Karl Marx was a nasty man.

He was racist, snobbish, hypocritical, dishonest, spiteful, cruel, covetous, malicious, arrogant and overbearing.

Racist? He scorned Blacks, he loathed Jews (although he was descended from a long line of rabbis). Poles and Czechs, he declared, were worthy only to be subjugated by their betters – “the  Austrian Germans” – or, better still, wiped off the face of the earth.

Snobbish and hypocritical? He scorned peasants – they were primitive “troglodytes”. He was repelled by “the masses”. They should and would, he predicted, inherit and rule the earth – but they were “the rabble”. On the other hand, he loved aristocracy. He was proud that his wife was an aristocrat. He kept her family name, von Westphalen, on their visiting cards. He most hated his own class, the bourgeoisie. He longed for, predicted, and rejoiced in the prospect of its utter destruction. Yet he longed to live again in the bourgeois style of his childhood, and towards the end of his life he did – kept in it parasitically and contentedly by his devoted admirer, Friedrich Engels.

Dishonest, spiteful, cruel? Engels was so devoted to Marx that he agreed to claim the paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child, Frederick Demuth. Marx begat the boy upon the subjugated body (one could fairly say slave body since he never paid her) of his servant Helene Demuth. (She even contributed her savings, from her better rewarded days with the Marx family in Karl’s childhood, to Karl’s family’s survival.) He had the baby boy taken away from her to be fostered and forbade any contact between the mother and her child.

Was Karl Marx clever? No. He left the University of Bonn without a degree. He graduated but failed an attempt to earn a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Then he had a bit of luck. The University of Jena found itself in financial straits and to raise revenue offered doctorates by correspondence. Karl had only to send it a fee along with an essay, which he did, and it mailed back a document certifying that he had a Ph.D.

He was quite unable to earn a living. Three of his seven children died in infancy and one at the age of nine because he did not get them enough to eat nor buy medical treatment for them when they fell ill – though he always managed to afford cigars. He demanded money to which he was not entitled from his widowed mother – so much that he impoverished her. He even begged, and got, small change from the poor. He did, however, promise them a glorious future when his grand economic theories proved prophetic and they ruled the world.

His theories? They were not his. He was a shameless plagiarist. Ideas that are attributed to Marx were appropriated by him without acknowledgement of their source. Examples: “Dictatorship of the proletariat” (Blanqui); “Scientific socialism” (Proudhon); “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau); “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (Saint-Simon). ); “Workers of all countries, unite” (Karl Schapp); “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains” (Jean-Paul Marat); “The Labor Theory of Value”  (David Ricardo).

In 1867 Marx’s very long, wholly fallacious book Das Kapital was published. Marx and Engels claimed it “proved”, by the “iron laws of economics”, that the prevailing capitalist order would be “inevitably” overthrown by violent revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would impose Communism. The revolution was needed to force this inevitable transformation.

And then?

Well, then everyone would be happy – or else.

In the name of that vision tyrants have terrorized and impoverished nations, murdered uncountable millions by starvation, torture, slave labor, executions.

And yet it is now in high favor in the United States, formerly the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“We are trained Marxists,” Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, boasted as its adherents rampaged through the Democrat-governed cities, injuring neighbors, burning their property, killing law enforcement-officers.

The Leftist federal government, “elected” through voter-fraud, approves of the inspiration and the action.

What can be done to stop it?

What will be done to stop it?

NOTE:

References to sources for the information in this post can be found with our essay under Pages titled The Fiddler and His Proof, a subsection of The Darkness of This World Part One. To find it go here and scroll down to essay 7.

Here are some extracts from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry, showing that with all the many accusations of his being engaged in corrupt dealings, no evidence has ever been found that even a single one of them is true!

According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which “Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.”

Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since the early months of 2019, Biden and his father have been the subjects of unevidenced claims of corrupt activities in a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory pushed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies, concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts there on behalf of the United States during the time he was vice president. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”. 

In December 2020, Biden made a public announcement via his attorney that his tax affairs are under federal criminal investigation. The New York Times and CNN, citing sources familiar with the investigation, described the investigation as having started in late 2018 and being related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had provided legal and consulting services that generated foreign-earned income, citing a Senate Republicans’ report that says millions of dollars in wire transfers from entities linked to Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming were paying for such services.The New York Times reported that according to people familiar with the inquiry, FBI investigators had been unable to establish sufficient evidence for a prosecution of potential money laundering crimes, including after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden, and so the investigation progressed onto tax issues.

From 2013 to 2020, Biden served as a member of the board of the China-based private equity fund BHR Partners, of which he acquired a 10% stake in 2017 at a discount. The founders of BHR Partners included Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm (20% equity), along with US-based Thornton Group LLC (10% equity) and two asset managers registered in China. The Chinese-registered asset managers are the Bank of China (via BOC International Holdings-backed Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management) and Deutsche Bank-backed Harvest Fund Management. The BHR Partners fund invests Chinese venture capital into tech startups like an early-stage investment in Chinese car hailing app DiDi and cross-border acquisitions, in automotive and mining, such as the purchase of a stake in Democratic Republic of Congo copper and cobalt producer Tenke Fungurume Mining.

In September 2019, while President Trump was accusing Hunter Biden of malfeasance in Ukraine, he also falsely claimed that Biden “walk[ed] out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” and earned “millions” of dollars from the BHR deal. Trump publicly called upon China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities there while his father was vice president. Hunter Biden announced on October 13, 2019 his resignation from the board of directors for BHR Partners, effective at the end of the month, citing “the barrage of false charges” by then-U.S. President Trump. According to his lawyer, Biden had “not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors” nor had he received any return on his equity share in BHR. Biden’s lawyer George Mesires told The Washington Post that BHR Partners had been “capitalized from various sources with a total of 30 million RMB [Chinese Renminbi], or about $4.2 million, not $1.5 billion“.^[31]

Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014. Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, and a consulting firm in which Biden is a partner was also retained by Burisma.

Biden served on the board of Burisma until his term expired in April 2019, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month in some months. Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine. While serving as vice president, Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in encouraging the government of Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was widely criticized for blocking corruption investigations. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Shokin in March 2016.

Former President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed in 2019, without evidence, that Joe Biden had sought the dismissal of Shokin in order to protect his son and Burisma Holdings. Actually, it was the official policy of the United States and the European Union to seek Shokin’s removal.

We do wonder how the European Union came to be perturbed by Shokin’s doings. Is it possible that Joe Biden told them things that caused their uneasiness?

There has also been no evidence produced of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The Ukrainian anti-corruption investigation agency stated in September 2019 that its current investigation of Burisma was restricted solely to investigating the period from 2010 to 2012, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014. Shokin, in May 2019, claimed that he was fired because he had been actively investigating Burisma, but U.S. and Ukrainian officials have stated that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time of Shokin’s dismissal. Ukrainian and United States State Department sources note that Shokin was fired for failing to address corruption, including within his office.

In July 2019, Trump ordered the freezing of $391 million in military aid shortly before a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation of the Bidens. Trump falsely told Zelensky that “[Joe] Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son; Joe Biden did not stop any prosecution, did not brag about doing so, and there is no evidence his son was ever under investigation. The United States House of Representatives initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019 against Trump on the grounds that he may have sought to use U.S. foreign aid and the Ukrainian government to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko said in May 2019 that Hunter Biden had not violated Ukrainian law. After Lutsenko was replaced by Ruslan Riaboshapka as prosecutor general, Lutsenko and Riaboshapka said in September and October 2019 respectively that they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

During 2019 and into 2020, Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley investigated Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, as well as allegations that Democrats colluded with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2016 election. American intelligence officials briefed senators in late 2019 about Russian efforts to frame Ukraine for 2016 election interference. Johnson said he would release findings in spring 2020, as Democrats would be selecting their 2020 presidential nominee, but instead ramped up the investigation at Trump’s urging in May 2020, after it became clear that Joe Biden would be the nominee.Trump tweeted a press report about the investigations, later stating that he would make allegations of corruption by the Bidens a central theme of his re-election campaign. Johnson decided in March 2020 against issuing a subpoena for former Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko, a Giuliani associate who had made appearances on the pro-Trump cable channel One America News, after the FBI briefed him about concerns Telizhenko could be spreading Russian disinformation. The State Department revoked Telizhenko’s visa in October 2020, and CNN reported the American government was considering sanctioning him as a Russian agent. CNN reported that Vladislav Davidzon, the editor of Ukrainian magazine The Odessa Review, told CNN that in 2018 Telizhenko offered him money to lobby Republican senators in support of pro-Russian television stations in Ukraine. When Johnson released the final report on the investigation, it contained no evidence that Joe Biden had pushed for Shokin’s removal in order to benefit Hunter or Burisma.

In June 2020, former Ukrainian prosecutor general Ruslan Riaboshapka stated that an audit of thousands of old case files he had ordered in October 2019 had found no wrongdoing by Hunter Biden. Riaboshapka was described by Zelensky as “100 percent my person” during the July 2019 call in which Trump asked him to investigate Biden.

Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, released in May 2020 alleged snippets of recordings of Joe Biden speaking with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko during the years Hunter Biden worked for Burisma. The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared heavily edited, depicted Biden linking loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general. The recordings did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son. Poroshenko denied in June 2020 that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma.The United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach in September 2020, stating he “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”. The Treasury Department added Derkach “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election” including by the release of “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials”. Close associates of Derkach were also sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January 2021. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that Derkach was among proxies of Russian intelligence who promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Biden “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”.

Two Republicans on a Senate investigation committee in 2020 claimed that Russian businessperson Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, wire-transferred $3.5 million in 2014 to an investment firm linked to Hunter Biden. The report cited unspecified confidential documents. The report gives no indication that Hunter Biden personally accepted the funds.Biden’s attorney denied the report, saying Biden had no financial relationship with the woman and no stake in the partnership that received the money, nor did he co-found the partnership. However, Trump’s White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah repeated the claim, and in a press conference President Trump repeatedly claimed that Biden received millions of dollars from the former mayor’s wife. 

With all that lack of evidence, and all accusers turning out to be liars and/or Russian agents, it is hard on the poor man that reports still keep emerging which cast doubt on his innocence.

From the Western Journal:

It’s the [Hunter Biden] laptop that just keeps on giving.

According to a report published Wednesday by the New York Post, emails found on [it] show that now-President Joe Biden’s son brought his father to a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Washington during Biden’s tenure as vice president.

While previous emails found on the laptop had hinted at meetings between some of the shadier associates Hunter Biden picked up during his time on the board of the Ukrainian energy holding company Burisma, the report throws serious doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he had little knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Eastern Europe.

The meeting took place on April 16, 2015, in the so-called “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant described in a 2017 New York Times article as “the Georgetown restaurant where some of the world’s most powerful people go to be noticed but not approached. “

The importance of the date is that it came one day before one of the more controversial emails found on the infamous laptop, where Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to the then-vice president.

The guest list prepared by Hunter three weeks before the Café Milano dinner included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry. [But] Archer told Hunter that Baturina wouldn’t be attending; “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s Thunder, so she’ll be in town to meet with us but doesn’t want to come to dinner,” he wrote in a March 20 email. “That was just her thoughts. We could insist.”

“Obviously save a seat for your guy (and mine if he’s in town),” he added.

In a reply, Hunter said, “I think your guy being there is more trouble than it’s worth – unless you have some other idea.”

“Ok – the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security,” Hunter wrote in a March 26 email, according to the Post. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”

The reported dinner is yet another complication to the official Joe Biden line: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said in October of 2019.

And yet there are the emails, the golf outing with a Burisma executive in 2014, this dinner and other red flags.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an Oct. 15 editorial, a Senate report found multiple Obama administration officials knew about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma and that one official emailed colleagues saying that “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”

It is not kind to recall that Joe Biden “bragged that he got chief Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who once investigated Burisma, fired as a precondition for international aid in 2016 when the then-vice president was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine”. (The crime of which  President Trump was accused without evidence and for which he was impeached.)

In fact, Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry is one long exoneration, explaining away crimes he’s been accused of. His life seems to have consisted of little more than doing things that look unethical or positively criminal. But all of them, you see, can be explained. Every one of them. Explained.

For more about all these unevidenced accusations and others against Joe and Hunter Biden see our posts: The Biden scandal, October 17, 2020 (here), and The Bidens: models of decency, October 27, 2020 (here).

The press and CNN report – or don’t report; Wikipedia asserts; you judge.

What explains the success of anti-white racism, a cult spreading rapidly throughout the Western world?

How could it happen when “the entire edifice of [anti-white] critical racialism sits on a foundation of fakery and fiction, storytelling, and superstition”?

Stanley K. Ridgley explains how:

If you’ve any interest at all in the current roiling contretemps over “critical race theory” then you’ve seen “The List”,  which is a compendium of 15 qualities that purportedly constitute “white supremacy culture”.

The List is ubiquitous, in workshops on campuses, in corporate diversity sessions, in secondary school programs, and in New York City education workshops for teachers. Versions of the List appear on government websites, on “anti-racist” nonprofit sites, and have made it onto the Race, Research, and Policy Portal of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

Who generates this racialist material, where, and why? Is it the result of sophisticated theorizing? Did this “White Supremacy Culture” emerge in the findings of an extensive, multi-year social science study?

Of course, the most obvious question is: Where did this list originate?

As with all of critical racialist material, it’s traceable to the unsubstantiated opinions of a mere handful of critical racialists.

The author of the List is Tema Okun, a would-be academic. Okun has been trading in the lucrative racialist workshop industry since at least the mid-1990s when she was a disaffected corporate trainer.

But as for the List itself, where did Okun get it? What was the source Okun used for the List in the original article?

Let’s allow Okun to tell us in her own words, found on page 29 of her dissertation.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I arrived home after a particularly frustrating consultation with an organization I was working with at the time.  In a flurry of exasperation, I sat down at my computer and typed, the words flowing of their own accord into a quick and dirty listing of some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in organizational behavior.  The paper I wrote in such a frenzy on that afternoon so many years ago lists 15 behaviors, all of them interconnected and mutually reinforcing—perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness and/or denial, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, the belief in one ‘right’ way, paternalism, either/or binary thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, progress defined as more, the right to profit, objectivity, and the right to comfort.

Okun simply concocted the list.

She made it up, then put it into an article, then put it into a workbook, then used the workbook as part of her dissertation, then published her dissertation as a book with an obscure independent publisher, and she continues to promulgate this fraudulent List today with the help of hundreds of folks who, most likely, don’t know better and who repeat it in a way designed to legitimize it.

Are you surprised that a disaffected diversity hack scribbled the List in a fit of pique and then cobbled it into an article in 1999, which now appears nationwide in materials presented as fact to the nation’s schoolchildren, teachers, corporations, and college students?

This is how academic fakery enters the popular consciousness to become conventional wisdom. It becomes ritualized, repeated, and unquestioned until its origins become obscured.

Looking for historical precedence for it, Ridgley calls  it “medieval” thinking.

The technique is to simply fabricate something ideologically useful, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluff and bluster. It demonstrates the power of medievalist thought, action, and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth”. 

Only the word  “medievalist” needs to be removed and lo! there is a perfectly explanation of the origin and early spread of Christianity.

Fabrications can always be turned by such means into “truths” because a passionate campaign carried on by a persistent advocate will always persuade others to believe the fantasy if it appeals to their passions too. It was just so that the fakery, the fiction, the storytelling, the superstition concerning “Jesus Christ” were spread in the first instance by the faker, the fictionist, the storyteller St. Paul, wandering preacher and author of (some of) the Epistles, and his side-kick Dr. Luke, author of the Acts of the Apostles.  

Fakery such as the Okun list of “white supremacy culture” becomes part of what anthropologists call a myth-dream or collective story for an ideology.

Ridgley sees that “critical race theory” is a type of “cargo cult”.

The process is like that found in primitive magic-driven societies, which provide excellent examples of communities constructed around a core myth-dream, like the one we deal with here.

Let’s look at the similarities.

Take, for instance, the Pacific Island communities in Melanesia, where storytelling and myth-building are conventional ways of understanding the world. The core myth of a society is eventually ritualized, and it becomes a “historical truth” that is referenced but never challenged as the foundation of a growing corpus of stories and narratives.

The Melanesian cargo cult, for example, has been studied for decades. It’s grounded in magic thinking that exemplifies this process of developing the collective story. As time goes by, the ritualized “truth” enters into the stream of what is commonly believed.

Once a statement or proposition is given consent it becomes True, a part of truth, assuming an existence which is not necessarily contingent on explicit withdrawal of consent. For, having achieved objectivity or truth in a myth a statement may persist in the myth long after those who retail or who listen to the story say they discount its validity for the present. Then the statement becomes a historical truth. And, so it would seem, the longer a statement is contained in a myth as truth the longer it will persist. New truths, or rather, statements which are becoming truths, and which are expressed in the additions of individual storytellers, are extremely vulnerable to, and dependent upon, consent. But once the first tentative consent begins to harden into solid approval [it] becomes more and more secure, more and more independent of explicit consent or inarticulate dissent.

St. Paul was the Tema Okun of his day.

His theory that Jesus was God Incarnate started as just such a cult.

His “statement” – or rumor – became the largest religion in the world.

Christianity impoverished, terrified, tortured, and killed uncountable multitudes. And so does Socialism.

Why then are so many who earnestly desire the happiness of humankind drawn to either or both? Because both advertise benevolence as their purpose. And it sells.

But while many, perhaps most, are seduced by Socialism’s imagined benevolence, its political pimps understand how to use its attractive image to gain the power of government.

Roger Kimball, writing at American Greatness, points out:

The party of benevolence is always the party of big government. The imperatives of benevolence are intrinsically opposed to the pragmatism and common sense that underlie the allegiance to limited government.

And –

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat but the environment, not the struggling masses but “reproductive freedom” [aka abortion on demand – ed.], gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. … Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly.

Socialism “flatters the vanity of those who espouse it”.

Even though it “actually creates more of the poverty and dependence it was instituted to abolish” …

The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything from race, sexuality, and “the environment” to the fate of the Third World.

Which is why …

… the consistent failure of statist policies [do] not disabuse the advocates of the statist agenda.

And he asks rhetorically:

Where else are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be had at so little cost?

*

These signs decorate many front lawns in our heavily Socialist Democrat town:

“Virtue” Boasting

President Trump achieved a remarkable development in the Middle East with the “Abraham Accords”, bringing peace, trade, and –  even more amazing – good will between Israel and several Arab states. A new era had dawned, in which a settlement of the Palestinian problem was for the first time in a hundred years genuinely possible.

Then along came the crooked “Biden administration” and undid all the good President Trump and his envoy Secretary of State Pompeo had done. “Biden” gave billions to the terrorist group Hamas, and released billions to the mullahs of Iran, who fund not only Hamas but terrorist attacks everywhere in the region.

It was not just encouragement to Hamas to make war on Israel, it was a signal to do so. The Democrats’ anti-Israel White House did everything it could to undo the Trump achievements and return to the disastrous policies of Obama, with greater intensity.

And it is Israel who is blamed for the war! As usual.

Richard Kemp writes at Gatestone:

During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.

The IDF operation was a carefully coordinated combination of intelligence, surveillance, knowledge of enemy tactics, deception, surprise and precisely targeted, overwhelming force. Of all these, deception and surprise were key. Surprise is a principle of war in the American, British and many other forces, defined in the US Army Field Manual as “striking the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared’. The manual goes on to say: “Deception can aid the probability of achieving surprise”. Throughout the history of warfare, surprise achieved through deception has led to many stunning military victories — often against the odds.

Last Thursday, the IDF massed tanks, artillery and infantry combat vehicles on the Gaza border. The build-up was observed by Hamas and widely reported in international media as an imminent ground invasion. Hundreds of Hamas fighters rushed to take shelter inside the “metro” tunnel network. Built by Hamas after the 2014 conflict to house command facilities, store weapons and facilitate protected movement, these tunnels covered dozens of kilometres beneath the Gaza Strip. There the fighters were trapped as JDAM after JDAM thundered in from above. Emerging to fight the invasion that never came, the surviving anti-tank teams and mortar squads were then also hit from the air.

This masterpiece of tactical synchronisation, with all its complex elements, symbolises the IDF’s precision attacks during this campaign, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which have already inflicted damage from which Hamas will not recover for years. The IDF learnt many lessons from previous engagements in Gaza and since 2014 have vigorously collected intelligence and worked to develop battle plans and technological solutions to deal with Hamas and their Palestinian Islamic Jihad bedfellows.

Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that. They know they cannot prevail over the IDF and have no intention of trying. Their entire strategy is to attack Israeli population centres using rockets, kamikaze drones and tunnels, aimed at luring IDF counter attacks that will kill their own civilians in order to vilify and isolate Israel around the world and gain international support for their cause. With human shields as the fundamental element of every operation, Hamas are the first “army” in history to use the lives of their own civilian population as weapons of war.

Their strategy has been woefully successful. Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world’s media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel’s callous and uncaring way of war. This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and “useful idiots” in the West. In the US, Britain and Europe, last week we have seen hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators brandishing Palestinian banners, burning Israeli flags, spitting out their hate for the Jewish state and screaming about IDF baby-killers. Hamas’s calumny is a prime motivator among Israel-loathing academics in Western universities and high schools who have mined their false allegations as rich seams of material to indoctrinate generations of students.

Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same. There have been dozens of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN, often drawing on Hamas’s narrative, twisting every aspect of the conflicts in Gaza. The prize has been the International Criminal Court’s decision this year to launch a full investigation with the hope of dragging Israeli soldiers, officials and politicians into the dock at The Hague.

I have taken part in every UN Human Rights Council evidence session and emergency debate on Gaza conflicts in the last 15 years. The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking. Every commission of inquiry determined Israel’s guilt before it even met for the first time. Every debate and vote has overwhelmingly and of course falsely affirmed Israel’s supposed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile Hamas’s actual multiple war crimes have been brushed aside.

The reality is very different from the lies emanating from these modern-day Towers of Babel. The IDF attack on the “metro” tunnels this week depended on lightning action and the coordination of 160 planes attacking a small area in a very short space of time. Alongside these awesome complexities, the IDF did all they could to ensure minimum loss of civilian life by selecting targets where the lowest levels of innocents would be harmed, such as empty roadways under which tunnels ran, and maintaining close surveillance to confirm a bus load of civilians didn’t suddenly appear. The IDF have so far destroyed several high-rise buildings containing critical Hamas military infrastructure as well as civilian offices and apartments. Remarkably all of these have been smashed down without any reported civilian casualties.

As in previous conflicts in Gaza the IDF has made radio broadcasts in Arabic, sent SMS messages and even phoned civilians inside the Strip to warn them of impending strikes, where to go for their own safety and which routes to take.

When civilians do not leave an intended target building, the IDF sometimes drop specially designed low-power munitions (“knock on the roof”) to encourage them to get out. With careful surveillance of target areas, the Israeli air force frequently aborts planned sorties if there is a risk of civilian casualties.

In a conflict designed by Hamas to maximize civilian deaths, some are inevitable. It is too early to accurately assess casualty figures or ratios of civilians to fighters killed, but current assessments suggest the IDF have been even more successful in minimizing civilian casualties during this campaign than in previous engagements in Gaza. Many in the media, human rights groups and international bodies have rushed to characterize all civilian casualties (other than those inflicted by Hamas, of course) as war crimes. But the Geneva Conventions disagree. Inflicting civilian casualties is not illegal provided a military operation is necessary for the prosecution of a war, they are not disproportionate to the planned military gain and that combatant commanders do not intentionally target civilians while doing all they can to avoid hitting them.

The media takes reports from the Gaza health ministry as authoritative and objective. That is disingenuous and they know it. The health ministry is controlled by Hamas and follows their every order. For example, of around 2,000 rockets fired so far by Hamas during this conflict, approximately 400 have fallen short, landing inside Gaza. Some of these have killed civilians and the health ministry has attributed all of them to IDF action.

Counterintuitively, the most effective means of saving Gazan civilian lives has been Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Despite Hamas efforts to overwhelm it, Iron Dome has had a 90% success rate in preventing missiles from Gaza hitting their targets. Not only has this saved the lives of countless Israeli civilians but it has also meant the IDF campaign can be more deliberate, discriminating and precise. If hundreds of Israelis were dying under Hamas rockets, the IDF would have no choice other than to strike Gaza with much greater ferocity and ground forces would already have entered the Gaza Strip, unavoidably inflicting vastly more civilian casualties than we have seen so far.

Despite all of this, as the media unceasingly show us, the real victims in this campaign have indeed been Gaza civilians. But they usually get the cause wrong. Every one is due to Hamas’s unprovoked aggression against Israel. None would have occurred without it. Once this round of fighting is over, Hamas will work to build back better for next time — that is, to regenerate their military capability rather than civilian infrastructure. If Western governments, international bodies and human rights groups are genuinely interested in avoiding suffering in Gaza, they should start now, striving to end Hamas’s reign of terror rather than support it by parroting their baleful narrative.

Bitter laugh for the day:

The “Biden” administration is compelled by the Holy Writ of Wokeism to appoint black women to top government posts.

It’s not easy to find black women to head some of the posts, such as the Office of Science.

But they have found one. She has the skill to adapt Science to fit the dogma of Wokeism.

She will stop Science being a form of white-supremacist racist oppression which is all it has been hitherto.

Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

President Joe Biden has now taken the push for “diversity” in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator. The typical head of DOE’s Office of Science in the past has had managerial authority in the nation’s major physics labs and has been a physicist himself, Science reports.The new nominee’s only managerial experience consists of serving since 2020 as an interim associate dean of UC Merced’s graduate division.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science”, as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion.

As head of the Office of Science, Berhe would be asked to choose strategic directions for DOE-funded science. Should the agency try to expand understanding of fundamental particle physics or of the physics of the universe? How much attention should be given to solid-state lighting, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence? With regard to energy conservation and clean energy, should DOE pursue geothermal or biomass, tackle storage issues, or seek greater energy efficiency through insulation and refrigeration? Each day, the Office of Science turns out dozens of “one-pager” descriptions of projects and proposals. It is unlikely that a soil geologist (with an M.S. in political ecology) will have the knowledge to evaluate proposals for, say, advanced scientific computing research or nuclear physics, or make the policy judgments that those “one-pagers” require.

But she is not expected or asked by the “Biden” administration to do anything of the sort. She is asked to be black, which she is; to be female by nature or choice, and she qualifies in that by nature; and to get non-white people recognized as scientists. Getting non-white people recognized as scientists is the future of Science. It is called “Diversity” and is far more important than nuclear physics.

It is fitting that Berhe teaches at the University of California, Merced. UC Merced was created as a diversity campus, in the hope of minting more Hispanic graduates with a UC degree. No one advocating for this new institution, located in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, made the case that California needed more university research capacity. Berhe herself benefited from UC’s obsessive diversity push, having received a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program for promoting “underrepresented minority” graduate students.

A physicist wonders if Berhe “can know merit when she sees it”. Preference beneficiaries “think that merit is a myth and hierarchies of achievement are arbitrary and based on power and oppression“, this professor observes, based on years of watching academic admissions and hiring. Berhe argues that the lack of race and sex diversity in STEM is due to exclusion, rather than to the absence of a proportional number of competitively qualified “diverse” candidates in the hiring pipeline. Her co-authored articles include: Leaky Pipeline vs. Vicious Obstacle Course: metaphors for the persistent exclusion of minoritized scholars from STEM; A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies; Hostile climates are barriers to diversifying the geosciences. She will undoubtedly further elevate the importance of race and sex as criteria for federal research awards.

Berhe’s Soil Biogeochemistry Lab at UC Merced strives, according to its website, to “create a dynamic, diverse, and equitable STEM community that represents the public”.  Scientists do not mirror the public’s demographics, however, thanks to yawning academic skills gaps. Nor is it the mission of science to be representative of population groups; its sole mission is to advance knowledge. Berhe’s lab, however, is developing and testing “sexual harassment bystander intervention training programs that incorporate experiences of diverse women” as part of a National Science Foundation consortium. Her lab recommends readings on racism and offers tips on writing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” statements that are increasingly required of academic science hires. Expect such statements, thinly disguised euphemisms for announcing oneself as “diverse”, to become mandatory for a DOE science job or grant.

The Biden administration’s war on merit is being waged at an unprecedented rate.

The subjection of scientific research to the requirement of race and sex parity threatens future human progress. Such parity can be achieved only by sacrificing intellectual standards. An electrical engineer at a prestigious California university compares Berhe’s nomination to “putting a newspaper delivery boy in charge of Google”. Theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia warns that by choosing scientific leadership according to a political agenda, “science itself risks becoming another form of covert political activism”.

It is that. Has been for decades. What is global warming science but a form of political activism – and not covertly but openly?

The national science agencies have already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on identity politics. The Biden administration will multiply that waste at a time when China is relentlessly racing to surpass the United States at the frontiers of science.

China is winning. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe will help it win.

And the new great goals of Woke America – the abasement of the white race, the humbling of men, the bringing down of the barriers those villains put up by making Science, Engineering and Mathematics difficult – will be achieved.

We usually only review books about religion and contemporary politics, but we made an exception for NOVA ROMA* for three reasons: first, we happen to know that the author, Anderson Gentry, is an atheist conservative; second, we admire the Roman Republic and appreciate how much our own civilization owes to it; third, we found that the story makes a strong contribution to an important debate pursued with ever greater intensity here and now in the West.

Don’t be put off by the Latin title. The book is written in English. And nothing it tells us about the Romans can seem strange to us in our time. The author rightly reminds us in his Introduction:

“Once all roads led to Rome. Now, Rome stands as the source of all roads that lead to modern Western civilization. In fiction and in fact, Rome excites the imagination as few other nations ever have.”

The story – which moves at a fast pace, making it a real page-turner – begins in Rome in 44 B.C.E. Caesar has crossed the Rubicon and is advancing with his army towards Rome. Some of the Senators, suspecting that he wants to be crowned king and so put an end to the Roman Republic, form a plan, not to stab him to death as happened historically, but to bring a powerful military force of their own to oppose him.

Among the would-be defenders of the Republic are Pompey, Cato, Cicero, and Brutus. They set sail with two legions, livestock, arms and horses, and the treasury gold, in forty ships bound for Spain, where Pompey has reserves of money and can recruit soldiers. But they never reach their intended destination. A tremendous storm blows them way beyond the Iberian peninsula, right across the ocean. Thirty-four ships survive to land them on the coast of an unknown continent which fifteen hundred years later would be called America.

Reconciled to the certainty that they will never be able to return home, they found a new Rome, starting with the construction of a Senate, a forum, and a protective wall, all built with wood and stone. They name their rudimentary city Nova Roma.

And they encounter the native peoples. The Romans call them Novans, regard them as primitive savages. But, needing to trade with them, they soon find that there are wise men among them, worthy of all respect. Friendly relations are established early with two tribes, but there is also a tribe of fierce warriors, and war between the Romans and Novans becomes unavoidable.

Most of the rest of the story is about the war. It is excitingly narrated and demonstrates an expertise in military tactics on the part of the author which will add to the appeal of the novel for readers who share his fascination with the subject.

We will not give away the ending, which we found not just satisfying but moving. Suffice it to say that that the resolution of the problem of how an advanced civilization can come to terms with a less developed nation to the satisfaction of both is typically Roman – and a model for our time.

* NOVA ROMA: DE ITINERE IN OCCASUM by Anderson Gentry, Crimson Dragon Publishing, Aurora, Colorado, 2020. 383 pages. Available from June 1, 2021, at $16.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other bookstores, or direct from CrimsonDragonPublishing.com. Pre-order here. The  e-book at $8.99 will be available through the same, as well as Nook, iBooks, and OverDrive (Library System).

Police officers are resigning by the thousand.

With what – surely expectable – result?

Example:

Throughout a year of riots, autonomous zones, demonization of the police by public officials and defunding in 2020, over 200 officers quit the Seattle force. An additional 66 officers have quit so far in 2021. There are only 1,080 deployable officers –  a record low not seen since the 1980’s when the population of the city was less than half what it is now.

In August, the Seattle City Council defunded the department in perverse response to the riots following the death of George Floyd. Millions of dollars were funneled from the police department to local activist organizations, many of which were involved in the riots and the setting up of an “autonomous zone”. 

The defunding of the police has meant that the department is critically short-handed. This affects the investigation of crimes, and curtails routine patrol shifts to prevent crimes being committed. Residents wait long for a response after calling 911. Often there is no response.

This week it took police almost an hour to respond to a gun emergency on a public school campus.

Crime has increased across the city. The homicide rate in 2020 doubled from 2019 and is continuing the same upward climb in 2021.

Despite this, the City Council is considering more cuts to the police department’s budget.

In an interview with NPR, Seattle’s former police chief, Carmen Best, who resigned last summer, said the cuts and anti-police climate convinced her that her department was “destined to fail”.

Even Democrats can figure out, since it is obvious, that if you have too few police, or none, you will have a lot of crime. 

So having a lot of crime is their intention.

The agenda for which, they tell us, a majority of Americans voted in 2020!