Webinar on Communitarianism April 13, 2013

Our first webinar on Communitarianism is on April 13, 2013, at 2:30 to 4:30 PM Alaska Time. Enrollment for each class is limited to 10. The cost is 40.00 USD, payment accepted via paypal only. Email registration requests to nikiraapana@gmail.com. Make your reservation today! Scholarships available.

http://nikiraapana.enterthemeeting.com/m/A14ZH1UN

Opposition to Agenda 21 is not just a Right Wing agenda

Over the past few years we've seen a rising swell of opposition against Agenda 21 in the United States. It's becoming harder for Americans to not see that something is very wrong in America. We've also seen our book orders triple in the last few months, and a huge percentage of the orders are coming from the UK and the EU. People are catching on to the hidden nature of the plan, and seeking information at a level that almost gives me a renewed sense of hope.

There are hundreds of new websites and articles about Agenda 21 flooding the internet. While some are innacurate, borrow heavily from other people's research and provide no new information, the good news is, they're not all conservatives. The opposition to the big lie is not only coming from Christian and Right Wing perspectives; just one "Democrat" site opened the whole topic up to a general audience uncomfortable with the idea of aligning themselves with the Eagle Forum and the John Birch Society.  Lucky for all of us, that one Democrat site uses the term "Communitarianism" to define the political theory driving Agenda 21 and all Sustainable Development around the world. Lucky for us, Rosa Koire still links to our websites and many people have found the ACL via her. Because of our low-key approach and our aversion to advertising ourselves, and because the JBS and their network of Christian affiliates do not even mention our work (even when they use it in their articles), there is no one in the "information war" who knows what Communitarianism is, or if they do know, they aren't willing to take the time to explain it properly.

We are not Right Wing Christians and there were very few Christian writers I was willing to cite at the ACL ten years ago when we built the website. In fact I purposely avoided republishing any of the religious views thinking that was unecessary and clouded the issue. I provided links to religious people I thought were offering good research, and included in those lists were several I have since learned to distrust. It's okay, it's all part of the learning process that this kind of work requires, and our attachments to people and dialectical pieces are sometimes very deeply held and unbreakable. Especially when it comes to relgion. So I avoided it, wanting to leave something for people to hold on to and find out more about their own beliefs on their own. Today I see communitarianism is the global religion, and my next book is exploring the expanding communitarian religion, and all the churches embracing it, in detail. It's the final key to putting the whole plan into perspective, and as painful as it may be for some people to pull back this final veil, it has to be written.

Our original thesis poses that Communitarianism is the final synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic. But that means nothing to the average reader. Hegel confuses people with Master's degrees who read Hegel in college. Our first Hegel Communitarian tutorial was designed for my father, a US Army soldier who had no formal exposure to dialectial reasoning. We later laid out our argument so that Dr. Amitai Etzioni and the Communitarian Network, who we were calling out for a public debate, could follow precisely how we arrived at our conclusion in The Anti Communitarian Manifesto.
Part 1 went online in December 2002, and Part 2 was completed in spring 2003. We started at the upper academic level because that's where the only "debates" were taking place.

Over the years I tried hundreds of ways to explain it to the laymen who begged us for a "simple" explanation.  I'm still trying, and my new approach is the 30 second flash card:

The confusion about what the term "communitarianism" actually means continues. That's why any beginner to the topic needs to know right up front that Communitarianism was designed to confuse us. We're not ever supposed to understand it. It's considered as, "most notable for its vagueness."

The new ACL website will have a beginner series of articles about Communitarianism and several new topic sections.  After 14 years of studying and writing about Communitarianism, after a few years in the social networks meeting like-minded folks and some not so like minded, I'm ready to take ACL research to the next level, and put our information into the "game."  And so is Nordica, without whom there would be no ACL, and no new ACL Books site. It should be going up in the next couple days. I'll let you know when it's up.

Communitarianism? shhhhhh

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. 

Is Palin Responsible?

Keep running into online forums with arguments raging about Sarah Palin's responsibility for the assault/murder on the Giffords. I'm looking for good citations for the Community Policing chapter, but staying focused is a real challenge today. Americans are so into arguing over things which they cannot prove exist. They argue over things that haven't even happened yet. Since so many Americans insist I'm a nut job and a conspiracy theorist (and this is not surprising when I read how my "supporters" post links to my blog from some places...ergh), then you'd think the topic of communitarianism would fit nicely into the American psyche.

When does the huge American argument over theoretical Communitarianism begin?

Book Reviews
http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/documents/D69_000.pdf

D69. "Banding Together," The Times Literary Supplement, (July 14, 2000), p. 9.
(Elizabeth Frazer, The Problems of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict.)

by Amitai Etzioni

Third Way political ideology--that is at least in part communitarian--is an amalgam of three elements. While it rejects both statism and unfettered markets, it seeks a carefully crafted balance between the government and the private sector, surely not to eliminate either. The third element is the community.

Professor Frazer, in a key passage of her new, important book, summarizes the communitarian perspective as follows: "The state-society formulation altogether should become a community; power and authority that has been accrued by individuals on the one hand, and the state and its bureaucratic agencies on the other, should be given back to the 'community.'" A good part of her book is dedicated to showing that such an approach, as reflected in reliance on community action, community policing, and "caring," is profoundly misguided.

At first one may be puzzled by this mischaracterization of the communitarian position by a distinguished political theorist. This puzzle only deepens when one notes that the book openly challenges the intellectual assumptions that undergird the Blair government, which obviously has been both nurturing the market and making some rather liberal use of the state. (If any element has been a bit neglected by Blair, it is the third partner, the community). What makes Frazer's thesis even more surprising is that the book as a whole constitutes a carefully laid out, responsible, even respectful critique of communitarian politics, without any crocodile tears, old left bellyaching, or simplistic ideological slogans ( "end inequality").

The enigma is unraveled as one reads on and realizes that Frazer is, up to a point, correct. There are some--who might be called "utopian communitarians"--who write as if one could center a future society on community action, These writers include Dick Atkinson (and to much lesser extent Henry Tam) in the UK, and Harry Boyte in the USA, all cited by Frazer as evidence. Moreover, other communitarians--who argue that communities can and should play a much larger role in our life--have left themselves open to the criticism that they care little about the two other sectors. If one, though, looks beyond a few authors and matters of emphasis, one finds that communitarian politics is essentially aiming to develop a judicious balance among the three partners; it does not wish away the government (and hence "politics") nor the market in a kind of end-of-history Marxist fantasia.

In the same vein, communitarians' call for greater reliance on community is meant to rearrange the societal division of labor, not to eliminate the other partners. For instance, greater reliance on self-help groups and other forms of community-based caring often cited by Frazer, may ease the burden on the National Health Service, and more generally on the welfare state--but obviously cannot replace either. Likewise, community policing may ease and improve the work of the police but surely cannot substitute for it. Above all, community action cannot substitute for local, let alone national and international, politics. On the contrary, community action is the place citizens gain the know-how and experience essential for meaningful political participation.

I should no longer delay disclosing that I am one of the communitarians whose political theory is questioned in this book. Under most circumstances this fact would have compelled me to refuse to review the book. However, given that Professor Frazer's book is couched in such a scholarly and gentile manner, I see my way clear to join in the dialogue she has laid out on communitarian politics. No offense given, none taken.

Frazer is aware that communitarians differ from one another as much as the Catholicism of worker priests (or liberation theology) differs from the Pope's conservative Catholicism--or as welfare liberals differ from classical ones. To proceed, Professor Frazer disregards Southeast Asian communitarians (who are basically authoritarians who seek to suppress individuals for the sake of national goals). And, while she includes considerable discussion of philosophical communitarians (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer), whose theoretical criticism of liberalism she examined in a previous, highly-regarded work she co-authored with Nicola Lacey (The Politics of Community), at the focus of this book are the new communitarians. This group issued a platform in 1990 in the USA, formed the Communitarian Network, published a quarterly (The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities) that Frazer often cites, and who--together with their British associates, Blair, and key people around him--constitute what Frazer considers the main political communitarians. The other mainstay of political communitarians according to Frazer, is Tikkun, an American Jewish left-liberal outlet with considerable New Age overtones, usually not considered communitarian.

The subtitle of Frazer's book is Unity and Conflict. At first, I feared that Frazer would fall into the trap of characterizing communitarian politics the way the old left used to: communitarians were said to prefer consensus building over conflict, and hence served to hide the fact that a call for consensus serves the forces of the status quo and hides that society is nothing but an arena in which classes clash. However, Frazer seems to recognizes that one can have conflict within unity. Thus, members of a family (however defined) can struggle to restructure their division of labor, power, and relationships--while seeking to maintain the union. Her criticism of communitarian politics on this matter is at its best when she argues that it has been inclined too much to seek consensus and not enough toward conflict, which Frazer considers the core of politics. Blair would in all probability still be the leader of a frustrated opposition if he followed this line of thinking, however it does not follow that once in office one cannot consider spending a bit more political capital on addressing some divisive issues.

While Frazer does not provide specific examples, her formulation makes one wonder if the time has come to move beyond relatively highly consensuated themes such as modernizing Britain (and making it mod and cool), to facing tougher--and more conflict-prone--matters, all of which concern the integrity of the nation as a community. For instance: Can a national community thrive if one allows inequality to grow ever larger? How far should the nation allow multiculturalism to replace existing British national identity? Has devolution both proceeded too far, threatening national unity, and not progressed far enough, bringing missions and control to local communities? And if this is the case, how might nation building be nurtured to maintain the proper communitarian balance between unity and conflict?

The main difference between philosophical and political communitarians in Frazer's book is that the latter seek action in the real world, a realm that is worlds apart from the contemplative groves of philosophers. Yet the criticism of political communitarians on which Frazer delves most is oddly definitional. She argues that the notion of community--the core concept of political communitarianism and the one very often evoked by Blair--is vague and elusive. As I see it, while terminological precision may be a virtue in academia, it matters little on the stump. And while Frazer is correct in noting that terms such as "liberty" and "democracy" have been much more carefully studied than community, this is true mainly on the campus; when used by politicians, they all become rather fuzzy. See, for instance, the frequent references to Russia as a democracy.

Moreover, community can be defined at least with the same amount of precision as other widely used but often contested concepts, such as class, power, and even rationality. A community is a group of people who share criss-crossing affective bonds and a moral culture. By asserting this definition I mean to clearly indicate that communities need not be local (let that canard die), and are distinct from mere interest groups in that communities address a broad band of human needs and not only narrow interests. People who band together to gain privileged treatment for office equipment make an interest group; those who share a history, identity and fate, a community. And such communities can be made to last for centuries; they are far more tangible than a spirit or euphoria, as both Frazer and Martin Buber would have it.

Also, Frazer sets some very high thresholds as to what she is willing to consider a community. For instance, she argues that unless there is a very robust set of shared meanings, a group cannot a community make. However, many communities thrive despite serious differences in the terms used, assumptions made, and world views held. (Frazer has much more to say about "interpretivism" and "social constructionism," which the readers of this review will somehow have to do without.)

Frazer argues that communitarians jump from the insight that people require social attachments, which they can find in friendship and other relationships, to the need for community. Indeed, communitarians have not done a good job in showing the difference. Communities, firstly, provide a rather different kind of attachment; the kind a person feels when they feel that they are a member of a whole group. Much more important is that communities undergird a moral culture. They define what a society considers virtuous, provides approbation for those who live up to these definitions, and censors those who do not, thus reducing the need for policing.

This is the point Frazer misses most. She insists that the central concept of communitarianism is community. Actually, it is the idea that societies require shared formulations of the good rather than leaving each individual to make these determinations (the core conception of political liberalism). This oversight of Frazer's might not be accidental. Political communitarians in the UK rose in response to the left, as the Labour party moved away from state socialism. In the USA, the group rose in response to the religious right, which kept trying to fill the moral vacuum that was generated by the collapse of traditional values, a vacuum liberals were reluctant to fill. Hence, the dialogue about virtues has preoccupied American communitarians more than British ones. However, given that there can be no community, nor a stable society, without a shared moral culture, this issue will continue to be pivotal for both philosophical and political communitarians.

Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at The George Washington University. His most recent book The Third Way to a Good Society will be published by Demos this summer.

Getting Cozy with Etzioni Communitarian Guru (and everything expert!)

"As someone who’s been contributing to the public debate about encryption and wiretapping policy over the last seven years, I was startled to find that Etzioni gets some of the most basic details of the crypto debate spectacularly wrong. Most notably, he confuses key recovery (the holding of decryption keys by the government, sometimes referred to as “key escrow”) with public-key cryptography (crypto schemes like PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, that depend on paired keys, one of which is freely available to the public). Absurdly, he keeps referring to the government’s policy as one of “public key recovery.” If the keys are public already, you don’t need a policy to enable the government to “recover” them."

http://axiomamuse.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/getting-cozy-with-etzioni-communitarian-guru/

Update on revision of 2020: Our Common Destiny & TACM

Fred & Tomas home on R&R

It's been very difficult to focus on writing the additions to the revised edition of 2020 and TACM. I've stayed in 3 different homes over the past 2 months waiting for Tomas to arrive, smoking outside at every one, and I've decided the only way I can finish my portion of the project is if I go back to my primitive gertee lifestyle. My neighbors in Kenny Lake have kept me aware of the fact that the temperatures keep dipping down past 50 below, so our friends around here (where it's warmer) are convinced that's reason enough for me to remain in their part of civilization.

It has been luxurious staying in modern homes with all the amenities: indoor toilets, baths, showers, running water in sinks, drains, automatic thermostats, %you set and leave alooooooonnnnne, aaaallllllooonnnnee...% and wireless and dishwashers too! Being around generous, loving, and kind Christians during Christmas was beautiful. It's also been fun to get to know my new friend Lewis, an inspiring 15 year old truth seeker with a passion for research that surpasses my own. We went down some of the most difficult paths an anti-NWO researcher can take, and I saved the best websites and sources we found to do a post about when I have time.

So I'll head home and get straight to work on the rewrite. I'll be sitting in almost the exact same spot as I was in 2006 when I finished the last draft of 2020 in the wall tent. I built the "kitchen/living room gertee" in my same old RV space, facing the same southerly direction. Tim welded steel over my little Hunter stove's huge holes so it should hold a fire for at least 4 hours now. I have 7-8 cords of wood and with my new chainsaw from sister Kathy I'm confident I'll be plenty warm as long as I don't get lazy. My daily chores will take only a couple hours and the rest of my days will be all writing (with no internet to distract me!). This also means I won't be able to upload blog posts very often either.

Barring anymore glitches or setbacks I should have the rewrite ready in 2 weeks, which means the e-book will be ready to download by January 15 and the hardcopies will be printed and mailed by the end of the month. The good thing is there are no major life changing events underway, I'm not pregnant and neither is Nordica, so we should be able to meet this new deadline without anymore delays.

Hope everyone has a fun New Years Eve! I'm thinking about playing bingo! Either that or Monte Carlo bowling. They have both in Wasilla... and a few fun bars too (where smoking's allowed inside!!!!!). Just because I don't plan on drinking doesn't mean I can't hit the pubs.:)

Interest grows in anti communitarian theory

The garden view in early spring,

we just had the warmest February on record?

Perfect weather here today!

I'm getting more pleas for a simplified explanation of anti communitarian thinking. Must be because Clinton is going around the country telling us we have to be more communitarian

Here's a response I sent to my mother this morning, with all the typos fixed. :) Please feel free to add comments and share with my mom what anti communitarianism is for you, or anything else relevant to this. My mom is not the only one asking for a simple explanation, and I know that anti communitarianism is defined differently by everyone who understands it. That's the nature of the beast. Communitarian solutions require dialectical conflicts, and we have all been trained to think and fight dialectically. But not all our differences are dialectical, and I know that if we agree on one piece of this, we don't always agree on another. What's the bottom line to you?

Dear mom,
Communitarianism is the theory behind the emerging global government. It over rules all US law and replaces it with communitarian supremacy of law (EU, WTO, NAFTA, etc.) It's been introduced under treaties (Law of the Sea, Kyoto, etc) and under the Administrative Procedures Act of1946 (agency regulations). The blueprint for changing the global landscape is called UN Local Agenda 21. http://nord.twu.net/acl/agenda21.html

The global system is based in self appointed community councils who direct all private and public resources. According to the gurus (and yes Clinton is one of them)all rights to privacy and property are barriers to peace and global prosperity; communitarianism promises all wealth will be gathered and redistributed amongst the poor nations who suffered so long from Western greed and gluttony.This is why Seattle had the new "right" to enter our homes without a legal search warrant. Under communitarian law, ALL individual rights must be "balanced" against the rights of the undefinable, vague community, who have their own new police force introduced under Clinton, called community policing. (I have many recent quotes of Clinton on the ACL homepage, http://nord.twu.net/acl/index.html)

I am opposed to elimination of US law without a constitutional amendment approved by 3/4ths of the state legislatures, as per our constitutional requirements. If this isn't what you wanted or you want to know more, we just restocked 2020: Our Common Destiny. That's the most simplified explanation of the system we've written. http://nord.twu.net/acl/books.html I also highly recommend you read our Anti Communitarian Manifesto, http://nord.twu.net/acl/manifesto, available free online or in hardcopy collector's editions. Part I will be difficult since you have no education in philosophy, but please plod through even where you don't understand it. In the end you will, I promise.

Mom, our thesis against communitarianism has been studied by university students AND professors for eight years... and no one has ever rebutted us. Our work has been introduced in Vassar College Seminars on Quality of Life, it's been included in National Association of Scholars research into communitarian residence life movements. I can assure you I have established myself globally as a credible researcher, I am the expert, and my audience is world wide.

If it sounds like I was bragging too much, I was, but like Kathy says, in our family if you don't brag, nobody listens to you. America is a lot like that too. Raised in American "no brag just facts" territory, I also know my words must counter what other words are often used to describe me, my lifestyle, and my work. I wanted to plant the possibility in my mother that my anti communitarian stand is right and just, that it has value, and that I can claim a certain amount of respect for what I've accomplished. I added that I love her, because I do, but I forgot to add the line I came up with during a radio interview last year: Communitarianism is best defined as Rule By Permit Only.

Been thinking about gertee so much lately, it's hard to get my head back around my ACL arguments. Part of me would rather not, and like I told Susan (who reminded me how many other times I've said this), I am again thinking very seriously about ending this blog and letting it stand as it is. There's not much more I can add to my argument. All I can do is follow communitarianism's rapid global development, witness more people I love fawning all over it and listen to everyone repeating communitarian lingo... what's the point of that?

I have 2 radio interviews coming up, March 14th 7pm CST on Intelstrike with Michael Vail and April 13, 9pm MTN with Melodee at The TruthQuest with guest co-host Lark! Links to both show hosts are on the right side, under Radio Interviews. They will probably be my last ones. Now that everyone in the US recognizes there are new rules, it's going to get even uglier out there, and I just can't imagine following every yukky way this thing goes down.

Watching my people flounder and drown is not how I plan to spend my last years of freedom. I want to live as if there are no communitarians anywhere, make my daily plans as if I hold all the natural born liberties that my constitution says I hold. Like dad always said, "the best defense is a good offense," and I further agree with another Friedrich named List, too.

I do believe the way we take back America is to take back our land, our natural resources and rebuild upon our local industry and agriculture. The US national system of high tariffs and fair trade with equals existed long before the national socialist model adopted by the Nazis.

Communitarian "balancing" eliminates the balance between national industry and agriculture. That's the ONLY "balance" the USA needs. We are still (on the books) a constitutional republic where the legitimate law exists only to protect individual citizens' life, liberty and property. It's always been about the land, and everything on it. The question is, who owns it? Even Lenin talked about that being our only strength as a nation. Without it, without our land and the right to use it and manage it as we see fit, we have nothing solid to sustain us, and our nation becomes dependent on the empire for all its necessities... just like the good old colonial days. Visit any American Indian reservation if you have any question about what happens when you lose your right to control your economic landscape.

So, because I can, I will try to do my duty and part, as an American (and not a global communitarian subject). I will start a homegrown business, create industry and find ways to take our goods to the marketplace. I'm certain I will see how many communitarian regulations my American freedoms violate, particularly since the whole new system is modeled after the system built by our Soviet allies in Israel.

As a freeborn citizen of the state of Alaska, I have the God given, natural right to do it all. I was raised to honor my heritage. I was told to think and then freely act upon my moral obligations, which moral men and women do naturally recognize. I was endowed with great respect for my ancestors, who put their lives on the line to defend my God given rights, because the world holds many men who seek to make me and my offspring slaves. I look at my children and my children's children and I can only weep when I verify the most horrific truths of what the future looks like for Nordica and Nolan, let alone Freddie's generation. I see an America ruled by the same principles ruling Gaza, the ME poster child for universal communitarian peace. I can only live each day with gratitude that we are not there yet, and every day we're not is a blessed gift.

The Anti-Communitarian Manifesto hardcopy update

Nordica picked up the proof and says it looks good enough to print! They'll be going out either Friday or Monday. We both still think we need a better introduction, it was hard to write it after so many years since we wrote the online manifesto. I continue to find and read excerpts and essays published online about Hegel and want to address their arguments. Seems like there's more and more available and I wanted to use the intro to describe the dialectic in philosophical terms as well as for average readers. Which I think is appropriate, whereas Nordica wants it to be simple, like 2020. Maybe next printed version will have 2 intros, one from her and one from me. She's the best business partner I've ever had but that doesn't mean we share the same creative expression. She is an srtist first, drawing and graphics are her passion and she sees things so differently than me, a non-fiction writer who loved Facts on File. I'm hoping someday she'll be inspired to do a comic strip of our little "league", she can draw the cutest little people and you know exactly who they are. She's done some of me that are just funny looking and the nugget people are my most favorites. One time she drew me as this little tiny nugget lady and the community cop was this big huge nugget with a gigantic mouth sneering down at me.

Plus this whole health aspect that she's into is rubbing off on her old ma. I've learned a lot about natural remedies and how good you feel when you eat good food. This is a direction that would be worth pursuing as one alternative to continuing writing about Etzioni and the global government. Since the comms are moving into their solution based mentality then I'm wondering if it isn't time for us to do the same. I know there are things out there that have been taken from us and things that have been planted that are poisoning us and killing us, and like everything else connected to the "plan," it's been going on for a long time. I used to tell Nordica if I've been eating and drinking poison my whole life then it's too late for me, and wouldn't it be better if we give her the expensive food since she has hope, and leave me in peace to smoke my cigarettes and drink my coffee and occassionally eat toast. But with the amount of fresh food and pure juice in our home the past year (because she's breastfeeding) I ate so good that now I'm actually mixing my Tops tobacco with Catherine's Summerwind Tea, a mixture of mint, chamomile, spruce tips, fireweed, rosehips, yarrow, clover, wormwood, coltsfoot, raspberry leaves, organic orange peel. It's been sitting here for months since I never drink anything but coffee, and then tonight Nordica suggested I try smoking it. It's a lovely blend, it actually soothes my throat. My tobacco will last a long time doing this, and maybe so will I. :)

Living Other People's Lives, A Dutch view on the Communitarian v Liberalism divide

Have a few days of fast internet left and watching videos every chance I have. Here's a youtube presentation of another young European man's fundamental, philisophical view of the Dutch Prime Minister's Communitarian paternalism. He gets it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yoi9joi2vm8&NR=1

I still find it amazing that Europeans know so much about this theory of law when Americans still call it a conspiracy theory.

Hardcopy Manifesto update: We are looking at the proof this week. We expect it to take one more week before they're ready to ship. Thank you for your paitence!

Obama's selection of Hillary Clinton as Sec State has to mean more than just a bottle of champagne for Communitarian Network founder Amitai Etzioni. I'd think 2 openly communitarian politicians leading the White House would call for something just a little bit stronger.

Wasn't Hillary the one who used the term communitarian when she was campaigning in Iowa? And Bill is going to distance himself from his Global Initiative when Obama sponsored the Global Poverty Act?

Abstract - The Anti Communitarian Manifesto

What is the Hegelian Dialectic?
and The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking
by Niki Raapana and Nordica Friedrich, 2003
Seattle, Wyoming, Alaska.

(Update June 6, 2013: Ten years ago when we first published our free online antithesis to communitarianism we were, like most Americans, identifying it as a softer version of communism. A decade of further study showed us conclusively that communism is only one piece of the whole system introduced under communitarianism. Free trade and corporate capitalism are just as much a part of the economic theory, and unlike atheistic communism, Communitarianism is also a religion. There are just as many communitarians on the political right as there are on the political left. Almost all major organized religions have embraced Communitarianism. Many new movements that sound like they're promoting freedom from corporations and bankers promote communitarian solutions. The thing to remember is communitarianism is NOT a natural part of anything, it is a virus that attaches itself to everything and desrtoys wahtever value the true believers place on it. As Anti Communitarians we do not oppose any of the individual religions or political or economic beliefs that are part of the scam. We oppose the Communitarin influence on everything, and we are convinced Amitai Etzioni, the "everything expert" behind all of it, is a con.

In order to fully grasp the enormity of the system of global governance we faced in 1999, we started by understanding the formula for changing society. The Hegelian formula was well identified by many writers before we began our studies. What no one else had ever done before us was to identify the final synthesis in the Hegelian dialectic as communitarianism. The Anti Communitarian Manifesto is the only antithesis to communitarianism in the world. We were also the first to show Local Agenda 21 as communitarianism and provide ample sources for our claim. We were the first Americans to do an indepth study of Communitarian Law and provide sources for our claim that LA21 is a blueprint for communitarian law. Our works have been much plagiarized over the past decade. Regardless of what you may hear or read, Agenda 21 planners do not now nor have they ever identified their sustainable development plans as "Communitarian." The only evidence for LA21 plans being based in communitarian is our thesis and research.)

Abstract

Background: Communitarianism is the theory that individual rights must be balanced against the rights of the "community." Its many proponents insist that individual rights and liberties pose a real threat to the health and safety of the "community at large." The founders of the Communitarian Network began "shoring up the moral, social and political environment" in the early 1990s. Today the communitarian theory is the basis for hundreds of new global rules and regulations eliminating individual rights, yet fewer than one percent of the affected population knows about it.

Results: The progression of recent history clearly shows a dedicated effort to lead the world into unknowingly accepting communitarian solutions. To understand how philosophical Communitarianism advanced itself, the authors traced it back to the original source. Using the works of the leading Communitarian theorists, they followed the path from Seattle Neighborhood Plans all the way to the International Court at the Hague.

Conclusion: The foundation for the communitarian theory is undisputedly the Hegelian dialectic; Part I, a tutorial on the Hegelian dialectic is fully substantiated by Jesuit priests, Renowned Marxists and Pope John Paul. Theoretical analysis, i.e.. (A) Communitarianism did not evolve naturally (B) and it was never a movement that arose out of U.S. society (C) therefore, communitarianism has no natural home in the United States., is further substantiated with 70 verifiable, solid references that overwhelmingly support it. Part II, also heavily referenced, outlines historical events leading to the global communitarian synthesis. The changing duality of the new legal system clearly indicates Communitarianism is a criminal enterprise whose aim is to destroy all legal institutions established under national and state constitutions. Both Part I and Part II establish the aims and shared goals of the lesser arms involved in the global communitarian insurrection, showing direct ties to the War on Terror business, the European Union's integration under Communitarian Law, the emerging North American Free Trade Zone, UN Local Agenda 21, global sustainable development programs, Regionalization, Faith-Based Initiatives, Volunteer America, Community Oriented Policing, Rebuilding Community and Community Development.

To order your copy of the "ACL Manifesto" and "2020: Our Common Destiny" combined and updated in 2012:
http://nord.twu.net/acl/books.html

For more detailed analysis of UN Local Agenda 21:
United Nations' Local Agenda 21 (LA-21)
& Communitarian Development Programme
http://nord.twu.net/acl/research/agenda21.html

Travel the Wayback Machine to access older pages from the Anti Communitarian League.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040319220638/http://nord.twu.net/acl/standfor.html

Here's what the Hegel tutorial looked like ten years ago:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031114005342/http://nord.twu.net/acl/dialectic.html

The Anti Communitarian Manifesto in hardcopy, ebook and mp3

The Anti Communitarian Manifesto is ready to print! We put the ad for it in the back of the last edition of 2020: Our Common Destiny and already started getting orders for it. Whoo hoo! We didn't think it would happen that fast but we were almost done laying it out and now, thanks to our good friends and supporters in beautiful Montana, we have produced a hardcopy version of What is the Hegelian Dialectic? and The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking.

We decided to print them exactly as they have appeared online for the past few years. While it was torture not rewriting them with everything we've since learned, we felt it was important to keep it the way it's been for every person who's read it and studied it online. Also this is our primary thesis paper and I have submitted this version to hundreds of American political science and law professors over the years. If we are ever to be disputed, this is what they will dispute.

For the book version we listed every reference link (there are 80) and note the ones that are no longer available online. We decided to add several articles I've written that supplement our thesis with updated information and references. Depending on the printing costs, I also want to include 2 ACL charts. Big Mother's Game Plan: Checkmate and The Rule of Law have been fairly well visited online, so I assume they are either hugely entertaining or helpful in some way.

I want to thank all the people who have been helping us lately. You've changed the way we look at our work. Nine years ago I dove into this research like a maniac because I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing in municipal planning meetings. I lost the respect and friendship of many people who I'd earned it from during my first 40 years of life. I was the kind of person who was a friend to anyone who needed a friend. My dad taught me the value of being a good host (the Army loves its parties). I liked to host birthday parties for people who never had one in their life. I sang at weddings, made treats for Nordica's classes, joined a morning bowling league and always had a bunch of people at my house; hundreds of people have stayed with me over the past 30 years. I like to cook bread and huge pots of stews and the family spagetti and meatballs recipe and when I got into recovery I did it even more (my house even became a meeting spot for a while for men who were victims of sexual abuse). So when I stopped doing ALL of that and focused every ounce of energy and intellect I had left into finding out who was destroying my country, well, this affected the quality of Nordica's life in numerous ways.

Nobody we knew understood what I had found. Nobody we knew was capable of reading the long boring, confusing papers that had to be read in order to see there indeed was a plan. I'm from lower-working class America. (My dad was an E-5 when we were in Germany, with a wife and five children.) My friends (even the ones I made in college) all come from working class families. My sister Susan was the first one in our large Friedrich family to graduate from a university. She was the only one in my family who could read some of my work, but she read it from the perspective of a registered socialist, anti-war activist with a degree in Sociology, and we never had the opportunity to discuss Hegel or dialectical materialism. When Susan was involved I was still researching Seattle COPS, HUD and NATS for the Dawson lawsuit, not Hegel. Susan helped me come up with a name before I spoke at the Libertarian convention. Along with our unwavering supporter Jim P., my sister named us the anti-communitarian league in April, 2000. Eight years later the ACL still exists, and that is pretty incredible really.

I promised Nordica for years that "someday" somebody would see the value in what we've done and send us money or other support for our work. I knew it had to come out sooner or later that there IS a written plan for a new political and legal system in the USA. How could it not???? I said a lot of things to her over and over again, and on the top of that list is: "People will start looking when it gets so bad they have to know what's happening to them. When it gets so bad they want to know, they will find our work along with all the other opinions out there, and maybe we can help some of them to skip all the dialectical crap that leads away from the truth."

Nobody ever disagreed with me that "people should have the chance to know." They just diagreed that I should be the one to study it. I had no school to study at, I had no grants or an income to support me, and weren't there better qualified people who should do this? The arguments against me were strong and I had no defense that made sense to anyone but me. I've had to just get real quiet and withdrawn in order to shut them down. Two years ago I came here and set up a tent and called it the ACL Headquarters. In defiance of the perception my lifestyle caused with my rising middle class friends and family, I began calling myself the Tent Lady.

So how fortunate are we that my daughter stood by me all these years, helped me build the ACL website in 2002, and eventually rewrote our Hegel tutorial into a Manifesto in 2003? She never made me quit and she never believed I was crazy either. She built the book business and now, thanks to the generous support we've been gifted in the past 2 years, she believes what we've done has some tangible value. The ACL would not exist if it were not for the contributions we've received from the day it was conceived as a "league." May God bless you all, each and every one.

Please contact me if you have a nice speaking voice and would like to do an mp3 recording of 2020 or the manifesto. Several people have asked for this and my good friends in Walla Walla have expressed an interest in creating audios, which got us thinking. We don't want to use our own voices. (I lost my bottom bridge last December and I've got a bit of a lisp going these days. Losing my teeth is one of the consequences of years of poverty level living, boo hoo.)

We're also very pleased with Paul Barnes' contribution to 2020, and excited to hear he may be writing an entire Canadian edition with another Canadian politician. With all the interest lately in the UK regarding their new agreement with the European Union, who knows where this will go.

I had a dream I wrote something called "Ode to an Old Soldier." I think it was for my dad.

2020: Our Common Destiny- Camp Redington

2020: Our Common Destiny

new edition-Jan 2008

I'm pretty sure I can say the books are on the way! It's been 20 to 45 below zero since we got back from Anchorage. Vehicles hate to start in these temperatures, but we manged to get to Copper Center and ship the auction items to the ebay winners yesterday.

Outside temperature at 5am, Feb 2, 2008

Camp Redington update: I love having a publisher program again! Designed an awesome 30' GerTee for the museum and office, laid out phase 1 construction maps and finally got started on the actual business plans. I've pretty much decided to build a traditional homesteader fish camp. Tim's excited about it because he "knows how to build that."

Tim Redington's Fish Cleaning Station,
summer 2007

Tim Redington's Alaskan Homesteader MuseumWho knows what you'll find in a homesteader's pantry?

15,000 to 50,000 year old bison skull
found north of Fairbanks.

The central park strip behind the museum will be the "slime line" for Copper River Salmon. It'll have fish cleaning tables, smokers and drying racks, a bbq grill inside a screened gertee, an outside fire pit, and we're putting up Rick's 18 foot teepee by the fire.

For phase 2, I hope to build 4 private camp bath houses in 14' gertees, each furnished with a funky shower, wooden hot tub and a comfortable dressing/sitting area. These will rent by the hour and will be designed to accomodate big trucks. While the museum is targeting the outside visitors, the fish camp targets Alaskan fishermen. It may be fun for the outside visitors to watch and learn how to process our salmon. Be lots of good eating, for humans and dogs both!