"No strategy" is not a strategy

One of the responses to a previous post on here--the one showing that 30% of British Moslems support the Islamic State and bemoaning the British government's steadfast refusal to combat Moslem terrorism by, inter alia, calling it Moslem terrorism--observed that the Western governments' apparent impotence in the face of Islamic terrorism and extremism owes to their desire to not alienate the (probably? hopefully?) 70% of the Moslems who do not support the I.S.  Even though support for the I.S. is just one measure of the nomos of the Moslem communities and societies worldwide--and other criteria yield far more depressing statistics, well exceeding a half of the Moslem populations--, that statement is essentially correct.  The Western governments do not want to alienate the Moslems living in their countries who, even if they hold abhorrent views, do not actually go out bombing, raping, running over, and hacking up people.  They also do not want to incense those who, while neither engaging in nor supporting such acts, are Moslem in name and do take pride in their Islamic heritage.  That much is understandable and even commendable.

The problem, however, is that the Western governments are not doing much of anything.  (And no, pretending and contending that terrorism is a bane upon everyone, that "far-Right" "extremism" is as much a danger as Moslem terrorism, and that the answer is more unity, more diversity, and more love does not count as doing something.)  Essentially, those governments do not wish to alienate their Moslem communities--or the global Islamdom--but they are simultaneously bereft of any vision of how to approach the Moslems living in the West, which includes endeavoring to coopt them in the fight against terrorism.

The first step, surely, would be to acknowledge that terrorism is rooted in the Moslem community and, indeed, that it is rooted in the ideology to which the members of that community overwhelmingly subscribe.  That does not need to be an indictment of the entire community or of Islam but there has to be a recognition that, sometimes, something goes wrong there and that it is largely that community's responsibility to ensure it does not.  After all, Moslems generally have a propensity to both hold Westerners collectively accountable for our "foreign policy" as well as boast of their strong family ties that contrast favorably with the hedonistic individualism of the wretched infidels.  It would surely not be too much to insist they took better care of their much more nuclear and close-knit communities.

How to encourage the Moslem communities to take point in battling the terrorism emanating from them is another matter.  There is not much of a carrot to dangle in front of them.  Despite the occasional howls of hysteria about "Islamophobia," Moslems in the West are not discriminated against in any palpable way.  They have free and ready access to the same education and employment opportunities as anyone else.  The stick approach would not be necessarily more desirable because it both would effectively criminalize and marginalize the entire Moslem community--and collective punishment is instinctively wrong to the modern Western psyche--and would necessitate immense resources to monitor millions of people scattered throughout a country.

The only realistic option left, then, is the proverbial if jaded "battle for the hearts and minds."  The Moslems of the West must be persuaded of the virtues of the classical liberal worldview, including the rule of law, the separation of church and state, the equality of the sexes, the protection of minorities, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of expression, and so forth.  That persuasion must be confident and resolute.  The inevitable pushback--from segments of the Moslem communities as well as the inevitable Leftist professional activists screaming about "racism"--must be confuted unapologetically and with ever-renewed vigor.  Naturally, doing so requires repudiation of the poisonous cultural relativism credo and rediscovery of pride in the Western classical liberal thought.  The toxic self-flagellation by the Western society over the past half a century or so has resulted in a dispirited, mentally-feeble, morally-rudderless majority people.  Such demoralized Westerners are no match for the more assertive and aggressive cultures.

The first step in answering how to foil the germination of terrorism in the Western Moslem communities is therefore to bolster the fundaments of the Western society.  The second step is to essay to extend those ideals to the Moslem communities, too.  It may or may not be effective, but one thing is certain: Failure to take this path will ultimately result in repression of the entire society by governments anxious to get a handle on rampant terrorism, and that will in turn eventuate in everyone losing the benefits of the civil liberties listed above.

© 2017 Michael L.S.

Westminster Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down...

Another Moslem terrorist plot, this one successful, unfolded in London a few days ago.  Adrian Elms became Khalid Masood and, as in so very many cases when a Christopher turns into an Abdullah, decided he hated the West, the Jews, the gays, the liberated women, and so forth... - and that they deserved to die... - and he was going to make it happen.  (That rather contrasts with converts to Buddhism simply shaving off their heads and changing their diet, converts to Hare Krishna going around banging on bongs, and converts to Judaism getting a separate set of crockery for meat and milk dishes.)  Such attacks are intercepted and thwarted by the dozen all over Europe and the West every single week.  They are so commonplace that they are not even being given much airtime or attention anymore.

What transpired in London, then, was not overly surprising.  Nor were the exhaustingly predictable and risible public reactions that followed.  The inane Twitter hashtags, the imbecilic heart-shaped hand gestures, the facile slogans, the insipid props (flowers, candles, and teddybears)...  If that does not petrify the dime-a-dozen Johhny B. Jihadis lurking and scheming all over Britain and the West, or alternatively convince them of the error of their ways, then surely nothing will.  The crowd of saps in London's main square was conspicuously devoid of more than a handful of Moslems, in extremely stark contrast to the tens of thousands of them who come out every few weeks to rage about something or other in "Palestine."  Indeed, more Moslems turn out to flag-burning events than were present at the laughable wake in Trafalgar Square.

Also inevitable were the vacuous protestations about how London had survived the Nazi onslaught so these ragtag terrorists did not have a chance.  The folktales of London's stoic endurance of the Blitz bombings are unfailingly trotted out every time some misfortune befalls London, be it a terrorist outrage such as this or when a bunch of avaricious subway or railroad workers decide to hold millions of passengers for ransom in order to bilk out a few extra thousand pounds on top of their already ludicrously inflated salaries.  A high-profile British newscaster went on a defiant rant on the theme, highlighting London's defeat of the German airforce.  What neither he nor anyone else regurgitating this jaded trope mentioned were a few facts that should be pertinent when attempting to draw analogies.  For one thing, Britain did not defeat the Nazis by holding fatuous candle-lit vigils; rather, it sent manpower and firepower the Nazis' way.  Britain also identified the Nazis as the enemy rather than as some indeterminate aberration that had no connection to anything else happening in the world at the time.  Winston Churchill made no assertions that the Luftwaffe was "not really German" or that it was no better or worse than any other old airforce.  Nor did Britain allow millions of Germans to roam around the country freely--despite serous double-digit percentage of them having unambiguous Nazi sympathies*--and besmirch those who objected as "racists."  Londoners did not elect a Nazi mayor who proceeded to lecture them how being bombed to kingdom come by his fellow travelers was normal: "part and parcel" of living there.  Analogies are very useful, both scholastically and rhetorically, but they need to be accurate.  The London of the early 1940s bears little resemblance by any criterion to the London of 2017.

Meanwhile, the explanation for Adrian-cum-Khalid's terrorist atrocity?  Yep, you guessed it: "racism."  The lunacy marches on.

* For those tempted to reel off the usual canards about Islam being a religion of peace and "the overwhelming majority of Moslems are tolerant," etc., a few home truths would not go amiss.  Firstly this,

Secondly: More granular statistics are just as unequivocal and even more damning.  This site lists a comprehensive overview of the research done into the Moslems' views and attitudes, but some of the highlights include:

• 25% British Muslims say 7/7 bombings were justified.
• 35% of young Muslims in Britain believe suicide bombings are justified.
• 25% of young Muslims in Britain (and 20% overall) sympathize with those who fight for ISIS.
• 66% of Muslims in Britain would not report terror plot to police.
• 48% of British Muslims would not report a person "linked to terror."
• 18% of British Muslims would be proud or indifferent if a family member joined al-Qaeda.
• 1-1/2 Million (30%) British Muslims support the Islamic State.
• 36% of British Muslim students believe anyone who leaves Islam should be killed.
• 78% of British Muslims support punishing the publishers of Muhammad cartoons.
• Hardcore Islamists comprise 9% of Britain's Muslim population, another 29% would "aggressively defend" Islam.
• 11% of British Muslims find violence for religious or political ends acceptable.
• Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, 27% of British Muslims openly support violence against cartoonists.
• 40% of British Muslims want Sharia in the UK; 23% support the introduction of Sharia in the UK "instead of British Law."
• 28% of British Muslims want Britain to be an Islamic state.
• 68% of British Muslims support the arrest and prosecution of anyone who insults Islam.
• 21% of British Muslims decline to condemn stoning adulterers (5% openly support them).
• 1 in 3 Muslims in the UK strongly agree that a wife should be forced to obey her husband's bidding.
• 10% British Muslims support killing a family member over "dishonor."
• 20% young British Muslims agree that "honor" violence is acceptable.
• Only 34% of British Muslims believe the Holocaust ever happened.
• 51% of British Muslims believe a woman cannot marry a non-Muslim; Only 51% believe a Muslim woman may marry without a guardian's consent.
• Up to 52% of British Muslims believe a Muslim man is entitled to up to four wives.
• 61% of British Muslims want homosexuality punished.
• 62% of British Muslims do not believe in the protection of free speech.
• 58% of British Muslims believe insulting Islam should result in criminal prosecution.
• 11% of British Muslims find violence for political ends acceptable.
• 18% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should remain legal.

The figures are as bad or even worse in other parts of the West, not to mention the rest of the world.  Surely these data are strongly indicative that "Houston, we have a problem."  One wonders in bewilderment what purpose it serves to studiously ignore these figures and/or denounce those who publicize them while persistently promoting diametrically opposite claims.  Yes, if 30% of British Moslems support the Islamic State, it (probably) means up to 70% of them do not.  Is that cause for jubilation though?  Firstly, a million and a half British Moslems think there is nothing wrong with walking up to a stranger kneeling on the floor, grabbing a fistful of their hair, and slowly slicing off their head with a kitchen knife.  Let that sink in.  Secondly, it is worth recalling that only up to 18% of the Germans were members of the National-Socialist (Nazi) Party, and very, very few of those 18% were actually pulling triggers on machine guns or levers in concentration camps.  What difference did the 82%+ non-Nazi Germans make and was their culpability for the Nazi atrocities any less?  The answers are surely in the negative.  Yet, the threat of Moslem terrorism, arguably more potent and much more long-lasting than that of Nazism, is approached with almost no strategy or resolution of the mindset.

Indeed, the British interior ministry announced early February that it would be essaying to "address the threats of 'far-right and extreme right-wing narratives.'"  Yes.  Really.  Though tempting to view such pronouncements as hailing from a parallel universe, they conform perfectly to the prognostications many, including the present author, made a while back, scilicet, that repeated terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Moslems will be countered by increased prosecution against general, abstruse "extremism."  "Extremism," like "hate speech," is an amorphous, subjective notion and by its very nature eludes objective definition.  As such, it is simply begging for misuse and abuse by those in power.  As is already happening, "Islamophobia" (defined as anything ranging from throwing some bacon rashers at a mosque to publishing data such as those above) incurs as astringent legal prosecution and sanction as acts of terror by Moslems.  The Canadian parliament just passed a motion condemning, exclusively, criticism of Islam.  "Extremism" is beginning to receive similar treatment.  The "racism" label has been overused to the point that it has lost much of its potency whereas "hate speech" is not catching on, at least in America where the First Amendment is too inextricably ingrained in the citizens' psyche to be watered down by such an alien concept.  Cue "extremism."  The only "acceptable"--which is another increasingly normalized purely subjective criterion whereby to judge speech and behavior, including in semi-legal contexts--response to the savagery, destruction, genocides, humiliation, and misery wrought by Moslem terrorists will be otiose public piety and virtue signaling.  Such displays must invoke "tolerance," "respect," "coexistence," and all the other vapid, make-feelgood buzzwords so beloved of the peddlers of the politically-correct multiculturalist credo who, invariably, live detached and removed from the areas where that credo has been put into practice in the earnest.  In their environs of leafy suburbs and safe-space campus echo-chambers, "racism" and "global warming" are the biggest problems in the world, Moslems are the biggest victims of injustice including "discrimination," "lone-wolf" terrorism is not connected to any ideology--least of all Islam--and is a product of mental disorder, and--for a great many of them--the Islamic State are "really" Israeli secret service agents and 9/11 was an "inside job."  As bizarre as such a platform is, it is espoused by all "mainstream" politicians, regardless of their supposed factional stripes.  Those who endeavor to follow a different path--such as President Trump, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban, Marine le Pen--are vilified and demonized, and, if they are fortunate, only their characters are assassinated.  The "little folks" are treated the same: Those who dissent from the "acceptable" narrative are banned from the social media, doxed and hounded by assorted professional "activists" and the media, arrested in dawn raids, fired from their jobs, fined, and jailed.

As the crescendo of Moslem terrorism intensifies, so will those tactics by the authorities.  Eventually though, as more and more people get groomed (q.v. Rotherham, England) and raped, deliberately run over by a truck or a car, hacked up with an ax or a machete, executed in a restaurant or a theater, gunned down on a train, blown up on a plane, there will come a straw that breaks the camel's back.  When it does, all the "narratives" and normative imperatives and laws and treaties and crowds with candles will go out the proverbial window.  It is often said that every few generations need to experience a good old-fashioned bloody war in order to appreciate peace.  Perhaps this will be the West's next war...

© 2017 Michael L.S.

UPDATED: Five Minutes to Midnight

This entry is being written as the results of the U.S. Presidential election are streaming in.  It certainly promises to be a roller-coaster ride, just as the entire year leading up to the election has been.  In reality, the outcome of the election is not as important as it is made out to be.  If Mr. Trump wins, many of his grand plans will be severely stymied by the Congress, even if both the House and the Senate emerge Republican-controlled.  If Secretary Clinton prevails, she will encounter similar obstacles.

The election is but an exiguous piece in a much larger puzzle, which concerns the survival of the Western civilization.  Europe, Canada, and Australia--and, if Clinton has her way, America, too--are being inundated with millions of migrants.  Carefully vetted immigration is to be encouraged and, indeed, it is precisely on the talents, diligence, and sheer numbers of immigrants that the Western civilization emerged to be dominant and prosperous.  However, it hardly requires much divination or analysis to understand that permitting the importation, wholesale, of millions of individuals who live and breathe tribalism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, nepotism, polygamy, and other habits that the West abjured eons ago will end in conflict.  Certainly, some of those migrants will renounce their cultural values and nomos, and they will do so of their own accord and--lamentably--contrary to the exhortations of the assorted bien-pensants in the West.  The latter still persist in their preposterous belief that all cultures are equally valid or, worse, that the Western values should defer to minority norms in the name of "diversity."  These days, one observes, everything is relativized and open to debate; every absolute of old must be challenged.  While it is assuredly laudable to question and to doubt, leering to the extreme of discarding everything once cherished is foolhardy and outright foolish.  Rule of law is better that authoritarian caprice.  Equality of the sexes is better than institutionalized misogyny.  Democracy is better than autocracy.  Separation of church and state is better than theocracy.  Ultimately, individualism (including individual human rights) is better than collectivism.  Therefore, the prevailing precepts upon which the Western civilization rests are better than those practiced in, say, the Near East: be it Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran or Yemen or the supposedly more enlightened Lebanon, Morocco or Malaysia.

While some migrants, accordingly, will embrace the liberal democratic values of their new host states, many will not.  Those who do not will do one or both of two things: Withdraw to their self-imposed ghettos and procreate or bomb and shoot up the rest of the population.  Even if they do merely the former, they will only do so until their numbers grow sufficiently to engage in the civil unrest that inevitably arises with ghettoization.  In either case, civil strife is unavoidable.

Once that societal upheaval materializes, two scenarios can come to pass.  A section of the population (commonly derided as "nationalist" by the soi-disant opinion-formers) may decide to proverbially take matters into its own hands.  The people being insulted for wearing certain apparel, harassed for drinking alcohol, assaulted, attacked and killed may well reason that they can no longer rely on the authorities to protect them and so resolve to do so themselves.  The authorities, such as there are and will be, may accept that, without resolute measures aimed at filtering out the destabilizing elements in the society, said society faces an imminent collapse, and they may or may not assist the popular uprising.  Alternatively, the governments may use the societal instability as a pretext for arrogating to themselves enormous powers, such as not seen in decades, even centuries.  Such governments--bigger and stronger than for many a generation--would ineluctably engage in blanket repression of the general population, migrant and nonmigrant, under the guise of restoring and maintaining public order and security.  Put simply, what today happens at airport "security" would be extended to almost every facet of life.  One needs to be only a casual student of history to know that suppression of dissent can successfully last for only a limited time before the population revolts.  That would in turn trigger the first course of events detailed earlier.

The upshot of the foregoing is that, unless the migrant invasion of the West is not stanched immediately, the question of war is going to be a matter of when rather than if.  Whatever the corollary of that war, it would shake the Western world to its core and undoubtedly abrogate the West's cultural, political, economic, military, and other dominance.  While some elements in the West--particularly among the elites--may exult at such a possibility, they would do well to reflect on whether they would rather live in Pakistan, Venezuela, Congo or Laos than in their comfortable ivory towers in the West.

This being an international law platform, it behooves to examine the role legislation and jurisprudence might play in the above context.  The answer is: enormous.  International law pertaining to refugees and human rights is hopelessly anachronistic.  It was designed decades ago and was not envisioned to cater for scenarios such as the one unfolding in the United States and in Europe at this time.  The laws on the books were passed in order to protect the most vulnerable, destitute people fleeing for their very lives: women, children, and the elderly escaping by the skin of their teeth an almost certain death and ensconcing themselves, mostly temporarily, in the nearest shelter they could find.  Those laws did not foresee millions of healthy young men storming national borders thousands of miles from their domiciles because they heard welfare and other freebies would be doled out there.  Nor were those laws meant to provide for the fact that a fair many of the said millions would endeavor to change their new host lands into the image of the decrepit third-world despotisms and theocracies whence they came.

With that in mind, it is high time for alterations of the relevant laws to be effected without delay.  The most salient and pressing of these are:

• The refugee law has to be clear that an asylum application lodged anywhere other than the nearest safe state to the asylee's will be automatically denied and followed with an immediate deportation.  That means that e.g. an Afghan can only hope to receive asylum in Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, but not Sweden, Germany or even Turkey.  An Eritrean--insofar as Eritrea can be deemed unsafe at all--can get asylum only in Djibouti, Ethiopia or Sudan, not in Italy, Greece or England.  In practice, since the European Union does not border any state that can be considered unsafe, all asylum applications made in an E.U. member should be ipso facto rejected, with extreme prejudice.  The same applies to the U.S.
• Dovetailing off the previous point, deportations of failed asylum seekers have to be rendered at the time the refusal is issued.  There should certainly be an appeals process--except when the rejection is based on the grounds from the first point--but it cannot be dragged out for months and years, all the while allowing the asylee to roam around at will.
• Human rights cannot be invoked by a failed asylee as a means of circumventing the refugee law and stay in the host country.  It very frequently happens that someone whose asylum claim has been rejected then launches a suit preventing his or her deportation on the basis that, say, they already formed a family in the host state or that, though their life might not be in danger in their home state, they might nonetheless get arrested there and wind up in a prison without a T.V. and Xbox in the cell.
• Technicalities must likewise not preclude the operation of the law, the foremost of which is an asylee lacking identity documents or a failed asylee's home state refusing to accept them.  Those two arguments thwart both processing of asylum applications as well as deportations in alarming numbers of cases.  States that refuse to admit failed asylees have to be subjected to extreme pressure, including economic and other sanctions, with a view to making them amend their ways.
• Similarly to the preceding point, political correctness must not be permitted to impede investigations into the validity of asylum claims.  An asylee professing to be underage (which attracts more lenient treatment as well as conferral of more generous entitlements) has to undergo whatever tests are necessary to ascertain the veracity of his or her claim regarding age.  It is unforgivable that, as recently reported, 29-year-olds are admitted into a country as "child refugees" because conducting examinations into their age would be "intrusive" and breach their "right" to "privacy."  Similarly, those not in possession of identity documents must be interviewed and interrogated, with skepticism and at length, to determine where it is they come from.  Making false claims about one's background has to be disincentivized.
• While their claims are being processed, asylees must be housed in secure accommodations.  They cannot be allowed to wander around the country (or, indeed, the whole Schengen area) together with their flashy sneakers and latest smartphones, all the while being in receipt of hundreds of dollars of monthly maintenance.  Further, those accommodations have to conform to the domestic legal standards, meaning that incidents such as that reported recently in Denmark, where an asylee was allowed to live as a married couple with his underage "wife," must not occur.
• Asylees who are successful and thus legally become refugees do so on the understanding that (1) their stay in the host country is temporary, and (2) their status applies exclusively to them.  That means that there is no pathway to citizenship, but only to permanent residence, and even that only after the best part of a decade has elapsed.  Moreover, a successful asylee cannot be permitted to "bring in" (i.e. sponsor) any current or new family members to the host country.  It is egregious that a single asylee--even before having his/her asylum claim approved--is allowed to bring in a half a dozen family members, too, on the grounds of family unification. 
• Refugees, although their sojourn in the host state is temporary, are to be expected to fully integrate with and practice the host state's cultural, social, and legal values.  That, in the West and many other places, includes, but is not limited to, speaking the language, abandoning the burka, abjuring the sharia, earnestly looking for work, participating in the civic life, respecting and promoting individual liberties (including in and for own family's), etc.
• Migrants rescued from dingy, sinking ships on the high seas, most often in international waters, should be given basic immediate assistance, such as some food provisions, blankets, and clothing.  They should then be sailed back to the shores they had set off from and left there.  There is no justification for transporting migrants who shipwrecked a few dozen miles off the coast of Libya 500 miles to Italy.
• Probably the most commonsense point of all: An asylee who commits any legal infraction--even jaywalking, let alone rioting or rape--is, if need be, incarcerated, and deported with a lifetime immigration ban.  The sight of hordes of asylees who (1) illegally snuck into a country thousands of miles away from their home, (2) are lavished with munificent benefits paid for by the host country's taxpayers, (3) show overt disdain for the host state's citizenry and culture, and then (4) engage in rioting, sexual abuse or terrorist activities is enough to make anybody's blood boil.

The antecedent constitute the bare minimum necessary to save the Western civilization from not only civil war with the battalions of migrants and their descendants but also from the populism, jingoism, virulent nationalism, xenophobia, and bigotry that will inevitably arise betimes if such measures are not taken.  The measures above, and the sentiments behind them, may sound callous.  I personally do not blame the asylees for trying all kinds of tactics to make it to the West.  I know that if I had been born--through no fault of my own--in a part of the world where I knew I would never have any prospects for a better life regardless of whatever I did, I might well essay to go elsewhere by any means necessary.  I also do not blame the terrorists and other enemies of the civilized world for exploiting the refugee and other laws to form a fifth column in our midst and attack us.  As they say: All is fair in love and war.

I do, however, blame the Western governments for not patching up those laws and commissioning other methods of combating illegal immigration. 

Just as it is not the fault of a Honduran, Pakistani, Sudanese, Syrian or Senegalese that they were born where they were, neither is it ours.  Nor is it our fault that we happen to live in much nicer and all-around better places.  Life is unfair and just because not everyone can partake in the quality of life and other privileges we in the West have does not mean we, too, should be stripped of them by allowing ourselves to be swamped by millions of people who share neither our demographics nor--far more importantly--psychographics.
 
©2017 Michael L.S.

You the Schmucks...

With the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)--who calls himself a "democratic socialist"--the term "socialist" has been somewhat normalized and has firmly entered the mainstream discourse as something approaching a respectable epithet.

Without examining Sen. Sanders' platform in great detail--beyond reproducing a popular online meme below--it is the notion of socialism itself that merits scrutiny.

The instant analysis will, in the first instance assimilate socialism with Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Stalinism, Leninism, and any other similar -ism.  "Communism" will initially be employed as a catch-all term for the foregoing.  Foremost attention will be given to the global experience and rational deductions rather than technical economic theories and calculations.

The first, ineluctable, observation that has to be made is that Communism has been an abject failure everywhere in the world it has been implemented and operated.  The Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact states, pre-1990s India, Cuba, Venezuela, Viet Nam, and dozens of countries at different times in Central and Latin America, Africa, and Asia all experienced Communism and, given a chance, all, down to the state, resolutely spurned it, after years or decades of iron-fist Communist rule.  Despite that, there are still fervent advocates for Communism, not least among the self-styled intelligentsia on college campuses in the West.  (The supreme irony is that intellectuals were almost always the first to face the Communist purges and firing squads, but, then, logic and intelligentsia are these days not always in the happiest of marriages.)

Tomes upon tomes of academic and popular material has been written examining, pontificating about, and apologizing for the causes of the disintegration and invalidation of Communism.  The most fundamental explanation is very simple, however.  The theory of Communism fails to take into account human nature.  The average person wants to own things.  The average person wants to own nice things.  The average person wants to own nicer things.  The average person wants to wear nice clothes and visit nice places and reside in nice houses.  The average person wants to get wealthier.  The average person wants to express his/her individuality.  The average person wants to compete.  The average person wants to improve him/herself.  The average person wants to get better: better autonomously (self-actualize) and better than others.  The average person does not want to be a mindless automaton, an anonymous cog in a nondescript wheel, one in millions of such wheels, without a personality, without anything to work toward, purposed only with playing a minuscule part in making the whole plod along.

That is what Communists do not understand wherefore, whenever the Communist theory came to be enacted in practice, it encountered the brick wall of indomitable human nature.  The Politburo's functionaries' answer to this conundrum was predictable: endeavor to change human nature.  That was invariably done in several stages:

1. Relentless propaganda and brainwashing: "Yes, we want to be gray, mindless drones!  We want to be an amorphous mass called the Working Class™!  We want to fight the endless [though the "endless" part was never openly admitted] fight to create a People's Utopia!"  En passant, it is always amusing and telling how Communist regimes feel the need to prefix just about everything with the possessive "people's": the "people's" army, the "people's" republic, the "people's" assembly, the "people's" museum, theater, supermarket, etc.  The chuckle-worthy part is that The People™ under Communism have about as much stake in the above as they do under an absolute monarchy.
2. Fear: "Enemies external and internal are chomping at the bits to subvert our glorious struggle!  Capitalist, imperialist swine lurk in the shadows--indeed, possibly in every shadow--scheming to make you their slaves!  Resist!"
3. Threats: "Better watch what you say and do, or we just might start thinking you might be one of those enemies we talked about!"
4. Coercion and force: blacklists, punishing entire families, show trials, disappearances, gulags.

There is not one single Communist society that did not adhere to the given paradigm.  Yet, despite having the most extensive surveillance and oppression apparatuses humanity ever saw, one after the other, the Communist regimes collapsed.  Stirring images of East Germans attacking the odious Berlin Wall with their bare hands, the fire of FREEDOM blazing inextinguishable in their eyes, are Communist ideologues' worst nightmare: That is the threat they are forced to continuously--and ultimately in vain--try to forestall.

There is also the small matter of the Communist economics, which are antiquated and irrelevant to the modern world.  The vaunted Working Class™, insofar as it even exists anymore, no longer encompasses the majority of those in gainful employment of a country nor are countries (especially the developed world) anymore replete with tractor drivers, assembly-plant workers, and coal miners.  Manual labor is of marginal importance in the today's knowledge-based economy and information-based society.  The service sector does not require a Revolution!, and the call center workers, Walmart shelf-stackers, and McDonald's burger-flippers will be replaced with robots and online processes within the next decade anyway.  Other than the permanently unemployable, Communism has nothing to offer to an increasing proportion of people with jobs or those willing and able to secure one.

Two retorts are commonly given to the above: (1) That was not real Communism, and (2) Communism is one thing; socialism is quite another.  They will be addressed in turn.

#1: The U.S.S.R., China, Cuba, Nicaragua, India, Viet Nam, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, North Korea, dozens of Soviet satellite states, Yugoslavia, El Salvador, Albania, Argentina, Bolivia, and several dozen others were not a genuine representation or faithful reflection of an unadulterated form of Communism.  Whatever the system those places had may have been, it was at best a warped, perverted version of the true ideology of Communism, which is nothing if not humane and humanistic.  If that sounds familiar, it is because the selfsame assertion is trotted out with tiresome frequency in an attempt to whitewash the indelible link among Islam, the dozens of Moslem terrorist groups worldwide, and the tens of millions of active supporters and sympathizers (also, of course, Moslems) of those groups.  Indeed, it seems that the more destructive, barbaric, and brutal an ideology is, the more vocally this argument is propounded.  It is, however, fundamentally wrong.

• Firstly, it is the archetypal, textbook-perfect No True Scotsman fallacy.  If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has little ducklings for offspring, then chances are extremely good it is indeed a duck rather than an elephant wearing a duck costume.  The various iterations of Communism globally can be safely adjudged to have been "genuine" enough.
• Secondly, even if it be accepted that, somewhere along the process of implementing the said system, the protagonists deviated from the [insert favorite Communist dogmatist]'s vision, it is indisputable that their initial design fully was to implement Real Communism®.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that millions of revolutionaries and their leaders, all across the globe, were only paying lip service to Communism, all the while plotting to establish a grossly bastardized version thereof.
• If, therefore, it is the case that, in spite of the best intentions of the comrade leaders, one nation after another after another fell victim to a phenomenal misapprehension of
  Real Communism®, then the logical corollary must be that Real Communism® itself is fundamentally flawed.  Surely a viable, feasible, practical ideology would be more immune to corruption than Real Communism® has consistently, yea exclusively, demonstrated itself to be.
• The risible and pitiable cheerleaders for Communism, however, breezily ignore all the antecedent.  Their gambit is, in essence: Relinquish your freedoms, liberties, wealth, individuality, personality, ambitions and dreams, forget history, and just let us take yet another crack at setting up this system sure to rectify so many wrongs and benefit all.  In other words: Hand over your money, shut up, and... - revolution, comrade!.

#2: Communism is altogether different than socialism, so criticism of the former does not--can not--apply to the latter.

There is some merit to this rebuttal.  On paper, socialism and Communism are indeed quite dissimilar.  Communism is an all-pervasive, intrusive, control-freak-y regime, which seizes and maintains an ironclad grip on every facet of individual and collective lives, education, commerce, politics, law, the economy, and even philosophy.  Socialism, on the other hand, is a collection of so-called "social programs" that is large enough--yet unquantifiable--to merit being labeled as socialism.  It is unquantifiable because, while to many the eponymous ObamaCare warrants the label socialist, to others even trippling all the current federal programs would not constitute socialism.

In practice, however, this protestation rings hollow.  The more "social programs" are instituted, the larger the bureaucracy and machinery necessary for operating them.  That in turn requires a bigger government and a more bloated public sector in general, as well as more material resources.  All that ultimately leads to having to take more money from the working people.  Unremitting raids on the taxpayers' pockets sooner or later call for indoctrination, which the more observant of the readers will recognize as the first step in establishing a Communist hegemony.  One would certainly not wish to commit the slippery-slope fallacy by proposing that socialism invariably evolves into Communism, and examples to the contrary do abound.  It is, nonetheless, beyond controversy that socialism is close on the ideological spectrum to Communism and that the difference between the two is not conspicuously demarcated.

#3: Bonus argument: The Scandinavian states are social democracies, so surely America can be, too.  The Left in America likes to flaunt Scandinavia as an example, indeed paragon, of many desiderata: from anti-gun laws to multiculturalism to the socio-polito-economic system.  Yet, if comparing Communism and socialism be a false analogy, then so is comparing Scandinavia and the United States.  The Scandinavian states' combined population is around 7% of America's and, until very recently, they were all highly homogeneous demographically and, crucially, psychographically.  In other words, those countries had comparatively few people and they were all, colloquially speaking, "on the same page" as regards their values, including diligence, interdependence, taxation, etc.  America's population as well as inimitable diversity--most importantly in values and lifestyles of its inhabitants--mean that replicating the Scandinavian system would be implausible.  Indeed, following the unprecedented and seismic changes (read: prodigious non-Western immigration) those states experienced in the past decade or two, reports are now plentiful of the social democratic system bursting at the seams.  Warnings, each more dire than the previous, are coming thick and fast about the working Scandinavian population no longer being able (or even willing) to support its unemployed, unemployable, and employment-averse counterparts.  This, to anyone who ever participated in a group project of any sort, will be unsurprising: Five motivated people get along fine and work like a well-oiled machine.  Twenty people working on the same thing, and with varying levels of motivation, evidence a considerable incidence of "freeloading," sometimes to the extent of making the group unworkable or causing it to disintegrate beyond the committed core.

If the foregoing has veered between scholarly and demotic in tone, it is only because it is difficult to ascribe full seriousness to this type of topic.  In 2015 no-one except the ignorant, the indolent or the malevolent should be extolling or prescribing Communism, socialism, fascism, or any kind of an oppressive, forcibly-collectivist ideology.  The fact that so many do means that the lovers of freedom must remain vigilant because the battle for common sense is never-ending.


©2015 Michael L.S.

Of Guns and Men

On the heels of the San Bernardino shooting perpetrated by two Moslem terrorists, tiresomely and predictably, President Obama and the chiefly liberal sections of the political establishment were on point railing against the supposedly too great availability of some or all types of weapons.  Their trope is: Guns should be banned or restricted because, intuitively, fewer guns means fewer gun-related deaths.

In making such assertions, however, no hard data are ever adduced.  Rather, they munificently deploy one emotionally-laden appeal after another, hoping to sway public opinion with sentiments that devolve to: "We must do something about it."

Following is just a selection of the factual arguments germane to the issue to be considered:

• Historically, the U.S. has been a "gun-toting" nation.  Indeed, after the Second World War, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, and others, America was awash with both weapons of every kind and with war veterans suffering from P.T.S.D. and many other mental ailments onset by the traumas they endured in the conflicts in which they fought.  One would have expected those mentally-unstable people with ready access to destructive weaponry to have been shooting up America with terrifying frequency.  Yet, prior to the 1980s there were only two mass shootings of note: A WW2 veteran killed 13 people in 1949 and a discharged Marine killed 16 people in 1966.  Even in the 1980s there were still only a handful of such incidents.  The prevalence of weapons and gun crime (especially high-profile, mass-casualty gun crime) clearly do not correlate historically.
• Case in point: Russia.  The country has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world where it is virtually impossible to obtain a gun.  Fewer than nine out of 100 Russians possess a firearm.  However, its overall homicide rate is almost four times that of the United States.
• By contrast, apart from having a lower homicide rate overall than Russia, despite there being 100 firearms per 100 population, only 10% of all violent crime in America involve firearms.
• The various recent trends in the United States also undermine the anti-gun narrative.  The rate of gun ownership has been on a steady increase over the past two decades.  Simultaneously, the homicide rate has been on a distinct downward course.  (On a point of interest and without necessarily suggesting a causal relationship, home robberies have also been decreasing as gun ownership has been increasing.)
• Consider the following chart:
  
  
  This chart is frequently employed by pro-gun advocates to argue that gun-"control" measures cause an increase in homicide, rather than a decline.  That argument is a post hoc fallacy; much more additional study would be required to validate it.  However, the chart does prove beyond a doubt that gun-"control" does NOT decrease homicides.
• Turning to history again, it demonstrates unequivocally that banning something deemed undesirable does not make it disappear.  The examples are innumerable, and the range includes everything from alcohol and drugs, to pornography and homosexuality, to speeding and D.U.I.  A ban on guns in Denmark, Belgium, and France very tragically did not prevent Moslem terrorists from massacring hundreds of people in cafes, trains, restaurants, and theaters there.  Indeed, arguably, if even a fraction of the victims would have been armed, it is likely that the death toll in all such attacks would have been considerably lower.  Likewise, astringent anti-gun laws in e.g. Chicago, Washington, and Detroit do not prevent those cities from having the highest gun-caused homicide rates in the nation.
• On the subject of D.U.I., more deaths are caused by intoxicated drivers than by guns.  Yet, no proposal has been advanced to further restrict the availability of automobiles or driver's licenses or even to mandate installation of additional safety mechanisms.  The reason why that should be so is self-evident: The overwhelming majority of drivers are law-abiding and responsible citizens.  It would, therefore, be unconscionable to penalize them for the excesses of an exiguous and statistically-insignificant minority, notwithstanding the suffering the latter group causes.
• As far as safety, only 0.025% of the guns in circulation in the United States are utilized for illicit purposes.  That is a safety record of 99.975%, which eclipses many common items in everyday use.
• Per 100,000 population, statistics show that such objects as swimming pools, scissors, stepladders, automobiles as well as many medical procedures are more lethal than guns.  In other words, many--sometimes on the order of magnitude of several tenfold--more deaths are caused by the items aforesaid than by guns.
• The standard retort to the foregoing is that, unlike guns, those objects are "not designed to kill."  That is correct; however, if the focus is on saving every precious life possible, then surely the most prolific provenances of death should be addressed in the order of priority.
• Another stock rejoinder is that people "do not need" firearms.  Surely such advocates recognize that government apparatchiks deciding what people "need" and "do not need," particularly pursuant to their personal beliefs, is the very definition of totalitarianism, indeed, fascism.
• The overwhelming majority of firearms use and fatalities involve the criminal underworld (more than 80%).  By its very definition, that milieu would not be affected by legislation restricting or banning guns.
• On a related note, far more crimes are prevented by the use of firearms than are committed.  The most conservative ratio is 10,500 : 1.  Recently, in Chicago--which, (in)famously has some of the harshest gun-phobic laws in the country--a conceal-carry citizen prevented a mass shooting.
• For years the pro-gun lobby's reflexive retort to attempts to institute gun-"control" has been to advert to the Second Amendment.  For most of the time, the anti-gun campaigners ignored that point and deployed other arguments to support their position.  As of recently, however, that has changed and it is now more common to witness rebuttals along the lines of: "The Second Amendment concerns the right of a militia to bear arms rather than ordinary citizens" and variations on the theme.  Unfortunately for the proponents of that line, the U.S. Supreme Court already issued a crystal clear ruling on the matter (District of Columbia vs. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)), which affirms that the Second Amendment does apply to individual citizens outwith any reference to any militia (s. (1)(f)).
• A favorite anti-gun exponents' mantra--and one coopted by Pres. Obama himself--is that, if countries like Australia and England can "do it," then so can the United States.  "Do it" is either left undefined altogether or its meaning is made suspiciously vague.  The tenor behind such statements is that, basically, countries such as Great Britain and Australia banned gun ownership outright, and their rates of homicide are lower than America's, ergo... - it should be easy by now to fill in the rest.  There are two major problems with this statement:
• England and Australia effected a complete ban of firearms.  Unless mainstream politicians, including the President and highest-ranked lawmakers are lying, that is by no means the goal behind any gun-"control" initiative under even theoretical consideration.
• More importantly, statistics controvert the main premise of the argument, to wit, that the bans in the two countries had any salutary effect on their rates of homicide.  Survey the following charts:
  
  
  It is obvious that, in both cases, anti-firearms measures did not entail a decrease in homicide.  The same conclusion emerges from this, just as it does from every set of data: Banning guns does not reduce homicide.
• The moral of the story is that these highly selective attempts at comparison between the United States and a few carefully picked countries is an exercise in futility.  A far more productive endeavor would be to cross-reference the rate of gun ownership with the rate of homicide, worldwide.  The result of such a study is astounding: The United States is the undisputed leader as far as gun ownership (112.6 guns per 100 residents), leaving Serbia a distant second at under 70 guns per 100 residents.  In terms of the intentional homicide rate, out of 218 states and territories, America is 121st.  So 1st in gun-ownership, 121st in homicides: That does not sound like a country that has an intractable gun problem.
• On a final note, Switzerland has a high rate of gun ownership: little over a half of the U.S.  However, there have been no mass-casualty firearm-related incidents in Switzerland.  Conversely, Spain has a rate similar to Russia (i.e. less than 10% of that of the U.S.).  Hypothetically, if the rate of gun ownership in Spain was similar to Switzerland's or America's, is it likely there would be mass shooting incidents there?  While speculative, logic and extrapolation dictate that the answer be negative: The culture and nomos of Spain are different to that of America.  The familial and societal structure are different, the values (such as individualism) are different, the quality and quantity of crime are different; all of those conspire to create an environment in which people simply do not act out in the way in which they act out in the United States.  That involves not just mass shootings but many aspects of individual and collective behavior.  Indeed, it answers the conundrum with which this piece opened: Why were there almost no mass shootings prior to the 1980s despite the prevalence of guns?

It is incontrovertible that, despite high-profile and widely-publicized incidents, the absolute and overwhelming majority of firearms in the United States are used legally, legitimately and responsibly, and that there is no scientifically-justified cause to believe that restricting or banning them would have the desired effect of significantly reducing gun-related violent crime.

The facts and figures above (all readily available and easily verifiable with simple Internet searches) cannot be rebutted by reiterating that, essentially, "guns are bad."  Anti-gun advocates need to counter the foregoing data with data of their own, which are more scientific, more credible, more reliable, and more plausible.  However, that is consistently and conspicuously not being done for the simple reason that such data do not exist.  The said advocates, accordingly, fall back on the tactic of using interminable argumenta ad misericordia, false analogies, non-sequiturs, and other logical fallacies, i.e. they essay to impose what are mere personal prejudices and values on the rest.

That is anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and disingenuous.

It has also, thankfully, been ineffective in swaying public opinion.


Selected Bibliography (not formatted to standard):

• Crime and Guns (with a plethora of own references).
• Drunk Driving by the Numbers.
• Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
• Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts.
• Kates, D.B., & Mauser, G.  "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?"  Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.  Vol. 30, No 2.
• Nine Myths Of Gun Control (also containing further references).
• Planty, M., & Truman, J. L.  (2013).  Firearm Violence, 1993-2011.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC. 
• The most common causes of death due to injury in the United States.
• The truth about gun deaths: Numbers and actual solutions.
• The U.S. Has More Guns, But Russia Has More Murders.

 ©2015 Michael L.S.