The War Is Right And Just. But Is It Prudent?

From Andrew Sullivan, "A year later, the end-game of the war in Ukraine is dangerously murky":

There are so many ways in which the West’s defensive war against Russia is a righteous cause.

It is right and just to defend a sovereign country from attack by a much larger neighbor; to fight back against an occupying force committing war crimes on a massive scale; to oppose the logic of dictatorships and defend the foundations of democracy; to uphold a post-Cold War international order which forbids the redrawing of borders by force; to unite democratic countries in Europe against a resurgence of imperial Russia; to defang and defeat a poisonous chauvinism that despises modern freedoms for women and gay people.

It is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?

That’s the question I’m still grappling with, in a week which saw the conflict deepen and the two sides entrench their positions further. President Biden’s trip to Kyiv and his speech in Poland have heightened the stakes, turning this into a more obvious proxy war between the United States and Russia … edging gingerly but relentlessly toward something more direct. He’s all in now: declaring that Ukraine “must triumph” and that Russia cannot win a war that the Russian leader deems existential. NATO armaments are pouring into Ukraine at an accelerating rate. The training of Ukrainian troops is happening across the Continent. Germany is sending tanks. Pressure is building on Britain to send fighter jets.

The US is ratcheting up arms production as fast as it can, while seriously depleting our own Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems. These are good times for arms producers:

The Army is planning a 500% increase in artillery shell production, from 15,000 a month to 70,000, according to Army acquisition chief Doug Bush … and intends to double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, make roughly 33% more Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems surface-to-surface medium-range missiles a year, and produce each month a minimum of 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — which were “almost not in production at all,” according to Bush.

When Ukraine’s effective military is made up almost entirely of NATO equipment, and trained by NATO forces, there surely comes a point at which claiming NATO is not actually at war with Russia gets fuzzy.

It’s worth remembering how Biden put it less than a year ago: “the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War Three.’ Okay?” Well, technically, he’s still right. We don’t have American pilots and troops in the air and on the ground in Ukraine. But we do have them just over the horizon, along with tanks and planes and highly effective drones on the front lines in Ukraine itself. The munitions are being made in the USA — many in Biden’s beloved Scranton! And Ukraine cannot win without them.

And this is not exactly a proxy war like Vietnam — because the country involved is right on the nuclear super-power’s border and was long part of that power’s empire; and any attempt to reclaim all of Ukraine will obviously spill over into Russia proper at some point. And the logic of escalation in wartime has its own momentum, if we don’t want to seem as if we’re losing ground.

Sure enough, every time the Biden administration has said it would restrict the provision of arms to Ukraine, it has backtracked quickly, as Putin digs in. Upwards of 140 tanks are being sent from NATO, and hundreds more may follow. Long-range missiles capable of hitting Russia have also been sent — on the condition they not be used in Russia. The 2022 dynamic was summed up by the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov:

When I was in DC in November [2021], before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible. Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimeter guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM [missiles], no. Now all of that is a yes. Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be…F-16s.

The Russians are escalating as well: they now have 300,000 troops in Ukrainian territory (way more than they had for the original invasion), are ramping their economy into wartime gear, and are still on the offensive (if ineffectively so). Their economy has held up far better than anyone expected. Last March, Biden assured us that “the totality of our economic sanctions and export controls are crushing — crushing the Russian economy.” The actual contraction was 2.1 percent in 2022, according to the IMF. A crinkle, not a crush.

In fact, Russia has merely diversified its customer base: “for all of 2022, Russia managed to increase its oil output 2 percent and boost oil export earnings 20 percent, to $218 billion ... Russia also raked in $138 billion from natural gas, a nearly 80 percent rise over 2021 as record prices offset cuts in flows to Europe.” This year, the IMF predicts that Russia will have a higher growth rate than either Germany or Britain, and in 2024, it will best the US as well. Yes, sanctions will, in the long run, hurt investment and future growth in Russia and cripple technological essentials for war. And tougher sanctions on oil are underway, and could have an impact. But Russia is far more resilient economically than almost anyone foresaw a year ago.

Russia’s isolation? Not so splendid anymore. The West is indeed united, for which Biden deserves real credit; the rest, much less so. India has increased Russian imports by 400 percent. But the real game-changer is China. Its initial neutrality is clearly shifting. Yesterday, Der Spiegel reported that “the Russian military is engaged in negotiations with Chinese drone manufacturer Xi’an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology over the mass production of kamikaze drones for Russia.”

Previously dependent on Iran for these weapons, a serious and reliable supply from China will come in handy. More significantly, as Noah Smith notes, in a long war of attrition, as this is becoming, mass production of weapons matters. And China has a much bigger manufacturing base than the West. Will they use it? It must be tempting to pin the West down in Europe. We’ll learn more when Xi visits Putin this spring.

Politically, moreover, Russia appears stable, if brutally controlled. Muscovites remain relatively protected and are carrying on as if the war didn’t exist. The public sphere has become ever more subsumed in militarism, dissent has been largely crushed, and the invocation of the fight against the actual Nazis seems to have helped galvanize public support. Popular backing for the war, even among non-Russian polls, remains high.

The most intense opposition has come from the far right, military bloggers and crazed TV jingoists, wanting to ramp up the action. In the US, in contrast, the opposition is in favor of less, rather than more. The two likeliest Republican candidates in 2024, Trump and DeSantis, favor talks and a peace settlement, along America First lines. As Biden was in Poland, Trump was in Pennsylvania; and DeSantis was urging restraint. The chances of an American pivot on Ukraine seem at this point higher than a Russian one, do they not?

That’s why, I suppose, the chorus of support this past week in Washington — by almost the entire foreign policy Blob — had a slight air of desperation about it. Two Atlantic headlines blared the neocon message: a surreal piece arguing that “Biden Just Destroyed Putin’s Last Hope,” and “Biden Went to Kyiv Because There’s No Going Back.” Anne Applebaum says Biden’s trip is “putting everyone on notice, including the defense ministries and the defense industries, that the paradigm has shifted and the story has changed.” Europe is at war and there is no going back until Russia is defeated and has withdrawn from all of Ukraine. The off-ramps are being removed.

Which is a little bit concerning when the enemy has nukes. That’s why the US stood by when Soviet tanks went into Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War — a far greater incursion than a fifth of Ukraine. We held back not because it was right, but because the alternative could have been catastrophic. We can pray that nothing happens this time — but prayer is not that effective against a potentially desperate regime fighting for what it believes is its existential survival and for a leader who knows a loss would mean his possibly literal demise. In short: we’re objectively taking more of a risk now than we did for almost all of the Cold War, excepting October 1962, with far lower stakes. Has the nuclear equation changed that much since then?

Wars are dynamic and unpredictable. Will Putin invade Moldova? Will Belarus go all-in against Ukraine? Will this war cement a Russia-China alliance and deepen Russia-India ties? Or will battlefield success for Ukraine lead to some kind of breakthrough, as the current strategy seems to be aiming at? I don’t know, and none of us know. What I do know is that Russia is going nowhere; that getting it out of the Donbas may require a long WWI-style slog; that at some point, a territorial compromise is inevitable; and that the longer this war goes on, the worse the human and economic toll on Ukraine.

And as Ron DeSantis pointed out this week, the strongest argument for war — that anything less would put all of Europe at risk of Russian invasion — is a lot weaker now that the shambles of the Russian military has been exposed. A military that cannot occupy more than a fifth of a non-NATO country on its border is not likely to be entering Warsaw anytime soon. And the conflict has strengthened NATO immeasurably and accelerated Europe’s transition from carbon energy, both indisputably good things.

My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righteous but dangerous. Putin is very much in the wrong, just as Saddam was. Evil men, vile regimes. But the one thing I learned from all that, is that focusing on morality rather than prudence, and letting the former eclipse the latter entirely, can be a righteous and well-intentioned road to hell.

Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility

Yes, and it ain't "right-wing" antisemitism.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Some students report being spat upon and harassed, while some campus groups have forced out those who support Israel":

Some college students say they have started hiding their Jewish identity in fear of rising antisemitism. “We have basically been shunned.” https://t.co/ibsI06h6xa

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 14, 2022

Adina Pinsker commutes to Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to study supply-chain management. She is also active in Hillel International, the nation’s largest collegiate Jewish organization.

When she arrives on campus, she takes an indirect route to class and tucks inside her shirt the silver Star of David she wears around her neck. These are precautions, she said, to avoid harassment from students who dislike Israel, the people who support it, or both.

“We have basically been shunned,” said Ms. Pinsker, who said she has been subject to derogatory remarks about her beliefs.

Ms. Pinsker’s actions are emblematic of rising fear among some Jewish college students around the country, who have begun shrouding their religious identity and political beliefs to avoid growing ostracism and harassment, according to interviews with dozens of students.

College campuses have long hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But now, students say anti-Jewish antagonism is on the rise: Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.

Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.

Students at schools including the University of Vermont, Wellesley College and DePaul University have ejected Jewish students who support Israel from clubs and study groups, according to interviews with affected students.

Students at Tufts University, University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles tried to prevent Jewish classmates from serving in student government or attempted to remove them from positions in student government because of their support of Israel, according to students, administrators and campus news reports.

The uptick in incidents and tension on some campuses comes amid a string of recent high-profile controversies that have drawn renewed attention to antisemitism. This month Twitter suspended the account of rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West—who now goes by the name Ye—after he tweeted to his 32 million followers an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, weeks after he tweeted: “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

On campus, students say that stereotypical antisemitic slurs are directed at Jews, but that much of the hostility derives from growing criticism of Israel’s handling of its political and military conflict with Palestinians over land rights. Jewish students say harassment often compounds when criticism of Israel increases.

Most American Jews feel an attachment to Israel, though many are critical of the Israeli government, according to a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center.

Some of the conflict on campus stems from competing definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and whether they overlap.

Anti-Zionism is a political position distinct from antisemitism, which is a prejudice, said Dylan Saba, an attorney with New York-based Palestine Legal, which works to support the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who advocate for Palestinians. The two are conflated by supporters of Israel to discredit critics, he said.

Condemning Israel may make some Jewish students feel uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it is antisemitic, he said. “All we are asking for is equal rights,” he said...

Bullshit. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel is antisemitic. Full stop. "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free" means wiping Israel --- and all its Jewish citizens --- off the face of the map.

It's easy to prove, too. Just walk up to any pro-Palestine student organization --- literally in any college campus in America --- and ask its leaders if they support Hamas. In my experience they will not answer. Not only that, in my case, they'll call the police on you. 

Henry Kissinger Is Worried About 'Disequilibrium'

The man's still in the arena, at 99.

At the Wall Street Journal, "The 99-year-old former secretary of state has just published a book on leadership and sees a dangerous lack of strategic purpose in U.S. foreign policy":

At 99 years old, Henry Kissinger has just published his 19th book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy.” It is an analysis of the vision and historical achievements of an idiosyncratic pantheon of post-World War II leaders: Konrad Adenauer, Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan-Yew and Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1950s, “before I was involved in politics,” Mr. Kissinger tells me in his midtown Manhattan office on a steamy day in July, “my plan was to write a book about the making of peace and the ending of peace in the 19th century, starting with the Congress of Vienna, and that turned into a book, and then I had about a third of a book written on Bismarck, and it was going to end with the outbreak of World War I.” The new book, he says, “is a kind of continuation. It’s not just a contemporary reflection.”

All six figures profiled in “Leadership,” says the former secretary of state and national security adviser, were shaped by what he calls the “second Thirty Years’ War,” the period from 1914 to 1945, and contributed to molding the world that followed it. And all combined, in Mr. Kissinger’s view, two archetypes of leadership: the farsighted pragmatism of the statesman and the visionary boldness of the prophet.

Asked if he knows of any contemporary leader who shares this combination of qualities, he says, “No. I would make the qualification that, though DeGaulle had this in him, this vision of himself, in the case of Nixon and probably Sadat, or even of Adenauer, you would not have known at an earlier stage. On the other hand, none of these people were essentially tactical people. They mastered the art of tactics, but they had a perception of purpose as they entered office.”

One never goes long in conversation with Mr. Kissinger without hearing that word—purpose—the defining quality of the prophet, along with another, equilibrium, the guiding preoccupation of the statesman. Since the 1950s, when he was a Harvard scholar writing on nuclear strategy, Mr. Kissinger has understood diplomacy as a balancing act among great powers shadowed by the potential for nuclear catastrophe. The apocalyptic potential of modern weapons technology, in his view, makes sustaining an equilibrium of hostile powers, however uneasy it might be, an overriding imperative of international relations.

“In my thinking, equilibrium has two components,” he tells me. “A kind of balance of power, with an acceptance of the legitimacy of sometimes opposing values. Because if you believe that the final outcome of your effort has to be the imposition of your values, then I think equilibrium is not possible. So one level is a sort of absolute equilibrium.” The other level, he says, is “equilibrium of conduct, meaning there are limitations to the exercise of your own capabilities and power in relation to what is needed for the overall equilibrium.” Achieving this combination takes “an almost artistic skill,” he says. “It’s not very often that statesmen have aimed at it deliberately, because power had so many possibilities of being expanded without being disastrous that countries never felt that full obligation.”

Mr. Kissinger concedes that equilibrium, while essential, can’t be a value in itself. “There can be situations where coexistence is morally impossible,” he notes. “For example, with Hitler. With Hitler it was useless to discuss equilibrium—even though I have some sympathy for Chamberlain if he was thinking that he needed to gain time for a showdown that he thought would be inevitable anyway.”

There is a hint, in “Leadership,” of Mr. Kissinger’s hope that contemporary American statesmen might absorb the lessons of their predecessors. “I think that the current period has a great trouble defining a direction,” Mr. Kissinger says. “It’s very responsive to the emotion of the moment.” Americans resist separating the idea of diplomacy from that of “personal relationships with the adversary.” They tend to view negotiations, he tells me, in missionary rather than psychological terms, seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than to penetrate their thinking.

Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose.”

On the question of Taiwan, Mr. Kissinger worries that the U.S. and China are maneuvering toward a crisis, and he counsels steadiness on Washington’s part. “The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure.”

Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine. He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history—were logical members of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland.”

He says, however, that the die has now been cast. After the way Russia has behaved in Ukraine, “now I consider, one way or the other, formally or not, Ukraine has to be treated in the aftermath of this as a member of NATO.” Still, he foresees a settlement that preserves Russia’s gains from its initial incursion in 2014, when it seized Crimea and portions of the Donbas region, though he does not have an answer to the question of how such a settlement would differ from the agreement that failed to stabilize the conflict 8 years ago...

 

Georgia Election Worker Shaye Moss, And Her Mother and Grandmother, Terrorized by Trump Followers After 2020 Election (VIDEO)

Citizens' fear from the repercussion of voting isn't a thing I've ever contemplated. I always thought the intimidation and violence of Southern Blacks was historical, like marchers being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama during the King Years.

It's cliche at this point to say American politics is ugly and vicious. I know personally from the left's lying, low-down attempts to cancel me, to get me fired ten years ago from my teaching position, that ideological hate drives political polarization. I was physically attacked when I covered the Hamas/International ANSWER demonstrations in Los Angeles. I finally quit reporting them, it got so bad. You get a target on your back.

But I've never been targeted at my home. I've never had to relocate to a safe house for months because of my politics and teaching. Imagine the nightmare that Shaye Moss and her family have been living since November 2020, when President Trump called her out by name during his efforts to overturn the Georgia election results. His words set off mobs of MAGA supporters on campaigns of terror. I want to continue loving President Trump for his time in office before the 2020 election. But everything that happened after that makes me sick. 

The more I see of it, of Trump's very own words, on audio and video, broken down and put in context, makes me hope that he's not the GOP nominee in 2024. Right now I favor Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and pray to God he wins and that the conservative movement can start over and rebuild under new leadership. 

There's too much hate in this country. Had not the "Big Lie" taken over Republican politics after the election, and had not January 6th not happened, I'd be the world's biggest supporter for Trump 2024. Now I just can't.

The story's at the New York Times, "‘There Is Nowhere I Feel Safe’: Election Officials Describe Threats Fueled by Trump":

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?’’ Ruby Freeman, a Black election worker from Georgia, told the Jan. 6 committee.

WASHINGTON — Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of Arizona’s House, braced every weekend for hordes of Trump supporters, some with weapons, who swarmed his home and blared videos that called him a pedophile.

“We had a daughter who was gravely ill, who was upset by what was happening outside,” he said. She died not long after, in late January 2021.

Gabriel Sterling, a top state election official in Georgia, recalled receiving an animated picture of a slowly twisting noose along with a note accusing him of treason. His boss, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, recounted that Trump supporters broke into his widowed daughter-in-law’s house and threatened his wife with sexual violence.

And Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, two Black women who served as election workers during the pandemic in Georgia, suffered an onslaught of racist abuse and were driven into hiding after Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Donald J. Trump’s lawyer, lied that they had rigged the election against Mr. Trump.

“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman said, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Election official after election official testified to the House Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday in searing, emotional detail how Mr. Trump and his aides unleashed violent threats and vengeance on them for refusing to cave to his pressure to overturn the election in his favor.

The testimony showed how Mr. Trump and his aides encouraged his followers to target election officials in key states — even going so far as to post their personal cellphone numbers on Mr. Trump’s social media channels, which the committee cited as a particularly brutal effort by the president to cling to power....

Ms. Moss, who goes by Shaye, and her mother became the targets of Trump supporters after Mr. Giuliani falsely accused them in a Georgia State Senate hearing of passing around USB drives like “vials of heroin or cocaine” to steal the election from Mr. Trump.

What her mother actually handed her, Ms. Moss testified on Tuesday, was a ginger mint candy.

But Mr. Giuliani’s claim — later elevated by Mr. Trump himself, who referred to Ms. Moss by name more than a dozen times in a call with Mr. Raffensperger — tore across far-right circles of the internet. Soon after, the F.B.I. informed Ms. Freeman that it was no longer safe for her to stay at her house.

The urgency of that warning became clear after Trump supporters showed up at the door of Ms. Moss’s grandmother. They forced their way into her home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter.

“This woman is my everything,” Ms. Moss testified about her grandmother. “I’ve never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life, and she called me screaming at the top of her lungs.”

While in hiding, Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman continued to face threats explicitly invoking their race, including a comment that Ms. Moss and her mother should “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”

“A lot of them were racist,” Ms. Moss said. “A lot of them were just hateful.”

Both women testified that nearly two years later, they were still haunted by the threat of violence. Ms. Moss recalled listening to the audio tape of Mr. Trump attacking her and her mother and immediately feeling “like it was all my fault.”

“I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job,” she testified, growing emotional. “And being the one that always wants to help and always there, never missing not one election. I just felt like it was — it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, quietly responded from the dais.

Ms. Freeman testified that she no longer went to the grocery store, and felt nervous every time she gave her name — once proudly worn bedazzled on T-shirts — for food orders.

“There is nowhere I feel safe,” Ms. Freeman testified. “The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one.”

New U.S. Containment Policy Against the Soviet Union Russia

I don't think most people realize, especially the weird right-wingers siding with Russia over Ukraine (something I haven't completely figured out, except for maybe Tucker Carlson?), that it's a new era. Big time.

NATO's never before authorized armed mobilization under the NATO Charter's Article V, which calls for "collective defense" in the event of a military attack against any NATO member. If there's an attack, each other NATO member is committed to providing mutual aid to any other member state of the alliance. There are 30 members, but without the U.S. it's pretty weak. 

The fighting in Ukraine, its initiation and its conclusion, will either dramatically shift the world balance of power or dramatically alter the perceptions of the world balance of power, regardless of the material qualitative/quantitative indices of national capabilities. 

The U.S. already looks weak after basically 20 years of unsuccessful wars, with the punctuation mark being the Biden administration's debacle in Afghanistan last summer. My sense, in the short term, is that China will quickly pocket whatever relative gains there may be. It's not a combatant, for one thing. Russia's now a total client state to Beijing. And the U.S. will be seen for clumsy, noncommittal strategic restraint. If Ukraine can't hold out, the U.S. will once again look the weaker, nothing like we were after World War II, when only the Soviets could claim to be a peer rival. 

No matter what happens, current events show how much things have change. The post-WWII international order is collapsing, or has already collapsed.

To even mention "containment" in the same breath sounds strange. During the Cold War, the U.S. was fully ready to back up its deterrence posture with hard force, anywhere in the world, and especially with our strategic nuclear weapons.

In any case, at the New York Times, "Biden Targets Russia With Strategy of Containment, Updated for a New Era":

WASHINGTON — More than 75 years ago, faced with a Soviet Union that clearly wanted to take over states beyond its borders, the United States adopted a Cold War approach that came to be known as “containment,” a simplistic-sounding term that evolved into a complex Cold War strategy.

On Thursday, having awakened to a violent, unprovoked attack on Ukraine, exactly the kind of nightmare imagined eight decades before, President Biden made clear he was moving toward Containment 2.0. Though it sounds a lot like its predecessor, it will have to be revised for a modern era that is in many ways more complex.

The nation that just moved “to wipe an entire country off the world map,” in the words of Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, also remains a key supplier of natural gas to keep Germans and many other Europeans warm. That explains why Mr. Biden has been constrained from cutting off the valuable export. And the Russia of today has a panoply of cyberweapons that it can use to strike at the United States or its allies without risking nuclear Armageddon — an option to retaliate against American sanctions that was never available to President Vladimir V. Putin’s predecessors.

Those are only two examples of why containment will not be easy. But Mr. Biden has been clear that is where he is headed.

For three decades, American presidents described a series of Soviet and Russian leaders as “businesslike” or even “partners.” They celebrated “glasnost” and ushered Moscow into the World Trade Organization and the Group of 7 industrial nations. Washington even entertained the idea in the 1990s — very briefly — that one day Russia could join NATO. No one has talked that way in years. But Mr. Biden, who came to office last year talking about establishing a “stable, predictable” relationship with Moscow, spoke of a completely ruptured relationship on Thursday.

“Now the entire world sees clearly what Putin and his Kremlin allies are really all about,” Mr. Biden said in a speech from the White House. “This was never about genuine security concerns on their part. It was always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary, by bullying Russia’s neighbors through coercion and corruption.”

He vowed to make Russia pay “dearly, economically and strategically,” and to make Mr. Putin a “pariah on the international stage.” Those words might have even been familiar to George F. Kennan, the American foreign service officer who became famous as the grand strategist who invented containment, though he later warned, at age 94, that expanding NATO to Russia’s borders was a bad idea, bound to become “the beginning of a new Cold War.”

The “containment” Mr. Kennan described in his famous “Long Telegram,” an 8,000-word dispatch from the American embassy in Moscow, was primarily aimed at putting geographical limits on Soviet ambitions. But even though the Long Telegram was long, it spent the most time explaining the psychology of Stalin’s regime, which Mr. Kennan described as paranoid, viewing the outside world to be “evil, hostile and menacing.”

The similarities to Mr. Putin’s speech on Monday night, in which he accused Ukraine of triggering genocides and seeking nuclear weapons — both false claims — and the United States of seeking to use Ukrainian territory to strike at Moscow, are striking. So was his description of America’s “empire of lies.”

But as Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Thursday, “It’s much more complicated to make containment work today.”

The Soviet Union largely presented a military and ideological challenge, he noted. Yet modern-day Russia is a provider of needed fuel and minerals, “and that gives them leverage over us, even as we have leverage over them.” The force of that leverage was made clear from Mr. Biden’s answer to a question on Thursday about why Russia had not been thrown out of SWIFT, the global communication system for financial transactions.

Barring Russia from that system would be a devastating move, cutting off its government from oil and gas revenue. That accounts for about 40 percent of its incoming cash and would be the one sanction almost certain to hurt Mr. Putin like no other.

But Mr. Biden noted in his speech that “in our sanctions package, we specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue.” When asked about barring Russia from SWIFT, he added, delicately, “Right now, that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.” In fact, the debate over SWIFT has been a source of tense behind-the-scenes exchanges, chiefly with Germany. The German objection is clear: If the country cannot pay for its gas, Russia will not deliver it.

But the second reason containment may not work is that Russia has a new, if not very enthusiastic, partner in standing up to the West: China...

Keep reading.

 

What's Really at Stake in America's History Wars?

At WSJ, "In debates about monuments, curricula and renaming, the facts of the past matter less than how we are supposed to feel about our country":

In January, McMinn County, Tenn., made international news for perhaps the first time in its history when the school board voted to remove “Maus,” the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the 8th-grade curriculum. The board stated that it made the change on account of the book’s “use of profanity and nudity,” asking school administrators to “find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.”

This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.

This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures.

None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.)

Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders.

It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine.

Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes.

That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon.

But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either.

Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves.

Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse?

How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.”

To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population?

Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment.

The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice.

In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line.

In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject.

Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries.

It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization...

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.

The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.

The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.

We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.

The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.

Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”

Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.

The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.

In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.

At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.

These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”

Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.

The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.

This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”

A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.

As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”

Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”

But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.

“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”

In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.

As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.

Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.

And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.

Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”

A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”

The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis

for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.

Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

 

Five-Star Emporium of Ambition in Kinshasha

Following-up, "A Power Struggle Over Cobalt Rattles the Clean Energy Revolution."

At NYT. "On the Banks of the Furious Congo River, a 5-Star Emporium of Ambition":

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The lobby of the Fleuve Congo Hotel was a swirl of double-breasted suits and tailored dresses one April morning. Shiny gold watches dangled from wrists. Stilettos clacked across marble floors. Smooth jazz played as men in designer loafers sipped espressos.

Situated on the banks of the muddy, furious Congo River, the Fleuve is an emporium of ambition in a nation that, despite extreme poverty and chronic corruption, serves up raw materials crucial to the planet’s battle against climate change.

The soil in the Democratic Republic of Congo is bursting with cobalt and other metals used in the production of electric car batteries, wind turbines and other mainstays of the green energy revolution. Practically everyone who passes through the hotel, where the air conditioning battles the sweltering heat, seems determined to grab a piece of the wealth.

Just off the lobby that day, near a sumptuous brunch buffet, sat Dikembe Mutombo, the 7-foot-2 former NBA all-star player. He had teamed up in his quest for mineral riches with Gentry Beach, a Texas hedge-fund manager who is a family friend and major fund-raiser to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Mutombo shared his table with a top Congolese mining lawyer turned politician whose office is conveniently located in a complex near the hotel.

As the clean energy revolution upends the centuries-long lock of fossil fuels on the global economy, dealmakers and hustlers converge on the Fleuve Congo Hotel.

Felix Tshisekedi, the Congolese president, top in the gray suit, arrived this spring at the Fleuve Congo Hotel in Kinshasa.Credit...

Situated on the banks of the muddy, furious Congo River, the Fleuve is an emporium of ambition in a nation that, despite extreme poverty and chronic corruption, serves up raw materials crucial to the planet’s battle against climate change.

The soil in the Democratic Republic of Congo is bursting with cobalt and other metals used in the production of electric car batteries, wind turbines and other mainstays of the green energy revolution. Practically everyone who passes through the hotel, where the air conditioning battles the sweltering heat, seems determined to grab a piece of the wealth.

Just off the lobby that day, near a sumptuous brunch buffet, sat Dikembe Mutombo, the 7-foot-2 former NBA all-star player. He had teamed up in his quest for mineral riches with Gentry Beach, a Texas hedge-fund manager who is a family friend and major fund-raiser to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Mutombo shared his table with a top Congolese mining lawyer turned politician whose office is conveniently located in a complex near the hotel.

Mr. Mutombo is among a wave of adventurers and opportunists who have filled a vacuum created by the departure of major American mining companies, and by the reluctance of other traditional Western firms to do business in a country with a reputation for labor abuses and bribery.

The list of fortune hunters includes Erik Prince, the security contractor and ex-Navy SEAL; Jide Zeitlin, the Nigerian-born former chief executive of the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade; and Aliaune Thiam, the Senegalese-American musician known as Akon.

All have been drawn to Congo’s high-risk, high-reward mining sector as the demand for cobalt has skyrocketed because automakers around the world are speeding up plans to convert from gasoline- to electric-powered fleets.

Most recently, Ford Motor, General Motors and Toyota announced they would spend billions of dollars to build battery factories in the United States. The price of cobalt has doubled since January, and more than two-thirds of the global supply is here in Congo.

The Fleuve became the go-to luxury destination after a politically connected Chinese businessman — himself a mining dealmaker — was awarded a contract to run what had once been an abandoned 1970s-era office building. The now five-star hotel has usurped the elite status of its competitor next door, built in the 1960s with U.S. government financing, and it is the kind of place where swashbucklers arrive by private plane trailed by paparazzi, and where some guests keep suitcases of cash and nuggets of gold locked in their rooms.

The frenzied atmosphere at the hotel reflects a pivotal moment for the country — and the world — as the clean energy revolution upends the centuries-long lock of fossil fuels on the global economy.

“Congo is the one who is going to deliver the EV of the future,” Mr. Mutombo, the retired basketball player, said of electric vehicles. “There is no other answer.”

But such bravado signals trouble to some seasoned business people, who see a lot of show and little substance in the new class of deal seekers.

“The country has become the prey of international adventurers,” said Jozsef M. Kovacs, who built the neighboring hotel, originally an InterContinental, which once hosted waves of executives from major Western mining companies that had billions of dollars in capital available to them and decades of mining experience. A handful of those traditional investors remain in Congo, including Robert Friedland, founder of Vancouver, B.C.-based Ivanhoe Mines. But Ivanhoe’s operations are now in large part financed by Chinese investors, who dominate the industrial mining sector in Congo.

“You don’t have a lot of these Fortune 500 mining companies,” said Luc Gerard Nyafé, a regular at the Fleuve who advises the Congolese president and is pursuing mining interests here. “That is something that needs to change.”

But for now, at least, the adventurers have taken center stage, and sometimes their ambitions converge at the Fleuve. Ambassadors, mercenaries, celebrities, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs — they all pass through...

Why Australia Bet the House on Lasting American Power in Asia

So you would think.

I'm surprised the U.S. has waited this long to bring the Aussies into the nuclear loop.

At NYT, "Less than three years ago, Australia’s leader said his country need not choose between the U.S. and China. A nuclear submarine deal shows that much has changed since then":

SYDNEY, Australia — When Scott Morrison became Australia’s prime minister three years ago, he insisted that the country could maintain close ties with China, its largest trading partner, while working with the United States, its main security ally.

“Australia doesn’t have to choose,” he said in one of his first foreign policy speeches.

On Thursday, Australia effectively chose. Following years of sharply deteriorating relations with Beijing, Australia announced a new defense agreement in which the United States and Britain would help it deploy nuclear-powered submarines, a major advance in Australian military strength.

With its move to acquire heavy weaponry and top-secret technology, Australia has thrown in its lot with the United States for generations to come — a “forever partnership,” in Mr. Morrison’s words. The agreement will open the way to deeper military ties and higher expectations that Australia would join any military conflict with Beijing.

It’s a big strategic bet that America will prevail in its great-power competition with China and continue to be a dominant and stabilizing force in the Pacific even as the costs increase.

“It really is a watershed moment — a defining moment for Australia and the way it thinks about its future in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Richard Maude, a former Australian security official who is now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“It does represent really quite sharp concerns now in the Morrison government about a deteriorating security environment in the region, about China’s military buildup and about China’s willingness to use coercive power to pursue national interests,” he said.

“This is utterly irresponsible conduct,” Mr. Zhao said.

For the United States, the decision to bolster a close Asia-Pacific ally represents a tangible escalation of its efforts to answer China’s rapid military growth. The Defense Department said in its most recent report to Congress that China now had the largest navy in the world, measured in numbers of vessels, having built a fleet of approximately 350 ships by 2019, including a dozen nuclear submarines.

By comparison, the U.S. Navy has around 293 ships. While American vessels tend to be larger, China is also catching up with aircraft carriers while surpassing the United States with smaller, agile ships.

At the same time, China has moved aggressively to secure locations for outposts and missiles, building up its presence on islands that it constructed in the South China Sea. Security analysts believe that Australia would be likely to use nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the important shipping lanes there, in waters also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. The choice of vessel, they said, sends an unmistakable message.

“Nothing is more provocative to China than nuke stuff and submarine stuff,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, who is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and at the American Enterprise Institute. “China’s so weak in anti-submarine warfare in comparison to other capabilities.”

“To me,” said Ms. Mastro, a regular visitor to Australia, “it suggests that Australia is willing to take some real risks in its relationship to stand up to China.”

American and Australian officials, seeking to douse proliferation concerns, emphasized that the submarines were nuclear-powered but had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The promise of eight American vessels coincided with Australia’s cancellation of a contract for 12 conventional French-designed submarines that had been delayed and running over budget. French officials reacted angrily, calling the abandonment of the deal a betrayal of trust...

The French are the biggest fucking babies. *Eye-roll.*

Still more.

 

DRASTIC

This is the big Wuhan lab-leak story, in great detail, at Vanity Fair, "The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins":

I. A Group Called DRASTIC

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild animals—a possible source of the virus.

That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections of bat samples and bat-virus strains. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as the natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally. After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and Shi became known in China as “Bat Woman” for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples. More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.

To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has strenuously denied.

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.

At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade.

With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the DRASTIC researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness, working on the world’s most urgent mystery. They weren’t alone. But investigators inside the U.S. government asking similar questions were operating in an environment that was as politicized and hostile to open inquiry as any Twitter echo chamber. When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.

The question is: Why?

II. “A Can of Worms”

Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.

On May 26, the steady crescendo of questions led President Joe Biden to release a statement acknowledging that the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios,” and announce that he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days. His statement noted, “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” But that wasn’t the only failure.

In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”

Keep reading.

 

Why China's Rise Won't Happen

From Gordon Chang, at the National Interest, "China's Rise (and America's Fall) Just Won't Happen. Here's Why":

China's Rise (and America's Fall) Just Won't Happen. Here's Why https://t.co/qoBzTM9dh6

— National Interest (@TheNatlInterest) October 13, 2018

"This geopolitical recession is something really simple—it’s the end of the U.S.-led global order," Ian Bremmer, head of risk advisors Eurasia Group, told the ANZ Finance & Treasury Forum in Singapore this week.

Bremmer’s message plays well, and not just to those attending financial conferences. Most American policymakers, for instance, have bought into his “declinist” predictions about China’s rise and America’s fall. At least two—and maybe all three—of President Donald Trump’s immediate predecessors accepted the premise of eventual Chinese dominance.

For a long time, those predictions were generally accepted. Most recently, however, there are even more reasons to challenge the assumptions underpinning the narrative of declinism.

Declinists make one fundamentally incorrect assessment. “So that is one big reason why we have entered a geopolitical recession,” Bremmer told the crowd in Singapore. “All of the major international underpinnings of the U.S.-led order have become unmoored over the last 25 years.”

The most important reason for the establishment of the U.S.-led order after the Second World War was the dominance of the American economy, and the most important justification for declinist views has been China’s stunning four-decade economic revitalization. There is no shortage of predictions when in dollar-denominated terms China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the U.S.

The gap between the two economies is still wide, however. Last year, the U.S. produced $19.39 trillion of GDP. China’s 2017 GDP, at a reported $12.84 trillion, was only 66.2 percent of America’s.

And that gap is, in reality, widening. Beijing’s official National Bureau of Statistics reported 6.8 percent growth for the first half of the year, far in excess of the American rate.

Yet China’s number is surely exaggerated. Beijing claimed nearly identical 6.7 percent growth for 2016. The World Bank, however, has cast doubt on that figure by releasing a chart in the middle of last year.

So what was China’s gross domestic product increase in 2016 according to the World Bank? Answer: 1.1 percent.

Shocked? The 1.1 percent figure is surprisingly close to the single best overall indicator of Chinese economic activity, total primary energy consumption. In 2016, total primary energy consumption, according to Beijing’s official numbers, was up 1.4 percent.

America’s economy, thanks to Trump’s deep cuts in taxes and regulations, is powering ahead. In the first two calendar quarters of this year, the economy grew 2.2 percent and 4.2 percent. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for the just-completed third quarter is 4.2 percent.

China’s economy is beset by excessive debt accumulation and other maladies, but the main factor inhibiting economic potential is not a systemic debt crisis—a concern to be sure—but the abandonment of reformist policies. Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, has turned his back on Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” program that is credited with sparking Chinese growth for almost four decades. Instead, Xi for a half decade has been reinstituting the Stalinist state model that Mao Zedong embraced in the early 1950s.

Xi’s reversal of liberal economic policies has been matched by his reversal of political and social policies. He has de-institutionalized the Communist Party, thereby heightening the risk of political instability. At the same time, he has demanded conformity—“absolute loyalty”—and tightened social controls. The institution of a nationwide social credit system , which will assign a score to every resident for all his or her actions, is but one example of the state’s attempt at total control of society.

China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.

And there is one more reason to doubt Chinese economic dominance: demography. China will soon join the ranks of shrinking nations. The population will peak somewhere around 1.44 billion people at the end of next decade according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. By the end of the century, China will have a population of 1.02 billion.

China’s decline has implications for its competition with the U.S. In 2015, China’s population was 4.4 times larger than America’s. By 2100, China is projected to have a population only 2.3 times larger.

China’s projected decline—and we should remember the U.N.’s estimates seem to overstate that country’s demographic potential—does not mean the Chinese economy cannot succeed, but it does mean it will have to succeed in spite of demography. China’s four-decade burst of growth occurred during the reaping of the “demographic dividend,” an extraordinary increase in the size of its workforce...

Still more.

Leftists Freak Out at the Appointment of 'Über Hawk' John Bolton as National Security Adviser

I of course am delighted with Bolton's appointment, not the least because of how it freaks out the retarded leftist progs, lol.

At Foreign Policy, via Memeorandum, "John Bolton Is a National Security Threat":

Three weeks ago, I said if John Bolton replaces H.R. McMaster, “we are going to die.” This new piece with @JBWolfsthal via @ForeignPolicy explains why 👇 https://t.co/ftTNTc5GDX

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) March 23, 2018

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster is out as Trump’s national security adviser and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and current Fox News contributor) John Bolton is in. This is no mere rotation of on-screen personalities in the latest episode of “The Trump Show.” It is a move with potentially profound implications for the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, Bolton’s ascendance increases the risk of not one, but two wars — with North Korea and Iran.

McMaster was no dove. But Bolton falls into an entirely different category of dangerous uber-hawk. Fifteen years ago, Bolton championed the Iraq war and, to this day, he continues to believe the most disastrous foreign policy decision in a generation was a good idea. Bolton’s position on Iraq was no anomaly. Shortly before the 2003 invasion, he reportedly told Israeli officials that once Saddam Hussein was deposed, it would be necessary to deal with Syria, Iran, and North Korea. He has essentially maintained this position ever since. Put plainly: for Bolton, there are few international problems where war is not the answer...

More.

At at NYT, lol:

John Bolton is considered too extreme for any position requiring Senate confirmation. Just the kind of man the president likes. https://t.co/1PqTIYZn2I

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) March 23, 2018

The Palestinian Mountain of Hate

Following-up, "Omar al-Abed, Hamas-Allied Terrorist, Murders Three Israelis in Jihad Knife Attack in West Bank's Halamish Settlement (VIDEO)."

From Liel Leibovitz, at the Tablet, "How the Noble Sanctuary, sacred to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount, was transformed into a megaphone for bigotry, murder, and genocide":

Tens of thousands of faithful Muslims pack Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque every week. Things have been particularly tense in the holy site this week, after Palestinian terrorists murdered two Israeli police officers last Friday. Israel responded by putting up metal detectors, an act that led thousands of Palestinians to riot and assualt Israeli soldiers with rocks, bottles, and clubs.

What could make folks gathered for prayer so rowdy? Listen in on some of the mosque’s sermons, and the answer becomes painfully obvious.

“The Israelites,” roared Khaled al-Mughrabi, one of al-Aqsa’s top preachers, in the summer of 2015, “have a holiday, Passover. Every holiday, each group would look for a small child. They would kidnap the child, steal him, and put him inside a barrel, called ‘the barrel of nails.’ They would put the small child inside the barrel, and his body would be pierced by the nails. At the bottom of the barrel they would put a faucet, and that faucet would run with the boy’s blood. This is because Satan demanded of them, in return to doing everything they want, that they eat bread kneaded with the blood of children.”

When they’re not ritually slaughtering babes, Mughrabi said on other occasions, the Jews have a full agenda of evil: they’re the real culprits behind the 9/11 attacks, are planning to take over the world, and are actual blood-drinking vampires, which is why the industry they control, Hollywood, loves making so many movies about the Jew Dracula.

Not to be outdone, Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, is fond of using the mosque to talk about one of his favorite topics, the Holocaust. Which, to hear the renowned sheikh tell it, never happened. “Six million Jews dead? No way, they were much fewer,” he told an interviewer. “Let’s stop with this fairytale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity. It is not my fault if Hitler hated Jews, indeed they were hated a little everywhere.”

 Still more, but you get the idea.

Linda Kimball, 'Exposing America's Enemies: The Social Justice Seeking Communist Left'

At his post this morning, Robert Stacy McCain linked Linda Kimball's piece on "Cultural Marxism" at American Thinker. It's an old piece, which I've read before, but I googled some of the articles linked there. One of these is, "Exposing America's Enemies: The 'Social Justice Seeking' Communist Left," originally posted at the American Daily, but now dead.

I'm posting here some excerpts I've found at various other cites. Ms. Kimball apparently aroused some strong passions on this issue, at Democrat Underground, for example, and this was back in 2006.

Free Republic also posted it at the time:

On one hand, Americans were outraged and appalled by the May 1 immigrant demonstrations that clogged streets and virtually closed down some cities. Law-abiding citizens saw lawbreakers who not only seemed to feel justified in their criminal behavior, but also believed they ought to be rewarded for it.

On the other hand, Americans are more infuriated and disgusted with their duly elected government officials in both legislative and administrative branches for not enforcing the law and protecting the rights of citizens. President Bush and the weak-kneed GOP have deservedly come under fire. If our sovereign nation is to survive, however, it is of paramount importance that the harsh light of truth be focused upon the subversive element responsible for creating an atmosphere conducive to lawlessness and tyrannical militants brazenly declaring their intentions to ''conquer'' the Southwest and to throw Americans out of their homes and off of their land.

The subversive element--a motley collection of Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, and malcontents--organized themselves in the 1960’s and became known as the New Left. For over forty years the New Left has been waging a Gramscian ''quiet'' revolution for the overthrow of the America of our founders. Today these subversives call themselves liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Even though there yet remain good, decent Democrats such as Zell Miller, the majority, as David Horowitz attested to, are social-justice seeking communists: “The Democratic Party is very close to being the (Communist-controlled Progressive) party of Henry Wallace…The vast bulk of the American left is a Communist left and they’ve introduced some fascist ideas like “identity politics,” which is straight out of Mussolini.” (How Marxism Dominates the Left, Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com, June 1, 2005)

America’s Communist Left operates in a vast interconnected matrix of revolutionary groups disguised as respectable civil rights and legal organizations. These front groups have consistently worked towards the transformation of America through subversion of America’s Rule of Law, Constitution, judiciary, and all institutions necessary to the longevity and health of our nation and civilization. These groups attack all national security measures, subvert immigration laws and procedures, lobby on behalf of terrorist and enemy combatants, and engage in propagandistic apologetics for the most brutal dictatorships in the world even as they constantly vilify and demean America and Americans. As they do these things to destroy America and shame Americans, they hypocritically portray themselves as defenders of democracy and humanity.

The purpose of this article is to expose, at least in part, some of the principal communist groups responsible for undermining and weakening America and who likewise serve as a power source, not only for the militant Marxist organizers of the recent demonstrations, but for Islamic jihadists as well.

The Quiet Revolution

In 1984, “The Power to Lead” was published. In it, author James McGregor Burns admitted: “The Framers of the US Constitution have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages, frail bridges, tinkering. If we are to ‘turn the Founders upside down’…we must directly confront the constitutional structure they erected.” (A Chronological History: The New World Order by D.L. Cuddy PhD)

Turning the ''Founders upside down'' and directly confronting the ''constitutional structure'' are what the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild, and The Center for Constitutional Rights are committed to doing. Together, these three communist front groups comprise the “legal left,” and they slash and rip at the fabric of the constitutional framework.

The ACLU was established in 1920 by Roger Baldwin, a Stalinist who candidly admitted: “I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself.” On the Communist Party USA website, the ACLU can be found at this link: go here. http://www.cpusa.org/link/category/22/

When not working with and defending terrorists like Sami al-Arian, the ACLU terrorizes towns into removing Ten Commandments monuments and crosses and persecutes and intimidates Boy Scouts and law abiding Christians. The ACLU’s Immigrant Task Force and Immigrant Rights Project are a dual driving force in the Open Borders Lobby. Among current projects: dissolving America’s borders, erasing all evidence of Christianity and God, and requiring the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to provide free legal counsel to illegals while simultaneously demanding that illegals be provided with full welfare benefits.

The ACLU and its partner groups receive funding from a large assortment of subversive leftist funders. Among them: Arca Foundation, Ford Foundation, George Soros Open Society Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, Woods Fund of Chicago (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1936 by the Communist Party USA. The NLG is an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which served as a Soviet front group during the Cold War. The NLG defines its mission as an effort to: “unite lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers of America (to) function as an effective political and social force…to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.” In other words, its mission is to ''deKulakize'' America in the name of social justice.

In 1999, NLG member Chip Berlet described a Guild ''communist debate'' session: “The cacophony at some meetings (arises from) debates featuring…Leninist, Trotskyite, Stalinists…Maoist…Marxist, anarchists, libertarians and progressive independents…with multiple identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers, tribal sovereignty activists, civil liberties and civil rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and people of color.” Chip Berlet is an activist with Morris Dees Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), another communist front group and Open Borders member.

Not coincidentally, it was the SPLC that ''redistributed''--in the name of social justice--an Arizona ranchers’ property to some illegal aliens. This incident was detailed in an article entitled: “Two Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court,” (New York Times, 8/19/05). Dees was quoted as saying, “…it’s poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land”

Like the ACLU, the NLG is a key member of the Open Borders Lobby. Its National Immigration Project consists of a network of lawyers, law students, and legal workers committed to “full democratic rights for all non-citizens”--in the name of social justice. The NLG receives funding from, among others, the George Soros Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The last of the trio is the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was founded in 1966 by pro-Castro attorneys Morton Stavis, Ben Smith, Arthur Kinoy, and William Kuntsler. The CCR prides itself on using “litigation proactively to advance the law in a positive direction to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protections.” This is communist code for: “We subvert America’s laws.” Among those deemed by the CCR to be in need of protection are terrorist organizations, enemy combatants, and illegal immigrants.

The CCR receives funding from the Ford Foundation and George Soros Open Society Institute. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org )

Two principal front groups, both of whom disguise their treachery as ‘civil rights,” are United for Peace and Justice and Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

The UFPJ is a rabidly anti-American, anti-war coalition co-chaired by committed communist Leslie Cagan. Cagan, who worships upon Fidel Castro’s altar, was an original founder of the Committees of Correspondence, a splinter group of the Communist Party USA. The UFPJ was created Oct. 25, 2002 in the Washington D.C. offices of People for the American Way, which played a key role in forming UFPJ. UFPJ is a sponsoring organization of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. UFPJ’s social justice agenda extends well beyond anti-war activism as it is also a pro-abortion, pro-open borders advocate that condemns nearly every aspect of American culture and our government’s foreign policy. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR), another key player in the Open Borders Lobby, is supported by the ACLU and Communist Party USA. Additionally, it has the backing of Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, and Joe Lieberman. Among other groups listed as members of the IWFRC’s national sponsoring committee are ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, and United for Peace and Justice.

At the link below are literally hundreds of sponsors of IWFR, such as: Democratic senators, representatives, county board supervisors, governors, town council members, radical organizations, liberalized Christian and non-Christian churches, and political parties (including CPUSA and Democratic Socialists of America: go here).

Many thousands of Americans have been taken in by a myth. The myth states that communism died when the Soviet Union imploded. It further says that in these ''enlightened progressive times,'' only superstition-believing McCarthyite rednecks still believe in the communist boogieman. The myth, of course, was created by New Left communists to whom seduction, deception, and psychological manipulation are the ''rules of the game.'' Gramsci’s transformational revolution is very much alive. It’s spreading the cancer of godless communism--the ideology from Hell--throughout the length and breadth of our culture, and corrupting and decaying everything it touches.

President Ronald Reagan cautioned that: “…without God, there is no virtue because there’s no prompting of the conscience. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Americans---awaken and remember!

And here's more, from "Exposing America's Enemies, Part 2: Communist Progressive Democrats":

Social Justice is Communism

Judging from the adolescent name-calling and howls of protest which my previous article elicited from Progressive groups such as the Democratic Underground, it is obvious that the enraged howlers have no idea of what it really means for one to be a seeker of social justice. Either that or they really do know but are deceivers of the first magnitude.

Be that as it may, some clarification and definition of the terms social justice and communism is in order before proceeding on to the issue of Progressive Democrats.

To most Americans, communism means the Kremlin, gulags, killing fields, and Mao's brutal Red Guard. These things though were not the essence of communism. They were the visible manifestations of inhumane power and its consequences, all of which resulted when social justice seekers acquired total control to remake society and man.

The essence of communism is social justice, or justice in the social sphere. This is code for the elimination of poverty, of suffering, and of all differences between humans that erect walls between people. Fundamentally, social justice is a process of elimination that results in sameness (egalitarianism). When social justice seekers speak of the need for equality, what they're really calling for is sameness.

However, the attributes which make people different from each other and which social justice seekers are determined to eliminate, are the product of human nature and of freely made choices. For instance, some people are ambitious and hard-working while others are indolent and lazy and may willfully choose to live out of the pockets of the former.

It's the positive aspects of human nature that make a society dynamic. Dynamism is the animating force behind America's greatness -- her productivity, excellence, creativity, free markets, etc. In eliminating human differences, social justice seekers kill all of this, and as they did in the former Soviet Union, leave behind a smoking ruin haunted by despairing cookie-cutter claymation beings.

In speaking of the social justice process of elimination, Balint Vazsonyi remarked, prophets of socialjustice communists, whether by that name or any other name, focus on who should have less. Because they have nothing to give, they can only take away. First, they take away opportunity. Next, they take away possessions. In the end, they have to take away life itself. (America's 30 Years War, Balint Vazsonyi, p. 59)

The America of our Founders simply cannot coexist with the Search for Social Justice. For instance, as designed by our Founders, the Rule of Law exists to guarantee that unequal (different) people can have individual liberty, rights and possessions—including land ownership, which social justice seekers view as the original sin. Social justice demands that those who possess more of anything have it taken away from those who earned it and redistributed to those who did nothing to earn it.

Social Justice Seeking Democratic Progressive Caucus

The Democratic Progressive Caucus (DPC) is an organization comprised of about sixty Members of Congress. It was founded in 1991 by Rep. Bernie Sanders, former socialist mayor of Burlington, VT, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA describes itself as the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. (www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The DPC advances its communist agenda behind innocuous sounding phrases such as social and economic justice. The three core principles of The Progressive Promise are:

1. Fighting for economic justice and security for all. (Code for: We’re going to ‘eliminate poverty and suffering’ by taking away all of your possessions and redistributing them.)

2. Protecting and preserving our civil rights and civil liberties. (Code for: We’re going to ‘eliminate’ all differences and pound everyone down to the lowest common denominator).

3. Promoting global peace and security. (Code for: We—your Superiors—will finally feel secure and at peace once agendas 1-2 have been carried out to completion.) (Source: http://www.bernie.house.gov/document_display_text.asp?FileToConvert=/pc/index.asp)

In “Pelosi Leader of Progressive Caucus,” it was revealed: “Until 1999, the website of the Progressive Caucus was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Following an expose of the link between the two organizations in World Net Daily, the Progressive Caucus established its own website.” (WorldNetDaily.com, Nov 11, 2002)

On the website of the DSA it boldly declares: “We are socialists…Democracy and socialism go hand in hand…wherever…democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org ) The DSA increases its influence and power by networking with the Democratic Party to advance social justice programs and policies such as affirmative action and Stalinist hate crime laws. “Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party.” (ibid)

Following are brief descriptions of some of the social justice seeking subversives in the Democratic Progressive Caucus whose words and actions embrace the tenets of communism:

1. Barbara Lee (D-CA): “former agent of the Black Panther leader and convicted killer, Huey Newton. Lee conspired with fellow communist, Cong. Ron Dellums, who used his authority to impede US foreign policy with regard to the Communist dictatorship of Grenada.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetWork.org ) “anti-American Communist who supports America’s enemies and has actively collaborated with them.” (Radical Road Map, James H. Hansen, p.189)

2. Jim McDermott (D-WA): “In 2002, McDermott and fellow Progressive Caucus member Rep. David Bonoir (D-Mich) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) traveled to Baghdad, where they publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and created propaganda on his behalf.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetWork.org )

3. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill), who has accepted an award from the DSA once told one of its writers: “The American people are not ideological; therefore, the way to go is to attack private power.” (ibid)

4. John Conyers (D-MI): “In 1981 Conyers co-hosted a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, giving that group a forum in Congress. Conyers endorsed a Communist-led antiwar demonstration in Washington in 1983 and…spoke at another Washington demonstration led by ANSWER in 2003.” (Radical Road Map’s, James H. Hansen, p 189)

5. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) “has taken part in…CAIR (a radical group with ties to Mideast terrorist organizations) events…including a Ramadan iftar…hosted (on Capitol Hill) by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA).” (Kucinich Headlines Muslim Fundraiser, WorldNetDaily.com, Nov. 30, 2003)

The Constitution requires that members of Congress “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.” The Oath of Office sworn to by US Senators reads:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the U.S…that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Very simply, if Democratic Progressive Caucus members truthfully believed in the Christian-Judeo God and likewise in our Constitution--the document conceived of by our Founders and not the Lefts living document nonsense—they wouldn’t be social justice seeking communists. Rather, they would be Conservative Constitutionalists. That they are social justice seekers tells us that when they took their oath before God, they lied. Quite simply—they lied.

In Noah Webster’s 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language we find the correct term to apply to treacherous Democratic Progressives. That word is “traitor,” and the following definition is the one most likely referred to by our Founders. “Traitor: One who violates allegiance and betrays his country; one guilty of treason…who, in breach of trust, delivers his country to its enemy…who aids an enemy in conquering his country.”

Through use of Stalinist psycho-politics, America’s Communist Left imprisoned the consciences of Americans within psychic strait-jackets of political correctness. As long as we allow ourselves to be chained by political correctness, we will not be able to identify and speak openly about our enemies--those without, and those within. In the absence of freedom of conscience and of clear and honest speaking, we can neither formulate strategies for our safety nor deal appropriately with the treacherous deceivers operating amongst us who are colluding with our enemies and plotting to destroy our nation from within. The first order of business then, is for all Americans to break out of the psychic strait jackets of political correctness, thus allowing Truth to expose the treachery and treason at work in our nation.

Truth will set us free: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.