A history lesson playing out on too many American campuses

A history lesson playing out on too many American campuses

Col. Mike walker, USMC (retired)

All,

 

Calling people Nazis and fascists is popular sport of late. We should not take it lightly. A far-left American movement known as Antifa is now systematically attacking free speech (and especially conservative speech) across America’s university and college campuses.

 

The abbreviation “Antifa” -- like “Nazi” -- comes directly from interwar Germany: the Antifascist Action (Antifaschistische Aktion or Antifa) that was the German Communist Party’s equivalent of the Nationalist Socialist’s Brown Shirts/Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung or SA). By 1930, the Nazi's and communists were the two largest German parties and worked TOGETHER to destroy democracy in Germany in preparation for the final showdown. 

 

The communists waged divisive class warfare to establish one-party rule and state ownership of the economy. The Nazis and fascists sought to unify the nation through the persecution of “enemies of the state” while seeking one-party rule and governmental control over (not state ownership of) the economy.

 

The future, as the interwar radicals saw it, was an ultimate socialist struggle between communism and fascism. Americans have forgotten that.

 

By the way, fascism is not the opposite of communism. They are two peas from the same rotten socialist pod. The antithesis of radical socialism is libertarianism.

 

Here is some more history that we have forgotten to our own peril:

 

The two radical socialist movements (communism and nationalist socialism) of the 1920s and 1930s held in utter contempt liberal democracy. The communist and Nazi/fascist movements abhorred limited government, free market economies and personal liberties such as free speech. To them, all liberal democracies were failures and, to use Trotsky’s term, destined for the dustbin of history.

 

To understand just how alluring fascism was read this:

 

6 June 1919 Manifesto of the Italian Fascist Struggle

Italians! Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and against prejudice.

 

For the political problem:

 

We demand:

a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.

b) A minimum age for the voting electorate of 18 years; That for the office holders at 25 years.

c) The abolition of the Senate.

d) The convocation of a National Assembly for a three-years duration, for which its primary responsibility will be to form a constitution of the State.

e) The formation of a National Council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made from the collective professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a General Commission with ministerial powers.

 

For the social problems:

 

We demand:

a) The quick enactment of a law of the State sanctions that an eight-hour workday for all workers.

b) A minimum wage.

c) The participation of workers' Representatives in the functions of industry commissions.

d) To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that evidence to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants.

e) The rapid and complete systemization of the railways and of all the transport industries.

f) A necessary modification of the insurance laws to invalidate the minimum retirement age; we propose to lower it from 65 to 55 years of age.

 

For the military problem:

 

We demand:

a) The institution of a national militia with a short period of service for training and exclusively defensive responsibilities.

b) The nationalization of all the arms and explosives factories.

c) A national policy intended to peacefully further the Italian national cultures in the world.

 

For the financial problem:

 

We demand:

a) A strong progressive tax on capital that will truly expropriate a portion of all wealth.

b) The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor.

c) The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

 

I may not be the sharpest mind but in my experience I have never met a Republican or a conservative who would ever sign on to a fascist agenda demanding control over both civil governance and the economy by an all-powerful national government. I would also go so far as to say that the only people I have ever met that endorse every aspect of the manifesto above are on the far-left. 

 

In that sense, the future is back to the 1930s: Radical socialism still has two branches (fascism and communism) and both hold free-market, free speech, liberal democratic principles in utter contempt and will use violence to destroy them.

 

But a funny thing happened on the radical socialist road to a brave new world: Both nationalist socialism and communism failed badly and those plucky liberal democracies grew stronger and better than ever.

 

The ANTIFA failed then and will fail again -- even on America's college campuses.

 

Mike

Obama Is America’s Version of Stanley Baldwin

Obama Is America’s Version of Stanley Baldwin

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Both leaders put their successors in a dangerous geopolitical position.

Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”

Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.

Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions. 

Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.

Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.

Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.

All that can be said about the Iran deal is that Obama’s concessions likely ensured he would leave office with a non-nuclear Iran soon to get nuclear weapons on someone else’s watch. 

Obama green-lighted the Syrian disaster by issuing a red line over the use of chemical weapons and then not enforcing it. When Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad called Obama’s bluff, Obama did nothing other than call on Russian president Vladimir Putin to beg Assad to stop killing civilians with chemical weapons.

Nearly five years after Obama issued his 2012 red line to Syria, and roughly a half-million dead later, Assad remains in power, some 2 million Middle Eastern refugees have overrun Europe, and Assad is still gassing his own citizens with the very chemical agents that the Obama administration had boasted were removed.

Obama’s reset policy with Russia advanced the idea that George W. Bush had unduly polarized Putin by overreacting to Russian aggression in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. But Obama’s concessions and promises to be flexible helped turn a wary but opportunistic Putin into a bold aggressor, assured that he would never have to account for his belligerence.

Middle Eastern terrorism? Obama assured us that al-Qaeda was “on the run” and that the Islamic State was a “jayvee” organization. His policy of dismissing the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” along with his administration’s weird assertions that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was “largely secular” and that “jihad” did not mean using force to spread Islam, earned the U.S. contempt instead of support. 

Russia and China launched cyberattacks on the U.S. without worry of consequences. Both countries increased their defense budgets while ours shrank. China built artificial island bases in the South China Sea to intimidate its neighbors, while Russia absorbed Crimea.

North Korea built more and better missiles. Almost weekly, it threatened its neighbors and crowed that it would soon nuke its critics, the American West Coast included.

In other words, as was true of Europe between 1933 and 1939, the world grew more dangerous and reached the brink of war. And like Stanley Baldwin, Obama was never willing to make a few unpopular decisions to rearm and face down aggressors in order not to be forced to make far more dangerous and unpopular decisions later on.

Baldwin was popular when he left office, largely because he had proclaimed peace, but he had helped set the table for the inevitable conflict to be inherited by his successors, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.

Obama likewise ignored rumbling volcanoes, and now they are erupting on his successor’s watch.

In both cases, history was kind while Baldwin and Obama were in office — but not so after they left.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2017 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446688/obama-foreign-policy-trump-situation-resemble-britain-wwii?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-04-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

The Situation in Syria

The Situation in Syria

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Few realize just how fragile Assad’s rule over Syria is today. Many felt his victory at Aleppo in December 2016 meant that the end of the war was in sight – that Assad was finally and firmly on the road to victory. But that victory, when analyzed closely, displays the full weakness of Assad and the reason is simple: 

Assad did not win the battle of Aleppo.

The battle for Aleppo was decided by the fighting of Hezbollah, the military infrastructure provided by Iran and Russia's logistical support and airpower. Take those three factors out of the equation and Assad would have lost the battle and that explains why he cannot win the war. 

Assad no longer has sufficient security forces to both defeat his enemies and occupy the majority of the country that remains deeply hostile to rule.

That presents his allies with a deep quandary: Is the bulk of Hezbollah's fighters along with thousands of revolutionary guards from Iran's Quds Force to remain in Syria indefinitely in order to keep Assad in power?

They know better than anyone that even if they “win” in a conventional sense, the Assad regime will collapse as soon as the military forces of Russia, Hezbollah and Iran withdraw.

The West and other powers in the region may be rightly criticized for having no clear vision over how to proceed in Syria but the other side (Assad, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia) is stuck on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma.

After over 400,000 Syrians have been killed, over a million more wounded and six million turned into refugees, the civil war rages on.

To help understand how this came to pass a short timeline is provided.

The Syrian War Timeline

• Spring-summer 2011, peaceful protests bring Assad’s regime to the brink of collapse. Iran, Russia and Hezbollah pledge to support Assad.

• August 2011, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) forms the al Nusra Front in Syria.

• Early 2012, Assad orders in the army and air force to crush the opposition. Civil war ensues.

• July 2012, al Nusra seizes border crossings with Iraq. Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force send military advisors to Assad.

• September 2012, Assad’s troops shell the Kurdish Quarter in Aleppo. Syrian Kurds enter the war against Assad.

• January 2013, Assad regime again teeters on the edge of collapse.

• 6 March 2013, Raqqa falls into rebel hands with help from al Nusra Front.

• April 2013, al Baghdadi breaks from al Nusra and forms the Islamic State (IS). Hezbollah sends in 4,000 fighters from Lebanon to bolster Assad.

• September 2013, Western-backed Syrian opposition engages in heavy fighting with the Islamic State – a three-way civil war begins.

• January 2014, Raqqa declared the capital of the Islamic State’s caliphate.

• Spring-summer 2014, IS launches major offensives in Syria and Iraq. In northern Iraq, only the Iraqi Kurds hold firm against the IS invasion.

• Throughout 2015, IS expands internationally (like al Qaeda in 1998).

• Summer 2015, Assad again is on the ropes, looks likely to fall from power.

• July 2015, Iran nuclear deal reached. Quds Force head Qasim Solemani heads to Moscow with a plan to save Assad that requires Russian intervention (Assad is not invited to the talks).

• August-September 2015, Assad continues to lose ground.

• 30 September 2015, Russia enters the war.

• October 2015, thousands of Quds Force reinforcements begin to arrive in Syria.

• 16 January 2016, Iran sanctions lifted. Cash flows into Iran and funds supporting Quds Force operations in Syria increase accordingly.

• 15 March 2016, Russia announces it will withdraw from Syria but the Assad regime is too weak to allow it.

• May 2016, Syrian Kurdish forces begin attack on Raqqa but fail to take the city.

• 25 June 2016, Syrian army along with Iranian and Hezbollah forces begin offensive against Aleppo (then Syria’s largest city and rebel stronghold).

• July 2016, last rebel supply route into Aleppo shut down by Assad and his allies.

• September 2016, rebels lose control over western Aleppo.

• October 2016, final rebel counteroffensive to break the siege of Aleppo fails.

• November 2016, Syrian Kurds launch second attack on Raqqa. After minor gains, the attack halts.

• 22 December 2016, Aleppo falls to Assad and his allies.

• 14 February 2017, Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasim Solemani makes another trip to Moscow to plan out the next phase of the war.

• 9 March 2017, US Marines with heavy artillery arrive at the Raqqa battlefield to assist US Special Forces and the Syrian Kurds.

• 4 April 2017, Assad drops air-delivered sarin gas munitions on Idlib province (SW of Aleppo). All the casualties are civilians, including dozens of children.

• 6 April 2017, the United States strikes the airfield used to launch the chemical attack.

Thank you Neil Gorsuch

Thank you Neil Gorsuch!

SchumerNuke

Nice dew, Chuck!

This is what happens when you deal with adults. What did you expect?

SENATE REPUBLICANS COME THROUGH

John Hinderaker, Powerline

While nearly everyone has been saying that Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation was inevitable, I was worried. The Democrats’ filibuster of Gorsuch, a thoroughly noncontroversial nominee, seemed to make little sense unless they thought that a handful of Republican senators wouldn’t go along with the Harry Reid option, leaving the nominee stranded with fewer than 60 votes. 

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. The Senate voted today along party lines to do away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. All Republicans joined in, to make the vote 52-48. The New York Times is regretful:

Senate Democrats in 2013 first changed the rules of the Senate to block Republican filibusters of presidential nominees to lower courts and to government positions, but they left the filibuster in place for Supreme Court nominees, an acknowledgment of the sacrosanct nature of the high court.

Actually, it was an acknowledgement that they didn’t need it at that point. Plus, Republicans have never engaged in a partisan filibuster of a Democrat’s Supreme Court nominee.

“This is the latest escalation in the left’s never-ending judicial war, the most audacious yet,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after describing Democratic opposition in the past to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas. “And it cannot and it will not stand. There cannot be two sets of standards: one for the nominees of the Democratic president and another for the nominee of a Republican president.”

That is exactly right. McConnell is the hero of this battle. And now the Democrats won’t have the filibuster to fall back on, if and when President Trump makes his second Supreme Court nomination. That nominee might not be more controversial than Judge Gorsuch, but he can’t be any less so.

Susan Rice Ordered Spy Agencies to Spy

Cover Artist: Mark Fredrickson

Who smells a rat? The whole election narrative of Trump/Putin was a calculated attempt to disrupt a presidency... remember, just one small piece is that Ben Rhodes' brother is David Rhodes, the president of CBS news. There are other media/Obama WH close ties as well. Whenever you hear a "talking head" saying that no less than 17 agencies have info concerning Trump/Putin then you know they are complicit in the larger group think. Watergate? Sleuths going through files in an office? Seems like that was child's play now! It all started with intel surrounding a private citizen, who became a candidate and then was elected president

Former US Attorney: Susan Rice Ordered Spy Agencies To Produce ‘Detailed Spreadsheets’ Involving Trump

Richard Pollock, Daily Caller

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.

Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.

Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.

Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

Farkas sought to walk back her comments in the weeks following: “I didn’t give anybody anything except advice.”

Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told TheDCNF that many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.

“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.'”

“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”

“That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”

Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”

“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new precedent.”