Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts

Thursday, July 04, 2013

When the Arab successor of Nazi Germany is Overthrown, There is Cause for Celebration

Guest post by David Bedein


There is no reason for a long winded article with a Jerusalem by line over the ouster of the Moslem Brotherhood, the ideological ally and successor of Nazi Germany.

Haj Amin El Husseini, Hitler's ally and the Mufti of Jerusalem, played a decisive role in pioneering the Moslem brotherhood, whose focus rests on an obsession with Israel's destruction.

To witness the overthrow of the Moslem Brotherhood regime in Cairo is a blessed day for the people of Israel.

The Israeli government does not need to say anything or do anything except to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

There are those who bemoan the fact that Egyptian president Morsi was brought to power in a democratic process.

Give me a break. So was Hitler. And so was Hamas for that matter.


David Bedein is director of Israel Behind the News (via Dan Friedman)

How the Tea Party Can Save America and the World – a Plea From New Zealand

Guest post by Trevor Loudon


Many Tea Partiers and American patriots understand that the fate of the United States of America hangs in the balance.

No melodrama here. If the US loses its position as the world’s number one military super power, another country, or countries, will take its place.

Realistically, that can only be Russia or China, or more likely, an alliance of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Vietnam and whoever ever else climbs aboard.

As the U.S. Dollar slowly sinks and America’s prestige and power goes with it, the “Evil Axis” grows bolder.

But why should I care? I’m safe aren’t I? Way down at the bottom of the South Pacific, in New Zealand.
Well, maybe not so safe. China is steadily advancing through the Pacific. It now has several footholds in our region, particularly in Fiji, which is my country’s nearest major island neighbor. To any thinking Aussie or Kiwi, this is cause for major concern.

in June of 2012, Song Xiaojun, a “retired” Chinese general, told Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, that “Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later…” “Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the ‘son’ of the U.S. or ‘son’ of China,” Song said, adding that Australia had best choose China because it all “depends on who is more powerful and based on the strategic environment.”

If America goes under folks, the West goes under. No ifs, no buts. Only a strong America can keep the bad guys in check. Just as soldiers from all over the world fought in Europe and the Pacific to save liberty in WW2, today’s freedom lovers need to join the fight to save the US. Once liberty was fought for in the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, Normandy and Sicily. Now if liberty is to be saved, we must win the electoral battles of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado.

From my home in Christchurch, I recently spent an hour on the phone with a savvy Florida activist. She outlined for me the crushing problems being faced by American patriots, in the face of a relentless leftist onslaught from the Obama Administration. According to my usually optimistic friend, much of the Tea Party is in disarray, the GOP leadership is even more arrogant and out of touch than usual and if the Dems pass “immigration reform” the Republic will be swamped with millions of new loyal Democrats, effectively turning the US into a permanent “one party state.”

And to cap that, now I’m hearing whispers of a third party.

Let’s get real. There is only one vehicle that can take back America from the Democrats and their union and far left allies, in the very limited time we have left. That is the Republican Party. If the Democrats hold the Senate and take back the House in 2014, or even 2016, which they could well do, America is done for.

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

OBAMA BEGS EGYPTIAN MILITARY: Please Don't Arrest Members of Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda in North Africa!

Unfortunately, that headline is deadly serious. Please consider Obama's just-released statement concerning the deposed Islamist Morsi:

The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters...

...During this uncertain period, we expect the military to ensure that the rights of all Egyptian men and women are protected, including the right to peaceful assembly, due process, and free and fair trials in civilian courts. Moreover, the goal of any political process should be a government that respects the rights of all people, majority and minority; that institutionalizes the checks and balances upon which democracy depends...

Checks and balances? You mean like "If Congress won't act, I will"? Or declaring the Senate in recess to make unlawful recess appointments? Or ramming Obamacare down the throats of the American people in 2010 against overwhelming opposition?

Considering the actions of President Lead-from-behind over the last four-plus years, I suspect Egyptians won't be losing much sleep over the Obamaltimatum. It would seem that Mr. Obama has his cross-hairs fixed on Americans, not Egyptians.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Hillary 2016 Super-PAC introduces new branding!

The People's Cube has the exclusive:


It's not just a great logo: Hillary's political action committee appears to have global support!


Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Are you ready for Hillary in 2016?

Because by 2016 an article of the Constitution may yet remain un-shredded by the Democrats, Hillary Clinton's SuperPAC is mobilizing for action. Pictured below: one of her early supporters.


Quals? We don't need no stinkin' quals.


Hat tip: @Slublog.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

If you live in the United States, you are already far too late [finem respice]

Guest post by finem respice

If you live in the United States it may finally be dawning on you that you have something of a problem in the government to which you are now a Subject. In fact, the details of the [NSA Snooping|Verizon Metadata|IRS Political Targeting|Bankruptcy Preference|Fast and Furious|State Department Coverup|Libyan Ambassador|George Takei Facebook Ghostwriting] scandal are meaningless. You are already far too late. It will get worse before it gets better, it may never get better again, and, frankly, finem respice has not a shred of sympathy for your plight or that of your countrymen/women. In fact, given the manner you have quashed the opportunity- almost unique in the history of the species- created by an impossibly rare coexistence of liberty, private property, free markets, the rise of scientific method, and freedom of expression (to name just a few) there is more than a passing argument to be made that your society has squandered one of the greatest intellectual and individualistic fortunes in history.

Moreover, less charitable commentators may one day look upon what you have vainly and arrogantly loosed upon the world and wonder if the word "criminal" might not actually be excessive. To the extent humanity was headed towards something approaching a post-scarcity society finem respice would not wonder if you have collectively set that project back decades, or even centuries.

You see, for generations now you have collectively built and nurtured a massive, living, metabolizing creature. From the inanimate, intellectual detritus of "progressivism" and your unending and increasingly all-consuming narcissism you have kneaded it into a shapeless husk, pouring in rank mud like "Save the Planet," "Global Warming," "The American Dream of Home Ownership," "The War on Drugs", "Mothers Against Drunk Driving", "The War On Terror", "Speculators", "Too Big To Fail", "The 1%", and of course the essence and spark of its life, "…if it saves just one child." In conjunction with (but far more so than the other buckets of intellectual mud) "…if it saves just one child" has created the Golem of Government.

It was useful once, certainly, but it has since grown larger and more unwieldy as you slumbered. It is more potent than you now, and now it wields its own momentum with a self-directed animus of its own design, winding to and fro, unpredictable and twister-like, a destructive force that, despite what you thought, is not magically contained by the frontiers of the United States. Its power is extraterritorial and carves a wide swath across and through international law, international relations, international taxation, "force projection," and grips a stranglehold on the global financial system, which it greedily claims as its own and uses as hostage to bend the laws of other states to its will.

With almost Tolkienesque malice it seeks to see all, hear all, and know all- and owing to complacency that runs the gamut from your blithe acquiescence to your active participation, increasingly looks close to meeting its total information omniscience goal. Yet, the Golem is possessed of no craft, no subtlety, no art. Its sensory organs inform crude appendages that know how to do nothing but squeeze, smash, stomp, kidnap, and explode the targets of its interest without apology or feeling. Moreover, the Golem has no sense of proportion, happily imposing costs of $10 billion on the developed world to collect less than one tenth of that in revenue for itself, raining fire from the sky upon any collection of persons it feels might maybe contain a couple troublemakers. It thinks nothing of shutting down the 20th largest city within its borders (at a cost of many billions of dollars) to hunt down a single sleep-deprived, starving, wounded, and suicidal criminal. Likewise, it laughs to spend hundreds of thousands in time and expenses to ransack those of its Subjects' entities with operating budgets of $20,000, $15,000, or even less, or to ruin a mid-sized enterprise with a displeasing political orientation over vague foreign regulations on the exportation of wood.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

NOT SEN. MITCH McCONNELL: The Obama Administration's Fascist Attacks on Free Speech

Guest post by Not Sen. Mitch McConnell [R-KY]


The First Amendment is under attack. It is under a full-bore assault by Marxist, Progressive, foreign, and Democrat front groups, and this assault is coordinated directly by the White House. In fact, we have seen hard proof that this White House is more totalitarian, more fascistic, and more authoritarian in its behavior than any in American history.

An internal Media Matters memo from January 2010, and this group is linked directly to the mainstream media, to the Democrat Party and to the White House, revealed that news personalities and other executives at Fox News would be personally attacked -- up to and including intimidation techniques and veiled threats of violence.

We have seen a coordinated effort by the Obama administration, whether it be the FEC, the FCC, HHS, the SEC and the IRS, to target political dissent and free speech in ways that more resemble Chavez' Venezuela or Hitler's Germany than America.

When asked directly by Congress about targeting groups for their political affiliation, managers at the IRS lied to Congress repeatedly. We have identified literally hundreds of cases of the IRS targeting conservative groups to suppress their political activities -- and the IRS has prevaricated, obfuscated and resilitated (that's not a word, but it rhymed) discovery into their actions.

But this issue isn't about the IRS or any single agency. It's endemic to an administration built on a cult of personality and led by a charismatic ideologue who fashions himself as some sort of imperial president. His personal logo, like a swastika, is emblazoned on all of his propaganda material. His political action wing has assembled a massive database on Americans, according to the ethically challenged Democrat Maxine Waters, that would probably shock the average NSA analyst.

We had an inkling this was coming: when the President wagged his finger at the Supreme Court for its Citizens United decision in 2010, it was emblematic of a man who thinks like a dictator. There's a reason Obama, Schumer and the rest of the Marxist Left were so angry with the Citizens United decision: because it broke the media companies' monopoly on free speech.

Any corporation and organization should be absolutely free to participate in political speech, not just the companies that own newspaper and television stations. Why would companies that own news organizations get to own political speech?

Citizens United wasn't controversial in the least. It simply broke the Marxist Left's monopoly on political speech. That's why Obama and his ilk were so upset.

The reasons that donor lists to political groups remain utterly private are to prevent authoritarians from using the instrumentalities of government to target them. The FEC has protected the donor lists of the Socialist Worker’s Party since 1979. And the Supreme Court told the State of Alabama's racist Democrats it couldn’t force the NAACP to disclose the names and addresses of its members back in the 1950s.

No, we have an administration so laced with ideologues that it is willing to shred the Bill of Rights. They took an oath to uphold that which they despise and ignore.

And that is why tonight I, Not Mitch McConnell -- Not the Senate Minority Leader -- am announcing the following:

• I will organize filibusters of every bill more than the number of pages of the U.S. Constitution and which is not available for public review and comment -- unmodified -- for 30 days.

• No bill, nor any nominee, will be permitted to proceed through the Senate until we have full disclosure of all documents sought by the Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and IRS investigative committees in the House of Representatives.

• There will be no Amnesty for illegal aliens and no "comprehensive immigration reform" permitted until Democrats agree to secure the border. Period.

Why would Republicans cooperate with fascist bullies? The only way to beat a bully is to fight back. And the only way to beat a fascist is to wage total political war.

From this day forward, and until we receive satisfaction on the points listed above, I declare total political war on Obama, his administration and the Democrat Party.

When they renounce fascism, I'll welcome them with open arms. Until then, they can expect a rain of political ruin the likes of which have never before been seen in Washington. As the dumbest vice president in American history might say, "Gird your loins."


Note: This speech is based upon a real speech by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. In fact, this is a speech he would give if he happened to be a true statesman and conservative, which he is not.

Friday, June 21, 2013

GREAT NEWS: China's Fighters and Drones Bear Uncanny Resemblance to U.S. Fighters and Drones...

...in what must be just a startling coincidence and not a case of widespread espionage and theft.

China’s models of military planes at the Paris Air Show bear resemblance to U.S. aircraft, drawing attention to the rising concern in the Defense Department that the country is using cyber espionage to obtain sensitive defense technology.


The state-run Aviation Industry Corporation of China had a large exhibit of military and civilian models of aircraft at the show, held outside Paris at the historic Le Bourget airfield... The display included three fighters and a drone: a single-seat version of the FC-1, a single-engine fighter built for the Pakistani air force and designated JF-17; a dual-seat variant of the FC-1 in development; the dual-seat, twin-engine L-15 trainer; and an unmanned system called Wing Loong.

The fighters looked like the F-16 made by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the drone bore resemblance to the MQ-1 Predator made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., without the inverted tail. The Chinese drone is designed as a low-altitude craft that can fly up to 16,500 feet and loiter for 20 hours... Notably missing from the exhibit was any display of the J-20, China’s classified stealth-fighter program.

...Obama faced pressure to raise the [espionage] issue after the recent leak of a classified section of a Defense Department report showed that designs for the most advanced U.S. weapons have been compromised by suspected Chinese hackers. The list of weaponry includes the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, among others.

...the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, considers the strategy of “information dominance” a critical form of defense against countries that it views as “information dependent,” such as the U.S.

Since the days of Bill Clinton, Red China has bribed, bought, and stolen their way into countless classified defense programs. The feckless Obama administration is just one in a long line of catastrophic national security failures certain to cost American servicemen and women their lives.


Related: Walking Back the Wildcat.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

MOVIE POSTER: Gen. Bennet Sacolick Presents a New Kind of Special Operator Because "The Days of Rambo Are Over"

You really can't make this s*** up:

Special forces opening to women; ‘days of Rambo are over,’ general says

A top general says cultural, social and behavioral concerns may be bigger hurdles than physical fitness requirements for women looking to move into the military's special operations units... Maj. Gen. Bennet Sacolick, director of force management for U.S. Special Operations Command, says "the days of Rambo are over."

He says he has seen women working alongside special operations teams in Afghanistan who met difficult physical requirements. But he says the commandos usually deploy as small teams, often with a dozen or fewer troops, in austere conditions for long periods of time.



Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHS: Virtual Civil War

Mike Lynaugh's Virtual Civil War is a treasure trove of photos from the cataclysmic War Between the States. Four of my favorites (of hundreds):


Click here for the whole gallery.


Hat tip: Wanda.

Afghanistan: Another Spectacular Administration Foreign Policy Success

Dan from New York calls the following a "slow-mo replay of Obama's latest diplomatic meltdown":

US, Taliban to start talks on ending Afghan war - AP, June 18, 2013

The Taliban and the U.S. said Tuesday they will hold talks on finding a political solution to ending nearly 12 years of war in Afghanistan, as the international coalition formally handed over control of the country's security to the Afghan army and police... The Taliban met a key U.S. demand by pledging not to use Afghanistan as a base to threaten other countries...

Afghanistan: Taliban 'Admit' US Troop Attack - Sky News, June 19, 2013

The Taliban has said it was behind an attack that killed four US troops in Afghanistan, just hours after Washington announced planned talks with the insurgents...

Afghan leader backs away from Taliban talks - AP, June 19, 2013

Afghanistan's president said Wednesday he will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations... Hamid Karzai's strong response and the Taliban attack deflated hopes for long-stalled talks aimed at ending nearly 12 years of war in Afghanistan...

Karzai, angry about Taliban's Qatar office, suspends peace, security talks - CNN, June 19, 2013

Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out Wednesday at the United States over the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar, pulling out of security talks with U.S. officials and refusing to take part in peace talks with the Taliban that he said would only benefit "foreigners' strategies and goals."

Comforting.


Friday, June 14, 2013

PERFECT: Obama's Total National Surveillance Dragnet Excludes......... Wait For It......... Mosques

Guest post by Investors Business Daily.


Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are.

That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.

The bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.

One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.

This is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature to worshippers.

What other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be monitoring?


Hat tip: BadBlue Conservative News. Follow IBD on Twitter at @IBDinvestors

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

COMFORTING: Obama Appointee Who Heads U.S. Nuclear Security Agency Is Hacked and Publicly Humiliated

When one asks -- pertaining to the Obama administration -- the rhetorical and semi-serious question "What could possibly go wrong?" the real answer is: everything.

The Obama administration official who heads the agency responsible for maintaining the country’s nuclear stockpile as well as securing “loose nukes” worldwide is the latest victim of “Guccifer.”

Neile Miller, acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently had her Facebook account breached by the notorious hacker, who also apparently illegally accessed one of Miller’s personal e-mail accounts.


In 2010, Obama nominated Miller, 55, for the principal deputy administrator’s post at NNSA (she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in August 2010). Following the departure of the agency’s administrator in January, Miller stepped up into the post of acting administrator.

Miller, who has top secret security clearances, runs an agency with a broad portfolio of nuclear-related responsibilities, including managing and securing the nation’s nuclear weapons and keeping weapons of mass destruction “out of the hands of state and non-state actors.” The NNSA has a $12 billion annual budget, 2500 employees, and 35,000 other contract workers.

...Through an NNSA spokesperson, Miller--who last month announced that she was leaving her government post effective June 14--declined to comment beyond noting that “these were personal accounts and no classified information was accessed.”

...Several months into an online strafing campaign, “Guccifer” appears unconcerned about the law enforcement effort to capture him/her/them. “My end is far,” the hacker noted in an e-mail “Remember this is another chapter of the game.”

Feel better yet?


Hat tip: BadBlue.

Saturday, June 08, 2013

Checking back in with the survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings

People Magazine's Kristen Mascia (subscription required) circles back with several survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings:

When they met on April 15 on their way to the hospital, Roseann Sdoia and Marc Fucarile were both fighting for their lives.

"She kept me awake, telling me to focus on my fiancée and my kid," says Fucarile, who lost his right leg that day.

They're still turning to each other, like so many of their fellow survivors – whom PEOPLE photographed on May 30 at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Charlestown, Mass.

"Marc and his family will be in my life forever," says Sdoia, who also lost a leg. "The new friends I've made, they're all amazing. I'm thankful for them."

Mery Daniel shares that spirit. "I choose to focus on the positive," she says. "I'm happy to be alive."

Bless all of these folks and their families.

But seemingly lost among the series of scandals swirling around the Obama administration is the Marathon bombing:

Despite being warned -- repeatedly -- by foreign intelligence services that the Tsarnaev brothers were likely Jihadists bent on terror attacks in the U.S., the Holder Justice Department did nothing.

Perhaps that was related to the bizarre directives, beginning in 2009, to scrub all connections between Islamists and terrorism from law enforcement training material.

In October 2011, 57 Islamic groups wrote a letter to John O. Brennan, now CIA director, but then President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser. Citing news reports, the groups complained of “biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam” inside the federal government’s instructional halls...

...The White House issued an edict to scrub all law enforcement, intelligence and military teachings on Islam. The FBI ended up discarding pages of information that warned about the threat from the Brotherhood.

Consider for a moment: the myriad of scandals swirling around President Obama -- Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS targeting of political opponents, the wiretaps of the Associated Press, the James Rosen debacle, and many, many more -- all appear related to suppressing the American people. At the same time, illegal aliens and Islamists are welcomed with open arms by the administration.

There is something fundamentally broken in America.


Hat tip: BadBlue Fame: Real-Time Entertainment News.


Thursday, June 06, 2013

The Government's Official Database on YOU

The latest scandal involving the Obama administration is a simple one to describe: it was caught monitoring every single U.S. citizen's complete record of phone calls over a three month period. Every single one.

Remember the breathless, hysterical criticism by the Left over international terror wiretaps during the Bush administration's war on man-caused disasters? Those blithering idiots were shrieking over something targeted and precise: people calling into terror hotspots from the U.S. or vice versa.

But the Obama administration is building a massive database of every American's telephonic activities.

Consider the massive database that the federal government is amassing on you, the law-abiding citizen:

Your physical and mental condition, complete with medical procedures, drugs, and therapies, thanks to Obamacare.

All of your finances, from a single share of stock down to your checking account, thanks to the IRS and Dodd-Frank "financial reform".

Your energy consumption, thanks to mandated "smart-meters" that can monitor and control every aspect of power consumption in your residence.

Your car's location, courtesy of new and mandated "black boxes" for cars.

Your location and activities, thanks to an estimated 30,000 drones that will be flying over American skies by 2016.

Along with telephone records and -- in all likelihood -- GPS data from your smartphone, the federal government can create the most comprehensive database ever seen on Earth.

And consider the most important database the Statists want to create: those tracking your firearms.

Of this fact I can promise you: this mammoth database will not used to advance liberty. On the contrary, if the IRS scandal teaches us anything, it is that the federal government under the Obama administration can not be trusted with data of any kind.

Obama and his sycophants are Statists: they are guaranteed to abuse their power to advance their political ends, no matter how unlawful, how tyrannical, or how despotic.

Ladies and gentlemen, this country is teetering on the brink of totalitarianism. It has crept upon us stealthily, bit by bit, just as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

And if real Democrats can't see it now -- not the loons and Communists, they're lost causes; I mean the real Democrats -- if they can't see it now, then this country is destined for some very, very dark years.


Related: Police Departments Scrape for Ammo After DHS Buys 1.6 Billion Rounds.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

HELPFUL GRAPHIC: Political Left and Right Properly Defined

While I don't agree with all of its characterizations, The Objective Standard offers an interesting illustration of the political spectrum.

...the terms “left” and “right” are already widely used to denote the basic political alternative, and because that alternative is in fact binary, the best approach for advocates of freedom is not to reject the prevalent terminology but to clarify it—by defining the relevant terms.

The problem with conventional approaches to the left-right political spectrum is that they either fail to define the alternatives in question, or proceed to define them in terms of non-essentials...


...fascism, far from having anything in common with capitalism, is essentially the same atrocity as communism and socialism—the only difference being that whereas communism and socialism openly call for state ownership of all property, fascism holds that some property may be “private”—so long as government can dictate how such property may be used. Sure, you own the factory, but here’s what you may and may not produce in it; here’s the minimum wage you must pay employees; here’s the kind of accounting system you must use; here are the specifications your machinery must meet; and so on...

....The essential issue in politics is not the size but the function of government; it’s not whether government is big or small but whether it protects or violates rights...

The proper purpose of government is to protect individual rights by banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. A properly conceived political spectrum must reflect this fact. Whatever terms are used to identify the positions of political ideologies or systems must be defined with regard to the fundamental political alternative: force vs. freedom—or, more specifically, rights-protecting vs. rights-violating institutions.

Whether you are an objectivist or a Constitutionalist in the mold of the Framers, on this we can agree: those who paint the right as "Nazis" are either ignorant or lying.

'I am a Socialist,' Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, 'and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow'.

No one at the time would have regarded it as a controversial statement. The Nazis could hardly have been more open in their socialism, describing themselves with the same terminology as our own SWP: National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left. Its militants marched on May Day under red flags. Its leaders stood for collectivism, state control of industry, high tariffs, workers' councils. Around Europe, fascists were convinced that, as Hitler told an enthusiastic Mussolini in 1934, 'capitalism has run its course'.

One of the most stunning achievements of the modern Left is to have created a cultural climate where simply to recite these facts is jarring. History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty. You expect this level of analysis from Twitter mobs; you shouldn't expect it from mainstream commentators.

...I just hope that Lefties who have read this far will have a sense of how conservatives feel when fascism is declared to be simply a point further along the spectrum from them. Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism.

Simply listen to Democrats like the unhinged progressive Tom Harkin, who says that income and wealth needs to be "reallocated" -- by force, presumably -- and you can hear the echoes of fascists past.


Wednesday, May 29, 2013

WELL, WELL, WELL: It turns out JFK was a big admirer of Hitler

Praetorian media appears to have kept this particular tidbit a national secret for, oh, about the last half century or so. The national treasure Brent Bozell has the scoop.

You won’t read about this in the mainstream media, of course, but they recently found a diary our former president kept in the 1930s and 1940s wherein he expresses admiration for Hitler and the “Nordic races.” Here’s what he said while traveling through Germany in 1937:

The towns are all charming which shows that the Nordic races appear to be definitely superior to their Latin counterparts. The Germans are really too good — that’s why people conspire against them…

After the war Kennedy was still a Hitler fan:

Anyone who has visited these places can imagine how in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures that ever lived… He was made of the stuff of legends.

Perhaps that explains the rumored long-lost chapter of Profiles in Courage.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.