The big divide in politics, the all-important ideological choice, is between collectivism and liberty.

On the one side are those who want to be looked after. They believe that the state should guarantee that they will always be fed, housed, schooled, and medicated. They believe that they should not be left to provide the necessities of life for themselves. The state should be their guardian and provider. Thus, they imagine, they will be secure; they will never starve, freeze in the streets, be left helpless when they sicken. We’ll call them the Serfs. Also on this side are those who want to be the guardians, the providers, the controllers. They covet the power. They will pride themselves on being the benefactors of the rest. They believe they know what’s best for the people better than the people can know it themselves. We’ll call them the Masters. This ideology of total state control, of an entrenched and privileged elite ruling by decree over obedient serfs, is Collectivism. Its devotees do not describe themselves in those terms. They see themselves as Benefactors and Good Citizens rather than as Masters and Serfs. They name their ideology variously as Socialism, Communism, National Socialism, Progressivism, and even – self-deceivingly – Liberalism. But whatever they call it, it is Collectivism.

On the other side are those who know it is an illusion that lives are best sustained by the state. They know that to depend on the state is to be powerless. They know that what the state gives the state can withhold. They know that each of us can only, first and last, depend on himself. What they want is to be free to pursue their own aims and interests as best they can according to their own judgment. They may acknowledge the necessity of government, but government kept within limits, serving the people and not mastering them; using its monopoly of force only to protect the liberty of the people. That means to protect the country from external enemies, and every individual’s person and property. Those elected to govern must be forever subservient to the rule of law, which must apply to everyone equally – the only equality that is needed and desirable. This is the ideology of Liberty.

These two ideologies are obviously, by their very nature, opposed to each other. Nations need to choose between them. They cannot combine collectivism and liberty. Liberty is indivisible.

Attempts have been made to combine the two. After the Second World War,Western European states tried to preserve a degree of freedom for their citizens while at the same time using the power of government to provide for them. They called this hybrid the Welfare State. It was doomed to failure.

The welfare state is too expensive to maintain. The welfare state is a Ponzi scheme, and can only last – only seem to work – for a limited time. Ponzi schemes must collapse sooner or later.

This is what happened. Productive citizens were taxed exorbitantly to fund “free” education, “free” health care, subsidized housing, and cash handouts to the jobless and handicapped. Multitudes quickly realized that they could do better living on the money the state handed out than by working. In some European countries a working life was barely twenty years. The age at which retirement could begin might be as low as forty-five. Pensions were provided by those still working and paying heavy taxes. Pensioners lived long. The working generation bore fewer children, preferring to use the money the state left them with to finance a pleasurable life. There were not enough productive citizens to keep the Ponzi scheme going. So foreigners were imported. But many of them did not work. Rather than contributing to the economy, they immediately became dependent on the state – which is to say on the ever-decreasing revenue collected from the ever-decreasing work-force.

All over Europe, welfare states are failing, as they had to. Those that are not failing now must fail eventually. For some the moment of crisis has arrived. The people are rioting in the streets. Governments are desperate. They search for help from sources as helpless as themselves. The experiment in “the mixed economy” is over.

More slowly, less comprehensively, the United States has been turning itself into a welfare state over the same period of time. When, in 2008, it elected a Marxist to the presidency, and he appointed collectivists to help him rule as far as he could by decree, and the collectivist Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress, the pace quickened. Giant steps were taken towards transforming the land of liberty into a European-like welfare state.

It is too expensive to maintain. It is a Ponzi scheme. America is impoverishing itself. It has run into vast debt by handing out tax revenues to tens of millions for their “social security” and health care.

The crisis has come upon America. It had to come, and it has come now. There is no reconciling the ideology of those who want to finance “big government” and its spending on entitlements by means of high taxes, limitless borrowing, and the printing of paper money – all of which are impoverishing measures – with the ideology of those who believe in self-reliance, fiscal responsibility, limited government, and who would rather pay for defense than finance dependency.

Compromise between the two is not possible. The collapse of the European welfare states proves that. The choice has to be made now between the crippling Ponzi economics of redistribution and the tried and proved prosperity-making economics of the free market. Which is to say, between collectivism and liberty.

The bitter wrangling between Republicans, who in theory are the party of liberty, and Democrats, the collectivist party, over whether to raise the debt-ceiling; the mutual accusations of “unwillingness to compromise”; the insistence on one side that government spending must be cut and on the other that taxes must be raised, are skirmishes in the battle that had to be joined, that was being prepared over many decades. Some on each side have accused the others of “playing politics” or “only trying to score a political point”, not understanding that this is nothing less than the most important political battle of the age. It is being fought in Congress. It is being fought with words between the political parties in Congress, and more distantly between the Tea Party and the White House. It is not being fought with weapons in the streets. Or not yet. Whether it will come to that depends on whether the argument is won decisively now in Washington.

It is much more than a theoretical controversy. It is not “bickering”. This is the moment of having to choose between serfdom or liberty.

The survival of our civilization depends on the outcome.

Jillian Becker  August 8, 2011

By special request of our reader George we are again putting this picture, which we first posted on November 6, 2010, on our front page.

It shows the bodies of Christians burnt to death by Sunni Muslims in Nigeria.

For more such pictures (if you have the stomach for them) see our post Muhammad’s command (March 30, 2010).

Note: Some commenters in October 2011 tell us that these burnt bodies were victims of a truck accident in the Congo. Whatever the provenance of the picture, it was posted in good faith, and Christians were burnt to death in 2010 by Muslims in Nigeria. See the reports here and here and here.

How did it ever come about that an unelected official has the power to override the verdict of a court and have a convicted prisoner released? Isn’t this against the rule of law? Doesn’t it undermine the rule of law?

Attorney General Eric Holder wanted a terrorist, who’d been sentenced to 80 years imprisonment, to be released after serving 25 years, and released she was in July 2010. Nineteen days later she died of cancer. So it was a case of compassion overruling justice?

She could hardly have expected it. While she was in prison she wrote poems in which she described the United States as a terribly cruel country. “US koncentration kamps” … “The amerikkan nightmare of life“.

J. Christian Adams writes at Big Government:

Attorney General Eric Holder has a peculiar tendency to set loose militant black panthers. Everyone is already familiar with the dismissal of the voter intimidation case I brought as a Justice Department attorney. There, the DOJ dropped claims against Malik Zulu Shabazz, national head of the New Black Panther Party, and Jerry Jackson, a Philadelphia panther and Democratic Party official. But Jackson and Shabazz aren’t the only militants Holder has set loose.

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers. Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition. She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered. If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building. In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. … Releasing Buck reflects an alien attitude that has caused the Obama years to be characterized by an ideological disconnect with most Americans.

The letters which persuaded the Justice Department were stuffed with crackpot arguments and have yet to be reported over the last year. They are full of lawlessness and arguments from extreme fringes of political thought. What’s worse, the letters are on the letterhead of government and private institutions, institutions most Americans incorrectly think are worthy of respect.

Consider Jill Elijah. She writes on behalf of Buck’s release that “a warm nurturing living arrangement is available to Ms. Buck in my home located in Brooklyn. . . . I and my family look forward to her joining our home.” The letterhead? Harvard Law School, where Elijah runs the criminal justice institute.

Also on the letterhead in the Elijah letter to the Justice Department is Charles Ogletree, President Obama’s dear friend and mentor. Having Ogletree’s name associated with such a request was like mailing Buck the keys to her jail cell. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer.

Note the efforts of James Kyung-Jin Lee. He seeks Buck’s release hoping she can visit Southern California: Buck “would benefit from the refreshing environment and welcoming community, she would also, I believe, enhance the community through her example and fortitude in prison.” The letterhead on Lee’s lunacy? University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of Asian Studies. How reassuring that professors at California’s state university admit they would welcome a Marxist terrorist and feel sufficient sympathy on campus to use school letterhead.

Joseph Velasco, a self described “teacher, storyteller and artist” sent a letter to DOJ arguing for Buck’s release saying: “someone like Marilyn is a role model . . . . I welcome the creativity and intellect that she will bring to our community. . . . Marilyn will find a welcoming home here.” The letterhead on Velasco’s letter to DOJ? The official stationary of the Santa Barbara School District, Santa Barbara High School.

A letter from Das Williams states Buck “participated in many educational and cultural activities. . . . Having her serve any more time is pointless and will accomplish nothing more than wasting of government funds.” Williams sends this letter on the letterhead of the City Council of Santa Barbara, where Das served on city council. Williams now serves in California’s State Assembly.

There are many more. Philip Moffitt of the Life Balance Institute argues in a letter Buck’s release “would be a positive step toward healing the past and our society.” Merle Woo, “retired educator,” tells the DOJ “what a shame she cannot be among us, the public, who could benefit so much from her teachings and great human spirit. . . . With her brilliant human insights, she has given us tools to live better, more enlightened, more conscious lives.” Woo was a professor of woman’s studies at San Jose University. No surprise that she “usually used Marilyn’s poetry and essays in my classes.” Other apologists for the murderer Buck include California attorney Robert Bloom (“loving kind person”), retired math professor Elana Levy (Buck’s “caring for others also continually reminds me of how to live in a compassionate manner.”) and Zaveeni Khan-Marcus , the director of the University of California Santa Barbara multicultural center (“I welcome the creativity and intellect she will bring to our community.”) …

Students of history often wonder how civilized countries can devolve into murderous nightmares. These letters provide a homegrown American example of sophisticates excusing murderous behavior because they agree with the murderer’s political philosophy. Simply, they are chilling.

Also chilling is that the militant and destructive ideas that fueled Buck’s murderous campaigns have gained creeping acceptability in American institutions. Teachers, professors, politicians and lawyers all clamored for Buck’s release. 

Theorists like them brought a real nightmare of life upon the people of Russia, China, Cambodia … But these friends of Marilyn Buck safely dream of their Marxist utopias in a “refreshing environment” unaccountably surviving in amerikka.

US taxpayers are lavishly funding jailed Palestinian terrorists.

Fox News reports:

The Palestinian Authority is spending more than $5 million per month in salaries for 5,500 convicted and alleged terrorists imprisoned in Israel — payments that defy congressional rules for U.S. funding to the PA, according to a new report from an Israeli research institute. …

“The U.S. funds the PA’s general budget. Through the PA budget, the U.S. is paying the salaries of terrorist murderers in prison and funding the glorification and role modeling of terrorists,” the report reads.

The average salary of a prisoner is greater than Palestinian civil servants – prisoners on average receive $3,200 a month compared with $2,800 for civil servants. …

[But] under 2010 funding legislation that lays out the rules for supplying money to the West Bank and Gaza, the secretary of state “shall take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity,” according to the report.

The State Department, which oversees foreign aid, did not return numerous messages seeking comment. …

Recently the House “introduced a foreign aid bill that would restrict President Obama’s authority to provide U.S. funds not only to the Palestinian Authority, but also to Pakistan and Egypt and cuts money for international organizations.”

On this measure the State Department had a comment to make: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton immediately objected to it.

The view from Foggy Bottom, it seems, is that some terrorists are deserving.

Its as bad as the idea, or another way of putting the same idea, that some victims deserve terrorism.

Nashi (“Ours”) is a government-funded youth movement in Russia. It is to Putin what the Hitler Youth was to Hitler and the Young Pioneers to Stalin. It claims to have 10,000 active members and 200,000 participants in its events.

It adulates Anders Breivik, the mass murderer. See the video in the post immediately below, Putin Youth.

In summer Nashi members go to procreation camps where they procreate for Russia, in a desperate effort to preserve their nation, which is halving with each new generation.

Edward Lucas writes:

Couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.  …

This organisation – known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” – is a youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

Nashi’s annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear – supposedly a cause of sterility – and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp’s first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia’s dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country’s demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

Summer sex might be the best part of belonging to Nashi, but the organization’s chief purpose has less to do with embracing in dutiful pleasure  and more to do with tightening the grip of the state.

But the real aim of the youth camp – and the 100,000-strong movement behind it – is not to improve Russia’s demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as ‘Young Guard’, and ‘Young Russia’, is in the forefront of the charge. …

Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose – but a leg up in life, too.

Nashi’s senior officials – known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as “Commissars” – get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business …

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin’s first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. … Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia’s feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he “apologise”. With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance – a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Soviet-era war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia’s Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalin-era military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador’s car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin’s newly-minted ideology of “Sovereign democracy”. This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia’s supposed unique political and spiritual culture. …

The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.

Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany’s history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia’s. It has rehabilitated Stalin …  And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his “weak” pro-Western policies. …

Edward Lucas speaks of “a new cold war”.

It does seem that Russian leaders are waging a new cold war, but American leaders are – or choose to behave as if they are – blissfully unaware of it.

As the new cold war deepens, Mr Putin echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists in the last one. …

For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin’s rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness.

Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. Nashi is both a symptom of the way Russia is going – and a means of entrenching the drift to fascism.

If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Führer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren’t they ringing about Nashi?

As this is an Al Jazeera video, the reporter stresses the “nationalist” – ie anti-Muslim – aspect of Nashi, and suggests that it is “extreme Right”, by which he means to imply Nazi-like. In fact, of course, Nazism and Communism are alike in all important respects. Both are collectivist ideologies – as is Islam.

New information about Anders Brievik, the Norwegian terrorist, is being published in erstwhile Soviet satellite countries – that he underwent militant-terrorist training in (post-Soviet but still communist) Belarus.

According to this report he was trained under a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, Valery Lunev.

Eastern European feeds are full of details of Breivik’s multiple trips to Belarus, changes in his behavior and wealth, and the training he underwent in Belarusian militant camps. In fact, Belarus’ tight government regime and active intelligence have served a great purpose this time around. … Belarusian KGB kept precise records on Breivik, who was called “Viking” in the intelligence reports. …

It appears that the Norwegian terrorist underwent the militant-terrorist training under the guidance of 51-year-old Valery Lunev, a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, who now lives in Netherlands but regularly visits Belarus. According to Mikhail Reshetnikov, the Head of the Party of Belarus Patriots who is familiar with the intelligence records, “Breivik visited Belarus three times. Last Spring, while actively preparing for the terrorist attacks, he entered Poland with his own passport, and then travelled to Minsk under a passport of another European country. He recently got a Belarusian girlfriend and obtained access to significant amounts of money.”

Who paid him? To do what?

His targets were members of a Russia-friendly left-wing Norwegian political party. How did his terrorist actions against them serve the interests of communist Belarus?

It is an impoverished state with a “Soviet-style economy”, ruled by a man who, according to the BBC (which is not unfriendly to collectivist tyrannies), is a nasty tyrant:

[Belarus] has been ruled with an increasingly iron fist since 1994 by President Alexander Lukashenko. Opposition figures are subjected to harsh penalties for organising protests.

In early 2005, Belarus was listed by the US as Europe’s only remaining “outpost of tyranny”. In late 2008, there were some signs of a slight easing of tensions with the West, though this proved to be only a temporary thaw. ..

In the Soviet post-war years, Belarus became one of the most prosperous parts of the USSR, but with independence came economic decline. President Lukashenko has steadfastly opposed the privatisation of state enterprises. Private business is virtually non-existent. Foreign investors stay away.

For much of his career, Mr Lukashenko has sought to develop closer ties with Russia. On the political front, there was talk of union but little tangible evidence of progress, and certainly not toward the union of equals envisaged by President Lukashenko.

Belarus remains heavily dependent on Russia to meet its own energy needs and a considerable proportion of Russian oil and gas exports to Europe pass through it.

Seems Master Putin may be choosing another class favorite:

Relations with Russia deteriorated sharply in the summer of 2010, with disputes over energy pricing, customs union terms and the presence in Belarus of ousted Kyrgyz president Bakiyev, prompting speculation that Moscow might switch support from Lukashenko to another leadership candidate.

In Russia and Eastern Europe, it seems, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

There is a mystery here. Does Belarus just train anybody  who applies to become a terrorist, regardless of the use he intends to put his training to, or the objectives he has in mind?  That would mean that Lukashenko (remember nothing official happens in a tyranny  without the tyrant ordaining it) simply wants to promote general chaos.

If not that, what particular Belarusian or Russian interests was Breivik serving? Did Lukashenko want to strike a very indirect blow against Putin by hurting his Norwegian fans?

Perhaps Breivik misled his trainers. Perhaps he told them he intended to bomb the US embassy in Oslo.

With what’s been revealed, there’s plenty of scope for conjecture but little certainty. Rather, uncertainty grows.

And it’s unlikely that explanations will come out of Belarus. None, anyway, that a savvy observer would trust.

Footnote: Of course the whole story of Breivik being trained in Belarus could be “disinformation”, a term coined during the Cold War meaning: false information, spread for mischievous ends through obscure channels on the chance of it’s reaching and deceiving the enemy’s mainstream media and intelligence agencies.

Today Syrian state television showed human bodies and detached limbs floating down the Orontes River.

They are the remains of dead soldiers torn apart by protestors in Hama. Or so the state claims.

A more objective report identifies them differently:

They are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up …

Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river. …

The dead are believed to be in the hundreds and rising all the time because the thousands of injured cannot be reached for medical care.

But the numbers of the dead and injured are not known, because the Syrian authorities have “cut off all the city’s ground and cell telephone and Internet links”, and “the satellite phones in the hands of some of the dissident leaders provide the only source of information on the situation in the embattled city.”

Assad has no reason to fear that any power or combination of powers will try to stop him slaughtering his own people by the thousands.

Turkish units had been waiting on the border to enter Syria, and possibly establish a refugee camp on Syrian territory to stop the flow of refugees into Turkey itself. But a few days ago all the chiefs of the Turkish army resigned, and the threat to Assad receded.

The UN will not actively intervene in Syria. Those passionate protectors of “human rights” are not easily distracted from their supreme task of censuring Israel.

The US Congress had exhausted its energies raising the US debt ceiling:

After the Senate … had approved the bill raising the national debt ceiling, the lawmakers were scheduled to turn to the crisis in Syria. However, US Ambassador Robert Ford, on hand to brief the senators, saw them hurrying to leave Capitol Hill.

Only one senator [Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)] remained for the briefing.

Michael Ledeen writes:

There is no reason to believe that this administration grasps the dimensions of the world war in which we are engaged, like it or not. To look at Syria alone is a failure of strategic vision, because the battle of Syria is part of the larger conflict, involving our current major enemy Iran. Indeed, the Syrian slaughterhouse is a repeat performance of the earlier (and still ongoing) massacre in Iran, and is assisted (perhaps even instructed) from Tehran.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have a special force for operations outside Iran called the Al-Quds Force. (Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) It is assisting Assad in his attempts to crush the popular uprising. Iran has also lent him technicians to help identify and track down activists through their use of the Internet.

The Iranian tyrants tremble at the thought of a free Syria, since, as in Iran itself, the odds favor a successor regime that would devote its energies and depleted resources to the care and feeding of its own people [hmmm- JB] rather than to the support of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Moreover, the spectacle of the overthrow of Iran’s closest regional ally might well inspire the Iranian people to take to the streets once again against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

The Heritage Foundation comments:

The [Obama] Administration has a long way to go to correct its ill-advised efforts to seek better relations with a gangster regime that has murdered more than 1,400 of its own citizens in the last four months; thrown more than 12,000 in jail; served as Iran’s chief ally in the Middle East; supported a wide array of terrorists against the U.S. and its allies; and conspired with North Korea (and probably Iran) to illegally build a nuclear reactor designed to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

The collapse of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy is yet another example of how the Obama Doctrine has undermined U.S. national interests in a naïve effort to engage a despotic regime. Now that the Administration’s timid and weak policy toward Syria has emboldened the Assad regime to attack the U.S. embassy [on July 11], it is time for President Obama … to replace his myopic engagement strategy with meaningful efforts to help the Syrian people oust the predatory Assad regime.

But does he want to? Perhaps Senator Bob Casey could tell us.

This is not the most persuasive speech with the best possible examples of what’s wrong with Islam that the courageous Wafa Sultan has ever made, but we value it because she makes the case that Islam itself is evil, and is not some innocuous ideology to be distinguished from a bad one that the West calls “Islamism”. She wants to change Islam. It needs to be changed – totally.

Obama – or “Bambi” as we hear him called ever more frequently in the data-clouds of the ethereal region where we live – is against war. Being against war is one of the off-the-peg principles that all socialists/collectivists/lefties/Marxists wear on their sleeves. But the small print on the label says it’s okay to got to war if absolutely no interests of your country are served, and it’s even positively noble to spend blood and treasure to protect some class of people you can patronize as underdogs.

So Obama took America to war against Libya to protect “civilians”. Well it wasn’t exactly war. “War” is a nasty word. It was more what you should call a “kinetic operation”. And hardly even that. It was a cheering on of other nations kinetically operating. Supplying them with some equipment and materiel and advice.

And they weren’t exactly  “civilians”. Nobody knows for sure who or what they were or are. Broadly speaking they’re the people who’re against the people whom Bambi and the other nations are against. True, they’re armed. And okay, they include al-Qaeda terrorists. So if you don’t want to call them “civilians”, call them collectively “the rebels”.

Though they’re not not really united except by their shared aim of replacing Muammar Gaddafi as the government of Libya.

In fact, they’re killing each other.

By Frank Crimi at Front Page:

General Abdul Fattah Younes, who had been summoned to the Libyan opposition capital of Benghazi by the ruling Transitional National Council (TNC) for supposed questioning about military operations, was murdered last week along with two other military officials.

Younes, who had assisted Muammar Gaddafi’s rise to power in 1969, was Libya’s interior minister and commander of its powerful Lightning Brigade before he defected to the rebels in February 2011. …

TNC minister Ali Tarhouni said Younes had been killed by rebel fighters who were sent to bring him back from the front lines to Benghazi. Still, despite the apprehension of a suspect, suspicion still remained as to what militia group carried out the assassination.

Some rebel fighters claimed the killers were from the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, a rebel group that is part of the larger Union of Revolutionary Forces (URF). However, Tarhouni claimed the killers were from the Obaida Ibn Jarrah Brigade, an Islamist faction in the rebel command.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding Younes’ assassination … the TNC would replace Younes with Suleiman Mahmud al-Obeidi as well as order all militia factions to disband and come under its control. However, that latter directive may prove particularly difficult to carry out.

None of them will disband easily. Bambi and the other kinetic operators have recently made it very worth their while to continue fighting not only Gaddafi but, with stronger determination, each other.

Specifically, the killing of Younes comes at time when the TNC — having recently been sanctioned as Libya’s legitimate ruling government by 40 nations, including the United States, France and England — now stands to receive over $30 billion of Gadaffi regime funds currently frozen in Western banks.

The sudden influx of such vast sums of money have, according to one Mideast expert, only served to intensify the inner divisions within the TNC, with each faction jockeying for control to “secure the status of being the only legitimate force to lead the country in the future.”

Whoever could have foreseen such a development!

Of course, it should come as little surprise that the Libyan rebels apparently find themselves now locked in a deadly internal struggle. From the onset of the February uprising, it has been well known that the TNC is riddled with a rogue’s gallery of rival factions and alliances that are chock full of duplicitous characters, ranging from former Gaddafi loyalists to criminals to al Qaeda insurgents.

For starters, the Libyan rebel leader, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, has openly said jihadists who fought against US coalition forces in Iraq are well-represented in rebel ranks. While al-Hasidi has insisted his fighters “are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists.”

But of course it depends what you mean by “terrorists”.

He has also said, “The members of al Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.”

The invader? Isn’t that the combined forces who are only trying to protect civilians and/or help al-Hasidi’s rebels with a kinetic operation?

Of course, an al Qaeda presence in the TNC shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. According to the US military, Libya, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, contributed more than any other nation to the ranks of those forces fighting against the United States in Iraq. In fact, al-Hasidi has acknowledged that he personally fought against the “foreign invasion” in Afghanistan before being captured in 2002 in Pakistan and sent back to Libya in 2008.

Moreover, the TNC, which has reportedly sold chemical weapons to both Hamas and Hezbollah, has also been linked to supplying arms to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

In addition to the notorious nature of its membership, the Libyan rebels have been repeatedly accused of committing atrocities on a par with those of Gaddafi’s forces. Those allegations include, according to Human Rights Watch [not always trustworthy but believable in this case – JB], Libyan rebels in the last month “burning homes, abusing women and looting hospitals, homes and shops.” …

The killing of Younes has now created so much distrust within the rivalries, conflicting agendas and alliances of the TNC that stability will be hard to come by, even if it can successfully oust Gaddafi.

And thus far, if any side is winning, it seems to be Gaddafi’s.

However, the prospect that the rebels can overcome Gadaffi on the battlefield looks increasingly bleak. Gaddafi’s regime controls around 20 percent more territory than it did when the uprising began in February despite the recent launching of a rebel offensive in the western mountains near the Tunisian border; more than four months of sustained air strikes by NATO; and the defection of a number of Gaddafi’s senior commanders.

As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ Admiral Mike Mullen said only weeks ago, the war remains a “stalemate,” a status not too surprising when an operation is led without a clear strategy or exit route [or aim]. To that end, it appears that England and France, the two leading nations in the fight against Gaddafi, may also be tiring of the game.

This was evident in a joint press conference last week when British foreign Secretary William Hague said “What happens to Gaddafi is ultimately a question for the Libyans.” Hague’s French counterpart, Alain Juppe, echoed that sentiment by saying that Gaddafi’s fate “is ultimately a question for Libyans to determine.”

So, for now, the fate of Gaddafi, his regime and the future direction of Libya remain as cloudy as ever. However, what is becoming clearer by the day is that even if Gaddafi does go away, all NATO may have done is trade one insane, brutal despot for a far larger and more deadly problem.

And that is not all the bad news.

Not only are the groups within the rebel group fighting each other, they are killing darker-skinned Africans from non-Libyan tribes who have come north to fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi. Or are maybe only passing through from other conflict-torn countries on their way to the safer and happier shores of Europe.

Now they’re underdogs alright but nobody’s protecting them.

Some of them get into boats. Of these, many die harrowing deaths.

From an ABC report:

Italian coast guards have found 25 people dead in the engine room of a tiny boat crammed with 271 African refugees fleeing Libya.

The 15-metre boat landed on the holiday island of Lampedusa on Monday.

It was heavily overcrowded and survivors said they had been at sea for three days.

Prosecutors said the victims, crowded in a space accessible only through a trap door, appeared to have died from asphyxiation.

Refugees cited in Italian news reports said the people in the engine room had tried to get out but were blocked by others because there was not enough space on deck, and probably died of intoxication from the engine fumes. …

Coast guards said the engine room was only accessible through a 50-centimetre wide trap door from the deck.

A fireman who helped pull out the bodies from the boat said: “I will never forget the scene.” …

Thousands of refugees fleeing Libya, mostly migrant workers from other parts of Africa [mainly Ghana, Nigeria, and Somalia], have arrived on Lampedusa in recent weeks.

Hundreds have drowned, often on rickety fishing boats not suitable for choppy seas. In April, 250 refugees drowned off Lampedusa when their boat capsized. …

The Italian authorities are clearing away the refugees as fast as possible. (We don’t know where to.)

Scenes of desperation seen earlier this year have hit the pristine island’s tourism industry but many holidaymakers have started returning to the beaches.

Bambi and Michelle might schedule a vacation there.