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If you're not thinking historically, you're not thinking at all. "The trick is not minding that it hurts."
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Jul 9, 2024 25 tweets 6 min read
9 July 1776: A Conservative Revolution

After the Declaration of Independence was read to Washington’s Army in New York City… 🧵Image as I previously posted here:

Jul 9, 2024 20 tweets 6 min read
9 July 1776: Washington’s Army Receives the Declaration

“In New York City, July 9 was a day much like all the other days of the past week,” writes Bruce Bliven in Under the Guns. “The Americans had constantly watched the long line of British warships filling the Kills, but there had been no signs of unusual activity in the fleet, and soldiers and civilians had gone about their work.” 🧵

Bliven’s Under the Guns (the best place to start if you want to understand what was going on in New York City in 1776), p. 345-54: archive.org/details/underg…Image As I previously posted, the British landed on Staten Island on 2 July, the same day Congress declared independence.

Jun 30, 2024 11 tweets 4 min read
17th Century White Flight

William Okeley was an Englishman captured at sea and enslaved in Algiers. He and seven other English slaves surreptitiously built their own dinghy and launched it on 30 June 1644 hoping to sail to Europe and freedom. 🧵Image Okeley later wrote an account of his capture, time in captivity, and harrowing flight to freedom. It was these sorts of accounts that began to turn public opinion in Western Europe and America against slavery.

archive.org/details/ebenez…
Image
Apr 30, 2024 14 tweets 5 min read
What Went Wrong

What went wrong? We can answer with one word: Marxism.

And we mean Marxism as it was rightly defined in the New York Times on 30 April 2018, just over two years before the Demsurrection of 2020. 🧵

nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opi…Image Most people were taught to think of Marxism in economic terms, namely the abolition of private property and public ownership of the means of production. And Marx himself did indeed define it that way at times. Image
Apr 9, 2024 23 tweets 6 min read
This beauty from James Baldwin, an African American socialist and so-called civil rights activist, appeared in the New York Times on 9 April 1967. That's was when Critical Race Theory began taking off.

I’ll quote three lines from it here and provide some more of the article in a thread:

“It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.”

“One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.”

“In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man -- for having become, in effect, a Christian.”

Needless to say, that's the logic of Critical Race Theory’s and BLM’s anti-Semitism, although Baldwin, despite 90% of his article being a vitriolic anti-Semitic diatribe, ultimately claims the enemy is actually Christianity (he also suggests Europe, in which he includes Jews, and hints at “capital,” which is to say capitalism), not technically Jews. For instance, this is how he concludes the article:

“The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”

In other words, ultimately Baldwin is saying he hates Jews because they're not helping him, a black socialist, destroy Western Civilization.

🧵

Baldwin’s “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White”: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…Image Here’s the first page. I’ll magnify the words on these pages and others below. Image
Apr 3, 2024 4 tweets 2 min read
Hitler was legally appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) immediately followed. Having consolidated his dictatorship, the German military reoccupied the Rhineland on 7 March 1936. A little less than a month later Churchill wrote the “First of new series of articles, to appear regularly in the ‘Evening Despatch’.” That more or less marked the beginning of appeasement and Churchill’s fight against it. Trump could say the same thing about Republicans appeasing Marxist Democrats today. 🧵Image That’s how it appeared on page 10 of the Evening Despatch on 3 April 1936. I’ve highlighted the part I highlighted above and the next paragraph, which is magnified below.Image
Mar 16, 2024 31 tweets 8 min read
A few days after American-backed Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Nazis violently overthrew the democratically elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine in late February 2014, Russia invaded Crimea. A referendum in Crimea followed on 16 March 2014. Although we should assume there was some fraud involved, there is no reason to doubt the vast majority voted to rejoin Russia. Indeed, that was to be expected given Crimea is more Russian than Texas and California are American. 🧵Image First, let’s look at the referendum. Unsurprisingly Wiki’s article steel mans Ukraine’s case. Nevertheless the basic, undeniable facts that support Russia’s position are included. Image
Mar 10, 2024 9 tweets 4 min read
1715. The Brith of Antiracism & Abolition

Although antiracism and abolition didn’t really become movements until around the time of the American Revolution, here we see what has been described as “by the far the longest and most systematically argued attack on slavery that had yet appeared [1715] in the American colonies.” As usual, it came from a Christian and was argued from a Christian perspective. It also came from a former indentured servant. His name was John Hepburn. 🧵

John Hepburn’s The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, or An Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men, p. 8 (Internet Archive page): archive.org/details/bim_ei…Image For a little context:

In American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, p. 15, :archive.org/details/isbn_9…Image
Mar 8, 2024 11 tweets 5 min read
As Jacobin proudly admits, International Women's Day (8 March) was created by communists to dupe women into supporting Communism in a textbook communist bait and switch. And note they even used a picture of the women's march in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on 8 March 1917 (our calendar) that was co-opted by communists to launch the Russian Revolution. 🧵

jacobin.com/2017/03/intern…Image Before looking at how the Russian Revolution began on 8 March 1917 and in order to understand the purpose of International Women’s Day, look at what one of its founders thought.

In Cintia Frencia & Daniel Gaido’s “‘A Clean Break’: Clara Zetkin, the Socialist Women’s Movement and Feminism”:

Transcript of Zetkin’s speech: academia.edu/37690398/A_Cle…
marxists.org/history/intern…Image
Mar 5, 2024 19 tweets 6 min read
Trotsky’s Partridges

Who was Trotsky threatening to shoot like partridges on 5 March 1921? The aristocracy? The capitalist bourgeoisie? White Guards? No, Trotsky was threatening to shoot what he himself had called “the pride and glory of the Russian revolution” — the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd.

After having won the civil war, the Bolsheviks turned on their own. 🧵

Trotsky in Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, p. 523: archive.org/details/unknow…Image At the beginning of March 1921 sailors at the naval base in Kronstadt outside Petrograd rebelled against the new Bolshevik regime that was consolidating its power after having won the Russian Civil War. Image
Feb 2, 2024 4 tweets 1 min read
Figured out when, where, and who invented internationalism in an anti-nationalist sense. I already knew it was communists, not liberals, and that Marx most famously essentially called for the abolition of nations in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. But he got it from the Fraternal Democrats who were talking in those terms as early as 1845. I'll be posting on it and one entry in about two weeks. Fraternal Democrats was an international socialist organization founded on 22 Sep 1845 in London. Marx and Engels weren't there though because they were out of the country at that time.
Jan 19, 2024 31 tweets 7 min read
Trail Sinister. Machtübergabe (18 Jan 1933): The Sleepwalker

Because we know Nazism ended in the Second World War and the Holocaust we forget the Nazis rode the victim card to power. But on 18 January 1933, just 12 days before Hitler was appointed chancellor in what has been called the Machtübergabe (handover or transfer of power), the war and Holocaust hadn’t happened yet and many Germans, including and especially Hitler, though of themselves as victims and what we call social justice warriors today. 🧵Image It’s impossible to understand the rise of the Nazis and appeasement without understanding they credibly claimed Germans were victims.
Jan 14, 2024 14 tweets 5 min read
White Slaves

Pierre Dan was a a French priest who travelled to North Africa not long after 1619 to ransom European slaves. The following pics and numbers at the end are from Robert Davis’s Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. 🧵Image Slaves being disembarked in Algiers.

P. 56: archive.org/details/trent_…
Image
Jan 7, 2024 14 tweets 6 min read
Trail Sinister. Racializing Marxism (7 Jan 1920): “Jewish Capitalism”

Hitler was essentially the first critical race theorist.

Whereas Marx had called for the dictatorship of the proletariat (“oppressed”) and the elimination of the bourgeoisie (“oppressors”), Hitler, who had served in the Bavarian Soviet Republic’s Red Army in 1919, began racializing Marxism late that year by replacing Marx’s proletariat with Germans (or Aryans) and bourgeoisie with Jews. And, as you can see, he did so from a Marxist and anti-capitalist perspective, just as critical race theorists have racialized Marxism today, although obviously whites are their Jews. 🧵

Hitler in Thomas Weber’s Becoming Hitler, p. 177: archive.org/details/becomi…Image For example, in this landmark text on “The Key Writings that Formed the Movement,” they say (zoomed in next slide):

And note how they even chose the colors of Nazism.

P. xxv: archive.org/details/critic…
Image
Jan 5, 2024 38 tweets 10 min read
Trail Sinister. Machtübergabe (4 Jan 1933): A Conspiracy is Hatched

The Nazis had begun gaining significant traction after the Great Depression. 🧵Image On 31 July 1932 they became the largest party in Germany. Image
Dec 27, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
For emphasis:

“It is not possible to analyze the evolution of Palestinian nationalism without understanding Palestinian opposition to Zionism.”

In short, the Palestinian nationality was invented (or imagined as the Marxist historian Benedict Anderson put it in Imagined Communities) around the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century IN OPPOSITION to the immigration of Jews to the region and the creation of the state of Israel. In other words, Palestinian nationalism was entangled at its birth with opposition to Jewish immigration to the region and the establishment of the state of Israel. And that explains why “From the river to the sea!” is practically a Palestinian national anthem.

Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, p. 69: yplus.ps/wp-content/upl…Image This also means, by the way, in some sense asking Palestinians to accept the state of Israel is the same thing as asking them to stop thinking of themselves as Palestinians. Needless to say, that is a difficult problem to solve.
Dec 26, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read
25-26 Dec 1776: Washington’s Crossing

“The painting is familiar to us in a general way, but when we look again its details take us by surprise…

"One man wears the short tarpaulin jacket of a New England seaman; we look again and discover that he is of African descent.”

— David Hackett Fischer
Washington’s Crossing

🧵Image It began that cold and wintry evening with parts of The Crisis, which Thomas Paine had written during their retreated across New Jersey and that had recently been published in Philadelphia, being read to the assembled soldiers along the banks of the Delaware.Image
Dec 6, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Remember when communists focused on class conflict instead of race (National Socialism, i.e. Nazism) and gender conflict? Those were the days. It’ll be interesting to see what they turn to next after we defeat this latest iteration of the Wile E. Communist Coyote or what Camus called the plague bacillus.

I’ve pulled the quote Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in Power and it’s worth looking at the context and a little more. In short, Nikolayeva was campaigning amongst women for the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections following the Bolshevik seizure of power in October (our calendar) 1917. 🧵

The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 64-5:
Image As Rabinowitch explains:

Note the Kadet Party (Constitutional Democratic Party) was a liberal party that even included some socialists, so hardly far right. Image
Nov 19, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
On 19 November 2015, a little over two years after the founding of BLM, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quietly warned their congressional leaders that BLM was, as we all now know, “radical.” 🧵

Images of memo in Huffington Post: huffpost.com/entry/dnc-blac…

Image Maybe the DCCC had noticed things like this:

Nov 18, 2023 34 tweets 6 min read
Trail Sinister. Big Lies (17 Nov 1918): Revolutionsfeier

The German Revolution arrived in Munich exactly one year after the October Revolution / Bolshevik Coup in St. Petersburg. There it was led by Kurt Eisner, a 51-year-old bohemian intellectual dilettante, drama critic and communist who spent his time in the artists’ cafés around the University of Munich in Schwabing. 🧵
Image For the the uprising and establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, see my previous thread here:

Nov 16, 2023 19 tweets 5 min read
Stalin’s Apologists (16 Nov 1933): News Fit To Print

You’re looking at an article from the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty published the day before FDR announced he was officially recognizing the Soviet régime. Mind you this was in the middle of the first great Communist genocide that we now call the Holodomor as Duranty and Roosevelt well knew. 🧵
Image News of the Soviet genocide broke in the spring of 1933.