To fight global warming, a bill in Sacramento would enable Los Angeles County transit officials to increase taxes on motorists. It's a bad idea that may foreshadow even worse to come.
Billed as a "climate change mitigation and adaptation fee," the measure would cost motorists either an additional 3 percent motor fuel tax, or up to a $90 annual flat fee, based on vehicle emissions. The new charges would be on top of taxes already paid at the pump. Either option requires a majority approval by a vote of the people.
"At this point the people of the Los Angeles region have just had it when it comes to traffic and air quality," claimed Assemblyman Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat and author of Assembly Bill 2558.
Who now travels around town on the LA subway, right ...
We concur about the traffic mess, but with little else Mr. Feuer claims in seeking to overtax motorists. The assemblyman's sleight of hand conflates two issues, the real problem of congested traffic and the contrived emergency of so-called global warming.
Congested traffic is easily verifiable. If it went away tomorrow, politicians would be unable to persuade voters to tax themselves to fix it. Traffic congestion is caused by Global Warming.
Global warming at best amounts to less than a degree of temperature increase during the past century. If the recent several-year cooling trend is an indication, global warming may be going away. But because the only "proof" of long-term catastrophic consequences lies in contrived computer models, politicians like Mr. Feuer can insist even as temperatures decline that doomsday still lies ahead unless people tax themselves to fix the problem.
Los Angeles County motorists should ask Mr. Feuer what global temperature would persuade him that a new tax is unneeded. Global warming, now conveniently rechristened "climate change," is perfect for demagoguery. Those advancing the cause won't explain how they will know we have won the global warming fight, let alone what the ideal temperature is supposed to be. If temps continue to fall they will take credit.
Climate has changed as long as the Earth has spun on its axis. It's been considerably warmer in recent centuries than today, and during those periods humanity simply adapted, indeed, flourished with fewer cold-weather deaths and more abundant crops.
But facts don't deter schemes like Mr. Feuer's to raise $400 million in additional taxes to pay for already funded transit projects. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority would have to place the issue on the ballot if AB2558 becomes law, and probably would do so because the agency would reap the bounty.
We hope, however, that motorists see the ploy for what it is and reject the additional tax. If not, it's a good bet this scare tactic will be repeated throughout the state.
#1
How about a "statist tax", which assesses a substantial fee for every enacted statute or regulatory change upon both the proposers and the legislators. The legislators get their salaries, less the statist tax costs of any legislation passed during their term of office. Lobbyists have to pay the state in order to lobby said legislators for new regulations, new taxes, and new mandates. Include an automatic exemption for deregulatory and tax-cut initiatives.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
04/09/2008 13:21 Comments ||
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#2
And if you complain, they'll tell you about the new "Bad Attitude" tax...
#3
So now we get down to the entire point of making such an issue over "climate change" ... so govt can extract additional taxes. But there is no way in hell that the government of Los Angeles is going to impact even in the most tiny of ways the climate of the entire planet. It is pure crap. The US isn't even the world's largest CO2 emitter and US emissions have been DROPPING since 2005.
Not to mention that there has been no "global warming" for the past 10 years. Climate ALWAYS changes.
#4
"But there is no way in hell that the government of Los Angeles is going to impact even in the most tiny of ways..."
I must respectfully disagree. Take a look at your car's emission systemss; most have their genisis in California-only systems that have spread, either by other state's jumping on the CA eco-bandwagon, or car companies doing the cost-cutting thing. If this kudzu takes root out there, it is only a matter of time before it spreads.
#6
If Hollywood went away then all the Hot Air emitted would stop and Global Warming would be solved.
When I lived ion LA Global Warming would start every morning and get worse when the fog cleared. It always got better at night.
The logic is that since most of the traffic is in the daytime and it's hottest in the daytime therefore the heat must come from the traffic. Tax the traffic.
#7
I must respectfully disagree. Take a look at your car's emission systemss; most have their genisis in California-only systems that have spread, either by other state's jumping on the CA eco-bandwagon, or car companies doing the cost-cutting thing. If this kudzu takes root out there, it is only a matter of time before it spreads.
And the funny thing is, when all this California-mandated-junk actually results in the limitation of energy-efficient technologies like diesel engines, the people who got it enacted are going to blame oil company conspiracies.
#10
"I must respectfully disagree. Take a look at your car's emission systemss; most have their genisis in California-only systems that have spread, either by other state's jumping on the CA eco-bandwagon, or car companies doing the cost-cutting thing. If this kudzu takes root out there, it is only a matter of time before it spreads."
Those changes were for AIR POLLUTION not for climate change. Were you alive in the Los Angeles area during the 1960's? The air was positively horrible.
China is adding the equivalent CO2 emissions of the entire UK every 90 days. In other words, if we went and killed every single human being in the entire UK and took the carbon footprint there to zero, China would make up the difference in three months. Any change LA would make to their emissions would probably be swamped in literally minutes by a corresponding growth in China's emissions. Every barrel of oil not burned in the US is a cheaper barrel that can be burned in China. We aren't "saving" anything. We are simply making it cheaper for someone else.
Even if Los Angeles were to find ways to significantly reduce CO2, if the entire world adopted them, it STILL wouldn't make any difference because people still do not understand A: the scale of CO2 emissions or B: that those emissions aren't even impacting the climate to begin with. THERE HAS BEEN NO WARMING FOR 10 YEARS. Before that there was 30 years of cooling between the 40s and the 70's, about 15 years of warming, and the last 10 years have been flat to slightly cooling.
THERE ISN'T A PROBLEM THAT NEEDS TO BE SOLVED. Please, lets stop wasting money trying to "solve" non-problems.
#11
Interesting that you should bring up China, there, crosspatch.
If the money from this tax would help develop mass transit for traffic relief I might be sympathetic because getting stuck in traffic is a bitch. But if the assemblyman thinks it's going to reduce global warming and air pollution I think he's barking up the wrong tree.
Because from what I've heard, the biggest source of air pollution in the LA Basin these days is all those giant cargo ships from China that offload their plastic crap at San Pedro or Long Beach. The cars have gotten a lot cleaner and more efficient but the ships haven't. I went to San Pedro one day last year and those bad boys were all belching tons of ugly, brown, diesel fuel exhaust into the atmosphere. They do it every day and there are a lot of them. Now, you'd think some smart politician in Sacramento might consider taxing them, wouldn't you?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/09/2008 16:12 Comments ||
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#12
People in LA love their beaches. All that sun bathing is using up the Sun's radiation and reducing Sun Spots. This allows Cosmic Rays to bombard the Earth and cause more cloud cover. More cloud cover causes "Nuclear Winter" or Climate Change.
Solution is a beach tax to help control global Climate Change. Works for me! Am I the only one that sees the solution.
#13
seems to me crsoopatch taht the particulate concentrations in the air have been blamed for climate change, so my original comment stands;
but actually i was using the california auto anti-smog issue as the lead in to the california leads the rest of the US down the road line of thinking.
Multiculturalism is Canadas greatest mistake, but if it is any consolation, it is every western countrys greatest mistake. And now some of them are paying a terrible price. If I have to elaborate on the names Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh and Ali Hirsi, then you just havent been paying attention.
The official idea behind multiculturalism was that cultural diversity would make us all better people. It would enrich our drably homogeneous social fabric, encourage tolerance and combat hatred. The happy surface of multiculturalism is a street-enlivening diversity of skin hues, native fabrics, with a panoply of foreign cuisines on every corner schwarma, pad thai, falafel, tandoori goat not to mention the feel-good, meticulously painted-by-number rainbow of visible minorities one sees working in government agencies, non-profit organizations and university equity offices.
The underside of multiculturalism is its ideological root in West-bashing. Sometime around 1960, it was determined by a few French intellectuals (whose unintelligible gibberish other intellectuals pretended to understand) that the greatest criminals against humanity in the history of the world werent the Nazi and Communist murderers of 100 million people. Rather, it was European colonialists, who imposed their cultural values on their captive audience.
Even though Canada was a colony itself, and had never indulged in imperialism of any kind, Canadians were informed they must share in the blame because of their religious, racial and cultural association with former colonialists.
Multiculturalism is idealistic in theory, but its real effect has been the entrenchment in our intellectual and cultural elites of an unhealthy obsession with a largely phantom racism amongst heritage Canadians that no amount of penance or cultural self-effacement can ever transcend.
#2
It certainly was. The 2nd biggest is living amongst the destruction of one's culture and not doing anything to correct that situation. Really, the beginnings were the general populace listening to elitists at universities and elsewhere instead of laughing them out of existence.
#3
All publicly funded universities in Canada should be closed. Any that consider themselves to be financially viable on the basis of the research funding and tuition revenue they attract should feel free to re-open with the faculty best suited to attracting the best minds.
This will leave many fill-in-the-blank studies departments closed for good any many tenured fools looking for real jobs for the first time in their lives.
#7
Caving in to Quebec time and time again has to rank up there as one of the big mistakes. The Canadians have a history of bending over for non-English cultures for some reason.
The Jingo in me says the biggest mistake was not joining the USA. Trying to join with each province as a state would have given them an enormous amount of clout in the US Government and put Quebec in her place. Yeah I know, National Pride, but I can't take that rational serious when they are turning over their sovereignty to Jihadists bit by bit.
I would like to get your feedback on the subject of those who end up in Hillary's orbit. Can you conceive of a strong, leader-type male ever working under her? An alpha, if you will. And if the answer is no, then why do you think that is?
The men you always see under her are to a person passive-aggressive, sadistic, mean, little, petty beta-male pieces of work who would not naturally succeed in a common male-type hierarchy. By that I mean an environment that values straightforward achievement rather than the darker political arts. . . .
What kind of person would go to work for a Clinton in the first place? A naive true-believer? Everyone knows what they would be getting into: constant war rooms, personal attacks, spin, daily damage control, a boss prone to temper tantrums, placing your own integrity out on the ledge as a shill for a fundamentally dishonest person. I would argue that nobody who hasn't already sold their soul years ago would ever want to be a part of that mess.
Your thoughts?
Chris Richard
Agoura Hills, Calif.
You have succinctly expressed one of the most unsettling aspects of Hillary Clinton's character and modus operandi. There is a strangely static and claustrophobic quality to the fiercely loyal cult she has gathered around her since her first lady years. Postmortem analysts of this presidential campaign will have a field day ferreting out all the cringe-making blunders made by her clique of tired, aging courtiers who couldn't adjust to changing political realities. . . .
I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. . . . If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males (as you so aptly describe them) are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.
The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. The White House should not be a banging, rocking washer perpetually stuck on spin cycle. Many Democrats, including myself, have come to doubt whether Hillary has any core values or even a stable sense of identity. With her outlandish fibbing and naive self-puffery, her erratic day-to-day changes of tone and message, her glassy, fixed smiles, and her leaden and embarrassingly unpresidential jokes about pop culture, she has started to seem like one of those manic, seductively vampiric patients in trashy old Hollywood hospital flicks like "The Snake Pit." How anyone could confuse Hillary's sourly cynical, male-bashing megalomania with authentic feminism is beyond me.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/09/2008 14:53 ||
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Wow. I know things in the Democratic Party are tense, but this metaphor from the guys at The Economist seems a bit over-the-top:
The Democrats are all too aware that their civil war could spell disaster. A cavalcade of senior Democrats, including senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd, have advised Mrs Clinton to retire to her room with a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.
Come on, guys. Besides the awful implied suicide metaphor, there's no way anyone would phrase it this way, as I'm pretty sure all of those guys support gun control.
UPDATE: I'm told "Here in Britain, the expression 'going into the library with a whiskey and a loaded revolver' is so commonly used, especially in a political context, that it has no shock value at all." Wow. I guess it's more or less their version of "taking out behind the woodshed", but it still sounds bloody to my ears on this side of the pond.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/09/2008 09:32 ||
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#1
I suggest that if someone gave Hillary a glass of whiskey and a loaded revolver, she would go hunting for Obama, the drink the whiskey to celebrate.
#3
I will...ahhhhhmmmm...provide the...ahhhhmmmm...whiskey.
Oh, wait. Ahhhhhhhmmmmm...nevermind.
Perhaps I can offer her a...ahhhhhmmmm...ride?
Posted by: Senator Edward M. Kennnedy ||
04/09/2008 11:55 Comments ||
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#4
The Brits (from my dealings with them) are a lot more easy-going with their phrasings, assuming (correctly) that no one really is suggesting any such thing. I believe Churchill said that bad or ineffective prime ministers must be pole-axed.
Hillary Clinton's campaign, which is a guttering candle, has suffered a perhaps extinguishing gust of ill wind. Her principal strategist has been forced to resign from that role.
Mark Penn's sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. Penn's downfall makes him a member of a species that many Democrats insist is large and about which Democrats theatrically grieve: Penn is a casualty of free trade.
He was freely practicing one of his trades, which is advising clients on how to deal with the U.S. government. To that end, he met with the Colombian ambassador to the United States concerning how to win ratification of the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement.
Although he simultaneously was freely practicing another of his trades, being a campaign operative, he probably perished for commercial reasons rather than political principles. Colombia hired him through the corporation for which he works, Burson-Marsteller. Unfortunately, his other client, Clinton, currently opposes the free-trade agreement as ardently as, presumably, she opposes the Red Sox -- for now.
Penn's actual beliefs about free trade, whatever they are, pro or con, certainly accord either with those that Clinton holds now or with those that she held back in the 1990s, when she was in the White House's East Wing acquiring the semi-demi-quasi-presidential experience that makes her just the person to answer the red telephone that, judging by her campaign ads, rings constantly in the West Wing.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/09/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
This is a winning issue for Republicans with a majority of Americans - particularly the better informed ones. Union membership has been declining in America for decades but it remains a potent atavistic bloc in Democratic politics.
It will prove very easy for Sen. McCain to argue that protectionism harms broader American interests, especially since the domestic economy is faltering but with U.S. exports at an all time high.
#3
Ahhhh but Woodrow, you miss the key phrase there.
"...private-sector workforce."
The Dems are totally in hoc to the PUBLIC sector unions and, as counter intuative as it may be, are required to pander to the Union Label no matter what!!
#4
Hillary has thrown a lot of her staff overboard and under the bus. Hillary, that is not a strategy but the behavior of petulant, peevish, vindictive person looking for someone to blame for shortcomings.
Once the election was underway, Barack Hussein Obama was very careful to promote himself as a Christian and the keystone of his Christian identity was Trinity Church, a Church shaped around a former Muslim whose Divinity School Masters Degree was on Islam and who used the Church to preach hatred for America and support for terrorism. That man of course is Jeremiah Wright.
With the revelations that Jeremiah Wright is a former Muslim and received his Masters degree from the University of Chicagos Divinity School on Islam in Africa Obamas affiliation with Wrights Trinity Church takes on a whole new meaning.
When Obama attended Wrights Trinity Church, was he really attending a Church or a Mosque that Wright had built with a Christian facade over it.
Wright has admitted to incorporating ideas from Black Muslims into Trinity. He himself is a former Muslim who promotes an Islam centered view of America and Israel as demon states. There are Synagogues that are actually Churches dedicated to targeting Jews. Muslims have been covertly imitating some of this. There is a Jews for Allah and Muslims have been trained to lead religious discussions with Christians by equating Christianity with Islam, proclaiming that they too believe in Jesus. If there are Messianic Christian synagogues, why not a Prophetic Christian mosque?
Either way, conspiracy theories aside, the Church that Obama was attending had more in common with a Mosque than with a conventional Church. It was led by a former Muslim whose specialty was and is Islam. A former Muslim who hates America and Israel and who preaches ideas that are basically Black Muslim ideas. So Obamas claim that Trinity Church normalizes him as a Christian goes out the window, because Trinity Church is no mainstream Christian Church. Its as close as anyone can come to attending a Mosque without actually attending a Mosque.
Consider Obamas Im not a Muslim defense reverted back to square one. Or is that Mosque one.
He writes about the 1988 Ojhri Camp arms dump explosion which was blown up just before the arrival of a US defense audit team to cover up the fact that some Stinger missiles had been sold off to other countries and given to jihadi terrorist groups. More than 100 people in Rawalpindi and Islamabad died as rockets rained down.
On the morning of April 10, 1988, a dreadful blast ripped through the big ammunition and missile depot of the Ojhri Camp, located midway between Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Live armament and ammunition, missiles, rockets, shells, bullets shot up skyward and rained death and destruction on the people and property, leaving 100 dead, 1100 wounded, over 7000 tons of arms and ammunition and a large number of vehicles completely destroyed.
The horror-stricken citizens at first did not know what had hit them. Was it a departing murderous strike by the Soviet forces which were poised to end their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, or was it a sudden surprise attack by Pakistan's archenemy India on the pattern of its unexpected opening salvo of the 1965 War? Then, they found out that the Ojhri Camp depot had blown up.
To this day the government has not told the full story of this fiasco. Public was told that an inquiry had been held, but its findings were not disclosed. This devastating event is recorded in the expanding ledger of national disasters that were either not investigated formally or were investigated improperly or only partially and still in most cases their findings were not revealed. A number of these destructive incidents were said to have taken place due to accidental factors or force of circumstances. Such reasoning that more often than not has proved to be false signifies ineptness and insincerity in the authorities.
The Ojhri Camp blast was blamed on accidental factors. This was just eyewash. The officials adopted the strategy of vagueness and silence, reckoning that over time the matter would be forgotten. Inner sources, however, disclosed: "President Ziaul Haq believed the blast was caused by sabotage." Obviously, he had some idea of the likely saboteurs, but he did nothing to expose them.
Even the stories in newspapers showed it to be an act of sabotage. More methodical analysis made it clear that the sabotage had goal-oriented, long-term advance planning behind it. It had the fingerprints of Mossad and CIA that almost always operate jointly as a unified team in Muslim countries, because both agencies are guided by the same master, the World Zionist Organisation. It was a special Sting operation, scripted in the grand plan of the 1979-89 Soviet-Afghan War.
In such schemes, the stingers (ironically or mischievously, this name was also given to the US anti-aircraft missile supplied to the mujahideen to combat Soviet aircraft) from the enemy agencies work as close allies with the target organisation to pursue apparently common objectives, thus securing the freedom to hit the target in the manner and at the time that their own hidden aims prescribe. Due to their deep penetration into the target country's official and private organisations, and the international resources of their powerful masters, the team can orchestrate a variety of mission-supporting, deceptive occurrences with the planned sting operation.
In January 1988, a settlement of the Soviet-Afghan War being negotiated at Geneva was on the horizon. President Ziaul Haq was reported to be fiercely opposed to several of the provisions in the proposed accord, which were extremely detrimental to the interests of both Pakistan and the mujahideen.
Pressure on him to accept the accord kept mounting and it increased his alienation to Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo, who, backed by the Americans, was in favour of the accord. In March 1988, Junejo, on the behest of his backers, organised an "all-parties conference" and then announced that there was consensus on signing the accord!
In the first week of April, the Indian film star, Dilip Kumar, accompanied by his actress wife, Saira Bano, came from Bombay to Pakistan on a pleasure trip that had official backing. Both President Zia and Prime Minister Junejo became noticeably involved with the daily engagements of the movie-world couple, who were given glowing publicity and VIP treatment. Wherever the Indian couple visited, the officials and staff remained distracted from their more important duties. While the officials were misled by their own weaknesses to sacrifice the official work to look after the film stars, they had also been prompted to do so by the attention that the country's president and the prime minister had showered on the Indian film couple.
Thoughtful observers questioned why the film stars had been invited to visit Pakistan when the nation was passing through a particularly disturbing period and the government was debating the very sensitive and thorny problem of the controversial draft of the Geneva Accord? At a time when President Zia, Prime Minister Junejo and the key officials should have been concentrating on resolving the urgent political issues, their attention and time had been cleverly diverted to a most frivolous affair! Why, in the first place, was this Indian actor allowed to be invited to Pakistan?
On the morning of April 9, President Zia flew to Kuwait to attend a one-day Summit of Muslim Heads of State. At night on the same date, a grand festivity had been arranged in Peshawar, to which all the key civil and military authorities, other officials and top political leaders had been invited. They remained rapturously absorbed in enjoying the late-night entertainment gala with the Indian movie stars. Early the next morning, the Ojhri Camp blew up with a dreadful boom.
The disaster shook the Zia-Junejo regime and Zia's resolve. On April 12 the regime signalled its acceptance of the accord, which was signed two days later in Geneva. It was a disgusting surrender of Pakistan's vital political and strategic interests and a negation of the just cause for which the Afghans had fought so hard. Besides unleashing other troubles, it legitimised Soviet-puppet Najibullah's regime and set in motion a mutually-destructive conflict amongst the Afghan mujahideen that cleared the way for the birth of the Taliban - all according to the grand plan. Within hours of the blast an American team for "assistance in investigation" landed at Chaklala airbase, with clearance coming from Junejo. The already shell-shocked authorities in Islamabad were astonished! They had no advance knowledge that an American team was coming. The Americans swooped on the blast site and removed or disrupted the telltale evidence before the local army authorities could activate their investigation efforts.
Ziaul Haq cut short his visit and rushed back to Islamabad. He tried to take charge of the situation. The aftermath of the blast intensified the estrangement between Zia and Junejo and caused discord in some of the senior army officers as each party sought to fix the responsibility for the disaster on the officers belonging to the opposite camp.
The depot had been servicing the war needs of the mujahideen. Off late its stocks had been especially built up to give additional armed strength to the mujahideen for a decisive offensive against the Kabul regime, once the Soviets had withdrawn. The colossal loss of arms and ammunition was a designed objective of the sabotage because the new Zionist schemes in Afghanistan, eg, the forthcoming programmed battle at Jalalabad, required that the combat power of the mujahideen parties be drastically cut. The Jalalabad Battle, we know, turned out to be a catastrophe for the mujahideen - and it also awaits investigation.
Using their vast capabilities, including penetration into the foreign affairs departments in the Muslim countries, the Zionist plotters had programmed an OIC mini-Summit in Kuwait on April 10. One of its objects was to ensure that President Zia would be out of the country on the day of the blast and Prime Minister Junejo would be making the immediate decisions. So, when the American 'investigation team', sent by the Zionist plotters, arrived literally unannounced, Junejo readily gave it his approval to investigate the blast. They had also programed the movie stars' visit to Pakistan. Among other things, agents of RAW could smoothly enter Pakistan with the movie couple. This Indian agency is a regular partner with Mossad and CIA in their subversive schemes against Pakistan.
The foreign saboteurs invariably make use of local accomplices and pawns. The pawns act unconsciously. The accomplices are conscious and hold influential status. Quaid-e-Azam, in his speeches in early 1948, called them 'fifth columnists' - people living in a country and working for the interests of the enemy country. They have been active all along in the wars and crises faced by Pakistan. They are the main reason behind the absence of inquiries into national crises or the suppression of reports of inquiries that were held, because that would expose the culprits and the fifth column.
The Ojhri Camp sabotage displayed the standard pattern the Zionist schemers use in sabotage, assassinations, suicide bombings and other terror operations: utter surprise, synchronisation in timing, orchestration of events, multiple extensive damages, multifarious hurtful effects, humiliation and helplessness of the target nation - and its inability to expose the real culprits. No Osamas, Zawahiris, Al-Libbies or Mehsuds can carry out such operations.
What is described here is based on unclassified information. It still offers important lessons. It is essential to recognise the master schemers and their grand design. The authorities must have much more and vital information that can yield more valuable lessons, if it is coupled with the analytical comments and clues presented here.
Posted by: john frum ||
04/09/2008 18:23 ||
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#1
Jeebus! them muzz got some krazy fuckahs runnin round ovah theyah in Pakiwakiland!
Last week, Russias lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalins man-made 1932-33 famine called the Holodomor in Ukrainian wasnt genocide.
Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. It notes that victims included different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.
Translation: We didnt kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.
And thats all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. . . . The word genocide was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchills 1941 lament that we are in the presence of a crime without a name. Lemkin, a champion of human rights who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, gave it a name a few years later. But to get the U.N. to recognize genocide as a specific crime, he made compromises.
Pressured by the Soviets, Lemkin supported excluding efforts to murder political groups from the U.N.s 1948 resolution on genocide. Under the more narrow official definition, its genocide to try to wipe out Roma (formerly known as Gypsies), but its not necessarily genocide to liquidate, say, people without permanent addresses. You cant slaughter Catholics, but you can wipe out religious people and dodge the genocide charge.
Political scientist Gerard Alexander decries that type of absurdity as Enlightenment bias. Reviewing Samantha Powers moving 2003 book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Alexander observed that this bias leaves the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century self-described Marxist-Leninists somewhat off the hook. . . . by focusing so narrowly on the U.N.-style definition of genocide, she implicitly upholds a moral hierarchy of evil, which in effect renders mass murder a second-tier crime if its done in the name of social progress, modernization, or other Enlightenment ideals.
This is dangerous thinking; people perceived to be blocking progress farmers, aristocrats, reactionaries can be more forgivably slaughtered than ethnic groups because theyre allegedly part of the problem, not the solution. After all, youve got to break some eggs to make an omelet.
For many, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge because Communists were omelet-makers. Ukrainian kulaks, or independent farmers, opposed Stalins plan for collectivization, so they were murdered for that greater good. . . . Note how the Russians have no problem copping to the charge of mass murder but recoil at suggestions it was racially motivated.
Its a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive is bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning.
Its also a false distinction. Racial genocide is often rationalized as a form of progress by those responsible. Under the Holodomor, Ukrainian culture was systematically erased by the Russian Soviets, who saw it as expendable. No doubt the Sudanese janjaweed in Darfur and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army in Tibet believe they are modernizers, too. . . . In Germany, the effort to crush Jewry was intertwined with the effort to nationalize the economy and eliminate small and independent businesses. For German social engineers, the Jews were convenient guinea pigs for their economic experiments. The first test cases were not the Jews but the mentally ill, who were classified as an economic liability useless bread-gobblers in Germanys 1936 Four-Year Plan of economic modernization.
The climate of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, but so did Enlightenment bias, which holds that almost anything can be justified in the name of progress.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/09/2008 14:32 ||
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#1
So get off my ass, ya bastids! And tell Pinchy to shine up my Pulitzer and get it back in the lobby.
Posted by: The Ghost of Walter Duranty ||
04/09/2008 14:41 Comments ||
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The climate of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, but so did Enlightenment bias, which holds that almost anything can be justified in the name of progress.
Which explains the adaption of the term 'progressive'.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester ||
04/09/2008 19:06 Comments ||
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#5
that's too bad. As one of your most vociferous critics, I have to say your recent article posts have been a pleasant change (notice I didn't say anything bad?)
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/09/2008 19:35 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
To fight global warming, a bill in Sacramento would enable Los Angeles County transit officials to increase taxes on motorists. It's a bad idea that may foreshadow even worse to come.
I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. . . . If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males (as you so aptly describe them) are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.
