Congress Votes To Secure Borders For NATO Countries
Jan 29, 2019 Read More Articles by Cliff Kincaid In what has been called a “strong message” to President Trump, the new socialist-controlled House of Representatives has passed the “NATO Support Act” (H.R. 676) by a vote of 357 to 22. So while the House under the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi has resisted paying for a wall to defend the sovereignty of the United States, the House has voted overwhelmingly to defend the borders of countries in Europe. The NATO Support Act is described as one of the first bills pushed through the new Democratic-majority House. This demonstrates their priorities: open borders for the U.S. and secure borders for the rest of the world, to be guaranteed by American fighting men and women. Incredibly, many Republicans, including House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, went along with the ploy. The bill prohibits withdrawal from NATO and even endorses “robust United States funding for the European Deterrence Initiative,” a plan for even more spending by the U.S. on our European “allies.” One can easily see this developing into American support for a European Army or even a United Nations Army. But the U.S. can’t protect its own southern border. Trump’s position has been that NATO members should pay their fair share, a minimum of two percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. This stance has made him, in the view of House Democrats and some Republicans, a Russian agent. What it really means is that deadbeat nations do not think enough of themselves or their people to safeguard their own sovereignty. Trump is simply recognizing this fact, and trying to shock them into recognizing reality. Only through self-reliance can these countries ever hope to stand up to Russia. Only 22 members of the House voted against this misguided bill that commits American blood to defend the borders of other countries. Republican Rep. Russ Fulcher told the Idaho Statesman that he voted “no” because it “empowers foreign leaders too much authority by locking the United States into the current terms of NATO.” He added, “More than 20 countries currently don’t pay their dues; in so doing increasing obligations to the U.S. If we remove our own ability to make any changes to our position in the future, we also remove any leverage we could have to hold other nations accountable to pull their own weight.” Another dissenter, Rep. Tom McClintock, noted, “This act prohibits U.S. withdrawal from NATO and commits perpetual American support. While I support NATO and our continued presence in it, this bill is unnecessary and appears deliberately aimed at undercutting the President’s efforts to get NATO countries to pay their fair share for its support. NATO was formed to provide security against the now-defunct Soviet Union; not to relieve individual European nations from their responsibility to maintain their own defenses at America’s expense.” Rep. Scott Perry objected to the bill for many reasons, including that the proposal was clearly unconstitutional by violating the “separation of powers” through Congressional interference with legitimate presidential authority. He explained, “The Executive Branch is responsible for international relations and treaties. The Constitution is very clear. The bill attempted to supersede the Constitution and case law; only the president has the Constitutional authority to negotiate treaties.” What Trump has been saying about the NATO deadbeats is entirely factual. He has questioned the value of NATO when only five of its 29 members actually pay their way. In an article headlined, “Trump is right about the NATO deadbeats,” Yahoo Finance reported last July that, “In 2014, NATO agreed that each member country should spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on defense within a decade. So far, only five countries [of NATO’s 29 members] meet that threshold: the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Estonia and Latvia.” Of course, NATO continues to insist that its members will eventually meet the target. There was a time when NATO was perceived as an anti-Soviet alliance. But that completely changed under President Clinton, who illegally transformed NATO into an offensive military force without submitting a new NATO Treaty to the Senate for ratification. NATO’s new “Strategic Concept” involved operating outside the borders of NATO member-states and undermined the so-called “principle of collective defense” under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. All of this brings up the most protected man in the media today, globalist George Soros, who wrote Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO, back in 1993. He figured that NATO could take on the military responsibilities of the New World Order until the U.N. was ready to do the job. Giving NATO a blank check has real consequences. As a result of expanding NATO to 29 countries in 2017, American troops are now obligated to defend tiny Montenegro, the newest NATO member and a so-called “critical addition” to the Transatlantic alliance, without Congress first passing a declaration of war. For questioning why Americans should die for Montenegro, Trump was accused by the late Senator John McCain of “playing right into Putin’s hands.” The “NATO Support Act” now goes to the Senate, where we can anticipate anti-Trump Senator Mitt Romney of Utah joining the campaign for a bigger NATO that’s paid for by American taxpayers. The Senate legislation, S.J. Res. 4, is officially sponsored by Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Jack Reed (D-RI), Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Susan Collins (R-ME). But their claims about NATO being “the world’s most successful military alliance and a major force for peace” are demonstrably false. The NATO war on Yugoslavia launched by President Clinton benefitted a Muslim terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with links to Osama bin Laden, who had declared war on America in 1996, bombed our embassies in Africa in 1998, and would later, of course, orchestrate 9/11. It was a NATO war which only benefited the Muslim terrorists in the KLA, further destabilizing the region. Clinton could have been impeached for taking the country to war under false pretenses and without congressional approval. Indeed, his intervention in Kosovo was rejected by Congress, and Clinton proceeded with the war anyway. He waged it through the use of executive orders and presidential power. Under this self-designated authority, Clinton delegated command-and-control of U.S. forces to NATO and its then-Secretary-General Javier Solana, who decided when the air war would be discontinued and had the authority to order U.S. troops into military action once again. (Solana also served as European Union high representative for common foreign and security policy and secretary-general of the Council of the European Union.) As part of this process, Clinton deployed U.S. forces to Macedonia as part of a United Nations force, prompting one patriotic U.S. soldier, Michael New, to declare he signed up for the “Green Team,” the Army, not the “Blue Team” of the U.N., and he resisted. His father Daniel New and I wrote a book, Michael New: Mercenary or American Soldier, about how he was court-martialed and given a bad conduct discharge for refusing the illegal and unconstitutional orders. Despite a solid record against the United Nations, we are still waiting on the White House to grant a presidential pardon of Michael New. This is something Trump can easily do that cannot be reviewed by the courts. It’s a way that the president can reassert the value of a pro-American foreign policy. He could also threaten to veto the NATO Support Act. Before the deadline of February 15 arrives regarding negotiations on border security, Trump could explain to the American people that Congress is now in the strange position of promising that American soldiers should die to protect foreign borders while it fails to authorize a Border Wall to protect our own people. In effect, the U.S. Armed Forces have become a Border Wall for foreign countries that will be reinforced by the spilling of American blood. It is not promoting Russian interests to question this insanity. It is good old-fashioned American patriotism. © 2018 NWV – All Rights Reserved E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: [email protected] Significant Dates in the Creation of the New World OrderPerhaps the best way to relate a brief history of the New World Order, would be to use the words of those who have been striving to make it real throughout the ages. You will be amazed at how far back this grand plan has extended, and how many similarities there are in early Century 21 compared to the 1990's, with two Presidents from the Bush family in power....(Read More...)
Wednesday, 19 December 2018 History of Push for Global Order Revealed in Latest Foreign Affairs
Written by Steve Byas “Who Will Run the World?” graces the cover of the January/February 2019 edition of Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the self-identified globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In the lead article, Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose gives an eye-opening survey history of the efforts by globalists to establish a “liberal order” for the world. Rose begins his article, “The Fourth Founding,” with a brief discussion of the traditional foreign-policy view of the United States from its founding until the 20th century. He rightly admits that George Washington warned Americans about the “dangers of alliances,” and that other early American political leaders, such as John Quincy Adams, agreed with him. Adams offered the classic explanation of how America should deal with the rest of the world, saying that the United States would be the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” while being the “champion and vindicator” only of its own. But, like most globalists, Rose argues that the Washington-Adams way of dealing with other nations simply could no longer work as America moved into the 1900s. It was then that President Woodrow Wilson “first tried to found” the “international order” after World War I. Rose doesn’t say it, but Wilson called this effort at global governance a “new world order.” Rose, in his article, just calls it “the order.” “Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman tried again during and after World War II,” Rose explained, calling this the second founding of the order, with the efforts of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton the third founding in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Now, Rose is calling for a fourth founding of the order, lamenting, “In 2016, Anglosphere voters rang down the curtain on the third phase of the order’s history with Brexit and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, and for two years, the world has drifted.” Students of this effort to establish a global “order” have often wondered why these globalists have done certain things, and how it all fits into their push for global governance. A careful reading of Rose’s article gives us some answers. Rose writes of the First Founding of the Order, “So when the United States entered the war [World War I], it sought not only a postwar collective security system but also the removal of the Prussian autocracy.” Why? “Wilson thought regime change was necessary because dictatorships could not be trusted to participate in his collective security system,” Rose explained. In other words, if dictatorial governments supported the formation of the new world order, they were acceptable, but if not, they must be removed from power. Over the years, the United States and other partners in the order have implemented regime change in places such as Panama, Iraq, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and China. Alas, from Rose’s point of view, “The first attempt to found the order was in trouble by the end of 1918, was on life support by the end of 1919, and died slowly and painfully in the years after.” Rose does not mention it, but this failure was the reason for creation of the CFR and the publication he now edits — to promote the New World Order envisioned by Wilson. But World War II presented an opportunity for a “second try” at establishing the order. “The Roosevelt administration was stocked with rueful Wilsonians. They continued to believe that the best way to protect American interests was to use American power to transform international politics.” Rather than wait until the war’s end to set this order up, Rose said a “better-designed league would be set up during the war, with American participation locked in from the start.” Despite the best efforts of Rose’s ideological ancestors, “the American public was quickly turning inward again.” While Rose did not put it this way, patriotic Americans who valued our national sovereignty were not yet ready to turn over that sovereignty to a United Nations organization. It was obvious that supporters of the order needed to “shift course.” Instead of a “grand universal institutional framework,” a “smaller, more practical one” would be used to advance the order. This involved a more piecemeal approach, with Bretton Woods (an international monetary arrangement based on the U.S. dollar) “supplemented by the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.” It should be emphasized that Rose argues that these three supplements were intended mainly to promote the order’s creation. The 1947 plan to “pump American capital” into Europe (the Marshall Plan) was for the purpose of creating an “integrated European economy centered on Germany and France.” While American policymakers did consider the Soviet Union a threat in the late 1940s, Rose said that they were not actually concerned about any threat “to the U.S. homeland.” The “threat was to the order they were trying to build.” Rose admits that “neither Congress nor the American public was clamoring for the launch of such a grand new postwar project.” Bluntly put, Americans had — again — essentially rejected the dreams of the New World Order envisioned by the Wilsonians. It was at this point that the globalists “cleverly flipped the story, presenting its new approach not as an independent project of American order building but as a response to a growing Soviet threat.” But, as Rose readily concedes, this “distorted what was really going on.” What was really going on was the elites using a legitimate fear of the Soviet Union’s aggressiveness to build the New World Order. As Rose explained, “Cooperative integration was sold as something that was done to bind the American alliance together to win the conflict rather than as something valuable in its own right. This went on so long that when the Cold War finally ended, many were surprised that the order continued.” Even CFR member Jeanne Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador for President Ronald Reagan, said at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, “Now we an be a normal country again,” and advocated pulling back on U.S. commitments, such as NATO. But, if NATO was never about containing the Soviet menace, primarily, but rather about advancing the New World Order, that was not going to happen, and it did not happen. In fact, NATO was expanded. When President George H.W. Bush formed the alliance to push Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, he gloated that he was establishing a New World Order, using those very words. The end of the Cold War was not going to end the push for a New World Order — global governance — as the next president, Bill Clinton, even “advanced North American economic integration” and expanded NATO into eastern Europe! At this point, Rose fondly recalls, “the order” was stronger than ever. But problems remained, Rose lamented, arguing that without state intervention into the economies of the world, the benefits of “capitalism” were not distributed “steadily or evenly.” Apparently, free enterprise is not a goal of the order. Another problem was that there were still large numbers of Americans who opposed the New World Order. Rose quoted one reader of Foreign Affairs: “I’ll simplify it for you: the average American rejects your Globalist, anti-American, anti-constitution, politically correct VOMIT.” Finally, Rose turns his attention to Donald Trump, taking aim at his campaign theme of “America first,” noting that Trump wanted to take American foreign policy back to the 1930s. Perhaps the most revealing tidbit in the Rose article was his version of an event that took place early in the Trump administration: “At one point, Trump’s entire national security apparatus gathered in the basement of the Pentagon to explain the order to him. The president was bored and implacable.” This explains the intense hatred that the architects of the order have for Trump. American conservative constitutionalists certainly have problems with Trump, but it is clear that those who would terminate America’s national sovereignty, submerging us into their vision of a New World Order, have even more problems with him. Rose concludes his article by looking forward to the day when “Trump leaves office” and the next president can repair “the damage” to the order. On the contrary, we can hope that the next president can finish the job that Trump has begun, and the American people can send the order to the ash heap of history. __________________________ 
Why Supreme Court opinions are not the 'Law of the Land,' and how to put federal judges in their place
By Publius Huldah November 15, 2018 Central to the silly arguments made by the "Convention of States Project" (COSP) is their claim that 200 years of Supreme Court opinions have increased the powers of the federal government (as well as legalized practices such as abortion); that all these opinions are "the Law of the Land"; and we need an Article V convention so we can get amendments to the Constitution which take away all these powers the Supreme Court gave the federal government. But the text of Article V contradicts COSP's claim. Article V shows that our Constitution can be amended only when three fourths of the States ratify proposed amendments. The Supreme Court has no power to amend our Constitution. And it's impossible for an amendment to take away powers our Constitution doesn't grant. 1. First Principles Let's analyze COSP's silly argument. We begin by looking at First Principles:
and as a mere "creature" of the Constitution, it may NOT change the Constitution under which it holds its existence! 4 2. Supreme Court Opinions are not "the Law of the Land" Article VI, cl.2, US Constit., the "supremacy clause," defines "supreme Law of the Land" as the Constitution, and acts of Congress and Treaties which are authorized by the Constitution. Supreme Court opinions aren't included! Furthermore, Art. I, §1, US Constit., vests all law-making powers granted by the Constitution in Congress. Our Constitution doesn't grant any lawmaking powers to the Judicial Branch. So why does everybody say, as we heard during the Kavanagh confirmation hearings, that Roe v. Wade is "the Law of the Land"? Because Americans have been conditioned to believe that the Supreme Court is superior to our Constitution; that their opinions about our Constitution are "law," and we are bound by them unless and until they issue new opinions which release us from their previous opinions. 3. Organic & statutory law and the totally different "common law" precedent followed in courts Americans have been conditioned to ignore the huge distinctions between organic and statutory law, on the one hand; and the common law which is embodied in the precedents followed by judges in litigation. Organic Law Black's Law Dictionary defines "organic law" as "The fundamental law, or constitution, of a state or nation, written or unwritten; 5 that law or system of laws or principles which defines and establishes the organization of its government." The organic laws of the United States are
Do you see how absurd is the claim that the Supreme Court, a mere "creature" of the Constitution of 1787, has the power to change the Organic Law of the United States? Statute Law Black's Law Dictionary defines "statute law" as the
Common Law The "common law" applied in courts in the English-speaking countries came from the Bible.7 The Bible has much to say about our relations with each other: don't murder people, don't maim them, don't steal, don't bear false witness, don't tell lies about people, don't be negligent, don't cheat or defraud people, and such. The Bible provides for Judges to decide disputes between people and empowers Judges to require the person who has violated these precepts to pay restitution to the person whom he harmed. So, e.g., the Biblical prohibitions against bearing false witness and slandering people became our modern day concepts of slander, libel, and defamation. These principles were applied in the English courts from time immemorial, and are applied in American Courts. Modern day American attorneys litigate these common law concepts all the time. So if I am representing a client in an action for say, fraud, I look at the previous court opinions in the jurisdiction on fraud, and see how the courts in that jurisdiction have defined fraud – i.e., I look for "precedents" – the courts' previous opinions on the subject – and I expect the Judge on my case to obey that precedent. 8 THIS is the "common law." It is "law" in the sense that it originated with God's Word; and from "time immemorial" has been applied in the Courts of English speaking countries. But this precedent is binding or persuasive only on courts.9 As precedent for judges to follow, it is never "the law of the land"! So, keep these three categories – organic, statutory, and common law – separate, and do not confuse court precedent with the "Law of the Land." The latter is restricted to the Organic Law, and statutes and treaties authorized by the Organic Law. Now let's look at the constitutional jurisdiction of the federal courts. 4. What kinds of cases do federal courts have constitutional authority to hear? The ten categories of cases the Judicial Branch has authority to hear are enumerated at Art. III, §2, cl. 1, US Constit. 10 The first category is cases "arising under this Constitution." In Federalist No. 80 (2nd para), Hamilton shows these cases concern "provisions expressly contained" in the Constitution. He then points to the restrictions on the authority of the State Legislatures [listed at Art. I, §10], and shows that if a State exercises any of those prohibited powers, and the federal government sues the State, the federal courts would have authority to hear the case (3rd & 13th paras). So if a State enters into a Treaty, or grants Letters of Marque & Reprisal, or issues paper money, or does any of the other things prohibited by Art. I, §10, the controversy would "arise under the Constitution" and the federal courts have constitutional authority to hear the case. Likewise, if a State passed a law which violated the Constitution – say one requiring candidates in their State for US Senate to be 40 years of age – instead of the 30 years prescribed at Art. I, §3, cl. 3 – the federal courts have constitutional authority to hear the case. So the purpose of this category is to authorize the Judicial Branch to enforce the Constitution – not re-write it!! 11 Now let's look at one way the Supreme Court butchered our Constitution in order to strike down State Laws they didn't like. 5. How the Supreme Court violated the "arising under" clause to hear casesthey have no constitutional authority to hear Let's use "abortion" to illustrate the usurpation. Obviously, "abortion" is not "expressly contained" in the Constitution. So abortion doesn't "arise under" the Constitution; and the constitutionality of State Statutes prohibiting abortion doesn't fit into any of the other nine categories of cases federal courts have authority to hear. Accordingly, federal courts have no judicial power over it. The Supreme Court had to butcher words in our Constitution in order to usurp power to legalize abortion. This is what they did: The original intent of §1 of the 14th Amendment was to extend citizenship to freed slaves and to provide constitutional authority for the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866. That Act protected freed slaves from Southern Black Codes which denied them God-given rights. 12 Now look at §1 where it says, "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;" That's the "due process" clause. As Professor Berger points out [ibid.], it has a precise meaning which goes back to the Magna Charta: it means that a person's life, liberty or property can't be taken away from him except by the judgment of his peers pursuant to a fair trial. But this is how the Supreme Court perverted the genuine meaning of that clause: In Roe v. Wade (1973), they looked at the word, "liberty" in the due process clause and said, "liberty" means "privacy," and "privacy" means "a woman can kill her unborn baby." 13 And they claimed they had jurisdiction to overturn State Laws criminalizing abortion because the issue arises under the Constitution at §1 of the 14th Amendment! [ibid.] The Supreme Court redefined words in Our Constitution to justify the result theywanted in the case before them. The Supreme Court didn't "enforce" the Constitution – they butchered it to fabricate a "constitutional right" to kill unborn babies. And the lawyers said, "It's the Law of the Land"; the People yawned; and the clergy said, "the Bible says we have to obey civil government – besides, we don't want to lose our 501 (c) (3) tax exemption!" 6. What are the remedies when the Supreme Court violates the Constitution? The opinions of which the convention lobby complains constitute violations of our Constitution. 14 The three remedies our Framers provided or advised for judicial violations of our Constitution are:
1 "Creature" is the word our Founders used – e.g., Federalist No. 33 (5th para) & Jefferson's draft of The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (8th Resolution). 2 Art. VII, cl. 1, US Constit., sets forth ratification procedures for our Constitution. 3 Madison's Virginia Report of 1799-1800 (pp 190-196). 4 Madison's Journal of the Federal Convention of 1787 shows that on July 23, 1787, the Delegates discussed who was competent to ratify the proposed new Constitution. Col. Mason said it is "the basis of free Government" that only the people are competent to ratify the new Constitution, and
5 It is said England doesn't have a written constitution. 6 Acts of Congress which are not authorized by the enumerated powers are void.They are not made "in Pursuance" of the Constitution and have supremacy over nothing. Federalist No. 27 (last para) says:
7 John Whitehead mentions the Biblical origin of the common law in The Second American Revolution. 8 Art. III, §2, cl.1 delegates to federal courts power to hear "Controversies between Citizens of different States." Much of the litigation conducted in federal courts falls into this category. These lawsuits aren't about the Constitution. Instead, they involve the range of issues people fight about in State Courts: personal injury, breach of contract, business disputes, fighting over property, slander & libel, etc. In deciding these cases, federal judges are expected to follow the "common law" precedents. 9 In Federalist No. 78 (next to last para), Hamilton discusses how judges are bound by "precedents" which define and point out their duty in the particular cases which come before them. 10 In Federalist No. 83 (8th para), Hamilton says:
13 In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court said under Part VIII of their opinion:
© Publius Huldah |
 Image Source: Creators Syndicate
WILLIAM MURCHISON: Abortion: The People Are Catching On
May 21, 2019 So, when the U.S. Supreme Court numbered abortion among our precious constitutional rights, we expected everlasting bliss? Anything but the present knock-down-drag-out over Roe v. Wade and its prospects for survival? I mean, we’re stunned to see state legislatures moving to outlaw abortion? Why? On what grounds? America is presently absorbing a major political science lesson. To wit, a social revolution commenced and overseen by a coterie of philosopher kings — Platonic guardians, you could say — is a non-starter. Won’t work. We generally don’t do business that way in America. Roe v. Wade was a notable exception to the seemingly odd notion that the governed and those who govern them should work hand in hand so as to maximize consent and minimize anger of the sort deadly to peace and unity. You negotiate rivalries, see? You don’t turn to a body of semi-Solomons saying, “Tell us what’s right; we’re too dumb to figure it out for ourselves.” It’s been more than 46 years since Roe. Ah, the changes we’ve seen! Back then, we still conversed with telephone operators. The odor of lighted cigarettes enveloped commercial airliners, and the Nixons were our presidential royalty. Forty-six years has not rendered America amenable to the divinations of seven intellectually polished law school graduates — two colleagues dissented — who revealed something previously unsuspected by the dumb peasants. An expectant mother, the court majority said, enjoyed the constitutional right to decide whether or not to give birth. As for any constitutional rights the baby might enjoy, we surely have gleaned by now here we have an entirely different matter! Up to 1973, several states had spoken to the matter of abortion through elected legislatures and the weighing of competing interests. The great majority of state laws emphasized protection for the not yet born as opposed to solicitousness for the mother’s choice. At that, nothing was engraved in marble, with guards on hand to shoo away proponents of change. The self-liberating ’60s produced a growing clamor for liberalization of the abortion laws. Gov. Ronald Reagan of California signed in 1967 the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, enacted on the grounds that the law forbidding abortion except to save a woman’s life was in fact responsible for 18,000 illegal abortions — during many of which the mother (nonwhite in four-fifths of the cases) died. Nor, in any case, was the law regularly enforced. The new law allowed abortion for protection of the mother’s health, as well as for pregnancies due to rape or incest. Whether correct or incorrect, the Legislature’s chosen solution reflected popular acceptance: the consequence of open argumentation over a period of six years. No semi-Solomons handed it down from the throne. Its passage by elected lawmakers meant a different set of elected lawmakers could write a law with new or few specifications — in line, more or less, with voter preferences. The rest of the 50 states were free to do likewise. Or do nothing at all. There followed Roe v. Wade — the proclamation, on dubious constitutional grounds, of a national abortion policy. The states could enact weak protections for unborn life. Strong protections? Naaah. Which is what brings us to this present moment, with Alabama and several other states writing into statute the human life protections favored, presumably, by their own citizen-electors, rather than by the semi-Solomons. It seems hardly likely today’s high court, given the crackling tensions of the moment, would try to throw a 46-year-old revolution completely into reverse. To be sure, in older times, the justices would never have volunteered themselves as moral arbiters. In the age of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, they should have known better than to try and reframe our moral norms — given the moral law’s ancient antecedents and its claims on democratic thought and action. Nonetheless, inasmuch as morals and politics often intertwine and contradict each other, here we are: the semi-Solomons at odds with, as polls suggest, nearly half the populace. What a dim and destructive decision, Roe v. Wade. That much the supposedly sovereign people are beginning to figure out for themselves. William Murchison is writing a book on American moral restoration in the 21st century. His latest book is “The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson.” _________________________ What Americans Must Know About Socialism
Dec 3rd, 2018 23 min read COMMENTARY BY Lee Edwards, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought Lee Edwards is a leading historian of American conservatism and the author or editor of 25 books. Portrait of Karl Marx (1818-1883), before 1875. Fine Art Images Heritage Images/NewscomKEY TAKEAWAYSSocialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials. “They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented." This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny. CopiedIs a specter of socialism haunting America, especially among our millennials? There is disquieting evidence of many young Americans’ sympathy for socialism. Exhibit A: 2.052 million people under the age of 30 voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and caucuses. Exhibit B: Polls find that, not only do a large majority of millennials have a favorable opinion of socialism, a near majority would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism. Exhibit C: The no-longer sleeping Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) now boasts 30,000 members, most of them in their twenties and eager to follow the socialist banner. We’ve come a long way since the 1988 presidential race when George H. W. Bush buried his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by labeling him a “liberal.” Socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials who are not put off by the radical DSA platform. DSA believes in ending the private ownership of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities.” The production of such products, it argues, should not be left to “profiteers.” It also believes that government should “democratize” private businesses — that is, give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible. “Socialism,” explains a member of DSA’s national steering committee, “is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.” Get exclusive insider information from Heritage experts delivered straight to your inbox each week. Subscribe to The Agenda >> What is happening in America, once the apotheosis of capitalism? The first part of that answer lies in two words, not “Karl Marx,” but “Bernie Sanders.” The senator from Vermont captured the hearts and the votes of many millennials with his call for single payer health care, free public college, campaign finance reform, and racial, economic, and climate justice. The prime target of his animus was the top 1 percent in America who own, it is true, some 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth — as much as the bottom 90 percent. What Bernie rarely pointed out was that the same top 1 percent paid 39.5 percent of the individual income taxes. Sanders had a ready explanation for how to pay for all of the freebies: increase the taxes on the rich and their corporations. In Bernie’s world, there is such a thing as a free lunch because the bill will be paid by those at the top. According to one CNN analyst, millennials rallied in the many thousands behind Sanders because they are socially liberal — especially on LGBT rights — saddled with mountains of student debt, disillusioned with the status quo, “and eager to break with traditional [political] models.” Bernie provided solutions to all their problems — without detailing the price or conceding the lessening in individual liberty. Such details were swept aside by the revolutionary spirit of the millennials who “felt the Bern.” As one Bernista said, “You can build a powerful political movement with a base of 2 million true believers.” The second reason for the shift toward socialism was the Great Recession of 2008. It tore a huge hole in the American people’s belief in capitalism as the way to a better life and sent them looking for alternatives. Many of them, especially younger Americans, found it in a “soft socialism” that was part welfare state, part administrative state, part socialist democracy. The most startling poll was the YouGov survey that reported that given a choice, 44 percent of young people between the ages of 16 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist nation rather than a capitalist country. Another seven percent would choose communism. However, the same poll revealed that only 33 percent of the respondents could correctly define socialism as based on the common ownership of economic and social systems as well as the state control of the means of production. What most millennials mean by “socialism” seems to be a mix of our welfare state and what they perceive to be Swedish democratic socialism. But Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries including Denmark favor the free market and are content with private rather than government ownership of their major industries. However, Danish domestic spending including comprehensive health care has a high price — a top personal income tax of 57 percent. The millennial trend toward an acceptance of socialism is not new. A 2014 poll by Reason-Rupe, a libertarian group, reported that 58 percent of those aged 18 to 24 had a favorable view of socialism. A 2016 Gallup survey found that 55 percent of those 18-29 had a “positive image” of socialism. But 90 percent were favorable to “entrepreneurs” while 78 percent favored “free enterprise.” How can a group be 55 percent socialist and 78 per cent entrepreneurial? Either through cognitive dissonance or plain ignorance. In any case, it is critical for advocates of free enterprise to make the case against socialism because acceptance of socialism by any name places millennials on a slippery slope. Another recession and/or a well-run presidential campaign by a charismatic demagogue could move America farther down the road to serfdom. A 2016 Harvard poll determined that 33 percent of Americans under 30 wanted socialism. In January 2016, YouGov asked millennials whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism. Eight percent replied “very favorable,” 35 percent “somewhat favorable,” for a total of 43 percent, almost the same percentage as in their 2017 survey. But would these same millennials choose socialism, if in exchange for “free” education and “free” health care, they would have to give up their personal property, such as their iPhone? Would seven percent of millennials declare their willingness to live under communism if they knew the real costs of communism as practiced in some 40 nations over the past century — the denial of free speech, a free press, and free assembly, the imprisonment and execution of dissidents, no free and open elections, no independent judiciary or rule of law, the dictatorship of the Communist Party in all matters and on all occasions? For the first time in decades, socialists are taking advantage of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon to organize, raise funds, and field candidates from New York City to Oakland, California. A major instrument is DSA — the Democratic Socialists of America — about which the liberal New Republic asked, “Are the Democratic Socialists for America for Real?” The most dramatic proof of socialism’s new-found political clout was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, the number four Democrat in the House of Representatives, in the June Democratic primary. Ocasio-Cortez received 57 percent of the vote — to Crowley’s 42 percent — while pledging to back Medicare for all, free college tuition, legalization of marijuana and the elimination of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Attractive and articulate, the 28-year-old socialist announced she would support progressive candidates who challenged Democratic incumbents in primaries. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi cautioned Ocasio-Cortez not to oppose liberal Democrats who had a proven record of results. Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, warned that “the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems.” He noted that Republicans were already referring to Ocasio-Cortez as “the new face” of the Democratic Party. But an ideologue like Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to be ruled by conventional politics. The same can be said of Democratic Socialists. Over 700 elected delegates from around the country attended DSA’s 2017 national convention in Chicago, the historic site of many political beginnings from the 1860 presidential nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Veterans of the organization were “blown away” by the enthusiasm of the younger DSA members whose priority is to win elections that advance socialism. Chicago City Councilman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, aged 28, is one of DSA’s elected officials. He advised an ecumenical approach for socialist candidates — to run on the Democratic ballot line because it offers access to people who want single-payer healthcare and a $15 minimum wage. As part of its demographic outreach, Bianca Cunningham, the African-American chair of New York City’s DSA labor branch, helped to form a national Afro-socialist caucus. Until Ocasio-Cortez’s startling win, DSA and its leftist allies concentrated on elections at the state and local levels; they have had success such as the victory of Councilman Khalid Kamau in South Fulton, Georgia. Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative Party won a seat on Seattle’s city council and pushed through an increase in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Running as a socialist, thirty-four-year old Franklin Bynum was elected a criminal court judge in Houston. In Pittsburgh, eight Democrats sought the endorsement of the local DSA chapter in this year’s primary. Even in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the reddest of states, four Democrats ran as democratic socialists. “It’s not a liability to say that anymore,” commented DSA activist Jorge Roman-Romero. As proof of their expanding influence, socialists point to the radical magazine Jacobin, which has about 1 million page views a month, and the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, which delights in ridiculing politicians and journalists on the center left. Following the 2016 election, for example, a Chapo co-host compared Hillary Clinton to race car driver Dale Earnhardt, joking that both had crashed because they “couldn’t turn left.” (Earnhardt was killed in a 2001 racing accident.) It was unvarnished commentary but no rougher than the frequent media comments about (or by) Donald Trump. Socialist publications like “n+1” and the “New Inquiry” have attracted younger readers with their unremitting attacks on capitalism. After Trump’s victory, commentators such as Michael Kazin, editor of the leftist magazine Dissent, thought that the Left would be on the defensive as “when Reagan and George W. Bush were in power.” Instead, there is a renewed interest in the radical left and the possibility that DSA “might be able and will certainly try to take advantage of it.” What does all this — the Sanders candidacy, the national polls, the political organizations like DSA, the intense media focus — add up to? Are they the makings of a national movement or merely a passing fancy temporarily fueled by young people who will soon get caught up in the next political fad? Let’s judge them by the five essential elements of a successful political movement: charismatic leadership, a national constituency, adequate financing, media proficiency, and a relevant philosophy. In some ways, the “new” DSA is reminiscent of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960s. Then YAF claimed a membership of 20,000, backed Sen. Barry Goldwater and his promise to offer a conservative choice and not a liberal echo, raised money with the help of OAFs (Older Americans for Freedom), convinced the media (led by the New York Times) that YAF was the wave of the future, and hoisted the anti-communist flag high at every rally and meeting. It was the height of the Cold War and America was engaged in a deadly struggle with the forces of evil. Like DSA, YAF leaders were mostly white, male, well-educated, and from middle-class families. They were young men in a hurry, certain they could change history, and so they did — first, with the presidential nomination of conservative Goldwater in 1964, and later the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Bill Buckley was YAF’s luminous hero, the St. Paul of the conservative movement who went where no conservative had gone before — into the belly of the liberal beast, Harvard. As for DSA, it has a national constituency, principled if aging leaders like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, fund-raising potential, strong media interest, and a philosophy attractive to Americans tired of sliding down the economic ladder and wondering what happened to the American Dream. Before dismissing the Democratic Socialists of America — and its compatriots — as idealistic and naïve, it should be remembered that the Tea Party had only 60,000 members in 2010 but won 47 seats in the House of Representatives that fall. On the road to socialism, DSA and its fellow socialists will seek to convert industries like health care into public utilities; regulate coal mines out of existence; subsidize sectors of the economy like solar energy; and operate corporations like Amtrak and Freddie Mac. They will present socialism as the reasonable alternative to the unchecked greed of the captains of capitalism. However, as it grows in numbers and influence, DSA will encounter a critical discrepancy — the telling difference between its pure socialism and the soft socialism of popular opinion. DSA purists seek public ownership of the means of production as well as centralized control of goods and services. Soft socialists see a limited role for the private sector à la Sweden. Will DSA be able to fuse the two kinds of socialism as conservatives like Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. blended traditional conservatism and libertarianism in the 1960s and 1970s? Which brings us to the urgent need to depict the realities of socialism to Americans who have never heard of the Berlin Wall, the Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the daily bread lines in Moscow. According to the YouGov survey, one-third of all Americans would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism. Why? Is it idealism — the desire for a classless society in which everyone is equal and envy does not exist because everything is owned in common? Is it a lack of knowledge? When asked how many people have died under communism, only 31 percent of Americans could provide the correct answer — “Over 100 million.” About seven in ten Americans could not define communism. Commented one millennial about his peers, “They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented. They haven’t seen socialism’s failures firsthand.” Here are the realities of socialism and its grandmaster, Karl Marx.
Mikhail Gorbachev took over a bankrupt Soviet Union in 1985 and desperately tried to resuscitate “socialism” (i.e., communism) through perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). He failed abjectly and was forced to preside over the dissolution of the once mighty Soviet empire on Christmas Day, 1991, seven decades after Lenin mounted a truck in St. Petersburg to announce the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping abandoned the rigid excesses of Maoist thought and adopted a form of communism with “Chinese characteristics” that was more capitalist than socialist in several ways. Deng, however, also ensured the Communist Party’s control of any new homeland enterprise or foreign investment. After decades of sluggish growth and bureaucratic inefficiency, India rejected state socialism in the 1990s and shifted to a capitalist approach that spawned the world’s largest middle class of more than three hundred million (nearly equal to the entire U.S. population). Sweden is often described as a “socialist” country, but is not and never has been socialist. It is a social democracy in which the means of production are owned primarily by private individuals. Among the proofs of its commitment to a market economy is that Sweden ranked number 19 worldwide in the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Economic Freedom. Socialism’s failure to deliver on its promises of bread, peace, and land to the people is confirmed by the repeated, open resistance of dissidents: in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980 with the formation of Solidarity, China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in present-day Cuba with the resolute Ladies in White who parade every Sunday after mass to call attention to the many jailed dissidents including their husbands and sons. Socialism failed in America in the early 19th century when the English philanthropist Robert Owen launched New Harmony, a “village of cooperation” on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. Volunteers flocked to the socialist experiment, but most were better at sitting in a chair than making one. Within a few years, New Harmony collapsed, and Owen went home.
Much of the appeal of Marxism was its scathing critique of capitalism and its 19th century excesses, which included 16-hour work days and Dickensian working conditions. It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution when exploitation of workers, young and old, was widespread and horrific. By the end of the century, much had changed. Capitalism was not breaking down under the pressure of industrial concentration as Marx had predicted. To the contrary, economies were expanding and the lives of workers were slowly but demonstrably improving. Rather than developing into revolutionaries (as predicted by Marx), the workers were becoming reformers and even bourgeoisie. The core philosophical weakness of Marxism was the founder’s insistence that his version of Hegelian dialectic — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — was scientific and without flaw. He asserted that feudalism had been replaced by capitalism which would be replaced by socialism in an irreversible process. But it is now close to 200 years since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, and capitalism rather than socialism dominates much of the global economy. In the Heritage Foundation’s 2018 Index of Economic Freedom, 102 countries, many of them less developed or emerging economies, showed advances in economic growth and individual prosperity. Economic freedom improved globally for the sixth year in a row. Marx was not the first utopian. Plato had his Republic,and Thomas More his Utopia. They were centrally ruled and devoid of individual choice. More’s Utopia was a highly regimented “paradise” in which all citizens dressed alike and lived in identical houses and where private discussion of public affairs incurred the death penalty. Marx insisted that his socialist Utopia would be different because it would be classless and free of all nationalist sentiment because the nation state would have withered away. Ever melodramatic, he called on the “workingmen of all countries” to unite against the ruling classes — they had “nothing to lose but their chains.” It was powerful rhetoric, but was Marx’s socialist world any more possible than the utopias proposed by Plato and More and other central planners? How good a historian and how accurate a prophet was Karl Marx? Contrary to Marx, feudalism broke down, not because of economic contradictions, but because of the new trade routes which helped England and other countries move from a land-based to a money-based economy. Capitalism did not emerge naturally as the antithesis of feudalism but through a series of events including the emergence of the Puritan ethic, inventions like the cotton gin, the individualism of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of classical liberalism in the writings of thinkers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Nor did Marx anticipate that workers would become increasingly affluent, independent, and even bourgeois. He did not foresee that capitalists would address problems such as unemployment and inflation, monopolies, Social Security and health care, and the proper balance of private and public control over the means of production. Furthermore, the working class has not fallen into greater and greater misery. The industrial nations have seen a dramatic rise in the standard of living of the average worker. The middle class has not disappeared but expanded. As the esteemed economist Paul Samuelson wrote: “As a prophet Marx was colossally unlucky and his system colossally useless.”
But private property is not just any right; it is integral to civilization. There never was a time or place when all possessions were collectively owned. There is no convincing evidence, writes the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, that there were societies that knew “no boundary posts and fences” or ignored “mine” and “thine.” It is often argued that socialism is a secular version of Christianity, referring to Acts 2-5, which describes the early Christians as having “all things in common.” It is true that following Pentecost, Christians sold their possessions and property and shared the results with “any [that] might have need.” But there is a critical distinction between Christians and socialists: Jesus urged his followers to give up their possessions while socialists want to give away the possessions of others. St. Paul is sometimes quoted as saying that “money is the root of all evil.” What he actually wrote in a letter to Timothy was that “loveof money is the root of all kinds of evil.” His indictment, as the former AEI president Arthur Brooks has pointed out, was of an inordinate attachment to money. More secular sources about the consequential role of private property can be cited. In The Constitution of Liberty, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek writes that the recognition of private property is “an essential condition for the prevention of coercion.” He quotes Lord Acton as saying that “a people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom” and Henry Maine as asserting: “Nobody is at liberty to attack [private] property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.” In view of the alleged lack of individual liberty in classical Greece, writes Hayek, it deserves mention that in 5th century Greece the sanctity of the private home was so recognized that even under the rule of the “Thirty Tyrants,” a man could save his life by staying at home. The power of private property indeed.
Marx borrowed from the Enlightenment to say that human nature is intrinsically malleable. The Communist state established by Lenin in Russia in November 1917, wrote Richard Pipes, was “a grandiose experiment in public education” to create an entirely new type of human being — Soviet Man. Christian theology with its idea of a fixed human nature infuriated Marx, who was not just an atheist but a God-hater who denounced religion as “the opium of the people.” His disciples, led by Lenin, always targeted the churches when they came to power. They initiated without apology a campaign of terror, shutting down churches, executing priests and bishops and violating nuns. The horrors were justified as part of the class-cleansing Marx envisioned. The Founders of the American Revolution rejected those who believed that man was born without any imprint and sided with those who accepted that man was born in the image of God. As the Declaration of Independence states, all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Founders disagreed with those who thought man was perfectible and instead took the Christian position that man’s nature was fallen. As Madison famously observed, “If men were angels there would be no need for government” and “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” It is a reflection of human nature, Madison said, that “such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.” George Washington summed up the Founders’ realism: “We must take human nature as we find it, perfection falls not to the share of mortals.” The essential difference between the visions of Karl Marx and George Washington, aside from the question of human nature, is that in Marx’s socialist world there is a dictatorship of the Communist Party, while in a liberal democracy like the United States “We the People” tell the government what to do, the government does not tell the people what to do.
Personal experience with this common falsehood has been eloquently provided by six famous intellectuals in The God That Failed. They describe their journey into Communism and their exit when they encountered the gigantic gap between their vision of a socialist Utopia and the totalitarian reality of the socialist state. All of them, points out editor Richard Crossman, chose Marxist socialism because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice “bourgeois liberties” in order to defeat Nazi Germany. Their socialist conversion was rooted in despair with Western values that produced the Great Depression and permitted Fascism. Their conversion was greatly strengthened by what Crossman calls “the Christian conscience” even among those who were not orthodox Christians. The emotional appeal of Marxist socialism lay in the sacrifices, material and spiritual, which it demanded as well as the unswerving obedience to the socialist line no matter how radically or quickly it changed. A case in point: Communists condemned Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s until the summer of 1939, when Joseph Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact. Immediately, all “true” socialists were obliged to reverse course and hail the agreement as a major step toward peace. It was, in fact, a cynical deal that allowed the Nazis and the Soviets to invade and divide up Poland, thereby precipitating World War II. With the Hitler-Stalin pact, scales fell from the eyes of the six intellectuals, starting with the Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler, who now condemned the infamous show trials ordered by Stalin: “At no time and in no country have more revolutionaries been killed and reduced to slavery than in Soviet Russia.” The American black writer Richard Wright wrote, “At that [socialist] meeting I learned that when a man was informed of the wish of the Party he submitted, even though he knew with all the strength of his brain that the wish was not a wise one, was one that would ultimately harm the Party’s interests.” After visiting the Soviet Union, the French Nobel Laureate André Gide said bluntly, “I doubt whether in any country in the world — not even in Hitler’s Germany — have the mind and spirit ever been less free, more bent, more terrorized and indeed vassalized — than in the Soviet Union.” Gide said that “the Soviet Union has deceived our fondest hopes and shown us tragically in what treacherous quicksand an honest revolution can founder.” The American journalist Louis Fisher, once an enthusiastic chronicler of Soviet economic advances, recounted how much the Soviet Union had changed: “Ubiquitous fear, amply justified by terror, had killed revolt, silenced protest, and destroyed civil courage. In place of idealism, cynical safety-first. In place of dedication, pursuit of personal aggrandizement. In place of living spirit, dead conformism, bureaucratic formalism, and the parrotism of false clichés.” So it was in the Soviet Union under Stalin; so it has been in every socialist experiment since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Soviet-Nazi agreement was the cracking point for many intellectuals in the West, including the American Louis Fisher, who accused Stalin of building an imperialistic militaristic system in which he is, and his successor will be, “the Supreme Slave Master.” How then, Fisher asked, can anyone interested in the welfare of people and the peace and progress of humanity support such a system? “Because there is rottenness in the democratic world?” he asked and answered, “We can fight the rottenness. What can Soviet citizens do about Stalinism?” It took decades, but the citizens of all the nations behind the Iron Curtain finally threw off their chains in 1989, and wrote finis to Soviet communism. Tragically, there are still more than 1 billion people living today under the Marxist socialist regimes of China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos.
But if you were asked, “How many victims of communism have there been?” You would probably hesitate and respond — “Five million? Twenty million? Fifty million?” Few of us would know the right answer: at least 100 million men, women, and children, more than all the deaths of all the major wars of the 20thcentury. Communism committed the great crime of the last century. It is a number difficult to comprehend, let alone accept. Surely, you might say, there could not have been that many. But we can be certain of saying that there have been at least 100 million victims of communism because of the painstaking research of the editors of The Black Book of Communism, published by the Harvard University Press. They document that each and every Marxist socialist regime has prevailed by way of a pistol to the back of the head and a death sentence in a forced labor camp. There is no exception whether in China under Mao Zedong, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, Cuba under Fidel Castro, Cambodia under Pol Pot, or Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam. According to Stephane Courtois, the editor in chief of The Black Book of Communism, the leading mass murderer is Pol Pot, whose attempt to communize Cambodia resulted in the deaths of one fourth of the country’s population. His closest rival is Mao, under whom as many as 40 million Chinese died in just one socialist campaign — the grossly misnamed Great Leap Forward. Of the Soviet Union’s first two dictators, Lenin and Stalin, Courtois says, “The blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical and ‘politically collect’ mass slaughter.” What price socialism? We must not limit ourselves to numbers. The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang listed the “little terrors” that prevailed in China — making children of 12 subject to capital punishment, sending women to work in underground coal mines, harassing workers during their lunchtime with threats of prison if they were late returning to work. There were the costs in terror. One Soviet defector wrote about Soviet life: “We lived in a world swarming with invisible eyes and ears.” There were the costs in thought control. The content of everything in print and broadcast was limited to authorized “truths.” The Soviet press dismissed the 1932-33 forced famine in Ukraine that took the lives of seven million innocents as an anti-communist myth. One Western apologist for the regime, Edouard Herriot, wrote: “I have crossed the whole of Ukraine, and I can assure you that the entire country is like a garden in full bloom.” There were the costs to the world. There was no crisis anywhere in the world from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, in which the ideological ambitions of Moscow and its imitators, driven by Marxist-Leninist thought, were not involved throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny. This is the case against socialism — a god that failed, a science that never was, a political system headed for the ash heap of history.  On March 14, 1948, Douglas Hyde handed in his resignation as the news editor of the London Daily Worker and wrote “the end” to twenty years of his life as a member of the Communist Party. A week later, in a written statement, Hyde announced that he had renounced Communism and, with his wife and children, was joining the Catholic Church. The long pilgrimage from Communism to Christ carried Douglas Hyde from complete commitment to Marxism, to a questioning uneasiness about Soviet Russia’s glaring contradictions of ideology and action, to a final rejection of the Party. In DEDICATION AND LEADERSHIP, he advances the theory that although the goals and aims of Communism are antithetical to human dignity and the rights of the individual, there is much to be learned from communist methods, cadres and psychological motivation. Hyde describes the Communist mechanics of instilling dedication, the first prerequisite for leadership. Here is the complete rationale of party technique: how to stimulate the willingness to sacrifice; the advisibility of making big demands to insure a big response; the inspirational indoctrination; and the subtle conversion methods. In this small book, so large with implications, Douglas Hyde comments on both Communist and Catholic potential and their lack of maximum effectiveness. He advocates positive Catholic action, not just a negative anti-Communism, and he points out that the guidelines are now down for a decisive choice between total Communism and a total Christianity. Here is a realistic approach to an acute problem uncolored by emotional propaganda, and here is a realistic answer on how to inspire dedication for leadership.
posted 10/04/2016
Excerpts from the book, “Dedication & Leadership – Learning From the Communists” The author, Douglas Hyde, renounced Communism after serving in the party for many years. He points out that the reason Secular Humanists, Socialists and Communists are winning the cultural war, is due to the lack of dedication and commitment of many conservatives and Christians. Communists are more dedicated, courageous, and energetic than Conservatives - that although Communism is evil there is much to be learned from its methods, members, and psychological motivation. The tragedy is that people give such energy, zeal and dedication to socialism, and other forms of Secular Humanism, while those who have the best cause on earth often give so little to it. Hyde starts out by saying, “Often, ex-communists meeting together talk of the old days when we were in the Party rather like old soldiers discussing nostalgically the campaigns they shared in the past. We talked of old comrades who now saw themselves as our enemies. Do you remember what life was really like in the Party? You got up in the morning, and as you shaved you were thinking of the jobs you would do for communism that day. You went down to breakfast and read the Daily Worker to get the Party line - to get the shot and shell for a fight in which you were already involved. You read every item in the paper wondering how you might be able to use it for the cause. I had never been interested in sports, but I read the sports pages in order to be able to discuss sport with others and to be able to say to them, “Have you read this in the Daily Worker?” I would follow this through by giving them the paper in the hope that they might turn from the sports pages and read the political ones too. On the bus or train, on my way to work, I read the Daily Worker as ostentatiously as I could, holding it up so that others might read the headlines and perhaps be influenced by them. I took two copies of the paper with me; the second one I left on the seat in the hope that someone would pick it up and read it. When I got to work, I kept the Daily Worker circulating. One worker after another would take it outside, read it for a few minutes and bring it back to me again. At lunchtime I would try to start conversations with those with whom I was eating. I made a practice of sitting with different groups in order to spread my influence as widely as I could. I did not thrust Communism down their throats, but steered our conversations in such a way that they could be brought around to politics or, if possible, to the campaigns which the Party was conducting at the time. Before I left my place of work at night, there was a quick meeting of the factory group or cell. There we discussed the successes and failures of the day. We also discussed what we hoped to be able to do on the following day. I dashed home, had a quick meal and then went out, maybe to attend classes, maybe to be a tutor, maybe to join some communist campaign, going from door to door canvassing or standing at the side of the road selling communist papers - doing something for communism. At night I thought about the jobs I was going to do for communism the next day.” If we lose the cultural war for the soul of America – tyranny will be the result. The consequences of losing this war are major - more horrendous than I care to contemplate. If we continue to lose this war we will no longer be able to enjoy our Constitutional freedoms, practice our religion, or raise our children as we see fit. It is important that every American - should understand that we are at war. The enemy realizes it, whether or not we do! The things I’m suggesting pale in comparison to some of the antics of many sports fans who are nearly hysterical in their enthusiasm. Some paint their house and their car in their team’s colors. Some even riot as a result of their teams winning or losing. It makes me wonder; who or what is their god? If 10% of Americans had the same level of commitment progressives and Muslims have, we could preserve and pass freedom to our children. “The World is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” Albert Einstein ____________________________ New World Order Definition
Introduction The following article is extracted from an excellent analysis of the New World Order by author Ken Adachi which can be found at educate-yourself.org. The term New World Order (NWO) has been used by numerous politicians through the ages, and is a generic term used to refer to a worldwide conspiracy being orchestrated by an extremely powerful and influential group of genetically-related individuals (at least at the highest echelons) which include many of the world's wealthiest people, top political leaders, and corporate elite, as well as members of the so-called Black Nobility of Europe (dominated by the British Crown) whose goal is to create a One World (fascist) Government, stripped of nationalistic and regional boundaries, that is obedient to their agenda. Listen to the Zionist* banker, Paul Warburg: "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (February 17, 1950, as he testified before the US Senate). Their intention is to effect complete and total control over every human being on the planet and to dramatically reduce the world's population by two thirds. While the name New World Order is the term most frequently used today to loosely refer to anyone involved in this conspiracy, the study of exactly who makes up this group is a complex and intricate one. For further research sources, please see the side bar on the left. In 1992, Dr John Coleman published Conspirators Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300. With laudable scholarship and meticulous research, Dr Coleman identifies the players and carefully details the New World Order agenda of worldwide domination and control. On page 161 of the Conspirators Hierarchy, Dr Coleman accurately summarizes the intent and purpose of the Committee of 300 as follows: "A One World Government and one-unit monetary system, under permanent non-elected hereditary oligarchists who self-select from among their numbers in the form of a feudal system as it was in the Middle Ages. In this One World entity, population will be limited by restrictions on the number of children per family, diseases, wars, famines, until 1 billion people who are useful to the ruling class, in areas which will be strictly and clearly defined, remain as the total world population. There will be no middle class, only rulers and the servants. All laws will be uniform under a legal system of world courts practicing the same unified code of laws, backed up by a One World Government police force and a One World unified military to enforce laws in all former countries where no national boundaries shall exist. The system will be on the basis of a welfare state; those who are obedient and subservient to the One World Government will be rewarded with the means to live; those who are rebellious will simply be starved to death or be declared outlaws, thus a target for anyone who wishes to kill them. Privately owned firearms or weapons of any kind will be prohibited." Why the Conspiracy is UnknownThe sheer magnitude and complex web of deceit surrounding the individuals and organizations involved in this conspiracy is mind boggling, even for the most astute among us. Most people react with disbelief and skepticism towards the topic, unaware that they have been conditioned (brainwashed) to react with skepticism by institutional and media influences. Author and de-programmer Fritz Springmeier (The Top 13 Illuminati Bloodlines) says that most people have built in "slides" that short circuit the mind's critical examination process when it comes to certain sensitive topics. "Slides", Springmeier reports, is a CIA term for a conditioned type of response which dead ends a person's thinking and terminates debate or examination of the topic at hand. For example, the mention of the word "conspiracy" often solicits a slide response with many people. What most people believe to be "Public Opinion" is in reality carefully crafted and scripted propaganda designed to elicit a desired behavioral responsefrom the public. Public opinion polls are really taken with the intent of gauging the public's acceptance of the New World Order's planned programs. A strong showing in the polls tells them that the programming is "taking", while a poor showing tells the NWO manipulators that they have to recast or "tweak" the programming until the desired response is achieved. The NWO Modus OperandiThe NWO global conspirators manifest their agenda through the skilful manipulation of human emotions, especially fear. In the past centuries, they have repeatedly utilized a contrivance that NWO researcher and author David Icke has characterized in his latest book, The Biggest Secret, as Problem, Reaction, and Solution. The technique is as follows: NWO strategists create the Problem - by funding , assembling, and training an "opposition" group to stimulate turmoil in an established political power (sovereign country, region, continent, etc.) that they wish to impinge upon and thus create opposing factions in a conflict that the NWO themselves maneuvered into existence. In recent decades, so called opposition groups are usually identified in the media as 'freedom fighters' or 'liberators'. At the same time, the leader of the established political power where the conflict is being orchestrated is demonized and, on cue, referred to as 'another Hitler' (take your pick: Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Kadaffi, etc.). The 'freedom fighters' are not infrequently assembled from a local criminal element (i.e. KLA, drug traffickers). In the spirit of true Machiavellian deceit, the same NWO strategists are equally involved in covertly arming and advising the leader of the established power as well (the NWO always profits from any armed conflict by loaning money, arming, and supplying all parties involved in a war). The conflict is drawn to the world stage by the controlled media outlets with a barrage of photos and video tape reports of horrific and bloody atrocities suffered by innocent civilians. The cry goes up "Something has to be done!" And that is the desired Reaction. The NWO puppeteers then provide the Solution by sending in UN 'Peace Keepers' (Bosnia) or a UN 'Coalition Force' (Gulf War) or NATO Bombers and then ground troops (Kosovo), or the military to 'search for Weapons of Mass Destruction', which of course are never found. Once installed, the 'peace keepers' never leave. The idea is to have NWO controlled ground troops in all major countries or strategic areas where significant resistance to the New World Order takeover is likely to be encountered. Who is the NWO?The corporate portion of the NWO is dominated by international bankers, oil barons and pharmaceutical cartels, as well as other major multinational corporations. The Royal Family of England, namely Queen Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor, (who are, in fact, descendants of the German arm of European Royalty - the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family - changed the name to Windsor in 1914), are high level players in the oligarchy which controls the upper strata of the NWO. The decision making nerve centers of this effort are in London (especially the City of London), Basel Switzerland, and Brussels (NATO headquarters). The United Nations, along with all the agencies working under the UN umbrella, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), are full time players in this scheme. Similarly, NATO is a military tool of the NWO. The leaders of all major industrial countries like the United States, England, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, etc. (members of the "G7/G8" ) are active and fully cooperative participants in this conspiracy. In this century, the degree of control exerted by the NWO has advanced to the point that only certain hand-picked individuals, who are groomed and selected are even eligible to become the prime minister or president of countries like England, Germany, or The United States. It didn't matter whether Bill Clinton or Bob Dole won the Presidency in 1996, the results would have been the same. Both men are playing on the same team for the same ball club. Anyone who isn't a team player is taken out: i.e. President Kennedy, Ali Bhutto (Pakistan) and Aldo Moro (Italy). More recently, Admiral Borda and William Colby were also killed because they were either unwilling to go along with the conspiracy to destroy America, weren't cooperating in some capacity, or were attempting to expose/ thwart the takeover agenda. The NWO's Role in Shaping HistoryMost of the major wars, political upheavals, and economic depression/recessions of the past 100 years (and earlier) were carefully planned and instigated by the machinations of these elites. They include The Spanish-American War (1898), World War I and World War II; The Great Depression; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; the Rise of Nazi Germany; the Korean War; the Vietnam War; the 1989-91 "fall" of Soviet Communism; the 1991 Gulf War; the War in Kosovo; and the two Iraq wars. Even the French Revolution was orchestrated into existence by elements of the NWO. The instigation of a trumped-up war as a cover for amassing fortunes which can be dated back to at least the 12th Century when only a core group of nine members of the Knights Templar, kicked off the The Crusades that lasted for over a century and a half. The core group mentioned above have been reported as being the military arm of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, but this has been proven to be a hoax, In 1307, the king of France, Philippe the Fair, coveted the wealth and was jealous of the Templars' power. The French king set out to arrest all the Templars in France on October 13. While many Templars were seized and tortured, including their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, many other Templars (who had been tipped off) escaped. They eventually resurfaced in Portugal, in Malta (as the Knights of Malta) and later in Scotland as The Scottish Rites of Freemasonry, with Albert Pike playing a key role in defining a plan for establishing a world government. The acquisition and consolidation of ever greater wealth, natural resources, total political power, and control over others are the motivating forces which drive the decisions of the NWO leaders. The toll in human suffering and the loss of innocent lives are non issues for these individuals. Next: The New World Order Timeline. Previous: World War 1 and World War 2 compared. ___________________________ |
The Case Against Arms Control
By Peter Pry June 24, 2019 Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP Historically, U.S. modernization of its nuclear deterrent Triad—ICBMs, bombers, and missile submarines—has advanced hand-in-hand with arms control treaties. Of necessity, the Trump Administration is breaking this longstanding precedent. Long-delayed U.S. strategic forces modernization proceeds, while the U.S. withdraws from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because of Russian cheating. The U.S. may not renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), on which Russia is also likely cheating, because of growing nuclear threats from China. The U.S. is even reversing course on the Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI) virtually eliminating U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, because of Russian non-reciprocity. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “peace offensive” calling upon the U.S. to renew arms control negotiations correctly calculates any new negotiations and new agreements will unilaterally constrain the U.S. and benefit Russia—which always cheats. Likewise, the U.S. arms control community, led by the State Department and their allies in government, academia, and press, who were quiescent about Russian cheating—would launch new arms control negotiations, just when U.S. Triad modernization commences. Nuclear arms control’s record is one of failure, constraining U.S. programs while adversaries gain advantage through noncompliance. America no longer enjoys such technological superiority over Russia and China that it can afford arms control agreements constraining only the United States. However, Washington's commitment to arms control is not based on rational objective cost-benefit calculations but is deeply rooted in political and ideological factors unique to Western strategic culture. U.S. Triad modernization has been so long neglected that unflagging bipartisan support will be necessary from the White House and Congress across successive administrations for decades—which may no longer be possible politically. Can arms control partisans and partisans of Triad modernization be persuaded to compromise? Can they agree on an emergency program greatly strengthening U.S. active defenses (space-based missile defense) and passive defenses (EMP and cyber-hardening critical national infrastructures) as an insurance policy against failures of arms control and possible future failure of Triad modernization? Arms Control IdeologyPolitical and strategic reasons account for Washington linking modernization of the nuclear Triad with arms control. Politically, nuclear weapons are unpopular with many, if not most Americans. Nuclear weapons are antithetical to a constitutional republic that derives its legitimacy from, and values most profoundly, the people—whose existence is threatened by such weapons. Arms control provides “political cover” for supporting nuclear deterrent modernization by signaling to the people their political leaders are trying to limit nuclear arms and calm international tensions through negotiation. Winton Churchill’s admonition, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war" is an oft-quoted justification for arms control. (However, Churchill did not subscribe to this view as regards Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy or Adolph Hitler’s territorial predations that led to World War II). Arms control is deeply embedded in U.S. strategic culture. The State Department, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and academia mostly believe arms control really does constrain the nuclear threat by limiting forces, building confidence through verification, and lessening suspicion and hostility ("convergence") through negotiations and the arms control process. Unique to U.S. strategic culture is the “science” of arms control with its own lexicon and theories about "strategic stability" developed over decades in entire libraries of books and journals and believed by many adherents with something like religious fervor (see the Arms Control Association). Negotiating differences and compromise is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian culture, antedating Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and his Medieval ruminations over “Just War” doctrine. Modern nuclear arms control began in 1946 with the U.S. Baruch Plan, proposed by Bernard Baruch to the United Nations, originating from Dean Acheson’s State Department, influential scientists and academics. (Baruch was the U.S. representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission.) The Baruch Plan proposed the U.S. and all nations ban atomic weapons, enforced by the UN, and that the UN oversee the development of peaceful atomic energy. Beginning with the Baruch Plan, modern nuclear arms control is championed most vociferously by the State Department, academics, internationalists, globalists, and political Left, who see nuclear weapons as an evil that must be controlled—not evil nations. Since these groups have influence only in the West, their focus overwhelmingly is on “controlling” U.S. nuclear weapons. Consequently, arms controllers tend overwhelmingly to blame the U.S. for provoking nuclear arms racing. They value so highly the “arms control process” that promises “convergence” that the State Department and its allies in academia and the press are very resistant and slow to acknowledge arms control violations by adversary nations. Indeed, arms controllers often go to great lengths to deny violations, usually blaming the U.S. for failures of arms control. Arms Control versus RealityNuclear arms control began with failure, the USSR rejecting the 1946 Baruch Plan to ban atomic weapons, detonating its first A-bomb in 1949. Unfortunately, principles of negotiation, compromise, legality, and “win-win” outcomes are alien to totalitarian and authoritarian states. These are led by ruthless elites who have often murdered their way to the top, believe that “power comes from the barrel of a gun” (to quote Mao), and the lives of men and nations is a “zero-sum” game of victors and defeated, of the living and the dead. Consequently, the presumed benefits of arms control are more fictional than real. Arms control agreements can limit arms only if the agreements are obeyed, which has generally not been the case, for example, with Russia, the USSR, or North Korea. Verification provisions for arms control agreements that are supposed "confidence-building measures" for growing trust between nations typically are woefully inadequate. Verification provisions for New START, the Presidential Nuclear Initiative, or for any nuclear arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow have never been adequate to confirm with high-confidence the number of Russian (or during the Cold War, Soviet) nuclear weapons deployed operationally or stockpiled. Russia could have thousands of nuclear weapons operationally deployed over New START limits—and we would not know. Another notorious example of verification inadequacy is the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), allowing inspections of Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities only—not military facilities, where a clandestine nuclear weapons program almost certainly continues. The Iran nuclear deal epitomizes almost everything wrong with arms control. Iran can be in technical compliance with JCPOA, but according to highly competent U.S. and Israeli experts probably already has nuclear weapons. (“Underestimating Nuclear Missile Threats From North Korea And Iran” National Review February 12, 2016) The JCPOA, like arms control generally, provides the false illusion of security. Dr. Mark Schneider, former senior Defense Department official and nuclear strategist, in “Trading Arms Control for Nuclear Modernization: An Old Scam” (RealClearDefense.com June 12, 2019), spent decades at the Pentagon exasperated by arms controller’s dangerous hypocrisy: “The U.S. arms control enthusiast establishment generally cares little about the substance of arms control agreements, their verifiability, or whether the Russians actually comply with them. They support arms control agreements irrespective of whether the agreements actually accomplish anything useful. They fight against the U.S. determining Russian arms control violations, terminating U.S. compliance with arms control agreements that Russia is violating or responding to them by weapons developments and deployments. Their position on these issues is almost identical to the Russian Federation, and this has been going on for decades.” As for “convergence”—the promise that arms control will build trust and a safer world—the world is more dangerous because of arms control. Arms Control FailuresBefore “arms control” it was called the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact (outlawing war), and the Washington and London Naval Treaties. All of these were violated or exploited by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to prepare for their nearly successful bid to win World War II. Then as now, advocates of appeasement (before World War II “appeasement” was a policy, not a dirty word) went through extraordinary mental gymnastics to deny or justify ignoring “pocket battleships”, submarines, tank armies, air forces, and acts of aggression that violated what today would be called the “international arms control regime”. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and then the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and SALT II) allegedly enshrined the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) for the U.S. and USSR, while supposedly capping numbers of permitted strategic forces, even while allowing modernization. In reality, the USSR and Russia today never subscribed to U.S. theories about respecting MAD by constraining “destabilizing” offensive and defensive capabilities. Moscow exploited arms control to constrain the U.S. and gain strategic advantages to prevail in nuclear diplomacy and war. For example, President Reagan’s blue-ribbon General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, in their summary of “A Quarter Century of Soviet Compliance Practices Under Arms Control Commitments: 1958-1983” examined 26 arms control treaties, agreements, and commitments. The USSR violated all the most important arms control treaties of that era, including:
During the 1980s through today, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START and New START), and Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI) made deep reductions in strategic and tactical nuclear weapons (mostly on the U.S. side) while permitting modernization (almost entirely on the Russian side). Now the decades-long experiment in nuclear arms control has failed catastrophically, shredded by Russian cheating:
Yet the arms control community refuses to face these realities. Instead, they criticize the United States for withdrawing from treaties already broken by Russia. They complain about U.S. modernization of its nuclear deterrent, while for years watching Russia’s illegal nuclear build-up in uncomplaining silence. Arms Control CostsArms control has cost the West a lot more than champagne and caviar for diplomats in Geneva. The United States and its allies have paid a steep price for their arms control addiction in worsened international security. Specific examples abound, some already described above, of how arms control has constrained the U.S. unilaterally and given Russia and other potential adversaries significant strategic advantages. Perhaps even more dangerous is how the ideology of arms control has become second nature to U.S. policymakers, consistently misleading them to disadvantage the United States. Arms control pretends to an objective “rational actor” model that assumes moral equivalence and makes no distinction between the worldviews, histories, and behaviors of the United States and its arms control "strategic partner." Indeed, the focus is on controlling arms, especially nuclear arms, not on controlling nations, as if the weapons themselves are the most dangerous variable. Such thinking, fixated on controlling inherently dangerous nuclear weapons, was a significant factor driving the United States to profoundly reduce tactical nuclear weapons under the PNI and strategic nuclear weapons under START and New START. No one in Washington seemed to consider the possibility that the U.S. and global security might NOT benefit from deep reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons—to levels where Russia could afford to sustain nuclear parity. Arms control, seeking to maintain the U.S.-Russia nuclear balance, instead forfeited to Moscow (and also possibly to Beijing) numerical and technological superiority they never enjoyed during the Cold War. If the U.S. had not sacrificed its Cold War inventory of about 10,000 strategic and 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons, perhaps today Russia and China would be so far behind they would not even dream of nuclear arms racing. Perhaps the costliest national security sacrifice on the altar of arms control is President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and the opportunity through space-based defenses to render nuclear missiles obsolete. President Clinton would not withdraw from the ABM Treaty and the MAD relationship with Russia, that he deemed “the cornerstone of strategic stability” in order to deploy SDI’s Brilliant Pebbles space-based anti-missile system, then ready to go. Instead, President Clinton canceled both SDI and Brilliant Pebbles—thereby surrendering the only plausibly realistic pathway to achieving the dream of both President Reagan and President Obama for “a world without nuclear weapons.” Historically, arms control was not even able to ban the crossbow. Technological innovation made the crossbow obsolete—and can “ban” The Bomb. Arms control has also cost the United States and the world dearly by terminating or stunting peaceful uses of nuclear energy that had the potential for revolutionary advancements in technology and science. For example:
James Green in “Nuclear Weapons Might Save The World From An Asteroid Strike—But We Need To Change The Law First” (https//phys.org/news/2019-04) argues for stopping NASA and Russian scientists planning to use Russia’s high-yield ICBMs to deflect monster meteor collisions, until international lawyers first negotiate arms control treaties regulating nuclear schemes to save planet Earth. Green acknowledges that negotiations could take years. RecommendationsDo not link U.S. modernization of its nuclear Triad and tactical nuclear weapons to arms control negotiations, if at all possible. Unfortunately, arms control is so deeply ingrained in U.S. strategic culture that it may be inescapable. The Cold War bipartisan Republican-Democrat consensus that sustained U.S. nuclear parity with the USSR is broken. Arms control was part of that consensus. Since modernizing the nuclear Triad and resurrecting its scientific-industrial base will require decades, somehow rebuilding a bipartisan political consensus to support this program will be necessary. However, even the allure of arms control may not be enough to persuade a radicalized Democrat Party to support U.S. nuclear forces modernization. Congressional Democrats, led by the powerful Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, have advocated for the most radical schemes of anti-nuclear activists. Chairman Smith has voiced support for dismantling U.S. ICBMs and strategic bombers, two of the three Triad legs, reducing U.S. ballistic missile submarines from 14 to 6, and relying on this small Monad of submarines to enforce a new U.S. nuclear strategy of Minimum Deterrence. Moreover, even if a new bipartisan consensus emerges to support the current program for Triad modernization—it may not be enough to close the technological gap with Russia, China, and perhaps even North Korea (that likely has Super-EMP warheads) in new, advanced generation nuclear weapons. Astonishingly, the current U.S. plan will modernize only nuclear delivery vehicles—replacing aged missiles, bombers, and submarines with new versions—to be armed with antique nuclear weapons, designed and manufactured decades ago, continually refurbished for 30-40 years. Many experts warn that the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of these old warheads is increasingly doubtful. In today’s nuclear threat environment—where for example Russian new generation nuclear weapons can generate specialized effects such as Super-EMP for blacking-out critical infrastructures, neutrons for anti-tank and anti-aircraft missions, x-rays for missile defense, “clean” ultra-low-yield battlefield weapons that produce no fallout—U.S. high-yield warheads designed for massive blast, shock, and thermal effects may be irrelevant. Former Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, Vice Admiral Robert Monroe, correctly insists that the U.S. must develop new generation nuclear weapons and resume nuclear testing. Politically, this may be a bridge too far. (Monroe, “It’s Time For America To Resume Nuclear Testing” The Hill, November 15, 2017) Before the U.S. engages in another failed adventure negotiating arms control treaties with Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran—the State Department and larger arms control community should agree to support rapid expansion and strengthening of U.S. strategic defenses. Space-based missile defenses like Brilliant Pebbles, according to former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Ambassador Henry Cooper, can be deployed in about five years (by 2025) at the cost of $20 billion. Brilliant Pebbles would close the window of vulnerability to the growing nuclear missile threat from Russia and others much more rapidly than the modernization of the U.S. nuclear Triad, mostly to be accomplished after 2030 at the cost of about $700 billion. Passive strategic defenses, hardening U.S. critical infrastructures against electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cyber-threats, could be accomplished in an accelerated program in 3 years for $2-4 billion. Strategic defenses could quickly compensate for the catastrophic failures of arms control. Peter Vincent Pry, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, served as Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, on the staffs of the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, the CIA, and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. |
