Category: Foreign Affairs

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.

Misinformation

I caught this fact-checking Associated Press article the other day, which I consider to contain not a little misinformation, if not outright disinformation in that the AP seems unwilling to call murderous terrorists from Gaza terrorists. The first paragraph says it all.

In the days since Hamas militants stormed into Israel early Oct. 7, a flood of videos and photos purporting to show the conflict have filled social media, making it difficult for onlookers from around the world to sort fact from fiction.

Militants who stormed into Israel? What happened on October 7 was that members of the organization called Hamas invaded Israel and murdered some 1400 Israelis, including 1033 civilians. Approximately 200-250 persons were seized and taken back to Gaza as hostages. These civilian casualties were not the inevitable collateral damage that occurs during any military strike. They were deliberately targeted and murdered by persons to spread terror. The purpose of these attacks was not to defeat Israel militarily but to compel the submission of the Jewish population of Israel through the use of terror. There is a word in the English language for people who use such tactics. That word is terrorist. The people who attacked Israel were not “militants”. That word implies a military group that abides by the rules of war. The people who attacked Israel were terrorists. The people who have expressed support worldwide for the actions of the Hamas terrorists are supporters of terrorism.

Few of the many conflicts in this world are definitely good versus evil. There is usually at least some and some evil on both sides. The war between Ukraine and Russia has often been presented as a clear case of good against evil, yet the conflict is not as unequivocal as the partisans for Ukraine like to portray. Ukraine is far from a paragon of honest, democratic governance, and Russia may well have a historical and demographic claim to the regions of Ukraine it covets. Russia is in the wrong because its leader, Putin, decided to settle the dispute with war, but this is a conflict where there is at least some justice on both sides.

That is not the case with the present conflict between Israel and Hamas. This war is as clear a case of good and evil as we are ever likely to see. Hamas has deliberately attacked civilians. Even worse, they have deliberately placed Palestinian civilians, their own people, in harm’s way to maximize civilian casualties to use as a reproach to Israel in world opinion. Their actions are evil. If there is any justice on the Palestinian side, it is negated by the atrocious actions of the Palestinian leadership in Gaza.
The Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005. They compelled Jewish settlers to leave and gave control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. If the Palestinians had made use of their freedom to invest in their economy; if they had made Gaza into a Singapore or Hong Kong on the Mediterranean; and if the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank had negotiated in good faith against a recalcitrate Israel, I might concede that they had justice in their claims against Israel. Instead, the Gazans elected Hamas to govern them. They destroyed the infrastructure that the hated Jews had left behind and launched rocket attacks against Israel. They sent suicide bombers to kill Jews until the Israelis built a wall along the border to keep them out. Hamas and the people of Gaza have not sought to live in peace with Israel. They want to destroy Israel.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is a struggle between good and evil, between civilization and barbarism. The Associated Press is not being objective and even-handed by referring to the murderous barbarians of Hamas as “militants.” It actively supports evil.

War in Gaza

I have a few things to say about the ongoing war in Israel. Obviously, this conflict is a tragedy for everyone concerned, especially the civilian population of Israel that is being specifically targeted for atrocities by the Hamas barbarians, but also for the Palestinians who lived under the tyranny of terrorist rulers and who will pay the price for their leaders’ crimes.

President Trump’s critics portrayed him as a reckless loose cannon who would inevitably start a war, perhaps even a Third World War. The actual history of the Trump administration was quite different from his critics’ expectations. Not only did Trump not start any new wars or military actions, but his administration did much to promote peace by taking potential threats seriously. Among other actions, Trump helped to begin the Abraham Accords that opened up normal relations between Israel and the Arab Gulf States. It was only after Trump left the White House that things started to fall apart, with war breaking out in Ukraine and Israel and China becoming more belligerent.

The lesson here is obvious, yet somehow we keep forgetting it. When the United States projects strength, there is peace. When a weak, senile president guided by subordinates who despise their country leads America, there is war. When the American military is strong and respected, we deter bad actors. When the American Military is weak and woke, we encourage bad actors. Like it or not, America must, to some extent, be the world’s policeman. That does not mean we should involve ourselves in every little conflict. America should very seldom deploy its forces abroad. Indeed, if America consistently projected strength and confidence, we would rarely have occasion to intervene. It is weakness that gets us into forever wars.

The reason the strife in the Middle East simmers for decades without ever getting resolved is that Israel is not permitted to win the conflict. For Israel to have peace, they must convince the Palestinians that they are defeated and that there is absolutely no possibility that they will gain their goals through violence. That means that Israel will have to be brutal to the Palestinians. Israel has not been able to do this in part because Israel, unlike its neighbors, is a civilized nation, and civilized nations find it difficult to fight barbarians on their own terms. Israel has also not been allowed to win because Western “human rights” organizations seem to believe that Israel protecting itself is an egregious violation of the Palestinian’s right to kill Jews.

General William T. Sherman was brutal to the Confederates during the Civil War. Sherman was not a cruel man, nor did he hate the South. Sherman understood that the people of the South had to realize that they were defeated and that there was no possibility of the South rising again. He knew that if the defeated South held fast to any hope they could achieve their aims by violence, the United States might be fighting another Civil War in twenty years. Likewise, the Allies were brutal to the Axis powers. We knew that the people of Germany and Japan had to realize we had completely defeated them. Otherwise, there might have been another “stab in the back” myth, and we might be fighting the same war in twenty years. In both cases, what seemed acts of cruelty in the short term were, in fact, acts of compassion in the long term, to the extent that they deterred the next war. It is counter-intuitive, but war is, in its nature cruel, and a little bit of cruelty in the short term is preferable to a festering, decades-long struggle that blights generation after generation.

For their own good, the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank need to understand that they cannot defeat Israel. They must learn that they can only survive by reconciling themselves to the continued existence of Israel and making some accommodations with it. That is the reason many other Arab nations, Egypt, Jordan, and others, have opted to make peace with Israel. They realized that they could not defeat Israel and, therefore, must learn to live with Israel. The Palestinians need to come to that same understanding.

The greatest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the ill-informed left-wing peace activists and their allies in national governments and international organizations. These are the people who loudly announce their solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians while denouncing Israel as an “Apartheid State.” Not only are these fools implicitly endorsing anti-semitism by holding Israel to an impossible standard while ignoring the terrorist actions of Hamas, but they are prolonging the conflict by giving the Palestinians hope of an eventual victory over Israel with foreign aid. As peace activists generally do, they have been making war more likely. The blood of the Israeli civilians murdered by Hamas is on their hands, as well as the blood of the Palestinians killed by Israeli retaliation.

Israel will not have peace until it can achieve victory over its enemies. Until that time comes, the killing will continue.

King Charles III

King Charles III got his long-awaited coronation today. I know that as an American, I’m not supposed to care about British royalty, except to exhibit a certain sense of superiority that we Americans ditched the royals. I’m supposed to wonder why a civilized country like the United Kingdom still puts up with the expense and bother of the monarchy much less a formal coronation.

Well, I don’t. I support the British monarchy. I have always been something of an anglophile and a monarchist. As far as I can tell, I am descended from Germans, Scots, and English, but I identify most with my English ancestors. I am proud to be an American, but if I had to be of any other nationality, I would choose to be an Englishman. I even occasionally regret the unpleasant events of 1776, at least until I recall that the United Kingdom does not have any equivalent of our First and Second Amendments. They badly need one. In any case, I feel that the British monarch is, in some sense, my monarch and King Charles III is my king. 

Long live the King

And so, God save King Charles III (even if he is a bit of a doofus), and long may he reign over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

 

 

 

The End of an Era

Queen Elizabeth II is dead.

Long live King Charles III

From the Washington Post.

Queen Elizabeth II, the seemingly eternal monarch who became a bright but inscrutable beacon of continuity in the United Kingdom during more than seven decades of rule, died Sept. 8 at Balmoral Castle, her estate in the Scottish Highlands. She was 96.

Her death, of undisclosed causes, was announced by Buckingham Palace.

In her reign, which began in February 1952 after the death of her father, King George VI, Elizabeth served as a constant and reassuring figure in Britain and on the world stage as she helped lead her country through a period of profound shifts in geopolitical power and national identity.

The designs of postage stamps and bank notes changed through the decades, but they all depicted the same, if aging, monarch. The British national anthem now shifts to “God Save the King,” but most Britons have only known the other version, for the queen.

It is the end of an era. Queen Elizabeth II is the only monarch most Britons, and most of us elsewhere, have ever known. Although as an American I live in a republic without any kings or queens, I am enough of an anglophile that I felt that she was my queen. I am sorry to see her go and I wish the best of luck to the new King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

This Flag Stands for Freedom

In Cuba, the people are fighting for their freedom against Communist tyranny.

 

Just as the people of Hong Kong have been protesting the despotic rule of the People’s Republic of China.

 

Isn’t it ironic that all over the world the American flag is a symbol of freedom, except here in America? In the United States, our leftist elite despises the flag as a symbol of racism and hate. They are triggered by the sight of the flag. Children are taught to hate the American Flag. 

 

 

I think this tells us everything we need to know about the American flag-hating left. They are not fighting against racism but freedom. They despise the greatest symbol of freedom in the world as much as they despise the freedom that flag represents. These socialists are on the same side as the tyrants of Cuba, China, and everywhere else freedom is denied to the people. They are on the same side as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and every other despot who tormented the people he ruled. Their Critical Race Theories and 1619 Projects and socialist politics are simply a way to attempt to impose the same sort of totalitarian rule that the brave people of Cuba and Hong Kong are fighting against. 

For millions of people around the world, the American flag stands for freedom. It is a pity that is no longer the case for so many people here at home. 

Quarantine China

If it were not for the criminal negligence of the government of the People’s Republic of China, the world would not be suffering from the coronavirus pandemic. They lied about the extent of the pandemic in their own country and punished medical authorities who dared to tell the truth. Their incompetence permitted the spread of COVID-19 beyond Wuhan.  The Chinese government is still not being truthful or responsible about events in China and has even permitted the wet markets, where the disease began, to reopen.

All of this could be forgiven if it were a one-time event, but the recent history of pandemics originating in China reveals that the spread of this latest pandemic is part of a pattern. The Chinese government was just as incompetent and dishonest in its reaction to the SARS epidemic of 2002, the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009, and the Bird Flu epidemic of 2013-16. It must be obvious by now that the People’s Republic of China is unable or unwilling to maintain the minimum standards of public health or fulfill its obligations as a good global citizen. It is time to quarantine China.

We need to cut off our trade with China as much as possible. We certainly should not rely on a potentially hostile trading partner for our military or economic necessities. Wherever possible we need to bring our manufacturing back to America. American companies need to come home. When it is not feasible to locate a factory or other facility in the United States, we should at least locate it in a friendly country. There are many places with cheap labor. We do not have to rely on a country with values hostile to our own to make our stuff.  We should also restrict travel from the People’s Republic of China until they can show that they are capable of establishing public health protocols that will prevent the next pandemic from spreading outside of China. Unfortunately, these proposals will cause hardship for the citizens of China who have no control over the actions of their government, but we have to put the health and welfare of our own people first.

We also need to investigate the Chinese Communist infiltration of American and Western institutions. In recent years, the Chinese have been leveraging their increasing economic prosperity to gain influence over our universities, research laboratories, entertainment industry, and judging by their eagerness to parrot Chinese propaganda even our news media While the Democrats have been fretting over alleged Russian electoral interference, it is China that has been expanding its efforts to influence public opinion in Western nations and even donating to preferred political parties and candidates. All of this needs to be stopped, particularly the self-censorship that Hollywood imposes on itself to gain market share in the vast Chinese movie-going public. We need to ask ourselves what does it gain us to get cheap stuff and profits from China if we lose our nation, our freedoms, and perhaps even our lives?

While we are decoupling economically from the Communist Chinese state, why don’t we reverse the terrible decision President Carter made in 1978 to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China and sever diplomatic ties with the Republic of China in Taiwan. The Communists are the de facto government of the Chinese mainland, but that doesn’t mean we ought to recognize them as being in any sense the legitimate government. The Communist government of China is nothing more than a band of corrupt bandits who shot their way into power and then proceeded to murder and starve tens of millions of their own citizens. The economic reforms of the last few decades may have allowed some economic freedom for the people of mainland China and some degree of prosperity, but China remains a totalitarian state that denies its people the most basic civil rights. Even if the Communist government of China was, in any sense, the legitimate government of China, it surely lost its legitimacy when it sent soldiers to gun down its own citizens at Tiananmen Square for asserting their right to be free. It is time to stop pretending we are dealing with a civilized power and re-establish diplomatic relations with the free and democratically elected government of the Republic of China in Taiwan.

Whatever we decide to do after this present crisis is over, we had better make sure that we take steps to make sure something like the COVID-19 pandemic does not happen again. One thing that we can certainly do is to decouple ourselves from China until they show that they can get their act together and keep their citizens and the world safe and healthy.

“Chinese Virus” is not Racist

No, it is not racist to refer to the coronavirus or COVID-19 as the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus. Calling it the Kung Flu might be racist and is certainly inaccurate, considering we are not dealing with a strain of influenza, but it is funny. This pandemic had its start in Wuhan, China, and it is commonplace to name a new form of a disease by its origin. As David Mastio, the Deputy Editor of USA Today’s editorial page, and no Trump supporter, explains;

But many of the reports left something out: just how common and innocuous geographic names are for diseases.

Here are a few:

And disease names don’t have to come with a foreign flavor. Lyme disease is named for a town in Connecticut. Norovirus is named for Norwalk, Ohio. Rocky Mountain spotted fever!

And then there is the issue of facts. The Spanish flu was most likely misnamed; we don’t know where it came from. But we do know that the novel coronavirus now sweeping the world emerged from a city called Wuhan in central China.

I suppose that if COVID-19 had first emerged from Hoboken, New Jersey it would be popularly named the Hoboken virus or the American virus. Would that be racist? Is referring to rubella as German measles racist or anti-German? No sensible person would maintain such a ridiculous notion. Why is Wuhan or the Chinese virus somehow racist? Why are so many in the media jumping on this bandwagon? I can only think of two reasons.

The government of the People’s Republic of China has been very eager for the rest of the world to forget that the coronavirus originated in China. China’s leaders would especially like for people to forget that the pandemic could have been easily managed had they managed the minimal level of transparency expected in a good global citizen. Instead, they tried to cover up the problem to protect the Party’s reputation. Now, they are trying to blame the United States by promulgating a bizarre conspiracy theory, while insisting that “China virus” is racist. Our elite media seems all too eager to repeat Chinese Communist propaganda points, whether because they are that eager to find some way to blame Trump or they admire China’s authoritarian government, I don’t know.

Or maybe they just despise their fellow Americans. The idea among our betters seems to be that if the president refers to the Chinese virus, it will lead to attacks against Asian-Americans. Already, the media is breathlessly reporting on a handful of incidents of insults and violence against East Asians. According to our elite, those of us who are benighted enough to live in flyover country are so racist and ignorant that any mention of the China virus will drive us into a frenzy of hate and will cause us to form mobs to hunt down every Chinese we can find and murder them, just as mobs of Europeans murdered Jews during the time of the Black Death. Well, in a nation of over 320 million people there are going to be a few cases of people behaving badly, especially in California. Contrary to what our betters on the coast might believe, the United States of America is not a nation of haters. We do not form mobs to kill “foreigners” at the drop of a hat. There are not KKK rallies being held on every street corner, and Trump’s supporters are not White supremacists. We are better people than they believe us to be and I wish they would stop projecting their own bigotry on to us.

It is certainly appropriate to refer to the coronavirus as the Chinese virus. I cannot say that I am very much troubled if the Chinese leadership or their allies among our own leaders are upset by the use of that term. To be honest, I am more than a little irritated at the Chinese, or to be more accurate, at the Chinese communist government for their negligence which led to our present crisis. I have already been upset by the Chinese government’s totalitarian disregard for the basic civil rights of their own citizens, the near genocide of the Uighurs, the occupation of Tibet and the bullying way in which they have been leveraging their economic power to supplant the democratic values of free nations with their own authoritarian values. The Chinese virus is simply the last straw. The People’s Republic of China has shown that it is not a friend to the United States or to the free world. It is time we take their threat seriously. We can begin by assigning the blame for the coronavirus pandemic where it belongs and not allowing them to bully us into denying the obvious truth.

Greta Thunberg

Jason D. Hill writes an open letter to Greta Thunberg on Frontpagemag. I don’t why people write editorial pieces in the form of open letters since the intended recipient will almost certainly never see it. Why not just write a straight editorial? Still, Hill makes some very good points.

Greta Thunberg:

You have declared yourself a leader and said that your generation will start a revolution. You have comported yourself as a credentialed adult and climate change activist who has fearlessly addressed politicians and world leaders. You have dropped out of school and declared that there isn’t any reason to attend, or any reason for you to study since there will be no future for you to inherit. You have, rather than attend your classes, been leading Friday Climate Strikes for all students in your generation across the globe. Your attendance at oil pipelines has been striking. There, you unequivocally declare that all oil needs to remain in the ground where it belongs.

In September of 2019 you crossed the Atlantic in a “zero carbon” racing yacht that had no toilet and electric light on board. You made an impassioned plea at the United Nations in which you claimed that, “we have stolen your dreams and our childhood with our empty words.”  You claimed that adults and world leaders come to young people for answers and explained in anger: “How dare you!” You claimed that we are failing you and that young people are beginning to understand our betrayal. You further declared that if we continue to fail your generation: “We will never forgive you.”

You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects — because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?

It is strange that these activists only harangue western countries, especially the United States, where carbon dioxide emissions have been falling. I guess they know that countries like China and Iran don’t care what they think. It is far easier to virtue signal by shaming the West.

First, we did not rob you of your childhood or of your dreams. You are the legatee of a magnificent technological civilization which my generation and the one before it and several others preceding it all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance, bequeathed to you. That growth-driven, capitalist technological civilization has created the conditions for you to harangue us over our betrayal. It is a civilization that eradicated diseases such as small pox from the word, and that lifted millions out of abject poverty in a universe you think is dying and decaying. It assured you a life expectancy that exceeded that of your ancestors. Most likely by focusing on economic growth which you demonize, and scientific advancement, that civilization will further enhance a robust quality of life and health for your descendants.

Young people in the West like Greta Thunberg have absolutely no reason to feel frightened or pessimistic about the future. They are already living lives that kings during the Middle Ages would envy. They can grow up confident that they will never know famine. They do not need to fear dying from diseases like smallpox or plague. All over the world, the standard of living is rapidly improving, even in the poorest parts of the world. There is no reason to believe that the future will not be even brighter, provided the ecofascists don’t take over and undo the industrial revolution.

Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.

Why do we pay any attention at all to what children are saying? By definition, children are ignorant. They lack any real knowledge of the world. It is up to us, the adults to teach them about the world, not to indulge them by pretending they are saying something wise or profound or to use them as political props.

Yes, we have betrayed you: by capitulating the world of leadership to bored, attention-deficit children who spout bromides, platitudes and slogans that a rudderless and morally relativistic culture accepts because a significant number of its denizens have become intellectually bankrupt and morally lazy.

Greta Thunberg reminds me of Samantha Smith. Samantha Smith was a ten-year-old girl who wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov when he succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in 1982. In her letter, she asked Mr. Andropov, why he wanted to conquer the United States. Andropov, a KGB man who had helped to brutally crush the Prague Spring and had persecuted dissidents in the Soviet Union, replied that, of course, the USSR had no such intentions. He only wanted peace and invited her to come to the Soviet Union. She accepted and became a “goodwill ambassador”, and a Soviet propaganda prop. Meanwhile, foolish adults interviewed her and solemnly intoned that a simple child could see what the adults could not.

Samantha Smith was only a child. She had little or no knowledge of the totalitarian nature of the Soviet government or of the Communist party’s aggressive commitment to spreading Communism worldwide. She knew nothing at all about international relations or the geopolitical realities that made nuclear disarmament extremely difficult and even undesirable. Anything she had to say on the state of Soviet-American relations was worthless. She would have been better served if she had stayed in school in the US and studied.

Likewise, Greta Thunberg knows nothing of climate science, the real science as opposed to the politicized nonsense the public is being fed. She knows nothing of the difficulties of ending fossil fuel use and has no idea that such a step would consign billions of the poorest people in the world to starvation. She has not the slightest idea just how good her life is. She has nothing worthwhile to say and would be better off going back to schools. ‘

Greta Thunberg cannot be blamed for her folly. She is only an ignorant child. It is the adults who are using her who should be ashamed of themselves.

Feminist Vegan Restaurant Closes

Here is a wacky story from Down Under.

A lesbian-owned, vegan restaurant that charged an 18% “man tax” has closed its doors after less than two years of business in Brunswick, Australia.

Handsome Her, a small restaurant billed as “a space by women, for women,” made international headlines in 2017 after announcing upon its opening that female customers would get priority seating and men would be charged an optional 18% tax “to reflect the gender pay gap.”

Less than two years later, the cafe’s owners announced that they would be closing up shop in order to continue their mission with more “hands-on work.”

“When we opened Handsome Her in 2017, we expected that perhaps we might make a stir through our brazen public discussions of structural inequality and oppression,” the cafe said in a Facebook post. “The man tax blew up the internet, an idea that we didn’t think was all too radical, yet the way the world responded showed us how fragile masculinity is and solidified the necessity for us to confront and dismantle patriarchy.

The idea of charging a “man tax” seems radical to me and I wonder how this man tax did not run afoul of Australia’s anti-discrimination laws. It certainly seems to be discrimination based on sex, but perhaps discrimination against men doesn’t count. Maybe the fact that the tax is optional is enough to keep them out of trouble. I also wonder how these women expected to stay in business when they were alienating half of their potential customers. More than half really, since I am sure that many women did not appreciate the discrimination against the men they loved.

It is easy to make fun of these foolish women with poor business sense, but I think there is an important lesson for more established businesses here. The reason that any business exists, whether it is owned by a single proprietor or a great multi-national corporation is to make money for its owners. Any business must make a profit or it will eventually go out of business. The only way for any business to make a profit is to please its customers by providing goods or services they desire in a manner they desire. If the owner or manager of a company decides to pursue any goal besides making a profit by pleasing its customers, such as pursuing social justice, it will cease to please its customers and will eventually go out of business. This is particularly true if the pursuit of virtue-signaling results in policies that alienate customers. Yes, I am looking right at you and your new gun policies, Doug McMillan, CEO of WalMart. Trying to impress the social justice warriors, who despise WalMart and would never willingly shop there, while alienating gun-owning customers is simply not a good business policy.

Ultimately, the CEO of any corporation works for the stockholders, the owners, of the corporation. It is his or her job to serve the interests of the stockholders by pursuing policies that legally and ethically maximize profit for the corporation. As I stated above, any company can only make a profit if it provides goods and services that customers want to buy. If the CEO of a corporation decides that impressing his elite peers with virtue-signaling is more important than providing customers with the goods and services they want, he is not pursuing policies that will maximize profit and therefore is not serving the stockholders. He is in the same position as any of his employees who pursue outside interests while on the job.

Businesses should concentrate on the business of making money and pleasing their customers, not engage in political activism or pursue social justice. When I decide to buy something from Walmart or some other store, the only thing I want to consider is whether I am getting a good deal. I don’t want to have to be in the situation of having to consider whether the money I am spending is going to serve a bad cause. I don’t want every decision in my life to have political considerations. Not everything has to be about activism.