Author Archives: theartfuldilettante

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About theartfuldilettante

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.

Notes from the Underground

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Socialism is legalized crime. It makes sense that socialist cities are encouraging violent crime to rise. It’ what the DemComs want. America’s great cities will join the ash heap of history, sadly.

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President Joe Biden’s first year in office has resulted in record illegal immigration to the United States and defiance to constructing new border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

By the end of the month, analysts project that nearly two million illegal aliens will have attempted to cross the southern border since Biden took office — hundreds of thousands of which have been released into the U.S. interior. [Breitbart News 12-28-21]

DemComs smugly assume they will be in power forever, and this is why. They figure bringing in all these illegals, who fled authoritarian countries, will lead them to embrace an authoritarian, one-party America in exchange for freebies. Will it work? Dishonest, collectivist schemes always have unintended, unexpected consequences. We shall see what happens.

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In a population of almost 40 million Californians, 1 percent of taxpayers account for nearly half of the state’s income tax revenues. And Elon Musk, the biggest of the “1 percenters,” just walked. [Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education]

California is heavily dependent on the top 1 percent of income earners to finance their unlimited, expansive socialist programs. Those top income earners are starting to flee. How can California be so stupid? They’re counting on the REST of the country to adopt their policies, so there will be nowhere else to flee. They’re counting on the DemComs to always be in power nationally, to make the US completely socialist, so California won’t seem so oppressive by comparison. They’re also counting on Florida, Texas and other states NOT to secede if we continue on our present, utterly destructive path. Quite a tall order.

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“Common people will believe anything if they are frightened. But critically-thinking people will look for deception and find the truth through the smokescreen of fear. Listen to critical thinkers, not fearful reactors.” — Dr. Suzanne Humphries

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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Stephen Hawking

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“I think college is basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they are not for learning. You can learn anything for free.” — Elon Musk

Conflict: The Iran Regime and its Citizens

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Posted on 12/27/2021, 2:20:05 PM by Kaslin

In July, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) hosted a three-day conference to discuss the future of the Islamic Republic and the prospects for a change of government facilitated by the domestic activist community. Those prospects already appeared substantial in the wake of the previous month’s boycott of the country’s presidential election, which reportedly caused voter turnout to be the lowest in the four-decade history of the clerical regime.

The boycott inspired NCRI members and supporters to conclude that pressure on the regime had not been seriously alleviated over the past year in spite of the fact that the coronavirus pandemic caused a decline in large-scale public unrest. Prior to the pandemic, Iran was experiencing a virtually unprecedented growth in that unrest, with one nationwide uprising encompassing more than 100 localities in January 2018 and another being nearly twice as large in November 2019.

Both uprisings featured slogans like “death to the dictator” which evoked public support for the goal of regime change. This message was reinforced afterwards by smaller-scale demonstrations and by the boycott not only of the presidential election but also earlier elections for parliament seats and governorships. In each case, “Resistance Units” affiliated with the NCRI’s main constituent group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), promoted non-participation as a means for Iranian citizens to “vote for regime change.”

The MEK’s influence over those boycotts was clearly an extension of the influence it had demonstrated in the midst of the uprisings. Although regime authorities had long sought to dismiss the democratic opposition as poorly organized and lacking in popular support, this narrative effectively evaporated in 2018 when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei acknowledged that the MEK had “planned for months” to popularize anti-government slogans and lead protests in every province.

This message was reinforced by Khamenei and others in the context of the subsequent uprising, and even after that movement was suppressed via an extraordinary outpouring of violence, authorities continued to warn about the potential for the MEK to lead further protests and continue expanding its social profile. Such warnings persisted even during the pandemic-related downturn, and have since been proven prescient by new waves of protests.

While many of those protests have been focused on specific grievances such as poverty-level government wages, poor resource management, water shortages, and blackouts, many of them have still featured the demands for regime change that defined the uprisings in 2018 and 2019. Those demands have also been repeated by Resistance Units in the form of public displays that risk arrest for their creators by featuring images of Mrs. Rajavi, or by burning pre-existing public images of the supreme leader.

Behind all of these activities, there appears to be a growing sense that the problems currently facing Iranian society can only be solved through the ouster of the clerical dictatorship. Mrs. Rajavi highlighted this perception in the July conference and concluded that it would be a driving force behind the unprecedented increase of “hostility and enmity between the Iranian regime and society” throughout the year to come.

In offering that prediction, she recognized and praised the very same trends that regime authorities had recognized with a sense of mounting dread. The regime and the Resistance appear to be in agreement about the vulnerability of the clerical dictatorship, though the former is working to conceal it while the latter is working to exploit it. The outcome of this competition may very soon be determined by whether Iran’s foreign adversaries are also able to recognize the same vulnerability, and whether they choose to facilitate Tehran’s concealment or to join the NCRI in adding to pressure on the regime.

Such recognition shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. The Iranian regime’s actions both at home and abroad have frequently betrayed its own vulnerability for all to see. Even the installation of Ebrahim Raisi as president, over the clear objections of the Iranian people, was indicative of just how much the regime felt threatened by the recent growth of unrest.Raisi’s primary claim to fame is as one of the leading perpetrators of a massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, and this legacy of human rights abuses was reinforced during the 2019 uprising, when Raisi was elevated to the presidency.

Even the installation of Ebrahim Raisi as president, over the clear objections of the Iranian people, was indicative of just how much the regime felt threatened by the recent growth of unrest.

Raisi’s primary claim to fame is as one of the leading perpetrators of a massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, and this legacy of human rights abuses was reinforced during the 2019 uprising, when Raisi oversaw key aspects of the crackdown as head of the judiciary. His ascension to the presidency was characterized by Mrs. Rajavi as an emerging source of the aforementioned “hostility and enmity.” And even before Raisi was inaugurated in August, the growth of unrest lent support to that conclusion.

Of course, Supreme Leader Khamenei wouldn’t have chosen Raisi as president if he did not believe that the “butcher of 1988” would be capable of overcoming that unrest. But his ability to do so may depend in large part on whether the international community choses to turn a blind eye to his culpability for crimes against humanity, or whether it opts instead to exert more pressure on his administration and on the regime itself.

Only by adopting the latter option will Western powers be fulfilling their solemn duty to safeguard human rights for vulnerable groups throughout the world. But what is just as important is the fact that this strategy will challenge Tehran’s longstanding impunity and thus make it less likely that the regime will expand its nuclear activities, its financing of international terrorism, or any of its other malign activities.

Beyond that, new international pressure on the Iranian regime would go a long way toward supporting the democratic opposition in its efforts to facilitate regime change. This goal has been absent from Western policymaking for a very long time, but the ongoing trend of domestic unrest in the Islamic Republic should awaken lawmakers to the fact that regime change is closer at hand than ever before, and more attainable than many observers ever thought possible.

The Myth of January 6th

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The myth that January 6 was an insurrection that aimed to “overthrow the government” must not be allowed to stand. The time to counter the Big Lie is now.

Most people, I believe, think that the age of myth-making lies in the past. Myths are the things that Ovid wrote about, or Robert Graves cataloged. Their home is in the ancient world, primarily. They live on today mostly in books or in quips. Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, provides a good illustration of the latter when he exclaims that Lady Bracknell is a Gorgon and then admits that “I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth.”

Nevertheless, in school, if we went to an artsy one, we learned that myths were important. They told us not about what happened in the world, precisely. Rather, they told us interesting stories about character, motivation, and the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, crime and punishment.

All of that is true, but I submit that the impulse to myth-making, if atavistic in origin, remains a potent force and one, moreover, that has been folded into the metabolism of partisan politics.

An illuminating example from the recent past is the public understanding of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist radical who had adulated the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. The bullets had barely left Oswald’s rifle before this was known. But the truth about the identity of Kennedy’s assassin was quickly overtaken and enveloped by a partisan myth, assiduously massaged and circulated by Kennedy’s widow, the media, and the political establishment.

brief, the myth about Kennedy’s assassin downplayed Oswald’s communist affiliation and insisted that Kennedy was killed not (as he in fact was) by a lone gunman by rather a generalized “spirit of madness and hate.”

That phrase dripped from the pen of James Reston, one of America’s star columnists whose post at the New York Times amplified and legitimated his opinions nationwide. (The Times was still a respected newspaper in 1963.)

The process of substituting a “climate of hate” for Oswald’s index finger started almost immediately. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson notes that on the trip back from Dallas, Lady Bird Johnson and others asked if Jackie Kennedy wanted to change out of her blood-spattered clothes. “No,” the grieving widow would always reply, “I want them to see what they have done.”

Who, Piereson asks, is “they”? Camelot and the Cultural Revoution traces the rapid process of myth-making that greeted the assassination of Kennedy. It was a transformation or “metamorphosis” as dramatic as anything Ovid described. Kennedy was killed by a wacko communist radical sent round the bend by America’s vendetta against Castro. Within days, Oswald, the lone communist, had been replaced or transformed into a dispensable persona of a mythic “far-Right.” Piereson quotes Drew Pearson, another influential columnist (for The Washington Post*), who argued that American presidents who had been assassinated were killed not by “the fanaticism of one man” but by “powerful influence molders” who “preached disrespect for the authority of the government and the man in the White House who symbolized government.”

Sound familiar? From there it was but a small step for demands that the government tamp down on what Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia University, called the “sin” of “prejudice.” The state, Kirk said, needed to exert “more energy against extremists and their poison.” It may go without saying that he did not mean communist extremists.

Is there anything that could have been done to intervene in that exercise of myth-making that surrounded the Kennedy assassination? Anything that could have short-circuited the metamorphosis of the criminal action of a single deranged communist into the group responsibility of nebulous “haters” and “extremists” throughout the country?

do not know the answer to that. But the same question has come around again with respect to the events of January 6, 2021 and, more generally, with respect to support for Donald Trump.

Here we can witness in real time the effort to enact another myth—the myth that the events at the Capitol on January 6, constituted an “insurrection” as deadly as Oklahoma City, as 9/11, as Pearl Harbor, even (if you are to believe Joe Biden) the “Civil War.” You could see that narrative, that process of mythopoeia, begin to take place even before the protestors withdrew from the Capitol. It was all nonsense. But it has been pursued assiduously by the left-wing political apparatus in the government and their megaphones in the media.

Nearly year out now, we can see phase two of the operation take shape, as globalist think tanks like the Niskanen Center send around 

send around fundraising newsletters warning that “the majority of the Republican party promotes an authoritarian narrative, purges GOP dissenters, and encourages anti-democratic legislation,” i.e., legislation that aims to check the woke progressivism of the globalist Left. Send money now!

Then we have Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calling for a “full program of events” and “solemn observance” to mark the anniversary of theinsurrection event. If only she can cadge official recognition for the event, perhaps she can inscribe it on the national conscience as a Democratic talking point.

She will have plenty of support from academia. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, has just announced “The Shock of January 6: First Annual Conference on America’s First Attempted Coup Since 1865.” Will it be a perpetual event? The event will stream live on Twelfth Night, January 6, so those not celebrating Epiphany can tune in to watch Jim Acosta, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Jonathan Karl, and other, similarly qualified figures weigh in on “extremists,” Trump sympathizers, and other threats to the equanimity of the regime.

I have no doubt that there are many other initiatives of mythopoetic endeavor, from the preposterous and illegally formed January 6 Commission on down. But the new myth has not yet gelled. There are too many dissenting voices, too many accounts of what actually happened that day that conflict with the regime narrative.

The trick now is to magnify those alternative accounts, disseminate them as broadly and as authoritatively as possible. There is no reason that Nancy Pelosi or Jim Acosta or Joe Biden or Merrick Garland should be allowed to define the reality of what happened on January 6. The work of writers like Julie Kelly at American Greatness and Darren Beattie at Revolver News needs to be echoed and extended as vigorously as possible. Myths can be pernicious as well as illuminating or entertaining. The myth that what happened on January 6 was an insurrection that aimed to “overthrow the government” or “overturn the election” must not be allowed to stand and gain credence. The time to counter that Big Lie is now.

  • * The original version of this essay identified Drew Pearson as a columnist for The New York Times. In fact, he worked for The Washington Post.

Liberals are Miserable People

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They say misery loves company, and that may be why liberals always want to extend their control over everyone and everything—because they are miserable people. Thomas Byrne Edsall covers some of the survey evidence about the misery and unhappiness of liberals in a New York Times article back in October:

Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss.

Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.Y.U., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester.

Using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine other countries, Napier and Jost note that they

consistently found conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style. We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.”

Need I point out that Napier and Jost are far-left? Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that the issue of “inequality” shows up for heavy work here. I suppose it makes some sense, given how the super rich are skewing left these days, and must be unhappy with guilt about this.

But let’s continue with a paper less enslaved (see what I did there?) to leftist ideology:

A very different view of conservatives and the political right emerges in Schlenker, Chambers and Le’s paper:

Conservatives score higher than liberals on personality and attitude measures that are traditionally associated with positive adjustment and mental health, including personal agency, positive outlook, transcendent moral beliefs, and generalized belief in fairness. These constructs, in turn, can account for why conservatives are happier than liberals and have declined less in happiness in recent decades.

In contrast to Napier and Jost’s “view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality,” Schlenker, Chambers and Le argue:

Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general and in specific domains (e.g., marriage, job, residence), report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems, and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.

There’s a lot more in Edsall’s long survey of academic literature on this subject, and as a liberal himself Edsall resists drawing the sensible conclusion that conservatives are generally much happier than liberals because of their conservatism.

But if you want to see a great example of the essential miserableness of liberals, take in this piece of work from MSNBC:

NORAD’s Christmas Eve Santa Claus tracker needs to end

By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

I’d prefer we end the tradition because it’s about time that we decoupled St. Nick from the world’s most powerful military. American culture is saturated with a desire to associate the military with the saccharine. We get videos of soldiers returning home to their pets or children but never questions about why they were deployed for so long or what threat they were fighting; military jets flying over NFL games give us an injection of jingoist testosterone before more regionally focused battles of testosterone are played on the field; and we get the Netflix movie “Operation Christmas Drop,” a seasonally themed rom-com that cheerfully seeks to boost approval for America’s military base in Guam. . .

I suppose we should be glad that between the existential threat of climate change, which is urgent, and the threat to democracy from the “insurrectionist” right that nearly toppled our Constitution on January 6, some liberals still have the bandwidth to worry about NORAD’s Santa tracker.

Steven Hayward

Individual Rights are the ONLY RIGHTS

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Individual rights exist when the government says: “You are sovereign over your own life. As long as you don’t infringe on this same sovereignty in others, you are free to do as you please. We will uphold your right to life, liberty and property as inalienable.”

“Rights” as they’re known today: “We will protect your rights [LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, racial minority rights], and even give you the property of others beyond what you’re entitled to, via the wheeling and dealing of daily dirty politics. In exchange, we OWN you. When we tell you to mask up, to report your nonvaccinated neighbors, to hand over 50 or 90 percent of your income, to stop using fuel even if it means living the lifestyle of an 18th Century pioneer — WHATEVER we tell you to do, you do it. Why? Because we own you.”

The only rights that matter are individual rights. “Rights” as they’re defined today are not rights at all. It’s nothing more than a legalized criminal protection racket. If you sell your soul to the devil — then you deserve whatever you get. These legalized mobsters in the Imperial City or your state capitals will never have your back … not when it doesn’t suit them.

That’s what happened to America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Rebel Jesus

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The media distorted parts of Jesus’ message right from the start. The Gospels, and the first generation of Jesus’ followers, effectively altered or hid his more radical teachings, and what has been preached from a million pulpits and that we still get from many today is a gross distortion. Jesus was not preoccupied with individual “sin” but with systemic injustice, in opposition to the commercializing empire of his time. The historical Jesus disclosed by contemporary scholarship appears to be fundamentally the same as the Jesus who is preached and practiced in the Catholic Worker movement, for example. And the parallels between his conflict with Rome and our own with imperial America are striking indeed.

Then as now, the maldistribution of wealth was quite severe, with peasants comprising the bulk of the population. “The term peasant ? denotes a relationship of exploitation in which the vast majority who produce the food on which everyone and everything depends are consistently relieved of their surplus, so that a small minority have a huge surplus while most remain at a subsistence level. Simply: a peasant is a systematically exploited farmer.” John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus 4 (1995). Being a Jewish peasant had its saving moments, however, because of “a traditional ideology of land ? enshrined in the ancient Pentateuchal laws.” Just as the people were to rest on the seventh or Sabbath Day, so God’s land was to rest on the seventh or Sabbath Year, when Jewish debts were to be remitted and Jewish slaves released. Exodus 23:10-11; Deuteronomy 15:1-3, 12-14,” Id. 5-6. And in the “Jubilee Year, the year after seven sets of Sabbath Years, all expropriated lands and even village houses, though not city ones, were to revert to their original or traditional owners. Leviticus 25:10, 18. “While the Jubilee Year was most likely no longer implemented at all by the first century, the Sabbath Year was probably still more or less enforced.” Id. 6. Those ancient laws “refuse to see debt, slavery, or land expropriation simply as business transactions. The land is a divine possession not a negotiable commodity[:] ? ‘The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.’” Leviticus 25:23.

By Jesus’ day, however, the Roman Empire was no longer a traditional but a commercialized agrarian empire. To the Roman imperialist, land accumulation was a sensible business practice and debt foreclosure the best and quickest way to accomplish it. Crossan, The Essential Jesus 6. In first century Palestine, the Jewish peasantry was being pushed into debt and displaced from its holdings at unusually high rates, since land became, under the commercialized Roman economy, less an ancestral inheritance never to be abandoned and more an entrepreneurial commodity rapidly to be exploited. As higher rates of imperial and Herodian taxation forced increasing numbers of peasants from their land, there developed a growing class of destitute people with few options. One could become an artisan, a prostitute, a beggar, or a bandit. In this context Jesus of Nazareth appeared, the son of an artisan.

“Repent and believe in the gospel.” But “repentance” is not about a feeling of penitance for individual sins. It means a turning, at a more fundamental level, of the heart and soul to God. Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision 122 n. 74, and 163-164 (1987). “The prophets called Israel to repent, which meant to turn or return, and which referred primarily to a change in Israel’s collective life, and not simply to a change in individual lives.” Id., 153 text and n. 13. Belief in the gospel does not mean merely to believe, as a condition of salvation, in certain doctrines or teachings, but to “give one’s heart to” the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand. See Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time 137 (1995). And the Kingdom entails both religious and political meanings, in a situation of imperial domination and colonial exploitation. “The phrase evokes an ideal vision of political and religious power, of how this world here below would be run if God, not Caesar, sat on the imperial throne.” John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus 7-8.

In the Kingdom of God, it is not the rich who are favored, but the destitute. As destitute people flocked to Jesus to hear his teaching and to see or be cured by his mighty works, he taught them by the example of his life, as well. Be compassionate as God is compassionate. (Luke 6:36; see Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again 46, text and fn. 1.) Judge not, lest you be judged. If you have two coats and your brother has none, give one to your brother. Never refuse alms to one who asks for them. What you do for the least of these, you do for me. Love your neighbor as yourself. And who is my neighbor? A broken stranger lying by the side of the road. Eating and drinking, Jesus practiced open commensality, shared table fellowship, that mirrored many of his stories in their radical egalitarianism. He practiced free healing, declining to set up a brokered healing business that would stay in one place and let his disciples mediate access to him for a fee. Instead, he was always on the move for the next town, personally and directly accessible, and always performed, as it were, free of charge. He didn’t make people dependent on his power: he empowered them.

The stories of Jesus’ interactions with women are remarkable. First century Judaism was deeply patriarchal. Women had few rights; they could not be witnesses in a court of law, or initiate a divorce. They were not to be taught the Torah and were to be separated from men in public life. Respectable women did not go out of the house unescorted by a family member; adult women were to be veiled in public. But Jesus defended the woman who entered an all-male banquet, unveiled and with her hair unbraided, and washed his feet with her hair. While being hosted by Mary and Martha, he affirmed Mary’s choice of the role of disciple. And of course, he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Women were apparently part of the itinerant group traveling with Jesus; the movement itself was financially supported by some wealthy women. And the evidence is compelling that women played leadership roles in the early post-Easter community. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time 57 (1995).

“When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them.” Gospel of Thomas 14:2. See also Luke 10:4-11 = Matt 10:8-14 and Mark 6:8-13 = Matt 10:8-10a, 11 = Luke 9:2-6. John Dominic Crossan in a study based in part on the Didache argues persuasively that the itinerants who went out preaching the gospel in the century or so following Jesus’ ministry offered free healing in exchange for a meal, carrying on the practice mentioned, briefly, in the Gospels. Crossan, The Essential Jesus 9-10, and The Birth of Christianity, passim. Crossan speculates that the disciples were sent out two by two because one of them was likely female in many cases, and the two would travel as a couple for the woman’s protection.

The Kingdom movement was thus a form of community organizing, Jesus’ program of empowerment for a peasantry becoming steadily more hard-pressed through insistent taxation, indebtedness, and eventual loss of land, within the commercialized Roman Empire under Augustan peace and a Lower Galilee under Herodian urbanization. “Jesus lived, against the systemic injustice and structural evil of that situation, an alternative open to all who would accept it: a life of [free] healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy, programmatic homelessness, and fundamental egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination, and of divine contact without hierarchy. He also died for that alternative.” Crossan, The Essential Jesus 12.

The parallels with contemporary events could scarcely be more clear, or more striking. The form of globalization promoted by the elites of the rich countries and their instruments such as the IMF and the World Bank have driven peasants the world over off their land and into lives and early deaths of destitution. For example, “[p]rior to the 1910 revolution, wealthy landowners had confiscated most of indigenous Mexico’s communal farmland, reducing the campesinos to a state of serfdom. ? [L]argely through the struggle of Zapata and his followers ? the Mexican constitution of 1917, [in] Article 27, guaranteed the return and protection of communal land to farmers. ? [A]lthough land reform [thus] became law in Mexico, it was only partially carried out. However, on January 1, 1994, as a condition of Mexico’s joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Article 27 of the Mexican constitution was abolished. An organization of Mayan Indians from the state of Chiapas, calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), recognized this abolition as a death sentence for Mexico’s rural indigenous population. NAFTA would force farmers who could not compete with foreign investors’ technology and equipment off the land, thus opening up a wealth of cheap land and labor for exploitation by international corporations.” Donald Nollar, “Fighting For Our Lives,” Catholic Agitator (May, 2001), p. 1.

The rest has become part of our recent history, and is still going on. Similar scenarios have played out all across the globe. The rich countries continue to enforce protectionist policies and provide subsidies for their own basic industries, while demanding access to the markets of developing countries. “Free trade” is a euphemism for unfair trade. Protectionism is the only way any country has ever developed a domestic industrial base. The destruction of trade barriers and other mechanisms have, however, opened up many Third World countries to imports from the rich countries, resulting in the devastation of Third World industries, agriculture, and entire economies. Haiti is one of the more heart-rending examples.

The stories of Jesus’ interactions with women are remarkable. First century Judaism was deeply patriarchal. Women had few rights; they could not be witnesses in a court of law, or initiate a divorce. They were not to be taught the Torah and were to be separated from men in public life. Respectable women did not go out of the house unescorted by a family member; adult women were to be veiled in public. But Jesus defended the woman who entered an all-male banquet, unveiled and with her hair unbraided, and washed his feet with her hair. While being hosted by Mary and Martha, he affirmed Mary’s choice of the role of disciple. And of course, he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Women were apparently part of the itinerant group traveling with Jesus; the movement itself was financially supported by some wealthy women. And the evidence is compelling that women played leadership roles in the early post-Easter community. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time 57 (1995).

“When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them.” Gospel of Thomas 14:2. See also Luke 10:4-11 = Matt 10:8-14 and Mark 6:8-13 = Matt 10:8-10a, 11 = Luke 9:2-6. John Dominic Crossan in a study based in part on the Didache argues persuasively that the itinerants who went out preaching the gospel in the century or so following Jesus’ ministry offered free healing in exchange for a meal, carrying on the practice mentioned, briefly, in the Gospels. Crossan, The Essential Jesus 9-10, and The Birth of Christianity, passim. Crossan speculates that the disciples were sent out two by two because one of them was likely female in many cases, and the two would travel as a couple for the woman’s protection.

The Kingdom movement was thus a form of community organizing, Jesus’ program of empowerment for a peasantry becoming steadily more hard-pressed through insistent taxation, indebtedness, and eventual loss of land, within the commercialized Roman Empire under Augustan peace and a Lower Galilee under Herodian urbanization. “Jesus lived, against the systemic injustice and structural evil of that situation, an alternative open to all who would accept it: a life of [free] healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy, programmatic homelessness, and fundamental egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination, and of divine contact without hierarchy. He also died for that alternative.” Crossan, The Essential Jesus 12.

The parallels with contemporary events could scarcely be more clear, or more striking. The form of globalization promoted by the elites of the rich countries and their instruments such as the IMF and the World Bank have driven peasants the world over off their land and into lives and early deaths of destitution. For example, “[p]rior to the 1910 revolution, wealthy landowners had confiscated most of indigenous Mexico’s communal farmland, reducing the campesinos to a state of serfdom. ? [L]argely through the struggle of Zapata and his followers ? the Mexican constitution of 1917, [in] Article 27, guaranteed the return and protection of communal land to farmers. ? [A]lthough land reform [thus] became law in Mexico, it was only partially carried out. However, on January 1, 1994, as a condition of Mexico’s joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Article 27 of the Mexican constitution was abolished. An organization of Mayan Indians from the state of Chiapas, calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), recognized this abolition as a death sentence for Mexico’s rural indigenous population. NAFTA would force farmers who could not compete with foreign investors’ technology and equipment off the land, thus opening up a wealth of cheap land and labor for exploitation by international corporations.” Donald Nollar, “Fighting For Our Lives,” Catholic Agitator (May, 2001), p. 1.

The rest has become part of our recent history, and is still going on. Similar scenarios have played out all across the globe. The rich countries continue to enforce protectionist policies and provide subsidies for their own basic industries, while demanding access to the markets of developing countries. “Free trade” is a euphemism for unfair trade. Protectionism is the only way any country has ever developed a domestic industrial base. The destruction of trade barriers and other mechanisms have, however, opened up many Third World countries to imports from the rich countries, resulting in the devastation of Third World industries, agriculture, and entire economies. Haiti is one of the more heart-rending examples.

ROBERT ROTH can be reached through his website, Healing Justice.

NOTE: The ideas expressed in this post are not necessarily shared by the Artful Dilattente.

Why Are Suddenly All the Democrats in Power Getting Sick?

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Last year, you almost never heard of a Democrat in power getting COVID. Only Republicans. This year, every time you turn around a Democrat “has tested positive for COVID.”  That seems strange. Why would the dishonest, one-party media conceal Democrats getting COVID last winter, while publicizing — almost bragging — about it this year?

Remember: The Democrats are always in charge, because they control the media, the schools, the universities, the think tanks, the medical establishment and the establishment of government (even when Trump was President). It’s all about optics and the narrative — nothing whatsoever about health, science or reality.

I will speculate that last year Democrats wished to show how reckless and irresponsible Republicans were, while trying to show that Democrats were clean and healthy. This year, the focus is different. They’re trying to get people to panic. Even with unprecedented voter fraud, no voter ID requirements and millions of illegal aliens being shipped in to vote, they still could lose a few elections. They must have you afraid, because it keeps them in control. Because they think you’re gullible and stupid (like they are), they want you to think, “Wow. Even those smart Democrats are getting sick. It must be really bad. I had better quadruple mask and get dozens of boosters, hunker down, duck and cover, and — above all — mock, shame and segregate anyone I suspect of not having been vaccinated. Just like our commendable President and the infallible Dr. Fauci have told us to do.”

Of course, all of this goes on while millions of people who got vaccinated get COVID. Not that the vast majority will even come close to dying of it.

We live in interesting times. Not in a good way.

No society that falls for even two percent of this can hope to survive. Our only hope is that nobody believes it. And that maybe, just maybe– one day soon — mass numbers of people will actually start to rebel against it in a big way.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Best Wishes for a Safe and Blessed Christmas Season. The Artful Dilettante