"This book is about a year of eating locally, a year
that also happened to be a watershed in the history of
global food politics. It is the story of finding
kindred food-loving souls within a 250-mile radius of
my home in Arizona, and sharing with them the
pleasures of gardening and gathering, pit roasting and
fermenting, feasting and frolicking." Author Gary Paul
Nabhan
Or "Please Pass the Dry Roasted Crickets"
by F. Blanchard
For a year, Gary Paul Nabhan turns his back on the
global food vending machine and vows to eat only food
that has been grown, gathered, fished, or hunted in
his own backyard. The result is an inspirational,
entertaining, and practical treatise on how to eat
locally and think globally. Often humorous, always
respectful, this book is a must read for anyone who
believes that, "We are what we eat."
Gary Paul Nabhan is an ethnobotanist and the founder
of Native Seeds Search, a man who spent more than 25
years traveling the world to save seeds from heritage
plants. The author's neighbors, from Tucson, Arizona,
to the Gulf of Mexico, are Mexicans and Tohono
O'odham, Pagago, and Seri Indians who once lived
entirely off the land and enjoyed excellent health.
Now these same native peoples suffer from many
ailments and the Tohono O'odham tribe suffer one of
the highest rates of diabetes in the world.
Nabhan begins his journey by cleaning out his
cupboards - good-bye to the Betty Crocker Pudding in
the Supermoist Cake Mix , the Kelloggs Marshmellow
-Blasted Fruit Loops, the Hi-C 10% Orange Drink. He
asks himself why we have traded live food that
sustains local communities for the tasteless,
irradiated, hermetically sealed food spewing from the
planetary supermarket.
He starts by raising a few old breed turkeys and by
planting a garden from local heritage seeds like
"baby-girl" squash from the Tohono O'odham
reservation. He learns to hunt quail in nearby
gullies, and he searches out those few people who
still remember how to harvest and prepare native
foods. During this year-long odyssey, Nabhan
participates in a communal harvest of cactus fruit and
finds and tastes the ancient Papago sand food plant.
He takes a four- hour boat trip to Tiburon Island with
an elderly Seri Indian to gather and roast Mescal
fruit. In the middle of downtown Tucson, he finds a
woman who will make tortillas from mesquite flour. In
a Seri Indian village, he tries roasted chuckwalla a
desert reptile known for its tender meat. He even
prepares and samples dry roasted sphinx moth larvae,
once a critically important wild food for the
indigenous people of the Arizona desert.
Over and over the author underscores the concept of
food as a communal experience. Throughout history,
people have gathered, grown, hunted, and fished for
food together to feed the tribe. He participates in
many feasts and fiestas as he celebrates the joy and
significance of community and food, something that has
been lost in a culture where many families rarely
prepare a meal together and routinely eat out.
But with the pleasure comes the politics. Nabhan
continually juxtaposes scenes from corporate
agriculture with his food gathering adventures. He
visits farm states like Kansas, Illinois, and
Wisconsin and the "industrialized food blender" of
Chicago. He discusses genetically modified seeds, the
travesty of NAFTA, and "terminator" technology
engineered by Mansanto. Traveling in unfamiliar
territory, he carries his own mesquite tortillas and
apple/amaranth muffins to tide him over in airports
and other food wastelands.
The journey ends with a pilgrimage called the Desert
Walk for Heritage and Health. More than 100 people of
mixed ages and heritage walk for 240 miles from Tucson
to Mexico living off the land as they travel, visiting
and feasting with other desert villagers along the
way. It is a befitting and sacred trek to end a year
that is all about the pleasures of caring for
ecosystems and community.
As a result of reading this book, I am rethinking my
position as an "almost" vegetarian. Perhaps eating
locally is more important than not eating meat.
Perhaps opting out of the global supermarket is a
better choice than buying that organically grown
broccoli from California?
And what about those hoards of Mormon crickets that
invaded my garden last year? A little flour, a little
oil. Hmm, I wonder . . .
THE NIGHT HENRY DAVID
THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL
A play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
"If the law is of
such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, the I
say, break the law."
These words were spoken by a young
Henry David Thoreau, a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emmerson. This young man was
thrown in jail for refusing to take part in a war which he thought Americans had
no business partaking in, and for refusing to pay taxes to the government that would
use these funds to finance an American war machine. A war that was never formally
declared and that was started without Congressional authorization. This war being
the war against Mexico, but certainly just as applicable in todays time.
This is the story of a young man whose
very friends and family, the very ones who he so desperately sought to educate about
the affairs of an unjust system, end up having him throw in jail and even arresting
him.
A story that sounds so
very familiar to anyone involved in the struggle for freedom, social
justice, and racial identity. It is the story of a young Henry David
Thoreau was thrown in jail for refusing to follow a corrupt and
criminal regime and for refusing to pay taxes to finance The System's
war machine. The young Mr. Thoreau uses this injustice done against him
and the encounters that he faces while in jail, to educate others on
the injustices taking place and being commited against himself and
others. Mr. Thoreau uses this time to instruct others and show them
that the power to effect positive social change truly rests in the
hands of the people, and how through grass roots efforts, thoughts and
ideas can catch on and grow like wildfires.
This book has just as much relevance
in today's circumstances with the war against Iraq and the using of your tax dollars
to finance this war machine, as it did when he first took Thoreau first underwent
this noble act of defiance.
The stand that Henry David Thoreau
took went well noticed and can continue to be noticed by others even today. It is
a book that one can share with others regardless of their political leanings, and
can be used to get them thinking about the current war, the US's imperialist
policies against other nations, and the injustices being commited in our name.
Since Thoreau first took
his stand, many have taken note of him and his efforts. Tolstoy was
influenced by this mans actions and Gandhi even based his "passive
resistance" upon Thoreau's actions. How will you be influenced by this
book? Only you can decide by reading this book and taking his words up
and applying them to our present struggles.
This play has been called "The most
famous act of civil disobedience in American history" With a comment like that you
can not afford to miss out on this book.
Martin
A. Lee, 'The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's
Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists' (1996), published by Little,
Brown
A review by : Andrew
Webb
Martin A. Lee is
a Jewish-American journalist who considers himself a 'progressive' and writes
for 'progressive' publications such as the Village Voice and the Southern Poverty Law Centre Intelligence Report. Lee's colleague, Kevin Coogan, supposedly plagiarised large parts of The Beast- for his biography of Francis Parker
Yockey, The Dreamer of the Day (1999), published by the 'progressive' Autonomedia (I have not yet read Dreamer-, so I am unable to verify this).
Bill White and others have written on this
phenomenon: how journalists like Lee and Coogan pass themselves off as 'progressives' but really function as agents for the most reactionary, illiberal, pro-Israel, pro-Likud,
anti-Arab organisations (such as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Anti-Defamation
League of B'Nai B'rith) and how the SPLC and Britain's Searchlight Educational
Trust serve as front organisations for these Jewish 'anti-hate' groups (whose real
function is to, of course, foment Jewish hatred towards Arabs, anti-Semites, Holocaust
Revisionists and other enemies of the Jewish state). Lee, in his acknowledgements,
thanks Gerry Gable - former Jewish communist and house burglar, now impresario of
the shady Searchlight organisation - for his assistance.
You know, then,
what to expect from a book like this: lots of venomous, Jewish ranting, fulminating
and agonising on the subjects of Holocaust denial, white "racism" and the ultimate
sin - anti-Semitism - mixed in with the usual leftist clichés on why people become
fascists, anti-Semites and racialists.
The book covers
the entire history of the 'movement' from the post-war era to the present, ending
with chapters on the American scene and the usual suspects - Timothy McVeigh, the
militia movement, Louis Beam, Willis Carto, the Institute for Historical Review,
Richard Butler and Aryan Nations, David Duke, etc, etc. (Lee displays the usual
Jewish abhorrence of Pat Buchanan and tries to link him to far-right and Neo-Nazi
groups).
The book touches
on the rise of Neo-Nazism in Germany in the eighties and nineties: one of themes
of the book is that the Germans have failed to show sufficient contrition for the
"Holocaust" and that they show a deplorable lack of "Holocaust" education (yes,
Lee, in his manically subjective, solipsist Jewy fashion, really does expect us
to believe that). Lee is a Jew who never stopped hating Germany: like Daniel Goldhagen,
the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), he regards the Germans
as being collectively "guilty" of the "Holocaust". He views Germans as a tribe of
barbarians who have remained anti-Semitic and "racist" despite de-Nazification.
He spits venom at Germany and Germans throughout; in one passage he calls Germany
an 'agressive' and 'bullying' nation - mainly because some unusually outspoken Germans
have expressed a desire, after reunification, for the return of the massive areas
of land stolen from them by Poland after the war (and from which they were ethnically
cleansed in the millions).
In the early chapters
of the book, Lee examines the careers of two former Nazis, Otto Remer and Otto Skorzeny
- the former the heroic tank general who helped put down the July 1944 coup against
Hitler, the latter the scar-faced daredevil commando who rescued Mussolini from
his mountaintop imprisonment by the Allies. Lee uses the lives of these two men
to weave together the threads of his history of the movement.
Skorzeny is, of
course, the less interesting of the two: a man of action (with a striking physical
resemblance to Errol Flynn) who was, in Leon Degrelle's words, 'not a philosopher'
and who after the war made a living trading arms, engaging in little political activity.
Remer enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the movement, founding the Socialist
Reich Party in West Germany in 1949 (which was so successful that the Bonn government
banned it in 1952) and, right up until his death at the age of 84, working as a
publicist for Holocaust and WWII revisionism and acting as a mentor for rising stars
on the German Neo-Nazi scene. (Not being familiar with the German groups Lee writes
about, I'm not sure of the accuracy of the term 'Neo-Nazi'; after all, journalists
label the German National Democratic Party (NPD) as a 'Neo-Nazi' movement, which
it isn't - it is more of a generic neo-fascist, nationalist movement. But the Jews
and their lackeys will always call anyone who disagrees with them 'Nazi'. Lee even
refers dismissively to Julius Evola - who is for the most part conspicuously absent
from the book - as a 'Nazi philosopher'!). Remer also wrote some ideological treatises
which, I would imagine, would make fascinating reading (and which, unfortunately,
have not been translated into English).
Which brings us
to Third Positionism. Lee gives an account of Germany's - or rather Prussia's -
historical attempts to forge an alliance with Russia against its foes in Europe
and how German statesmen, ever since, have adopted this strategy. Hence the persistent
attempts by the Nazis to come to an understanding with Russia, even up to the last
moments of the war (as related in David Irving's biography of Goebbels).
How does this relate
to the history of the neo-fascist right? The once sovereign states which comprised
Europe, of course, were under American occupation after the war, and remain so to
this day: and so Remer and other movement ideologues who shared his 'National Bolshevist'
view (among them Francis Parker Yockey and Jean Francois Thiriart) believed that
Europe should free itself from the clutches of NATO and American Jewry by aligning
itself with the USSR. (Jean Francois Thiriart took this doctrine to extremes, giving
the appearance of having become a fully-fledged communist revolutionary and guerilla;
he even sought support from communist China). The USSR, in their view, had been
dejudaised by Stalin's turn towards anti-Semitic Slavic nationalism in the early
fifties.
The Third Positionists
were more successful in allying themselves with the Arab anti-Zionist cause. One
of the axioms of the German realpolitik school of foreign policy is 'the enemy of
my enemy is my friend': hence Hitler's tilts towards the Third World countries (eg,
Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, India) which were then ruled by his enemy, Britain, in the
latter stages of the war. Lee dredges up the usual stories of the wartime Palestinian
collaboration with the Nazis and the connections, real or spurious, between Palestinian
terrorist groups, such as the PLO and the PFLP, and Neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.
He also traverses Frederick Forsythe-Odessa File territory, documenting the activities
of former Nazis who emigrated to Egypt and Syria and worked with the likes of Nassar
in their struggle against Israel, and the heroic attempts by the likes of Mossad
who strived to thwart this evil conspiracy!
Lee is in a bind
here: the plight of the Palestinians - and Arabs in general - who have been persecuted
and slaughtered by Israel occupy a special place in contemporary leftist mythology;
but Lee is, first and foremost, a Jew. After some mild displays of sympathy for
the Palestinian cause, he socks the boot into Arabs for being anti-Semitic and for
cozying up to ex-Nazis. How dare they translate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
into Arabic and distribute it throughout the Arab world? Don't they know, foams
Lee, that The Protocols are a 'canard'?
And this is something
which gives the lie of the book's pretence to objectivity: its sheer Jewiness. The
book is sneeringly cynical and indifferent when it describes the sufferings of racial
groups who are enemies of the Jews (eg, the Germans), hysterical when it touches
on the sufferings of Jews. Lee spends a great deal of time castigating those who
would 'relativise' the "Holocaust" by comparing it to the Ukrainian famine or, heaven
forbid, the millions (2 to 6 million by James Bacques' estimate) of ethnic
Germans killed in the post-war ethnic cleansing of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The
"Holocaust", Lee tells us, was a unique event in human history because it was an
attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group.
On the topic of
genocide, Lee - just like Deborah Lipstadt, his ideological comrade in arms - denies
that the Jewish-American Morgenthau Plan (for the post-war extermination of millions
of Germans) was ever implemented: a typical piece of Jewish chutzpah which, were
our present-day laws against "Holocaust" denial reversed, would see Lee and Lipstadt
fined or imprisoned.
But such denials
of reality constitute the main staple of anti-fascist and anti-anti-Semitic ideology.
No real arguments exist against the anti-Semitic, neo-fascist point of view: no-one
can deny, for instance, that the Talmud contains vile, perverse, diabolical, bigoted,
"racist" passages; that Bolshevik Jews slaughtered millions of Russians, out of
sheer Jewish racial hatred; that Hitler and his allies were thoroughly justified
in resisting Stalin's attempt to enlarge the Soviet sphere of influence into Western
Europe (to judge by the awesome rapes and massacres perpetrated by the Russians
after the war, which Lee, in a typically Jewish fashion, fails to mention); that
the "Holocaust" story, which is ludicrous, no matter which way you tell it, collapses
under any honest and objective examination; and so on.
The only avenue
of escape for Jews when confronted by these truths is to simply deny them outright.
One can't refute Holocaust Revisionism by digging up actual photographs and footage
of giant Nazi gas chambers, because no such evidence exists. And so all an opponent
of Revisionism can do is rant, over and over, that Revisionists are 'Nazis' and
'anti-Semites' for wanting documentary and forensic evidence for the Jewish gas
chamber story, and leave it at that.
In fact, the book
repeats all the old myths concerning the war which have been force-fed to us by
American (or rather, Jewish-American) popular culture and history: that 20 million
Russians died "fighting the Nazis" during the war; that the Nuremberg trials catalogued
Nazi crimes and proved the moral rightness of the American (and Russian) cause;
that Hitler's assault on the USSR was unprovoked; that the Morgenthau Plan was never
implemented; that six million Jews were "gassed" in giant "gas chambers"; that Dr
Mengele performed grisly, bizarre, pointless and grotesquely comical experiments
on Jews in Auschwitz; that Hitler had the July 1944 coup plotters strangled with
piano wire and hung on meat hooks; and so on.
All of these myths
taken together form the basis of post-war liberal democratic ideology, not only
in post-war Germany, but the entire Western world. One of the reasons why we moderns
know that the two-party, "democratic" system is so excellent is that a) it did not,
unlike the fascist regimes, "gas" millions of Jews and b) it has never committed
genocide. These myths are so pervasive that even radical leftists - who pride themselves
on their ability to see through "capitalist" propaganda - have swallowed them hook,
line and sinker.
Is Lee's book 'leftist'
and 'progressive'? In some passages, yes: Lee follows the usual Trotskyist-Stalinist
party line on why people become fascists and neo-fascists. It's all economics, you
see: the nineties was such a terrible period economically for Americans and Europeans
that many of them turned to 'scape-goating' Jews and non-white immigrants; fascism
and Nazism themselves were bourgeois capitalist con-games, designed to lure the
disenchanted working-classes away from socialism (ie, communism) and towards an
ideology which upheld the right of capitalists to own property.
But Lee, on the
whole, shows little interest in leftism: to him, politics should be about censoring
and jailing anti-Semites, Holocaust Revisionists and "racists" (goyish "racists"
that is). In his passages on Germany after reunification, he paints Germany as post-Apartheid
South Africa in reverse - with the number of incidents of white on non-white "hate
crime" reaching epidemic proportions. Which, in its own way, is amusing - reminiscent
of the practice of those communist party propagandists who manipulated infant mortality
statistics, for example, to show that Americans were worse off than people living
in the Soviet Union.
As a reviewer of
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun (2002) pointed out, it's doubtful that anyone
outside the movement reads these anti-fascist tomes: certainly I can't imagine anyone
reading this large volume for pleasure. But I would recommend it to anyone in the
movement who wants to fill in the gaps of his knowledge concerning movement history.
(It was through this book that I came to respect Jean Francois Thiriart, who I had
previously written off (without knowing much about him) as another Alain de Benoist
- ie, as a typically pretentious Gallic pseudo-intellectual who passes off his Gaullist
disdain of all things American as neo-fascism. But I discovered that Thiriart was
unconnected to the Nouvelle Droit and was very much a hands-on intellectual who
practiced what he preached).
Having said that,
I wouldn't swear to the book's accuracy; it goes without saying that a hostile commentator
like Lee will strive to the utmost to make leading figures in the movement stupid
and foolish. But no journalist or academic, of course, would dare research and write
an objective history of the movement. So, for the moment, we need to stick with
the likes of The Beast Reawakens.
FNF Note: The preceeding review
was contributed by Andrew Webb. It is included and kept in its entirety in efforts
to show political synthesis of many ideologies.
