Posts Tagged → Apartheid
America is gonna need a Truth & Reconciliation Commission
When the Democrat Party’s brutal and lawless assault on Americans who support democracy and the Constitutional Republic as America was founded comes to an end, America is going to have to go through a South Africa-style Truth & Reconciliation Commission process to resolve the endless injustices now being committed against political opponents of the evil Democrat Party.
Just looking at the Department of Justice’s latest illegal attack on President Trump, we all can imagine what horrible pain is in store for the rest of us citizens. DOJ AG Merrick Garland won’t voluntarily release the affidavit that was used to secure the bogus search warrant that allowed thirty federal agents to swarm through President Trump’s personal belongings inside his home in Florida, searching for a crime they don’t know of yet. Already the DOJ and FBI are returning personal items that were improperly removed, like President Trump’s passports.
A legitimate search warrant written according to the US Constitution specifies EXACTLY the items that are to be removed from a private home or business. Any search and seizure that results in all kinds of “oopsy” property removal is on its face an illegal search and seizure. But this DOJ FBI brutality isn’t a mistake, it is on purpose. They are looking for a crime, any crime, so they can hurt a political opponent, which is illegal.
It was this EXACT bully behavior by the authoritarian British against the early Americans that resulted in the Revolution, that resulted in the US Constitution and its Amendments, so that government could never again behave in such a lawless fashion.
Yet here we are now, and here we are headed for more of this behavior with not just the DOJ and FBI, but a new literal army of IRS armed agents coming to our homes. It seems that under the Democrat Party, ruling the populace through SWAT team is the new daily norm. Which of course is not normal, and it is not legitimate. American voters did not and would never have given the Democrat Party any of this authority or power, and it is why the Democrat Party had to steal the 2020 election, steal the presidency, and then hijack the federal government. They are now building on that steal and aggressively consolidating power and control over every US citizen.
Inevitably Biden’s lawless, cruel, evil, and oppressive misuse of official government is going to result in a lot of badly hurt people and seriously damaged lives. Americans who are right now kind of coasting through their lives are about to get a seriously rough awakening from Biden’s SWAT teams and heavily armed IRS agents. These agents are not coming to our homes to help us out. They are not coming into our lives to help us and assist us in complying with a complex tax code that requires mental gymnastics even for the Certified Public Accountants we use to report our taxable income.
No, these heavily armed federal agents are all arriving in our kitchens and living rooms and dining rooms to control us with an iron fist, to arbitrarily and capriciously hold us extremely “accountable” for even the smallest and most honest of our mistakes. Just like the British bullies did in the 1770s, with all of the unfair human wreckage they left in their wake. And before that, just like the Sheriff of Nottingham did in Britain.
So if old history is repeating itself now as tax compliance authoritarianism and it becomes the new normal, then maybe America will need to borrow a page from more modern times. For example, after Apartheid ended in South Africa, and yes I believe that even after just eighteen months America is already right now deeply into an Apartheid-like system, the only way to help South African citizens heal and learn to live in peace with one another was to have a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. And America is going to need the same thing.
The American Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s purpose will be to address and resolve the terrible political injustices that are being perpetrated by the Democrat Party under color of “law.” Anything other than a process like this is going to leave a deep and festering scar under the surface of America’s skin…pretty much like what happened after the Democrat Party’s Civil War from 1861-1865. Back then the Republican Party took away the Democrat Party’s African slaves, and the Democrats never forgave the Republicans for it, and the Democrats created all kinds of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings, to hold onto their power. And here we are, 160 years later, with the Democrats yet again trying to brutally control and enslave everyone. Political lynchings of people like President Trump are only the beginning.
Americans eventually getting out from under Democrat Party brutality are going to have to go through a better process than we did the last time the Democrats did this. Let’s start planning the American Truth & Reconciliation Commission now.
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar: How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar:
How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
© Josh First
July 31, 2011
Time was, for people in need only the local churches helped them. Every frontier town had a church, and its doors were always open to the needy. In a frontier society, the needy are ever-present. Over time, America grew, and seeking America’s promise, the needy increasingly arrived, and the model expanded. Are you hungry, do you need clothes? A local religious group was there to help you or your family. Bethesda Mission, Hebrew Free Loan Association, a myriad of Catholic charities, all served increasingly robust communities and then whole populations of American immigrants from across Europe. Immigrant aid societies flourished, most aimed at their own ethnic or linguistic group.
That model of bare-bones, volunteer-driven organizations advancing and increasingly advocating for the rights, needs, and interests of everyday shlmiel citizens is a uniquely American development. It is something to be proud of. That safety net for newcomers released their potential, increased the opportunity that awaited them, and enhanced their ability to become integrated, productive Americans.
Over decades, mirror image organizations evolved out of more refined social expectations, like human dignity and individual rights, wildlife habitat, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Out of this distinctly private and mostly religiously-based effort came public commissions, bureaucracies, laws, and then government mandates, with increasingly complex goals and symmetrically mixed results. Public health offices aimed at cholera, orphans, and clean water were useful; Prohibition spawned the Mob.
Beating Jim Crow in the South began in the late 1950s, and infused other movements. Responding to the Cold War, international causes became popular in the 1960s, spawning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Increasing public and private financial resources, and increased economic and individual opportunities across America created more defined political jockeying between these safety net groups. Many eventually morphed into highly tuned political machines with sophisticated interest groups, grassroots armies, funders, political backers, friendly media outlets, and crafted messages, many arriving at their final destination and recognizable form in the 1960s and 1970s. Those two decades are also recognizable as the turning point in American public political activism. Gun control, animal rights and welfare, gay rights, etc., all followed, and the laundry list is now long and well known. The political lines are now well drawn in the sand.
What impelled and set the original “founding” interest groups above, apart, and beyond their original surrounding circumstances was a powerful, convening clarion call that coalesced universal conscience: The moral claim.
The moral claim was based on a distinct and publicly recognizable difference between what was common practice at the time, on the one hand, and what was obviously needed to elevate and fairly improve the human condition, on the other hand. The moral claim was a non-partisan standard that appealed to nearly everyone, rallying and focusing fair-minded citizens from across religious, economic, racial and regional boundaries.
One of the most famous examples of the moral claim is King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dead people in coffins have been widely documented to sit up and cry when it’s replayed in their presence, because it is undeniably powerful medicine for a nation designed for freedoms it hadn’t yet delivered.
Similarly, when the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, advocates for environmental quality had one hell of a moral claim, and legitimately aimed at ending a long tradition of egregious pollution that privatized profits and socialized the costs. Three decades later, River Keeper was shutting down the last industrial pipes bleeding privately conjured PCBs and other chartreuse-colored ooze into the Hudson River’s very public waters.
But times change, and thankfully, the vast majority of the moral claims have been settled (more on this later, obviously). The problem is that the well-oiled machines that got those moral claims over the goal line are still running on high octane, and they have to keep going, or die. So they stay in the groove that worked for them, well worn over decades, and the growing differences between their goals, methods, and reality is now making hypocrites out of many of these the now-former bearers of the now-former moral claim. Hypocrites do not make good standard bearers.
For example, here in Pennsylvania this past January, purported environmental activists (self-appointed keepers of the green moral claim) banged drums and shouted into bull horns, doing everything possible to disrupt Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural speech, occurring three hundred feet away. What was the issue that impelled them into their most moral rage? Why, it was the very most moral issue of natural gas drilling. And not just any gas drilling, but hydrofracturing deep gas wells. You’d think from their behavior that gas drilling is a moral issue found directly in the Constitution and the Bible, or that terrible crimes are occurring.
But it’s not a moral issue. Gas drilling is an every-day issue like plastics or peanut butter, arising from modern social needs, demands, and industrial processes that environmental activists themselves help perpetuate in their individual daily lives. It is subject to scientific analysis, assessments of risk-benefit tradeoffs, and regulations, both sufficient and insufficient. It is not a matter of principle.
But once Tom Corbett became governor, within his first two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, as a matter of fact, the activists turned gas drilling into an artificially manufactured issue of principle. Invoking the moral claim, protestors complained that the new Corbett administration, in office for exactly two minutes and thirty eight seconds, was environmentally immoral.
Uhhh, where were these folks during the eight-year tenure of the immediate past governor, Ed Rendell? You know, the same governor who handed out gas drilling and hydrofracking permits like they were potato chips, for years before Corbett was even a candidate? Rendell got a free pass from these purported keepers of the flame, apparently because he was of a political party that the activists otherwise generally concur with. Holding Corbett accountable for something he hasn’t yet done, while giving a free pass to Rendell who done a lot, makes them partisan, makes the gas drilling issue partisan, employs a double standard, makes the activists hypocrites, which terminates their moral claim.
Looking farther abroad, international human rights groups were once the only lifeline of political prisoners in Soviet, Socialist, and authoritarian gulags around the world. Today, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disproportionately criticize democratic countries where press freedoms, free movement, and economic comforts make it easy to get access to friendly advocates and information, like Israel and America. And they ignore egregious violations among the harder targets, like Saudi Arabia’s all-encompassing barbarism and summary executions, China’s crushing occupation of Tibet, Iran and Syria’s mass executions of peaceful protestors, and Turkey’s ongoing genocide against the Kurds.
Saudi Arabia, that epitome of cruelty, barbarism, discrimination, lacking basic human freedoms and rights, in fact, has recently become the actual benefactor of Human Rights Watch, and thereby bought off the group. Getting access to authoritarian countries is hard, and if the masters of all things human rights play hardball with authoritarian regimes, they get tossed out. So they withhold full criticism, and instead criticize the enemies of the worst brutes, just to keep the machine running. And they take the brutes’ money, too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and other supposed watchdog groups, are now such giant hypocrites that their misdeeds have spawned watchdog groups to hold them, the self-appointed human rights organizations, accountable to their own purported standards. Groups like NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and UN Watch (www.unwatch.org), which is “tasked with measuring the UN by the yardstick of its own charter,” are playing backup to maintaining the moral claim, and not allowing it to be watered down in the name of convenient politics.
Internationally, certain pet issues predominate, monopolizing press exposure and the supposed moral claim. Despite a nearly two-to-one ratio of Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Arab and Muslim countries, versus the number of Arab refugees from Israel in the same time period, today we hear only, hypocritically, about the Arabs. Compensating Jewish refugees, whose farms, homes, religious sites, and businesses remain under Arab colonialist occupation, is not a vogue subject. It’s still not vogue in Poland, either, by the way, another mass event held at the same time.
Similarly, Turkey’s still-smoldering genocide against the Armenians, its ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, its brutal occupation of Cyprus complete with an Islamic Apartheid wall, and its officialization of Islamic imperialism all get no media juice. Being a NATO member has its benefits, I suppose, but where oh where is the moral claim? Hypocrites all, the Human Rights Watches of the world. They are focused on tiny, democratic Israel.
In conclusion, if someone abdicates their self-appointed role and abandons the helm, which had been based on a universal standard, and instead becomes a hypocrite, then their moral claim has been badly cheapened or lost. Since the beginning of modern social activism, based on the early faith-based model, public deference was automatically given to those who made the moral claim, who rallied us around a universal conscience. No longer. We are in the beginning of a historic shift of moral authority away from the partisan establishment grievance groups and back into the hands of wired up, dialed-in citizens, whose blogs aggregate and focus public wrath on the official failure du jure. Tunisia one day, British Petroleum the next. Shifting and diffusing power back into the public venue is an inevitable and necessary cog in the evolution of social activism. Who knows what beautiful things will come out of it? Thankfully, hypocrisy won’t be one of those things, because it doesn’t pass the public’s sniff test.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com