Source: National Vanguard Magazine -- Number 114

Freedom Under Attack

The government assault on the Second Amendment has been much in the news this year. Less noticed, however, even by the Second Amendment's fervent defenders, has been the ongoing effort to scrap the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Just as with the effort against the Second Amendment, which has been depicted by the mass media as an effort to "control crime," the campaigns against other fundamental liberties have been mounted under false rubrics for the purpose of deception. The enemies of the First Amendment, for example, want their efforts to stamp out Politically Incorrect speech to be viewed as a campaign for "human rights." Paramount among these human rights, in their view, is the right to feel good about oneself at all times (unless, of course, one is a heterosexual White male): hence, any spoken or printed word which may be offensive to members of an officially favored segment of the population is to be banned.

The efforts to stamp out "offensive" speech have been reported earlier in these pages: see, for example, "The Campaign to Outlaw 'Hate'" in issue No. 111, and "The Destruction of the Academy" in issue No. 112. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of the speech regulators for their work continues to grow. At the same time that they are becoming more Orwellian in their efforts, they are having more success at enlisting the police powers of the state to back them up.

In some recent cases the law already has gone far beyond anything George Orwell himself could have imagined. In 1988 Congress enacted the Fair Housing Amendments Act (an enhancement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968), imposing severe criminal and civil penalties on anyone who interferes with the housing rights of federally favored groups. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which administers both acts, interprets as illegal interference any complaint--even a letter to a newspaper--about any of its projects to homogenize the U.S. population by establishing housing projects for its favored groups in predominantly White areas. It has sued or threatened criminal and/or civil action against a number of complainers recently: people who have objected to HUD plans for "rehabilitation centers" or "group homes" in their neighborhoods to house drug addicts or homeless alcoholics, for example. (The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 added mentally and physically handicapped persons to the federally favored list, and HUD and the courts since have ruled that alcoholics, drug addicts, and persons with AIDS are included among the handicapped.)

HUD's campaign to imprison or bankrupt dissenters has been in the spotlight recently as the result of its threats against three Berkeley, California, residents--Alexandra White, Joseph Deringer, and Richard Graham--who protested HUD plans to establish a housing project for homeless alcoholics in their neighborhood. Before recent publicity caused HUD to back off a bit, the three were threatened with a year in prison and fines of $100,000 each if they did not cease their protests. They were ordered to turn over to HUD all of their correspondence, memoranda, press statements, and other papers connected with their objections to the project, so that government lawyers could look for evidence against them.

If this sounds like HUD never heard about the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, don't be alarmed. Assistant Secretary Roberta Achtenberg, the lesbian Jewess appointed by Bill Clinton to the second-ranking position in HUD, has assured reporters covering the aforementioned Berkeley case that HUD will not infringe the Constitutional rights of persons who object to its projects--provided that their objections are not based on the specific characteristics of the favored group for whom the housing is being provided.

Thus, HUD will not bring charges against someone who objects to a home for persons with AIDS being established in his neighborhood, if his objection is that the home would be too far from the nearest hospital or that the neighborhood lacks other facilities needed by the home's residents. But if he objects that people with AIDS are a generally unsavory lot--homosexuals, non-Whites, drug addicts--and he doesn't want his children coming in contact with them, then the Bill of Rights goes out the window. Ms. Achtenberg, who seems to have a larger role in making housing policy than her nominal superior at HUD, Henry Cisneros, believes that when the Bill of Rights collides with the special rights legislated in recent decades for the government's favored minorities, the special rights should prevail. After all, the Bill of Rights was enacted more than 200 years ago by White males, some of them slave owners and none of them "gay" or Jewish, and this in itself makes it déclassé.

Unfortunately for most of us, the courts have been moving inexorably toward Ms. Achtenberg's view of things. The controlled media already are there. The August 29, 1994, issue of U.S. News & World Report, the most "conservative" of America's major weekly newsmagazines, commented on the Berkeley case:

HUD should clear the air quickly with clear guidelines that acknowledge First Amendment protections. It is one thing to organize to keep blacks out of an all-white area and quite another to question, as some Berkeley people did, a decision to put a home for alcoholics near two liquor stores. . . .

HUD officials suggest that it is illegal discrimination to question housing programs on the basis of protected characteristics of those to be housed. That is clear and just when we are talking about race, illness or physical disability. It's not so clear when the people to be housed are disorganized street people who qualify as a protected class because of drug problems or the fact that they happened to contract AIDS.

A careless reader who skims quickly over this commentary might get the false impression that U.S. News & World Report believes in the First Amendment. Actually, the magazine is owned and edited by one of Ms. Achtenberg's kinsmen, Mortimer Zuckerman, and he is clever enough with words to create such an impression even in careful readers. Too many people will let themselves be bullied into positions they really didn't want to take, rather than appear unreasonable or "extreme": "We must acknowledge First Amendment protections of our right to dissent--so long as we don't say anything racist or anti-homosexual or . . . ." It's much like the "defense" of the Second Amendment we've been hearing from a lot of politicians recently: "We must not infringe the right to keep and bear arms--that is, the right of a well-regulated militia, under the control of the government."

Criticizing HUD's housing policies is not the only thing White Americans no longer can do: they also must be extraordinarily careful in formulating their personal housing policies, if that involves advertising to sell or rent real estate. The Fair Housing Act, as amended in 1988, prohibits advertising which "indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin or an intention to make any such preference," and this provision of the law is now being enforced with a vengeance by Ms. Achtenberg and her cohorts at HUD. Almost any indication in an apartment or real estate advertisement that the owner is looking for normal, healthy, or decent tenants or buyers is verboten. The guiding philosophy is that no member of a favored group must feel excluded, no one must be offended, no one must even be reminded of whatever it is that gives him an officially favored status. Thus, an advertisement for an apartment that specifies "no drug addicts" or "no drinkers" will bring a team of HUD enforcers with a subpoena in a hurry.

The tyranny of the Fair Housing Act goes far beyond the imposition of punishment by the government itself, however; like other "civil rights" laws, it encourages aggrieved members of favored groups to file ruinous civil suits against anyone who has offended them, and many members of these increasingly uppity groups are very easily offended. This provides a lucrative opportunity for some lawyers, who are getting together with local minorities and organizing "fair housing councils" or the like to ferret out possibilities for lawsuits and for complaints to HUD against property owners, realtors, and even the newspapers which carry real estate advertising.

Some of the complainants feel compelled to push the law to its limits. A woman describing her religion as "non-Christian" is suing a newspaper in Salem, Oregon, for religious discrimination because it ran an apartment-for-rent advertisement on Easter Sunday under a logo consisting of a bunny in a flower basket and the words "Happy Easter." Ms. Achtenberg is investigating the matter.

Such complaints may seem ridiculous, but they are not amusing at all to a property owner of modest means who becomes a target. He usually finds himself in a no-win situation: even if he prevails against the complainant and HUD, he may have to sell his property to pay his legal expenses.

Terrified of lawsuits, newspapers and realtors are censoring themselves. They have compiled a long list of "discriminatory" and "offensive" words and phrases which should not be used in advertisements. Some especially careful realtors have gone so far that they no longer use the phrase "master bedroom," because Blacks may be offended by a reminder of the master/slave relationship. Nor will they mention a "walk-in closet" or a "spectacular view," lest a lame or blind person take offense.

Absurd? Not to the favored groups, who are intoxicated with their new power to exact vengeance for a thousand real or imagined slights by making the resented majority dance to their tune. Tim Kearney (disability unspecified), program coordinator for the Fair Housing Council of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, is typical. He is eager to hold the majority's feet to the fire by suing whenever he imagines that he sees an objectionable advertisement: "If somebody didn't pick up the phone [to respond to a housing ad] because they [sic] felt excluded by the wording, you have [grounds for] a complaint. All day long some people suffer pangs and stings of discrimination, and it adds up. That's what civil rights is all about."

Many Americans, even those who are well read and keep up with politics and current events, simply cannot grasp the monstrousness of what has happened to their country. They have learned in school that the American Revolution was fought by men who valued their honor and freedom above all else, men who established the U.S. government and wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and they know that the officeholders who make, administer, and judge our laws today are sworn to uphold that Constitution and that Bill of Rights. They cannot grasp the fact that a substantial portion of these officeholders are now people who hold the Constitution in utter contempt and are working diligently to undermine and destroy it, and virtually all the rest are people willing to go along with the former as long as it is the fashionable thing to do.

Most Americans, who have grown up believing that they had an absolute right to say whatever they wanted to say, do not understand that they no longer have that right. It has been taken away from them, almost without a fight.

Should Americans really be surprised by this development, though? Do they really believe that they can permit a lesbian Jewess to set government policy and not use her power against the heterosexual Gentiles she despises so vehemently? Do they really believe that they can permit a piece of filth like Bill Clinton to occupy the White House, and still keep their freedom?

The key, of course, is the control of the media by an element utterly alienated from the White majority of Americans; an element whose ancestors did not share in our revolutionary struggle for freedom; an element with no conception of personal honor and no tradition of liberty; an element whose whole, parasitic history is one of conspiracy, subversion, deception, and conflict with the host people among whom they have lived. They spent decades laying the groundwork for what is happening now. When they finally were able to get a man like Clinton in a position where he could make top-level appointments of their kind of people to the Supreme Court and the Federal bureaucracy, why should they forbear? They want their pound of flesh, and they want it now.

They will get it, and more. They will feast on the goyim again, as their ancestors feasted on the fat of Egypt and a hundred other nations. They will feast until the emasculated, liberalized, fashion-subservient goyim find their manhood again and put a final end to them and their collaborators.

 George Orwell wrote in 1984 of "thought crime" (thinking a Politically Incorrect thought) and "face crime" (having a Politically Inappropriate expression on one's face--e.g., smiling at a joke about homosexuals, or failing to smile when passing a racially mixed couple on the sidewalk), but one that Orwell didn't think of might be called "ear crime": listening to something that is deemed "offensive." That's what 30-year-old Nunzio Bonaccorsy, of Annapolis, Maryland, did earlier this year, and it cost him dearly.

Bonaccorsy was employed as a shipping clerk by Alcon Labs, Inc., which sells contact lens products. He worked in Alcon's warehouse in Savage, about 20 miles from Annapolis, and he had his radio tuned to a local rock music program one day last May: the Grego and Mo Show. The program's two disk jockeys were discussing a news report about a Jaguar executive who was in hot water because he had referred to Mercedes Benz as a "nigger in the woodpile."

A Black warehouse worker who heard the word "nigger" coming from Bonaccorsy's radio several times became incensed. He complained to Bonaccorsy, and, without Bonaccorsy's permission, tuned the radio to another station. Then the Black, still indignant, complained to the warehouse manager about the program Bonaccorsy had been listening to. The manager called Bonaccorsy into his office and told him he was fired. The reason Bonaccorsy was given was that he had an "inappropriate racial attitude."

Such corporate bigotry is still a step away from government enforcement of "appropriate" radio listening habits, of course. And the chances are that Alcon Labs doesn't really care what programs its employees listen to. What Alcon cares about is minimizing its problems with the government, and it knows well that a complaint to the bureaucrats in Washington from any minority employee can mean big problems. Bonaccorsy probably would have been fired if his Black coworker had complained instead about an "insensitive" slogan on his T-shirt or an "offensive" bumper sticker on his car. The customary response of employers to governmental programs favoring minorities has been to go beyond even what is required by law, just to be safe.

 The great fascination which George Orwell's 1984 holds for readers is that it is uncannily prophetic. One after another the features of the nightmare society he imagined in his futuristic novel nearly a half-century ago are appearing in our society today.

Consider, for example, Newspeak. The task of Orwell's government was to control its citizens. It did this by controlling their thoughts. This was easy with most citizens, who were happy to think only Politically Correct thoughts. Some citizens, however, were not as public-spirited as the rest: they insisted on thinking whatever they wanted to think, and the Thought Police were kept busy tracking them down. The government's solution to this problem was to limit the vocabulary of its citizens. Without words to represent disapproved ideas, the citizens would not be able to think dangerous thoughts. Therefore, the government began pruning Politically Incorrect words from the dictionary. Each new edition of the dictionary which appeared had fewer words than the previous one.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), the Jewish Thought Police organization commissioned to promote Political Correctness among the Gentiles, believes that Orwell's Newspeak is a wonderful idea. It has been working diligently to pressure the publishers of dictionaries into deleting disapproved words, starting with the word "jew" used as a verb.

The ADL scored a notable success recently when it persuaded Hasbro Inc., the company which makes the board game Scrabble, to purge as many as 100 "offensive" words from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. After the ADL publicly accused Hasbro of "literally playing games with hate," Hasbro agreed to delete words such as "wetback," "kike," "nigger," "lezzie," and a number of others.

The public reaction to the announcement of this shrinking of the Scrabble vocabulary has been less than encouraging. Instead of a cry of outrage from non-Jewish logophiles, there has been a rush by other favored segments of the population to have even more words tossed down the memory hole. Gypsies want the word "gyp" flushed, among others. Homosexuals want to get rid of a number of words besides "lezzie." The feminists, who already have succeeded in changing the rules of grammar, so that a pronoun no longer must agree in number with its antecedent, have a very long list of words they insist must go. Fundamentalist Christians--who are not even an officially favored minority--want all those awful words referring to the nastier parts of the human body and to bedroom activity deleted.

Hasbro is not happy about this development but says that it will consider carefully all requests for further deletions from the Scrabble dictionary.

It's not just White Americans and South Africans who are in a self-destructive mood: voters in Switzerland trooped to the polls on September 25 and voted obediently to give up their right to free speech, in the name of "anti-racism."

The government and the controlled media had argued that in order for Switzerland to play a more active role in the European Union and the United Nations, it was necessary to ban "racist" speech and writing. Swiss citizens, despite their reputed love of freedom and independence, let themselves be convinced, and 55 per cent of those who cast ballots voted for a government ban on any public expression which "injures human dignity" or which "justifies, denies, or minimizes acts of genocide." It is now forbidden in Switzerland for anyone to make a "racist" statement or to question in any way the official Jewish "Holocaust" myth. Forty-four percent of the eligible electorate participated in the voting.

Rosmarie Dormann, co-president of the "Yes to the Anti-Racism Law" committee which pushed hard for the new law, says she is satisfied that free-speech advocates have been silenced, but she is unhappy that 45 per cent of those who voted opposed giving up their freedom.

The anti-racism committee's other co-president, Sigi Feigel, a prominent Jewish lawyer in Zurich, also is unhappy. Feigel said that he is "full of consternation that almost half of the Swiss people have said no" to the ban, despite the barrage of very clever television and newspaper propaganda designed to help them "get it."

Feigel, Dormann, and other advocates of prison for Political Incorrectness are made uneasy by the fact that only 24 per cent of Switzerland's total electorate voted with them (i.e., 55 per cent of the 44 per cent turnout), and that those who voted were sharply divided between urban and rural parts of the country. The rural areas remained strongly in favor of freedom, while the cities--where virtually all of Switzerland's Jews and other minorities live--voted for repression.

Feigel, who also is a leading figure in Switzerland's Israeli Cultural Community, complained bitterly that Swiss voters also have failed to respond with sufficient enthusiasm to other measures he and the media have backed recently. This year they rejected two proposals he was especially eager to see adopted: one was to send Swiss troops on United Nations "peace keeping" missions abroad, and the other was to make it easier for the children of recent immigrants, most of them from the Third World, to become Swiss citizens. And in 1992 Swiss voters rejected a "free" trade proposal promoted by Feigel.

Feigel and his collaborators console themselves with the knowledge that, with their opponents silenced by the new ban on free speech, it will be easier for the media to bring the remaining Swiss voters into line and get other proposals approved.

 While the spotlight focused on the nation's capital city at least makes alert citizens aware of assaults on the Bill of Rights by the White House or the Congress, similar assaults at the state level often remain unnoticed by most of the citizens whose liberties they are intended to destroy. The unfortunate fact is that, as rotten as the gang in Washington is, the politicians at the state and local level usually are cut from the same cloth, and the same piper plays the tune to which they dance.

One of the principal Jewish lobbying organizations, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), has been especially successful in persuading state and local politicians to assist them in their efforts to silence and disarm Politically Incorrect Americans. A pet project of the ADL has been state "hate crime" laws.

The first stage of the ADL's "hate crime" campaign was to persuade legislators in a number of states to enact new laws drastically increasing the penalties for a wide range of crimes already on the books, if those crimes were motivated in part by what the ADL defines as "hate."

The next stage was to create a whole new class of crimes by criminalizing what the ADL calls "hate speech." In both stages the ADL has provided lawmakers with "model statutes" to be introduced into their respective legislatures, and legislators have been obedient tools in this program of subversion.

An example of a stage-two "model statute" is a bill introduced this year into the New Jersey Assembly (No. 1447, introduced March 7 by Assemblyman Roma, Republican). It provides for any "person who, in a public place, expresses ill will, hatred, or bias towards an individual or group of individuals because of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, with a purpose to incite any other person to commit a crime against such individual or group" to be imprisoned for up to 18 months. If the expression of ill will "causes, or is a contributive factor in causing, another person to commit a crime against an individual or group of individuals," then the person who expressed the ill will may be sentenced to as much as five years in the state penitentiary. The bill defines "public place" as "any place to which the public or any substantial group thereof has access."

Think what this means: A state college or university campus is a "public place." There already are laws in many states criminalizing discrimination against homosexuals in hiring. A professor or a student who states in a classroom that he believes that homosexual behavior is abhorrent and that homosexuals should not be hired as teachers has not only expressed "ill will . . . towards an individual or group of individuals because of . . . sexual orientation," but he has incited "other person[s] to commit a crime against such individual or group" by refusing to hire homosexuals for teaching positions. Whereas before he merely would have exposed himself to censure from his Politically Correct peers and perhaps to a demonstration by a shrieking, spitting mob of homosexuals, feminists, and Jews, under this new bill he can be thrown into prison for a year and a half. If someone who heard him make his remark later refuses to hire a homosexual, his term of imprisonment can be increased to five years.

Bills of this sort are becoming commonplace across the land, as legislators scramble to please their masters--and as the citizens who elected them acquiesce in such behavior rather than risk being considered unfashionable. Do such citizens really deserve to be free?

Our forefathers, who were free men, would have marched on Assemblyman Roma's office in fury and hanged him from the nearest lamppost. They deserved their freedom, unfashionable though they may have been.