BERJAYA

:: Thursday, January 12, 2012 ::

Objectivist Round-Up

:: Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 10:39 AM

Welcome to the January 12th, 2012 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Keith Weiner presents Inflation: an Expansion of Counterfeit Credit posted at keithweiner's posterous, saying, "One of the most important topics of our era, and the proper concept of "inflation"."
Joseph Kellard presents Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson posted at The American Individualist, saying, "My review of Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs."

Diana Hsieh presents Video: Tenacity in Pursuit of Goals posted at NoodleFood, saying, "In Sunday's webcast, I discussed how to be tenacious in pursuit of your goals. Check out the video!"

Darius Cooper presents US "Entitlement" programs - Impact on debt posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "I examine Federal liabilities for Social Security and Medicare."

Edward Cline presents Rivals for Your Life: Religious Conservatives vs. Islam posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Conflicts between mere beliefs – beliefs without evidence of what is believed, beliefs based on the unknowable, beliefs based on the whim or emotion that “I just want it to be so” – have led and will continue to lead to horrific warfare in which force determines the victor and the outcome without really settling the question of whose God was greater."

Paul Hsieh presents The Truth About RomneyCare posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "My latest PJMedia OpEd rebuts Romney's deceptive claim that his Massachusetts health plan didn't impose price controls. And what similar price controls under ObamaCare will mean for residents of the other 49 states."

Santiago and Kelly Valenzuela presents Movie Recommendation - The Artist posted at Mother of Exiles, saying, "My brief comments about a wonderful new movie and a link to the trailer."

Kelly Elmore presents Reepicheep's Coracle: Things I Learned on My Travels Aside from the Order of Succession of the Monarchy posted at Reepicheep's Coracle, saying, "This post is a tongue-in-cheek catalog of lessons learned traveling in England, from the value of solo-travel to the uselessness of hotel reviews to complaints about spousal train negotiation."

John Drake presents Tenacity in Goal Pursuit posted at Try Reason!, saying, "Diana Hsieh's excellent Philosoph in Action video about tenacity in the pursuit of goals inspired me with some futher observations. See the video, read my comments, and get cracking on those goals!"

Jenn Casey presents Progress on my Goals posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "Off to a great start in 2012!"

* * *

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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:: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 ::

Rivals for Your Life: Religious Conservatives vs. Islam

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 4:56 PM

“If you, as a servant of your god, must use one hundred thousand warriors to destroy me, a solitary servant of my God, then you whisper to me, Muhammed Ahmed, who will be remembered from Khartoum: your god or mine?”

— General Charles Gordon to the Mahdi in Khartoum (1966). Writer, Robert Ardey

In April 2009 I noted in a column, “The Irrelevancy of Conservatism,” which was devoted to examining why conservatives and the Left hated novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, that

Rand herself marked the malaise of conservatism in 1962 in her essay, “Conservatism: An Obituary.” Identifying why conservatism was finished as a distinct political ideology and political force, she wrote:

“If the ‘conservatives’ do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone. Yet capitalism is what the ‘conservatives’ dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: altruism.”

More importantly, however, the article reveals that conservatives are afraid that men are realizing that Ayn Rand is fundamentally relevant to today’s political, moral and economic crises, and that they, the conservatives, have grown irrelevant. The “transcendent order” of Russell Kirk (1918-1994), cited by [William R.] Hawkins as a source of moral and political wisdom, was based “variously on tradition, divine revelation, or natural law,” but has made way for the “transcendent order” of the brute collectivism of the state, to which Americans are more and more expected to defer.

“What should really agitate the public is not the principle of government intervention to prevent an economic collapse, but how the politicians have seized the opportunity to spend huge sums on non-emergency, special interest programs.”

And what is the wisdom of conservatives? It is the “dean of conservative thinking” Russell Kirk’s, which the reader may sample here, beginning with:

“….Conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

So it is an anti-ideology, or a set of “sentiments” and non-ideas, or a “state of mind” which is supposed to animate anyone to try to dam the advancing, liberty-destroying lava of statism. Hawkins offers his conservative credentials in this outburst:

“The most alarming sign that the anarchists are trying to take over the Tea Party movement is the sudden revival of the amoral and anti-social screeds of the late and unlamented Ayn Rand. Her name has been bantered around far too often on talk radio and by Fox News commentators.”

Hawkins should wonder why her name is so frequently “bantered around,” and not [William F.] Buckley’s or Russell Kirk’s. Perhaps it is because men are searching for answers and ideas, Rand has had them for decades, and answers and ideas are not to be found in conservatism. He should also learn that Rand was neither an anarchist nor a libertarian.

As if to underscore the religious, anti-reason color of conservatism, Hawkins manages to introduce Original Sin as an ingredient of the financial crisis:

“True conservatives know the character of Mankind is ’fallen’ and that there is a dark side to human nature to which bankers and fund managers are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Freedom without responsibility, and rights without duties, leads to license and wrong-doing.”

I ask here, almost three years later: What responsibilities? What duties? Hawkins names none. And why are rights contingent on meeting and fulfilling them? True conservatives, however, speak for themselves. Only they know how far they have “fallen” and are more acquainted with the dark side of their “souls” than they should wish anyone else to be.

Premises have a way of percolating to the top sooner or later. This is the case with conservatism, specifically religious conservatism. There is secular conservatism, which is more a species of pragmatism than it is of principled ideology. Capitalism “works.” A modicum of freedom “works.” (But not “too much” of either.) And there is religious conservatism, which is a marriage of pragmatism and faith, otherwise known as “social conservatism.”

Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave us an idea of what it means to be a “social conservative.” The Blaze offers the low-down on Santorum and explodes the notion that he is against “big government.”

Today, Santorum tells voters that Medicare is “crushing” the “entire health care system.” In 2003, Santorum voted for the Medicare drug entitlement that costs taxpayers more than $60 billion a year and almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Santorum voted for the 2005 “bridge to nowhere” bill and was an earmark enthusiast his entire career.

These days, Santorum regularly joins a chorus of voices claiming that he would greatly reduce the role of federal government in local education. When he had a say, he supported No Child Left Behind and expanded the federal control of school systems. In his book, in fact, Santorum advocates dictating a certain curriculum to all schools. The right kind. It’s not the authority of government that irks him, but rather the content of the material Washington is peddling today.[Italics mine.]

There is no reason that candidate Mitt Romney is any different. He’s a social conservative, too. What is it that social conservatives want to “conserve”? “Traditional” values and big government as our shepherd and arbiter of those values. Hardly an ideology.

The fundamental obstacle for conservatives to understanding the pernicious influence of altruism is precisely their altruist premises. They will not question those premises. To question them is to question the role of government as a proactive agent for altruism as an apology for freedom and capitalism. The history of conservatism, especially in the 20th century, bears out the truth of this contention.

The Left allies itself with Islam because of shared totalitarian yearnings and ends.

Religious conservatives, however, oppose Islam basically because it is a rival creed, a “competing faith.” It is not a turn-the-other-cheek creed. It advocates throwing stones, lots of stones, in the form of real rocks and passenger jets and arsonist’s torches. The quotation from Khartoum that precedes this column may be taken as evidence of that fear, although Charlton Heston’s Gordon, speaking with conviction to Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi, doesn’t seem particularly fearful. But after his first fictive meeting with the Mahdi, he confesses to an aide:

"I seem to have suffered the illusion that I have a monopoly on God."

Perhaps that’s why conservatives hate Islam. Let’s look at the “Five Pillars of Islam”:

Allah is the only God and Mohammad his prophet (shahada)
The Haj (or pilgrimage to Mecca)
Prayer five times a day (sala)
The giving of alms (zaka)
Ramadan (saum, month-long fasting)

We are all now familiar with the unnamed “sixth” pillar of Islam: Jihad.

What are the parallel pillars of the Christian faith? The Christian God is the only God. To some Christians, Allah is an apostate, or Satan himself; to others, he’s just another “false idol” with peculiar habits. A one-time trip to Vatican City to hear the Pope give his Easter sermon can be taken as the Christian Haj. I don’t think other Christian denominations have a similar obligatory pilgrimage to make. Prayer five times a day isn’t required of Christians, although I’m certain many pray every day before meals and participating in sports events and the like. Charity is also a major altruistic practice in Christianity; in fact, it’s regarded as a key virtue. Lent is the Christian Ramadan.

Jihad? The only modern equivalents have been the missionary “outreaches” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the modern versions. These, however, have never entailed violence against pagans or infidels or native populations. The Spaniards, however, took along priests to convert South American Indians to Christianity as sanctifying baggage in their quest for gold, and there were the religious wars of Europe.

So, the similarities are there. An interesting site, “Theological differences between Islam and Christianity,” features a précis on the doctrinal differences between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam:

The faith of Muslims is based on the works of accomplishing the five pillars of Islam. Christianity, on the contrary, it based on faith that people can be freed from their sin[s] by the blood of Christ Jesus.

Most Arabs are Muslim, but most Muslims are not Arabs. There are millions of followers who are of Persian and Asian descent. Arabs came from the line of Ishmael (the half brother of Isaac - father of the Jews). However, descendants of Ishmael were a nomadic people who intermarried with the Midianites (Judges 8:1, 12, 22, 24) and others, while the Hebrews largely avoided a racial mix. After Islam violently imposed its doctrines on the Arab world, Muslim men were permitted to take wives of any faith in order to raise the children in Islam. (Muslim women were [and still are] obligated to marry only Muslim men.)

Those who practice the "Five Pillars" of Islam worship a god named Allah, who was the chief god of the Quraish tribe that controlled Mecca. This god was selected by Mohammad from among the 300 plus idols honored at the Ka’aba, and Muhammed tried to modify his moon god to become the God of Abraham. The symbol of this moon god, Allah, is known as the crescent symbol of Islam. Conversely, the Christian god revealed Himself to Moses as "Yahweh" (Exodus 3:14-16). In the Torah and in the Koran, Allah and Yahweh speak in the third person plural, yet both Judaism and Islam dogmatically proclaim their god to be singular. ("Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God is One God" Deut. 6:4) As Christianity branched off of Judaism, they saw this as additional evidence for the Trinity.

All varieties of Christianity are founded on saving one’s soul, or on personal salvation, and the different denominations encourage or prescribe various degrees of ardor to that end. This does not necessarily entail, either, going on a homicidal rampage.

Christianity, on the other hand, follows the Lord God of Israel. Christians believe that God sent His Son to Earth to be the atonement for sin….[A]ll a person needs to do is accept the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The Great Commission to all Christians states, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Matthew 28:18-20, NKJV.

Personal salvation in Islam, however, is as bloody-minded as one can imagine.

Muhammed specified that God does not have a son. Because of this, there is no redemption from sin in Islam. Salvation comes by works which never carry an assurance of being good enough unless one were to die for Allah as a suicide bomber or die killing infidels in battle. "If you should die or be killed in the cause of Allah, His mercy and forgiveness would surely be better than all they riches they amass. If you should die or be killed, before Him you shall all be gathered" (Sura 3:157-8). "Those who are slain in the way of Allah - he will never let their deeds be lost. Soon will he guide them and improve their condition, and admit them to the Garden, which he has announced for them" (Sura 47:5).

Another religious site, “Yahweh (the God of the Bible) vs. Allah (the god of the Koran),” stresses these differences between Christianity and Islam (comments in brackets are mine):

(A) Allah is distant and unknowable. The God of the Bible is close and personal.
(B) Allah does not love every person; Yahweh [God’s moniker in the Old Testament] does love every person. [Although he did have his temper tantrums and could be maliciously capricious, causing plagues of locusts, deaths of first-borns, turning wives into pillars of salt, the Tower of Babble, and so on. This is the “tough love” of a psychotic, and differs little from Allah’s behavior.]
(C) Allah did not, would not, and will not die for you, nor would he ever send anyone to do so [Allah did not have a son]. But the God of the Bible loves you so much He sent His one and only Son to die for you. And He stands ready to grant you everlasting life if you will receive Him by faith. [Islam, or “submission,” by any other name.]

Both Christian conservatives in America and Islamic fundamentalists seem to hate gays, hold traditionally non-Progressive old school conservative ideologies, demean women, and are guided in their lifestyle and thinking by their basic doctrinal texts, i.e., the Bible and Koran. Which, condensed, means adhering to an old time religion, because it requires nothing more than faith and credulity.

We can understand the animosity held by Islam for Christianity. The Koran is very clear about what to do about the “People of the Book” – slay, subjugate, or convert them if they don’t accept the Koran as God’s final word and Mohammad as the last and most important prophet. Islam is the youngest of the three major faiths and much of its doctrine was cadged from Christian and Jewish scripture – with much tongue-in-cheek inventiveness over the centuries. And Islam does not so much fear Christianity as hates it and intends to eradicate it.

But why do especially Christian conservatives hate and fear Islam? When one reads the comments on the latest Islamic depredation or instance of taqiyya on sites such as Jihad Watch or Atlas Shrugs, a fair percentage of the readers feel obligated to bring God into the discussion. Their ardor is virtually palpable, and any deprecatory remark made by an atheist about Christianity or God usually provokes outrage and posses form. There is a clinical or sociological term for such mob behavior: majority syncing bias.

Because most of Christian doctrine is founded on the life, homilies, and travails of Jesus Christ, possibly that fear and hatred of Islam are based on the secondary status that Islam accords Christ, as a mere prophet, not a “son of God.” Islam claims he was sent to earth by Allah to advance the cause of Islam. In fact, Islam contends that Christ was never crucified, but simply “raised up to Him.”

“Islam and the People of the Book,” by Anwar Shaikh, provides a very simple explanation that supports this contention:

Of course, the Koran treats Jesus as a Prophet of God and confirms that he had been given the power to perform miracles but it defies the Christian fundamentals. For example, it refutes the doctrine of Crucifixion, which holds that God made His Son the Sacrificial Lamb to carry away the people's burdens of sin:

"...for their saying, We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God. Yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown them... God raised him up to Him..." (IV - Women: 155)

It means that God did not allow Jesus to suffer crucifixion, which is the kernel of the Christian faith. He raised him from the cross, and replaced him with someone, who looked like Jesus. Thus Islam destroys the very foundation of Christianity. Not only that, Islam subordinates Jesus to Muhammad. The Hadith No. 287 of Sahih Muslim, volume one, states: "...the son of Mary will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will break crosses, kill swine and abolish Jizya..."

That is, Christ will return to destroy Christianity at Allah’s behest. Presumably Judaism and Jews will have been exterminated long before Christ reappears. Muslim Brotherhood Legal Expert Yusuf al Qaradawi earnestly wishes it to happen. He’s President Obama’s pick to negotiate a “peace” between the U.S. and the Taliban. In 2009, on Al-Jazeera, he implored:

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them–even though they exaggerated this issue–he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

It’s all part of Allah’s plan, you know. Christ, however, is noted for wanting to be kind to animals. Would the Islamic Christ approve of halal, and really go about killing swine? And dogs? And apes?

And Christianity and Islam both have their unique versions of the “end of days.” The sun will rise in the West, billions of corpses will come back to life, stars will go out or fall to earth, the Horsehead Nebula will neigh, the Crab Nebula will sidle up to Orion, almost knocking over the Pillars of Creation, there will be earthquakes and pestilence, water running up hill, and everyone queuing up in an infinite line to be judged by one or the other deity (you can make this stuff up; the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and other religious documents prove it). St. Peter and God are on one side of this vast celestial arena, the Angel Gabriel and Allah on the other, ready with their naughty-nice lists. Satan and his legions of minions are waiting and fuming (literally, they’re from Hades) outside the arena, impatient to collect kindling for the hellfire as Allah or God casts souls into it.

What a premise for an opera bouffe!

There are no serious or fundamental conflicts between men of reason. Reason is their guide. If there are conflicts or differences between them, the most consistent man will be proven right. Knowable reality will govern the outcome. But conflicts between mere beliefs – beliefs without evidence of what is believed, beliefs based on the unknowable, beliefs based on the whim or emotion that “I just want it to be so” – have led and will continue to lead to horrific warfare in which force determines the victor and the outcome without really settling the question of whose God was greater.

God, after all, has always been on the side of enemy combatants.

Islam is not only a major rival religion to Christianity, but it also has an aura of greater potency which Christian conservatives must envy. It sanctions violence and deceit as Christianity does not, and flouts practically all of the Ten Commandments. Violence and deceit are great time-savers when one is trying to collect souls and extort jizya from the greatest number for the greater God in the shortest time. Thus, failing persuasion or dawa, Islam can just barge into societies and cultures and nations with sword and club and impose its will, committing murder, coveting and taking wives and property, lying from ear to ear, cursing, taking the name of the other guy’s God in vain, sparing those who recognize Allah, and so on.

Of course, in Islam, everything a person does is “written,” predestined to happen by Allah. So the average Muslim is but an automaton. He’s only doing what Allah intended him to do. Still, if he slays unbelievers and other infidels and is killed “in action,” as a “martyr,” he will be guaranteed Paradise. So, Islamic justice is hard to reconcile with reason. One may as well pat one’s coffee-maker on the head for, well, making coffee, and tie a bright red ribbon around it.

But then Christian ethics is little better. Without going into the issue of the contradictory attributes of omniscience and omnipotence – some Christian doctrines allege that God also knew everything that one will do eons before one’s Stone Age great-great-grandparents were conceived – one encounters the minimal role of volition as the key to one’s salvation. It also renders the deed-doer selfless, as well, because no good deed is supposed to be performed with the expectation of reward – not even personal, “spiritual” satisfaction – but only for its own sake as a Kantian maxim. Instead of performing the deed in the name of Allah, it is done in the name of the deed. The least quantum of self-interest in performing a good deed leaves the deed tainted with selfishness or with greed for absolution or a place in Heaven.

Of course, this puts the receiver or beneficiary of a good deed in a moral quandary. It is his happiness and well-being that is supposed to be one’s motive. But shouldn’t the same maxim apply to the beneficiary? If his life is saved by a selfless benefactor, how can he not feel selfishly grateful? Ideally, he should feel just as selflessly disinterested in the preservation of his life as the benefactor was supposed to have been in having saved it.

The consistent altruist would be dead from a brief career of selfless service to others. And the consistent beneficiary would be dead from refusal to accept any alms, for they would only make him happy.

So, “social conservatives” find a comfortable medium between altruism and staying alive. The policy explains their practiced compartmentalization of Christian morality, their hypocrisies and inconsistencies, and their politics.

“Ay, there’s the rub,” mused Hamlet. Christians consider it nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous illogic rather than acknowledge it.

Logical conundrums, however, do not weigh upon the minds of devout Muslims. Islam does not paint itself into such ethical corners. It is not concerned with contradictions, moral absurdities, or syllogistic traps. It is brutally frank in its means and ends. Convert or die, or cough up the protection money. Nice cheek, infidel Christian. Can you turn the other one? Thanks for tolerating me. Now, get out of my way.

Perhaps that is why Islam is feared – and envied – by its rival religionists.

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:: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 ::

Review: Fascism and Theater

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 9:20 PM

The first time I watched a political convention to nominate and select presidential and vice-presidential candidates – I forget whether it was a Democratic or Republican one, it hardly mattered then, and does not matter now – I was astounded and not a little appalled by the sheer mindlessness of the event. There they were, hundreds of party delegates from all the states, a great slobbering mass worked up into consecutive bouts of noisy, frenzied rapture over supposedly charismatic nonentities whose platforms and speeches were measures of carefully crafted banality and skillfully inserted buzz words.

There they were, hundreds of adults of both sexes and various ages and sizes, wearing buttons and masks and funny hats and other goofy party paraphernalia, shouting and cheering themselves hoarse on cue in unison, forming conga lines and waving flags and signs, behaving as though they had all checked their brains, dignity and self-respect at the door. Which they evidently had. It was politics as a football game, it was a life-and-death matter of “our team” versus “their team” – all ideational content abandoned and replaced by raw emotion triggered by faces associated with particular sounds emptied of meaning.

The capacity for abandoning one’s mind and for taking orders from delegate leaders has always seemed to be an important qualification for being a convention delegate. On the convention floor a delegate was and is still expected to surrender his “autonomous inner man” or individuality and merge into a smothering, communal gestalt with his party colleagues.

It is well known that television game show guests and contestants are selected for their quotient of enthusiasm and ability to communicate it to and with an audience. By this measure, a political convention has any game show beat by a factor of a thousand. And the prize is not a fancy car or living room set or a Caribbean cruise or $100,000, but the White House and “our guy” sitting in the Oval Office. In such escapist moments, when delegates seem to undergo a kind of mass “out of body” experience, the candidate is reduced to a mere symbolic image, regardless of character or qualification. He is “it.” They become human counterparts of Pavlov’s dogs, able to bark and drool and froth at the mouth on command and at the slightest autosuggestion by an overbearing delegate whip.

This is “democracy” in action. It was and still is stage-managed theater. It has not changed at all from the first time I saw a convention on black and white television. Being caught in the middle of such a phenomenon would be as scary to me as being surrounded by a mob of Muslims carrying signs that read “Behead those who insult Islam.” One would be tempted to strike out at the maddened, sweating fools on the convention floor, only at the risk of being pummeled to death by delegates from Wisconsin and Idaho and Massachusetts and California. They would all plead temporary insanity, and get away with it.

After all, you had insulted their candidate, their Mahdi, their Thirteenth Imam. Their Savior. You deserved to die.

The religious hysteria, as an element of the phenomenon, is not coincidental, or an anomaly, or a fluke. It is part and parcel of modern convention behavior. It clearly was not a governing factor of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Then, delegates brought their brains with them, they brought their principles and rectitude. Can you imagine the Founders wearing funny hats and chanting slogans and forming conga lines to press a point of Constitutional law? No? Is the contrast too ludicrous and obscene to contemplate? Yes. Each and every one of those men, even the villains and fence-sitters, was an exemplar of intellectual and moral decorum. Then look at the baboons and halfwits who are charged with selecting an individual whom they want to “run the country.” Their choices over the last half century or more are reflections of what transpires on convention floors.

Today, the catalyst for the hysteria is not an invisible deity, but a flesh-and-blood human being. With calculated “behavioral” conditioning (à la B.F. Skinner), and a willingness to submerge one’s identity in the collective, the sight and sound of a candidate can reduce these delegates to quivering masses of raw emotion. One almost expects them to fall to the convention floor, wreathing and shrieking in deliverance, and speaking in tongues like any Holy Roller. Call it Political Pentecostalism.

Reading Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945*, I was not surprised to find in this collection of essays similarities between the methods employed by Nazis, Fascists and Communists to create and sustain support for their régimes, and the methods by which the Democrats and Republicans recruit and maintain their hard core, registered voters, activists and especially their convention delegates, the ones charged with nominating their parties’ candidates – that is, the people responsible for foisting onto this country for the last half century or more a succession of fork-tongued demagogues and empty suits.

There are eighteen chapters in Fascism and Theatre, but only a few can be highlighted here. Some deal with the subject more successfully than others, but all discuss the role of “theater” in fascism. The term fascism is used generically in the essays to stand for Mussolini’s Italian Fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, and, to a lesser extent, General Francisco Franco’s Falangist or Nationalist régime, which was a tepid admixture of Fascism and Nazism. (Although Spain remained “neutral” during World War II, Franco approved of sending approximately 19,000 Spanish volunteers to serve in a special division of the German army, to fight exclusively the “Bolsheviks” on the Eastern Front, but not the forces of Western armies. Spanish troops fought with the SS during the Soviet taking of Berlin.)

The term theater as used in the essays means either extravagant mass events such as the annual Nuremberg rallies or the political subornation of high and popular culture, from operas to plays to folk festivals to suit or conform to fascist aims and purposes.

One indisputable characteristic of fascism is that its theater borrowed heavily from Christian and especially Catholic practices and rituals, selectively exploiting the emotional nature of religion. Roger Griffin, in “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth,” introduces this idea which is elaborated on in most of the other essays:

…[F]ascism, if it can seize power, is able to remain true to its core myth and legitimate itself only by generating an elaborate civic liturgy (or a ‘civic,’ or ‘political’ religion) based on the myth of imminent national rebirth. In the two cases where it managed to conquer the State, it rapidly developed characteristic rites and ceremonial, its own iconography and symbology, its own semiotic discourse, aping (but only aping) any established Church. [p. 25]

For Hitler and Germany, “rebirth” meant the resurrection of a Teutonic or Aryan state superior to all, and to rise from the ashes of the Versailles Treaty and the failed Weimar Republic; for Mussolini and Italy, it meant reviving the imperial grandeur of ancient Rome. Hitler and Mussolini, however, had first to concoct and propagate “myths” about the lost greatness of their countries, and then pose as saviors or messiahs who alone had the power to reclaim the greatness and lead their nations to glory. Propaganda ministries and bureaucracies were created in both countries to establish and enforce official party lines about a nation’s past, present and future the subjects of art or in plays, national holidays, and even in opera.

Much of editor Günter Berghaus’s contribution to the collection of essays, “The Ritual Core of Fascist Theatre: An Anthropological Perspective,” is flawed by psycho-babble and sociological semiotics, but much of it also is lucid and on-point. To wit:

Fascist parties rose to positions of power by gaining mass support and winning democratic elections. Millions of people were inspired by Mussolini and Hitler and developed a genuine enthusiasm for their politics, because they promised an answer to a need that was widely felt in different sections of the population. People were fascinated by what fascism proposed in response to a crisis that affected the economic, social and cultural spheres of their lives. Political promises played a role in this, but the emotional appeal of the leaders and their programs was probably stronger. Fascist leaders avoided the rational rhetorics typical of bourgeois politicians, and instead employed performative language that had a captivating force unequalled by traditional means of propaganda. {pp. 39-40. Italics mine.]

Sound familiar? Does that passage hark back to the 2008 presidential campaign and election? Does it not describe the method by which the current occupant of the White House rose to power? However, Berghaus correctly dwells on the relationship between the religious and secular elements of fascism.

This grafting of the Christian redeemer and savior image onto a historical person was a post-figuration technique often employed in the Christian drama of the Baroque period and was ultimately derived from medieval theology. Both Hitler and Mussolini were well versed in the literary traditions of Christian religion and were fully capable of adopting their conventions. Hitler helped the transformation of his own person into the archetypal, divine redeemer figure through his mythological biography, Mein Kampf. [p. 62]

Berghaus quotes Hitler on the purpose of the Party rallies held in Nuremberg and other German cities. From Mein Kampf:

Mass meetings are a necessity because the individual (…) who feels isolated and easily succumbs to the fear of loneliness, is given here an idea of a greater community. (…) When he as a seeker is swept along by the mighty effect of the ecstasy and enthusiasm of three to four thousand others, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the rightness of the new doctrine (…), then he will submit to the magic spell of what we call “mass suggestiveness.” The will, the longing, as well as the power of thousands of people are accumulated in every individual. The man who entered such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it with an inner conviction: he has become a member of a community. [p. 60]

One could also say that this was no less true for Hitler, that he was literally nothing if not the leader of such a community. Without all those chanted “Sieg Heils” and tens of thousands looking up at him on a high rostrum with adoration and worship, he was a vacuum, an isolated and fearful nonentity who assumed an identity only in the presence and eyes of disciplined and attentive mobs.

Many uninvolved contemporary observers were struck by the fact that the public rituals of fascist régimes were “more than a gorgeous show; [they] also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas mass in a great cathedral.” “Is this a dream or reality?” asked one of the visitors to the Reichsparteitag 1936 after the spectacle on the Zeppelinwiese and concluded: “It is like a majestic church service (Andacht) where we have congregated to find new strength…”

[Albert] Speer said that Hitler canonized the formations, processions and celebrations so that “they were almost like rites of the founding of a Church.” Once he had worked out the right forms, he wanted to fix them as “unalterable rites” that gave him the status of a “founder of a religion.” [p. 53]

Mussolini was of a like mind concerning the religious “experience” possible in the Italian version.

Mussolini stated in 1923 that “Fascism is a religious phenomenon of vast historical proportions” and that fascism was “a civic and political belief, but also a religion, a militia, a spiritual discipline, which has had – like Christianity – its confessors, its testifying witnesses, its saints.” The Fascist Party was often described as “a new Church (La nuova chiesa is the title, for example, of a play by [Virgilio] Caselli) or as a “religious or military order.” [pp. 53-54]

For example, from 1933 on, from Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship through the next eleven or so years, German playwrights (those who prostituted their talents to the Party) wrote plays that portrayed the past struggle of the German people to assume their “rightful” place in the world. If this meant fudging history or ascribing to past historical persons presaging yearnings for Nazi or Fascist domination and identity, such hacks were perfectly willing to falsify history, submit their work to Party censors and make the requisite changes. As Berghaus notes:

Consequently, fascist playwrights evoked a large number of situations that indicated a return to a united people. They propagated a new ethics that was aimed at overcoming egotism, uniting one individual with other individuals, creating a firm bond between them, making them identify with the aims of the fascist State and submit to the orders of a leader….The conduct of this leader was modeled, of course, on the historical examples given by the Führer, Duce, and Caudillo. Or rather, one should say, on the way those historical figures were mythisised, legendised and sanctified in fascist hagiography. [p. 61. Italics mine.]

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini was ever portrayed in these plays. Some species of false but more likely fearful fastidiousness in Party censors prohibited it; no actor could have been trusted to faultlessly impersonate Hitler or Mussolini, even had a hack written a play that featured them, and probably no actor would have wished to risk the role, either. Hitler and Mussolini were instead substituted with stand-ins or proxies, such as Frederick the Great or Bismarck or Garibaldi or some two-dimensional fictional character, always ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good in the most cavalierly selfless manner, which was the unity of the German or Italian people. Acceptable plays were set in the past, to convey a false historical overture to Nazism or Fascism – or the alleged inexorable inevitability of Nazism and Fascism, which a mere individual was helpless to oppose and whose only recourse was to submit to it.

Barbara Panse, in her essay, “Censorship in Nazi Germany: The Influence of the Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda on German Theater and Drama, 1933-1945,” discusses several of these plays, and cites how one playwright even perverted the American Revolution:

In Hanns Johst’s play [Thomas Paine], Thomas Paine is the ideological Führer of the American War of Independence. He, too, upholds the notions of colonialism and conquest. With the propagandistic slogan, “America needs land,” he seeks to mobilize the exhausted and hungry insurgent army so that they venture to take the path into the unknown, to victory or death. His appeal to faith and comradeship forges the “racially worthy citizens” (volkisch wertvollen Glieder) of America into a nation. In this play, the life of the Führer character also ends tragically, but his mission is fulfilled: the ‘national idea’ has come to fruition. [p. 149]

Johst wrote this play in 1927. He was a career anti-Semite who wrote a play, Schlageter, which extolled Nazi ideology, to celebrate Hitler’s victory and birthday in 1933. It is interesting to note also that Howard Fast, a steadfast member of the American Communist Party, also appropriated the American Revolution as a means to advance the “people’s struggle” narrative (à la Howard Zinn) on the origins of the United States. Citizen Tom Paine (1943) is one of a number of novels he wrote set in that period.

No discussion of the theatrics of fascism would be complete without mentioning Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary, Triumph of the Will. This task fell to contributor Hans-Ulrich Thamer and his essay, “The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremberg Party Rallies of the NSDAP.” Writing about the purpose and style of the rallies, Thamer observes about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress:

The heroic style and dramaturgy of the event were fixed on celluloid by Leni Riefenstahl in her film Triumph of the Will (1934). Much more than simply a documentary, this film foregrounded the symbolism and liturgy of the ceremonies and established their pattern for the years to come. At the same time, the film disseminated the mass spectacle of Nuremberg throughout Germany. It was a “production of a production” and thereby a reduplication of the “mass appeal” of National Socialist political aesthetics. Triumph of the Will turned the military parade of the National Socialist movement into a platform for the Führer-cult. [p. 175]

Thamer then takes the reader on a tour of the typical succeeding rallies, all based on what Riefenstahl had recorded in 1934, which acted as a template, and then were expanded in scope and in the number of participants. These rallies lasted for days. Thamer follows Hitler from elevated rostrum to a ceremony of flags and banners when he rubbed shoulders and pressed flesh with rank-and-file, to a ritual of consecration of the “martyrs” that was much like a glorified mass of the dead. Hitler was the focal point of every important event. But, it was all a manufactured show.

Nothing was left to chance in the stage-management of the Nuremberg rallies. Every stylistic device had a purpose. The flags were determined in number, size and position; shortcomings in the urban development and gaps in the old town fortifications were covered up by scenery. Everything was subjected to the meticulous plans of the bureaucratic and technical apparatus. The men in charge of the cult were cool-headed technicians, sons of a rational era. Yet they were also theatrical wizards who knew intuitively how to exploit age-old cultic practices for their political aims. It was exactly this link between atavistic ideology, mystical ceremony and the modern age, which helped to eliminate all critical reasoning in both audience and participants. [p. 186. Italics mine.]

Before the entire length of Triumph of the Will was removed from YouTube for copyright infringement (the full version now can be watched with ads), I watched it twice, and I can attest to the effectiveness of the stage management described by Thamer. I distinctly remember Jimmy Carter’s appearance at the conclusion of the 1976 Democratic Convention, when he and his wife Rosalind appeared on stage before a brilliant blue background. That was calculation.

The typical American political convention is also planned and laid out in meticulous detail, from the flags and bunting, to the timed applause and cheers, to the demonstrations of dancing and chanting, to the bands and choreography and lighting, all the way to the climax of the acceptance speeches. Little during these cattle calls could be called spontaneous, except for the essential emotional character of the proceedings that verges on a mass revival meeting. But the spontaneity is also cued and calculated to advance or obstruct a point of order or dissension. For the typical delegate, a convention is a vacation from reality, from the facts of political and economic life.

I doubt that many delegates, upon returning home from a Grand Gestalt, pause long enough to acknowledge just how much they have degraded themselves and regret having let loose a monster. And the ensuing political campaigns have become more and more shallow and meaningless popularity contests, with candidates stooping to the level of rock stars repeating the most popular lyrics and buzz words. Thamer concludes his essay with:

The Führer-myth as the propagandist core of the rally distracted from the political reality of Party as well as everyday life and became the most important means of stabilizing the rule of the Nazi Party. The dream world conjured up by the events manipulated consciousness and created a second reality, which of course could not change the outside world, but could counteract and control it. [p. 188.]

The Obama/McCain campaigns of 2008 were also products of such dream worlds, the one more masterfully managed and staged than the other. And then the winner encountered the “outside world” and, like King Canute, as the legend goes, he attempted to command its tides to cease. In fact, Canute was making a point for his supporters, that he was only a king and not a miracle worker. Perhaps Obama will be imbued with the same wisdom.

The Republicans, however, seem determined to offer their own Æthelred the Unready to oppose him. Election year 2012 is going to be interesting.

*Providence/Oxford: Berghahn Books: 1996. Edited by Günter Berghaus.

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:: Sunday, December 11, 2011 ::

Washington’s Rocket Bombs

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 8:43 PM

Think what you will about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. After all, you might say, it was written by a lapsed Communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War (fighting on the Communist-dominated Republican side) and author of the Trotskyite parable, Animal Farm, an apologia for Communism. All of which is true.

But I do believe that had he not died of tuberculosis (1949), he would have become one of the first neo-conservative intellectuals and writers in the West. He had been creeping in that direction ever since the Spanish Civil War, driven by his growing and articulate animus for totalitarianism (born during WWII, during which he saw elements of it in British government domestic wartime policies). This direction could only have ultimately led him to renounce collectivism, but probably have not motivated him to advocate capitalism or found a fresh new political philosophy (as Ayn Rand did, but from a philosophical perspective, and not from a solely political one). In that respect, he was not a profound thinker or philosophical innovator. But he was a first-class and honest observer.

I have always enjoyed reading Orwell’s prose, whether or not I agreed with him on any specific topic. He was such a consciously fine writer, which explains his deceptively effortless style. My favorite essay of his is “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

Orwell is one of the very, very few writers of the liberal/left who actually respected his readers’ minds and adopted an appropriate policy of writing clearly and stated his intentions and meanings without obfuscation or equivocation.

Humbug, however, is the subject here, and while reading something else, Peter Carl’s six-part essay in The Brussels Journal, “Surviving Islam…and Right/Left Politics: Churchill’s Principle,” caused me to recall the whole “war on terror” coupled with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hosting of a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Washington this week. That was the subject of Clare Lopez’s “Criticism of Islam Could Soon be a Crime in America” on Family Security Matters. This in turn caused me to recall something from Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of rocket bombs that fell on London. From Part 2, Chapter 5:

The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil….

In some ways she [Julia, Winston’s lover] was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.

The mind works in not entirely mysterious ways.

“Just to keep people frightened.” How appropriate an observation to make about our own government. What have Americans seen since 9/11 but attempts to keep them frightened and pacified? The Department of Homeland Security, the “war on terror” now graduated from hunting down the kamikaze soldiers of Islamic jihad to include anyone who questions government policy (re the National Defense Authorization Act, discussed in a previous commentary, “Portrait of a Police State”), the appeal to snitch on one’s neighbors and friends, the completely useless but very expensive, intrusive, and arrogant TSA, Obamacare and other socialist legislation, the campaign to govern one’s diet and light bulbs, the government’s push to take over the Internet, the campaign to demonize freedom of speech in regards to Islam, the excising of all references to Islam, Muslims and Jihad from official documents and training materials (With whom are we at war? Eurasia or East Asia? Who knows? Terrorists just materialize from a parallel universe, not all the time from Islam, but often on blog sites and newspaper columns and not always about terrorism) – all calculated to keep the public dumbed down, diverted, quiet, misinformed, and in a constant state of semi-fright and anxiety.

They are all Orwellian rocket bombs.

Here is another rocket bomb: U.N. Resolution 16/18, which would “criminalize” any and all kinds of criticism of Islam, whether they are cogent essays or cartoons, will be an effort to utilize “techniques of peer pressure and shaming,” and is endorsed without reservation by Secretary of State Clinton. (These same remarks were repeated virtually verbatim by Daniel Baer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which also concerns itself with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues, among other earth-shaking matters, at the Compass to Compassion Conference), and a career bureaucrat whose academic curriculum vita includes degrees in every woozy, humanitarian subject imaginable.) After a mountain of fluffy and venal rhetoric, Clinton noted on July 15th of this year, during a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation:

The Human Rights Council [of the U.N.] has given us a comprehensive framework for addressing this issue on the international level. But at the same time, we each have to work to do more to promote respect for religious differences in our own countries. In the United States, I will admit, there are people who still feel vulnerable or marginalized as a result of their religious beliefs. And we have seen how the incendiary actions of just a very few people, a handful in a country of nearly 300 million, can create wide ripples of intolerance. We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

There is an instance of what Orwell would call the “gumming together of long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

By the U.N. resolution, and through “peer pressure and shaming” advocated by our Secretary of State, “Islamophobia” will include these “criminal offenses”: Religious profiling, defamation, vilification, fear-mongering, discriminatory speech, hate speech, intolerance…ad nauseum. The resolution clumps together the antics of Terry Jones of the Dove Outreach Church and his Koran burning with authoritative essays and books by Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson, Ali Hirsi, Ibn Warraq, Pamela Geller, Melanie Phillips, Walid Shoebat, and many other experts on Islam.

The irony is that Islam that is guilty of everything its defenders charge others with. Call it “Westphobia,” or “Speechaphobia,” or “Reasonophobia.” As Pamela Geller put it, truth is the new “hate speech.” That the OIC and the U.N. would go to such lengths to oppose freedom of speech should cause one to ask: What have the Islamists to hide, that they wish to suppress the truth? What don’t they wish others to know? What truths do they not want identified, exposed and spoken and written about?

What they and their companion organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Circle of America, and other such “civic” outfits, wish to hide is the fact that Islam is antithetical to every rational political concept in the West, that it is totalitarian in nature and in practice, that it is anti-man, anti-life, and anti-value. That it is essentially and incontrovertibly nihilist in theory and in implementation. And that Muslims who are devoted to it are essentially “dead souls,” living ballast in the form of 1.3 billion manqués on which to establish Sharia law and a global caliphate. All those dead souls: Allah owns them – this they know, for the Koran tells them so – to paraphrase Anna Bartlett Warner’s hymn, and they don’t mind.

The OIC gathering in Washington is merely one rocket bomb among others launched by our own government to keep us worried and distracted and always ducking for cover.

As Winston Smith did Part 1, Chapter 8, when a rocket bomb suddenly strikes.

Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 meters up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist….

If the government launches this particular rocket bomb, and agrees with the OIC and the U.N. to enforce a ban on “hate speech” in America by statute or by “peer-pressure and shaming,” we will not see anything as prosaic as a severed wrist, but the heads of the champions of freedom of speech, severed at the neck. For the purpose of this particular rocket bomb is not to cause physical destruction and death, but to destroy the mind and establish a reign of living death.

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:: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 ::

Portrait of a Police State

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:03 PM

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Portion of Emma Lazarus’s poem, “A New Colossus,” for the Statue of Liberty

The chief thrust of this article is that none of this would occur, or even be thought “necessary,” if we had eliminated states that sponsor terrorism after 9/11. But when one reads the text of Senate Bill 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), one gets the impression that many in positions of power and influence, particularly Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, have a vested interest in sustaining an indefinite “war” against terrorism. This would entail establishing, or laying the groundwork for, a police state in which citizens would be lawfully accountable to the state, and not the other way around.

Fundamentally, they have a vested interest in waging a war against America and individual rights. Many sections of the bill are overtures to establish a permanent police state or an authoritarian government. As with many instances of legislation in the past, the bill is chiefly a finance bill, but contains riders, amendments, and sections that have little to do with finance but whose inclusion requires that their authors and sponsors resort to contemptible subterfuge.

One of the consequences of not having properly defended this country from attacks by our enemies – and Islam is certainly an enemy, the strenuous denials of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama to the contrary notwithstanding – is that to defend the country against “terrorism” without taking effective and final action against those enemies, the government must establish a “Fortress America,” or policies which not so much ensure our protection as ensure the survival of the government. What happened to our liberties? They take a back seat. Eventually, they must be thrown from the vehicle of statism.

The Library of Congress inexplicably removed the links I found to the two versions of Senate Bill 1867 (my search was “timed out” and the links no longer work), but I found another one that contains the text of the bill. I have also included separate links to the texts of the notorious Sections 1031 and 1032, which discuss detention of U.S. citizens. These two sections were opposed by some Senators without success. Senators McCain and Levin sponsored the bill and were its principal architects, drafted in secret with not much to-do and only now making its debut. It almost makes one sigh with relief that McCain lost the 2008 election (Was the alternative any better?) The heading of Section 1031 reads:

Sec. 1031. Affirmation of authority of the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Despite assurances in the bill of Constitutional guarantees, the Secretary of Defense and the director of national intelligence may "waive" the inapplicability of Sections 1031 and 1032 to U.S. citizens after leave from Congress to do so. The assurances are merely devious lip service to a document that has been all but gutted of meaning, and to a political philosophy that began to expire with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. (Some would argue that it began to expire with the first imposition of the draft and income tax under President Abraham Lincoln, but that’s another story.) A paragraph of Section 1032 reads, in relation to the status of American citizens who may or may not be detained by the military:

32. (4) WAIVER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY.—The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States.

From the McCain-Levin bill:

ACT OF TERRORISM- The term `act of terrorism' means an act of terrorism as that term is defined in section 101(15) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 101(15)).

The term "terrorism" means any activity that - (A) involves an act that - (i) is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; and (ii) is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and (B) appears to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. (16)(A)

The left is up in arms over the bill because Sections 1031 and 1032 do specify that captured or apprehended enemy combatants or agents who happen to be U.S. citizens or legal alien residents, and who have taken “hostile” actions against the U.S., may be detained without trial. The Left is more concerned with that than with the power of waiver granted to the government. Terrorists, apparently, have rights, but not their victims. But terrorists – the homegrown or foreign kind – have forfeited all rights by attacking the government and country that upholds individual rights with the purpose of destroying it and imposing totalitarian rule – whether that rule is Nazi, Communist, Fascist – or Islamic.

Lindsey Graham and other defenders of the bill’s controversial riders referred to the United States as inclusive in a global “battlefield.” On a battlefield, however, there are no rules of combat or engagement. One kills, wounds, or captures as many of the enemy as possible, with all means available. A battlefield is the stage of focused, controlled violence. Graham’s remark was inappropriate, but reveals his estimate of his country and its citizens. His “battlefield” analogy is reminiscent of the propaganda of Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and Fascist Italy, where citizens were constantly reminded that the “battlefield” was their homes, their jobs, their families, their leisure, their churches, their friends, and the enemy anyone who opposed, resisted or questioned the respective ideology.

Not covered by either McCain’s bill or the Homeland Security Act is the subject of war. What is an “act of war” but what is covered in the definition of “terrorism” cited above? Why has our attention been diverted from ‘acts of war” to “acts of terrorism”?

(4) the term “act of war” means any act occurring in the course of —
(A) declared war;
(B ) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or
C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin;

War would mean armed conflict with the advocates and enablers of another ideology. War means open, armed hostility, not necessarily for the enemy nation’s cultural sum, but for its political ideology. A “war on terrorism,” however, discards the ideology and focuses on the enablers (plotters, foot soldiers, etc.) as though they come from some generic template, and does not declare war on what motivates the plotters, soldiers, and so on. Neglecting to oppose and refute the enemy’s ideology while focusing only on its carriers, propagators and advocates, is futile.

One could say that one cannot be at war with Islam, because Islam, as an ideology, seems to be “stateless.” But, is it? No. Islam is what governs Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and all of the North African states. Islam is not some disembodied entity that infects individuals and causes them to fly planes into buildings or attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Islam is not the common cold. It isn’t even typhus, or influenza. It is the bubonic plague of the mind.

If Islam declares war on freedom of speech, then it has declared war on an ideology, that is, on the political philosophy that professes and upholds the universality of individual rights. Why is it deemed inappropriate to declare war on Islam? Because it is also a theology? Because it propagates and perpetuates the belief in a supreme being or all-knowing and omnipotent deity? Christianity does that, as well, but Christian doctrine has been boxed in and stripped of the power to enforce its doctrine on all. One may believe in God or not; belief in a deity is immaterial in a society governed by secular law. There are those, of course, who assert that God is the source of all individual rights, but such a position ignores reality; it defies the law of identity and the evidence of the senses, as well.

Islam, however, cannot be boxed in or delimited in its political ambition. Its politics and theology are cut from the same cloth, which is belief without reservation, question, or doubt.

Ayn Rand posited a handy and eminently appropriate characterization of the dichotomy that can be applied to Islam: the Witch Doctor and Attila. The Witch Doctor depends on Attila to impose his mysticism; Attila depends on the Witch Doctor to sanction his reign of force. The Witch Doctor stands for the mystics of the mind – don’t question, doubt, or think, just believe – while Attila is the mystic of muscle – force is the solution to all problems. The Witch Doctor is any imam or mullah or ayatollah or sheik; Mohammad is their ideal Attila. (While Allah, as portrayed by Islamic scholars, is the perfect symbol of the mystics of mind and muscle, a being governed by whims and who is not governed by reality or morality).

It is noteworthy that while the government, on one hand, is bowing to the complaints of Islamic activists (the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Muslim Brotherhood affiliates) and is culling all references to Islam and Muslims from defense documents and training materials and courses for counter-terrorism, on the other, Senators McCain and Levin do mention Al-Quada and the Taliban in their bill (Section D, 1031). But Al-Quada and the Taliban are nothing if not Islamic organizations, from their burqa tops to the hems of their thawbs.

Put one way, the organizations charged with defending the country against terrorist attacks – the CIA, the FBI, and state and local law enforcement entities – are expected to conduct the “war on terrorism” blindfolded, dizzy from being turned around dozens of times by contradictory orders and criteria, and armed with a stick with which to strike at an empty piñata, which is moved away from them every time CAIR or some other Islamic front organization cries “victim” or “Islamophobia.”

Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) wrote today on his Facebook page that S. 1867 is “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime.” Moreover, Amash maintains that the bill capitalizes on misleading semantics; regarding section 1032 , he says “‘The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.’ This language appears carefully crafted to mislead the public. Note that it does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary.”

But, who is defined as a U.S. citizen? And if a U.S. citizen wages war against his own country, should he not be charged with treason? And if he is charged with treason, is he not entitled to the full protection of the Constitution he wished to obviate?

Does the bill genuinely define a belligerent as an individual or “person,” whether or not he is a U.S. citizen, who has taken up arms against the U.S., or has taken actions within its jurisdiction with the purpose of subverting or overthrowing the government or harming its citizens or “infrastructure”? Does it specifically exclude newspaper columnists, writers, satirists, or Internet bloggers, or anyone else who questions the wisdom or morality of government policies?

The six-hundred-plus pages of Senate bill 1867 do not answer these questions. This bill is the kind of legislation that is knocked together in the purgatory of non-objective law and fuzzy, evasive, non-objective thinking.

Another part of the bill, Section 584, “Report on the Achievement of Diversity Goals for the Leadership of the Armed Forces,” is particularly onerous. It does not even define the term “diversity,” but since the term was sired by multiculturalism, one presumes that it means not excluding Muslims from command and advisory roles. There are several “prohibitions” or limitations in the bill, but who or what is to enforce them when the bill grants the executive branch, Congress, and bureaucrats the discretionary power to designate who may or may not be an “enemy of the state”?

The U.S. would not be a “battlefield” had we eliminated states that sponsor terrorism over a decade ago. But the Senate bill underscores the fact that our policies do not now and never will identify the specific enemy. This is the deadly neurosis of a nation that has convinced itself that it is not worthy of self-preservation as a free country, but as just another “unexceptional” country which must turn on its own citizens to preserve the state and not the rights and liberties America was once famous for.

The police state proposed in S. 1867 needs and requires Americans to be tired, poor, and huddled, but not yearning to be free. Like "The Picture of Dorian Gray," that “beauteous” welfare and regulatory state established early in the 20th century and welcomed by so many, is turning very, very ugly.

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:: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 ::

Ambidextrous Statism

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 10:18 AM

The standard Left-Right yardstick of political identity places President Barack Obama on the Far Left, which means Communism and the total state. On the Far Right? Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck and others, according to the received wisdom. The Far Right is synonymous with fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and autocracy, with some religion mixed in.

But another measure takes into account the actual implementation of his political agenda and would place Obama on the Far Right. Indeed, political cartoons that emulate Nazi and Communist propaganda posters from the past have depicted Obama in the correct attire and waving the appropriate swastika or hammer-and-sickle banner. The one image is just as credible as the other.

The standard, ubiquitous yardstick begins on the left side with Communism and ends on the Far Right with fascism. But is this yardstick of any value? Is it a valid measure of political systems? Is it a trustworthy indicator of an individual’s or organization’s political beliefs? For decades it has served only the Left when the Left wishes to characterize a politician or political agenda in deprecatory terms as being on the Far Right.

In truth, there is no fundamental difference between the Far Left and the Far Right. They are both totalitarian in nature. Their median is a mushy socialism posing as “Progressive” welfare statism that leaves no whine or grievance left behind. And in all historical cases, the median has always drifted inexorably in one direction or another. The “liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the French Revolution that threw off the aristocracy – a revolution colored by egalitarian collectivism – gave way to the Reign of Terror, a dictator, and two decades of war. In truth, the direction is irrelevant. One can be enslaved, robbed, imprisoned, and beaten by a man wearing a brown shirt as thoroughly as by a man wearing a red one. Or a black one. Or even by a man in an Earth First T-shirt.

The 2010 Super Bowl Audi commercial was a tongue-in-cheek depiction of “Green Police” lording it over violators of government environmental regulations with all the fervor and intrusive power of TSA screeners. Whose progeny are they? The Left’s, or the Right’s? Who sowed the dragon’s teeth of environmentalist tyranny and let loose the uniformed harpies? Tom Haydn and Bill Ayers, or Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush?

The standard yardstick is ambidextrous in nature, and is useful only to the totalitarians of either “side” when they wish to resort to name-calling and pre-digested bromides. There is no yardstick that truly incorporates the antithesis of the alleged opposites, which is individual rights under laissez-faire capitalism. Seen from the perspective of an “outsider,” the Left-Right yardstick is useful only if one wishes to measure the contradictions and conundrums posed by modern political trends and how they imperil individual liberty.

The device of “ambidextrous politics” to measure and explain political trends and consequences is not new. Search the Web and one will find dozens of references to the subject, and long essays about how the standard yardstick is inadequate to explain contemporary or even historical political systems. The Left-Right yardstick has been critiqued before. But because there is a common revulsion among “conservatives” and Progressives alike for unfettered free markets and the rule of secular law (and not of bureaucrats or priests), laissez-faire is missing from the yardstick. And justly so. Laissez-faire breaks the ruler in half. But that yardstick has been burned into the minds of millions over decades of indoctrination in schools.

Norman Berdichevsky, editor for The New English Review, is the author of The Left is Seldom Right, published in 2011 by The New English Review Press. It is a collection of essays and articles by Berdichevsky from over the last five to six years. It challenges the Left-Right yardstick and offers ample evidence of its inadequacy to explain and incorporate all the varieties of statism and freedom. Berdichevsky, however, does not offer an alternative measure that would handily identify the particulars of the Left and Right. It owes much to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which pioneered the critiquing of the Left-Right yardstick.

The Left is Seldom Right is a virtually unedited collection of twenty-two of Berdichevsky’s pieces. It suffers from numerous typos, awkward syntax and sentences, and duplicated paragraphs that pop up in different articles or chapters. There is no index of subjects, only a selective bibliography. An index would have been helpful because so many of the names, kinds of government, and historical instances recur or overlap in the chapters. The book is disorganized and lacks a thematic flow. And often one will find whole paragraphs lifted from sources like Wikipedia without attribution (e.g., the account of the Luxor, Egypt massacre of tourists by jihadists in 1997, p. 244). Attorney General Eric Holder is referred to as “District Attorney.” One is at a loss to understand why so little care was invested in a book that purports to refute an important ideological premise.

An instance of how the Left-Right yardstick can tilt one’s perspective on politics (not cited in the book) is offered here from “Our Bipolar Politics” on The Working Reporter website about politics in Wisconsin and Minnesota:

Minnesota and Wisconsin are politically bipolar. Wisconsin, in particular. The home to so many progressives and union activists is the same state that gave us Joe McCarthy and Paul Ryan. McCarthy’s record of deception, witch-hunting, black-listing, career-wrecking and defamation, speaks for itself. Congressman Ryan, who grew up in a nearly all-white town, attended a nearly all-white college and then went to work for his family’s small town business before being encapsulated by the bubble of conservative politics (great range of experience), is “ranked among the party’s most influential voices on conservative economic policy.”

Lucky us. No surprise that this guy is to the right of Attila. Before long, he’ll probably be calling for hearings on un-American activities. Like his fellow-traveler Michele Bachmann, he’s on the “Less government and more God!” track.

“Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.” – Paul Ryan

Apparently Mr. Ryan sees no gap between the figurative and the literal, feels no real need for context (a number of the founders were Deists), and thinks that if we all pray hard enough everything will be just fine. Hallelujah.

My home state of Minnesota is also on tilt. They’ve given us Humphrey, Mondale and Franken. The good ol’ DFL. Common sense at every turn. Garrison Keillor’s written a wonderful book about Minnesota politics entitled, “Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America.” And now, like a bad cold that won’t go away, the great state of Minnesota continues sending us the uninformed right-wing mental machinations of Michele Bachmann.

The author would be less flummoxed had he not employed the Left-Right yardstick, which makes him the prisoner of an unnecessary paradox. But, note the repeated usage of the term “right” in the screed, always as a term of disparagement. The term “left” is not in evidence. This is because the implied “correct” direction is left and needn’t be mentioned in print or outloud. There is no other default direction. The term “left,” after all, might alert the reader to unsavory elements of that position better left unsaid and un-implied. “Left,” however, is synonymous with welfare state entitlements, “empowered people” vs. political cronyism and corruption and unrepresentative government, caring for the poor, soaking the rich, guaranteeing a “quality of life,” opposing an ossified “establishment,” and so on. All of it “good.” All of that is implied or insinuated.

Conservatism, allegedly a “right-wing” phenomenon, always stands for penny-pinching, heartless, union-busting, old-boy networking Scrooge-ism, not to mention unfettered, unregulated capitalism. In fact it does not stand for any of those things. Conservatism means: conserving or preserving the status quo, even if it means preserving a wealth-consuming and wealth-spreading, right-violating, deficit-financing welfare state. The Left always wins in these circumstances, even if it loses elections. Conservatives do not challenge the moral premises of the Left. It shares the basic altruistic, collectivist premises of the Left. It would rather “progress” to full statism in a soap-box racer, instead of on the Left’s Harley-Davidson. But both sides depend on building their statist utopias on the standing rubble of a semi-free economy.

It is this kind of blinkered, epistemologically arrested measure that can be dispensed with. In the first chapter, “The Origins of the Right-Left Metaphor; The True Right-Left Dimension,” Berdichevsky presents several alternative yardsticks, or graphs, or compasses which, while they are inadequate in themselves, demonstrate that the notion that all politics must be viewed as either Left or Right or somewhere in between (the “center” or “middle ground”) is absurd and misleadingly simplistic.

Surely, a pictorial guide is needed. Berdichevsky depicts one on page 30 of his book, a compass with four directions emanating from liberty and tyranny, with Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left, Objectivists, independents and centrists on the top of liberty, pointing to freedom, and communists, fascists and other totalitarians on the bottom, pointing to serfdom.

Berdichevsky presents abundant evidence throughout his book that the Left-Right dichotomy is patently false. He describes how various authoritarian regimes in history were designated “right” or “left” by their opponents. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, supposedly a “pro-business” regime that oppressed the workers, was simply a pale imitation of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, complete with major industries and businesses entering into government-private sector “partnerships” in command economies. The sauerkraut of Nazism was complemented by the pasta of Fascism.

Oddly, Berdichevsky does not mention Otto von Bismarck’s socialist welfare state, thus missing a chance to underscore the nascent and watershed fascist origins of a unified Germany and how its welfare statism spread to the rest of Europe. Were Mussolini, Hitler and Bismarck “right-wingers,” or “left-wingers”? Neither. They were statists of varying degrees and styles of tyranny. The details of the regimes are almost irrelevant. Force was the sole and final arbiter of an individual’s relationship with the state. The Hitler and Mussolini regimes were noted for their “right-wing” violence and brutality: street warfare, assassinations of opponents, party purges, show trials, and the like, all staged in the pursuit or retention of power. As were the Lenin-Stalin brands of Communism. But they were all instances of socialism and collectivism in action. That is, of the “Left” in action. Or the “Right.”

Berdichevsky’s book, if nothing else, can enlighten a reader about so many past paradoxes, such as why the Left originally endorsed the founding of Israel but now is engaged in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel vitriol. Berdichevsky discusses the Spanish Civil War, the Greek and Argentine episodes of authoritarianism, and why the Left allies itself with Islam and the Right refuses to condemn that particular species of totalitarianism (to question Allah and Mohammad, after all, must eventually lead to questioning God and Jesus Christ – this is my observation, not Berdichevsky’s).

In a chapter too short by several hundred pages, Berdichevsky also tackles Hollywood’s Leftish paradigm and our Leftish literary establishment but leaves one unsatisfied. Ayn Rand is mentioned once as the only screenwriter in Hollywood who had lived under Communism, and a quotation from her HUAC testimony would have been illuminating. Director Elia Kazan is mentioned as the bane of Hollywood communists. Berdichevsky, however, fails to mention one movie that would have helped to underscore his point that Hollywood was under the strong influence of American communists, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I saw this film, directed by Sam Wood and released in 1943, for the first time decades ago before I knew anything about the Spanish Civil War, that is, about who was on the Left or Right (or who were the Republicans and who were the Franco-Falangists, or who were the good guys and who were the bad). Or before I knew anything about Sam Wood. Hemmingway’s novel was a disappointment. But the film still leaves me almost uncontrollably moved – especially the ending – as much as does the ending of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (the Ralph Richardson audio production, not the José Ferrer, 1950 film production, although I won’t gainsay the film). Is liking For Whom the Bell Tolls an indication of political naiveté? Does liking it place me on the Left or Right?

Berdichevsky, apparently an anti-abortionist religious conservative, reveals his own “right-wing” leanings (in many instances he includes abortion as another left-wing imposition) when he excoriates the film Inherit the Wind (the 1960 version) and claims that the depiction of William Jennings Bryan as a fundamentalist, bible-thumping, non-intellectual yahoo, which he actually was, constituted a disgrace and evidence of Hollywood’s Leftism.

And it is here that Berdichevsky also reveals his own Left-Right yardstick confusion. Bryan’s populist appeal meshed neatly with the Progressive or socialist message that grew louder and louder from the 1880’s throughout the 1920’s (culminating in FDR’s New Deal). Somehow, Bryan is revered by Berdichevsky as a tragic martyr of the Right. Yet it was the Progressive movement of the 19th century, coupled with imported statist ideas from Europe, notably from German universities, that resulted in the accelerating growth of big government and the Left’s welfare and regulatory state in the United States. Bryan contributed to that growth, as did many, many “right-wing” Republicans.

How would Berdichevsky place H.L. Mencken on any yardstick or political measure? What does he think of Mencken’s sardonic obituary of Bryan, who died shortly after the Scopes Monkey Trial? Mencken:

“The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice, started something that will not be easy to stop. In ten thousand country towns his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it…. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate.”

Mencken was arguably of the “Right” – when the “Right” meant respect for individual rights and opposing an intrusive, invasive, and shepherding government. Where would he fit in Berdichevsky’s political universe?

Is Berdichevsky of the Left, or of the Right? Go figure.

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:: Saturday, November 19, 2011 ::

The Storm Troopers of OWS

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 3:51 PM

It would be interesting to draw some parallels between Occupy Wall Street and a phenomenon that preceded and that fed the rise of Nazism and the ascension of Nazi power in Germany. That phenomenon was the post-World War I paramilitary Free Corps (Freikorps), or Freebooters.

When Germany lost the war, its army was disbanded, setting loose hundreds of thousands of German soldiers into a stagnant, debt-ridden, and government-controlled economy that had yet to begin paying the Versailles Treaty-mandated reparations that came to billions of dollars. Armies of Free Corps roamed the country, fighting pitched battles with the Communists. They probably decided the outcome of the German Revolution of 1918-1919. The common enemy of the Free Corps was the Communist Party. However, before the Weimar Republic was formed – and even after it had been installed – Germany was ruled by anarchy, with armed mobs of Free Corps and Communists clashing in city streets, with casualties in the thousands.

In early 1919 the strength of the Reichswehr, the regular army, was estimated at 350,000. There were in addition more than 250,000 men enlisted in the various Free Corps. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Germany was required to reduce its armed forces to a maximum of 100,000. Free Corps units were therefore expected to be disbanded.

The parallels discussed here are not the social or even military ones, but the moral ones.

After World War I, the German Army was restricted to 100,000 men, so there were a great amount of soldiers suddenly de-mobilized. Many of these men were hardened into a Frontgemeinschaft, a front-line community. It was a spirit of camaraderie that was formed due to the length and horrors of trench warfare of WWI. These paramilitary groups filled a need for many of these soldiers who suddenly lost their "family"—the army. Many of those soldiers were filled with angst, anger and frustration over the loss and horror of the war. (Italics mine.)

What have we here? One could say that the protesters of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have been addled by the “length and horrors” of, well, making a living. By having to earn their own keep. By dealing with a welfare state which they approve of but which they claim isn’t generous enough with other people’s money. Of being fed up with a Congress that doesn’t respond immediately to their “needs.” By being congenitally outraged by the alleged “pro-business” corruption and lobbying in Congress (but not too outraged by the Solyndra scandal, because that kind of taxpayer fraud and malfeasance is okay with them, it only hurts taxpayers, and it was for a “good cause” – all lobbying and cronyism forgiven). They are unfairly burdened by student loan debt (funded by taxpayers), personal lifestyle debt, and other annoyances.

The irresponsible, the indebted, the reckless, the hankerers after the unearned – that is their “family.”

So, there they are, brimming to their eyebrows with “angst, anger, and frustration.” Many of them are now infested with diseases and illnesses that soldiers during WWI actually contracted in those trenches. The OWSers complain about the police using pepper spray and using force (having to compel a protester to have his wrists restrained with plastic cuffs). Would they like to experience a dose of mustard gas, instead? How about having one’s body riddled by machine gun fire, or being blown to a dozen pieces by an artillery shell? Or being bayoneted? Of simply expiring in water-logged trenches from pneumonia or rickets or typhus? Or dying neglected in a body-strewn, crater-dotted landscape of No Man’s Land because medics couldn’t get to them for fear of being blown to bits, as well.

No, the OWSers have no taste for that kind of misery. Their misery has no antidote, no cure, no magic pill that would make the “pain” and “anger” go away except the expansion of government powers. Theirs is the pain of the unearned uncollected, the frustration of the entitled who cannot be satiated except by the slavery of those who must provide or subsidize the entitlement.

Occupy Wall Street was no spontaneous phenomenon, but a planned and organized instance of “community organizing,” on a scale that would make Saul Alinsky proud. It is orchestrated anarchy intended to cripple the “system,” careening towards whatever target its mobs reach a consensus to freeze, personalize, isolate, and polarize, angling for “confrontation” with the police that would put them in the role of “victims of violence” – when they are the initiators of force. One OWS chant is, “The whole world is watching.” Unfortunately for the chanters, what the world is watching is a farce, of the police not obliging the trespassers and profanities and noise by cracking skulls and water hosing the hordes. Which is what ought to have happened the first time OWS blocked a street or broke a window.

(Interesting side-note: secular leftists do not have a monopoly on Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Islamist outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, The Islamic Circle, and other Muslim “advocacy” groups already practice targeting and personalizing issues, and with growing success. They are masters of those rules.)

“Occupying” a public space and blocking its use by the public, however, is an initiation of force. Zuccotti Park in New York, for example, is a nominally private park open to the public. OWS closed it to all but its own. The whole world was watching while the filth accumulated in that park, while crimes like rape and theft and threatening local businesses occurred, while a “flying squad” of pillagers went on a rampage in Oakland, while hundreds have been arrested with kid-gloves and led away to school buses. One strongly suspects that what OWS was plotting and hoping for was a repeat of the violence of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The news media were on the side of the left even back then. But, it hasn’t happened – not yet. It doesn’t even have a Tom Hayden to excuse, explain, and sanction their cause and its violence. On the surface, OWS has a central nervous system but no brain, no guiding agenda or petition of grievances except a desire to destroy and loot the ruins.

Also, on the surface, OWS does not resemble the pre-Nazi Free Corps. The rabble sports no uniforms, no semblance of military or other discipline, no decorum to speak of, no homogeneity of any kind. It is a conglomeration of slobs, wannabe criminals, punks, weirdos, women with bees in their bonnets and men with only half a deck of cards in their craniums. The variety of protest signs, usually scrawled on cardboard, and often revealing a profound illiteracy in spelling and grammar, testify to the unity of “angst and anger” and the triumph of a university education. OWS brandishes a variety of banners, including the American, but the Palestinian and Puerto Rican flags were also in evidence. On the whole, what OWS is rebelling against is reality, a reality their elective ilk have created.

But like the Free Corps, OWS is a kind of syndicate or an uneasy alliance of disparate collectivist causes and organizations. Some Free Corps upheld the Weimer Republic. Others fought to bring it down. OWS is an amalgam of communists, welfare state liberals, old school radicals, gray panther leftists, new age hippies, holders of worthless degrees, the professionally unemployed, the perpetually alienated, the clinically certifiably disgruntled, career vagrants, vehicles of middle class guilt, black power advocates, Muslims, anti-Semites, Hispanics of indeterminate national origin, unions, AmeriCorps manqués, Peace Corps veterans, environmentalists – all the bilious movements that mushroomed on the mulch of American educational philosophy, and that were prepared and sanctioned by grade and high schools and universities and patronized, idolized, and encouraged by the news media.

But while Barack Obama is blamed for OWS and its violence and health issues and the whole mess, it would be unfair to lay it all on his doorstep. Obama and OWS, like Tom Hayden and the radicals of the 1960’s and 1970’s, are a consequence of the collapse of philosophy and the disparagement of reason. OWS is merely the post-Woodstock, second wave of Borg raiders with bachelor’s degrees.

The protesters of OWS are prime cannon fodder, and perfect recruits for an American version of the Free Corps. We have seen how quickly they can be called up for “action”; that mobs of “Occupiers” sprang up almost simultaneously in cities all over the country testifies to the availability of so many aimless foot soldiers and to a committee or cabal of planners and “community organizers” working behind the scenes and who remain undiscovered and undiscussed by the news media. As we get further into the presidential election campaign, we will see more of this kind of “action.” The “interruption” of Michelle Bachmann’s speech in South Carolina by OWS, and the attempted storming of the Americans for Prosperity event in Washington DC, are but a taste of what is ahead – unless the planners decide that OWS has been a failure, even for the dereliction of responsibility of various municipal leaders of having let the movement grow out of control, as Mayor Bloomberg did in New York. He had Zuccotti Park cleared out – and then invited OWS back, sans tents, tarps, and other camping gear. As though that would make a difference.

The denizens of OWS can be organized into roaming and violent Free Corps. They can be taught discipline and minimal decorum. The SEIU, the UAW, and other strong-arm outfits can give them advice on logistics, manpower, and offer seminars on the art of news-hogging police provocation. They can be given any cause their philosopher-kings wish to give them, and most OWSers will be amenable to it. The news media will give the new Free Corps their blessing, and cheer them on from their insulated TV studios and round tables, and call it freedom of speech, when in fact OWS is an enemy of the First Amendment.

As with the German Free Corps and the consolidation of power that brooks no rivalry – the Free Corps SA was purged, while the Free Corps SS was elevated – there will be purges from OWS and a campaign to paint it in respectable colors. The purges won’t be pretty; there will be weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth. As with the non-violent Tea Party movement, it will seek to become an influential “voice” in Washington (not that it lacks such a voice now, as witness the endorsement of OWS by the POTUS, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other America-changing activists).

OWS in this instance is merely an exploratory phenomenon, to see what will or will not be tolerated, of feeling out the “establishment” for weaknesses and sizing up its strengths. As of this writing, the “establishment” has no proven strengths to counter the intended terrorism of OWS but its own inertia. It has no philosophy of individual rights, of laissez-faire, of limited government, of an understanding of the purpose of government. Fundamentally, in the deepest sense, the federal, state, and municipal governments are one with OWS.

2012 will be a watershed election year. Chickens came home to roost in 1968. In 2012, it will be vultures who flock in large numbers to pick at the carcass of the American Republic.

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