The Women’s Strike About Communism, Not About Women

Dennis Prager discusses the issue of radical Leftism and the useful idiot that follow these people. The term “useful idiot” in political parlance means:

  • In political jargon, a useful idiot is a person perceived as a propagandist for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who is used cynically by the leaders of the cause

Dennis reads from a NEW YORK TIMES article where Tithi Bhattacharya, a member of the strike’s organizing committee, says the strike on Wednesday focuses on rejecting the “systemic violence of an economic system that is rapidly leaving women behind.” Continuing, she notes:

“This is the day to emphasize the unity between work done in the so-called formal economy and the domestic sphere, the public sphere and the private sphere, and how most working women have to straddle both,” says Ms. Bhattacharya. “Labor is understood to be work only at the point of production, but as women we know that both society and policy makers invisibilize the work that women do.” The strike calls for women to withhold labor, paid or unpaid, from the United States economy to show how important their contributions are.

The platform of the strike seeks to elevate the demands of the majority of women, not simply the demands of the loudest or most privileged women.

“The language of feminism in recent years has been used to talk about ‘Lean In’ feminism,” says Ms. Bhattacharya. “We do not want a world where women become C.E.O.s, we want a world where there are no C.E.O.s, and wealth is redistributed equally.” This, she explains, is why they decided to convey their “new international feminist movement” around the socialist philosophy of “Feminism for the 99 Percent.”…

Reagan Defines “Conservative”

At this point I do hope I am not confusing readers with the terms “fascist” and “socialist.” Both are forms of utopianism and are based on central planning by a few elitist individuals. The only true difference is in the ownership of production. In the classic socialist or Marxist state, the government not only directs but owns the means of production. In the fascist state—sometimes referred to as “national socialist” —the central planners still direct the means of production, but ownership or part ownership remains with individuals. Under this definition, the current single-party economic model of China is- “national socialist” or “fascist” rather than Communist.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (New Jersey, NJ: Regnery, 2016), 138-139.

CNS-NEWS notes that,

…In a Dec. 14, 1975 interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace, Reagan discussed his political philosophy, saying that “the heart of my philosophy is much more libertarianism, than –.”  Wallace then interrupted, “Well, that’s the fashionable word these days, I guess. A conservative is no longer just that, he’s a libertarian.”

Reagan continued, “It always has been. How do we call a liberal?  You know, someone very profoundly once said many years ago that if fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.”

“And what is fascism?” Reagan said.   “Fascism is private ownership, private enterprise, but total government control and regulation. Well, isn’t this the liberal philosophy?”

“The conservative, so-called, is the one that says less government, get off my back, get out of my pocket, and let me have more control of my own destiny,” he said….

Short Bio’s on Obama’s Radicals – William J. Murray

I updated a couple posts to compliment this excerpt, they can be found here:

This is an excerpt dealing with some short biographies of people Obama chose to surround himself with. You can see they are radicals who export Marxist ideals into public policy as well as some overtly anti-American positions. I would say “enjoy” the read, but I cannot.


  • William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 165-174.

REGULATORY UTOPIANS

CASS SUNSTEIN

Cass Sunstein was the Edward Mandell House/Rexford Tugwell char­acter in the Obama administration. He was appointed to run Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009. He left the administration in 2011 to return to Harvard, where he continues to brainwash his students into supporting his anti-Constitutional and totalitarian beliefs.

Sunstein is the consummate Progressive and utopian tyrant. He believes that the Constitution is a “living document”—code words for liberal judges having the power to interpret the Constitution and law in general to support the latest leftist political agenda.

Writing in The Partial Constitution (Harvard University Press, 1993), Sunstein pushed the idea of a “First Amendment New Deal,” which would create a government panel of experts to ensure a “diversity of views” on the airwaves. Imagine a panel of presidential appointees determining what constitutes diversity on TV and radio.

Sunstein also believes hunting should be banned, that animals should have the same rights as humans, and that lawyers should be empowered to file lawsuits on behalf of animals. Despite being against the killing of rabbits or deer, he is, like all Progressives, perfectly agreeable to destroying unborn humans at any stage of pregnancy.

In 2004 he published A Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. In it, he proposed a series of “rights” for individuals that would inevitably result in greatly expanding the power of the federal government over every aspect of our lives.

According to Sunstein, “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government inter­vention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”

Sunstein’s views sound like those of Benito Mussolini or Philip Dru in the utopian novel.

JOHN HOLDREN

President Obama appointed John Holdren to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to cochair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Holdren sounds like a very dangerous tyrant in his written state­ments on population control and other issues. In 1977 he coauthored a book with Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, 1978), which seriously pro­posed, among other things, that women should be forced to abort their children; that populations should be sterilized by dropping drugs into the water supply; that people who “contribute to social deterioration” should be forcibly sterilized or forced to abort their children; that a “Planetary Regime” should assume total control of the global economy; and that an international police force should be used to dictate how all of us are to live our lives.

Because this was a White House office, the Senate did not have the authority to stop the appointment; however, some senators should have come forward and pointed out on the record that Holdren’s suggestions were very much the same as those of fascist utopian Adolf Hitler.

Holdren openly condemns the free enterprise system as the enemy of the people and a threat to the environment. Writing in his 1973 book, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, also cowritten with the Ehrlichs, he called for a “massive campaign . . . to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations.

According to Holdren, the “mad czar” of science and technology:

De-development means bringing our economic system (especially pat­terns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

Elsewhere, he wrote, “By de-development, we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

The Soviet Union successfully did away with “planned obsoles­cence” by eliminating innovation. As no new cars were designed for decades, vehicles like the unsafe Lada lived on unchanged for decades. Like many Progressives who believe jobs should be “preserved” as a right, Holdren does not understand that artificially preserving out­dated industries and nonproductive jobs results in a failure for new industries to come into existence.

DONALD BERWICK

Dr. Berwick was picked by President Obama to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Knowing that Berwick’s views were so radical, Obama used a recess appointment to get him into this position so he wouldn’t have to undergo Senate scrutiny. Once his recess gig expired, he simply resigned to avoid having to answer questions under oath before a Senate committee.

Berwick has an open love affair with the British National Health Service (NHS). In his own words, “I’m romantic about the National Health Service. I love it!” In fact, he loves it so much that he says it is an “example for the whole world—an example… that the United States needs now.” ‘Why? Because he considers America’s health care system to be “immoral” and an example of the “darkness of private enterprise.” And in typical utopian-tyrant fashion, he believes that only government-enforced “collective action” can override “individual self-interest.”

He was, however, a bit more honest than his boss, President Obama. He openly admitted that under Obamacare, “the decision is not whether or not we will ration care, the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” Conservatives always find this a terrifying thing about central planners—their willingness, even eagerness, to assume the role of making life-and-death decisions about the fate of other individuals.

So, how is the love of his socialist life working for British citizens, keeping in mind that this is the same system he wanted to bring to the United States? The Boston Globe shares some quotes from UK newspapers:

“Overstretched maternity units mean mothers face a 100-mile journey to have baby.”

“Hundreds of patients died needlessly at NHS hospital due to appalling care.”

“Cash-strapped NHS trust introduces rationing for common children’s conditions.”

“Standard of care in some wards ‘would shame a third world country.”‘

“Stafford Hospital caused ‘unimaginable suffering.”‘

And to top it all off, in Britain 36 percent of patients wait more than four months for nonemergency surgery. In America, only 5 percent do.

According to Berwick, “Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health­care is by definition distributional.”

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? From Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, there’s a clear socialist utopian model in play that results in the control of Americans’ lives through rationed medical care.

These are only three of the most high-profile utopian totalitarians to serve in the Obama administration, but they are typical of those whom the president picked to assist in an Imperial Presidency in which central planning of society has become the goal.

FOOD UTOPIANS

First Lady Michelle Obama and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg are what could be politely referred to as the “Food Police” by the vast majority of Americans who prefer to choose their own foods. A more accurate description would be Food Nazis, because they both desire to dictate to Americans what they will eat, how much they will eat, and what size portions they will be served at restaurants.

Mrs. Obama’s mind-set about Americans may be defined by her husband’s definition of her during pre—White House years as his “bitter half.” Apparently even President Obama knew that his wife was not capable of seeing a glass half full; how, then, could she possibly see that a hamburger with lettuce and tomato was actually a balanced meal?

Michelle Obama decided early on that she would seize the issues of “childhood obesity” and “food deserts” as her crusade while inhabiting the White House. She and her utopian handlers created the “Let’s Move” campaign to force restaurants, schools, and parents to feed children more “nutritious” meals. Initially she wanted a mere $400 million from taxpayers for her program.

Walter Williams was warning against this years ago: 

Lifestyle Nazis Update (02/16/2000)

Without any real evidence, Mrs. Obama has claimed that poor Americans are trapped in what she calls “food deserts,” where they must apparently trudge for miles outside of their dismal neighborhoods to buy a piece of fruit or some celery sticks. According to Mrs. Obama, a food desert is an inner city without a grocery store. She envisioned spending millions of federal dollars to plant grocery stores in those blighted areas so the “poor” won’t have to buy food at mini-marts.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan actually attended Al Sharpton’s National Action Network annual con‑

vention in April 2012. There he told an absurd story about how Barack Obama, who attended Harvard University, knows what “it’s like to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store.” No fruit at Harvard?

The story may be ridiculous, but Michelle Obama was dead serious about extorting $400 million from American taxpayers to solve the nonexistent problem of food deserts.

In reality there are no such things as food deserts. Researcher Roland Sturm at the Rand Corporation studied food desert claims and found that individuals in urban areas can get any kind of food they want within a couple of miles. He suggested we call these areas “food swamps,” rather than food deserts.

In addition, researcher Helen Lee at the Public Policy Institute in California found that in poor neighborhoods, citizens had twice as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier neighborhoods had, and more than three times as many corner stores. These areas had twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocery stores as wealthier neighborhoods.

The truth was exactly the opposite of Mrs. Obama’s claim, but hers satisfied the mind-set of the utopians, who believe they alone could solve problems that never existed. Mrs. Obama later began a second crusade to force restaurants and schools to serve “healthy” foods, ban “junk food,” and bully restaurants into serving smaller portions.

Michelle Obama worked in 2010 to get Congress to pass a nutri­tion bill that would give the Department of Agriculture new powers to regulate school lunches. The bill was passed in December of that year, and now that the regulations have gone into effect, it is having a devastating impact on students and their angry parents.

Under Department of Agriculture edicts, cinnamon rolls and chili are banned. School bands and groups can’t sell candy bars for fund-raising. The government is now mandating portion sizes, including how many tomatoes must go into a salad!

Children are permitted to refuse three items on a tray, but not fruits and vegetables. Of course, the Food Police can’t yet force them to eat their veggies, but it’s not far-fetched to think they might someday. After all, the Obamas have rammed through legislation that initially demanded that nuns buy insurance coverage for contraception and preg­nancy. Fortunately the Supreme Court ended that requirement in 2014.

The new federal guidelines, thanks to Michelle Obama, now limit caloric intake to between 750 and 850 a day for schoolchildren. Teenagers require between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day to be healthy and grow, and high school athletes need up to 5,000 calories per day. In short, the First Lady is responsible for malnourishing kids through the school lunch program.

In 2006 the three-term mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, decided to add the title “Food Police Chief’ to his list of duties in the Big Apple. That year, he banished trans fats from city restaurants and, in 2010, forced food manufacturers to alter their recipes to include less sodium. He failed, however, to remove salt shakers from the tables. Patrons who receive a dish of food at a New York restaurant that they deem not salty enough may still simply add salt.

In spring 2012 Bloomberg decided that New Yorkers had to be protected even more from themselves, so he issued an edict banning soft drinks larger than sixteen ounces. The ban applied to restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and arenas.

In August 2012 Bloomberg banned the distribution of baby formula in city hospitals unless it is medically necessary because he, a man, had decided that new mothers should always breast-feed regardless of their weight, professions, or other personal details. Free formula provided to mothers was also eliminated. Bloomberg determined that breast-feeding is best for children and that new mothers should not have a voice in the decision regardless of their circumstances. But Bloomberg did want women to have freedom of choice to kill their young before they are born. He was willing to give moms the option to abort their unborn babies, but not to feed formula to those who are living.

What is next for those like Obama and Bloomberg? Mandated cal­isthenics each morning at six? Currently the United States seems to be incubating and hatching utopian tyrants at an alarming rate.

WATERMELONS

[Green on the outside, “red” on the inside]

America is threatened not only by the Food Nazis, but by the Watermelon Utopians, who are working to destroy our industrialized civilization and bring us back to an agrarian society in the name of the environment.

These are the Watermelons. They’re Red (Marxist-Leninist) on the inside, but are using the Green movement on the outside to promote totalitarian central-planned government.

VAN JONES

The poster child for this Watermelon movement is Van Jones, a Marxist with a nice smile who hates free enterprise just a bit less than nuclear power and fossil fuels.

In March 2009 President Obama picked Jones to be his “Green Jobs Czar.” In September 2009 Jones resigned after television host Glenn Beck exposed the fact that Jones was a militant Marxist radical.

After his departure from the Obama administration, Jones went to work at the Center for American Progress, a socialist group funded by one-worlder George Soros. Jones also began teaching at Princeton University at the African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a “senior fellow” at the Center for American Progress and is an advisor for the extremist group Green for All, which he founded in 2007.

In an unsurprising way, Van Jones symbolizes the support Barack Obama received from the left that helped him win two terms. Jones also highlights the vast portion of the US population who do want the government to take care of all their needs and are willing to allow government to be the god of their lives in return.

Jones openly said he became a Communist shortly after the 1992 Rodney King riots and the trial. According to Jones, “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th” and “by August, I was a communist.”

In 1993 he moved to San Francisco and helped found the Bay Area Police Watch, which demonized the police in that city. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, designed to under­mine the criminal justice system, which he saw as unjust to minorities. The Baker Center received more than $1 million from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

As Jones’s commitment to Marxist-type central planning grew in the late ’90s, he became a leader of the group called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement).

Then in 2006 Jones endorsed an antipolice day held by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party. Jones considers all American prisons to be racist and nothing more than “slave ships on dry land.”

As a green activist, Jones demanded that America “build a pipe­line from the prison economy to the green economy.” He wants the federal government to hire ex-felons to work in “green jobs” to do weather-stripping for energy efficiency in homes and offices. He did not mention if the home and business owners would be informed of workers’ felony convictions.

According to Jones, in an interview on Uprising Radio in Los Angeles, “The green economy will start off as a small subset” of a “com­plete revolution” against what he calls “gray capitalism.” The goal is the “redistribution of all wealth.”

Part of this anticapitalist effort is being accomplished through Green for All, funded in part by George Soros and our incredibly wealthy former vice president Al Gore—a true multimillionaire of the people. The organization’s alleged purpose is “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” In reality the plan would use taxpayer dollars to fund centrally planned government-run boondoggles in the inner cities.

Jones has openly admitted that his green agenda is designed to destroy capitalism. “We are going to push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society,” he said.

The Long Road To Hell – Statism and Truth (William J. Murray)

Before the excerpt, here are some short videos with the author, who happens to be the son of MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR:

Here is an excellent excerpt from a book a friend got me reading:william-murray-utopian-road-hell-book-330

  • William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 112-119.

…As Hayek noted back in 1944: “There can be no doubt that plan­ning necessarily involves deliberate discrimination between particular needs of different people, and allowing one man to do what another must be prevented from doing. It must lay down by a legal rule how well off particular people shall be and what different people are to be allowed to have and do.”

From these examples you can see that the totalitarian nature of government does not suddenly appear in a democracy. First there must be social acceptance among the elite, who then persuade the rest of society to go along with them. Hayek noted this progress in his 1944 essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism”:

The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be per­suaded to adopt it as their program.

TYRANNY THROUGH THE BALLOT BOX

Hayek reminded us that socialist tyrannies can come through legal means in the democratic process just as easily as through abrupt totalitarianism. Adolf Hitler, for example, was elected to office, unlike Cambodia’s Pol Pot, who seized power. Thus, democracies aren’t necessarily a protection against utopian central planners taking away the liberties of individuals.

Quite often, democratically elected representatives can delegate authority to bureaucrats who have the authority to impose the draco­nian policies on an unwilling populace. Hayek wrote, “By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.”

Hayek isn’t the only philosopher or economist to warn about the dangers of tyranny being imposed through the democratic process. Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French philosopher who visited the United States in the mid-1800s to study the democratic system and culture, warned that democratic systems could become despotic.

In Democracy in America, in his classic chapter “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” (volume 2), Tocqueville accurately predicted the rise of bureaucratic czars and webs of legislation that would stifle human freedom and productivity. It is as if he were writing prophetically about the Environmental Protection Agency, which has imposed so many irrational rules on industry that our nation is in danger of losing its ability to compete in many industries, such as energy.

Tocqueville compared the ancient tyrannies of the past and noted that Roman emperors had tremendous power over the lives of their subjects who were scattered throughout the world, but that the “details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control.” However, Tocqueville warned:

It would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question, that in an age of instruc­tion and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands, and might interfere more habitually and decidedly within the circle of private interests, than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigour.

He continued: “I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.”

According to Tocqueville, this kind of democratic oppression is

absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, fore­sees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.

America’s schoolchildren today are educated under policies of “no tolerance” that demand they become automatons. Showing various emotions, such as anger or love, can lead to expulsion from school, or worse. Children have been arrested for pointing a finger and saying, “Bang!” and suspended from classes for sharing a hug in the hallways. Currently, some high school students, thanks to legislation promoted by First Lady Michelle Obama, are not allowed to eat more than 750 calories for lunch, even boys on the football team, who require upwards of 3,000 calories a day. This is exactly the type of democratic oppression that both Tocqueville and Hayek discussed, and it continues to spread in Western nations.

Tocqueville described what happens to citizens when they’re slowly enslaved by an all-powerful central government:

It [the statist] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, ener­vates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Like a frog placed in cold water, and then the temperature is increased slowly until the frog is cooked, the populace do not notice the melting away of individual liberty. For instance, the American people were placed in the cold water of a “small” income tax imposed by President Woodrow Wilson that has become today almost total control of the economy by the central government. Hayek and Tocqueville both described accurately the destruction of individual liberty, not only through absolute dictatorships, but by democratic totalitarianism as well.

THE END OF TRUTH

Hayek devoted a full chapter in The Road to Serfdom to the function of propaganda in a socialist welfare state. He pointed out that in such a totalitarian system, it isn’t enough just to force everyone to work for the end desired; they must also be convinced that those ends are actually theirs and that they are obtainable. Thus, the propagandist must be able to brainwash the populace into believing that the central planners are benevolent and that their goals are actually those of the people.

As Hayek observed, “The skilful propagandist then has power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intel­ligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.”

According to Hayek, the moral consequence of totalitarian propa­ganda is that it undermines the sense of and respect for the truth. In fact, the totalitarian propagandist isn’t concerned with the truth. He only wants to convince the populace that the rulers are acting in the best interest of the enslaved citizens, to achieve their utopian dreams. Lying becomes the standard of utopian governments.

FREDERIC BASTIAT’S WARNINGS AGAINST SOCIALIST UTOPIANISM

French economist and politician Frederic Bastiat’s writings aren’t well known in the United States these days, but they certainly should be. Bastiat was the deputy to the Legislative Assembly in France during the mid-1800s, when that nation was rapidly turning into a socialist state.

Alarmed by the trend, Bastiat spent his time and energies debunking all of the    excuses that were used to impose statism on the French people. His classic, The Law, was published in 1850 and followed some of the similar lines of logic as did Hayek’s later work. It was his desire to convince his fellow Frenchmen that socialism would inevitably lead to slavery and Communism. Regrettably, his warnings were mostly ignored, but his prophetic writings against socialism are very timely, as our own nation’s leaders play with totalitarian ideas about how to turn us into dependent serfs.

Bastiat began The Law by clearly asserting that God gave us life, including physical, intellectual, and moral life. In addition, God gave each person the ability to use resources to create value and to own property. He further asserted, “Each of us has a natural right—from God—to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?”

He defined law as the “organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and prop­erties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”

But what happens when the state uses the law to destroy freedom? It is engaging in what Bastiat rightly called “lawful plunder.”

When a state legalizes plunder, wrote Bastiat, one of the first effects is to erase “from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

When legalized plunder becomes commonplace in a socialist govern­ment, noted Bastiat, every group in society will want to get their share of it. Everyone will begin plundering from everyone else: “Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few, whether farmers, manufacturers, ship owners, artists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so.”

Bastiat clearly shows us how we can determine if a law is actually legal­ized plunder. His definition perfectly fits much of the transfer of wealth that occurs in Western nations today, including in the United States.

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites repri­sals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case—is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

Sadly, when Woodrow Wilson introduced the income tax, the people had the opportunity to stop just such an evil, but out of the promise that it would benefit the many at the expense of the few rich of the time, a constitutional amendment was approved to allow the theft of the income of those who produce value through labor or investment. The result is massive government today, which takes from virtually everyone’s earnings to some degree.

Bastiat continued: “Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.”

Augustine of Hippo made a similar statement regarding government plundering in the fifth century:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

Following a road to serfdom as described by Hayek inevitably leads to what might be called a benign authoritarian system, where everyone is brainwashed into docile obedience, or to a brutal dictatorship that includes a police state, a reign of terror, and gulags to keep the populace under control. Authors George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have described these two kinds of societies, but the result is the same in both: freedom of the individual is destroyed and the state rules from cradle to the grave.

No Analogy Needed For This Failure of Socialism

BREITBART notes the following:

The Russian-made jeep carrying the ashes of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro broke down in the middle of his funeral procession on Saturday, forcing soldiers to push the vehicle until it could be repaired.

Nearly every major news website buried the news, though it was perfectly symbolic of the Cuban regime’s economic failures, and those of socialism in general.

Fox News reported:

  • The breakdown of the jeep in the midst of adoring crowds chanting “Long live Fidel!” was symbolic of the dual nature of Castro’s Cuba. While his legacy inspires fierce adulation by many of the nation’s citizens, others continue to grumble about Cuba’s autocratic government, inefficient bureaucracy and stagnant economy.

I just want to note that a man who had 900-million dollars, was brought to his final resting spot by a crappy Russian jeep the broke down. And those guys pushing their leaders ashes — by hand — is the best visual of the failure of socialism. (NEWSBUSTERS) Conan O’Brien mocked the moment, making the obvious comparison to the problems of communism:

  • “Here’s a weird story: On Saturday, the hearse carrying Fidel Castro’s remains broke down and had to be pushed. The hearse was being driven Cuba’s minister of metaphors.” 

“Immigrants! Don’t Vote for What You Fled” ~ Gloria Alvarez

Many of America’s legal and illegal immigrants fled nations that were ruined by corrupt politicians and failed government policies. But once here, they support the same things. Why? Gloria Alvarez, Project Director at the National Civic Movement of Guatemala, explains.

Here was her appearance on the Dennis Prager Show:

Jamie Foxx “Hearts” Socialism (Plus: Caller From Caracas)

Dennis Prager first read from an AP story about Jamie Foxx visiting the death hole known as Venezuela (see the Free Republic post). Later in the show he actually gets a call from Caracas, Venezuela. I teared up a bit during the call, as did Prager apparently. Good stuff Maynard!

George Ayittey Defines Dictatorships

This book is pretty amazing in that it defines the parameters that essentially make up a dictatorship. This will be especially helpful to all the Hollywood types and hipster douche-bags that like to support regimes in places like Venezuela or Cuba as good for it’s people. The book is a bit dated, but one of AYITTEY’S best.


Excerpt


CHAPTER 1

DESPOTIC REGIMES TODAY

“A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creat­ing repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is con­demned and illegitimate.”

—Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri

THE TERMS “DESPOT,” “AUTOCRAT,” “TYRANT,” AND “DICTATOR” are used interchangeably throughout this book to refer to a ruler with ab­solute or unlimited power, but there are subtle differences. A despot may be more reminiscent of medieval monarchs who were convinced that they were endowed with the divine right to rule over their people. In other words, despotism is often infused with a dose of narcissism. An autocrat may have no such grand delusions about himself, but he still wields enormous power. A tyrant is a ruler who exercises power op­pressively and harshly. The word dictator may be more applicable to a ruler with a military background who barks orders, issues diktats or edicts, and expects full compliance and obedience. It is possible to make other distinctions, such as “benign” or “benevolent” dictatorship, but this book does not do so.

Modern dictators come in different shades, races, skin colors, and religions, and they profess various ideologies. However, in general, they share common characteristics and idiosyncrasies. They are rulers who are neither chosen by their people nor represent their people.ayittey-george-defeating-dictators-book

[p.8>] The political watchdog Freedom House found in 2011 that 60 of the world’s 194 countries are “partly free” and 47 are considered “not free.” That means that the populations of roughly 55 percent of the world’s nations are oppressed.

The continent of Africa has the dubious distinction of harboring more dictators per capita than any other region in the world. Teeming with tyrants, it is the most unfree continent in the world. The usual sus­pects received the lowest possible ratings for both political rights and civil liberties: Myanmar (Burma), Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Tibet, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. But China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are cited for having stepped up repressive measures with greater brazenness.

Despots are constantly refining their tactics and learning new tricks from each other in their efforts to control pro-democracy forces. To maintain their iron grip on power, despots invent new “enemies.” This enables them to mobilize their security forces, keep their countries on a war footing, and suspend civil liberties. These enemies are often for­eign, but they might also come from within, in which case they are labeled “neo-colonial stooges,” “imperialist lackeys,” or “CIA agents.”

In some countries, despots justify their repressive rule by rallying the people around some nationalistic cause or some farcical “revolu­tion.” In Sudan, for example, Lieutenant-General Omar al-Bashir pro­claimed an “Islamic Revolution” that will deliver the Sudanese from abject poverty and squalor by tapping the country’s oil and mineral riches to create a model economy.

The despots have grown bolder as the resistance against them ap­pears to be collapsing. The weakness of domestic opposition and inad­equate support from democratic countries for that opposition, as well as fatigue, appear to be contributing factors. Unless the resistance—both domestic and international—is strengthened and democratic countries join forces, the despots will continue to gain momentum and win.

THE GALAXY OF DESPOTS: THE WORLD’S MOST ODIOUS AND DESPICABLE DICTATORS

On April 8, 2010, a coalition of opposition groups ousted Kyrgystan’s dictator, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, from power in Bishkek. A con­tinent away, Africans like myself cheered: “One coconut down, 54 more to harvest!” Then, on January 14, 2011, came a loud thud! Another co- [p.9>] conut down, this one in Tunisia, inspiring others to shake coconut trees vigorously. Then another in Egypt on February 11, 2011, with more to follow.

The West was caught completely off guard by the upheavals in North Africa. In fact, the West—or the international community—had lost the will to fight dictators, preferring “dialogue,” “partnership,” or “rapprochement” with such hideous tyrants as Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Pundits intoned that “these people preferred strong men.” But this author foresaw these upheavals. Despotism has never been acceptable to “these people,” despite the veneer of “stability” despo­tism projects. There is one insidious and odious aspect of despotism that is particularly infuriating and galling—the political and cultural betrayal. As in Kyrgyzstan, many despots began their careers as erst­while “freedom fighters,” who were supposed to have liberated their people from repressive rule. Back in March 2005, Bakiyev rode the crest of the Tulip Revolution to oust another dictator, President Askar Akayev. So familiar are Africans with this phenomenon that, it may be recalled, we have this saying: “We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba! [Darn!].”

In an article published in Foreign Policy, I denounced these revolu­tionary-turned-tyrant “crocodile liberators” who were joining the ranks of other fine specimens: the Swiss bank socialists, who socialize eco­nomic losses and stash personal gains abroad; the quack revolutionaries, who betray the ideals that brought them to power; and the briefcase bandits, who simply pillage and steal. I drew up a list of the “Worst of the Worst” dictators and warned of their imminent demise. Here is my list, based on these insidious, ignoble qualities of perfidy, cultural betrayal, and economic devastation. These criteria are decidedly non-Western.

THE LIST: THE MOST ODIOUS AND DESPICABLE

  1. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan: A megalomaniac zealot who has quashed all opposition, Bashir is responsible for the deaths of more than 4 million Sudanese and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. His Arab militia, the Janjaweed, may have halted its massacres in Darfur but it continues to traffic black Sudanese as slaves. Bashir himself [p.10>] has been accused of having several Dinka and Nuer slaves, one of whom escaped in 1995.

Years in power: 21

  1. Kim Jong Il of North Korea: A personality-cult-cultivating isolationist with a taste for fine French cognac, Kim has pauperized his people, allowed famine to run rampant, and sent hundreds of thousands to prison camps (where as many as 200,000 languish today)—all while spending his country’s precious few resources on creating a nuclear program. As he succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il is being succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Eun. The country is a “family business and property.”

Years in power: 16

  1. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe: A liberation “hero” in the struggle for independence who has since transformed himself into a murderous despot, Mugabe has arrested and tortured the opposition, squeezed his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation, and funneled off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts.

Years in power: 29

  1. Than Shwe of Myanmar (Burma): A heartless military coconut-head whose sole consuming preoccupation is power, Than Shwe has decimated the opposition with arrests and detentions, denied humanitarian aid to his people after the devastating Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and thrived off a threatened black-market economy of natural gas exports. This vainglorious general, bubbling with swagger, sports a uniform festooned with self-awarded medals, but he is too cowardly to face an untampered-with ballot box.

Years in power: 18

  1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran: Inflammatory, obstinate, and a traitor to the liberation philosophy of the Islamic Revolution, Ahmadinejad has pursued a nuclear program in defiance of international law and the West. Responsible for countless injustices during his five years in power, the president’s latest egregious offense was leading his paramilitary [p.11>] goons, the Basij, toward the violent repression of protests after the June 2009 disputed presidential election, which many believe he lost.

Years in power: 5

  1. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia: A “rat” worse than the “cockroach” (former Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam) he ousted, Zenawi has clamped down on the opposition, stifled all dissent, and rigged elections. After he stole the May 2005 election, his security thugs opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing more than 200 of them, and jailed more than 1,000 opposition leaders and supporters. Like a true Marxist revolutionary, Zenawi has stashed millions in foreign banks and acquired mansions in Maryland and London in his wife’s name, according to the opposition—even as his barbaric regime collects a whopping US$1 billion in foreign aid each year. He won 99.6 per cent of the vote in the May 2010 election—just shy of the 100 percent Saddam Hussein won in a 2002 referendum for another seven-year term.

Years in power: 19

  1. Isaiah Afwerki of Eritrea: Another crocodile liberator, Afwerki has turned his country into a national prison in which independent media are shut down, elections are categorically rejected, military service is mandatory, and the government would rather support Somali militants than its own people.

Years in power: 17

  1. Hu Jintao of China: A chameleon despot who beguiles foreign investors with a smile and a bow but ruthlessly crushes any political dissent with brutal abandon, Hu has an iron grip on Tibet and is now seeking what can only be described as new colonies in Africa from which to extract the natural resources his growing economy craves and in which to resettle surplus Chinese population.

Years in power: 7

  1. Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya: An eccentric megalomaniac infamous for his indecipherably flamboyant speeches and equally erratic politics, Qaddafi today runs a police state based on his version of Mao’s Red Book—the Green Book—which [p.12>] includes a solution to “the problem of democracy.” Under siege by rebels, he vowed to crush “the rats and traitors.” After they seized his compound on August 24, the rebels vowed to smoke out the rat from the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the compound. So who’s the real rat?

Years in power: 42

  1. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela: The quack leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez promotes a doctrine of participatory democracy in which he is the sole participant, having jailed opposition leaders, extended term limits indefinitely, and closed independent media outlets. He has vowed to rule till 2021.

Years in power: 10

  1. Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan: Succeeding the eccentric tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov (who even renamed the months of the year after himself and his family), this obscure dentist has continued his late predecessor’s repressive policies, explaining that, after all, he has an “uncanny resemblance to Niyazov.”

Years in power: 4

  1. Idris Deby of Chad: Having led a rebel insurgency against former dictator Hissene Habre, today Deby faces a rebel insurgency led by his own brother. Deby has drained social spending accounts to equip the military, co-opted opposition leaders, and is now building a moat around the capital, N’Djamena, to repel would-be insurgents.

Years in power: 20

  1. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea: Obiang and his family literally own the economy in one of the world’s most unequal countries; the masses are left in desperate poverty in a country where oil wealth yields a GDP per capita that should be on a par with many European states. (How much oil revenue the country earns is a “state secret.”) Obiang is a vicious despot who tolerates no dissent and has amassed a fortune exceeding US$600 million. When he accused his government of corruption, incompetence, and poor leadership, the entire government resigned in protest in [p.13>] 2006. He became the chairman of the African Union in 2011.

Imagine.

Years in power: 31

  1. Yahya Jammeh of Gambia: An eccentric military buffoon who has vowed to rule for 40 years and claims to have discovered the cure for HIV/AIDS, Jammeh insists on being addressed as “His Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya Abdul-Azziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh.” He claims he has mystical powers and will turn Gambia into an oil-producing nation; no luck yet. He has threatened to behead gays. He is terrified of witches and evil sorcerers, who, he claims, are harming his country. To root out witches, villagers at Jambur were rounded up and forced to drink a foul-smelling potion in 2009. Six people later died.

Years in power: 16

  1. Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso: A tin-pot despot with no vision and no agenda save perpetuating himself in power by liquidating all political opponents and stifling dissent, Compaoré rose to power after murdering his predecessor, Thomas Sankara, in a 1987 coup. He dishonors the name of his own country, Burkina Faso, which in the Dioula language means “men of integrity.”

Years in power: 23

  1. Bashar al-Assad of Syria: A pretentious despot trying to fit into his father’s shoes, which are too big for him, Assad has squandered billions on foreign misadventures in such places as Lebanon and Iraq. After neglecting the needs of his people, they rose up against him in May 2011. But he used tanks and his extensive security apparatus to crush them and maintain his tight grip on power.

Years in power: 10

  1. Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan: A ruthless thug since Soviet times, Karimov has banned opposition parties, tossed as many as 6,500 political prisoners into jail, and labels anyone who challenges his iron grip on power as an “Islamic terrorist.” What does he do with “terrorists” once they are in his hands? Torture them: Karimov’s regime earned notoriety for boiling [p.14>] two people alive and torturing many others. Outside the prisons, the president’s troops are equally indiscriminate, massacring hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in 2005 after a minor uprising in the city of Andijan.

Years in power: 20

  1. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda: After leading a rebel insurgency that took power in 1986, Museveni declared, “No African head of state should be in power for more than 10 years.” He is still in power, winning one coconut election after another. Political parties can be formed legally, but a political rally of more than seven people is illegal.

Years in power: 26

  1. Paul Kagame of Rwanda: A true liberator who saved the Tutsis from complete extermination in 1994, Kagame now practices the same ethnic apartheid he sought to end. His Rwanda Patriotic Front dominates all levers of power: the security forces, the civil service, the judiciary, banks, universities, and state-owned corporations. Those who challenge him are accused of being “hatemongers” or “divisionists” and are arrested. Such was the case with opposition leaders who were jailed days before the August 2003 election. A similar campaign of vilification was waged against the opposition in the run-up to the August 2010 election.

Years in power: 16

  1. Raul Castro of Cuba: Afflicted with intellectual astigmatism, Castro is pitifully unaware of the fact that the revolution he leads is obsolete, an abysmal failure, and totally irrelevant to the aspirations of the Cuban people. He blames the failure of the “revolution” on “foreign conspiracies,” which he then uses to justify even more brutal clampdowns that lead to more failures. He operates from the offensive notion that the entire Cuban economy belongs to the Castro family alone.

Years in power: 2

  1. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus: An autocrat and former collective farm chairman, Lukashenko maintains an iron grip on his country, monitoring opposition movements with a secret police distastefully called the KGB. His brutal style of [p.15>] governance has earned him the title “Europe’s last dictator”; he even gave safe haven to Kyrgyzstan’s toppled leader during the uprising in that country in the spring of 2010.

Years in power: 16

  1. Paul Biya of Cameroon: A suave bandit who has reportedly amassed a personal fortune of more than US$200 million and the mansions to go with it, Biya has beaten the opposition into complete submission. Not that he’s worried about elections—he has rigged the term-limit laws twice to make sure the party doesn’t end any time soon.

Years in power: 28

The list, of course, is not exhaustive or static; it keeps evolving.

DESPOTIC REGIMES AROUND THE WORLD

An analysis or a discussion of despotic regimes around the world would involve a tedious repetition of brutal acts of repression, injustices, indig­nities, and grotesque human rights violations. Moreover, despite regime differences, the modus operandi of one despot is strikingly similar to that of all the others. Most despotic regimes are characterized by the following:

  • Unyielding grip on power: Elections, if any, are farcical and are always won by the despot.
  • Political repression: Opposition parties are banned or afforded little political space to operate; key opposition leaders are arrested, intimidated, hounded, or even killed.
  • Intellectual repression: Censorship may be imposed; journalists, editors, and writers are harassed, intimidated, jailed, or killed; newspapers and radio and television stations that are critical of government policies are shut down.
  • Brutal tactics: Street protests are disrupted with batons, water cannons, tear gas, and even gunfire.
  • Flagrant violations of human rights: Opponents of the regime are detained without trial; disappearances and murder are common; freedom of expression, movement, and assembly are nonexistent.

[p.16>] Rather than discuss these traits for each despotic regime, I will just list the countries where such practices are most prevalent:

  • Africa: Algeria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe
  • Asia: Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, and Vietnam
  • Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan
  • Eastern Europe: Belarus
  • Latin America: Venezuela
  • Middle East: Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen

Across Eurasia (comprising 12 states), governments are character­ized by strong executives and weak legislatures. The primary focus of politics is on elections and on the constant tussle between presidents and parliaments over their respective authority. Presidents routinely rig elections and rule by decree, bypassing parliaments. Opposition politi­cal parties are not well organized and offer few viable alternatives. As such, “there are few intermediaries between high politics and the peo­ple, and the press that might play that role relies on the patronage of the state or powerful business cliques with their own agendas.”

The picture is much the same in Latin America. The caudillos (mil­itary strongmen) may be back in the barracks but despots now emerge from the ballot box. Once elected, they succeed in neutering and de­bauching the state institutions. As reported in the Economist:

Mr Chavez has turned Venezuela’s courts into a tool of the executive and used them to jail, harass or disqualify a growing number of his opponents. Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, has abused his power to rig both municipal elections and the supreme court. Less blatantly, Ecuador’s Mr Correa has tried to muzzle the media, and the Kirchners in Argentina have used the presidency to bully opponents in business and the press. Yet the leaders of the region’s main powers have stayed silent about these abuses.

Even in countries where the separation of powers exists, weak in­stitutions are unable to uphold the rule of law, provide effective gov­ernment, and advance the rights and freedoms of the people. In Peru, neither the incumbent, Alan Garcia, nor his predecessor, Alejandro Toledo, have commanded much clout or popularity. Political parties in [p.17>] Peru, the Economist went on to say, are just personal vehicles for self-aggrandizement: “For local elections in Oct 2009, no fewer than 60,000 candidates registered in 14,000 municipalities for just 2,000 slates. There is no civil service. There are constant demonstrations, some vio­lent. In a recent poll 22% of respondents outside Lima approved of blocking roads as a form of protest.”

The Middle East is the region most bereft of democracy. Until the recent upheavals, only 3 of the 22 countries in the Arab League—Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories—could be said to be demo­cratic, even with some caveats. With access to the media restricted, chaotic general elections produce predictable results: the autocrats and vampire elites retain power; the opposition is demoralized, even radical­ized; and the word “democracy” is bastardized. As the Economist notes:

Every Arab country now has a form of representative legislature, even if most have little power and some, like Saudi Arabia’s, are appointed by a king. Some of these autocracies allow more pluralism than others. Morocco, for instance, has widened its space for debate. Others, such as Kuwait, allow a directly elected parliament, but the ruling royal family, still ultimately in charge, has often rued the legislative near-paralysis that followed.

Whether they are monarchies or republics, the Arab states tend to act much the same. Says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and board member of the Free Africa Foundation: “The Arab League has become, in effect, an autocrats’ club.” Elections are for show, a window-dressing to let off steam. Technically, they are meaningless. But now the youth have started to change things. Angry street protesters sent Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fleeing into exile on January 14, 2011, and brought down Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on February 11, 2011. In Burkina Faso, Libya, Syria, Uganda, and others, dictators put up a fierce resistance. In the end, however, the forces of liberty will triumph.

THE DEVASTATING TOLL

The act of repression not only assails our human conscience and dig­nity but also exacts a toll in terms of human lives and economic ac­tivity. Despotism wreaks economic, social, and human devastation [p.18>] Consider the impact on economic activity: An error made by a despot who does not have the necessary experts advising him could result in commodity shortages, overproduction, or a breakdown in the produc­tive process. Since a despot is not likely to admit this, the problems can fester until they erupt into a full-blown crisis. This was the cause of the demise of the former Soviet Union. To be sure, impressive rates of economic growth are possible under authoritarian or despotic re­gimes. China and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) are often cited as examples, but there is a caveat. Exceptions do not make the rule. A final day of reckoning eventually arrives. In an interview, South Korea’s former president, the late Kim Dae-jung, asserted in an interview that placing economic develop­ment ahead of democracy was “the fundamental cause of the Asian financial crisis in 1998” because “the authoritarian style of govern­ment permitted corruption and collusive intimacy between business and government to flourish.”

Economic Underperformance and Collapse

In a dictatorship, the normal order of things and even common sense have been turned completely upside down. There is no freedom of speech, no rule of law, and state institutions are packed with sycophants and praise-singers. Professionalism disappears from the security forces and the civil service. Fealty to the despot counts more than competence or efficiency. Promotions and job security depend upon who can shout the loudest praise of the despot.

Infrastructure such as roads, bridges, schools, telecommunications, and ports begins to crumble because contracts are awarded by the des­pot to family members, cronies, and loyal supporters. To sustain the heavy patronage doled out to supporters, the despot may impose heavy taxation and tariffs. Prices—especially food and fuel prices—start to shoot up. The public might vent its outrage in street protests. The des­pot may clamp down brutally on these street protests and take drastic measures to prevent future price hikes. The hikes are blamed on foreign saboteurs. Property rights are scoffed at. Commercial properties of busi­nessmen alleged to be “anti-government” may be confiscated or seized for distribution to the poor masses in the name of social justice. Such was the case for more than a decade (2000-2010) in Zimbabwe, where the despotic regime of Robert Mugabe organized ruthless thugs to vio‑ [p.19>] lently seize white commercial farmlands. Similarly, in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez “seized rural estates and factories the government deemed to be unproductive, including some assets of Lorenzo Mendoza, Venezu­ela’s second-wealthiest man, and of H. J. Heinz Co., the world’s largest ketchup maker.” Chavez also seized control of or nationalized oil re­fineries in 2008. Such contempt for property rights scares off investors, who fear that their commercial properties may be the next to be seized without due process. They flee the country and, without investment, the economy contracts.

The crisis in Zimbabwe, for example, has cost Africa dearly. Foreign investors have fled the region, and the South African rand has lost 25 percent of its value since 2000. Zimbabwe’s economic collapse caused US$37 billion worth of damage to South Africa and other neighboring countries. Although South Africa has been most affected, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia have also suffered severely.

Foreign investors fled Venezuela, too. According to Bloomberg News, such investors “sold $778 million more in Venezuelan assets than they bought in the first nine months of 2006, according to the central bank; a decade ago, in the same period, they added $5.9 billion more than they disposed of”

This is also true of other Latin American countries where private property rights are not well protected because the rule of law is weakly enforced. As a result, despite Latin American economic growth rates that averaged more than 5 percent in 2004 and 2005, capital flows were negative, meaning more money left the region than entered it. The ba­sic reason was an ongoing lack of confidence among long-term inves­tors. Latin America expert Andres Oppenheimer was cited as saying that “only 1 percent of the world’s investment in research and develop­ment currently goes to Latin America.”

Rash diktats and reckless mismanagement inevitably produce economic crises. To deal with these crises, despots may take desperate and drastic measures, such as imposing strict economic/price controls, printing currency, and/or revaluing the old currency. However, as we shall see in chapter 5, none of these measures solves the economic crisis. Instead, they exacerbate it, creating black markets, greater scar­cities, and even higher prices, resulting in a vicious downward spiral to economic collapse and a failed state (as has occurred in North Korea and Zimbabwe) unless the despot has access to substantial revenues from a mineral resource, such as oil, as has been the case with Saddam [p.20>] Hussein of Iraq, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.

The Human Toll

The cost of despotism in human terms is impossible to estimate. A handful of despots around the world inflict misery, despair, hope-lessness—and even death—on millions of people who have pro­tested against tyrannical rule. Hundreds of thousands have been jailed. Millions have been killed and millions more have fled their countries to become refugees elsewhere. Among the most infamous despots was Pol Pot of Cambodia, who ruthlessly eliminated anyone who posed a threat to him. Out of a population of 8 million in 1975, 2 million were executed. Another was Idi Amin of Uganda, who butchered as many as 200,000 Ugandans in the 1970s. It should be no surprise that about 70 percent of the world’s refugee population is in Africa and the Middle East—the two regions that harbor the most despots.

Particularly treacherous have been massacres condoned or orches­trated by despotic regimes against particular groups for ethnic, reli­gious, political, or other reasons. Pogroms are violent acts by mobs that are characterized by killings and the destruction of homes, businesses, property, and religious centers. The past four decades have seen attacks on the Copts in Egypt in the 1980s, on the Tamils in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and on ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan in the 1990s.17 The human toll of despotism can be seen even more dramatically in the pogroms against the Igbo that led to the 1967-1970 Biafran War in Nigeria, the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis, and the ongo­ing genocide against blacks in the Darfur region of Sudan. Postcolonial African leaders—mostly autocrats—have caused the deaths of more than 19 million Africans since 1960:

  • 1 million Nigerians died in the Biafran War (1967-1970).
  • 200,000 Ugandans were slaughtered by Idi Amin in the 1970s.
  • 100,000 were butchered by President Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea in the 1970s.
  • Over 400,000 Ethiopians perished under Mengistu Haile Mariam.
  • [p.21>] Over 500,000 Somalis perished under Mohammed Siad Barre.
  • Man-made famines claimed over 2 million lives between 1980 and 2000 in Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, and Sudan.
  • Over 2 million have died in the wars of Liberia (1993-1999),Sierra Leone (1994-1999), and Ivory Coast (2000-2005).
  • Over 1 million died in Mozambique’s civil war in the 1970s.
  • 5 million died in Angola’s civil war, which began in 1975 and continued intermittently until 2002.
  • 800,000 perished in Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.
  • 300,000 died in Burundi in 1993-1994.
  • 4 million perished in Sudan’s civil wars from 1960 to 2006.
  • 6 million died as a result of Congo’s wars from 1996 to 2006.

The rough total of 19.8 million does not include conflict-related deaths in Chad, Western Sahara, and Algeria and those who perished at refugee camps. Historians estimate that the total number of black Af­ricans shipped as slaves to the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was about 10 million. Africa lost another 10 million people through the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade run by Arabs. This means that, in a space of just 50 years after indepen­dence in the 1960s, postcolonial African leaders have slaughtered about the same number of Africans as were lost to both the West and East African slave trades over several centuries. Think about it.

Failed States

Every year, the social and economic toll of despotism is driven home by the publication of two indices. The first is the Index of Failed States, drawn up by Foreign Policy magazine in collaboration with the Fund for Peace, an independent research organization. Using 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance, compiled through a close examina­tion of more than 30,000 publicly available sources, the Index ranks 177 states in order from most to least at risk of failure. In the 2010 Index, most of the 20 failed states at the bottom are ruled by despotic regimes. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan may be regarded as exceptions because of ongoing wars in 2009. The majority of the failed states-12 out of 20—are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 11 out of those 12 African countries are ruled by despots. [p.22>]

Even more telling is the United Nations Human Development In­dex. Of the 24 at the bottom, a staggering 22 are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite its immense wealth of mineral resources, Africa remains mired in abject poverty, misery, deprivation, and chaos. The World Bank adjusted its yardstick for extreme poverty from US$1.00 to US$1.25 a day, which means that 389 million of the 875 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lived in poverty in 2005.

Millions of lives have been lost, economies have collapsed, and whole states have failed under brutal repression. The toll of despotism [p.23>]  has been especially devastating for Africa. Africa is poor because she is not free. However, a failed state evolves through various stages. It begins as a vampire state, metastasizes into a coconut republic, and then finally implodes, becoming a failed or collapsed state.

Vampire States

“Anyone who gets to the presidency ends up with way more than he had before, while the poor and working class are the ones always left behind.”

—Roberto Pedroza, a newspaper vendor in Mexico City

The most remarkable aspect of despotism is the rapid deterioration of the institution of government. “Government,” as it is known in the West, does not exist in countries ruled by despots. Leaving aside the democratic requirement that a government must be “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” one expects a government, at a mini­mum, to care for and be responsive to the needs of the people, or at least to perform some basic services for its people. But even these minimal requirements are often lacking in a dictatorship, where government as an entity is totally divorced from the people and perceived by those running it as a vehicle not to serve but to fleece the people. Dishonesty, thievery, and embezzlement pervade the public sector. Public servants embezzle state funds, and high-ranking ministers are on the take. Gov­ernment then becomes irrelevant to the people.

What then exists is a vampire state—a government hijacked by a phalanx of bandits, gangsters, crooks, and scoundrels who use the ma­chinery of the state to enrich themselves, their cronies, supporters, and members of their own ethnic, racial, or religious group and to exclude everyone else. It is an apartheid-like system based on the politics of exclusion. One is poor if one does not belong to that charmed circle. The richest people in Africa and many Third World countries are the ruling vampire elites and government ministers. And quite often, the chief bandit is the head of state himself.

Examples of vampire states abound. In fact, one can characterize all communist states as such. They suck the economic vitality out of their people for the enrichment of the ruling communist apparatchiks. Even in post-communist Russia corruption has become a nearly insurmount­able obstacle to the country’s economic development. Berlin-based NGO Transparency International rates Russia 146th out of 180 nations [p.24>] in its Corruption Perception Index, saying “bribe-taking is worth about $300 billion a year.”

The PRI party, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years, though not communist, is another example (its replacement was scarcely bet­ter). Said Lino Korrodi, finance manager for Vicente Fox’s 2000 presi­dential campaign: “It is evident that he (Vicente Fox) got rich during his six years in office, in a very shameless and cynical way.” Mexican presidents are limited to one six-year term. Their last year in office is cynically derided by Mexicans as “el año del dinero” (year of the money). That is when Mexican presidents bare their fangs and suck as much as they can in a frenzy. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who served from 1988 to 1994, was probably the most bloodthirsty. His name became synonymous with fraud, corruption, and economic devastation, and he fled in disgrace into a self-imposed exile in Ireland. The New York Times reported that “In 2002, Swiss banking authorities found more than US$100 million sitting in a Swiss bank account once controlled by his brother Raul Salinas and froze it.” The loot “was held in the name of a Cayman Islands shell corporation, Trocca Ltd., secretly controlled by Mr. Salinas.”

The regimes of several other Latin American countries ruled by oligarchies and caudillos in the 1980s and 1990s can also be charac­terized as vampire states. Their rule deepened social and economic inequalities, provoking social discontent and sparking revolutionary movements in such countries as Colombia and Nicaragua. Wide­spread government dysfunction, corruption, and economic despair forced many Latin Americans to migrate and settle in the United States, often illegally. Known as the “undocumented,” their number now exceeds 10 million.

In the Middle East, the classic example of a vampire state is Saudi Arabia. Others include regimes in Tunisia (under the ousted dictator Ben Ali), Egypt (under Hosni Mubarak), Iraq (under the late Saddam Hussein), Iran, Syria, and Yemen. More examples can be found in Af­rica, where the state has been reduced to a mafia-like bazaar in which anyone with an official designation can pillage at will. Dictators seize and monopolize both political and economic power to advance their own selfish and criminal interests, not to develop their economies, and they don’t care about the poor. Their overarching obsession is to amass personal wealth, gaudily displayed in flashy automobiles, fabulous man­sions, and bevies of fawning women. Helping the poor, promoting eco‑ [p.25>] nomic growth, or improving the standard of living of their people is anathema to the ruling elites. “Food for the people!” “People’s power!” “Houses for the masses!” are simply empty slogans that are designed to fool the people and the international community.

Nigeria is the mother of all vampire states. Between 1970 and 2004, more than US$450 billion in oil revenue flowed into Nigerian govern­ment coffers, but much of it was looted by Nigeria’s reckless military bandits. Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission set up in 2003, confirmed the theft of $412 billion over the period from 1960 to 1999. “We cannot be accurate down to the last figure but that is our projection,” said Osita Nwajah, a commission spokesman.

For 18 months (from February 1999 to August 2000), Nigeria’s vampire state was paralyzed by legislators’ wrangling over perks. Its 109 senators and 360 representatives passed just five pieces of legislation, including a budget that was held up for five months. Immediately upon taking office, the legislators voted themselves hefty allowances, includ­ing a 5 billion naira (US$50 million) furniture allowance for their of­ficial residences and offices. The now-impeached ex-chairman of the Senate from President Olusegun Obasanjo’s own People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Chuba Okadigbo, was the most greedy, according to New African:

As Senate President, he controlled 24 official vehicles but ordered 8 more at a cost of $290,000. He was also found to have spent $225,000 on garden furniture for his government house, $340,000 on furniture for the house itself ($120,000 over the authorized budget); bought without authority a massive electricity generator whose price he had inflated to $135,000; and accepted a secret payment of $208,000 from public funds, whose purpose included the purchase of “Christmas gifts.”

And it gets better: President Obasanjo went after the loot that for­mer president Sani Abacha and his family had stashed abroad. There was much public fanfare regarding the sum of about US$709 million and another L144 million recovered from the Abachas and the former president’s henchmen. But then, this recovered loot itself was quickly re-looted! The Senate Public Accounts Committee found only US$6.8 million and £2.8 million of the recovered booty in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

[p.26>] In case after case, government officials in the developing countries get rich by misusing their positions. Faithful only to their foreign bank accounts, these official buccaneers have no sense of morality, justice, or even patriotism. They kill and maim their own people and destroy their own countries to acquire and protect their booty because, functionally illiterate, they are incapable of using the skills and knowledge they ac­quired from education to get rich on their own in the private sector. Needless to say, they are “derided by some experts as ‘the extractors,’ people who squandered wealth without building for the future.”

The inviolate ethic of the vampire elites is self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation in power. To achieve these objectives, they take over and subvert every key institution of government: the civil service, judiciary, military, media, and banking. As a result, state institutions and commissions become paralyzed. Laxity, ineptitude, and unprofessionalism thus flourish in the public sector. Of course, the country may have a police force and judiciary system to catch and prosecute the thieves. But the police are themselves highway robbers who are under orders to protect the looters in power, and many of the judges are themselves crooks.

Obviously, there are no checks against brigandage. The worst of­fender is the military—the most trenchantly perverted institution, es­pecially in Latin America and Africa. In any normal civilized society, the function of the military is to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and its people against external aggression. But under despotic regimes, the military is instead locked in combat with the very people it is supposed to defend. Witness the barbaric brutalities meted out against street protesters by Iran’s Basij militiamen in June 2009. Or those of North Korean security guards against market traders in De­cember 2009. And think of Muammar Qaddafi sending jet fighters to bomb street demonstrators in February 2011. In We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch writes that, “Across much of Africa, a soldier’s uniform and gun had long been regarded—and are still seen—as little more than a license to engage in banditry.” Wole Soyinka handed the postcolonial soldiers a blistering rebuke:

The military dictatorships of the African continent, parasitic, unproduc­tive, totally devoid of social commitment or vision, are an expression of this exclusionist mentality of a handful; so are those immediately post- [p.27>] colonial monopolies that parade themselves as single-party states. To exclude the sentient plurality of any society from the right of decision in the structuring of their own lives is an attempt to anesthetize, turn co­matose, indeed idiotize society, which of course is a supreme irony, since the proven idiots of our postcolonial experience have been, indeed still are, largely to be found among the military dictators.

A simple rule of thumb on development has emerged: the index of economic well-being of a developing country is inversely related to the length of time the military holds political power. The longer it stays in power, the greater the economic devastation. Again, a few exceptions may be noted, as in the case of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, but excep­tions do not make the rule.

Meanwhile, the vampire state wobbles as it lurches from one crisis to another. Its legitimacy is openly questioned. Some sections of the population are in open revolt and others may even mount roadblocks to keep out state officials, as occurred in many Latin American coun­tries in the 1990s. Such was also the case in Libya in February 2011. The despot barks orders but is routinely ignored. His ruling vampire elites, clueless about how to resolve the economic crisis, resort to des­perate measures to keep things under control, but they fail to arrest the deterioration. They readily give up and flex their muscle, daring any­one to hold them accountable or take power away from them. Steadily, the vampire state, infused with the arrogance of power, hardens into a coconut republic and provokes a rebellion: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in North Africa and the Arab world.

Coconut Republics

This invites a distinction. In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work for the people now and then, albeit inef­ficiently and unreliably. Electric supply is spasmodic and the water tap has a mind of its own. Occasionally, it might spit some water and then change its mind. Buses operate according to their own internal clock. By the grace of God or Allah, a bus might arrive, belching thick black smoke. Food and gasoline are generally available but expensive, if one is willing to contend with occasional long lines. The police are helpful when they are bribed and will then protect the people by catching real crooks. There is petty corruption. Now and then, a million dollars here [p.28>] and a million there might be embezzled. Such a banana republic often slips into suspended animation or arrested development.

A coconut republic, on the other hand, is ruthlessly inefficient, lethal, and eventually implodes. Instead of a banana peel, one might step on a live grenade. Here, common sense has been butchered and arrogant tomfoolery rampages with impunity. The entire notion of “governance” has been turned completely on its head by the ruling vampire elites, who wield absolute power, commit crimes, and plunder with supercilious arrogance. They are not answerable or accountable to anybody and one dares not ask. Impunity reigns supreme. It is here where one finds tyrants chanting “People’s Revolution” and “Freedom!” while standing on the necks of their people. A “revolution” is a major cataclysmic event that brings about an overthrow of the ancient regime. It makes a clean break with the existing way of doing things and estab­lishes a new way or order. In politics, for example, a “revolution” occurs when the subjugated and exploited class rises up to overthrow the oppressors—as occurred with the American and French Revolutions. But in a coconut republic, it is the other way around. It is the dictators who are chanting revolution! Have you ever noticed that those Third World leaders who vociferously claim they are fighting against terrorism in order to receive Western aid are themselves sponsors of state terrorism against their own people?

In a coconut republic, the rule of law is a farce; bandits are in charge, their victims in jail. The police and security forces protect the ruling vampire elites, not the people. The chief bandit is the head of state himself. He and his family and his henchmen have a constant supply of electricity and their water taps run all the time; the people can collect rain water. There are inexhaustible supplies of food and gasoline for them, but not for the people. And there are no buses for the people, period. Those shiny buses that ply the road are for vampire elites. The people can walk. The republic sits atop vast reserves of oil and exports oil, but there is no gasoline for the people since the coun­try’s oil refineries have broken down. Funds earmarked for repairs have been stolen, and refined petroleum products must be imported. The country may also be rich in mineral deposits such as diamonds, gold, and coltan, yet the mineral wealth has produced misery—or a curse.

Here are some examples of life in a coconut republic: [p.29>]

  1. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela forces everyone to listen to his hours-long tirades but dozes off when he listens to them himself.
  2. Saparmurat Niyazov, the late president-for-life of Turkmenistan, erected statues and portraits of himself everywhere and named cities, airports, and even a meteorite after himself. The months and days of the week were named after him and his family, and a family feast was celebrated every day.
  3. When a presidential election was held in Uzbekistan in 2007, President Islam A. Karimov’s three opponents each publicly endorsed him. In the 2009 parliamentary election, all four parties in the race staunchly supported Karimov. Asked if there was any real political opposition and competition in his country, Karimov replied that the 2009 race for the parliament’s lower chamber “had injected genuine competition into the process, largely because the four parties have vocally criticized one another.”
  4. Uganda’s agriculture minister, Kibirige Ssebunya, declared that: “All the poor should be arrested because they hinder us from performing our development duties. It is hard to lead the poor, and the poor cannot lead the rich. They should be eliminated.” He advised local leaders to arrest poor people in their areas of jurisdiction. He died four years later.
  5. A former minister of finance was found hiding—where else?—in a coconut tree: “[Zambia’s] former finance minister, Katele Kalumba, was arrested and charged with theft after the police found him hiding in a tree near his rural home. Mr. Kalumba, who had been on the run for four months, is being charged in connection with some US$33 million that vanished while he was in office.”
  6. The late president of Liberia, General Samuel Doe, summoned his finance minister, “only to be reminded by aides that he had already executed him.”
  7. Tanzania’s anti-corruption czar, Dr. Edward Hosea, was himself implicated in a corruption scandal involving the award of a US$172.5 million contract to supply 100 megawatts of emergency power to a Texas-based company that did not exist. [p.30>]

Coconut Security Forces

In a coconut republic, the police are scarcely professional. Tell a police officer that you saw a minister steal­ing the people’s money and it is you he will arrest! After the brutal mur­der of politician Robert Ouko in 1990, the Washington Post reported that, according to Kenyan police, “Foreign Minister Robert Ouko was presumed to have broken his own leg, shot himself in the head and set himself afire. Two years earlier, Kenyan officials suggested that a British tourist, Julie Ward, lopped off her own head and one of her legs before setting herself aflame.”

The ever-ready security forces can unleash the full force of their fury on unarmed civilians with batons, tear gas, water cannons, and rub­ber bullets. But how brave are the security forces really? Ambushed by a bunch of ragtag cattle rustlers, Kenya’s elite presidential guards quickly surrendered. Johann Wandetto, a reporter for the People Daily, a news­paper in Kitale, Rift Valley province, published a story in the March 6, 1999, edition with the title: “Militia Men Rout 8 Crack Unit Officers: Shock as Moi’s Men Surrender Meekly.” Wandetto was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison on what the court described as an “alarmist report.”

And the mother of all security forces? When the African Union (AU) peacekeepers’ base on the edge of Haskanita, a small town in southern Darfur, came under sustained rebel assault on September 29, 2007, the AU soldiers fled. According to the Economist, “Ten were killed; at least 40 fled into the bush. The attackers looted the compound before Sudanese troops arrived to rescue the surviving peacekeepers.”

Coconut Elections Coconut elections are, essentially, farcical elections in which the incumbent writes the rules and then serves as a player, the referee, and the goalkeeper. The deck is hideously stacked against the opposition candidates, who are starved of funds, denied ac­cess to the state-controlled media, and brutalized by government-hired thugs as the police watch. Opposition parties may be banned too.

By contrast, the incumbent enjoys access to enormous state re­sources: state media, vehicles, the police, the military, and civil servants are all commandeered to ensure his re-election. Further, the entire elec­toral process itself is rigged: voter rolls are padded with ruling-party supporters and phantom voters while opposition supporters are purged. The electoral commissioner is in the pocket of the ruling party, as are the judges who might settle any election disputes. During the election cam­paign, posters of the incumbent are everywhere while pro-government [p.31>] thugs terrorize the populace and anyone perceived to be a supporter of the opposition parties. Innocent civilians are force-marched to attend the incumbent party’s rallies, while opposition rallies are violently dis­rupted and opposition supporters are brutalized and even killed as the police look on.

On election day, the ruling party resorts to various tricks to steal the election. Ballot papers do not arrive on time, inducing frustrated oppo­sition supporters to leave polling stations. Ballot boxes may eventually arrive but are already stuffed with votes for the incumbent. (Mayoral elections were held in Kampala, Uganda, on February 18, 2011. When the polls opened at 7:00 A.M., ballot boxes were already full of pre-ticked ballots for the ruling National Resistance Movement candidate, Peter Samatimba. This led to the cancellation of the results. Queried, Samatimba denied any involvement. “This could have been done by my opponents to discredit me,” he said.) And if during the vote count the opposition appears to be winning, the process can be halted and the bal­lot boxes transported to a secret location where the votes are counted in camera. Most often, posted election results do not reflect actual voting. This was the case in Ghana’s 1996 elections, where Major Emmanuel Erskine, a challenger to the brutal regime of Fte./Lte. Jerry Rawlings, did not even get one single vote in his own constituency. That is, the results indicated that he did not vote for himself and his wife and four children did not vote for him. After he complained bitterly about the rigging, the electoral commission tossed six votes his way.

Here is a short list of instances that indicate coconut elections:

  • The electoral equipment for coconut elections, the results of which are stolen anyway, was itself stolen (Nigeria, December 9, 2010).
  • Both candidates—Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara—claimed victory and installed themselves as presidents after Ivory Coast’s November 2010 elections.
  • For the November 7, 2010, elections in Myanmar (Burma), military rulers bestowed upon their country a new flag, a new seal, and a new anthem. The old flags were to be lowered by people born on a Tuesday and the new flags were to be raised by people born on a Wednesday. Then all the old flags were to be burned. Many parties were blocked from participating by fees set so high that in many districts only government-backed [p.32>] candidates could register, by stipulations that the military could allot close to one-quarter of all seats after the election took place, and by the harassment and threatening of opposition candidates who tried, against all odds, to compete. No international observers were permitted, and no foreign journalists were allowed in. The military junta declared victory even before voting started.
  • At the time of the August 25, 2003, elections in Rwanda, opposition leader Faustin Twagiramungu found his campaign stymied at every turn by government security forces. His rallies were canceled, his workers arrested, and his brochures seized. On the eve of the voting, “police arrested 12 of Twagiramungu’s provincial organizers, saying they were preparing election day violence.” Additionally, “In Mr. Twagiramungu’s home town, soldiers reportedly looked at ballot papers and ordered those who voted the wrong way to try again.” For the August 2010 elections, preparations for the September victory celebration by the incumbent despot, Paul Kagame, began before the voting did.

The year 2010 reaped a harvest of coconut elections in Belarus, Burkina Faso, Myanmar (Burma), Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Rwanda. No incumbent lost an election.

Belarus, a country of 10 million, held its presidential elections on December 19, 2010. Long-term dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who had been in power for 16 years, won handily. His government controls the media, and opposition candidates were denied airtime. An agency called the KGB watched over the people. Intimidation was the order of the day. The government machine that pressured people into early voting was in place, and those who failed to vote early were threatened with the loss of their jobs in the state sector.

Lukashenko won nearly 80 percent of the vote and his closest ri­val 1.8 percent. Opposition activists and critical journalists denounced the vote as fraudulent, and over 10,000 demonstrators poured into the streets in a protest march toward Independence Square in the heart of Minsk. But heavily armed security and police forces unleashed their full fury on the demonstrators, who were savagely beaten. Seven of the nine opposition candidates were arrested, and over 600 protesters were taken into custody.

[p.33>] The opposition candidate Vladimir Neklyayev, who received 1.8 percent of the vote, was beaten unconscious and rushed to the hospital. While he was being treated for head wounds, he was abducted by sev­eral men in civilian clothes. Also severely beaten and rushed to a hospi­tal was another presidential candidate, Andrei Sannikov. And what was the reaction of the head of the Central Elections Commission, Lidiya Ermoshina—who was appointed by Lukashenko? According to an ar­ticle in Der Spiegel, she “said that her office was aware of only very few complaints about the elections.” Naturally.

Coconut Reform It is clear that the vampire state or the coconut republic must be reformed and replaced with a well-functioning state. To establish one, reform is needed in many areas—in the political sys­tem, the economic system, the judicial system, the educational system, and the electoral system. But reform is anathema to the ruling vampire elites and coconut heads, for it would threaten their lucrative businesses and their hold on power.

  • Ask them to privatize inefficient state enterprises and they will sell the companies to themselves and their cronies at fire-sale prices: examples are Uganda under Yoweri Museveni and Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. Said Muhammad Al Ghanam, the former director of legal research in Egypt’s Ministry of Interior: “The Mubarak era will be known in the history of Egypt as the era of thievery.”
  • Ask them to develop their economies and they will develop their pockets. Ask them to seek foreign investment and they will seek a foreign country in which to invest their loot.
  • Ask them to enforce the rule of law and they will force the law to respect their whims. Said The Economist: “In Zimbabwe, the thieves are in charge and their victims face prosecution.”
  • Ask them to trim their bloated bureaucracies and cut government spending and they will establish a “Ministry of Less Government Spending.” Ask them to establish a market-based economy and place more emphasis on the private sector and they will create a “Ministry of Private Enterprise,” as Ghana did in 2002.
  • Ask them to reform their abominable political and economic systems and they will perform the “coconut boogie”—one swing forward, three swings back, a jerk to the right, and a tumble [p.34>] to land hard on a frozen Swiss bank account. Swiss authorities froze the bank accounts of Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya in 2011.
  • Ask them to establish democratic pluralism and they will create surrogate parties, appoint their own electoral commissioners, empanel a gang of lackeys to write the constitution, inflate the voters’ register, manipulate the electoral rules, and hold coconut elections to return themselves to power. Even African children could see through this chicanery and fraud. Said Adam Maiga from Mali: “We must put an end to this demagoguery. You have parliaments, but they are used as democratic decoration.”

Reform becomes a charade. The reform process has stalled through vexatious chicanery, willful deception, and vaunted acrobatics. The ruling vampire elites and the coconut heads are just not interested in reform, period. They benefit from the rotten status quo. But without reform, their countries could implode or collapse in a Tunisian-type revolution. In fact, the adamant refusal of despots to reform their odi­ous and dysfunctional political systems has ignited revolutions:

  • Nicaragua: In 1979, a revolutionary movement called the Sandinistas, led by Daniel Ortega, ousted from power Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled the country since 1936.
  • Indonesia: In 1998, Suharto, who had held power for 32 years, was forced to resign following the Asian financial crisis. In May 1999, Time Asia estimated Suharto’s family fortune at US$15 billion in cash, shares, corporate assets, real estate, jewelry, and fine art. Of this, US$9 billion was reported to have been deposited in an Austrian bank. Suharto was placed highest on Transparency International’s list of corrupt leaders with an alleged misappropriation of between US$15 and 35 billion during his 32-year presidency. His ouster led to the breakaway attempts by East Timor and Aceh.

However, Africa abounds with examples of despots who refused to heed the call to reform and, as a result, saw their countries implode in a violent vortex of chaos, carnage, and destruction, ending with their [p.35>] own deaths: Somalia (1991), Rwanda (1994), Liberia (1991), and Zaire (1996), among others. The cost of rebuilding each country devastated by war is in the billions. Rebuilding Liberia alone would cost at least US$15 billion.

The Coconut Cure Alas, there is a cure for coconut heads. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, there is a place called “the magic corner,” where all and sundry, including politicians, come to be relieved or cured of their problems. “Even those top leaders of the government come to that tree,” said Shabuni Haruni, a private security guard. “Yes, during the election.”

Upon the payment of a small fee, a traditional healer will take a pa­tient to a huge baobab tree, reputed to be the abode of ancestral spirits. Patients remove their shoes and kneel in front of the tree with their eyes closed. At one session described by the Washington Post correspondent Karl Vick,

Rykia Selengia, a traditional healer, passed a coconut around and around the head of her kneeling client. The coconut went around the man’s left arm, then the right, then each leg. When she handed the coconut to the client, Mussa Norris, he hurled it onto a stone.

It shattered, releasing his problems to the winds.

Islam Is [NOT] Peace (Updated)

Don’t believe the lies. Islam doesn’t mean peace. And every single good Muslim knows this FACT. But that doesn’t stop them from pushing the ‘peace’ narrative. It works well with the massive wave of opportunistic Muslim migration. In fact, it’s a key aspect of the dissimulation that allows the European Migrant Crisis to continue to spiral out of control.

Gateway Pundit notes the naivety expressed by a New York Times reporter about how Muslim law views non-Muslims. GP goes on to quote the Urban Dictionary, which defines ‘kuffar’ as:

“Also spelled ‘kafir’ or ‘kaffir’, Kuffar is a highly derogatory Arabic term used to refer to non-Muslims, though it is usually directed less against “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews) and more against others (Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, etc)…”

This just isn’t true. That is, that it is directed less against the “People of the Book.” Bill Warner explains (also, see the final — long — quote at bottom):

The ISM (International Solidarity Movement) issued a statement praising Kayla Mueller for her work with the group in “Occupied East Jerusalem.”

The Jewish Action Taskforce (JAT) notes the radical nature of this organization, ISM:

…The Solidarity Movement is not a legally incorporated entity. It is a fairly loose association of individuals free to unite, to depart, and to call themselves by a different name every day. Indeed, it is often to their advantage to do so because if, as has happened, Charlotte Kates, the leader of the New Jersey Solidarity Movement, gives a ringing endorsement of suicide bombing, other branches of the solidarity movement can say: she does not speak for us.

Solidarity movement is also both a proper noun and a term of art. Supporters of the Solidarity Movement have come out of the International Socialist Organization, a group that has spawned other international solidarity movements. Socialists and radical leftists use this sort of phrasing: we should form an international solidarity movement to help in the people’s struggle for X since international solidarity movements have been so useful in past struggles.

This particular International Solidarity Movement is often called the Palestinian Solidarity Movement in the United States. Local chapters have myriad names. Names of groups linked in the “local chapters” section on theInternational Solidarity Movement web site, include: Boston to Palestine, the Palestine Information Project (Seattle), and the Free Palestine Campaign (Ann Arbor), which has a useful section on its web site labeled “attacks on the ISM” [Ref. 1]. The section contains several excellent articles regarding the nature of the ISM and its activities.

The web sites of local ISM affiliates are indicative of the complexity of the Movement itself. The founders of ISM openly endorse terrorism, and the volunteers on the ground in Israel work to protect terrorists, but in the United States the group also depends upon the support of individuals who believe that they are working for a peaceful solution and who not only are not personally anti-Semitic, but who are often Jewish.

[….]

In another email, ISM cofounder George Rishmawi offers his opinions on why terrorism and violence are needed [Ref. 11]:

You are mistaken my friend. I am sorry to tell you this but you are. Well, When did the suicide bombing start? When did the occupation of the west Bank and Gaza started? When did the aggression agaisnt the Palestinian started?

You need to know the source of the conflict and the source of the suffering that bushes people to kill themselves and others.

I do not want to see anybody killed but we need to say that taking people’s rights and freedom is the source of the problem and when this stops there should be not need for anymore killing. This is what we should advocate for it right now.

In a recent interview, ISM cofounder Adam Shapiro “justifie(d) the Palestinian armed resistance against Israel as long as it is targeting Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Otherwise, he is not in favor of suicide bombings.” [Ref. 12].

…read it all…

The socialists LOVE jihadists… because their real goal is to overthrow capitalism (see chapter from book explaining more, here):

Jihad Watch also notes the support the organization (ISM) gives to terrorists:

…But many documented International Solidarity Movement speakers or workshop leaders participated in this week’s Duke conference, including ISM’s co-founder Huweida Arraf, who tried to recruit students to join her group.

Arraf led a workshop yesterday titled “Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists.” Arraf handed out brochures for the ISM and urged students to join the terror-supporting group, members of Duke’s Conservative Union who attended the workshop told WorldNetDaily. They asked that their names be withheld from publication.

Arraf, together with seven other self-declared International Solidarity Movement members who would not state their last names, screened a slide show about ISM activism, detailed the group’s two-day training session and fielded questions about the logistics of traveling to “Palestine,” explaining how to fool Israeli border control since ISM members are denied entry.

Arraf also told students the ISM “happily works with Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” said one Conservative Union member who attended the talk…

…read more…

Explaining Islamic theology to all the wing-nuts at the NYTs is this longer excerpt from a wonderful book edited by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

NON-MUSLIMS IN THE QUR’AN

The attitudes of modern Muslims toward non-Muslims are rooted, of course, in the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the eternal words of Allah dictated to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. The Qur’an occupies an influence in the Islamic world that is far greater than that of the Bible in the West, even during the heyday of Christendom; it exerts a dominant and formative influence on the Muslim mind and culture.

Proponents of the myth of Islamic tolerance point to verses such as this one: “Those who believe [in the Qur’an], and those who follow the Jewish [scriptures], and the Christians and the Sabians, any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve” (sura 2:62; cf. 5:69 and 22:17). Muslim spokesmen in the West like to quote such verses and to stress, as in the Council on American Islamic Relations ad, the commonality between Islam and Christianity—and sometimes even between Islam and Judaism.

However, the preponderance of Qur’ anic testimony favors not tolerance and harmony between Muslims and non-Muslims, but just the opposite. A fundamental component of the Qur’an’s view of non-Muslims is the often repeated and implacable belief in its own superiority: “The Religion before Allah is Islam” (sura 3:19), or, as another translation has it, “The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam.” Muslims, accordingly, are also superior to others: “Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah.” By contrast, most Jews and Christians (“People of the Book”) are wrongdoers: “If only the People of the Book had faith, it were best for them: among them are some who have faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors” (sura 3:110).

According to orthodox Muslim belief, the Qur’an is the final and perfect revelation from Allah, the one true God. It confirms earlier revelations—a fact of which Muhammad was evidently so sure that in the Qur’an he has Allah telling him that if he is harboring any doubts about the veracity of his experiences with Gabriel, he need only check with those who received scrip­tures before Muhammad’s time—that is, Jews and Christians: “And if thou (Muhammad) art in doubt concerning that which We reveal unto thee, then question those who read the Scripture (that was) before thee. Verily the Truth from thy Lord hath come unto thee. So be not thou of the waverers” (sura 10:94).

Yet the testimony that the earlier scriptures were supposed to bear to the coming of Muhammad has been obscured by Jews and Christians. In a lengthy passage in a late sura (chapter) of the Qur’an, “al-Baqara” (the Cow), Allah castigates the Jews and Christians for rejecting Muhammad when they know better:

We gave Moses the Book and followed him up with a succession of mes­sengers; We gave Jesus the son of Mary Clear (Signs) and strengthened him with the holy spirit. Is it that whenever there comes to you a messenger with what ye yourselves desire not, ye are puffed up with pride? Some ye called impostors, and others ye slay! They say, “Our hearts are the wrappings (which preserve Allah’s Word: we need no more).”

Nay, Allah’s curse is on them for their blasphemy: Little is it they believe. And when there comes to them a Book from Allah, confirming what is with them, although from of old they had prayedfor victory against those without Faith, when there comes to them thatwhich they (should) have recognised, they refuse to believe in it but the curse of Allah is on those without Faith. Miserable is the price for which they have sold their souls, in that they deny (the revelation) which Allah has sent down, in insolent envy that Allah of His Grace should send it to any of His servants He pleases: Thus have they drawn on themselves Wrath upon Wrath. And humiliating is the punishment of those who reject Faith.

When it is said to them, “Believe in what Allah Hath sent down,” they say, “We believe in what was sent down to us”: yet they reject all besides, even if it be Truth confirming what is with them. Say: “Why then have ye slain the prophets of Allah in times gone by, if ye did indeed believe?”

There came to you Moses with clear (Signs); yet ye worshipped the calf (even) after that, and ye did behave wrongfully. And remember We took your covenant and We raised above you (the towering height) of Mount (Sinai), (saying): “Hold firmly to what We have given you, and hearken (to the Law).” They said: “We hear, and we disobey.” And they had to drink into their hearts (of the taint) of the calf because of their Faithlessness. Say: “Vile indeed are the behests of your Faith if ye have any faith!”.. .

Say: Whoever is an enemy to Gabriel—for he brings down the (revelation) to thy heart by Allah’s will, a confirmation of what went before, and guidance and glad tidings for those who believe—whoever is an enemy to Allah and His angels and messengers, to Gabriel and Michael, lo! Allah is an enemy to those who reject Faith. We have sent down to thee Manifest Signs (ayat); and none reject them but those who are perverse. Is it not (the case) that every time they make a covenant, some party among them throw it aside? Nay, Most of them are faithless. And when there came to them a messenger from Allah, confirming what was with them, a party of the people of the Book threw away the Book of Allah behind their backs, as if (it had been something) they did not know! . . . If they had kept their Faith and guarded themselves from evil, far better had been the reward from their Lord, if they but knew! (sura 2:88-103)

By the evidence of this passage and others in the Qur’an, the Jews and Christians who remain in the world after the time of Muhammad are renegades who have rejected this final revelation out of corruption and malice and who have exchanged truth for falsehood: “The Jews call Uzair [Ezra] a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say” (sura 9:30). Nor is that remotely all. The Jews “have incurred divine displeasure): in that they broke their covenant; that they rejected the signs of Allah; that they slew the Messengers in defiance of right; that they said, ‘Our hearts are the wrappings (which preserve Allah’s Word; We need no more)’; nay, Allah hath set the seal on their hearts for their blasphemy, and little is it they believe . .” (sura 4:155). They even misrepresent the scriptures: “There is among them a section who distort the Book with their tongues: (As they read) you would think it is a part of the Book, but it is no part of the Book; and they say, ‘That is from Allah,’ but it is not from Allah. It is they who tell a lie against Allah, and (well) they know it!” (sura 3:78). They blasphemously doubt Allah’s power: “The Jews say: `Allah’s hand is tied up.’ Be their hands tied up and be they accursed for the (blasphemy) they utter” (sura 5:64).

The Qur’an also frequently censures Christians for believing in false doctrines—including beliefs that are central to the faith as it had been understood and practiced for as long as six centuries before Muhammad began preaching. Apparently misunderstanding the nature of the Christian Trinity, one verse has Allah quizzing Jesus: “0 Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah?” Jesus answers: “Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say)” (sura 5:116).

In the book Allah frequently insists that he has no son—a fact Muslims believe to be an essential component of true monotheism. “Say: ‘Praise be to Allah, who begets no son, and has no partner in (His) dominion: Nor (needs) He any to protect Him from humiliation: yea, magnify Him for His greatness and glory!'” (sura 17:111).

Finally Muhammad weaves his charges against Jews and Christians together by condemning Christians for believing that Jesus was crucified, and Jews for believing that they crucified him: “They said (in boast), ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not” (sura 4:157).

Because of the cavalier, self-serving, and underhanded ways in which they have treated Allah’s message, both Jews and Christians live under the curse of Allah: “Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” (sura 9:30).

The idea that Jews and Christians are accursed recurs several times in the Qur’an. Both have rejected Allah and his messenger Muhammad:

Allah did aforetime take a covenant from the Children of Israel, and we appointed twelve captains among them. And Allah said: “I am with you: if ye (but) establish regular prayers, practice regular charity, believe in my messengers, honor and assist them, and loan to Allah a beautiful loan, verily I will wipe out from you your evils, and admit you to gardens with rivers flowing beneath; but if any of you, after this, resisteth faith, he hath truly wandered from the path of rectitude.”

But because of their breach of their covenant, We cursed them, and made their hearts grow hard; they change the words from their (right) places and forget a good part of the message that was sent them, nor wilt thou cease to find them—barring a few—ever bent on (new) deceits: but forgive them, and overlook (their misdeeds): for Allah loveth those who are kind.

From those, too, who call themselves Christians, We did take a covenant, but they forgot a good part of the message that was sent them: so we estranged them, with enmity and hatred between the one and the other, to the day of judgment. And soon will Allah show them what it is they have done.

0 People of the Book! There hath come to you our Messenger, revealing to you much that ye used to hide in the Book, and passing over much (that is now unnecessary): There hath come to you from Allah a (new) light and a perspicuous Book, wherewith Allah guideth all who seek His good pleasure to ways of peace and safety, and leadeth them out of dark­ness, by His will, unto the light, guideth them to a path that is straight. (sura 5:12-16)

All this leads directly to the Qur’an’s notorious verses of jihad, such as this one from later in the same sura: “And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith” (sura 2:190). Many Western Muslim spokesmen today deny that this verse applies to Jews and Christians of this age or any other, as they are in the Qur’an “People of the Book” and not idolaters. However, it is clear from the long passage above that Jews and Christians are indeed counted in the Qur’an among those who “suppress faith” and thus must be met by Muslims not with talk of tolerance and peaceful coexistence but with jihad warfare: “And fight them until persecu­tion is no more, and religion is all for Allah. But if they cease, then lo! Allah is Seer of what they do” (sura 8:39).

Indeed, the sura that most Muslim scholars believe to have been the last one revealed—and hence the portion of the Qur’an that takes precedence over any contradictory passage revealed earlier—is sura 9, at-Tauba (“Repentance”). It explicitly enjoins Muslims to wage war against the People of the Book until they either convert to Islam or are subdued as second-class dhimmis: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya [a special tax on non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (sura 9:29).

In the end it is the will of Allah that Islam will triumph over all other reli­gions: “He it is Who bath sent His messenger with the guidance and the Reli­gion of Truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may be averse” (sura 9:33).

This is tantamount to a declaration of war, and its spirit pervades the entire Muslim holy book. So far is the Qur’an from modern notions of toler­ance and peaceful coexistence that it even warns Muslims not to befriend Jews and Christians—apparently including those who “feel themselves sub­dued” and are paying the jiyza: “0 ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protec­tors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust” (sura 5:51).

It is ironic in light of all this that the Qur’an also criticizes Jews and Chris­tians for being intolerant. Allah warns Muhammad that “never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion. Say: ‘The Guidance of Allah, that is the (only) Guidance.’ Wert thou to follow their desires after the knowledge which hath reached thee, then wouldst thou find neither Protector nor helper against Allah” (sura 2:120; cf. 2:135).

This is the Qur’an that pious Muslims cherish and memorize in its entirety; it is for them their primary guide to understanding how they should make their way in the world and deal with other people. It is nothing short of staggering that the myth of Islamic tolerance could have gained such cur­rency in the teeth of the Qur’an’s open contempt and hatred for Jews and Christians and incitements of violence against them—and a testimony to the ease with which one can convince himself of the truth of something in which one wants to believe, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

NON-MUSLIMS IN THE HADITH

The Hadith, the traditions of the sayings and doings of the prophet Muhammad, are second in authority only to the Qur’an for most Muslims. In fact, Sunni Islam, the sect of 85 to 90 percent of Muslims worldwide, takes its name from the Sunnah, the Traditions, which Sunnis follow in contradis­tinction to Shi’ite Islam, which from the days of its great imams and in a different way thereafter invested more authority than do Sunnis in religious leaders. Sunnis rely instead, at least according to the theory, on the teachings of Muhammad as recorded in the Hadith and explicated by Islamic jurists.

The Hadith is voluminous, and much is of doubtful authenticity. But in the early centuries of Islam six collections were identified by Muslims as being substantially authentic and therefore trustworthy: those known today as Sahih Sittah (“reliable collections”): Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, the Sunan of Abu Dawud, the Sunan of Ibn Majah, the Sunan of an-Nasai, and the Jami of at-Tirmidhi. These, as applied and interpreted by jurists from the four prin­cipal Sunni madhhabs, or schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafi’i) form the primary source for the innumerable regulations of Islamic law, which governs virtually every aspect of life—from personal hygiene to macroeconomics. Although it is likely—and Western scholars have established in many cases—that many of these traditions that are revered as reliable are just as tenuous and inauthentic as many of those that are univer­sally rejected, this fact has had little impact thus far in the Islamic world. Many of them enjoy normative status as principal sources for religious beliefs and practices. Critical analysis of both the Qur’an and Hadith has been slight and furtive among Muslims—largely owing to the fact that Islamic tolerance, both in history and today, does not generally extend to a willingness to allow the words of Allah to be examined and prodded. To allow this would be tan­tamount to admitting that the Qur’an is a human book, which few pious Mus­lims have been prepared to do ever since the comparatively rationalist Mutazilite sect was vanquished centuries ago and the idea that the Qur’an was uncreated was raised to the level of an unquestionable dogma. In any case, since these traditions are regarded as authentic by orthodox Muslims, they play a key role in the elaboration of Islamic intolerance and were accordingly muted in the era of the imposition of the myth of tolerance.

The Traditions’ message regarding non-Muslims consists primarily of an amplification of that of the Qur’an. The Qur’an’s inconsistent statements about whether or not Jews and Christians will enter paradise are resolved: “It is narrated on the authority of Abu Huraira that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) observed: By Him in Whose hand is the life of Muhammad, he who amongst the community of Jews or Christians hears about me, but does not affirm his belief in that with which I have been sent and dies in this state (of disbelief), he shall be but one of the denizens of Hell-Fire.” So once again we see that if there is any tolerance in Islam at all, it is only provisional, in anticipation of the great Day on which Allah will make it manifest to all that “the Religion before Allah is Islam” (sura 3:19). Another Hadith has Muhammad saying:

On the Day of Resurrection, a call-maker will announce, “Let every nation follow that which they used to worship.” Then none of those who used to worship anything other than Allah like idols and other deities but will fall in Hell (Fire), till there will remain none but those who used to worship Allah, both those who were obedient (i.e., good) and those who were dis­obedient (i.e., bad) and the remaining party of the people of the Scripture. Then the Jews will be called upon and it will be said to them, “Who do you use to worship?” They will say, “We used to worship Ezra, the son of Allah.” It will be said to them, “You are liars, for Allah has never taken anyone as a wife or a son. What do you want now?” They will say, “0 our Lord! We are thirsty, so give us something to drink.” They will be directed and addressed thus, “Will you drink,” whereupon they will be gathered unto Hell (Fire) which will look like a mirage whose different sides will be destroying each other. Then they will fall into the Fire. Afterwards the Christians will be called upon and it will be said to them, “Who do you use to worship?” “They will say, ‘We used to worship Jesus, the son of Allah.'” It will be said to them, “You are liars, for Allah has never taken anyone as a wife or a son,” Then it will be said to them, “What do you want?” They will say what the former people have said. Then, when there remain (in the gathering) none but those who used to worship Allah (Alone, the real Lord of the Worlds) whether they were obedient or disobedient.

Of course, consigning other groups to hellfire doesn’t necessarily mean that one will not consent to live in peace as equals with them on earth. But Islam in its totality attempts an audacious recasting and, in a real sense, appropriation of Judaism and Christianity—a kind of theological imperialism that can serve as a useful analogy and paradigm for the true nature of the tol­erance that Islamic jurists envision for this world.

For Muhammad did not hesitate to appropriate the central figures of Judaism and Christianity and to claim that they were Muslim. Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus appear in the Qur’an and Hadith as Muslim prophets (see suras 2:87, 2:136, 3:84, 33:7, 42:13, etc.). Their religion was Islam—until it was corrupted by their wicked followers (who were, of course, the ancestors of the Jews and Christians, who remained outside the fold of Islam). In the Christians’ case, Jesus will set this right in the latter days, returning to end the dhimmi status of non-Muslims in Islamic soci-eties—not by initiating a new era of equality and harmony, but by abolishing Christianity and imposing Islam upon everyone:

Allah’s Apostle said, “By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, surely (Jesus,) the son of Mary will soon descend amongst you and will judge mankind justly (as a Just Ruler); he will break the Cross and kill the pigs and there will be no Jizya (i.e., taxation taken from non Muslims). Money will be in abundance so that nobody will accept it, and a single prostration to Allah (in prayer) will be better than the whole world and whatever is in it.” Abu Huraira added, “If you wish, you can recite (this verse of the Holy Book): `And there is none of the people of the Scriptures (Jews and Christians) But must believe in him (i.e., Jesus as an Apostle of Allah and a human being) before his death. And on the Day of Judgment He will be a witness against them”‘ (4.159)

To drive the point home, another tradition adds that Muhammad said: “How will you be when the son of Mary (i.e., Jesus) descends amongst you and he will judge people by the Law of the Qur’an and not by the law of Gospel?”

Still, while all this and similar material is useful to refute the pseudo-multicultural posturing of contemporary Muslim advocacy groups (particu­larly in the United States), it doesn’t add up in itself to anything particularly intolerant. Theological absolutism of a similar kind can be found in virtually all sects of Christianity, as well as in other religious traditions. But although sura 109 of the Qur’an—often quoted today—envisions a live-and-let-live attitude between Muslims and non-Muslims, that is far from the last word on the subject in either the Qur’an (as we have seen) or the Hadith. The Hadith expand upon verses 9:5 and 9:29 of the Qur’an with accounts of Muhammad’s battles against unbelievers. One of the most notable of these records not a battle but an epistolary encounter between the Prophet of the new religion and the leader of the old empire, Heraclius of Byzantium. The account in Sahih Bukhari is full of unlikely details, including the assertion that Heraclius was mightily impressed by Muhammad and all but acknowl­edged his prophethood. To the dismay of courageous Muslim apostates through the centuries, the Heraclius of this hadith burbles to one of Muhammad’s men: “I asked you whether there was anybody who, after embracing [Muhammad’s] religion, became displeased and discarded his religion; your reply was in the negative. In fact, this is the sign of True Faith, for when its cheerfulness enters and mixes in the hearts completely, nobody will be displeased with it.”

But most noteworthy is the brief, easy-to-overlook threat lobbed into the letter from the holy man: “Embrace Islam,” he exhorted Heraclius, “and you will be safe.” No guarantee of safety or offer of truce is made in the event that Heraclius declines to accept Islam.

The imperative was to invite non-Muslims to become Muslim—as Muhammad did Heraclius and Osama bin Laden did the United States in the late 1990s—and then fight those who refuse. This hadith delineates these choices, in accord with sura 9:29’s mandate to fight Jews and Christians until they pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)—or, of course, convert to Islam. Says Muhammad:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war; do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and do not mutilate (the dead) bodies; do not kill the children. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. . . . If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.

When speaking of non-Muslim dhimmis, the sahih ahadith are primarily concerned with the collection of the jizya—which constituted the “source of the livelihood” of the Muslims. The traditions say little about the way in which Islamic societies are soon going to ensure that non-Muslims “feel themselves subdued,” in accordance with sura 9:29. But Muslims from the earliest ages seem to have been intent to fulfill this command and devised numerous ingenious ways to do so. This resulted in an elaborate system of regulation for the treatment of dhimmis that enforced their humiliation and inferiority on a daily basis—and that remained constant in the Islamic world, although they were enforced with varying degrees of ferocity in different regions over the ages. These regulations, as intolerant as they are, remain part of the Sharia to this day. Radical Islamic terror organizations around the world have repeatedly declared their intention to impose the Sharia wherever and whenever they can. This stands as an enduring threat to non-Muslims in nations with Muslim majorities and elsewhere.

Robert Spencer, Ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treat Non-Muslims (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 39-48. (For footnotes/references of quotes, buy the book.)