Letter from a political prisoner in the USA 128

We found this profoundly shocking letter through a link brought to us at our Forum.

We reproduce it in full. (The writer is religious, and regardless of what we think of his God, we hope he derives comfort from his belief.)

It shows that America under the rule of the Socialist Democrats has begun to be a tyranny like the Third Reich, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China. 

Dear fellow Americans:

I never thought I’d write a letter like this, but we’re living in very different times. This is my cry for help.

My name is Nathan DeGrave, and as a non violent participant at the Jan 6th rally, I’ve spent the last 9 months detained as a political prisoner in pod C2B at the DC Department of Corrections (DOC) otherwise known as DC’s Gitmo.

The conditions here for Jan 6ers have been inhumane. In fact, some inmates are even begging to be transferred to GUANTANAMO BAY, where even THEY have more acceptable standards.

Class action LAWSUITS are being filed against this prison; and even the ACLU has gotten involved. Senators Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have since attempted to gain access to this facility and inspect the conditions of the jail, only to be denied.  The vile filth of what has become our daily life is being illegally HIDDEN from the members of OUR OWN CONGRESS.

So let me tell you about what me and many of the other Jan 6ers have been experiencing in DC’s Gitmo. It is my hope that with MEDIA EXPOSURE and the awareness of the American public, that SOMETHING may be done and this never happens to anyone ever again.

 OUR CONDITIONS – For the first 120 days in DC’s Gitmo, Jan 6ers experienced DAILY LOCKDOWNS for 23-24 HOURS before being allowed to leave our small 120 sq. ft cell. The PHYSICAL and MENTAL ANGUISH that results from this kind of SEVERE ISOLATION has caused many people to go on a RAPID mental decline.

As a result, a large percentage of us are HEAVILY MEDICATED with anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs, which helps to cope with the psychological and mental ABUSE we endure.

Many times, the little rec we DO receive is STRIPPED AWAY if our cell isn’t up to the standards of the guard on duty. This changes from day to day. Jan 6ers have lost rec time and out of cell activity ANY TIME news interviews about the jail are aired on TV, people speak up about our conditions, or rallies are held in our name. We’ll probably have a lockdown upon the publishing of this letter. So I have already warned those I know in advance.

Masks are WEAPONIZED and used against us, even though we NEVER leave the facility. Officers have walked in with the SOLE INTENTION of needing to write 20-30 disciplinary reports against Jan 6ers, which adversely effects our chances of release and causes loss of privileges, phone time and commissary. Masks need to be covering both the nose and mouth AT ALL TIMES or we are threatened and locked down in our cells. Jan 6ers are always respectful to the employees around us, but CO’s maintain the need to invent reasons for discipline.

PRIVILEGED LEGAL DOCUMENTS have been CONFISCATED and gone missing from various cells, and HIGHLY SENSITIVE discovery (video evidence under attorney/client privilege) is watched by employees during our legal calls.

Jordan Mink, for example, had all discovery TAKEN by ERT officers on August 23rd despite the objection of his attorney. They handcuffed him, searched his room, and then proceeded to take all video evidence in his possession. Additionally, legal visits take 2-3 WEEKS or more to be scheduled, leaving little time to discuss our defense and prepare for trial.

The EXTREME medical neglect in this facility has caused a variety of adverse illnesses and disease. Some show signs of scurvy. And some even have Covid like symptoms, but medical personnel have refused to treat it.

Christopher Worrell, for example, is an inmate with Cancer, who also broke his hand in prison and requires surgery. Both have been completely ignored. Federal judge Royce Lamberth got to the point where on October 12th, he filed contempt of court charges against the warden of the DC DOC, claiming that Worrell’s civil rights have been violated, and demanding the U.S attorney general inquire further about his and other possible violations.

Another inmate, Peter Stager, WAITED FOUR MONTHS to receive his CPAP breathing machine, and has needed an MRI since spring, which has also been ignored by staff.

The harsh, unlivable conditions of our unit has caused health hazards that defy Department of Health regulations. And on at least five occasions, RAW SEWAGE has overflowed our unit, causing human fecal matter to flood the floors and rooms. That’s also in addition to the MOLD on cell walls, as well as the rusty pipes, and DIRTY WATER that flows from these sinks. White rags TURN BROWN when exposed to the water from our faucets.

We are undergoing SEVERE NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES and STARVATION. For breakfast this morning, I received a tray of flavorless paste, two slices of bread, and a slice of bologna. Lunches usually consist of rice and beans, but we’ll get cold chicken/beef patties if we are lucky. For dinner, we are sometimes fed a diet of cheese sandwiches, and bologna and cheese 4 to 5 times per week.

Without commissary, people like myself are FORCED TO STARVE. I suffer from HEADACHES and NAUSEA on an almost REGULAR BASIS from the malnutrition and constant hunger I am subjected to. I have lost ALMOST 15 POUNDS since I’ve been detained.

Our rights to personal hygiene are also totally neglected. Razors are PROHIBITED, and inmates are forced to either go unshaved and grow long beards, or use a razor free cream that BURNS and IRRITATES the skin. But many other jails have allowed the use of razors without incident. Haircuts are also PROHIBITED from unvaccinated inmates.

For me, it’s been nearly 9 months. I look VIRTUALLY UNRECOGNIZABLE in the condition I’m in. I fear even my family would not recognize me.

Contact with the outside world, from legal visits to seeing loved ones is HIGHLY RESTRICTED. After in-person visits, legal or otherwise, we are forced to undergo humiliating STRIP SEARCHES, despite ALL visitors being thoroughly checked for contraband. If it’s a legal visit, we are placed in a 14 day quarantine, with no out of cell time; EVEN IF your attorney is VACCINATED and tests NEGATIVE for Covid. Visits with friends or family members, for unvaccinated inmates, are NEVER ALLOWED.

As a result, many people have skipped critical meetings with their council, and NEVER get an opportunity to see friends or family. VIDEO VISITATION, while available to the rest of the jail, is RESTRICTED in the Jan 6 pod. Mail is delayed for MONTHS, and phone calls are limited to a MAXIMUM of pre approved 12 numbers. If there’s anyone else in our extended family or otherwise we’d like to call, we’re pretty much out of luck.

RELIGIOUS SERVICES, protected by the 1st amendment, are NOT provided to Jan 6ers. Neither are in person classes or other activities available to the rest of the jail. An inmate named Ryan Samsel, instead attempted to organize his own bible study inside the pod, until he was viciously BEATEN and LEFT FOR DEAD by correctional officers. He suffered a broken eye socket and brain damage as a result of the vicious attack. He’s now permanently blind in one eye. On another occasion, Scott Fairlamb was confronted by an officer in the middle of the night, and his life was threatened, once the officer’s body cam was disabled. Many, like myself, are afraid they could be the next victim.

And last but not least, we experience racism from many guards on a daily basis, being the ONLY WHITE REPUBLICANS in the entire jail. The false narrative is has been passed around the jail and to corrections officers that we are “white supremacists” (we are NOT). The inmate population is predominantly black, so we are at risk being here because of this false narrative. The guards are mostly liberal migrants from Africa who have been conditioned to hate us, and hate America.

Jan 6ers have been mocked, beaten and ridiculed by guards for singing the National Anthem. The Corrections Officers despise our politics and the love we have for this country. At one point, an officer even yelled “FUCK AMERICA!”, and threatened to lock us down FOR A WEEK if we attempted to sing the National Anthem again.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MY STORY – Finally, I feel like I should touch briefly on the government and prosecutor’s portrayal of who I am as a person.

No, I am not a terrorist, extremist or any of the other names I’ve been called by the government. More than anything, I am a red blooded patriot and I love this country more than anything.

I am being unfairly prosecuted and definitely overcharged. I never assaulted anyone, destroyed property, or stolen anything. I walked through wide open doors to enter the Capitol, along with my camera crew hoping to get the rally on video. I was never even armed at any point inside the Capitol.

Our goal was to make a documentary, and get likes and shares on social media. Yes I wore a costume (that the prosecutor refers to as paramilitary gear and body armor) but it was for the movie and was nothing of the sort. And yet, 9 months later here I sit, with 10 years worth of charges and no hope for a future. The surveillance footage shows absolutely no signs of assault, and despite attempts by media companies to get it released to the public, the government has denied it.

I think that’s because they are fully aware that this footage is questionable at worst, and exonerates me at best. Please don’t be fooled by the media. I am a loving and peaceful person with no history of violence.

This weaponized DOJ and their blatant resentment of my respect for President Donald Trump is putting me in a situation that makes me feel helpless in my current situation.

HOW YOU CAN HELP – Despite me and other Jan 6ers experiencing these unthinkable conditions, all of us remain POSITIVE and HOPEFUL that, in the end, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL. We maintain a LOVE for this country and the Constitution like no other. The only thing keeping us going is our undying patriotism, the camaraderie between one another and our faith in God.

Please…SHARE THIS LETTER with EVERYONE you know: friends and family, senators, representatives, political organizers, civil rights groups and media outlets. The truth HAS to get out. And the jail MUST PAY for what they are doing to this country’s citizens.

As a result of this unlawful detainment the last 9 months, I have lost everything. The successful business I spent 13 years of my life working on, my apartment in Las Vegas, social media accounts with a lifetime of memories… you name it.

The government has essentially CANCELLED ME. Not only that, but following the arrest, my best friend of 12 years robbed my apartment, stole my cat, and hacked my personal Instagram with 100,000+ followers. Since then, I often go between feelings of hopefulness and moments of depression. I wonder if I can ever recover from this, but I have to remind myself to never give up.

There are major medical complications I now struggle with as a result of the jail’s neglect of my health since being here. If there is any way I hope to recover, my only hope are the ones who are reading this. I was on top of the world once upon a time, and that life seems now only like a distant memory.

If there’s anything you can do to help, I would appreciate anything at all. Inmates here are being extorted with lack of nutrition, forcing me to spend most of what’s left on commissary which I can no longer afford.

I need desperate help with my legal expenses and just help staying alive in here with commissary and all the expenses I still have on the outside as my livelihood and life has been stripped away from me. Thank you for any her you can afford, even if it is a few dollars it goes a long way in here.

Sincerely and with love,

Nathaniel DeGrave

Indispensable gas and coal 11

Good sense spoken in Congress!

Republican Congressman Byron Donalds reminds a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on “the climate crisis” that the electricity to fuel electric cars comes from gas and coal:

Posted under Energy by Jillian Becker on Friday, October 29, 2021

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The superhero God is unjust, untrustworthy, unintelligent 96

But Dennis Prager, like billions of others, think he’s nice, smart, fair, and honest.

Dennis Prager is a perceptive conservative writer, but unfortunately he’s afflicted with religion.

He writes at Townhall:

If no one goes to prison for actor Alec Baldwin’s accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, our society will have failed a crucial moral test.

We will be saying human life is not sacred; that it, in effect, is of little or no consequence.

The killing was, we presume, unintentional (though we do not know for sure, as the possibility remains that someone had motive to load the gun with real ammunition). But that does not mean that no one should be held culpable and punished. Society must regard the taking of human life — even when unintentional — as something terrible.

So if you accidentally fall from a height on top of someone and kill that person, you must be punished? How just is that?

If Alec Baldwin did something wrong, but only if he did something wrong, may he be punished. We don’t like him, but that’s irrelevant, and it is not the Alec Baldwin shooting that we are concerned with here. It is Prager’s and God’s morality.

Prager goes on:

I get this principle from the Bible …

Ah, from the Bible! No surprise then.

… which was, until the last century, the source of America’s and the Western world’s moral values.

To the extent that it was, much injustice resulted. Fortunately there were also laws which in many codes, some much older than the Books of Moses, distinguished crime from accident.

This principle is repeated over and over in the Bible’s first five books (the Torah), the source of all biblical laws. This repetition strongly indicates how seriously the Bible takes this issue.

The five books of Moses are full of God’s capricious and often cruel decisions and actions. One of them, Exodus, has its chief hero, God, fiddling with the mind of the Pharaoh of Egypt so that one moment he’s prepared to let Moses lead the Hebrew slaves out of bondage, and the next moment he isn’t. And this happens over and over again. It’s a tease. Promise given, promise broken. It’s only when God has all the Egyptian boy children in Pharaoh’s city killed  – the Angel of Death enabled to distinguish which household with a boy in it must suffer the loss because God gets the Hebrews to mark a sign with animal blood on their front doors so his messenger passes over their dwellings (which were well away and apart form the Egyptians’ anyway) – that Pharaoh lets Moses lead the slaves away. And even then God “hardens his heart” yet again, so he sends enforcers after them to bring them back.

Now don’t say that’s not dishonorable of God! And how about unjust and cruel to the Egyptian parents? On the whole, not great examples of moral behavior, wouldn’t you say? 

And after the Pharaoh chapters, this supreme moral guide, the Torah, gets even sillier.

We could offer many examples of its silliness, but we’ll stick to Dennis Prager’s text for precepts he considers supremely admirable. They are silly enough:

He writes: 

Example one:

Exodus 21:28: “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned …”

The obvious question is: Why would the ox be put to death? It is surely not guilty of murder; oxen have no free will. The reason it is put to death is that the killing of a human being cannot go unpunished.

The Jewish Bible scholar, professor Nahum Sarna, wrote:

The execution of the ox was carried out in the presence, and with the participation, of the entire community (the animal was stoned, not merely killed) — implying the killing of a human being is a source of mass pollution and the proceedings had an expiatory function. The killing of a homicidal beast is ordained in Genesis 9:5-6: “For your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast … Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in His image did God make man.” The sanctity of human life is such as to make bloodshed the consummate offense, one viewed with unspeakable horror. Both man and beast that destroy human life are thereafter tainted by bloodguilt.

You see? Man is made “in God’s image” therefore the ox must be stoned to death. Okay?

Example Two:

Deuteronomy 19:5: “(If) a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; and as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies, that man shall flee to one of these cities and live.”

Again, the Bible describes a homicide that is entirely accidental. But the person who accidentally committed the homicide is not free to live a normal life. He cannot go on with life as if nothing happened. While he is not to be executed, he must flee to one of three “cities of refuge” in ancient Israel. There he may not be killed or otherwise hurt by a member of the killed man’s family. But he is not a completely free man.

So there were sanctuary cities even in those days! To be a punishment, they were probably derelict, crime ridden, filthy, with many living on the streets.

Prager continues:

In my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, I quote Leeor Gottlieb, a professor of Bible at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University: “The Torah is morally ahead of some modern societies, in which people’s lives go on nearly uninterrupted if they killed unintentionally.”

As the Bible explains five verses later:

Thus blood of the innocent will not be shed, bringing bloodguilt upon you in the land that the Lord your God is allotting to you.

Human bloodshed brings bloodguilt upon the land.

A tremendous lot of human blood, the innocent sort included, is shed on that land in the five books. At least as much as anywhere else in the inhabited world. And much has been shed on it in the three thousand years and more that has passed since Moses died. So bloodguilt is upon it. What is God or man going to do about it?  Rationally now: what?

Ah, there is something that can be done to cure bloodguilt when the cause is not a particular known person. A prayer can be said. An incantation. Apparently it does the trick:

Example three:

Deuteronomy 21:1-4 and 7: “If, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns … And they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O Lord, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.’ And they will be absolved of bloodguilt.”

Unlike the previous instance, in which the (unintentional) killer is known, the killer of the slain man found “in the open” is not known. Nevertheless, the community is still held accountable and must ask for forgiveness for not preventing a homicide.

The message is, they should have known the murder was going to be committed. It was immoral of them not to know.

Prager’s last example is not from the five books. But his attitude to what happens is set by the biblical rules.

Example four:

The final example is not biblical but from my radio show. Many years ago, a woman called to tell me about an ostrich raised on her family’s ostrich farm. One day, this ostrich kicked her father to death.

 I asked the woman what was done to the ostrich. “Nothing,” she replied.

Given my biblical background, I was taken aback.

“So you tell people who visit your farm, ‘This is the ostrich that killed my father’?”

“Yes,” she responded.

In my view, that cheapened her father’s life and death.

So Prager would have had the ostrich killed, not because it was a danger to other people which would be rational, but as condign punishment. Because? Because man is made in God’s image. Because human bloodshed brings blood upon the land. Because of mass pollution, and expiation is required to cleanse it. Ideally, the woman should have summoned her neighbors to help stone the ostrich to death.

And this code of behavior, this ancient prescription for the provision of justice, is, according to the sage Gottlieb and to Prager himself, morally advanced!

The Bible has lots of dramatic, exciting, shocking, amusing, puzzling, frustrating, and satisfying stories in it. (We like the one about God refusing Cain’s offer of vegetables, preferring Abel’s meat.) It also has – at least the so-called “Old Testament” has in the King James translation – lots of very beautiful poetry in Isaiah, Job, Psalms, Daniel, Ecclesiastes … Parts of it are a good read,  and it is essential to a proper education.

But it is not a moral guide.

Posted under Ethics, Judaism, Law by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, October 26, 2021

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The sudden decline and fall of America 209

… from triumph to abasement.

So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive?

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

Standstill 95

Two pictures to illustrate the economic doldrums the “Biden” administration has navigated us into.

Rep. Devin Nunes discusses issues in the global supply chain on 'Kudlow'

Goods stuck at ports. No one to unload the ships, no one to load the trucks, no one to drive the trucks.

Evolution VC Partners founder Gregg Smith discusses the economic issues facing America under the Biden administration. 

The result: empty shelves in the stores.

It will be a cold and lean holiday season this year.

Posted under Economics by Jillian Becker on Thursday, October 21, 2021

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Invitation to our visitors 10

This website is visited thousands of times a month. No doubt many of the visits are by the same visitors, coming back often – some regularly – to read our new posts, explore what we have written in the past, or find essays of interest listed in our Pages section.

We have had tens of thousands of comments, almost all of which contribute vitally to the value of the site.

Now we have opened a Forum where you can freely comment and debate, post your own articles on any topic, or link us to news reports and columns of opinion by others.

Please join us there.

Posted under Miscellaneous by Jillian Becker on Sunday, October 17, 2021

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More from L: A Novel History 161

L: A Novel History is an easy and stimulating read for anyone who is interested in politics and the condition of government oppression prevailing now in almost every country in the West and its sphere of influence.

You may be astonished at how closely the story – though set in another country at another time – reflects what is happening now in America.      

 

L: A Novel History

Terrible crimes are committed. But criminals are not punished – only those are arrested and tried who dare to express opinions not sanctioned by the regime, or are critical of it.

From mid-December 1987, for the duration of the regime there were no criminal trials held except for “political crimes” (which were often televised). Theft and burglary were no longer considered possible, as all goods were held in common. This meant that those best able to defend what they gained possession of by whatever means, kept it.

As no one, except a political criminal, could be accused of having done something wrong, since guilt was collective, the vocabulary of the courts had to change. If the old police arrested a lone youth for a violent attack, and brought him before the court, they could not say that they had seen him mug, assault, rape or murder his victim; they could only say that he was “involved in a mugging situation”, “an assault situation”, “a rape situation”, “a murder situation”. This turn of phrase hinted that he was not an individual responsible for deciding to do a certain deed and carrying it out, but only one of a group – two people at least – who had been present when something had happened. The victim was as much “involved in the situation” as the attacker. The nature of the incident was “social”, its diagnosis “anti-social behaviour”, its remedy lay in more group participation, the method of  remedy was counselling.

Judges and magistrates were abolished in January 1988. All political trials, as well as all “enquiries” − the name given to civil and “old crime” trials − were heard by a jury. The highest court of appeal was the Council. Top Party officials had direct access to the Council for an “enquiry”. Both prosecuting and defending counsel were appointed by the state. For all important trials they were chosen from among the few dozen members of the League of Leftwing Lawyers. This, the League asserted, helped to guarantee “genuinely unbiased judgment”.

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging. If the pursuit of his own ends were perceived to be more important to him than “co-operation with the community”, he was “suffering from a condition of false consciousness” and must be sent to a psychiatric hospital for as long as it took to cure him. Many − the incurable − never returned. Defendants quickly learned to claim motives of the politically-moral kind that the BBC had been drumming into its listeners for years: “I wanted to help the young / old / handicapped”; “I heard this person make a racist / sexist / ageist / faithist remark”, and so on. It was a variation  of the “righteous indignation” ennoblement of violent deeds, held as the highest principle of justice by the state itself. Whether the explanation was accepted or not depended mainly on the political status of the defendant. If he was a “special reservist” of the New Police, he would be acquitted. If he was an official of a trade union, he stood a good chance of acquittal. If he was a member of the Party, he was almost certain to be revealed as a benefactor of society.

In a civil case the rule was that wherever the litigants derived from different classes, the “underdog” had the “right to justice”.

*

L insists:

The issue of race is the most important moral issue confronting us.

*

Early in his reign, L emptied the lunatic asylums and hospitals of mental cases, even before he emptied the prisons of criminals condemned in “the last era”. Henceforth the only madness − or crime – was opposition to, dissent from, criticism of communism and the regime: or so it was officially. In actuality many of the former inmates were returned to the wards and cells.

In televised and broadcast speeches delivered by various of the Ministers but written by L, it was frequently explained that madness was simply the clear manifestation of alienation, for which capitalism was responsible. Now that capitalism was abolished, and society was “being treated” and “undergoing therapy”, “true madness”, which is false consciousness, would disappear. And that state of “heightened awareness” which used to be called madness could be turned to creative purposes, for it was no longer needed as a “device of escape” from “the unbearable world of the male-dominated authoritarian family”. Self-healing from alienation and false consciousness was easy enough. One had only to “give oneself wholly to the power and the glory of the new order, become part of it without any reservation, without the least atom of the old self being held back: to choose it because there was no other way to free oneself from the torturing blinding crippling responsibility of choice.” The “victims had become the masters.” The cause of the old mental maladjustments had been cured by the revolution. And L announced the appointment of erstwhile patients to positions of authority in the “mental hospital” prisons, in schools, civil administration and the law-courts, which “proved his faith” in their “essential sanity”.

*

L wrote in one of the permitted newspapers:

In this country the masses do not choose opulence for themselves in a world of poverty. A man with a social conscience wants the happiness of knowing that he consumes no more than his neighbour consumes. This is moral beauty. If its appearance upsets a visitor from the cruellest nation on earth, a nation of capitalists, exploiters, imperialists and racists, then we shall make no apology for our preference for a log fire over central heating, for a little bread over a superfluity of luxury provisions. As socialists we shall continue to comprehensivize our schools. To take all land into public ownership. To employ every man and woman. Our aim must be to house them all, clothe them all, feed them all, teach them, heal them, organize their leisure. None shall be underprivileged, all shall be made equal. The underprivileged must be freed from all oppression, the oppression of being less lucky, less successful, less energetic or healthy than others. Positive discrimination will liberate women, youth, blacks. Especially the immigrants from those parts of the world which we exploited, raped, robbed and pillaged, who have come to share with us our greater good fortune must be liberated from their oppression. The first duty of the state is redistribution. There is no question of one man earning a reward greater than another. All must be balanced. If one man has a clean job, he must get less money than one who has a dirty job. The state must equalize with due regard not merely to externals but to inner feelings. There must be no prizes for one man to win who was better endowed by the accident of nature with stronger limbs or some fortuitous talent. No one can take credit for anything he does, and no one is to blame for anything he does. As Professor L teaches us, neither achievement nor guilt are individual. Society achieves, society is guilty. …. No man can decide his needs for himself. What he feels are wants and to indulge them is selfish, anti-social. But what others diagnose as his needs, those are his needs. And as his needs are shared with others, the problem of supply is a community problem. …. The state alone must be the source of the satisfaction of all needs. The state must give all, and command all. Nobody must suffer the pangs of doubt as to whether what he is doing is right or wrong. Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. And he will be saved too from any temptation to disobedience which could destroy his happiness. For what the state bestows, the state can withhold. He will belong to the state and the state to him, he will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast. Until the state gives him everything he is not free of purposelessness, he remains alienated, he longs for community and cannot find it. When the state gives him all he has, he will be ready for the last and final stage on earth, the stage of history for which all history has been preparing. He will not rebel. His need to rebel will be gone. But the state has first to conquer the rebel in him. And that it will do. For what the state gives, the state can take away. The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, and they know that there is nothing else outside the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the New Age, the Third Millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man. ….

And –

L wrote in the weekly journal REALITY UPDATE:

There is a reactionary tendency among the working-classes, especially women, and even among blacks who have not yet organized around their own oppression, to try to maintain an anti-social and outdated institution, the Family, one of the chief sources of oppression to women and the young, as a centre of moral indoctrination and the kind of selfish inward-looking support-system which mitigates against the liberation of the community as a whole. The family is a reactionary institution, and only a reactionary will defend it. A radical involved in the struggle will be committed to opposing it as a major hindrance to liberation.

Children could be taken from foster-parents and is [soon after that]  from adoptive and even natural parents, by social workers (who had a statutory right of entry into every home), on the grounds that they were too happy!

But no one should  spend any part of their waking hours alone:

If someone kept to himself to write a book or compose a piece of music he was accused of  “extreme selfishness”.

And where did he get that musical instrument, that pen, that paper ? Did he formally apply for it? For how many hours of use? And who gave him permission to shut that door and take sole possession of that space?

*

There had never been such feast-days for spite. In the first week of the Red Republic three people died in the streets of London as a result of being assaulted by an L-ite “RI” (Righteous Indignation) group. No charges were brought against these “avengers of the people”, as the RED TIMES described them, and this immunity was a green light to other avengers. Over a hundred thousand people were “executed” by RI mobs in the fifteen months of the interregnum.

*

Read it if you love liberty. It will not disappoint you.

 

Jillian Becker    October 14, 2021

Posted under communism, tyranny by Jillian Becker on Thursday, October 14, 2021

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The Pope and Pelosi 20

The earthly Devil and his ideological mate.

See how lovingly they gaze into each other’s eyes.

They both personify the two evils we exist to oppose: RELIGION AND LEFTISM.

The Pope and Pelosi

Posted under Leftism, Religion general by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, October 13, 2021

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Homo nudus 101

The naked human.

That’s the Great Idea of Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive President of the World Economic Forum, would-be Architect of the future of humankind which he describes as the Great Reset.

The richest people on earth fly their private jets up, up, to Davos on its alp. There among the clouds they dream together of how beautiful it will be when no one except themselves owns anything.

It is a dream of global totalitarian Communism with them and their heirs in power over everyone else forever.

They promise the rest of us:

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

“And if you dare not to be happy, we will exterminate you. Resistance is futile.”

You will be assigned food, drink, clothes, bed, transport, schooling, job, duties, leisure, sex sessions (diverse, inclusive, and equitable), health care, vacation, friends, entertainment, opinions, values, death.

Of what type, they will decide. By means of algorithms.

In my prescient book L: A Novel History (first published 2005, new edition 2012), I describe what happens when a totalitarian Communist regime – led by the eponymous hero L – that has come to power in England in the 1980s, brings about, as it must, the day when there is nothing for people to own or to eat.

Here are some passages from it:

To help us learn what many citizens must have felt at that moment when civil life broke down, we have this recollection by a tobacconist and newsagent, a Mr Bruce Waughs, a staunch Conservative by his own account, who had run his own small shop in Brixton until the revolution, and then carried on working in it when it was expropriated like all other businesses big and small, as a licensed distributor of the RED TIMES. It tells what is surely a most surprising anecdote.

My wife Stella appeared at the door, and she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes wide open and saying nothing, like someone who had just seen something happen that could not happen. I said, “What is it?” And she said, “There’s nothing! Nothing to eat. Everything’s just stopped.” It took some time for me to get the story out of her. When I did it took me even longer to grasp what it meant. Then I walked out of the shop, shut the door behind me, and was about to lock it, when Stella said, “What are you doing that for? Who are you going to lock it against?” And then it really came home to me. Well, I pushed the door open again and left it gaping wide, and I took her hand – something I hadn’t done for years − and we started walking along the street. And suddenly I felt − terribly, terribly happy. I can’t explain it. I can only say that I had never felt so happy in my whole life, not even when I was a child. And at that moment I looked at Stella, and she looked at me, and we began to laugh, and we couldn’t stop, we walked along the street laughing and laughing, and then we joined hands and began to dance, skipping round, like children, and if anybody had asked us what we were laughing at we couldn’t for the life of us have told them, not then. And all at once we weren’t alone, not alone in the street and not alone in our happiness, there were others, several others, many others, and then hundreds of others, the streets were full, and everyone was laughing, and dancing, we had seen nothing like it since the day we stood outside Buckingham Palace in July 1981 and cheered the Prince of Wales and his bride. And that was the same month our shop had been broken into and our stock looted by a mob in a riot, and Stella had cried. And I think the royal wedding had been a tonic for us, and Stella felt much better afterwards. But now what were we celebrating? The moment when we knew we might starve? It was only afterwards I could put a name to that feeling. Freedom. Somehow, in the twinkling of an eye, we had been set free. Free of what, you might say, when we were living under a tyranny, and had no notion of how we were going to go on living at all. Exactly. It was irrational. But somehow it happened. It wasn’t just having no more living to earn, no more mortgage to pay, no more bills, no more saving and budgeting, no more being told how much better Stella’s brother was doing with his furniture stores and garages than I was with my corner shop – all those sorts of worries had been lifted one by one when the revolution came eight months before, and other worries had come to replace them, heavier too, by far. Worries about the grandchildren and were they getting enough to eat, and about Stella’s mother who not only had her teeth taken away but even her wheelchair so that she just stayed indoors and we had to carry her from the bed to the chair and back again, and generally worries about whether life would ever again be comfortable and pleasant – as it had been when we had only the mortgage and things like that to worry about. And so what kind of happiness was this, what kind of freedom was it? I can tell you now – it was freedom from hope! Stella and I and all those other people made a strange discovery that day. We discovered that when you truly despair − there’s nothing to do but laugh.

It is perfectly true that on that day many people danced in the street. The New Police, mounted and on foot, descended on crowds wherever they found them, and broke them apart and sent them home. They rode or marched up, thinking that these must be the beginnings of the first genuine and justified demonstrations against a government since the 1930s, after all these years, even before the revolution, of groups playing at protest, playing at suffering, playing at reaction to pretended oppression and pretended deprivation. And the New Police were themselves so surprised at the carnival mood they found in borough after borough, that they were caught by the television cameras smiling, chatting to people in a friendly way, as they asked rather than ordered them to get off the streets. …

Bruce Waughs, the man who had laughed the day civilization stopped, was to write, in after years, this evaluation of L’s “precious gift of anarchy and dissolution”:

I soon enough found that this was not “freedom” after all. It was the extremest form of slavery – slavery of your entire being to the labour of keeping alive, supplying the simplest and most fundamental needs of life, exhausting the body and soul to keep body and soul together, in constant fear of starvation, dread of your fellow man, and a desperate urge to seize and devour whatever you can, by whatever means. For a hunk of meat you would happily kill any man or woman who stood in your way. We descended lower than savages. We became beasts.

*

Citizens’ lives had been getting increasingly difficult for some time before the day of hunger arrived.

At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER* (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalized, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.

However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP [Workers Socialist Party] group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people” [Righteous Indignation – a violent Antifa-type group].

He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalize things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”.

*

All industry failed after a few months of central communist management.

The bewildering fact was that the first country in the world to have become industrialized, the very home of the Industrial Revolution, the country which had once led the world in manufacturing industry, the erstwhile hub of the greatest empire in history, had become one of the poorest states in the world; a people surrounded not by wild tracts of unused land, with isolated constructions which signify the first frantic efforts to build mills, factories and mines in undeveloped countries, but by the decaying ruins of industrial might, of mills and mines and factories fallen into disuse and decay, rusting machinery, the vast wreckage of a once great industrial civilization, dilapidated monuments of human ingenuity and at the same time to human idiocy; acres of towns and cities deserted, tumbling into rubble, and all this devastation brought about not by war, not by any external enemy, but by a faction among the people treacherous out of intellectual blindness, guilty of a shallow moralistic idealism and economic folly; of a desire to be good, and a failure to be intelligent.

For it was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable,  of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind, the Ted and Marjorie Winsomes, the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected, who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were  equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

L: A Novel History

 

Jillian Becker   October 12, 2021

 

Posted under communism, Totalitarianism by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, October 12, 2021

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Islamophobia is good 261

“Islamophobia” means irrational fear of Islam.

There is nothing irrational about fear of Islam. Its terrorists terrify us.

Abigail R. Esman writes (in part) at The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Even after over 50 Islamist terror attacks in Europe and America since 9/11; and even in the face of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, a resurgent al-Qaida, and dozens of ISIS fighters about to be released from European prisons, we live with a global media that frequently appears more comfortable condemning counterterror policy and strategy than with criticizing the terrorists themselves.

In other words, they have bought fully into the notion, oft-promoted by Islamist groups, that any criticism of radical Islamist ideology – including even satirical cartoons – is to be reviled as “Islamophobia”.  It’s a notion that translates into a near-hatred of the United States; and if criticism of Islamism is “Islamophobia”, then what we are seeing can only be described as putting forth a form of “Ameriphobia” in its place.

That subversive rag the New York Times says that after 9/11, Muslim women chose to “lean into their Muslim identity”. Abigail Esman comments:

This statement is disturbing. Why is this the “identity” they choose? Why not their American identity? Their careers? Their womanhood? Why not their chance to represent Muslim women who are not covered [do not wear a hijab or burqa], who oppose the patriarchal honor-based systems of conservative Islam, or who work to counteract the violent ideologies of Islamist extremists?

More disturbing: why are these women – the ones who have chosen to identify as Muslim first, and not American, the ones who exalt the principles and values of Islamism and not the Enlightenment –  the “leaders” that the media choose to celebrate?

We quote from our own post When hate is a virtue, November 29, 2017:

If you are liberal in the true meaning of the word – a lover of freedom for everyone; if you are tolerant and broad-minded; if you believe that all persons should be equal before the law; if you believe that individuals should not be judged according to the ethnic group they “belong” to; if you believe that it is of no concern to you how one adult satisfies his or her sexual desires with another willing adult (or adults) in private; if you believe that no one should have his (“he” being the generic masculine for the human species) life taken from him unless he has taken a life; if you believe that torture is wrong;  that slavery is wrong; that depriving a person of his hands and feet as a punishment for theft is wrong; if you believe that no one should be held fast in a hole up to her chest (“her” chest because women are most commonly subjected to this) and have stones thrown at her head until she dies; if you believe in a benign god or if you do not believe that any god exists; it  is not only right and good that you hate the ideology (or religion or cult) of Islam with its sharia laws, it is a moral imperative that it be hated.  

A decent person must hate Islam. Islam cannot be liked by decent people. If a person does not hate Islam, he is not a decent person.

It does not mean that individual Muslims deserve to be hated or subjected to harsh treatment of any kind, verbal, physical, or legal. Most Muslims are born into the cult, and have great difficulty leaving it if they want to, because Islamic law, sharia, prescribes death for those who do. Non-Muslims who convert to Islam deserve contempt but not persecution.

Because …

Islam is supremacist, totalitarian, homophobic, misogynist, murderous, and savagely cruel. 

No one who hasn’t been in a coma for the last twenty years needs proof of it. Who has not been informed that Islam’s jihad is against all non-Muslims, and that wherever Islam rules it oppresses non-Muslims? Who has not seen the photos of men being thrown off rooftops to their deaths because they have been accused of homosexuality?  Who does not know that Islam insists on the subjugation of women to the absolute authority of men? Who genuinely doubts that for the last few decades most acts of terrorism everywhere in the world have been perpetrated by Muslims? Who has not seen at least some of the snuff films put out by ISIS of rows of men having their heads sawn off, caged prisoners being set on fire, human heads on poles along the sides of streets, uncovered mass graves of suffocated women and children, people in  tanks being drowned? And of kids – boys under twelve years old – trained by ISIS to decapitate men? And of women being stoned to death? And of hands being chopped off in a public place watched by a crowd including children? Who hasn’t heard of children being used as bombs?

And who hasn’t heard Western government spokesmen saying over and over again, a thousand times, that all this “has nothing to do with Islam” ?

Yet in Europe and Britain, those who hate – or are even merely suspected of hating – Islam, are punished by the law. British police spend so much time hunting down and charging people suspected of expressing hatred of Islam, they have no time, money or personnel left to pursue criminals. All West European governments are stupidly ready to let Muslims take power, in the name of democracy, which of course the Muslims are only too happy to exploit. When democratic process has brought them to power, they will impose their tyranny. Democracy will end because it can only work for a virtuous people, since “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin said. It’s a regrettable but incontrovertible fact that people who are virtuous can also be abysmally stupid.

In all West European countries, ever more rigorous surveillance of people’s internet communications is urged by governments so they can be arrested, tried, and imprisoned if they tweet or post criticism of the abominable ideology. (We are still free to criticize Islam in the United States, but in almost no other Western country.) They are accused of “Islamophobia”  – an irrational fear of Islam. But it is entirely rational to fear Islam. Making non-Muslims afraid of it is a prescribed religious duty, called jihad. Jihad is holy war against all non-Muslims.

If you are not a Muslim, you are not innocent according to Islamic teaching. Children, even new-born babies, are guilty and deserve severe punishment. If you are not a Muslim, you are a sinner by definition, you offend the Muslim god, and your punishment should be death. Or you can be enslaved. Or you can pay to be allowed to live. Your death can be brought about by any means, however violent, however painful, however cruel. You can be blown into pieces by a bomb. You can be put in a cage and burnt to death. You can be crucified. You can be stoned. You can be drowned. You can be buried alive.  You can have your head sawn off.

Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx believed that people of certain races they considered inferior should be exterminated; Muhammad believed that all people except Muslims should be exterminated.

To condemn all three idealists for advocating mass murder, and in the case of Hitler and Muhammad carrying out mass murder, is obviously the right thing to do.

If for holding that opinion, and saying so, we provoke Muslims and their apologists into calling us “Islamophobic”, then so be it; that is what we are and what everyone should be.

Posted under Islam, jihad, Muslims, Terrorism by Jillian Becker on Sunday, October 10, 2021

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