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Let the Genocide Games Begin! By Rick Moran

By on January 31st, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/01/30/let-the-genocide-games-begin-n1554381

This Thursday, thousands of athletes from more than 100 nations will arrive in Beijing to participate in the Winter Olympiad, a made-for-TV spectacular.

In 2011, NBC agreed to a $4.38 billion contract with the International Olympic Committee to broadcast the Olympics through the 2020 games, the most expensive television rights deal in Olympic history. NBC then agreed to a $7.75 billion contract extension in 2014, to air the games through 2032.

Over the fortnight during which the games are played, the spectacle will be watched by more than a billion-and-a-half people at one time or another, including an unknown number of Uyghur Muslims. The significance of carrying on with the games at this point in the history of the Uyghurs is that China is seeking to destroy their culture, their way of life, and their religion in the name of conforming to the Communist ideology.

In December, an independent tribunal found the People’s Republic of China guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of committing crimes of torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Uyghur people.

The U.S. State Department has also condemned the PRC, accusing them of “arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; arbitrary detention by the government, including the mass detention of more than one million Uyghurs and other members of predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps and an additional two million subjected to daytime-only ‘re-education’ training; … arbitrary interference with privacy; pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members, and censorship and site blocking; … severe restrictions and suppression of religious freedom; substantial restrictions on freedom of movement; … forced sterilization and coerced abortions; forced labor and trafficking in persons.”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, HISTORY Comments turned off

Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense- January 10, 1776

By on January 10th, 2022

On January 9, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that set the American colonies afire with a longing for independence.

Paine was born in England to a poor family and received little schooling. For several years he drifted from job to job – corset maker, seaman, schoolteacher, customs collector, tobacco seller  – without success. His prospects were few when he met Benjamin Franklin, then living in London, who suggested he go to America. Sailing across the Atlantic, Paine caught a fever and was carried ashore half dead in Philadelphia. Once recovered, letters of recommendation from Franklin helped him get a job as a magazine writer.

It has been said that Paine “had more brains than books, more sense than education, more courage than politeness, more strength than polish.” But he could work magic with pen and paper. In Common Sense made bold arguments that Americans should demand their freedom. “The birthday of a new world is at hand,” he insisted. He attacked the idea that people must live under a king, and urged a break from Britain.

“O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” he wrote. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! [America] receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Paine’s words sounded like a trumpet blast through the colonies. Thousands snatched up the pamphlet and decided that he was right. As Thomas Edison, one of America’s great geniuses, wrote 150 years later, “We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. . . . In Common Sense Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable.”

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EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

Misrepresenting Madison, Destabilizing Democracy By Thomas Koenig

By on January 10th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/misrepresenting-madison-destabilizing-democracy/#slide-1

A Columbia law professor takes to the New York Times to libel the Constitution’s chief architect and to propose system-unsettling changes to our politics.

T here is much talk of the impending death of American democracy. Some of it is worth reading and worrying about. A volatile situation is brewing as partisan tribes become more internally homogenous and distanced from one another — geographically, ideologically, and culturally.

We can ward off potential disaster via piecemeal changes geared toward lowering the temperature and weakening the power of the most extreme elements in our politics; we will catalyze disaster through brash, systemic overhauls. Enter Columbia Law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy and his recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy.”

In support of his advocacy for constitutional change by simple majority, Britton-Purdy draws a straight line from our supposedly antidemocratic constitutional structure to much of the Republican Party’s (ongoing) descent into conspiracy and rejection of the democratic process during the Trump era.

He argues that “an antidemocratic system has bred an antidemocratic party,” while claiming that key Founders such as James Madison harbored “elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule” that they then translated into an antidemocratic document. That’s not true.

The current iteration of the Republican Party has many problems. But we can’t let partisan arguments slip into libels of the Constitution and its Framers for a simple reason: Recommitting ourselves to their insights regarding government and human nature — and the Constitution they framed embodying those very insights — is the only way we’ll forge a functional politics. Defaming the dead isn’t a good call when it is their wisdom that could help lead us out of our present mess.

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American Slavery in the Global Context By Dan McLaughlin

By on January 8th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/american-slavery-in-the-global-context/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

No topic in American history is more enduringly controversial than slavery. It sits at the heart of every indictment of America and our founding principles. It is central to battles over critical race theory, the removal of monuments, and the renaming of places and institutions. It is invoked in debates over policing and welfare.

For the New York Times’ 1619 Project, slavery is foundational to American identity. Its beginning is our “true founding.” We should “reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point.” Slavery is “the seed of so much of what has made us unique” and should sit at “the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Yet this claim lacks the global perspective we need to examine what is actually uniquely American. Where did American slavery come from? How did it differ from other systems of bondage and forced labor?

Slavery was a human crime of which Americans were one part. It proliferated for millennia before slaves are first known to have been sold in Virginia, in 1619. It persisted long after it was abolished in the United States in 1865. It was practiced by people far from our shores without American influence. People were enslaved in virtually every society from which American slaves were descended. Few of the world’s major civilizations have been innocent of it.

In the story of world slavery, Americans loom much larger in the history of abolition than in the history of enslavement. Seymour Drescher, one of the great historians of slavery, summarizes the landscape in 1775:

Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.

Slavery and its close cousin, serfdom, were the lot of a vast proportion of the human race, beginning in ancient times and continuing for over 1,300 years after the fall of Rome in the fifth century a.d. Slavery’s origins cannot be located; it predates history, and in many parts of the world it appears as early as there are historical records. It appears in Genesis, Exodus, and the Code of Hammurabi. It was pervasive in classical Athens and Sparta and in republican and imperial Rome. Under Augustus Caesar, a third of the population of Italy were slaves. Aristotle defended slavery as the natural order of humanity — among non-Greeks. Few other ancient writers even considered the morality of slavery.

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BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Complicated History of Jews in America by Michael Finch

By on January 3rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18058/jews-history-usa

“Benjamin’s is a quintessentially American story, one in which all Americans, and especially American Jews, should take pride.”

Writer Diane Cole, who reviewed James Traub’s new book about Judah Benjamin for the Wall Street Journal… argues that possessing slaves does not “jibe” with her understanding of Jewish tradition. Cole, however, fails to mention that possessing slaves also does not “jibe” with anyone’s understanding of Christian tradition.

You can certainly condemn someone for owning slaves, but to single out Jews while disregarding the centuries of non-Jews who owned slaves is unfortunately antisemitic.

In the ancient world, virtually everyone owned slaves: Romans, Greeks, Persians, and yes, Jews. Slavery was as common to the ancient world as people waking up and going to work is today. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had slaves; they were nonetheless, in other respects, great men. We may not like it, we may find it morally repugnant, but it is fact, and it was a part of those societies and has continued for thousands of years, into the modern era.

The Torah planted the seeds in Jewish tradition that would ultimately engender the call for all people to be free.

The Jewish historical narrative in America has, for the most part, been written and shaped by the great wave of Jewish immigrants that arrived in our nation around the turn of the 20th Century. That this wave has had a huge impact on American life and culture is undeniable. But it is not the entire history of Jews in America—far from it. Jews arrived on the heels of the earliest American settlers, primarily making their homes in Charleston, South Carolina, which was a religiously tolerant city, welcoming various Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews alike. Today that seems common enough, but it certainly wasn’t in the 1600’s, especially in the Massachusetts Bay Colony where even many Protestants were not welcome, much less Catholics and Jews.

The Jews that settled in the South were primarily Sephardic, with roots going back to Spain and the Mediterranean area. They assimilated and became part of Southern society; some became landowners or became prosperous enough even to own slaves. We can indict those Jews for this sin as we can indict anyone and everyone who also owned slaves, but it was part of American society at that time.

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Pearl Harbor 80th anniversary brings memories, tributes – and a lesson Lesson of Pearl Harbor is to be vigilant not only for the unexpected but also the expected By Walter R. Borneman

By on December 8th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/pearl-harbor-80th-anniversary-memories-tributes-lesson-walter-borneman
“As we honor those who gave their all 80 years ago, the need to adapt before the next attack remains the greatest lesson of Pearl Harbor. The aircraft carriers and air power that changed warfare in 1941 are still key components of American military might, but our enemies employ other weapons. Terrorism on unprecedented levels brought about the devastation of 9/11. Digital attacks on infrastructure and networks are evidence that keyboards more so than aircraft carriers are already fighting the next wars.”

The attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, 80 years ago today, remains one of the most traumatic events in American history. The date is a generational landmark comparable to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the horrors of Sept. 11. America changed overnight.  

Eighty years later, the Pearl Harbor tragedy is still highly personal. It continues to touch the families of the 2,403 servicemen who lost their lives and the many more who survived that Sunday morning. At a national level, the legacy of a country first surprised but then remarkably united still resounds. 

Many at Pearl Harbor found themselves on the front lines not out of patriotic pride or personal desire to see the world, but out of economic necessity. They were children of the Depression and the $5 or $10 most sent home out of monthly incomes of $36 for a seaman recruit helped to feed younger siblings. Less concerned with national strategies, their personal goals were a few dollars in their pockets, more letters from girlfriends and living to see another sunrise. 

Of a crew of 1,500 on the battleship Arizona, 1,177 sailors and Marines, including a rear admiral and the newest recruit, perished. Among the 78 men with a brother aboard, only 15 survived the attack – a staggering 80% casualty rate. The lucky ones lived with enormous personal grief and sometimes, profound survivor’s guilt. 

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FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

US military minds still stuck in Pearl Harbor mentality Eighty years after Japan’s surprise strike on Pearl Harbor, US is at risk of making the same mistakes vis-a-vis China David Goldman

By on December 7th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/us-military-minds-still-stuck-in-pearl-harbor-mentality/

“What would Winston Churchill say?,” protested China hawk Michael Pillsbury when Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration, asked him what he would do if China sank a US aircraft carrier. I reported the exchange in a November 3 analysis, “Sleepwalkers in the South China Sea.”

More relevant is what Churchill actually said just before the war. Like most of the Allied leadership, Churchill refused to believe that Germany could bypass France’s Maginot Line, or that the Japanese could roll up British forces in Asia in a matter of weeks. Hitler and Hirohito both threw the British into the sea, respectively at Dunkirk and Singapore.

With 350 intermediate-range missile launchers and DF-21 and DF-26 ship-killer missiles, China can sink American carriers as surely as Japanese torpedo bombers sank Allied battleships in World War II.

Allied leaders refused to believe that battleships were sitting ducks. Churchill and his cabinet were mental giants compared to the counterinsurgency soldiers who now lead the American military, but they got it terribly wrong. The Americans now may do worse.

America’s Navy, predictably, wants more aircraft carriers. “When we think about how we might fight, it’s a large water space, and four aircraft carriers is a good number, but six, seven or eight would be better,” Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Karl Thomas said on November 30 after exercises in the Pacific.

Not a replacement for the aging Aegis anti-missile system that can’t protect American ships from Chinese missiles dropping from the stratosphere at Mach 10; not a space-based anti-ballistic missile system that could intercept such projectiles at launch; not a defense against Chinese and Russian hypersonic glide vehicles that can evade all existing anti-missile systems; not an alternative to American GPS and communications satellites, which Chinese or Russian lasers and missiles could disable in a matter of hours. Admiral Thomas wants more of the same century-old weapons platform that the Chinese have spent billions learning how to sink.

The idea is Churchillian, to be sure, but that is not necessarily a recommendation.

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Misremembering Pearl Harbor The tactically brilliant but strategically crazy attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed incalculable furor against a once sophisticated Japanese empire, which foolishly attacked the United States at peace. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 6th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/05/misremembering-pearl-harbor/

Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America’s past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth. 

The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions. 

On an early Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted a tactically successful, but strategically imbecilic, surprise attack on the U.S. 7th Fleet—while at peace and without a declaration of war. The assault—synchronized with subsequent bombing and invasions of the Philippines and British-controlled Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and some Pacific Islands—did not just ensure an existential Pacific theater war between Japan and America. It also prompted the entry of the United States on December 11 into the European theater of World War II, after both Italy and Nazi Germany first declared war on America. Had the latter not done so, it is arguable that the United States would have instead concentrated on Japan alone and might have knocked it out of the war even earlier.

Revisionists often cite conspiracy theories that the Roosevelt Administration lured Japan into the war by previously limiting oil exports to Tokyo (a mere five months before Pearl Harbor) or by foolishly moving the 7th Fleet from San Diego to a deliberately exposed and not so well defended Pearl Harbor. 

Such contrarian views fail to persuade because the one-sided source of tensions had been clear to all for a decade. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. It resumed its war with China by invading the mainland in 1937. In September 1940, it absorbed French colonial Indochina. The idea of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was informally circulating by 1940, as a blueprint of consolidation of the planned Japanese imperial wartime acquisitions of China, and the former British, American, French, and Dutch colonial territories. 

The mercantile system was envisioned as a sort of Asian version of a would-be Napoleonic Europe but based on the supposed racial superiority of Japan and the propagandistic and cynical notion that even harsher Japanese imperialism would be less resented by Asians in the Pacific than then current nation-building colonialism of Western powers. Such crude propaganda was never taken too seriously outside of Tokyo, given the Japanese mass civilian killings of conquered Asians in Nanking, China and the massacres that followed from the takeover of Singapore. 

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Lessons from the Totalitarian Past Augusto Zimmerman

By on December 4th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-law/2021/12/lessons-from-the-totalitarian-past/
It is increasingly clear the principle of legality is no longer regarded as important by some elements of the judicial elite, at least insofar as governments can allege the ’emergencies’ they declare justify the enactment of measures that profoundly affect our fundamental rights and freedoms. There is an unsettling precedent for the law’s endorsement of the unacceptable.

Excerpts

Unfortunately, the Australian legal profession has generally accepted the use of emergency powers by the executive government, thus enabling authorities to issue executive orders that impose heavy fines and imprisonment for non-compliance with certain arbitrary measures. Apparently, even the principle of legality is no longer regarded as important by some elements within the judicial elite, at least insofar as the government can allege that an “emergency” justifies the enactment of measures that profoundly affect the enjoyment of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

When one looks at the German legal profession in the 1930s, leaving aside those who were committed to the Nazi ideology, it becomes apparent that legal positivism played a significant role in the failure of lawyers to stand up against the Nazi atrocities. As noted the late Charles Rice, when the Nazis moved against the Jews, most lawyers who personally opposed the Nazi regime were ‘disarmed’ by legal positivism.[8] This wouldn’t be so if those lawyers had responded to the early Nazi injustices with a sound and principled denunciation rooted in traditional principles of the natural law. However, embedded in the positivist dogma that ‘law is law’ regardless of its substantive nature, many German lawyers became defenceless against laws of arbitrary or criminal content.[9] Because such lawyers ‘argued that the evolution of law should be viewed as following purely positive patterns’, Seitzer and Thornhill explains, ‘they concluded that the validity of law depended on its status as an internally consistent set of rules, and it could not be reconstructed or interpreted on the basis of moral prescriptions’.[10]

However, the vast majority of lawyers in Germany were supportive of Hitler. These lawyers embraced the notion that Germany was an organic unity and the spectacle of a divided parliament was unnatural to them. The principal characteristic of German lawyers, including law professors, was illiberalism.[21] The German legal profession generally welcomed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor.[22] In October 1933, in their annual convention at Leipzig, 10,000 lawyers raised their right arms in a Nazi salute and swore, ‘by the soul of the German people’, that they would ‘strive to follow the course of our Führer to the end of days’.[23] On that very day the official journal of the Ministry of Justice exhorted the German legal profession to ‘march as an army corps of the Führer’.[24]

The Reich Minister, Hans Frank, was the head of the German Bar Association (1933–42), the Elected President of the International Chamber of Law (1941–42), and also President of the Academy of German Lawyers. Frank
believed that ‘the basis for the interpretation of all legal sources is the National Socialist ideology that is particularly manifested in the party program and the Führer’s statements’.

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Yom HaGirush: The Inside Story of ‘Expulsion Day’ The largely forgotten ethnic cleansing, almost unparalleled in the history of human rights abuses Edwin Black

By on December 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/yom-hagirush-inside-story-expulsion-day-edwin-black/

Today, we speak of a largely forgotten ethnic cleansing largely unparalleled in the history of humanitarian abuses. Recall the coordinated international expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they had lived peaceably for as long as 27 centuries. As some know, in 2014, the Israeli government set aside November 30 as a commemoration of this mass atrocity. It has had no real identity or name like “Kristallnacht.” But today, from this day forward, the day will be known as Yom HaGirush: “Expulsion Day.”

It has been a years-long road to identify and solidify this identity. It began the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. The international Pan-Arab community, coordinated out of Palestine and spanning four continents, formed a vibrant political and later military alliance with the Nazis. This partnership functioned in the rarefied corridors of governments, the riot-torn streets of many cities on all sides of the oceans, and eventually the gun-powdered trenches and frontlines of war-strangled Europe. The overseer of this alliance was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but he led an eager coalition of Arab leaders organized into the Arab Higher Committee, along with popular supporters from the Arab Street. They had fused with Nazi ideology and goals, which included the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of British influence.

After the Mufti fled criminal prosecution in Jewish Palestine in October 1937, he relocated to Baghdad. Iraq became the new center of gravity for the Arab-Nazi collaboration. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Iraqi Arabs under the guidance of the Mufti had imported all sorts of Nazi ideology and confederation into Iraq. On June 1–2, 1941, as Germany was poised to attack Russia and needed Arab oil, Nazi Arabs in Iraq launched a bloody two-day pogrom against its Jewish community which had dwelled there for 2,700 years—a thousand years before Muhammad. The hyphenation Arab-Nazi applies, not merely because these Arabs were fascist in mind and deed, but because they actually identified with Germany’s Nazi Party. Some rioters wore swastikas; many had actually marched in the Nuremberg torchlight parades. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party adopted a flag that spun off from Nazi Germany’s.

In that nightmare June 1–2 riot, Jews were hunted in the streets. When found, Jewish girls were raped in front of the parents, fathers were beheaded in front of their children, mothers were brutalized in public, babies were sliced in half and thrown into the Tigris River. The Baghdad mobs burned dozens of Jewish shops, invaded Jewish homes and looted them.

We will never know how many hundreds were murdered or mutilated because in the investigation that followed, many were afraid to come forward. But that bloody event became known as the Farhud, meaning violent dispossession. The Farhud spelled the beginning of the end of Iraqi Jewry—more than 140,000 souls.

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