- We Know What Inspired The Manchester Attack, We Just Won't Admit It
Authored by Patrick Cockburn via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
In the wake of the massacre in Manchester, people rightly warn against blaming the entire Muslim community in Britain and the world. Certainly one of the aims of those who carry out such atrocities is to provoke the communal punishment of all Muslims, thereby alienating a portion of them who will then become open to recruitment by Isis and al-Qaeda clones.
This approach of not blaming Muslims in general but targeting “radicalisation” or simply “evil” may appear sensible and moderate, but in practice it makes the motivation of the killers in Manchester or the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015 appear vaguer and less identifiable than it really is. Such generalities have the unfortunate effect of preventing people pointing an accusing finger at the variant of Islam which certainly is responsible for preparing the soil for the beliefs and actions likely to have inspired the suicide bomber Salman Abedi.
The ultimate inspiration for such people is Wahhabism, the puritanical, fanatical and regressive type of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, whose ideology is close to that of al-Qaeda and Isis. This is an exclusive creed, intolerant of all who disagree with it such as secular liberals, members of other Muslim communities such as the Shia or women resisting their chattel-like status.
What has been termed Salafi jihadism, the core beliefs of Isis and al-Qaeda, developed out of Wahhabism, and has carried out its prejudices to what it sees as a logical and violent conclusion. Shia and Yazidis were not just heretics in the eyes of this movement, which was a sort of Islamic Khmer Rouge, but sub-humans who should be massacred or enslaved. Any woman who transgressed against repressive social mores should be savagely punished. Faith should be demonstrated by a public death of the believer, slaughtering the unbelievers, be they the 86 Shia children being evacuated by bus from their homes in Syria on 15 April or the butchery of young fans at a pop concert in Manchester on Monday night.
The real causes of “radicalisation” have long been known, but the government, the media and others seldom if ever refer to it because they do not want to offend the Saudis or be accused of anti-Islamic bias. It is much easier to say, piously but quite inaccurately, that Isis and al-Qaeda and their murderous foot soldiers “have nothing to do with Islam”. This has been the track record of US and UK governments since 9/11. They will look in any direction except Saudi Arabia when seeking the causes of terrorism. President Trump has been justly denounced and derided in the US for last Sunday accusing Iran and, in effect, the Shia community of responsibility for the wave of terrorism that has engulfed the region when it ultimately emanates from one small but immensely influential Sunni sect. One of the great cultural changes in the world over the last 50 years is the way in which Wahhabism, once an isolated splinter group, has become an increasingly dominant influence over mainstream Sunni Islam, thanks to Saudi financial support.
A further sign of the Salafi-jihadi impact is the choice of targets: the attacks on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015, a gay night club in Florida in 2016 and the Manchester Arena this week have one thing in common. They were all frequented by young people enjoying entertainment and a lifestyle which made them an Isis or al-Qaeda target. But these are also events where the mixing of men and women or the very presence of gay people is denounced by puritan Wahhabis and Salafi jihadis alike. They both live in a cultural environment in which the demonisation of such people and activities is the norm, though their response may differ.
The culpability of Western governments for terrorist attacks on their own citizens is glaring but is seldom even referred to. Leaders want to have a political and commercial alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states. They have never held them to account for supporting a repressive and sectarian ideology which is likely to have inspired Salman Abedi. Details of his motivation may be lacking, but the target of his attack and the method of his death is classic al-Qaeda and Isis in its mode of operating.
The reason these two demonic organisations were able to survive and expand despite the billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars spent on “the war on terror” after 9/11 is that those responsible for stopping them deliberately missed the target and have gone on doing so. After 9/11, President Bush portrayed Iraq not Saudi Arabia as the enemy; in a re-run of history President Trump is ludicrously accusing Iran of being the source of most terrorism in the Middle East. This is the real 9/11 conspiracy, beloved of crackpots worldwide, but there is nothing secret about the deliberate blindness of British and American governments to the source of the beliefs that has inspired the massacres of which Manchester is only the latest – and certainly not the last – horrible example.
- Millions Of Americans Just Got An Artificial Boost To Their Credit Score
Back in August 2014, we first reported that in what appeared a suspicious attempt to boost the pool of eligible, credit-worthy mortgage and auto recipients, Fair Isaac, the company behind the crucial FICO score that determines every consumer’s credit rating, “will stop including in its FICO credit-score calculations any record of a consumer failing to pay a bill if the bill has been paid or settled with a collection agency. The San Jose, Calif., company also will give less weight to unpaid medical bills that are with a collection agency.” In doing so, the company would “make it easier for tens of millions of Americans to get loans.”
Then, back in March of this year, in the latest push to artificially boost FICO scores, the WSJ reported that “many tax liens and civil judgments soon will be removed from people’s credit reports, the latest in a series of moves to omit negative information from these financial scorecards. The development could help boost credit scores for millions of consumers, but could pose risks for lenders” as FICO scores remain the only widely accepted method of quantifying any individual American’s credit risk, and determine how much consumers can borrow for a new house or car as well as determine their credit-card spending limit
Stated simply, the definition of the all important FICO score, the most important number at the base of every mortgage application, was set for a series of “adjustments” which would push it higher for millions of Americans.
The outcome of these changes was clear for the 12 million people impacted: it “will make many people who have these types of credit-report blemishes look more creditworthy.“
Now, as the Wall Street Journal points out today, efforts to rig the FICO scoring process seems to be bearing some fruit. The average credit score nationwide hit 700 in April, according to new data from Fair Isaac Corp., which is the highest since at least 2005.
Meanwhile, the share of consumers deemed to be riskiest, with a score below 600, hit a new low of roughly 40 million, or 20% of U.S. adults who have FICO scores, according to Fair Isaac. That is down from 20.5% in October and a peak of 25.5% in 2010.
Of course, to be fair, we are also reaching that critical 7-year point where the previous wave of mortgage foreclosures start to magically disappear from the FICO scores of millions of Americans.
Mortgage foreclosures stay on credit reports for up to seven years dating back to the missed payment that resulted in the foreclosure. Foreclosure starts, the first stage in the process, peaked in 2009 at 2.1 million, according to Attom Data Solutions. They totaled nearly 1.8 million in 2010 and remained above one million during each of the next two years.
Personal bankruptcies are more complicated and can stay on credit reports for seven to 10 years.
Consumers who filed in 2007 for Chapter 7 protection—the most common type of bankruptcy, in which certain debts are discharged and creditors can get paid back from sales of consumers’ assets—are now starting to see those events fall off their reports. Some 500,000 Chapter 7 bankruptcy cases were filed in 2007, a figure that swelled to nearly 1.1 million in 2010, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Chapter
13 bankruptcies, in which consumers enter a payment plan with creditors, usually stay on reports for at least seven years. Those filings reached a recent peak of nearly 435,000 in 2010 and are set to start falling off reports this year.
All of which, as the WSJ points out, will help to “boost originations of large-dollar loans for cars and homes.” Which is precisely what the average, massively-overlevered American household needs…more debt.
Fresh starts for credit reports are likely to help boost originations of large-dollar loans for cars and homes. Consumers have a greater chance of getting approved for financing if they apply for loans after negative events fall off their reports, in particular from large banks that have stuck to strict underwriting criteria, says Morgan Whitacre, who oversees consumer-loan underwriting at Bank of America Corp.
Credit-card lending, already on the rise, could increase further as a result of fresh starts. Consumers who have one type of bankruptcy filing removed from their credit report experience a roughly $1,500 increase in spending limits and rack up $800 more in credit-card debt within three years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
So maybe that auto lending bubble has a little room left to run afterall…
- In Memoriam, 2017
Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,
You don’t fight for your country, you fight for your government.
The Golden Pinnacle, by Robert Gore
On Memorial Day, America remembers and honors those who died while serving in the military. It is altogether fitting and proper to ask: for what did they die? Do the rationales offered by the military and government officials who decide when and how the US will go to war, and embraced by the public, particularly those who lose loved ones, stand up to scrutiny and analysis? Some will recoil, claiming it inappropriate on a day devoted to honoring the dead. However, it is because war is a matter of life and death, for members of the military and, inevitably, civilians, that its putative justifications be subject to the strictest tests of truth and the most probing of analyses.
Millions have marched off to war believing they were defending the US, which implies the US was under attack. Yet, setting aside for a moment Pearl Harbor and 9/11, US territory hasn’t been invaded by a foreign power since the Mexican-American War (arguably—Mexico claimed the territory it “invaded” was part of Mexico), or, if the Confederacy is considered a foreign power, the Civil War. That war ended a century-and-a-half ago, yet every US military involvement since has been justified as a defense of the US. That has gradually attenuated, in a little noted slide, to a defense of US “interests,” which is something far different.
Only one of those involvements could, arguably, have been said to have forestalled not an invasion, but a possible threat of invasion: World War II. Watching newsreel graphics of Germany’s drives across Europe, Northern Africa, and the USSR, and Japan’s across Asia and the Pacific, it was perhaps understandable that Americans believed the Axis powers would eventually come for them, especially after Pearl Harbor. However, that was a one-off attack by the Japanese to disable the US’s Pacific Fleet. To launch an invasion of the US, Japan, a smaller, less populated nation whose economy depended on imports of vital raw materials, including oil, would have had to cross the Pacific and fight the US, and undoubtedly Canada, on their home territories. The Pearl Harbor attack, provoking America’s entry into the war, proved a strategic blunder for the Japanese. An invasion would have been ludicrous. Similarly, Germany, up to its eyeballs in a two-front war, couldn’t conquer Russian winters or Great Britain across the English Channel. How was it supposed to either cross the Atlantic, or the USSR and hostile guerrillas, then the Pacific, and attack the US? That, too, would have been ludicrous.
The 9/11 attack was also a one-off. A majority of the attackers came not from a US enemy but rather a supposed ally, Saudi Arabia. They received funding and other support from people in that country and perhaps its government. A conventional war against a “state sponsor of terrorism” might have required war against Saudi Arabia; it is still not clear how involved its government was. That option was never considered. Rather, the Bush administration performed metaphysical gymnastics and launched the first war in history against a tactic: terrorism. Although the jihadists who perpetrated 9/11 were self-evidently not the vanguard of an invasion, the terrorism they employed was deemed a threat to US interests in the Middle East, and to life and property in the US. However, none of our subsequent involvements in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen have been necessary to maintain US citizens’ freedoms, the nation’s territorial integrity, or its lives and property.
There are undoubtedly many epitaphs on tombstones in this country to the effect: Here lies the deceased, who died defending America, and not one that reads: Here lies the deceased, who died defending American interests. However, the latter is in most cases more accurate than the former. Who decides the interests for which members of America’s military will die? Those considering entering the military today must look beyond the slogans, contemplate the risks of being killed, wounded, dismembered, paralyzed, or psychologically traumatized, and ask themselves: why and for whom are these risks being borne? “You don’t fight for your country, you fight for your government.” Is it worth risking one’s life for the US government?
In 1821, John Quincy Adams said America had not gone “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and while we wished those seeking liberty well, theirs was not our fight (see “In Search of Monsters,” SLL, 4/11/15). Since then, America has searched for monsters, found, and in some cases, destroyed them. However, as the poison of power has worked its evil on the minds and souls of those who possess it, the monsters have become more ethereal, apparitions conjured like creatures in the closet by children when they go to bed. The war on terrorism creates more terrorists, the monsters of choice since 9/11. The government still pays occasional lip service to “democratic values” and “civil liberties,” but allies itself with regimes which have no more fealty to those values and liberties than the “tyrants” the government opposes. “Defending America” and “Promoting Our Way of Life” have become transparent pretexts for American power and domination unbounded. As Adams so presciently warned, the search for monsters has turned the government itself into a monster, the biggest threat to Americans’ “inextinguishable rights of human nature.”
Those who have fought and died to defend America and its freedoms are noble beyond measure. Those who pay self-serving tribute to their valor, but make war and expend lives as means to corrupt ends are evil beyond redemption. Honor the former; expose and oppose the latter.
- Biden Bashes "Distracted" Democrats For Ignoring Working-Class Concerns
After declaring to a bunch of SALT Conference attendees last month that Hillary “was never a great candidate,” former Vice President Joe Biden criticized the Democratic Party's campaign strategy for winning over working class voters, saying that too many were distracted by the Trump campaign's negativity, the Hill reported.
“Because of the negative campaign that [President Donald] Trump ran, how much did we hear about that guy making 50,000 bucks on an assembly line, [and] the woman — his wife — making $28,000 as a hostess?" Biden asked.
"They have $78,000, two kids, [are] living in a metropolitan area, and they can hardly make it," Biden added. "When was the last time you heard us talk about those people?"
Biden, who was stumping for New Jersey gubernatorial candidate and former Goldman Sachs executive Phil Murphy, sounded like his old campaign-trail self, stoking speculation of another run in 2020.
When asked at SALT if he would run again for the presidency, Biden said “I may very well do it,” but added that he couldn’t commit to another run right then.
As The Hill reports, some Democrats see Biden as the best candidate to try and win back some of the working class white voters lost to Trump. Biden maintains that he hasn’t ruled out another run for the presidency.
- "The Technology Is Getting Real" – Laser Weapons Edge Closer To Battlefield Use
Three months after China unveiled "Silent Hunter" – its vehicle-slicing laser weapon, Stars & Stripes reports that US military forces are testing their own array of hi-tech weaponry.
The Silent Hunter laser is powerful enough to cut through light vehicle armor at up to a kilometer away, making you wonder if China already has more powerful laser weapons only for domestic use.
And now Military.com reports, the toy-like drones destroyed during an Army field exercise at Fort Sill, Okla., last month weren't anything special; however, the way they were brought down — zapped out of the sky by lasers mounted on a Stryker armored vehicle — might grab people's attention.
The first soldier to try out the lasers was Spc. Brandon Sallaway, a forward observer with the 4th Infantry Division. He used a Mobile Expeditionary High Energy Laser to shoot down an 18-by-10-inch drone at 650 yards, an Army statement said.
"It's nothing too complicated but you have to learn how to operate each system and get used to the controls which is exactly like a video game controller," said Sallaway, who hadn't fired a laser before the exercise.
The drone-killing laser was relatively low energy — only 5 kilowatts — but the Army has tested much more powerful weapons. A 30-kilowatt truck-mounted High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator shot down dozens of mortar rounds and several drones in November 2013 at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
Lockheed Martin's 30-kilowatt Accelerated Laser Demonstration Initiative, known as ALADIN.
Since then, researchers have made rapid advances in laser weapons, said Bob Ruszkowski, who works on air dominance projects and unmanned systems in Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works facility.
"We're really on the cusp of seeing the introduction of lasers in future systems," he said.
The weapon tested at White Sands is about to double in power with a 60-kilowatt laser the Army plans to test in the next 18 months, he said in a phone interview May 12.
The laser generates its beam through fiber optic cables like those used by telecom companies, said Robert Afzal, a senior fellow for laser and sensor systems at Lockheed.
"We demonstrated that we could combine large number of these fiber lasers and link them to a weapons system," he said.
Lasers are very efficient at converting electrical power to a laser beam, Afzal said.
That's important for the platforms that carry them, he said. It means they don't need a large generator or cooling system and that high-powered lasers can be easily transported.
"This was the key puzzle piece that needed to be solved before we could begin to deploy these laser weapons," Afzal said. "The technology is getting real. It's the dawn of a new era where the tech can be made smaller and powerful enough to be put on vehicles, ships and aircraft."
Scientists showed the potential of more powerful laser weapons in 2015 by burning a hole through a truck's hood at a range of one mile.
"It was the most efficient high-powered laser ever demonstrated," Afazal said of the test, which mimicked what might happen if a laser was fired at a vehicle from an aircraft.
During an operation, a laser might be used to disable a vehicle where the goal was to capture rather than kill an individual, Ruszkowski said.
"The laser is a surgical weapon and it's something customers are interested in," Afazal said. "Something like that can be easily integrated into an AC-130 gunship. That is something the Air Force is planning on demonstrating in the next two to three years."
Researchers believe they have the key ingredients to make such a system work, Ruszkowski said.
"When we realized that laser technology was maturing enough that we could be close to having something we could integrate on an aircraft we started looking at other difficulties that might arise," he said.
Airflow around a plane can destabilize lasers, so engineers developed a way to minimize turbulence, said Ruszkowski, who added that the Navy has deployed a laser weapon on board the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf.
Laser weapons could be arriving just in time to defeat a growing menagerie of cheap-to-make drones and missiles in the hands of terrorists and rogue states, which could threaten expensive American military hardware.
"The threats are proliferating and changing," but laser weapons could counter some of them, Afazal said.
An advantage of laser weapons is that they don't need ammunition, he said. For example, a forward-operating base could protect itself from airborne threats with a laser as long as there was enough fuel to power a generator and recharge its batteries.
Use of such weapons on enemy troops is a gray area that, for now, the U.S. military is steering clear of since international agreements ban the use of weapons intended to blind, Afazal said.
"Before lasers have been deployed and we understand how they work, the policy is conservative," he said.
- Hong Kong's Housing Market Has Become "A Sea Of Madness" Central Bank Warns
What a difference 16 months makes.
It was in February of 2016 when, looking at the latest trends in the Hong Kong housing market, we wrote that in January [2016] Hong Kong home prices tumbled the most since July 2013, and after a 12 year upcycle, prices were now down 10% from the recent peak just four months prior…
… while the local Centaline Property Agency estimated that total Hong Kong property transactions at the start of 2016 were on track to register the worst month on record.
Fast forward to today when that particular blip is long forgotten, swept away by the record credit injection unleashed by China in the interim, which has spilled over into the Hong Kong’s housing market where instead of concerns about a bubble bursting, the locals are preoccupied with chasing the latest, and biggest yet, housing bubble to form in Hong Kong, as crowds of people line up in hope of being the winning bidder for one of several properties for sales, some of which are oversubscribed as much as 15x.
Another HK new home sales oversubsribed 14.8x today, not as hot as ystdy ‘cos >HKD18k/sq ft. Only hundreds buyers. pic.twitter.com/WrraPLudEk
— Simon Ting (@simonting) May 27, 2017
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According to the latest data from Hong Kong’s Centaline Property Centa-City Leading Index of existing homes, prices have risen an unprecedented 23% in the past year, setting new price records week after week. Over the past decade, home prices in the financial capital of Asia have tripled.
As Bloomberg observes, snaking queues of thousands of prospective apartment buyers in Hong Kong signaled authorities have made no progress in cooling a red-hot property market, where prices are at records.
A HK new home sale site queues with over thousand of buyers.
Last time this happened in 1997. pic.twitter.com/DHtH897ga9— Simon Ting (@simonting) May 26, 2017
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At the Victoria Skye, a luxury project at the former airport site of Kai Tak and at the Ocean Pride development by Cheung Kong Property Holdings people were lining up on Friday and over the weekend for their chance to buy a home at all time high prices.
K&K Property has offered an additional 200 units at Victoria Skye after it sold 306 flats on Saturday, Ming Pao newspaper reported. Cheung Kong will put another 346 up for grabs after selling 496 in a single day, May 26, it said. In both cases, the developers will raise the prices of the additional units by about 2 percent, the newspaper reported.
Yes, HK real estate prices are rising by 2% not over a year, or a month, but in one day!
That, however, does not stop the relentless demand from local buyers. Hong Kong developers sold 8,616 homes in the first five months of the year, more than were sold in any first half since new purchasing rules were introduced in 2013, the Hong Kong Economic Times reported.
What makes this particular bubble different is that this time, it is obvious to everyone, certainly the local press. An editorial in The Standard newspaper on Monday was surprisingly accurate: “successive moves by the government in recent memory to cool the property market only resulted in it becoming crazier. The result is a sea of madness.”
It is also obvious to the local central bank, which, however, like Vancouver and Toronto, appears powerless to halt the tsunami of hot mainland money. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has been tightening rules for lenders, Bloomberg writes, including restricting levels of lending to developers, as it tries to limit financial risks and take some of the heat out of the market.
And yet, so far the result is absolutely nothing as nobody bothers to listen to the growing warnings.
Speaking at a Legislative Council meeting last Monday, Hong Kong’s central bank chief, HKMA Chief Executive Norman Chan, said levels of demand were reminiscent of 20 years ago, just before Hong Kong suffered a property bust, and he expressed concern that people with limited financial resources were buying just because they thought prices would only keep going up, just like in a bubble.
Chan said that while the global economy has improved, uncertainties remain and warned that when the property cycle reverses, “the impact will be serious.”
With real estate prices rising fast – in some cases as much as 2% per day – his warning has fallen on deaf ears. Of course, it will be different when the bubble against bursts, and everyone is “shocked” that the authorities let it come to this again, and then first the HKMA, then the PBOC, will have to again step in and bail out all the bubble chasing speculators once more, or risk yet another economic collapse, rinse and repeat.
- Euro Slides After Greece Hints At Default
EURUSD is sliding in early Asian trading after Greece’s government is reportedly planning to forego its next bailout payment (of around EUR7bn) if no debt relief is offered by creditors (thus leaving it likely to default on its next round of repayments).
Bloomberg reports, Greece’s government preparing to possibly go without next bailout payment if creditors don’t agree on debt relief for the country according to German newspaper Bild (without saying where it obtained the information).
While probably just another negotiating step, it is weighing on EURUSD.
- Inside The Republicans' 'Black-And-Blue' Bill
Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,
Naturally, the solution to the problem of police abusing their authority is to hold them less accountable when they do exactly that.
Leave it to “law and order” Republicans such as Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe to evolve such logic. They have put forth the Black and Blue – whoops, Back the Blue – act (see here) which would make it harder to sue run-amok law enforcers in civil court to recover damages resulting from actions undeniably illegal – while at the same time imposing more severe penalties on Mundanes who affront the holy person of a law enforcer than those imposed on Mundanes who do exactly the same thing.
As regards the first:
So long as the victim – er, perp – was “engaged in felonies or crimes of violence” (how this it to be determined in the heat of the moment remains unclear) the law enforcer administering the wood shampoo or “directory assistance” (beating administered with a phone book in between the flesh and he nightstick, to keep the bruising down) or some other such informal technique, will be immunized from subsequent civil suit by his victim, provided the abuse suffered occurred while the enforcer was acting in a “judicial capacity.”
Breathtaking.
It is obvious – or should be – that this only encourage more lawless “street justice” by the enforcers of the law. It will also encourage more generous application of the law – i.e., of bogus/trumped-up charges (such as felony “resisting”) in the immediate aftermath of an otherwise legally unjustifiable beatdown, to immunize the beaters from the legal consequences of said beatdown.
This GOP act of cop suckage is even better than a throw-away stiletto – which dirty cops used to keep on hand to leave adjacent to the bloodied corpse of their victim, so as to justify his aeration.
That was at least illegal.
Now, they won’t have to bother.
What these Republican brownshirts – and that term isn’t too strong; if anything, it is too soft – propose to do is legalize objectively criminal conduct, the conduct to be justified by eructing that the victim was a “law breaker” and so – presumably – deserved to have more than the legally prescribed justice meted out to him and – critically – before he has been duly convicted of anything at all.
Under the proposed Black and Blue lawlessness, law enforcement is to be given discretion to administer street justice, according to its lights – and the victim of this is to be rendered legally helpless. No damages are to be awarded for any violations of law that occurred during “any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in the judicial capacity of that officer.”
Hut!Hut! Hut! You will respect my authoritah!
At the same time, any assault upon the person of a law enforcer by a Mundane becomes a separate federal crime with a mandatory two-to-five-year stint in federal prison. Twenty if the accused was in possession of a weapon during the incident.
The legal definition of “assault” can be a trivial as jabbing a finger onto someone else’s chest. Or – in the case of law enforcement – defending oneself against an assault by a law enforcer. Attempt to ward off a wood shampoo – a reflex action that is almost impossible to suppress, and – to well-practiced cries of “stop resisting!” – you have just purchased a two-to-five-year ticket to the federal prison of their choice.
It goes without saying that a law enforcer who commits exactly the same offense – assuming he is even charged – will suffer nothing of the sort.
Cannot suffer anything of the sort, because the the law specifies more lenient treatment for assault-by-cop upon a Mundane.
And the lights just got a little dimmer.
One hates to trot out the Nazis, but they seem never to go away. They merely change uniforms. In the Third Reich, to strike an officer of the Reich was an enormous crime, far worse – and treated far more severely – than the treatment meted out to officers of the Reich who abused citizens of the Reich. For which acts, the officers of the Reich were usually rewarded.
As is often the case, the words of the brutal but never truckling Reichsmarschall Herman Goring are worth recalling.
But first, it is worth recalling that Goring was Nazi Germany’s chief law enforcer for a time. Head of the Prussian State Police, creator of the first German concentration camps and founder of the Gestapo, the acronym standing for geheim staats polizei, or secret state police. He was hanged – well, supposed to have been hanged – after the judgment at Nuremburg precisely for his activities as Nazi Germany’s Top Cop.
And here is what Goring had to say about his law enforcers, when the question of excesses arose:
“Shoot first and inquire afterwards; if you make mistakes, I will protect you. Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered. I ordered all this. I back it up. I assume the responsibility and I am not afraid to do so.”
One can imagine Cornyn or similar “law and order” Republican – including the current orange-tinctured buffoon – saying pretty much the same.
What the hell happened to us?
Well, to some of us.
There has always been a jackbooted strain in American politics, the bloody lust of the Red Queen to “off with their heads.” But until recently, it was backwater – along with things like handling snakes, jabbering in “tongues” and sipping strychnine.
But these and worse barbarisms wax mainstream.
Rather than hold those who enforce the law to at least the same standard expected of the rest of us – if not a higher standard – they are to be held to a lesser standard. We, meanwhile, had best not so much as raise our voices to these dispensers of “justice.”
Remarkable.
And it’s only taken 70 years for us to get from there to here.
- Russia Expects China To Help Resolve Syrian Crisis, "Restore The Country"
Last summer, when the Syrian conflict was near its peak under the Obama administration, China unexpectedly warned it was ready to enter the proxy war when in a stunning announcement, Xinhua reported that Beijing was prepared to side with Syria – and Russia – and against the US-led alliance, and that Xi and Assad had agreed that the Chinese military will have closer ties with Syria and provide humanitarian aid to the civil war torn nation.
A high-ranking People’s Liberation Army officer also said that the training of Syrian personnel by Chinese instructors has also been discussed: the Director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China’s Central Military Commission, Guan Youfei, arrived in Damascus on Tuesday for talks with Syrian Defense Minister Fahad Jassim al-Freij, Xinhua added. Guan said China had consistently played a positive role in pushing for a political resolution in Syria. “China and Syria’s militaries have a traditionally friendly relationship, and China’s military is willing to keep strengthening exchanges and cooperation with Syria’s military,” Xinhua quoted Guan.
Rear Admiral Guan YoufeiAs Reuters also added at the time, China tends to leave Middle Eastern diplomacy to the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France and Russia, while relying on the region for oil supplies. But over the past two years, China has been trying to get more involved, including sending envoys to help push for a diplomatic resolution to the violence there and hosting Syrian government and opposition figures.
Fast forward to today when the Syria proxy war is once again at an impasse – especially after today’s warning by Macron that France would get involved after another “chemical attack” – and once again it may be up to China to be the decisive tiebreaker.
According to both Sputnik and the Daily Sabah, Moscow is once again hoping “for China’s help in solving the Syrian crisis and restoring the country: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said Monday.
“Our cooperation with China on Syria at various international venues is unprecedented. We blocked six attempts to pass anti-Syrian resolutions in the U.N. Security Council,” Morgulov said at “Russia and China: Taking on a New Quality of Bilateral Relations” international conference.
The Russian deputy foreign minister added that Russia values Beijing’s position on the Syrian crisis, and hopes that, “the Chinese partners will continue their efforts to promote a political settlement.”
“Together we call for a peaceful and political-diplomatic solution to conflicts, without double standards, unilateral action or attempts at ousting regimes. Our approaches coincide, among other things, on the uncompromising fight against terrorism,” Morgulov said.
To be sure, Russia and China are already largely alligned at the United Nations, where the two nations have repeatedly vetoed Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions against the Assad regime. Moscow has long-standing links to the Assad regime and is its key ally, while China has an established policy of non-intervention in other countries’ affairs, although as noted above that appeared to change in 2016.
Needless to say, should China break from its policy of direct foreign non-intervention, and should it indeed side with Syria, and Russia, as it hinted it would do last year, the shape of middle eastern geopolitics would change overnight. And now we await the official, or unofficial, response from China to Russia’s “indecent” diplomatic proposal for a joint effort in Syria against the US-led alliance.
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