A CORRESPONDENT who had read one of my recent essays wrote to me, incredulously asking me if I was actually so wicked as to “condemn democracy.” I asked him to consider the facts and think, instead of just regurgitating the quasi-religious shibboleths that were imparted to him by the public schools:

James Madison certainly condemned democracy. So did Mencken and Saki and many others. And so do I.

If the majority is allowed to seize your property or make its opinions into law whenever it so chooses, how is that different from an autocracy? (With an autocrat, bad as that system is, at least you have a chance that the ruler will be wise or benevolent or both. With democracy, there is no chance whatsoever.)

That is why the founders opposed democracy and gave us a constitution that would protect us from it, just as much or more as it protected us from would-be kings.

They tied down the government with the stringent chains of the Constitution, which, especially the Tenth Amendment, severely restricted the areas in which government could do anything at all.

But politicians, notably Lincoln and the Great War Criminal but also many others including G.W. Bush and Obama, have found that, through bluster, intimidation — and packing the court (and the law schools) with those whose main goal was avoiding the founders’ strictures — they could get away with trashing the Constitution on almost every level.

The result is that we now do indeed have the “democracy” that the founders were trying to avoid; with the thoughtless majority easily manipulated into doing almost anything the ethnically distinct media masters want them to do.

The result is that we openly tolerate the invasion of our southern border while we slaughter innocents by the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East who never constituted even a slight threat to America.

The result is that we have a National Security surveillance state which arrogates to itself the right to “monitor” almost everything we say and do, and spy on our formerly private transactions and interactions.

The result is that we now have almost totally given up the right of freedom of association and must hire and buy and sell and send our children off to school all in accordance with our masters’ latest arcane formulations based on the race and ethnicity of their “subjects.”

The result is indefinite detention without trial.

The result is “extrajudicial rendition.”

The result is Predator drone attacks on apartment buildings containing mothers and children.

The result is the openly admitted ordering of the assassination of an American citizen by one of those Predator drones.

Yes, I condemn “democracy” as it currently exists in the country which is, quite anachronistically, still called by the name “United States of America.”

Mahadev Desai (left) and Gandhi meet with other Indian nationalists in 1939

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THIS WEEK Google replaced their normal search page graphic with one depicting Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known as Mahatma (Sanskrit for “Great Soul”) Gandhi, in recognition of his birthday, which is now celebrated as the International Day of Non-Violence. Gandhi’s movement of civil disobedience was a significant factor in India’s successful quest for self-determination and the ultimate withdrawal of Britain from the Indian subcontinent.

Barack Obama praised Gandhi on Friday, saying “Gandhi’s teachings and ideals, shared with Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1959 pilgrimage to India, transformed American society through our civil rights movement. The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led. We must renew our commitment to live his ideals and to celebrate the dignity of all human beings.”

Many people, Obama included if he’s sincere, see Gandhi and his movement in very simplistic and essentially mythological terms: Gandhi’s movement, they believe, was a “struggle for equality” within a multiracial paradigm. Actually it was the opposite of that.

Mohandas Gandhi wanted his people, the native people of the Indian subcontinent, to be free of the British Empire. He wanted his people to have their own country. He wanted them to have their own government, answerable to no other people. He wanted self-determination for his folk: their own territory, their own leaders. And he looked at this situation in explicitly racial terms.

Though there was much greatness in it to be sure, the British Empire outside the Anglo-Saxon dominions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, was a multiracialist empire which forced differing peoples together against their will, crushing their self-determination and freedom largely for crass economic reasons. Sound familiar?

What Gandhi was most emphatically not doing was seeking “equality” under the Empire. He was not saying “We are all the same. Therefore give us equal incomes, equal schooling, equal housing and we will all live in harmony and brotherhood as one people.” That is what representatives of the new world empire, like Obama, his handlers, and the billionaire moguls who long preceded them, wish he had said.

What Gandhi was saying was that his people were unique and worthy of survival — and in order to secure their survival they must rule themselves and possess their own territory. Hence his two-word slogan for his movement — his command to the British Empire — “Quit India.” His was no M.L. King-like quest for a chimerical “fairness” enforced by central authority in an equally chimerical race-blind society. Quite the opposite! He said in essence that this land belongs to me and my people — and you, your race, your bureaucracy, and your Empire should just get out.  Ultimately, they did exactly that.

Gandhi’s parallels in the Black community are Robert Brock and Marcus Garvey and Sharity Ross-Petit — not King.

Gandhi expressly stated his belief in maintaining the purity of not only his race, but all races, when he gently chided White nationalists who only cared about their own racial integrity and who crudely lumped all non-Whites together. He wrote in 1903:

“We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone.”

Gandhi also stated in his Indian Opinion newspaper, referring to a then-current issue in multiracial South Africa :

“The petition dwells upon ‘the co-mingling of the colored and white races.’ May we inform the members of the Conference that so far as British Indians are concerned, such a thing is particularly unknown. If there is one thing which the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is the purity of type.”

Greater India, even after the British left, was an artificial construct encompassing several peoples, and it’s not clear to me to what extent Gandhi recognized that further partitions would be necessary. But that’s a subject for another day.

Empires — from the ancient Assyrians in Palestine, to Tito’s Yugoslavia, to the Communist Chinese in Tibet — invariably say that they force differing peoples under one rule — their rule — “for their own good”… to “bring peace”… to make everyone “equal.”

And they invariably condemn any person who wants his people to be free of the empire’s rule — whether Gandhi or Jefferson or the Dalai Lama — as a “troublemaker,” a “hater,” a “terrorist,” or the like:

How dare Gandhi advocate breaking the King’s laws! We’re all subjects of the Crown, Indian and Briton, and Gandhi is a hooligan and criminal!

How dare the Dalai Lama insist that Tibetans should have their own territory and their own government, answerable only to Tibetans! How dare he call for an end to the mass importation of Chinese into Tibet! That’s anti-Chinese — that’s racist! (Of course, once you understand the Maxim of Self-Determination, you can easily see it’s nothing of the kind. The Maxim reads “Every people which considers itself to be a people should, to the maximum extent possible, live under its own government.”)

There is much to be learned from Gandhi and his efforts to gain self-determination for his folk. But we must see that struggle for what it was — a distinct people’s fight for a separate, distinct nation — before we can even begin to learn.

USA NOW MARXIST?: I suppose it had to happen sometime after the accession of Barack I, but it’s still an historic moment: a writer on Russia’s Pravda has described the U.S.A. as “Marxist” and called for Russians to rethink their American investments.

Pravda has quite a bit of courage and some good articles these days. Wish they’d do two things, though: 1) put their best material in audio form and start an Internet radio network with licensable hourly newscasts to compete with the “Western” corporate media (which could also be put on shortwave); and 2) stop running the sensationalistic/sexy stuff with which they salt their site in an apparent effort to increase ratings and revenue — it hurts the credibility of the serious pieces.

John Kennedy delivering his State of the Union address, 1963, fasces displayed behind him.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

IF YOU WATCH FOX NEWS or read political blogs you probably have a headache from all the accusations of “fascism” bouncing back and forth from left to right and back again. “Obama’s a fascist!” “Rush is a fascist!” “Bush is a fascist!” “The Zionists are fascists!” “Your grandmother’s a fascist!” “Kevin Strom is a fascist!” And then we have that ridiculous neologism “Islamofascism.”

Modern Republicans and Democrats both misuse the term “fascist” — and to such a degree that the misuse has started to be enshrined in dictionaries.

In the broad sense, the term (from the Latin for “bundle”) just refers to the strength of a united people — as in the ancient Roman story in which a father asks his sons to gather sticks from the forest and bring them to him. Taking the wooden rods one at a time, he easily breaks each of them in two. But when the very same rods are bound together — symbolizing a united family or people — they are unbreakable.

The symbol of the French republic.

The fascist symbol, or fasces, usually with the rods bound around an axe to signify authority, thus became the symbol of the Roman Republic and its ideals. It was also used by the French republic, was adopted by Mussolini’s 20th century Fascist movement, and was also used by the United States during the same era — among many others.

The U.S. dime displayed the fasces on its reverse from 1916-1945; and it is displayed prominently to this day in the main chamber of the U.S. Congress.

It’s also a prominent element of Daniel Chester French’s highly idealized sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial.

In the narrow sense, fascism means specifically the socio-political movement popularized by Benito Mussolini and to some degree carried on into more recent times by the Movimento Sociale Italiano.

Reverse of the U.S. ten-cent piece, 1916-1945.

It was characterized by the ideal of the state as expressing the will of the people, with the people being an organic, natural entity, not divided into classes with differing economic interests but instead with each sector of society (such as farmers, laborers, administrators, merchants, et cetera) able to elect its own legislative representatives. In practice, many compromises were made with allies and with the old order of things.

The central government and ruling party had a lot of authority under Italian Fascism, and that is really the only similarity real fascism shares with the pop-definition of the word. But other central governments and parties past and present had similar or greater degrees of authority — such in fact being the norm for almost all human societies throughout history.

Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French: Lincoln's hands rest on two large fasces.

The pop-definition of “fascist” is roughly “big, bad, scary, and mean authoritarianism.”

“Fascist” is used by the Democrat gang to refer to the Republicans and their often authoritarian views on (among other things) war, drugs, and sexuality — and by the Republican gang to refer to the Democrats and their often authoritarian views on (among other things) freedom of association, financial privacy, and taxation.

It’s misused that way because both sides think they can make brownie points by scaring voters with the spectre of authoritarianism from the rival gang.

Here’s the truth: both modern Republicans and modern Democrats score pretty high on the authoritarianism scale — somewhat higher, I’d say, than the Movimento Sociale Italiano.

HAS ANYONE NOTICED?: “Our new president” has dismantled the NSA’s and CIA’s and FBI’s wiretapping and snooping programs… hasn’t he? He’s stopped the wars in the Middle East… right? And lobby groups for special interests like Wall Street and Israel no longer rule Washington… as promised, right?

Sorry, but… those were just more lies. What we have in Washington now is not the legal government of the United States of America. It is an illegal, illegitimate regime. Both ruling parties are complicit in its crimes. It uses the symbols and trappings of the original government; it uses the names and titles and some of the forms of that government; but it is in its essentials exactly the kind of government the Constitution was written to prevent.

TODAY MARKS the 200th anniversary of the birth of the European-American literary genius and racially concious writer Edgar Allan Poe. I have paid my respects to the eternal memory of Edgar Poe in person at the Poe Museum in Richmond and at his and his beloved Virginia’s grave site in Baltimore, and I offer them again to all who read my words today.

Just as an abomination like Barack Hussein Obama could only be elected in an artificial multiracial slave state (and never in the White America of recent and lamented memory, and likewise never in a healthy all-Black nation) — just as a degenerate like “Martin Luther” King could only be lionized by a degraded, ignorant, and servile population — so Edgar Poe could never be published in modern America. His recognition of individual and racial inequality would have made him anathema to those who control the media today, and his private life and reputation would have been ripped to shreds by the international vermin and the vultures they employ.

According to the most plausible theory of his death, Poe died as a result of the corrupt mass ‘democracy’ he despised. Never able to withstand drink without severe reactions, it appears that Poe was shanghaied by ward politicians who were sweeping people off the streets and pumping them with free liquor in between sessions of herding them to the polls to be “voted” several times in succession. (Similar techniques are still used today, especially in “communities of color.”) He was found on the street inebriated and half-mad with alcohol poisoning. He died shortly thereafter. He was only 40 years old and had been planning to remarry when he died.

Who knows what works this sensitive genius might have bequeathed to us had his life not been ended so early? What might he have said about the tragic war brought to this nation by the abolitionists’ equalitarian delusions? What advance might he have made to the Cosmotheist ideas he began to express in his late work Eureka ? What would he have said of Karl Marx and Nietzsche and Wagner and Herbert Spencer? What works of ratiocination and romance and high poetry might he have given us in his second 40 years? We will never know.

Had he been born in our times, we would never even have heard of him. How many European-American geniuses have been relegated to obscurity and despair, about whom we will never know because they refuse to serve the alien masters of the media? We will never know that, either.

Here is one of Poe’s greatest short poems, A Dream Within a Dream :

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?