Robert Conquest has died at age 98. He was a gigantic hero of truth and the voiceless.
On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia” — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration.
In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.
Some relevant passages from the book follow.
p. 94
British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46
How could that be? Without understanding the extent of Communist pen- etration into the decision-and-opinion-making echelons of the West—and, as important, into the decision-and-opinion-making minds of the West—the question is baffling, a mystery without clues, a historical brick wall. From our vantage point, blanks and all, it is almost impossible to comprehend how it could have been that our relatives and forebears, apparently sentient, apparently decent Americans, could have looked on in neutral silence as the Soviet state, year after year, starved and brutalized and enslaved millions of its own people to death—news of which did indeed spread throughout the West despite Soviet censorship and prevarication, although it remained outside consensus.47 Dalton Trumbo, as we’ve seen, took pride in the silence on the Hollywood front. He’s hailed as a martyr of idealism. Historians, as we’ve seen, looked the other way, strenuously, to protect their precious “basic symmetry.” They remain figures of respect and authority. How—and when—did these and other inversions of logic and morality, common sense and common decency, begin to take place?
pp. 100-101
On his real-life return to the USSR, [journalist] Eugene Lyons would see and eventually understand. He writes of finding the familiar old mind games, the sifting techniques, no longer effective on his return. “With every week after my return I came to feel more ashamed of my mealy-mouthed caution while at home,” he writes. “Deep under those excuses I had made for myself, I now was forced to admit, had been the subconscious desire to remain persona grata with the masters, retain my job. I was protecting my status as a ‘friendly’ correspondent. And at that I had just about crawled under the line.”60
There Lyons was to stay at least long enough to participate in a seminal event in Soviet crime and Western turpitude: what Robert Conquest would much later identify as the very first successful implementation of the “Big Lie”—the concerted assault on truth to form world opinion, in this original case, to deny the regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine. It was a Faustian turning point.
Conquest writes:
On the face of it, this [deception] might appear to have been an impossible un- dertaking. A great number of true accounts reached Western Europe and America, some of them from impeccable Western eyewitnesses . . .
But Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly calls the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be read- ily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand, and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive false- hood on the other, were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively in- structed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.
Flat denial plus a corpus of positive falsehood: Sounds like another black hole of antiknowledge, another corroding attack on the basis of the Enlightenment itself. Conquest describes this concerted effort to deceive the world about the truth of the state-engineered famine, Stalin’s brutal war on the peasantry, as “the first major instance of the exercise of this technique of influencing world opinion.”61
This instance, then, was a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century, a moment in which history itself, always subject to lies and colorations, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian in- novation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, wea- ponized, by KGB-directed armies of dezinformatsiya agents.
pp. 104-108
More than three decades later, in 1968, when Robert Conquest came along with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the colossal horror of the Soviet regime, first regarding the Moscow show trials, and then, in 1985, with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, there was no need to meet in a hotel room with a Soviet censor and work out a conspiracy of denial and drink to it with vodka. Nor was there consciousness of such a need. The legacy of denial had become so powerful in the interim as to have become imperceptible and stunningly effective. “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the moti- vation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children,” Conquest wrote, but class was incapable of learning.70
“People accepted his facts, but they didn’t accept his conclusions,” British writer Neal Ascherson said to the British newspaper The Guardian in 2003, perfectly crystallizing the intelligentsia’s permanent reaction to Conquest.71 This facts-sans-implications formulation is key. It sounds so reasonable. Come, come, dear boy; no one is rejecting your facts, just your conclusions. There may indeed be extreme “food shortages,” but widespread mortality is due to diseases associated with “malnutrition,” not famine. Facts, yes. Conclusions, no. However, such facts are conclusions because they are crimes. Soviet exterminationism is Soviet exterminationism (emphasis on Soviet), just as Nazi genocide is Nazi genocide (emphasis on Nazi). Reject the conclusion and the facts, the crimes, become meaningless. Indeed, such facts demand judgment, just as such crimes demand a verdict. As Conquest put it:
The historian, registering the facts beyond doubt, and in their context, cannot but also judge. Die Weltgeschischte ist das Weltgericht—World History is the World’s Court of Judgment: Schiller’s dictum may seem too grandiose today. Yet the establishment of the facts certainly includes the establishment of responsibility.72
The Left tried to drive a wedge between the facts as Conquest marshaled them and the conclusions as he drew them, making efforts to taint both due to his evident “dislike” of purges, terror, and death camps—or, as Eugene Lyons might have put it ironically, his middle-class liberal “hang-overs of prejudice” against dictatorship, mass slaughter, and the crushing of the human spirit. Conquest writes:
It was believed that a “Cold Warrior” became opposed to the Soviet system be- cause of some irrational predisposition . . . The idea seems to be that if one can show that opposition to the Soviet threat was in part based on dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions—that is, “emotions”—then the opposition cannot have been objective. But, of course, the Soviet system was indeed disliked, even detested, because of its record and intentions.73
What Conquest’s detractors dismissed as “emotions”—namely, “dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions” (including twenty million killed by Stalin)— was in fact a historian’s verdict of responsibility regarding such crimes. Visceral feelings aside, it is a judgment based on evidence, logic, and moral analysis. These are the same underpinnings of any rational investigation into Nazi “ac- tualities and intentions” and subsequent finding of their detestable nature. No one would pause over the following slight reworking of a Conquest line quoted above: “The main lesson seems to be that the Nazi ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children”— but insert “Communist ideology” into the sentence and boy, look out.
“No one could deal with this,” he writes of his Great Terror research, “or other themes I wrote of later, unless judgmental as well as inquisitive; and those who denied the negative characteristics of Soviet Communism were deficient in judgment and in curiosity—gaps in the teeth and blinkers on the eyes.”74
To be able to “deal with” the evil of Communist extermination history, then, as Conquest writes, is to be judgmental as well as inquisitive. This suggests a continuum between such fruits of curiosity and academic labor—the repugnant facts of Communist extermination history—and our judgment of them. The gap-toothed and blinkered ones, however, set out to interrupt this continuum, to sunder these facts from their conclusions, to explode the whole logical exercise that begins in facts and ends in conclusions into senseless fragments—to decontextualize it (and everything else while they’re at it). Yes, the Nazi system killed six million people (fact), and yes, the Nazi system was evil (conclusion); and yes, the Soviet system killed twenty million people (fact), but how dare that “cowboy” Ronald Reagan call the Soviet Union the “evil empire”?
Like postmodernism itself, this massive inconsistency on Nazism and Communism doesn’t make a shred of sense. If making sense were the goal, the phrase “evil empire” would have been a trite truism, a hoary cliché long before Ronald Reagan uttered the words, which, like the most potent incantation, drove tribes of intelligentsia the Western world over into fits of mass hysteria and rage—against evil Reagan, not the empire. If the words today no longer conjure the same teeth-gnashing indictment of Old West simplicity they once did, they still manage to strike a spark or two of faux outrage. Also, the quotation marks of irony have yet to fall away.
I went back to the original Reagan speech recently, realizing I’d never heard or read any more of it than that signature phrase. Reagan was addressing evangelical Christians at a time when the so-called nuclear freeze, which we now know to have been a colossal Soviet influence operation,75 was under debate in Congress and Reagan was proposing to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe. Two weeks later, he would announce his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which, even as it became the obsession that would drive the final Soviet dicta- tors to exhaust the Communist system in their futile efforts to compete, was endlessly caricatured in Western media as a “cowboy’s” comic-book ray gun of choice straight from Star Wars—no doubt a Soviet-encouraged moniker.
The speech is surprisingly mild. I was surprised to learn that by the time Reagan gets around to mentioning the “evil empire,” he was not inveighing against the USSR directly but rather against the creed of moral equivalence, at the time the very definition of intellectual chic. It’s hard to convey the intensity of the drumbeat for moral equivalence in those days. It was background noise and op-ed commentary, the premise of debate (“Resolved: There is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union,” Oxford Union debate, February 23, 1984) and the endings of movies (Three Days of the Condor [1975], Apocalypse Now [1979], Reds [1981]). The era Reagan was trying to end was one of entrenched belief in “ambiguities” between capitalism and Communism, between liberty and tyranny. It was too much for one man to do, even Ronald Reagan.
“We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke,” East German agent Fiedler remarks to British agent Leamas in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, le Carré’s stunningly successful 1963 novel that instituted the le Carré brand. This joke was an old story by the 1980s, the conventional wisdom, the Establishment point of view. It still is. By 2008, le Carré was confiding to The Sunday Times of London, over fragrant, amber-colored glasses of Calvados, as the waves crashed at the foot of the cliffs below the author’s Cornwall home, that he had himself been tempted to defect to the Soviet Union.76
“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” [ellipses in original].
The rest about the twenty million killed? Heavens, no. The Times explains:
This is maybe less surprising than at first it seemed: we are in true le Carré territory, nuanced and complex, where the spying is sometimes an end in itself and where there is rarely an easy, Manichaean split between the good guys and the bad guys. Defecting was a temptation the writer resisted, to our good fortune [em- phasis added].
To each our own. What is remarkable here is less the “news” about le Carré than the ease with which the reporter absorbs this point of moral cretinhood, conveying the author’s view as a beguilingly piquant eccentricity even as it skirts the charnel houses the man found himself fascinated and not repelled by. Such enthusiasm would not have greeted a thriller writer who expressed a temptation to “jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” about, say, the Third Reich.
If an unhealthy attraction to the Soviet Union was still respectable as re- cently as 2008, imagine how outrageous the phrase “evil empire” sounded twenty-five years earlier. This is what Reagan actually said:
In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunder- standing and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.77
Reagan’s exhortation to face “the facts of history” was a broad challenge, his reference to “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. The cataclysmic histories of Ukraine, Finland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Korea, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Angola, and on and on were not the shining raiment becoming an empire of peace. Reagan was challenging us to acknowledge the implications of this fact, to fight the paralysis of “moral equivalence,” and see not two bullies in a playground, as the East-West struggle was repetitiously framed, but one aggressor seeking to impose a totalitarian system over as much of the world as possible. Good and Evil. Reagan may have had to struggle to explain this to the West, but the Soviets, as Robert Conquest reminds us, looking back from the vantage point of 2005, were never unclear, morally or otherwise, about their intentions:
The Soviet Union, right up to the eve of its collapse, was committed to the con- cept of an unappeasable conflict with the Western world and to the doctrine that this could only be resolved by what Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko de- scribed, as officially as one can imagine (in his 1975 book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union) as world revolution: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.”78
As Conquest added, “one could hardly be franker.”
—
And he is gone from us now. A permanent loss. R.I.P.
President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran paves the way for this totalitarian regime to attain nuclear weapons, ones which Iran’s dictators could then aim squarely at the United States, Israel, and our allies. But the complicit media repeatedly join the administration in championing the deal, which both falsely claim is the only viable alternative to war.
In order to stifle opposition to this narrative, the mainstream media have mostly offered the public misleading information and punditry. After an estimated 12,000 people gathered in New York City’s Times Square on July 22 to fight the Iran deal, the media did what they do best in the face of inconvenient truths—marginalize the opposition, or ignore the facts.
“Speakers, including Republican politicians, called on Congress to throw it out, whipping up the crowd that included supporters of right-wing Jewish and evangelical Christian groups,” reported AFP about the Times Square rally. Similarly, the widely distributed Associated Press article reported that “The event…consisted mainly of pro-Israel supporters, though organizers said it represents Americans of all faiths and political convictions.”
In other words, move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of right-wing crazies who want war with Iran. There’s no popular protest against the Iran deal, we are told, and opposition to the deal is not actually bipartisan. Yet notable Democrats who spoke at the rally included liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
David Brog, Executive Director, Christians United for Israel
Monica Crowley, Political Commentator
U.S. Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Steven Emerson, Founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Frank Gaffney, Founder of the Center for Security Policy
Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post
Kasim Hafeez, Christians United for Israel’s Outreach Coordinator
Pete Hoekstra, Former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee
Richard Kemp, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan
Tony LoBianco, Actor and Activist
Herbert I. London, President London Center for Policy Research
Clare M. Lopez, Center for Security Policy
U.S. Navy Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
Kevin McCullough, Radio Host from WMCA and 970 The Answer
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney from 1975 to 2009
George Pataki, former Governor of New York
General Paul Vallely, Chairman of Stand Up America
Col. USA (Ret.) Allen West, former Congressman
Genevieve Wood, The Heritage Foundation
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report
The New York Times’ decision to report on a minimum wage protest with far fewer attendees, and to splash that article onto the front page, reflects the cursory, feigned ignorance adopted by many in the media about this protest. The thousands of attendees apparently weren’t “enough people to catch the attention of The New York Times, who feature a $15 an hour minimum wage protest of a couple of dozen people on the front page, but not thousands rallying against the Iran deal,” notes Rick Moran for The American Thinker.
That pro-minimum wage hike article by the Times was titled, “Push to Lift Minimum Wage Is Now Serious Business,” and featured on page A1 of the July 24 issue. Instead of covering the Iran protest, and doing some genuine reporting on what was happening on their own doorstep, the Times instead featured the widely cited Associated Press article.
Clearly, the media aren’t going to tell the public the truth about the Iran deal—which is actually between the P5+1 nations and Iran—or why people oppose this debacle.
The many speakers at the rally provided compelling insights into why this is such a bad deal, and the video of this three-hour-plus rally can be viewed online. Speaker after speaker explained why this deal with Iran is inherently flawed and should be rejected.
One consistent theme throughout this powerful and emotional rally was urging people to contact their congressmen and women to try to get them to vote against the deal when it comes time for Congress to vote. Congress has 60 days to consider their vote, and that period began on July 20th.
The main focus of the event was on Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Schumer hasn’t committed either way, and is in a difficult position. He hopes and plans to succeed Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as the Senate Minority Leader (and eventually Majority Leader), and wants to be loyal to President Obama, and the party. But this conflicts with his longstanding support for Israel, which strongly opposes this deal.
The message from many of the speakers was that this is a moment of truth for Schumer. It won’t be good enough, they said, to wait until enough Democrats are lined up to assure that President Obama’s anticipated veto won’t be overridden, and then be able to make a safe vote against the deal. This crowd expects Schumer to lead the fight against the Iran nuclear agreement, which may be the only way for Congress to be able to defeat it. Even then, with the United Nations having already voted to lift its sanctions on Iran, based on certain conditions, it may not matter anyway. But it would definitely send a message.
There were too many great speeches to document here. I attended the event to be there in person, and to support my fellow members of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB). Below are the speeches of the six CCB members who spoke there, providing the story that the media refuse to tell.
“The reality is this arrangement, this deal with Iran is the worst negotiation the United States has conducted in history. … This agreement will actually free known terrorists who have killed Americans, Israelis, Europeans, Westerners and Muslims. An agreement that doesn’t give anything to the United States except the fact that it levels the playing field for Iran to dominate the Middle East, equate itself as a superpower, and ultimately become a power that has the ability to destroy all of its neighbors in the Middle East.”
“We stand united in believing that this is a bad agreement for America and the rest of the world, and we stand united knowing that America is strong. And in our history when we see evil we will confront it, contain it, and we will defeat it. … We have never, and we will never, accommodate it.”
“We know what’s in a good agreement, and people and this president say, ‘But it’s all we could get.’ It’s a sign of weakness.”
“This is the simple message that we should be sending to Iran. When Iran stands up and they chant, ‘Death to America!’ all we need to say is, ‘You first!’ … Well let me tell you something, the United States of America is about victors. The United States of America is about champions. The United States of America does not surrender to a bunch of black-robed crazed clerics that want to see us destroyed.”
“This traitorous group traded our national honor. … They humiliated this great nation before our friends, our allies, and most importantly our enemies. This surrender document must be thoroughly rejected by Congress, and then Congress must exercise its authority to start impeaching executive officials, starting with Secretary Kerry and following [with] President Obama for his illegal and unconstitutional acts.
“There’s only one sure way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon capability and that’s with a military strike—and you can take that to the bank.”
“And, oh by the way, we just learned there are two new side deals to this deal with Iran, and those deals have to do with a place called Parchin, where Iran was testing explosives for its nuclear warheads, says the IAEA. And the other one [is] about the ‘possible’ military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. These two side deals—not going to be made public, not going to be shared with Congress, not going to be shared with the American people or anybody else.”
“The last thing that Iran gets to keep, they’re keeping four American citizens hostages. … Until these hostages are set free we should not be having one word of negotiations with this Iranian regime.”
“I am tired of the deception, I am tired of the lies that come out of the White House and our government. …Let’s stick together, stand up, and kill this deal!”
Louis Farrakhan is at it again… calling for civil unrest and the murder of all whites. No matter how many times he screams for violence from the pulpit, the media just yawns and he is mostly ignored. Except for the 50,000 or so who follow the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. They are listening very closely and preparing – for war. Late last month, Farrakhan called for blacks to “rise up” and “kill those who kill us” if the federal government fails to “intercede in our affairs.” In other words, if Obama doesn’t step up moving forward towards a race war, the Nation of Islam will do it for him. Farrakhan delivered his calls for an uprising on July 30th in a speech given at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Miami. Shame on the Baptists for letting this vile race monger preach evil from their church.
“The Koran teaches persecution is worse than slaughter. Then it says, retaliation is prescribed in matters of the slain. Retaliation is a prescription from God to calm the breaths of those whose children have been slain,” Farrakhan intoned. “So if the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us. Stalk them and kill them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling,” he thundered.
Notice how they applaud this man. The congregants smile and cheer his racist, murderous words. They embrace his vile, hateful speech. Why isn’t the government looking into this incitement to violence? It is a call to slaughter white Americans and revolt. And the crowd went wild for it. Comments were all over the place stating that people would rather die fighting the white man than see black brothers and sisters die at the hands of white supremacy. May I just say, huh? Blacks are not being rounded up and murdered in the streets. Not by cops or anyone else. This is a false, wicked narrative that justifies a race war and it is gathering steam out there.
This video was on Farrakhan’s Facebook page. He included the lovely hashtag: “#JusticeOrElse.” Next month in DC, he’ll be rallying the troops in a demonstration that is meant to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his 1995 Million Man March. It should be filled with hate and possibly violence as Farrakhan brings his words and threats to life. Or should I say, ‘death.’ I consider Farrakhan to be a racist and a terrorist. The Nation of Islam is a terrorist organization as well. This is par for the course for the Religion of Peace.
Don’t let Farrakhan’s age of 82 make you think he is passe and weak. He’s anything but that and when he delivers one of his fiery speeches he commands huge numbers of acolytes who are more than willing to kill for their cause. He’s a dangerous snake. When Farrakhan calls for “10,000 fearless men who say death is sweeter than continued life under tyranny,” he’s got them lining up and volunteering in the aisles. “Death is sweeter than to continue to live and bury our children while white folks give the killer hamburgers. Death is sweeter than watching us slaughter each other to the joy of a 400-year-old enemy,” the radical orator told the faithful.
Close at hand to Farrakhan was Carlos Muhammad who leads the Baltimore chapter of the Nation of Islam. He is a devoted disciple of the minister of hate. Remember that the Nation of Islam also crashes press conferences and shows up in the guise of guarding others from violence and offers to take care of them. Much like the mafia would. They were right there with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in April following the first day of rioting in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray. That was no coincidence or accident. It was by coordination and design.
Following the Dylan Storm Roof murders in Charleston, South Carolina there have been confrontations between the New Black Panthers and the KKK. Then a black man who defended the Confederate flag was forced off the road and killed by members of a group of men that I would bet money on belonging to the New Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam. Between incidents like these and every time there is the death of a black individual that involves a police officer, racial tensions are ratcheting up more and more every day.
“If we are denied what rightfully belongs to us then there has to be unified action that we take that will force the justice that we seek.” − The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
As James Simpson put it in a comment on Farrakhan’s incitement, this is agitation and provocation, not speech.
Farrakhan is a master strategist and orator. It was not by chance that he chose Mt. Zion Baptist Church to give his furnace blast of a speech and a call to arms. This church has served as a meeting place for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. The church was packed and several dozen couldn’t get in because it was filled to capacity. They lined up around the block to get in.
Two decades after the historic march in Washington, D.C., a rally will be held on the mall on Oct. 10. According to the Washington Post, leaders across the country are coordinating an effort to attend the event. This time organizers hope to attract a diverse cross-section of people, including Native and Hispanic Americans, to a rally that is being promoted with the hashtag #JusticeOrElse on social media.
According to the Twitter feed of Brother Jesse Muhammad, a blogger and member of the Nation of Islam who attended Thursday night’s gathering, Farrakhan spoke about respect for women, religion and race relations in America. Journalists from mainstream media outlets such as the Miami Herald, WLRN-FM, CBS 4 and others were not allowed into the church for the event.
“Every time they kill a black man, beat a black woman, we’re being radicalized,” Muhammad quoted Farrakhan as saying.
Farrakhan said it was necessary to return to the site of the Million Man March to demand justice.
“We want to go back to Washington to demand from the government what we have paid for with our sweat and blood,” he said.
Farrakhan called for the Million Man March in 1995, when hundreds of thousands of African American men descended on the National Mall for one of the largest gatherings in U.S. history. The theme of the march was to promote family values and dedication to the community among black men. Men from an array of backgrounds and classes attended the historic march.
As the leader of the Nation of Islam and a prominent public figure, 82-year-old Farrakhan is noted for his outspoken commentary on social and political issues. In June, he announced the October rally at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., where he pointed to recent police shootings and the mass killing at a church in South Carolina while criticizing race relations in America.
“Yes, all lives matter, but the only reason you’re here is because black lives are being slaughtered,” Farrakhan said to the crowd on June 24, according to the Associated Press.
Louis Farrakhan hates America and he hates white people. He’s also a virulent antisemite. He hates the police, our laws and our Constitution. He is promoting a full blown race war and wholesale murder. Americans are the enemy to him: “Who are we fighting today? It’s the people that carry the American flag,” Farrakhan continued. “What flag do the police have? What flag flies over the non-Justice Department? What flag flies over the White House?” This is a man who demands Shariah Law. A man who would subjugate America to radical Islam and eradicate the white population. He is absolutely evil and as his final act on this earth, he may just bring full scale civil war if he gets his way.
Barack Obama has dined and hung out with Farrakhan. Here’s a relevant quote from the minister:
“The cracker don’t have no authority over me”
“I’m a guided man, and Allah has blessed me to get you this far”
“Since i’ve been on this tour, I’ve been telling the people – that God wants to give you the promised land”
“I know the messiah – I am taught by the messiah – because my work is messaianic”
“I can never forget Iran – Iran has beautiful Muslims. You don’t know how much our Muslim world is anxious to see the enemy handcuffed. …the enemy – the British and the Americans have created all of that havoc in the Islamic world. And imagine us rising up in America at a time.
Sounds like he has a lot in common with Obama, doesn’t it? Between racism, Iran and an overwhelming hatred of America, they could be brothers.
It’s funny… Christian pastors can quietly and strongly stand for their freedom of religion and traditional marriage, and they are denounced and pilloried for it. But if you let a black Muslim minister call for the death of all whites in America, no one seems to care or notice. The leader of the largest Muslim movement in America is openly calling for a race war and we hear next to nothing about it in the media. I imagine we soon will – it’s Farrakhan’s legacy and parting gift to America that I worry about.