In The Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for “the Great Charter of the Liberties”) established in 1512, illegal imprisonment was outlawed. Chapter 39, stipulates that no “free man,” could be punished without “lawful judgment of his equals.”
In England 1512, these freedoms were to be accorded to titled gentry and not to the common man.
In England 2018, these basic freedoms are denied to critics of Islam, but they are strictly upheld for the hate speech of Jihad enablers. RSK
General Douglas MacArthur said of the American soldiers: “However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.”
In his farewell speech to West Point on May 12, 1962 he gives an eloquent tribute to those who choose to serve and defend America:
“Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.
But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory’s eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light.
And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory – always victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.”
On the eve of Memorial Day, here’s a piece we get a lot of requests for. It was first written for The Chicago Sun-Times and other papers in 2004, and is anthologized in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn. A lot of the controversies mentioned below – Abu Ghraib, etc – are forgotten, and others – Guantanamo Bay – became mysteriously less controversial after, oh, late January 2009. Time passes, and moss and lichen creep across ancient grave stones. But the men beneath them are forever young:
Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays “Anchors Aweigh,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America” and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens’ “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)” (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town’s selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War’s great poetry. There’s a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.
Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day – a day for going to the cemetery and “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.
I wish we still did that. Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12389/britain-dissent-silenced
“I am in a country that is not free… I feel jealous as hell of you guys in America. You don’t know how lucky you are.” — Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad), YouTuber with around a million subscribers.
“I am trying to recall a legal case where someone was convicted of a ‘crime’ which cannot be reported on.” — Gerald Batten, UKIP member of the European Parliament.
“UKIP Peer Malcolm Lord Pearson has written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid today saying: if Tommy is murdered or injured in prison he and others will mount a private prosecution against Mr Javid as an accessory, or for misconduct in public office.” — Gerald Batten.
Good on Lord Pearson.
On Friday, British free-speech activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson was acting as a responsible citizen journalist — reporting live on camera from outside a Leeds courtroom where several Muslims were being tried for child rape — when he was set upon by several police officers. In the space of the next few hours, a judge tried, convicted, and sentenced him to 13 months in jail — and also issued a gag order, demanding a total news blackout on the case in the British news media. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was immediately taken to Hull Prison.
Most media outlets were remarkably compliant. News stories that had already been posted online after Robinson’s arrest at the Scottish Daily Record, Birmingham Live, The Mirror, RT, and Breitbart News were promptly pulled down, although, curiously, a report remained up at the Independent, a left-wing broadsheet that can be counted on to view Robinson as a hooligan. Indeed, the Independent’s article described Robinson as “far-right” and, in explaining what he was doing outside the courthouse, used scare quotes around the word “reporting”; it then summed up the least appealing episodes in his career and blamed him for an attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque last January. Somehow, the Independent also got away with publishing a report on London’s Saturday rally in support of Robinson.
Also on Saturday, Breitbart UK posted a copy of the gag order, but redacted it as required. The resulting document proved to be a perfect illustration of Western Europe’s encroaching tyranny.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270270/trumps-candor-animals-and-ms-13-michael-cutler
President Trump recently used the term “animals” in referring to members of MS-13, a vicious, barbaric and murderous transnational gang.
The mainstream media immediately attacked the President and falsely claimed that he used the term “animals” to describe all immigrants. In reality, a reality substantiated by videos of the President making his remarks about MS-13, the President was solely referring to members of the MS-13 Gang as “animals.”
The lies spewed by the mainstream media, wherein President Trump was seriously and intentionally misquoted, was paraded as a factual news reports that provided the leader of another infamous gang, the Washington-based, “Gang of Eight,” Chuck Schumer, an opportunity to once again get his voice heard.
However, Schumer was no more honest than the reporters who misquoted the President.
Schumer said that it was wrong to call immigrants animals and noted that his grandparents, who immigrated to America, were not animals, thereby blithely ignoring that the President was crystal clear that he was not lumping all aliens in with the barbaric gang members whose tactics parallel those of ISIS terrorists.
This is the same Chuck Schumer who, at the helm of the Gang of Eight (or “Eight Gangsters,” as I came to call that bipartisan Senate wrecking crew) attempted to provide millions of illegal aliens trespassing on America, with lawful status and even United States citizenship yet proposed federal legislation that would incarcerate, for a period of five years, anyone who trespasses on national landmarks and/or critical infrastructure.
What hypocrisy!
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270284/how-can-we-honor-soldiers-endless-war-daniel-greenfield
What does Memorial Day mean in an age of endless war?
The era of wars that began and concluded neatly, with declarations, speeches, rules, objectives, deciding battles and signed peace accords, ended before the oldest active duty soldier serving today was born.
The men and women who fight and die, leaving their families never knowing if they will return, and in what form, serve not in wars, but endless police actions, peacekeeping missions, terrorist pursuits and nation building exercises with names that sound like obscure action movies, New Dawn, Inherent Resolve, Freedom’s Sentinel, that will never have a final ending, only another generic name.
Obama ended the Iraq War twice. It’s still ongoing. And likely will for all of human history.
We didn’t begin the Iraq War. Arguably Mohammed and the Sassanids did. Over 1,300 years later, the Persians and the rulers of Mecca and Medina are still fighting over Bahrain. When we left, it went on without us. And the Sunnis and Shiites, Mecca, Medina and Tehran, will go on fighting no matter what.
Civilized nations fight wars. And the places where we fight are not civilized, though they may have flags, anthems and constitutions. They’re murderous tribal wastelands torn by perpetual hatreds and feuds.
The Islamic resurgence has placed us in a state of permanent war. We may debate over which fronts that war should be fought on, but only the left can deny that the conflict itself is inescapable. We may fight it in Iraq or in New York, in Syria or in Sweden, the front lines may shift, but the war won’t go away.
To read the headlines, you would think that Britain was still fighting for her life: defending its shores from German U-boats, launching the RAF to repel the Luftwaffe, and London subjected to regular bombings by V-1, V-2 rockets and flocks of Messerschmitts and Dorniers. As far back as WWI, British newspapers were given what were called “D Notices” by the War Ministry about what news about the war effort could not be published to prevent the enemy from gleaning information about Britain’s plans and capabilities.
But it’s not the 1940s. It’s May, 2018. Britain has slid down the slippery slope to out-and-ought censorship, or to Sharia, the subjugation of Muslims and non-Muslims to Islamic law in which one can criticize Islam usually on pain of death. The current, outstanding instance in this case has been the arrest, sentencing, and jailing yesterday (May 25) of Tommy Robinson for doing nothing, but for “disturbing the peace,” by reporting the outcome of a trial of Muslim groomers outside the Leeds courthouse. There was no mob of Muslims near him threatening to attack him or shout him down; only the police. It was the police who were disturbing the peace by shutting Robinson up, preventing us from hearing what he had to say, and hauling him away in a van, to court to be charged and booked, and then to prison.
It’s as though the government believed that Robinson was about to reveal Britain’s plans to repel the Huns – or the Muslims – or rather, reveal Theresa May’s plans to admit more Muslims into the country. What little of his broadcast outside the courthouse we heard contained little or nothing about the verdict on the groomers. He did not have time except to say what was occurring in the courthouse, before he was surrounded by over half a dozen policemen and shut down. His silencing amounted to that old-fashioned D-Notice with restrictions imposed on the story of Robinson’s arrest. One can’t discuss what happened (at least not in Britain) without risking committing a “crime.”
He was sentenced to thirteen months, as of today.
http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/trump-dumped-business-usual-asia/
Despite the best hopes of the liberal-minded West, the globalisation and modernisation of China have made its communist rulers less democratic at home and, on the international stage, more belligerent. Trump is prepared to accept this reality and acts accordingly.
In his seminal book Why I Am Not a Conservative (1960), F.A. Hayek contended that conservatism—at least the British and European version of conservative politics at that time—did not “offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving”. While the British Tory party, for example, might “succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments”, it “could not prevent their continuance” since it failed to “indicate another direction”. The populist-nationalism of President Trump, I suggest, is emancipatory to its core, not the least reason being that he has clearly articulated and is now pursuing “another direction” in Asia.
The “current tendencies” and “undesirable developments” in America—and we could extrapolate to most Western nations—have to do with a dynamic and mutually fortifying relationship between politically-correct ideology and the development of a new power elite. Today’s ruling class, to borrow from James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, is not the old-time family entrepreneur in league with a national parliament, but a managerial elite of “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians … administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on”. This evolving ruling class, warned Burnham, would not necessarily be committed to economic freedom, personal liberty, parliamentary sovereignty and patriotism, their interests being monopolistic rather than market competitive, oligarchic rather than parliamentary, transnational rather than local, global rather than patriotic.
The America First creed is in obvious conflict with the globalist worldview. President Trump’s nationalist insurgency exists on a number of fronts, with each serving the same populist goal: to push back against the “insiders” or power elite who have hijacked the nation to serve their own agenda; an agenda which is at odds not only with the interests of the “outsiders” but also with the long-term viability of American self-determination. Take Trump’s tariff initiatives, for instance. His argument was not advanced simply on economic grounds but also in terms of national security. Tariff announcements on steel and aluminium imports have made Wall Street jittery, and yet President Trump expressed the obvious in one of his tweets: “When our country can’t make aluminum and steel … you almost don’t have a country. We need great steel makers.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/05/did_you_know_that_president_trump_stood_on_concrete_in_the_hot_sun_and_shook_the_hand_of_every_single_naval_academy_graduate.html
I am a fairly avid consumer of political news, and I watched the live coverage of President Trump’s address to the Naval Academy graduates at their commencement ceremony. (If you happened to miss the inspiring speech, Rick Moran’s coverage of it was excellent. But Rick and I, and probably you, did not hear about the fact that the President of the United States, a 71 year old man, stood in the Maryland sun and heat, wearing a suit jacket, and took the time to shake the hand and thank every single one of the 1,191 graduates. I learned of this via Glenn Reynolds and The Newly Press.
It was not exactly a secret, yet got little play in the media. You can see the entire process, speedy up, in this tweet:
Josh Caplan @joshdcaplan
Awesome video of Pres. Trump shaking hands of Naval Academy graduates for 90 minutes. Here’s every single one in under a minute.
dagny @dukeblu85
71 year old, stood straight backed in the sun on concrete and shook hands for 90 minutes. What an incredible tribute. Thank you President Trump. Meaningful. #MAGA
These new Naval Officers and Marines will remember the gesture for the rest of their lives. I don’t recall President Obama doing anything similar.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/the_feminist_endgame.html
Feminists will win once they’ve succeeded in banishing humor.Remember the wave of light bulb jokes popular some years ago? One in particular captured the essence of feminism:
How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
Modern feminism is characterized by a toxic mix of prudishness, self-importance, paranoia, groundless hatred, and epidemic humorlessness. As a disease of sheer cray-cray offense-taking, culminating in hatred for half the human race, with a special emphasis on white males, feminism will not rest satisfied until men are taught to keep their knees together, their eyes down, and their mouths shut, eliminating confident alphas from the sexual equation or turning them into compliant betas.
Humor, or rather lack of same, is the key to understanding the feminist personality type and the species of derangement to which it is prone. A sense of humor, including a penchant for wit and satire, is a sign of developed intelligence. Being able to tell jokes and especially to get jokes, even at one’s expense, is a human quality whose absence betokens a closed and rigid sensibility.
Examples abound; I will consider a few of the most egregious.
In 2015, Nobel Laureate Sir Tim Hunt, the discover of cyclin, was forced to resign from his position as honorary professor at University College London’s Faculty of Life Sciences and from the Royal Society for making a facetious and self-deprecating jest at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul about relations between teachers and students. “It’s strange,” he said, “that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”
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