A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?

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Source: City Journal | Claire Berlinski

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

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Read the entire article on the City Journal website (new window will open).

Acton Institute: Atlas Shrugged – See the Movie, Skip the Book [VIDEO]

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I received permission to reprint this blog post by Acton Institute blogger Bruce Edward Walker. Walker, correctly in my view, draws out the authoritarian impulse in Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism” that can be distilled down to this: The libertarianism (man’s moral agency is self-referencing) that describes Rand’s Objectivism stands against the classical liberalism (what we today would call moral conservatism) of a Burke, Kirk, or even Tocqueville which see the bonds between people and thus society and culture as fundamentally religious in character.

Ayn Rand

Rand stood against the cultural leveling of statism, particularly the loss of character and mediocrity it fosters. That is the appeal of her philosophy. There is little difference between, say, Soviet materialism and the state-sponsored corporatism of the modern welfare state (Europe in particular but increasingly so in the United States). However, the final refutation of this debilitating journey into what Friederich Hayek warned is a new “serfdom” is actually moral renewal. Rand was not able to penetrate the moral dimension of statism because of her passionate atheism. The best she could offer was an anti-statist libertarianism that inevitably results in an authoritarianism of a different sort (and fostered a personal life that is best described as morally chaotic).

Whittaker Chambers

I’ve included two items that shed more light on Rand and her influence on American intellectual history. The first is the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist turned Catholic who’s book “Witness” is perhaps the clearest testament of moral clarity of his age. The second is an interview with William F. Buckley, who fills in some of the cultural history of the era. Buckley described Atlas Shrugged as “ideological fabulism.” (Chambers worked for Buckley at National Review in the 1950s.)

Whittaker Chambers: Big Sister is Watching You

William Buckley on Ayn Rand & Atlas Shrugged:

Source: Acton Institute | Bruce Edward Walker

Atlas Shrugged – See the Movie, Skip the Book

Is it conceivable to endorse the cinematic adaptation of Ayn Rand’s libertarian manifesto Atlas Shrugged – as I do – while rejecting the flawed ideology which inspired it?

I would argue, yes. On the one hand, I place the Beatles at the pinnacle of 1960s pop music while concluding that their song “Mr. Moonlight” is wince-inducing to the point of being unlistenable. Likewise, I admire 99.9 percent of G.K. Chesterton’s body of work yet disagree with him on his assertion only men should vote. On the other hand, I disagree for the most part with Camille Paglia’s worldview yet admire her writing style and intellectual honesty.

So it goes with Ayn Rand. Her free-market views were a welcome antidote to New Deal policies and the malignant growth of government programs and crony capitalism. And for the same reasons I warmly welcome the first installment of the planned cinematic trilogy of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – timed to coincide with the traditional Tax Day this coming Friday – which renders her themes in such a fashion they appear ripped from the headlines of today’s Wall Street Journal.

Atlas Shrugged-Part I captures the malaise of our times in its depiction of a United States of the near future when businessmen look to government to throttle competition by any means necessary (e.g. legislation and regulation) rather than innovating and investing to succeed. Part I ignores Rand’s anti-collectivism, rampant individualism, atheism and, for the most part, libertarian libertinism, to focus on her depictions of government looters and corporate rent seekers.

All this recommends the movie to lovers of liberty properly understood, to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk. In fact, I’ll go so far as to encourage readers to see the film and skip the book.

My problems with Rand and Objectivism, the ideology of “enlightened self-interest” she founded, go beyond the oft-quoted admonition of Whittaker Chambers in which he expressed her autocratic intransigence led him to read Rand’s command to all detractors real and perceived “to the gas chambers go!” on every page. There is some truth to Chamber’s critique, to be sure, in that any worldview that rejects faith and community eventually succumbs to obduracy leading to what Russell Kirk labeled the “chirping sect” of libertarianism (a phrase he borrowed from T.S. Eliot).

By chirping sect, Kirk intentionally references Edmund Burke’s “insects of the hour” — those libertarians who splinter into ever smaller groups and thereby sacrifice both the personal and common good on the altar of their own narcissism masked as “individualism.” One need only read about the internecine strife within the Objectivist’s ivory tower to note the wisdom of Burke and Kirk. The CliffsNotes version: Arguing with Rand meant immediate exile to intellectual Siberia.

Contrary to Rand’s individualism, the United States since its beginning has congregated in townships and parishes where true democracy flourishes under the express influence of religious faith. Nineteenth-century writers Alexis de Tocqueville and Orestes Brownson both noted these communal incubators and conservators of liberty – small collectives that reflect their respective faiths to advocate for the good of all within their sphere.

As Tocqueville wrote in his seminal Democracy in America:

In the United States the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people. Amongst the Anglo-Americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of Christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they are afraid to be suspected of unbelief. Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and the experiments of men. Thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; and, whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount. Before it can perpetrate innovation, certain primal and immutable principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions of human device are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion.

Among his many salient points against libertarianism enumerated in the essay, “Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries,” Kirk said:

What binds society together? The libertarians reply that the cement of society (so far as they will endure any binding at all) is self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment. But the conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.

Elsewhere in his essay, Kirk delineates the differences between individualism as expressed by Rand and her like and the community spirit so intrinsic to our national character by invoking Eric Voegelin, whom, Kirk states:

[R]eminds us – is not between totalitarians on the one hand and liberals (or libertarians) on the other; rather, it lies between all those who believe in some sort of transcendent moral order, on one side, and on the other side all those who take this ephemeral existence of ours for the be-all and end-all-to be devoted chiefly to producing and consuming. In this discrimination between the sheep and the goats, the libertarians must be classified with the goats – that is, as utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct. In effect, they are converts to Marx’s dialectical materialism; so conservatives draw back from them on the first principle of all.

In short, capitalism and the toxic individualism of Rand and others for the instantaneous benefits supposedly granted leads to liberty misunderstood in the forms of materialism and licentious behavior – both antithetical to liberty properly understood as the fully realized temporal life in community and faith.

So I’m thankful Atlas Shrugged-Part I avoids the toxic elements of Rand’s so-called “philosophy” and am hopeful the subsequent installments of the film trilogy steer clear of the same pitfalls. By all means, see the film and avoid the book.

Death Warrant of Ancient Christianity

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If American liberals and neo-cons get their way and America invades Syria, the Syrian Christians will be persecuted and forced out of their ancient homeland.

Source: Real Clear Politics | Philip Jenkins

Ever since the wave of popular movements started sweeping the Middle East, Western media have rarely found much good to say about the authoritarian regimes under attack. Few observers deny that the last generation or so of Arab rulers were indeed greedy despots, and it seems desirable for Western powers to intervene as forcefully as they can on behalf of what are commonly billed as pro-democracy movements. The arguments against intervention are obvious enough, most obviously that it is much easier to begin a military intervention than to end it, while we rarely have much idea about the political character of the supposed democrats we are trying to aid. But in one case above all, namely Syria, debates over intervention have missed one overwhelming argument, which is the likely religious catastrophe that would follow the overthrow of the admittedly dictatorial government. Any Western intervention in Syria would likely supply the death warrant for the ancient Christianity of the Middle East. For anyone concerned about Christians worldwide — even if you believe firmly in democracy and human rights — it’s hard to avoid this prayer: Lord, bring democracy to Syria, but not in my lifetime.

Why is Syria so critical to the religious geography of the region? From ancient times, the territory had a complex mixture of religious traditions, and one that was far too complex to reduce to a simple Christian-Muslim divide. Under the long centuries of Ottoman power, Syria retained its sizable Christian minority, but other minority populations also flourished, groups that originated within Islam, but which orthodox believers condemned as heretics and apostates. Particularly important were the Alawites, a group that certainly includes Christian and even Gnostic strands in its esoteric world view. In fact, they were long known locally as Nusayris, “Little Christians” The Druze are no less secretive in their beliefs, and are equally loathed by strict Islamists. Although estimates are shaky, a reasonable estimate is that Alawites make up around ten percent of Syria’s population of twenty million, with the Druze at another three percent.

Christian numbers are still harder to determine. Over the past century century, Syria regularly served as the last refuge for Christian communities who had been largely destroyed elsewhere in the Middle East — for Christians fleeing massacre in Turkey after 1915, or in Iraq after 2003. A standard figure for the number of Syrian Christians is ten percent, or around two million believers, but that omits an uncertain number of thinly disguised crypto-believers, not to mention the recent arrivals from the wreck of Saddam’s Iraq. A fifteen percent Christian minority is quite probable.

It’s one thing to catalogue the religious oddities of a particular country, but we also have to know that that diversity is the absolute foundation of Syrian politics. Basically, a large majority of Syria — officially, some 74 percent — is Sunni Muslim, and the nation’s politics for almost fifty years has been devoted to ensuring that this majority does not gain power. Ever since 1963, Syria has been ruled by variations of the Ba’ath Party, an Arab ultra-nationalist movement originally co-founded by the Syrian Christian intellectual, Michel Aflaq. Because of its devotion to absolute secularism, the Ba’ath cause appeals strongly to religious minorities who fear the overwhelming demographic power of Sunni Islam. Christians, Alawites and others all have a potent vested interest in drawing all Arab peoples, regardless of faith, into a shared passion for secular modernity and pan-Arab patriotism, in sharp contrast to Islamism.

Since the 1960s, Ba’ath rule in Syria has meant the dictatorship of a highly structured one-party system closely allied to the armed forces and the intelligence apparatus. But it has also meant the dominance of the nation’s religious minorities, who are so over-represented in the military-intelligence complex. This means above all the Alawites, in alliance with Christian elites. Hafez al-Assad (President from 1971 through 2000) was of course an Alawite, and by the 1990s, five of his seven closest advisers were Christian. The deadliest enemies of the al-Assad clan were the Sunni Islamists, organized in groups affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. But any effective Sunni opposition ended violently in 1982, when government forces suppressed a revolt in the city of Hama, killing possibly twenty-five thousand.

The evils of the Syrian regime are obvious enough: this is a classic police state with a penchant for assassination whenever it sees fit, and no compunction about supporting terrorist attacks at home or abroad. But just imagine that the Ba’ath regime fell. Whatever happened in the first few months of revolution, by far the most likely successor regime in the long term would be Islamist, led by activists anxious to avenge Hama. Alawites, Druze and Christians could all expect persecution at best, massacre at worst, a fate that could potentially befall five million residents. And this time, there would be no welcoming Middle Eastern refuge (Egypt has millions of its own Coptic Christians, but is not going to welcome a mass immigration of foreign Christian refugees). The only solution for these Syrian minorities would be exile from the region — to France or the US, Australia or Canada.

The West might like to see the Ba’ath regime crushed as thoroughly as its counterpart in Iraq, but as on that earlier occasion, the religious consequences of intervention could be horrible. Before planning to intervene in Syria, Western nations had better start printing several million immigration visas to hand out to refugees seeking political asylum, and demanding protection from religious persecution.

‘Erdoğan saved future of Greek Orthodox Patriarchate

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Diostheos Anağnostopulos

Source: Today’s Zaman

The spokesperson of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Father Dositheos Anağnostopulos, has said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saved the future of the patriarchate by offering Turkish citizenship to a number of archbishops in 2009.

In an interview with the Star daily, Anağnos-topulos said there were 12 archbishops on the patriarchate’s Spiritual Board at the time. “Most of [those archbishops] are very old. In order to become a member of this board, one has to be a Turkish citizen. If the patriarch dies one day, it seemed unlikely that a new patriarch would be elected from the board [due to the members’ age]. This danger has now passed. The prime minister attended a luncheon on Büyükada in August 2009 … and said the problem with the Spiritual Board will be overcome if archbishops applied to become Turkish citizens. He assured us that applicants would be granted citizenship,” the spokesperson stated.

Anağnostopulos defined the prime minister’s remarks as the “most positive moment in his lifetime.” “After the prime minister’s call, 27 of 35 archbishops abroad submitted applications to become Turkish citizens. Thirteen of them have already been granted citizenship,” he added. In 2010, CNN International ran a story on the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in which it suggested that Patriarch Bartholomew could ultimately be the last patriarch if Turkish laws, demographics and attitudes do not change. According to Anağnostopulos, however, this is no longer the case, thanks to Erdoğan.

The spokesperson also said Erdoğan and Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç were the first state authorities to express their wish to re-open a closed Greek Orthodox seminary on Heybeliada, off the coast of İstanbul. The Halki Seminary was closed in 1971 in accordance with a law that put religious and military training under state control.

In addition, Anağnostopulos said the Halki Seminary is of high importance for the Greek Orthodox population as it was once a base where clerics were trained for the religious community.

“An argument has been put forward by some people in Turkey. They say the Greek Orthodox population comprises only 2,500 people, and we needn’t train clerics for so few people. They say we may ‘import’ clerics from abroad. However, they should know that the Greek Orthodox patriarch is the most senior among Orthodox churches in the world. This is why he was granted the ecumenical title. We also have followers outside of İstanbul, including in North and South America and some parts of Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Their priests and archbishops are appointed by our patriarch. And for their appointment, it is a must for candidates to have graduated from a seminary,” he stated.

Anağnostopulos also said the re-opening of the Halki Seminary would not run contrary to the Treaty of Lausanne. He also ruled out fears that the “Byzantine spirit” would be revived if the seminary is re-opened.

“Some fear that it will go against the principles of the Republic of Turkey if the patriarchate is a very strong institution. This is wrong. The Republic of Turkey has a secular character. Every religious group has the right to continue its activities provided they are not engaged in politics. It is now a fact that the closing down of the Halki Seminary was not legal. I personally believe that the seminary was used as a trump card in the Cyprus issue and was eventually shut down,” he noted.

Islamists on Welfare: Paid to Plot the West’s Demise

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Source: Middle East Forum | Kathy Shaidle

In 2008, the Toronto Sun reported that “hundreds of [Greater Toronto Area] Muslim men in polygamous marriages — some with a harem of wives — are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses, thanks to the city and province, Muslim leaders say.”

“Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” Canadian Society of Muslims president Mumtaz Ali declared bluntly. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”

Government officials quickly denied the Muslim leader’s claims about immigration law and social benefits regulations. Only one public servant seemed sufficiently concerned. “This is wrong,” said city councilor Rob Ford. “They should put a stop to this immediately.”

Instead, welfare abuse by Muslims appears to have metastasized across the Western world. Almost three years later, news stories about radical Muslims — often immigrants — engaged in social benefits scams emerge regularly from Europe, Canada, and Australia. Even when they are not involved in fraud, Muslims frequently are overrepresented on welfare rolls, compared with other communities. The statistics from around the globe are jaw-dropping, especially in economically uncertain times.

According to one 2007 source, immigration, of which Muslims comprise a significant part, “costs Sweden at least 40 to 50 billion Swedish kroner [approximately $7 billion] every year … and has greatly contributed to bringing the Swedish welfare state to the brink of bankruptcy.” Yet two years earlier, the country’s finance minister declared counterintuitively that “more immigrants should be allowed into Sweden in order to safeguard the welfare system.”

One Iranian immigrant to Sweden expressed astonishment at his new country’s policies: “In Sweden my family encountered a political system that seemed very strange. The interpreter told us that Sweden is a country where the government will put a check into your mailbox each month if you don’t work. She explained that there was no reason to get a job.”

The statistics from Norway are even more shocking. According to a University of Oslo study, “non-Western immigrants” are ten times as likely to be on social assistance as native Norwegians.

In Germany, Muslims are four times as likely to be receiving welfare as non-Muslims. However, unlike his counterpart in Sweden, Berlin’s former finance senator Thilo Sarrazin is speaking out against the benefits system and has penned a bestselling book condemning the nation’s immigration policies. Sarrazin stated while in office that welfare recipients could feed themselves on four euros per day, adding that “losing weight is the least of their problems.”

Research by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard from 2002 reveals that mostly Muslim immigrants in Denmark “constitute five percent of the population but consume upwards of 40 percent of the welfare spending.” In that country, numerous “single” women who receive social assistance are really the wives of polygamous Muslim men.

Polygamy and benefits fraud go hand in hand across the continent. Last year in France, a polygamous Muslim and father of 17 children was charged with welfare fraud when authorities discovered that “two of his companions lived in Dubai for a year while continuing to receive welfare benefits worth 10,000 euros.” The man did not exactly have a low profile, as he made news previously when one of his wives was fined for driving while wearing a niqab that restricted her vision.

In one instance, a former minister in the British government, which has been known to grant additional welfare benefits to cover a man’s additional wives, openly promoted welfare use and abuse among her Muslim constituents. Last December, deputy Labour Party leader Harriet Harman labeled Muslim immigrants who send a portion of their welfare payments to families back home “heroic.” She even “called for tax refunds to encourage more immigrants to follow suit.”

However, ordinary Muslims are not the only ones exploiting generous Western welfare systems for personal gain. In 2005, the UK Telegraph reported that the governor of Pakistan’s Sindh province had received British state benefits of around £1,000 a month for ten months, plus the rent for a northwest London house.

Even worse, many well-known Islamic radicals are on the dole. The irony of the situation is inescapable: their parasitical behavior obliges governments, through taxpayers, to subsidize their adopted country’s own destruction.

For example, one of England’s most notorious Muslim leaders, hate preacher and Islamic law proponent Anjem Choudary, has boasted about receiving £25,000 a year in benefits, explaining that the money “belongs to Allah.” Membership in Choudary’s Islam4UK group was criminalized after he threatened to lead 500 followers on a highly provocative “anti-war” march, “carrying empty coffins to mark Muslims ‘mercilessly murdered’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Choudary even paid the £50 fine brought down against Emdadur Choudhury (no relation) for burning poppies while disrupting somber Remembrance Day services last year. It was revealed that Emdadur Choudhury, who has been dubbed “the designer label extremist” for his taste in Western clothes, lives in “a free council flat and [receives] almost £800 a month [in] state handouts.”

Then there is Abdul Rahman Saleem, who once served prison time for inciting racial hatred during London riots against the Danish Muhammad cartoons. He now stands accused of “fiddling the benefits system by working while claiming jobseekers’ allowance.” A “friend”-turned-informant told the Daily Mail, “He likes to say ‘Allah provides’ — but in reality it is the state he seems to despise so much that makes the provisions for him. The Child Support Agency claim[s] there is nothing they can do to make him pay for his children because he is in receipt of jobseekers’ allowance.”

Meanwhile, five Muslim men convicted of harassment for shouting insults during a 2009 homecoming parade for British soldiers nevertheless went unpunished, declaring that taxpayers would foot the bill for court costs because they were on welfare.

Moreover, it was revealed last year that the council house occupied by the wife and eight children of England’s most infamous convicted hate preacher, the hook-handed Abu Hamza, received a £40,000 “makeover paid for by taxpayers.” His children are British-born, the Daily Mail reported, “meaning they are entitled to support from the state, which would continue even if Hamza is extradited.” This support has included close to £700 per week in rent, benefits, and allowances.

Not even revelations that some actual terrorists collect welfare payments before and after they commit their crimes have prompted sweeping reforms of the benefits system.

Two weeks after the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, four explosions disrupted the city’s public transportation system once more. (Fortunately, only one injury was reported.) British authorities subsequently discovered that the Muslim radicals involved in the attack had collected more than £165,000 in benefits, aided by multiple addresses and national insurance numbers. Two of them originally won asylum in Britain by using forged passports and false names.

Abu Qatada, sometimes referred to as “Osama bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe,” was found guilty of plotting to plant bombs during millennium celebrations in Jordan. After his release from prison in 2008, he was granted £150 a week in “incapacity benefits” for a bad back — despite later being photographed wearing a knapsack and carrying groceries on the anniversary of the July 7 London bombings. Along with publishing that photo, the Telegraph revealed that “Qatada’s family is understood to be claiming around £47,000 a year in benefits — £500 a week in child benefits for the four of his five children under 18, £210 for income support, £150 for incapacity benefit, £45 in council tax benefit — along with a council home worth around £800,000.”

Similar situations have occurred in Australia. When Abdul Nacer Benbrika stood trial on terrorism charges, it emerged that the illegal Algerian immigrant and father of seven, who had been ordered deported three times, “never worked a day” in 19 years and “has cost us millions” in welfare payments, “baby bonus” checks, and other benefits, in the words of one broadcaster.

Furthermore, Australian David Hicks brazenly declared his plan to go on the dole as soon as he was released from prison. An unrepentant would-be “martyr,” Hicks trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and claims to have met Osama bin Laden 20 times. His father told the Herald Sun in 2007, “He’s an Australian citizen. He has a right to that sort of thing.”

One of Norway’s most notorious welfare recipients is also a convicted terrorist: Mullah Krekar, who has been linked to bombings in Madrid and Iraq.

Meanwhile, Canada’s most famous welfare recipients — Muslim or otherwise — remain the Khadrs. Confessed war criminal Omar Khadr still resides in Guantanamo Bay, having pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. However, his extended family members, all of whom share his radical views, continue to live on welfare in a Toronto suburb.

Despite the public outrage provoked by the Toronto Sun in 2008, little evidence suggests that the situation has improved in Canada. In early 2011, the Mounties charged Ahmad El-Akhal, a Quebec immigration consultant, with “providing Canadian citizenship documents to hundreds of people in the Middle East so they could collect benefits and tax refunds” to the tune of $500,000. Adding an original twist on the venerable scam, none of the individuals receiving benefits actually lived in Canada. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the scheme had been going on since 1999.

This author contacted the officials originally quoted in that Toronto Sun report to ask what is being done about welfare abuse by Muslims. The office of Rob Ford, who is now Toronto mayor, never replied to inquiries. Just one individual, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Community and Social Services, responded — but only with a boilerplate email. Rebecca MacKenzie explained that the ministry is “not able to provide comment on specific cases due to privacy concerns,” adding that they “take allegations of fraud very seriously.”

Seriousness is long overdue. As an Islamist Watch blog post from 2009 put it, “Only one adjective properly describes a government that funds those who seek its destruction: suicidal.”

Kathy Shaidle blogs at Five Feet of Fury. This article was sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

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