Allen West: Has the Militarist Right Found its New Warlord?

(Photo composite by William Wallace Grigg.)

Hello, Tea Partiers. Look at your president. Now back to me. Now back at your president. Now – back to me. Sadly, your president isn’t me…. Look down. Back up -- where are you? You’re in a torchlight parade led by the man who could be your president! What’s in your hand? – back at me. I have it – it’s that Constitution that you say you love. Look again – your Constitution has been replaced by a military junta! Anything is possible when your man smells like white phosphorous. I’m on a white horse.

"I want to start a draft Allen West movement!" exclaimed Glen Beck during his April 21st radio program. The radio personality has been cooing and burbling about West for months. He's convinced that the retired Army Lt. Colonel -- who was cashiered in disgrace for abusing a prisoner in a fashion that merited prosecution under Article 93 of the UCMJ -- is the "man of honor" our troubled country needs. 

Of course, Beck isn't the only one infatuated with West: the freshman congressman from Florida is emerging as something of an Old Spice Guy for the punitive populist Right.


"The next president will be either the end or the beginning of our country," Beck intoned, taking note of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the metastasizing debt and our continued descent into an economic abyss. West has displayed no measurable interest in reducing the size and expense of the Leviathan State. In fact, the contrary is true: Before being elected to represent a Florida congressional district, West was an employee of the wealth-devouring, debt-propelled imperial military. His career as a hireling killer is what Beck describes as his most alluring trait.


"He has a strong military background," Beck gushed. "The guy was led through war, and he's not afraid to pull the trigger."


With Washington's legions engaged in three open wars and at least five covert conflicts, it's clear that the incumbent warlord is not hindered by a disinclination to "pull the trigger." In fact, under the reign of the Nobel Peace Laureate, Washington's military entanglements have expanded considerably and deepened dramatically, particularly through the use of death-dispensing drone aircraft. 

In terms of bellicosity overseas, a President Allen West would most likely take up seamlessly from his predecessor. The substantive difference between the two would become apparent in domestic affairs: West's model of an ideal society is the proto-fascist totalitarian state that ruled ancient Sparta.

In a recent address to a meeting of the Evangelical group "Women Impacting the Nation," West extolled the supposed virtues of the Spartan system, in which children (at least those who made the initial cut as newborns and weren't selected as genetic culls to be hurled from a cliff) were stolen from their parents and raised as the property of the State.

 "Spartan women at the age of nine gave up their male sons," West recounted to the gathering. "And their male sons went into a training that was called the Agoge and they stayed in that training for the next eleven to twelve years. And when they were finally qualified, when they were finally ready to join the ranks for the Spartan army, it was not their father who gave them their cloak and shield. It was their mother who gave them their shield" -- while uttering the famous admonition to return either carrying the shield in triumph, or as a lifeless corpse being carried upon it.



  
The ironies are thick enough here to blot out the sun, but it's sufficient to focus on three of them. First, the Evangelical women in the audience can be heard swooning with approval as West hymns the purported merits of a thoroughly pagan society that embodied the antithesis of every Christian virtue. Second, West -- who insists that we must either subjugate or annihilate Muslims because they "have no respect for human life" -- apparently believes that America should re-model itself after a garrison state built on a foundation of institutionalized child sacrifice on behalf of the State.

Even more remarkably, the same Allen West who recently sent a thrill down the leg of many Right-collectivist warbots by denouncing the integration of homosexuals into the imperial military heaped extravagant praise on a military indoctrination system built on what Dr. Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University calls "ritualized pederasty." Enforced homosexuality was part of the process whereby Spartan boys became "qualified" (as West so daintily put it) for service in the city-state's army.

 In his book The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, from Utopia to Crisis and Collapse, Dr. Cartledge observes that after a Spartan boy's seventh birthday "he was removed from the home environment, for good, to embark on the compulsory and communal educational system know as the Agoge or Raising/Upbrining. Between the ages of seven and eighteen the boys and youths were organized in `packs' and `herds' and placed under the supervision of young adult Spartans. They were encouraged to break the exclusive ties with their own natal families and to consider all Spartans of their father's age to be in loco parentis."

At the age of twelve, the Spartan male "was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover -- the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was `inspirer,' while the junior partner was known as the `hearer,'" relates Dr. Cartledge. When the Spartan boy reached age eighteen he was evaluated for membership in the Crypteia, a police force assigned "to control the Helots" -- a population of civilian slaves who lived under a form of martial law and could be killed, with impunity, by the Spartan police.

If Barack Obama -- or even some tertiary bureaucratic appointee in his administration --were to invoke totalitarian Sparta as a model for an American social renaissance, Glenn Beck most likely would suffer a seizure at his chalkboard, and the entire warbot Right would go into convulsions. Allen West's candid endorsement of that vile totalitarian system, however, is seen as "courageous" and "principled" by that same social cohort.


"When was the last time you heard a politician speak like this?" squealed an enraptured conservative commentator regarding West's paean to Sparta's child-snatching militarist overlords.

Well, let's see:


There was that curious little fellow -- a bit eccentric, but a decorated combat veteran nonetheless -- who about eighty years ago explained: "When an opponent says, `I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, `Your child belongs to us already.... You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community." 


Fleshing out the Dear Leader's vision, his Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, insisted that the "primary obligation" of parents, schools, and other institutions was "to raise youth for service to the Volk and state...." 

Another version of that same sentiment was expressed at a Soviet Communist Party Education Workers' Conference in 1918: "We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."

A few years ago, the militarist Right worked itself into a spittle-flinging frenzy over a video depicting what was described as Obama's "paramilitary youth corps." The black teenagers in that video -- whose choreographed presentation did have the flavor of a ritual worshipping the Dear Leader of a third world nation -- were enrolled in a Kansas City program for troubled youngsters. This disagreeable episode was an entirely isolated incident.

Allen West, on the other hand, has candidly endorsed the idea that virtuous American mothers should "[give] up their male sons" to be raised by the State, for the State; that they should teach their sons that there is no vocation holier than killing on behalf of the State; and that there is no act nobler than sacrificing one's life in the State's service.  

Many of the same people who saw the odd little performance in Kansas City as evidence of a plot to create a monolithic, nation-wide Paramilitary Youth Corps of fearsome size and iron discipline apparently think this arrangement would be just fine, as long as Allen West were the one in charge.


Perhaps he's being coy, but Colonel West insists that he's not interested in a presidential run in 2012. If he's sincere in that refusal, he might find himself gravitating toward a different venture promoted by Beck -- what one of his publicists describes as a coterie of "former CEOs, CIA agents, and military personnel who share his vision to restore the republic." 

On the basis of prior performance, it's pretty clear that Beck's "vision" doesn't include a repudiation of the Warfare State. The thumbnail sketch of his proposed brain trust suggests that he would be communing with people who have been instrumental in building that vertically integrated enterprise of plunder, bloodshed, and misery, and have profited from it. 

I find myself wondering if Beck and his clique will gather in some sheltered Rocky Mountain redoubt to prepare for the final economic and social collapse -- and then emerge in the aftermath to offer the kind of leadership only seasoned militarists can provide. If this is the case, I'd suggest naming their sanctuary Galtieri Gulch, in memory of a CIA-supported figure whose junta field-tested many of the techniques -- military tribunals, kidnappings, torture, summary execution -- that are now routinely employed by Washington. 


Allen West would make a suitable figurehead for a post-collapse American military junta, and I suspect that among his admirers can be found many people who quietly long for the advent of an American Galtieri or Pinochet. I suppose it would be progress, of a sort, to see a black man considered for the role of the Man on the White Horse. 


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Dum spiro, pugno!

When Will It Be "Enough"?

Uninvited, unwanted, but there anyway: Hamilton police disrupt a funeral.

Within the space of about a day, New Jersey experienced two public displays of organized intimidation by paramilitary thugs. The first involved an armed assault by black-clad bullies whose conduct was indistinguishable from the criminal street violence of the Nazi SS. The other was merely a public protest by the local chapter of the National Socialist Movement.

The family of Elsie Wenzel, a beloved school lunch lady who died at age 71, gathered for a memorial service at a funeral home in Hamilton (a small town near Trenton) on April 15. Charles Wenzel, one of her grandsons, "had ... something like a seizure," related Elsie's widower, Edward, in an interview with The Trentonian. The family called 911 to summon the paramedics. Unfortunately, if you call the paramedics, the police are part of the package deal, whether they're wanted or not -- and they have an unfailing talent for making matters worse.


When Charles had another convulsion, he committed the unpardonable offense of defiling one of the sanctified bully-boys through physical contact. This constitutes "battery on an officer," and so the offended cop and several of his boyfriends attempted to handcuff Charles while he was lying on the ground receiving medical treatment.


"We didn't call you for this!" exclaimed a witness as several other people, including a granddaughter of the deceased, tried to intervene to protect Charles from the criminal assault. The officers responded by pepper-spraying the mourners and throwing several of them -- including Edward's middle-aged granddaughter -- to the ground. 

One of the officers called in a report that a "riot" was in progress -- "riot" being defined as any situation in which Mundanes loudly criticize the anointed purveyors of consecrated violence for their crimes against innocent people. Apparently the funeral parlor was located near a donut shop, because within seconds at least a dozen police vehicles were on the scene. 





(Courtesy of the Trentonian.)


One of Elsie's sons, who was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, was jumped by "seven or eight" of the armed tax-feeders and thrown to the floor of the funeral parlor, Edward Wenzel reported. Another eyewitness who drove by the scene was alarmed to see police swarming four other prone, helpless men.

By one account, at least a half-dozen of the pallbearers were arrested to sent to the hospital as a result of gang violence by the police. When police attempted to "escort" him from the chapel, Edward Wenzel refused; if they had laid hands on the bereaved elderly widower, an authentic riot might well have ensued. 


A day later in nearby Trenton, a battalion-strength contingent of riot police was on hand to provide "security" during a protest staged at the Statehouse by about fifty members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a pathetic little outfit that -- in terms of authenticity -- has the same relationship to the Third Reich that Spinal Tap has to Led Zeppelin. 

As is typical in events of this kind, the NSM nitwits were outnumbered about three-to-one by counter-protesters. Events of this kind are an orgy of overtime for the unionized gendarme, and the April 16 protest was no exception: Every law enforcement agency -- local, state, and federal -- sent a contingent of uniformed trough-swillers to strut and preen in riot gear.

The familiar ritual of neo-Nazi protests reminds me a bit of Voltaire's description of the typical 18th Century Parisian dinner party, where one would experience "the usual unintelligible chatter, witticisms, false rumors, bad reasoning, a little politics, [and] a great deal of slander...." 


Every time neo-Nazi numbskulls conduct a protest, the air will be clotted with the same familiar slogans, the standard assortment of insults will be exchanged, and all of the familiar poses will be struck. 

All of this, I'm convinced, is incidental to the real two-fold purpose of such displays: Allowing the local constabulary to run up overtime, and reinforcing the notion that the police are the valiant protectors of the innocent, rather than the most significant threat to their life, liberty, and property.

It wasn't neo-Nazis of the NSM variety who disrupted Elsie Wenzel's funeral. It would be interesting to find out how many of the paladins of public order who pulled "riot duty" in Trenton on Saturday, April 16 had taken part in the police riot in Hamilton on the previous day. In similar fashion, it's quite likely that nobody who attended Elsie's funeral had ever been the victim of criminal violence apart from that inflicted on them by the Hamilton police. 

Domesticated neo-Nazi groups like the NSM have a way of Bogarting all of the civic outrage wherever they materialize, including outrage more properly directed at the local branch of the Ordnungspolitzei. This is one reason why the Feds are eager to feed and care for groups such as the NSM -- which also act as useful vehicles for federal provocateurs.


The likelihood that the National Socialist Movement -- or any similarly situated neo-Nazi group -- could become a menace to individual liberty and dignity comparable to that posed by the State's punitive priesthood is so small that it couldn't be detected by en electron microscope. Neo-Nazis are almost impossible to find, unless one seeks them out in a few rural habitats in the Northwest and Deep South. The police, by way of contrast, are almost impossible to avoid, and their behavior -- as I've noted before -- increasingly resembles that of an army of occupation. 

In part, this is because many of them are Reservists or Guardsmen who have served in Washington's military occupations abroad. But even those who have not been deployed overseas are being indoctrinated to think of themselves as combatants in constant peril for whom "officer safety" is the paramount consideration. 


To understand the institutional mindset of contemporary law enforcement, it's useful to juxtapose video records of two incidents. The first took place in Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2005:

“Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of "Schindler's List," struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and “Jackass”: Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.

One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:



In 2003,  two years before the episode at Iraq's Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault — albeit with “non-lethal” weapons — against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force,” observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. “It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.”

Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read “Fear Totalitarianism.” As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign — only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.

During the  next morning’s mission briefing,  black-shirted thugs commanded by Sgt. Michael Kallman of the Broward Sheriff’s Office of homeland security enjoyed a hearty laugh as they reviewed footage of the criminal assault on Ritter. This led to Kallman being captured in his own “Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” moment.

“I don’t know who got her,” chortled Kallman, “but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head.”

“Can I get a little piece of her red dress?” chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.

In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved “from one of the scurrying cockroaches.”

“Oh, cool!” exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. “This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories.”

Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the “Miami Model” of homeland security.

 The foundation of the "Miami Model" is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of "order": The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt -- or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and "civilians," which is why every such encounter -- even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral -- is freighted with incipient police violence.

Hamilton Township, New Jersey -- described by its municipal government as "America's Favorite Hometown" -- is a community of about 100,000 people. It is a reasonably affluent suburb blessed with abundant parks and other amenities -- and blighted by a police force capable of busting up a funeral in a fit of official violence that wasn't that far removed from the behavior of the torch-bearing Cossacks who raided the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof.

Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief's "duty" is made clear to him.

"Orders are orders -- you understand?"  simpered Anatevka's village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: "If you don't want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will." Such people are never in short supply.

We are told that many -- nay, most -- of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I've met everybody who fits that description.

For reasons of institutional solidarity -- or, what's much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation -- such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must "calm down" in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.

As I've pointed out before, a police officer who actually intervenes to prevent criminal violence by a professional associate can expect to be cashiered immediately. The criminal offender himself, by way of contrast,  can expect a lucrative paid vacation while the local police union spares no effort to preserve his job. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.


It's tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation's Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said -- a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime's armed enforcers.

When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi's father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid -- a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis -- Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia's deeply depressed economy.

For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a "fine." 

As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it's extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.

He was driven to fatal despair when a municipal police officer confiscated his merchandise. 

The matter could have been cleared up if the officer had accepted the seven-dollar fine for operating an unlicensed merchant stand. But the sadist insisted on berating Bouazizi, slapping him, spitting in his face, and insulting his dead father. Heartsick with inconsolable despair, the young man set himself on fire. Public outrage over this incident grew into a revolt that eventually unseated the U.S.-supported incumbent dictator.

"What happened to him?" The police "happened" to him.

Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said's throat.

News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt's deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.

In police states of the kind Washington has supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the region, people have been willing to endure a great deal of abuse as long as there was some reasonable expectation that they would be able to feed themselves. It's not surprising to see that forbearance evaporate in the heat of the ongoing economic meltdown, which has left many people without the means to feed their families.  

The triggering incidents that set off revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt were episodes of casual, arrogant abuse by police officers who considered themselves to be imperviously clothed in official privilege. Incidents of that kind are becoming more commonplace here in the putative Land of the Free, and the debt-prolonged illusion of prosperity that has long anesthetized public sensitivities is coming to an end.

Once again, it's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone, somewhere is going to be pushed too far by an officious prig in a government-issued costume, an atrocity will result -- and then all hell will break loose. 

Given the perverse ingenuity police display in arranging opportunities to impart such abuse, this could happen nearly anywhere, at any time. Meanwhile, those of us who belong to the productive class should avail ourselves of every opportunity to share the following message with representatives of the State's coercive caste:

We don't need you.

We don't want you.

We don't respect you.

We won't tolerate you much longer.

Obiter Dicta

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Stormtroopers and Child-Snatchers (Update, April 14)

The Nanny State Goes to War: Paramilitary Police lay siege to Maryanne Goldbodo's Detroit Home.

Ariana Goldboldo, a mentally handicapped 13-year-old, was abducted from her home at gunpoint on March 24. Her captors have systematically poisoned her through injections of a dangerous psychoactive drug. There is also reason to believe that Ariana, who has reportedly tested positive for an STD, has been molested during her time in captivity.


Ariana's mother, Maryanne, made a valiant but futile effort to protect her daughter. As a result, she may end up in prison. If this happens, Ariana almost certainly won't survive.

Godboldo, a college dance instructor, had attempted to school her daughter at home, but eventually decided to place the youngster in a local government school. This meant that the girl would have to undergo a government-dictated suite of vaccinations. 

Shortly after receiving the injections, the girl experienced severe side-effects, including behavioral problems she hadn’t previously experienced. 

When Godboldo consulted with local health and welfare officials, she was told that her daughter would have to receive regular injections of Risperdal, supposedly to counteract the effects of the other government-mandated vaccinations. This is a bit like prescribing cancer to treat diabetes. Among the documented side-effects of that drug are tardive dyskinesia (difficulty with basic motor skills) and severe emotional problems – including suicidal thoughts. When Godboldo’s long-suffering child began to display those symptoms, the mother refused to continue with the injections.

The local “child protection” bureaucracy – which, like all other agencies of its kind, subscribes to the totalitarian assumption that children are the property of the state – decreed that Godboldo was "in denial about her daughter's mental health issue." 

There's no evidence that Godboldo disputed the seriousness of her daughter's condition; as Ariana's primary caretaker, she understood it very well. She had very reasonable doubts about the competence of the therapeutic officials who were forcing Ariana to undergo injections of a potentially lethal drug. But it is impermissible for parents to entertain such reservations about the wisdom of those clothed in the purported authority of the State, or to resist their prescriptions, whatever their efficacy. 

Sure, Ariana might die or be driven irretrievably mad as a result of government-mandated treatment -- but this was a decision for the Anointed Ones to make, and for parents to accept with proper docility. Accordingly, the CPS authorized itself to “liberate” Godboldo’s daughter in order to continue poisoning her with Risperdal injections. A small team of government kidnappers – CPS workers and Detroit Police officers – materialized on Godboldo’s doorstep, demanding that she surrender the child. 

Nied preens in Iraq.

"They broke into my home illegally in an effort to take my daughter," Godboldo recalls. "They had no documentation that said they were allowed to enter my home."

Godboldo, acting on her natural authority as a parent to protect her child, refused to let the kidnappers take her daughter. 

When Godboldo refused to let CPS take her daughter, a home invasion team -- led, appropriately, by a veteran of the Iraq occupation, Lt. Michael Nied -- forced its way into the home.  Nied claims that Godboldo fired a gunshot that sprayed him with drywall residue and made his little heart quiver. He and his fellow heroes retreated and called in a "barricaded gunman situation." A ten-hour siege then ensued.

Prudential considerations aside, Godboldo would have been within her rights to gun down the kidnappers, had she possessed the means to do so. She hadn't committed a criminal offense, and the police didn't bother to bring along one of those cunning little permission slips judges reflexively issue any time police want to invade a home. In moral and legal terms they were no better than any other gang of armed intruders.

Eventually a paramilitary SWAT team – complete with automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters – was dispatched to surround Godboldo’s home. The mother eventually surrendered and was put in jail on a $500,000 bond. Although Maryanne was released on bail, her daughter remains in the custody of her abductors, undergoing forcible injections of a drug that is slowly destroying her body and mind -- and, quite possibly, being subjected to sexual violation as well.

Godboldo can take a small measure of comfort in the fact that Ariana -- unlike Aiyana Jones, who was murdered by a Detroit SWAT team in a gratuitous raid staged for a "reality TV" program a year ago -- is still alive. But the risk to that child increases with every minute she remains in the custody of Michigan's child "protection" service.

Last year, Detroit ABC affiliate WXYZ presented a detailed report on the murder of 10-year-old Johnny Andron, a child suffering from epilepsy and cerebral palsy who was seized by the state and starved to death in what was referred to as a "foster care facility." Johnny's mother Elena, a single parent, devoted most of her free time to caring for her wheelchair-bound son. 

After she lost her factory job, Elena made the tragic error of seeking "help" from the child "welfare" system, which makes a federally subsidized profit each time it steals a child from his parents. Johnny was made a "temporary ward of the state," a judicial designation that was tantamount to a death sentence. The same was true of Elena's parental rights, since the same ruling placed her on a central registry of "abusive" and "neglectful" parents. She was placed inside the hamster wheel of government-approved "parenting classes" taught by profiteering busybodies who've attached themselves like boxcars to the federal gravy train.

For months, Elena struggled to find and keep a new job while dutifully attending classes that did nothing but clutter her schedule. During the same period she watched her son, who had been a hefty child but -- considering his disabilities -- a healthy one, slowly waste away through deliberate criminal neglect. 

Infuriated that her child was being tortured to death through starvation, Elena dared to complain. This action was taken as evidence of her unsuitability to be a parent. She was summoned to court and informed by a black-robed functionary that she wouldn't be permitted any further visits with her son. She had no further contact with Johnny, and no updates on his status until a representative of the criminal syndicate that had taken him hostage announced to her that he had died.

Mike Ratte nearly lost his seven-year-old son into Michigan's foster-care gulag after mistakenly allowing the child to take a sip from a beverage called Mike's Hard Lemonade during a Tigers game in 2008. Ratte, a professor of archeology at the University of Michigan, didn't know that the product contained alcohol. Since the sign advertising the drink described it only as "Mike's Lemonade," Ratte assumed that it was merely an overpriced soft drink.

Leo took a sip of the beverage, immediately found it distasteful, and place the bottle on the floor near his bleacher seat. Shortly before the game ended a Comerica Park security guard waddled over, picked up the bottle, and asked Ratte if his son had been drinking from it. 


Although Reed was puzzled by the question, he replied in the affirmative. His puzzlement mutated into alarm when he was told that the "lemonade" was actually an alcoholic drink. The guard demanded that Ratte and his son remain seated while a scrum of his buddies assembled to escort them to a police substation located in the stadium.


When questioned by the police, Ratte admitted -- once again -- that Leo had taken a swig of the drink, repeating as well his insistence that this was an innocent mistake. Anybody burdened with even a particle of common sense would recognize this as the truth. If Mike Ratte were perversely determined to get his son drunk, would he do so in public? If questioned about this, would such a person admit that his son had sampled the forbidden libation?

Anybody capable of making an EEG needle twitch would recognize that this was an honest mistake, not a crime. (Another Michigan family recently had a similar but scarier experience, due to a mix-up at an Applebee's restaurant.) This was made all the more obvious when an exam confirmed that Leo wasn't intoxicated. But this didn't prevent the police from doing what they are programmed to do in such circumstances, which is to use any available pretext to kidnap the child.


As described in a civil complaint filed on behalf of the family, Mike and Leo were forced to take an ambulance ride to a nearby hospital, where Leo was forced to endure a blood test that confirmed the absence of alcohol in his body. While his son was being needlessly bled and perforated, Mike was taken to a separate room and questioned by Officer Celeste Reed of the Detroit Police Department's Child Abuse Division. This wasn't an investigation; it was a dilatory maneuver. Reed was simply waiting until the child-snatchers had worked out the details of the abduction. 


When she finally acknowledged to Ratte that she and her comrades were going to steal his son, Reed played the Nuremberg Defense card, blaming a superior who was "pushing this case to impress her new boss." Once Leo was in custody, however, Reed took the initiative, perjuriously claiming in her report that officers had "observed [Leo] to be intoxicated." 


Leo was sequestered from his family and put into temporary foster care while the CPS bureaucracy labored to find some way to make their abduction permanent. The "referee" assigned to the case announced that she would keep it open for a week. However, Mike and his wife -- unlike most of the families victimized by the child-snatchers -- were people of means and influence. With the help of a capable attorney they were able to free their son after a mere two days' captivity. 

 "Class has something to do with the fact that the child was only in care for two days," points out Don Duquette, a law professor at the University of Michigan and director of the university's child advocacy center said. "If you're not sophisticated, the system isn't set up to give you very much of a chance to work against the ritual that's ordinarily done."

The "ritual" Duquette refers to is a form of bureaucratic child sacrifice: Families are destroyed, and children are abused under the color of supposed government authority, in order to placate the demands of the tax-feeding class. That ritual can commence at any time, for any reason. And any family can be selected as sacrificial victims. All that is required is the conjunction of an anonymous complaint and a willing bureaucrat. I write those words as a father who has confronted that prospect face-to-face.

Damn straight.

 The kidnapping of Leo Ratte occurred because his father made a trivial mistake involving a government-restricted mood-altering substance that inflicted no measurable harm on the child. 

By way of contrast, Elena Andron and Maryanne Godboldo have been traduced as "neglectful" parents because they sought to preserve their handicapped children from state-sanctioned harm. As a result, Elena's son Johnny is dead, and the same people responsible for that atrocity will quite possibly kill Ariana unless Maryanne is able to rescue her from the child "protection" system.





If Maryanne goes to prison, her daughter will die. At present, her prosecution on assault charges is being held in abeyance pending a ruling from the Michigan State Supreme Court in a case "that will determine if residents have the right to defend themselves from police officers entering a home without proper authority," reports the Detroit News. 

Embedded in this delay is a critical admission by the prosecution -- namely, that Godboldo is correct in claiming that the CPS raid was conducted without legal authority. Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that it is, in all circumstances, a "felony" for a Mundane to obstruct or resist the aggressive violence of a police officer acting without lawful authority. 


In a 1999 ruling (People v. Wess), the Michigan Court of Appeals, citing the state legal code, admitted that citizens had a right, explicitly protected by state statute, "to use such reasonable force as is necessary to prevent an illegal attachment and to resist an illegal arrest." However, in the dicta of that ruling the court all but begged for either the legislature or the state Supreme Court to change the law:


"We share the concerns of other jurisdictions that the right to resist an illegal arrest is an outmoded and dangerous doctrine, and we urge our Supreme Court to reconsider this doctrine at the first available opportunity.... we see no benefit to continuing the right to resist an otherwise peaceful arrest made by a law enforcement officer, merely because the arrestee believes the arrest is illegal. Given modern procedural safeguards for criminal defendants, the `right' only preserves the possibility that harm will come to the arresting officer or the defendant."

The line about "procedural safeguards" is unfiltered codswallop, of course -- but remember it, because we'll return to it anon. 


In 2002, the Michigan state legislature modified the relevant section of the state code (MCL 705.81d) by removing the clause recognizing the common law right to "use such reasonable force as is necessary to prevent" an unlawful arrest (that is, an armed kidnapping) by a police officer.  

 In a 2004 ruling (People v. Ventura) that dealt with a self-defense claim against an unlawful arrest, the Court of Appeals, in a perfectly nauseating display of mock humility, proclaimed that "it is not within our province to disturb our Legislature's obvious affirmative choice to modify the traditional common-law rule that a person may resist an unlawful arrest." 

Of course, the legislature made that "choice" after being invited to do so by the same Court of Appeals.

Maryanne Godboldo (center) with liturgical dancers at her church.

In the 2008 case headed for the state Supreme Court (People v. Moreno), the Appeals Court observed that "we find no reference to the lawfulness of the arrest or detaining act" in the statute, which "states only that an individual who resists a person the individual knows or has reason to know is performing his duties is guilty of a felony."


As the Michigan Court of Appeals acknowledged, the Common Law recognizes an unqualified right to resist an unlawful arrest. The Constitution -- for whatever it's worth -- reinforces that right by placing due process impediments (such as the necessity of obtaining search warrants) on the ability of armed hirelings in government-issued costumes to inflict themselves on their betters. But the Court of Appeals -- like every statist body of its kind -- insists that the costume trumps the Common Law and the Constitution. 


Now let's return to the notion that the right to resist arrest has become "outmoded" because of the "procedural safeguards" that supposedly protect criminal defendants. Ariana Godboldo has never been charged with a crime; neither had her mother, until she engaged in a heroic but doomed effort to protect her child from an assault on their home that the prosecution now tacitly admits was unlawful. 

As Elena Andron and countless other parents have learned, there are no procedural safeguards for parental rights or the individual rights of children once the CPS intervenes. 

The federally subsidized child "protection" universe is a joint production of Lenin, Kafka and Salvador Dali in which power means everything, facts and law mean nothing, and the contours of "reality" are warped in the service of  self-enraptured bureaucrats. 

Unless a parent is a person of means and influence, like Mike Ratte, active resistance
may be the only way to keep his child or children from disappearing into the CPS Archipelago once the family comes to the attention of the child-snatchers. Ideally, this would mean pro-active measures to conceal a targeted child, or to provide for the child's escape in the event the child-nappers arrive.

As the abduction of Ariana Godboldo demonstrates, the child "protection" apparatus is literally at war with American parents, and police are prepared to murder any parent determined to keep his children out of the hands of those who can drug them, starve them, and molest them with impunity.  

Update: No crisis, no crime, but the prosecution will proceed

"Authorities have determined there is no emergency need for [13-year-old Ariana Godboldo] ... to be on medication, after the girl's mother was accused of medically neglecting her by not giving her a psychotropic drug," reports the Detroit Free Press. "Though officials said Wednesday that there was no immediate need to give the girl medication, Michigan Assistant Attorney General David Law said he may reintroduce the issue later if the need arises."


Assistant Commissar for Official Persecution Law is not referring to any "need" on the part of Ariana. This entire exercise never had anything to do with her welfare. This official determination has validated Maryanne's refusal to poison her daughter with Risperdal -- but that doesn't matter, either: She is scheduled to go on trial June 8 for the supposed offense of refusing to permit her daughter to be seized at gunpoint and forcibly injected with a drug the state now admits did her no good.

 Thanks so much for your generous help to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!