An Acknowledgement of Evil

President Barack Obama made an eloquent appeal in Tucson yesterday for civility and communal healing following the horrific shooting in that city last Saturday. One of the more interesting things he said was the following:

” Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world and terrible things happen that defy human understanding”

It is notable that this is actually the second time, to my knowledge, that Obama during his presidency  has used the word evil.  The first was in the delivery of his Nobel acceptance speech in December, 2009.   There he said:

‘” I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

At the time I saw it as a signal of his recognition of certain realities in life and his willingness to identify the existence of absolute moral standards.  Unfortunately the subsequent twelve months did little to buttress that belief.

His comments in Tuscon, which underscored an apparent belief that Jared Lee Loughner’s actions were the result of a manifest evil which had gripped the young man – and not only a consequence of mental illness, political extremism or social alienation, is evidence ( if thin) of  a  moral maturity that has noticeably lacking in this President.  Too many in his own party and on the left are willing to see gray areas where the evidence suggests stark black and white distinctions.  This is of course most relevant to the seething hatred poised against the United States from Islam and the Arabic world.  We should never ignore that the evil which drove 19 young men to fly planes into the Twin Towers 10 years ago is of the same character which made Jared  Loughner pull the trigger over and over again in Tucson on Saturday afternoon.

Lets hope this president indeed continues to face the world as it is and grasp that, as he states in his own words, ” evil really does exist in the world”  and that he, of all people, cannot stand idle in the face of it.

Jenny McCarthy Gets Her Comeuppance

For nearly 14 years, many parents in the Western world have been wringing their hands about what to do about vaccinations – a formality taken for granted over the past half century.   Measles, mumps, chicken pox and small pox- killers of children in past centuries, were nearly wiped out in the latter half of the 20th Century by the advent of preventative vaccinations which injected antibodies  that impeded the spread of the diseases.

That was until an unfortunate article appeared in the U.K’s premiere medical journal The Lancet in July 1998.  A study then published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—a mainstay of public-health disease prevention efforts around the world—was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders in young children.

The study led to a highly charged campaign, led by such celebrities as former Playboy centerfold and television personality Jenny McCarthy, that called for the end of vaccinations.   At the same time, a parallel campaign was led by medical researchers who claimed that the original study had been based on a fraudulent and inaccurate data.

The Lancet finally withdrew the article in January of last year after concluding that “several elements” of the paper were incorrect. But the journal didn’t describe any of the discrepancies as fraud. A British regulator stripped Dr. Wakefield of his medical license last May, citing “serious professional misconduct” in the way he handled the research.

An article, published  a few days ago by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. “In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal,” the editorial said. It called the study “an elaborate fraud.”

The damage done by the original article and the irresponsible advocacy of people like Jenny McCarthy and the organization Talk About Curing Autism is incalculable.   Hundreds of thousands of children in the West are now exposed to diseases that were already but wiped out by the mid 1960s. Much like the scare over DDT, fraudulently declared toxic to human beings by Rachel Carson in the mid- 1960s ( despite practically having wiped out malaria), the scare over vaccinations has proved again how politics has crept into science and how political correctness  has been used to assault the truth.

Jenny McCarthy and her supporters steadfastly cling to their version of the truth.   But her pseudo-science now deserves out right condemnation and a public backlash against her irresponsible advocacy and that of her claque  should be exposed as the posturing of a know nothing celebrity completely out of her depth.

Goodbye Arnold

Today Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office as governor of perhaps the worst performing state economy in this country.  It is indeed a deep irony that the movie star who came to take control of California’s fortunes after a recall of  his (by comparison) surprisingly competent predecessor Gray Davis, has left this state in a far worse condition than in which he found it:  A ballooning state debt , now slated to reach $25 billion by 2014; a gridlocked legislature;  an unrepentant and emboldened union culture;  environmental policies totally out of control and a bureaucracy that has swelled beyond reasonable imagination over the past seven years.

Schwarzenegger was the first governor since the Great Depression to issue IOUs to state employees and vendors after he was confronted with a $90 billion shortfall in 2009.  He raised taxes ( violating a campaign promise) and curtailed spending on education.  In my own neighborhood,  public libraries were forced to substantially reduce  hours of operation;  the District Court would not stay open longer than 4: 30 pm because the supervisors feared having to pay overtime and the Department of Motor Vehicles slashed an entire work day from their branches’ operating schedules.

But you would barely know that Schwarzenegger retires as a failed governor. In most accounts of his stewardship, he is still the action hero who strode into office with great promise but was unfortunately dealt a bad deck of cards.   The press seems loathe to truly take him to task for his maladroit performance and his abject failure of leadership.   Pat Morrison’s fawning interview in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times is a good example.  Rarely does Morrison,one of the paper’s leading columnists, go much beyond the giddy fan worship you would expect to find the paper’s Calendar section.  No question about the Golden State’s embarrassing economic slide;  no discussion about the State’s likely bankruptcy and nothing about the way in which government unions increasingly gained influence and  control over state policy.

The failure of many media commentators and editorialists to savage Schwarzenegger for his limp performance is perhaps a symptom of a society that lives  in thrall to celebrity. There is no doubt  Schwarzenegger is a consummately charming man, possessed of  a wicked sense of humor and a certain measure of self deprecation, which have all served him well in dealing with a combative public.  But the convincing explanation of the press’ hero worship is that Schwarzenegger actually swapped parties while still in office.   His volte face in  October, 2005 after he was defeated on all eight special  election initiatives he had proposed for dealing with some of California’s endemic economic problems, transformed  him from a moderate Republican into a progressive Democrat who was prepared to embrace a host of  hot button liberal agenda issues such as  gay marriage,  fixed emission controls for California industry and increased taxation.

This transformation left us with the odor of a man of few fixed convictions or principles and who was open to changing them as the political winds dictated.  In the end Arnold Schwarzenegger’s seven year term of office differed little from his movie career.  In both cases he regularly adopted differing personas to suit the script.  The difference is that playing The Terminator never had dire implications for the future of California.  Sadly, we are now reminded of how fantasy figures bear little resemblance to real life characters, who may turn out to  have no good ideas about  how to deal with the harsh realities of  governing a fractious state.

What John Lennon Failed to Imagine

Its a landmark event for Beatledom.  John Lennon, dead these 30 years, would have turned 70-years-old today.

For many 60′s survivors who grew up in thrall to the Fab Four, the idea that such an important symbol of the youth culture had arrived at the threshold of old age (if such a category still exists in our teen obsessed culture) must be profoundly unsettling.

It is as if that entire generation had finally found itself washed up at the very doorstep of senility.

There can be no doubt Lennon, in his partnership with the brilliant tunesmith Paul McCartney, did craft some of the most memorable pop tunes of the 20th Century. That might be reason enough to celebrate his life. Yet the failure to complete his life’s journey has frozen his memory in perpetual mid-life. There he presides as the guru of peace and love, an unfazed and unrepentant hippie whose vision for world peace remains unfettered by reality or subsequent historical events.

Forgotten, or perhaps conveniently overlooked, is that Lennon’s solo work in his ten post-Beatles years was far inferior to anything he did as a member of the group and was weak even by comparison to the output of his fellow Beatles ( and yes, I include Ringo Starr in that assessment). His coda, the cloying and maudlin Double Fantasy (1980) was an embarrassment for such a great talent, and evidence that perhaps his muse had permanently fled.

Part of this can be attributed to Lennon’s early 70s determination to make political statements rather than music.  Moving permanently to New York City in 1970, he and his wife Yoko Ono became lightening rods for radicals and far left causes. Feminists, Black Panthers, Yippies and peace movement activists, all pitched their tents under the Lennon/ Ono carapace to propagate their liberation politics. The recorded product of this eclectic jamboree, Sometime In New York City (1972), is a rather tuneless and bleak attempt to capture the radical zeitgeist. It bombed and is regarded universally as one of the worst post break up efforts by any of the Beatles.

While Lennon’s post-Beatles recordings, save for the very early ones, can be largely dismissed, what can’t be dismissed is his cultural influence. Lennon stands today as the most revered icon in the pantheon of the peace movement – a figure of such sainted majesty that he has been practically beatified by secular humanists. This reputation balances precariously on the foundation of just one song – the anthemic Imagine.

Imagine dredged up some half baked Romantic notions and presented a vision of a world free of conflict. Attached to an ethereal melody it seem to float in a sea of mysticism, painting a picture of a utopia that most Communist leaders in the 1970s would have recognized.

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…”

Would Lennon have matured intellectually as he aged – ultimately recognizing that this formula for world peace, written in a swishy mansion in the English countryside, far from the Communist despots and authoritarians who at that time imprisoned nearly half of humanity, could not work? Would he have understood that there was something a little skewed about attempting to denude the world of religion, governments, sovereignty and wealth?

Would he have finally understood that his adopted home, the United States, actually stood as the last best chance for humanity to preserve the liberty that had allowed him to pen such masterpieces such as Across the Universe and A Day In the Life….?

Probably not. Naivete is one of the great privileges of the rich and famous. Insulated from the hard realities of life, our pop icons are safe and free to make ignorant guesses about the world and pose solutions that suggest more, not less, misery for its human population. Once having made such a statement of principle, it is highly unlikely that Lennon would ever have retired his Imagine philosophy. Unlike McCartney, who has revealed himself to be comparatively sensible on a number of important security issues, Lennon, socially alienated as a child and conditioned to reject convention, would have continued to find some gratification in oppositional politics and ideologies. It is doubtful he could ever have written a song such as Freedom, which McCartney penned in outrage following the attacks of 9/11.

But his legacy remains and his Imagine vision continues to inspire the contemporary anti-war movement, a fact of which he would doubtless have been proud. Yet as the threat of a nuclear Iran grows and Islamic terrorism sets Western society in a state of constant alert, the notion that we can embrace those sworn to our destruction in a ‘brotherhood of man’ is a chimera reflecting nothing more than an irresponsible failure of imagination.

This article first appeared in The American Thinker.

The Passing of Paul Conrad

Encomiums have poured in from around the world today for the celebrated former Los Angeles Times  cartoonist Paul Conrad.  The three time Pulitzer Prize winner, who died on Saturday at the age of 86, won renown as a political satirist, whose liberalism was worn as a badge of honor and who never shied away from confronting men and women in power.

But I can’t count myself as one of his admirers. While  Conrad, more than almost any other political cartoonist of modern times, gave the concept of the ” editorial cartoon” a certain elan, freeing it from its image as a misplaced comic, he also did considerable damage to the image of the journalist as  the objective reporter of truth.

The editorial cartoonist possesses great power.   Among us few remaining newspaper readers, with our  increasingly strained attention spans, there is a respect for the editorial cartoonist that stretches beyond his real powers of persuasion.  We readers might  scan images  such as photographs and photo-sketches to obtain our opinions on any given subject.   With one glance we believe we  can absorb the full import of an editorial position, which may well have some bearing in forming our own ideas.

But in this way, complex issues are often reduced to fairly simplistic statements, stripping the issue of a certain gravitas and balance that is achieved in good editorial writing.

The political cartoonist, who does not have many words with which to convey an opinion and is often consigned to a single panel of images,  must therefore be careful that his or her positions do not cross the line from commentary  into propaganda – a tempting option in such a  format.

Conrad rarely exercised this kind of restraint.   Inflamed by his liberal sense of injustice he railed at the big and mighty often simply because they were big and mighty.

No more was that the case when it came to the Arab- Israeli conflict.   He was unable to appreciate or understand Israel’s need for self defense and repeatedly made provocative comparisons between the IDF and Nazis.  After a particularly meaningful use of the Star of David in a cartoon depicting Soviet prisoners of conscience as the equivalent of Jewish prisoners of concentration camps ( September 24, 1972) , he rarely ever employed it again except as a symbol of hate, repression and violence.    His cartoon in the Los Angeles Times following the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982 ( where he arranged the Palestinian corpses in the shape of Star of David) was beyond the bounds of decency, considering that it was not the Israelis who had perpetrated the killings but the Christian Phalange.  As his comment on the Palestinian intifada of the late 80s , he drew a Star of David made of barbed wire and billy clubs.  He was a particularly vitriolic enemy of West Bank settlers, whom he often depicted as deranged gun-toting Messianists, bent on killing Palestinians and uprooting olive groves – an accusation which has absolutely no basis in reality.    He gave very little time to exploring the violence inherent in Arab society and the emergence of the suicide bomber as the Palestinian weapon of choice.

Years ago I heard a prominent journalist bemoan the fact the journalists no longer seem as concerned with reporting objective truth as with seeing their own idiosyncratic form of justice achieved.  This agenda  Conrad embraced with gusto. “Don’t ever accuse me,” he once said, “of being objective.”

Given this position it is hard for me to agree that Paul Conrad was one of the giants of Western journalism in the last half of the 2oth Century.  His brand of “personal journalism” actually did far more damage to the practice of his craft than good.   His greatest legacy is not a fearless approach to confronting men and women in power, as much as it is a profound cynicism which now pervades his profession and has brought  it increasingly into disrepute.

The Humanitarians Who Turn Victims Into Victimizers

The brave sailors and passengers aboard the boat brace for what is about to happen.Off to starboard they can see a series of skiffs racing towards them, while a naval gunship announces emphatically by megaphones in English and Hebrew, that they must  stand down or else be boarded.   But the passengers of this particular craft have sailed too far and endured too much tragedy to be denied.   Within sight of their beloved coastline, these determined passengers are willing to risk capture and even death to reach it.    So when the first soldier places his boot on deck, all hell breaks loose.  In the melee shots are fired and bodies slump.  When the smoke clears, several passengers are dead and the cries of the wounded are heard everywhere.

Think you’ve seen this movie before?  No wonder.  It could have been a scene from any  combination of ships which attempted to run the British blockade of Palestine  from 1939 to 1947.  At that time fleeing Jewish refugees, denied entry to any other world port, sought sanctuary in Palestine where they suspected they would find safe harbor.

Recreating history to become the “21st Century’s Jews” the Palestinians have reversed engineered Jewish victimhood,  in the process becoming the very model of a brutally repressed and forgotten people.  From the self-designation of a national liberation movement (the mantle the PLO adopted in the 1960s) to the assertions of  dispossession to the claims of being the subjects of a  ” Holocaust ” and “genocide,” the Palestinians regularly invoke the images of the Jewish people’s own past, convincing the world that the Jews learned nothing from the centuries of vilification and hatred leveled against them and have become the mirror image of their own oppressors.

So it should come as no surprise that Palestinians and their humanitarian supporters have once again captured the limelight by drawing another historical parallel between themselves and the Jewish people.  The flotilla which sought to subvert the Israeli “blockade” of Gaza ( although no such thing truly exists)  was a carefully constructed pantomime, played out for the benefit of the world press under cover of a humanitarian mission.   In the furor that has met the deaths of the eleven passengers aboard the Turkish registered Marmara, the facts are completely neglected.  Overlooked is the reality that there is no shortage of food or medical supplies in Gaza; that those aboard the Marmara had no intention of staging a peaceful protest but had come armed with clubs and knives and were resolutely determined to take Israeli lives;  that Hamas terror and the incessant bombing of Israeli border towns has given Israel very good reason to interdict the passage of unchecked humanitarian aid , in the interests of preventing future weapons supply of Hamas terrorists.

None of it matters because the far better story -  and the ones the Palestinians and their supporters so earnestly cultivate, is that Jews have transformed into Nazis and their means are both nefarious and oppressive.  The alacrity with which not only the foreign press but supposedly friendly world governments have jumped to condemn the Israeli assault, even when the video footage clearly reveals the Israeli soldiers to have fired in self defense and only as a last resort, is evidence of the increasing willingness of the world to buy a Palestinian narrative of eternal victimhood which is twisted beyond all realities.

Maybe it would be a good idea to look into the provenance of these humanitarians.  The so called Freedom Flotilla maintains extensive terrorist ties.  For instance,  itss primary sponsor, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH)has been  identified by the CIA as connected to al Qaeda and the millennium plot of 1999.

Also unknown to most people is that the humanitarian aid to Gaza could have been delivered by truck, as the Israelis had offered.  However  flotilla spokeswoman, Greta Berlin made it clear in a Agence- France interview in May that the ” mission, is not about delivering humanitarian supplies.  Its about breaking Israel’s siege. “

Can’t get  much clearer than that.

The danger  of such willing gullibility and open hostility to a democratic government seeking to enforce measures to aid its own self defense are obvious.  The Israeli experience leaves all democracies open to similar forms of harassment as the press is cajoled and fooled into presenting images of the weak against the strong and the bona fides of any humanitarian effort, regardless of the ideologies and intentions of those who carry out the mission.

Thus the United States is increasing taken to task for its failures to uphold the human rights of  incarcerated terrorists, no matter their intentions; and the United Kingdom finds itself purloined by the attempts to stem the tide of  an unwanted and culturally devastating immigration, which continues under the guise of humanitarian openness and pluralism.

Meanwhile truly evil regimes  such as North Korea can torpedo a South Korean ship with the loss of 67  lives without a whimper from the West; a Sudanese dictator can carry on the world’s most devastating genocidal campaign and barely anyone reports it; 45,000 people a month can be murdered in the Congo without it registering on any one’s radar and Iran can continue to develop unimpeded the world’s most deadly and destabilizing weapons system.

It is, as British journalist Melanie Phillips has so powerfully written in her new book, a world truly turned upside down.  But it is only made possible by the West’s willingness to accept a spurious narrative which is divorced from reality.  The West’s  romance with humanitarians who turn victims into victimizers must therefore end before the veneration of “heroes”,  such as those aboard the Marmara, eventually castigate us all as Nazis and fascists.

Michael Lerner’s Night of Broken Glass

Pity Michael Lerner.  The oft quoted far left rabbi from Berkeley, the famous avatar of the Clintonian Politics of Meaning, has been the victim lately of a vicious blow-back against his political positions – most particularly his embrace of South African jurist Richard Goldstone as well as  his support for the U.S. imposition of a peace treaty upon Israel.

It has gotten so bad for the outspoken rabbi that vandals last week , according to a press release issued by Lerner’s organization, affixed  posters to his door, attacking the man personally, and pillioring liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and “Islamo-fascism.” They glued to his door a printed bumper sticker which sported the logo “fight terror–support Israel” next to a caricature of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose UN report on Israel’s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror.

Lerner’s supporters around the world have declared the house’s defacement an act of fascist vandalism and evidence of a brooding hatred in the Jewish world.  In particular, they have fingered the prolific pen of Alan Desrhsowitz, who in an opinion piece on April 28 in the Jerusalem Post called both Lerner and  Goldstone to task for their anti-Israel stances.

Labeling Goldstone’s rabbinic supporters  as ” Rabbis for Hamas”,  Dershowitz explained:

“Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that’s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine‘s “Ethics Award.” I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner’s litmus test of lying about Israel. That’s Lerner’s definition of “ethics.” There are some good people on the advisory board of Tikkun Magazine. They now have an obligation to reconsider their membership unless they wish to be associated with a rabbi who is prepared to accuse Israel, in the absence of any evidence, of deliberately setting out to murder Palestinian civilians without any military purpose.  “

Lerner supporters, in reflecting on the vandalism and provocations of Dershowitz and others, have also invoked the imagery of  Night of Broken  Glass in Germany – or Kristallnacht as it is more familiarly known (November 9, 1938), when thousands of  Jewish shop windows , synagogues and homes were destroyed in state sanctioned violence after a Jewish student shot to death a German diplomat in Paris.

Such a comparison, is, of course, absurd.  Neither Dershowitz nor any other of the Lerner/ Goldstone critics are calling for the death of either man nor for the looting and sacking of their homes and injuring others.  But the far left’s  accusation is couched in language that they  – and Michael Lerner and Richard Goldstone in particular -  understand very  well.

In the early 1970s,  Lerner  created an organization called the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), which participated in numerous anti-war protests and at least one riot.   During this period , SLF, the Black Student Union (BSU), and the violent terrorist group Weathermen (led by such luminaries as Bill Ayres  and Bernadine Dohrn) collaborated to carry out a number of direct actions on university campuses. One day, SLF and BSU members — bearing pipes and clubs while shouting “Power to the people!” and “Smash the state!” – rampaged through several university buildings and, in some cases, roughed up innocent onlookers. Washington state attorney Slade Gorton, who later went on to become a U.S. Senator, described the tactics of Lerner’s SLF as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.”

SLF’s most famous action was a February 17, 1970 demonstration at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle, which escalated into a riot in which twenty individuals were injured.   Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven,” charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.” He spent several months in prison before the main charges against him eventually were dropped and he was released.

Richard Goldstone, on the other hand, has had his own flirtation with fascist undertakings.  In the 1980s and 90s, before the collapse of Apartheid, Goldstone took an active part in the racist policies of the South African regime.   During his tenure as sitting judge in the appellate court, he  sentenced dozens of blacks mercilessly to their deaths. The Richard Goldstone of that day and age was a great enthusiast for capital punishment, torture and miscegenationist policies.   He imposed and affirmed death sentences for more than two dozen blacks under circumstances where whites would almost certainly have been dealt with more leniently.  He gave sentences of physical torture–euphemistically called “flogging”– for other blacks. He also facilitated miscegenation and other racist laws with no recorded word of criticism nor dissent.   He therefore fulfilled an  important role in the state apparatus that enforced racial subjugation in his own country.

Even today Goldstone expresses few regrets.  ” It was the law of the land,”  he says, without seeming to understand in the slightest that statement’s  irony.  After all, antisemitism was the law of land on the night of November 9, 1938, as well.

Fascistic outbursts, as Jonah Goldberg has brilliantly illustrated in his book Liberal Fascism, is not only a phenomenon of the right.  Lerner, Goldberg and their supporters would therefore do well to investigate their own fascistic legacy before choosing to slap that label on to anyone else.

No Blanks: Kent State 40 Years Later

The student antiwar movement of the late 60s and early 70s lives on in American consciousness as a symbol of high-minded idealism.  Some like to point to the altruism and innocence of the movement and the way it stirred students out of their apathy, creating a generation of activists.  Such a view conveniently ignores the movement’s essential self-centeredness, its denunciation of patriotism, its rejection of authority and its penchant for violence.  Yet all of those things were clearly on display in the events leading up to the afternoon on May 4, 1970, perhaps the very apogee of student protest in this country.

Much of what we know about the event popularly referred to as the Kent State Massacre has come down to us only in history’s shorthand — that the military sought to kill innocent unarmed students and bystanders in an effort to subvert dissent.  But the back-story does not always conform to the heroic narrative of this tragic event.

Perhaps the first thing to appreciate about the events at Kent State is the highly charged political atmosphere of the time. The escalation of the U.S. bombing campaign into Cambodia, and the perceived expansion of the Vietnam War, galvanized an anti-war movement that was beginning to lapse into dormancy. As a result of a number of incendiary campus incidents in the month of April 1970, there were widespread fears that student protests had become generalized riots, associated with attacks on private property, threats to life, and with unsavory elements such as bikers and criminals joining in the general havoc.

The decision of Ohio governor James A. Rhodes to send the National Guard to the city of Kent, Ohio, on May 2, was sparked by a request from the city’s mayor, Leroy Satrom, who had earlier urged the declaration of a state of emergency after a riot in Kent’s downtown on May 1. At that time, a bonfire had been lit in the main street and the crowd seemed to be a mix of students, bikers, and itinerants who frequented Kent’s bars.  Beer bottles had been thrown at police as they tried to restore order and shop fronts were damaged.

On May 1, arsonists had also set the ROTC building at Kent State on fire and a large crowd of students, nearly 1,000, had applauded as it burned. Moreover, the students did their best to interfere with fire fighters’ efforts to extinguish the flames.

On Monday, May 4, the Kent State University administration, fearing the same kind of violence that had broken out only a few days earlier, sought to cancel a protest rally set for noon that day.  Nevertheless 2,000 students showed up for the rally on the University Common and within minutes of the appearance of the National Guard, began to throw rocks and other projectiles at the soldiers. The National Guard, with bayonets fixed, ordered the rally to disperse and when there was no response, lobbed gas canisters at the students.  When this had no effect, the Guard advanced, forcing the students to flee the Common.

That’s where it should have ended. But the Guard pursued the students from the Common, over what was known as Blanket Hill and on to a practice field. What happened then was eerily reminiscent of the events on Boston Common almost exactly 200 years before. Soldiers, feeling trapped and perhaps fearing for the lives, let loose several volleys designed to frighten the crowd, only to result in injury and death within the crowd.  Much like the earlier historical event, three people died almost instantly — two of them bystanders, who were merely walking to class.  A fourth victim died in hospital a short while later.

Much has been made of Rhodes’ decision to send the National Guard to the University and the legality of the University’s right to disperse the crowd.  But a decision of the United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit found, in an action subsequently brought against the University and the State of Ohio, that the University did have such a right, given the threats to the peace and the provocations of earlier in the month.

Why the National Guard was armed with live bullets and not blanks, how the level of command collapsed to allow American soldiers to fire on unarmed American civilians and why the Nixon administration was so slow to condemn the shootings, remain some of the imponderables of history.

But what is not so imponderable is the fact of the students’ motivations.  David Horowitz, one of the editors of the New Left Magazine Ramparts in the 1960s, has written extensively about the student anti-war movement and its descent into radicalism and violence. He pays particular attention to the discrepancy between the attendance at a rally in Washington D.C. in June 1970, which drew nearly one million people, and another in May 1971 which drew only 30,000.

What had happened in between? Nixon had ended the draft.

“When the fact registered on me, ” Horowitz concludes in Radical Son, “the effect was devastating.  The driving force behind the massive anti-war movement on America’s campuses had been the desire to avoid military service.”

This seems to put the burning of the ROTC building on the Kent State University campus on May 1 and the Kent riots of the next day in rather stark perspective.  The students were not anti-war, as much as they were anti-draft, far more focused on self-preservation than on idealism. The bombing of Cambodia in April 1970 made it appear to students that Nixon intended to widen the war rather than end it — a manifest betrayal.

Since the 1960s and early 70s, a number of the anti-war movement’s erstwhile leaders came to regret their involvement in a campaign that reeked of self indulgence and narcissism.  But by then it was too late.  Resistance to any form of militarism had become a sine qua non of student life, as a generation who participated in the movement gradually assumed positions of authority on our college campuses. Today these same people feel relatively at ease in educating our students about the evils of American imperialism, the absence of any nobility in American enterprise, and contempt for government.

Kent State became a rallying cry and slogan for these disaffected Americans.  While most of the 60s generation moved on to productive lives in American society, these stalwart peace activists, men such as Noam Chomsky and Bill Ayres, have remained fixated on the events of May 4, 1970 and have used the tragic event to denounce the United States as a locus of repression and terror.

Kent State was no doubt a tragedy that could and should have been avoided.  But the far greater tragedy was the continued insistence by a small but influential lobby that the events of that day somehow reflected the true nature of the United States.  In this way the student protesters of May 4, 1970 are wreaking their continued vengeance on America.  The lethality of their attack is just as focused as the National Guard’s was 40 years ago. And like the young National Guard soldiers, they are certainly not firing blanks.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. His writings and blog entries can be found at The Intermediate Zone and at the Los Angeles Jewish Journal blog On The Other Hand

This piece originally appeared in The American Thinker

Remembering No Nukes

It is now 30 years since the No Nukes Concert, held on September 23, 1979 in Madison Square Garden.  That event, held  in the shadow of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, was a call to arms against nuclear energy, and featured such musical luminaries as Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby Stills and Nash and the Doobie Brothers.

The accident, which had occured a six months earlier, involved a partial core meltdown of a nuclear generating station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisberg.  It was the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry and was further illuminated by the Jane Fonda/ Michael Douglas movie The China Syndrome, an  American thriller that revealed safety coverups at a fictional nuclear power plant in North Carolina.  The film was released only 12 days before the actual incident at Three Mile Island and jump started a national alarmist movement to combat the proliferation of nuclear energy.

Not many people, however, remember the aftermath of that incident.  The reactor was quickly brought under control and an extensive investigation by the Kemeny Commission Report concluded that ” there was no case of cancer detected or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. “

 Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation releases from the accident have had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant.

But none of this would affect the No Nukes campaign and its determination to impede the proliferation of nuclear energy in the United States.

Reading the liner notes from the No Nukes album, released in November of that year, we can obtain an appreciation of how certain were these latter day Chicken Littles that nuclear energy was going to hasten the end of the world.  Jesse Colin Young comments:

 “I’m afraid we’ll live to see a terrorist atrtack on a nuclear facility in our lifetime.”

And Jackson Browne:

” We have  these multinational corporations that control the energy telling us that we have to become self- sufficient. They’re not talking about people. What they’re talking about is protecting their profits. I guess I think of the corporate mentality as the enemy.  These people have to be called the enemy, because whether of not they are consciously trying to kill us , they threaten our very existence and they threaten the life of this planet.”

And John Hall:

“The energy situation presents us simulateneously with a deadly threat and the promise for a near Utopian solution. Its clear the alternatives to nuclear energy are so plentiful and promising that we are by no means released to the ” last resort.”

Graham Nash adds this slice of ineluctable pop star wisdom:

” The cartels and multinationals and the oil companies have billions of dollars invested in the nuclear program and they’re not about to come off it.  The only thing we can defeat them with is the truth. ”

The “truth” – or at least these rocks stars’ version of it,  won.  The nuclear energy industry was stopped in its tracks and after 1980 no further federal licenses were granted for the construction of new nuclear facilities in the United States.

But that didn’t stop the existing nucelar facilities from operating and continuing to produce clean and efficient energy for Americans.  So much so that by 1990 America’s 110 nuclear power plants set a record for the amount of electricity generated, surpassing all fuel sources combined in 1956  – which is when the first nuclear power plant had been built.

A great deal  has changed since 1980.  Computer technology, which had barely penetrated the nuclear industry in the 1970s, has developed to such an extent that no event as occured at Three Mile Island could possibly occur today given the extensive monitoring capabilities of networked security systems.  

The problems associated with nuclear waste have also almost been eliminated by reprocessing technologies developed by the nuclear industry.  According to William Tucker in this Wall Street Journal article reprocessing reduces the volume of spent fuel—already remarkably small—by 97%.    “The French,” Tucker explains, “ reprocess and store all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 70% of their electricity beneath the floor of one room in their La Hague plant.”

The fears of a successful terrorist attack on a nucelar reactor, similar to the ones of 9/11, have also been put to rest.  Consistent studies have shown that a jetliner crashing into a reinforced concrete wall at 700 mph would have almost no affect on the wall, but would certainly cause the jetliner to disintegrate upon impact.  It has to be remmbered that the 9/11 attacks were  launched against buildings whose exteriors were 90% glass and not against bunkers whose outer shell is composed of tens of feet of reinforced concrete.

In addition, wind and solar power, as the No Nukes folks once argued, can simply not compete with nuclear energy for sheer economy, efficiency and environmental protection. To match the power produced by one reactor at a cost of $6 billion to $8 billion, we would need a wind farm spanning 200,000 acres and as much as $12 billion in investment capital, plus natural gas-fired plants to back up wind turbines that are idle the majority of the time.

Imagine the CO2 that would spew into the environment from such an installation.  

Today, nuclear reactors produce more than 70% of the carbon-free electricity in the country.  According to Patrick Moore in this  Los Angeles Times article,

 ” California would have to remove more than half a million passenger cars from its roads to eliminate the amount of carbon dioxide prevented by the state’s four nuclear reactors.”

It is  any wonder then that President Barack Obama last week, apparently freeing himself and the country from the No Nukes headlock, could announce that the federal government would guarantee loans for two advanced-design nuclear plants in Georgia and that many more are on the way. 

Still, the No Nukes lobby rolls on.  An example is this argument from Chip Ward, a founder of Heal Utah and author of  the anti -Yucca Mountain nuclear dump polemic Canaries on the Rim:  

“Nuclear power generates a radioactive waste stream from hell that will threaten even our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We still have no repository for the waste and no plan to dispose of it.  It also costs 30% to 35% more than power produced from coal or natural gas plants. Delays and cost overruns are common in nuclear plant production. ”

Time and time again in reading through these objections, you find 1970s arguments applied to 21st Century conditions.  They take almost no account of the advances in monitoring capacties, waste removal, reprocessing technologies or the increasing economic benefits of nuclear energy.  After a while you get the feeling that the real objection is not to nuclear energy at all but rather to the perceived ” cartels and multinational corporations” who stand behind it.  With corporations as the designated “enemy”, there will be nothing to convince the likes of Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, the  Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club or Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen that anything the nuclear industry suggests, proposes or offers will be of benefit to Americans.

Fortunately their influence is fast waning and a new era, providing Americans with safe, clean and economically efficient nuclear energy is moving towards us after thirty years of false alarms and overblown fears.

 

 

Imagining John Lennon’s World

Would the world have been a better place without John Lennon?

Such a question will  engender a surge of rage in members of my generation. Questioning Lennon’s role and importance in modern culture is tantamount to pop heresy.  After all, much of Lennon’s music and late 60s antics were embedded in our adolescent consciousness. Even amongst conservatives it is somewhat gauche to suggest that Lennon was anything other than one of the greatest cultural figures of the modern era, whose signature tunes Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day In the Life….… and Imagine defined the modern sensibility.

I can’t claim to have ever really disagreed with that sentiment.  I am as big a Beatles fan as any.  But since this year marks the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s murder (preceded by the 40th anniversary of the Beatles break up), maybe its finally time to take a closer look at Lennon’s real legacy, divorced from the hagiography that has accumulated around his memory.

I had the opportunity to think more about this after seeing a show celebrating his music, presented by Tim Piper and his band in North Hollywood last Sunday afternoon.  Piper did a commendable enough job impersonating Lennon (although there were so many Lennons over the 20 years of his public career it would have been hard to represent all his incarnations on stage).  He offered serviceable renditions of Beatles songs, as well as Lennon’s solo efforts and the intimacy of the nightclub made the performance feel warmly nostalgic.

 It was only on the drive home, listening to Imagine , that I began to think more deeply about how disagreeable some of Lennon’s messages seem today and how deeply flawed was his global perspective. Imagine itself of course, is not a song as much as an anthem, a fragile vision of an unobtainable world, wiped clean of religion, war, conflict, sovereignty and possessions.

Lennon wasn’t so stupid to believe his nirvana achievable immediately. And he certainly liked expensive cars, beautiful homes and the freedom to travel whenever and however he wished, as much as anyone else.

But listen again to the lyrics of that song – 

Imagine no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too.

 Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

 

      - and you can begin to hear the first philosophical rumblings of the environmental movement, the U.N.’s global governance campaign and the human rights industry.  All of these forces are posed against capitalism, free enterprise, sovereign jurisdiction and representative government. They are supranational in scope, claiming allegiance to nothing and no one, save a nebulous concept of truth and justice.

Lennon was in essence promoting a world without boundaries – and his program would extend beyond bulldozing physical borders, to demolishing sexual, political and economic restrictions as well.  But truth and justice, or as, in Ringo Starr’s repetitive mantra “peace and love,” are impossible to imagine without the imposition of boundaries. With no restrictions on sexual impulses, economic transactions or property claims, humanity could not effectively function.  Even the primitive tribes in the world’s most remote jungles maintain boundaries over these aspects of human interaction.

Imagine’s world, in the end, sounds more like a place where conflict would be a constant as those seeking to protect what they have and need for sustenance are forced to share it with others, who have not contributed to its growth, harvesting or development.

Of course we had seen this kind of utopianism before. It began once as starry eyed dreaming in the villages of the Ukraine and Hunan Province and ended as inhuman Five Year Plans in the Soviet Union, a crushing Cultural Revolution  in China and the murderous Relocation Farms in Cambodia.  Commencing with the same brand of utopianism, they degenerated into ruthless campaigns to consolidate power. The misery inflicted on the world by such ideas and their idealogues is something Lennon perhaps didn’t quite link with his own brand of utopianism.

A more realistic world view, one schooled in practicalities of human existence and human nature might take a more jaundiced view of utopianism and embrace the realities of life. Perhaps a more mature Lennon, steeped in these realities, might have written this update to his earlier vision:

             Imagine there’s no evil

                  You know it isn’t too late

                  Just take goodness and kindness

                        And fight against those who hate 

               Imagine no terror

                The West’s haters wiped away

                  Love of democracy and freedom

                 Might save us all one day

               Imagine all the people

                 Respecting individuality