How is this not treasonous?

I don't lightly throw around the word "treason." It's the most serious crime there is, worse even than murder which only affects one or a few. But "treasonous" gets us thinking about the issue of who's "us" and who's "them" without getting all steamed up over legal definitions. As things go these days , even such a general inquiry is a much neglected one.

Here's a passage from an article about a French fellow who's done some serious analysis of French realities, particular French real estate:

[Guilluy] aims only to show that, even if French people were willing to do the work that gets offered in these prosperous urban centers, there’d be no way for them to do it, because there is no longer any place for them to live. As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants’ quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.^[1]

Just noticing the ethnic decomposition of major Western cities is such as to make a reasonable person who thought he lived in "his" nation wonder when it was that the government decided to welcome a tidal wave of foreigners that has, in some cases, made him a minority in his own capital city, as is the case in London. In the words of John Cleese, London is no longer British.

One hears the "f" word at every turn these days but never the other "f" word, namely, the word "foreigner." It's the word that can never be uttered for to the beautiful people of our moribund civilization it's a dirty word, without meaning. We're all law-abiding pals with a love of tortillas, halal food, monkey brains, and genital mutilation, aren't we? Huddled masses!

Not foreign.

In the military, it's woe to the man who falls asleep at his post. The idea is that he exists to keep the enemy out of the area he and his comrades control. But there's no longer a place for such thinking in the minds of beautiful people with oh-so-much education in the things that aren't. No. For them immigration is a sacred thing.

But look at the result. Public housing that was built for French people at the time is now exclusively housing for foreigners bent on being parasites and taking over. Native Frenchmen, in this case, were pushed aside, as is also the case now in Sweden where white Swedes are pushed out of public housing to make way for foreigners.

Some might argue that stupidity does not bootstrap one into the realm of treason, but this isn't stupidity and the slow but huge increases in the presence of hostile foreigners is no less an unopposed or encouraged invasion because the invaders come with diaper bags and without visible weapons. It's not stupidity; it's a deliberate betrayal under the banner of the loathsome slogan, "Diversity is our strength." Even circus contortionists don't dare to attempt that kind of twisted thinking.

The people who have done this deserve the punishment reserved in more sensible times for "treasonous" behavior. Each person's last words "But I didn't know!" can be duly noted for the record.

Notes
^[1] "The French, Coming Apart." By Christopher Caldwell, City Journal, Spring 2017.

Day Off, With A Difference

     I’m rather weary this morning – yesterday was a pretty big day in several senses – so rather than attempt a fresh essay, I’ll recount the meat of a brief exchange I had with the C.S.O. when we sat down to lunch after viewing The Case For Christ.

     Beth is not a Christian. Indeed, she’s not religious at all. Ironically, her work involves the finances and administrative arrangements of several orders of Catholic nuns, who often call her “Sister Beth” and ask her when she plans to take her final vows. However, she does know a fair amount about Christianity and the Catholic Church, and is generally respectful of both. But yesterday, as she awaited her shrimp and fried clam strips and I my crab linguine Alfredo, she asked me about the history of the Eucharist, and the “why” of it.

     That got me talking about the food chain and its historical significance in religious belief. It took some explaining – no, she doesn’t read what I write; approximately 2317.84% of spouses don’t read their beloveds’ written emissions – but there came a point where I sensed “a light going on.”

     As I’m a loquacious sort, it took all my willpower plus 5% (helpfully supplied by the waitress who brought our lunches) to stop right there.

     All I could think at that point was “Now we shall see.” (Cf. The Man Who Would Be King.)

     I’ll see you tomorrow, Gentle Readers. Have a nice day.

The Case For Christ

     The Case For Christ movie is currently playing in theaters nationwide. The subject of the movie is the evidentiary odyssey of Lee Strobel, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who set out to debunk the Resurrection of Jesus Christ...but wound up becoming a Christian, and eventually a Christian pastor.

     The movie, which largely follows Strobel’s first-person account of his investigation in his book of the same name, is frank about his initial intention, which was specifically to disprove the historicity of the Resurrection. He sought to establish it as a pleasant myth embraced by persons with a need to believe it. That desire arose from his wife’s surprise conversion from atheism to Christianity, which upset him greatly, as is often the case in marriages in which one spouse experiences such a transition. Strobel was certain at first that he could demonstrate objectively that the Resurrection could not have occurred. Ultimately, he amassed such a mountain of evidence for the Resurrection that he could no longer maintain his own atheism.

     Most faith-centered movies are unimpressive. They share the fault of most faith-centered fiction: excessive preachiness. The Case For Christ is free of that flaw. Nor does it exhibit any other flaw of significance. It’s well done in every dimension: script, acting, sequencing, pacing, and conclusion.

     As I’ve written before, propositions such as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ can always be rejected by one determined to do so. Even one who personally witnessed the Resurrection, if sufficiently nimble of mind, could concoct unfalsifiable alternative explanations for the event. What Strobel’s book and movie do for us is to assemble a mass of evidence sufficient to armor a believer against the barbs and scorn of today’s vociferous militant atheists.

     I found one specific segment of the movie particularly impressive: After a number of “false starts,” Strobel seeks to disprove the Resurrection by establishing that Jesus didn’t die on His Cross. In confronting a medical expert deemed an authority on the subject, he tells the expert – himself a Christian – that “You’re hardly an impartial source.” The expert replies that Strobel would find the same to be true of everyone who had undertaken his journey. There’s a lot of food for thought in there.

     Believers will come away from The Case For Christ reassured and refreshed. Non-believers will mostly refuse to see it...which is a great pity, as it would do a lot to soothe the acrimony that exists between Christians and skeptics today.

     Highly recommended.

A Summation

     Dystopic has been doing excellent work for quite some time, but his most recent piece is a Jeremiad, a stunning summation of the tactics of the collectivist Left that lead directly to its strategic core. It’s must reading, and I beseech my Gentle Readers to head over there right now to drink it to the lees.

     Here’s an appetite-whetter:

     Underneath it all, of course, [Leftists] hate themselves. This has given rise to people who say things like “I won’t have children, because they would be white.” Or other folks, like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King, who desperately wish to be black, perhaps because they could escape the weight of the world by identifying with the oppressed instead of the oppressor.

     Weaponized Empathy has destroyed these people, body and soul. They mutilate themselves, hate themselves, rail against the very society that created them, and then seek to unload their shame and self-loathing on to others.

     (If you’re not already conversant with Dystopic’s writings on Weaponized Empathy, repent of your sins, get over there, and start reading at once! No concept is more important to the comprehension of what’s been done to us this century past, entirely through appeals to what we think of as our better natures. But I digress.)

     I’ll wait right here till you’ve finished.

---

     The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
     Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

     [From 1984]

     There are particular concepts within the realm of argumentation tactics that, in my view at least, constitute heinous crimes against their targets: genuine violations of the moral law that deserve to be harshly punished. The two I have in mind at the moment are of such enormity that I find myself contemplating other horrors in reciprocation: things I would normally regard as beyond the pale.

     The first of these is the deliberate contradiction or inversion of the facts: a practice that’s sometimes called “gaslighting.” This tactic, especially when substantially extended and prolonged, can erode the target’s confidence in the evidence of his senses. The point, of course, is to “persuade” him to rely entirely upon the pronouncements of others, even when his eyes and ears tell him that they’re lying to him.

     Even the strong-willed can be brought low by a persistent gaslighting campaign. The Left is aware of this. Indeed, by combining it with the deliberate effacement of history, the Left weakened Americans’ will nearly to the point of surrender.

     In that light, consider the passage Israeli Deputy Minister Michael Oren found in our “paper of record,” the New York Times:

     Michael Oren: …I talk about an incident that occurred in May of 2010 with the New York Times when Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he alleged that he insinuated that the Arabs accepted the U.N. partition resolution of 1947, and the Jews rejected it. And I called up the editor of the New York Times, and I said wait a minute, this is exactly the opposite. Don’t you check facts? We [Israel] accepted it. The Arabs rejected it, and went to war against it. That was the war of independence. And the Arabs rejected the first two-state solution. And he says well, that’s your interpretation. Now wait a minute, there are certain in-controversial historical facts, uncontestable facts. I mean, did the Allies land, or did they not land on Normandy Beach in June, 1944? And the editor’s response was [analogous to] well, some people think so.

     If the editors of the Times are complicit in this sort of deception, no one can be confident that he’s safe from it. The young, who have little knowledge of history owing to our government schools, are particularly susceptible.

     The second tactic is one known to every schoolchild: group pressure. He who finds himself surrounded by a chanting mob will often surrender to that mob’s pronouncements just to get out from under the pressure. The Left has made use of this tactic in innumerable ways. For example, it strives to colonize propagative organizations – educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industries – because those organizations can create pressure waves in public opinion: waves that, if unanimous among such organizations, become all but impossible to resist. John Q. Public might start “swimming with the tide” before he realizes it.

     On a micro-scale, consider how Julius Nyerere’s Communist TANU regime strove to “re-educate” the people of Tanzania via the compulsory “ten-house cell” led by a Communist apparatchik:

     TANU recognizes the urgency and importance of good leadership. But we have not yet produced systematic training for our leaders; it is necessary that TANU Headquarters should now prepare a programme of training for all leaders – from the national level to the ten-house cell level – so that every one of them understands our political and economic policies. Leaders must set a good example to the rest of the people in their lives and in all their activities. [source]

     The point of the ten-house cell was to marshal peer pressure against private dissenters – i.e., to encyst them within a chorus of Communist orthodoxy that would force the dissenter to choose between conformity and isolation. (Really stubborn dissenters, of course, were taken out back and shot.)

     The combination of gaslighting with persistent, inescapable group pressure can overwhelm all but the strongest wills. This is a key element of what Dystopic addresses in his essay.

---

     ’Another example,’ he said. ’Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’
     An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
     ’It exists!’ he cried.
     ’No,’ said O’Brien.
     He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
     ’Ashes,’ he said. ’Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
     ’But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
     ’I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
     Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

     [1984 again.]

     If “we” have any collective responsibility at all, it would be a responsibility to acknowledge reality. What happens has happened; we are obligated to resist all efforts to deny or efface it. The O’Briens of the world are our mortal enemies.

     Yet O’Brien represents his efforts as beneficial, curative; he tells Winston to regard him as an ally, if not a friend. It is the supreme horror of the novel that sufficiently prolonged, O’Brien’s tortures “persuade” Winston to accept him as such. The Left aspires to a different position: as the hegemon over all things.

     The ultimate tyranny is tyranny over the mind. Dystopic notes how vulnerable any one of us could be:

     The pressure is both great and subtle. Imagine a conversation about the weather, innocent enough on its own. A friend might say “wow, that global warming sure is kicking in today!” You’ve a few choices here. You can challenge him, but the immediate counter is likely to be something like “well, 99% of scientists agree, sooooo….” The implication, of course, is that you are stupid for disagreeing with 99% of scientists (whether or not there is any truth to that claim, either). You could remain silent because it’s easier. Or you could just give in, regardless of the truth of the matter, because it’s easiest. Meanwhile, if you counter your friend successfully, you may be down a friend by the end of the night.

     Placed in such a situation, many of us would regard the loss of a “friend” as weightier than the maintenance of reality. This is especially urgent for those without support. That’s why the Left seeks to separate us from one another. That way, its gaslighting campaigns and group pressures could not be resisted or relieved.

---

     “Senor D’Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”
     “Just exactly what it deserves.”
     “Oh, how cruel!”
     “Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, Madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.”

     [From Atlas Shrugged.]

     An old mantra of the early New Left was that “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” That’s the zygote of collectivism – yet in one and only one sense, it contains a kernel of truth. The kernel consists of a phrase that was once an essential part of international law: “enemies of all Mankind.”

     The category of “enemies of all Mankind” subsumed pirates and other felons who plied their trades on the high seas, beyond the territorial jurisdictions of Westphalian states. It was considered an obligation of every nation with seagoing capability to collaborate in expunging such felons, as they threatened the travel and commercial intercourse that made possible the advancement of civilization. In more recent years, “enemies of all Mankind” has enlarged to embrace slavers, terrorists, and those who kidnap for ransom of any kind.

     I submit that if there is any obligation that lies upon every man that has ever lived or ever will, it would be to oppose the “enemies of all Mankind” by any and every means, a outrance -- and in that category I would unhesitatingly include those who strive to deny or efface reality. Dystopic’s peroration concludes thus:

     It is, often times, difficult to resist the allure of just giving up the fight. It’s so much easier to throw in the towel, and jump when someone else tells you to. When damn near everyone accuses you of something, to just say “yes, I’m guilty.”

     But you can’t. I can’t. And even if I could make such a choice for myself, I cannot make it for my family, for my country, for my civilization.

     You are not Atlas, and you do not need to suffer his punishment. You are not Christ, and you will never be morally perfect, and can never carry the weight of another’s sins (you will have enough trouble with your own).

     If the ultimate tyranny is tyranny over the mind, then the ultimate bastion of liberty is mental liberty: the insistence upon the real, “the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” He who maintains the facts as witnessed, confirmed, and recorded by reliable record-keepers is a defender of freedom; he who excuses himself from that effort, whatever his rationale, has joined forces with the tyrants.

     And that is really all that need be said.

Whackjob Sweden.

In early 2017, the Swedish police were instructed to increase their preparations for war. They were not told who this potential war would be against, although the authorities like to talk about an alleged threat of an invasion from Russia.

It is not, however, the Russians who now routinely burn cars and commit gang-rapes in Swedish cities. These crimes are largely committed by recent immigrants, many of them Muslims coming from war zones. These immigrants have for decades been allowed in by the ruling political elites, applauded by the mass media and supported by the EU and the UN.^[1]

Löfven strikes back.

Notes
^[1] "Europe: Combating Fake News." By Fjordman, Gatestone Institute, 4/5/17.

Please consider a contribution to Fjordman. There's a link to do that at the bottom of the Gates of Vienna page here. Thank you.

Tommy Robinson can also do with some help. A link for that is on the main page of Gates of Vienna. For that, I thank you as well.

Sabotage of our nuclear forces.

What is left mostly unsaid is that this was a deliberate decision to hobble our nuclear forces in the future and to make it very expensive and difficult for others to fix. It only becomes more expensive and more difficult with each passing year, so hopefully more mature and responsible minds with the long view will get to work this year to give the future options and not problems.

"The Crisis in Nuclear Husbandry." By CDRSalamander, U.S. Naval Institute, 3/29/17.

H/t: Woodpile Report.

Our corrupt, clownish leadership.

All dissent is a Russian operation. Anything bad that happens to America has nothing to do with our corrupt, clownish leadership, but is Putin’s fault. This is where all of this is going, and it’s further evidence that the American empire has entered a much more pronounced and dangerous period of decline.

"Our corrupt, clownish leadership" seems harsh but these times call for clear assessments.

The Republicans have yelled about Obamacare from the git but come time to come up with a replacement that's not a modified version of that leftist monstrosity they've got nothing in their bag of tricks. Not only didn't they have a colorable scheme of what might be a better approach, but what they did come up with was hush hush and rolled out as just another exercise in jamming it down the throats of the people. Take it or leave it, suckahs.

No discussion beforehand. No attempt to show how something as simple as allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines could stimulate competition and lead to more options. No focus on the problem of the uninsurable and what we should do as a nation, whether pretend it's a problem to be dealt with by insurance or a matter of taking care of people in a bad way as a matter of public policy. Ryan knows best!

No discussion of the aberration of employer-provided health insurance as an artifact of WWII price controls.

And sure has shootin' no discussion of the known defects of socialized care elsewhere in the world.

Similarly, the seemingly sacred rule is that no other national problem can be dealt with other than in a "comprehensive" manner. Nope. Can't just build a wall to stop illegal immigration as in stanch the flow of newcomers before we decide how to get rid of the other invaders who got here earlier. We have to come up with the perfect plan for Indians to come take American jobs and seasonal agricultural workers to come from Brunei and deportation and the wall and sanctuary cities. Got cancer? How's that dandruff?

Tax system a bit cumbersome? Why, of course, we must have a "comprehensive" reform such that the deductibility of hobby expenses must be carefully examined. Just take a pen and change corporate tax rate – now the highest in the universe – to 15%? No, no, the clowns have never heard of the 80-20 rule.

These things take time. Arterial bleeding there, Rufus? We hear you but, first, what's the history of diabetes in your family?

"U.S. Propaganda is Embarrassingly Bad (and Why it Matters)." By Mike Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg, 4/19/17.

H/t: Zero Hedge.

Conversations

The following exchange took place outside a warehouse store. I can identify only one of the participants: myself. (Full disclosure: I faked a heavy Italian accent throughout.)

SHE: Excuse me, sir, are you an American citizen?
FWP: Si, si! Since before last year.

SHE: Did you vote for Trump?
FWP: E bene, I did. He build grande edifici! Bellissimo!

SHE: Would you call yourself a racist?
FWP: Mi scusi? Is a word I don’t know. What means?

SHE: A racist is someone who thinks his race is better than others.
FWP: Ah, si. Better in all the ways?

SHE: Well, not necessarily all ways. But the ways that matter.
FWP: Oh, so he thinks his race is better at the important things. But people, they disagree about what’s molto importante, no?

SHE: Well, yes, I suppose, but—
FWP: But let’s say there’s these three guys behind a...a tenda spessa, a curtain, and you have to assign each of them to one of three jobs. The first job is running a little shop. The second job is raising a family of sei bambini, six little children. The third job is playing the pro basketball. How do you assign the guys to the jobs?

SHE: Unless you were to tell me more about these guys, I’d have to do it randomly,.
FWP: Bene, bene. The first guy, he’s white. The second guy, he’s Asian. The third guy, he’s black. Now go.

SHE: What? I need to know more than that!
FWP: Mi dispiace, is all I know. So, what assignments, then?

SHE: Well, I suppose I’d have the white guy run the shop, the Asian guy raise the kids, and the black guy play basketball.
FWP: Molto bene, so would I. But why?

SHE: Because...uh...
FWP: Thank you for teaching me this fascinating word, this racist. Ciao!

Wrongthink

     The above neologism has gained some currency in recent months, owing to the efforts – semi-comic efforts, to be sure – of those being accused of it. For those who didn’t buy a program at the gate, wrongthink refers to the envelope of the Left’s attempts to silence certain opinions and positions. As the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are surely aware, that envelope now includes outright, undisguised violence.

     To this point, the violence has been “private:” i.e., conducted by Leftist activists such as “Antifa” and the “Black Bloc.” However, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be “municipalized.” Consider the passivity of the Berkeley, California police in the face of the recent riot there. Consider the memo that recently came to light:

     ...and ask yourself: “Just whose side were they on?”

---

     It’s easy to look at the Berkeley street scenes of which so many videos were taken, note the passivity of the “forces of order,” merely snort in contempt and move along. It’s harder to analyze the matter holistically, but much more rewarding.

     Like many coastal cities, Berkeley is hostile to the right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, Berkeley’s municipal ordinances regard even a walking stick as something no one ought to carry. (See the memo above.) I have no doubt that anyone who’d been visibly in possession of a firearm would have been arrested on the spot regardless of his conduct.

     What that does, in the face of a street clash that turns violent, is to award an advantage to the more numerous, better organized, more violently inclined force. That force becomes overwhelmingly likely to win the day. The Antifa / Black Bloc forces assumed that, as they were uninhibited about employing violence, the edge would go to them. Yet in the recent dustup, the pro-Trump ralliers, who had sincerely hoped for a peaceful showing, responded to Leftist assaults with an unprecedented degree of fury. The Leftists were unprepared to face it, and were quickly humiliated.

     Don’t imagine that Leftists will fail to draw the moral. At the next confrontation, they’ll be armed. The “forces of order,” which “stood down” on the most recent occasion, will look the other way.

     Wrongthink, you see, deserves no protection.

---

     Godwin’s Law:

     Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies) is an Internet adage which asserts that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1"—that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler.

     ...has reached peak absurdity. It is no longer necessary to strain to draw such comparisons. America’s Nazis are here and proud of themselves.

     They’re not in unchallenged power, mind you. They might not be in the ascendant. But they’re out and proud, doing what they can to quench all open dissent from their preferences. You can identify them by their willingness to silence anyone who disagrees with them. In Weimar Germany they wore distinctive brown shirts: the garb of the Sturmabteilung:

     The Sturmabteilung, literally Storm Detachment, functioned as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).

     It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Their primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, unionists, and Jews – for instance, during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.

     Like the original Brownshirts, they lack official sanction. However, they receive unofficial forbearance from the police departments of such places as Berkeley, California. The command levels of those departments sympathize with America’s Nazis. They feel wrongthink must be punished. As it would be indiscreet for those commanders to order the police to do so, the commanders order the police not to intervene. Until recently, that was sufficient to award the possession of the streets to the Nazis, and to intimidate anyone minded to challenge them.

     With the most recent events, the commanders’ attitudes might just be turning – but not in the direction of protecting the wrongthinkers! Oh no, we can’t have that. Rather, the police will be encouraged to intervene – subtly at first, no doubt – in favor of the Nazis.

     I may be wrong...but I don’t think I am.

---

     The transition from de facto wrongthink to de jure crimethink – the legal prohibition of the public expression of certain opinions – is already in progress in Europe. Laws that privilege Islam, explicitly banning the expression of certain anti-Islam sentiments, are now in place in France and Germany. Those governments are also pondering the banning of anti-“refugee” sentiments, which have swelled greatly in reaction to the tides sweeping northward and westward from the Muslim Middle East. And of course, there’s considerable agitation for the EU and its member states to condemn Israel and outlaw any commercial interaction with it.

     Too many Americans have told themselves that “it can’t happen here.” Perhaps it can’t, at least with regard to Islam, though the numbers of Muslims in America are growing faster than the population as a whole. But what about other opinions disfavored by our political class and our glitterati? Is it really impossible to imagine that the currents that have produced a rash of “safe spaces” at our institutions of ignorance and indoctrination higher learning could some day burst forth to seize our legislatures – first of municipalities such as Berkeley, then perhaps a few state legislatures, and eventually the Congress of these United States?

     It wouldn’t be promoted as “punishing wrongthink,” but in the name of “public order.” Remember Mark Steyn:

     If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there's an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don't attack him head on, don't brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he'll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons. [From Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It]

     A few more street battles – especially battles in which America’s Nazis are on the losing end – and laws that forbid the public expression of certain opinions (see the attached list, which will include a schedule of penalties) would become more likely than not. That’s how wrongthink is transformed into crimethink...and the last, pitiful vestige of the freedom Americans once enjoyed is stripped away.

     Scared yet?

---

     I can’t close this essay without mentioning this little raffle, which seeks to promote “wrongthinkers” among our contemporary storytellers. If you enjoy fantasy and science fiction, you’re likely to enjoy the books being given to all entrants. (Entering costs nothing.) The three winners would enjoy a still larger array of “naughty books.” Please consider entering. (No, nothing of mine is on offer.)

Realism

     There’s a substantial, threatening deficit of realism among our politically engaged. If you’ve been listening to the chatter or reading the politically oriented Websites, you might already have noticed it. Or you might be part of the problem, and thus as unable to recognize that deficit as a fish is unable to recognize water.

     But then, quite a lot of people have no idea what realism means.

---

     For some years we’ve been having a kerfuffle over ideology, specifically political ideologies and their influence over the decisions of public officials. As many people don’t have a clear understanding of the nature of an ideology, much of what’s been said and written about it has been utter bilge.

     An ideology is a set of ideas (sometimes a set of one) about the cause-and-effect laws that govern some segment of reality. Those ideas must be consistent with one another – i.e., they must not imply contradictory consequences – for the ideology to be coherent. An ideology that persists for long enough and acquires enough adherents will be given a name by which it can be recognized.

     Ideologies have addressed many aspects of human life: politics, economics, social order, conventions of courtesy, morality and ethics, and so on. However, not all ideologies are recognizable as such. We most easily recognize the ones that pertain to politics and political economy.

     Ideologies must not be confused with principles. A principle is a fundamental rule about right and wrong – a rule that divides the universe of human action into the morally acceptable and the morally unacceptable. Oftentimes a set of principles will underlie an ideology, but this is not always the case.

     Consider the term human rights for a moment. Does this term denote an ideology? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Rather, human rights is a grab-bag term that summarizes certain moral obligations – an implicit invocation of the moral principle that thou shalt not violate another person’s rights. That not everyone agrees on what should go under that heading is a secondary consideration.

     By contrast, consider Thomas Mackay’s statement about welfarism:

     ...the cause of pauperism is relief. We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for. [Thomas Mackay, “Methods of Social Reform”]

     That is a statement about cause-and-effect: a diminutive ideology. That it can be part of a larger ideology about political economy is not a dismissal, as several such ideologies incorporate it – and they disagree with one another.

---

     The salient facts that apply to all ideologies are these:

1. They pertain to specific areas of human conduct;
2. They propose cause-and-effect models for those areas;
3. They can be wrong.

     I’ve ranted about Fact #1 before, albeit in an inverse way: An ideology must not be pushed beyond its domain of applicability. (See Part 4 of the cited essay: “The Ongoing Political Problem.”) Libertarians’ attempt to do so was motivated by a desire to solve problems in public policy to which libertarian ideas do not apply. It’s brought considerable harm to the pro-freedom cause. That harm has not yet ceased to accumulate.

     Fact #2 is definitional: a part of the differentia that distinguishes ideologies from other abstractions. A silly counterexample might go like this:

“Jelly doughnuts must always be eaten with coffee.”

     Is that an ideology? Certainly not: it doesn’t make a cause-and-effect claim. It’s really a silly attempt at a moral principle: a statement that not to have coffee with one’s jelly doughnut is wrong. Yes, there’s an implied “or else” to it: “If you don’t, you will be punished somehow.” However, the implication is too weak to claim that it proposes a cause-and-effect model.

     By contrast, the following:

“Eating a jelly doughnut without coffee will cause indigestion.”

     ...is a true cause-and-effect statement: if you will, a rather trivial ideology. However, I can testify from personal experience that it is incorrect. That brings us to Fact #3, which is at the core of this tirade.

---

     “If what you’re doing doesn’t work, do something else.” – Michael Emerling

     To say that some method or procedure “works” implies the following:

1. It was aimed at producing a well-defined result from well-defined initial conditions;
2. It achieved that result, within the limits of allowable deviation;
3. The costs, including all side effects and second-order effects, were acceptable.

     All three of those conditions are imperative. They’re the touchstones by which we judge all proposals for doing anything, regardless of the subject. They apply to ideologies with full force.

     I shan’t sugar-coat the matter. It can be exceedingly difficult to meet all three of those conditions, especially in the realm of public policy. Much that Smith claims to be indisputable truth is pooh-poohed by Jones, because Jones insists on a different set of initial conditions, or places a higher weight on certain costs or consequences than does Smith.

     If we return to Thomas Mackay’s statement about welfarism:

     We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism...

     ...one determined to “disprove” Mackay might insist that public welfare programs inherently diminish pauperism by converting paupers to non-paupers! There’s quite a bit of definitional sophistry there, and an ill-concealed determination to ignore the second-order effects of public welfare programs. Yet many persons dedicated to the expansion of governmental welfare programs do exactly thus...and get away with it.

     Nevertheless, there are times when an ideology is either demonstrably wrong or inapplicable to the case at hand.

---

     The Obamunist foreign-policy posture of “strategic patience” is currently under discussion, especially in contrast with the still-emerging foreign policy of the Trump Administration. During the campaign, some drew parallels between the two, claiming that Obama’s reluctance to involve the U.S. in foreign conflicts was largely similar to Trump’s “America first” stance. I believe this to be incorrect: Obama’s posture didn’t actually refrain from involving us; rather, he greatly preferred rhetoric to action, unless he believed action incapable of adversely affecting his Administration. Atop that, Trump’s “America first” stance doesn’t automatically preclude involving the U.S. in a foreign dustup; it merely insists that any such involvement must serve American interests above all else.

     The arguments over Trump’s actions in Afghanistan and Syria, and the arrival of several carrier battle groups in the waters around the Korean Peninsula, have ranged from dubious to ludicrous. It is defensible to argue about what best serves American interests, though in some cases there isn’t a lot of room for disagreement. It is not defensible to argue that an intervention can’t possibly serve American interests. Indeed, it borders on lunacy.

     Foreign-policy ideologies often incorporate a large amount of lunacy.

---

     The political economy ideology that advocates the free market has come in for some body blows in recent years. That isn’t really the fault of free market economics, but rather the ways in which governments have learned how to disguise their market interventions to the intended benefit of their domestic industries. For example, Country X’s subsidies and regulatory concessions to particular industries can create conditions under which Country Y’s participants in those industries will be induced to relocate to X. That’s not a market failure, but a failure of government X to respect the market. If the effects sufficiently disfavor country Y, its government can and should react – and that’s not a failure of free market economics either.

     Yet there are free-market ideologues unwilling to concede that the political conditions that surround the marketplace can cloud the desirability of unfettered international trade. They maintain that as bad as X’s policies may be, Y’s attempt to compensate for them is still “wrong.” Wrong by their dictates, perhaps, but in what other sense?

     President Trump’s proposed “border adjustment tax,” intended to create a counter-incentive to the expatriation of American industries and employers, might fail for several reasons. It might be ineffective; the costs it imposes, especially upon American consumers, might be too high to bear; or it might precipitate a second-order effect that’s far worse than the flood of industrial expatriations. But those possibilities can only be tested in the crucible of experience. To say a priori that they’re “wrong” is a different sort of pronouncement: a moral pronouncement, with which not everyone is likely to agree.

---

     Realism is, above all else, the readiness, willingness, and ability to recognize when events have diverged from one’s preferences or expectations, and to admit that that is the case. The admission should imply a concomitant readiness to revise one’s ideology, if it should come to that. The resistance to making such revisions, displayed today by so many, doesn’t alter the facts. How could it?

     Realism also partakes of another practice: the willingness to confront one’s own choices. For an individual, that consists of asking oneself “What did I do to bring this about?” and answering candidly, to the best of one’s ability. For an electorate, it involves asking “What did we do – and ought we to have expected the consequences it has brought?”

     We elevated a consummate deal-maker to the presidency. He’s out there doing his best to make deals – deals that he believes will serve America’s interests. Was it really imaginable that he would superglue himself to any set of policy prescriptions?

     We returned a group of legislators to Congress who could best be described as “pusillanimous time-servers.” There’s very little courage to be found among them; they cower at the lightest criticism from the press, to say nothing of the way they shrink from the barbs of their political opponents. Their highest ambition is to die in office; by their behavior we must conclude that they believe the best course toward that end is never to offend anyone. Was it really imaginable that they would follow any bold course, regardless of the topic or their supposed positions on it?

     We consistently expect more honesty, candor, and respect for our rights from politicians than they provide in practice. We keep “throwing the rascals out” and electing a new set, “insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in.” (H. L. Mencken) How is it that we have not yet confronted the fatuity of our expectations?

     The greatest need of our time is for realism about politics, governments, and the behavior thereof. Will it come? If so, from where – or whom?

Resurrections: A Post-Easter Rumination

     Something is happening. Something good. It’s been quiet until recently, but it’s slowly becoming more vocal, more visible, and more self-assured.

     I hope I’m reading the evidence accurately, because it’s something that all by itself could bring these United States back from the twin brinks of disaster and despair.

     I think Americans are rediscovering their Christianity.

---

     There’ve been many expressions of “Happy Easter!” sentiments on the Web this year. Religious sentiments; not “enjoy your chocolate bunnies” secular crap. People are acknowledging the reason for the feast day, and acknowledging its overwhelming significance. Considering how loud the militant atheists have been in deriding faith, and considering their alignment with left-wing assholes who’ll do anything to beat down those who dissent from their Hellish gospel, that’s a development of note.

     People in my usual orbits have been more cheerful about their Christianity lately, too. There’s less furtiveness about it, generally. That’s more important than it might seem. The pragmatic, temporal impact of a sincerely held faith is its moral-ethical code. It’s pretty hard to be dedicated to the observance of one’s moral code if one’s faith is treated as a cosmetic or an accessory.

     A lot of faiths have promulgated moral codes over the centuries. Most of them, pardon the expression, have been complete horseshit. Many have proceeded from some utterly ludicrous notion about racial or regional superiority. Only two – Christianity and its ancestor faith Judaism – have embedded what C. S. Lewis termed the Law of General Benevolence: the moral obligation to be well-disposed toward others regardless of their identities.

• Hillel: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.”
• Jesus of Nazareth: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

     Unless you’re Robert Axelrod or a millennial genius of fantastic erudition, it can be tough to arrive at those principles from quotidian experience.

---

     As I’m a Catholic, I’ll add a few words about our particular burden and obligation. The Catholic Church in America has been under a cloud for some years, owing to the “pedophile priests” scandal. I have no doubt that many of the dioceses afflicted by the problem handled it very, very badly. I also have no doubt that the public-relations dimension of the thing was wildly overblown. Sex crimes sell newspapers and commercial slots, and the more lurid, the better.

     There’ve been pedophiles in the clergies of other religious denominations: Christian, Jewish, what-have-you. They don’t get the air time or column inches Catholic priests get, because of the Catholic requirement that our priests must be celibate. And of course, there are pedophiles among non-clerical occupations, as well. Indeed, pedophile Catholic priests were not statistically more numerous than pedophiles in other walks of life. That doesn’t excuse it, of course; as has been said, and truly, even one is too many.

     However, the reactions to the scandal have been healthful and heartening. An increasing number of American Catholics have involved themselves deeply in their parishes, partly from the desire to prevent such horrors and partly out of the recognition that their faith and the Church are of great value to them. They’re determined that no such blot will afflict their parishes, and not by contriving that the hierarchy should cover it up.

     Most encouraging of all, they’re being vocal about it, especially toward diocesan prelates desperate to have the whole thing be forgotten.

---

     Nothing could be more constructive toward the future of this nation than a general rebirth of sincere Christian allegiance. All Christian sects promulgate the same ethics: those summarized by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Yes, we differ in some theological doctrines, and on some minor ethical points, but those pale in comparison to our commonalities. A Christian nation would be a nation whose people are at peace with one another, whose assumptions about one another are benevolent: “We may differ in methods, but I’m sure we want the same things for our countrymen.” It would not excuse the State or its agents from obedience to the laws that bind the rest of us. (Especially “Thou shalt not steal.”)

     Of course, the keyword in the above paragraph is sincere. One must not adopt a faith for pragmatic reasons. “It would be good for me and those around me” is not an adequate basis for committing oneself to a theological creed. That’s why Easter is such an important event.

     Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, on the third day after His death on the cross, is the confirmation of His authority and the authority of His preachments. Of course, the qualifier of importance here is “if it happened.” One must accept that He rose, laid the Great Commission on His apostles, and will come again at the end of all things to pronounce the judgments that only God is entitled to give.

     That’s an act of faith. One must rationally work one’s way past the objections to the Resurrection. One must then experience a private, interior event – a personal commitment to Christ’s Resurrection as a matter of historical fact – despite the inability to prove that it happened. These are things each candidate for the faith must do for himself.

     Lee Strobel did it. An intelligent, atheistic journalist, disturbed by his wife’s conversion and determined to “rescue” her from her newfound faith, found that despite his best efforts he could not debunk the Resurrection. Strobel became a Christian, and one of the best lay evangelists of our time.

     What about you, Gentle Reader?

Today’s Important News

     We here at Liberty’s Torch are committed to bringing you the news of the most important events of our time, as swiftly and accurately as human capability allows. Accordingly, please take note of the following, which is of critical significance to everyone alive...and to quite few that aren’t:

     In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.
     And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.
     His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
     And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.
     And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.
     He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.
     And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you.
     And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word.
     And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him.
     Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.

     For those disinclined to accept the testimony of partisans, we have this corroborating account, which can hardly be doubted.

     Happy Easter, everyone. May the joy of His Resurrection be yours throughout this year and every year.

Pretty much "must read":

The left makes its opposition to the Constitution, the election process and the rule of law into a crisis. And then it uses that crisis to demand a new system. It has pursued this approach successfully in local areas and in narrower causes. This is not the first time that it has embarked on such a project on the national level. But this is the first time that it has the full support of a major national political party.

And that is the true crisis that we face.^[1]

The radical left assault on Trump and our constitutional system was visible within days of the election. What has become obvious was a virulent, dishonest campaign to delegitimize Trump's presidency in every way possible.

I'm not a fan of his actions respecting Syria, Russia, China, and North Korea but this goes beyond difference of opinion on policy matters and Trump's personal fidelity to his stated objectives. The radical left and its friends in the Democrat Party simply do not want America. They want dictatorship.

Notes
^[1] "IT’S OFFICIAL: Democrats Now the Party of Radical Revolution." By Daniel Greenfield, Doug Ross @ Journal, 4/14/17.

A Brief Moabite Digression

     It’s somewhat unfortunate that the U.S. had occasion to use its GBU-43 “MOAB” bomb just now, for a reason that few other than observant Jews will be familiar with: Moses, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, died on a mountaintop in the land of Moab, overlooking the promised land – Israel, for those of you who don’t have a program – which God had forbidden him to enter. Yet we just dropped a MOAB on a mountain in Afghanistan, and in Passover season, at that. Well, military timing isn’t always convenient for the rest of us.

     Anyway, the Left’s carping about the bomb being somehow “inhumane” (alternately, “obscene”) left me briefly chuckling. How could a bomb be “humane?” Its purpose is to kill and destroy. This particular bomb was ideally suited to its target: a complex of caves and tunnels embedded in the Afghan mountains. The overpressure its nine tons of RDX explosive generated in that confined space would kill everyone in those caves more or less instantaneously. If you want an essentially painless way of dispatching a group of enemies who’ve concentrated underground to their eternal reward, I can’t think of a better one. A better non-nuclear one, at least.

     To me, the GBU-43 is an impressive device. Very few persons appreciate how difficult it is to build a chemical explosive that large and have it go off as a single event. There have been larger chemical bombs – the Allies mined a German emplacement with a 500 ton (1,000,000 pound) bomb during World War I – but the records don’t indicate whether it exploded singly or as a succession of smaller blasts. At any rate, it appears not to have mattered to the Germans.

     The problem lies in combustion front speed versus shockwave speed. A chemical explosive is really a material that burns very, very fast. The expansion of the combustion products – hot gases, mostly – creates a wave of overpressure called a shockwave. The overpressure created by the shockwave is isotropic. As it burns, the combustion front is partly retarded by the shockwave, which is simultaneously pushing the material around it outward. Thus, if the bomb is large enough, the combustion front that expands from the point of ignition will eventually reach a void: a gap between the combustion front and the unexploded part of the bomb. If the unexploded part has been pushed too far from the combustion front to ignite, combustion ceases at that point.

     Let it suffice to say that a really big chemical-explosive bomb must be very carefully designed and constructed. The explosive must be special; the ignition mechanism must be special; the container must be special; and the men who decide whether, when, and where to use it must be very special indeed.

     Yes, there are some analogous problems with fission and fusion bombs, but in those cases there are some offsetting advantages. The “combustion front” in a fission weapon is a wave of fast neutrons. In a fusion weapon, which requires a fission explosion to set off the fusion component, reflectors are used to redirect those neutrons into a compressive force that squeezes the fusion core to the pressure and temperature required to initiate a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Solving the problems involved took a considerable amount of brainpower from some really heavy dudes.

     Now, to those on the Left who don’t reflexively condemn anything the American military does and have retained some vestige of rationality: Analyze the “humanity” of being killed instantaneously by a GBU-43 MOAB — or a nuclear weapon, for that matter – in comparison with death on a cross. Show all the relevant steps in your equations and sign your work at the bottom. While you’re busy with that, I’ll be praying. It’s Holy Saturday, don’t y’know.

Predictability Part 2: Warfare

     As I wrote yesterday, when armed conflict arises, predictability loses the value it has in peacetime. All other things being equal, a predictable adversary is one whose moves can be countered with confidence. Therefore, a nation at war cannot afford to be predictable.

     However, there’s an exception of enormous importance.

---

     For openers, I will once again quote military SF writer Tom Kratman, from the afterword to his novel A Desert Called Peace:

     [I]t has been said more than once that you should choose enemies wisely, because you are going to become just, or at least, much like them. The corollary to this is that your enemies are also going to become very like you....

     If I could speak now to our enemies, I would say: Do you kill innocent civilians for shock value? So will we learn to do, in time. Do you torture and murder prisoners? So will we. Are you composed of religious fanatics? Well, since humanistic secularism seems ill-suited to deal with you, don't be surprised if we turn to our churches and temples for the strength to defeat and destroy you. Do you randomly kill our loved ones to send us a message? Don't be surprised, then, when we begin to target your families, specifically, to send the message that our loved ones are not stationery.

     This is a central motif in Tom’s “Carreraverse” series, which chronicles the conflicts that beset the small, politically unique nation of Balboa on Terra Nova. It’s not a philosophical thesis but a law of human nature:

Savagery begets savagery.

     Like the other laws of nature, it can neither be repealed nor modified by any legislature. There are no exceptions to it.

     Arguments over the value of predictability cannot alter a law of nature.

---

     When civilized society C finds itself in conflict with savage force S – i.e., a force that openly dismisses the Judeo-Christian moral and ethical constraints that characterize an advanced civilization – a seemingly moral quandary arises: Can we defeat them without descending to their level?

     Note the occurrence of the word seemingly in the above statement. The moral nature of the quandary might be illusory, for much depends on the pragmatic characteristics of the conflict:

1. What is the correlation of forces between C and S?
2. What costs would accrue to C from a victorious campaign?
3. Would S’s military defeat solve the problem? If not, what would?

     If the answers to those questions are all satisfactory, C has no insurmountable problem before it. However, let any one of the answers be unsatisfactory, i.e.:

1. S is as formidable as C, if not more so; or:
2. The costs would badly destabilize C, perhaps irrecoverably; or:
3. The problem cannot be solved by a military campaign. Other methods are morally inadmissible.

     ...and the problem acquires a moral dimension. Tom Kratman’s observation then looms large, for among the developments that can ruin a society is the erosion of its common morals and ethics.

     History has not yet recorded a period in which a single nation, if opposed by all the other nations of the world, could not be defeated. There has always been a global counterbalance against true hegemony by any single nation, even if it was not invoked. Thus it has always been possible that nation C might face opposition so great that all hope of C’s victory was vain. That, of course, would exclude the possibility of a victory morally acceptable to C, as well.

     Kobayashi Maru, anyone?

---

     Consider the following scenario from On Broken Wings:

     "Next problem. No maps or planning tables this time. You're the commander of an attacking expeditionary force. Suppose the defenders here have a positional advantage, which allows them to repel any attack at ruinous cost to the attacker. However, it only works in defense, so they mount no counterattacks. Moreover, they don't appear to be interested in counterattack, and you have nothing to tempt them with. What do you do?"
     Christine pondered. "Well, I don't attack here, that's for sure."
     Loughlin snorted. "You think it's always that simple? Maybe there are no tactical alternatives. Imagine that the General Staff disagrees with you about the impossibility of a successful assault, only you know that you're right and just can't demonstrate it without slaughtering a quarter million of your own men. Imagine that you have political pressure building up on your shoulders." Anger crackled through the words. "The people at home are demanding a quick end to the war and the return of their sons. The Emperor has already speculated openly about whether it might be time to replace you. Your troops trust you and will do whatever you say. It's worse: your troops can't imagine what's holding you up. They want to charge across the desert and annihilate those Godless devils, and they're perfectly sure they can do it."
     She grimaced. "You're talking about a no-win scenario. I've been charged with delivering a tactical success from a situation that doesn't allow one, and nobody knows it but me."
     "Exactly."
     "Well, what should I do?"
     He raised his fists over his head as if to smash them against the table, and held them there. After a moment he seemed to recover himself, and brought his hands down before him, staring at them as if he wished they belonged to someone else.
     "I don't know." His voice was bleak. He turned his hands over and stared at his palms, then joined them in a trembling grip. "I didn't know then, and I don't know now."
     "What?"
     "Never mind."

     A civilized nation facing a savage enemy will sometimes be caught in a situation that inflexible. Consider our current face-off against world Islam. (Yes, we are at war with Islam; we’re just reluctant to admit it. Sufficiently prolonged, that reluctance might get us all enslaved or dead. Islam, you see, has no qualms about being at war with us.) There are exactly two ways for the civilized West to prevail over the savagery of Islam:

• Quarantine: the confinement of Islam’s adherents to an enclosed, tightly patrolled space;
• Genocide: the elimination of Islam’s adherents from the face of the Earth.

     Both those solutions trouble a great many Westerners on moral grounds. They regard quarantine as a form of imprisonment without trial. Genocide, of course, would involve the slaughter of persons who might have nothing criminal to account for, and no conscious hostility toward anyone. To this point, those moral qualms have handcuffed the West in its dealings with imperialist, inherently violent Islam.

     They’ve also made us predictable in the near term.

     At every terrorist attack, our panjandrums orate about “bringing the perpetrators to justice.” But justice of that sort is a peacetime conception, carefully defined by penal laws and rules of procedure that can’t be honored on a battlefield. Moreover, our domestic enemies are eager to have those handcuffs bind us absolutely and permanently, such that we can’t even investigate such attacks effectively. Thus, they who would terrorize us into the “shariafication” of the West believe they can foresee our moves with high accuracy. Up to now, that belief has been correct.

     But Tom Kratman’s key observation:

     [I]t has been said more than once that you should choose enemies wisely, because you are going to become just, or at least, much like them. The corollary to this is that your enemies are also going to become very like you....

     ...will not be denied in the long term. The restraint the West has enforced upon itself, which stems almost entirely from the denial of the inherent war between Islam and societies founded on Judeo-Christian principles, is causing pressure to build up. The longer it builds, the higher it will rise. Its release is already likely to result in the deaths of millions, including millions of nominal innocents. That, too, is predictable. What’s entirely unpredictable is the exact course of events: which millions will die, by what method, and by whose hand.

     Long term, the predictability of Western survival depends on our becoming unpredictable in the near term. That will be the case for as long as the conflict should last.

---

     The geniuses of conflict studies have poured much hard thought into these matters. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been general concurrence among them. Nor would I represent my own thoughts as conclusive. Like everything else I write, I’ve expressed them in the hope of stimulating still further thoughts.

     (There are other approaches to this subject, including Frank Fleming’s classic essay “Nuke the Moon.” Unfortunately, I can’t find a linkable copy at this time. Any help, Gentle Readers?)

Beyond the pale.

That mission turns into a hunt, a search for these two guys [New York National Guardsmen]. Long story short, our unit – my guys, Dog Company – finds one of the guys in a field some distance away [in the Tangi Valley of Afghanistan]. His arms had been hacked off. He’s naked. His uniform has been ripped off. His heart has been cut out, or at least that’s what we suspect because there is a hole in his chest right where his heart should be. At this point in time, we had a lot of assets in the air, and we were getting reports that his fingers were being sold in the local bazaars as war trophies.^[1]

The speaker is Army Captain Roger Hill.

Think of this story next time you hear senior American military officers talk about rules of engagement. About how punctilious we must be in fighting these primitives.

We must limit the application of our laws to people of our own civilization. The Muslims cheerfully treat infidels in their midst as second-class citizens. Why do we pretend that they are our civilizational equals?

If we're going to be there or anywhere we have to fight till the surviving enemy begs for mercy. Mostly, we don't belong anywhere in any Muslim nation and no Muslim belongs in ours.

Western elites are cowards and dance around the pathology of Muslims which is Islam itself. Not radical jihadi, Islamist, terroristic, salafist savagery but Islam. Muslims have to be told they can expect nothing from us until they are housebroken. Secular states from which all remnant of Islam have been removed are welcome in the community of nations and can have their oil fields back. If it takes 500 years for that to be achieved anywhere, so be it.

Notes
^[1] "‘Dog Company’: Bronze Star Decorated Army Captain Explains How Politically Correct Lawyers Are Betraying Our Troops." By John Hayward, Breitbart, 4/12/17.

Predictability: Threat Or Menace?

     Yes, the title is a counter-riff on this old National Lampoon cover:

     ...but what of that. Of course I’m thinking about the geostrategic value of predictability in a nation: the extent to which its responses to particular developments can be accurately forecast.

     And yes, the Syria matter is on my mind again.

---

     Many persons of high prestige study international relations. Unfortunately, most have large, double-edged axes to grind about international relations. It’s a difficult field for anyone interested in gathering unbiased opinions. It’s made opaque by the impossibility of experimentation, though in all candor, the notion of experimenting on nation-states causes me worse shudders than the impossibility of locating an expert on foreign policy who isn’t blinded by his own opinions.

     If there’s a central meta-question about international affairs, it might be this one:

Is it better to be predictable or unpredictable?

     ...where better should be taken to mean “favorable to one’s own national interests.”

     A nation that pronounces specific foreign policies will be deemed predictable if:

• Its actions consistently accord with those policies;
• It announces changes to them before acting on those changes;
• Such changes, if any, are gentle rather than dramatic.

     The inverse is also true. But which condition is more conducive to a nation’s own interests?

     As usual, the answer is: It depends.

---

     In peacetime, the importance of predictability is high. Nation-to-nation bargaining of all sorts reposes on an expectation of trust: first, trust that agreements will be kept; second, trust that changes in government will not automatically alter or nullify such agreements. A Darth Vader nation (“I am altering the deal, Calrissian. Pray that I don’t alter it any further”) soon discovers that no one is willing to negotiate with it.

     Indeed, even a very powerful nation cannot afford to be unpredictable in peacetime, for other states, large or small, will seek to avoid dependency on its actions. Trade relations, customs barriers, the policing of the high seas, and other matters that touch upon the international order will be arranged in such a fashion that the impact of any actions by the unpredictable state is minimized.

     The old diplomats’ definition of peace – “a state of tension that falls short of armed conflict” – acquires a particularly ironic force here, because as a practical matter, peace is always a matter of degree. As I wrote in the Foreword to Freedom’s Scion:

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.
     Yet individuals manage to move among them with a fair degree of facility and (usually) little risk. Cross-border trade is commonplace, in some places torrential. Though wars are frequent, they seldom result in major alterations to the overall political pattern. The uber-anarchy of Terrestrial society exhibits more stability than one would expect from two hundred well armed, quarrelsome States, each of which perpetually schemes at snatching some advantage at another’s expense.

     That condition practically guarantees that the “state of tension that falls short of armed conflict” will be decorated now and then with...armed conflict, albeit mostly of an intensity that doesn’t engage a national military in open combat.

     When “peace” begins to slide down the continuum toward open warfare between the militaries of nation-states, the value of predictability decays along with it.

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     In warfare, unpredictability has a high value. What the enemy cannot predict, he cannot confidently prepare to counter. Major battles in all the wars of Westphalian society have hinged on surprise moves by bold commanders, whose opposite numbers were caught unprepared by them. The slow discovery of the great military value of surprise, whether strategic or tactical, has largely shaped the evolution of warfare since the Industrial Revolution.

     Broadly speaking, in warfare:

• You don’t want the enemy to be able to predict your moves, whether in initiative or on response;
• You don’t want the enemy to be well informed about your overall capabilities;
• You don’t want the enemy to know your strategic goals.

     But no more than peace is warfare a binary condition. International relations have often produced intermediate conditions – nominally peace, though substantial armed conflict is in progress – that require a sophisticated approach to predictability / unpredictability decisions. In the current circumstances, it behooves the United States to be reliably predictable about some things, but wholly unpredictable about others.

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     As I’ve said more than once this past week, the United States has maintained a policy of deterring lesser states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and of punishing their use when it should occur. WMDs were unknown until fairly recently in historical terms. The first introduction of a WMD to the battlefield was Kaiserine Germany’s use of war gases – at first chlorine; later on phosgene – in World War I. The horror of that weapon was sufficient to include a ban on the use of war gases in the Geneva Conventions.

     Over the past thirty years there have been a few cases in which a state was suspected of having employed war gases. Saddam Hussein is believed to have gassed the Kurds shortly before the First Gulf War. Of course, the use of Sarin in Syria is at the heart of the current geopolitical foofaurauw.

     President Trump acted on that longstanding policy. If we leave aside the supposed uncertainty about “whose Sarin” it was, the subject of debate is the policy itself. Should the U.S. have such a policy? If the answer is yes, then should our response to the use of a WMD be highly predictable, or should violators (and uninvolved bystander-states) wonder what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it?

     For my part, I think the policy is wise. However, the response, inasmuch as it’s more likely than not to be military in nature, should be difficult to predict, so that a violator cannot know in advance what penalty will be imposed upon him. Such uncertainty tends to augment the deterrent value of the policy.

     Of one aspect of the retribution, predictability is essential: it should hurt the violator, and hurt him badly, but if possible without harming the uninvolved. Smith’s violation should not cause Jones to bomb Davis. That problem is what has evoked the use of human shields by gangster-states determined to avert the consequences of their aggressions.

     Which is part of the problem I visited in this essay.

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     There are no provably correct solutions to the problem of aggressive violence by nation-states. As has been remarked many times, hindsight is always 20-20; armchair quarterbacks throw no passes and win no games. I expect the Tomahawk strike against Syria to be chewed over for years to come, whether or not there’s a major alteration of the Middle Eastern muddle any time soon. If there is, of course, politicians will scramble to take any available credit and avert any blame. That’s what they do.

The popularity of Assad.

When Assad did stand for reelection in 2014, after 14 years of unopposed rule, in a contested election that was judged "free, fair, and transparent" by an international commission of observers, headed by Jimmy Carter--Assad won 88% of the vote if such a thing is possible. That's 3 percentage points higher than Putin's highest point of genuine popularity. Could it be?

* * * *

The neocons were shocked (Like the "liberated" Iraqis not greeting our invading forces in 2003 with flowers.) But Assad's popularity is really not so hard to fathom. For while both he and his father, Hafez al-Assad, did rule as dictators--even brutal dictators at times--they were also "enlightened" dictators in the sense that they well understood that even dictators ultimately only govern with the consent of the governed; and that it was therefore in their interest to respect the rights, especially the religious rights, of all of their citizens, while simultaneously emphasizing the unifying feeling and concept of a shared secular identity among their citizens as "Arabs" and more specifically "Syrians."^[1]

Notes
^[1] Don't Blame Assad for Syrian Gas Attack Yet." By Dr. William Wedin, Russia Insider, 4/8/17.

The Common Carrier Conundrum

     At this point, everyone in the known universe (i.e., Mount Sinai, NY and its immediate environs) has heard more than he cares to know about the April 9 foofaurauw over United Airlines’ forcible deplaning of a passenger. The airline definitely mishandled the matter not once but twice: first in the method used to remove David Dao from the airliner; second in attempting to improve its public-relations position by publicizing unpleasant facts about Dao’s past and his behavior during the incident. So the airline has a self-inflicted black eye from the event that’s unlikely to heal quickly.

     Yet even with all of that, I have some sympathy for UA. It’s a common carrier, as are all airlines that fly out of federally controlled airports, and the law treats such organizations as a lower species of creature:

     A common carrier in common law countries (corresponding to a public carrier in civil law systems, usually called simply a carrier) is a person or company that transports goods or people for any person or company and that is responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport. A common carrier offers its services to the general public under license or authority provided by a regulatory body. The regulatory body has usually been granted "ministerial authority" by the legislation that created it. The regulatory body may create, interpret, and enforce its regulations upon the common carrier (subject to judicial review) with independence and finality, as long as it acts within the bounds of the enabling legislation. [Wikipedia]

     Under the law, a common carrier is obligated to provide its services more or less automatically to anyone who requests them. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re dictated by federal law: e.g., a common carrier must follow the law about who may bring a weapon with him. Anyone not a member of a legally exempted category must be serviced upon request.

     Add that to UA’s obligation under its union contracts to return employees displaced in the course of their duties to their home bases. Suddenly, UA is caught between two fires. Even though it was contractually and legally in the right in selecting a random passenger to be removed, the implied denial of service puts the airline in obligation to that passenger for any losses he incurs for having been removed – and as you can see from the available videos of the incident, David Dao was both vociferous about his losses-to-be and determined to incur a couple of new ones.

     Once again, there are exceptions to the carrier’s liability for such losses:

     Common carriers are subject to special laws and regulations that differ depending on the means of transport used, e.g. sea carriers are often governed by quite different rules from road carriers or railway carriers. In common law jurisdictions as well as under international law, a common carrier is absolutely liable for goods carried by it, with four exceptions:

• An act of nature
• An act of the public enemies
• Fault or fraud by the shipper
• An inherent defect in the goods

     It is unlikely that any of those exceptions will be found to apply to the UA / David Dao case.

     Yes, the airline handled the matter badly. It could have continued to escalate its offer of compensation until cupidity persuaded some passenger to accept. It certainly didn’t need to smear David Dao, though the temptation, given Dao’s determination to make a fight of it, was surely strong. Yet I have some sympathy for any organization that, when caught between Scylla and Charybdis, loses its way. Under such inflexible conditions, with the harsh light of publicity shining upon it, to blunder into either the monster’s jaws or the whirlpool’s maw is easier than the uninvolved might imagine.

You know you're in trouble when . . .

When, that is, you pay close attention to a press conference after the foreign ministers of two major nuclear powers hold a meeting in Moscow.

To be interested in what government officials say is not a sign that world affairs are humming along as they should under the firm hand of rational, normal human beings. It bespeaks a concern that something is unbalanced and that irrational or illegitimate force is a possibility in the near term. At least in my view. What strikes me as "must watch" isn't what anyone else should go along with.

I have these thoughts about what I saw:

1. 
   U.S. Secretary of State, Tillerson came across as an arrogant man, a classic example of America, the arbiter of the fate of mankind, the Dudley Do-Right before whom the waves must part.

   We've got conclusive evidence that Bashar al-Assad planned, directed, and executed the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria and that Assad has a history of such awful behavior. Even criminal prosecution for war crimes is being considered. The days of Bashar al-Assad and the Assad family are limited.

   Awareness of or concern for what might follow after successful completion of Job Number One = zero. Assad did it, he's trash, he's toast, sauve qi peut, bichez.

   And, yes, K-Mart shoppers, Russia did decide to stick its fingers into the giant fur ball, maelstrom, NASCAR pileup, cat fight, and National Organization of Wymen convention that is American presidential politics. For which, mind you, further sanctions against Russia would be warranted.

   They are evil geniuses and they provided crucial evidence of Hillary's health problems and grotesque corruption in the form of laughable "speaking fees" and "contributions" to the Clinton Foundation. No one in West Virginia had any clue beforehand that Bill'swife (with a sidekick with disturbing Saudi Arabian connections) wanted a war on coal. And no one else had figured out that she was lying through her teeth about the loss of at least three fine Americans in Benghazi and that she had cackled with delight over the death of Muammar Gaddafi.

   No sociopathy here.

2. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, by way of stark contrast, came across as a sensible and healthy individual not at all arrogant. He is fully committed to an investigation of recent events in Syria rather than going off halfcocked a la You Know Who.

   "Ready, aim, fire" as opposed to "fire."

   He noted the Syrian request for an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons with approval.

   Mr. Lavrov also noted the history of the U.S. over many years of being fixated on regime change. E.g., Serbia (with U.S. bombing of a TV station and other civilian targets and the Chinese embassy), Libya, and Iraq, I think he mentioned. He sensibly argued that what takes place in Syria should be determined by democratic means whereby the people of Syria can determine what they want.

   The matter of regime change should be considered in the light of what has happened when that approach was implemented before.

The press conference:

As various commenters around the web have asked, What happened to improving relations with Russia and abandoning moronic ideas about playing God in Syria?

A tragedy is about to unfold with this degree of American arrogance and deceit at work.

Edit

Minor edit 4/13/17.