Displaying posts published in

August 2020

The Three Perils Threatening the United States People are looking for crisis leadership that comprehends the dangers, is prepared to deal with them, and most importantly realizes that America is worth defending. By Richard Higgins

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/05/the-three-perils-threatening-the-united-states/

The Republic is in grave danger.

There, I said it.

Does anyone really doubt it? America is stumbling and the vultures are circling. What is the nature of these perils that afflict us?

America sits atop a global system created at the outset of the 20th century. That century saw the United States elevated to the status of global imperial power, having been victorious in two world wars and the beneficiary of an international monetary system that, post World War II, provided for a vast global, if not regional, peace. Sure, there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union and other limited wars, but no true great global war in which the entire geo-political order came into question.

Times have changed. Today the United States is faced with three enormous perils: an external threat, an internal threat, and a fulcrum on which the two interoperate to synchronize a multi-prong attack on America. 

The first peril is that China has emerged as a geopolitical and economic challenger to the United States. The simmering geopolitical threat from China is multilateral in nature. In fact, a geopolitical reordering on an historic scale is taking place. 

Supported by financial stakeholders, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” seeks no less than the unification of the Eurasian landmass. This geopolitical and economic reordering has seen China peel off NATO ally Turkey, make common cause with Iran, align with Pakistan, and subsume Hong Kong. Even European Union nations, beneficiaries of 75 years of American security, are drifting into the arms of the Chinese Communists.

The second peril, a domestic counter-state, has emerged pressing a Marxist revolutionary insurrection in alignment with China’s objectives. With a century of Marxist subversion in the making, this counter-state manifested as a silent or soft coup attempt in 2017, and subsequently has evolved into a Marxist revolutionary insurrection rising to a boil inside the United States. 

THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT-BY YURI SLEZKINE *****

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction

The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Poland’s Geopolitical Future and America’s Role In It Germany and Russia will do everything they can to overturn the existing pro-American balance of power. Is the United States ready to confront that? By Lucja Cannon

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/05/polands-geopolitical-future-and-americas-role-in-it/

The greatest significance of the recent victory of President Andrzej Duda of Poland in the presidential election over his liberal and pro-German opponent is international, not domestic. Poland is where the clash of geopolitical futures is occurring right now among the top world powers.

Russia dominated Poland until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and it is trying to preserve remnants of its influence. Germany acquired a position of dominance in the early 1990s. It made many business investments in Poland to produce inputs for German industry, and 28 percent of Polish trade is with Germany. It also invested in the politics of Poland with numerous grants to Polish organizations, scholarships, and cultural programs. This symbiosis was agreeable to both countries and peaked with Poland’s 2004 admittance to the European Union. It was a great boon to Poland’s economic development but now the EU increasingly is regarded as a heavy-handed tool of Germany. 

The biggest disagreement between Poland and Germany concerns Russia. This conflict demonstrates itself in numerous issues such as NATO, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and many others. Poland pays its 2 percent of GDP NATO requirement, loves America, and is positive about the presence of U.S. troops, while Germany spends little on defense, has an army that is far from fighting status, and fosters anti-Americanism. Germany is constructing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to become a distribution hub of Russian natural gas in Europe, which will increase its vulnerability to Russian blackmail. Poland is constructing pipelines and LNG terminals within the Three Seas Initiative to free Eastern Europe of the Russian natural gas monopoly and to import it from elsewhere, mainly the United States.

Polish people also remember the 1981 German support for the imposition of martial law in Poland and its lack of contribution to overcoming communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. 

Palestinians: We Support China’s Muslim Concentration Camps by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16310/palestinians-china-concentration-camps

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas… is saying that he fully supports China’s right to hold more than one million Muslims in re-education camps and crack down on human rights activists and journalists in Hong Kong. Yet Abbas, a Muslim, sees no reason why he or anyone else should ask the ICC to launch an investigation into China’s “war crimes” against Muslims.

Why have Palestinian leaders chosen to side with China? Money and political support. The Palestinians are hoping that China will replace the US as an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Iran, Egypt, Syria and dozens of other countries that could not tolerate a magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilisation of Muslim women. They will give concentration camps a conniving wink of approval, but draw the line at cartoons in a Danish newspaper.” — Nick Cohen, The Guardian, July 4, 2020.

The Palestinians’ hate for Israel and the US has blinded them to the point where they are prepared to support the penning up of more than a million Muslims in re-education camps in China. Such a show of support ought to serve as a re-education for the international community about the warped Palestinian perspective of justice.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) says it is determined to proceed with its request that the International Criminal Court (ICC) launch an investigation against Israel for “committing war crimes” against the Palestinians. The PA is hoping that such a move by the ICC would pave the way for filing “war crimes” charges against several Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While it is seeking to indict Israeli officials for their ostensible “war crimes” against Palestinians, the PA leadership is working to strengthen its relations with China, where more than one million Muslims are being held in detention in re-education camps.

Palestinian leaders have a long record of supporting dictators and autocratic states, including Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. The Palestinian leadership’s current support for China’s repressive regime is part of a larger pattern. They have proven that they are always ready to support any dictator who openly challenges Israel or the US.

Peaceful Riots and the Left’s Reality-Avoidance Lessons unlearned after a century of genocide, gulags and mass starvation. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/peaceful-riots-and-lefts-reality-avoidance-don-feder/

People ask how Democrats can look at what’s going on in Portland and other urban combat zones and call it “peaceful protest” when on the nightly news they can see fires raging, hear mobs howling, and watch police being assaulted. Are they nuts?

In a way, they are.

It’s not just the anarchy in the streets. The entire progressive worldview is based on a far-reaching denial of reality.

Since at least the Enlightenment, those who embraced objective truth believed it was their responsibility to use empirical evidence and reason to understand the world, so that they didn’t end up getting eaten by tigers they mistook for tangerines.

Leftists work overtime to reshape the public perception of the world around them to conform with their ideology – even when it means denying the obvious. The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called it “whim-worship.” In other words, this is the way it is because this is the way I want it to be. Because I hate America, I want it to be an inherently racist country, based on oppression and exploitation – and thus it is.

Here are a few examples of reality-avoidance ripped from the headlines: 

Guns cause crime. My city is a shooting gallery because of guns brought here from places with loose controls.

Malik Obama Still ‘110 Percent’ with Trump, Who Is ‘Not a Fake’ Obama “Big Bad Brother weighs in on “cold and ruthless” former president who “needs to be worshipped.”Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/obama-still-110-percent-trump-who-not-fake-lloyd-billingsley/

“What I saw was he was the kind of person that wants people to worship him. He needs to be worshiped and I don’t do that.”

That was Malik Obama in an August 1 interview with the New York Post. Obama, 62, was promoting his new book, Big Bad Brother from Kenya, and his interview proved enlightening on several fronts.

Malik managed a foundation named after his father, the Kenyan Barak H. Obama. In a telephone call shortly before the 2009 inauguration, the American president-elect “insisted I shut down the website and not continue with the foundation.” If Malik continued with the idea, the president threatened “to cut me off.”

In 2015, Malik Obama made an appeal on behalf of Aunt Hawa, living in poverty and working as a charcoal seller. The president told Malik he was “broke.” Aunt Zeituni Onyango died penniless in 2014 and Malik Obama appealed for $20,000 to transport her remains back to Kenya. The president said that was “too much” and ponied up only $5,000.

As Malik Obama explains,  “I don’t understand how somebody who claimed to be a relative or a brother can behave the way that he’s behaving, be so cold and ruthless, and just turn his back on the people he said were his family.”

Malik Obama also charged that Dreams from My Father, was inaccurate and freighted with “embellishments.”

‘Slaying and Being Slain’ for Islam’s Heavenly Whores A reminder that the Muslim mindset and the motivations behind jihad are many and multifaceted. Raymond Ibrahim

/https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/slaying-and-being-slain-islams-heavenly-whores-raymond-ibrahim/

According to a July 22, 2020 article on PMW:

Since the Palestinian Authority started its terror campaign—the second Intifada—in 2000, it has been promising terrorist Martyrs that as Muslims they will be rewarded in Paradise with 72 Dark-Eyed Virgins. The promises are given in religious lessons, statements by political figures, and poems and music videos, while funeral notices are worded as “wedding” announcements.

As a recent example, the article cites a Palestinian music video that “reminds viewers that death as a ‘Martyr’ is really a ‘wedding’ to the 72 Virgins of Paradise.”  Another video shows a Palestinian cleric brainwashing young children with dreams of “martyrdom” and subsequent “marriage to the Dark Eyed Virgins of Paradise”—even as the children, who appear oblivious to his words, scream “Allahu Akbar!”

Who are these “dark-eyed virgins in paradise” that “yearn”—as another Palestinian figure phrased it—for martyrs, for those Muslims who, in the Koran’s words, “slay and are slain” (9:111)?

The proper Arabic term for these entities is hour al-‘ayn, commonly known by the English transliteration houri(s) [pronounced who-ree].  They are supernatural, celestial women—“wide-eyed” and “big-bosomed,” says the Koran (56:22, 78:33)—created by Allah for the express purpose of sexually gratifying his favorites in perpetuity.  (Whether or not the English word “whore” is etymologically connected to the Arabic houri (who-ree) appears a moot point as they both seem to serve the same function.)

Britain’s First Test Case Under Covid Laws When some protests are more equal than others. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/britains-first-test-case-under-covid-laws-katie-hopkins/

Meet Fiona.

She’s a lovely English lady with a happy family, hard-working parents and a firm belief that as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else and resect the law, you should be free to live your life as you please.

Whether you choose to work like a demon, live off-grid, or identify as a cocktail sausage on a Wednesday, frankly, Fiona couldn’t care less, as long as you pay your way and mind your own business. 

Fiona is also a test case in the UK.

She is due to appear in Westminster Magistrates Court in London on 19 August and her charge sheet reads as follows:

‘On 16th May 2020 at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, London W1, without reasonable excuse, during the emergency period, other than as permitted by Regulations, you participated in a gathering in public place of more than 2 people’.

AOC Redux: St. Louis voters defeat 10-term machine incumbent, hand Dem nomination for Congress to radical Ferguson riots leader Cori Bush By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/aoc_redux_st_louis_voters_defeat_10term_machine_incumbent_hand_dem_nomination_for_congress_to_radical_fergusson_riots_leader_cori_bush.html

Like her friend and ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush defeated an incumbent machine Democrat for the Democrats’ nomination for Congress in a heavily blue district.  Come November, a new member of Congress will be elected to join AOC’s “Squad,” representing the black-majority Missouri First Congressional Distric

CBS News reports:

Cori Bush, a onetime homeless woman who led protests following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a Black 18-year-old in Ferguson, ousted longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay Tuesday in Missouri’s Democratic primary, ending a political dynasty that has spanned more than a half-century. Bush’s victory came in a rematch of 2018, when she failed to capitalize on a national Democratic wave that favored political newcomers such as Bush’s friend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This time she was able to pull out the victory winning 49%-46%, CBS affiliate KMOV-TV reports. Bush’s supporters said protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis and outrage over racial injustice finally pushed her over the edge.

An emotional Bush, speaking to supporters while wearing a mask, said few people expected her to win.

The incumbent Bush defeated, William Lacy Clay, inherited his seat from his father.  Between the two of them, the family had represented St. Louis for 52 years.  Like the incumbent Joe Crowley defeated by AOC, Lacy Clay had been denounced for ignoring his district and spending most of his time in D.C.  But unlike Crowley, Clay is black, was endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, and in 2018 defeated Bush by 20 points in the primary.  So it is clear that Democrat  primary voters have moved left and that the insurgent radical left in the Democrat party has gained significant resources in the interim.

A good primary night for Trump — not so good for Biden By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/a_good_primary_night_for_trump__not_so_good_for_biden.html

My guess is that President Trump was happy with the Kansas primary results.  He did not take sides but clearly wanted the more electable Republican to win, and indeed he did.   He got his man when Rep. Roger Marshall defeated Kris Kobach, the man that Democrats were rooting for.

So Kansas should vote GOP in the fall and that will help keep the U.S. Senate.

My other guess is that Biden was not so pleased.   The left is a bigger factor than ever, as Doug Schoen wrote:    

Moreover, it is clear that the multitude of victories by left-leaning Democrats will put more pressure on Joe Biden to adopt more progressive policies on reducing if not defunding the police, climate change and raising taxes.

Indeed, we can expect that this string of progressive victories will force Biden to move out of the center and make him more vulnerable to attacks by the Trump campaign. 

The Trump campaign has already been pushing the message that the Democrats are a far-left party, and Tuesday’s results in Missouri and Michigan, as well as the results of the June primaries in New York, bear that out and make Trump’s reelection case more credible.