Edward Cline's Blog, page 25

The Sneers and Smears of IPS

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) bills itself as the nation's oldest progressive organization. Progressive meaning collectivist.

IPS is a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. We work with social movements to promote true democracy and challenge concentrated wealth, corporate influence, and military power.

Actually, the oldest progressive organization is the Democratic Party, if we are to judge an organization by the policies it pursues, advocates, and advances. The Democratic Party, too, is a community of public servants and allies who link peace, social justice, and the environment. It, too, works with social movements to promote true democracy (populist mob rule) and challenges concentrated wealth (not any owned by members of the community, of course), corporate influence (not their crony capitalist friends and junket-generous lobbyists), and military power, for the Party's ideal military policy would abolish all the services and rely on the National Guard to keep the populace honest and in line.

IPS, however, as a 501(c)3 organization that relies on public donations, can only inform and advise politicians and the public and has no legislative powers. It can't force citizens to obey its whims and wishes or to conform to its agenda. That's what its principals believe Congress is for.

IPS studies policies, and doesn't like them or their authors or their supporters. It so dislikes the policies its minions study, that only the width and breadth of its scholars' desks and all the junk on them prevent them from just penning placards with Magic Markers and stencils to make protest signs, instead of laboring over long, tongue-in-cheek anti-American screeds. IPS so dislikes the authors of these policies that it would just rather produce National Enquirer-level exposés on these individuals. After all, to IPS, anyone who argues for self-defense, individualism and the rule of law, private property, and using nature to enhance man's existence, is tainted by bourgeoisie ideology and is a reactionary varmint undeserving of an iota of politeness or courtesy. IPS profiles of such persons are frankly and admittedly unflattering, stereotyping caricatures, not disinterested proxy resumes or curricula vitae. IPS has never tried to disguise its invective and malice for any person, group or idea it deems an obstruction to the progress of Progressivism.

Reflecting the fresh and blossoming alliance between the Left and Islam, "Islamophobia" is the new sin IPS scholars and interns can excoriate, and anyone found guilty of expressing a fear of Islam, its depredations, and its jihad gets the same a priori derogatory treatment as have individuals such as John Bolton and David Horowitz (characterized in his profile as an "ex-lefty"—the traitor!).

IPS, in short, is a kind of "academic" auxiliary of Saul Alinsky-style community organizers and activists, a resource to turn to should a community organizer or activist be unable to coin an original slogan or who otherwise lacks the gray matter to effectively demonize his targeted, isolated, and polarized prey. Should a politician seek precooked mantras and party lines and buzz phrases with which to assault the House and Senate from the floor, and the public from the approving pulpits of The New York Times and Washington Post, IPS's numerous papers and books are a rich trove of treasured bromides.

IPS enthusiastically endorsed Occupy Wall Street. Here it names two luminaries, the witch doctor and his cultural son and heir, a thug, as champions of OWS:

Occupy Wall Street is also garnering more attention from both local and global media, thanks to the growing outrage and support from well-known figures including MIT professor Noam Chomsky and rapper Immortal Technique.

Doubtless not a few of OWS's behind-the-scenes planners and managers have intimate connections with IPS. The only "how-to" manuals that can instruct "revolutionaries" on methods to incite violence, "occupy" anything, disrupt commerce, trash public parks, and cry for vengeance (i.e., "social justice") are to be found in IPS's backlist of publications. IPS waxed poetic as OWS settled into its appropriated venues like Turks occupying Cypress, or Muslim hordes occupying European cities, and presumed to instruct us in the Howard Zinn kind of American history:

But we do know that three of the four top presidential candidates in 1912¬the "Bull Moose" Theodore Roosevelt, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson -anchored their campaigns in the struggle against wealth's maldistribution.

Our democracy faced "ruin," Roosevelt warned, "if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few." The 1912 incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft, blasted Teddy for "appealing to class hatred." Taft ended up appealing to virtually no one. Wilson, Roosevelt and Debs together captured 75 percent of the final vote.

American politics a century ago revolved around wealth's deeply dangerous concentration. Wealth meant to nations, activists preached, what manure meant to farms. Spread evenly, manure enriches the land. With manure concentrated in heaps, the land sours.

The young men and women these activists inspired would two decades later usher in a "New Deal" for America. Unions would "level up" average incomes. Steeply progressive taxes would "level down" incomes at America's top. By the 1950s our plutocracy had melted away. The fortunes of our remaining rich no longer towered high enough to dominate us.

That more equal America now seems ancient history. Fifty years ago America's top 400 incomes averaged only $14.6 million each, in today's dollars. In 2008 our top 400 averaged $270.5 million. The 1961 ultrarich paid, after loopholes, 42.4 percent of their incomes in federal tax. The 2008 ultras paid just 18.1 percent.

From its beginning in 1963 by peaceniks and malcontents Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, two Congressional aides who left their government jobs to found it (they weren't happy with JFK's approach to disarmament), IPS has been Left with a capital L. Its first crusade was against the Vietnam War. It has remained Left for half a century. Over the decades it has latched onto and endorsed every collectivist and social "progress," from disarmament to the civil rights movement to feminism.

It has been investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service, by the FBI for its communist connections and serving as a front for the Soviets, and by the IRS for alleged violations of its non-profit status. Barnet and Raskin were on President Richard Nixon's "enemies list," and earned the enmity of President Ronald Reagan. In sync with the times, it published environmental impact and globalization studies. It has become vociferous in its opposition to corporate CEO pay, since 1994 publishing an annual report on the differences between what corporations pay their executives and what they or the corporations pay in federal income taxes.

Family Security Matters, whose IPS "profile" is particularly egregious and full of inaccuracies, cited IPS in January 2009 in connection with its role as advisor and stage prompter for Congress.

Leon Panetta…[former chief of the CIA and now Secretary of Defense]… previously strongly sympathized with the "Institute for Policy Studies" (IPS), a Washington based leftist think tank known for its bitter opposition to the intelligence community, notably the CIA. As a member of Congress Panetta supported the IPS's "Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy Line" in 1983. He was also one of the congressmen who biennially commissioned IPS to produce an "alternative" budget that dramatically cut defense spending.

He did so together with, among others, fellow democrat John Conyers, known for his close links to the World Peace Council (WPC), an organization financed and led by the former International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (ID-CPSU). And there is even more shocking information: the Soviet Russian secret service KGB appeared to be highly interested in the activities of IPS. This controversial think tank was targeted by a number of KGB agents…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a huge file on the Institute for Policy Studies and its founders. Some of the FBI documents are quite revealing.

IPS sanctimoniously boasts that it takes "No government funding":

Since it is difficult to "speak truth to power" if one takes funds from that "power," IPS does not accept any government money.

So, where does the money come from? Who were its original "angels," and who supports IPS now? Aaron Klein, writing for WND in June of 2011, penned a hard-hitting exposé about Panetta and his IPS connections. In it he states:

"The IPS is currently funded by philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute."

Wes Vernon, in his November 2010 Renew America article on the IPS, provides more details of IPS's current funding:

A recent dossier on the IPS lists its financial backers as the Ford Foundation, the Ploughshares Fund, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Arca Foundation, the Ben and Jerry's Foundation, the Compton Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Energy Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Open Society Institute, and others.

Some of the older foundations listed here are troubling enough. Of special interest is the money poured into IPS by the ubiquitous George Soros, who controls the Tides foundation and the Open Society Institute. That Soros, a man with a messianic complex and disdain for American values, is using his (tax-exempt) largesse to fuel the IPS's long-standing anti-Americanism is beyond troubling.

David Horowitz, a former left-winger turned neoconservative columnist and blogger (most notably on FrontPage), traced the original funding of IPS to veterans of the Old Left in his introduction to S. Steven Powell's book, Covert Cadre. Vernon quotes from Horowitz's introduction:

"…[S]ince the Communist Party was in a state of political decline, it was only natural that old-left stalwarts, faithful to the fifth column vision, would turn to the Institute for Policy Studies as a political base."

Thus, continued Horowitz, IPS "owed its continuing existence to the old-left diehards. And to three in particular, Peter and Cora Weiss, and to her father Samuel Rubin, a Communist Party member of the Stalin epoch, whose fortune provided IPS with its chief source of financial support."

Discover the Networks: A Guide to the Political Left also concurs on IPS's original sugar-daddy:

In 1963 the Samuel Rubin Foundation created the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which lays claim to the title of "the nation's oldest multi-issue progressive think tank." Samuel Rubin's daughter Cora Weiss, was a director of the Rubin Foundation from its inception, and was instrumental in the funding decision to create IPS. Today she is the Foundation's President. Her husband, Peter Weiss, was the first IPS board chairman and is currently the Rubin Foundation's Treasurer.

Samuel Rubin (1901-1978) apparently was a prototype George Soros, a Russian immigrant who in his youth joined the Communist Party, but in the meantime created the Fabergé cosmetics empire, which he sold in 1963 for $25 million to start his Foundation and to underwrite IPS and other leftist outfits and charities. One wonders about the mental health of men who succeed fabulously in a free country, then turn on the very system that made their success possible. Soros hales from the same disturbed pod that Rubin inhabited. Their malevolent premises compel them to advocate that all men be leashed, tamed, and controlled, in exchange for the spare messy pottage or gruel of a welfare state and command economy.

Having established IPS's Communist and Left credentials, we turn now to its mala fides. To be fair, the lurid "exposés" one can find in supermarket tabloids are less vicious than those produced by IPS. At the top of each profile is this advisory: "IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site." After reading just a handful of the entries, this ubiquitous disclaimer becomes redundant once the malice and near-libel are detected in each profile. Only a blinkered twit would believe that these profiles are fair, just, and objective.

In most of these profiles, the targeted, isolated and polarized individual is accused of making a "career" of opposing Islam, collectivism, disarmament, and other IPS-approved movements and issues. On the other hand, it is quite all right for IPS alumni to make careers of advancing collectivism and totalitarianism. However, this is a charge of mere hypocrisy, surely not the worst indictment that can be found against IPS.

About Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it reports:

Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has a made a career denouncing Islam, argues that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood may be more dangerous than Al Qaeda precisely because it has given up armed struggle….

About that "traitor," David Horowitz, it reveals:

Horowitz, an ex-lefty known for making vitriolic attacks on his former comrades, has turned the demonization of Muslims into a lucrative enterprise….

About Steve Emerson, whose Investigative Project on Terrorism reports on Islam's violent character, it writes:

Despite his history of making questionable claims, self-proclaimed terrorism "expert" Steve Emerson has made a lucrative career warning about terrorist threats and condemning Islamists….

About Brigitte Gabriel, whose Act for America site also reports on Islam's inroads in the U.S., IPS pouts:

Brigitte Gabriel has made a post-9/11 career out of roundly denouncing Islam, decrying "political correctness," and promoting the concept of an existential clash of cultures. She founded….

It is not noted in any of these profiles that the individuals must hire their own security and keep their places of residence and work a secret, lest they be murdered by foreign or home-grown jihadists. There are more such profiles of anti-jihadists and also of advocates of free enterprise and "militarism" (i.e., American self-defense) and of outspoken exponents of liberty, all of the same character-assassinating quality.

There are other Left/Liberal "think tanks" one could dwell on, all of them performing the same ideological chore of falsehoods and misinformation. Don't get me started on the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress.

IPS is not the Frankfurt School, which at least was imbued with a sense of "scholarly" Marxism, and which had to flee to the U.S. to escape Nazi persecution. IPS is its slovenly, not too fastidious cousin, perfectly at home in the statist régime it has helped to foster and make a reality.

The Sticky Wickets of "Radical" Islam

In a 1983 all-star pirate comedy, Yellowbeard , basically an expensively sewn grab bag of sight gags, one-liners, and pratfalls, there is one scene in which most of the principal characters, in search of Yellowbeard's treasure, form a kind of conga line on a beach, crawling on their hands and knees, following cryptically written directions on a piece of paper that may lead them to the buried chest. As a yawner, it was a low point in a sequence of low points. We were not amused.

I was reminded of that scene while reading another low point of political enquiry, the British Home Affairs Committee report, The Roots of Violent Radicalisation. In search of the reasons why British-born Muslims and immigrant Muslims turn to terrorism, this lengthy report asks many questions but answers none, tip-toeing as it does around the central ideological content of Islam that is at radical (and violent) variance with Western values, and could be characterized as a conga line of magnifying class-equipped twits examining every little grain of sand and pebble and tide-swept debris in search of those answers. The committee was chaired by a Muslim, Member for Leicester, Keith Vaz, a scandal-soaked politician who, among his many other offenses, in 1989 lead thousands of Muslims in a demonstration to demand the banning of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

The Home Affairs Committee report differs little from what passes for Congressional studies of the same subject (except for the Peter King hearings), which have for over a decade bent over backwards to identify the roots of Islamic jihad but not mention or incriminate Muslims or Islam itself.

Here are some randomly selected excerpts from the report that treat "violent extremist" Muslims as victims or put-upon, passive, and helpless Islamic receptors of "extremism":

The empirical evidence base on what factors make an individual more vulnerable to Al Qa'ida-influenced violent extremism is weak. Even less is known about why certain individuals resort to violence, when other individuals from the same community, with similar experiences, do not become involved in violent activity.

We suspect that violent radicalisation is declining within the Muslim community. There may be growing support for nonviolent extremism, fed by feelings of alienation, and while this may not lead to a specific terrorist threat or be a staging post for violent extremism, it is nevertheless a major challenge for society in general and for the police in particular.

One of the few clear conclusions we were able to draw about the drivers of radicalisation is that a sense of grievance is key to the process. Addressing perceptions of Islamophobia, and demonstrating that the British state is not antithetical to Islam, should constitute a main focus of the part of the Prevent Strategy which is designed to counter the ideology feeding violent radicalisation.

The Government notes in the Prevent Strategy that individuals "who distrust Parliament" are at particular risk of violent radicalisation. This appeared to be borne out in our inquiry, both in terms of Islamist and extreme far-right- radicalisation.

However, the Committee report concludes, not so startlingly and in conformance with calls in the U.S. to adopt the same policy:

The Committee concludes that the internet is one of the most significant vehicles for promoting violent radicalism - more so than prisons, universities or places of worship, although direct, personal contact with radicals is in many cases also a significant factor. Witnesses told the Committee that the internet played a part in most, if not all, cases of violent radicalisation.

Although there are statutory powers under the Terrorism Act 2006 for law enforcement agencies to order unlawful material to be removed from the internet, the Committee recommends that internet service providers themselves should be more active in monitoring the material they host, with appropriate guidance, advice and support from the Government. The Government should work with internet providers to develop a code of practice for the removal of material which promotes violent extremism.

Let us put some well-deserved words in the Committee's collective mouth.

Where do those "radicals" come from? From the realm of "disaffection"? From the nursery of "alienation"? From the islands of "grievance"? We really can't reach any definite conclusions, because, after all, Islam is a "religion of peace" and to say otherwise will only compound feelings of alienation and contribute to the grievance racket, err, that is to say, such a careless and hurtful assertion would solicit more complaints from the aggrieved. If there is any disaffection or alienation out there, it's all the fault of British society and its Western values.

And we mustn't place much importance on prisons, mosques, and universities as incubators of "radicalism" – we've done our best not to look, or pay attention to the percentage of prisoners who are Muslim or who convert to Islam, or to record the hateful rantings of Muslim clerics in places of worship, or the clotting of Muslim students on university campuses and their participation in "Islam will Dominate Britain" rallies.

Rather, we should focus our attention on the Internet.

Of this we are certain: the Internet, after all, is an efficient facilitator of communication among terrorists and would-be terrorists and other "extremists," including those who oppose the Islamisation of Britain. The government must monitor Internet traffic and sites more effectively than it does at the present, and persuade providers and ISP owners to do a better job of self-policing. We are particularly interested in sites that promote or invite "hate speech" and other modes of illegal expression. We would like to see these vanish from the Internet just to save us all a spot of bother.

Of course, any legislation introduced in the House that would adopt our recommendations would invite opposition from those concerned about freedom of speech and the like, but we are confident that these objections can be circumvented without hurting anyone's feelings. It has been done before.

At the moment, however, budgetary constraints prohibit Her Majesty's government from emulating the American Department of Homeland Security and monitoring every bit of Internet usage and red-flagging every suspicious word and image. Muslims are a minority in Britain (at the moment), and we mustn't leave them feeling left out of the political process (we discount the number of Muslims in the Commons and those who have been elevated to the Peerage, they're a minority, too, and we don't feel that the Muslim community are satisfied with such "tokenism").

The Home Affairs Committee regret not having been able to reach any definitive conclusions, except on the role of the Internet. We will convene again soon and brandish our new, improved magnifying glasses to better and more thoroughly examine how the Internet contributes to extremism and radicalisation, and discuss how best to solve these sticky wickets.

We have one standing rule, however, which will go far in our fair and disinterested deliberations: No one will be allowed to quote Winston Churchill on the nature of Islam and the character of Muslims. Some members of the Committee find his statements violently offensive. Particularly Mr. Vaz.

The State of the Reich

Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, began his column of January 28th, "Free Market Socialism," with

Before Obama got around to digging up his copy of last year's State of the Union address, crossing out a few lines, adding something about Iraq and Bin Laden, before heading out for another round of golf, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column urging Obama not to forget to mention the importance of promoting education for a free market economy. He titled it, Free-Market Socialism. (January 23)

Indeed, President Barack Obama did blather on about the importance of education during his address (on January 24, in approximately 410 words), remarking that the U.S. "leads the world in educating its people," and about the imperative of the government doing more to improve it, almost as though he were winking at Brooks. Greenfield focused on the ludicrousness of Obama's assertions about education and Brooks' dreamy imaginings of its perfect state, in light of the disastrous consequences of government involvement in education. In fact, Obama's State of the Union address, from one perspective, is simply an exploded, verbose rewrite of Brooks' article with minor asides on Iraq and Iran and jobs. To wit, Brooks wrote:

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive, two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

Meaning competition that is approved by the government married to an expanded welfare state, with the whole "social structure" of wider "safety nets" and subsidized skills education in technical schools; and more government-approved competition subsidized or favored by the government. In a word: fascism. Its euphemism is "economic dynamism." Well, there is failed Solyndra, and failed General Motors, and there are the Krupp works of Nazi Germany, which were certainly "dynamic" in turning out Panzer tanks, artillery, locomotives and heavy armor for the Wehrmacht.

Jonah Goldberg, however, wrote an interesting column that sliced and diced the central premise of the State of the Union address, "Obama's Vision for a Spartan America" (January 27). In it he takes Obama to task for advocating, in so many mealy-mouthed words, a kind of militarized America.

He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."

That is disgusting.

What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn't America any longer. He's making the case not for American exceptionalism, but Spartan exceptionalism.

Goldberg focuses on the "spirit" or "theme" of the address. While the speech was a revision of Obama's 2011 State of the Union address, a new element was introduced, the appeal for regimentation.

Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I've seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.

More than likely Goldberg has seen similar pictures from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. North Korea is a Johnny-Come-Lately. And while his Spartan analogy is thin, Goldberg put his finger on the mentality of a power-seeker and cites one prominent advocate of a "militarized" society.

Of course, Obama's militaristic fantasizing isn't new. Ever since William James coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life. "Martial virtues," James wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built." His disciple, liberal philosopher John Dewey, hoped for a social order that would force Americans to lay aside "our good-natured individualism and march in step."

Williams James did not mince words, as Obama has done in the past, did during his address Tuesday evening, and will in the future now that he's running for reelection. In his essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1906), James frankly confesses:

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree [if] its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. [Italics James's]

Discipline. Marching in step. Martial virtues. Service to the state. The abjuration of private interest to better follow orders and to tailor one's life and mind to serve state goals. Superficially "Spartan," but essentially collectivist. Specifically fascist. Too reminiscent of the requisite conditions Hitler and Mussolini imposed on Germans and Italians to create and sustain their totalitarian states.

And, of course, the American president who first explicitly articulated such a submissive society was John F. Kennedy, who, in his inaugural address in January 1961, proclaimed:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

Ayn Rand wrote the defining essay on the nature of Kennedy's policies, and the whole of his inaugural address is an appeal to sacrifice our liberty, wealth and rights in the name of saving the rest of the world from tyranny, poverty and misery.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

In "The Fascist New Frontier," among her other damning observations, she noted about our welfare state, that

"But the new frontier of which I speak," said Senator John F. Kennedy, "is not a set of promises, it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It holds out the promise of more sacrifice, instead of more security."

After quoting Hitler, General Franco of Spain, and Mussolini on the subject of the individual being compelled to defer and sacrifice to the state or the "community" and that an individual's rights are secondary to the "rights" of the collective,

President Kennedy finds it harder. According to the New York Times, he said that "he was confident of victory in the Cold War, and that any necessary sacrifices would be made. However, he said, he did not know how to distribute these sacrifices equitably in a free society."

Rand's "punch line" to that – and it is a line that ought to knock anyone flat – was:

Observe that any social movement that begins by distributing income, ends up distributing sacrifices.

Is there not a single rational, or even semi-rational person left in this country who does not understand that Obama's policies are consciously designed to extort the maximum amount of sacrifice from Americans, more than Kennedy could ever allow himself to imagine?

Hitler occupied Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, and The Netherlands. The American version of his invading armies has "occupied" parks and public places in cities around the country. Why? Because they are "poor." Hitler knew how to organize the "poor." Here he describes the Vienna he lived in:

Abject poverty confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class face-to-face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the Ring Strasse; and below that Via Triumphalis of the old Austria the homeless huddled together in the murk and filth of the canals. (Mein Kampf, Chapter 2, Book One)

Obama spoke with approval of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement which too obviously was planned and coordinated, very likely by George Soros and his protest machine. It was the Saul Alinsky tactic writ large. Many of the "occupied" sites have since been cleared out, but OWS is still a virulent, dangerous machine that invites and practices violence. Its hard core members – recruited mostly from the educated middle and upper classes – will become the Storm Troopers of fascism, regardless of who wins the election this year.

Are these thugs selfless, and committed to service in a cause higher then themselves, and ready to sacrifice their lives for the national community?

A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for the service of the community. (Mein Kampf, Chapter 3, Book One)

There exists a little known "sequel" to Mein Kampf, an untitled, and unpublished 200-page manuscript that is basically Hitler's megalomaniacal vision of Germany and the "Folk." It was written in 1928, only a few years after the publication of Mein Kampf (two volumes, 1925-1926). (Interestingly, the editor of Mein Kampf, Bernhard Stempfle, was targeted for death during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler orchestrated the murders of key members of the rival SA.) It was discovered by an American officer in an air raid shelter in 1945.

It would be appropriate to end this commentary with a quote of a single line from it that is relevant to Obama's new vision of an America he hopes very much to change:

The people who chatter so happily about socialism do not at all realize that the highest socialist organization of all has been the German Army. (Chapter 3)

Obama ended his State of the Union address with words consonant with his military theme:

This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other's backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we're joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Substitute "This Nation" with "Germany," and I challenge anyone to fail to see the difference between that and anything Hitler or Mussolini had ever written or spoken.

Watch your back. There may be someone peering over your shoulder, and holding a gun.

Cumulative Consequences

Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, recently inveighed against the higher education racket in "Free Market Socialism" (January 28tth). Among other observations, he noted:

Mass education also devalues the actual education being received. Today's college students know less than yesterday's high school graduates. Today's high school graduates know less than a middle schooler from 50 years ago. And there is no way around that. Tossing everyone into the same system and expecting the same results leads to a lower quality system.

The post-World War II G.I. Bill, passed by Congress to keep countless returning and unemployed soldiers busy and distracted and out of trouble while bureaucrats and policymakers continued to regulate an economy which otherwise would have boomed sooner and faster than it did following the war, was the beginning of higher education's addiction to and dependence on federal money. Private and public universities and colleges were introduced to the federal teat. The intervention co-opted the "Greatest Generation" and set another precedent for government intervention in the economy and the culture, an unchecked intervention which inexorably and ultimately led to control.

And to the "degree mills" that exist today. Of course the greatest beneficiaries of a mandated college education are the very ones who are in positions of government power or who teach socialist economics, history and "diversity" in those very same institutions.

By way of seconding Greenfield's points on economics and politics, it should be observed that President Barack Obama has a college education. Why, he was even a "professor" of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. One imagines that this stint was on-the-job training for how later to usurp the Constitution. Well, both Bushes, and Clinton, and Carter and virtually every president going back to the early 19th century have had a college education. I think George Washington and Lincoln are the only exceptions. And except perhaps for the Adams's and Jefferson, those graduates invariably made a mess of things, or wisely refrained from trying to apply their college-imbibed learning to policymaking.

Some people wonder whether or not the dumbing down of education (and of Americans) was an "accident." I don't think it was a conspiracy. It's an issue of philosophical disintegration, aided and abetted by government intervention.

Take the G.I. Bill mentioned in the beginning. Aside from becoming addicted to and dependent on government subsidies, in order for private and public universities and colleges to admit hundreds of thousands of discharged G.I.'s to school – countless among them not really after such an education, but they couldn't find work, so, what the hell – the schools had to lower their admission standards and settle for minimal criteria. Of course, there were exceptions to the rule; many veterans took to "higher education" like ducks to water and did well, usually in the sciences and in engineering.

One unfortunate result of this is that G.I. Bill beneficiaries, when they went into the private sector, were inculcated with the "You've got to have a college education to get anywhere" mantra and succumbed to hiring and employment requirements, which they easily met but imposed on a new generation of job applicants. Consciously or not, they helped to foist upon that generation an unnecessary and unrealistic policy for living.

But, just as I had no use for a college education – no law mandated having a college education to pen a novel, and no publisher, either – I don't think most veterans back then had a use for it, either. They'd done their duty for their country, and perhaps many wrongfully thought that a subsidized education was the least the country owed them. After all, they'd been drafted, that is, the government had required service of their lives and bodies and appropriated those lives and bodies for the duration.

The initial lowering of admissions criteria was the beginning of the dumbing down. No mastermind or secret society conspiracy was behind it, no government master plan to lobotomize Americans could ever be drawn up. That is the stuff of dystopian novels. There's no such thing as an omniscient or omnipotent evil, just occasional and random concessions by the rational to the occasional and random irrational in acts of futile and suicidal pragmatism.

To pose an analogy: We wound up applying all sorts of car-making rules, including emissions and safety standards, and the steel-bodied 1939 Packard ends up being a General Motors dog-cart, less safe and certainly more expensive.

That is, higher education began early in the 20th century turning out graduates who had to know that Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher, how to perform trigonometry, how to parse and analyze the Constitution, and had been introduced to the literary canon. Now it turns out expensively educated graduate students who may think Heraclitus is either a rock band or a mutation of herpes, cannot balance their checkbooks and for whom simple math is an arduous challenge, have been taught that the Constitution needs "reforming," and who won't bother with the literary canon because it can't be "texted" (not that universities are pushing the canon, anyway, that would be too "elitist" and discriminatory against lesser literature).

And with the dumbing down come shorter attention spans and conditioned appetites for quick fixes and instant gratification.

It's a matter of cause and effect. Ideas matter, and have consequences. And the G.I. Bill, together with a government reluctant to relinquish control of the economy, was a bad idea opposed by few.

The consequences and results are cumulative in nature, if not checked, opposed or questioned. This rule applies to all realms.

From the minimalization of the American mind and spirit, we turn to the practiced delusions of the political oligarchy.

In his article, "Weaponizing the Passenger Plane" (January 30th), Greenfield noted:

The war against us has been made possible by a leadership that is unable to identify the problem, let alone formulate a meaningful response to it.

I disagree. The war against us was made possible, and continues to be made possible, by a leadership that is evasive, that will not identify the facts of reality – at least, not publically – because those facts will challenge or contradict their most fundamental premises. Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called this "blanking out," that is, knowing the facts but shoveling them beneath an impenetrable carpet of rationalizations and excuses. Holder, Napolitano, Obama, and the rest of that crew know that Islam is an ideology more than it is a theology, that it is essentially political in nature because it governs every aspect of an individual's life and also the contents of his mind. Not surprisingly, these are also the ends of liberalism. They recognize the peril posed by Islam. Yet they will not identify it in public and formulate efficacious polices to combat Islam. Instead, they ally themselves with Islam in a replication of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

This constitutes a refusal to think. Why do they refuse to think? Because every one of them recognizes a symbiosis between the secular tyranny they prefer and Islamic tyranny. To question one is to suggest that both species of tyranny are prime candidates for intellectual interrogation. If you question the rightness of Sharia Law and assert its incompatibility with individualism and liberty, it is but a short step to question the rightness of the altruist premises of, say, ObamaCare and assert its incompatibility with individualism and freedom. You simply remove Allah and Mohammad from the picture and substitute a bureaucrat or politician and his champion in academia. And from there one must logically question the moral underpinnings of the welfare state. Rebuttals, refutations, and repudiations would follow exponentially from one premise to another.

Privately, a refusal to think will earn one many just desserts, usually death or tragedy. But a public official's refusal to think, regardless of the issue, affects everyone else, especially the electorate.

I don't say that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Holder and the rest of them know this as clear, objectified knowledge. They don't dare pursue their secret, gloppish, unformed suspicions to their roots. They simply sense the threat as a feral warning that they shouldn't "go there" if they wish to retain their power, never have it questioned, and rest easy in their hubris. It would interfere with and imperil their agenda to enlarge an omnivorous welfare state complemented by a growing police state. That's the symbiosis between, say, ObamaCare and the TSA. There are other symbioses festering in Washington – it's too long a list to include here, feel free to name anything or any action that has not been the subject of controls, including speech – but they're all cut from the same collectivist cloth.

The rot or cancer of federal controls – and this also applies to any government's interference in the economy, state or municipal, the scale and object of intervention and control are immaterial – may, like the G.I. Bill, have benign and good-intended origins but foster unintended consequences, with the result always being the same: the steady accumulation of power by the state and the steady extinction of liberty.

"Strike" One

The voluntary "blackout" of Wikipedia and other major Internet sites on January 18th in protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation in Congress had Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged written all over it. It's likely that these sites' owners even disdain Rand and her philosophy of reason and individual rights, but, there it was. They heard the wolf packs baying in the distance and coming closer, and took action. Here's your world without us or our minds and our services. That was the message of the novel and of the blackout.

Moreover, the blackout had consequences. It forced the sponsors and advocates of the legislation to think twice about passing it. Can you imagine what might have happened if doctors had gone on a one-day strike before ObamaCare was passed? Possibly Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would have demanded that National Guard SWAT teams be called up to force doctors to return to their hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. There was no strike. That would have revealed the true nature of ObamaCare. It could possibly have delayed or aborted passage of that pernicious legislation. And Vice President Joe Biden would have instead exclaimed, "What's the big *%#!* deal???"

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, House Bill 3261), and PIPA (Protect IP Act, Senate Bill 968) were condemned for two main reasons: the congressmen who drew up the legislation revealed a fatal ignorance of how the Internet works and so were proposing to hand government bureaucrats and law enforcement agencies the power to control its content, rendering the legislation ill-conceived and utterly impotent to combat the piracy of movies, music and even copyrighted written content; or because it would indeed empower the government to police the Internet, ostensibly to protect copyrights and intellectual property, but actually to control content and silence opposition to government policies at the behest of whatever lobby, group, or person had influence over Congress.

Some "strikers" and pundits opposed the legislation for technical reasons, citing the confusing language of the legislation. You can't start a car without a solenoid, they were saying. It's really very simple. The car can't be stolen by pirates either if you remove the solenoid. That means the thieves would have to stop and strip or vandalize the car, giving you enough time to call the cops and see them arrested. Or they could bring their own solenoids, usually stolen from an auto parts store. What you're proposing is that the guy who buys a used car not knowing it was stolen is a party to the theft, and you'd arrest him and let the thieves go free. That's not really fighting car-theft, is it? – you cretins.

And your rules would crush the whole used-car market, in which the majority of used car sales are legitimate, but no one would want to risk selling or buying a used car because anyone could claim his car was stolen, even though it might have sat on the lot for ages. So, we refuse to be the patsies and fall guys of bureaucrats and other government knowledge "managers."

An article by Derek Broes in Forbes on January 20th, "Why Should You Fear SOPA and PIPA?" cuts to the chase. After posing the rhetorical question, "What's so bad about trying to protect movies and music from being pirated?" Broes notes:

The birth of SOPA and PIPA has been established through the efforts of the lobbying arms of the studios and labels The MPAA and RIAA. SOPA or (Stop Online Piracy Act) is in the Senate and PIPA, or (Protect Intellectual Property Act) is in the House [sic]. Both bills are essentially the 'same wolf in sheep's clothing' so there is really no need to try and differentiate.

If passed, SOPA and/or PIPA will give the Justice Department the ability to shut down almost any blog or website at will, PLUS it will also do absolutely nothing to stop those that pirate movies or music.

Today the studios and labels rely on DMCA take down notices to handle piracy on websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) allows the website to take down the content within a specific period of time after receiving a DMCA notice without penalty.

Broes has the venues of the legislation backwards, but adds that in "most cases all of the companies mentioned above do a fantastic job, and thus far have not done too much complaining about the costs of implementing technology and resources for a successful DMCA compliance structure." He then wades into the complexities of the Internet and how piracy is practiced on it. This article should be read for the "solenoid" details to better understand how piracy is possible and why SOPA and PIPA would not actually stop it.

If the government, and those behind government, didn't like Huffington Post or Breitbart.com it would now be legally plausible and simple to shut them down. After all, Huffington Post editors at some point in time have posted links to content from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other organizations. These networks could now claim that the Huffington Post was infringing upon their copyrights, and that Huffington editors, under SOPA/PIPA, be charged for each offense and go to jail. Yes jail.

"That would never happen" a friend of mine that works at a major studio told me. My response to him was simple. "I have never known a law that gives the government more power that they have not only used but exceeded the law's intent to gain even more power."

Broes concludes:

SOPA and PIPA are dangerous, half-baked solutions that will cost millions of jobs, stifle innovation and ultimately do nothing to stop piracy at all. It [sic] could be used as a solution for those in Government that seek to silence their opposition, even if that was never the intention. Hollywood has many large donors that are huge contributors to Obama so, even though Harry Reid postponed a vote on the bill, you can bet that they will try to wait for the frenzy to calm down before voting on a somewhat different version of the bill and most likely have a different name than SOPA or PIPA. After all, those names are as about as unpopular as members of Congress right now.

And who would be the Alpha Male wolf leading the pack? Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and regulatory "czar."

Alec Rawls in an article on the "Watts Up With That" anti-climate change site, "Regulatory Czar wants to use copyright protection mechanisms to shut down rumors and conspiracy theories" (January 20th), also gets down to brass tacks and opens with:

As Congress considers vastly expanding the power of copyright holders to shut down fair use of their intellectual property, this is a good time to remember the other activities that Obama's "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein wants to shut down using the tools of copyright protection. For a couple of years now, Sunstein has been advocating that the "notice and take down" model from copyright law should be used against rumors and conspiracy theories, "to achieve the optimal chilling effect."

What kinds of conspiracy theories does Sunstein want to suppress by law? Here's one:
… that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud. [From page 4 of Sunstein's 2008 "Conspiracy Theories" paper.] [Italics Rawls']

What an odd but cruel metaphor for Sunstein to employ – chilling effect – when advocating the gagging of critics of global warming. Yet Sunstein means it. Rawls poses a real life conundrum:

Suppose you are a simple public-spirited blogger, trying to expose how Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, and other Team members conspire to suppress the research and destroy the careers of those who challenge their consensus views. If Sunstein gets his way, Team members will only have to issue you a takedown notice, and if you want your post to stay up, you'll have to go to court and win a judgment that your version of events is correct.

Sunstein is for government information "management" of men, to combat what he cynically deems "rumors and conspiracy theories," that is, truth or the search for truth. He views men as mere sociological units and passive receptors of sense data which their "bias" translates into subjective interpretations of reality. Nothing that men know, that is, men who are not in power to enforce their own subjectivity, has any validity. Reality is unknowable. The peace and quiet of society must be preserved at all costs, even if it means tearing out the tongues of men or addling their minds with "preferred" or "official" truths.

If men sense that they are being tracked by wolf packs – if they sense that a government or president is preying upon their freedom, their wealth, their livelihoods, their lives – then this is simply a group "bias" or a psychosis that the government must combat with knowledge manipulation. Rawls writes:

The path from Sunstein's 2008 "Conspiracy Theories"" article to his 2009 On Rumors book is straightforward. According to Sunstein's 2008 definition, a conspiracy theory is very close to a potentially libelous rumor:

… a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it is an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role. [Abstract]

At this time, Sunstein's "main policy idea" was that:

government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories….

… government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. ["Conspiracy Theories," pages 14-15] [Italics Rawls']

Sunstein wrote in On Rumors:

"….[R]umors [or conspiracy theories] often arise and gain traction because they fit with, and support, the prior convictions of those who accept them. Some people and some groups are predisposed to accept certain rumors, because those rumors are compatible with what they think they know to be true." [p. 6]

So, if your conviction is that your life is your own, and you notice that various regulatory "czars" assert otherwise, that you must live for the good of the nation and sacrifice yourself to penury, and defer to elitist society managers before you buy a can of soup or light a cigarette or purchase a pair of shoes, and you conclude, with others who hold and share the same conviction, that the government is encroaching on every little aspect of your life and that this enveloping trend seems to be a conspiracy – well, SOPA or PIPA would allow the government to send in its "infiltrators" to set your mind straight. Or perhaps an ATF or DHS SWAT team for a more visceral persuasion, if you persist in your delusion that the government is intent on enslaving you.

Picture a worst case scenario under SOPA or PIPA: The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or the Islamic Circle of America, or the Muslim Public Affairs Council filing a complaint with the government about "rumors and conspiracy theories" being posted on Jihad Watch or The Middle East Forum, and demanding that these sites be taken down as defamatory and disrespectful and malicious, even though all these sites do is report on the crimes committed in the name of Islam and the stealth jihad conquest of the country. Or imagine Ron Paul wishing to have his weird foreign policy statements expunged from the Internet record so that no one could judge him by those statements.

Imagine the doors to all kinds of knowledge shut in your face because Cass Sunstein has diagnosed you as nuts.

Do not be fooled by the ubiquitous photo of a smiling Cass Sunstein. He is a totalitarian of the first rank. But while he is only one of dozens of such creatures in the current administration, SOPA and/or PIPA would empower him to impose his vision of an ideal society

Another website, "Cloud Tweaks," carries an article by Jeff Norman on the intricacies of "cloud computing" and the inherent dangers of SOPA and PIPA.

Understandably, many would-be cloud users might be warded off by fear of a federal shakedown. Businesses should also be concerned, since their employees might choose to store important information in cloud sites that might be dismantled and rid of their data.

The SOPA/PIPA affair has not concluded by any means. Both Craigslist and Wikipedia warn their users that the bills will continue to lurk in Congress' shadows, perhaps to eventually resurface in a revamped and less easily overpowered form.

Let us concretize the peril and the stakes this way: the Internet enabled me to research and write this article in record time – one day – whereas in the past researching and writing such an article may have taken me a week. But all the research capabilities were there, thanks to protected IP's and the skill and knowledge of those "providers" (too frequently regarded by regulators and a mooching public as "common carriers"). Yes, there are pirates who exploit the Internet, but they need to be combated with objective law, and not by slapdash legislation drawn up by men with faulty and fatal grasps of how and why the Internet works.

Finally, a great lesson is being overlooked even by those who welcome Congress's second thoughts about SOPA and PIPA. The Internet blackout proved, perhaps more than the Tea Party movement ever put Congress on notice that Americans were tired of its juggernaut to national insolvency and socialism, that power-lusters and their abettors can be stopped cold. On January 23rd, PC World reported:

By the time the week was over, dozens of lawmakers had abandoned the two bills or voiced opposition, and a cloture vote on PIPA scheduled for this Tuesday in the Senate was delayed as lawmakers try to find a compromise. In the House, Representative Lamar Smith, the lead SOPA sponsor and Texas Republican, killed his bill.

And that was "Strike One" against statism. Who will throw the next pitch at Congress and the White House? Who will emulate John Galt? Doctors, or oil companies?

Objectivist Round-Up

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

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

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:
Keith Weiner presents Inflation: an Expansion of Counterfeit Credit posted at keithweiner's posterous, saying, "One of the most important topics of our era, and the proper concept of "inflation"."
Joseph Kellard presents Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson posted at The American Individualist, saying, "My review of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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Rivals for Your Life: Religious Conservatives vs. Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps that's why conservatives hate Islam. Let's look at the "Five Pillars of Islam":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a premise for an opera bouffe!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Fascism and Theater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington's Rocket Bombs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mind works in not entirely mysterious ways.

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

They are all Orwellian rocket bombs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of a Police State

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…"
Portion of Emma Lazarus's poem for the Statue of Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the McCain-Levin bill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

War would mean armed conflict with the advocates and enablers of another ideology. War means open, armed hostility, not necessarily for the enemy nation's cultural sum, but for its political ideology. A "war on terrorism," however, discards the ideology and focuses on the enablers (plotters, foot soldiers, etc.) as though they come from some generic template, and does not declare war on what motivates the plotters, soldiers, and so on. Neglecting to oppose and refute the enemy's ideology while focusing only on its carriers, propagators and advocates, is futile.
One could say that one cannot be at war with Islam, because Islam, as an ideology, seems to be "stateless." But, is it? No. Islam is what governs Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and all of the North African states. Islam is not some disembodied entity that infects individuals and causes them to fly planes into buildings or attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Islam is not the common cold. It isn't even typhus, or influenza. It is the bubonic plague of the mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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