The Utter Desperation of Global Warmists

By Alan Caruba

In the “glory years” of the global warming hoax, you had Al Gore picking up Oscars and Nobel Prizes (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and government employees like James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies were picking up wads of cash as awards, speech fees, and grants.

The folks who conjured up the computer models featured in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports also did quite well for themselves, along with all the others who climbed on the gravy train of global warming grants.

And then in 1998 a cooling cycle set in. It was hard to hide because the weather satellite data was indisputable, but try to hide it they did. Even then, however, there was a handful of outspoken meteorologists and climatologists who were trying hard to get out the message that the perfectly natural warming cycle was over and had been replaced, thanks to—guess what?—a lower output of solar radiation by the SUN.

Still the warmists persisted, infiltrating school systems to frighten children, brainwashing students in colleges, and coercing the public through apocalyptic books, through magazine and newspaper articles, and on television and the Internet.

In 2009, the release of a huge cache of emails between the IPCC global warming perpetrators instantly became known as “Climategate” as the world learned that it was all a scam, a hoax, a fraud based on deliberately falsified computer models, and force fed to the public.

The desperation of the warmists was palpable.

In 2006, Grist, an eco-magazine, called for Nurenberg-style trials for skeptics. By 2007, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had called any doubts about global warming treason. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.” Two years later in 2009, Kennedy called coal companies “criminal enterprises”, declaring that their CEO’s “should be in jail…for all of eternity.” In 2008 NASA’s Hansen was calling for trials of climate skeptics for “high crimes against humanity.”

Didn’t like the warmist’s bogus science? A former member of the Clinton administration, Joe Romm, defended a comment on his Climate Progress website that warned that a generation of brain-washed youth would see to it that skeptics would “be strangled in their beds.”

Today, another Clinton appointee, Carol Browner, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator is one of Obama’s “czars” and the unseen specter whispering in the ear of Lisa Jackson, the current EPA administrator. She is joined by John Holden, an Obama science advisor, and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.



Prof. Kari Norgaard

 If threats of jail and murder couldn’t shut up the skeptics, then Professor Kari Marie Norgaard, speaking at a warmist confab, “Planet Under Pressure”, put forth the notion that any science-based skepticism—based on actual, not fictional data—should be “recognized and treated” as some sort of aberrant behavior.

Doubt global warming? Well, you must be nuts!

Norgaard is a professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. As she put it, “Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected. People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. That habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level—how we think the world works and how we think it should work.”

“Should work”? The Earth—the oceans, the clouds, and its entire eco-system—doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about how warmists and other weather crazies think it “should work.” All that intellectual claptrap adds up to a totalitarian belief that people who disagree with global warming should be jailed or killed.

And in true totalitarian fashion reminiscent of the Stalin era when people simply disappeared from public records and reports, on April 2nd Norgaard’s bio for Whitman College could no longer to be found on the its website. True to the eco-fascist approach, she had become a liability, a non-person for having revealed their plans for humanity.

Regular people who actually do something useful with their lives know that intellectuals like Norgaard hold them in utter contempt, but it is those who profess belief in global warming that should be regarded with grave and serious suspicion.

Those who use global warming, i.e., the assertion that carbon dioxide emissions should be restricted and controlled, are the true enemies of progress, of freedom, and of humanity.

In the twentieth century intellectuals foisted Communism on the world, thus ensuring that millions of Russians, Chinese, Cambodians and others would be killed for their dissent. Intellectuals are always the first to embrace every dictator and to excuse their methods.

The warmists are increasingly desperate as their dreams of global domination are falling apart.

In Europe and here in America all their schemes to replace the real production of electricity with solar panels and wind turbines are being rejected. Their plans for herding populations into cities and onto mass transit meet with resistance. Parents are objecting to their eco-curricula in schools. Al Gore has become a joke.

Consider this, if they were in charge, anyone who voiced dissent from their global warming-climate change lies would be in concentration camps, undergoing “re-education”, being “treated” with mind-altering drugs, or dead.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Auschwitz: Ignoring History, Predicting the Future

The gates of Auscwitz - a Nazi death camp

By Alan Caruba

The late Israeli scholar and diplomat, Abba Eban, (1915-2002) said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Similarly, Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” In Churchill’s case, he was referring to the U.S. reluctance to become involved in another war in Europe, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed that overnight. By 1945, along with our allies, the wars in Europe and Asia were over.

Sixty-seven years ago, on January 27, 1945, elements of the Soviet army came upon the Auschwitz concentration camps to discover a Nazi killing machine, one of several such camps created to exploit forced labor and to systematically kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, clerics, prisoners of war, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Nazi state, right down to children and infants.

The Nazis killed people on such a scale that it is almost incomprehensible. It happened within my lifetime and that of many others, some of whom are among the fortunate survivors. And yet, today, the denial of the Holocaust and the millions of other Nazi victims is an article of faith among Arabs in the Middle East and countless others around the world.

A January 25th Agence France-Presse article reported that “One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead of Holocaust memorial day. Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp”, the Stern magazine poll revealed “that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.”

It is essential that people in their respective nations know their own and other’s histories. A hallmark of the former Soviet regime in Russia was the way it rewrote history and, in George Orwell’s classic “1984”, a work of fiction about communism, there was a Ministry of Truth in which history was rewritten.

In the United States, since around the 1960s, strenuous efforts have been made to alter the teaching of the nation’s history. The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as slaveholders to downplay their devotion to liberty.

Even they knew that slavery was an abomination, but their task was to create a new nation, one dedicated to liberty. The U.S. Constitution was approved by twelve state delegations in 1787, but in 1861, barely 74 years later it would take a Civil War to put an end to slavery and another hundred years to end the exclusion of African Americans from access to their full rights under the Constitution.

Several generations of Americans have passed through our school systems—literally controlled by the federal government after the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 after being transferred from the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s single term. All curriculum taught in the schools comes from the DOE thanks to its control over a national, one-size-fits-all testing system introduced with the “No Child Left Behind” program championed by George W. Bush.

To not know about Auschwitz, whether one is German, American, or any other nationality is a failure on a grand scale because it means that it can be repeated. To not know America’s epic struggle to fulfill its promise of liberty leaves new generations at a disadvantage, as in the case of a fifth of young Germans today, ignorant of their nation’s past.

In today’s world, many worry about the fate of Israel, surrounded by hostile nations and openly threatened by an Iran seeking nuclear weapons. Its independence was declared in 1948, barely three years after the end of World War II. Its first task was to absorb, not only the survivors of the Nazi regime throughout Europe, but those who were forced to flee Arab nations in the wake of the war. Its independence was greeted with the first of several wars against it. The general hostility to Jews that preceded the Holocaust by centuries is a stain on humanity.

So there is cause for concern when one in five young Germans have no idea what went on in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

It is a concern when the Syrian dictatorship has already killed 5,000 of its own people to maintain itself.

It is a concern for Iraq, already falling back into an internal conflict after decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the end of the U.S. occupation.

It is a concern for an Iranian dictatorship on the cusp of creating its own nuclear weapons.

It is a concern for Venezuela, held in the grip of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship, an acolyte of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It is a concern for Europeans whose political experiment, the European Union, threatens the financial stability of its member nations with the sole exception of Germany.

It is a concern for Americans who witnessed the unilateral limited nuclear disarmament of the nation and the huge reduction of its military power by the Obama administration, less than the lifetime after the end of World War II.

The world remains a dangerous place. That is the lesson of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Busybodies, Nags and Control Freaks

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago I saw a television documentary on the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. I have, in addition, read any number of books on the period of the 1920s and 30s. The lesson it teaches is that the Nazis did not suddenly arise, take control, and impose a totalitarian government on Germans. It was a matter of slow progress until October 29, 1929 when the U.S. stock market crashed.

The effect was worldwide. In Europe where nations were still trying to revive from the devastating impact of World War One, it created havoc similar to the Great Depression that gripped America for a decade.

In the wake of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, a defeated Germany had been hit with huge reparations. The Weimar Republic was struggling to return the nation to some degree of stability.

The destabilization of the worldwide financial system created the chaos needed for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to gain seats in the government and when Hitler was named Chancellor it opened the door to total control.

Thousands of communists were rounded up and put in concentration camps, thus eliminating the main political challenge. Ordinary Germans realized that anyone could be arrested and detained without any recourse to the law.

Hitler then turned his attention to the Jews of Germany, a minor part of the population, many of whom had lived there for generations. Scapegoating the Jews played into the anti-Semitism that had existed for centuries in Germany and provided an “enemy”, an alleged reason for the nation’s travails.

I was thinking about this with regard to the way Hugo Chavez managed to take over Venezuela, a major oil producer, step by step until recently when that nation’s supine congress gave him the right to rule by dictate. Ever since he took over and began to nationalize everything, Venezuela has been on a downward path economically and socially. The same thing happened after Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959.

Dictators are the ultimate control freaks, nags and busybodies.

In countries where Islam is both the state and the primary religion, people can be whipped, stoned to death, jailed, tortured, and executed for religion-based reasons. One must always demonstrate support for the state and the faith or run terrible risks, but unlike Communism, religion is the all-consuming factor.

Largely unreported, the ethnic cleansing of Christians continues apace in the Middle East, hardly differing from the fate of its Jews. There are few Jews in those nations where many had lived for generations because, with the founding of Israel in 1948, thousands were forced to flee for their lives. Many Arab Christians and Persian Bahaists, joined them. Thousands sought sanctuary there along with the survivors of the Holocaust, but Israel would have to fight several wars of defense. For more than sixty years, no effort to find peace with the Palestinians has yielded any positive response.

What does this have to do with America?

Well, it seems to me that the first two years of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid administration has given most Americans a taste of what it is to live in a nation where the central government is run by people who do not give a damn for public opinion or the Constitution.

It took barely a year for Americans to come together in a Tea Party movement to oppose Obamacare. That hideous piece of legislation interposes the government between all Americans and their physicians, inflicting a bureaucratic nightmare that, if permitted to exist, will surely kill Americans denied timely care.

The members of the Tea Party are not just Republicans, not just Democrats, and not just independents. They are quintessentially Americans that swiftly concluded that a serious mistake was made when Obama was elected. On the anniversary of the original tea party, Sen. Reid was forced to make a humiliating retreat, dropping the $1.1 trillion "budget" bill intended to shackle the newly elected members of Congress and to impose still more debt and control over Americans.

The Obama administration is shot through with control freaks, nags and busybodies, not the least of whom is the First Lady, Michelle Obama. On the signing of a bill giving the governmental control over food in the nation’s schools she said that obesity is “not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.” That is just absurd. It is a feeble excuse to interpose the federal government between parents and the schools to which they are compelled to send their children.

“We cannot leave it up to the parents,” said Michelle Obama. Not surprisingly, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that 75% of those asked did not agree with the First Lady.

Hardly a day goes by when some member of the Obama administration doesn’t say or do something absurd. In mid-December, the U.S. Surgeon-General, Regina Benjamin, said “there is no risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.”

She claimed that even occasional smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke “causes immediate damage to your body that can lead to serious illness or death.” That is not based in any valid analysis and it ignores the rising levels of life expectancy in America. It is just another piece of the hysterical anti-tobacco agenda of busybodies who have no right to tell anyone whether they should smoke or not.

The most dangerous thing Americans do every day is to get behind the wheel or be a passenger in an automobile. Auto accidents annually kill 40,000 or more.

Recently, at the Cancun, Mexico conference of global warming charlatans, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said that “climate change is one of the greatest threats facing our planet” as if human beings had anything to say or do about it. He might was well have said that the United Nations must begin to control the Sun, the oceans, and the clouds.

Finally, after being banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980, the agency decided that saccharin, a sweetener substitute for sugar, was neither toxic nor a cancer-causing agent, a fact determined in the late 1990s by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The EPA routinely bans chemicals claiming they could cause cancer, ignoring the fact that too much exposure to any chemical, including salt or sugar, is unwise.

These and a thousand other examples are reasons to distrust the Obama administration in particular and the federal government in general. As it continues to grasp more and more power over lifestyle decisions that belong to individuals, it threatens the very reason America was founded.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Echoes of 1930s Germany?

By Alan Caruba

Time and again in these troubled and troubling times people make reference to Germany in the 1930s, the rise of the Third Reich, and to Hitler as they express their fears regarding the Obama administration.

It is an interesting comparison if only because it reveals a sense that an authoritarian government is poised to impose its dictates. This is highly unlikely if only because the forthcoming midterm elections give every indication of overturning any such ambitions by the present administration.

It is, for example, bleeding its top economic advisors, the former chief of staff to the President, the sudden resignation of the president’s national security advisor, and, most tellingly, virtually every Democrat running for office is running away from Obama’s legislative agenda.

Obama is hardly a Hitler and the Democrats are hardly Nazis. It's a bad comparison.

I think what is at the heart of the comparison is the way, in just under two years, Americans witnessed the government takeover of the healthcare sector, one sixth of the economy, the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler to the benefit of the United Auto Workers and the loss of their creditors and bondholders, and a so-called stimulus package that by most accounts has wasted billions.

The general anxiety is bolstered by the stagnation of the job market and a widespread belief that Obama, Pelosi and Reid, along with the Democrats in Congress, have taken the nation in the wrong direction. Those familiar with history see the kind of conditions that existed in Germany in the 1930s that were the background for the rise of the Hitler and the Nazi Party. Hitler, however, was not massively abandoned by his supporters as Obama as been.

It happens that I have been reading a book, “Berlin at War”, by historian Roger Moorhouse. What we tend to forget is that the National Socialist party, led by Hitler, was freely elected to power by Germans and, in general, had their support because of its early success energizing a moribund economy.

Though we know in hindsight that Hitler was a monster, at the time he gave Germans a reason to take pride in their nation again and he proved adept at adding more territory to Germany without firing a shot. In the years leading up to the invasion of Poland in 1939, Berliners and other Germans were generally content with Hitler and the party.

It wasn’t until 1943 that Berliners began to feel the affects of the war in ways other than rationing and the conscription of their fathers, brothers, and sons. “After the first spate of bombings through late 1940 into the spring of 1941, there had followed a period of almost two years in which Royal Air Force raids on the capital became fewer and farther in between,” noted Moorhouse. “So, when the RAF reappeared in the skies over Berlin on the night of 1 March, it came as a shock.”

Americans were shocked to see Obamacare rammed through the House and Senate on a party line vote. It came after nearly a million Americans had shown up at the steps of the Capital building to protest against it.

In effect, the Obama administration had declared war on Americans. It was not merely unresponsive to the majority, but contemptuous of it.

What Obama forgot or never knew is that our government exists with the consent of the governed. What he forgot or never knew is that our presidents govern, not rule.

Something quintessentially American occurred.

The same sense of unity and urgency that Americans felt after Pearl Harbor, that spurred the Greatest Generation to take on totalitarian threats in two theatres of combat, occurred in the rise of the Tea Party movement because many Americans perceived that their nation was literally under siege by an enemy and this time it was an internal one.

It took twelve years of Nazi rule and the reduction of Berlin to rubble for the usurpation of power to end on May 9, 1945. Compare that, then, with the Obama administration that began on January 20, 2009 followed by a swift loss of public support because of, not despite, its thuggish political effort to reshape the American model into a European socialist one.

Americans are just weeks away from “taking back” their nation from a man who hid or denied his real life from the voters to get elected on the basis of his oratorical skills and the stage managing of mass gatherings that were curiously reminiscent of Nazi rallies.

Obama had the good luck of having a lackluster opponent and a financial crisis that too conveniently broke just before the election in 2008. Even so, his margin of victory was slim.

It is not 1930s Germany. It is America in the first decade of a new century with new challenges.

It is an America that has been through recessions and even a Great Depression, and which must learn again the fundamentals of the Founding Fathers; the need for a small, limited central government, the importance of sovereign, independent States, fiscal prudence, and citizens free to make their own choices regarding their lives.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nazi Dreams were Green Dreams

The gates of Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp

By Alan Caruba

In a week when Jews will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the New Year--5771, the connection between the Nazi’s rebellion against the Judeo-Christian worldview and the present-day ideology that drives the environmental movement needs to be exposed.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere around the world, driven in part by the Islamic hatred of Jews, but also reflected in the liberal antipathy to corporations and the financial community, often portrayed as “Jewish bankers”, as history’s favorite scapegoat for economic problems. The situation mirrors Germany in the 1930s.

Few know of the connection, but it is spelled out in “Nazi Oaks” by R. Mark Musser ($12.75, Advantage Books, softcover, via Amazon.com). Thanks to his research we learn that “the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet.”

“It is no coincidence that sweeping Nazi environmental legislation preceded the racially charged anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws.”

In the decades during which I have seen the rise of the environmental movement in America I have also seen its inherent totalitarian drive to not merely alter society, but to completely control the lives of all Americans. It is fundamentally an attack on the American credo of individual freedom and it has become commonplace to suggest that environmentalism has become a pseudo-religion.

Mark Musser is a 1989 graduate from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, widely regarded as one of the premier environmental institutions in the nation. In 1994, he received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland and, for seven years, was a missionary in Belarus and the Ukraine. He is currently a pastor.

The history spelled out in Musser’s book needs to be understood in terms of what is occurring in America today. The title of the book comes from the fact that, “With the oak tree being such a powerful symbol of German nationalism and the German natural landscape, Hitler had oaks planted all over the Reich in hundreds of towns and villages.” The practice was dubbed by Nazi environmentalists as “concordant with the spirit of the Fuhrer.”

Just as America is passing through a period of economic stress, the Nazis in the 1930s sought to tap into the German psyche and a “return to nature” myth was seen as a unifying measure. The same regime that would later create the means to systematically kill Europe’s Jews shared a lot in common with any number of present-day environmentalist leaders and academics.

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is on record saying, “Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.”

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the United Nations Environmental Program, said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?” When you contemplate the many measures taken by the U.S. government against the mining of coal, the drilling for oil, and even the shutdown of a nuclear waste repository, is it not obvious that denying America the energy it requires is one way to destroy its economy?

In one chilling way in particular, the hatred of the human race, does the environmental movement reflect the Nazi’s merciless destruction, not only of Jews, but of millions of others consigned to its concentration camps and the relentless killing wherever they sought conquest.

This is why the Club of Rome could say, “The earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man.” How does this differ from Hitler’s many expressions of hatred for Jews and others, Africans and Asians that he deemed to be “sub-human”?

This is the naked face of environmentalism.

Remember, too, this did not happen a long time ago. The “greatest generation”, some of whom still live, fought the Nazi regime a scant seventy years ago.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic warns that “it should be clear by now to everyone that environmental activism is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a ‘noble’ idea.”

Couple that with a torrent of falsified “science” and you have the modern environmental movement.

The single greatest threat to freedom in America is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current efforts to acquire the authority to regulate a gas that is responsible along with oxygen for all life on Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2).

If the EPA gets that control, it will be able to determine every aspect of life in America because it is the use of electricity, industrial and all other machine-based technology that generates carbon dioxide.

And it is the Big Lie that CO2 is causing global warming that is being used to justify the agency’s quest. There is no global warming. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle.

The Nazi regime was made up of animal rights advocates, environmentalists, and vegetarians, of which Hitler was all three.

And it led ultimately to mass murder.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

D-Day - June 6, 1944 - Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

There is a cruel calculus of war. It is the number of casualties required to win. Beyond that, it is the consequences of losing.

Sixty-six years ago, on June 6, 1944, the greatest armada of ships and men laid siege to the beaches of Normandy, France, in an invasion that would put an end to the Nazi conquest of Europe.

The invasion was divided into sectors involving U.S., Canadian, and British troops, including airborne. Conservative estimates are that the U.S. alone lost 4,696. The U.K. lost 1,043. The Canadians lost 1,204. The total is 8,443 and, in general, it is believed to have been closer to 9,000.

As the battles raged on, pushing into Germany, some American troops under the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower came upon the Nazi concentration camps. Eisenhower ordered all possible photos to be taken and that Germans from the surrounding villages be required to see the camps and even be made to bury the dead.



In words to this effect, Eisenhower said, “Get it all on record now, get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Having previously attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan, beginning in 2003 American and allied forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, invading Iraq. Between then and now, the total American losses have been just over 4,400 while the British have lost 179 and others 139 for a total of 4,720.

In seven years of combat to create a democratic government there, the losses have been half of what was lost in the D-Day invasion.

As Eisenhower predicted, in Iran and throughout the Middle East and everywhere else that Jews are hated, the Nazi Holocaust, the deliberate killing of six million Jews, is denied.

In the past week, the doyen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, demanded the Israelis “go home, to Germany, to Poland.” She could have added that the Israelis return to the Arab nations they had to flee following the founding of Israel in 1948 or the Russian émigrés who fled persecution in the former Soviet Union. There are six million Jews who call Israel their home.

The Israelis are home. After an exile of 2,000 years, they returned to their home and restored their nation.

On September 11, 2001, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. took approximately 3,000 American lives.

In late May, John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave a speech in which he described the people who flew commercial airliners into those buildings and who have not stopped plotting to kill more Americans as victims of “political, economic and social forces” who should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the Obama administration’s assertion that the enemy is not “terrorism”, dismissing it as a “tactic” because, he said, terrorism is “a state of mind.” Then he added that the word “jihad” should not be applied to 9/11 and the subsequent attacks such as the Fort Hood murders.

Brennan described jihad is “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” adding “there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.” Brennan denied the jihad that justified those murders.

Jihad has never really meant anything other than the total conquest of the world to impose Islam.

D-Day was the beginning of an epic struggle to restore and protect Western civilization against the barbarism of Nazism and every day that has passed prior to and since the establishment of Israel in 1948 has been part of this struggle, the legacy of that struggle.

Since the end of World War Two, Americans have sacrificed their lives in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, joining that struggle wherever freedom is challenged, wherever the barbarism of enslavement has asserted itself.

Does anyone think that the Israelis, on the frontlines of Western civilization in a barbaric region of the world, will not ultimately have to defend themselves against Iran?

That they are not now defending themselves against Turkey that has allied itself with the Palestinians who have no legitimate claim to Israel or Jerusalem, a city holy to Judaism and Christianity? Against a people who would dare to build a mosque within a short walk from ground zero in New York?

Does anyone think we should not have landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944?

Does anyone think that freedom is not worth fighting for and even dying for?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Chavez Transforming Venezuela into a Nazi State

Venezuela is being transformed into a Nazi state and the first sure signs of it are the attacks on that nation's Jews.

Why can't we find any news of this in the U.S. mainstream press? Why is this not addressed at the highest level of our government?

Obama & Congress Shrink Freedom in America

By Alan Caruba

Whether it was the Hitler Youth or Mao’s Red Guard, one of the elements of every totalitarian regime is to create organizations that indoctrinate a nation’s youth to blindly follow the leader.

They are a far cry from America’s Boy and Girl Scout movement in which patriotism mixes with learning a wide variety of useful skills and, if you’ve been paying attention, the Boy Scouts refusal to permit gays to participate has cost them various forms of support. In June 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boys Scouts were within their Constitutional rights hold this position.

The Boy and Girl Scouts are private groups, but a far more insidious government sponsored youth corps is making its way through Congress. In late March the House of Representatives approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” for the nation’s youth. The legislation makes references to “uniforms” and the need to train future “public sector leaders.” Nothing much about it sounds voluntary.

The vote reauthorized the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973; acts that originally were intended to fund AmeriCorps and the National Senior Service Corps.

The current problem is all that talk by Barack Obama of a “National Civilian Security Force” which he envisioned as being as big and well-funded as the U.S. military. That would put it somewhere in the vicinity of more than a million, all goose-stepping around your city or hometown like some homegrown Taliban.

To assist this Force, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced a bill in February (H.R. 645) to construct no fewer than six “national emergency centers” that reek of the camps the Nazis set up initially to imprison their political enemies and later to kill Jews, Catholics, trade unionists, homosexuals, and gypsies.

Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner wants more and more power to regulate everything in the nation’s financial sector. Banks stocks plummeted on that news.

If the existing government entities such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Security Investors Protection Corporation to name a few were blind to the growing threat to the nation’s financial system, why would we think some supra-agency would offer any more protection?

“It all comes down to whether these agencies were actually willing to exercise their authority,” an insider with decades of experience said to me when I posed that question. It was not just their failure, but included the cover up by members of Congress who protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac until both government sponsored entities had to be seized before a complete implosion occurred.

For a bit of legerdemain, while everyone was watching the White House scoundrels, the House of Representatives voted 285-140 in late March to put approximately 1.2 million acres off limits for any natural resource development. By this vote, they denied Americans access to 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of oil according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of land Management.

The BLM oversees 26 million acres designated as part of the National Landscape Conservation System that environmentalists say permanently “protects” the land. This Green Talk for further denying Americans access to our vast natural resources, leaving us forever dependent on foreign oil and natural gas despite the endless nauseating talk of becoming “energy independent” in the name of national security.

From proposed youth corps, to civilian security forces, to expanded regulation of the nation’s banking and investment sectors, to the set-aside of lands representing natural resources that will never be available, the net grows wider and tighter to curtail the freedoms Americans take for granted and deny them the energy they require.

It’s something to think about before the knock on the door late at night or in the early morning hours before you’re taken off to a concentration camp for having dared to express an opinion.

There will be no one left to protect you

By Alan Caruba

Barack Obama wants to institute a Civilian National Security Force, a vast militia not unlike Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a personal army. He knows he would need such a force to protect him and to enforce his will on Americans.

Americans will have not seen such arbitrary power used against them since the days of the Civil War when Lincoln put the Constitution in the bottom drawer of his desk and set about arresting anyone who opposed his policies to enforce the Union on southern States seeking secession. The moral issue was slavery. The Constitutional issue was states rights.

If you want to see another civil war, just wait for this new security force to come into being. Obama would need it because the concept of posse comitatus forbids the use of the U.S. military to enforce laws within the nation. An army of domestic followers of “the One” would fill that need, assuming that all other law enforcement agencies failed to resist such a horrendous plan.

There is absolutely NO need for a homeland security force. We have the Federal Bureau of Investigation that has a long and distinguished history of obedience to the U.S. Constitution and respect for the rule of law. We have a huge law enforcement community that is likewise pledged to the rule of law. We have a Central Intelligence Agency and a National Security Agency, both defending against foreign enemies. Nothing Obama proposes is more dangerous to the comity of the nation than a National Civilian Security Force.

A friend recently suggested that the KKK is probably hoping Obama will win because they anticipate their numbers will gain in response. That would be unfortunate, but not surprising. These days the KKK, if you visit their website, are all about “white, Christian Americans.” They still hate Blacks and Jews, and one supposes everyone who is not a white Christian by their definition.

What this ignores is that America was founded by Christians for the free practice of Protestantism. Even the Declaration of Independence makes reference to the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…” While the Bill of Rights forbids the “establishment” of a state religion, it does not forbid the practice of religion, any religion. America has been mostly free of overt religious bigotry, despite attacks on the early Mormons, a rampant distrust of Catholics, and evidence of anti-Semitism that virtually disappeared after the Holocaust in the last century.

So the question is not who the KKK is voting for, but what the unwitting and ignorant followers of Obama voting for? And do they know what awaits them in an Obama administration backed up by a Congress in the total control of the Democrat Party? I doubt that most do.

Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a German Lutheran pastor who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 wrote, “In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.”

The liberties that thousands of Americans have fought and died for hang in the balance.

All the conditions are in place for a huge Democrat blowout this election. That much power concentrated in a single political party is not a good thing. It is, in so many ways, not democratic and not American.

Coincidences About Life and Death

By Alan Caruba

If you’re a writer, you begin to notice how various pieces of information come at you in what appears to be a random fashion, but which have a curious way of connecting. That’s because everything human connects in some fashion. Nothing human happens in a vacuum.

On Sunday evening, the famed “60 Minutes” had a segment on the Israeli Air Force, interviews with its commander and with some of its pilots, including one girl who was small enough to be asked if they made uniforms in her size. She flew a U.S. made Apache helicopter, the kind the Israelis use to kill the leaders of Hamas if they can find them driving around Gaza. They use them to suppress the daily rocketing. She was only one of forty in her class who earned the right to kill Israel’s enemies in this fashion.

Others flew large fighter planes, acknowledging that Israel rules the skies. That’s a good thing because the field from which they fly is only fifteen minutes from Beirut or Damascus. Everyone, young men and women, in Israel must serve in its defense force, but the Air Force has the right to choose the best among them to fly. It is not a choice for those called to this duty and, even then, only the best among them will have the responsibility.

Israel cannot lose a single war. So far, as it makes ready to celebrate its sixtieth year, it has not. Against impossible odds, the Jews fought, triumphed, and survived. It is not a coincidence. They have no intention of being killed like sheep as occurred to six million European Jews during World War II. Some of the survivors made it to Israel to reclaim their lives and to resurrect their nation.

Later Sunday evening, I turned to the National Geographic Channel and it had a program that showed extremely rare photos of the commandant and staff of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where, astoundingly, a million Jews were systematically killed between 1944 and the end of the war in the following year. The work for the staff was very demanding, trainloads of Jews would arrive and as many as 8,000 at a time had to be sent to the gas chambers, their bodies burned in the crematoriums.

The photos of the staff showed them relaxing from their task. In one, maybe twenty women are shown being given blueberries, all young, smiling. In others, the men seemed in good spirits, including a smiling Dr. Mengele who, by age 32, had both a medical degree and one in philosophy. They were happy in their work and their work was not war, but murder, genocide.

The photos of a trainload of Hungarian Jews showed men, women, and children of all ages, including a mother holding her baby. With the exception of those separated to become workers, all were killed within hours of arrival. The mind cannot comprehend murder on such a scale.

The Israeli Air Force general put it this way, when Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, you have to take him at his word.

The world did not believe what the Nazis were saying until it was too late to realize they were telling the truth when the said that Europe must be “judenfrei”; that all the Jews must be killed. Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad also denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

About seven months ago, the Israeli Air Force blew up a nuclear facility in Syria that we are now told was being built under the supervision of North Koreans whose chief export is death. It is only a matter of time before the Israelis will have to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities being built, we’re told, for “peaceful” purposes. One hopes that American bombers will be flying with them.

As the war clouds gathered, the British tried to negotiate peace with the Nazis. The Russians signed a peace pact. In 1939 the Nazis attacked Poland and, as they say, the rest is history. History teaches that you cannot negotiate with murderers, with people who have a history of taking hostages, with men obsessed with the belief that their god commands them to do monstrous evil. You must kill them before they kill you.

The Israelis know this.

One hopes the rest of the world and, especially, America, does as well.

Kristallnacht

By Alan Caruba

An interesting thing happened in Prague last November. There was, so far as I can determine, virtually no news of the event except in a few newspapers that might be expected to cover it.

The place was Prague, but what precipitated the event had occurred in 1938 in Nazi Germany and had come to be called “Kristallnacht”, the night of broken glass when synagogues and other places associated with Jews were attacked and destroyed.

By the time it ended, Nazi stormtroopers had killed 91 Jews and 30,000 others had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps. It marked the beginning of what was to be known as “the final solution”, the deliberate murder of millions of European Jews that has since been called the Holocaust.

In Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, the word went out that several hundred neo-Nazis were preparing to march on the city’s Jewish quarter on the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

They found themselves confronted by thousands of Czechs who filled the streets that Sabbath Saturday to show their solidarity with their nation’s Jews. Masses of non-Jews showed up wearing yellow Stars of David inscribed with the word “Jude”, the same symbol the Nazis had required Jews to wear.

There were some bloody street fights, but the 1,400 police who had been mobilized, along with the sheer numbers of the anti-Nazi protesters were sufficient to maintain the peace. It was the first time in recent memory that residents of a former Eastern bloc capital had taken to the streets to protest anti-Semitism.

Only about 1,500 Jews live in Prague, but an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 protesters were on hand for the day’s events that included prayer, musical performances, and presentations by Holocaust survivors that were projected on a large outdoor screen.

While there are probably less than 1,000 active neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic, there are others throughout Europe and anti-Semitism, though muted, remains a part of European culture.

Prague Mayor, Pavel Bern, addressed thousands during a ceremony sponsored by the Jewish Liberal Union. “We need to cultivate the national memory to avoid what happened in the past.” The Nazis murdered 80,000 of Czechoslovakia’s 120,000 Jews during World War II.

The Czechs remembered. They came together to protest the evil of anti-Semitism, but we all have to remember and we all have to protest whenever some group, any group, is singled out from the family of man for murder.

When the Iranian leaders say the Holocaust is a myth, the truth cries out from six million graves. We must not be silent. When they threaten tiny Israel with nuclear death, we must not be silent. We must say to ourselves, “Never again.”

We must all become Jews in the face of evil. Silence is the ally of those who would perpetrate such horrors.