"How Much Does the State Weigh?"

The persistence of evil: An aging adherent of Stalin's personality cult loves him some Big Brother.

During the Moscow Show Trials of the late 1930s, Soviet prosecutors ran across one particularly recalcitrant subject who simply refused to confess. The man maintained his innocence despite the demonic inventiveness of the tormentors who employed what the Bush regime calls “coercive interrogation” methods to break him down.

Granted, the interrogators could simply have treated him to a “Lubyanka breakfast” -- a cigarette and a bullet to the back of the head. But without a confession, the entire exercise would have been sterile at best, and counter-productive at worst. The entire point was to extract a confession, and to display the broken defendant to the public as evidence that the state was both infallible and pitiless. It simply wouldn't do to execute a man who defiantly insisted on his innocence.

Perplexed and anxious, the lead prosecutor sought and was granted an audience with Stalin, who listened intently. After the prosecutor finished describing the troublesome case, Stalin sat in quiet thought for a moment before asking an unexpected question of the increasingly agitated prosecutor.

“How much does the State weigh?” asked the Soviet ruler in a disarmingly gentle voice. “All of the buildings, the farms, the weapons and equipment? All of the officials, police, soldiers, and prosecutors?”

The prosecutor, who by this time was probably about to suffer a stress-induced coronary, replied that he didn't know the answer, and doubted that anybody could know.

“How long could one man hold the weight of the State on his back?” Stalin persisted, his voice still atypically mild.

“Comrade Chairman, no man could bear the weight of the State for an instant!” answered the prosecutor.

“Exactly,” replied Stalin, his voice suddenly transposing into a quietly threatening register that induced a perceptible chill in the room. “Remember this well, and go back and get that confession.”


The very model of the modern prosecutor: A.Y. Vyshinsy was chief prosecutor at Stalin's Purge Trials in the late 1930s, before going on to be a co-author of the UN Charter. His approach to prosecution -- assuming that everybody is guilty of something, he worked to extract confessions that enhanced the power and prestige of the state -- is followed by most American prosecutors today.


Please forgive me if the details of that incident aren't exactly right; it's been a quarter century since I first read that story. I was prompted to remember that story by the most recent batch of headlines describing the fact that the United States of America has an unassailable lead over the rest of the world – including such havens of liberty and justice as Communist China and post-Soviet Russia – in the field of incarceration.

Citing the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts points out that “the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia. The US has five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The American incarceration rate is seven times higher than that of European countries.”

One of every 32 adult Americans is either imprisoned, on parole, or on probation. Roberts is of the opinion – a point of view he has ably defended in his extremely valuable book The Tyranny of Good Intentions – that a very high percentage of the prison population consists of people who have been wrongfully convicted. This isn't because our jury system is useless, but rather because “hardly any of the convicted have had a jury trial. No peers have heard the evidence against them and found them guilty. In the US criminal justice (sic) system, more than ninety-five percent of all felony cases are settled with a plea bargain.”

In elaborating on this point, Roberts describes what can properly be described as a neo-Stalinist “justice” system in which the central objective is to validate the State's infallibility – albeit through pre-trial allocution by the defendant, rather than a successful trial -- and career-minded prosecutors have long abandoned any pretense of being interested in justice:

“Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's lawyer and family convince they defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than the negotiated plea.”

Accordingly, our “justice” system at present “consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes created by the process of negotiation to close a case.... What we have today is a conveyor belt that convicts almost everyone who is charged.”

Once again, a fuller understanding of the process Roberts describes is offered in his book, which outlines the abandonment of our Anglo-Saxon tradition of individual rights through the rule of law in favor of a version of Jeremy Bentham's evil collectivist doctrine of utilitarianism (the “greatest good for the greatest number,” as “good” is defined by a supervisory elite).

But a good and sufficient illustration of the truth of Roberts' indictment of our “justice” system can be found in the case of Richard Paey, a wheelchair-bound 48-year-old father of three serving a 25-year prison sentence in Florida for the supposed crime of asserting his innocence. About two and a half years ago, Paey – who is in chronic severe pain as a result of injuries suffered in a car accident, and exacerbated by an inept surgery and the subsequent development of multiple sclerosis – was convicted of fifteen counts of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, and possession of a controlled substance.

The “drugs” in question were painkillers Paey obtained in Florida with the help of Dr. Steven Neurkowicz, his family's former physician in New Jersey. Paey claims that Neurkowicz wrote him the necessary prescriptions; this account was validated by Florida pharmacists during his trial, and in Neurkowicz's initial testimony.

However, the prosecution was able to terrorize Neurkowicz into changing his story through the simple expedient of threatening to take away his practice and face a 25 years-to-life sentence for over-prescribing painkillers.

Neurkowicz, already rattled by the paramilitary raid on his office in New Jersey (Paey's family received the same jackboot-on-the-neck treatment in Florida), agreed to testify against the crippled man in court.

Following standard procedure, prosecutors offered Paey a deal: Eight years' probation, including three years of house arrest, if he were to plead guilty to attempted drug trafficking. Insisting that he had done nothing wrong, Paey refused that deal, and subsequent offers – including one that would have reduced the charges against him in exchange for testimony against Dr. Neurkowicz.

It took three tries for the prosecution to convict Paey. The first attempt ended in a mistrial; the second in a conviction that was thrown out because of a procedural error.

The third trial resulted in a guilty verdict, despite the fact that the prosecution admitted that Paey didn't sell or otherwise distribute the painkillers. Under Florida's laws, however, possession of more than 28 grams of painkillers is sufficient to provoke a charge of drug “trafficking.” Accordingly, the jury – owing largely to false assurances by the jury foreman that a guilty verdict would result in probation – voted to convict. After the trial, one juror told the press that he voted guilty in order to avoid being the sole holdout.

Displaying the soul (if that's the correct word) of a Stalinist prosecutor, Florida Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis declared after the trial: “It's unfortunate that anyone has to go to prison, but he's got no one to blame but Richard Paey. All we wanted to do was get him help.”

You're a damned liar, Mike – a gelded, sycophantic, metrosexual liar. The same is true of your comrade Scott Andringa, the prosecutor who presided over the “trial” of Paey, who told New York Times columnist John Tierney that he was “proud that I did my job as a prosecutor” in sending an innocent man to prison.



Drug war casualty Richard Paey: Although confined to a wheelchair, he stands much taller than the corrupt, tax-engorged drones who sent him to prison.

Your “job” was to get a crippled, pain-wracked man to submit to the power of the State – and you lost. He's in prison, with his integrity intact. You're not physically imprisoned, but as hostages to professional vanity and corrupt ambition you're not free men, or men of any kind. If either of you were any part of a man, you would resign your positions and work tirelessly to rectify the injustice you wrought on this innocent man and his family.

Now that he's in prison, Paey is actually receiving – courtesy of the same state that imprisoned him – a larger daily dose of painkiller than he had been consuming “illegally” before his trial. Of course, this blessing comes with conditions.

Radley Balko, in an October 24, 2005 piece for National Review, pointed out that following a July interview with the Times' John Tierney, which resulted in piece sympathetic to Paey and critical of the State of Florida, “prison officials retaliated” by moving Paey “to a prison facility more than two hours from his wife and family. He was then moved even farther away, some 170 miles, to the Tomoka Correctional Institution near Daytona Beach. Sympathetic prison officials, other inmates, and medical staff have since told Paey he was moved away from his family because the guard who sat in on his interview with Tierney had complained to prison authorities about what Paey had revealed to the journalist.”

At the same time, medical staff at the prison told Paey they had been denied permission to refill the morphine pump attached to his wheelchair. For several weeks Paey lived under “the equivalent of a death sentence” -- actually, something much worse, given the unbearable agony he confronted if the morphine were to be cut off – before the prescription was filled literally hours before his pump ran dry.

Last week, Florida's Second District Court of Appeals refused to overturn Paey's sentence, insisting that while the sentence was manifestly unjust, the proper course would be to appeal to outgoing Florida Governor Jeb Bush for executive clemency.


Mercy is for the privileged: Noelle Bush, daughter of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, was arrested and charged with an offense similar to the one for which Richard Paey was sent to prison for 25 years. Because she was born into the royal family, Miss Bush was referred for drug treatment.

Jeb Bush's daughter Noelle, incidentally, was also found guilty of prescription tampering. She was referred to a drug treatment program.

The ruling in Paey's appeal prompted an incendiary dissent by Judge James Seals:

“I suggest that it is unusual, illogical, and unjust that Mr. Paey could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen 50 oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist.”

But Judge Seals is making a category error here by assuming that the purpose of the law in proto-Soviet America is to punish crimes against persons and property. An armed robber behaving as Seals describes, after all, would not be defying the power of the State. This is why the State wouldn't deposit the entire weight of its coercive apparatus on the back of that criminal, as it did in dealing with Richard Paey.

Point of Personal Privilege

Last week I received several donations from some incredibly generous people. You know who you are, and I intend to thank you individually, but for the record, I want to let you -- and my other readers -- know how deeply grateful I am. The help was timely and very much appreciated. God bless you.

On a less pleasant subject:

I really don't want to return to the subject of my termination by the JBS, but numerous inquiries received during the past couple of weeks -- and the increasingly bizarre stories that are being told about me -- make it necessary for me to clarify some important points.

Point one: I did not quit. I was involuntarily terminated.

Point two: At no time subsequent to my termination was I approached by JBS leadership to open "negotiations" with a view to bringing me back on the staff. Various third parties have offered to act as intermediaries in such discussions, but none of those overtures was made on behalf of JBS leadership.

Point three: I have not been sued by anyone for anything I have written here or anywhere else.

One reader informed me this morning that his local coordinator "asked his boss how the `negotiations' were going on to get you back. He was told that those had ceased as you had now gone off and gotten yourself sued.... He said that the JBS legal staff did not want to consider hiring you now since it would bring all kinds of legal ramifications on them as well."

There is not a molecule of truth to that account. Furthermore, the official letter of termination I received on October 3 says nothing about concerns over the
"legal ramifications" of what I've written here; had such concerns existed, they would certainly have been mentioned in that letter, or in the conversation I had with the JBS CEO on the previous day.

The official reason I was fired, as explicitly described in the October 3 letter from JBS CEO Art Thompson, was my refusal to take down this personal blog, apologize for everything I have written herein, and submit everything I write or say in public to JBS leadership for pre-approval. That refusal, according to the letter of termination, constituted a breach of "responsibility to [my] employer."

I've used this blog to tell the truth as I've been given wisdom to understand it. This was unacceptable to my former employer, which now apparently expects its field staffers (who, it must be said, are not privy to the relevant details) to retail untruths about the reasons I was fired.

Since the people I'm referring to are friends, I hope I'm wrong in that perception. However, given the extent to which the misrepresentations have been circulated, I'm left without a suitable alternative explanation.

Members and staffers of the JBS who want to learn more about this should contact me directly at WNGrigg@msn.com.

The Way We Are Now: A Brief Photo Essay

I'm grappling with a really nasty strain of the flu today, and will probably be back later with a more substantial offering. Until then, I present the following for discussion:




A typical scene from "liberated" Baghdad.



The feet belong to Jose Padilla, the Chicago gang-banger designated an "enemy combatant" and tortured for the better part of his three and a half year detention; the guys in Imperial Stormtrooper drag are getting ready to haul Padilla to the dentist. Bear in mind that the purpose of the detention was not to protect the public, but to force Padilla to become an informant/agent provocateur.



Here's the explanation provided for this award-winning photo captured by a Collegiate journalist:

"A member of the Durham Police Department Selective Enforcement Team escorts a child to use the bathroom after serving a search warrant at a suspected drug house. Working closely with the police department's Gang Units, SET is responsible for making high-risk entries into dwellings to serve search warrants. Gang Unit Two made two controlled buys, or drug purchases, from the home with the help of an informant, giving them probable cause for a search warrant. Even if a raid doesn't turn up anything, presence and show of force sends a hard message to the neighborhood that gang and drug activity will not be tolerated."

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan and Radley Balko for the photos, and to Clyde Wilson of Chronicles for the borrowed title.)

Three Men

“He died trying to save his family.”

It is impossible for human hands to compose a nobler or more honorable epitaph.

Two weeks ago I was only dimly aware of the late James Kim, senior editor for the on-line tech journal CNET, and former contributor to the now-defunct Tech TV cable network. Like many others, I followed wire service accounts of the search for Kim and his family – wife Kati, and daughters Penelope (4) and Sabine (seven months) – after they got lost in the forbidding, snow-bound wilderness of southwestern Oregon during a return trip to their home in San Francisco.

James was not with Kati and the children when they were found alive last Monday. After spending a week stranded in the family's station wagon, James had made the desperate choice to strike out in search of help.

Wearing only street clothes to protect him from the pitiless winter conditions, Kim managed to traverse more than ten miles before collapsing in a shallow creek. That trek followed seven days with his family in their station wagon, which had become stuck on a road made impassable by a severe winter storm. Bear Camp Road was supposed to be closed to traffic, but vandals had destroyed the padlock on the gate that would otherwise have prevented the Kim family from taking their tragic wrong turn.

Marooned without cellphone coverage and with a tiny supply of bottled water and snack food, James and his family used the station wagon as a shelter, melting snow and eventually burning the tires for heat. After the food ran out, Kati was able to nurse the children.

After waiting several days for rescue, James made the decision – a mistaken one, as it turns out, but it was not for that reason the wrong one – to set off on foot for the town of Galice, which he erroneously thought was only four or five miles away. He collapsed roughly a mile away from a well-stocked fishing lodge, and had only been dead for a matter of hours when rescue workers located his body.

“He’s the most tenacious man- seven days in his car and hiked that many miles to get help for his wife and two little ones,” commented Jackson County Deputy Grant Forman, who had been part of the search. “With everything going on in the world, you have a man who will do everything to save his family. It’s just amazing. I don't think he gave up until he died.”

“He was very motivated – he traveled a long way,” observed Josephine County Undersheriff Bill Anderson.

While understandably devastated by Kim's death, his professional associates were not surprised by the self-sacrificing tenacity he displayed in trying to save his wife and daughters, because he had made it clear – in ways both large and small – that nothing was more important to him than his family.

I know nothing of James Kim's religious convictions, if any, nor do I know – or care – about his politics. This much, however, I know:

There is a quality of will inscribed in a father's heart by his Creator, a determination to protect those he loves at whatever price to himself. This essential quality of soul will impel a man to see his body broken before he will yield and admit defeat.

That defining trait of true manliness was displayed by James Kim, a bespectacled Gadget Geek who exhibited none of the stigmata of comic book machismo. May God grant comfort to Kim's wife and daughters, and may we honor Kim's memory for reminding us, albeit in such heart-rending fashion, of what it truly means to be a man.



Two days ago I had been shamefully ignorant of the life and martyrdom of Franz Jagerstater, an Austrian peasant patriot who was beheaded by his country's Nazi-dominated government in August 1943 for refusing to serve in the armies of the Reich. An unassuming man of an unremarkable background, Jagerstatter was a sacristan at his local church and a self-taught poet. Through weekly visits to the modestly appointed local library, he had “a ringside seat to the discussions, arguments, discourse and monologues of dialecticians, ethicists, orators and poets of the ages,” writes Justine Nicholas, who teaches English at the City University of New York. “He internalized their teachings, along with those he gleaned from the Bible, which he had committed to heart.”

Jagerstatter, like all Austrian men, was subject to conscription following the Anschluss. From October 1940 to April 1941, he served in the army, albeit not at the front. After a year at home with his wife and three daughters, he was called up once again, but this time, recalls Nicholas, he refused, “asserting that Hitler's regime went against the best of what he had read and experienced in life.”

He was arrested and interrogated by dutiful public servants who couldn't refute his arguments (which astonished them, coming as they did from the mouth of an unschooled peasant) but insisted that his duty was to power, not to conscience.

To fight on behalf of the Reich, Jagerstatter believed, “was a matter of personal guilt and serious sin,” observes one biographer.

“It is very sad to hear again and again from Catholics that this war, waged by Germany, is perhaps not so unjust because it will wipe out Bolshevism,” he wrote in 1942. “It is true that at present most of our soldiers are stuck in the worst Bolshevist country, and simply want to make harmless and defenseless the people who live there and defend themselves. But now a question: what are they fighting in [that] country – Bolshevism or the Russian people? When our Catholic missionaries went to a pagan country to make them Christians did they advance with machine guns and bombs in order to convert and improve them?... If we look back a little into history, we note almost the same thing again and again: If a conqueror attacks another country with war, they have not normally invaded the country to improve people or even perhaps give them something, but usually to get something for themselves. If we fight the Russian people, we will get much from that country which is of use to us here. If one were merely fighting Bolshevism, these other things – minerals, oil wells or good farmland – would not be a factor.”

Transpose those remarks into a slightly different key, and they would apply just as well to the Bu'ushist crusade against “Islamo-Fascism.”

Despite taking an oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer at the time of his forced induction, Jagerstatter “stubbornly refuses for personal reasons to fulfill his patriotic duty in Germany's hard struggle for survival,” wrote a military investigator shortly before the death sentence was carried out. Those “personal reasons” were Jagerstatter's sober and binding moral convictions, chief among them the belief that no government or ruler has the right to re-write the moral law to suit his corrupt whims.

Like his perspicuous critique of the true motives behind Germany's supposed “struggle for survival,” Jagerstatter's condemnation of Adolf Hitler's claim to be the Great and Glorious Decider for the entire Reich has contemporary resonance as well.

“Who dares to assert that among the Germany people in this war only one person bears the responsibility?” he asked of those who insisted that once their Fuhrer spoke, the thinking had been done. “What Catholic can dare say that these raids which Germany has carried out in several countries, and is still carrying out, constitute a just and holy war?... If the Church stays silent in the face of what is happening, what difference would it make if no church were ever opened again?”

Condemned to death for “sedition,” Jagerstatter was visited by his local Catholic bishop, who advised him to suppress his conscience in order to survive and live a “Godly” life after the war. Despite his desire to live and be reunited with his wife and daughters, Jagerstatter wasn't willing to surrender that which made him a man – his freedom to obey God's law – in order to live as a serf.

“When a leader allows himself to break the rules of humanity, it is the duty of every citizen to break the leader's rules,” he wrote. He recognized that he could “change nothing in world affairs,” but understood that his doomed resistance would be “at least a sign that not everyone let themselves be carried away with the tide.”

A man is not a cork carried haplessly on the eddies and currents of contemporary opinion, but a firm and immovable rock that the stream must accommodate. Jagerstatter was rock-like in his composure as he was led to the gallows, and he left an impression on those who witnessed his matrtyrdom. Father Jochmann, the priest who was with the condemned Christian patriot in the hours prior to execution, commented later that Franz Jagerstatter was the only saint he had ever met.



Sgt. Ricky Clousing was a “partier and snowboarder” in High School before having a conversion experience that convinced him that “God had a different plan for me.” Attending a local Presbyterian church in Washington as a teenager, he went on four mission trips to Mexico and was on an evangelical mission in Thailand through Youth With a Mission when the Towers Fell on Black Tuesday.

Like thousands of men his age, Clousing enlisted in the military after 9-11, eventually becoming a “human intelligence collector” -- that is, an interrogator – with the 82 Airborne. He spent four months in Baghdad and Mosul interrogating “insurgents” corralled by American troops. His experiences in Iraq, as well as his study of the origins and conduct of the Iraq war, left him convinced that the invasion and occupation constitute a monumental offense against God's law and our Constitution.

Sgt. Clousing “said he saw American soldiers shoot and kill an unarmed Iraqi teenager, and rode in an Army Humvee that sideswiped Iraqi cars and shot at an old man's sheep for fun – both incidents [he] reported to his superiors,” summarized a New York Times account. “He said his work as an interrogator led him to conclude that the occupation was creating a cycle of anti-American resentment and violence.”

After returning to Ft. Bragg, Sgt. Clousing described his objections to his superiors. He was sent for counseling to a chaplain, who recited the familiar statist catechism – Bible citations referring to war, orphaned from their context and conscripted to serve the cynical interests of the ruling elite. He was sent to a psychologist who informed him that he could be discharged from the military if he took the “Corporal Klinger” route – feigning insanity or homosexuality.

Clousing, who hadn't been looking for a way out of the military and wasn't interested in lying, was offended by that advice. And because he doesn't object to all warfare in principle, Clousing couldn't file for conscientious objector status. (Like countless millions who oppose the Iraq war – myself among them – Clousing supports the right of armed self-defense.)

When the order came to re-deploy to Iraq, Clousing chose not to show up for duty. Fourteen months later he turned himself in to military authorities at Fort Lewis. A court-martial in August found Clousing guilty of being AWOL, and sentenced him to eleven months in jail.

Before he surrendered for trial, many of Clousing's church friends rebuked him for refusing to re-deploy, insisting “God established government and we're supposed to be submitting to authorities, and by me leaving it's rebelling against the authority that God established,” he recalled. “Their politics has infiltrated their religion so much, they can't see past their politics.”

Those who reflexively disgorge this summary of Romans 13 misrepresent the single most important principle revealed therein: All authority comes from God, and thus can only be used on behalf of Godly objectives. This means that no ruler or leader has the authority to command us to support or carry out innately un-Godly actions – such as aggressive war waged on behalf of patent lies.

Clousing, 24, understands this truth and had the courage to uphold it at the cost of imprisonment, and in defiance of the advice he received from both friends and clergy.

Different as they are from each other, James Kim, Franz Jagerstattler, and Ricky Clousing all displayed glorious, principled intransigence in the face of insurmountable circumstances.

There are times when a man, in order to be a man, simply has to say “no” -- as in, “No – I will not let my family freeze to death without doing anything I can to save them,” or “No – I will not be complicit in an illegal war of aggression” -- and stick with that answer irrespective of the cost.