The Communitarian "debate" between the Madville Times and the John Birch Society

This blog started as the ACL blog in 2003. Technically it still is, although I have made hundreds of posts unrelated to the ACL over the past nine years. Some of the top searches leading visitors here are "Why do people live in Alaska" and "Selling fur seal". I am a published author, I've also published hundreds of articles and research topic papers, but I blog too. What is the point of the whole "they're just a blogger" accusation that I hear more of these days?  I'm as connected to the posts I make on my blog as any articles or books I've written, and I have come to find many blogs well worth my time in my exhaustive research endeavor. What a shame that we have allowed a blanket dismissal of what has proven itself to be a wealth of knowledge and insightful perspectives, from so many viewpoints.

 

Because I have scoured the internet for over a decade doing keyword searches for the word "communitarian" on every website I visit, and spent easily a thousand hours doing google searches for variations of the term, I found an article recently posted at the Madville Times where the term was used. This pro-communitarian author not only used the term communitarianism, he chastised the John Birchers for their paranoid use of the word communitarianism.  This is his opening graph, leaving no doubt as to the purpose of the coming article:

 

"The Agenda 21 nutfest rolls on. The local John Birchers (under the guise of "Northern Hills Patriots") are wasting the Whitewood City Council's valuable time with their propaganda campaign to make every vaguely progressive public project or expenditure sound like a Marxist United Nations plot. Spearfish conspiratist Bill Nachitilo asked Whitewood councilors last week to adopt a resolution rejecting any policies or money related to the United Nations effort he and his pals imagine is afoot to take away our lives, liberty, and property." http://madvilletimes.com/2012/08/local-birchers-harass-whitewood-council-with-agenda-21-harangues/

 I think it's only fair to let my readers know what I wrote on that blog, since some are fans and/or members of the JBS. It's also important to me now that I make a very clear distinction between our ACL research and the John Birch Society. I wrote about how the JBS is using my research in their publications without attribution in the revision to 2020, but I didn't explain the exact difference between our views until I wrote it in the comments I made at the Madville Times.

 

Here's why I commented:

 

There's no fixing some political madness. But I want to take issue with just one tiny sliver of NHP's madness. In their deep study of unicorns, Nachatilo and his obsessive cohorts have determined that "'Communitarianism' refers to the community being superior over individual rights." {lbid}

 Who exactly are Nachatilo's "obsessive chorts"? I don't know Nachatilo, but he is quoting our thesis that LA21 Communitarianism means the community is "superior over individual rights."  This is our original theory of the Communitarian philosophy that's driving Agenda 21. Nobody else has done the same research we did or came to this conclusion before us. The JBS writers "leading" the fight against Agenda 21 ten years ago refused to even use the term in their publications. We were completely ostracized from the right wing "freedom" movement because we used the word!

 

I had to go look up Nachatilo and see what and who the Mad writer was referring to. There's nothing on Nachatilo's site with the word "Communitarian." http://www.northernhillspatriots.com/?s=communitarian So how did he become associated with the term? I had to go read the article cited in the piece by Jason Gross, a writer for The Black Hills Pioneer, who wrote:

 

"Nachatello said students of Agenda 21 have categorized three key areas:

*“Social equity” is based on social justice, which is about redistribution of wealth;

*“National sovereignty” is perceived as a social injustice, and open borders are favored; and

*“Communitarianism” refers to the community being superior over individual rights." http://www.bhpioneer.com/local_news/article_a2cd4312-ee3b-11e1-ba64-001a4bcf887a.html

 

 

What "students?" Why did Nachatilo include our original thesis in his summary as if it was a collective effort by some vague, un-named group of students working for the JBS/Right Wing opposition to Agenda 21? We're not JBS, we're not Right wing, we never have been, and we're certainly not students anymore, good grief. With what we've published and how many people we've taught about communitarianism, we're experts in this topic now.

 

Why did the Madville writer make a direct association between the "key area" called "communitarianism" with the John Birch Society? Maybe because the Northern Hills Patriots have the JBS magazine, The New American, listed on their website:

Special Web Links

Nothern Hills Patriots Website: http://www.northerhillspatriots.com/
Citizens for Liberty -Rapid city: www.sdcitizens.com/events/group-events/rapid-city-tax-day-tea-party/
Tea Party Express: http://www.teapartyexpress.org/
Human Events: GunsandPatriots@email.humanevents.com
Heritage Foundaton-Morning Bell morningbell@heritage.org
The New Americaqn News Magazine: http://www.thenewamerican.com/
Political Math http://www.politicalmath.com/index.php
Contact Info: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
National Review: www.nationalreview.com/articles/262205/obamacare-marches-michael-tanner

 

The JBS never published any original research about Communitarianism (unless Berit Kjos or Jerri Lynn Ball are JBS). They cannot show how they came to the conclusion that it's the philosophy behind Agenda 21. We have, and we can.  Yet the JBS never linked to our research, and we were never invited to speak or participate in any of their "Freedom" events. I contacted them more than once over the years since they were such a major component in the Sustainable Development arena, but like the Libertarians, they refused to use the term communitarianism and for the most part refused to acknowledge our work even existed. Not that we wanted to go to their "liberty" fests or join their "Freedom" clubs, but after a few years it became obvious that there was some kind of a club of people studying Agenda 21, and we were not in it. In the past few years many new websites have popped up all over the internet claiming to be "experts" on Agenda 21, but not ONE of them produced any original research on communitariansm that tied it to Agenda 21. 99 out of a 100 never even used the term, and the majority excluded our links from their source and reference lists.

 

Napa, California anti-communitarian Kevin Eggers told me he attended a JBS meeting last year and not one of the twenty members present had heard of it. But every article recently that's written anything about the local opposition to Agenda 21 that mentions the word communitarianism in their piece, directly associates the term with the John Birch Society.

 

So why, now that Agenda 21 has caused such a commotion across America, is the JBS being given all the credit for our contributions to understanding the philosophy behind Agenda 21? Because the JBS leads everyone right back into the dialectic by telling people it's "basically communism." This retreat into the outdated 50s dialectic gives the other "side" of the phony dialectical debate a target they can easily ridicule and dismiss. By associating communitarianism with the JBS and their Right Wing definition, it keeps any discussion of what Communitarianism really is out of the conversation altogether. Most American "patriot" sites continue to rail against the system by calling it communism or socialism, but that's slowly changing right before my eyes. I think we can expect to see the word communitarianism used more and more, but it'll keep being dismissed as a JBS unicorn study.

 

Our position in the debate was challenged by the Maddies and I was personally attacked as being a self-inflated egotist because I insisted my research gives me a position of authority on the anti communitarian position. I was told I'm not the "only anti communitarian researcher" and that there are many others. That would be good news, if it were true. But the facts don't support it. The only "students of Agenda 21" who categorized it as a Communitarian Program are at the ACL. Anyone else who writes that is using our research. The only students of Agenda 21 who wrote an original thesis disputing Communitarianism and Agenda 21 are at the ACL. 

 

We wrote the only published Manifesto against Communitarianism. We always acknowledged and referenced anything we used from Jerri Ball, but our work is very different from hers (Kevin assures me Jerri has changed her view of it since she last published Time Bomb in 2002). Constance Cumbey is another writer who has published some articles about it and uses it in her tag line, but the only published works that focus opposition on The Communitarian Network and the guru Amitai Etzioni are at the ACL, or originated from the ACL. The only extensive lists of published papers and original opposition research on International and EU Communitarian Law is at the ACL. The law is another piece that most anti Agenda 21 writers ignore, and I still get emails telling me crazy things like EU Communitarian Law evolved organically and has nothing to do with Agenda 21! 

 

The LAST thing the dialectical players want any of us to know is that there is no official "communist law," and there is no official "socialist law," but there is definitely an official law called "communitarian law."  So okay, you get to learn the word Communitarian now, the controlled right have to use it because Rosa Koire let the cat out of the bag, but you can't know what it is, and all left wing rebuttals will be against the JBS. Now that's what I'd call a nutfest too.

 

I'm going to make a new section at the ACL website called Plagiarizers and Disinfo Experts. If you're one of the many people who have stolen my words and written them as if they were your own, if you're one of those plagiarizers who ignored my email requests to remove it from your site, this is your last warning to take it down off the internet and pull every hardcopy publication you put out that reproduced our original research without proper attribution or acknowledgement. We made our work freely available because we wanted to share it. "Share" is the keyword. We never gave up copyright.