DESCRIPTION OF THE SUSPECT

WHEN ANN COULTER SPEAKS there are always folks in the audience who have gone public with the fact that they refuse to use the brains they inherited by birth, educated by culture, and now deny by choice, by using their similarly bestowed mouths to hiss and boo, and this occasion is no different. But there are cheers as well. Listen and act upon your own best instincts. You're entitled to THAT much I suppose. Even my foes on the Left.

ADMIRING THE PEBBLE GARDEN OUT BACK

[My Dearest] Felix:

When your Trotskyite party is formed, launches a revolution, and follows its namesake's lead in strategy and tactics, I hope you are thrown into the front lines against extremely determined reactionaries—in short, given the choice of possibly being shot by your enemies vs. certainly being shot by your own cadres to the rear. It was how Trotsky won the Russian civil war.

Trotsky's losing to Stalin and ultimately getting Ramon Mercader's ice pick stuck in into his vicious, bloodthirsty head is proof that God probably heard some Russian's prayers for mercy on his country. Given how Trotsky ran his forces in the Russian Civil War, he would have machine-gunned recalcitrant Russian peasants or, to spare bullets, threatened his troops with shooting while they bashed in heads with shovels had he won the power struggle with Stalin. A Trotskyite Russia probably would have been Democratic Kampuchea on a large scale.

Yes, Trotsky was an incorruptible, sterling idealist—just the sort of man who never, never, ever thinks he could possibly be wrong, and that since her serves a great ideal, whatever means he uses to reach it are justified.

Also, I doubt a Trotskyite Party would be any bulwark at all against radical Islam. All Marxists at this time seem to see the Furor Islamicus as a wonderful weapon to turn against the decadent Western bourgeoisie (and are too blind to see that they themselves are part of the decadent Western bourgeoisie now in radical Islam's sights).

Indeed, all Trotskyites I've known seem to share the common Marxist disease—an intense, nihilistic hatred at the civilization that reared them that explodes into a great, black f@5t of rage that leaves the victorious "revolution" squatting in a slum surrounded by desert. Indeed, in this, Marxism is a lot like Islam.

As for the Wobblies, how much luck will an exploited working class will have once there's only one employer—the Nomenklatyura who control the state? I mean, even in Democratic Kampuchea, some were still more equal than others. I suspect the only reason why the exiled Trotsky rediscovered his youthful egalitarianism was because he lost the perks of being part of the new Soviet elite. The Wobblies' descendants should be grateful that their forefathers lost.

Now, as a fan of the late Saul Bellow, let me say that I DO NOT think that the only good Trotskyite is a dead one. An ex-one is fine by me.

Still, the only thing I have to say about Marxism, whether Stalinist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Gramscian, or whatever, is that I hope I live to see the day when anyone talking about Marx will hear the reply, "Which Marx? Groucho, Harpo, Chico, or Beppo?"

—Kepha

We just had to repost that wonderful smackdown of the Felix who was whingeing on about political matrices he obviously had not quite grasped. But Kepha was not finished. His coup de grace, reposted below, adroitly sums up our position here at the Bellicose Augur, so we thank him for his beautiful and concise prose:

It does not do to demonize either the Serbs or the Croats. All of them had the unhappy lot of living at the fault lines of several civilizations.

Further, the Yugoslav experiment further underscores the fatuousness of even "independent" Marxism. Had the erstwhile Croat Austro-Hungarian master sergeant Josef Broz Tito truly fostered a national identity, the knives would not have come out the minute his corpse turned cold.

As for the bombing of the Serbs being part of corporate or political America's drive for hegemonism, I disagree. It was a strictly reactive action taken when our European allies were clamoring for us to "do something", and it just so happened that the propaganda that reached us was about Bosniaks and Kosovars being victims of Serb ethnic cleansing. Wall Street loves money, not blood; and, much as I dislike the Clintons, I give them credit for having pacifist instincts (why, it even takes something like the 9/11 attack to get a Texas cowboy like Dubya Bush to call out the troops—and this after he ran a campaign about getting us out of nation-building overseas!).

The rest of the world looks on us Americans as war mongering barbarians chiefly because they're always trying to figure out ways to get us to protect them from themselves or their neighbors; and secondarily because their intellectualoids swallowed the Marxist kool-aid which has to blame someone else when The Revolution fails to unleash the promised productive forces or when the newly victorious liberated masses of Viet Nam and Kampuchea decide to have a go at each other.

A CLOCKWORK TENACITY

On July 13, 2010 at 8:29 AM, I on the ball patriot comments to an article about strategic debt defaulting at Naked Capitalism :

ANOTHER SPLENDID EXAMPLE OF THE NOW not so misty ‘global conspiracy picture’ gaining clarity with a few more brush strokes of reality. This is just another facet of, and a continuation of, the top down intentional pitting of the prudent against the not so prudent for control and elimination (it goes well beyond instilling deflective jealousy and is more focused on creating anger and hate).

It is an integral part of the larger global divide and conquer scheme whereby the rich eliminate the high resource consuming, expensive to maintain, and always threatening middle class, and replace it with a low cost, non threatening, low brow, law enforcement class, with the ultimate goal being a two tier ruler and ruled world. Its the warm and wonderful industrious Germans against those lazy shiftless Greeks. It is Pernicious Greed replacing good old fashioned Vanilla Greed. Its the same old shit in a different suit!

All of life is politics. The backlash will be strengthened and hastened by having ready a fair alternative to the end of all of this socially destructive parasitic voodoo bullshit whereby economics is falsely and deceptively separated from politics#151;namely#151;a very transparent, INTEREST FREE, alternative utility banking system that is controlled by the people.

Come on kids—it is time to pump up the volume of resistance while you still have a few resources remaining! It is time for election boycotts!

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

A sad reckoning, but then Diogenes contributed his own two cents, adding to the profound real estate bust many of us are feeling:

I live in Phoenix.

I know many people who can pay, but are preparing to walk.

While Case-Shiller indicates that Phoenix is down 55% from the peak, I can tell you that, in many areas, it is much more than this. Case in point: a Scottsdale friend that bought a $950k house to live in, with a healthy down payment, now worth $350k.

At a recent dinner party, this was all everyone discussed. Lots of people are buying new cars, some are buying new townhouses or small homes, and others renting apartments while their credit is good, in anticipation of defaulting. Perhaps this was why conumer spending jumped a month or so ago?

Most of these poeple put 20% or more down, but are porfoundly under water, and may not see a recovery in their lifetime. And they see not a shred of hope coming from DC or anywhere else…

ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE OVER AMERICA

Dear Gabriel,

Yesterday an op-ed by ACT! for America president Brigitte Gabriel, about the recent Gaza Flotilla incident, appeared in The Washington Times (see below). While much of the world raged at Israel's legal right to enforce the blockade of Gaza, Iran continued its headlong march toward acquiring nuclear weapons. We believe one of Iran's goals is to use nuclear weapons to initiate an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack on the U.S. We discussed this in several emails about a year ago.

Tonight at 6:00 EDT a program about the EMP threat, entitled "Electronic Armageddon," will air on the National Geographic channel.

WHILE WORLD MEDIA AND PUBLIC ATTENTION is focused on the Israel-"Freedom Flotilla" incident, Iranian mullahs in Tehran are celebrating their brilliant war strategy in advancing their nuclear program. As world-renowned masters of the game of chess, Iranian mullahs can add "strategic marketing, public relations and media planning" to their resume.

Iran, anticipating a damning report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealing Iran has more than 2 tons of enriched uranium (two warheads' worth), had been actively working with Israel's enemies to divert world attention away from the alarming findings. The IAEA report, released on May 31, the day of the raid, was virtually unreported by the media, as all eyes had turned to Israel and Gaza.

Iran is manipulating operations in the Middle East and building alliances with like-minded jihadists driven by the same goal. Iran's strategic operations surrounding Israel include setting up bases of operation and creating controlled and planned conflicts as part of a bigger strategy not only to suffocate Israel but also to distract the world community from its own nuclear development plans.

Iran began building its base in Lebanon in 1982 with the creation of Hezbollah. By combining nearly 10 Islamic terror groups that shared the same ideology as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran created a proxy Iranian army on Israel's northern border. After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Iran seized the opportunity to extend a helping hand to Hamas, a Sunni group that shares the Iranian Shi'ite leadership's aspiration to wipe Israel off the map.

As evidenced by weapons and material recovered from the ship MV Francop in November 2009, Iran is not a stranger to using the high seas as a way to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran has been working with North Korea, Syria, China and Russia and is actively courting Turkey to create a counterbalance to American power in the Middle East. A Russian submarine flying an Iranian flag docked in Beirut last month, where what is believed to be chemical weapons were unloaded by people wearing "hazmat" or chemical warfare suits. Syria, working with Iran, has supplied Hezbollah with Scud missiles able to reach all of Israel. Iran's plans for Israel are as clear as the writing on the wall.

This summer could easily reprise the war of 2006, when Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon opened a two-front confrontation against Israel, sparked by Hamas' and Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. The conflict dragged Israel into an all-out war with Lebanon, and Iran and Syria were content to pull the puppet strings.

As a result of the flotilla incident, a Syrian television show already has called for suicide bombers to attack Israel; the head of the Palestinian Islamic council on Lebanon is calling for the kidnapping of Israelis; the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is calling for withdrawal from the Arab Peace Initiative; and the Muslim Union of Islamic scholars is calling for the cancellation of all peace agreements with Israel.

And who is talking about the IAEA report of Iran having two nuclear warheads' worth of enriched uranium? Virtually nobody.

Score: Iran: 1, Israel/America/IAEA, 0.

You can hear the laughter all the way from Tehran.

The flotilla incident is nothing more than a spark in a larger web of explosives set and organized by Iran and is the first step toward accomplishing Iran's ultimate goals. First, create whatever distraction is necessary, preferably one that inflames world hatred of Israel, to buy time to finish the bomb. Second, attain the bomb and become the Islamic superpower of the world, with the ability to wipe Israel off the map. This will usher in a new era of hegemony in the Middle East.

The stakes are high, and time is running out. Western governments must stand together against Iran and the new axis of tyrannical power that is developing. While it is Israel that will soon face a nuclear-armed Iran, in the long term, it will be Europe and America facing an Iran capable of projecting its totalitarian ideology across the globe.

Brigitte Gabriel is author of "Because They Hate" and "They Must Be Stopped" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and 2008). She is the president of ActforAmerica.org.

WHY ISLAM IS DIFFERENT

"This is America. That means that if a religious organization legally sets up shop it must be accepted. Why the hate against Islam alone?"

Such is often the earnest query put to those who work in the American Resistance to stop the Islamization of our republic. The following is another excellent retort posted orginally at Jihad Watch by the eminently learned Hugh Fitzgerald:

OH, I CAN ANSWER THAT, as an atheist—just like Pat Condell, Oriana Fallaci, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others— just like you. Only, not like you, Pat Condell, and Oriana Fallaci, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, understand perfectly well that Islam is not only, and not even mainly, about providing an explanation for the creation of the universe and for describing a Creator and setting out some rituals for worship of that Creator.

No, Islam is a Total Belief-System. Islam provides a Total Regulation of Life, and a Complete Explanation of the Universe. Islam discourages free inquiry and encourages adherents—requires them rather—to be slaves of Allah. Islam sets out rules of conduct that are not based on morality, but are simply rules according to what Muhammad, a seventh-century Arab, is said to have transmitted from Allah, and those rules are not subject to questioning, moral or otherwise, or re-interpretation, but are simply divided as to What Is Commanded and What Is Prohibited. And among the many things Prohibited are most forms of artistic expression, including all paintings of people, statues, and music, so that if one finds Muslims practicing this, it is only because they choose to ignore Islam at the edges, and have no defense if other Muslims come along and insist that they halt that music or that painting. Prohibited too is the kind of skeptical inquiry that so threatens the brittle structure and hold of Islam over the minds of its adherents, and in discouraging that, Islam discourages mental freedom of all kinds.

And above all, what is so worrisome about Islam is that it lays claim to the whole world. There is not only a Dar al-Islam and a Dar al-Harb, but between the two, there must be a state of permanent warfare. It is the duty of all Muslims—a duty not tangential but central—to win ever-greater amounts of territory for Islam, for Dar al-Islam. And that must be done by removing all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, but the struggle, or Jihad, to remove those obstacles must go on forever. It is not a case of recovering this or that sliver of territory once possessed by Muslims, though theoretically—and emotionally—priority in the To-Do List of Islam is given to such places that were once under Islam. These include not only Israel, whihch gets such exaggerated attention, but Spain and Portugal, Sicily, Greece, the Balkans (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia), Rumania, Bulgaria, much of Hungary, most of Russia, almost all of India, and more besides. But if the Sudan, or Nigeria, or southern Thailand, or part of the Philippines, or countries or parts of countries in Western Europe, fall to Islam before some of the lands on the To-Do List, that is fine with Muslims.

The main point is that Islam uncompromisiingly divides the world between Believer and Unbeliever, Musliim and Infidel. And Muslims owe their entire allegiance to Islam, and to fellow members of the Umma (that loyalty is one that becomes real mainly when Infidels are involved, for as the behavior of the Arabs toward non-Arab Muslims makes clear, Islam is also a vehicle for Arab supremacism), and as the behavior of rich Muslim states toward poor Muslim states also makes clear, there is no real sharing or help among Muslims; the only help is that provided against Infidels.

I could go on, but why should I? Your question has been answered sufficiently.

There is no comparison between the Total Belief-System of Islam—called, faute de mieux, in modern times, a "religion," (earlier Western men called it not a "religion" but a "faith" or "a fanatical faith"—this "great religions of the world" business started mainly in the early 20th century, with American Protestant schoolbooks of the "Different Peoples of the World" type, with a unit on "The World's Great Religions."

Islam is a threat to me and to you. Christianity is not. Judaism is not. Hinduism is not. Buddhism is not. But Islam....Islam is quite different. And more and more people, despite the best efforts of those in authority to try to make us believe otherwise, are examining the evidence of their senses (including the daily Jihad news from around the world, but also books on Islam, and the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira themselves) and discovering this, disturbing and unpleasant as it is, to be true.

And they will continue to do so, and the race is on: will enough people have grasped the meaning, and the menace, of Islam in time to take the measures necessary to adequately protect themelves, or will the crazed squandering of resources, including the transfer of vast sums from the Infidel peoples to Muslims—even beyond the fantastic sums, the trillions, that have gone to Muslim oil-rich states, battening on an accident of geology—stop, and reasonable, effective, and much less burdensome measures, be taken in time?

One hopes. One keeps on hoping.

—Hugh Fitzgerald