Venezuelan Fascism

Venezuelan Fascism

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All, 

As Venezuela descends into economic failure and political authoritarianism, the young people are taking to the streets. As one youthful demonstrator recently told a reporter, “As long as there is repression, we will keep coming out.”

President Nicolas Maduro, the blow hard holding the reins of power in Caracas, is calling the people joining the student-led movement, “fascists.”

Really?

Let us take a closer look.

The founder of fascism was Benito Mussolini, a life-long socialist and nationalist.

He spent his early adulthood as an activist and leftist author becoming the editor of “Forward,” the official paper of the Italian Socialist Party. When the party split apart after the First World War, Mussolini took the expelled nationalist socialists and formed the National Fascist Party.

He believed in a one-party dictatorship and used the security services and his Black Shirts to intimidate and beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

Nicolas Maduro is also a life-long socialist and nationalist. He spent his early life as an activist and radical union leader. As Hugo Chavez rose to power, Maduro was a principal organizer within the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Maduro believes in a one-party dictatorship and uses the security services and his paramilitary colectivos to intimidate, beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

The fascists in Venezuela are not the protesters, they are Nicolas Maduro and the thugs who keep him in power.

Mike

Chicago Professionals

The mayor of Chicago… respect for the office.


CHICAGOLAND, PART TWO
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline


Arthur Bishop, the new director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), was convicted in the 1990s of bilking his employer, a substance abuse counseling center, out of money received from its clients. According to the center’s director at the time, Bishop created a bogus program for convicted drunk drivers. He took money from patients and provided them with forms they wrongly believed would allow them to get their driver’s licenses back.

Unfortunately for Bishop’s victims, the center wasn’t licensed by the state to provide that service at the time. Bishop pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, is standing by his decision to make Bishop the state’s top child-welfare official. He claims to see no connection between Bishop’s corruption and his ability to lead a department that has been plagued by charges of failure to keep track of its money. In December, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued a Chicago businessman and friend of a former DCFS director to recover millions of dollars in state grant money the businessman allegedly misspent.

If Quinn can’t see the connection between stealing and unfitness to run a large government agency, perhaps he can connect the dots on Bishop’s own “children and family” issues. Court records show that a paternity case was filed against Bishop in 2003, when he was a DCFS deputy director. DNA tests showed he was the father of Erica Bishop, then 17.

According to the child’s mother, Bishop, who was married to another woman when Erica was born, “denies his own daughter’s existence” even though “he visited us on numerous occasions at my parents’ house when she was a child.” The mother further alleged that Bishop “even asked me if he could live in with me if his wife put him out after she learned the truth.”

The mother obtained a $4,175 judgment against Bishop and health insurance coverage for Erica until she turned 18. But she was denied back child support after Bishop argued that she had never sought support of any kind from him and had concealed that he was Erica’s father.

A crook and deadbeat dad at the helm of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services. That, it seems, is the Chicago/Illinois way.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

 JOHN HINDERAKER IN SECOND AMENDMENT

Yesterday a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Peruta v. County of San Diego that the county’s broad prohibition against concealed carry violates the Second Amendment. The context was a California law that that generally bans both open and concealed carry, but allows individuals to apply to local authorities for a concealed carry permit. In San Diego County, an ordinary citizen could not get a concealed carry permit; rather, exceptional circumstances had to be demonstrated. Thus, as a practical matter the typical citizen couldn’t carry at all, either open or concealed. The court held that this scheme impermissibly infringes the constitutional right not just to keep arms, but to bear them. The court said that neither concealed carry nor open carry is constitutionally mandated, but some form of a right to carry must be broadly available to citizens. (“To be clear, we are not holding that the Second Amendment requires the states to permit concealed carry. But the Second Amendment does require that the states permit some form of carry for self-defense outside the home.”)

The court’s opinion is lengthy but well worth reading. It includes a historical survey of how the right to bear arms was understood at the time when the Second Amendment was adopted, and in the years thereafter. The court notes that there is a split among the circuits on this issue, which ultimately will have to be resolved by the Supreme Court. I don’t have any doubt that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would side with this 9th Circuit panel and uphold a right to carry arms as well as to bear them. The 9th Circuit opinion responds to and expressly rejects the reasoning that was used by the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits:

[T]he analysis in the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuit decisions is near-identical to the freestanding “interest-balancing inquiry” that Justice Breyer proposed—and that the majority explicitly rejected—in Heller. See Heller, 554 U.S. at 689–90 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (proposing that in Second Amendment cases the court should “ask[] whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other important governmental interests”); see also id. at 634–35 (majority opinion) (rejecting a “judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry’” as a test for the constitutionality of Second Amendment regulations because “no other enumerated constitutional right [had its] core protection . . . subjected to [such] a freestanding” inquiry).

That’s right: the courts would find absurd an argument that 98% of citizens should be deprived of their rights of free speech in order to serve some other governmental interest, but that same argument is still made with a straight face when the Second Amendment is at issue. The 9th Circuit opinion concludes by quoting the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald decisions:

We are well aware that, in the judgment of many governments, the safest sort of firearm-carrying regime is one which restricts the privilege to law enforcement with only narrow exceptions. Nonetheless, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. . . . Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court [or ours] to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” Id. at 636. Nor may we relegate the bearing of arms to a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.” McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3044.

For many years, of course, the right to keep and bear arms was a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees….” When Larry Tribe published the first edition of his treatise on Constitutional Law in 1978, he famously treated the Second Amendment in a single footnote. The amendment was more or less a dead letter. What changed? Several things: empirical research by John Lott and others showed that more guns do not mean more crime; legal scholars analyzed the genesis of the amendment and refuted the claim that it had no application outside of state-organized “militias,” and–most of all–a grass roots movement that ultimately encompassed millions of Americans promoted guns and gun safety, lobbied for modern carry legislation including “shall issue” requirements, and generally improved the image of guns and gun owners. The result of this grass roots movement is that at least 40 states now have “shall issue” laws.

My guess is that the legal revolution would not have happened without the grass roots movement. Scott has noted more than once that the image of the federal courts as bulwarks of civil rights, standing tall against the winds of prejudice to uphold unpopular freedoms, is almost entirely fictional. In reality, the courts have almost always bent with public opinion, as they did for a long time with regard to the Second Amendment.

That doesn’t mean that gun rights advocates can rest. While I think there is little doubt that the present court would agree with the reasoning in Peruta, that could easily change: Heller was decided 5-4. Liberals are revanchists on all issues. They do not accept that the flow of history can move in any direction but theirs, and they won’t give up. This is just one more reminder than any conservative who sits out an election is foolish.

Not Even a Smidgen?

Why So Much Anarchy?

Stratfor Global Intelligence

By Robert D. Kaplan

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.

However, what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.

The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though -- roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:

The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire -- whose whole identity was infused with Christianity -- had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.

Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after my article was published -- like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through foreign peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of efficient and responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.

The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.

The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.

Read more: Why So Much Anarchy? | Stratfor
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"Why So Much Anarchy? is republished with permission of Stratfor."