Sunday 28 January 2007

oh no, its politics

"Inside every revolutionary, there is a policeman."- Flaubert.

The article below comes from a London-based far left magazine of the 1990s (& v.v.early 2000s) called Between The Lines, which bit the dust a few years back. I've kept a few articles from it, and as BTL never had a website, this is possibly the first time one of BTL's articles has made the web (I'm quite willing to be corrected). This is from Issue 7, and sort of articulates why I'm so hacked off with politics at the moment. No author's name is given.

oh no, it's politics

cults 'R' us



What's it like to be in a political group?

By a process of (un)natural selection only people who can handle going to lots of meetings will last the distance. People are bullied or guilt-tripped in to doing activities. Anyone with a life outside of politics is seen as not serious about their politics.

People who start to question the unspoken assumptions of the group can expect the cold shoulder from people who were previously friendly. Maintaining the shared illusions of the group is more important than any relationships.

question time

Political groups claim to be about the liberation of ordinary people. So why are they so elitist? Political groups claim to oppose a society which is based on conformity. So why are they hostile to independent and critical thinking?

The way people taking part in a political meeting relate to each other just reproduces the same crap we have to put up with in the rest of our lives. How is this going to lead to a new sense of community.



How much is being achieved after all those hours of meetings and marches? Political people feel the need to be doing something, but the political scene only offers the feeling of doing something.

You might expect a genuinely liberating movement to unleash some suppressed energy. But you will mostly find hours of deadly boring meetings, and the old ways of working (public meeting, leaflet, march etc etc) trotted out time after time. The only energy is shown by the hardcore activist who runs harder and harder around the cage of leftist misery. Where is the creativity, the fresh ideas, the sense of festival and fun?

Surely the point of politics is to improve the quality of life for ordinary people- and that includes us. If we're working for a world which gives a better life for the mass of people how can this be served by making out own lives as miserable as possible?



getting your fix

People who become politically conscious tend to look for another package of ideas to replace the conventional ideas they have rejected. But getting your ideas in a package rather than picking and choosing for yourself is part of the problem not part of the solution.

Being in a political group can be an attempt to overcome loneliness and to boost self-esteem by being involved in something 'worthwhile'. People can be persuaded to go through the misery of political activity 'for the cause' and will give up huge amounts of their time to political activity in the belief that there's a higher purpose to it all.



Leftist politicos like the feeling that they have a superior understanding of life and the world to that of the 'ordinary' person. (But surely clinging to a system which claims to explain everything is a sign of great insecurity?)

Political groups don't encourage people to think about how it feels to be involved in the group. They don't encourage people to think about what else is going on in the group, how the way people act is influenced by what else s going on in their lives, and by what their emotional needs are at the time.

dictators and sheep




The hyper-activist is generally the one who has the initiative to set something up, or has taken over the initiative of others. He (it usually is a 'he') does a large amount of work. He doesn't really trust anyone else to do things right so he takes on most of the tasks himself. (This basic lack of belief in the people around him contrasts with his supposed faith in the ability if the masses to take control of society.) Since the hyper-activist is the one setting the agenda and taking on most of the tasks, others feel increasingly alienated from the process and want to participate less. This confirms the leader's paranoid belief that he is the only one doing anything and that the others can't be trusted. This creates a siege mentality in the leader's head and increased his autocratic behaviour towards others. And so the situation downwards.




Hyper-activists cling to the cause to the point of breakdown.

There are never leaders without sheep. People can only get away with being dominant because others let them get away with it. We let them get away with it because a lot of the time we'd rather have someone else take charge so we can stay in the passive role which society has already conditioned.

Reality TV and Unreal Politics

With the ongoing fiasco concerning "Celebrity Big Brother" due to end tonight, it might just have the effect of calming down politicians and policy wonks who want to make politics into one big reality TV show. I remember that glorified ex-TV PR officer "Call me Dave" Cameron saying that the next General Election campaign could learn a lot from "Big Brother" ("Second week of Election '09 campaign: major diplomatic incident with India.."), which shows that when it comes to superficial gestures, the current Tory leader is the true heir of Blair.

Although ITV keep quiet about it (as they should do with 99.99% of their programmes over the last decade), they did have a politics "talent show" at the last election: Vote For Me. I didn't watch much of it but I remember the bloke who won the nomination. If I remember rightly, the public had no say in choosing the candidate. There was a panel of three judges, the most influential was former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie (once parodied in Steve Bell's If... comic strip as "Bustin McMammary"). The bloke who was chosen was basically Kelvin's mini-me ie I Blame The Immigrants & Political Correctness Gone Mad- Bring Back National Service & Hanging. Obviously Kelvin thought he had found a Man Of The People ie a loudmouth know-nothing, who would rock the British political world to its foundations. In fact, the daft sod stood in the then Tory leader Michael Howard's constituency of Folkestone, got next to no votes, lost his deposit and was openly courted by the BNP. I bet Kelvin puts that triumph of having his finger on the popular pulse on his CV...

However, it seems Canada is going to try something similar, apparently to get "the kids" interested in politics. This is really the most patronising load of cobblers. I would suggest that instead of gimmicky TV shows, voting figures would go up amongst "the kids" (and the public in general) if:

1. Political parties offered a clear choice of policies, not aped each other with platitudes;
2. There was an electoral system where every vote counted ie PR so everyone's voice is heard in national (and local) politics; &
3. Parties stuck to their election promises, not doing policy U-turns once in office.

Perhaps that's too much to ask for. Instead, it seems we will get gimmicks (text voting anyone? If that isn't a field day for ballot riggers, I don't know what is) and further electoral disengagement, until the politicians stop treating the public like idiots. Over to you Canada...



There is simply nothing to be learned from reality TV at all: The quack new orthodoxy that young people will never pay attention to politics unless it's like Big Brother is utterly absurd.
Marina Hyde, The Guardian, Saturday December 2, 2006


News that Canada is to stage a reality TV show in which former Canadian prime ministers grill contestants on their leadership qualities before choosing a winner is, strictly speaking, not news at all. The Next Great Prime Minister is actually on its second outing, and the fact that the international news media have only just noticed it suggests that the wider world is even less engaged with the country's politics than are Canadians in the hallowed 18-35 age range, to whom the format is presumably designed to appeal.

Allowing former PMs Brian Mulroney, John Turner, Joe Clark and Kim Campbell to pick a notional future prime minister is probably no worse an idea than allowing Margaret Thatcher, Iain Duncan Smith and selected members of the old gang to pick a notional Tory leader. But the obvious comic horror of the latter aside, neither of them's a cracker. In fact, there's something infinitely tiresome about The Next Great Prime Minister, something that really saps the spirit. It's not the discovery that the contest will be held in the venue that hosts Canadian Idol. It's not the slight confusion caused by knowing that by next March, when the programme is aired, Canada will have a backlog of two next great prime ministers and counting. It's not even the fact that part of the first prize is to be a trainee in a Canadian public policy thinktank. But do feel free to insert the obligatory second-prize gag here.

It's the sheer wrong-headed inevitability of this exercise in engaging youth, which appears to be inspired by that endlessly quacked modern orthodoxy that more young people vote in big reality TV contests than in general elections. In the vague interests of accuracy, this is complete nonsense. In Britain's 2005 general election, Mori research showed that voting among 18- to 35-year-olds was in fact 3% up on the 2001 election, with 5,696,907 people in the bracket taking part. Across all ages, a total of 6,363,325 votes had been cast in the most recent Big Brother final, but that figure does not take into account widespread multiple voting, so graspingly encouraged by Channel 4. Naturally, one is loth to ask the awkward questions. But if someone is willing to spend time and money voting 17 times for some spiteful dimwit to win a cash prize, perhaps we should not expend similar seducing them into voting in a grown-up election till they are at least 35.

Nevertheless, it appears to have been decided that, by 2016, young people will neither comprehend nor be interested in anything at all unless it has been refracted through the familiar prism of a talent show with celebrity judges. Even food items will have to compete for their all-important text vote before they can be persuaded to upload them off their plates, while a table-side panel of Gordon Ramsay, Lorraine Kelly and David Icke bickers stagily about the respective merits of the chip and the steak.

Yet, before EU trade disputes are settled by pitting commissioners against each other in witchety-grub-eating trials ("I'm afraid the public has selected you to face another one, Mr Mandelson"), perhaps the powers that be might care to call a halt to what can only be described as the obsessive over-democratisation of democracy. Having elected their government via a democratic system (we'll save arguments about first past the post for another day), are voters not entitled to see them actually govern decisively, as opposed to wasting time on endlessly needy consultation exercises such as Big Conversations, which end up signifying very little?

It was Lord Reith who once opined that the BBC "has never attempted to give the public what it wants. It gives it what it ought to have." For all his yesteryear patricianism, politicians still take a leaf out of his book when it suits them, which is, unfortunately, at all the wrong moments. It's a shame, for instance, that our prime minister is so able to apply this "I know best" dictum to foreign policy matters, yet affects quite the opposite domestically, when we might wish for strong leadership and confident decisions, as opposed to procrastinatory websites, church hall chats, and "partnerships in power".

When asked to explain her choice of Lester Bowles Pearson as Canada's greatest ever PM for the programme, something Kim Campbell conceded seems worryingly significant. "Pearson's colleagues often regarded him as a weak and vacillating leader," she wrote in her citation. "It was said that he told the people what they wanted to hear, and held the views of the last person who'd spoken to him." He'd have made an excellent reality TV judge, clearly.

In the end, if Brian Mulroney wishes to pass his twilight years dispensing Cowellian putdowns to youngsters - "That was the worst fisheries policy we've heard in Montreal" - then that is a matter for him. But if current politicans are hell-bent on "learning" from reality TV, they ought to note that, time and again, these formats produce nothing of lasting value whatsoever, be it someone who can shift more than two singles, or a celebrity worthy of admiration as opposed to ridicule.

Friday 26 January 2007

Steyny Boy Update



Never trust a warmongering nutter with a beard...

After wondering aloud about the location of good slag offs of "The Ugly Canadian" Mark Steyn on the web, I have discovered that there is a Steyn Watch website, which features lots of stuff on The Great Man. Apparently, Steyn (rhymes with "whine") was taken somewhat aback by the Great War Leader's reverses in the November elections. Furthermore, Steyny has a new book out banging on about how Europe will be an Islamic Republic before you know it (with his beard and generally reactionary view of the world, Steyny Boy would make a good Mullah). Apparently the book is not selling well. It couldn't happen to a nicer Chickenhawk Armchair General.

You don't like it? So what?

Bloggers are the grave diggers of newspaper commentators. It takes a lot for me to read an opinion piece now. Unless it is witty and/or full of facts/figures I haven't seen before, what's the point? I thought the point of newspapers is that they are full of news. Show me what is going on in the world, so I have the information that can help me decide what I think about matters.

Just think: soon we will have a world without Richard Littlejohn, Janet-Street Porter, Melanie Phillips, Simon Jenkins, Jeremy Clarkson, Polly Toynbee, Simon Heffer, Martin Wolf, Peter Hitchens, Julie Bindel, Bruce Anderson, Gary Younge, David Aaronovitch, Janet Daley, Nick Cohen et al clogging up the pages of papers wittering on about how they see the world.

If/when there are no more opinion pieces in newspapers, I hope Charlie Brooker is amongst the last. Perhaps the piece below is just a pose, but it's a bloody good one...

Why would I want to hear your opinions when I've got so many more interesting ones of my own?
Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, Monday January 22, 2007


If there's one thing I can't stand, it's opinions. Opinionated people are everywhere. There's probably one standing beside you right now.

Look at them. There they stand, the great I-Am, eyes glinting with indignation, swinging their pompous little gobhole open and shut, spouting out one self-important proclamation after another. Have you actually heard what they're saying? Probably not. You doubtless switched off. And little wonder: it all blurs into one great big river of blah: it's all "If you ask me . . ." and "Well, what I think is . . ." and "I think you'll find . . ."

They should all either shut up or be forced to shut up by stormtroopers. Or maybe we could seal them inside a Perspex chamber filled with angry bees swarming around with razor blades glued to their bellies. We could televise this. And encourage viewers to text in their opinions about what they're seeing. And trace those viewers from their mobile numbers, round them up, and slap them in the chamber too. And so on and so on, until we've whittled the population down to one person. Me. Watching everyone perish in a chamber of bees. That's my stock answer to everything.

Never in history have there been so many opportunities to put your opinion across. You can print it in papers, shout it on the radio, text it to the news channels or whack it on the internet. And it all happens so quickly, you don't even have to think your opinions through; if you can't be bothered doing the brainwork, you can simply repeat what someone else has said using slightly different words. And poorer spelling.

Most opinions, however, don't really need to be written down at all. They can be replaced by a sound effect - the audible equivalent of an internet frowny-face. Imagine a sort of world-weary harrumph accompanied by the faintest glimmer of a self-satisfied sneer. That's 90% of all human opinion on everything, right there. Internet debates would be far more efficient if everyone just sat at their keyboards hitting the "harrumph" key over and over again. A herd of people mooing their heads off. Welcome to 2007.

Mind you, even the most bone-headed online debate is infinitely more sophisticated than any kind of "public discourse" you'll see on TV, particularly if you're watching the news and they've just invited their viewers to call in for some kind of faux-democratic "Have Your Say" segment, which inevitably functions in the same way as someone turning on a gigantic idiot magnet, given the sort of dribbling thicksicle it attracts.

In fact, that's what they should call it. The Idiot Magnet. At the end of each item on Sky News, they should say "We're switching on the idiot magnet now. Let's see what we dredge up. Ah, Dick from Colchester, you're on the air . . ."

Cue five minutes of Dick repeatedly tapping the "harrumph" key on his phone.

What is it with all this patronising "Have Your Say" bullshit anyway? They don't call the rest of the programme "Have OUR Say". I can have my say now, can I? What, right here, in this two-minute slice of air-time, which no one's listening to anyway since they're too busy trying to get through themselves, or texting their disapproval or going online to moo at a rival? Why, thank you, Lord Media, and harrumph to you, Sir.

Anyway, that's my two cents. Your turn.

Yours' suffering political fatigue



Perhaps one of the reasons I have been posting less on my blogs recently is that mentally I have been close to political burnout. I've used the phrase "same old, same old" when it comes to politics. Very little politically stimulates me any more- or at least to the level it used to. I think I will sit down at some point soonish and blog about why exactly I've lost much of the political bug. Perhaps it will come back sooner than anticipated. It's just at the moment I feel that anything I say or do or write when it comes to politics has no effect whatsoever on anyone else. Perhaps it has been like that for a long time, but perhaps it is only in the past few months I've come to realise it. Hope I don't sound like a self-pitying winger saying that!

However, I haven't lost interest completely. Greg Palast still writes interesting stuff, and avoids a lot of the cliches Planet Leftie writers fall into. No "duckspeak" (to use a phrase from Nineteen Eighty-Four). While I was on nights I got two pieces by GP winged to my inbox & I thought you may like to read them.

WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY, by Greg Palast, Thursday, January 11, 2007

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Been there. Done that. In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,

Lyndon Johnson told the nation
Have no fear of escalation.
I am trying everyone to please.
Though it isn't really war,
We're sending 50,000 more
To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.


Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis.

There's always a problem with giving a junkie another fix. It can only make things worse. Our maximum leader says that unless he gets to mainline another 21,000 troops, "Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons," and terrorists "would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people."

Excuse me, but didn't we hear that same promise in 2003? Nearly four years ago, on the eve of invasion, this same George Bush promised, "The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed."

Instead of diminishing the threat from terrorists, Bush now admits, "Al Qaeda has a home base in Anbar province" -- something inconceivable under Saddam's rule.

Four years ago, Bush promised us, "When the dictator has departed, [Iraq] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation." Just send in the 82d Airborne and, lickety-split, we'd have, "A new Iraq that is prosperous and free."

Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Here's my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?

We know the US military didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)

We know the Iraqi government didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).

So who wants the occupation to continue? The answer is in Riyadh. When the King of Saudi Arabia hauled Dick Cheney before his throne on Thanksgiving weekend, the keeper of America's oil laid down the law to Veep: the US will not withdraw from Iraq.

According to Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi who signals to the US government the commands and diktats of the House of Saud, the Saudis are concerned that a US pull-out will leave their Sunni brothers in Iraq to be slaughtered by Shia militias. More important, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shia-majority government in Iraq controlled by the Shia mullahs of Iran. A Shia combine would threaten Saudi Arabia's hegemony in the OPEC oil cartel.

In other words, it's about the oil.

So what's the solution? What's my plan? How do we get out of Iraq? Answer: the same way we got out of 'Nam. In ships.

But can we just watch from the ship rail as Shia slaughter Sunnis in Baghdad, Sunnis murder Shia in Anbar, Kurds "cleanse" Kirkuk of Turkmen and so on in a sickening daisy-chain of ethnic atrocities?

No. There's a real alternative. And it isn't more troops, George.

Let's imagine that somehow we could rip away the strings that allow Cheney and Rove and Abdullah to control our puppet president and he somehow, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly grew a brain. His speech last night would have sounded like this:



"My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn't collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I've just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them.

"My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It's time your 16,000 princelings got out of their Rolls Royces and formed the core of an Islamic Peacekeeping Force to prevent mass murder in Iraq. The American people are tired of you using the 82nd Airborne as your private mercenary army. It seems like the Saudi military's marching song is, 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'

"Well, King Ab, we're out of here. We're folding tents and loading the wagons. For four years now, Saudis have been secretly funding the berserkers in the Iraqi 'insurgency' while the Iranians are backing the crazies in the militias. Well, we're telling you and the Persians: you're going to have to stop using your checkbooks to fund a proxy war and instead start keeping the peace. It's time you put your own tushies in the line of fire for a change."

"If the African Union nations, poor as they are, can maintain a peacekeeping force to stop killings in Sudan and Senegal, you Saudis, with all the military toys we've sold you, can certainly join with your Muslim brothers in Jordan, Iran and Turkey to take responsibility for your region's peace.

"And when you get to Fallujah, don't forget to drop us a postcard."


Well, that's my fantasy. But instead, War Junkie George will get his fix of another 21,000 American soldiers.

It reminds me far too chillingly of a Pete Seeger tune written when LBJ was saving Vietnam from Vietnamese. It was based on the true story of a US platoon in training, wading into the rising Mississippi, whose commander order them to keep going, deeper and deeper -- until they drowned.

We're waste deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.


GP Missive 2:

Off the Rails: Big Oil, Big Brother Win Big in the State of the Union, by Greg Palast
23 January, 2006




There was that tongue again. When the President lies he's got this weird nervous tick: He sticks the tip of his tongue out between his lips. Like a little boy who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat.

In his State of the Union tonight the President did his tongue thing 124 times -- my kids kept count.

But it wasn't all rat-licking lies.

Most pundits concentrated on Iraq and wacky health insurance stuff. But that's just bubbles and blather. The real agenda is in the small stuff. The little razors in the policy apple, the nasty little pieces of policy shrapnel that whiz by between the appearances of the Presidential tongue.

First, there was the announcement the regime will, "give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers." In case you missed that one, the President is talking about creating a federal citizen profile database.

There's a problem with that idea. It's against the law. The law in question is the United States Constitution. The Founding Fathers thought the government had no right to keep track on a citizen unless there is evidence they have committed, or planned to commit, a crime.

But the Founding Fathers didn't imagine there were millions and billions of dollars to be made by private contractors ready to perform this KGB operation for the Department of Homeland Security, tracking each and every one of us to keep tabs on our "status."

These work databases will tie into "voter verification" databases required by the Help America Vote Act. And these will tie to the databases on citizenship and so on.

Will Big Brother abuse these snoop lists? The biggest purveyor of such hit lists is Choice Point, Inc. – those characters who, before the 2000 election, helped Jeb Bush purge innocent voters as "felons" from Florida voter rolls. Will they abuse the new super-lists? Does Dick Cheney shoot in the woods?

There were several other little IEDs (improvised execrable policy devices) planted in the State of the Union. Did you catch the one about doubling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? If you're unfamiliar with the SPR, it is supposed to be the stash of oil we keep in case the price of crude gets too high.

Well, the price of oil has been horribly high but Dick Cheney, the official who sits on the Reserve's spigots, has refused to release the oil into the market.

Instead of unleashing the Reserve and busting Big Oil's price gouging Bush will double the Reserve, which will require buying three-quarters of a billion barrels of oil. This is a nice $40 billion pay-out to Big Oil from the US Treasury. Compare this to the President's health insurance plan which will be "revenue neutral" -- that is, have a net investment of zero.

But the $40 billion in loot the oilmen will get from us taxpayers for doubling the Reserve is nothing compared to the boost in the worldwide price of crude caused by this massive, mad purchase. While the Congressional audience didn't even bother polite applause for the reserve purchase plan, there's no doubt they were whooping it up in Saudi Arabia. Clearly, the state of the Saudi-Bush union is still pretty good.

But why end on a cynical note? I must admit I was moved by the President's praise of Wesley Autrey, a New Yorker who, last month, threw himself on top of a man who had fallen on subway tracks -- and held him between the track rails as the train passed over them.

While the President properly acknowledged Autrey's courage in saving the man who fell on the subway tracks, Mr. Bush still did not explain why Dick Cheney pushed the man in the first place.


Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse (details via his website and available at all good bookshops in the English-speaking world) was for me the best politics book of 2006. One of the most interesting bits of it is how the Saudis manipulate their oil production, and hence the oil price, to affect politics elsewhere. For instance, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudis flooded the oil market, pushing the oil price down. As a consequence, Soviet oil revenues fell drastically in the 1980s, which probably had more of an effect bringing about the collapse of the "Evil Empire" than Ronnie and Maggie talking tough to the Bolshevik hordes (Armed Madhouse, p.87). (BTW Margaret Thatcher is the only British PM to have signed away British territory to an avowedly Communist regime ie Hong Kong in 1984. Although, as Thatcher's conduct as PM with the then European Economic Community shows, her so-called patriotism went out the window in the chase for a fast buck).

Similarly, "the only other time in the past decade the Saudis have produced flat out to bring down the price of oil was just before the 2004 US presidential election" (Armed Madhouse, p.88).

Well, I still have the political bug, I guess, a bit, anyhow. It's just finding people with the same strain...

24 Nights on...



Early morning London- I've seen a fair bit of that recently...

It's the longest I've worked nights. I feel much better than I should, but one upshot is that nearly everything else in my life has been neglected, including this blog. I'm still hoping to do some more overtime in the next couple of months before British Summer Time officially starts (the last few weeks have seen some nights warmer than the July average, but we were hit by snow Wednesday morning gone) but not on such a scale.



Beach Avenue, English Bay, Vancouver, viewed from Stanley Park. Not being seeing enough of that recently!

It nearly goes without saying that the overtime money is intended to fund another trip to Vancouver. I'm off Thu June 28th, back on Mon 16th July. This time I'm staying at the Buchan Hotel on Haro, which is near the Sylvia in the West End. It's a bit cheaper than the Sylvia and quite well recommended. I don't think the Buchan is as upscale as the Sylvia, but it's not a big deal for me. In fact, I think unless you (i) are on honeymoon or (ii) go someplace where it rains 24/7, your hotel room should not be a big deal. OK, it shouldn't look like something to illustrate conditions during the Irish potato famine or resemble a refugee camp (years ago I came close to staying at such places) but one shouldn't be too fussy. Perhaps this is a legacy of me spending my 20s staying at youth hostels (when I hit 30 I realised I want a room of my own when I went travelling).

Young people today....

Todays Neo-Nazis Have No Respect For Tradition

The Onion

Today's Neo-Nazis Have No Respect For Tradition

The other week, I read that the founder of the National Vanguard is in the clink for having child pornography in his computer. What is going on...