Edward Cline's Blog, page 24

The Afghanistan Murders and the Abyss of Altruism

The military policy of the United States has been governed by altruism since at least World War I, when Herbert Croly, the proto-fascist and Progressive writer, advocated that America involve itself in that war as a "tonic of a serious moral adventure." The shocking news is that, if an American soldier murdered sixteen Afghani citizens in cold blood, it is a direct consequence of that policy.

The messianic President Wilson could not pass up what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help remake the world. As historian Arthur Ekirch writes in The Decline of American Liberalism, "The notion of a crusade came naturally to Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, imbued with a stern Calvinist sense of determinism and devotion to duty." He was goaded by a host of Progressive intellectuals, such as John Dewey and Herbert Croley, editor of The New Republic, who wrote that "the American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."

In terms of a self-sacrificing foreign policy, you can't get more altruistic than that. It has been the rule of thumb ever since, with only superficial variations on the theme.

To forego any counter-arguments, it is not the purpose of this column to argue for or against why the U.S. involved itself in that war and in World War II, as well. America was already regarded as an enemy by Germany before our entry into either war; it may have become embroiled in those conflicts regardless of the rationality or irrationality of our policy. Speculation on this particular issue is not the subject here.

First, it would be helpful to clarify exactly what I am referring to when I say that our foreign policy has been governed altruism, and it would be especially helpful if we got it from the horse's mouth, that of French philosopher, Auguste Comte:

Altruism (also called the ethic of altruism, moralistic altruism, and ethical altruism) is an ethical doctrine that holds that individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, if necessary at the sacrifice of self interest. Auguste Comte's version of altruism calls for living for the sake of others. One who holds to either of these ethics is known as an "altruist."

The word "altruism" (French, altruisme, from autrui: "other people", derived from Latin alter: "other") was coined by Comte, the French founder of positivism, in order to describe the ethical doctrine he supported. He believed that individuals had a moral obligation to renounce self-interest and live for others. Comte says, in his Catéchisme Positiviste, that:

[The] social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service.... This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely."

Two articles were published almost immediately after news of the crime broke, Ralph Peters's angry article on Family Security Matters (FSM, March 13), Soldiers Murders Afghans – Generals Murder Solders: It was Only a Matter of Time Before One of Our Men Broke Down," and Daniel Greenfield's bitter and sardonic Sultan Knish article of March 12, "The Blood Price of Afghanistan."

By contrast, the MSM reported the killings with an almost palpable tone of glee, a tone of near relief that finally, American troops can be accused of something heinous, and America itself implicated in the crime. CNN decided to quote the dismay of one of the head savages in Afghanistan:

NATO's International Security Assistance Force said the soldier acted alone and turned himself in after opening fire on civilians. U.S. President Barack Obama called the killings "tragic and shocking," and offered his condolences to the Afghan people in a phone call to his counterpart in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, the White House said.

But no condolences offered for the numerous Americans, Canadians, British, and Australians killed in cold blood by Afghans?

But the attack is likely to further more anger at international forces following deadly riots over the burning of Qurans by U.S. troops.

Oh, yes, let's bring up those Korans with the scrawled Muslim marginal notes that were burned. Let's fuel the anger by mentioning that subject.

"The Afghan people can withstand a lot of pain," Prince Ali Seraj, the head of the National Coalition for Dialogue with the Tribes of Afghanistan, told CNN. "They can withstand collateral damage. They can withstand night raids. But murder is something that they totally abhor, and when that happens, they really want justice."

Really? The Taliban and other Afghans "abhor" murder? But not honor killings, rape, torture, beheadings, ritual disfigurements, beatings, and whippings, all prescribed or sanctioned by the Koran? All a matter of everyday practice in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Libya…well, you know the map. ABC opined:

In the wake of the Quran burnings, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, visited troops at a base that was attacked last month and urged them not to give in to the impulse for revenge.

The tensions between the two countries had appeared to be easing as recently as Friday, when the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding about the transfer of Afghan detainees to Afghan control -- a key step toward an eventual strategic partnership to govern U.S. forces in the country.

Now, another wave of anti-American hatred could threaten the entire future of the mission, fueling not only anger among the Afghans whom the coalition is supposed to be defending but also encouraging doubts among U.S. political figures that the long and costly war is worth the sacrifice in lives and treasury.

General Allen ought to caution the troops on revenge – but, revenge on whom? Revenge on the politically-correct officer corps that instructs the troops to not fight back, to not show disrespect for the Afghans and their brutal and primitive culture, to not feel resentment for being a mere sitting-ducks "police force" to contain an enemy the policymakers dare not name, to not resent being guinea pigs in an altruistic war to bring "stability" to a part of the world that has never known it and never will?

And the transfer of those Afghan detainees? Did the "memorandum of understanding" lock the Afghan government into a promise to detain the "detainees" in the rottenest prison in the country? Or did the Afghan signers of the memorandum sign it with tongue in cheek?

And, oh, gee, we mustn't do anything that will unleash another wave of anti-American hatred and murderous anger, like exterminate the Taliban, withhold financial and material aid to a corrupt government, or urinate on Taliban fighters, or even so much as sketch a cartoon of Mohammad in a Koran. No, we, the policymakers and the MSM, will only focus and dwell on American actions, and not Afghan crime, for after all, if we weren't there, there wouldn't be any Afghan crime.

Right. Before the Americans arrived, Afghanistan was the playground of the rich and famous, with immaculate beaches, five-star hotels, a friendly and outgoing populace, health spas, ski resorts, and crime statistics so low they put the Amish country to shame.

Ralph Peters's column netted several score comments from readers of FSM. It resonated with those readers, because he was able to paint a picture of the obscene decrepitude that is Afghanistan, a decrepitude America should never have tried to correct, because it is the natural state of the country.

If there's a "battle cry" in Afghanistan, it's "Blame the troops!" Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to "respect Afghan culture."

But generals don't have a clue about Afghan "culture." They interact with well-educated, privileged, English-speaking Afghans who know exactly which American buttons to press to keep the tens of billions of dollars in annual aid flowing. The troops, on the other hand, daily encounter villagers who will not warn them about Taliban-planted booby traps or roadside bombs, who obviously want them to leave, who relish the abject squalor in which they live and who appear to value the lives of their animals above those of their women. When our Soldiers and Marines hear, yet again, that they need to "respect Afghan culture," they must want to puke up their rations.

And that's the country and populace we are sacrificing blood and treasure to bring "democracy" to a hellhole. But the "democracy" was already there. The squalor and the brute culture is what the Afghans want. They voted for it at an invisible ballot box, the ballot box of stagnation and status quo.

Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don't know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it's virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

What are our goals? What is our strategy? We're told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, ten years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk. Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets. We may not have a genius for war, but we sure do have a genius for kidding ourselves.

And the moral code that allows us to kid ourselves is: Altruism . After all, altruism can do no harm. It cannot be corrupted. It cannot corrupt.

Altruism took us to Iraq and Afghanistan, and altruism will be the death of us there (and of more U.S. troops). Purists claim that you can't corrupt altruism, that only good can emanate from it. But, there you are. Mr. Peters identifies with justifiable anger just how that can be and has been done. He puts his finger on the cause of such crimes by excoriating the policies that have governed the conduct of American operations in Afghanistan.

Is it really better to give than to receive? Altruism says so. But all the U.S. has received in return for expending American lives and incalculable wealth in that hellhole is hatred, scorn, and death.

It's interesting to note that the advocates of self-sacrifice rarely volunteer to sacrifice themselves, if they have cannon fodder available and the funds to send the cannon fodder in their place. Altruism is eminently corruptible, and the Afghan murder incident is merely the most visible instance of it. The advocates indulge in their altruism by proxy – with other men's lives. They consider themselves virtuous. In reality, they are a unique species of coward – men who know the consequences of the moral code they expect others to abide by, but refuse to themselves, because they know it means death and dishonor.

That is the dirty little secret of every altruist who has ever championed self-sacrifice. And when someone goes insane and violates that code, they howl in indignation. They disavow any knowledge of its inevitable consequences. They pose and pontificate about that "higher cause" and spit on its victims.

Altruism can also corrupt, and cause one to sacrifice or surrender one's most cherished values – or to employ force to compel others to surrender them.

Daniel Greene's Sultan Knish article is nearly literary in its explication of that altruist "military" policy.

The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone, is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent.

There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat.

No, no POTUS, no MSM anchor or pundit, no Charlie Rose or "Washington Week" host will raise those issues. After all, self-sacrifice demands that our soldiers expose themselves to the whim and malice of their enemies. Isn't that what soldiering is all about? So, please, don't bore our liberal/left elite with such stories.

Air strikes are for days gone by. The American soldier in the ISAF is expected to patrol and retreat, to smile and reach out to Afghans while they shoot him in the back. After risking his life to hold back the Taliban, he is expected to take it calmly when his government announces that it is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. As he waits out the final months until withdrawal, seeing his friends lose their limbs and their lives, knowing that the enemy has won, that he has been betrayed and is being kept senselessly on the front line for no objective except the diplomatic position of a government that hates him, that is taking away his health care, his equipment and his job; how does he feel?

Who knows what motivated the staff sergeant to kill those Afghans? He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, with several tours of duty. While his crime was inexcusable, Greene here, as well as Ralph Peters, describes the irrational "war-fighting" conditions our soldiers are expected to behave in.

The Panjwai district, where the shootings happened, is the cradle of the Taliban. Smiling civilians plant IED's and children serve as lookouts. Obama's Surge pushed hard into Panjwai and the Taliban pushed back. American soldiers were caught in the middle, dying for a handful of dusty towns where the inhabitants took their presents and shook hands with them, and then shot at them from cover.

That describes very well the surreal environment our troops must endure. Well, there were the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) of yore, with whom university presidents and professors negotiated. And there is the Taliban for a Democratic Society (Taliban from talib, meaning an "army of Islamic students"), with whom our government is negotiating a surrender. Some things never change; only the garb and the ideology. Only this time it is the heirs of the SDS negotiating with the TDS. That fact alone deserves book-length treatment.

Does our military actually expect to have first-class soldiers who are also armed social workers? Does it really expect our soldiers to develop pride, honor, and dignity by instructing them to become sacrificial animals? Does it really expect an altruistic "war-fighting" policy to not inculcate contradictions, contempt, and confusion in the minds of our soldiers – and still expect them to remain steadfastly sane and loyal?

Altruism is not a guide for living, but a prescription for dying. Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand noted:

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. ("Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 61)

And:

Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions. ("The Age of Envy," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p. 136)

The appeasement practiced by past presidents and policymakers was horrific enough. The wholesale destruction or surrender of values was inevitable. They thought they were being diplomatic and practical. But the appeasement being practiced by our leadership today – in Iraq, in Afghanistan – is consciously calculated to destroy, and destroy not only our military, but, in the long run, America itself. It represents a deliberate, intentional surrender of values, with full knowledge of the consequences.

Our "war-fighting" policy from the beginning -- just after 9/11 -- has been one governed by altruism.

It was not in our self-interest to "spread democracy" in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan. It was in our self-interest to eliminate states that sponsor terrorism in our own self-defense. That has not happened. Obama can blame George Bush for inaugurating that policy – although don't expect him to mention that – and Obama can blame himself for perpetuating it. But he won't blame himself. He doesn't give a damn. He hates this country, its freedom (what's left of it), and our military.

Appeasement is altruism in action. And the only destination possible by that policy is an endless, nihilistic abyss.

It is time that Americans called the appeasers and altruists to account for their actions. It is time they were judged in the court of reason.

Steal This Philosophy

A new book on Ayn Rand and Objectivism came out in February, from St. Martin's Press, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, by Gary Weiss. The book will be reviewed here at a later date. However, if Weiss's Huffington Post article on Ayn Rand is any indication of its objectivity, or lack of it, it telegraphs the book's inherent malignity.



In his Huffington Post article, "Why You Shouldn't Dismiss Ayn Rand," Weiss does something no other liberal or conservative writer has ever done: he urges everyone to take Rand seriously, not because she was right, or prophetic, or was a deeper thinker than most academics will ever admit, but because she and her philosophy pose a danger to the political establishment, especially to the liberal/left establishment. To my knowledge, he is the first liberal to adopt the policy of knowing his enemy, instead of dismissing Rand as on or beyond the fringe of political thought.



That is the single credit I can grant him. And he is Rand's enemy. He was clear about that in his article. And he doesn't know Rand as well as he claims. He writes from essentially a "libertarian" perspective.



First, his article reveals that leftist director Oliver Stone of Wall Street notoriety wanted to adapt The Fountainhead to film, but apparently failed.

Stone believed that it would be possible to make a movie that would turn [The] Fountainhead's lead character, an incredibly selfish man named Howard Roark, into a public-spirited altruist – a species of human that Rand believed to be evil incarnate. Why not? The positive character traits of Rand's heroes – their individuality, their integrity – are not the exclusive territory of the far right.



Stone points the way, I think, for progressives and liberals to make a greater effort to understand Rand, and even to adopt some of her views, so as to better counter the right's assault on social programs and the very concept of government.

Of course he failed. Individualism – authentic individualism, and not whimsical eclecticism or being "different" for the sake of being different, immature men wearing their baseball caps backwards come immediately to mind – is morally and politically incompatible with any brand of collectivism, and especially with altruism.

Weiss and Stone see a value in individualism and integrity? No. If they did, they would respect the individualism and integrity of the author that made the novel possible, and not propose to steal it to promote collectivism.



Perhaps a better and more feasible film project for Stone might have been to turn Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead's chief villain, into a public-spirited altruist "good guy," a less challenging transformation, to be sure. However, no "public-spirited altruist" or humanitarian can ever be a "good guy." An altruist is fundamentally selfless, and asks his beneficiaries to be selfless, as well. And also dependent on his selflessness. Hitler was selfless – personally, and in his career – and look at the results.



Saul Alinsky was selfless, too. He was a real life Ellsworth Toohey, the character who made Howard Roark his special target.

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

But, that wouldn't have been any fun for Stone. He prefers to speak kindly of dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Hugo Chavez. He would ignore, or be oblivious to, the fact that most humanitarians are at bottom killers. Such as Mother Teresa, who not so much wished to cure her charges of their diseases, as relieve their suffering, without actually eradicating it, and to make them dependent on her selflessness.



Weiss's "exploration" of the idea of Howard Roark as a humanitarian may be discussed in more detail in the book. That remains to be seen, and will be covered when I review the book.



Even more absurd than proposing the appropriation of Rand's hero and turning him into a selfless anti-hero, is Weiss's proposed appropriation of the concept of "rational self-interest."

Sure, the hyper-selfishness that she advocated was absurd. Rand was so intent on winning the intellectual argument over selfishness that she blithely misquoted the dictionary. But there is much to be said for people pursuing their rational self-interests, to use Rand's terminology, when doing so does not infringe on the rights of others. That's a concept the 99% should embrace. Why do we support social programs? Because it is in our rational self-interests.

Progressive taxation is not in the rational self-interests of the 1%, but it is in the best interests of society as a whole--a concept that Rand did not accept. One can make a good argument that taxation is in the interests of the 1%, as members of the greater society.

Now we know something about Weiss's own "individualism and integrity": he has picked up the slogans of Occupy Wall Street and made them his own.

In the Randian worldview, however, there is no such thing as "the public," there were only individual people, with individual rights. That may be fine if you're a billionaire and don't give a hoot about other people. It's not so great if you're a little guy, which is why collectivism--ordinary people's collective prerogatives--is the antidote to the privileges of the 1%.

It's not in the rational self-interests of the 1% to support collectivism, but it is in the selfish interests of the rest of us. It's also far more in keeping with the view of the Founders, who included forward-thinking progressives like Thomas Paine. He advocated a guaranteed national income.

So, progressive taxation, robbing the rich to support the mythical poor 99%, and not minding being robbed blind by an omnivorous government and endless "wars" on poverty and smoking and homelessness and unhealthy foods and whatever other "social" problems a humanitarian can concoct, is in one's "rational self-interest"? One may as well, to paraphrase Whittaker Chambers in his hysterically malicious review of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, claim that entering a gas chamber would be in one's rational self-interest, if one cared about "society," because it would mean more air and food and shelter for those who don't enter it.




Thomas Paine was not one of the Founders. He was a pamphleteer who, after the American Revolution, left the Revolution behind and began advocating socialism, something none of the Founders ever did.



Collectivism is the "ordinary people's collective prerogative"? So were the OWS mobs. So were the guillotines of the Reign of Terror. Or Derrick Bell's "critical race theory." Or ObamaCare.

I'm not a Rand follower--an "Objectivist"--and never will be. I don't believe in laissez-faire, free-market capitalism. I believe in regulation and taxation and Medicare--all the things she hated (even though she became a Medicare recipient when it suited her purposes). But I can't deny that there were aspects of her work that appealed to me. It's foolish, I found, to pretend that Rand is a repulsive creature that only nutcases could fine appealing. If that were so, she wouldn't be as powerful--and dangerous--as she is today.

Weiss believes in regulation, taxation and Medicare – and probably Social Security and the plethora of other entitlement scams, scams founded on government fraud, extortion and force, as well – but has never actually bothered to examine the moral and economic consequences of these laws and policies. Weiss has the reputation of being an "investigative journalist," although to judge by his publishing credits, they are more in the nature of publicist for collectivism than they are instances of genuine investigation or journalism.



Note Weiss's parenthetical; snarky zinger he includes in his statement, that Rand was a "Medicare recipient when it suited her purposes." Evva Pryor, who worked for Rand's law firm and handled signing the paperwork to apply for Social Security and Medicare towards the end of Rand's life, said that she persuaded Rand to grant her power of attorney in these matters.* At the time when it "suited her," Rand and her husband, Frank O'Conner, were in declining health. Pryor argued with Rand that because Rand "had worked her entire life and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it."



I would disagree with that argument, because Social Security by that time was being financed by deficits; the money extorted from individuals having already been spent a generation before. The government was simply "crediting" Social Security based on the future income earnings of generations that hadn't even yet entered the work force. Medicare itself was an overture to ObamaCare and the enslavement of the medical profession. Pryor does not explain how she convinced Rand to grant her the power of attorney to handle the matters, but when one is dealing with force or the consequences of force, virtually any decision is legitimate that allows one to "fight another day." Such a concession is not indicative of defeat or compromise, nor is it indicative of moral corruption, as Weiss insinuates.



Weiss ends his article with:

The Founders were certainly not Randian; they sacrificed for others. They were altruists. If they'd have thought only of themselves, there would have been no revolution.

Today, the revolution is being waged by the right. It will be successful--unless the rest of us stop ridiculing Ayn Rand and begin taking her seriously.

No, the Founders did not sacrifice themselves, nor were they altruists (the term not having been coined yet by August Comte). They were political thinkers who were committed to the idea of freedom, and that commitment required an individualism and integrity utterly foreign to Weiss. Fighting to preserve one's values is not a "sacrifice" if those values are imperiled by especially government force.



It was the Founders' commitment to political freedom – of selfishly thinking of their own personal freedom – that made the Revolution possible. America has been the beneficiary of that selfishness ever since 1776. That inheritance has since been frittered away in the realm of politics.



However, if liberals and leftists heed Weiss's advice, and attempt to appropriate elements of Objectivism for their own collectivist ends, one can expect to hear yelps of shock when their collectivist premises encounter Rand's individualist ones and cause philosophical short-circuiting.



Alchemists have tried turning lead into gold before. The modern alchemists will be equally as unsuccessful in their attempts to turn a philosophy of reason into a philosophy of need and "social justice," and at their own peril.



To be continued in a forthcoming book review of Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation.



*100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. Scott McConnell, ed. New York: New American Library, 2010. P. 521

Occupy the Money

"I think we've been too slow to realize [why] people our own age, with histories just like ours, going through all that state stuff, to be [sic] dishonest, unprincipled, back-stabbing sleaze balls….Well, I was prejudiced in their favor. I thought that because they looked like us, and talked like us, they were going to think like us." (The Big Chill, 1983)

So whined an ex-radical from the protest movements of the 1960's and 1970's, at a reunion of ex-radicals on the occasion of the funeral of a former comrade, "Alex," who committed suicide and who was apparently the only one who "fought on." Most of the characters in Lawrence Kasdan's film of post-"revolutionary soul-searching over how they were "co-opted" by the "establishment" and now all lead comfortable middle class lives. That is, they had to actually support themselves.

Well, sir, they haven't stopped talking and thinking like "us." Taking a leaf from Saul Alinsky, they fought on. "There was only the fight." Now they're in power. They're the "establishment." You spoke too soon. You were dropped from the club of sleaze balls who ascended to the top and left you and your angst-ridden house-mates behind.

When the pond scum and bilge surfaced in American politics, you were not to be found in it.

Who would have thought, three or four decades ago, that Communist activists and terrorists such as Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Van Jones, Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Tom Haydn, Jane Fonda, and a gallery of other protégés, associates, appointees, and fellow travelers would become the social and political elite to formulate, determine and oversee domestic and foreign policies of the United States? Early on, in their violent and demonstrating heyday, they were virtually penniless, or the progeny of well-to-do parents. Now they bask in relative luxury, either as respected and tenured "academics," or thanks to their munificently compensated government appointments, or as heads of liberal non-profit organizations, or even as executives of multi-million dollar corporations.

They are not whining. How did they do it? Was it a conspiracy, or did they just fill a moral and political vacuum?

In "The Storm Troopers of OWS" last November, I noted that:

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."

Who are in the ranks of the OWS?

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 which were prepared and sanctioned by grade and high schools and universities and patronized, idolized, and encouraged by the news media.

And what did the mobs of the OWS want?

The variety of protest signs, usually scrawled on cardboard, 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, but it is a reality their elective ilk have created.

OWS has in its ranks countless individuals ready to emulate the German Free Corps of post-World War I Germany. The paramilitary Free Corps helped to elevate Adolf Hitler to power. Many of them made the easy transition from the Free Corps to the SA and SS once the Nazis began to gather electoral steam. Many others found employment in other departments and programs of the Nazi Party.

OWS does not boast uniforms or paramilitary discipline. Its legions have not been street-fighting Communists, but rather have been jockeying for confrontations with the police, so that "all the world" would witness the altercation. But the absence of uniforms and discipline is irrelevant. There is no fundamental difference between the OWS and the Free Corps.

How did Hitler finance his rise to power? There are parallels to explore.

OWS is preparing Phase II of its clamorous and disruptive calls for "change." Phase II will require money. Aside from the usual suspects of George Soros affiliated donors, there is the usual assortment of affiliated fools, such as Ben & Jerry's founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The Wall Street Journal of February 28th has this interesting story:

A group of business leaders—including Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg—are planning to pour substantial funds into the Occupy Wall Street movement in hopes of sustaining the protests and fostering political change.

Their goal is to provide some ballast to an amorphous movement that captured the world's attention with nonstop, overnight protests in dozens of cities but has had trouble regaining momentum since most of those encampments were broken up by police in the past few months.

OWS has gone "formal," creating a mother ship of finance and guidance. No more of that rowdy, unsanitary, chaotic come-by-chance organization for them. It has "incorporated."

The latest Occupy supporters call themselves the Movement Resource Group and have raised about $300,000 so far to parcel out in grants to protesters, said Mr. Cohen. Their goal is to raise $1.8 million.

Cohen and Greenfield were not protesting "radicals" of yore, though early photographs of them would lead one to believe they had been right in there battling police and inhaling tear gas and risking thwacks on the head by nightsticks and batons.

Nevertheless, they were "radicals," and still are.

A little more than two-thirds [of the $1.8 million] was donated by the Ben & Jerry's Foundation and members of the group's steering committee, which includes Dal Lamagna, founder of the company Tweezerman, entertainment-industry executive Richard Foos and Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, along with Messrs. Cohen, Greenfield and Goldberg.

The remainder—about $60,000—came from individual donors, including Norman Lear, a television producer and philanthropist, and Terri Gardner, former president and chief executive of Soft Sheen hair products.

Some entrepreneurs and successful businessmen will gladly provide the rope with which they will eventually be hanged. Norman Lear? Got to keep those "Meat Heads" all in the family.

"Many of us have been working for progressive social change," Mr. Cohen, a prominent supporter of liberal causes, said Monday. "There's been a critical ingredient missing."

Such as better coordination, a focused agenda, and better-trained troops. Perhaps an escrow account for attorney's fees and bail bonds.

The group will give grants of as much as $25,000 to protesters across the country after undergoing an application process that begins in March. The group, along with five Occupy activists, will review applications.

Of the money raised so far, $150,000 will pay for rent and equipment for an office in New York for the national Occupy movement. An additional $100,000 has been set aside for individual project proposals, and a small portion of the money has been set aside to provide stipends for people Mr. Cohen describes as "core activists."

Still, the dog insists on, if not biting the hands that feed it, then growling at it in dissatisfaction. There were complaints about the donations.

Mr. Cohen and other members of the group met with protesters in a Manhattan church Sunday night to pitch the idea to dedicated activists. Not all were impressed, on the theory it would only add bureaucracy.

"Essentially this is a group of very wealthy people who have picked a handler to deal with Occupy Wall Street," said Ravi Ahmed, 34 years old, a protester who works as an academic administrator. "They've re-created what's wrong with nonprofits and philanthropy structures."

What's wrong with the whole system is that without all the iPods, and cell phones, tents, and shoes, and processed food and Starbucks, and especially ice cream, not to mention cardboard on which to scrawl semi-literate protests with Magic Markers and dime-store stencils – all that and more produced by wealthy people and used by OWSers to facilitate their protest against "wealthy people" – where would Mr. Ahmed and his colleagues be? Would they even exist? But, these are subjects beyond the ken of OWSers.

And what is actually wrong with most nonprofits and philanthropies is that they are largely altruistic and leftist vehicles to distribute wealth their administrators never created. Watch the credits for any PBS television program about the plight of penguins or polar bears or rain forests, or the struggles of Mexican-Americans and Muslims to retain their "culture," or the aspirations of inner-city graffiti artists and gang members; it is a roll call of guileless and guilt-ridden "humanitarians."

Ben & Jerry's isn't in the same league as Krupp, German industrialists, bankers and manufacturers. But the German magnates and moneyed elite were also bitten by their beneficiaries. It's a difference in scale but the ends are the same.

Many years ago, Antony C. Sutton, a British-born "rogue historian," produced a three-volume blockbusting study under the auspices of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University of why the Soviet Union was able to stumble through seventy years of existence in spite of its mass murders, its vast gulag of prisons for dissenters, its chronic crop failures, its crippled industrial base, and a lethargic population of "workers," Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. In this remarkable study Sutton demonstrated how the Soviets were chiefly thieves and copycats in every major technological and industrial field, and that much of the thieving and copycatting was abetted by Western industrialists, bankers, and politicians.

Sutton made the same revealing and thoroughly documented study of the origins of the Nazi Party and its financial underpinnings, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, detailing as well Hitler's ability to command the whole German economy once the Party was in power.

We do know that prominent European and American industrialists were sponsoring all manner of totalitarian political groups at that time, including Communists and various Nazi groups. The [post-WW2] U.S. Kilgore Committee records that:

By 1919 Krupp was already giving financial aid to one of the reactionary political groups which sowed the seed of the present Nazi ideology. Hugo Stinnes was an early contributor to the Nazi Party (National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei). By 1924 other prominent industrialists and financiers, among them Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolph [sic>] Kirdorf, and Kurt von Schroder, were secretly giving substantial sums to the Nazis. In 1931 members of the coal-owners' association which Kirdorf headed pledged themselves to pay 50 pfennigs for each ton of' coal sold, the money to go to the organization which Hitler was building.

Reading about the humble donations of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, and their concerns about OWS's future as a mover and shaker for "social change" is a let-down, when we can see how big-scale financing of a mover and shaker was done in Germany.

In 1925 the Hugo Stinnes family contributed funds to convert the Nazi weekly Volkischer Beobachter to a daily publication. [Ernst] Putzi Hanfstaengl, Franklin D. Roosevelt's friend and protegé, provided the remaining funds. Table 7-1 summarizes presently known financial contributions and the business associations of contributors from the United States. Putzi is not listed in Table 7-1 as he was neither industrialist nor financier.

In the early 1930s financial assistance to Hitler began to flow more readily. There took place in Germany a series of meetings, irrefutably documented in several sources, between German industrialists, Hitler himself, and more often Hitler's representatives Hjalmar Sehaeht and Rudolf Hess.

The critical point is that the German industrialists financing Hitler were predominantly directors of cartels with American associations, ownership, participation, or some form of subsidiary connection. The Hitler backers were not, by and large, firms of purely German origin, or representative of German family business. Except for Thyssen and Kirdoff, in most cases they were the German multi-national firms — i.e., I.G. Farben, A.E.G., DAPAG, etc. These multi-nationals had been built up by American loans in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s had American directors and heavy American financial participation.

America has not seen the last of Occupy Wall Street. Like a spoiled, unruly brat who fouls his own nest on principle, the organization and its hierarchy are being preened for a more active role in American politics. This takes money, guidance, organization and very sophisticated press agentry. For an almost amusing story of the aimlessness and infighting among OWSers, read the New York Post's story from last October, "They Want a $lice of the Occupie," an aimlessness and inner-ranks conflict that "new money" hopes to correct.

As for George Soros's connection with OWS, Reuters published an insipid exposé that merely scratches the surface:

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

The Hungarian-American was an early supporter of the 2008 election campaign of Barack Obama, who will seek a second term as president in the November, 2012, election. He has long backed liberal causes - the Open Society Institute, the foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations and Human Rights Watch.

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros' Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

Aides to Soros say any connection is tenuous and that Soros has never heard of Adbusters. Soros himself declined comment.

As tenuous a connection as a pit bull latched onto one's leg. News Busters, however, not a member of the MSM, goes into far more detail:

Reuters even posed the question "Who's behind the Wall St. protests?" on Oct. 13, but downplayed Soros's actual financial involvement. Even though "Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground," the story added. But Reuters undersold the connection significantly.

The protesters stand by their claim that theirs is purely a grassroots movement. But it is hard to ignore the concerted effort by liberal groups, unions, and other Soros-funded entities that prop-up and fuel the Occupy movement. An echo-chamber of left-wing blogs and news sites that receive Soros cash continues to push the anti-capitalist protest story. Articles repeatedly praise labor and climate activists for their support while denigrating police for their efforts to keep the peace.

Organizations that joined the protesters were granted more than $3.6 million from Soros's Open Society Foundations. On Oct. 5 there was a "march in solidarity with #occupywallstreet" that listed seven such groups out of the 16 overall supporting the protest. Those seven organizations received $3,614,690 from Soros' Open Society Foundations since the year 2000, with more than $2 million going to Common Cause Education Fund, part of Common Cause, and another $1.1 million to MoveOn.org.

This writer does not subscribe to conspiracy theories. He puts more credence and the onus of responsibility on a moral and philosophical vacuum that collectivist plotters and actors are only too happy to fill. If there were a proper, principled defense of individual rights and the inviolate sanctity of an unadulterated Constitution, plotters and conspirators could act all they wished and would be foiled by such a defense. But what we are seeing unfolding before our eyes, with not much of an alarm being raised, as far as OWS is concerned, is a simply a rerun of what happened in Germany, with a whole new cast of directors and actors.

Imagine Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will remade in the spirit of Hair.

Nobody said that fascism had to speak German and wear shirts and ties when it resurfaced. And nobody every claimed that communism, or its national-socialist doppelganger, had to speak Russian and wear fur hats, either to march in the streets.

All it has taken, ever since the rise of totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century, is a little cash under the table to help make things happen.

Objectivist Round-Up

Welcome to the March 1st, 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:



Burgess Laughlin presents Postmodernism on reason and mysticism posted at The Main Event, saying, "Postmodernism is anti-modernism, where "modernism" means the best elements of the Enlightenment that have survived to our own time: a commitment to reason and the products of reason. Specifically what are the postmodernists' positions on reason and mysticism?"




Jared Rhoads presents Invisible independents: another missing voice in the healthcare debate? posted at The Center for Objective Health Policy, saying, "Is public support for health reform higher than polls indicate, because some people choose not to answer the questions?"




Darius Cooper presents A modest Platform - On Employment Policy posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "I suggest some ways the government can help reduce unemployment."




Diana Hsieh presents SnowCon 2012: A Full Slate of Fabulous Presentations posted at NoodleFood, saying, "SnowCon 2012 will have some fabulous presentations by our local Front Range Objectivists! Join us!"




Stephen Bourque presents Constitutionally Unable to Defend Liberty posted at One Reality, saying, "Was Justice Ginsburg's assertion that she would 'not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012' simply a remark pulled out of context?"




Paul Hsieh presents Wine Tasting Fallacies posted at GeekPress, saying, "Wine tasting is far more subjective than most people (including experts) think."




C.W. presents Europe Money Flood posted at Krazy Economy, saying, "This is the latest kraziness from Europe. Potentially, it could be more harmful than the bailout, which is why it is being hailed as such a good thing and actually getting less attention. At least for a while trips to Europe will be cheaper."



Edward Cline presents Only Words posted at The Rule of Reason,
saying, "But angry words, offending words, impermissible words, and
even unspoken words, when it comes to Islam, Muslims, and politically
correct speech and thought, are not the stuff of farce. They can be
fatal, fatal to freedom of speech, fatal to its practitioners. And the
First Amendment can no longer be relied upon to ensure one's right to
criticize Islam or Muslims or trump politically correct speech."




***



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.

Only Words

Words. Angry words. And objects!
Wilfred Lawson as the butler, Peacock (The Wrong Box, 1966)

The line is from a comedy about plots and mix-ups to collect the proceeds of a tontine. Peacock was describing the farcical altercation between two aged brothers, the last surviving members of the lottery, which was actually a kind of a trust-administered survivorship insurance policy.

Angry words? Offending words? Dangerous words? Impermissible words?

But angry words, offending words, impermissible words, and even unspoken words, when it comes to Islam, Muslims, and politically correct speech and thought, are not the stuff of farce. They can be fatal, fatal to freedom of speech, fatal to its practitioners. And the First Amendment can no longer be relied upon to ensure one's right to criticize Islam or Muslims or trump politically correct speech.

Readers are probably already familiar with the story in the Daily Telegraph and in other newspapers (and, needless to say, on the Internet). Gatwick Airport "security" guards wanted David Jones, a traveler, to admit he made an "offensive" remark and apologize for it. It is interesting that it was a Muslim "security" guard who demanded an apology for a remark not made to her but to another guard. She was not even present when Jones made it. So, the question also is, aside from the fact that this "security" let a veiled Muslim through without a check: Why wasn't she "offended" by the person who related the remark to her?

Put another way, if words can "hurt," why wasn't she hurt by the words of her colleague? Aren't words intrinsically "hurtful," no matter who utters them? These are rhetorical questions, of course, but the incident underscores the whole phenomenon of politically correct speech and its natural potential for abuse. There is no reasoning with Islam or with political correctness. David Jones learned that the hard way. Assertions made by Muslims are never to be questioned or held up for scrutiny.

There seems to have also been an element of racism in the security guards' treatment of Jones, as well. And it is precisely this kind of submission that Hillary Clinton wishes to impose on Americans via the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and the UN. I must give David Jones credit for standing up to these distaff thugs, although it seems that, like many Westerners, he has inured himself to being treated guilty until proven innocent at police state check points.

As David Jones arrived at the security gates at Gatwick airport, he was looking forward to getting through swiftly so he could enjoy lunch with his daughters before their flight.

Placing his belongings, including a scarf, into a tray to pass through the X-ray scanner he spotted a Muslim woman in hijab pass through the area without showing her face.

In a light-hearted aside to a security official who had been assisting him, he said: "If I was wearing this scarf over my face, I wonder what would happen."

The quip proved to be a mistake. After passing through the gates, he was confronted by staff and accused of racism.

Note that David Jones did not utter either the word "Muslim" or "Islam." He was wondering outloud. He did not say, "I wonder why that Somali or Egyptian or Saudi or Jordanian or Pakistani woman is allowed to pass through wearing a hijab, while I, a Caucasian male, am forced to pass inspection?" No reference was made by him, either, to the woman's race.

And guess what dimwit (or dhimmi) snitched on him to Gatwick Airport security.

He said that when he made his initial remark the security guard had appeared to agree with him, saying: "I know what you mean, but we have our rules, and you aren't allowed to say that."

The security guard apparently was not "offended" by the remark. He implied that women wearing hijabs regularly pass through without screening. That appeared not to concern him. But his mind had been captured by enforceable politically correct speech and behavior, that is, by wholly irrational rules, and off he went to report the "offensive" remark to others who would enforce the rules and confront the culprit with his offense.

By way of underscoring the phenomenon, here is a private anecdote from a British acquaintance about his own encounter with politically correct speech and its numerous enforcers.

Making logical observations in the UK is a dangerous pastime. There are more and more 'unwritten rules' governing how we should (or should not) express ourselves.

Just the other day, I was reprimanded by a colleague at work for talking about Koran burnings in Afghanistan. [Referring to the destruction of Korans on a U.S. base in Afghanistan, in which had been written messages by jihadists, surely an offense by Islam's own rules.]

This colleague was not a Muslim, but was concerned that someone who might or might not be a Muslim could overhear what was being said and might be offended.

I proceeded to explain that I was not referring to the burnings of the Koran on a US base, but of the destruction of the Nasir-I Khusraw Foundation by the Taliban in 1998, where they destroyed by fire an entire archive of ancient Islamic literature, including a Koran that was over a thousand years old.

And if someone were offended, he could, in such a risky circumstance, resort to two actions: assault the offender, or turn to the authorities to have them assault the offender.

I was advised to cease and desist from any further discussion of burning the Koran, upon which I proceeded to be more creative, finally settling on discussing the use of pages from the book to wallpaper a pigsty using alcohol-based glue. At this point my colleague called me a racist and said he would report me to my manager (who was sitting nearby, quietly sobbing with laughter).

I then pointed out that racism was prejudice against a human genetic or ethnic group and that the last time I looked, paper books were not being considered a valid branch of the hominid genus. I also pointed out that the person he thought might be a Muslim was indeed of Asian stock, but was actually from the UK by way of British Guyana and was a protestant Christian, in which case my colleague was guilty of racial stereotyping.

My colleague walked away.

David Jones was not so fortunate. Men with the power to enforce politically-correct and permissible speech do not walk away from offenders and other loose-tongued culprits, who are grilled until they confess, capitulate out of sheer exasperation, and, in effect, submit to Islam. Enforcers of politically correct speech pose as moral crusaders, especially Muslim spokesmen and "civil liberties" advocates. But what they are actually practicing is extortion.

Then there is the case of Charles Krauthammer, noted conservative columnist and panelist. He delivered a critique of President Barack Obama's apology to Afghanistan president Karzai over the burning of the Korans.

"He argued all the administration needed to do was just come out with a singular apology from a commanding officer in Afghanistan, and that would have been sufficient."

No, he ought to have said that an apology was neither necessary nor forthcoming. And he seems to have forgotten that the burned Korans were being disposed of because Muslims had written jihadist messages on their pages. He ought to have condemned General Allen and Obama and every civilian and military dhimmi for rushing to apologize. The United States has nothing to apologize for – except for its irrational foreign policy of propping up a master of taqiyya and probable drug lord with a big stash of money in a Swiss bank, Karzai, and treating as an ally a passive enabler of terrorism, Pakistan. He ought to instead have questioned the sanity of our foreign policymakers. But don't expect him to. His logic goes only so far, but not to a conclusion.

This news story underscores a fact that is not stressed nearly enough. Islam is a disease that enfeebles. It is meant to enfeeble not only Muslim believers, who refuse to think or listen to reason and "believe" that their creed allows them to dispense with reason. It also enfeebles its non-Muslim victims, and punishes anyone who does not "submit" to Muslim irrationality. The enfeebling element in non-believers is fear: fear of reprimand, or of punishment, or even of death. So, they say nothing. The enfeebling lies in the absence of any defense of them by and in the West.

Krauthammer has always bewildered me. I think that, like many articulate anti-jihadist writers, he is reluctant to condemn Islam across the board simply because it's a religion, and he may do this for the sake of Muslims who aren't violent. Perhaps he also thinks that Islam can be "reformed." As I have often argued in the past, Islam can't be reformed without killing it. You can no more "reform" Islam than you can an alchemist's sanctum by redecorating it with pictures of Einstein and Pasteur on the walls and furnishing it with Formica tables. It will still be an alchemist's sanctum.

Krauthammer practiced psychiatry, and one would think that he would examine the psychological appeal of Islam, and conclude that it requires no thought – in fact, demands that Muslims surrender their minds to brute authority – and so Islam, as a guide to living, is basically a guide to death. It spares Muslims the obligation of becoming individuals in command of their lives, of becoming independent thinkers, and inculcates the habit of deferring to mystical authorities who refer to a textbook that justifies murder, rapine, torture, and theft – with a quantum of pretty-sounding poetry thrown in. And in condemning Islam without reservation or shilly-shallying about all the wretched manqués who are in its ranks, Sunni, Shi'ite, and the lesser sects of Islam, condemn all Muslims, even the "moderate" ones, in the bargain.

But I suspect that if he ever made such a denunciation, the defamation mob would be all over him, Fox News would drop him, he'd no longer be invited to sit on PBS roundtables, and he'd lose his syndicated column. And I suspect that he knows this. He's too bright to have not suspected this would be the consequence of condemning a religion. Dancing around or evading that condemnation is, from where I sit, a form of submission to Islam.

"This is a world in which nobody asked the Islamic Conference, a grouping of the 56 Islamic countries, to issue an apology when Christians are attacked and churches are burned in Egypt or in Pakistan…."

It's interesting that he cites the OIC, which, with Hillary Clinton's help, is "work-shopping" how to abrogate and nullify the First Amendment, that is, to insulate Islam from any and all open criticism and examination. His statement, while cogent, seeks to shame the OIC into conceding that it is being hypocritical. This is a futile tactic. One can't shame Muslims because hypocrisy is an operative element of Islam. They know it, and Krauthammer ought to know it, but apparently he doesn't. Muslims will perform fantastic mental gymnastics to justify why Christians are being murdered and persecuted and their churches burned, and that's if they bother to answer the charge of hypocrisy, which they usually don't, especially if the charge is levied by an infidel, and, in Krauthammer's case, by a Jew.

Finally, there is the case of the Pennsylvania atheist who was assaulted by a Muslim for wearing a "Zombie Mohammad" costume during a parade. In this incident, not only was the assailant "offended" by the costume, but the judge, as well, who dismissed the charges against the assailant "for lack of evidence," even though a police officer testified that there was an assault, and even though there was a video of the incident, which the judge refused to admit as evidence. Judge Mark W. Martin proceeded to lecture the victim on the ways of Sharia and the fact that Islam is a culture whose adherents can be offended by mockery of it. Read the story here. In a display of gratuitous contempt for Perce, he called the man a "doofus."

Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand had these observations on words:

It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept; a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines—by specifying their referents. ("Definitions," Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 40)

Words transform concepts into (mental) entities; definitions provide them with identity. (Words without definitions are not language but inarticulate sounds.) ("Concept Formation," Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p. 11)

The "hurtful" or "defamatory" concepts that supposedly inflict "pain" on Muslims refer to the Koran, to Islam, or to anything Islamic in nature. These are the referents. The Koran is a real, actual thing in reality. Islam is a real theocratic system, which, like any other ideology or political system, resides exclusively in men's minds. It is an actionable ideology.

But concepts do not exist in reality, only in men's minds. There are no Platonic, "ideal forms" of thoughts floating about in space that inexplicably descend into men's minds. They have no physical attributes; they are not temporal manifestations of thought. They have less substance than bubbles; in fact, none. They cannot harm or alter or affect physical objects; unless actions are taken in their name, they are insubstantial. They cannot emanate or be projected from a mind or from print or even from a costume or illustration across space to harm or affect anything. To believe they can is to believe in telepathy or magic spells or psychokinesis. By themselves, words have no intrinsic power or efficacy. I know of no instance in which a man was sent to the hospital for injuries sustained by an avalanche of bubbles.

But I do know of countless – thousands – of instances in which men believed they were harmed by thought bubbles and subsequently sent countless men to the hospital – or to their deaths. By "offended" Muslims.

What about a Muslim's feelings? On what are those offended feelings based? What is their nature? Is it wounded "pride"? A tenuous, or insecure "self-esteem"? Can his pride or self-esteem be "injured" by concepts, by words? If a man's sense of self-worth can be injured by another's words, that self-worth is teetering on ten-foot-high stilts of uncooked spaghetti.

But is it really the case? Perhaps a better explanation is that, down deep, in the repressed recesses of his "soul" (or mind), a Muslim "knows" or suspects that his creed is debauched, evil, wrong, and horrendous. But believing in Islam is convenient; it spares him the effort of thought and critical introspection. So "hurtful" words can damage his pretence of pride or self-esteem. He has invested time, if not thought – rarely thought – in adhering to this creed. His creed, however, is one he accepted without the least conscious critical evaluation. He was born into it, or some weakness in him allowed him to be converted to it. Belief in the creed is an absolute, not to be questioned, let alone mocked or subjected to rational scrutiny. He will, at all costs, refuse to "go there," that is, to reexamine his premises.

Perhaps the very concept of "rational scrutiny" is beyond his ken. To him, rationality as such does not exist. Rationality is optional, subjective, and can be dispensed with. If that is his premise, then the "offended" is alive simply because he has copied the rational actions of others, and that is the limit of his understanding.

Perhaps it is just a matter of the "offended" making little or no distinction between right or wrong (or at least, right and wrong as defined by Sharia and the Koran), and is moved by a desire to compel others to not say anything critical about his religion, to see them mute from fear of discussing the subject, and also by a desire to "punish" anyone who does make a critical remark, directly or by implication, of Islam, such as the hapless David Jones at Gatwick Airport. He derives satisfaction from knowing that others dare not speak ill of his creed (and, in many cases, by implication, of his race), and from having the power to punish, or see punished, anyone who does dare speak.

What about "hurtful" or "insulting" actions, such as that of the Pennsylvania atheist in his "Mohammad zombie" costume? The same menu of explanations applies. One cannot get into any random Muslim's mind to determine precisely why he can be "offended" or "insulted" by the sight of a Mohammad cartoon or by someone dressed like Mohammad, sympathetically or satirically. One can only judge a Muslim by the actions he may take to uphold Islam's "honor," to avenge its defamation by others' rational scrutiny or mockery. Unfortunately, Islam requires that all Muslims – Sunni, Shi'ite, Salafi and so on—either wage active or violent jihad on non-believers and their cultures, or to lay low, say nothing, and pretend to be friends with non-believers, to help bring down "their miserable house" from within.

No one would have any reason to examine or mock Islam if the creed were not being constantly shoved in front of our faces like an unwelcome pop-up ad, just as no one would have any reason to criticize Obama or his policies if we were not daily reminded of their disastrous and destructive consequences. Islam would be virtually the sole subject of scholarly study, because, like the dead religions and ideologies of the past, it would pose no threat. There would be no living exponents of it attempting to impose Sharia law on us or demanding that we respect it by saying nothing about it. "Islamophobia" would not exist, because there would be nothing Islamic to fear.

"Magisterial" Judge Mark W. Martin scolded Ernest Perce and accused him of being ignorant of Islam. But Perce exhibited a better knowledge of Islam than Judge Martin suspected when he donned the costume of a "zombie" Mohammad, that is, of the icon of the "living dead." Islam is indeed a religion of the living dead. What it deserves is the bullet of reason driven through its rotting cranium.

Politically correct speech vis-à-vis Islam is, incredibly enough, the wedge with which Islam and its allies in the West work to eradicate freedom of speech.

Obama's Questionable Ad Strategy

Family Security Matters (FSM), a blog site that has carried my columns for a number of years now, is a non-profit organization under the IRS's 501(c)(3) guidelines. As such, it may not carry any column that endorses or attacks any political candidate's positions during a campaign season. President Barack Obama is running for reelection, so his policies and comments are off-limits – per IRS censors. A violation of the IRS's guidelines would result the termination of the organization's non-profit status and likely incur severe penalties.

So, in order to discuss Obama on FSM without really discussing him, I contrived this stratagem. What follows is a version of what will appear on FSM's blog site.
________________________________________________________________________________

Before commenting on President Barack Obama's newest campaign ad on YouTube, I invite readers to first watch the ad here . It isn't long.

Now I ask readers to reach their own conclusions about this ad. Is it racist? Does it appeal exclusively to blacks or "African-Americans"? Is it addressed to all Americans, and not just blacks? Or not? Do you think the ad is a version of the White House's policy of "class warfare" between the rich, the poor, and the middle class? I personally do not recall another candidate or incumbent addressing a specific race to garner votes. I have been watching presidential campaign ads for decades, and, in my experience, this ad is unprecedented.

Liberal pundits are screaming bloody murder over what they deem acerbic campaign ads put out by both parties. But I have heard or read nothing in the MSM or on any PBS affiliate or in any newspaper about this ad. Apparently, because the MSM has said nothing about it, it passes muster with them as a legitimate campaign ad.

I don't recall JFK appealing to Catholics for their votes. I don't recall Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton asking for Baptist votes. I don't recall either of the Bushes pleading for "Caucasian" votes. I don't recall any black candidates overtly soliciting black votes. Or Latino votes. Or Jewish votes. Not in a nationally broadcast speech addressed to the whole nation. And not delivered from the White House. And YouTube is open to the entire nation.

The only exception might be a George W. Bush campaign video ad from July 2004, in which he stresses that Latinos or Hispanics are Americans. It does not appeal to envy, and doesn't seek to be divisive. Watch it here . If you have trouble remembering other innocuous campaign ads from years ago, find them and compare them with the Obama ad. You may see a radical difference.

Which ad is flip side of segregation? Of affirmative action? Of Jim Crow-ism?

Racism, after all, is the lowest form of collectivism, but it's obvious some incumbents are willing and desperate enough to stoop to it.

FSM would like to hear from its readers. What do you think?

OIC "Workshops" Speech Crime

Stealth and violent jihadists have discovered the alchemist's secret of turning gold into lead – that is, of turning freedom of speech into a risky and unwanted liability. It's really quite simple, obvious for all to see. The formula is similar to the "good cop/bad cop" routine of detective movies.

Start with a cartoon of Mohammad, or a dozen of them, or with public remarks that directly or indirectly hold Islam and Muslims responsible for terrorism, or publish a scholarly, cogent paper on the totalitarian and brutal natures of Islam, or give a mooning "arse-lifter" on a public street the literal boot in a heart-felt moment of disrespect for a manqué bowing to meteorite and who's in your way.

Of course, the remarks, the charges, the papers, and even the disrespect are responses to about thirty years of irrational Muslim behavior.

Any one of those actions will precipitate riots, calls for death to apostates and insulters of Islam, noisy, ugly demonstrations, chants of "Islam will dominate," the waving of black jihad flags, and general pandemonium across the globe. And a few dozen or few score deaths at the hands of the insulted. All incidents starring Muslims. Not to mention the self-censorship of newspapers and book publishers, who abandon the issue for safety reasons; who, to borrow a line from "Seinfeld," draw their heads into their shells like frightened turtles.

When the fires have been put out and the streets cleared of debris and the signs stashed away until the next defamation or insult, things will be quiet for a while.

Then will come calls to tone down the anger and the rhetoric – addressed, not to the rioters, murderers, and Muslim clerics – but to those whose words, cartoons, or actions "offended" the congenitally offendable. The calls will be made by those responsible for keeping law and order and establishing policy. In order to maintain civil order and manageable budgets, it is decreed that anyone criticizing Islam or making fun of Islam and Muslims, will be charged with hate speech, or exhibiting disrespect for one of the world's oldest religions, or some such, in order to prevent more destructive and costly demonstrations. It's a matter of cause and effect, you see. If Muslim feelings weren't hurt, if their beliefs weren't examined or satirized or opened to the cruel sunlight of rational scrutiny, Muslims wouldn't resort to mayhem, rape, murder, and car-burning.

It's quite simple. Almost scientific. Just like global warming.

The calls come basically from two sets of liberals: those who are outraged that Islam has been insulted or defamed, because they are so tolerant and non-judgmental and it makes them feel good and virtuous to be so tolerant and non-judgmental; and from those who are intimidated by brute force and ugly chants and irrational behavior of any kind, and they'd just rather people shut up in the name of "community cohesion" so they won't need to hear or see the brute force and ugly chants of those less "cohesed" than they might want to imagine.

The pattern has been repeated numerous times over the last few decades. It works. It gets results. Why? Because our political and intellectual establishments are governed by egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and moral relativism. That is, by the irrational. And irrational policies benefit only the irrational, and punish the rational. There are two classes of irrationalists: those who are irrational on principle – otherwise known as nihilists – and those whose minds have been enfeebled by egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and moral relativism. Both classes can be identified by their political correctness.

But it takes some shoulder-rubbing and much intensive study to distinguish between the nihilists and the white-tailed deer, between those who want to just shut you up and reduce you to rags, and those who flee at the first sign of a wolf.

Having proven that their mumbo-jumbo works on the cowardly and credulous infidels, the irrationalists are taking their alchemy to a new level: a ban – by hook or by crook, by shame or by sedition, by ostracism or by force – of any and all criticism of Islam and Muslims, by way of the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC is a gang that works within that club of tyrannies, dictatorships, religious régimes, and clueless, compliant, and wimpy "democracies."

On February 13th, Bernama, the Malaysian state news agency, announced:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is to hold a media workshop in Brussels on Feb. 15 to 16 pertaining to the smear campaigns against Islam in newspapers and media institutions in the West. […]

Muslim, and non-Muslim leading civil society organisations, journalists, intellectuals and academicians are among the participants of the workshop, which will consist of brainstorming sessions to develop mechanisms for cooperation with external partners, and to develop an action plan to address the phenomenon of Islamophobia.

On February 15th, the OIC announced the "workshop."

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is holding a workshop in Brussels as of 15th February 2012, on the subject of Islamophobia, the first workshop of its kind aimed at establishing information mechanisms to face up to the slanderous campaigns against Islam in the media.

This workshop, held under the title of "Smearing Islam and Muslims in the Media", is being attended by major civil society institutions in the Islamic world along with the press community from the Islamic and Western worlds, in addition to many intellectuals and academics. It constitutes a watershed event in terms of effecting a real shift away from mere theorizing towards a more pragmatic action aimed at countering the phenomenon of Islamophobia.

It is now late February, and search as one might, one will not find a press release about what had been "work-shopped" and resolved. Who were the attendees? What Western academics, intellectuals and journalists were on the session rosters? What "mechanisms" were suggested and discussed? We Islamophobes, whose mouths may be gagged and our hands crippled by Muslims or by our own government, rendering our pens and keyboards useless, would like to know.

And we would also like to know which newspapers have been conducting smear campaigns against Islam. Which other media institutions? But for a pitiful handful of newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Britain's Daily Mail, I do not know of any other publication that is guilty of that charge, that is, of having written objectively about Islam. Perhaps, occasionally, Canada's National Post. And the Daily Mail has actually identified Muslim culprits, and called them Muslims. I know of no other mainstream print magazines that have waged an information war on Islam. The rest, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, are either frightened turtles, or Gila monsters for Islam.

The only other realm of information that can be charged with waging a "smear campaign" against Islam and Muslims is the blogosphere. It, and not the mainstream media, is the prime media institution in which real information about Islam and Muslims can be found. So, the whole "workshop" idea is merely an means to come up with ideas to shut down whatever blog sites have bad-mouthed or "defamed" Islam.
Robert McDowell, in his Wall Street Journal article of February 21st, "The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom," wrote:

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish "international control over the Internet" through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

Of the 193 members of the ITU, 57 of them are OIC members, meaning that the ITU cannot help but be influenced by OIC's clout, aside from that of Russia and China, both of them established dictatorships. One can guess what the new "treaty" will advocate or accomplish: the suppression of freedom of speech across the globe.

The OIC announcement does not mention the role of the United Nations in this "brainstorming" for "social justice," but Bernama does:

The organisation noted that the workshop is of particular importance as it will be held only weeks before the convening of the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in March, at which Resolution 16/18 will come to a vote for the second time after its unanimous endorsement in the previous session.

Resolution 16/18 aims to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief….The resolution was an outcome of bilateral talks between the OIC and a number of Western countries, including the U.S. Two meetings were held in Istanbul and Washington, respectively, to develop operational mechanisms to implement the resolution at the level of the United Nations.

Resolution 16/18…was backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December.

"Operational mechanisms"? What a subtle term for blackmail, extortion, harassment, political and economic pressure, the enforcement of politically correct speech codes, tire-slashing, anonymous phone call threats, envelopes filled with white powder, perhaps a little creative road-rage, house trashing, and strange men loitering beneath the street lamp or in the shadows outside your home. What else could the euphemism mean? Other than direct, brute force?

And Lady Macbeth reappears for an encore audition. Doubtless she will be a star witness and co-conspirator in Geneva next month. It will be all cocktails, canapés and censorship chatter before the vote. This subject has been discussed before, last August, in "Hillary Clinton Auditions for Lady Macbeth." And because of the paucity of information about the Washington Conference last December, and about the Brussels "workshop," all we can do is repeat what was reported before. We plead ignorance of what transpired during those conferences – which is how the OIC would have it.

"Resolution 16/18 aims to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief"?

But what creed and what group are notorious for all those things? Because the OIC is behind Resolution 16/18, the "combat" will not be launched against Islam and Muslims. But it is precisely Islam and its consistent practitioners that are perpetrators of rabid and violent intolerance, and of stereotyping and stigmatizing themselves through their actions and agenda and sensitivity to the least criticism.

The resolution's stated intention is an instance of Grand Taqiyya, or, the Big Lie, of saying one thing to the public (or to dhimmi Western diplomats) but meaning something else entirely. The Koran permits it. The Hadith permits it. And Reliance of the Traveler , that mammoth Islamic handbook on the methodology of conquest, permits it. To wit:

"Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible (N:i.e. when the purpose of lying is to circumvent someone who is preventing one from doing something permissible), and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory... it is religiously precautionary in all cases to employ words that give a misleading impression...Reliance of the Traveler, p. 746 - 8.2

(Shaffi Fiqh)
In May of 2006, in my Rule of Reason commentary, "Moving towards freedomless speech," I noted that:

The Mohammedan enforcer of politically correct speech is ready with his scimitar, watching your every movement and listening to your every word, eager to behead unrepentant infidels of the First Amendment. "Slay them wherever you find them." Or take them to court.

The enforcer no longer need be a Muslim. He can be a Presbyterian, or a Catholic, or a Baptist, or an agnostic, working for the government at the behest of the United Nations, authorized by Resolution 16/18 to silence you. It can be Hillary Clinton, whose State Department hosted the December 2011 OIC conference on what to do about the First Amendment. To accomplish the "praiseworthy" goal of silencing all criticism of Islam, the OIC can depend on the DHS, which now monitors all Internet traffic, looking for those "red flags" of "hate speech," "bigotry," and "Islamophobia."

Hillary Clinton is up to her neck in complicity to subvert freedom of speech in America, and in aiding and abetting the OIC's methods and ends. Nina Shea and Paul Marshall reported in The Wall Street Journal last December, before the Washington conference:

Last July in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired a "High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance" with the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Mrs. Clinton invited the OIC to Washington for a conference to build "muscles of respect and empathy and tolerance." That conference is scheduled for Dec. 12 through Dec. 14.

For more than 20 years, the OIC has pressed Western governments to restrict speech about Islam. Its charter commits it "to combat defamation of Islam," and its current action plan calls for "deterrent punishments" by all states to counter purported Islamophobia. […]

OIC pressure on European countries to ban "negative stereotyping of Islam" has increased since the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh for his film "Submission" and the Danish Muhammad cartoon imbroglio in 2005. Many countries (such as France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy and Sweden), hoping to ensure social peace, now prosecute people for "vilifying" Islam or insulting Muslims' religious feelings.

Shea and Marshall conclude, not quite believing then that the march of events could overcome their optimism:

Encouraging a more civil discourse is commendable, and First Amendment freedoms mean the U.S. won't veer down Europe's path any time soon.

It has been veering down that path since at least 9/11. The First Amendment is no longer sacrosanct, no longer a guarantee of freedom of speech – not if our own government is seeking to regulate it for its own statist ends in an unholy alliance with this nation's dedicated enemies.

Those who value that particular liberty should initiate "workshops" of their own, to combat the frightened turtles and Gila monsters at large in America and abroad.

The Road to Skandanistan

One shouldn't wonder much about why Norway, Sweden, and Demark are willing to submit, like "Britainistan," without so much as an audible whimper, to their steady Islamization, to their becoming de facto departments of a growing international caliphate. All three countries are welfare states that welcomed Muslim immigrants by the planeload over the decades to perform the work which entitlement-obsessed and welfare benefits-seduced Scandinavians no longer wished to perform. "Islamophobes" they were not. And still aren't, even though their skyrocketing crime rates are directly attributable to immigrant and second-generation Muslims.

All three countries are governed by leftist elites, by political parties that redistribute other people's money and spread the wealth around a lot. The Left has made an alliance with Islam, which wants to spread its creed around across the board and impose its ideology on non-Muslims by guile or force. There are, however, two camps of the Left. There is the Left that hates the West as much as do the Muslims, and will do anything to destroy it, even if it means its own dhimmitude and demise under Sharia law and submission. One could not imagine another group in that part of the globe more dedicated to the destruction of their own country. "We will be multicultural and non-judgmental, even if it means our own deaths. It is the right thing to do. We will be virtuous, even if it means accepting penance for our culture being superior to Islamic culture."

It is an instance of passive nihilism in the guise of the high moral ground. The only catch is that, ultimately, this high ground must lead to Norwegians having to walk in the gutter in deference to Muslims on the sidewalk.

And there is the Left that is afflicted with the intellectual cerebral palsy of egalitarianism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism. Its members cannot and will not oppose the invasion of their own countries by Islamic hordes. Members of this group are the three countries' intellectual elites, which, as such, advise and inform the political Left. Together with the political elite, this group holds Islam and Muslims as sacrosanct and untouchable by the least criticism, serious or satirical.

Muslims, however, do not reciprocate when it comes to Norwegian or Swedish or Danish cultural values, or women, or property or freedom of speech. They are protected by actual or de facto censorship and political correctness. For all their relativist language, it is almost as though these intellectuals have conceded the assertion by Islamic intellectuals that Muslims are in every way superior to non-Muslims. It is useless to point this out to these "thinkers," because they will only flip the coin and reply, "Heads, we're at fault. We shouldn't be so culturally imperialistic in our own country."

Bruce Bawer, in a Wall Street Journal article on February 7, "After the Oslo Massacre, an Assault on Free Speech" (the full article was reprinted in Canada's National Post) recounted the July 22, 2011 bombing and massacre committed by Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian who opposed the government's immigration and multiculturalist policies, and his own prediction last year that a backlash would be mounted, not against raping, looting, and anti-Semitic Muslims, but against Norwegians who spoke out or wrote about the irreconcilability between Western values and Islam.

"In Norway," I wrote in these pages on July 25, "to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter . . . . It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam."

This statement was harshly criticized by Norway's multicultural left. How dare anyone speak of such issues at a time like this! […]

On the contrary, Islam's rise in the West is a subject that needs to be discussed frankly, without euphemism or disinformation. The survival of secular democracy, individual liberty and women's rights depends upon it.

Sadly, my prediction turned out to be far more prescient than I could have imagined. In the weeks and months following Breivik's rampage, dozens of high-profile Norwegian leftists stepped forward to claim that critics of Islam shared responsibility for his crimes—and to call, darkly if vaguely, for action.

Imagine if Colonel Travis had drawn a line in the sand at the Alamo, and asked any of its defenders who would not only surrender the Alamo, but help the invading Mexicans overcome the fort, to step forward over the line. One supposes that is the new Norwegian notion of courage.

Bawer writes:

Consider this: Criticizing Islam is now a punishable offense in several European countries. In the past few months alone, a Danish court fined writer Lars Hedegaard for talking about Islam's treatment of women in his own home, and activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf was found guilty of lecturing about Muhummad's marital history in what an Austrian court considered an inappropriate tone.

And, in Austria, a man was fined for allegedly "mocking" a nearby mosque's muezzin by yodeling, and a retired French actress was hauled into court for placing an ad in the paper that warned potential Muslim job applicants that she had a dog. Another man spoke ill in his own home of the Muslim treatment of Muslim women, and was taken to court.

Norwegian intellectuals claim that because Breivik was "inspired" by what he read in various anti-jihadist bogs that criticized Islam, they all contributed to Breivik's criminal state of mind and so therefore their authors are just as culpable. This position underscores the notion that men's minds are merely passive receptors of ideas that cause men to act, that ideas themselves are intrinsically potent, like sugar or cholesterol, and should be regulated to prevent events such as the Oslo bombing and massacre.

This notion also applies to Muslims, as well. If Muslims weren't offended or insulted or made the special attention of critics and authorities as likely terrorists (a.k.a., "discrimination," "racism," "bigotry"), there would be a halt to bombings and rapes and murders committed by Muslims, and we would all be living in a multiculturally copasetic world. Muslims, Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews would all be holding hands and dancing around a Maypole.

But it is the Muslims who benefit from such rationalizations, not their victims or their critics. Muslims are implicitly granted the privilege of saying whatever they please without risk of reprisal or censure, because they are a protected group posing as "victims." And there is no evidence that gagging their critics leads to a cessation of Muslim crime. In fact, state or politically-correct self-censorship causes a rise in such crimes, because there is no attendant risk in committing them. Their imams or mullahs will come to their defense, as well as the infidel egg-heads and "journalists" who report the news with socks in their mouths.

Bawer offers evidence of the campaign against critics of Islam in Norway and beyond. It is an episodic sequel to Julien Benda's The Treason of the Clerks. Benda noted that French intellectuals,

… whose function is to uphold eternal and disinterested values, such as justice and reason, whom I call the intellectuals, have abdicated their role for the sake of practical interests.

Those "practical interests," as far as Norwegian intellectuals are concerned, being to assault freedom of speech and to call for the demonization of its advocates and practitioners. Standing up for freedom of speech is simply not "practical." As for the "disinterested" values of justice and reason, these IQ-challenged cultural and political Quislings are clearly not interested in them. Bawer presents some of the disgraceful capitulations by Norwegian "clerks."

On July 28, for instance, novelist Jostein Gaarder, author of "Sophie's World," and social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, writing in the New York Times, linked Breivik to "right-wing" Islam critics, including me. "Mr. Breivik," they wrote, "has now shown that those who claim to protect the next generation of Norwegians against Islamist extremism are, in fact, the greater menace."

Cartoonists, Austrian yodelers, and retired French actresses are a greater menace than roving gangs of Muslim youth? Bruce Bawer is a graver threat than a suicide bomber? Just how many women have they raped, disfigured, or beaten to a pulp? How many have they killed on Spanish trains, or London subways, or in skyscrapers, or in Bali nightclubs? One must really question, not only the condition of a poisonous stasis of Muslim minds, but the mental health of intellectuals who defend Muslim crimes out of a perverted sense of justice.

Lars Gule, former head of the Norwegian Humanist Association, agreed. "It is obvious," wrote Mr. Gule in VG, Norway's largest daily, on Aug. 1, "that certain groups, persons, and communities have contributed to Breivik's warped view of reality, and these people need to take a good look at themselves. If not, others must help them."

On the contrary, it is intellectuals like Lars Gule who must take a good look at themselves, and ask themselves whether or not they are still human. They must ask themselves: If Anders Breivik's mind was so influenced by the statements of people like Robert Spencer and Steve Emerson, not to mention by Hitler and other tyrants, why have I not turned into a homicidal maniac? I have read the same things, too, yet here I am, without the least impulse to plant bombs or shoot those whose words I hate. But that kind of realization would be repressed, for Gule sounds like a wannabe reeducation camp warden who would like to "help" them get their minds and words sanitized.

On Aug. 22, Norway's newspaper of record, Aftenposten, ran an op-ed coauthored by Mr. Eriksen and three others—social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad, philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen and Bushra Ishaq of Norway's Anti-Racist Center. Titled "Hateful Utterances," it called for tighter limits on free speech in the wake of July 22.

"Certain hateful utterances," the authors insisted, "are legally and morally unacceptable." Rejecting "free speech absolutism," and criticizing the United States for "go[ing] the furthest in protecting the right to expression—including hateful expression," they argued that "Norwegian editors as well as politicians" needed to make it clear that "it is not a human right to express oneself in public; and that certain hateful utterances . . . are not acceptable."

Bawer does not note it, but it apparently took Messrs Eriksen, Bangstad and Ishaq a whole month – between the massacres of July 22 to August 22 – to gather enough collective chutzpah to openly call for censorship and the suppression of all speech not approved by the government (or by Muslims).

Anthropologist Runar Døving agreed, declaring flatly, in a Sept. 2 interview with the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet, that criticism of Islam should be censored. Mr. Døving admitted that his view of the public square was "authoritarian"—the expression of certain ideas, he said, should simply not be allowed—and that he was "entirely in favor of what many people are now describing as a witch hunt," because "there needs to be an investigation of what was written before July 22″ so that we can "see the connection between words and actions."

Indeed, Bawer's appellation, witch hunt, is eminently appropriate. A witch, after all, it is claimed, uses magic potions, spells, and curses that cause others to be wicked and sinful. Obviously, to Doving and his ilk, Breivik was influenced by the things he read (and the things he read comprised a chaotic potpourri of legitimate and irrational statements about Islam), things that cast a spell on him and drove him to acts of terrorism. So, to prevent others from being victims of such anti-social behavior, and for the public's security, those things must be banned, the writings of those who influenced Breivik must be "investigated" and cast into a memory hole so they never "do harm" ever again, and the authors of those writings be held accountable for their "hateful" or "hatemongering" speech.

And never, ever accuse Muslims of hate speech, or the defamation of other religions, or intolerance, or anti-social behavior. Don't even look at a Muslim the wrong way. It will earn you a dunking, or a beheading, or a rape, or a bomb.

Bawer concludes his article:

Indeed, a witch hunt is under way in Norway. In the name of multicultural tolerance and social harmony, some of the most powerful members of the country's leftwing intelligentsia are seeking to silence Islam's critics by linking them to a mass murderer who has become the most despised individual in modern Norwegian history. This campaign has been carried out on a scale, and with an intensity, that is profoundly unsettling. It should be firmly resisted by everyone who treasures freedom of expression and recognizes it as the cornerstone of human liberty.

Bawer was probably thinking about Fjordman and Hans Rustad, two outspoken Norwegians against multiculturalism and the Islamization of Norway who became the first scapegoats of the Left in its search for explanations for the Breivik massacre and bombing. About the laying of responsibility for Breivik's actions, The Gates of Vienna, in December 2011, in a long commentary on the Oslo massacre and on the opening baying of bloodhounds in the witch hunt, had this to say about both the Left's intellectuals and the Norwegian news media:

Are the media in Norway seriously trying to convince us that they have no culpability in influencing Breivik to commit these crimes by publishing critical articles about non-western immigrants, but that Fjordman and Mr. Rustad who have simply been linking to the newspaper articles published by the same media somehow are? That is logical fallacy, and it simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If they keep insisting on trying to pin the blame on Fjordman and Mr. Rustad then they have to stand up and accept equal responsibility, which of course they will never do.

Samuel Johnson is alleged to have quipped, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Egalitarianism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism began as "good intentions" adopted by the champions and enforcers of the welfare state, which is a political system that relieves some men of their lives, liberty, and property to redistribute them to men who want no liberty but need property. Norway, Sweden and Denmark are welfare states that also wish to relieve men of their freedom of speech. Their political elites and their intellectuals have for decades paved the way to a hell they don't wish to acknowledge or see, and are willing to blind everyone else to.

And America's own political elite and intellectuals are laying the same paving stones to hell for this country.

Objectivist Round-Up

Welcome to the February 16th, 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:









Burgess Laughlin presents BkRev: The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism posted at The Main Event, saying, "Studying postmodernism is difficult for two major reasons. First, postmodernism is an ideology that rejects ideology and other large-scale integrations; students of the subject therefore have trouble 'connecting the dots'. Second, some of postmodernism's most influential leaders write in a style based on the assumption that words, concepts, and reality do not connect. Stuart Sim's The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism largely overcomes those difficulties."



Darius Cooper presents Labor Turnover posted at Practice Good Theory, saying, "I provide a benchmark against which to evaluate weekly and monthly reports about jobs."




C.W. presents A Note on Greek Banks Recapitalization posted at Krazy Economy, saying, "The fate of the Greek Banks is to become the property of the swindler. A tale of modern economics."




Rational Jenn presents A Recent Perfectionism Monster Smack Down posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "This is a story of a creative way to handle an unwanted bout of perfectionism."




Rational Jenn presents ATLOSCon Update posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "Check it out! ATLOSCon 2012 has a Facebook page!"




Jason Stotts presents Erosophia posted at Erosophia, saying, "Valentine's Day is much more than a "Hallmark Holiday.""




Jared Rhoads presents Concierge physicians now being targeted by regulators posted at The Center for Objective Health Policy, saying, "Concierge physicians have been left mostly free to run their practices, but now some states are starting to regulate them as insurance companies. Oregon is the most recent example."




Ari Armstrong presents A Few Thoughts about Volunteer Search and Rescue posted at Free Colorado, saying, "If you find yourself in a search and rescue (or recovery) effort, here are a few things to keep in mind."




Diana Hsieh presents How to Make Bacon in the Oven posted at NoodleFood, saying, "Here are my instructions for making bacon in a glass pan in the oven... which is an easy way to make lots of perfectly-cooked bacon with little mess."




Edward Cline presents The Sneers and Smears of IPS posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "The Institute for Policy Studies has never tried to disguise its invective and malice for any person, group or idea it deems an obstruction to the progress of Progressivism."






* * *



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.

Islamic Rules for Radicals

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future."

-- Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's current communications director

Reading through David Horowitz's 51-page pamphlet, Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model*, one is struck almost immediately by the similarities between Saul Alinsky's "rules for radicals" to more effectively disrupt and bring down "the system," and the methods employed in the cultural and political jihad employed by such "radical" organizations as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Circle of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), among other affiliated Muslim "civic" entities.

I was so amazed by the similarities that I thought this remarkable pamphlet deserved a few words. It is an invaluable primer for understanding not only President Barack Obama and his policies, but also the arsenal of deceit, fraud and misrepresentations with which Muslim organizations are waging a war of sabotage and subornation in this country.

I have often written before on the methodology of Islamic jihad, particularly in "A Nexus of Nihilism," in August 2010 on Rule of Reason and other blog spots, in which I explore the curious and sometimes startling alliance between Islam and the Left. But I was too close to the subject to see the parallels in tactics, even after having read large portions of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (which I guiltily bought on Amazon, reluctant to reward the Alinsky estate, if one exists, with a few pennies, before I learned I could read it online).

Horowitz does not discuss Islam in his pamphlet, but the methodology recommended by the patron saint of the New Left, Alinsky, is so eerily simpatico with Islam's that they are virtual doppelgangers. And, as Horowitz explains Alinsky's principles, one can see that the means and ends of communists, socialists, fascists and other "radicals" are not dissimilar from Islam's methodology and ends. Here is a quotation from the seminal Muslim Brotherhood memo of 1991:

The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan [brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

A global caliphate is the end sought by Islam, a "heaven on earth." Leftists also pursue such a "heaven on earth" (an ideal world of "social justice," a preserved planet, the equalization of wealth, a guaranteed existence, etc.) and are also willing to wage not only violent war against the "system" to bring it about, but practice their version of taqiyya, or double-speak, or the policy of saying one thing in public and meaning something else entirely. Until that global or universal caliphate is accomplished, Islam will wage continual war against everyone who has not submitted to Islam or been subjugated by it.

So have Alinsky's radicals worked to bring down the "miserable house" of America and replace it with their own "caliphate" of totalitarian rule.

For Alinsky, politics is a zero-sum exercise, because it is war. No matter what Alinsky radicals say publically or how moderate they appear, they are at war. This provides them with a great tactical advantage since other actors in the political arena are not at war....By contrast, Alinsky radicals have an unwavering end, which is to attack the Haves until they are finally defeated. In other words, to undermine the system that allows them to earn and possess more than others. Such a system, according to the radicals, is one of "social injustice," and what they want is "social justice." The unwavering end of such radicals is a communism of results.

Or, "heaven on earth." The Marxist Dar Al-Islam, or Land of Islam. A land of peace and plenty in which no man has more than his brother, and in which selfishness has been controlled or eradicated.

Horowitz states in the beginning that Alinsky was fundamentally a nihilist. He hated America and the freedom it enjoyed. He simply wished to corrupt, compromise and destroy the system that made it so exceptional: capitalism (or what there was of it in mixed economy). He was not too particular about the cause. It didn't matter to him whom or what radicals demonstrated against or targeted, isolated, and polarized, just as long as it was a "Have" or a "Have's" institution, such as private property or constitutionally protected rights.

Alinsky distinguished between "rhetorical radicals" and "realistic radicals," and believed that "rhetorical radicals" might mean well but would accomplish nothing because they refused to compromise their principles. "Realistic radicals," however, were pragmatists willing to make compromises and concessions, so long as they corrupted the principles of their opponents. Horowitz writes, citing Alinsky who regarded "idealistic" radicals as naïve and impotent to effect "change":

"'Power comes out of the barrel of a gun' is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin [one of Alinsky's heroes] was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns."

And power was the ultimate and sole end of radical activism. Nothing else. The cause was immaterial. It could have been "decent" housing, or factory working conditions, or slum landlords or banks. The target was interchangeable. Alinsky did not necessarily hope it was communist power, or a socialist, or fascist power that triumphed. Any political system that wielded total power over men was fine with him. So, he was not only a nihilist, advocating destruction for the sake of destruction; but he was a political whore, as well.

What do the Islamists seek? Power. Political power. Total power with Sharia law installed and enshrined as the ultimate and only moral code, piecemeal at first, nation by nation, and then globally. The establishment of Sharia law is their notion of "social justice."

Although he was never formally a Communist and did not share their tactical views on how to organize a revolution, his attitude towards Communists was fraternal, and he saw them as political allies…

By his own account, Alinsky was too independent to join the Communist Party but instead became a forerunner of the left that emerged in the wake of the Communist fall….

For Alinsky, the revolutionary's purpose is to undermine the system and then see what happens. The Alinsky radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is political nihilism….

This attitude also characterizes the methods of Islamists in this country. One never really knows where or when they will strike next. It doesn't matter to Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR what the issue is. He and his stealth jihadist ilk will take advantage of any opposition to the Islamification of America. Lacking opposition or provocation, he and his ilk will invent a cause. Alinsky advocated that tactic, too. Wherever there are Muslims – at jobs, in a park, in a restaurant, in school, in the military, reading newspapers, during standard holidays – the venue is immaterial but rich in exploitive potential.

"Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn't look for a nation to be in better condition than another nation. Islam doesn't care about the land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam. Any nation or power in this world that tries to get in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy." – Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan's Fundamentalist Movement

Citing Hillary Clinton's Wellesley adulatory senior thesis, "There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model" (1969), and an SDS radical who wrote, "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution," Horowitz puts his finger on the core motivation of radicals, secular or Islamic. The cause is irrelevant, and solely a means of achieving political power, which is always the end. Horowitz notes:

In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.

And still is. Observe the agenda of the Democratic Party and Occupy Wall Street. Political power is also the end of the Islamists. Just as radicals insinuated themselves into the welfare state establishment and became "respectable reformers," and in academia to teach watered-down Marxism cum Progressivism, but in fact had never given up on the "revolution," Islamists pose as champions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech – except when it's someone else's religion or speech.

For example, CAIR and other Muslim organizations are opposing a movement among states to forbid state courts from using any but U.S. law. The movement is specifically aimed at prohibiting Sharia law from being employed or considered in any judicial decision, Sharia being treated as foreign law. Indeed, it is "foreign," not only because of its Mideast, Islamic origins, but because it is a brutal, primitive legal code that does not recognize individual rights, only the "rights" of Allah and Muslim men, and so is alien to American concepts of liberty. The opposition to a ban of Sharia law can only be described as a quest for political power.

"Realistic" and "pragmatic" Islamists wisely and pragmatically work within the system, as Alinsky advised his radicals. They don business suits and acquire a knowledge of American law. They infiltrate the system, pretending to be moderates representing liberal causes. They get elected to office, from Congress to mayor to alderman. They "bore within the system" to achieve the same end as "idealistic" plane hijackers and bomb-makers, which is the disintegration of the system.

Horowitz writes that Alinsky's method was indeed revolutionary;

Alinsky's advice can be summed up in the following way. Even though you are at war with the system, don't confront it as an opposing army; join it and undermine it as a fifth column from within. To achieve this infiltration you must work inside the system for the time being. Alinsky spells out exactly what this means: "Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people"….You do this by proposing moderate changes which open the door to your radical agenda….

Think of all the socialists, Marxists, and nascent totalitarians who have held office in Congress, in state governments, in the multitude of bureaucracies. They apply the same policy of ambiguity and dissimulation. They pose as "moderates" to advance their own radical agendas.

Advocates for the Islamization of America employ the same methods. All they want is "social justice": a foot bath and prayer room in an office or factory here; the removal of Christian symbols from the sight of Muslims there; the "right" of Muslim men to beat their wives in "marital disputes"; the derogation and cessation of all unflattering spoken and written criticism of Islam and its practices. All little, "moderate" things that begin to pile up and which inure Americans to an Islamic presence, a presence which is a measure of conquest but which Islamists claim with a straight face is "freedom."

After all, Ibrahim Hooper might argue, we don't mock the Amish, or the Baptists, or the Catholics. Why are Muslims the object of so much trepidation and discrimination and defamation? It might have something to do with the fact that the Amish, Baptists and Catholics are not waging a war against the rest of American society for the purpose of bringing it down and converting it to their preferred faiths.

Horowitz relates a revealing story about Alinsky and his approach to teaching radicals how to pursue their own preferred paradise of "social justice":

The following anecdote about Alinsky's teachings as recounted by The New Republic's Ryan Lizza nicely illustrates the focus of Alinsky's radicalism: "When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: 'You want to organize for power!'"

There are so many more gems and nuggets of observation in this pamphlet that to discuss them here would result in a pamphlet equally as long as Horowitz's. Suffice it to say that the Alinsky principles in the pursuit of socialist or totalitarian power are no less applicable to Islamic stealth jihad. One may observe them in both the socialist realm and the Islamic realm. I end this review with my own observations, from "The Nexus of Nihilism":

Islam is no stranger to socialism. In fact, as Daniel Pipes and other observers have noted, Islam has made common cause with communism and socialism in the past. Islamic scholars and intellectuals have endorsed socialist trends in countries they wished to see Islam triumph. The phenomenon of America's liberal/left making cause with Islam is just another episode of that on-again and off-again alliance.

Had Alinsky, who died in 1972, lived long enough to see the progress Islamists had made in their pursuit of power in America, he might have suspected that they had read his books, and sent them congratulatory notes. After all, to him, it mattered not who acquired power, just as long as the "system" was targeted, isolated, polarized – and destroyed.

* David Horowitz Freedom Center. Sherman Oaks, Ca, 2009.