RUTHFULLY YOURS

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research}

Published in: https://spectator.org/democracy-v-republic/

Plato argued that democracy by its very nature cannot work. The direct involvement of the people in the affairs of state will lead to a situation where takers outnumber givers thereby rendering the economy precarious. But that isn’t the only issue the demos introduces. Direct participation can lead to the belief a majority rules denying the rights of minorities or there is justification for “the people” to take matters into their own hands.

Since the beginning of democracy in Athens, the greatest danger to democratic institutions has been the demos, the people themselves. Each person in a democracy is an individual. But when individuals become “the people,” trouble may be on the horizon.

The Founders of this new nation, having immersed themselves in the classics, created a system that is a republic, with the will of the people manifest through the election of representatives and in which taking matters into constituent hands is both unnecessary and counterproductive. The problem facing the United States is that the Trump presidency has resulted in the belief on the part of many that this is a democracy demanding direct public intervention in the affairs of the nation. Hence, students justify violence at the University of California as a form of democratic action. Street demonstrations calling for overturning the president’s limited ban on immigration are rationalized as democracy at work. Alas, it is democracy at work, but Americans live in a republic.

That distinction is lost on a public uneducated in the difference. Rabble rousers discuss the right to assemble, but assembly doesn’t infer violence. Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right, but even that right is limited by “clear and present danger.” A republic recognizes constraints overlooked by the flock of direct involvement.

Having stretched the idea of democracy into new and unexplored avenues of public participation, the republic itself is imperiled. The Ferguson effect, in which people believe they were wrongfully treated by the police, justifies taking to the streets. The republic, that relied on the seamless transition from one government to the next, is facing a new and relentless challenge that is based on a misconception.

Join me here as I argue that people in the west are in revolt against the dictatorship of virtue that has sought for decades to enslave them. The transcript of my remarks follows beneath the video.http://melaniephillips.com/uprising-moral-extortion/

As we never stop being told by furious commentators, Britain and America are descending into a neo-Nazi, xenophobic, fascist hell on earth. Britain’s Brexit vote was anti-immigrant. President Trump is a fascist. Steve Bannon, his senior adviser and formerly of Breitbart news site, is a white supremacist.

None of these claims is true. Britain is not anti-immigrant but against uncontrolled mass immigration. President Trump is not a fascist but wants in fact to restore the rule of law and respect for the US constitution. Steve Bannon is not a white supremacist but someone who believes in western national identity based on Judeo-Christian values.

In other words, the opposite of fascism. But those making this charge aren’t just diminishing and trivialising the horrors of true fascism or bigotry. They are also demonising all those who voted for Brexit or Trump. Millions of people. One British columnist wrote:

“Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.”

Listen up, folks: if you voted for either Brexit or Trump, he means you and me. We are the compulsive believers, apparently, enabling liars and charlatans and half-mad fanatics. Such as you-know-who. This writer went on: “We are now at the beginnings of a new opposition movement, a liberal version of backlash politics, which feels the urgent need to drive the right from power”.

In similar vein, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has urged Britain to rise up against Brexit on the basis that the people didn’t understand what they were voting for. Please bear in mind that not only did the British people vote for Brexit but the House of Commons has overwhelmingly voted to trigger Britain’s exit from the EU. All that apparently counts for nothing. The public’s democratic choice must not be allowed to stand.

Now this isn’t just monumental arrogance and hubris. These anti-democrats are the real compulsive believers, the real demagogues. Everyone who opposes them is a fascist, it seems, and so they feel not just entitled but morally obliged to impose their own vision over the will of the people – who are of course all fascists too. How can this be?

This week, Britain’s Channel Four TV is to screen a documentary presented by Trevor Phillips, the former head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission. Once upon a time, Mr Phillips was a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan liberal set. Now, if I might use the well-known phrase, he appears to have become yet another liberal who has been mugged by reality.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/02/muslim-mania-and-other-insanities.html

The world is having a conniption fit seizure, “triggered” by Donald Trump. The main victim of this ongoing seizure is the MSM. Call it cultural and political epilepsy, it’s not pretty to look at. I am reminded of a childhood experience with witnessing these seizures.

In grade school, for a reason never explained to me or to anyone else, my class for years was burdened with a boy (Robert) who was not only mentally ill and deficient in how to perform every day actions (such as reading or tying his shoe laces), but was subject to unarticulated fits in class when he drooled, frothed at the mouth, and became violent, so violent that it would require all the strength of a nun (and the nuns in my school were mostly burly and hefty; one of them, the gargantuan Sister Barbarossa, could beat up a school foot ball player) to subdue him – Robert was as strong as a bull – but also need the help of the bigger boys to literally hold him down in his seat-desk until an ambulance showed up to take him away.

The episode that sticks in my mind now, however, is when he stood at the top of a small cliff that overlooked the neighboring school playground and began to throw rocks at us. Big rocks.

It was never revealed why Robert was even in the school and not in a facility that could treat and handle his condition. It was a Catholic, private school (Nativity Parish School) and cost money to send a child there; so doubtless he was enrolled there by state mandate, or because of some dangerous physician’s recommendation, and so someone else was paying the bill.

The behavior of the MSM towards President Trump and his surprising, “shock –to-the-system” election in November are so similar to Robert’s frequent and frightening outbursts that I couldn’t help but dwell on the parallels. In fact, it has been the MSM’s behavior that caused me to recall Robert.

Wikipedia writes:

Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive and abnormal nerve cell activity in thecortex of the brain…. The word epilepsy is from Ancient Greek: ἐπιλαμβάνειν ” to seize, possess, or afflict.”

Daniel Greenfield’s article “If We Don’t Let In Muslims To America They’ll Kill Us” of February 10th highlights the madness that has gripped the MSM and many politicians. His column title was taken directly from a statement by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy:

Trump’s executive order is “going to get Americans killed,” Senator Murphy declared.

The Connecticut Democrat was joining a chorus of the clueless warning us that if we don’t let Muslims into America, they’ll join ISIS and kill us.

Singing their brains out in the same stupid chorus were Senator McCain and Senator Graham (“a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism”), Senator Ben Sasse (“the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims”) and Senator Heitkamp (“confirms the lie terrorists tell their recruits: that America iswaging a war on Islam.”)….

Senator Cardin went one better by whining that keeping potential Islamic terrorists out, “promises to make the U.S. less safe and places our courageous servicemen and women in even greater danger as they fight against terrorism.” Just tell it to the Marines shot and killed by a Muslim immigrant at a Chattanooga recruiting station and Naval reserve center.

There’s only one problem with this hostage crisis theory of immigration. It’s insane.

So, it now appears that those who identify as women (please note how politically correct I am genderally speaking) are planning another big demonstration/protest named A Day Without Women.

Anna L. Stark writes about it: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/a_day_without_women.html

How dull and how silly and pointless.

In 411 BC the playwright Aristophanes had a far more original and hilarious idea. He wrote “Lysistrate” a comedy about a woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by denying all the men and warriors sex.

Lysistrata plans a tribunal of all the Greek women to discuss her plan. When they assemble she disdains the weakness of women and convinces them to swear an oath that they will withhold sex from their husbands until both sides sign a treaty of peace. The sex drive finally has an effect and Lysistrata frees the women and men to resume doing what comes naturally.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=imgres&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwje9pv9jJfSAhVFTSYKHfelDm8QjRwIBw&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Brides_for_Seven_Brothers_(musical)&psig=AFQjCNFlejgvPjcZAmCCOPdl9ZsdFiUSsw&ust=1487419878155713

Now there is an idea. By the way the story was adapted into a fabulous musical movie in 1954 with Jane Powell and Howard Keel and sensational choreography by Michael Kidd which includes raising a barn.
Script by Lawrence Kasha and David Landay, music by Gene de Paul, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. There was also a TV series in 1982.

There was a time, in the years immediately after 9/11, when I was reasonably (though not entirely) confident that we Americans would be too savvy to let ourselves be led down the primrose path of Islamization. I assumed that the alarming example of Europe – where the destructive nature of Islam’s impact was there for all to see – would be effective enough to persuade us to pull up the welcome mat and double-lock the door. What I didn’t count on was that so many of our politicians and media would do such a splendid job of covering up the facts about the European situation and whitewashing the Religion of Peace. Nor could I have imagined that the post-9/11 generation of Americans would grow up to be so thoroughly drenched in political correctness that many of them would, in fact, come to see Islam not as an violent existential threat but as the most vulnerable of victim groups.

Yes, Americans elected Trump. Red-state Americans, anyway. But coastal elites went ballistic over his executive order that sought to put a temporary halt to immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Hollywood, the bubble-headed brain trust of blue-state America, set the tone of the backlash: Judd Apatow denounced Trump’s “ignorance and cruelty”; Patricia Arquette suggested returning the Statue of Liberty to France; John Leguizamo reminded his Twitter followers that “The pilgrims came here on the #mayflower as refugees!” Several celebrity tweets implied that Europeans would never support such a monstrous act. Yet a new poll tells otherwise. Most EU citizens, it shows, would be happy to see a total and permanent end to immigration from the Islamic world. To be specific: 71% of Poles, 65% of Austrians, 53% of Germans, 51% of Italians, 64% of Belgians, 58% of Greeks, 61% of Frenchmen, and 64% of Hungarians want Muslim immigration to stop. For good. Only in two of the ten European countries surveyed did a Muslim immigration ban not win the support of a clear majority, and even in those cases a plurality approved of a ban: in Britain, the numbers were 47% for, 23% against; in Spain, 41% to 32%.

Chatham House, the London-based think tank that conducted the survey, plainly found these results distasteful. Calling them “sobering” and attributing them (at least in part) to the influence of the so-called “radical right,” the pollsters sought to discount opposition to Muslim immigration by emphasizing that it was stronger among pensioners, the undereducated, rural types, and those “who are dissatisfied with their life” – in other words, not the right sort of people. Of course, what self-respecting think tank would be willing to admit that Europeans – having had enough of doling out welfare to immigrants who, in return, rape women and children, torment Jews and gays, commit violent crimes on an unprecedented scale, and express contempt for democracy and their infidel neighbors while tacitly supporting terrorism and sharia – are finally waking up?

How depressing that while more and more Europeans are snapping out of their self-delusions, all too many North Americans remain first-class dupes. According to the results of a Rasmussen poll that were released just the other day, 56% of Democrats actually believe that Muslims undergo serious persecution in the U.S, while only 46% think that Christians are persecuted in the Islamic world. What could be more delusional? Meanwhile, a CBS survey showed that only one in seven Democrats consider Islam to be more dangerous than any other religion and that nearly seven out of ten Democrats think Islam encourages violence to approximately the same extent as other faiths. Insane. Not to leave Canadians out, on February 16 the Parliament in Ottawa will actually consider a motion, known as M-103, that would criminalize Islamophobia. It’s a move that should elicit mass protests in the streets; but most Canadians appear to be far more worked up about Trump than about the prospect of their own government severely curtailing their free-speech rights.

Cognoscenti – is used by pretentious people, moi included, to describe those who are particularly well informed about a subject- usually in the arts- but also in sports, cuisine, wines etc.

The “know it alls” by contrast are a group of people who ostracize, libel, boycott, protest and demonstrate against all those who do not agree with the political left and every cult du jour such as global warming, reproductive rights (???) unlimited and unvetted immigration, Islamophobia, and now transgender phobia, and of course the Israeli “occupation. “They are unfettered by any knowledge of history. They know as little about the Korean War and its aftermath as they do about the Peloponnesian Wars. While their rhetoric is about their custodial rights to their “body” they know nothing about biology or anatomy. Their knowledge of the “Cold War” is equal to their knowledge of the Ice Age. And they bandy words like “fascist” and “dictator” without a clue about their definitions. Their ignorance would fill volumes and their human made hot air would really warm the planet.

They are the collective antithesis to the cognoscenti…. they are the” ignoranti “- a word I just coined to describe the smug and opinionated fools who preen and pose as “activists.”

I have to admit that the numbers….in the many hundreds of thousands of women’s protests throughout the nation are impressive but also depressive. Are so many women so shallow? They came, they howled, they carried signs and wore stupid “pussyhats” and they accomplished nothing, nada, zilch other than street theater.

I posted this in October 2012 Updated….and revised

Do women think that foreign policy, support for Israel, a looming debt crisis, a deficit, immigration policies that are out of control, crumbling infrastructure, energy independence, an economy choked with specious regulations, the threat of terrorism, and nukes in the hands of Islamic lunatics and a North Korean thug, are all men’s issues.”

“So…..just call me mister.”

I remember several years ago reading the words of the late and much missed Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien. The good doctor was referring to the erroneous belief that there is such a thing as moderate Islam set against radical Islam.

This eminent statesman known as “the Cruiser” was one of the most remarkable scholars, historians, authors, intellectuals and politicians that modern Ireland ever produced.

O’Brien who was born in Dublin in 1917 and who died in 2008, declared that for the past two centuries Islam has been dominated by the “House of War” (dar al-Islam) which calls for unremitting warfare against all non-Muslims.

He pointed out that it is intolerable to Muslims that Islam is not ascendant enough and that the remedy is jihad, not the struggle for inner peace that Muslim apologists falsely claim, but rather the violent struggle against non-believers which is a religious obligation imposed by Mohammad upon all Muslims.
“Islam is an ideology wrapped in a religion”

O’Brien’s view publicized in Britain’s liberal newspaper, the Independent, some twenty one years ago was not well received then, just as liberals and the ossified but vicious Left today still refuse to accept its reality. His words would certainly be derided by the apologist for Islam in chief; the man who infested the Oval Office of the White House during his last eight baleful years.

Dr. O’Brien was adamant that it was dangerous to talk about radical Islam for it falsely implied that there is some other kind of Islam; one which is well disposed and tolerant to non-Muslims. He baldly stated that there is no other kind and that Islam is “universalist, triumphant and highly political.”

Winston Churchill himself much earlier had written that, “Islam is an ideology wrapped in a religion.”

Want more proof? This from the words of the increasingly Islamist and dictatorial leader of Turkey, Tayip Recip Erdogan? Here is what he said as far back as 2009 when interviewed on Kanal TV’s Arena program about suggesting that there is both radical and/or moderate Islam.

“˜These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

Islam does not mean peace; it means submission – not to the will of the people as in a democracy – but to the will of Allah.

In his magnificent speech “I Have a Dream” delivered on August 28, 1963 Dr. King stated:

“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ignited a movement in America that culminated in the landmark Civil Rights Act , that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Alas, he did not live to see its implementation and the effects of ameliorative policies. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee by a racist criminal James Earl Ray.

Since his death, many hucksters have tarnished his legacy… among “preachers” such as Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, to name only a few, and among thugs such as the old and new Black Panthers and the current racists of the #Black Lives Matter movement.

Dr. King would be appalled that under the administration of America’s first Black president, race relations in America are worse and introspection on both sides has diminished and been replaced with hardened prejudice.

His words matter more than ever……rsk