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Posts Tagged ‘Magna Carta’

Where’s Your Loyalty?

Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2023

On the other hand, I have quite a strong loyalty to one concept of governance—that of liberty—minimal government. The Athenians were on the right track but were unable to sustain their idea over the long haul. Similarly, the Magna Carta was an excellent step in the right direction. Better still was the US Constitution. To all of these efforts I feel loyalty. But, as stated above, such a high-minded concept is elusive and, when it occurs, may not last throughout the lifetime of the individual.

Where’s Your Loyalty?

by Jeff Thomas

loyalty

Recently, after reading an essay of mine, a reader angrily questioned my loyalty to the USA. My immediate reaction was that I’m not a US citizen. I therefore tend to observe the US dispassionately, just as I’d observe any of the nearly 200 “foreign” countries in the world.

But, as I’m British, what if he’d questioned my loyalty to the UK? Would he have a valid point? Well, at the very least, he’d certainly have a question worthy of an answer.

I, of course, have a legal right to live and work in the UK, and yet I choose not to. It’s simply not my idea of a great country in which to reside. As much as I regard the traditional English village to be an ideal environment in which to live, I reside elsewhere. The reason is that I place a very high value on personal freedom, a nonintrusive government, and a populace that doesn’t feel that it’s entitled to largesse that’s been forcibly taken from another segment of the population.

But that doesn’t exactly address the question of “loyalty,” does it? Well, there, I must confess, I tend to answer the question with another question. Whenever someone speaks to me of his loyalty to his country, I’m inclined to ask him to define “country.”

See the rest here

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What if Ignored Covid-19 Warnings Had Been Leaked to WikiLeaks? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on April 13, 2020

“WikiLeaks and 9/11: What If?” is the title The Los Angeles Times gave an Oct. 15, 2010 op-ed by former FBI Special Agent/Minneapolis Division Counsel Coleen Rowley and former Air Marshal Bogdan Dzakovic, who led an elite “Red Team” for the Federal Aviation Administration to probe vulnerabilities of airports and aircraft during the years before 9/11.

After arresting would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui on August 16, 2001, Rowley’s colleagues in Minneapolis ran into unconscionable foot-dragging by FBI headquarters functionaries, who would not permit a search of Moussaoui’s laptop computer or his personal effects.

https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2020/04/12/what-if-ignored-covid-19-warnings-had-been-leaked-to-wikileaks/

by

The British court system continues to mock the Magna Carta. Bowing vassal-like to U.S. pressure it persists with Star Chamber proceedings against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange until he is either extradited to the US or winds up dead.

The judicial pantomime under way in London, under the guise of an extradition hearing, would make the English nobles who wrested precious civil rights from King John eight centuries ago sob in anger and shame. But nary a whimper is heard from the heirs to those rights. One searches in vain for English nobles today.

Yet the process stumbles along, as awkward as it is inexorable, toward extradition and life in prison for Assange, if he lasts that long.

The banal barristers bashing Assange now seem to harbor hope that, unlike the case of Henry II and Thomas More, the swords of royal knights will be unneeded to “deliver the Crown from this troublesome priest” – or publisher. Those barristers may be spared the embarrassment of losing what residual self-respect they may still claim. In short, they may not need to bow and scrape much longer to surrender Assange to life in a US prison. He may die first.

Puppeteers

For the UK and US barristers and their puppeteers in Washington, salivating to seize the Australian publisher, a deus ex machina has descended backstage. It is called Covid-19 and London’s Belmarsh prison is accurately described as a petri dish for such disease. We already know of one prisoner death there from the virus. God knows how many more there already are – or will be.

In refusing to allow nonviolent prisoner Julian Assange to leave that crowded prison (with his immunocompromised condition, weakened lungs, and clinical depression), presiding Judge Vanessa Baraitser leaves an open door to deliver Kings Boris and Donald this “troublesome” publisher by “natural” means. The swords of royal knights are not needed for this kind of faux-judicial, royal screw. And, happily for Lady Baraitser, she may not have to keep washing blood off her hands as Lady Macbeth was compelled to do.

Meanwhile, as all await Assange’s demise – one way or the other – his lawyers have had no contact with him for three weeks. They cannot visit him in prison; nor can they even talk to him by video chat, according to WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnnson.

Empire Drives Home an Old Lesson

However Assange is eventually dispatched – dead or alive – from Star Chamber and prison, the Empire remains hell-bent on demonstrating that it will give no quarter to those endangering it by WikiLeaks-type disclosures.

The lesson is now abundantly clear to all “troublesome” publishers tempted to follow Assange’s example of publishing documentary truth (a function of what used to be called journalism). They will be cut down – whether by “natural” means, or by endless faux-judicial proceedings resulting in lengthy imprisonment, financial ruin, or both.

On Tuesday Judge Baraitser announced that the Assange extradition hearing will resume on May 18, as previously scheduled and that it may drag on into July — Covid-19 notwithstanding. The big question is whether Assange, if he is kept confined in Belmarsh prison, will live that long. Meanwhile, thousands of other nonviolent prisoners are being released from other UK prisons in a humane step to reduce the chances of infection.

As I think of my good friend Julian, what comes to mind are the desperate words of Willy Loman’s wife Linda in “Death of a Salesman”:

“He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

(On the chance you are wondering, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal – as well as National Public Radio – have paid zero attention to the extradition hearing in recent weeks – much less to Judge Baraitser’s Queen of Hearts-style, “off-with-his-head” behavior.)

Aping Caiaphas

The pitiable Baraitser, of course, is simply a cog in the imperial machinery, a self-impressed, self-interested, rigid functionary aping the role of Caiaphas, the high priest beholden to an earlier Empire. “It’s better that one man die,” he is said to have explained, when another nonviolent truth-teller dared to expose the cruelties of Empire to the downtrodden of his day – including the despicable accessory role played by the high priests.

Here is how theologian Eugene Peterson’s renders Caiaphas’s words in John 11: “Can’t you see that it’s to our advantage that one man die … rather than the whole nation be destroyed.” (“Nation” in that context meant the system of privilege enjoyed by collaborators with Rome – like the high priests and the lawyers of the time.)

The lesson meant to be taken away from Assange’s punishment are as clear – if less bloody – as the crucifixion that followed quickly after Caiaphas explained the rationale. The behavior of today’s empire pretends to be more “civilized” as it manufactures stories of rape, leans on ratty satraps in Sweden, England, and Ecuador, and ostentatiously thumbs its nose at official UN condemnations of “arbitrary detention.” And, if that were not enough, it also practices leave-no-marks torture.

Cutting Off Nose to Spite Face

Meanwhile, those who in an ideal world should be natural allies of WikiLeaks, the media, are cowed, and are as pitiable as Baraitser. Many loudly betray Assange outright.

There is no need now, two millennia later, to erect crosses along the roadside as graphic reminders to intimidate those who would expose Empire’s oppression. Civil rights wrested from King John 800 years ago – habeas corpus, for one – have become “quaint” and “obsolete”, adjectives applied by that distinguished American jurist, and George W. Bush “lawyer,” Alberto Gonzales to the Geneva Convention protections against torture. The successors to the English “nobles” of Runnymede seem to have gone the way of Gonzales.

This is not only a case of “killing the messenger”, lamentable as that is. It amounts to cutting off our collective nose to spite our face.

Because most Americans are so impoverished on accurate information, and so misled by the corporate media regarding WikiLeaks – and Assange, in particular – they are blissfully unaware of WikiLeaks’ capability to expose crucial information that can head off disaster.

What If? Read the rest of this entry »

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30 Years Later: Margaret Thatcher’s Vision for Europe Revisited | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019

But today, with another debate on the future of the European Union – and even farther down the road of the “ever closer union,” we should keep in mind what Lady Thatcher said, and “to raise the flag of national sovereignty, free trade and free enterprise – and fight.” Indeed, as the Prime Minister wrote in her memoirs, “if there was ever an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state.”

https://www.austriancenter.com/thatcher-europe/

This week we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘Bruges Speech,’ where she put forward her vision for the future of the Europe. In our new study 30 years after Bruges: Margaret Thatcher’s Vision for Europe Revisited, we have looked at what we can still learn from the former British Prime Minister. Download the study here, and read a summary below:

Europe is today in the midst of a debate on the future of the European Union. It is not the first one: back before the Maastricht Treaty was passed in 1992, political leaders were discussing as well about where the EU, or as it was called back then, the European Community, was heading. Should it go the way of the “ever closer union,” or revert back to the fundamental principles? There was a split going through Europe on questions like this.

This was the situation in which the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found herself on September 20, 1988, when she stepped in front of a crowd at the College of Europe in Bruges. “I decided that the time had come to strike out against what I saw the erosion of democracy by centralization and bureaucracy, and to set out an alternative view of Europe’s future,” she would later write in her memoirs The Downing Street Years.

The result was today’s infamous yet magnificent ‘Bruges speech,’ which was far from being anti-EU, but a stark warning against Brussels, an attempt to save the EU in the wake of federalists demanding more and more integration. This week, we are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of this speech. And, as it turns out, it has stood the test of time shockingly well. Indeed, many of the warnings that Thatcher put forth are even truer today (which you can read in our new study).

The European Heritage

In Thatcher’s vision, the European heritage is of crucial importance. She tries to teach us that Europe can be proud of its history. While wars did play too big of a role in the past, Europe is still the continent in which the ideal of individual liberty prevailed before anywhere else. It is the continent which brought forth many of the greatest innovations, artistic pieces, literary works, and intellectuals the world has ever seen.

Great Britain has played an instrumental part in the European story, Thatcher makes clear: “Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.” Britain has contributed mightily to European history and its values with the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and many other major steps on the path to freedom. But so has Britain benefitted from its link to mainland Europe, for instance having “borrowed that concept of the rule of law which marks out a civilized society from barbarism.”

This special relationship, says Thatcher, must be retained. Today this is even truer: on the eve of Brexit, it is of the utmost importance to keep this mutual understanding between the two sides intact, regardless of whether Britain is in- or outside of the EU.

Despite the millennia-long European history of (much) success, we need to remember that it is the long history of Europe, not the EU (the latter being only sixty years old): “Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.” Not everyone who criticizes the EU is automatically anti-European – an important point in today’s world in which Europe and the EU are most of the time used synonymously.

Rather, the European Union is a tool which can be used to promote the values Europeans defended so often in the twentieth century: the EU “is not an end in itself,” but rather “a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people.”

A Europe of Free Enterprise and Free Trade

What is the way to future prosperity? For Thatcher, it is “to deregulate and remove the constraints on trade.” It means “action to free markets, action to widen choice, action to reduce government intervention.” Instead of increasing centralization and regulatory efforts, Europe should remain a champion of free enterprise.  History – and the Soviet Union, should be enough proof that centralized decision-making doesn’t work.

The EU should not only be pro-trade to the inside, however. Instead, it should be globally oriented: “Europe never would have prospered and never will prosper as a narrow-minded, inward-looking club,” she warned. Free trade with the outside world – something that the EU is lacking behind to this day (while forcing all member states to comply with its trade policy), is one of the most important competences of Brussels: “we must ensure that our approach to world trade is consistent with the liberalisation we preach at home.”

For this, a strong relationship with America is needed. For Margaret Thatcher, the U.S. was indeed to a certain extent part of Europe, “in the sense that she shares a common heritage of civilised values and a love of liberty.” It is a natural fit between the two sides of the Atlantic, since the core values are shared with one another. In the face of today’s trade wars and aggressions on both sides, it would be all the worse if this relationship would be squandered in just a few months’ time.

Against Eurotopia

If there is any argument which the Prime Minister hit home continuously, it was her stark opposition to a centralized federal state, ruled by the Brussels bureaucracy. The idea of a United States of Europe is a utopia that “never comes, because we know we should not like it if it did.” Instead of politicians trying to create a single European identity, the mantra should be unity in diversity: “Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.”

In Margaret Thatcher’s opinion, the EU should stay a supranational organization which is based on voluntary cooperation between sovereign states, rather than one federal state. She perhaps felt alone with this opinion when she presented it thirty years ago. But today, with another debate on the future of the European Union – and even farther down the road of the “ever closer union,” we should keep in mind what Lady Thatcher said, and “to raise the flag of national sovereignty, free trade and free enterprise – and fight.” Indeed, as the Prime Minister wrote in her memoirs, “if there was ever an idea whose time had come and gone it was surely that of the artificial mega-state.”

Be seeing you

 

Margaret Thatcher once said that “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

 

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