Tones of Home

Imagine for a moment if each year hundreds of thousands of our poorest, least educated citizens illegally crossed the border into Canada in search of economic opportunity without ever having the intention of learning French, the lyrics to "Oh Canada", or how to make a killer poutine. How relieved would our government be that they were no longer obligated to try to provide basic services and welfare programs to many of our lower class citizens? How would Canada react to the increasing strain on their civic infrastructure and their humanitarian obligation to care of the new arrivals from south of the border?
Earlier this week protests were scheduled around the nation to coincide with the debate in congress over what to do about illegal immigration. Historical-revisionists such as MEChA and Aztlan, which are Latino organizations that promote anti-Americanism and civil disobedience with the dream of reconquering all of the lands "stolen" during the Mexican-American War, took the opportunity to rally the ignorant around their cause. If they would take the time to learn history as fact rather than history as relative to one's interpretation, they would realize that:
a) the U.S Government paid Mexico ~$630,000,000 (today's dollars) for the land gained in the war
b) there were only approximately 10,000 to 15,000 Mexicans living in "Aztlan" at the end of the war--hardly what one could call "critical mass"
c) Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, those Mexicans living in the new U.S. territory were granted full U.S. citizenship while retaining rights to all of their land. If they wished to return to Mexico, the U.S. government purchased their land from them.

Where does it end? Should MEChA and Aztlan then return all of Mexico to the Aztecs and the other indigenous tribes of history? Surely that is not their motive. My Huguenot ancestors were driven from France over 400 years ago by the Catholic church. Should I start a movement to reclaim our lost land?
I am not sure what those individuals who have legitimate concerns about our immigration policies think they have to gain by belligerently displaying the Mexican flag and shouting anti-American slogans, but they are not convincing me they want to become law-abiding citizens of the USA. I realize many of these agitators are misguided students, but they've appropriated a serious cause and claim to speak for those that have no voice. It seems to me that they should have taken the opportunity to express their solidarity with the country they chose to enter (legally or illegally) rather than participate as street theater puppet-pawns. It appears to me they yearn for the "good old days" that never existed in a land they left for a reason it seems they've forgotten.
Everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress agree that we have an illegal immigration problem. However, the solution remains elusive. One thing is certain though; until Mexico--and Latin America in general--addresses the fundamental structural problems of a ruling elite, the arbitrary enforcement of the rule of law, and the extensive corruption that exists at all levels of government, neither 200,000 troops on the border, or a wall 3,000 miles long and 50 ft high is going to stem the flow of people simply trying to make a better life for themselves.

Those that do make it here should pay attention to the company they keep.

An Issue of Trust

When I lived in New York City, I had a very good friend I worked with who had emigrated from Russia about 5 years before I met him. The day he was granted full U.S. citizenship he literally cried tears of joy. Aside from the day he left Russia it was one of the happiest days of his life. I learned a lot about Russia from him--usually over a glass of vodka. Culture, politics, curse words, proper toasts and most importantly, how to drink vodka all night without ending up in the gutter. When he spoke of home and his childhood, he seldom if ever had kind words to say. One thing he used to repeat ad nauseum was to never trust a Russian, ever. Surely he had his reasons for this, but I would usually chalk his rantings up as slightly hyperbolic.
I have a feeling he would read this story regarding newly exposed evidence of Russia's role in pre-OIF operations; shake his head, take a long drag on his cigarette, exhale, appear pensive for a moment and say something along the lines of, "well what did you expect?"

Thankless Pacifists

This morning I woke to the following headline: U.S., British Troops Rescue Iraq Hostages

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in a rural area of Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell" in a house, and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.
(Proof that when we torture poor sheep farmers with underpants and barking dogs they can yield useful information.)

As the article states, these were the comrades of the recently murdered American Tom Fox, all members of the Christian Peacemakers Team based in Chicago. From the heading on their website, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" I gather that they are pacifists in practice and at heart.
Doug Pritchard, the group's co-director speaking from Toronto, had this to say about the rescue operation:

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers," Pritchard said.

He also called for coalition forces to leave the country.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," Pritchard said.

Commentary

Pacifism is a fine strategy when the stakes are low. It's easy to make enlightened claims about the virtues of non-violence when the wolves are not knocking at the door. Probably the most famous pacifist of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers famously stood down the mighty British Empire, paving the way for an independent India. I can't help but wonder how India would have fared using such a strategy against Chairman Mao, Stalin, or Hitler rather than the largely benevolent British?
Gandhi had this to say regarding the Jews and the Holocaust: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." He believed that the Jews should commit mass suicide in order to make the Third Reich introspectively realize that maybe the Aryan race was not really the master race afterall, and should instead live peacefully with their neighbors as equals. Regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation as Gandhi did, recommending mass suicide hardly seems like the recipe for living peacefully on this earth in this moment.

The lack of gratitude that Doug Pritchard and CPT have shown for the brave troops that rescued the hostages is inexcusable. Instead of for a moment setting aside his dogmatic belief "... that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers" and thanking the actual people that rescued his helpless pacifists, he instead took the opportunity to call for the coalition forces to leave the country. Surely he would argue that they would have never been harmed had we never invaded Iraq etc... A chicken or the egg argument if there ever was one. It seems the power and the love of God was a little slow to the rescue. Fortunately for the CPT, our brave Armed Forces were up to the thankless task.
Pacifism is not only immoral, it's suicidal.

UPDATE:
In my recent post, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited" I mentioned the boxes of documents and hours of audio tapes that we've found in Iraq leftover from Saddam's reign. Some enterprising members of Pajamas Media have taken to translating some of the documents themselves and then cross-checking the translations for accuracy. The following link provides evidence that members of Saddam's regime were in contact with Osama Bin Laden via Sudan as early as 1995.
Also, Mark Steyn has written an excellent article that explores the costs of maintaining the U.N. mandated sanctions against Iraq had we continued with the status quo.

Proof That People Have Too Much Free Time

And to think I wasted last weekend enjoying good company, fresh snow and abundant sunshine in the Sierras when I could have stuck around town and participated in this.

Bad News for People Who Like Bad News

Shocking, I know, but there actually IS good news from Iraq from time to time.

It's easy to be a pessimist. All that is required of you is to give up.

Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited

One of the problems with the 24/7 news cycle we are all subjected to is that it rarely allows for a story to develop before the pundits start giving us their analysis in real-time. The result is that we are often forced to reach premature conclusions. The fact that we've been conditioned to think in 30 second sound bytes and seek instant gratification (if we don't insist on having things "yesterday") makes it difficult to recognize this cycle.
It has been almost three years since we invaded Iraq and rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Although there were many other legitimate reasons for our actions, ostensibly the easiest one to sell to the public was that Saddam had WMD's, had used them in the past and as a result he needed to be removed from power before he acted again. When we failed to find any WMD's, the left took the opportunity to use this as evidence that President Bush lied to us in order to further his neoconservative agenda. (I'd wager that the majority of those who use this argument have never taken the time to actually learn what the definition of a "neocon" is, but I digress).

On March 12, The New York Times published the first of two articles on "Saddam's Secret Strategy." The Times reported that "the Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them [in December of 2002] three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense."
This information was provided to a CIA task force called the Iraq Survey Group by Tariq Aziz, who had been deputy prime minister of Iraq. The survey group was established "by the CIA after the second gulf War ended to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapon's programs." The Times article continues, "to ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq Survey Group said." (link)

His own generals did not know that they had no WMD's, yet it was Bush who lied. But wait, maybe Saddam did, in fact, have WMD's; or at the very least, the capability to resurrect the program once he got France and Russia to persuade the U.N. to lift the sanctions and call off the weapons inspectors.
We are now in the process of interpreting 3,000 hours of audio tape and 48,000 boxes of records which document his military activities; records we surely would never have seen had we not invaded.

In one 1992 tape, Saddam discusses the diversion of electric power from a massive plant in Basra for a uranium-enrichment process like one the U.S. used to create the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In another tape, a top Iraqi scientist explains to Saddam how uranium is being enriched through the advanced process of plasma separation.
The tapes support the account of Mahdi Obeidi, who'd been in charge of the centrifuge program, that parts and blueprints were hidden from U.N. inspectors but not destroyed. Components of a gas centrifuge used to enrich weapons-grade uranium and documents relating to WMD were discovered in a barrel buried in Obeidi's backyard in a rose garden.

Too many people have too much of their credibility invested in the meme "Bush Lied, People Died" and in discrediting "Bush's War on Terror" to ever take an honest look at the entire issue. Anything that does not support this meme must be discredited at all costs. They will continue to pass as gospel reports by Western reporters safely in the Green Zone--who purchase gloomy stories from their Iraqi counterparts because they know that's what sells--as long as it supports the meme. Never for a moment will they consider that things may not be as bad as they seem.
Iraq continues to be story unfolding despite a 24/7 newscycle that forces us to react to every twist and turn of the drama. Stay tuned, and try not to lose your focus after 30 seconds.

Suicide Thinkers

There exists in Western civilization a virus that infects a certain percentage of the population. This virus causes the victim to believe that the West is responsible for all that ills the world. They refuse to acknowledge the myraid discoveries and contributions to the World Body of Knowledge that have come from the West; and how our open culture of natural and scientific inquiry has fostered this. They see the world through the twin lenses of "white, male oppression" and "capitalistic greed" and measure all things against a standard nothing short of perfection. To them, all discussion (if they allow any at all) is framed in this manner. There are numerous examples to be found in the current events of today. Not suprisingly, many of these infected minds can be found among the faculties of high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Mostly, they seem to be clustered in humanity departments where political grievances have been turned into courses of study with names such as "world studies", "women's studies" and "(insert your favorite 'oppressed' minority here) studies." They also reside in such prestigious places like the Arts & Sciences Department at Harvard as we found out when they recently forced Larry Summers from his job as president for his "heretical" views.
The following link explores this phenomena and its orgins in the Soviet Cold War propaganda machine. The Islamofacist movement--that explicity threatens all that the West stands for--sees in these infected individuals a valuable ally.
Here are some of the symptoms:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over
Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But "oppressed" people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.

I have to confess I do not know too much about the propaganda war that raged from the 1950's straight through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Department V did exist, and it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that they are responsible for this suicide virus that infects the West today.

Antidote anybody?