The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.—Ayn Rand
Freedom requires a price to be paid by every generation.
1. While most of America remains blissfully uniformed by our establishment press, the world’s two greatest superpowers are being manipulated by Dark Forces inside and outside our government, into a major military confrontation that no country wants, and no sane person would ever want.
2. I have no role in the Trump Administration, but over a long career in the active uniformed military, specifically military intelligence, I have made it a point to cultivate many sources of information around the world. From what I can piece together, I want to share my deep concerns about who is behind this march to war, and my recommendations for how our nation and the West can avoid a major military confrontation with Russia.
3. I believe that the American Deep State is staffed by those with a deep, visceral, and irrational hatred for Russia, and these persons have conspired to box in President Trump’s decision making through the Russiagate Hoax. During the time the Soviet Union was expanding and infiltrating our government, I was an outspoken anti-communist, but, despite the lies told by our Deep State, Russia is not the Soviet Union and Putin is not Stalin. Even today, years after the Russiagate Hoax has been exposed, President Trump’s efforts to bring peace are met with resistance. The Establishment Press, deeply influenced and even sometimes controlled by our Deep State, labeled President Trump and those who work for him “Putin’s Puppets” to goad him into taking unwarranted and aggressive steps against Russia. These voices from the establishment press reflect the views of the Deep State, not the American People, and not the MAGA movement, and should be completely disregarded, if not mocked.
4. During almost all of the post-World War II period, and certainly since the establishment of the CIA in 1947, these unelected dark establishment forces have acted to destabilize the world, bringing death, famine, assassinations, violence, coups, riots, revolutions, and destruction to our planet. Currently, these forces are working to provoke Russia into a major — perhaps a final — military conflict with the West.
5. This provocation has many forms. Most recently, it involves the surprise drone attack on the Russian federation strategic arsenal, said to affect 40 bombers, or about a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Since Russian and American strategic bombers are generally required by agreement to be visible to satellite surveillance, never before has anyone engaged in an attack on these visible targets. If Russian bombers can be attacked with impunity, so can American bombers. By this action, the Ukrainian Government has not just weakened Russia, it has jeopardized America. Thus, those in the Ukrainian government who ordered these strikes have made themselves enemies not just of Russia, but of the United States. Making matters worse, this unwarranted attack was followed by Ukrainian attacks on the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia and Crimea.
6. I do not believe that the recent escalation against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet was authorized by or coordinated with President Trump. Rather, it is my view that the Deep State is now acting outside of the control of the elected leadership of our nation. I believe that these persons in our Deep State are engaged in a deliberate effort to provoke Russia into a major confrontation with the West, including the United States. The time is now to take aggressive action against those who abuse their authority as government employees to manipulate the elected leadership of our nation.
7. Growing up in an Irish Democrat family in Rhode Island, I was only about five when John Kennedy was assassinated, but our family viewed John Kennedy as a hero. Not just for my family, one of our most beloved Presidents, John F. Kennedy, in 1961, found himself manipulated by earlier versions of these same Deep State forces when they attempted to manipulate President Kennedy to launch Air Force planes to attack Cuba after the failed invasion, resulting in an open conflict with both Cuba and the Soviet Union. In President Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at American University declaring his vision of peace with the Soviet Union, he declared himself to be an enemy of this Deep State, which by all indications then retaliated by participating in his assassination five months later in Dallas. The American Deep State is not only a threat to peace, but a threat to the President.
8. President Trump has already faced at least two assassination attempts. If there is one person who I believe has the character and love for our nation to rid our government of these forces, it is President Trump. After the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, President Trump displayed the type of personal courage that those of us who have served in the military deeply admire. With great affection for the President, I now urge him to risk the wrath of the Deep State once again by taking actions to purge enemies of our nation within our agencies and departments. Removing such persons from power is absolutely necessary to achieve the type of peace he described during his campaign and the beginning of his Administration.
9. Once President Kennedy realized he was being manipulated, and opposed because he sought peace, he removed Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence, and several of his assistants. I urge President Trump to immediately clean house of any in government who had prior knowledge of or participated in any way in the Ukrainian attack on the Russian federation strategic bombers, and to go further by immediately declaring an end to any support for the Ukraine War. President Trump is right: this is not “his” War. I urge him to recall all open and covert military and other government personnel from Ukraine. I urge him to have all those personnel removed and interrogated by the FBI or the military to learn of their possible participation in unauthorized military activities. Any Americans who have aided and abetted Ukraine’s attacks should be investigated for violation of American law, and prosecuted as necessary.
10. I also believe President Trump should distance himself from certain Western leaders such as German Chancellor Fred Merz, who have acted and spoken in an irresponsible manner with respect to the Ukraine War. If there are countries in Europe who wish to provide military assistance to Ukraine, that is their concern, and they should not be surprised by President Putin’s response to their actions against Russia. If such leaders want to lead their nations to war by persisting in such irresponsible behavior, they will go it alone.
11. I urge President Trump to also distance himself from demonstrated war mongers in our own government, chief among whom is U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham. Those who love wars fought by others are no friends of America, and have no entitlement to be friends of the President.
12. Finally, I urge the American people to stand prayerfully and resolutely with President Trump as he cleans house and acts in pursuit of the type of peace which President Kennedy embraced. Peace is not the normal state of man. Freedom requires a price be paid by every generation. It is time to recommit our nation to both.
The “true sign of adulthood” is multifaceted and subjective, but generally revolves around taking responsibility for one’s actions, becoming financially independent, and developing a sense of self-awareness. It’s about embracing independence, managing personal finances, and making informed decisions that shape one’s life and impact others.
Elaboration:
Financial Independence: This includes managing your own income, paying bills, budgeting, and saving for the future.
Responsibility: Taking ownership of your actions, their consequences, and the decisions you make.
Self-Awareness: Understanding your own desires, feelings, and biases, and how they influence your behavior.
Emotional Maturity: Developing the ability to regulate emotions, handle stress, and build healthy relationships.
Personal Growth: Continuously learning, adapting, and evolving as an individual.
Physical and Mental Well-being: Prioritizing health, rest, and overall well-being.
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The Trump administration has taken steps to free police and fire departments from the Biden administration’s onerous consent decrees.
The Trump administration has dropped the Biden administration’s push for onerous consent decrees on police and fire departments. These legal settlements micromanaged police operations and mandated DEI-based hiring and promotion practices.
“These radical requirements seem disconnected from how police departments actually work,” said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon on Friday. “They tie officers’ hands and make communities less safe.”
The proposed consent decrees required departments to change how they tested prospective hires, increasing the share of black and female candidates hired.
Dhillon also warned that consent decrees drain resources, saying, “Once a judge imposes a consent decree, cities typically spend $10 million or more each year to comply with endless legal demands.”
Such money could instead go toward actually policing our streets.
Data on DEI
DEI practices have been pushed on police departments by Democrat presidents for decades, and economists have studied how such decrees impact the effectiveness of police forces, particularly when they change or eliminate testing standards to reshape the racial or gender makeup of departments.
There can, however, be advantages to hiring minority officers. In many cases, residents of minority communities are more likely to cooperate with officers who share their background. Minority officers can also serve undercover more effectively.
Consent decrees increase minority hiring by eliminating or reducing intelligence test standards. Since all new hires take these tests, the practice risks lowering the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum. Such recruiting has led to increased crime rates, and the largest increases have occurred in more heavily minority areas.
The effect is quite significant. On average, cities that had consent decrees for hiring imposed on them saw their violent and property crime rates falling relative to other cities before the consent decrees and rising relative to other cities afterward. The average yearly decline relative to other cities before the consent decree was -5.3 percent for violent crime, and the average yearly increase afterward was 4.8 percent.
Police departments that hired more black officers after changing their hiring rules also tended to lower their hiring standards the most. A 1 percent increase in the share of black officers correlated with a 4 percent rise in property crime and an almost 5 percent increase in violent crime. These crime spikes hit hardest in areas with the largest black population.
Affirmative Action for Women
In contrast to race-oriented affirmative action, which lowers standards for everyone, affirmative action for women sets lower strength, speed, and size standards that apply only to female applicants. Last year, as Los Angeles battled its worst fires in history, the fire department’s highly paid diversity head faced backlash when asked if she was strong enough to carry someone’s husband out of a fire. Her response: “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
For police, changing strength standards has some offsetting effects. Hiring more women for male-designated positions reduces the number of available slots for men, so lowering physical standards for women results in more competition for the remaining slots for men and thus tends to result in men meeting stricter standards.
Affirmative action for women does not significantly affect crime rates. The change in the quality of male recruits helps offset the lower requirements for women.
Technology and new operating procedures can offset some differences between men and women. Cars can replace foot and bicycle patrols. Two-officer units can replace single-officer units, but that shift reduces the area law enforcement can cover. Eliminating foot patrols also weakens local connections, as officers spend less time building relationships with the communities they serve.
My research suggests that increasing the number of black male cops slightly reduces police shootings of civilians. But more female officers increased shootings of civilians.
Why? Criminals are more likely to assault officers whom they think they can overpower. Every 1 percent increase in the share of women on a police force is associated with a 15 to 19 percent increase in the number of assaults on police..
A recently released study that’s making the rounds in political circles confirms what’s been apparent for years: A significant percentage of leftists are mentally ill.
Conducted by researchers from Tufts and Yale Universities, the study published April 30 found that conservatives self-reported having higher rates of “positive” mental health than their liberal counterparts. According to a graphic summarizing the data released by left-wing election statistician Nate Silver, 51 percent of conservatives described themselves as having “excellent” mental heath, while only 20 percent of liberals said the same.
A similar dynamic also exists among those who self-reported having bad mental health. A whopping 45 percent of self-described liberal respondents described their mental well-being as “poor,” while just 19 percent of self-described conservatives offered the same response.
The data “comes from the 2022 and 2023 Cooperative Election Study (CES) surveys,” according to the analysis.
The study’s authors noted, “While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives.” They offered multiple explanations for this, saying “that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term,” and “that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.”
The authors acknowledge, however, that “overall mood” and “mental health” are “not synonymous,” and that the former is “a more short-term state.”
“It is possible, then, that overall mood, given its shorter term nature, can be influenced by daily stressors and emotional fluctuations that are less tied to ideology,” the study reads. “Asking an individual about their ‘overall mood’ might capture a more immediate response to an individual’s life events, or current state of being. ‘Mental health,’ given its longer term nature, might reflect an individual’s ability to cope with these daily stressors.”
The self-reported numbers aren’t exactly shocking. A quick glance at the current state of the Democrat Party reveals anything but a mentally sound political movement whose members are in touch with reality.
Consider leftists’ unhinged obsession with chemically and surgically castrating minors and allowing female-identifying men to compete in women’s sports. Or their addiction to blaming “racism” on any disparity between white and non-white Americans, the latter of whom they view as “oppressed.” Or their willingness to vilify traditional forms of masculine behavior as “toxic” and tout feminists’ “girl boss” attitude.
Under this “social justice warrior” lifestyle, the “cause” takes precedence above all else.
Contrast that with conservatives, many of whom prioritize their religion, family, and communities. Especially for conservative Christians, faith in Christ is a major blessing when confronted with challenging moments and provides a broader perspective on life itself.
Despite their insistence to the contrary, leftists’ dedication to a worldview built on lies is a recipe for personal disaster. They are a people in desperate need of spiritual revival, and hopefully, one day they receive it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Over the last month, we’ve seen an attack on Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the killing of a young couple in D.C., and now a Molotov cocktail thrown at people peacefully protesting. By the way, what do these incidents have in common? The targets are all Jewish and the guy in Boulder, Colorado somehow managed to get a work permit after his visa expired.
Where else is stuff like this happening? Let’s check out Brussels, once a very traditional European city that tourists loved to visit. Well, check again because Brussels may be exhibit A of Europe’s disintegration and where uncontrolled immigration is running wild.
Brussels, the self-proclaimed capital of the European Union, is no longer the beacon of a united Europe, but an advanced symptom of its disintegration.
The normalization of radical Islamic and anti-Semitic discourse we are witnessing in Brussels is the result of 15 years of leaders abrogating their responsibility. Brussels, through its inability — or unwillingness — to make unpleasant but necessary choices, is setting itself up as the first potential locus of protracted European unrest.
The Islamist Team Fouad Ahidar party embodies a new situation: a political Islam that no longer hides its identity. Instead, it advocates that a religious identity be the underpinning of national cohesion. This fragmentation reflects a profound breakdown in the social contract, between the old European society, which confines religion to the private sphere, and the “new Europeans” (Muslims), who want everything to be subject to their religious doctrine.
Crime rates are rising everywhere in Brussels, particularly in an area in the spotlight for its frequent shootings: the Bruxelles-Midi Zone (Saint-Gilles, Forest, Anderlecht). Between 2022 and 2023, notes the newspaper L’Echo, robberies and extortion rose by 23%, robberies without weapons by 34%, pickpocketing by 27%, and armed robberies by a staggering 53%.
Jew-hatred, often marketed in unconvincing, transparent disguises as “anti-Zionism,” flourishes in many other Islamic-centered and radical left-wing circles…. in Brussels, Jew-hatred enjoys almost total impunity.
As of 2023, 74% of Brussels’ population is of foreign background, compared to a European average of 10%… This demographic transformation or “great replacement,” far from being accompanied by an effective integration policy, has saturated Brussels — overcrowded schools, overwhelmed hospitals, sorely inadequate housing — and exacerbated communal tensions.
In 2022, a report revealed that 35% of young people with an immigrant background in Brussels were living in households where nobody has a job — a breeding ground for delinquency and radicalization.
Brussels is not only a city in crisis, it is a city on the brink of implosion.
Jew hatred? No kidding. It’s more than that. It’s what happens when societies don’t reproduce and eventually have to bring in people to do the work. It makes matters worse when the new kid on the block doesn’t respect your culture and is committed to undermine it. Chaos is the word.
The bad news is that Brussels is no longer Brussels. The good news is that this is our “ghost of the future,” the warning that it does not have to happen here. It does not have to happen here if we commit ourselves to preserving the West and what it stands for.
Yes, it is a battle of civilizations and cultures and we need to be ready for the fight.
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Progressive filmmaker and activist Michael Moore rewrote the words of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance on Monday, asking his readers to unite against President Donald Trump and “MAGA-heads” in the country.
“I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America. And to the democracy for which we all stand: One person, one vote, one nation, part of one world, everyone! A seat at the table! Everyone! A slice of the pie! With liberty and justice, equality, and kindness and the pursuit of happiness for all,” Moore wrote on his Substack account.
The “Fahrenheit 9/11” director said he wrote the new pledge “[f]or the people and for the country that deep down — in spite of its MAGA-heads, in spite of its insanity — we’ve decided to fight for its survival, holding onto a belief that we can make it better, that we can fix it, that we can end the madness and create a true Democracy for which it stands.”
After providing his pledge, Moore called on readers to act and offered several actions that would take just a few minutes, including emailing a one-sentence message to an elected official, calling a member of Congress, signing up for a local progressive group or creating a sign for an upcoming rally.
He implored readers to take at least one political action every day.
“Our hearts do not go more than a second without creating a beat. Our lungs do not skip more than 3 seconds without taking a breath. Can we all, all of us, together, pledge to not skip a day right now without taking some simple sort of political action?” Moore wrote.
Moore has come out against staples of the United States in the past but has usually targeted the Second Amendment, which protects the right to gun ownership. In 2022, he proposed a “28th Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment and enforce nationwide gun control.
The inalienable right of a free people to be kept safe from gun violence and the fear thereof must not be infringed and shall be protected by the Congress and the States. This Amendment thus repeals and replaces the Second Amendment,” Moore wrote at the time.
Lindsay Kornick is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to lindsay.kornick@fox.com and on Twitter: @lmkornick
Whether naive or ignorant, leaving apathy aside, modern man associates the notion of “slavery” with either Roman households and gladiatorial games or plantation management in the South. For the older generations, moral education found dramatic support in the TV series “Roots” (1977). By now, only a few have personally experienced the division of public transportation and benches, etc. by “color” — a shameful reminiscence of slavery and racial discrimination.
We have been taught in school that slavery is evil. As written in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), “all men are created equal”. Of course, nobody should own another man in the same way that he owns a horse or a cow. It is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian attitude towards life. Judging human dignity based on skin color is as immoral as it is stupid. So far, so good.
In the context of a post-Soviet Marxist revival, however, dramatically reinforced by the George Floyd affair, which elevated a habitual criminal to martyrdom, “white” Westerners have been pressured to do penance in recent decades. As if personally responsible for decisions made by those in power centuries ago, they are expected to tolerate “reciprocal discrimination” presented as “positive action” and make reparations for sins of the past. If they stand up for themselves and protest against revisionist absurdities, they risk being accused of “privilege blindness”, etc. (Marxist conspiracy theorists traditionally allude to oppressive “structures” into which only the ideologically initiated have full insight.)
Like bestial, cruel, and undignified treatment of our fellow men in general, slavery in one form or another has been prevalent as far back as our annals go. Even today, old-style slavery is widespread in certain parts of the world. In terms of numbers, however, there have never been more slaves in the world than in the twentieth century — long after the abolition of slavery in the U.S. during the 19th century.
Nobody in their right mind would haunt modern-day Italians with accusations of having exploited neighboring peoples, such as the French, as slaves. However, none of those, who are busy accusing the West of “inherited (collective) guilt” in connection with the eighteenth-century slave trade, take the trouble to address the current situation in Africa where slaves are traded along the same lines as 300 years ago.
In our time, when “The 1619 Project” was born, American school children know practically nothing about the victims of communism. For them, Che Guevara is the epitome of a “cool” rebel, whose iconic silhouette they love to wear on their T-shirts, as opposed to a cold-blooded killer in the ranks of “revolutionary” psychopaths. And few college students can barely account for the heinous crimes of Nazism. Indeed, indoctrinated by both news and social media, many have difficulty recognizing Jews as genocide “victims” rather than “executioners” because of the long-standing conflict with Muslims in the Middle East.
Why this obsession with, not the slavery of “Islamic warlords”, nor that of “KZ-camp Nazis” or “Gulag Bolsheviks”, but the transatlantic slave trade of eighteenth century America which ended more than 150 years ago?
Whether naive or ignorant, leaving apathy aside, modern man associates the notion of “slavery” with either Roman households and gladiatorial games or plantation management in the South. For the older generations, moral education found dramatic support in the TV series “Roots” (1977). By now, only a few have personally experienced the division of public transportation and benches, etc. by “color” — a shameful reminiscence of slavery and racial discrimination.
We have been taught in school that slavery is evil. As written in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), “all men are created equal”. Of course, nobody should own another man in the same way that he owns a horse or a cow. It is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian attitude towards life. Judging human dignity based on skin color is as immoral as it is stupid. So far, so good.
In the context of a post-Soviet Marxist revival, however, dramatically reinforced by the George Floyd affair, which elevated a habitual criminal to martyrdom, “white” Westerners have been pressured to do penance in recent decades. As if personally responsible for decisions made by those in power centuries ago, they are expected to tolerate “reciprocal discrimination” presented as “positive action” and make reparations for sins of the past. If they stand up for themselves and protest against revisionist absurdities, they risk being accused of “privilege blindness”, etc. (Marxist conspiracy theorists traditionally allude to oppressive “structures” into which only the ideologically initiated have full insight.)
Like bestial, cruel, and undignified treatment of our fellow men in general, slavery in one form or another has been prevalent as far back as our annals go. Even today, old-style slavery is widespread in certain parts of the world. In terms of numbers, however, there have never been more slaves in the world than in the twentieth century — long after the abolition of slavery in the U.S. during the 19th century.
Nobody in their right mind would haunt modern-day Italians with accusations of having exploited neighboring peoples, such as the French, as slaves. However, none of those, who are busy accusing the West of “inherited (collective) guilt” in connection with the eighteenth-century slave trade, take the trouble to address the current situation in Africa where slaves are traded along the same lines as 300 years ago.
In our time, when “The 1619 Project” was born, American school children know practically nothing about the victims of communism. For them, Che Guevara is the epitome of a “cool” rebel, whose iconic silhouette they love to wear on their T-shirts, as opposed to a cold-blooded killer in the ranks of “revolutionary” psychopaths. And few college students can barely account for the heinous crimes of Nazism. Indeed, indoctrinated by both news and social media, many have difficulty recognizing Jews as genocide “victims” rather than “executioners” because of the long-standing conflict with Muslims in the Middle East.
Why this obsession with, not the slavery of “Islamic warlords”, nor that of “KZ-camp Nazis” or “Gulag Bolsheviks”, but the transatlantic slave trade of eighteenth century America which ended more than 150 years ago?
Apparently neglected, because it poses an ideological taboo, the twentieth century saw the rise of the most powerful slave empires the world has ever known: Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Communist China.
Totalitarianism has proven to be inextricably intertwined, not only with “arbitrary trials and executions”, but also with “systematized slavery” — the exploitation of men as livestock resources to be consumed at will. Altogether, playing on credulity, human perversion reaches no greater heights than in totalitarianism.
From the moment that Lenin took over the Kremlin, wholesale massacres and slavery began. The Gulag archipelago became the “freezing inferno” of modernity, the burial ground for untold millions of slaves, political prisoners deprived of their humanity.
Neither Soviet Russia nor Communist China is in danger of being accused of the sins of slavery, because they were not involved in the export of slaves from the coasts of Africa. Incidentally, Arab and Ottoman Muslims also go free, although they could be responsible for far greater slave trade (e.g. trans-Saharan, Crimean, and Barbary) and slaveholding than Europeans and Americans combined.
The notorious “Generalplan Ost”, a Nazi vision with historical roots in the nationalist “Drang nach Osten”, was a sickening manifestation of ideological delusion and evil. It envisaged Germanic colonization of Eastern Europe and Russia west of the Urals, based on a premise of racial superiority and natural right to “Lebensraum” at the expense of other peoples. Amounting to a prepared “genocide”, industrial-style plans, apart from “Wehrbauer” settlements, included enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of both Jews and Slavs.
As soon as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was broken, Nazis displayed an unbridled abuse of Russians, whom they considered “Untermenschen” without claim to dignity, deluded by racist dogmas of Aryanism. In contrast, Bolsheviks were literally prepared to enslave and massacre anybody without regard to ethnicity. The loyalty of the individual citizen to the party mattered less than the capricious intrigue that permeated the organization from top to bottom. As the great purges revealed, nobody could feel safe in the long run. — At the hands of anti-Christian, totalitarian ideologies, alternately Bolshevik and Nazi, Russians have suffered in the twentieth century like few others in the world.
The truth is that for decades — both before and after the fall of Nazism — Bolsheviks operated a slave system with “terror” as the principal weapon. Since then, Maoists have followed suit. In moral terms, Bolsheviks and Maoists have no advantage over Nazis — unless “racism” as an ideological, explicit motive is made the ultimate measure of evil.
In the footsteps of Young Turks, who exterminated Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians under cover of WWI, Stalin used WWII as a pretext for deportations of entire peoples (e.g. Crimean Tatars) — resulting in millions of deaths. There was no limit to his social engineering. A vengeful tyrant and untroubled killer, he was as revolutionary as anybody.
Maoists have advanced in a similar way in Tibet and Xinjiang where presently hundreds of thousands are held as forced-labor slaves in so-called “education camps”.
In totalitarian states, the life of the individual citizen belongs to somebody other than himself. Like Africans on antebellum plantations, he is deprived of his right to self-determination. Whatever the rhetoric of “official propaganda”, he remains the property of the state. Without restrictions, he is a slave proper. Everybody except the tyrant himself is in reality a slave.
If the slave resists and demands his freedom, he is punished. And when he tries to escape from slavery, the slave owners send their dogs and guns after him. In the end, his choice is between submission and death. That was also the essence of Kunta Kinte’s reluctant realization in “Roots”.
In summary, there are ideological reasons for political activists to target the West while turning a blind eye to crimes committed on a much larger scale by their own political allies in Soviet Russia and Communist China — not to mention Muslims of the caliphates. Basically, everything useful in the war against Western civilization will be weaponized. The anti-democratic enemy is opportunistic.
Whether you are a “decent man” never depends on your skin color, gender or age, but the thoughts and feelings that guide your actions among your fellow men. It is that simple.
“In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism’s methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.” — Martin Luther King, Jr
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 