Traps on the road towards barbarism

The future hides in the past's shadows

By Nicholas A Biniaris

“Which is the plan, which is the appropriate shoe for the road?”     - Aristophanes: The Birds 

Yet another military strike is being debated against another country of the much-aggrieved Middle East. There are arguments for and against this new adventure into the unknown. This time, the analysts are reluctant to declare victory as they did in Iraq or to plot a democratic Syria free of President Bashar al-Assad. 

This is just one episode in the long and bloody saga of a Muslim world in transformation, and at the same time torn between acceptance and denial of the world. This episode is also another trap for the West, which is only bound to lose money, influence and its cohesion to the glee of fanatics, Russians, Chinese and assorted satraps all over the world. 

This trap opened with the Iranian Revolution and continued with the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That historical event contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union but created a psychological trap for the West, that of invincibility. That led to the first Gulf War and insidiously and cumulatively developed into a direct threat to the West slowly dragging us into a vortex of barbarity, self-deception and degradation of political life. 

Pro-strike arguments range from moral obligation to the loss of credibility of the US and its president. Shocked viewers of horrific images are totally justified to express their indignation. However, indignation, as Spinoza remarked, must turn to understanding, and this I suggest should lead to a rational plan to redress the cause of indignation. 

Do governments have such a plan? It may be argued that perhaps President Barack Obama had a plan. His view was correct as long as he stuck with it: stop the fearful satraps from spreading pernicious Salafism; come to terms with Iran; cease to condone Israel's conflictual plans for the area and address only its legitimate security problems; curtail the rampant megalomaniac aspirations of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism and last but not least, recognize that Russia has legitimate interests and influence in the area. 

Indeed, these were a tall order to fulfill. 

What skeptics and students of history think, is that moral arguments in the midst of a civil war are dubious. In post-modern rich liberal states, politicians actually lead by stealth and leaks through the press. These elected executives try to sell cheap moralism, not morality in any way, while they know that when the going gets tough the state will break every rule and use any means to survive. Terrorism brought about an ad hoc abrogation of our rights to privacy and circumvented legality for the sake of a great good, notional security. 

The pro-strike side also argues that the West has a legal right to launch a punitive assault against the perpetrators of the crime. They base this on the Kosovo's intervention in 1999, the case which Diane Johnstone in her book Fools' Crusade debunked as a totally illegal one. 

The strike on Syria is illegal even if the US Congress gave its approval for the strike. In this case at least Obama tried to conform to the American form of government. He should be commended for this. However, according to international law the right to protect does not offer a legal framework to attack another country without a mandate from the Security Council. 

The arguments against the attack range from the hypocrisy of the West to the possible dire consequences of a strike. 

The hypocrisy view examines all the previous behavior of the West in similar cases. None complained against Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran. Israel has developed nuclear weapons and so did Pakistan and North Korea. Egypt most probably has chemical weapons. Another question arises about the providers of these lethal weapons and it seems that Western firms and governments have fulfilled this role. 

The dire consequences arguments spin various scenarios about possible failures if the wrong targets are hit, civilians are killed or even if Assad continues to use chemicals since he is punished but still survives. Should the protectors strike again and again? 

What if Assad and Hezbollah retaliates against Israel? They have no chance of success but they have the chance to turn the Arab street in their favor. What if Iran gives him a helping hand to attack Western hardware? What if Iran decides that this attack is a preamble against it? In that case it may be more than willing to punish in several ways the protectors.

There are more considerations to be countenanced. Russia may become more committed in an anti-western stand. China may similarly decide to go for a more assertive foreign policy if it observes the West committed to ad hoc policies of use of hard power. 

Is seems that the pro arguments have won and as all predict the strike will go on. Is it the morality argument, or the credibility and interest's argument which would sway the leaders for a pro-strike decision? These interests though must be made visible and explicit to the citizens so that at least an act of war can be justified in their eyes. Nothing of this sort has happened up to now. 

We know that chemical weapons were used repeatedly but we don't know who gassed whom. However, if Assad reveals tomorrow that he possesses two nuclear bombs and he plans to drop one on Tel Aviv and the other on Ankara, then the West would have to start negotiations as it is with North-Korea. 

The gist of this argument is that entertaining moral arguments for war independently of power is irrelevant since war is a function of power and interests. The West is, relatively speaking, all-powerful and hence it tries by subterfuge to present power as moral responsibility to protect. The punitive expedition against Syria is war. War though presupposes rules and conditions about prisoners, non-combatants and most importantly a tenable purpose, and finally a treaty of capitulation which enforces the will of the victor. It seems that even war in our times has lost its character! 

The optimistic plan is that after this strike the two warring sides will be forced to find a political solution and stop destroying Syria and its people. This is perhaps what is hidden behind Obama's move to ask Congress to authorize the strike. 

Why didn't the "Great Powers" twist the arms of the combatants just after the armed struggle started? What actually happened was that the West, Turkey, Russia, Iran and China were playing criminal games on the back of the Syrian people. 

It is more than obvious that neighboring governments didn't care for the thousands killed and tortured, of all creeds, ethnicities and political views as they tried to implement their agendas. Three developments to be noticed: Israel's acceptance of the strike, Egypt's refusal to condone it and Turkey's insistence of toppling Assad.

Israel is ideologically pressed to strike because chemicals awaken a horrible past; Egypt because Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has actually an Assad-type agenda, and Turkey because it wants to shape the area and exclude any Kurdish aspiration for statehood. 

The future hides in the past's shadows
Self-deception has ruled the West for over 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union. That historical change filled the minds and hearts of our leaders and citizens of a fool's euphoria about the West's historical mission for the future of mankind. This triumphalist spirit seemed to realize the march of geist to freedom. Old Hegel was back with a smirk on his face. Freedom is not a given. It is historically reinvented by us with new vocabularies, as the late Richard Rorty would have said. 

The Cold War left a host of legacies and traumas: NATO, mutual destruction assurance, a reflexive hostility for Russia which has sidetracked effective and multilateral policies in the Middle East and an epiphany that the atheists and communists were struck down by God's scimitar. This last legacy left also a spirit of triumphalism to the side of the victorious mujahideen. 

The old issue of the role of religion in politics came back on the world stage by default. The West may not be atheistic but it is immersed in the meta-modern culture of the individual's self-realization and combined with its dominance in shaping political processes globally symbolized immorality and oppression.

These facts create new causes of conflict for both victors; the fundamentalists of nostalgia and the fundamentalists of the future. The Muslim ideology is under the spell of faith as a tool for reshaping the world; the West under the spell of invincibility and moral superiority and the thrust of globalization. 

All the above plus more tangible problems: poverty, inequality, suppression, demographics, democracy as a given, pressed the Muslim world towards a dramatic transformation. At the same time, as the late Marshall McLuhan had observed, restructuring of social groups and processes go on as our science and technology adventure is incessantly producing new extensions of our nervous system and translates the world in different vocabularies. 

I would add that these changes are not yet comprehensible to the slow thinkers called politicians or for that matter to interest bound analysts and academics. If McLuhan has touched part of the truth, this historical Gordian Knot becomes even more difficult to untie for both contestants. 

A civil war plus a religious sectarian war is the most barbaric of all wars. If external powers take sides because of interests or ideology it is a conflict without resolution in the minds of the warring factions in the spirit of vengeance for the defeated and triumphalism for the victor. No defeated side will acknowledge its defeat since it will ascribe it to the other's Protectors. Immanuel Kant in his book Perpetual Peace argued convincingly that outside powers should never take part in a civil war.

In the midst of a clear political revolution the ugly sectarianism raised its venomous head: Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Jihadists, Salafists, Moslem Brothers go hand in hand with different ethnicities: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Hellenes, Armenians, and more. What do we know about all of these conflicts, historical animosities and political power struggles? Very little and actually they don't seem to be part of any coherent plan of ours. 

A possible punitive attack against Syria in the immediate future is just a chapter of the historical transformation of the area, more or less a minor one since the tectonic plates of sectarianism, nationalism, fanaticism emergent new ways of life and energy resources, the blood of the economy are colliding with unpredictable force and cataclysmic repercussions for all of us.

The first is the millions of refugees seeking shelter in a Europe already saturated by refugees of other wars. The opposition in Syria, if it topples Assad and this may be realized sooner than later after the strike, will be less than willing to accommodate western interests lest it is branded as stooges of the West. No entity in the Moslem world is at the present moment friendly to the West. 

It is not "politically correct" to be pro-Western in these countries. Even in Turkey, a member of NATO and a "Westernized" country for 70 so years, America and Israel are considered the most dangerous countries for Turkey. The day after in Syria will be no better than the day after in Iraq. It may even be worse for Christians and Alawites. Look at Egypt; it is the Copts who are suffering the unintended consequence of Sisi's coup. 

The 9/11 attacks opened a huge trap for the international security system since we were foolish enough to accept security as a given (Europe is a consumer of security) or as a simple task since we possessed the most advanced weapons ever devised by man. This trap has ensnared us in the most chaotic way with something we believe we can manage as we managed the Cold War. 

We cannot. All other important problems of our societies , employment, education, Medicare, loss of competitiveness and problems about the environment, the disarmament from nuclear weapons, the economic cycles of boom or bust are sidelined in the effort to deal with this historical phenomenon which neither our sociologists, or social scientists or historians comprehend in full. 

It seems foolish to believe that solely with projection of air-power and action at a distance we can manipulate the social forces of history. Our encounter with such a historical development, actually a hot magma, creates conditions of osmosis with barbarism and contempt for civilized behavior which prompts us also into similar actions and psychology. 

We resort to barbarism (drones, production of new lethal weapons, torture, Guantanamo); illegality (the NSA scandal); loss of cohesion (the British vote in the House of Commons, Germany's abstention from hard-power projection, Russia's strong opposite views); stealth undeclared wars and last but not least economic decline and bankruptcy. We are writing history all right, but to our expense.  

An American Satyricon

Our elites would be right at home in Petronius’s world of debauchery and bored melodrama

By  Victor Davis Hanson

Sometime in the mid-first century a.d., an otherwise little known consular official, Gaius Petronius, wrote a brilliant satirical novel about the gross and pretentious new Roman-imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the Roman agrarian republic of old had degenerated into a wealth-obsessed, empty society of wannabe new elites, flush with money, and both obsessed with and bored with sex. Most of the Satyricon is lost. But in its longest surviving chapter — “Dinner with Trimalchio” — Petronius might as well have been describing our own 21st-century nomenklatura.

For the buffoonish libertine guests of the host Trimalchio, food and sex are in such surfeit that they have to be repackaged in bizarre and repulsive ways. Think of someone like the feminist mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner, who once railed about the need to enforce sexual-harassment laws, now only to discover ever creepier ways to grope, pat, grab, squeeze, pinch, and slobber on 18 co-workers and veritable strangers, whether in their 20s or over 60. Unfortunately, the sexual luridness does not necessarily end with Filner’s resignation; one of his would-be replacements is already under attack by his opponents on allegations that as a city councilman he was caught masturbating in the city-hall restroom between public meetings.

In good Petronian fashion, the narcissist Anthony Weiner sent pictures of his own genitalia to near-strangers, under the Latinate pseudonym “Carlos Danger.” Was Eliot Spitzer any better? As the governor of New York, he preferred anonymous numbers — “Client #9” — to false names, real to virtual sex, very young to mature women, and buying rather than romancing his partners. Is there some Petronian prerequisite in our age that our ascendant politicians must be perverts?

Transvestitism and sexual ambiguity are likewise Petronian themes; in our day, the controversy rages over whether convicted felon Bradley Manning is now a woman because he says he is. The politically correct term “transgendered” trumps biology; and if you doubt that, you are a homophobe or worse. As in the Roman Satyricon, our popular culture also displays a sick fascination with images of teen sex. So how does one trump the now-boring sexual shamelessness of Lady Gaga — still squirming about in a skimpy thong — at an MTV awards ceremony? Bring out former Disney teenage star Miley Cyrus in a vinyl bikini, wearing some sort of huge foam finger on her hand to simulate lewd sex acts.

The orgies at Trimalchio’s cool Pompeii estate (think Malibu) suggest that in imperial-Roman society Kardashian-style displays of wealth and Clintonian influence-peddling were matter-of-fact rather than shocking. Note that in our real version of the novel’s theme, Mayor Filner was not bothered by his exposure, and finally had to be nearly dragged out of office. Carlos Danger would have been mayor of New York, but the liberal press finally became worried over its embarrassment: Apparently two or three sexting episodes were tolerable, but another four or five, replete with more lies, risked parody.

US: The indispensable (bombing) nation

The Empire of Chaos is now totally out of control

By Pepe Escobar

Yes We Scan. Yes We Drone. And Yes We Bomb. The White House's propaganda blitzkrieg to sell the Tomahawking of Syria to the US Congress is already reaching pre-bombing maximum spin - gleefully reproduced by US corporate media. 

And yes, all parallels to Iraq 2.0 duly came to fruition when US Secretary of State John Kerry pontificated that Bashar al-Assad "now joins the list of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein" as an evil monster. Why is Cambodia's Pol Pot never mentioned? Oh yes, because the US supported him.

Every single tumbleweed in the Nevada desert knows who's itching for war on Syria; vast sectors of the industrial-military complex; Israel; the House of Saud; the "socialist" Francois Hollande in France, who has wet dreams with Sykes-Picot. Virtually nobody is lobbying Congress NOT to go to war. 

And all the frantic war lobbying may even be superfluous; Nobel Peace Prize winner and prospective bomber Barack Obama has already implied - via hardcore hedging of the "I have decided that the United States should take military action" kind - that he's bent on attacking Syria no matter what Congress says. 

Obama's self-inflicted "red line" is a mutant virus; from "a shot across the bow" it morphed into a "slap on the wrist" and now seems to be "I'm the Bomb Decider". Speculation about his real motives is idle. His Hail Mary pass of resorting to an extremely unpopular Congress packed with certified morons may be a cry for help (save me from my stupid "red line"); or - considering the humanitarian imperialists of the Susan Rice kind who surround him - he's hell bent on entering another war for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the House of Saud lobby under the cover of "moral high ground". Part of the spin is that "Israel must be protected". But the fact is Israel is already over-protected by an AIPAC remote-controlled United States Congress. [1] 

"You can't say that"

Blunt words about Muslim backwardness

Illustration by Persian scholar Al-Biruni (973-1048) of different phases of the moon, from his masterpiece Kitab al-Tafhim.

By mark steyn

In 2010, the best selling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

It’s factually unarguable: Trinity College graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.”

Full disclosure: Five years ago, when I was battling Canada’s “human rights” commissions to restore free speech to my native land, Richard Dawkins was one of the few prominent figures in Her Majesty’s dominions to lend unequivocal support. He put it this way: “I have over the years developed a dislike for Mark Steyn, although I’ve always admired his forceful writing. On this issue, however, he is clearly 1000% in the right and should receive all the support anybody can give him.”

Let me return the compliment: I have over the years developed a dislike for Richard Dawkins’s forceful writing (the God of the Torah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” etc.), but I am coming round rather to admire him personally. It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group. I doubt The Satanic Verses would be accepted for publication today, but, if it were, I’m certain no major author would come out swinging on Salman Rushdie’s behalf the way his fellow novelist Fay Weldon did: The Koran, she declared, “is food for no-thought … It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police.”

That was a remarkably prescient observation in the London of 1989. Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future. According to a new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, “Mohammed,” in its various spellings, is now the second most popular baby boy’s name in England and Wales, and Number One in the capital. It seems likely that an ever more Islamic London will, for a while, still have a West End theater scene for tourists, but it will have ever less need not just for Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward and eventually Shakespeare but for drama of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not.

A quarter-century on, Fay Weldon’s “thought police” are everywhere. Notice the general line on Dawkins: Please be quiet. Turn him off. You can’t say that. What was once the London Left’s principal objection to the ayatollah’s Rushdie fatwa is now its reflexive response to even the mildest poke at Islam. Their reasoning seems to be that, if you can just insulate this one corner of the multicultural scene from criticism, elsewhere rude, raucous life — with free speech and all the other ancient liberties — will go on. Miss Weldon’s craven successors seem intent on making her point: In London, Islam is food for no thought. 

A Dissent on Syria

Smooth words for a rough job

By  Jim Manzi

On Tuesday, the National Review magazine again endorsed military action in Syria. I disagree.

Though it is difficult to know precisely what action is being contemplated, I hope and expect that if the U.S. does launch such an attack, that our military would accomplish its defined tasks, and that we would more likely than not avoid some kind of a disaster. But the risks of a terrible outcome are not trivial, and not worth the putative benefits. 

The most common argument for attacking Syria is that we must maintain our credibility when the sitting president issues ultimatums (even if they are ill-advised).

The problem with this is that while the president of the United States has awesome powers under the Constitution, they do not include declaring war. He can declare “red lines” all he wants, but he can’t constitutionally commit the nation to preemptive military action in the event they are crossed. If this “loss of credibility” means in practical terms that U.S. presidents are less able to make credible insinuations that they can unilaterally commit us to wars, then this would likely result in: fewer such presidential assertions being issued; more consultation and consideration before they are issued; and more reliable delivery on the threats when the situation calls for it. Such a loss of credibility would be a feature, not a bug.

The best argument for attacking Syria is that it is necessary to maintain a credible deterrent against the use of chemical weapons in order to protect ourselves. This argument should carry great weight, but unfortunately we are on the horns of a dilemma.

On one hand, if the attack is not severe enough to force Assad from power, then where is the deterrence? If he is prepared to order (or at least tolerate) the gassing of thousands of citizens of his own country, why would the prospect of losing some soldiers and military facilities deter him or others like him? Even if it entirely eliminated his chemical-weapons capacity, he would still be in power, would have gotten the benefit of using them, and would have shown both that he can take a punch from the U.S. and that he is tough enough to do anything to win. Even after the fact and in full knowledge of such a U.S. attack, he would likely view using the weapons as having a positive net outcome. 

But on the other hand, forcing Assad from power represents a far larger and more uncertain undertaking than has been publicly discussed. 

Is The US Going To War With Syria Over A Natural Gas Pipeline?

Fight is all about control of the energy flow in Middle East

by Michael Snyder

 Could it be because Qatar is the largest exporter of liquid natural gas in the world and Assad won't let them build a natural gas pipeline through Syria?  Of course.  Qatar wants to install a puppet regime in Syria that will allow them to build a pipeline which will enable them to sell lots and lots of natural gas to Europe.

Well, it turns out that Saudi Arabia intends to install its own puppet government in Syria which will allow the Saudis to control the flow of energy through the region.

On the other side, Russia very much prefers the Assad regime for a whole bunch of reasons.  One of those reasons is that Assad is helping to block the flow of natural gas out of the Persian Gulf into Europe, thus ensuring higher profits for Gazprom. 

Now the United States is getting directly involved in the conflict.  If the U.S. is successful in getting rid of the Assad regime, it will be good for either the Saudis or Qatar (and possibly for both), and it will be really bad for Russia.  This is a strategic geopolitical conflict about natural resources, religion and money, and it really has nothing to do with chemical weapons at all.

It has been common knowledge that Qatar has desperately wanted to construct a natural gas pipeline that will enable it to get natural gas to Europe for a very long time.  The following is an excerpt from an article from 2009...

Qatar has proposed a gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey in a sign the emirate is considering a further expansion of exports from the world's biggest gasfield after it finishes an ambitious programme to more than double its capacity to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Syria’s War Redraws America’s Political Map

Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats join forces on Syria

By PAUL GOTTFRIED

The current debate about whether the president should take military action against the Syrian regime after Assad’s alleged use of chemical warfare against his people has taken a noteworthy turn. Those who oppose military intervention entirely or insist on making it contingent on congressional approval do not break down into the usual partisan categories. Broadly speaking, those who oppose immediate presidential intervention, or intervention generally, are a growing combination of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. Standing with them is now more than half of the American public.

Among the prominent opponents of intervention are Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, all outspoken small-government conservatives and U.S. Senators who are concerned about constitutional restraints on presidential powers. These figures are making common cause with people on the left, who insist that the UN, not the U.S. government, should handle the Syrian crisis. For leftist critics, our country has domestic concerns that are more pressing than meddling in another country’s civil war. Significantly, opponents of intervention, right and left, see no “American interest” at stake in Syria.

Those on the other side, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Congressman Peter King of New York, and the Rupert Murdoch media empire, believe that Obama should be bombing Syrian military installations without congressional approval and trying to overthrow and replace the Assad regime. Those who favor intervention typically endorse a far-reaching involvement in Syria that goes well beyond destroying chemical weapons facilities. From their point of view, the Obama administration has compromised American credibility by not taking decisive action to remove the Syrian government. It has also dishonored the “democratic values” that the U.S. should strive to bring to other nations. In a ringing statement of this creed, Brookings Institute fellow and a leading neoconservative theorist Robert Kagan delivered a speech last week, affirming the need for a global American presence aimed at nurturing democratic institutions worldwide. Kagan, who was a major rhetorical influence on the foreign policy of George W. Bush, views the Obama administration as retreating into an isolationist posture that betrays what the U.S. has stood for internationally for the last hundred years.

Big Business, War and Class Analysis

The biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism

This selection is from Justin Raimondo’s 1995 introduction to Rothbard’s monograph Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, in which Rothbard further develops libertarian class analysis in an examination of how “big business” and other monied elites have consistently controlled American domestic and foreign policy to the detriment of free markets.

by Justin Raimondo

Rothbard eagerly reclaimed the concept of class analysis from the Marxists, who expropriated it from the French theorists of laissez-faire. Marx authored a plagiarized, distorted, and vulgarized version of the theory based on the Ricardian labor theory of value. Given this premise, he came up with a class analysis pitting workers against owners.

One of Rothbard’s many great contributions to the cause of liberty was to restore the original theory, which pitted the people against the State. In the Rothbardian theory of class struggle, the government, including its clients and enforcers, exploits and enslaves the productive classes through taxation, regulation, and perpetual war. Government is an incubus, a parasite, incapable of producing anything in its own right, and instead feeds off the vital energies and productive ability of the producers.

This is the first step of a fully-developed libertarian class analysis. Unfortunately, this is where the thought processes of all too many alleged libertarians come to a grinding halt. It is enough, for them, to know the State is the Enemy, as if it were an irreducible primary.

As William Pitt put it in 1770, “There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself.”

This explains the strange historical fact, recounted at length and in detail by Rothbard, that the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of true capitalism. For virtually all of the alleged social “reforms” of the past fifty years were pushed not only by “idealistic” Leftists, but by the very corporate combines caricatured as the top-hatted, pot-bellied “economic royalists” of Wall Street.

The illusion of 'Stabilizing an Unstable Economy"

The “New Normal” world of lower economic growth

By Bill Gross's 

 They say that reality is whatever you wish it to be and I suppose that could be true. Just wish it, as Jiminy Cricket used to say, and it will come true. Reality’s relativity came to mind the other day as I was opening a box of Cracker Jacks for an afternoon snack. That’s right – I said Cracker Jacks! I can’t count the number of people who have told me during the seventh inning stretch at a baseball game to make sure I sing Cracker Jack (without the S) because that’s what the song says. I care not. No one ever says buy me some “potato chip” or some “peanut.” How about a burger and some “french fry?” In all cases, the “s” just makes it flow better. My reality is a box of Cracker Jacks, and I think little sailor Jack on the outside of the box would be nodding his approval if he could ever come to life, which maybe he can if the stars are aligned and reality is whatever we wish it to be.

Having mentioned Jack and the game of baseball, let me give you some opinions that come close to being hard cold facts, not wishes. First of all, baseball is the most boring game in the world next to cricket. I don’t know how to play cricket, which is the only reason I rank it second. CNN Sports did an actual survey of how much time during an average two hour and 39 minute game that baseball players are actually moving – you know, swinging a bat or running to first base. Five minutes and 13 seconds! The rest of the time the boys of summer are actually just standing around, scratching you know where, and spitting tobacco juice onto the nice green grass. Most disgusting, I’d say. And why, I wonder, does a baseball “season” consist of 162 individually boring games? In football you only need 16 or so to declare a champion, in boxing sometimes three minutes or less.

Towards A Recovery Of The Conservative Imagination

The Autumn of the Middle Ages

by Friedrich Hansen 

The American journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, interviewing Adolf Hitler before WW II, captured the German Führer, who after he introduced himself in German, with a motion to the throngs that awaited him, began speaking: “Tell the Americans that life moves forward, always forward, irrevocably forward.” 

Was Hitler a progressive or conservative? Certainly a difficult and irritating question which cannot be answered straight forwardly - however it symbolizes how much blurred the features of Western progress have become. The aim of this essay is to separate those blurred features by tracing them back to their roots in antiquity, and in the process referring to Jerusalem or Judaism with the same confidence that we invest in Athens and Greek philosophy. 

Anybody who has looked into this matter, as for instance Leo Strauss has done, will be surprised to observe that the enlightenment thinkers had disposed of three Western heritages, here represented with Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, with equal insouciance. The justification for this arrogance was nothing more than revolutionary urge or unquenchable desire for change identified by some as the birth of mindless progress. Against this the most perspicuous attitude of conservatives remained strong until recently, namely their reluctance to countenance the remaking of the world,  perhaps out of a deep respect for the contrast between the marvels of divine creation and our limited human intelligence, particularly in understanding the divine nexus between generalities and particulars or between the eternal and the immediate. After many losses in the culture wars the Christian resistance against the progressing sexual revolution has been all but broken, argues Rod Dreher.

Not for nothing political conservatism begins with Edmund Burke (1729-97), who regarded the separation or extraction of generalities from particulars or contingencies as almost impious. Firm moorings of universalist’ ideas in particularism could be called the Jewish genius, albeit not recognized to my knowledge by Burke. To the contrary it might even have inspired his Whig criticism of the Tory variety of conservatism, that “nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.” (Russel Kirk “Burke and the Philosophy of Prescription”, in: Edmund Burke – Great Lives Observed, ed. by Isaac Kramnick, spectrum books, Prentice Hill; New Jersey 1974, p. 138)

Ideological struggles and abstract ideas was not the natural domain of Burke, rather he was forced into that realm by the circumstances of the French Revolution, Russel Kirk tells us. Burke felt drawn to the conservative rejection equally of Rousseau’s romanticism, the rationalism of Voltaire and the Philosophes as well as the English rendition of it by Thomas Paine and John Locke. The prescience of Burke can be fathomed by his fierce attacks on Rousseau, the one and only surviving enlightenment prophet – post-modernity self-expression being the latest version of the noble savage - and therefore in my view the principal adversary of conservatives. However the confusion among the liberal Whigs could only be calmed temporarily by Burke and would soon wreak havoc on the conservative cause in the 19th century. By then the utilitarian variety of Whigs shared with collectivists the fatal redefinition of traditional Jewish sexual restraint and self-government as liberation of all duties and inhibitions – presented by Kirk as the “reform catalogue” underwritten by utilitarian and socialist reformers alike (Ibid, p.139):  The deist God was shared by Whigs and Rousseau; also on the agenda: man is by nature good; abstract reason to guide societal change; inexorable progress of humanity; choosing future over tradition. 

Guaranteed Income, Pay Limits – The New Drugs of Public Life?

There are clever ways to ruin a successful society

by George Handlery

We know that there are no truly local and thereby isolated developments. No criminal insanity that becomes the law of a foreign land will rest in the “Half-Baked Oddities Museum”. Be certain that what you filed as “how did those nuts come up with that?” will be presented to your community to save it and the world.

Bringing coal to Manchester is a deed that responds to a need that is already filled. Knowing that, we could avoid the critique of measures to which the title refers. It is unlikely that the readers, not being inmates of closed institutions, need arguments against the capping salaries to twelve times of the lowest paid by a firm. So, this piece does not intend to recruit support but warns, “You are next”. 

A word is needed about the unlikely venue of the imbecility. Switzerland is a success story where anything above 3% unemployment is a “crisis”. High-tech and luxury exports thrive. The currency is stable; credit costs are low without manipulation. All this regardless of major disadvantages. This is a small landlocked country inhabited by four nationalities, three of which are the people of state across the border. Add to this the climate and little arable land. This explains why, even in the 19th century, poverty was general and communities financed the emigration of their superfluous eaters.

With that said, one could conclude that we have a case of success – confirmed by a top rank in global competitiveness. Not so, at least not for the Left, the Greens, and armchair redeemers. This element is ideologically moved. It assumes that success by merit is impossible because any system to the right of Marx is built on exploitation. Therefore, without socialism, a just system is impossible. Success is explained away with an argument based upon the principle that “property is theft”. 

The End Of The American Imperium

So let the sun shine in

by David Stockman

Next week Congress can do far more than stop a feckless Tomahawk barrage on a small country which is already a graveyard of civil war and sectarian slaughter. By voting “no” it can trigger the end of the American Imperium - five decades of incessant meddling, bullying and subversion around the globe which has added precious little to national security, but left America fiscally exhausted and morally diminished.

Indeed, the tragedy of this vast string of misbegotten interventions - from the 1953 coup against Mossedegh in Iran through the recent bombing campaign in Libya - is that virtually none of them involved defending the homeland or any tangible, steely-eyed linkages to national security. They were all rooted in ideology—that is, anti-communism, anti-terrorism, humanitarianism, R2Pism, nation-building, American exceptionalism. These were the historic building blocks of a failed Pax Americana. Now the White House wants authorization for the last straw: Namely, to deliver from the firing tubes of U.S. naval destroyers a dose of righteous “punishment” that has no plausible military or strategic purpose. By the President’s own statements the proposed attack is merely designed to censure the Syrian regime for allegedly visiting one particularly horrific form of violence on its own citizens.

Well, really? After having rained napalm, white phosphorous, bunker-busters, drone missiles and the most violent machinery of conventional warfare ever assembled upon millions of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Serbs, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemeni, Libyans and countless more, Washington now presupposes to be in the moral sanctions business?  That’s downright farcical.  Nevertheless, by declaring himself the world’s spanker-in-chief, President Obama has unwittingly precipitated the mother of all clarifying moments.

The screaming strategic truth is that America no longer has any industrial state enemies capable of delivering military harm to its shores: Russia has become a feeble kleptocracy run by a loud-mouthed thief and the communist party oligarchs in China would face a devastating economic collapse within months were it to attack its American markets for sneakers and Apples. So the real question now before Congress recurs: how is it possible that the peace-loving citizens of America, facing no industrial-scale military threat from anywhere on the planet, find themselves in a constant state of war?  The answer is that they have been betrayed by the beltway political class which is in thrall to a vast warfare state apparatus that endlessly invents specious reasons for meddling, spying, intervention and occupation.

Small Time Crooks

Why Wall Street Wants Larry Summers (and Why the Rest of Us Should Not)

By Laurence Kotlikoff

On the surface the debate about the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve is about the merits of the two leading candidates, Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen. But looks can be deceiving. President Obama leans toward Summers not on the merits but because the Wall Street bankers want him. Summers is one of the boys, and the bankers know that Summers will do their bidding, at the expense of everybody else.

Obama has declared that the two candidates' attitudes to inflation and unemployment are his main concern, entirely glossing over the fact that the Fed oversees and regulates the US banking system. Our recent near-death experience under Alan Greenspan's anti-regulation Fed chairmanship, aided and abetted by the deregulation pushed by Summers, should cause the President to think hard about banking regulation. Yet Obama and his tight-knit circle of advisors, almost all of whom are from Wall Street, are apparently too beholden to Wall Street to contemplate any serious regulation of an industry that continues to be out of control.

On the merits, Janet Yellen is the obvious candidate. For six years, 2004 to 2010, she was President of the San Francisco Fed. She is Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve Board and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Her academic record is exemplary and distinguished. Her leadership of the Fed was widely admired, while Summers' Presidency of Harvard ended in a debacle. Yellen correctly foresaw the risks of the 2008 financial meltdown, while Summers famously missed it. She, not Summers, has hands-on experience running the Fed.

Moreover, she has not played the revolving door by cashing in on government service for personal wealth. That, of course, is why she is suspect on Wall Street. Yellen has proven herself to be less interested in her personal wealth than in her nation's monetary policy. For that reason, Wall Street leaders view her as dangerous.

Violence and the State : A Monstrous Pair

German Children Seized From Parents for Crime of Homeschooling

By GRACY HOWARD

The German government forcibly seized four children from their parents in a raid last Thursday in Darmstadt, Germany. Why? Because the Wunderlich children were home schooled – an illegal activity viewed by the German government as “child endangerment.”

Reports by World Net Daily and The Daily Mail said the police were armed with a battering ram, and held father Dirk Wunderlich to a chair while they removed the children. A team of 20 social workers, police, and special agents entered the home. According to a report by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an organization that advocates for parental choice in education, the children were taken to unknown locations and officials told the parents they would not be seeing their children “anytime soon.”

In a phone interview, Wunderlich called the episode a “nightmare.” He said that for several days, he has felt “very down and crushed,” but is trusting that “this terrible thing is one piece in God’s big plan.”

Michael Donnelly, lawyer for HSLDA, said, “This shouldn’t happen in Germany. This is a very peaceful family.”

Obama dips toe in Syrian Rubicon

Iron has entered into the president's soul

By M K Bhadrakumar 

For the first time through the two-year old Syrian conflict, the United States has mentioned the holy cow - "boots on the ground''. The Secretary of State John Kerry has pleaded that the US Congress should approve the use of American ground troops although the Obama administration may not intend to take recourse to such action. 

This is a hugely significant turning point in the fast-developing scenario of US military intervention in Syria. There was added poignancy that Kerry was speaking at a congressional hearing on Tuesday with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seated beside him. 

Kerry's careful choice of words indicated that the deployment of ground troops in Syria is very much in the consideration zone of the White House. "I don't want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country," Kerry said. 

He then went on to add the caveat that President Obama would exercise such an option of deploying ground troops in Syria if there is a potential threat of chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists. As he put it,

In the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of [al-Qeda affiliate] al-Nusra or someone else, and it was clearly in the interests of our allies and all of us - the British, the French and others - to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements.

A Fount of Economic Fallacies

Abenomics Held to ‘Teach Us Something’

By Pater Tenebrarum

After Japan has been berated by Western economists for more than 20 years, the mad-cap flight forward by the Abe administration is suddenly held to be able to 'teach us something' about what should be done with regard to economic stagnation. It is amazing what a little rally in the stock market and a few highly suspect GDP releases can accomplish.

As the LA Times writes in a recently published article entitled “Japan's economy is bouncing back, offering a possible model for U.S.”, 'Abenomics' (i.e., the same hoary inflationism that has been tried over and over again since John Law) is where it's at. The article is interesting mainly because it is a fount of economic fallacies on a par with Shinzo Abe's policies. An excerpt: 

“After two decades of economic stagnation, once-mighty Japan is beginning to revive — under policies that some experts say could offer lessons to the still-struggling economies of the United States and Europe.

While the Eurozone tries to break out of recession and the U.S. economic recovery remains anemic, Japan has begun to grow at an encouraging rate.

Magical Thinking Drags on Economics

Government Debt and Capital Destruction 

Many economists often attempt to set arbitrary thresholds. For example, if debt hits X% of GDP (or whatever measure) then it is “too” large and “impedes economic growth”. This article cites Carmen Reinhart attempting to do just this. It is the wrong approach entirely.

To understand why, let’s look at productive debt and contrast with government debt. If Joe borrows money to build a factory to produce Supersmart phones, then paying the interest and principle on this bond does not impede anything. His revenues would not exist without borrowing the money, and so we can say with certainty that this debt is good for Joe, it is good for Joe’s customers, and it is good for everyone else including Joe’s employees, Joe’s vendors, etc.

By contrast, what if John borrows to live a lavish lifestyle that his income would not otherwise support? EVERY PENNY spent to service this debt is a drag on John. At first, he was seemingly able to buy things without real cost. But when the first credit card bill comes due, then he incurs cost without being able to buy things. There is no magic number, no arbitrary threshold, no line in the sand. This debt is bad for John, and for everyone else that John touches. (I don’t think that there would be much, if any, consumer lending in a world where savers had to lend their hard-earned gold, a world in which the Fed was not the ultimate source of credit, but that is a different discussion).

The Three Types of Austerity

Without growth, Europe is heading for a train wreck

by Frank Hollenbeck

Reading the financial press, one gets the impression there are only two sides to the austerity debate: pro-austerity and anti-austerity. In reality, we have three forms of austerity. There is the Keynesian-Krugman-Robert Reich form which promotes more government spending and higher taxes. There is the Angela Merkel form of less government spending and higher taxes, and there is the Austrian form of less spending and lower taxes. Of the three forms of austerity, only the third increases the size of the private sector relative to the public sector, frees up resources for private investment, and has actual evidence of success in boosting growth.

Let’s take a closer look at the Merkel form of austerity being implemented in Europe in which governments “plan” to cut their spending and raise tax revenues. Of course, “planned” cuts are not actual cuts. Four years after the crash of 2008, the UK government had only implemented 6 percent of planned cuts in spending and only 12 percent of planned cuts in benefits. In almost all European countries, government spending is higher today than it was in 2008. A new study by Constantin Gurdgiev of Trinity College in Dublin examined government spending as a percentage of GDP in 2012 compared with the average level of pre-recession spending (2003–2007). Only Germany, Malta, and Sweden had actually cut spending.

Unintended Consequences

They’re of no concern to ideological crusaders and headstrong dogmatists

By THOMAS SOWELL 

One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers.

The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer.

The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone’s home values depend, tends to decline. “Who’s going to paint the outside of a rented house?” one resident was quoted as saying in a recent New York Times story.

Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level than homeowners. They are also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of homeowners that had not had such activities before.