 11 A.M. the rebels made a second determined assault on our works. In this attempt they were again successfully repulsed with severe loss. The enemy succeeded, however, in obtaining possession of two rows of barracks running parallel to the south side of the fort [italics supplied] and distant about 150 yards. The barracks had previously been ordered to be destroyed, but after severe loss on our part in the attempt to execute the order our men were compelled to retire without accomplishing the desired end, save only to the row nearest the fort. From these barracks the enemy kept up a murderous fire on our men, despite all our efforts to dislodge him. Owning to the close proximity of these buildings to the fort, and to the fact that they were on considerably lower ground our artillery could not be sufficiently depressed to destroy them, or even render them untenable for the enemy."

The buildings referred to in Lieutenant Leaming's report were situated in a ravine, thus described in the report of the Congressional committee which investigated the "massacre":

"Extending back from the river on either side of the fort was a ravine or hollow, the one below the fort containing several stores and some dwellings, constituting what was called the town. At the mouth of that ravine and on the river-bank were some government buildings containing commissary and quartermaster's stores. The ravine above the fort was known as Cold Creek ravine.... "

"The gunboat New Era, Captain Marshall, took part in the conflict, shelling the enemy as opportunity offered ... as they were shelled out of' one ravine they would make their appearance in the other. They would thus appear and retire as the gunboat moved from one point to another. About one o'clock the fire on both sides slackened somewhat, and the gunboat moved out in the river to cool and clean its guns, having fired 282 rounds of shell, shrapnel and canister, which nearly exhausted its supply of ammunition."

At this hour of one o'clock when, as appears from Captain Marshall's testimony, the gunboat fired its last shot the Confederates had for some two hours been in possession of the ravines which, it was afterward alleged, they secured only by violation of a flag of truce sent in about 3:30 P.M.

Upon his arrival at the fort Forrest began one of his usual close-up, naked-eye reconnaissances of the position. Almost immediately a rifle ball fired from the fort struck and mortally wounded his horse. Frantic with pain, the animal reared and fell over backward, carrying his rider with him and inflicting upon the General bruises and injuries which were painful and even serious. Undaunted, Forrest mounted another horse which, in turn, was shot and killed. Over the remonstrance of his adjutant, Captain Anderson, he mounted still a third time, declaring that he was just as liable to be shot on foot as on horseback and that he could see better from his horse. Before the painstaking reconnaissance was completed, Forrest's third mount of the day was struck, though not killed.

Fighter that he was, Forrest was not accustomed to sacrifice men needlessly. He got results but he wanted them as cheaply as possible. Throughout the time of his reconnaissance and afterward, he kept his men working forward through the underbrush and stumps toward the fort in short rushes, each advance being covered by the fire of sharpshooters converging from both sides upon the defenders behind the parapet.

By 1:00 P.m.-the time at which the gunboat ceased trying to shell the Confederates out of the ravines-the Confederate lines were already formed "on the declining ground from the fort to a ravine, which nearly encircles the fort" at a distance varying "from 50 to 150 yards of the works," according to Anderson's report. Anderson adds:

"The width or thickness of the works across the top prevented the garrison from firing down on us, as it could only be done by mounting and exposing themselves to the unerring aim of our sharpshooters, posted behind stumps and logs on all the neighboring hills. They were also unable to depress their artillery so as to rake these slopes with grape and canister, and so far as safety was concerned, we were as well fortified as they were; the only difference was that they were on one side and we on the other of the same fortification. They had no sharpshooters with which to annoy our main force, while ours sent a score of bullets at every head that appeared above the walls."

In this state of affairs when, as Anderson wrote, "it was perfectly apparent to any man endowed with the smallest amount of common sense that to all intents and purposes the fort was ours," the fight died down because Forrest was approaching the end of the ammunition which his men had brought with them, and was waiting for the arrival of his ordnance wagons, dragging their way through the April mud of the roads from Brownsville.

Upon the arrival of the wagons about 3:30 P.m. the Confederates sent in a flag of truce with a note to Major Booth. "My men have received a fresh supply of ammunition, and from their present position can easily assault and capture the fort," the note said, demanding "the unconditional surrender of the garrison, promising you that you shall be treated as prisoners of war" but declining, if the demand were refused, "to be responsible for the fate of the command," that being another form of the same threat which Forrest had so often and so successfully used ever since his first capture of Murfreesborough by stratagem and bluff.

And then began a correspondence carried on from the Union side entirely in the name of Major Booth, dead for more than six hours. First Major Bradford asked, in the name of Booth, for "one hour for consultation and consideration with my officers and the officers of the gunboat." Forrest, observing a steamer "apparently crowded with troops" approaching the fort, seeing "the smoke of three other boats ascending the river," and "believing the request for an hour was to gain time for reinforcements to arrive, and that the desire to consult the officers of the gunboat was a pretext," replied with a note allowing twenty minutes.

Meanwhile the troop-laden steamers - the Liberty from above and the Olive Branch from below, as appears from subsequent Union testimony continued to approach in apparent violation of the truce, with no signal of any sort being made to them from either fort or gunboat to turn back or stand away toward the Arkansas shore.

In this state of affairs, believing that the defenders were playing for time for the arrival of reinforcements and seeing the approach of what might well have been reinforcements, with no effort being made to warn them of the existing truce, Forrest ordered his adjutant, Anderson, to move 200 men of McCulloch's command down the ravine in which they already were safely ensconced, to the steamboat landing below the bluff on which the ford stood, and sent Barteau with another 200 down the Coal Creek ravine to prevent landing of reinforcements at either point.

It was this movement, plainly observed by those in the fort and on the gunboat, which became the basis for the later charge that Forrest violated the truce to put his men in position to storm the fort-"the very position," Lieutenant Leaming reported, "which he had been fighting to obtain throughout the entire engagement." Actually, so far as the storming of the fort was concerned, the move down the ravines put 400 men, one fourth of the entire force out of the assaulting columns. The move was purely one of precaution against what seemed to be an attempt to land reinforcements, although, as will appear, the detachments in these positions did play a part in the final act of the impending tragedy in preventing the escape of those who sought to flee along the riverbank beneath the bluffs.

While this was transpiring, Bradford sent out another note signed "Booth," to the effect that "negotiations will not attain the desired object." General Forrest, who had ridden forward to the point where the flags-of-truce transactions were taking place in order to convince the Union negotiators that be was indeed there in person, received the evasive answer and sent back a peremptory demand for "an answer in plain, unmistakable English. Will he fight or surrender?"
Having no real hope of holding the fort, apparently, but relying on an insane scheme of defense concocted with Captain Marshall of the gunboat, Bradford sent back the defiant message, "I will not surrender."

Forrest, without a word, rode rapidly back to his position a quartet of a mile from the line and ordered Gaus to sound the charge. As Jacob Gaus brought from his battered bugle the notes of the charge, the assaulting line sprang forward, not pell-mell or helter-skelter but as if they had been rehearsed in detail in crossing ditches and scaling parapets. While the sharpshooters redoubled their already effective efforts to keep down the heads of the defenders, the assaulting troops crossed the few intervening yards to the twelve-foot-wide ditch, jumped down into the mud and water in the bottom, clambered and helped one another up its six-foot sides to the little ledge below the parapet, paused there for an instant-all without firing a shot-and then, with guns loaded, climbed and pushed one another over the eight-foot wall.
As the first assaulting wave, boosted from below by their fellows, came over the wall they emptied their guns at point-black range into the bodies of the garrison crowded on the fire step of the parapet. Before the garrison, which had fired at the first apparition of the charging line, could reload, the second wave was over, to empty another 600 guns into the mass below them. The "rebel charge," reported Lieutenant Leaming, was "as if rising from out the very earth.

"In the meantime," Leaming told the Congressional committee, nearly all the officers had been killed, especially of the, colored troops, and there was no one hardly to guide the men. They fought bravely, indeed, until that time," when with the assaulting Confederates pouring over the supposedly impregnable parapet, a company of colored troops, according to Leaming's report and that of other white troops, broke and fled. "I do not think the men who broke had a commissioned officer over them," Leaming added.

The testimony of the colored soldiers, on the contrary, was to the effect that "the Tennessee cavalry broke, and was followed down the hill by the colored soldiers." Regardless of which element of the garrison first broke, it is agreed that almost instantly the whole garrison, or such of them as had not been already killed or wounded, ran from their positions back through the little enclosure of the fort to the brow of the bluff above the river side, and plunged over.

"Major Bradford signaled to me that we were whipped," Captain Marshall, commanding the gunboat New Era, told the Congressional committee. "We had agreed on a signal that if he had to leave the fort, they would drop down under the bank, and I was to give the rebels canister.
And so, with the flag of the fort still flying and with arms still in their hands, the garrison dropped below the bluff, with apparent intent to continue resistance there, while the gunboat was "to give the rebels canister." But not a shot was fired from the gunboat. Instead, the prudent Captain Marshall, having found that be was nearly out of ammunition and fearing that the victorious rebels would turn the guns of the fort on him - as they actually did - closed his portholes and steamed away out of range.

When the fleeing garrison found that there was to be no blast of canister at their pursuers, panic seized them. Some continued their resistance; others thought only of safety in flight. As they rushed southward along the riverbank, they were met with a volley from the detachment under Anderson, which had come down to the steamboat landing to prevent reinforcements from coming ashore from the approaching transports, and which now fired their first shots in the assault. Turning the other way, the demoralized troops of the garrison met the fire of Barteau's men, beneath the bank on the other side of the fort. Others rushed into the river where they were shot or drowned-and all the while the flag of the fort still flew from its staff, until Private Doak Carr of the Second Tennessee (Confederate) cut it down.

"For the survivors it was a fortunate occurrence that some of our men cut the halyards and pulled down their flag, floating from a high mast in the center of the fort," reports Anderson, who was under the bluff. "Until this was done our forces under the bluff had no means of knowing or reason for believing that the fort was in our possession, as they could from their position see the flag but could not see the fort."

What happened under the bluffs was described by Lieutenant Learning as a "horrid work of butchery," which continued from the fall of the fort "until dark and at intervals throughout the night. Others who testified, including both those who were there and those who were not, were more profuse and harrowing in their detailed accounts of rebel savagery in the 128 pages of the report of the Congressional committee. And there can be no doubt, nor has it ever been denied, that some men -perhaps a considerable number-were shot after they, as individuals, were seeking to surrender. However, as Second Lieutenant Daniel Van Hom of the colored artillery regiment put it in his report, "there never was a surrender of the fort." Instead, as Colonel Barteau described the situation in an interview published in 1884, "they made a wild, crazy, scattering fight. They acted like a crowd of drunken men. They would at one moment yield and throw down their guns, and then would rush again to arms, seize their guns and renew the fire. If one squad was left as prisoners ... it was soon discovered that they could not be trusted as having surrendered, for taking the first opportunity they would break loose again and engage in the contest. Some of our men were killed by negroes who had once surrendered.

As the Federal flag fell Forrest spurred his horse from the knoll a quarter of a mile away, from which he had watched the fight, into the fort, promptly ordered all firing to cease and, with the help of Chalmers and other officers, began to restore order.

"The unwounded of the garrison were detailed, under the supervision of their own officers, to bury the dead and remove the wounded to the hospitals, tents and buildings," Anderson reports, while he and Captain John T. Young, of the Fort Pillow garrison, went up along the riverbank with a white flag, in an endeavor to open communication with the master of the gunboat New Era, and try to get him to send ashore for the wounded.3-1 The New Era, however, steamed away, being "fearful that they might hail in a steamboat from below, capture her, put on 400 or 500 men, and come after me,"32 and so the wounded were left unattended for the night and most of the dead unburied.

With the coming of night Forrest started back to Jackson but, by reason of the severe shaking-up he had received in the fall of his horse that day, he stopped for the night about three miles from the fort. Chalmers likewise left the fort with the coming of dark, and marched his command well back and away from the works before making camp about two miles from the river. If, as Lieutenant Leaming and others testified, shooting, bayoneting and butchering of men went on all night at Fort Pillow, it was the work of stragglers or prowlers and not of organized Confederate forces, none of whom were in or about the place until the next morning, the thirteenth.

At daylight of the thirteenth, acting on orders from Forrest, Chalmers sent back to the fort details to bring away the captured artillery and other arms and to "burn all houses at the fort, except the one used as a hospital ... [and] leave with the wounded ... slightly wounded men sufficient to wait on them . . . [and] five or six days' supply of provisions and any medicine they may need.

While Chalmers' men were engaged in this work, including "applying torches to barracks, huts and stables," there appeared before the fort from below the gunboat Silver Cloud, accompanied by the transport Platte Valley, sent up from Memphis in response to news that the fort had been attacked. The gunboat shelled the fort and woods for about an hour until 8:00 A.M., when Captain Anderson, sent back by Forrest for the purpose, succeeded in making a truce for the day, under the terms of which the Federals would be put in full possession of the fort until 5:00 P.M. "for the purpose of burying our dead and removing our wounded," as Acting Master William Ferguson of the gunboat reported. Wounded were "brought down from the fort and battlefield and placed on board the Platte Valley. Details of rebel soldiers assisted us in this duty." Another Union observer reported that 'the rebels rendered us efficient aid, facilitating as much as possible getting the wounded on board transport"--quite at variance with the report of Lieutenant Leaming that "while the U. S. gunboat No. 28 from Memphis was shelling the enemy, who at the same time was engaged in murdering our wounded, Forrest sent a flag of truce to the commander granting him time ... to bury our dead and remove the few surviving wounded, he having no means to attend to them." In the anxiety to make out a case of cold-blooded butchery against Forrest and his men, the inconsistency in the two attitudes ascribed to them in the same sentence seems to have escaped attention.

In one of the hearsay statements included in the Union reports it is said that the Confederates "took out from Fort Pillow about one hundred and some odd prisoners (white) and 40 negroes. They hung and shot the negroes as they passed along toward Brownsville until they were rid of them all."In fact, the prisoners captured, other than the wounded who were turned over to the boats on the day after the fall of the fort, were promptly removed to Mississippi and arrived in Okolona on the evening of April twentieth.

During the truce of the thirteenth, while the parties from the Federal steamers were removing the wounded with some Confederate assistance and burying the dead, Chalmers' men were removing the captured arms, ammunition and other supplies for which they had transportation. Ox teams were impressed to haul away the six pieces of artillery captured., while the muskets-269 of which were picked up below the bluff, where they had been carried as part of the scheme to continue resistance with the help of the gunboat-were loaded into the ordnance wagons along with captured ammunition.

By 4:00 P.m. the work of the day was completed, the landing parties returned to the steamers in the river, Chalmers and his men marched inland, the gunboat lowered her flag of truce, ran up the United States flag and steamed off, and Fort Pillow was left alone with its dead.
General Forrest, in a dispatch to Polk from Jackson, said that "the loss of the enemy will never be known from the fact that large numbers ran into the river and were shot and drowned. . . . The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards." With the Federal reports of the number in the garrison, however, and the fuller information which became available later, it is possible to arrive at the loss with reasonable accuracy. Of the 557 members of the garrison the names of 226-168 whites and 58 Negroes-appear upon the lists of prisoners carried away from the fort by the Confederates. Captain Ferguson took on board the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley "some 20 of our troops" before the truce of April thirteenth began, and "found about 70 wounded men in the fort and around it," during the truce. Elsewhere, in the official reports of the navy there is a receipt from Ferguson to Anderson for 3 officers, 43 white privates and 14 Negroes, and also a nominal list of 58 wounded taken aboard during the truce. In addition to those taken off by Ferguson's boats "some 20 more" were placed on the Red Rover making a total of from 100 to 110 wounded taken off on that day. Two days later Captain LeRoy Fitch took off ten more wounded soldiers, bringing the total number of wounded in Federal hands to from 110 to 120.

It appears then that of the garrison of 557 there were at least 336 survivors, of whom 226 were unwounded or only slightly wounded and approximately 100 seriously wounded. The dead of the garrison may be calculated as not more than 231, which accords with the burial reports. Captain Ferguson says that his men "buried, I should think, 150 bodies."47 Captain Marshall, who returned to Fort Pillow during the truce of the thirteenth, buried 64.48 Others were buried by Lieutenant Commander Fitch whose gunboat, the Moose, was at Fort Pillow on the fourteenth. Some of the last, however, appear to have been reburied bodies hastily and imperfectly buried before . In addition to the dead of the garrison there were doubtless some deaths among the enlisted civilians, sutlers, traders and the like, who elected to take part in the defense of the place. The loss of life approximated forty percent of the garrison-by no means an extraordinarily high rate for a place carried by assault as Fort Pillow was.

During the investigation made by Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Daniel W. Gooch, a subcommittee of the joint Select Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War, special efforts were made to show that, with the exception of about a score, all the loss of life occurred after organized resistance ceased. Lieutenant Leaming, for example, having previously testified that the commanding officer of the post and his adjutant and indeed "nearly all the officers" had been killed during the fight, and having testified to the "murderous fire" and the "unerring aim of the rebel sharpshooters," was led by questioning to testify that of the eight officers of his regiment in the battle only two remained alive, all but one of the others having been killed after "we were driven from the fort." Sergeant Weaver of the colored troops, in response to a question from Senator Wade, "supposed" that before the fort was captured not "over a dozen" of the whites and "probably not more than fifteen or twenty of the negroes" were killed. He somewhat spoiled the answer, however, by adding that "there were a great many of the negroes wounded, because they would keep getting up to shoot, and were where they could be hit."
The Congressional committee arrived at Cairo, Illinois, on April twenty-second, took testimony there for two days, went down the river to visit Columbus, Memphis, Fort Pillow and the gunboat New Era, taking testimony at each place, and returned to Cairo on the twenty-eighth. During their investigation the committee interrogated sixty-seven persons about Fort Pillow, of whom forty-two were in the fort on the day of the fight-seventeen colored soldiers, twenty-one white soldiers, one colored civilian and one white, one white officer and one surgeon. The remainder included four officers of the gunboat New Era, ten persons who came to the fort the next day, six surgeons of the Mound City, Illinois, hospital, and five army and navy officers of rank who gave general testimony. In addition to those interrogated, the committee was furnished by General Brayman, commanding at Cairo, with affidavits from five white soldiers and four civilians who were in the fort and four others who came there the next day.

From this mass of testimony the Congressional committee reported, in summary, that the rebels took advantage of a flag of truce to place themselves in "position from which the more readily to charge upon the fort!'; that after the fall of the fort "the rebels commenced an indiscriminate slaughter sparing neither age nor sex, white or black, soldier or civilian"; that this was "not the result of passions excited by the heat of conflict, but of a policy deliberately decided upon and unhesitatingly announced"; that several of the wounded were intentionally burned to death in huts and tents about the fort; and that "the rebels buried some of the living with the dead.

Long afterward Dr. Wyeth collected sworn testimony from half -a hundred Confederate survivors and eyewitnesses of the fight, indignantly denying these and like charges. Disregarding this and other Confederate evidence on the subject, however, and relying only on statements from Union sources, it is apparent that no one of the five principal points of the committee's report can be sustained upon critical examination of the record.

As to the first, that of advancing under flag of truce to a better position for assault, it is clear from the Federal statements that Forrest's men were in the ravines below reach of the guns of the fort, and as close as fifty yards, before noon and some four hours before the truce began. Marshall of the gunboat testified that he was signaled from the fort to shell them out and tried to do so, but failed. Leaming testifies to like effect, although at another point he does say that the Confederates advanced under flag of truce. The movement he referred to, obviously, was that to the riverbank, made for the purpose of preventing the possible landing of reinforcements from the approaching troop-laden transports. That these transports were approaching and that they were not signaled from fort or gunboat to keep away is confirmed by the testimony of Brigadier General George F. Shepley, of the Union Army, who was on the Olive Branch going up the river, and who mentions the Liberty, bound downstream.

The Confederate detachments which went to the riverbank, moreover, did not put themselves in better position for the assault. They put themselves entirely out of that part of the action.

The description of the slaughter in the second principal point of the committee's report is rhetoric. The aged, the women and children, and the civilians in the fort who did not wish to join in the fight, were placed in a coal barge early in the morning and towed by the New Era "to a big island up the river," as testified to by Captain Marshall and referred to by other witnesses.

Of those engaged in the fight, the slaughter was by no means so great as it would have been had there been an order or a determination to exterminate the garrison, as is implied in the committee's report. About two-fifths of the garrison were killed, and another one-fifth wounded., It is impossible to know now how many had been killed before the mad rush away from the stormed parapet in an attempt to take up the fight from a new position, but from the testimony and reports it is apparent that there must have been heavy loss during the hours of fighting from the "unerring aim of the rebel sharpshooters," and probably still heavier loss as the assaulting waves came over the parapet, emptying 1,200 rifles into the crowded defenders at hand-to-hand range. It must be remembered too that there never was a surrender of the fort, nor an entire cessation of resistance until perhaps twenty minutes after the storming of the parapet. Had there been, the loss of life would have been less.

The third main charge, that the "atrocities committed at Fort Pillow" were the result of deliberate policy, does not stand up under examination of the Union record. Without doubt men were killed and wounded who should not have been, and the loss of life was greater than it would have been but for the attempt to prolong resistance beneath the bluff while the gunboat was supposed to be shelling the Confederates in the fort.

Undoubtedly, too, this was intensified by the bitter animosities, many of them personal, existing between the Tennessee white Unionist defenders of the fort and the assailants, and by the feeling of many Confederate soldiers toward those whom they looked upon as slaves in blue uniforms. In all the circumstances it would have been a strange and wonderful thing had there been no cases of individual assault in the closing portions of a fight which came to a ragged, scattering and indefinite end.

The finding of the committee as to a deliberate policy of destruction of the garrison rests partly upon Forrest's note demanding surrender and partly upon testimony of wounded survivors that "officers," or "Chalmers" or "Forrest" had ordered a slaughter of the defenders. As to the note demanding surrender, Forrest was probably correct in saying that he could not be responsible for the consequences if the demand was refused, but this was by no means the same as saying that he was ordering a slaughter. As a matter of fact, it was no more than a repetition of the device which he had used before and was to use again with success in securing surrender of places with minimum loss of life to his own command and, for that matter, to the defenders.

The testimony of survivors on the point of the attitude of officers is mixed. The very first survivor examined-Elias, a colored soldier-said that the rebels "killed all the men after they surrendered, until orders were given to stop. . . ."

"Till who gave orders?"
"They told me his name was Forrest."

The same witness told of seeing a soldier shoot one of the wounded men in the hand, when "an officer told the secesh soldier if be did that again he would arrest him."115 Lieutenant Leaming testified that when there were shots outside the hut to which he had been carried after being wounded he heard an officer ride up and say: "Stop that firing; arrest that man," and that another officer-prisoner told him "that they had been shooting them, but the general had had it stopped."
One witness, Frank Hogan, colored, testified that a "secesh first lieutenant" shot a captain of the Negro regiment, while others testified that they were told that the shootings were ordered by General Forrest. One imaginative witness, however, declared that "towards evening, General Forrest issued an order not to kill any more negroes, because they wanted them to help haul the artillery out."

"Were colored men used for that purpose?"
"Yes sir. I saw them pulling the artillery, and I saw the secesh whip them as they were going out, just like they were horses."

The only witness in the whole record who professed to have seen Forrest ordering, or otherwise participating, in the shootings was Jacob Thompson, colored civilian, who told the committee that he fought with the garrison:

"When were you shot?" be was asked. "After I surrendered."
"Who shot you?"
"A private."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'God damn you, I will shoot you, old friend'".
"Did you see anybody else shot?"
"Yes, sir; they just called them out like dogs, and shot them down. I reckon they shot about fifty, white and black, right there. They nailed some black sergeants to the logs, and set the logs on fire."
"When did you see that?"
"When I went there in the morning I saw them; they were burning all together."
"Did they kill them before they burned them?"
"No sir, they nailed them to the logs; drove the nails right through their hands."
"How many did you see in that condition?"
"Some four or five; I saw two white men burned.
"Did you notice bow they were nailed?"
"I saw one nailed to the side of a house; he looked like be was nailed right through his wrist. I was trying then to get to the boat when I saw it." [This, it is to be noted, was after the arrival of Ferguson and his two boats, with their numerous landing parties-none of whom reports having seen such sights.]
"Did you see them kill any white men?"
"They killed some eight or nine there. I reckon they killed more than twenty after it was all over; called them out from under the hill, and shot them down. They would call out a white man and shoot him down, and call out a colored man and shoot him down; do it just as fast as they could make their guns go off."
"Did you see any rebel officers about there when this was going on?"
"Yes, sir; old Forrest was one."
"Did you know Forrest?"
"Yes, sir; he was a little bit of a man. I had seen him before at Jackson."
"Are you sure he was there when this was going on?"
"Yes, sir."

Beside this one bit of positive evidence to connect Forrest with whatever shootings went on after resistance ceased, from a witness who knew him as "a little bit of a man," [Forrest was a big man, AE] there is the statement of Sergeant Benjamin Robinson, colored, that "General Forrest rode his horse over me three or four times. I did not know him until I heard his men call his name. He said to some negro men there that he knew them; that they had been in his nigger yard in Memphis. He said he was not worth five dollars when he started, and had got rich trading in negroes." Other references to Forrest in the testimony are to the effect that soldiers hallooed "Forrest says, no quarter! no quarter!" and the next one hallooed, "Black flag! black flag!"or that the "general cry from the time they charged the fort until an hour afterwards was, 'Kill 'em, kill 'em; God damn 'em; that's Forrest's orders, not to leave one alive."

That some of Forrest's men believed that he had made some such order is indicated in the letter of Sergeant Achilles V. Clark, of the Twentieth Tennessee, written from Brownsville to his sisters on the nineteenth:
"The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better.... I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded but Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued."

That Sergeant Clark was mistaken in his belief as to Forrest's orders is shown by the mass of sworn testimony subsequently assembled by Dr. Wyeth from staff officers of Forrest and Chalmers, from brigade and regimental commanders, and from surviving Confederate officers and soldiers of all ranks.

None of them denies that there was firing after the garrison broke from the fort to the prepared positions under the bluff where, in addition to the arrangements with the gunboats, "six cases of rifle ammunition were found ... with tops removed and ready for immediate distribution and use," and where "about 275 serviceable rifles and carbines were gathered up between the water's edge and the brow of the bluff, where they had been thrown down by the garrison when they found the gunboat New Era had deserted them and escape impossible. Several Confederate survivors testify to the effect that Forrest, as soon as he reached the scene, "rode down the line and commanded and caused the firing to cease." After this order was given, according to the testimony of Dr. W. J. Robinson, there was but one shooting and the guilty soldier was at once arrested and placed under guard by General Chalmers.

That Chalmers protected another of the garrison is attested, also, in a letter from Dr. C. Fitch of Chariton, Iowa, written to the General in 1879, after he had become a member of Congress and had been assailed on the floor for his participation in the "Fort Pillow Massacre." Dr. Fitch, who was the surgeon of the post, said that when his captors were about to strip him of his boots he appealed to the General, "who cursed them, and put a guard over me, giving orders to the guard to shoot down the first one that molested me.

"I am not aware that there was any formal surrender of Fort Pillow to Forrest's command," he added. "I looked upon many things that were done as the result of whiskey and a bitter personal hate, especially as regards the Thirteenth regiment. There was considerable alcohol outside the fort, which Forrest's men must have got hold of long before the charge was made. I have always thought that neither you nor Forrest knew anything that was going on at the time under the bluffs. What was done was done very quickly.

There is abundant testimony from Confederate sources that wide spread and almost general intoxication among the garrison contributed to the frenzy of the scattered resistance offered between the time the parapet was stormed and the time Forrest could restore order below the bluffs. Most of the fifty men who furnished affidavits to Dr. Wyeth mention the presence of whisky in the fort, and the evidences of its too-liberal use by the garrison. Barrels of whisky found along the parapet, with tin dippers attached, were kicked over and spilled by prudent officers of the attacking forces. Among the officers who mention this circumstance are Colonels Tyree Bell and Robert McCulloch, commanding the two assaulting brigades, Colonel Barteau and Captain Anderson, Forrest's aide and only staff officer during the Fort Pillow operation.
That men were killed who had ceased to resist is clear, and is not denied. That this was due to a policy, and not to the circumstances of the fight, is not established. That Forrest himself did exert effective efforts toward stopping any indiscriminate slaughter is clear.

The fourth principal point in the indictment of Forrest's men at the hands of the Congressional committee is that wounded men were burned to death in the huts and tents about the fort. That burned bodies were found by the burial parties from the Silver Cloud, the Platte Valley and the New Era on the thirteenth is not disputed. The explanation offered by Captain W. A. Goodman, Chalmers' adjutant, is that when the Silver Cloud began to shell the position that morning, the officer in charge "ordered the tents which were still standing . . . to be burned, intending to abandon the place. In doing this, the bodies of some negroes who had been killed in the tents, on the day before, were somewhat burned; and this probably gave rise to the horrible stories about burning wounded prisoners which were afterward invented and circulated."

The greater part of the testimony before the Congressional committee is not inconsistent with this explanation, being simply statements to the effect that charred bodies were seen in the tents, or that the witness had been told that someone else had seen them. One witness, Ransom Anderson, colored soldier, says that "they put some in the houses and shut them up, and then burned the houses," and that he knew they were there because he "went and looked in" and "heard them hallooing when the houses were burning." He places this on the night of the twelfth, however, while all other evidence is that the tents and huts were burned on the following day. Lieutenant Leaming, who was wounded, was in one of the buildings on the morning of the thirteenth. He testified that after the Silver Cloud, or No. 28, began to shell the place the Confederate officer in charge decided to burn the tents and buildings, but that he was "gotten out, and thinks that others got the rest out.
Except for Ransom Anderson's inherently improbable story. which fits in with none of the other evidence, there is but one other piece of testimony of intentional burning. Eli A. Bangs, mate of the New Era, who accompanied the burial party sent ashore on the thirteenth, says that in one burned tent he found the body of a man through whose clothing and cartridge box nails had been driven into the floor. Three corroborating witnesses support his statement, agreeing that there were other bodies found in the same tent but that "this man in particular was nailed down .1172 In the absence of any direct evidence to the contrary, it may be taken as possible that some vicious person, whether a Confederate soldier or some skulker or prowler, may have perpetrated such an outrage. Beyond this, however, there is no real evidence of value to sustain the committee's conclusion.

The fifth and last of the principal points made by the committee was that the "rebels buried some of the living with the dead." If living men were buried with the dead it was not by the rebels, for the entire work of burying the dead was carried out by Union soldiers, first by prisoners of the garrison and on subsequent days by burial parties sent ashore from the gunboats and transports in the river.

The weight of the evidence-even the Union evidence, when sifted and analyzed-is that any excessive loss of life among the garrison was due to the character of the command and the plan of defense which permitted no definite, clean-cut and readily understood surrender or end to the fighting. This uncertainty gave full play to the tensions between defenders and assailants and the passions aroused in the day of battle. It is plain that there was no planned and ordered "massacre," and that there was no considerable loss of life after the fact of general surrender was well established. The loss was from the sharpshooting throughout the day, in the storming of the parapet and in the period of uncertainty between that time and the arrival of Forrest in the fort after the flag came down-a period which Anderson estimates as "not to exceed twenty minutes."73 Marshall of the New Era says that "the rebels kept firing on our men for at least twenty minutes after our flag was down"74-So that there is a fair degree of agreement as to the period of time involved.

The development of the "massacre" theory of the capture of Fort Pillow may be traced in the columns of the Memphis Bulletin, a newspaper of strong Union complexion. Its first story, in the issue of Wednesday, April thirteenth, reports the arrival the night before of the steamer Liberty No. 2, bringing down families and refugees from Fort Pillow, along with the report that the place was under attack but that "no apprehensions were felt for its safety." On the next day, the fourteenth, the Bulletin reported the capture of the place by Forrest's force of 4,000, with an estimate that 300 of the garrison had been killed or wounded in the early fighting and storming of the works which, it was said, "were carried with the national flag waving over them." On the fifteenth the Bulletin stated that the gallant defenders had been massacred but again declared that the "greater portion of the garrison had been killed or wounded during the earlier part of the fight."

Two days later, on the seventeenth, an editorial in the Bulletin included some of the atrocity stories. On the twenty-first, in a dispatch from Cairo, new atrocities such as burying wounded men alive were added, and the dead Major Booth was praised for his order of the day, "Soldiers Never Surrender!" Finally, on the twenty-seventh, after the visit of the Committee of Congress, portions of its report making the "atrocity" official were published, along with an editorial denunciation of the "infamous General Forrest."

Two years later, on May 30, 1865, and after the end of the war, the same paper considered Fort Pillow once more, concluding that "there was much misrepresentation about the Fort Pillow affair. It is not true that the rebels took no prisoners. On the contrary, about 200 were taken prisoners and carried South."

Even before the Congressional committee was named to make the investigation which was to make of Fort Pillow the "atrocity" of the war, a military investigation had been started. Secretary of War Stanton on April sixteenth ordered Sherman to "direct a competent officer to investigate and report minutely, and as early as possible, the facts in relation to the alleged butchery of our troops at Fort Pillow." To this order, Sherman responded a - week later that the investigation was under way. He added:

"I know well the animus of the Southern soldiery, and the truth is they cannot be restrained. The effect will be, of course, to make the negroes desperate, and when in turn they commit horrid acts of retaliation we will be relieved of the responsibility.... The Southern army, which is the Southern people, cares no more for our clamor than for the idle wind, but they will heed the slaughter that will follow as the natural consequence of their inhuman acts."

The military investigation thus ordered was carried out by General Brayman, Union commander at Cairo, who on April twenty-eighth sent a copy direct to Secretary Stanton, as ordered, and gave another to the Congressional committee when it visited Cairo.

Sherman's judgment of the "massacre at Fort Pillow" as expressed in his Memoirs is that:

"No doubt Forrest's men acted like a set of barbarians, shooting down the helpless negro garrison after the fort was in their possession; but I am told that Forrest personally disclaims any active participation in the assault, and that he stopped the firing as soon as he could. I also take it for granted that Forrest did not lead the assault in person, and consequently that he was to the rear, out of sight if not of hearing at the time, and I was told by hundreds of our men, who were at various times prisoners in Forrest's possession, that he was usually very kind to them."

To this expression may be added his contemporary judgment expressed in action. "If our men have been murdered after capture," Grant telegraphed Sherman from Virginia, "retaliation must be resorted to promptly." Sherman made his own investigation, and had an opportunity to study that made by the Committee of Congress - but there was no retaliation, and General Sherman was not a man to shrink from ordering retaliation had he felt that it was justified.

Griffin and Harrington: the Political Soldiers

Griffin House - Tell Me A Lie

Would you buy a used car from this man?

"You shouldn't wash the party's dirty linen in public" certain British National Party members, to whom ignorance is bliss, may say. I say that if that is the only way to get the party's linen clean then it must be washed in public. There is simply too much dirt, the stench of corruption is simply too great, to do anything else.

If a 'red' says "the sky is blue, the grass is green", ought one, as a nationalist, to disagree, on principle?

If a homosexual, such as Martin Webster, says a thing is true, should they automatically be disbelieved, simply because of their homosexuality? John Tyndall once said that though Webster was many things, he had never regarded him as a liar. JT could hardly have said the same about Griffin, who must be one of the most notorious liars in politics today, a crowded field, it must be said.

All of this stuff is ancient history, for goodness' sake: give it a decent burial and let's move on, some may say.

The trouble is that unless the lessons of history are learnt, and understood, the same things tend to happen all over again, in much the same ways. Sometimes even the same human actors are involved, as happens to be the case with regard to the betrayal and destruction of both the National Front from 1986 to 1989 and the BNP from 2007 to date.

The following article was published almost four years ago, but in view of Griffin's behaviour as BNP leader during those intervening four years, its unanswered questions silently demand answers ever more urgently.

June 15, 2007

Martin Webster has another go at the BNP's Nick Griffin

Posted by Antifascist to the Lancaster Unity blogspot

In the latest edition of his ebulletin, Electronic Loose Cannon, the far-right's extremely loose cannon, Martin Webster, has again attacked the BNP leader Nick Griffin. Webster, who has had his claws deep into Griffin since the announcement that there is to be a BNP leadership contest, regales us with a list of small but far from insignificant facts (?) which, added to the body of evidence collected over years by both the anti-fascist movement and his opposition on the far-right, show Griffin to be a shyster on rather an impressive scale, if true.

For the most part, we'll repeat the allegations from Webster verbatim but where we feel the need to comment, we'll enclose our comment in square brackets [like these].

'I have no knowledge of Nick Griffin's father, Edgar, beyond that he is a chartered accountant and that his father, Edwin, was a leading Freemason who left Nick, £300,000 in the late 1980s (which he quickly lost in stupid property deals).'

[Curiously, considering what an enormous amount of money £300,000 is, isn't this just after Griffin declared bankruptcy? If so, perhaps that's how he managed to be discharged.]

'On the one occasion in the mid 1970s that I stayed over-night at the Griffin family home (then at Hill House, Huntingfield, near Halesworth, Suffolk) the kitchen was filled with oriental carpets, giving it the appearance of a souk.

Mrs Griffin had bought a job lot of these and was proposing, somehow, to merchandise them. She asked my opinion as to their quality. I was surprised she didn't remark: "Never mind the quality -- feel the width". It became evident to me on that occasion that the entire Griffin family were money mad.'

[It shouldn't take anyone long to come to that conclusion.]

'I was informed last year by Daily Mail feature writer David Jones that Nick Griffin's sister is "Susan Patricia". Jones said he had tried to locate her via a search of the on-line Registry of Electors, but had no luck. There is a real mystery concerning why she has broken off all contact with her family and made efforts to cover her tracks.

Susan Patricia was once engaged to Ipswich National Front branch organiser Tony Williams, a boyhood friend of Griffin's. At the time (late 70s/early 80s) Williams (whose father was a wealthy businessman) was building up a very successful off-licence business in East Anglia. During the 1970s Susan Patricia stood at least once (I think in Ipswich) as an NF local council candidate.'

[There's nothing about Susan Griffin on the net but it would be interesting to find out more about her. Any information would be welcome.]

'I don't know when or why the engagement between Susan Patricia and Williams ended. It may have been something to do with the following:

'NICK GRIFFIN'S FIRST SWINDLE?

In the mid/late 1980s Griffin swindled Williams of a couple of thousand pounds. Griffin told Williams that he had got news about a bargain supply of CDs somewhere on the Continent, but that he didn't have the cash to take advantage of the offer. He implied the purchase was for his own private business enterprise and promised to repay Williams in cash "within two weeks". As they were friends, the deal was transacted without paperwork.

Weeks went by and no repayment was made. When Williams asked for his money, he was astounded to be told by Griffin that the money was "a loan to the party" (i.e. what remained of the National Front, or one of its splinters) not a personal loan to him, or a loan guaranteed by him, and that if Williams wanted his cash, he should chase the party.

But this was at the time that the remnant of the NF was splintering into little grouplets and Griffin was helping Roberto Fiore set up the International Third Position, so in effect there was no identifiable "party" to chase and any litigation against the then impecunious Griffin would be futile.'

[If this is indeed true, we doubt very much if it was Griffin's first swindle but this does sound very much like Griffin's first foray into the music business, Rock Against Communism, a cash-generating racist music scene that eventually evolved into the enormously successful Blood and Honour.

It is believed by many who were involved in the scene at the time that Griffin realised that the 'white power' music scene was a money-making scam of epic proportions but it appears he was eventually sussed by none other than Ian Stuart Donaldson, the late lead singer of Skrewdriver, one of the most famous bands in the whole Blood and Honour movement, who, with a few others who were involved (Nicky Crane of the British Movement being one) got the hell out and largely separated the music from the politics (and the thieves from the money). Great White Records doesn't seem to be doing quite as well.]

'JUNK PRINTING EQUIPMENT AND A DRUNK'S LIFE-SAVINGS

You will know that Griffin was eventually forced to quit the ITP after a deal which involved the purchase of printing equipment which turned out to be only just so much scrap iron; and swindling one of its members, Colin Todd, caretaker of the Fiore-owned building Liss House at Liss Forest, Hants.

Somehow Griffin persuaded Todd to "invest" his life savings in a venture. It was a scam and Todd lost the lot. When confronted with this cruel swindle Griffin shrugged it off, remarking that "Todd is a drunk".

The two thousand pounds loss which [Tony] Williams sustained as a result of Griffin's crookedness was not the worst aspect of the sting. It was the crass and cynical dishonouring of an agreement between two long-standing friends. Williams just could not believe Griffin could be so dishonest and so brazen - and so casual about a long friendship.'

[Which is precisely what he's going to do to the membership of the BNP - take their money and run.]

'THE FIRST FARM BUILDING RENOVATION SWINDLE

This made Williams loathe Griffin and, decades later, prompted him to make available to me a DVD copy of a video he had shot of a building restoration project which had taken place in 1984 on Hill House, the Griffin family home in Suffolk.

Griffin told the NF that he had persuaded his parents to grant the National Front's youth wing, the Young National Front, free use of a number of outbuildings of their farmhouse, but that restoration work would need to be done free of charge.

YNF and NF members went to the farm for weekend after weekend during that year and did hard and dangerous building work for no wage. They paid their own fares to and from the site and slept on the floors of the buildings they were renovating.

A SWINDLE WITH GRATIS AD LIB LAGER FUNDED "FREE MEALS"

They were given "free" meals, but the meals were in fact paid for by means of a petty swindle.

Williams had delivered to the site before work commenced a van-load of tins of continental lager which had just gone by their 'sell-by' date and could not be sold via the off-licence trade. Williams GAVE the lager for FREE distribution to the young idealists. Griffins knew a business opportunity when they saw it and they set to work grinding off the 'sell-by' date from the cans, which were then SOLD to the workers at £1 per can! Easily £2 in today's values. But this was only a trivial side swindle.

The worst aspect of the main swindle - the building restoration - was that the youngsters were put to work on an a major asbestos clearance.

"IF HE DOESN'T BREAK HIS NECK HE'LL DIE OF ASBESTOS POISONING"

By that time a law had been passed requiring asbestos clearances to be conducted by specially licenced asbestos clearance contractors whose staff had been specially trained and who use special protective equipment and who bagged and disposed of asbestos waste in a prescribed manner.

Needless to say, the NF/YNF people were ignorant of the dangers and of the law governing such work, and they simply climbed on to the roof of "the Asbestos Barn" and hurled the asbestos sheets to the ground, sending up clouds of potentially lethal dust. This and other aspects of the work was filmed by Tony Williams on his video camera.

Griffin wrote and spoke a commentary to the video. His voice is unmistakable. At one point in the film John Field, then the organiser of Hackney YNF, is shown on the roof without any protective equipment or safety harness, hammering down asbestos sheets as clouds of dust rise.

Griffin remarks in his commentary: "If he doesn't break his neck, then he'll die of cancer due to asbestos poisoning".

This remark was made with cold matter-of-factness.

WHY SHOULD ALL THIS BE DRAGGED UP NOW - AFTER SO LONG A TIME?

Some may ask why such wickedness should be made an issue now.... "after all, it was a long time ago". There are two equally important answers, as follows:

Firstly, asbestosis is a terminal condition which takes decades to manifest itself. The people who as young men worked on the asbestos clearance at Hill House are now coming into the time when, if they have been unlucky, symptoms will start to present. They may have no idea what is happening to them, or why.

Secondly, anybody who in his 20s (an adult) who could perpetrate such a thing against anybody, let alone "comrades", and who could perpetrate sundry other swindles against friends and associates, is not somebody who at any subsequent time should have any trust reposed in them.

Needless to say, the property, once renovated, was never made available to the NF (nor was the video!!). The whole thing had been a trick whereby the Griffin family exploited their political connection to con young idealists to get dangerous, expensive and potentially lethal work done for free.'

[If the story about the lager is true, it simply shows what we already know - that Griffin will exploit anyone to make a quick buck. It just shows the actions of a petty thief. It's the other story that should concern us more - the asbestos story. If that's true and if evidence exists in the form of a film, it should be passed on to the police, Environmental Health and the Press with a view to pursuing criminal charges against Griffin. Without the film or at least evidence from the other people who were there at the time, this is all hearsay. With the film, Griffin could end up nicely tucked away in Strangeways. Come on Webster, do what's right.]

'VIDEO MADE TO CREATE ILLUSION OF "A HISTORIC PROJECT"

Griffin had only asked Williams to make the video to give the YNF lads the illusion they were engaged in "a historic project" - and how those innocents played up to the camera! Williams says he was as much conned as to the real purpose of being asked to make the video as he was conned by the use made of his supply of lager.

The work which those lads did added greatly the value of the Griffin property. When the property was sold, not a penny of the enhanced value created by the renovation work was directed to any nationalist political movement, as promised by Griffin at the outset.

Fiore and other of the Italian ITP prominenti occasionally turned up to Hill House inspect the good work, since the concept of "rural community centres" was then very much one of their ideological fads.

One would have thought that the swindle they saw Griffin perpetrate against the NF would have warned them off trusting him with their financial affairs...but Fiore and his gang were then and are now greedy for money, so perhaps they admired Griffin's style.

THE SECOND FARM BUILDING RENOVATION SWINDLE

Griffin performed another "Barn conversion" swindle soon after he became chairman of the BNP in 1999 - in about 2001/2.

The BNP put up the money for the materials and provided free skilled labour for the renovation of his barn on his 'Y Gribbin' farm in Wales. This barn is supposed to function as a venue for party meetings. If as and when it is used as such, the party is invoiced by Griffin for its use. Griffin did not grant the party any equity in the property in return for its "investment" so that if as and when the farm is sold, the added value created by the barn renovation go entirely to Griffin and not a penny to the BNP.

For some reason Griffin never secured the video (with his commentary dubbed on it) of the Hill House outbuildings renovation of 1984. Perhaps in the hurley-burley of political splits and financial shenanigans he forgot all about it.

WILLIAMS' HILL HOUSE VIDEO GOES WALKABOUT

Williams left the NF at about the time of its final disintegration under Griffin's (mis)management and some time in the 1990s became head of the minuscule National Socialist Movement. The NSM became exposed by the media for one reason or another and Williams fled the country and settled in a far-off land. He took with him the video of the Hill House renovation.

Eventually he made a DVD conversion of the video and made available a copy to me. The ownership of the copyright of this film is retained by Williams under contract.

Information about this DVD has been given to a wide cross-section of the media. I have retained the complete file of all the negotiations which took place. In all instances there was an initial flurry of keen interest and then, in all cases, the interest suddenly evaporated without any explanation.'

[Share it with us - we'll spread it around!]

'THE STRANGE REACTION OF THE MEDIA

Can one imagine what the reaction of the media would be in normal circumstances where a politician - of ANY party - was on record on a DVD of being involved in such a matter and of commenting sarcastically about the possible death of one of his duped helpers?

To put the gravity of the current situation into some kind of perspective, one would have to recollect the kind of huge smears, based on the most trivial of pretexts, levelled at personalities in the National Front during the 1970s.

In 1978, for example, the Daily Mirror concocted a double-page spread exposing the organiser of a local branch of the NF as "a Nazi" because part of the minute pattern on his tie, when hugely enlarged, could be said to resemble a "pattern of swastikas"!

The NF official concerned (Paul Kavanagh) was a respectable middle-class importer of machine tools with no "Nazi" background whatsoever. Indeed, he was widely rumoured to be an MI5 informant (but that is another story!). He was co-founder with Andrew Fountaine of the "National Front Constitutional Movement".

How does that bit of nonsense about Paul Kavanagh's tie compare with Griffin's outrageous record?'

[A nazi is a nazi whether his tie identifies him or not. Griffin's record though, if all this is true, is appalling.]

'WHO KILLED-OFF DOMINIC CARMAN'S BIOGRAPHY OF NICK GRIFFIN?

My recent experiences of the media via-a-vis Griffin seem to be very similar to that of the author Dominic Carman (son of the famous libel lawyer, the late George Carman QC).

Three years ago Carman was engaged in researching Griffin prior to producing a biography. Carman subjected me to two long in-depth interviews, the first was video-taped, the second audio-taped. He took copies of a lot of documents I have on file. The questioning covered a lot of ground, including most intimate matters.

In-between Carman's first and second interview with me, he had visited the Griffin farmhouse home in Wales. I understand he spent the weekend there and took the opportunity to interview Nick's wife Jacky separately from her husband Nick.

She was very frank on delicate matters. Carman also took information from former pupils at a girls public school in Suffolk, whose sixth form Nick and one or two other lads were permitted to attend. The information which they gave chimed with that provided by Jackie and provided context for my information in the same general area of sexuality.'

[This is presumably yet another reference to Griffin's interestingly hypocritical past.]

'THE ESTABLISHMENT IS HAPPY WITH GRIFFIN AS BNP CHAIRMAN

Two years rolled by but Carman's book did not appear. A brief article about Griffin by Carman appeared in the Daily Mail colour supplement about a year ago which was clearly based on his book researches, but since then there has been complete silence.

Intrigued by this, I e-mailed Carman on 25th April this year, saying:

"..... you will understand my wondering if the reason why your book on Griffin has not appeared has anything to do with my experiences of trying to get quite crucial information about Griffin's character and background into the public arena at a time when the mainstream media profiles of him are edging towards hagiography. Any reply will be kept confidential by me if you so request....."

Carman received my e-mail but has sent no response. I quite understand. He wants to be able to continue to earn his living from the mainstream media.

For want of any other explanation, I feel entitled to propose that the media was and is being orchestrated not to do anything to dislodge Griffin from his perch at the top of the BNP.

It is evident that the Establishment has every reason to be happy to have [a] creature like Griffin at the head of the premiere "nationalist" party in Britain, just as it is happy to have corrupt creatures at the head of every other political party which strives for the rewards which only Establishment patronage can bestow.'

[Webster's article ends, AE]

Apart from detesting Griffin for all the reasons laid out above, we can't see any particular reason for Webster to make all this stuff up. Apart from anything else, the information in the article simply confirms much that is already known (but from the other side, as it were) except the shocking asbestos story, which we feel deserves a far wider readership than we can give it.

Webster clearly has his own agenda and appears to be driven to write all this down by his loathing of BNP leader Nick Griffin. Nevertheless, the items in the article should be essential reading for anti-fascists and BNP members alike. The latter should at least be afforded the opportunity to quiz their party leader to discover how much truth there is to the items. If they could see the film too, it could dramatically change the way the current party loyalists view their not so glorious leader.

White Ethnocentrism: Can Americans Really Be Brainwashed?

By Kevin MacDonald

One of the great intellectual divides is the venerable nature/nurture dichotomy.

Conservatives tend to be on the side of nature:

Race exists as a biological reality; there are race
differences in socially important traits like IQ; people’s
brains are wired to prefer people like themselves;
they are more likely to contribute to public goods like
health care and education if the

beneficiaries are of the same ethnic group; people
trust others more if they live in homogeneous societies.

The left takes the opposite tack:

Race doesn’t exist; the idea that it does exist
is a fantasy of moral reprobates. To the extent
that differences in traits like IQ are interesting
at all, they are the result of capitalism, discrimination,
or general evil. If it weren’t for white people
behaving badly, we could easily build a strong,
racially diverse multicultural society where all
people can live happily ever after.

I am not going to try to convince you of the merits of either side of this debate. Over the years, VDARE.COM has certainly published some of the premier writers on the nature side.

But if you pick up the New York Times, you’ll get a very different version of these issues. It’s a version which, sad to say, has a lot more influence.

So what makes culture so powerful and how does it work at the psychological level?
Psychologists have shown that there are two different types of processing systems—the implicit and the explicit.

Implicit processing is the way the ancient parts of our brain operate—automatically and unconsciously.

Say you are talking to a salesman about a used car. Without any conscious effort on your part, your brain is processing an enormous amount of information. Some parts of your brain are processing the colors and shapes of the furniture, while others are responsible for recognizing the face of the salesman and picking up on his emotional expressions. Your brain is also assessing how similar this salesman is to yourself, and, without any conscious awareness on your part, it is making you trust him more if he is more like yourself. Furthermore, if he is from a different race or ethnic group, it is flagging that fact and it is coloring your interactions with stereotypes—whether negative or positive—that your unconscious mind associates with that race or ethnic group.

These implicit mechanisms - psychologists call them “modules” - are like zombies or robots. They go about their business without any conscious effort, and quite a few of them are beyond our control.

A good example is the face recognition module. If I am looking at someone I know, I can’t help but recognize him. I can’t simply turn off the module. The module takes in the information from the environment and simply does its thing in a preprogrammed way.

Importantly, the implicit brain includes mechanisms related to ethnocentrism. There are several different evolved mechanisms that make us prefer people like ourselves and be wary of people in outgroups.

Phil Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory [PDF] is a good example. Birds of a feather do indeed flock together. People tend to make friends and marry people who are like themselves on a wide range of traits, from IQ and personality, to ethnic group and even wrist size.

Research in Genetic Similarity Theory finds a biological basis to this flocking tendency. Each system of genes wants to reporoduce itself, and has the best chance of doing so if it chooses to mate with a system of genes which has some overlap.

But some aspects of ethnocentrism may be learned as well. The human mind is prone to rapidly learning negative stereotypes about outgroups. And even if these stereotypes are learned, they act just like the biological ones—they are triggered automatically via implicit processing.

The point is that in either case people tend to have negative stereotypes of other races and they prefer people from their own race. But, of course, that’s not the end of the story—only the beginning.

The other part of the brain is the more recently evolved part—the part responsible for explicit processing. Explicit processing involves language and thought.

The implicit brain processes information in a zombie-like reflexive way, but explicit processing is effortful and controlled. It’s the kind of processing that we use when we are solving a problem in math class, where we have to make a plan to solve the problem.

And it’s the part of the brain that takes in cultural information. When a person reads the New York Times, there a lot of explicit messages—immigration is good; people who oppose immigration are uneducated racist Neanderthals; there are no genetic differences between the races, yada, yada.

It’s easy to see that there can be conflicts between implicit processing of our ancient brain and the explicit messages one gets from the New York Times. The implicit part of the brain makes you more comfortable socializing with people like yourself. In fact, the implicit part of the brain leads white people to seek out implicit white communities — communities like NASCAR, country music, and certain kinds of rock music (like AC/DC) where the faces are pretty much all white.

White flight is one of the most salient phenomena of the late 20th century. And where are these white people fleeing to? To the suburbs where there are lots of other white people and where their children go to schools with other white children.

As sociologist Kevin Kruse notes in his book White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of white flight. Instead, white flight tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare state, taxation, and perceived moral dangers like abortion and homosexuality. But at the implicit level, the desire for white communities and the aversion to contributing to public goods for nonwhites are the overriding motivations.

Each of these identities allows white people to associate with other whites without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role.

Indeed, the granddaddy of implicit white communities is the Republican Party. In the recent election, the Republicans received at least 90% of their votes from white people. The delegates to the Republican convention in August were 93% white, 5% Latino, and 2% black. If these were all rich white oligarchs at the Republican convention, as Jon Stewart’s Daily Show would have it, that would be one thing.

But most Republicans are not rich white oligarchs. The fact is that the Republican base is really about the Sarah Palin phenomenon—white Christians—many with small town roots in the South and West—who yearn for the America they are rapidly losing: a white America.

But all of that is down deep in their brains, at the implicit level. In the upper reaches of their prefrontal cortex, they would never dream of saying explicitly that they are a party of white Americans. That would be "racist."

The same goes for their spokesmen—although calling these people spokesmen for the Republican base is being a bit generous. “Conservative” commentators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly studiously avoid saying anything that could be construed as "racist". Nor do they dare to oppose the massive legal immigration that will make the Republican base a permanent electoral minority even if we stopped illegal immigration immediately. That’s because the explicit processing system is in charge, at least at the conscious level.

Here’s how it works. Implicit attitudes on race are assessed by tests like the Implicit Association Test. (You can take the test here.) Subjects are presented with photos of blacks and whites in succession and asked to pair positive or negative words (e.g., "intelligent," "law-abiding," "poor," "success") with the photos.

Eighty percent of whites take longer to associate positive words with blacks than with whites. This is interpreted as indicating that whites have implicit negative stereotypes of blacks.

The interesting thing is that there is a gap between whites’ explicitly positive attitudes about blacks and their implicitly negative attitudes. Even white liberals show implicit negative attitudes toward blacks, although their implicit attitudes are less negative than those of conservatives.

In fact, white liberals are more hypocritical about race than conservatives: There is a larger gap between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes toward blacks among white liberals than among white conservatives.

What’s happening is that the conscious, explicit brain is thinking positive thoughts about blacks because it reads the New York Times. And it is suppressing the negative thoughts that are deep below the surface in the implicit part of the brain.

In one study, subjects were shown photos of blacks and whites while hooked up to an fMRI machine that takes pictures of the brain in action. When the photos were shown for very brief periods—too short to be explicitly processed, the fMRI showed that whites had a negative response to the photos of blacks. This procedure therefore measures implicit negative attitudes toward blacks.

However, the photos of blacks were presented for a much longer period, so that they were processed by the explicit part of the brain. The difference in negative reaction to black and white faces decreased.

This happened because the prefrontal cortex and explicit processing were activated. In other words, people who are consciously aware that they are seeing photos of blacks are able to suppress the negative automatic responses produced by their ancient brain. The explicit part of the brain suppresses the implicit part.

So implicitly processed feelings and perceptions are suppressed out of conscious awareness. But that doesn’t mean they have no influence. Besides affecting responses on the Implicit Association Test, the implicit brain is seeking out white communities like the Republican Party, and it has negative gut feelings about massive non-white immigration.

This disconnect between the implicit and the explicit brain produces some interesting phenomena. Young children tend to have unabashedly explicit bias in favor of their own race. Explicit race bias emerges early, as young as age three or four, peaks in middle childhood, and then undergoes a gradual decline through adolescence, and disappears in adulthood. Quite a bit of this decline is doubtless due to active campaigns to instill the official racial ideology of the Left in schools. Multicultural propaganda permeates education, from kindergarten through college, pushed by groups of cultural Marxists such as the National Association for Multicultural Education: "NAME celebrates cultural and ethnic diversity as a national strength that enriches a society and rejects the view that diversity threatens the fabric of a society."

However, there is no such decline in implicit racial preferences, which remain strong into adulthood. Indeed, there is also a decline in cross-racial friends and companions as children get older. White schoolchildren are much more likely to have white friends than chance expectation would account for, and this trend increases as they get older.

This means that at the same time that explicit racial preference in white children is declining, children are becoming less and less likely to actually interact with and form friendships with children from other races. In effect, schools undergo a process of self-segregation. And among adults, whites are significantly less likely than other racial groups to report interracial friendships and contacts.

The bottom line, then, is that as children get older they become increasingly aware of the official explicit racial ideology, and they conform to it. The explicit processing centers are becoming stronger, so that they are better able to suppress positive attitudes about their own race in order to conform to the demands of their teachers. At the explicit level, they are free from any negative attitudes toward nonwhite groups and may even be politically liberal or radical.

At the same time, however, they are "voting with their feet" by choosing friends and companions of the same race.

And their parents are doing the same thing. I have noted that liberals show a greater gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes and behavior than do conservatives. Indeed, while highly educated white parents tend to have liberal explicit attitudes on racial issues, a recent study shows that these same highly educated whites seek out schools that are racially segregated and are more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. In other words, there is a positive correlation between the average education of white parents and the likelihood that parents will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of black students increases.

Michael Emerson, an author of the study, is quite aware of the gap between explicit attitudes and behavior. He writes:

"I do believe that white people are being
sincere when they claim that racial inequality
is not a good thing and that they’d like to see
it eliminated. However…their liberal
attitudes about race aren’t reflected in
their behavior."

The explicit parts of their brains have been programmed to say and believe the right things. But the implicit parts of their brain are controlling their behavior.

This might be cause for hope for those of us whose explicit brain is more in tune with their implicit brain.

But the fact is that if explicit messages on race are repeated often enough, they start to become automatic and implicit. People can be brainwashed. This is the great hope of the cultural Marxists—that constant repetition and propaganda actually could produce what the Frankfurt School — the fons et origo of cultural Marxism in the West — called a "genuine liberal": someone who in his heart of hearts really has the gut instincts of a cultural Marxist; a white person who prefers non-whites on an Implicit Association Test.

They have a ways to go on that. But the election of Barack Obama will probably aid the cultural Marxist onslaught on the educational system. I can’t see any principles of human psychology that would prevent them from getting there eventually. (Of course the collapse of the Soviet Union indicates that religion and national identity are harder to eradicate than Stalin thought they were, and he tried very hard.) It would probably take a 1984-like police state to do it. But quite obviously that is not seen as a drawback by its proponents.

My conclusion: The New York Times is important because it and media like it control the explicit messages on vital issues like race and immigration. The culture of critique has become the explicit culture of the West, endlessly repeated in media messages but packaged differently for people of different levels of intelligence and education.

The message here is that by programming the higher areas of the brain, this explicit culture is able to control the implicit ethnocentric tendencies of white people.

The explicit culture may not be able to prevent white people from moving to white neighborhoods, and it may not prevent them from going to a NASCAR race. But it does make them supine in the face of a massive invasion of other peoples and cultures. It prevents the Republican Party from saying explicitly that they are a party of European-Americans intent on ending immigration and retaining their political majority and their cultural dominance. And it makes them cringe in horror when someone calls them a “racist”.

In attempting to find a way out of this morass, therefore, changing the explicit culture is critical. That’s why media like VDARE.COM and my own The Occidental Observer are so important. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign slogan, it’s the explicit culture, stupid.

Changing the explicit culture won’t be easy. I suggest that the first step is a psychological one: Proud and confident explicit assertions of ethnic identity and interests among white people, and the creation of communities where such explicit assertions are considered normal and natural rather than a reason for ostracism.

The fact that such assertions appeal to our implicit psychology is certainly an asset. It’s always easier to go with a natural tendency than to oppose it.

And in this case, our natural preference for people like ourselves is intellectually defensible: That is, it can withstand the probing rationality of the explicit processing system.

It’s the ideology of New York Times and the cultural Marxists that can’t withstand intellectual scrutiny.