Is U.S. Policy in Afghanistan Doomed?

Politico provides an account of a State Department election night “party” in Kabul’s U.S. embassy.  The author, May Jeong, explains “State Department employees, who are officially barred from political activism while living abroad but tend to support Democrats.”  As proof he reports, “On the wall hung a Donald Trump piñata.”  He reports a change in the party’s atti  The article explains the role of Scott Guggenheim, “senior adviser” to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.  He describes Guggenheim as, “one of the most powerful people in the country.”  Guggenheim has worked with Ghani since 2002.  Ghani and Guggenheim are member of the same elite.  Ghani is described as “former academic whose lifelong passion has been studying how to fix broken countries.”  Guggenheim spent the first half of his career as an international development expert.  They attended some of the same schools and both worked for the World Bank.

tude when it became clear that Trump was going to win the election.

Jeong claims that Guggenheim’s “sympathies run far closer to Afghanistan than the United States” and that he “often slips into the collective possessive pronoun—our country, our people—and refers just as reflexively to ‘you Americans.’”  He sees Afghanistan as a victim of modernizing struggles.  Apparently he believes in the “Noble Savage Theory.”  He attributes Afghanistan’s trouble to the result of British colonialism.  “What the British achieved was turning one of the oldest civilizations into warring tribes.”  The problem with this theory is that most of Afghanistan’s problems preceeded the British invasion.  The United Nations Development Program rates Afghanistan one of the worst countries in the world to be born female.  The sexual abuse of children is long standing characteristic of Afghan culture. “The practice is called bacha bazi, literally ‘boy play,’ and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene.” 

One of Guggenheim’s major duties is to act as Afghanistan’s informal ambassador to the world of foreign donors who fund most of the country’s budget.  Approximately 70 percent of the Afghan government’s budget since the 2001 has been supplied by foreign donors.  Guggenheim asked,  “Is the Parliament of Afghanistan really representative of the country, or is it a bunch of warlords dividing up national rent? This is what American foreign policy in Afghanistan has created. The institutions they built up are deeply corrupt.”  There are billions of taxpayer dollars circulating through Afghanistan.  One example is the $43 million ($42.7 million, to be exact) spent to build a compressed natural gas station in Afghanistan. Naturally this figure was disputed when the cost became public.  Critics claim the true cost was somewhere between $5 million and $10 million.  This is not a very precise figure for a facility that would cost no more than $500,000 in neighboring Pakistan.

Guggenheim views Afghanistan as an American experiment.  He was attracted to the job there by “the promise of the early years.”  He saw Afghanistan as a “modern society that would catch up to regional success stories like India or Iran.”  After emerging from decades of civil war and misrule it offered a country-sized laboratory.  Afghanistan was a chance to implement some of the theories Guggenheim and Ghani had “discussed during countless conversations at weddings, backyard swims and garden parties across decades.”  Progressives believed that a vote for Ghani was “a vote for progress, for reform, for equality, for human rights, and a sense of Afghanistan joining the rest of the world.”  Guggenheim described his vision: “What I’d like to see is countries with deep historical legacies, that are struggling, pull it off.  Some sense that they will finally get their act together and they are going to be democratic and there is going to be basic freedoms. Kids can go to a movie theater and not worry about being blown up, that sort of thing. I’m still a deep idealist on those scores.”  This would have been a prefect time for Mr. Guggenheim to break out in song: “You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one.  I hope some day you’ll join us And the world will live as one.”  But how many eggs will be required to make this omelet?

The people implementing U.S. policy in Afghanistan will have to put away their piñata and deal with the Afghan people for what they are.  They will not be holding any “gay” pride parades in Kabul in the near future.  The United States is providing billions to support an admittedly corrupt government yet this government is giving away mining rights to Chinese companies.  Guggenheim appears to be coming to the realization that the theories formulated at “weddings, backyard swims and garden parties across decades” may not be practical.  He declared, “What you are doing is doomed.  But isn’t that the story of life? And so, you do it anyway.”  Jeong described this as “sardonic wit.”  It is a type of wit that goes over well at garden parties but not in foxholes.  He should not try out his wit on the mothers of soldiers who have returned to the U.S. in body bags.  The elite has a different sense of humor.

Surely some revelation is at hand

Well it seems that things are falling apart, the centre is not holding.  There are those on the left who will not abandon the “dossier” fiasco.  As late as October 7, 2017 the Guardian described it as “one of the most explosive documents in modern political history.”  This “dossier” was an obvious fraud and no one in the intelligence community believed otherwise.  People who claimed it might possibly have value were deceiving the public. They did this because it was the only thing they had to justify an investigation of the Donald Trump campaign.  According to the Wall Street Journal the dossier “became a factor in Obama administration decisions to launch an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.”

This batch of memos was circulated through the media and intel community for months when BuzzFeed published the full document in January 2017.  As long as it was not public it could be vaguely referred to in order to support the charge that Trump was owned by the Russians.  Once it was published it because obvious that it was a fraud.  This is revealed on the first page.  No experienced intelligence officer would classify a Sensitive Source as Confidential.  If he did he would be looking for a new job or possibly be behind bars.   

The other implausible claim in the document concerns the “golden shower” allegations.  4Chan, an imageboard website, has claimed responsibility for this hoax.  Under the circumstances 4Chan has as much or more credibility than the former heads of three of the major intel agencies.  They have not perjured themselves in front of the U.S. Congress.  Their claim is that they mailed this “fanfiction” to Rick Wilson, a noted Never Trumper. They claim that Wilson then gave it to the CIA. In October 2016 Wilson on the Jamie Weinstein Show claimed “there are some things out there that I think would cause even his most passionate supporters to go, ‘Whoa, wait a minute.'”  It appears that he was hinting that he had some privileged information.

This would all be a very humorous incident except for the fact that the “dossier” was used for such a nefarious purpose.  Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, stated  “It’s so ridiculous on so many levels. Clearly, the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping that the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.”  C. Mitchell Shaw claimed, “the dossier does not read like the product of ‘a former British intelligence operative.’”  He continued, “With its bad grammar, poor spelling, and lousy format, the dossier reads much more like what the anonymous 4Chan user claims: a prank that wound up being wildly successful beyond anything its perpetrators could have hoped.”  Even Piers Morgan commented, “The moment I heard about it, my gut reaction was that it was utter nonsense.”

Eventually the details about these memos will be revealed.  We live in a new age.  Dan Rather found this out when he attempted to pass off a computer generated memo hr claimed was created in the 1970s.  San Francisco professor Eric Clanton discover that wearing a mask would not prevent him from being identified when he used a bike lock to assault a man.  All of the electronic communications dealing with these memos are available. The chain of acquisition is on the internet. The only thing lacking is the willingness to find them.  Secretary of the Interior Zinke claims that one third of the Interior Department’s employees are disloyal to the President.  The intel community may contain an even higher number of employees who do not want to see the President succeed.  They will not be enthusiastic about uncovering information they feel would benefit the President.  Perhaps they need a new team to discover the origins of these memos.

“Crackas with Attitude” appears to have the aptitude to do the research.  This is a British group and not Russian.  They were able to hack into the email accounts of CIA Director Brennan, Director of National Intelligence Clapper, FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Johnson. When they hacked CIA director John Brennan's AOL account they discovered a number of classified documents which were later published on WikiLeaks as well as the Social Security numbers of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials.  The British eventually arrested the 16 year old youth.

It has now been revealed that the DNC paid Steele for his efforts.  The Washington Post reported that, “After the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia.”  It is only a matter of time before all the details of the “dossier” affair are revealed to the public.

Former Secretaries of State advise U.S. Ambassador to U.N.

The New York Times recently reported on a conference in New York City attended by Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, former Secretaries of State, and Nikki Haley, the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N.  It was a discussion of American leadership sponsored by President Bush’s presidential center.  The Times reported that during a panel discussion the cabinet veterans “sought to school” Haley “on the importance of the State Department budget, the threat posed by Russia, the best way to reform the United Nations and the virtues of nation building, international trade and a free press.”  Ambassador Haley may need some schooling but it should not come from the people who created the current problems facing the U.S.  The Times went on to say “they offered an establishment tutorial on statecraft” claiming that the current administration had “disdained the very notion.”  One of the more perceptive comments made by the Times writer was, “it felt like a deposed order seeking to influence the revolutionaries who toppled it.”

Madeleine Albright advised Haley that, “Nation building is not a four-letter word.” She did not elaborated on the many nations that were successfully built during her tenure in the Clinton administration.  Albright is also famous for telling reporter Lesley Stahl in response to a question about sanctions causing the death of half a million children, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”  Albright also stated, “I think also that we have to be very protective of our press.”  This was a veiled criticism of the Trump administrations battle with the press.  Perhaps the best way to protect the press is to point out where it is distorting the truth in the hope that it will be more accurate.  Albright also offered advice on how to deal with the United Nations.  Funding for the international body is in jeopardy because of frequently its bizarre decisions.  The U.N.’s World Health Organization recently had to back down on its decision to appoint President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a "goodwill ambassador.”  Condoleezza Rice stressed international cooperation and mentioned the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural organization.  Rice was President Bush’s national security adviser in 2002 when the United States rejoined UNESCO.

The Times claims the discussion was overshadowed by a speech by President Bush “that sounded like a rebuke of President Trump and the forces that brought him to power.” CNN described this as “a major smackdown on Trumpism.”  This was a break from tradition and contrary to Bush’s own stated policy which he described in 2009 when President Obama took office: “There's plenty of critics in the arena. I think it's time for the ex-president to tap dance off the stage and let the current president have a go at solving the world's problems."

This conference brought together Republicans and Democrats in what the Times called “almost like a meeting of the exiled bipartisan order, sharing their anxiety about Mr. Trump’s leadership in the world.”  Rice and Albright encouraged Haley to resist President Trump’s proposal to slash the State Department budget.  Rice noted that “fighting AIDS, supporting women’s groups and financing election monitoring go a long way toward advancing American interests.”  She did not mention the State Department’s LGBT ambassador program which has not been popular on the African continent.  She did not mention the $5 million order for custom crystal wine glasses from a democratic campaign donor.  Some hand blown crystal retail for up to $85-per-wine glass.  The State Department also spent 4.5 Million for Embassy art, when it had no money for Benghazi security.

An attack on the Trump administration would not be complete without a mention of the claim that Russia put Trump in the White House.  Rice, described as “a longtime Russia scholar” said the intervention was “highly sophisticated.”  Being a longtime Russian scholar, she must know.  In an election that cost approximately $6.6 billion the Russians spent approximately $100,000 on Facebook ads.  If that swung an election it was truly highly sophisticated.  She could not be referring to the soon to be completely discredited “dossier.”  The truth about this “dossier” will prove to be a major embarrassment to many people and will further diminish to credibility of the press.

Ambassaor Haley also said, “When a country can come interfere in another country’s elections, that is warfare.”  She said this with a straight face apparently not realizing the irony.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing).  He has a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from St. Mary’s University.  He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Book Review - Sheryl Attkisson’s The Smear

Sheryl Attkisson’s, The Smear, gives insight to how news is made today.  It goes a long way in convincing readers that they should believe only a small portion of what is released by the government and reported by the press.  This leads to a very cynical view of the news and confirms Otto von Bismarck’s claim that "Nothing is proven until it is officially denied."  Attkinsson gives an account of how massive the smear industry is.  My only criticism of the book is her contention that, “the organized political smear entered the contemporary marketplace circe 1987.”  Some of these smear techniques can probably be found in a study of politics in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur.  The “scientific" smear might be traced back to George Creel’s World War I Committee on Public Information or Edward Bernays 1920s book Propaganda.  She also appears to attribute the advice “Admit nothing” to the CIA.  This is a classic Communist technique.  Dozens of Communist spies had denied their connection to the Communist party and have been believed by the gullible for decades.  She mentions the “infamous senator Joseph McCarthy.” who was the victim of an extremely effective smear campaign.  She might benefit from reading M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History.  Few people could survive the scrutiny and smear campaign Senator McCarthy was subjected to.

Her account of Larry Flynt’s reward for information on Congressional extramarital affairs was revealing.  Just how many Congressmen have nothing to hide and cannot be blackmailed?  The government undoubtedly has an incredible amount of information on every American.  Representative Maxine Waters revealed that President Obama had a database “that no one has ever seen before.”  Presumably he took this with him when he left the White House.  We know the FRI spied on Martin Luther King.  With the power of modern computers virtually everything can be recorded and stored in a database that is on a 1.5 million square foot facility in Utah.  Data collection is only one area that government officials have lied to Congress and the public about.  James Clapper, James Comey and John Brennan have all perjured themselves in Congressional testimony.

Smears are promoted by both the left and right.  However, considering the left has almost total control of the “commanding heights” of our society, they have an distinct advantage.  It is truly amazing that Donald Trump was elected president in the face of opposition from the media, academia, government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and a large portion of the Republican Party.  Attkinsson reveals the role of “non-profit” organizations in the smear industry.  She specifically mentions David Brock’s compensation which numbers in the millions.

Donald Trump’s victory has increased the need of the left to limit the amount of information available to the public.  The effort to eliminate “fake news” is a project led by people like Barack Obama, David Brock, Mark Zuckerberg, Angela Merkel and countless other members if the establishment.  Attkisson points out the problem with restricting news: “it relies on some of the very organizations that have gotten caught in compromising situations.”  Some of the people responsible for determining what is “fake news” might have a problem.  Anita Kahane, a former Stasi agent and social activist, may have a problem with being objective. As Attkisson says, “those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

The internet has made it extremely difficult to spread fake news.  Dan Rather learned this when he attempted to pass off a memo that he claimed was created in the 1970s.  It was immediately recognized as a fake because it was created with a computer font that did not exist at the time.  The “dossier” claiming to show Trump connection with the Russians is similarly an obvious fake.  It is amazing that people in the intelligence community can get away with claiming that it might be accurate.  The first page of the dossier is classified “Sensitive Source - Confidential.”  You do not have to be an intelligence expert to know that sensitive sources are never classified confidential.  A school teacher might try an experiment with a class of 6th graders.  After a brief lesson on classification have them produce a document containing a “sensitive source.”  It is unlikely that any of these children would label the document “Confidential.”

Nostalgia Merchants Vindicated – Part 1: African Americans

The nostalgia merchants sell an appealing Norman Rockwell-like picture of American life half a century ago, one in which every household was made up of stable parents, two kids, a dog, and a cat who all lived in a house with a manicured lawn and a station wagon in the driveway.  I understand that nostalgia.  I feel it myself when the world seems too much to take. - Hillary Clinton

The controversy about the 1950s has been rekindled by an article two law professors, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer.   They decry the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture and suggest that this has resulted in increase opioid abuse, homicidal violence, out of wedlock births and a general decline in human capital.  They describe these bourgeois values as:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They explain that, “These basic cultural precepts . . . could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities.”  However, they are being accused of being “white supremacists” and their jobs have been threatened.  Of course they have not come out and blatantly suggested whites are superior.  They are using a “dog whistle.”  The University of San Diego dean called their article, “an unapologetic paean to segregationist era America.”

Hillary continued, “There were many good things about our way of life back then.  But in reality, our past was not so picture-perfect.”   The elite concentrate on these not so picture-perfect aspects.  James Bowman wrote about the trend among historians to scrutinize the social institutions of the 1950s: “The idea is to show us how, when you rip away the Ozzie-and-Harriet facade of that decade, you reveal beneath it an ugly scene of domestic mayhem that goes far toward explaining why the phrase ‘family values’ inspires only derisive laughter among the elite.”    Newsweek magazine commented, “the `50s fantasy of mom and dad and 2.2 kids went the way of phonograph records and circle pins.”   Historian David Halberstam explained, “One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-fine later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.”

Hillary tells us to “ask African-American children who grew up in a segregated society” how perfect the 50s were, implying that they were far from perfect.  As it happens, prominent Black American have written about their experiences growing up in the segregated South.  While conditions were far from ideal, they were not as dire as progressives would portray them. 

Margaret Bush Wilson, former chairman of the NAACP, reported "I grew up in a ghetto in Saint Louis, but it was a safe and clean ghetto, if you can imagine that.  We had hardworking families living there.  We had a doctor, a lawyer, a bricklayer and a drunk on the same street.  But now those neighborhoods are gone.  Hardworking parents are losing control of their children.  The church and the family have deteriorated.  There is blood in the street.” 

Ralph Abernathy, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, described the life of his childhood in almost nostalgic terms.  His father, he said, was a farmer, “but unlike some of our neighbors, black and white, we were not struggling to survive on a patch of hard-scrabble land.  My father owned approximately five hundred acres of good, black soil.  To get ahead, he did three things: worked as hard as he possibly could; led a severely disciplined and sober life; and married well. . .

(He believed) in righteousness and self-reliance . . .  In a rural area where land was available to people who were willing to work for it, it was possible for a few blacks to enjoy both freedom and a kind of equality - one based on mutual respect and a certain standoffishness.  (In the 1980s,) as I encounter these tragic young faces (of poor blacks) all over the country, I remember the faces of my brothers and sisters and cousins of half century ago.  The faces I recall are not as bitter and hopeless as the ones I see today, if only because my father and the other adults in my family understood that economic independence, our ultimate freedom and salvation, was achievable.”

Black columnist William Raspberry recalls that a young man killed in a motorcycle accident was “the only contemporary of ours to die of any cause” during his late teens and early twenties (in the 1950s and ‘60s) Raspberry’s own middle-class children, in contrast, could name half a dozen deaths among their acquaintances, including several murders.  Conditions in poor black neighborhoods, of course, are far worse.

Today more Black Americans are murdered by other Black on a yearly bases than all of the Blacks lynched during an 87 year period.  Yet there is little protest. 

A CNN Exclusive

CNN has come up with an “Exclusive”:  Special Investigator Mueller’s team has met with the Russian dossier author, Christopher Steele.  CNN is the network whose former head, Eason Jordan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The News We Kept to Ourselves.”  In it he explained how CNN intentionally distorts the news.  CNN has “learned” that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community took the Steele dossier more seriously than they publicly acknowledged.  No more reliable anonymous sources.  They just “learned” it.  The claim that people of average or above average IQ took the “dossier” seriously is amusing.  Even Vice President Joe Biden recognized it as a fraud.   In January 2017 James Clapper claimed the intelligence community had "not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable."

CNN claimed, “the CIA, and the FBI took Steele's research seriously enough that they kept it out of a publicly-released January report on Russian meddling in the election in order to not divulge which parts of the dossier they had corroborated and how.”  If the information in this “dossier” is true, someone very close to Vladimir Putin is in serious trouble.    The article continued, “While the most salacious allegations in the dossier haven't been verified, its broad assertion that Russia waged a campaign to interfere in the election is now accepted as fact by the US intelligence community.”  Originally all 17 intel agencies agreed to this.  This was repeated ad nauseam.  Later it was revealed that only three agencies had agreed.  These three agencies were headed by known perjurers. 

The repetition technique has been very successful.  Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, stated "The committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like, who paid for it? Who are your sources and sub-sources?"  One has only to look at this collection of memos to know they are bogus.  The article concludes the “Committee (is) still searching for 'any hint of collusion.”  The House, the Senate, the intel agencies, a special prosecutor and thousands of reporters hoping to make a name for themselves have been searching for any “hint.” So far we have nothing.

James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan (all perjurers) knew this “dossier” was fake.  You don’t have to be an intel expert to know that “Sensitive Source” is never classified “Confidential.”  This is on the first page of the dossier and is a dead giveaway.  Joe Biden even recognized it as nonsense.  The FBI does “not divulge which parts of the dossier they had corroborated and how.”  If there was anything to reveal it would have been leaked already.  See the “dossier” yourself (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html).

We were constantly informed of how expensive Ken Starr’s investigation was.  If these shysters are charging $500 an hour they need to be investigated. They will have to come up with something to justify picking the lock to someone’s house and doing a KGB style raid.  Cardinal Richelieu said, “If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men I will find something in them with which to hang him.”  If they have access to Obama’s database they have the power to have people make false claims.  They have already revealed that committing perjury is not a problem for deep state members.

During this pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort’s home the FBI entered with their guns drawn catching the Manaforts asleep in their beds.  This may be standard operation procedure when serving a warrant.  Searching Mrs. Manafort for weapons in her nightgown may also be required procedure.  But why the “pre-dawn” raid.  This is reminiscent of the Gestapo or KGB.  Solomon L. Wisenberg, deputy independent counsel in the investigation that led to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton remarked, “They are setting a tone. It’s important early on to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled.”  Jimmy Gurulé, a Notre Dame law professor claimed, “This is more consistent with how you’d go after an organized crime syndicate.”

Did anyone die as a result of Mr. Manafort’s activities?  Perhaps Mueller’s resources would be better spent if he were to investigate Eric Holder’s role in Fast and Furious.   There are numerous examples of incidents needing investigation from the Obama administration.  Benghazi and the IRS scandal are just two of the many questionable occurrences.

Adios Columbus

The controversy surrounding the Columbus Day holiday is part of a culture war that includes the removal of Confederate monuments and the NFL protests.  Columbus Day is being renamed Indigenous People's Day in many locations.  The battles being fought over Columbus Day are already being fought over Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.  The very foundation of America is under assault.  Many powerful elite organizations are taking part in this attack and have been for decades.

The American Library Association issued a statement in 1990 denouncing the Columbus Jubilee.  They claimed the 1492 event “began a legacy of European piracy, brutality, slave trading, murder, disease, conquest, and ethnocide.”  The National Council of Churches passed a resolution condemning Columbus for invading America and inflicting "slavery, genocide, theft, and exploitation" on the natives.  The National Education Association’s journal, NEA Today, declared “Christopher Columbus brought slavery to this hemisphere.”  Journalist Richard Bernstein attended the 1987 convention of the American Historical Association.  He reported,   "The unvarying underlying themes were the repressiveness inherent in American life and the sufferings of groups claiming to be victims of that repressiveness.  ... The history of the United States was the history of suffering for all but the white establishment."  This critical outlook is reflected in the National Standards for U.S. and World History.

A major factor in binding a society together is a shared history.  To Americans, the Alamo is an example of heroism.  Mexicans have another view.  Heroes play an important part in a nations history.  Heroes, being human, have many flaws.  Therefore much of the accounts of their lives are based on myths.  The story of Columbus has traditionally been embellished and his flaws have been overlooked.  We are now confronting the opposite situation.  Many American heroes have undergone this transition.  People still require heroes (role models) and unfortunately many of these new heroes and rap singers, drug pushers or sports figures.

The attack on Columbus can be put in a larger context.  We are witnessing an all out assault on our culture.  The arguments used in the attack on Columbus can be used to attack the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and other holidays.  This attack is being led by members of our own “elite.”   Members of the media, academia, government bureaucracy, entertainers and even businessmen have joined in on this attack. 

Perhaps the most damaging attacks take place in the classroom.  Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley wrote, "When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples.”  She continued, "We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well." Bill Bigelow of the Zinn Education Project proclaimed, "If Indigenous peoples’ lives mattered, and if Black people’s lives mattered, it would be inconceivable to honor Columbus, the father of the slave trade, with a national holiday."  James Kracht from Texas A&M College of Education believes, "The indigenous population was kind of waiting expectantly (with the arrival of Columbus), almost with smiles on their faces.” Kracht envisioned them saying, "'I wonder what this guy is bringing us?' Well, he's bringing us smallpox, for one thing, and none of us are going to live very long."