Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever

Communism, Crime, History, The State

Did you know that Jews tried to flee back into Hitler’s Germany from the Communist-controlled, adjacent territories? As hideous as it was, fascism was more merciful than communism. Read “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever,” and its source, “The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.” And teach it, Brother!

An excerpt:

April the 15th marked Holocaust Memorial Day. Nearly everyone knows about the industrial killing of 6 million Jews, for no other reason than that they were Jews. “Serious historiography” of the subject has ensured that The Shoah, Holocaust in Hebrew, is “consigned to posterity”; its lessons remembered and commemorated throughout the civilized world.

Although she failed to dignify the Armenian genocide of 1915, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour certainly covered the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, northern Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur, for a 2008 documentary about genocide. In the interest of pacifying its Turkish allies, American officialdom has generally aped Amanpour, refusing to implicate the Ottomans in the mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians, 100 years ago.

This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance, remedied the Armenian “omission.” The Pontiff called the massacre “the first genocide of the 20th century.” The Armenian-American reality TV star, her posterior and the rest of her entourage, visited the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, to pay their respects.

There is no philosopher of Hannah Arendt’s caliber, today, to give dignity to the victims of the Stalinist, systematic starvation of the Boers by the British, during the Second Boer War. Fifteen percent of the Afrikaner population was rounded up, interned and starved to death–27,000 women and children. The image of young Lizzie van Zyl, who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp, ought to be engraved in popular memory. It is not! When she died, Lizzie looked like the Jewish bags of bones who perished in the Nazi death and concentration camps.

Mention of Hannah Arendt is a must since this remarkable Jewish philosopher illustrated the similarities between “our century’s two totalitarianisms,” the Nazis and the Soviets. Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” spoke to a truth unmentioned until the publication of “The Black Book of Communism”: Both “systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks.”

If anything, “The Black Book” treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.” On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims [is] variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered. … the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to Communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The fact that socialists and communists are still voted into power—with swagger in Greece—demonstrates that communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress,” whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies. …

… The complete column is “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever.”

Rubio’s Tax Plan To Redistribute Revenue

Republicans, Taxation

A tax cut is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings. A tax credits is social tinkering or engineering such that certain politically desirable constituents benefit to the detriment of others. Not surprisingly, the latter is what Republican Marco Rubio proposes. Via the Wall Street Journal (ignore the WSJ’s praise for Rubio’s foreign policy belligerence; it ought to be obvious that I don’t care for the praise or the Rubio impetus):

… His recently announced tax-reform plan, introduced with Utah’s Senator Mike Lee, reflects the tensions inside the GOP. It proposes dropping the corporate rate to 25%, a consensus figure. But it proposes remarkably timid reductions in marginal tax rates for individuals, leaving the top rate at 35% on relatively modest incomes. Instead the plan’s centerpiece is a large, new tax credit—$2,500 per child.

With this proposal, Senator Rubio makes himself the party’s most visible ally of the “new” Republican idea that the Reagan tax-cutting agenda is a political dead end, and that the party now must redistribute revenue directly to middle-class families. It’s not clear how Candidate Rubio would hope to win a tax-credit bidding war with Hillary Clinton, who’d see and raise on the size of the credit and make it refundable to non-taxpayers. The Rubio tax credit looks like an obvious political gambit with no economic growth payoff. …


MORE.

TSA: Real Home-Grown Terrorists

Homeland Security, Private Property, Terrorism, The State

At last, that statist strongholds, The Washington Post, has permitted a contrary position on the sacred homegrown state terror that is the Transportation Security Administration. However, the solution offered is wrong. It is not the privatization and regulation of the cattle prodders and molesters at the airports that must be sought; but the privatization of airports and airlines.

If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that, one way or another, the TSA is going to get at your crotch. The latest data point comes from Denver, courtesy of CBS4:

‘A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.’

Apparently, the two screeners, one male and the other female, worked out a system. The female screener operating the body scanner would misidentify attractive men as women on the scanner, so that the machine would flag the extra, uh, bulk in their groin area, which then initiated a pat-down from her partner in lechery.

I once had a similar experience at a TSA checkpoint. I had thoroughly emptied my pockets, but the body scanner nevertheless detected an object in my pants. Fortunately, my TSA agent did not appear to take any pleasure in the business and went about his duty with grim professionalism.

At the time, I was merely annoyed at the inconvenience, not to mention the poor performance of the taxpayer-funded $170,000 millimeter wave scanner that I had assumed was able to tell the difference between a brick of C-4 and genitals. It turns out those scanners have never stopped a terrorist, but maybe one day the TSA screeners will inadvertently catch a cute jihadist.

It’s a sign of just how resigned we’ve become to the TSA’s existence that most of the men getting felt up probably shrugged it off and thought, “Well, that’s the TSA for you.” We’ve become desensitized to being scanned and prodded and told our toothpaste is too large and must therefore be confiscated in the name of national security. TSA’s expansion of its PreCheck program and an announcement that it would stop searching black women’s hair for weapons are what pass for progress. …

… MORE (but no need to bother; the gist was summed up above in my into).

Lincoln Died Today; His Cult Never Says Die

Fascism, History, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

Today, in 1865, is the day John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, well after the 16th President of the United States had already done insurmountable damage. The heroic Lincoln myth-buster, Tom DiLorenzo, marks (but doesn’t mention) the anniversary with a detailed and well-sourced swipe at the cult that never quits:

… These are all the main ingredients of a modern Lincoln cultist, as [David] Brooks demonstrated in an April 7 New York Times column entitled “What Candidates Need.”

“I have two presidential election traditions,” Brooks wrote. “I begin covering each campaign by reading a book about Abraham Lincoln [probably not one by Yours Truly], and I end each election night, usually after midnight, at the statue of the Lincoln Memorial.”

Brooks should be credited with bravery for being anywhere in public in Washington, D.C., The Town That Lincoln Built, after midnight. He does not say if he holds a séance there, or just prays at the foot of the gigantic statue of the corporate lawyer/lobbyist in an armchair that is the Lincoln Memorial.

Reading most books about Lincoln by “Lincoln scholars” will generally make one stupid and misinformed, as Brooks very ably demonstrates. This is because all such books are bundles of excuses, phony rationales, and fabrications. They are all written like defense briefs in The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln, authored by third-rate lawyers or law students. Being a “Lincoln scholar” means fabricating an excuse for everything. The bigger and more elaborate the excuse, the more “prestigious” is the “Lincoln scholar.”

For example, when the high priestess of the Lincoln cult, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, wrote in her book, Team of Rivals, of how Lincoln was actually the source and promoter of the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery, she praised him for it. Rather than condemning him for supporting the explicit enshrinement of slavery in the text of the U.S. Constitution, Goodwin heaped praise on Lincoln because this slick political maneuver, she said, helped “save” the political fortunes of the Republican Party.

Another example is how, in his last book on Lincoln, Harry Jaffa tried for the ten-thousandth time in his career to explain away Lincoln’s admonition in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that he was “opposed to making voters or jurors of Negroes.” Lincoln opposed giving “Negroes” the right to vote in the 1850s, Jaffa wrote, so that they could have the right to vote in the 1950s. This of course is absurd nonsense but also a good example of the dishonest academic hocus pocus known as “Straussianism.” …

… The complete column is “The Very Model of a Modern Major Lincoln Cultist.” Read it.