Banning Franco

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s description of his experiences fighting the Spanish Civil War. Like all Orwell’s nonfiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest narrative. Unlike many political writers, Orwell was interested in people more than ideology. He favored truth and decency above party platforms. Orwell’s account is biased, but he admitted his biases and warned the reader not to take his or any other account at face value.

George Orwell

Orwell was a partisan for the Republicans first and a journalist reporting on the war second.  For this reason, I believe he misses some salient points about that war. Orwell spent the war entirely on the Aragon front. He fought with the POUM Militia, a faction of dissident Communists. He sympathized with the Anarchists who had gained control of Barcelona. Orwell spent much of the war in the most radically left-wing Spanish province with the most extreme left-wing faction of the Republican forces. That naturally skewed his perceptions.

George Orwell believed that Francisco Franco had almost no public support in Spain. He correctly understood that Franco was not genuinely a Fascist. Franco was a conservative who sought to restore the ancien regime of Spain. Orwell believed only conscripts and foreign mercenaries from Germany and Italy fought in the Nationalist army. Only the very rich and romantics supported Franco. I am not so sure about that.

Francisco Franco

I concede that few Spaniards may have loved Franco. The Spanish Fascist or Phalangist Party was a minuscule, fringe organization before Franco took it over as a vehicle for his political ambitions. Likely, not many people in Spain were enthusiastically in favor of Fascism. Many Spanish must have regarded the Republic as the legitimate government. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, an attempted coup by a few officers would have gained little public support.

Conditions in Spain during the 1930s were not normal. The Spanish far left was determined to convert Spain into a Soviet Socialist Republic, no matter what the voters in Spain wanted. The Spanish left’s policies frightened many Spaniards. Small farmers and shopkeepers did not want to see the socialists nationalize what little property they owned. Pious Spaniards were horrified by the Socialist and Anarchist attacks on the Catholic Church. Spanish patriots did not want the outlying territories of Spain, such as Catalonia and the Basque territories to become autonomous, perhaps as a prelude to independence. For these reasons, many people in Spain supported Franco out of fear of the Communists.

To test this hypothesis, I decided to google Spanish support for Franco. (In fact, I used Duckduckgo. I do not use Google. Google is evil). I did not discover how much support Franco enjoyed during the Spanish Civil War. I did learn that the Leftist dominatged Spanish Cortes has recently enacted a law banning praise for or support of Francisco Franco.

Spain’s Senate house has approved a landmark bill that will ban expressions of support for the former dictator Francisco Franco, and seek to bring ‘justice’ to the victims of the 1936-1939 Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship.

The new ‘Law on Democratic Memory’, which was already approved by the Spanish Congress in July, will for the first time also make unearthing mass graves a ‘state responsibility’.

Organizations that praise or support the policies and leaders of Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship, including the private Francisco Franco Foundation, will now be banned under the legislation. Fines for non-compliance will range from 200 to 150,000 euros.

The new law does not allow for crimes under the dictatorship to be prosecuted, however.

The bill was approved by 128 lawmakers in the Senate on Wednesday, with 113 votes against and 18 abstentions.

So, the Spanish government is defending democracy by limiting democracy. It is protecting freedom by restricting free expression. It is preventing a possible dictatorship by dictatorial means. How Orwellian.

I am not very familiar with Spanish politics. I do not know how many people in Spain would support a Franco-style dictatorship. I imagine that few Spaniards pine for the bad, old days of authoritarian rule. Even if there does happen to be a substantial number of people in Spain who desire a restoration of Fascist rule, it is not going to happen.

Spain is a different country in the twenty-first century than in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Spain was a badly polarized country with little experience of democratic government. Today, Spain is a mature democracy. The Spanish military is not likely to rise against its own elected government. It seems to be unnecessary to ban any expression of support for a dictator who has been dead for half a century. In any case, banning the praise of France will not change the minds of any die-hard Francoists. It only gives the appearance that they are the victims of government persecution.

Franco is dead,

I think I know what is going on here. The Left-wing parties behind this legislation are not frightened by a revival of Fascist dictatorship. They are taking the opportunity to ban opposition. At first, they will act against overt expressions of praise for Franco. Before long, right-wing or conservative statements will be considered subtle Francoist dog whistles. Opposition to the Spanish left will be equated with supporting Fascism. Eventually, anything but enthusiastic support for the left will be de-platformed and canceled.

This Spanish law would only be a minor concern to me if the trend toward censorship were confined to Spain. Unfortunately, they are part of a wider trend seen throughout the formerly free world. Nation after nation is increasingly imposing controls on speech, ostensibly to fight disinformation or hate speech. Even in the United States, with our First Amendment, we see the government attempting to control information with the collusion of social media platforms. It seems fewer and fewer people anywhere see any virtue in freedom of speech.

George Orwell did not think Franco would win the Spanish Civil War. His fear was that whatever government, whether of the left or the right, that emerged from that conflict would be a dictatorship. In the short term, Orwell was wrong. Franco did win the war. In the long term, it looks as if he might have been correct. Post-Franco Spain is becoming less free. It also appears that the dystopian world he imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four is getting closer to reality here and in Eurasia.

Cinco de Mayo

Charge of the Mexican Cavalry at the Battle of Puebla (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Today is Cinco de Mayo or the Fifth of May. Contrary to what is commonly believed, (including by myself), Cinco de Mayo is actually more of an American, or at least a Mexican-American, holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is only celebrated regionally in Mexico, primarily in the states of Puebla and Vera Cruz. Schools are closed on this day, but it is not an official national holiday in Mexico.

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of  Puebla on May 5, 1862. In 1861, the Mexican government was bankrupt and President Benito Juarez suspended payments on Mexico’s foreign debt. In response, Britain, France, and Spain sent naval forces to occupy the city of Vera Cruz and demand payment on the debts Mexico owed them. Juarez managed to come to an arraignment with Britain and Spain, but the French, ruled by Emperor Napoleon III had other ideas.

Louis Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I Bonaparte. He had somehow managed to get himself elected president of the Second Republic of  France in 1848. Still, he decided that president was not a grand enough title for a Bonaparte, and in 1851 he seized dictatorial power in France and named himself Emperor. Despite being the nephew of Napoleon I, Napoleon III was not a particularly aggressive Emperor and was mostly content to have France at peace with other European powers. With the crisis in Mexico, however, Napoleon III saw an opportunity for France to gain an empire in Latin America. The United States was involved in the Civil War and was in no position to try to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, an additional benefit to the French occupation of Mexico would be to give France a base with which to send aid to the Confederate States, keeping the nation divided and unable to resist the French conquest.

 

The French army invaded Mexico with 8000 men under the command of General Charles de Lorencez late in 1861. This army marched from Vera Cruz in April  1862 and defeated Mexican forces led by Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin on April 28. Seguin retreated to the city of Puebla where the Mexicans had two forts. Seguin had only 4500 badly armed and trained men to defend the city. It seemed likely that the French would crush the Mexicans and march on to Mexico City without any further resistance.

 

On May 5, Lorencez attacked the forts with 6500 men. Against all odds, the Mexicans successfully defended the forts against three assaults. By the third assault, the French artillery had run out of ammunition, so the infantry had to attack without artillery support. They were driven back and the French had to fall back. Then, Seguin attacked with his cavalry while the Mexican infantry outflanked the French on both sides of their positions. The French were routed with 462 men killed, while the Mexicans only suffered 83 dead. This unlikely victory has been an inspiration for Mexican patriots ever since.

 

The victory was a short-lived one. Napoleon III sent reinforcements to Mexico and the French were able to conquer the country. Napoleon III placed the Austrian Hapsburg Maximilian as the first Emperor of the Mexican Empire. He was also the last Emperor since as soon as the United States was finished with the Civil War, the US government made it clear to Napoleon III that it would not tolerate a French colony on the southern border. Since Napoleon III did not want to fight a war against battle-hardened Civil War veterans, he removed the French troops. Maximilian, even though he sincerely tried to govern Mexico well, was quickly overthrown and executed.

 

Although Benito Juarez declared that the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla would be a national holiday, Cinco de Mayo was first celebrated by Mexicans in the American Southwest, the territories the US gained in the Mexican War. The former Mexicans began to celebrate Cinco de Mayo both as a way to express their Mexican identity and to show their support for the North in the Civil War. It may seem odd that these unwilling Americans would care about a war half a continent away, but the Mexicans were against slavery, and Hispanics insisted that California enter the United States as a free state. Cinco de Mayo gained popularity in the 1960s with the rise of Latino activism and still more in the 1980s when beer companies realized that the celebratory nature of the holiday would be a good marketing tool to sell more beer.

 

So happy Cinco de Mayo, or should I say Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

 

 

 

 

Lady and the Cats

I started thinking of the Siamese Cat Song from the Disney animated classic Lady and the Tramp a few days ago. I don’t know why that song started running through my head. It must be at least thirty years since I have seen that movie. Whatever the reason, I decided to see if I could find a clip of that scene on YouTube. I wasn’t surprised to find the clip available. I was surprised to learn that the Siamese Cat Song is now considered racist. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Indeed, I should not have been surprised that Disney included a trigger warning on Lady and the Tramp on its streaming service Disney +.

Two Siamese cats sing the song. Because they are Siamese cats, the animators thought it would be amusing to make them Siamese. The song is in the musical style of traditional Siamese or Thai culture. The cats sing and speak in a vaguely Asian accent. Somehow, this is racist and offensive. Evidently, depicting Siamese cats as Siamese reinforces anti-Asian stereotypes.

The Siamese cats are not the only offensive characters in Lady and the Tramp. There is a Scottish terrier who speaks and acts stereotypically Scottish. There is also a Bulldog who speaks in a cockney accent, a Russian Borzoi with a Russian accent, a Dachshund with a German accent, and, worst of all, a Chihuahua who is Mexican. There is also a human owner of an Italian restaurant who happens to be a stereotypical Italian. Obviously, Lady and the Tramp is a breeding ground of bigotry. Its a wonder Disney didn’t ban the movie altogether.

So much racism in one picture

I have to wonder, is anyone truly offended by these ethnic stereotypes? Are there any Thais who feel belittled or marginalized by seeing Siamese cats singing a song in Siamese style? Are people motivated to discriminate against Asians or commit hate crimes as a result of this silly song? What about the other stereotypes? Are Russians, English, Germans, and Mexicans insulted by the portrayal of animals associated with their nationalities? Perhaps they are more inclined to be amused or flattered. It is not often that one sees any portrayal of Thai culture in American media.

I am reminded of Warner Brothers’ decision to retire the character Speedy Gonzales on the grounds that the Fastest Mouse in all of Mexico was offensive to Latinos. Warner Brothers backtracked when it discovered that Speedy Gonzales was well-liked in Latin America. After all, the Mexican mouse was a spunky character who regularly got the better of El Gringo Pussy Gato. I also recall that American Indians are less offended by Indian-named sports franchises than is generally supposed.

In the live-action remake of Lady and the Tramp, Disney changed the Siamese cats to a breed of cats not associated with any nationality. The song the cats sing is generic. I do not know what Disney did about the dog pound scene. I am certain there were no Hispanic chihuahuas. That is one way to solve the problem of negative national stereotyping. Aunt Jemina and Uncle Ben have been erased as mascots. The Indian Maiden in Land o’ Lakes has disappeared.

The answer is to avoid giving offense by including no national or ethnic characteristics at all. The solution is to make every character bland and generic. So much for diversity in our entertainment media

It seems that the only people bothered by supposedly offensive representations in the media are a small number of professional activists. These are people whose lives depend on finding reasons to be upset. That brings me to my next question. Why does anyone care what a small number of hypersensitive busybodies with a perpetual chip on their shoulder think? Why do we need to put trigger warnings to appease the unappeasable? Why not consign these people to their safe spaces and let the rest of us enjoy life?

The sooner we start ignoring the eternally offended wokescolds and get on with our lives, the better we all will be. We may start seeing entertainment we actually want to see again. Who knows? Maybe, Disney will start making money again.

Blocking the Sun

The sixth century AD was not a lot of fun for most people, especially in Europe. The Roman Empire had definitely fallen, at least in the West. With that fall came barbarian invasions, endless wars, economic decline, trade collapse, and infrastructure deterioration. The year 536 was the worst year of a bleak century. In fact, the year 536 might well be the worst in recorded history.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse

What happened? The most widely accepted theory is that a volcano erupted in Iceland and emitted ash and dust into the atmosphere. This volcanic debris blocked enough sunlight to cause the Earth to cool as much as 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Such a decline in temperature caused a devastating decline in agricultural productivity throughout the Northern Hemisphere leading to famine and plague. It took centuries for the population and economies of European and Asian states to recover.

The year 1816 was known as the Year without a Summer.

In the summer of 1816, the Northern Hemisphere was plagued by a weather disruption of seemingly biblical proportions. Following a relatively ordinary early spring, temperatures in the eastern United States plunged back below freezing, and communities from New England to Virginia experienced heavy snowfalls and crop-killing frost during June, July and August. Europe also found itself in the grip of an unseasonable chill. Winter snows refused to melt, and between April and September, some parts of the Continent were drenched by as many as many as 130 days of rain. The unrelenting gloom inspired author Mary Shelley to write her famous novel “Frankenstein,” but it also wreaked havoc on farmers. Crops failed across Europe and China, spawning deadly famines and outbreaks of typhus and other diseases. In India, the disturbances gave rise to a virulent new strain of cholera that eventually killed millions. The suffering in the United States was less pronounced, but many still felt the squeeze of soaring grain prices. Some poorer Americans were even reduced to eating hedgehogs and scrounging for wild turnips.

This time, a volcano erupted in Indonesia. Mount Tambora emitted ash and dust into the atmosphere. The volcanic debris blocked sunlight, causing the Earth to cool by .7 to 1 degree Fahrenheit, again causing a devastating decrease in agricultural productivity. 1816 was not as grim as 536, but the Year Without a Summer was enough to cause food shortages worldwide. The period of global cooling may also have changed American history by encouraging thousands of people to leave New England to settle in the Midwest.

In the twelfth century BC, the longstanding civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent collapsed rather suddenly. Historians are still not certain what caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Many factors contributed to the Collapse, but it is possible that it was triggered by a volcanic eruption that emitted dust and ash into the atmosphere. This volcanic debris blocked sunlight causing the Earth to cool.

Do you begin to see a pattern here? Let’s not forget that the most widely accepted theory for the cause of the extinction of the Dinosaurs is that an asteroid hit the Earth, throwing tons of dust into the atmosphere. This dust blocked sunlight and caused the Earth to cool.

Clearly, any decrease in the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface results in disaster for life and civilization. With that in mind, surely only a madman would suggest we pump aerosols into the atmosphere to block sunlight. This is precisely what some very influential people plan to do to fight climate change.

Bill Gates’s radical plan to “save the planet” from “climate change” by blocking out the Sun has officially launched as scientists began pumping chemicals into the sky this week.

As Slay News has previously reported, Bill Gates has long been advocating for the plan to fight “global warming” using experimental geoengineering to block the Sun.

The idea, promoted by Gates and leftist billionaire George Soros, involves pumping manmade white clouds into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet’s surface.

The radical scheme would lower the planet’s temperature and allegedly “combat global warming.”

Soros claims the technology will help to prevent ice sheets from melting.

Ice sheets melting in Greenland in particular, he claimed, could doom human civilization.

“Our civilization is in danger of collapsing because of the inexorable advance of climate change,” Soros said.

“The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would increase the level of the oceans by seven meters.

“That poses a threat to the survival of our civilization,” he alleged.

The method pushed by Bill Gates involves increasing aerosol concentrations in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.

The people proposing this plan are either insane or evil. Most likely they are both. They are mad enough to believe they can control the climate. They are evil enough to aspire to become the worst mass murderers in history. If this plan is implemented, we will see a repeat of some of the worst years in history. Millions could die of starvation. We will not have to worry about the imaginary threat of global warming. We will experience the very real threat of global cooling. We will not have to worry about the ice sheets of Greenland melting. We will have to worry about the polar ice caps advancing down North America and Eurasia.

This is a really bad idea

I do not remember ever being asked to vote on this madcap scheme. There has certainly been little public discussion of the concept. Even if the idea of blocking sunlight to fight global warming was sound, I think implementing actions that might drastically alter the Earth’s climate ought to be decided in some form of democratic manner. It definitely ought not to be decided by a handful of powerful oligarchs whose wealth will protect them from the consequences of their folly.

The Gates-Soros plan to bring about a new ice age is as mad as it is evil. It has to be stopped.

 

Some Thoughts on Class

In the second part of his book, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” George Orwell discusses the prejudices against socialism and the working classes. These prejudices make it challenging to improve the dire conditions faced by the people living in the industrial north of England during the Depression Era, which he described in the first part of his book. Orwell begins by examining the development of his own prejudices in the first chapters of the second part.

Orwell’s background was what he described as the “lower-upper-middle class.” Orwell’s family was not what we might call the one percent. His family was not even part of the ten percent. They were barely well off enough to distinguish them financially and socially from the middle-middle class, especially the lower or working class. In a sense, people in Orwell’s lower-upper-middle class were in a pitiable position. They were close enough to the top to aspire to rise to that top, yet not so close as to make such aspirations easy or even possible.

If Orwell’s family had been solidly middle or working class, the idea of joining the upper class would have been inconceivable. They could have led comfortable and contented lives. Because the possibility was tantalizingly close, they found it necessary to live as though they were upper class, as far as their finances would allow. They had to keep up appearances. Young Orwell had to attend the best schools possible. They had to pronounce their words the correct way. They had to have the correct manners. They had to avoid associating with their inferiors lest they pick up uncouth mannerisms.

Orwell was taught to believe that working people were coarse. They had atrocious accents. They were dangerous and violent. They were dirty and smelly. People of Orwell’s class clung to their prejudices all the more tightly because they, themselves, were so close to the working class. The most racist people of the Jim Crow South were the poor Whites. In many ways, they lived on the same level as the Blacks. Their white skin was all that distinguished them, and so they were the biggest proponents of the doctrine of White supremacy. The petty nobility of pre-revolutionary France were the most fervent upholders of aristocratic privilege. Other than their titles, they were indistinguishable from their peasant neighbors.

Among the ideas that Orwell discusses is the belief that the lower classes ought not to be too well off. They ought not to enjoy the same luxuries that middle-class people, let alone the upper class, enjoy. If the lower classes are prosperous enough to enjoy decent houses with indoor bathrooms, automobiles, etc., then the class distinctions between upper, middle, and lower start to fade away. People of Orwell’s lower-upper-middle class might find that they are not in the superior position they believe themselves to be. And anyway, what is the fun of being in the elite if ordinary people can afford some of the luxuries of the elite?

Much of Orwell’s discussion of class seems a little strange to me. I am not an Englishman, raised to believe that people can be graded like so many eggs. I am an American. I was taught that any man is as good as another and maybe a little better. It seems to me that class in America is more based on money than is the case in Orwell’s England. There is less of an idea of an impoverished aristocrat. Race also matters. The Whiter a person is, the better. Balanced against this idea of superiority of race and money, however, is the egalitarian ideal of America’s founding. That is why the definition of White has become more inclusive over time. People formerly considered nonwhite, South and East Europeans, have become White. I expect that in a few decades, Mexicans and other Latinos will be White, whatever the shade of their skin.

Yet, an American class system has arisen in recent years. There has developed an aristocracy based on going to the right universities and having the correct opinions on matters such as immigration or LGHTQETC affairs. People outside the elite class are deplorable who bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns. That explains the hostility towards Donald Trump. He may be wealthy. He is not of the proper class to be president.

What inspired my thoughts in this direction was the column, America’s Dysfunctional Overclass, by Michael Barone. I found the poll Barone cites to be particularly revealing. It seems the class prejudices of our elite are not dissimilar to those of Orwell’s background.

What does America’s overclass think of the rest of us? The short answer is “not much.” They think ordinary people’s splurging on natural resources is destroying the planet and needs to be cut back forcefully. And that the government needs to stamp down on ordinary people enjoying luxuries that, in their view, should be reserved for the top elites.

What is surprising is the extent to which this American overclass would deprive its fellow citizens of things they have taken for granted. Half of these groups, 47% of Elites and 55% of Ivies, say the United States provides people with “too much individual freedom.”

More than three-quarters favor, “to fight climate change, the strict rationing of energy, gas, and meat,” a proposition rejected by 63% of the public. Again, “to fight climate change,” between half and two-thirds favor bans on gas stoves (a recent target despite demurrals of Biden bureaucrats and New York state Democrats), gasoline-powered cars (heavily disfavored by Biden Democrats and California rules) and SUVs, “private” air conditioning and “nonessential air travel.”

The upper classes of Orwell’s time believed the working class to be dirty, coarse, and ignorant. The upper classes of our own time believe ordinary Americans to be racist, intolerant, and ignorant. In early twentieth-century England, the elite thought members of the lower classes who owned automobiles or houses with indoor plumbing to be impertinent. In twenty-first-century America, the elite think Deplorables who own gas stoves and air conditioning are climate criminals. Perhaps there is not as much difference between Orwell’s Britain and our America as we might wish.

 

Replacing Biden

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Over the last year, there has been a lot of speculation that the Democrats will replace Joe Biden on the ballot for the 2024 presidential election. Since Biden “won” the election of 2020, it has been increasingly apparent that Biden suffers from advanced dementia. His policies have been unpopular, and it would be fair to say that the majority of the American people are not better off than they were four years ago. The Democratic Party would surely be better served by another candidate. Certainly, the Democrats will replace an ailing Biden with Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, or anyone who is not practically an invalid.

I am skeptical. It seems to me that if the Democrats intend to replace Biden, they would already have done so before the primaries began. There is normally a primary challenge when an unpopular president is running for reelection. Ted Kennedy ran against the unpopular Jimmy Carter back in 1980. Pat Buchannan ran against the unpopular George Bush in 1992. Most notably, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy ran against Lydon B. Johnson in 1968. In the latter case, Johnson dropped out of the race after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

No one has challenged Biden in the Democratic primaries as one might expect. Robert Kennedy Jr. had planned to run against Biden but instead decided to run as an Independent. It seems that the power brokers inside the Democratic Party have pressured any potential candidates not to challenge Biden. I suspect they made it very clear to Kennedy that his candidacy would go nowhere. If anyone in the Democratic party planned to replace Biden, they would have encouraged a rival against Biden, hoping that a string of primary victories would induce Biden to drop out, just as Johnson did. That has not happened.

They could make a switch at the Democratic National Convention. Again, I am skeptical. The days of open conventions when a dark horse candidate could beat the odds to be nominated are long over. These days, political conventions are tightly scripted pep rallies for their parties. The candidate who has the primary votes is going to be nominated. For the Democrats, that candidate will be Joe Biden. Replacing Biden with a nominee who nobody voted for is unprecedented Since 1972, the nomination process has been dominated by primaries. Nominees are no longer chosen in smoke-filled rooms.

Why has there been no movement to replace Joe Biden? It is hard to say. Biden wants another term for president. He obviously believes he is up to the job of president. Perhaps Biden is healthier than his public appearances indicate. Perhaps Biden is as senile as it appears but the people surrounding him prefer a president who is pliable to one who is healthy and dynamic enough to actually run the country. Biden’s career in the Senate was one of a centrist Democrat. The far-left policies promulgated by President Biden might suggest that Biden is not making the policies. Then again, it may simply be that presidents who have to fight off primary challengers do not get reelected. A Democrat running against Biden would be as good as delivering the general election to Donald Trump.

I say that Biden will be on the ballot in November. We will see if I am right.

Beyond the Reset

You have got to watch this animated short film by Oleg Kuznetsov, Beyond the Reset, before someone working for YouTube figures out what it is all about and takes it down. It is an all too realistic portrayal of the future our elites have in store for us.

It would be nice to believe that the dystopian setting is entirely the product of Mr. Kuznetsov’s vivid imagination. It would be nice to be confident that such a dismal, oppressive world could never be a reality. It would be nice, but the experience of the years under COVID has demonstrated that it would be naive to believe that such a future is a very real possibility.

The fact is that nearly every feature of Mr. Kuznetsov’s short film is based on policies either adopted or considered by governments around the world. There really were quarantine camps, much like the one Bruce Kowalsky lived in. People really were confined to such camps in Australia. To be sure, the quarantine camps were chiefly for persons traveling to Australia. They were not placed there permanently. Still, there were serious proposals in the United States to require persons who refused the COVID-19 vaccines to be imprisoned. In China, millions of people who were not sick were imprisoned in their own homes. The Chinese government enforced its stay-at-home orders with drones.

All of us who lived through the pandemic can recall the nonsensical measures our leaders devised to keep us safe. We were supposed to wear masks and keep six feet apart from each other without evidence that such actions would prevent the spread of any disease. We had to stay home unless our betters decided our jobs were essential. They told us such emergency procedures were necessary to protect us from a disease with a less than one percent mortality rate, just as Bruce Kowalsky heard on the news.

There really is an effort underway to eliminate meat from our diets. They really want us to start using insects as our primary source of protein. I do not believe they will really destroy all the cattle, however. The elites deserve the best, including the beef denied to the serfs. We have all become familiar with the canceling of classic movies. We have also become familiar with streaming services providing propaganda in preference to entertainment people want to watch. When movies, like Gone with the Wind, come with trigger warnings, can an outright ban be far behind?

So what can we do to avert this dystopian future? If you are looking for practical advice, I am afraid you will have to look elsewhere. I am not an expert on prepping, guns, or military tactics of resistance. I have a feeling that an armed insurrection against a reasonably competent modern state would be futile. Although, it is an open question whether our leaders are, in fact, reasonably competent.

I will say this, however. If you do not want to live a life like Bruce Kowalsky’s, the best thing you can do is to be a skeptic. Doubt what you are told. Ask questions. Demand evidence. Request explanations. If the experts come to a conclusion, don’t take their statements at face value. Ask how they came to that particular conclusion. If you do not understand their explanation, try to learn enough in their field of expertise to comprehend the field’s jargon. Be a scientist. Remember that an expert can be wrong or biased. They may have their own agenda. As Dr. Richard Feyman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Do not comply. Resist whenever possible. Don’t get on that bus. Make them drag you on the bus kicking and screaming. If they want to tyrannize over us, make them work for it.

Be this guy

In the end, I don’t think the soft totalitarianism of the Great Reset will succeed any better than the hard totalitarianism of Fascism and Communism. Despite what the totalitarians believe, human nature is not malleable and resists easy definition. Totalitarians are always trying to insert the square peg of human nature into the round hole of ideology. It doesn’t work, as the failures of the Thousand Year Reich, the New Soviet Man, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and others have demonstrated. In the end, the Great Reset will fail, although a great many people may be hurt or killed. In the end, freedom will win.

The Attack

I have enjoyed reading Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull novels of an America divided between red and blue. Despite certain flaws, Kelly is something of a Gary Stu, and the effects of a national split would be far worse than Schlichter imagines; the series is fun to read, leavened with Schlichter’s humor. I might complain the liberal villains are too cartoonishly over the top. Still, as Libs of TikTok has demonstrated, leftists are determined to be as cartoonishly over the top as possible. If anything, Schlichter has difficulty keeping up with leftist insanity.

The Attack is not like Kurt Schlichter’s other fiction. There is little of Schlichter’s humor to be seen. There are no steely heroes who enjoy blowing away the bad guys. There are no insane leftists who use weird new pronouns. There are only ordinary American men and women trying to prevail in the worst terrorist acts in American history.

The Attack was inspired by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Kurt Schlichter decided to write a book about the possibility of such a terrorist attack on the United States. Schlichter originally intended to write a nonfiction book but was persuaded that a novel would be more engaging to the reader. The trouble with attempting a novel depicting a massive terrorist assault on the United States is that writing on such a scale would require a book the size of a sweeping Tolstoyan epic with a cast of thousands of characters to do the subject justice. Such an epic could not be written quickly. It would, perhaps, take years. By that time, the attack Schlichter’s book is intended to alert us about could have become real.

Instead, Schlichter chose to create a fictitious oral history, rather like World War Z. This proved to be the correct choice. It is the only way to properly explore the many ways in which America is dangerously vulnerable to an atrocity similar to that experienced by Israel. In the Attack, Schlichter describes a three-day assault by ten thousand Islamic terrorists who have crossed our southern border aided by Mexican drug cartels. After weeks or months of preparing, the terrorist cells are activated and attack their targets, assisted by leftist “revolutionaries”, mostly college students. On the first day they attack public spaces, the obvious terrorist targets. The second day, the terrorists move to residential areas to kill and rape as many civilians as possible. Schools are a particular target on this second day of terror. On the third and final day of horror, infrastructure is the target, along with devastating cyberattacks that bring down the internet. The result is a shattered country with hundreds of thousands dead and many millions affected.

In The Attack, we experience the full horror of a series of terrorist attacks on America as witnessed by a whole gamut of characters. We read the stories of first responders on the scenes of multiple attacks, the victims and survivors of those attacks, and a confession by a captured terrorist before he is executed. We hear the stories of those whose job it was to anticipate an attack, who tell why the system failed. We read in raw detail what rescuers found when they arrived too late and the testimony of a little girl whose parents were murdered in front of her after she was raped.

The Attack is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is one of the scariest books I have ever read, the more so because it could become a true story. Millions of people would love to bring the Great Satan down and would be perfectly willing to sacrifice their own lives for a chance of martyrdom. Our southern border under the Biden administration is essentially nonexistent. It would be all too easy to smuggle in an army of thousands, a few at a time.

Yet, The Attack is essentially optimistic. America is attacked but not defeated. America is devastated but not broken. In the moment of crisis, Americans fight back and prevail against the terrorists despite a lack of leadership from Washington. America emerges from the Attack stronger and more determined. Perhaps this is the true lesson of The Attack, America is better than either its leaders or its enemies believe it to be. We can only hope we don’t need to prove our goodness in such a way as Kurt Schlichter writes.

Read this book, and pray it remains fiction.

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. The story of Thanksgiving that we remember, with the turkey meal, etc is based on the Thanksgiving celebration held by the settlers of the Plymouth colony in 1621. They had a lot to be thankful for. These Pilgrims had decided to immigrate to the New World so that they could practice their religion freely. They had intended to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River, but their departure from England on the Mayflower had been delayed, and the trip across the Atlantic had been rough. They reached America farther north than they had intended, at Provincetown Harbor in November 1620. While they did not really have a legal right to create a colony in what is now Massachusetts, no one really wanted to spend the winter at sea so, on December 21, 1620, the Pilgrims began to build the settlement at Plymouth.

Would you spend any more time in a leaky ship like this than you had to? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first winter at the new colony was very hard. About half of the colonists had died by spring. By what must have seemed incredible luck or divine providence, the colonists were able to make contact with two Natives who could speak English. One of these was named Samoset, and he had learned some English from English trappers and fishermen. He introduced the Pilgrims to the other man, Squanto, who had a truly remarkable life. Captured by Englishmen, he was taken to England and instructed in the English language in the hope that he could serve as an interpreter. When he was brought back to New England, he was captured again, this time by members of John Smith’s expedition who planned to sell captured Indians as slaves in Spain. In Spain, some friars learned of this plan and had the Indians freed and instructed in the Catholic religion. Squanto was able to make his way back to England and then across the Atlantic. There, he discovered that his whole tribe had been destroyed by the diseases, probably smallpox, that the Europeans had brought to the New World.

Squanto was willing to help the Pilgrims and taught what they needed to know to survive in New England. The harvest in the summer of 1621 was good enough that the Pilgrims did not need to fear starvation that winter. They had a feast that Autumn to celebrate their good fortune and give thanks to God. This celebration was not considered to be very remarkable. Thanksgiving celebrations were fairly common at the time, especially among people who had successfully made the difficult and dangerous voyage across the ocean. It was not really the first Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving, painted by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930).

There were proclamations of thanksgiving at various times in American history, especially during the Revolutionary War, but the holiday we know of as Thanksgiving really began in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation that a national day of Thanksgiving was to be celebrated on the final Thursday of November. It might not seem that there was all that much to be thankful for in the middle of the Civil War but the tide was turning in the North’s favor after the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg that July, and the country was continuing to grow in strength and prosperity despite the horrors of the war. Lincoln’s proclamation set the date for the national holiday that has been celebrated ever since. Franklin Roosevelt set the date a week earlier in 1939 in the hope that an earlier date would mean a longer shopping season for Christmas, thus helping the economy still mired in the Great Depression. This was not without controversy, and in October 1941, Congress officially set the date of Thanksgiving on the fourth, and almost always the last, Thursday in November.

So, enjoy your turkey, but remember to be thankful to God. If you happen to be an American, you really are one of the luckiest people on Earth.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Voltaire once said that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him. I agree with the words of that statement, but perhaps not with the spirit in which Voltaire uttered it. I suspect Voltaire’s meaning was the cynical observation that people often invoke the Deity to exert control over people. Appealing to God has been a means to justify the rule of autocrats from the Pharaohs and Caesars demanding worship to the divine right of kings proclaimed by Louis XIV and his kind.

It would be necessary to invent God for almost the opposite reason. It would be necessary to invent God because God is necessary for the human soul for the same reason oxygen is essential for the human body. If oxygen did not exist, we would have to invent it. But oxygen does exist. We know that oxygen exists because we would not live without oxygen. Oxygen fulfills a need in our bodies. We know that God exists because we would not exist without God. God satisfies a need in our souls. For this reason, atheism as a philosophy cannot endure. Atheism cannot endure because it ignores a fundamental need of the human soul. The atheist is like a child who insists on holding his breath and denying himself oxygen.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and intelligent woman. She is intelligent enough to understand that, in the end, atheism fails to satisfy a basic human need. She is brave enough to admit when she has changed her mind.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells of her spiritual journey from Islam to atheism and finally to Christianity in an article she wrote for Unherd.

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not convert to Christianity solely to satisfy her spiritual needs. She is also concerned about the future of Western civilization and particularly the freedom that only Western civilization brings to the world.
I have often thought of the so-called New Atheists, the Hitchenses, the Dawkinses, and others as being a little like a man who is walking around in a beautiful cathedral. He sees before him a pillar that is in his way. Perhaps he does not like the shape or the color of the pillar. He decides the cathedral would be better without the pillar blocking people’s way, so he pulls it down. The man does not see that the pillar he dislikes is holding up the ceiling, and if he succeeds in pulling it down, the whole edifice will come crashing down on top of him. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it:

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

The New Atheists have made a career of debunking and discrediting Christianity. They have sought to debunk and discredit Christianity in the defense of Western Enlightenment values such as freedom of speech and thought. The problem is that by debunking and discrediting Christianity, they are debunking and discrediting Western Civilization. They are debunking and discrediting the ideals they hope to defend. The result of their efforts will not be the free and rational world they expect. The skeptics who attempted to debunk Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not create a free, rational world. They have created a world in which people searched for new faiths in the form of Fascism and Communism. The skeptics who are debunking Christianity today may well form a world in which people search for faith in the form of neo-fascism, Islam, and nihilism.

If I may be permitted the presumption of criticizing a woman my superior in courage and intelligence I notice that Ayaan Hirsi Ali omits the most important reason for becoming a Christian. The reasons she cites for converting to Christianity are practical. However, the only real reason to become a Christian is because Christianity is true. One becomes a Christian because the central belief of Christianity, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and that he was resurrected, defeating sin and death for all time, is a true belief.

It is this belief that separates Christianity from every other religion. In Islam, Allah demands that we die for Him. In Christianity, YHWH gives His only son to die for us. In Hinduism, gods like Vishnu assume human form to smite their enemies. In Christianity, God becomes human to be smitten. Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius taught the truth. Jesus asserts He is the truth.

The Christian belief that each human being is worth dying for leads to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of liberty. The Christian belief leads directly to the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.” In Islam, we are all slaves of God. In Christianity, God makes us His sons. Slaves have no rights. Sons inherit the Kingdom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is humble enough to admit that she is only a beginning Christian. Let us all pray that she grows in her new faith and continues to be a powerful warrior on the side of Western civilization.