“Zeno would also say that nothing is more hostile to a firm grasp on knowledge than self-deception.”
Diogenes Laertius
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Ego
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
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Sen. Rand Paul Spars With Fauci: ‘Noble’ Lies And Political Theater
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had a heated exchange with CDC’s Fauci in the Senate late last week, where the Senator pushed the bureaucrat to provide a single study showing that the possibility of re-infection among those who had Covid or had been vaccinated justifies current orders to continue wearing masks. What about the variants? Also today…even Fauci is admitting the six foot rule is not “science.” Finally, protests in Europe.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Fauci’s Out, Rand Paul, six foot rule, vaccinated | Leave a Comment »
Progressive Christian Hopes Heaven Will Feature Segregated Spaces For Every Tribe, Tongue, Nation
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
Heaven has responded and confirmed Jenks’s worst fears but also said Jenks won’t be there anyway, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
MONTEREY, CA—Local progressive Christian Charlie Jenks was pondering the promise of Scripture that in the new heaven and the new earth there will be people from every tongue, tribe, and nation worshiping Jesus. Jenks prides himself on accepting all cultures and races that aren’t white, but the verse troubled him nonetheless.
“I’m cool with all the tribes, tongues, and nations — but I hope they each have their own segregated spaces,” he remarked Friday while taking a stroll along the beach. “Can you imagine all the races melted together as one big multitude worshiping Christ? Ugh. Gives me the willies.”
In fact, Jenks says, having all the races together without their own safe spaces to be separated from the colonizing oppressor races, would be more like hell than heaven.
“Frankly, if it’s going to be all the races together and we can’t have separate and segregated Wedding Feasts of the Lamb for each and every culture on earth, then I don’t want any part of it.”
Heaven has responded and confirmed Jenks’s worst fears but also said Jenks won’t be there anyway, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
“Well, that’s a relief,” the man said.
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Terminate NATO – The Future of Freedom Foundation
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
As Moller argues, however, Russia poses no real threat to Europe and, therefore, cannot be seriously considered to be a justification for NATO. Instead, she argues, it’s time to replace Russia with China, owing to China’s rise as an international powerhouse. The reasoning is classic empire-think: If a nation starts to prosper and rise, it’s best to put it down before it gets too large and powerful.
How about just leaving China and Russia alone? What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with other nations becoming prosperous? The fact is that NATO should never have been established in the first place. Moreover, the biggest mistake in U.S. history was to convert the federal government to a national-security state. The best thing American could do now is terminate NATO and restore a limited-government republic to our land.
https://www.fff.org/2021/03/19/terminate-nato/
The Washington Post has published a long piece calling for NATO to take on a new official enemy — China. The piece is written by Sara Bjerg Moller, an assistant professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. She argues that after 30 years since losing the Soviet Union as its official enemy and struggling to find a replacement to justify its continued existence, a perfect replacement would be China.
I’ve got a better idea. Let’s just put NATO out of its misery and terminate it.
After all, let’s not forget NATO’s original mission: to defend Europe from the possibility of an invasion by the Soviet Union, which had been America’s and Britain’s World War II partner and ally but which had been converted to their official enemy at the end of the war.
But the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Europe was always nil. The Soviet Union had been decimated by World War II, especially as a result of the German invasion of the country. Even though the invasion was ultimately repelled and Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity had been destroyed, not to mention the millions of Russian citizens who had been killed. The last thing the Soviet Union wanted was another war, especially given that the United States possessed nuclear weapons and had shown a willingness to employ them against large cities.
The advocates of a national-security state in the United States, however, needed a new official enemy to replace Nazi Germany, especially to justify the conversion of the U.S. government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, a type of governmental structure with omnipotent, non-reviewable powers. The Soviet Union and “godless communism” fit the bill perfectly. The American people were then inculcated with the notion that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world that was based in Moscow, Russia.
To convince Americans and western Europeans that the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to them, U.S. officials pointed to the postwar Soviet occupations of Eastern Europe and East Germany as examples of communist aggression. They apparently forgot that President Franklin Roosevelt had delivered such lands into the hands of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who FDR affectionately referred to as his “Uncle Joe,” at their wartime summit in Yalta. Was it really too surprising that Stalin accepted FDR’s gift, especially given that Eastern Europe and East Germany would serve as a buffer against another German invasion of the Soviet Union?
It was within this fervent anti-communist environment that NATO was formed. But in 1989, the Cold War suddenly and unexpectedly came to an end, which, needless to say, put the U.S. national-security establishment and NATO into a panic. After all, the Cold War was the justification for both of these institutions. With no Cold War, they could both be dismantled.
Instead, the national-security establishment simply went into the Middle East and began poking hornets’ nest, which ultimately brought terrorist retaliation, which in turn brought the “war on terrorism,” another racket that has kept the national-security establishment in high cotton.
Meanwhile, unwilling to let Russia go as an official enemy, NATO began gobbling up former members of the Warsaw Pact, with the aim of placing U.S. troops and missiles ever closer to Russia’s borders and with the hope of provoking a reaction, which ultimately came about in Ukraine.
As Moller argues, however, Russia poses no real threat to Europe and, therefore, cannot be seriously considered to be a justification for NATO. Instead, she argues, it’s time to replace Russia with China, owing to China’s rise as an international powerhouse. The reasoning is classic empire-think: If a nation starts to prosper and rise, it’s best to put it down before it gets too large and powerful.
How about just leaving China and Russia alone? What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with other nations becoming prosperous? The fact is that NATO should never have been established in the first place. Moreover, the biggest mistake in U.S. history was to convert the federal government to a national-security state. The best thing American could do now is terminate NATO and restore a limited-government republic to our land.
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction | Mises Institute
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously, to keep them under its control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state’s siren song.
https://mises.org/library/song-irresistible-how-state-leads-people-their-own-destruction
[Robert Higgs’s Schlarbaum Award Acceptance Speech, delivered on October 12, 2007, at the Mises Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration.]
Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins:
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.
Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The beached skulls are those of our fathers and our sons, our friends and our neighbors, for whom the song proved not only irresistible, but fatal.
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency — war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose.
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war — not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged “services” and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies: only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state’s power will be brought to bear. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that compose its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards — legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty — channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people. Thus, the political class in general — that is, the oligarchs, the Praetorian Guards, and the supporting coalition — uses government power (which means ultimately the police and the armed forces) to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarchs demand or to obey the rules they dictate.
Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief that the government’s operation yields them net benefits. In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that, owing to democracy, they themselves “are the government.”
Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system’s cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the shafters and which the shaftees. At the top, a modest degree of “circulation of elites” within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system’s essential character.
It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it — that is, government without genuine, express, individual consent — a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process, while the oligarchs (elected or not, it scarcely matters) preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state.
Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which official high priests and statist intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses, and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country, and, most important, by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory restraints on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy, or “black market.”
These various forms of resistance together compose a force that opposes the government’s constant pressure to expand its domination. These two forces, working one against the other, establish a locus of “equilibrium,” a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black-market transactions, and other defensive violations of the government’s oppressive rules.
Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government’s dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so?
National emergency — war or a similarly menacing crisis — answers the political class’s crucial question more effectively than anything else, because such a crisis has a uniquely effective capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government’s expansion.
Virtually any war will serve, at least for a while, because in modern nation-states the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to “rally ’round the flag,” regardless of their previous ideological stance in relation to the government.
Recall the situation in 1941, for example, when public-opinion polls and other evidence indicated that a great majority of the American people (approximately 80 percent as late as autumn) opposed outright engagement in the world war, an engagement that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had been seeking relentlessly by hook and by crook from the very beginning. When news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the public, mass opposition to war dissolved overnight almost completely. No wonder the neocon intriguers, in a September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, expressed their yearning for “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Although other kinds of great crises may not elicit the same immediate submission to the government’s announced program for the people’s salvation, they may prove equally effective if they are sufficiently menacing and persistent. Thus, the Great Depression, which pushed millions of Americans into economic desperation in the early 1930s, was eventually viewed by almost everybody as, in Justice Brandeis’s words, “an emergency more serious than war.” Other pregnant crises have included nation-wide strikes or widespread labor disturbances, so-called energy crises, such as those of the 1970s, perceived crime waves, great epidemics or health scares, and, lately, even a bogus scare about global warming.
See the rest here
Author:
Dr. Robert Higgs is retired and lives in Mexico. He was a senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and longtime editor of The Independent Review; he was also a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty, and the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom.
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Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers – Edward Curtin
Posted by M. C. on March 22, 2021
Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well. I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”
You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent.
They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”
These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Except they could and can.
They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad. It’s one of their specialties. But they mean well. They screw up sometimes, but they mean well. They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.
As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates
The U.S. rulers have their defenders. Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties. They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.
These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other. They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else. They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.
Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this. But it is a small part.
For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other. It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.
And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between. Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.
Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective. They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy. Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere. It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]
See the rest here
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Be Kind
Posted by M. C. on March 21, 2021
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Power and Withdrawal of Rights by Proxy Equals Terrorism – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on March 20, 2021
The most ingenious part of this plot is that the government and its thugs will stay away from the front line of these atrocious measures as much as possible in order to gain compliance by using the very people being harmed to affect these policies. This will be a proxy operation whereby the people themselves force each other to obey and get injected in order to survive. The government can then claim that it is not actually mandating this shot; that these heavy-handed tactics are not being pursued by the state, but by individual businesses that are only seeking to protect themselves, their liability, and the public. This is just a way to transfer blame while retaining an air of innocence.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
George Orwell, “1984”
Concerning the controlling ruling class and their henchmen in government and government enforcement, total control is always sought, and power is the tool used to gain that control. Many tactics are employed to advance the growth of power, but in most cases, the more hidden and covert are the most desired, because that affords the opportunity for the people to relinquish their freedom and rights voluntarily. Therefore, risk to the state is lessened, as it can avoid showing its hand by not having to resort only to the use of deadly force. In the situation we face today, this has become obvious to those paying attention, but still remains a mystery to the masses at large. After all, as Orwell so correctly stated, “the object of power is power,” no matter the techniques used to gain it.
This is exactly what is happening in the case of what is falsely called the Covid vaccine. It has not been made mandatory that all take this gene-altering and poisonous shot, but the methods that will be used to get the public to consent to taking this concoction are many, and they are very devious. Few understand this, and they will soon voluntarily stand in line to take this injection, even though they have been warned already about how this will come about.
Trail balloons are filling the sky, but almost no one is looking up. Immunity papers, social credit scores, and vaccine passports have been discussed for a long time, and have already been implemented in other parts of the world, but this is only one piece of the puzzle. Without a passport in the future, there will be adverse consequences aimed at the population at large. It will begin with travel restrictions, and end with all goods and services refused without showing your papers. Many if not most employers will also require government approved papers in order to work. Additionally, especially as this monetary system is fully converted to digital, gaining access to life sustaining funds, bank accounts, credit, food, and energy will become impossible without showing proof of vaccination. But this is only half the story.
The most ingenious part of this plot is that the government and its thugs will stay away from the front line of these atrocious measures as much as possible in order to gain compliance by using the very people being harmed to affect these policies. This will be a proxy operation whereby the people themselves force each other to obey and get injected in order to survive. The government can then claim that it is not actually mandating this shot; that these heavy-handed tactics are not being pursued by the state, but by individual businesses that are only seeking to protect themselves, their liability, and the public. This is just a way to transfer blame while retaining an air of innocence.
This is like a rope-a-dope technique that allows the challenger to do all the work, while the state hides in the shadows just waiting to claim victory after its rival the people have exhausted themselves while fighting each other. The division that has been created among the people at the hands of the state has led to a situation that causes mass infighting amongst the people. So long as the people fight each other instead of fighting the real enemy that is the state, the state will always win, and in the process gain more and more power.
In the case discussed above, the business owners left standing will become the proxy government, while the employees become the proxy enforcers of local mask and vaccine rules, whether in banks, grocery stores, retail outlets, sporting events, concerts, and every other venue. The owners of power companies can enlist the help of their employees to enforce vaccine compliance by threatening to cut off power to those without an immunity passport. All this can take place while the state rulers avoid blame by saying there is no federal or state mandates for masks or vaccines, and it is out of their hands.
In many states, including my home state of Montana, similar dishonest tactics of blame shifting are taking place. The governor here stated that he was opening up the state, and lifting all mask mandates. What was little reported was that he at the same time stated that all final decisions were left to the local governing ‘authorities,’ thereby avoiding all blame to himself, and spreading it across the state to mostly other more anonymous political lowlifes.
Much of what has happened and certainly what will happen as the state imposes more and more rules that will be left to others to enforce, is that terrorism by proxy will be the result. Getting access to food and energy will likely be dependent on having proof of vaccination and obtaining state-authorized immunity passport “papers.” The same will most likely be required in the future to access bank accounts and credit. As time goes by and more and more businesses require papers from its customers in order to stay open, it will be difficult to survive without compliance, just as the state desires. Eventually, and I do not believe it will be too far into the future, virtually every aspect of life could be closed off to those that refuse to be vaccinated with this toxic poison. At that point, we will have lost.
The state cares nothing about any of you. It cares nothing about your well-being or health. It cares nothing about your children or grandchildren. It cares nothing about your freedom and rights, and in fact It has no compassion whatsoever for the people of this country. It is never interested in good, but only evil. None are exempt from the coming carnage unless they sit at the top of the pyramid, and voting or reform will never change anything except to bring false hope and despair while perpetuating the tyranny. Disobey, dissent, and take all power away from the wicked state. Understand what power brings, and lay siege on all that would claim ownership of it in any attempt to rule over you.
Gary D. Barnett [send him mail] is a retired investment professional that has been writing about freedom and liberty matters, politics, and history for two decades. He is against all war and aggression, and against the state. He recently finished a collaboration with former U.S. Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, and was a contributor to her new book, “When China Sneezes” From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Political-Economic Crisis.” Currently, he lives in Montana with his wife and son. Visit his website.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Power, rope-a-dope, Terrorism, Withdrawal of Rights | Leave a Comment »
Do We Not Have Enough Enemies? – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on March 20, 2021
Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.
With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.
Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk: “China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03/patrick-j-buchanan/do-we-not-have-enough-enemies/
Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.”
Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.”
Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and for meddling in the 2020 U.S. election to allegedly help Donald Trump. Russia also faces U.S. sanctions for building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic to deliver natural gas to Germany.
With its president being called a “killer” by the U.S. president, Russia called Ambassador Anatoly Antonov home “for consultations.” In other times, such an exchange would bring the two nations to the brink of war.
What is Biden doing? Do we not have enough enemies? Does he not have enough problems on his plate?
The May 1 deadline for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, negotiated a year ago with the Taliban, is just six weeks off. Do we stay and soldier on or depart? No decision has been announced.
If we stay, our forces in Afghanistan could, again, come under fire. If we leave, the Kabul regime could be shaken to its foundation and fall.
Leaving would be an admission that the U.S. failed, and the war is lost.
After the recent U.S.-South Korea military exercises, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister issued this threat to the Biden administration:
“We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powdered smell in our land (that) if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”
There is talk of new North Korean tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tokyo this week that the U.S. goal remains “the complete denuclearization of North Korea” But Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump all failed to achieve that goal.
With national elections in June, the clock is also running on the Tehran regime that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. Does Biden intend to sign on again, as he indicated in the campaign he would, or walk away?
Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.
With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.
Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk: “China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”
China has enacted a new law that authorizes its coast guard to use force to defend Chinese sovereignty. And among China’s claims to sovereign control are the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed and controlled by Japan.
Blinken has warned the U.S. will fight to keep the Senkakus Japanese.
While in Tokyo, Blinken also denounced the generals’ coup in Myanmar, accusing Myanmar’s army of “attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election and … brutally repressing peaceful protesters.”
Former national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton has listed other areas where China is engaged in “unacceptable behavior.”
“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion; building military bases in the disputed South China Sea; menacing Taiwan, Vietnam and India; increasing strategic nuclear forces and egregious global cyberwarfare; empowering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; concealing the origins of covid-19; stealing intellectual property and forcing technology transfers; and genocide against Uyghurs and the repression of Hong Kong.”
Perhaps the Anchorage talks can be extended to get all the items on Bolton’s agenda fully addressed.
Again, does not America have enough on her plate already?
Our national debt is now larger than our national economy. COVID-19 has killed half a million of us and is killing 1,000 a day more. We have a broken and bleeding Southern border being overrun with no end in sight.
Politically, our nation is divided as deeply as it was on the eve of the Civil War. We are caught up in a culture war, at the root of which is an irreconcilable conflict over whether America is a good and great country, perhaps the greatest — or a nation of whose history and founding we ought to be eternally ashamed.
If time is on America’s side in our cold wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, is not the wiser policy to maneuver to avoid any new hot wars?
Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.
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