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MEN OF PEACE
"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to." Leonard Peltier
Waiting for Putin and Assad to run out of people to kill. Is that our plan?
The response to years of atrocities enacted by the Syrian leader and his allies has been shameful. We should reconsider the use of force on them.
It has been a quieter than average week in Syria. More than 400 people were killed in the unimaginably awful siege of eastern Ghouta, most of them civilians. But in the seven years since the regime of Bashar al-Assad set in motion the Syrian civil war, almost 500,000 people have died – well over 1,000 a week.
The truth is that brutality is winning in Syria because the democratic powers are afraid to confront it. As for Assad’s allies, Iran and Russia, the latest deaths will certainly not make them reconsider their support for him. Since the war began in 2011, Russia has vetoed 11 draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Syria. On Saturday, the UN security council finally voted unanimously for a month-long Syria ceasefire.
As a permanent member of the security council, Russia has a special responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Instead, in New York it has protected Assad against the consequences of his actions, including the use of chemical weapons; inside Syria, its forces have actively participated in attacks on hospitals and other prima facie war crimes. These atrocities have been well-documented.
The response of western countries to the horrors in Syria is always the same: more statements deploring and condemning what has happened and appeals for an end to the violence. In the first two years of the conflict, the EU averaged almost one statement a week. The statements have become less frequent but no more effective. As the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said recently: “The conduct and management of this war has been utterly shameful from the outset and the failure to end it marks an epic failure of global diplomacy.”
After seven years, it would be easy to conclude that there is nothing we can do, or that – in the words of Yes, Prime Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby – “maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now”. Western countries could simply accept that the slaughter will go on until the vastly superior forces of Syria, Iran and Russia have wiped out or driven away all their enemies. But doing nothing in the face of massacres would not absolve the west of a share of responsibility for the bloodshed, any more than it did in Rwanda or Bosnia. Western leaders must also think about the impact on their own interests if the Syrian regime and its allies achieve victory and the only “political solution” in Syria is the reimposition of Assad’s autocratic rule throughout the country. Syria is not hermetically sealed from its neighbours or from Europe. There are already 5.5 million refugees outside Syria’s borders and more than 6 million internally displaced . Despite the aid the EU, the UK and other donors have given to support them, they will not be grateful to countries that would not tackle the source of their suffering. They will be ripe for exploitation by extremists and the countries that host the largest numbers – Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey – will be at risk of destabilisation.
At a minimum, the west and its allies in the region should do more to end the impunity of Syria’s leaders and their allies. The UN general assembly passed a resolution in December 2016 setting up a panel to assist in investigating and prosecuting those responsible for war crimes in Syria. Countries such as the UK that have laws allowing prosecutions for war crimes committed in other countries should work with the panel to open cases as soon as possible. If there is evidence to implicate Iranian or Russian forces in serious violations of international humanitarian law, then they also should be targeted for prosecution. Those most responsible for the suffering of the Syrian people over the last seven years should spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders.
In addition, the EU and like-minded countries should step up sanctions against Russian individuals and companies involved in supporting the conflict in Syria. Many may already be sanctioned in connection with Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, but the EU should increase the pressure with asset freezes, travel bans and restrictions on EU firms doing business with Russian entities active in Syria.
Finally, in the light of two significant military developments in recent weeks, western leaders should reconsider their reluctance to strike the forces responsible for so many atrocities. First, on 7 February, Russian private military contractors attacked a base in eastern Syria where US troops were based. The US forces appear to have killed a large number of attackers. The Russians were undoubtedly fighting in Syria with Kremlin approval, as a way of maintaining the fiction that Russia has no ground forces in Syria. Even so, Russia chose to cover up its casualties, rather than fight back.
Second, after Syrian air defences shot down an Israeli F-16 fighter on 10 February, Israel claimed to have destroyed almost half of Syria’s air defence system in retaliatory strikes. The Russians did nothing to prevent the Israeli attack. Israel’s success suggests that western military leaders were exaggerating the strength of Syria’s air defences to justify not striking regime targets earlier.
Taken together, these two defeats for the Syrian regime and the Russians suggest that a well-planned campaign (not the kind of one-off missile strike that Donald Trump launched in April 2017) could degrade Assad’s military capabilities, providing an incentive for him to look for a peaceful way out. A similar strategy, involving Nato strikes on Serbian forces, helped to bring Slobodan Milošević to the negotiating table and end the Bosnian conflict in 1995. A military campaign would need to be coupled with a strong message to Russia to stay out of the way and a plan for moving towards peace. Such a plan would need, among other things, to identify which members of the current regime and the Syrian opposition might be acceptable negotiating partners and which have put themselves beyond the pale.
After failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, western politicians understandably do not want to talk to their voters about military action in Syria. Russia’s involvement is an added complication: no one wants to stumble into world war three for the sake of Syrian rebels, especially when many of those still fighting are the kind of violent extremists that western governments are combating at home. But when politicians say that there is no military solution in Syria, they are lying: there is a military solution and Assad, Khamenei and Putin are imposing it. The west can either try to stop them or wait until peace comes to Syria when Assad and Putin run out of people to kill.
Ian Bond is the director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform
During the recent shooting in Parkland, Florida, four Broward County sheriff's deputies, including a school resource officer, allegedly waited to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while children were being murdered inside. If Sheriff Scott Israel's investigation confirms that those officers failed to take action, they should be fired for abrogating their most sacred duty.
Police officers need to confront suspects immediately during an active shooter situation in a school or other public place. Ideally, there should be at least two officers present to clear even a single room. The search of a school is best done by a tactical team, but an active shooter is an exception to the rule. In exigent circumstances, when there is a serious risk of death or bodily injury to others, police need to respond immediately, even if that means searching with a less than optimal number of officers.
The FBI has developed protocols for how law enforcement should respond to active shooters, and over 114,000 officers have already received Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training. This training is designed to give officers the basic tactical formations and other techniques needed to clear a school with a limited number of officers. When a mass shooting occurs, it is likely that the officers who respond will come from different departments and will have different levels of training, as was the case in Parkland. The training is designed to allow officers who never worked together to enter schools, locate the shooter, and eliminate the threat.
All active shooter incidents are exigencies, where even a lone officer needs to take action. When the attack is in a school, as in Parkland, the need for swift action is even greater. Children are among the most defenseless and vulnerable people in our society, and the main role of government is to stop citizens from using force against each other. It may seem harsh to criticize those four officers for not risking their lives and entering the school, but it appears they failed to fulfill a duty on which the public depends.
As a deputy sheriff with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, I once received a domestic disturbance call just as our patrol zones shifted to the east, so I responded knowing that my backup would probably be several minutes away. As I approached the parking lot to the complainant's community, the dispatcher updated the call to say she heard shots being fired. I requested my backup to expedite and jogged to the townhouse.
As I walked up to the front of the building, a terrified woman burst through the front door toward me. "He has a gun, and he's going to shoot my kids. Please, don't let him kill my kids," she pleaded. I radioed dispatch that an armed man was threatening to murder children, then I drew my gun and shouldered my way through the front door.
I quickly cleared the bottom floor, then slowly ascended the stairs to the second floor. The house was completely dark, and I held my flashlight in one hand and a .45 semi-automatic handgun in the other. There was an open bedroom door at the end of the hall, so I moved toward it because it was the most immediate danger. My pulse accelerated as I approached the door, not knowing where the suspect was or if the children were still alive.
I reached the room and saw a man lying flat on his back, blood pumping out of his chest, and a semiautomatic handgun on the floor near his right hand. I could smell the gunpowder in the room, and the man looked dead. I glanced around, but there was no sign of the children. "Sheriff's Office. Kids, are you here?" I shouted. A young boy, probably only five years old, popped up behind the bed, his eyes wide with fear. A moment later, a second child peeked over the bed at me. "Come to me," I said and stepped into the room positioning myself between the man and the children as they moved around the bed. "Run outside and find your mother," I said, and they fled the room in their pajamas.
This was a crime scene, and I didn't want to disturb the evidence, but I had to secure both the handgun and the man and then finish searching the house. I bent down cautiously and grabbed the handgun. As soon as I stood up, the man who I thought was dead bolted upright and screamed. My knees felt weak from the surprise, and I took a step back, covering him with my gun.
The man jumped up and ran from the room, blood spurting everywhere. I chased him down the hallway and radioed that the suspect was fleeing. I followed him down the stairs and out the front door, where the man stopped and confronted me. I stuffed his gun in my waistband, covering him with my own, and ordered him to "get on the ground," but he just babbled incoherently. A second deputy arrived and tackled him, and we quickly subdued and handcuffed him. I later learned that the gunshot was self-inflicted and that the man had had survived.
This incident illustrates the need to act from a disadvantaged tactical position when children are at risk. I didn't wait for my backup or take cover behind a car. I knew that searching a dark two-story townhouse alone was dangerous, but the circumstances made this an exception, so I confronted the suspect alone. If I didn't, those children could have died.
In Parkland, it is unclear how many children those four deputies could have saved if they entered the school immediately, but they may have been able to stop the attack much sooner. Even if the deputies who stayed outside the school while children died had poor training or little experience in lethal situations, they still failed to protect the lives of the innocent. Sheriff Israel needs to conduct a transparent investigation and quickly fire any officers who failed to respond properly. Not to harshly punish those officers for dereliction of duty is to undermine citizens' trust in the police.
Jeffrey James Higgins is a retired DEA supervisory special agent and a former Hillsborough County sheriff's deputy, with over 25 years of total law enforcement experience. His recent writing and media appearances can be found at JeffreyJamesHiggins.com.
Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
How hard is it to shoot an AR-15? Bill Whittle, Scott Ott and Steve Green share some laughs.
This video is from June 2016, but the topic is quite relevant. A reporter for the New York Daily News fires an AR-15 and is horrified, terrified and claims to have suffered PTSD. Much hilarity ensues, followed by a powerful point to be made.
The Internet Research Agency indictment accuses a troll bot farm of trying to influence the election in what the media claims is the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor. 9/11 need not apply.
Bots are everywhere.
"Bots Are Trying to Help Populists Win Italy's Election," claims Bloomberg. "Russian Bots Are Using 2016 Tactics to Hijack the Gun Debate," shrieks Vanity Fair. ABC spins that bots are trying to make Black Panther look bad. "Rampaging Twitter 'bots' bred in Suffolk farmhouse," the London Times asserts.
This media madness might make you think that bots are some sort of new and advanced technology. But you can see them in the comments and they’ve been around forever. Automated programs that log into social media accounts are not a new technology. Internet users of a bygone era remember seeing them in chat rooms and on bulletin boards without ever rampaging around Suffolk farmhouses.
Bots have become a convenient media scapegoat. The new formula is “Bots + Thing We Disagree With = Proof We’re Right”. That’s why there are stories claiming that Russian bots are tweeting against gun control or Islamic migration. And it explains the “Russian Bots Rigged the Election for Trump” meme.
Bots are an informational technique. Media spin reverse engineers the technique to discredit the idea. Not only is that a fallacy, but bots just piggyback on popular trends to gain influence. Russian bots don’t tweet about gun control because they care about guns, but because they get retweeted. The same was true of the bots promoting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. There are a million brands doing the same thing with bots and influencers. But that’s okay because they push politically correct messages.
And that’s the bot double standard.
When Russian bots and trolls push Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders or Dakota Access Pipeline protests, their programmed actions don’t reflect on leftist causes, organizations and politicians. But the revelation that Russian bots and trolls tweeted about the Bill of Rights, Islamic migration or Trump is spun by the media into a conspiracy that indicts the ideas and discredits the previous election.
The latest example of the Big Bot Conspiracy is a bizarre Newsweek article by Nina Burleigh blaming Senator Franken’s problems on bots. Some might have thought that Franken had been forced to resign for groping women across America. But according to Burleigh, it was the fault of the Japanese bots.
The feminist activist was already infamous for putting her allegiance to Democrats ahead of sisterhood.
“I would be happy to give him a b_____ just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,” Nina Burleigh had said of Bill Clinton. “I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude.” Now Burleigh has brought her kneepads to the raided offices of Newsweek.
Nina Burleigh’s article blames Franken’s problems on “fake news sites, an army of Twitter bots and other cyber tricks”. The Democrat Senator’s original accuser is dismissed as a “Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model”. So there was either nothing wrong with groping her or no reason to believe her.
That’s what leftists denounce as ‘slut-shaming’, but, as with Bill Clinton, it’s okay when Democrats do it.
Burleigh mentions the “release of a picture of a Tweeden and Franken” (editors are one of the casualties of Newsweek’s troubles), but neglects to mention that it’s a picture of Franken groping Tweeden. None of the other many accusers rate a mention from this feminist Franken activist.
There was the feminist choir member and book editor who accused Franken of groping her at the Women’s Political Caucus. It’s really hard to write her off as a “right-wing plant” or a “lad-mag model”.
Especially since she then voted for Senator Franken.
Another accuser was groped at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and claimed that Franken wanted to join her in the bathroom. Nina Burleigh would have probably told her to go along and bring her senatorial kneepads in gratitude for his support of Planned Parenthood.
A Democrat congressional aide remembers Franken trying to give her an open mouth kiss while he was still a radio host with Air America. “It’s my right as an entertainer," she recalls Franken telling her.
An Army vet on a USO tour described being groped by Franken during the Iraq War. "When he put his arm around me, he groped my right breast. He kept his hand all the way over on my breast."
Jezebel, a hard left feminist site, offered an account from a liberal "former elected official in New England" who remembers Franken trying to plant a “wet, open-mouthed kiss” on her, on stage.
Instead of addressing the many accounts of Franken’s liberal accusers who supported him and, many of whom indicated they didn’t want him to quit, Burleigh, like most Frankentruthers from Tom Arnold to Richard Silverstein, smears Leeann Tweeden while ignoring Franken’s numerous other accusers.
After silencing the women who came out against Franken, Nina Burleigh surreally claims that the Franken accusations had served to “silence the testimonies of eight former female staffers who defended the Minnesota Democrat”.
Presenting testimonies from the few women you didn’t grope is not considered a compelling argument.
But instead of talking about any of this, Burleigh talks about bots. A “bot army” made the Franken accusations go viral. And then there was "a developer named Atsufumi Otsuka" who "registered a web domain in Japan" that hosted “Japanese-registered fake-news sites”. But, "by November 17, the trending of 'Al Franken' was officially also a Russian intelligence operation."
The Japanese and the Russians had teamed up against the Minnesota groper. This wasn’t just worse than Pearl Harbor. It was WW2 and the Cold War combined in one hashtag.
“Researchers have found that each bot account had 30 to 60 followers, all Japanese. The first follower for each account was either Japanese or Russian,” Burleigh breathlessly relates.
Now that the Russian and Japanese bots had teamed up, all hope for humanity was lost.
Burleigh’s article has more international locations than a Tom Clancy novel. It also completely ignores the question of whether Franken groped his victims to discuss the bots who tweeted about it.
That’s not accidental. Burleigh doesn’t want to talk about whether Franken is guilty; she wants to write a progressive thriller in which international bots caused the problem by talking about it. And if it can be shown that bots amplified a scandal, then the facts somehow no longer matter. In the same way that if it can be shown that bots amplified Trump’s message, the 2016 election results were illegitimate.
But shooting the messenger bot doesn’t tell us anything the truth of the inconvenient message.
Since the election, these types of articles are everywhere. They rely on the work of “researchers” who are usually partisan activists, often amateurs with no actual technical training, to spread conspiracy theories. These conspiracy theories confuse correlation and causation. If a foreign bot retweets Trump, he works for the bot’s masters. If a bot tweets any conservative story, it’s a right-wing global bot plot.
Anyone who knows anything about how the internet works knows that this is nonsense.
Bots imitate to amplify. In this comments section, a bot will show up sooner or later, it will copy a comment that someone else made and post it in order to get likes so that it resembles a real account. For every stupid bot telling you how much it makes by working online, there’s a smarter bot leaving legitimate comments to blend in. And so bots tweet, comment and chat about everything popular.
If there’s a trending topic, the bots will quickly show up. And everyone uses them.
Rachel Maddow feeds the left’s appetite for bot conspiracy nonsense. But in 2013, MSNBC personalities, including Maddow, were being promoted by Chinese bots. Does that mean Maddow is a Chinese spy?
Bots are ads that pretend to be people. Tracking how they’re deployed can be interesting, but it’s dangerous to read too much into that. Correlating bots with narratives isn’t actually causation.
The bot paranoia is being used to delegitimize real stories and candidates. If you can connect bots to a point of view you don’t like, then no one really believes it. Link it to a candidate you don’t like and he was never really elected. Hook it up to a serial predator in the Senate and you can ignore his victims.
But if you believe that, then MSNBC must be a Chinese informational warfare operation.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Abstract: Should the US copy British gun laws? Politicians still claim that restrictive firearm regulations will makesociety safer. In a recent report published by the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC, Canada, I found that restrictions ongun ownership did not reduce either homicide rates or the rate of violent crime in any of the countries I examined. Ifthe goal truly is to improve public safety, governments are urged to seek more effective approaches.
Gun violence frightens many Americans. Some claim we’d be safer if only we had stricter gun laws like they have inthe British Commonwealth.
Gun laws must be demonstrated to cut violent crime, or gun control is no more than a hollow promise. It's time to pauseand ask: do gun laws actually work.
A study I conducted recently shows that recent gun laws in the Commonwealth have had no discernable impact onviolent crime. In "The Failed Experiment: Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales,"published by the Fraser Institute, in Canada, I examine trends in violent crime in Commonwealth countries that hadrecently introduced firearm regulations.
The widely ignored key to evaluating firearm regulations is to examine trends in total violent crime, not just gun crime.Firearms are involved in only a small fraction of criminal violence.The criminal justice system in the United States differs dramatically from those in the Commonwealth. Not only arecriminal penalties typically more severe in the United States, often much more severe, but also conviction andincarceration rates are usually much higher.Perhaps the most striking difference is that qualified citizens in the United States can carry concealed handguns forself-defense.
In 2004, there are 36 states where qualified citizens can get a permit to carry a concealed handgun.As surprising as it may seem, violent crime rates have been falling in the United States. The drop in America’s crimerate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world. In 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by theBritish Home Office, violent crime increased during the 1990s. This contrast should provoke thinking people to wonderwhat happened in those countries where they introduced more and more restrictive firearm laws.Recent gun laws introduced in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have failed to improve public safety. In thepast 20 years, the UK has introduced increasingly restrictive laws on firearm ownership, finally banning handguns in1997. The result? Police statistics show that the homicide rate in England and Wales jumped 50% in the 1990s, goingfrom 10 per million in 1990 to 15 per million in 2000. Violent crime rates are twice as high in England and Wales as inthe United States.
During the 1990s, Canada drastically restricted firearm ownership. Universal registration is now the law. The result?Even while violent crime has plummeted in the US, it continued to rise in Canada.The effort to register all firearms, which was originally claimed to cost only $2 million, has now been estimated by theAuditor General to top one billion dollars. Final costs are unknown.The Australian government made similar Draconian changes to its firearm laws during the 1990s, even confiscating alarge number of firearms from hunters and target shooters. Unfortunately, this effort has not made Australia safer.Homicide and violent crime continue to increase in Australia, while both are decreasing in the United States. Robberyand armed robbery rates have doubled in Australia, while they are decreasing in the US. The homicide rate in Australiahas started climbing again.It is an illusion that restrictive gun laws protect the public. What works is cracking down on criminals and allowingdecent citizens of all races to protect themselves.
Gary A. Mauser Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies and Faculty of Business Administration Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C.CANADA V5A 1S6 Word count: 546 File: Oped shorty 6-1-04
Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
In 2016, a Muslim terrorist with a truck killed 86 people and wounded another 458.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the Tunisian Muslim killer, had brought along a gun, but it proved largely ineffective. The deadliest weapon of the delivery driver was a truck. Mohammed, who was no genius, used it to kill more people than Stephen Paddock would with all his meticulous planning in Vegas.
Do we need truck control?
Deadlier than the truck is the jet plane. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11 by terrorists with a plan and some box cutters. And then there are always the bombs.
The Boston Marathon bomber wounded 264, a suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena last year wounded 250 and the Oklahoma City Bombing (the only non-Islamic terror attack on the list) killed 168 and wounded 680.
Guns are not uniquely lethal. We live in a world filled with extremely lethal objects from chemical compounds to big trucks. We can license and regulate some things. But we can’t regulate everything.
“This is the only country where this happens.”
America is not the only country where rampage killers operate. South Korea’s rampage killer Woo Bum-kon murdered 56 people. Seung-Hui Cho, one of this country's worst rampage killers who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech, was South Korean.
But the worst rampage killer in South Korea didn’t use a gun. He set a train on fire.
Kim Dae-han, a paralyzed middle aged man, started a subway fire that killed 192 people and wounded 150 others.
Guns aren’t uniquely lethal. Neither is America. Or South Korea. Or anywhere. “A mass shooting happens in this country every few days.”
The myth conflates drug violence in Chicago, which is nearly constant, with rampage killers like Stephen Paddock or Adam Lanza, who are far rarer, and Islamic terrorists like Omar Mateen.
Mass shootings and rampage killers are not the same thing.
Do we really have a “mass shooting” every few days? Most gun violence in this country is really gang violence. The mass shooting trackers list gang violence incidents in urban areas. And gang violence doesn’t depend on guns. It sharply rose in the UK despite gun control.
And it’s the left that has crippled the laws meant to fight gangs and drug dealers. Obama initiated a drug dealer pardon amnesty even while calling for more gun control. But the only way to control gang violence is by cracking down on gangs, not on guns. The pro-crime left deems such measures a “school-to-prison pipeline” that’s little more than “modern slavery”.
And so the gang violence goes on.
Most gun violence takes place in Democrat territory. And it’s caused by leftist pro-crime policies.
By conflating an Adam Lanza with a gang member shooting up a street corner in Chicago, the media hides what is really going on. Rampage killers are rare. Gang violence is commonplace. By making rampage killers into the face of gun violence, the left gets to blame its own policies on the NRA.
“If only we had gun control.”
Gun control works as well as any prohibitionist policy. It works as long as you follow the law. If you don’t follow the law, then getting the prohibited item is a matter of money and connections.
And it’s those people who shouldn’t have guns that are most likely to be able to get them.
The left will lecture on the failure of drug prohibition, but is sure that gun prohibition would work. Why? Because they usually have some personal experience buying drugs, but little experience buying guns. And so they’re sure that a ban that they would ridicule in any other area will somehow work with guns.
There’s always some country that’s a shining example of how gun control works.
The Europeans, who are progressive, suave and sophisticated, have no doubt figured out gun prohibition, along with socialized medicine. But Muslim terrorists armed with assault rifles and grenades have repeatedly carried out attacks in Paris. French gun control was working wonderfully.
The Bataclan attackers and other members of their cell had no trouble getting their hands on Kalashnikovs either. The Charlie Hebdo attackers used an AK knockoff.
Muslim terrorists were able to repeatedly strike in France despite its gun control laws. And they used the weapons that the media refers to with ominous dread as “assault rifles”.
“We have so many weapons in Paris,” the spokesman for France's police union had complained.
The French authorities seize some 1,200 “assault rifles” every year. Meanwhile in the capital of the European Union, you can get a “military weapon” for $500 in half an hour.
Gun control works as well at keeping guns out of the hands of terrorists as enforcement does at keeping drugs out of the hands of criminals.
Legal firearms make it easier for people to defend themselves and for the authorities to track criminals. Criminalizing firearms just creates a massive black market in which anything goes.
The Charlie Hebdo terrorists brought a rocket-propelled grenade launcher to the party. That's what happens when you let the black market take over. You don't control guns. Instead you feed a black market and lose all control over the sorts of weapons being sold in your country.
After every attack, the clamor for “common sense” gun control begins by political hacks, talk show hosts and celebrities who don’t set foot outside their homes without an armed guard. None of these “common sense folks” seem to know the first thing about guns. And none of them care.
Gun control isn’t a policy. It’s a moral panic. Like prohibition, it’s a xenophobic reaction to a different culture that shares the same country with them. Guns have come to embody a rural conservative culture in the minds of urban leftists the way that alcohol once embodied foreign immigrants to prohibition activists and the way that drugs represented urban decadence to rural America.
It’s why the “common sense solution” talk quickly gives way to broad denunciations of a “national gun culture”, of “white privilege”, of rural folk “clinging to their bibles and guns”, of American militarism and toxic masculinity, and of all the things for which guns are merely a symbol to the leftists who hate them.
A cultural critique is very different than a common sense solution. It isn’t guns that the left wants to ban. It’s people. It was never really about banning guns. It was always about the culture war.
Daniel Greenfield
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber
Government Failed, So ... Limit Americans' Rights?
An armed school resource deputy failed to engage the active school shooter, adding yet another layer to the list.
On Thursday, the American public learned of yet another failure by government officials related to the Parkland, Florida, school atrocity. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said that the armed school resource deputy assigned to work security at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School failed to enter the building and engage the attacker. Based on video footage from the school’s security cameras, Israel stated, “What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position and never went in.” When asked what the deputy should have done, Israel responded, “Went in and addressed the killer. Killed the killer.”
This latest revelation only adds to the growing list of failures by school administrators, federal and state government officials and law enforcement. Not only was the killer a known problem to local law enforcement, but the sheriff admitted his agency had received no less than 23 calls on him since 2008, and the FBI had been warned twice about this teenager and his talk of wanting to be a school shooter. Now we’ve learned that a law enforcement officer already on the scene failed to aggressively respond to the attack. The gross incompetence displayed by public officials is staggering.
Nothing is worse than the loss of life permitted to happen by this inaction. But his failure will also be exploited by anti-Second Amendment activists, who will now claim that having armed security at schools still fails to stop the attacks. Indeed, in its reporting on the story, The Washington Post made that very point:
Israel’s description of Peterson as an armed, trained officer who was present for a mass killing but did not confront the shooter also comes as President Trump, in response to the Parkland massacre, has suggested arming teachers as a way to deter possible threats, while the National Rifle Association has also pushed for more armed guards in schools.
Trump has frequently suggested in response to mass shootings that more law-abiding people with firearms could help stop a shooter and the head of the NRA has repeatedly suggested the same. However, Israel’s announcement Thursday suggested that even if a person is armed, trained and available to help, that may not stop a mass killing that unfolds in a matter of minutes.
Meanwhile, the Leftmedia and the gun control crowd (but we repeat ourselves) continue banging the drums in calling for more limits on Americans’ Second Amendment rights in the name of protecting children. The irony here is that the Left is calling for more power and trust to be given to those very government leaders who so abysmally failed in their duties. This is a classic example of the leftist mindset, which always entrusts the government with power over and against the rights of the individual. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that limiting law-abiding citizens’ access to firearms will do nothing to stop criminal behavior, especially when those entrusted to enforce the laws and protect citizens fail so abysmally.
Thomas Gallatin ·
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
“Our Father, which art in Washington”: on Jesus’s rejection of political power
I frequent The Saker website for analysis that is insightful and frequently intelligently contradicts the mainstream media narrative found on the primary promoted Google News sites and television networks. For example, Saker posted on the recent escalation in Syria that should be required reading for anyone who wants to make sense of recent events and possible dangerous outcomes.
Yet in addition to such political and military analysis, The Saker also posts Orthodox Christian writings that I am unfamiliar with. What caught my attention was this monograph he recently posted, Christ the Savior and the Jewish Revolution, by His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galicia (1863-1936), written right after the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Although focused on the Bolsheviks and providing an interpretation of historical events, this essay is crucial, I believe, to understanding the mentality to this day that both misunderstands and rejects the essential perspective of Jesus in combatting oppressive power. Even if one is not a believer, he should consider reading this work to gain understanding on the reason why Jesus was rejected—certainly by not all, but by so many—and why there was—and is to this day—great hostility to Him, and the consequences that occur when His way is not followed:
Thus, the silence of certain of the evangelists concerning what the fourth [Gospel] makes clear depends upon the Jewish revolution which was coming to ripeness in the Savior’s time, and which was directed by the Sanhedrin. From the Gospel episodes cited above, another truth, unremarked by biblical science, also becomes clear—that the Jewish revolution came into extremely close contact with the earthly life of Christ the Savior and in general defined by itself (of course with the particular permission of God) many of the events of the Gospel; further on we shall see that it was the principal reason for the arousing of the hatred of the people against Christ, which brought Him to be crucified.
I will quote an extensive excerpt that makes clear, in the interpretation of Metropolitan Khrapovitsky, what was the origin of this dissent and hostility against Jesus:
The Lord did not answer their question, but reproved them: “Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. Labor not for the food which perisheth, but for that food which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you” (Jn. 6: 27-27). This is not an upbraiding because of gluttony: the day before the people, carried away listening to the words of God, even forgot their daily bread, following Jesus into the wilderness. No, the Lord was displeased because they still had in mind what is earthly, temporal—an uprising against the Romans, military preparations, etc., which would nonetheless end in death, just like the triumphal passing of their forefathers through the desert. [Emphasis added.] “Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread that cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat of it, and not die” (Jn. 6:49-50). Before these words were spoken, the Jews had not yet lost all hope of persuading Christ to become for them another Moses, a leader, and they asked: “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” (Jn. 6: 28), referring to the miraculous leadership of Moses; and they added: “Lord, evermore give us this bread!” (v. 38), for then the success of the uprising would be assured. But Christ’s subsequent words about spiritual bread and life everlasting disenchanted the hotheaded Jews, and many even of His disciples lost their faith in Him (v. 64), “From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him” (v. 66). It is apparent that the heart of Judas also departed from Christ at this time, and He said: “Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (vv. 71-72). The decisive meaning of this event is demonstrated also by the following verse which commentators do not accord the necessary attention. “After these things, Jesus walked in Galilee: for He would not walk in Judea because the Jews sought to kill Him” (Jn. 7: 1). “After these things”, i.e. after the discourse which took place in Capernaum in Galilee. It is obvious that a report about this was made to rebel headquarters, i.e. the Sanhedrin, just as one was later made about the resurrection of Lazarus (Jn. 11: 46); and there they resolved to part company with the new Prophet Who was summoning the people to a different way of life, just as they had separated themselves from John the Baptist (Mt. 17: 12; Mk. 9: 13) who, when the people asked: What should we do? answered them with instructions of a purely moral character and did not support their chauvinistic aspirations (Lk. 3: 7-8, 11).
How far the clerical, and even popular, enmity directed against the Savior began then to assume an active character is clearly apparent from the further actions and words of Christ. When His brethren called Him to the approaching feast of tabernacles, He spoke to them of the world’s hatred for Him and did not go openly to Jerusalem, but secretly, as it were (Jn. 7: 7, 10); yet when He arrived and excited the people’s reverent astonishment by His teaching, without hesitation, and apparently without immediate cause, He said: “Why go ye about to kill Me?” (Jn. 7: 19). These words were so unexpected that “the people answered and said, Thou hast a demon; who goeth about to kill Thee?” (v. 20). However, as though in confirmation of Christ’s words, very soon “they sought to take Him,” first in the midst of the people (v. 30), and later by the servants of the Pharisees deliberately sent (v. 32); but no one laid a hand on Him (v. 30). The latter expression (Jn. 8:20) has a more important meaning than is apparent at first glance. In another article (“The Kiss of Judas”) we made clear, using the words of the Pentateuch, that it was forbidden by the law of God, by which the Jewish nation was governed, to condemn anyone without responsible informers who, when making an accusation against a man for something, had to lay their hands on his head and, after the death sentence, were required to be the first to cast stones at him (Lev. 24:14; Deut. 17:4-7). This no one undertook to do to the Savior, for false accusation was punished severely by the law: it subjected the informer to the fate he prepared for his victim (Deut. 19:19). Read the story of Susanna and the Two Elders (appended to the Book of Daniel), the account of the woman taken in adultery (Jn. 8), the condemnation of the Archdeacon Stephen and, finally, the trial of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and of the Apostle Paul by the Sanhedrin, and you will see that it was no easy matter for the enemies of justice to circumvent this wise law.
What did the enemies of Christ hope to accomplish in attempting to arrest Him, then? Of course, they were unable to lodge accusations against Him for not wanting to take part in an uprising; therefore they apparently returned to an old one—Christ’s healing of a paralytic on the Sabbath day, although this healing, which was performed in Jerusalem, preceded the miraculous feeding of the five thousand in Galilee, where the Lord went at that time, departing from the capitol unhindered, having delivered a tirade against the Jews because they murmured against the healing. And if after His return from Galilee the Savior was again compelled to justify a healing on the Sabbath, it was of course because that occurrence, as one not performed before witnesses, was probably interpreted by His lying enemies as an ordinary cure and could serve unscrupulous people as an object of accusation of violating the Sabbath rest, which, according to the law of God given through Moses, was punishable by death (Num. 1:33). The Savior always triumphantly refuted attempts to accuse Him of violating the Sabbath, when He performed healings on that day and shamed His accusers while the people approved His words (Lk. 13:17; cf. also 14:4-6). In the present instance, when it became clear that Jesus Christ was not in sympathy with the planned uprising, the malice of the Sanhedrin and the fanatic revolutionaries of Jerusalem reached such a degree that, incapable of concealing the real reason for their bitterness, they again brought up the case of the healing of the paralytic; but the Lord understood well where the actual reason for their enmity lay, and therefore, having spoken twice again concerning the legality of healing of the suffering on the Sabbath (Jn. 7: 22-24), and having vanquished this new attempt on the part of the Pharisees to accuse Him of violating the law in the case of the woman taken in adultery, on the second day after His arrival in Jerusalem He again directed His discourse toward the people of Judea who thirsted for political freedom and told them of that higher, spiritual freedom which He brought to earth by His teaching. [Emphasis added.] On that day, as on the day before, the people wavered between belief and bitterness of heart (Jn. 7: 31, 8:30). The Savior’s sincere speech, His staunch profession of His obedience to the Father Who sent Him: all of this poured the holy faith into the hearts of those who listened to Him, yet they were unable to wrest their hearts from their cherished dream of an uprising against the Romans under the direction of the awaited Messiah, of the extermination of all their enemies and the subjugation of the entire world to themselves, basing such hopes on a faulty interpretation of the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel and other prophecies. Such, and only such, an understanding of the current mood of those who listened to Christ makes clear for us the pertinence and consistency of the words of comfort which the Lord extended to those who believed in Him. His words were these: “If ye continue in My word, then ye are My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn. 8:32).
This passage and its interpretation make clear what is crucial to understand, something which I’ve raised in other writings: that Jesus sought to change human hearts bringing about the ultimate freedom; resistance by violence is the very antithesis of his central teaching in how human beings are to serve God and to become closer to Him. And so He was rejected by revolutionaries who thought the best way to free themselves from their conquerors was by focusing their hatred and anger and resentment at their oppressors in a violent revolution, perhaps with the ultimate hope that their roles were reversed. Jesus would have none of that yet this does not mean that Jesus thought there were not ways to resist Rome or more correctly, transform it from within.
Indeed, in Scripture we have a powerful example: think of the Roman centurion whose faith in Jesus was unrivaled, a man putatively an enemy of the Jews; he is one of those who has wrongfully conquered and occupied the territory of the Jewish people. And what had God done to this man that transformed him from an enemy to someone who trusts and loves Jesus? As Jon Bloom in his column for Desiring God explains:
Jesus had walked down from the brow of the low mountain outside of Capernaum, his adopted home (Matthew 4:12-16). He had just delivered what would become the most famous sermon in history.
When he entered the town, he was met by a small delegation of Jewish elders. They had an urgent request. There was this Roman centurion whose servant was so sick that he was expected to die shortly. The centurion had asked these elders to go to Jesus on his behalf to see if Jesus might be willing to heal his servant.
Now, this was very unusual. Jewish leaders were not in the habit of being fond of Roman soldiers.
Feeling the obvious oddness of the request, one of the elders quickly added, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue.”
This was also unusual. Roman soldiers were not in the habit of being fond of Jews.
Jesus discerned the Father’s hand in this and so he set off with them to the centurion’s home. He had also just preached a couple hours earlier on the importance of loving one’s enemies. This was something to encourage.
As they neared the house another group of friends intercepted them. There was a brief huddled conference with the elders. There were hushed earnest voices. The elders seemed confused and concerned. Some observers thought the servant must have died.
Then a representative of the intercepting group stepped over to Jesus and said respectfully, “Teacher, I have a message for you from my Roman friend. He says,
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‘Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, “Go” and he goes; and to another, “Come,” and he comes; and to my servant, “Do this,” and he does it.’ ”
Jesus’s expression turned thoughtful. He pondered the words, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof” and “I too am a man under authority with soldiers under me.” He nodded his head slightly and there was just a hint of a chuckle. This man was a Roman soldier, a representative of Israel’s enemy. And yet he understood what even these Jewish elders didn’t yet grasp. It was a marvel.
He looked back at the friend and then to the elders. Then he turned and scanned his eyes over his disciples and the small crowd of people who had followed him down the mountain. Then he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (Luke 7:9).
***
Both Luke (Luke 7:9) and Matthew (Matthew 8:10) use the Greek word thaumazo (thou-mad’-zo) which we translate “marveled” or “amazed” to describe Jesus’s response to the centurion’s faith. The only time this word is used to describe Jesus’s response to others’ faith is in Mark 6:6, when he marvels at the lack of faith in the people of Nazareth, where he grew up.
The centurion was one the most unlikely persons to amaze Jesus. He was a Gentile. Doubtless he had a pagan upbringing. He was a Roman, stationed in Palestine to subject the Jews to the Emperor’s rule. He was a man of war. He achieved the rank of centurion by distinguishing himself above others in the brutal Roman martial arts. Not exactly the résumé you’d expect for becoming one of the Bible’s great heroes of faith.
So what in the world had happened to this man? We don’t know. But there he is in Capernaum; a miracle of God’s marvelous grace. And he’s a firstfruit and a foreshadow of what Jesus had come to bring about. He was a living illustration that “many [would] come from the east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 8:11).
And so this possibility, this miraculous outcome is what the elders, many of the people, and the ruling priestly cast didn’t understand in their confrontation with Jesus: the way to stop enemies from being enemies is through the grace of God, by transforming them to friends who no longer see you with hostility and resentment; it is not by hatred and violent revolt, which so often (as history proved for Jerusalem) ends in disaster—destruction, death and defeat—that people will set themselves free and serve God. No, it is by patiently and diligently working to change hardened hearts; it is, as Jesus taught, by “loving your enemies,” which of course is so contradictory to human nature to cause consternation and violent rejection.
I think this perspective is terribly relevant to our present time. As Peter Dale Scott writes in his book, The American Deep State about these two different and opposing mentalities that exist side-by-side in America today:
As authors like Michael Lind have observed, for a long time there have been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government. One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain “order.”
To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two different and opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to “the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν), as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία).” In another essay, she wrote that “violence and power [i.e., persuasive power] are not the same. . . . Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” Arendt’s defense of persuasive power as the norm for an open constitutional society can be contrasted with the defense by Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington of top-down, coercive, or dark power as a prerequisite for social cohesion. The coercive power extolled by Huntington was antithetical to that of persuasion and openness: in his words, “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.” Arendt admired the American Revolution for having created a constitution to ensure the rule of politics by openness and persuasion. Huntington in contrast advised the Botha government of white South Africa on how to set up a powerful state security apparatus outside public control. We can say that Arendt was a theorist of constitutional power, and Huntington, of nonconstitutional power. Power “in the dark” is the essence of what I, borrowing in 2007 a term from Turkey, meant by the deep state: a power not derived from the constitution but outside and above it, “more powerful than the public state.”
Scott, Peter Dale. The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy (War and Peace Library) (Kindle Locations 738-752). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
To those observant of recent events there is more than ample evidence that the “Deep State” in Washington governs not from persuasion through argument, as Arendt admired, but by force, a force not always directed against the foreigner but all too often against its own citizens; numerous writings posted on LewRockwell.com in the past and very recently make this clear:
Consequently, despite Internet buzz about an impending “second American Revolution” that will miraculously restore liberty, a revolution allegedly to be initiated by military personnel within the Deep State close to Trump, to the contrary the further projection of force and military power abroad and at home prove that the Deep State, no matter who had become President—Trump or Clinton—has an agenda that will be, as Jesus has made clear and as history has proven, self-destructive and contrary (to believers) to what God wills for us, which is directly opposite to the power of force: to take actions that heal the rift between Man and God, to become like Him in his unconditional love. This, being something that is not done without great difficulty, sacrifice, moral strength and faith, is not a path most people will take. Yet that does not mean it is not something that must not be sought with all our hearts and all our souls.
Therefore, I think it is dangerous to put faith in any person or entity allied to such “powers” as liberators; I am certain there will be no second American revolution without a spiritual rebirth in this nation. Ironically, pagan Greece lacking knowledge of Jesus and his way created such masterworks as The Trojan Women that immortalized the suffering of the victims of Greece’s wars. Has any modern American playwright or novelist written sympathetically to the victims of America’s power projection, to lament and honor the millions dead and displaced? Do novels or plays about The Iraqi Women, The Afghani Women, The Libyan Women, or The Syrian Women exist? To ask the question is to divine the answer: compassion in our nation is not only selective, it’s often mawkishly self-directed and self-centered: candle light vigils for (frequently false flag) victims of the rejection of Christian faith in a post-Christian nation. As Rod Dreher writes in his The Benedict Option, “Over the last decade, I have been writing on and off about the Benedict Option, but it never took off outside a relatively small circle of Christian conservatives. Meanwhile the Millennial generation began to abandon the church in numbers unprecedented in U.S. history. And they almost certainly did not know what they were discarding: new social science research indicated that young adults are almost entirely ignorant of the teachings and practices of the historical Christian faith.” That ignorance includes the core principle of Jesus that I discussed, also the core libertarian principle: the principle of nonaggression. And to the contrary, the very core principle of the state and the ones who are its pinnacle is the very opposite: the power of force.
Therefore, I would direct those who think President Trump, aided by his “faithful” military officers will ride on a white horse to hand us liberty are suffering a delusion, for he is most likely a captive of the ruling ideology of force, as Justin Raimondo makes clear in “A President Held Hostage”:
There’s too much money riding on the continued existence and expansion of our worldwide empire to let Trump ruin their scam. Too many careers are based on it, too much prestige is at stake, too many “allies” are dependent on the largesse it affords them. They’re boxing him in, despite his noninterventionist instincts, and they’re compiling “dossiers,” and they’re mobilizing all their forces for the final assault on the Oval Office.
It is possible Trump did at one time want to oppose and scale back the militaristic, imperial agenda; but recent events prove otherwise, events that are noted in this site’s pages every day. Those who are looking to denizens of Washington for hope, for liberation would be wise to consider the words of the Psalmist [146]:
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes,
in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
Domestically, humanitarians from centuries past — the vast majority of whom were White Anglo Saxon and Protestant — battled the injustices of child labor that arose as a direct result of mass industrialization and the shift from agrarian to manufacturing based economies. They did so by setting up homes for exploited British children and orphanages to protect young people from the industries exploiting them.
Others worked to see that women trafficked into cities to service workers were given equal protection under the law, and that brothels that spread debilitating sexually transmitted infections and exploited desperately destitute women were closed and women were encouraged to quit the sex industry and join reform institutions.
Evangelicals preferred to select their own candidates for admission more directly and often recruited prostitutes through street work, midnight meetings or brothel visiting. The London Female Mission to the Fallen employed eight missionaries, each of whom was responsible for a particular area of London: one missionary was solely responsible for the bridges of London. Late night meetings were held in towns and cities across England….Ellice Hopkins and her supporters were critical of midnight meetings, because the prostitutes who attended were generally drunk or disagreeable, so they went (missionaries) went straight to the brothels during the daytime to recruit.”[1]
Activists operating during the Edwardian and Victorian periods also campaigned to see slavery abolished globally. After relentless parliamentary lobbying from both Christian and secular abolitionists, and within a year of Westminster passing the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, Britain’s Royal Navy took to the high seas separating the New and Old Worlds to eradicate the Transatlantic Slave trade, establishing the West Africa Squadron.
Unfortunately, that selfless Christian spirit does not exist with such power and confidence and prevalance among either the “Never Trumpers” wearing “pussy hats” marching on Washington or the “Always Trumpers” who “support out troops” and rooting for the latest military adventure, who do not feel commonality in the suffering of our “enemies,” be they North Korean, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, or Russian. How many Christian Americans have gone to Iraq and Syria to help some of the oldest Christian communities in the world that were decimated? Sadly, I think the number is too few.
Perhaps in addition to a “Benedict option” there should be a parallel “Libertarian option” of following the writings and authors presented on sites that have proven to be trustworthy, especially on www.LewRockwell.com to create a virtual community of like minded lovers of liberty who recognize wielding unbridled force is the great problem of our nation and will bring America’s downfall, who communicate the truth of liberty to those who have ears to hear.
Dreher quoted Father Martin Bernhard, and what he said reflects what I feel in my writing, not just in my novels but in my writing here and any act of creation rooted in goodness; I believe people of faith must keep this in mind:
“Creation gives praise to God. We give praise to God through Creation, through the material world, and into our areas of work. Any time we take something neutral, something material, and we make something out of it for the sake of giving glory to God, it becomes sacramental, it becomes a channel of grace.”
And reading Scripture and commentaries on it are essential, given so much ignorance; so much time is wasted spent pursuing mindless distraction and conflict in entertainment and social media interactions. As Dreher wrote, too many young Americans are ignorant of scripture.
Yet most of all, let us not be deluded into believing the lie that any kind of salvation shall be coming out of “Our father, which art in Washington.”
Yvonne Lorenzo
Pro Deo et Constitutione –
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis
Paratus et Fidelis
America’s Elite Thinks it Has a Divine Right to Rule the World
America’s ruling class has a curious attitude to democracy. It seems to be interpreted as something that’s good for the US and its allies but bad for critters who won’t accept their role in the ‘America-led international order.’
First off, let me be clear. I think all foreign electoral interference is wrong. In any country. And if it’s eventually proven that Russians meddled in America’s 2016 presidential election, I certainly won’t condone it. But I’ve have always doubted that the Russian state organized some heinous plan to tilt the contest to Donald Trump, so I’ll be shocked if something of this nature is ever proven.
Instead, I’ve always imagined the greatest extent of Russian ‘interference’ was probably some half-baked playing around by private individuals. Something akin to a “social media marketing campaign,” as the New Yorker’s Adrian Chan believes. And on a relatively minute scale, to boot. Because – given the billions of dollars swirling around American stumping – anything bar a full-scale FSB/GRU, all-hands-on-deck operation would probably amount to little more than a hill of beans.
By the same token, I was stunned back in 2011 when the Moscow Times (a pro-US title, overwhelmingly written by Westerners, despite its name) reported how ex-vice president Joe Biden had told fringe Russian opposition figures that “it would be better for Russia if Putin did not run” in the 2012 election. Indeed, when you see the opprobrium directed today towards US Green leader Jill Stein for once attending an RT banquet where Putin was present, its shows one hell of a double standard.
Distant View
Being relatively new to Russia in those days, and far from Moscow, it also seemed bizarre when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a “full investigation” of alleged irregularities in 2011’s parliamentary elections. And, even more absurd, that she did it in front of Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, at an OSCE meeting attended by 56 countries. Indeed, it seemed like a teacher wagging her finger at an errant student in front of his classmates, and not how you’d interact with the emissary of a powerful country.
At the time, something interesting happened. Many of my then-relatively new Russian friends had expressed concern about the vote, and a good few supported calls for a fresh ballot. However, once Clinton stuck her oar in, their anger switched to the American; with the attitude quickly transforming into outrage at her arrogance in trying to tell Russians how to manage their internal affairs. Last night, I reminded one of them, Vova, and he said: “Yeah, what did she think? That we were one of those sh*tty little countries the Americans can just push around?” This morning, he emailed me joking, “You know very well, I am not a huge fan of Putin but as soon as Hillary started that nonsense, it smelled to me of the Yeltsin years. I’d rather eat rats than go through that again.”
And this brings us to 1996. Back then, Russia’s economy was in serious trouble. American-backed neoliberal economic reforms had reduced ordinary Russians to penury. And Washington turned a blind eye when Yeltsin essentially dismantled the country’s nascent democracy in 1993, going so far as to take over the parliament in a tank battle, killing 187 people. He also banned opposition parties and newspapers. Of course, somewhat amazingly, Yeltsin is remembered as a “democrat” in the West – which is actually code for “he defended American interests.”
Anyway, by the spring of 1996, Yeltsin was in serious bother. The Communist Party, which had combusted in 1991, was back in business, with its new leader, Gennady Zyuganov, well ahead in the polls. And at this point, Uncle Sam got busy, in events which have been widely catalogued and even spawned a Hollywood movie, with the tagline “electing a Russian president, the American way.”
As Thomas Graham, who served as the chief political analyst at the US embassy in Moscow at the time, has admitted, the Americans “thought it was imperative that Yeltsin win, or that someone like Yeltsin win in June of 1996, in order to continue the reform process.”
“This was a classic case of the ends justifying the means, and we did get the result that we wanted,” he added.
Hidden Plot
Furthermore, in case you think the diplomats were on a solo run, Strobe Talbott, the main “Russia hand” to Bill Clinton, has detailed the then-president’s words at the time. “I know the Russian people have to pick a president,” Clinton told his close advisor, “and I know that means we’ve got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we’ve got to go all the way in helping in every other respect.”
As Jacobin’s Sean Guillory has outlined in a compelling piece (which I have used as a valuable reference here) on the interference, “The Americans (three consultants hired to assist Yeltsin) were sequestered in Moscow’s Presidential Hotel — the Yeltsin campaign headquarters — in a suite across the hall from the president’s daughter and campaign head, Tatyana Dyanchenko. They assisted in opinion polling; suggested a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign that would include planting ‘truth squads’ of hecklers to disrupt Zyuganov’s rallies; made Yeltsin’s ads slicker and his messages subtler; and urged him to travel around the country, stay on message, and connect with the Russian people.”
Guillory noted how “the Yeltsin campaign employ(ing) American consultants is hardly controversial.” But then pointed out that “the relay between Richard Dresner (one of the trio) and Clinton’s chief strategist Dick Morris, however, crossed the line. In his memoir ‘Behind the Oval Office,’ Morris notes that Dresner offered to keep him in the loop on the Russian presidential race. With Clinton’s approval, Morris received weekly opinion poll briefings that he would share with the president, who would in turn pass on recommendations to Dresner via Morris.
One can only imagine the outright hysteria if it were discovered today that a Trump advisor, especially one who advocated “dirty tricks” against Clinton, had been receiving suggestions from Vladimir Putin. But this is literally what happened in Russia.
Two years after the Americans had got the result they wanted, Russia defaulted on its debts and ordinary people had their meagre savings wiped out. This isn’t forgotten, and is widely blamed on pro-US ‘reformers’ such as Anatoly Chubais, once described by the the New York Times as “the most hated man in Russia.”
Double Standard
Even today, prominent Americans can’t shake their belief that US interference in Russia is legitimate, but any Russian responses are inadmissible.
For instance, just last weekend, Biden, who has admitted ordering Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to sack his prosecutor general, delivered an absurd speech in Munich. In Germany’s southern capital, he suggested sanctions and NATO pressure will make Russians look out of a “black hole.” He also declared that Russia’s leaders had an “illegal grip on power” – which is complete nonsense, no matter your opinion of the Kremlin.
But Barack Obama’s former sidekick didn’t even drop the most arrogant statement of the weekend. Instead, that dubious honor belonged to ex-CIA director James Woolsey, who admitted to Fox News that the US “probably” meddles in other countries elections.
The exchange was beyond parody.
Fox host Laura Ingraham: “Okay, but we don’t mess with other people’s elections right?”
Woolsey: “Well huehueyumyumyumyum… but only for a very good cause.”
This topic might have been a joke for the CIA and Fox, but it’s not a laughing matter for victims of American intervention around the world. And US-establishment hysteria over alleged (and clearly minor and haphazard and perfunctory, if it existed at all) Russian meddlesomeness in 2016 betrays one key fact: America’s elite thinks it has a divine right to control the world and these guys are unable to adjust to the new reality where the US no longer enjoys the status of sole hegemon. And this makes the world a very dangerous place right now.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
