As I suspected in the comments of a previous post, the case against Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Junior, who is suspected of killing 57 people in Philippine election related violence, is unlikely to prosper. The reason is simple. Junior is the son of Senior. And Senior is related to cabinet officials in the Arroyo administration. There are cousins and relatives all up and down the line. Hence the prospect of Junior ever walking the last mile to gurney is somewhere between slim and none. Jojo Robles of the Manila Standard writes:
Dureza, the presidential adviser on Mindanao affairs— who had already been fired as press secretary before—said he has visited the Ampatuans and secured a promise from them that they would “cooperate” with any investigation of the incident … laid the groundwork for what is now looking like a not-so-subtle scheme to get the Maguindanao warlord and his family off the hook for what is already being called the worst-ever mass killing in Philippine history outside of wartime. … announced that the palace was not going to arrest or even suspend Datu Unsay town Mayor Datu Andal Ampatuan Jr. “We have due process to be observed also, so let us allow the investigators on the ground to come up with [a case] through their investigation [first],” the intellectually challenged press secretary said yesterday.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed would be glad to know just how scrupulous the Western world is; that whether a perp is accused of killing 57 or 3,000 victims nothing must disturb the majestic progress of the law. Except that sometimes the law is used as an excuse to avoid, rather than to seek justice. Virtues are invoked to preserve vice; and when evil impersonates good, innocence is sometimes forced to come forward to identify itself. Right now innocence is being played for a sap. Consider the following statement from rival local politician Esmael Mangudadatu to the Telegraph about why he sent his wife into Junior’s lion’s den instead of going himself when he knew Junior had it in for him.
The gunmen waited for the six-vehicle convoy for two days and mass graves were already dug in advance.
Mangudadatu said he has received death threats from the Ampatuan clan and knew about a possible strike when registering his candidacy in advance.
He therefore delegated his wife Genalyn, two sisters, two women lawyers and a number of female supporters to register his candidacy on his behalf, believing that women would not be attacked.
“Under our tradition, Muslim women are being respected. They should not be harmed, just like innocent children and the elders,” Mangudadatu told local reporters an hour before the massacre.
However, the entire convoy, including 24 women, was murdered, with evidence that the women were also raped, tortured and beheaded. One of the women was pregnant.
The gunmen were in the process of burying the bodies in a shallow grave when they were disturbed by a helicopter nearby. It is feared that not all the bodies have been found.
If Mangudadatu were a European leftist I would put our old friend the “you can’t touch me, I’m protected by International Humanitarian Law” idiocy to be culpable for this miscalculation. But Mangudadatu being local knows the rules. He could not have seriously believed in the sanctity of anything — that stuff’s for the consumption of Western readers – in the context of the political warlord culture of Maguindanao. The men who had predug a mass grave with a backhoe for both the vehicles and the people and who subsequently raped, tortured and beheaded their hapless victims were not men who momentarily and unaccountably lapsed from their Islamic observance, and who were otherwise pious and upstanding , but experienced villains to whom such depredations are second and possibly third and fourth nature. Mangudadatu should have had few illusions about the political clout Junior wielded and still less about the state of law and order.
It’s much more likely that the candidate elected to let his wife take the risk, calculating that if she and a whole raft of journalists were offed by Junior then he would stand to win the election. Smart eh? But as it turns out, he may have severely underestimated the corruption and venality of the Arroyo administration. Because it looks like they’re going to let Junior walk. Mangudadatu should never have made the error of thinking there were limits beyond which even his enemies could not go. In the world of the low life the only lawyers worth a damn are the partnership of Smith and Wesson. The Philippine Star said as much in its editorial. You are never going to be judged by 12. About the best you can do is avoid being carried by six.
What is it about a small-town mayor that makes him warrant VIP treatment from top government officials? Three days after the Maguindanao massacre, the person tagged by the victims’ camp as the mastermind was finally taken into custody and held without bail for multiple murder. Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. was flown to Manila after a meeting with Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, and then escorted by no less than the secretary of justice, who like Malacañang officials sounded like the lawyer for Ampatuan.
The mayor has been mollycoddled from the start, when the victims’ relatives started screaming his name after Genalyn Mangudadatu told her husband in a cell phone call the identities of the men who were about to butcher her. Top officials of the Philippine National Police, whose members routinely gun down suspects even before formal charges are filed, and sometimes even before a crime is committed, scrambled to find excuses not to arrest a man accused of murdering 57 people as of the latest count. The PNP chief cheerfully told the press that cops were in “hot pursuit” of Ampatuan but were waiting for him to surrender.
So what was Mangudadatu’s mistake? Believing that Maguindanao Muslim tradition “respected women” or believing that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had hard ethical limits? There’s a moral in there somewhere, if only in the realization that there ain’t a moral in there anywhere. It done got up and left town.
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There’s a moral in there somewhere, if only in the realization that there ain’t a moral in there anywhere. It done got up and left town.
I believe the moral is that the western presumption is good and that the state (if not the diety) must own the monopoly on killing or all else falls apart.
Insofar as that is contradicted in Islam’s scripture it explains a lot about Islam.
What it might say about the Philippines, I knoweth not.
Here’s the moral, but not one the transnationalist peacenik elites would either want to acknowledge or hear: He who is kind when he should be cruel, will be cruel when he should be kind.
http://criticalmastiff.blogspot.com/2006/08/peace-in-our-time.html
I have two aunts from the Philippines that married my uncles, two brothers who were stationed there in the air force in the late 60s and 70s. I didn’t know one of them very well, but I knew Nati, the other one, pretty well and her daughter was always my favorite cousin (of 35 first cousins). She was always a very hard worker for her family and always had a very ready smile for us when we came to visit, and she was a wonderful aunt.
I always thought, though, that she had a core of steel. She was NOT a lady you wanted to piss off, and she did not suffer fools gladly. I always wondered where she got that rod of steel that sometimes seemed to be jammed up her ass.
I guess now thanks to W, I have an idea where that might have come from.
Memo to Mangudadatu:
Plan A: Next time send a couple of motorcyclists ahead, or barring that dispatch some guys to handrail the road with cheap handheld radios that they can ditch (tell them it’s ok) at the first sign of trouble, before sending your convoy up the road. A hundred men, a roadblock and a backhoe are hard to hide. If your scouts find trouble ahead, then radio to turn the convoy back.
Plan B: Rent a helo to recon the road. Junior doesn’t have triple A yet. That might put the Ampatuan thugs off their game and, representing as it does mysterious and still esoteric technology, the Ampatuans might have hesitated to pillage and rape in front of the great mechanical bird. Alinsky’s rule says “go outside the experience of your enemies”. But maybe it’s outside your experience too.
Plan C: Load every vehicle in the convoy with a hundred pounds of C4 and give the detonator to one of the women. That way the ladies can take those upstanding men with them to wherever Allah intended them to go if the threats become too obvious to ignore. Save the backhoe the trouble of digging a hole too.
But above all do not, repeat, do not, rely on the “respect” of thugs and villains for women, children and journalists that is widespread under your culture. You might as well throw sesame seed buns at wolves. They’re not interested in the condemnation of the International Union of Pacifist Journalists or anything like that. Them types want red meat and will only be stopped by a conk on the head or something of similar nature. That’s why David had a sling. But, wrong book and wrong tradition.
The contrast between this story and our American Thanksgiving today is dramatic.
Google News has this up high (and full of hyperlinks at site):
Andal Jr. known as ‘hatchet man’
Inquirer.net – 1 hour ago
MANILA, Philippines – Feared and loathed by his enemies, Andal Ampatuan Jr. is known as the “hatchet man” of a powerful Muslim clan in Mindanao whose family history is written in blood.
Video: Philippines ‘witness’ recounts killings – 26 Nov 09 Al Jazeera
Philippines prepares to charge suspect in massacre The Associated Press
Christian Science Monitor – Voice of America – guardian.co.uk – BBC News – Wikipedia: Maguindanao massacre
all 3,612 news articles »Email this story
The contrast between this story and our American Thanksgiving today is dramatic.
Turkeys everywhere, except in Mindanao they’re not on the platter but doing the carving.
So who is there left to trust? I’ve hidden survivors from Party purges in crummy safe houses. Faced off with shyster lawyers. Known leftist “idealists” who’ve gone off and killed hundreds of people; met the militias, rebels, cops and the robbers while advancing the “peace process”. Looked under cheap blankets at dead people, with their families sobbing in the background. Sat in a Basilan slum (better than staying in a hotel) listening the night long to gallows humorous tales of love and death.
Before I went to grad school in Cambridge, I sought out a Trappist in Disyerto, Ilocos Sur who had once been a guerilla leader. I figured he had more than a passing acquaintaince with God and the Devil. At the time SR had monastery he built among the sands in that unique place. He put me in a hut and asked me only one question: “Do you believe in God?” I said I that I did. I knew then that doubt was something that came with faith. Faith meant you were going to take the risk. Maybe that was all he was waiting to hear. Then he said he would be saying mass at some shrine he had hand-built (he had built them all) in the dead of the night and asked me to join him.
I remember that hut and shivering in the unlined M-65 jacket in that Northern Luzon headland that I picked up in Army surplus, and I later realized he had told me all that he could. You have to keep swimming for the light because the darkness is all around you. You need something to tell the newsman’s wife; something to say to family of a farmer who had been killed for a hundred buck chainsaw.
“Do you believe in God?” Is this trip necessary? Is it worth trying to make the world better?
w/7; maybe you can’t say ‘yes’ until you’ve said ‘no’ –and tasted that for awhile.
Maybe reluctance to try for faith is a sort of survival mechanism –for, if you see four states of being, that they are faithful, doubtful, faithful formerly doubtful, and doubtful formerly faithful, there’s only that last quadrant that is without hope, and only one way to get into it, and that way is through the the faith quadrant. So the sure way to stay out of it is to never have faith to begin with –stay always wondering, wandering, and faith may be out there before you somewhere in the future possible. If it can’t be behind you, then you can’t have had your chance and missed, it can’t be too late, you can’t have missed the last exit off the road to oblivion. IOW, if where there’s life there’s hope, then where there’s no hope there won’t be life. hey i think i just described ‘fear’.
buddy @ 8, I’ll take the other side of that – you really can’t say “no”, until you’ve said “yes”. You can’t reject what you don’t know.
Not that I’m claiming any revelations myself, just sayin’.
Buddy,
Now you know I think you’re really ( I don’t mean to insult a Texan here ) Will Rogers reincarnate but if I understand the quote below then how did mankind believe the world was flat for so long? Or a dozen other things we mankinders have bolloxed to heck over the centuries?
“You can’t reject what you don’t know.”
I mean in our own universe what we don’t know so far out weighs what we know that millions of people actually believe the Baby Ruth candy bar was named after Babe Ruth.
Or did I bollox the entire meaning of the discussion?
I’ve been riveted to this thread and its precursor. Thank you, W.
7/W “I knew then that doubt was something that came with faith. Faith meant you were going to take the risk.”
I have always believed in God. There have been many times when my life was reduced to its core, and that belief sustained me. Drifting on a morphine IV where nothing but God and pain were certain; struggling to save my daughter’s life and watching her turn blue; at the veil making the decision whether to fight to breathe through the blood or relax and follow the light; shoving a pistol between my belly and a very mean man’s belly and telling him to back off… God has been my constant. The sense that I have that He exists is what carries me. Perhaps it is self-deception — doubt and I are well-acquainted, but I have accepted that my faith in the essential need for goodness will galvanize me when push comes to shove. Faith means I *can* take the risk, I will step forward and confront evil, that God is on my side. In my nightmares I freeze, I can’t scream or move, but in real life I have always been able to dig deep and tap into the river and keep pushing, clear the airways or hit harder or whatever else is necessary to that moment, and I feel a driving certainty that is stronger than my fear.
Need to go baste the turkey again and get some pies ready to bake.
It seems there is shock that things got as far as they have — in terms of arrests.
One of the blogs I am starting to pay attention to regularly (again) is Manuel L Quezon III’s (MLQ3) blog and this is worth reading: http://www.quezon.ph/2009/11/26/the-long-view-shattered-talismans/
MLQ3 goes back to 1951 to a similar incident (though involving the challenging candidate rather than others) In that post MLQ3 ends: Ninoy Aquino’s, Cesar Climaco’s, and Evelio Javier’s murders (1983-86) all accomplished what Padilla’s killing did, which was to solidify outrage against official thuggery. Yet all these were individual assassinations. The Maguindanao mass murder was not only the liquidation of scores of individuals. It was a smashing of the talismans the vulnerable and powerless clutch when daring to confront the strong. Every warlord will be keenly watching to see if an infuriated public will topple the Ampatuans, who believe they are untouchable. To confront them, after all, by force of arms, is to confront them on their own terms, where they literally call the shots.
From the reading I have been doing on this affair the “smart” money is on a few small players taking the fall and the big fish getting away.
If you are on twitter — follow @wretchardthecat, @mlq3, & @DeanJorgeBocobo to keep you finger on new developments.
Habu:
I don’t want to derail a very serious topic and discussion thread, but see Snopes.
I’ll go back to lurking now, since this topic is pretty far outside my own personal experience.
Ninoy Aquino’s, Cesar Climaco’s, and Evelio Javier’s murders (1983-86) all accomplished what Padilla’s killing did, which was to solidify outrage against official thuggery. … From the reading I have been doing on this affair the “smart” money is on a few small players taking the fall and the big fish getting away.
Of course. I have unshakeable faith in the corruptibility of Filipino officialdom. They never saw a dollar they didn’t like. Why do you suppose al-Qaeda chose the Philippines to dry-run September 11? Because everything is possible in that neck of the woods.
The only way you operate in that island paradise is to gather up your own gang; people who are personally loyal to you. Fortunately, Americans have had long experience there. Know their way around. Lots of Filipino Americans who can slide along unseen. Lots of Filipinos who are willing to join the good guys. They know how to get things done. So when Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi found that money could open the door to jail cells, his opposite numbers found it could also arrange for being shot while trying to escape the next time they captured him.
The significance of the fact that every single one of the Abu Sayyaf gang that kidnapped Tim and Gracia Burnham are now dead may have escaped American audiences, but they have not escaped the consciousness of the bad guys. Do thus and die. Sad state of affairs ain’t it when you have to hope the home audience misses the point?
Now who the heck is going after Junior and his kindred? Who’s going to get justice for the AP stringer and all those ladies? The MSM? Nah. The reason the government took Junior to Manila is to keep the Mangudadatu from starting a blood feud. They took him to keep him safe, not to inconvenience him. Maybe a blood feud will start anyway. It’s been known to happen. But sooner or later, the Ampatuans will pay off the Mangudadatus and all will be papered over. And those newsmen and poor victims are going to be forgotten.
And speaking of Ninoy, Cesar Climaco and Evie Javier, well I met Ninoy and I knew Evie. Evie died not long after he went back to the Philippines. They shot him in a toilet. What does it say when you can look at a random list of three of the most famous political assassination victims in Philippine history and say you knew two of them? What does it say when you can stand on the corner of Quezon Avenue and EDSA and read the names on the memorial the guys who bought the farm fighting Marcos and realize you know a considerable number of them?
It shows you’re stupid that’s what. That you should have gotten on a boat ten years earlier and made yourself a life as a frickin fashion designer in London or something. Either that or you had better believe that it all means something, apart from the fact that things will take longer than you thought. And part of the process, I think lies in explicitly facing up to evil in public policy rather than fobbing it off to the tradesmen to fix things out of sight. When people say “do what’s necessary just don’t tell us” the real danger lies in the cumulative dishonesty, in the assumption that we can sin — or be saved — unseeen. The real problem with political correctness is that it’s a lie. It’s gaudy ballroom whose gleaming floor is just inches above an ossuary.
What needs to happen, I think is that many of fictions need to be torn down and public policy choices have to be humanely and honestly made. The world should be divided not into nations, but into functional parts. Between a part ruled by law and a part ruled by the jungle. The idea would be to gradually extend the law into the jungle. That may mean tolerating the Excellencies and Highnesses for a while, but always with the view of hoping that the better parts of their society will come to fruition. We don’t need One World so much as a world in which the basic principles of the Declaration are universally understood. That all men are endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights which in the fullness of time they will lay claim to. It beckons over the bridge, the only one worth crossing.
I went to thanksgiving at my sister’s house Montgomery County, MD today. I saw a guy walking into their block from the hispanic neighborhoods who was sizing me up. Reminded my of my NYC days when you needed street smarts at all times to get around. It got my back up.
I have not seen that before in my sister’s neighborhood.
After dinner I walked around the block with the Dreiers. My sister worried to me that there was increased gang related activity in the area area. Northern Virginia cops have driven the gangs out. They have come to very liberal Montgomery county in Maryland. Its not that criminal activity is condoned. It is rather that the people are too pc to fight. Now there is a tenseness in the neighborhoods I’ve not seen
before.
I wonder if I should tell my sister that its time to move.
Next time we get together I’d like to hear more about it.
The first house i owned was in Oxnard. A gang of punks used to gather a few blocks away. We were burglarized. A few years ago we drove past. Noticed bars on the windows. Neighborhoods are places invisible wars are fought. Sometimes with real casualties.
The world is a continum from neighborhoods where everyone feels safe enough to leave their doors unlocked, to the Richmond neighborhood where the only crime is to fink to the police. I’ve come to realize the best sign of a good neighborhood is cats. A bad neighborhood needs loud dogs. A smart cat will stay away. So look for cats if you want to learn about a neighborhood. It is the men of a neighborhood who determine what it will be. Are they free men who will stand together against the fall? Or thugs seeking to dominate by force to loot and abuse?
Killing your opponents seems like the easy way to win. The only problem is when you kill, be careful not to make a martyr. Also why we need the second amendment to make it tough on thugs. The thing thugs don’t realize is that free men have something to live for, and that makes them willing to die for it. Just ask the japs in WWII who fought the Marines on the Canal how tough free men can be.
This mess in the Philippines tells me we don’t appreciate just how good we still have it. We’ve got some thugs trying to cause problems. We have some major problems, but I wouldn’t trade places with anyone else in the world. I know it won’t be easy. The ship of state sails into dangerous waters. I don’t trust the captain and his thugs.
Be on alert. The cavalry will come, or maybe we need to be the cavalry. That is what the tea parties are. The more i read Sarah Palin’s book the more she seems sent by God to lead in a time of trouble. The most important thing to do is to clean up the Republican Party. If we can take back our government, we first must kick out the wreckers who only want to loot. When we win, we must have a platform of freedom. We the people governing ourselves. It is our house, not theirs. We are still free men armed with truth and a ….
Wretch, any chance you might ever drop by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy I’m studying at? I have a lot of classmates from the Philippines, and I really think they can gain a lot from your experience.
Habu/11; you got to ax Josh that question –he da one who made dat obsoivation. Will Rogers, can’t think of him without recalling two of his most famous sayings, that he never met a man he didn’t like, and that congress is the country’s only native criminal class. Since he surely met plenty of congressmen, in that gap between those two statements are all our problems stacked. me sainted mother liked to make the same comment, that if you like someone they can do no wrong, and if you don’t, they can do no right.
Such truisms is the mountain ranges in the shadows of which we wade the tumbling creek waters panning gravel for little nuggets of possible answers to our “fairness issues”.
To see antithesis of the tribal culture, see “The Blind Side” where the heroes are expressly Christian, Republican and gun totin NRA members, and the ghetto lifestyle is shown for what it is. The movie is also a great film, btw.
Arrest that man….and whatever you do….don’t muss his hair, fluff his beard nor offend his god and do not bust his lip.
Reading this takes my breath away. Wretchard, for Heaven’s sake please be careful.
Our host wrote:
‘The world should be divided not into nations, but into functional parts.[and then soon later] We don’t need One World so much as a world in which the basic principles of the Declaration are universally understood. That all men are endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights which in the fullness of time they will lay claim to.’
But isn’t that self-contradictory? It’s from the very nation of the USA that that precise statement developed, and it has been primarily by the courage, commitment and sacrifice of the good people of USA that the sentiment has been advanced meaningfully throughout the wold. Where would the state of humanity be today without the US military standing behind (pushing forward) the sentiment expressed in those words from Jefferson? When the world needs a cop, America has always been called. Because we cannot trust World Government, we need a nation-state with American ideals.
And then ‘It beckons over the bridge, the only one worth crossing.’
Agreed entirely.
He who pursues righteousness and love
finds life, prosperity, and honor.
–Proverbs 21:21
Best regards, Peter Warner.
What has never happened in the Phillipines is for the people (as a whole) to have a chance to live under a truly fair Rule of Law, and allow the concommittant civic peace develop between free men. This is the glue that holds together a lawful and peaceful society. I don’t know how you get there from here, which, I guess, is part of the tragedy. Not my knowledge personally, but how to build a healthy civil society among people that are generally decent and kind, but are corrupted by fear, poverty and thugs. It is sad to read Mr Fernandez’ comments about his beloved home, a patriot without his country.
This is what WE Americans stand to lose, a view of “The Shape of Things to Come.” This is what the corrupt and corrupting politicians and “business leaders” (can you say Jeffery Immelt?) wish to create; a Hobbesian state of nature where it is ‘all against all’. To create fear and loathing between us all, to destroy the mystic ties that bind us.
It is, in part, what Whiskey rails about in his posts about the feminization of America, the long term poison of ‘multiculturalism’. It’s not about having clever ethnic eateries in your town to show off your sophistication. It is and always has been about a shared ethic which supports the common civic virtue and the peace. This is what Obama and friends are so eager to crack and break, the key to their desire for political entropy. Hope and change; do they really hope to change us to be like…..the Philipines?
This is pure speculation and projection on my part, but I think it would fit a pattern that appears to be emerging:
Forgotten at the moment is the fact that this administration intends to start and fund a plethora of “volunteer corps” for Americans of various categories to join. It would not surprise me in the least if one initiative to emerge is to have street gangs “join” special “volunteer brigades,” under the guise of “rehabilitating” them. This would be a couple of orders of magnitude beyond the Midnight Basketball nonsense of the Clinton years.
The amount of violent mischief such “brigades” could get into would eclipse the SEIU Purple Shirt Gang’s amateurish attempts at thuggishness by a wide margin.
Paranoid fantasy? I would prefer that it were, but with this bunch’s penchant for lawlessness, it may come to pass.
Wretchard, I could not disagree more. We don’t need division of the world into law abiding and not. That to me smacks of trans-national utopianism.
What we need is nationalism, a lot more of it, and an honest assessment of peoples and nations. As a nation and as a people, Filipinos are a total failure, no less than my Scots-Irish ancestors. Like Scotland and Ireland, feuding, constant clan rivalries, and the like lead to atrocity after atrocity. In the Philippines case, aided by improved killing technology.
Nationalism, by defining the nation state and the nation, the people, dissolves clans and tribes and families. Scotland ceased being a cold Philippines with worse food when the clans were dissolved into Union with England. Ireland is still stuck into clan/tribal/religious loyalty with gangsterism. Not as much as the Philippines, but there it is.
AQ does not like and accurately states that modernism and particularly the modern nation state is like acid, dissolving the tribes and way of life into something new. Which it is. On the down side, nationalism’s costs are well known. But the upside is never counted: Switzerland, Denmark, America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, and Norway are all civilized places to live where one does not have to constantly worry about feuding and the firm of Smith and Wesson.
Twain wrote about this in Huck Finn. Harney rode back for his hat, because he lived like a Filipino. One marked by violent clan blood feuds. The Civil War killing off about 40% of men 14-45 in the South, and marking a nation-state forever, helped erase that whole social environment.
There is nothing wrong with the Philippines that erasing Filipino culture would not solve. Which means, a century or two of centralized power, depopulating the countryside, dissolving the clans and tribe and family, developing national identity and myths, requiring soldiers in wars to depend on their buddy regardless if he is from Cebu City or Manila.
Regardless, history shows us the way: ending states of affairs like the Philippines requires a modern nation state. It requires NATIONALISM. If Nationalism truly held in the Philippines, the feuding clan would be crushed, for the national interest, decisively.
I ran across this minutes after posting something akin to this topic elsewhere.
Rule of Law. In the absence of a constitutional rule of law, the day to day law is that of Lex Talionis if you are lucky, and Lex Ultima Ratio Regum when dealing with the state. What the current regime has done, is upset any calculation that the law or the Constitution will hold. What limits does the law place on the current occupant of the White House and his administration; or their supporters? What law can you expect that Attorney General Holder will uphold other than the political power and self-interest of the regime. And in the absence of an impartial rule of law; we are slipping down the steep slope to the world of the Phillipines that Wretchard describes.
If law is replaced by force, the only thing that can counter it is greater force. Clausewitz had the ultimate relationship between politics and war right. If there are no more legal, moral, or constutional boundaries to what an American administration does than say Clan Ampatuan; what should restrict those who oppose it or are targeted by it?
#23 E. Nigma
This is what WE Americans stand to lose, a view of “The Shape of Things to Come.” This is what the corrupt and corrupting politicians and “business leaders” (can you say Jeffery Immelt?) wish to create; a Hobbesian state of nature where it is ‘all against all’. To create fear and loathing between us all, to destroy the mystic ties that bind us. and do they really hope to change us to be like…..the Philipines?
That is, in fact their goal. Maybe not the Phillipines, but even if their goal is Zimbabwe, or Venezuela, or even North Korea is not a bad gig, if you are one of the ones on top.
#24 Don Rodrigo
It would not surprise me in the least if one initiative to emerge is to have street gangs “join” special “volunteer brigades,” under the guise of “rehabilitating” them.
and
The amount of violent mischief such “brigades” could get into would eclipse the SEIU Purple Shirt Gang’s amateurish attempts at thuggishness by a wide margin.
Even normally non-sensationalist blogs are beginning to openly comment on the parallels between the use of state sanctioned street violence by the current administration and by certain regimes of the Left and Right in the first third of the last century. I suspect that we will have a pretty firm idea of what fate has in store for us within the next year.
Subotai Bahadur
SB/26; here’s the press release for HB 1388:
http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/releases_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=1283
(no need to be a numerologist to sweat old “1388″ if civil society drifts toward disorder in the future)
Anyhoo, the link –which briefly describes the Kennedy Serve America Act of March 2009, closes thusly (this is copied straight off the dot gov link):
(open quote)
Supporting Innovation and Strengthening the Nonprofit Sector
Creates a Social Innovation Fund to expand proven initiatives and provide seed funding for experimental initiatives, leveraging Federal dollars to identify and grow ideas that are addressing our most intractable community problems.
Establishes a Volunteer Generation Fund to award grants to states and nonprofits to recruit, manage, and support volunteers and strengthen the nation’s volunteer infrastructure.
Authorizes Nonprofit Capacity Building grants to provide organizational development assistance to small and mid-size nonprofit organizations.
Creates a National Service Reserve Corps of former national service participants and veterans who will be trained to deploy, in coordination with FEMA, in the event of disasters.
Strengthening Management, Cost-Effectiveness, and Accountability
Merges funding streams, expands the use of simplified, fixed amount grants, and gives the Corporation flexibility to consolidate application and reporting requirements. Increases support for State Commissions on national and community service. Bolsters the capacity and duties of the Corporation’s Board of Directors.
Ensures that programs receiving assistance under national service laws are continuously evaluated for effectiveness in achieving performance and cost goals.
Introduces responsible and balanced competition to the RSVP program.
Authorizes a Civic Health Assessment comprised of indicators relating to volunteering, voting, charitable giving, and interest in public service in order to evaluate and compare the civic health of communities.
(close quote)
oh, and here, what turned out to have been the katy bar the door act for the planet, from the year 1933:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
After that, nothing –not a single thing –that old Number 88 did, was illegal.
***
also can’t help but remember that the Texas War of Independence (the Alamo war) was fought, on the side of the breakaways, in their own minds and in the writings you can see for yourself, not against Mexico but against the Santa Anna government which had overturned the Mexican Constitution of 1824. The Texians helf that the Constitution of 1824 bound and held them and that there was no grounds for rebellion under it. Santa Anna, charismatic dictator wannabee, took power and junked that constitution, arbitrarily, and then and only then did the troubles begin.
Someone mentioned that the oath administered to Homeland Security personnel no longer binds them to defend the Constitution of the United States.
In any case, any organization is deeply challenged to perform beyond the capabilities of abysmal leadership. Consider the Towering Intellect currently steering the dingy of state and the laughable judgment he exercises in actions and choices of advisors.
Led by Failure-Face’s appointees, we are poised for a massive chastisement from … well, any attacker with the organizational sophistication of of a street mob.
I say this NOT because I don’t have full reverence for our military, but because the current administration seems likely to order military units to stand down, confined to barracks, with weapons locked in storage, rather than use their bravery to defend themselves, much less the country.
I would appreciate it if someone could render an explanation of o’s policies and behavior that allow any interpretation other than that the current administration is working hard to create a crisis between its cronies and traditional defenders of the Constitution, then use that crisis as an excuse to confiscate personal firearms and emasculate any opposition.
Wikipedia
The quotation “All men are created equal” is arguably the best-known phrase in any of America’s political documents.[1][2] Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence as a rebuttal to the going political theory of the day: the Divine Right of Kings.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;[6
The same concept appears in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which was written mostly by John Adams.[7] The Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which opens that constitution states:
Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.[8]
Wikipedia Hobbesian Origin for “all men created equal”
In fact Thomas Hobbes proposed an early version of equality among men in his treatise The Leviathan:
Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.
And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules, called science, which very few have and but in few things, as being not a native faculty born with us, nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.[page needed]
In the above passage Hobbes proposes an equivalence among men, based on the idea that the strongest man is not so strong that he is protected from the strength of the weakest and is thus not strong enough to be considered greater.[improper synthesis?]