Month: October 2013

Franklin D Roosevelt’s America: A Progressive’s View

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , , ,

Matt Yglesias is shocked that Americans think the 1940-1949 was one of the best decades of last century. His description of the presidencies of FDR and Harry Truman is the best concise version I’ve ever read:

Some salient facts about the 1940s: There was a big war. One participant in that war had an active policy of targeting enemy civilian population centers for wholesale destruction as a battlefield tactic. Initially they did this with large-scale bombing raids designed to set as many houses ablaze as possible. Eventually they developed nuclear weapons in order to massacre enemy civilians in a more pilot-intensive way. The country in question was allied with a vicious dictator whose political strategies included mass rape, large-scale civilian deportations, and the occasional deliberate engineering of famine conditions. And those were the good guys! We’re all very happy they won!

Indeed. Let us never forget that the “victory” of the US over Germany in World War 2 was a savage one. Let us not forget that if the tables had been turned, and Germany and Japan had somehow been able to conquer the United States, Washington would have been found to be guilty of horrific atrocities both at home and abroad.

The German people have largely been implicated in the crimes of the German state. The logic behind this goes as following: yes, some Germans may have been forced to do things for their state that they would not have otherwise done, but for the  most part, most Germans were happy to oblige Berlin and commit crimes in the name of the state. I tend to subscribe to this view. In fact, it is this view that makes me a libertarian. Americans today seem far too comfortable committing crimes in the name of their government. They point to Roosevelt’s administration as proof of America’s wholesomeness.

They are far too comfortable committing crimes in the name of their government that they would never, ever commit by themselves. How many of you would be comfortable bombing Syria? What if Washington bombed Syria under the auspices of humanitarianism? Of an undefined national interest?

The Government Shutdown of 2013

Wood Liberty

Due to the lack of compromise over the budget plan for fiscal year 2014, involving the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare, there has allegedly been a “government shutdown”. One would imagine that the traffic lights are out, there’s people throwing bricks through windows to steal loaves of bread, cars are abandoned all over the roads; etc… etc…

Nah.

Wikipedia has compiled a list of the services of the government that have been shut down. Around 800,000 “unessential” federal workers from have been furloughed. Wikipedia’s official statement is: “The Federal Reserve is not affected by the Government shutdown as it is not dependent on Congressional appropriations for its funding.”

However, one should pay very careful attention to the agencies that have remained virtually untouched. Notice that none of these particular services have been shut down: police forces, military, and all the three letter agencies. What do all of these have in common? They all carry a loaded weapon at work.

The fact that all the Federal government’s armed personnel are still alive and well should wake people up to the reality of government’s purpose. “The government is not your friend”. This is not a silly anarchist slogan, nor is it statement that the government is your enemy. But it is not your friend, and is not there to be your friend, and was never intended to be your friend.

This is not an endorsement of an immature, egocentric Ayn Rand worldview. Or an implication of “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Bah humbug!” But Americans need to take a good hard look at how they’ve allowed themselves to become so dependent on a system that has proved to be unsustainable. In Matthew 7:24, it states clearly: “Do not build a house on a sandy foundation”.

This is not some cruel desire to see people in abject poverty, sick and dying in the streets. Those who talk of drastic government slashes overnight are as foolish as those who believes in the centralized government subsidizing everything.

Sustainability should always be the goal. It should not be considered unfair to ask why there are close to a million “unessential” people paid with Federal tax dollars. If such a catastrophe as this can happen, it is clear as day that the model is not sustainable. There’s no use blaming Obama or the Republicans because we as a nation have let things get out of hand.

The US is still in serious debt to China. The US government is using Chinese gold to pay for its projects. And he who foots the bill calls the shots. If the US government proves itself to be incapable of balancing their budget, then maybe the Chinese will do it for them. They are already starting to buy US companies. Maybe they will demand to manage and supervise government programs themselves.

This is not a tea partier rant. This is not an Ayn Rand pipe-dream. This is not an unoriginal Obama bashing. There is clearly a problem that has to be tackled.

A Glimpse into Ottoman Syria

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One must not lose sight of the fact that, historically speaking, and contrary to prevalent belief, the Alawites wanted no part of the “Unitary Syria” that emerged out of Franco-British bickering in the Levant of the interwar period. Indeed, when the French inherited the Ottoman Vilayets (governorates) of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Alexandretta in 1918, they opted to turn them into six autonomous entities reflecting previous Ottoman administrative realities. Ergo, in 1920, those entities became the State of Greater Lebanon (which in 1926 gave birth to the Republic of Lebanon), the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the State of the Druze Mountain, the State of the Alawite Mountain (corresponding roughly to what the Alawites are reconstituting today), and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (ceded to Turkey in 1938 to become the Province of Hatay.)

But when Arab nationalists began pressuring the British on the question of “Arab unity,” urging them to make good on pledges made to the Sharif of Mecca during the Great War, the Alawites demured. In fact, Bashar al-Assad’s own grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, was among leading Alawite notables who, until 1944, continued to lobby French Mandatory authorities to resist British and Arab designs aimed at stitching together the States of Aleppo, Damascus, Druze, and Alawite Mountains into a new republic to be christened Syria.

From this long-winded (but useful) article by Franck Salameh in the National Interest. What would be interesting to research is how long it took the Ottomans to figure out how to best govern such a diverse set of peoples. God forbid anybody let them govern themselves. Also interesting to note is the “Arab unity” canard that ultimately created the state of Syria. From what I recall, Arab nationalism was largely pushed by a hodgepodge of urban liberals with connections to British and French businesses and rural aristocrats hailing from the Gulf and promised land and power by the British for turning on the Turks.

What a mess. The liberals, by the way, are long gone. They were swept away by the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. The Islamists are largely a reaction to the military dictatorships. Islamism as we know it today only came into being in the late 1950s, when the leaders of the Middle East were all puppets that had been installed by the last vestiges of European colonialism. Arab nationalism was still strong in the late 1950s, so the Islamists lost out in popularity to the military dictatorships (which operated under the guise of “Arab socialism”). Twenty years of Arab socialism – guided by Generals and Colonels – paved the way for the Islamists and their internationalist rhetoric to become the voice of the Arab street.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing Syria dissolve back into six independent states. If the international community could get them to bind their economies together in a free trade zone of sorts, the region would heal quickly and set an important precedent: political decentralization and economic integration work well no matter where they’re applied.

Update: the Economist has more on the ethnic angle in Syria’s civil war.