Militarists, Drug Warriors, and Heresy-Hunters: The Anti-Ron Paul Axis of "Decency"

Toxic smugness: Google the term "Backpfeifengesicht."

Newt Gingrich, lapsed adulterer, impenitent warmonger, and self-appointed “teacher of civilization,” has excommunicated Ron Paul and his supporters from the ranks of human decency. A similar anathema has been pronounced by left-wing heresy hunter David Neiwert -- a former sidekick to the degenerate fraud named Morris Dees – and many other self-appointed political “watchdogs.” 

Those banishment decrees condemn Dr. Paul and his supporters for rejecting the fundamental tenet of statism – the belief that officially sanctioned lethal coercion is the key to social progress. 

"I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," insisted Gingrich in a CNN interview. Although Gingrich alluded to the manufactured controversy over decades-old newsletters published by Dr. Paul that contained supposedly offensive material dealing with matters of political correctness, Gingrich’s chief complaint – which he has reiterated on many occasions – is that Dr. Paul seeks to end America’s interventionist foreign policy and the God-awful wars that policy entails. 

Gingrich has also dismissed Dr. Paul’s constituency as being limited to “people who want to legalize drugs.” Unlike Gingrich – who used government-proscribed canabinoids as a young adult – Ron Paul has never used such illicit substances nor condoned their non-medical use, while understanding that no government has the moral right to punish individuals who consume them as they see fit. In 1988 – at a time when, according to Gingrich and other detractors, Paul was peddling racist propaganda – Dr. Paul was denouncing the racist roots of the so-called War on Drugs. Gingrich, on the other hand, has endorsed the execution of first-time drug offenders who possess trivial amounts of narcotics. 

For Gingrich and the dominant militarist wing of the GOP, it is rank indecency to oppose the mass murder of foreigners through aggressive war overseas, and to leave individuals free to choose what mood-altering substances they consume, if any. For “Progressives” of Neiwert’s ilk, it is similarly uncivilized to treat Americans as adults capable of managing their own affairs, and choosing their own associations, free from the directives of bureaucrats and social engineers whose mandates are backed by the threat of deadly force.

Neiwert volubly disapproved of foreign war when George W. Bush was in power, but found other things to complain about once Obama ascended to the Imperial Purple. A deeper problem than such facile and predictable hypocrisy is the insistence – which Neiwert shares with many other figures on the academic Left -- that war and military occupation are morally superior to peaceful, market-centered action in dealing with institutionalized bigotry. 

“The hand-wringing about whether Paul is a racist or not really is beside the point,” declared Neiwert in a typically sanctimonious outpouring. “Labels really become inconsequential when the real issue is how their politics would play out on the ground if they achieved power.” He denounces a supposed “monstrous bind spot in libertarianism – namely, their apparent belief that the only element of American political life capable of depriving Americans of their rights is the government….”

Actually, the core libertarian tenet is the non-aggression axiom (an application of the Golden Rule), which recognizes that it is an unalloyed wrong for anybody to commit aggressive violence against the person or property of another human being. Libertarians do not exempt private actors from that principle. We refuse to exempt the government from it, as well – and this is what is deemed unacceptable by collectivists of Neiwert’s ilk, who believe that all good things in life begin with officially sanctioned coercion. 

Consider, for example, Neiwert’s claim that it was libertarian-leaning conservatives (or their philosophical ancestors) in the aftermath of the War Between the States, who “led the resistance to Reconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war….” 

Neiwert’s use of the term “verdict” in this fashion resonates with the view expressed by Thrasymachus, the notorious sophist depicted in Plato’s Republic – namely, that “in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.”

In Neiwert’s moral universe, only incorrigibly hateful people question “verdicts” imposed through mass slaughter and property destruction.

The “Reconstruction,” it must be remembered, was an undisguised military occupation of the conquered South, in which “wholesale corruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands, political assassinations, riots, [and] revolutions … were the order of the day,” as Dr. Paul Leland Haworth wrote in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union, 1865-1912. 

The objective that inspired Reconstruction was not a vision of civic equality, but rather a desire to destroy the troublesome Southern aristocracy, which was seen as an impediment to the designs of the Northern corporatist elite. 

“I was satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory,” wrote General Sherman to his wife (in a letter quoted in Victor Davis Hanson’s book The Soul of Battle). In what Hanson approvingly called Sherman’s war of “terror” against the South, the General warned that those who refused to display a properly submissive posture would be “crushed like flies on a wheel.” 

"Good Indians," by Sherman's definition, at Wounded Knee.

Sherman, and his fellow state terrorist Philip Sheridan, would follow the same approach in dealing with the Plains Indians, who also had the temerity to claim a measure of independence from the supposed authority of the Central Government. Neiwert, interestingly, addresses that horrifying historican episode in his recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

In a chapter dealing with "Eliminationism in America,” Neiwert describes some of the atrocities committed against the Plains Indians by U.S. military forces commanded by  Sheridan and Sherman. He then devotes the rest of the book to ritual execration of "neo-Confederates." That category must include anybody who understands that war to reclaim and “reconstruct” the South was a bloody prelude to the slaughter of the Plains Indians, the imperial war of conquest in the Philippines, and contemporary campaigns of humanitarian bloodshed that have blessed the lives of “people of color” in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Neiwert, who is consistently oblivious to the implications of his own research, also points out that the Ku Klux Klan’s early-20^th Century revival began when it was embraced by local governments (including some in the Midwest) as "an auxiliary police outfit" to enforce laws against bootlegging. The Klan, of course, is the marquee hate group that has served as such a profitable foil for Neiwert’s mentor, Morris Dees – and it’s quite possible that group would have disappeared permanently had it not become a government sub-contractor in the first War on Drugs. 

This brings up a very important point: If Morris Dees and his comrades at the SPLC are genuinely agitated over institutionalized discrimination, why have they never publicly uttered a syllable of condemnation for the patently racist “War on Drugs”? 

One possibility is suggested by the fact that the contemporary SPLC, like the Ku Klux Klan of roughly a century ago, is a quasi-private adjunct to law enforcement agencies that profit extravagantly from Prohibition. Dees is too canny and cynical to disturb that lucrative arrangement by protesting about the costs inflicted by Prohibition in terms of the lives and liberties of black and Hispanic Americans. After all, complaints of that kind are the sort of thing one hears from indecent, irresponsible extremists like Ron Paul. 

David Neiwert and other self-anointed custodians of social justice insist that Ron Paul and his supporters have somehow inherited the sins of bigoted people who died long before they were born, and prospectively share the guilt of those who might do horrible things if federal power were curtailed. Meanwhile, the president supported by Neiwert and his ideological kin is massacring innocent “people of color” in at least three countries, and escalating a domestic Drug War that is rife with racial profiling and racial disparities in sentencing guidelines.  

 The mass slaughter of brown people abroad, and mass incarceration of brown people at home, are a price Neiwert and his ilk are willing to pay to preserve a system that can regiment societal arrangements to their liking. In that system, as Neiwert candidly admits, social “verdicts” are imposed and upheld through state-licensed murder, rather than achieved through peaceful cooperation. 

Professor George P. Fletcher of Columbia Law School provides an incisive description of the ideological foundation of that system in his valuable book The Secret Constitution. 

Fletcher, an unabashed Marxist, is difficult to dismiss as a “neo-Confederate,” yet he agrees with the revisionist view that the war waged by the North was not an effort to "preserve the Union," to emancipate the slaves, or (as Lincoln absurdly claimed) a crusade to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate a confederation of states into a unitary regime governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." The founding premise of that New Order is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.) That "aggressive intervention" inescapably involves the threat -- and, increasingly, the exercise -- of deadly force.

Newt Gingrich and David Neiwert -- and the ideological cliques they represent -- disagree about a great deal, but they agree that “decency” in political affairs is measured by one’s willingness to support State-sanctioned murder as the central organizing principle of society.

 Once again, thank you!

My family and I wish to express our continued gratitude for the generous support so many of you have offered to Pro Libertate. This means more to us that we can adequately express. God bless you all. 

On another matter: I have been curating the news blog for Republic magazine; please pay that site a visit, and -- if it meets with your approval -- spread the word. 

Be sure to check out Republic magazine! 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Steven Pinker's Statist Gospel

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has said that he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written a theodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the Leviathan State. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker insists that humanity has “evolved to become less violent” through the ministry of elites who employ the State to evangelize on behalf of what he calls “enlightenment humanism.” 

According to Pinker, since the emergence of the modern secular state in the 18th century there has been a dramatic decline in primitive expressions of aggressive violence. People who live in contemporary developed societies “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments; punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated a royal; pistol duels to defend their honor … or the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself,” Pinker asserts. 

The precipitous decline in private violence, which Pinker heralds as “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history,” is a triumph of the “social contract,” an arrangement in which political government asserts a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. By over-awing those inclined toward individual acts of violence, the State supposedly suppresses “demonic” impulses – such as greed and sadism – while emancipating the “better angels of our nature” – empathy, self-discipline, and peaceful cooperation.

"Oh Divine State, protect us from the unenlightened...."

 As is the case with most religious doctrines, Pinker’s theology of the divine State is built on a paradox – in this case the idea that the human tendency toward violence can be eradicated through the scientific application of the same by enlightened people who have supposedly transcended such primitive impulses. 

Given that Pinker is one of the leading exponents of the “box with wires” view of the human brain, there is also a rich vein of irony in Pinker’s unabashed use of the terms “demons” and “angels” in describing a conflict over competing visions of morality. 

In an interview given more than a decade ago, Pinker described human beings as “nothing more than a collection of ricocheting molecules in the head.” Like others who subscribe to that view, Pinker has yet to submit a schematic explaining how morality is produced through molecular reactions. And like theologians from other traditions, Pinker is content to leave such matters undisturbed in the unfathomable depths of mystery. This would be a perfectly acceptable arrangement – were it not for the fact that Pinker, like fundamentalists from other traditions, embraces the use of sanctified coercion as a means of purifying those less enlightened than he.

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracing anarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, he has put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarian statism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was  was the author of what he called "The Civil Religion" — a doctrine that would enable the masses, in Rousseau's phrase, to "bear with docility the yoke of the public good." 

The most important article of Rousseau's Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgression was "intolerance," which was regarded as evil not because it injured the rights of individuals, but because it challenged the State's authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a "form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates.... [W]hoever dares to say, 'Outside the church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff."

The State would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it was doing so: "While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: "If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death -- he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Rousseau believed that man --until corrupted by traditional institutions -- was intrinsically good. Thomas Hobbes – not to put too fine a point on the matter – didn’t share that opinion. He did agree that the State, as the embodiment of what could be called the “general will,” should combine the civil and ecclesial functions and exercise unlimited power to regiment the lives of its subjects. The objective wouldn’t be to save people’s souls, or elevate their morals, but merely to impose order.

Pinker claims to be “eclectically, non-dogmatically libertarian” in his political outlook. Given his unbuttoned embrace of Hobbesian absolutism, that’s a bit like claiming to be an “eclectic, non-dogmatic vegan” while subsisting on a diet of steak tartare.  

Although Pinker began his academic career in a Montreal counter-cultural milieu “dominated by hippies ... and US draft dodgers,” he has endorsed the exercise in State-inflicted violence called the “War on Drugs” in terms that would earn Hobbes’s approval:  “A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will get a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.”  

This process involves filling the streets with State-licensed “violent people” in military attire, and granting them a plenary indulgence to loot and terrorize the public. The “by-catch” gathered by thegovernment’s trawling net includes perfectly innocent people. But it is not our place to question the inscrutable wisdom of the divine State, which causes the pain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Leviathan's "by-catch": A 71-year-old victim of a wrong-door drug raid.

 There is also the matter of quo warranto: By what authority does the State assault and imprison people who peacefully ingest mind-altering substances? 

This is where Pinker’s Rousseauist background comes into play: It’s not necessary for subjects to understand the logic of the State’s decrees; they simply must have faith in its bottomless competence and unalloyed goodness – or suffer the penalty for their apostasy. 

All religious belief requires the acceptance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Pinker’s dogma requires that we ignore the evidence of things that are clearly visible in order to embrace his vision of something yet to materialize. The most compelling argument against Pinker’s claim that humanity has evolved beyond violence is the systematic slaughter during the 20^th Century of at least 170 million people by governments claiming and enforcing a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. 

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker – to his credit – does recognize R.J. Rummel’s pioneering research into the phenomenon of "democide." Given the body count compiled through war and politicized mass murder during the 20^th century, and the persistent bloodshed in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, the idea that humanity has progressed beyond violence “seems illogical and obscene,” Pinker admits. This is something else we simply have to take on faith as well, it appears. 

The rampages carried out by totalitarian states were a tragic prelude to the “Long Peace” that has prevailed since WWII, Pinker insists. We’ve reached a point at which mass violence only among those sub-populations that have resisted signing on to a “social contract that [gives] government a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” That heathen population, he points out, includes Americans who reside in the southern and western states, where people “retain the right to bear arms [and] believe it is their responsibility, not the government’s, to deter harm-doers.” This means that “private citizens, flush with self-serving biases, [can act] as judge, jury, and executioner….”

Of all the impious nerve! Such power can only be exercised by those duly anointed as emissaries of the divine State – beginning with the Exalted One in the Oval Office, who commands the power to imprison, torture, or execute anybody  on the face of the planet. 

In a 2007 TED lecture, Dr. Pinker urged Leviathan’s subjects to count their blessings: A mere century ago, he pointed out, some of them may have been “burned at the stake for criticizing the king, after a trial that maybe lasted ten minutes.” Today, by way of contrast, a U.S. citizen who condemns Washington’s imperial aggression can be summarily executed by way of a drone-fired missile without the benefit of a trial. The latter approach is acceptable to at least some people of Pinker’s persuasion because the State’s priestly caste possesses the mystical power to transubstantiate violence into “policy.” 

Although he followed a different vector, Steven Pinker, a proudly irreligious cultural Jew, has arrived at the same destination as the reactionary 18th Century Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre, who insisted that "all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears." While Dr. Pinker criticizes the death penalty, his view of social order ultimately rests on the supposed authority of State functionaries to kill those who refuse to submit to them.

The modern material and ethical progress Pinker properly celebrates are not the product of State coercion. They are the result of private, mutually beneficial action based on reciprocal respect for individual rights -- in other words, the application of the Golden Rule, which Pinker acknowledges in passing while pointedly ignoring uncomfortable questions about its provenance and most notable Exponent. 

To use Pinker's categories: The impulses unleashed by the State are demonic, not angelic. 

Your donations to keep Pro Libertate on-line are much-needed, and very much appreciated! God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Awlaki Sanction: Who's Next on the List?

The links connecting Anwar al-Awlaki to anti-American terrorism were entirely suppositious, forged through unsubstantiated official assertion. He was, at most, a clerical propagandist who never exercised command authority. For that matter, no evidence has been presented that he ever had an operational role in a military force of any kind. 

Awlaki -- an American-born cleric who was once courted by the Pentagon -- was accused of expressing support for armed attacks against U.S. military personnel and government interests. It is not terrorism to employ lethal violence against an invading and occupying army, nor is it a crime to express support for armed self-defense -- including armed interposition against the aggressive designs of the U.S. government.  

The administration asserted – without providing evidence – that Awlaki had an “operational” role in planning terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens. If evidence supporting that charge existed, the administration had the unconditional constitutional duty to indict Awlaki and put him on trial. 

Intelligence officials knew Awlaki’s location. The government of Yemen, which is headed by a pliant thug named Ali Abdullah Saleh, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington and would have eagerly cooperated in an effort to track down and extradite Awlaki. But this would not have validated the claim – made by the Bush administration, and embraced by its successor – that the President of the United States isn’t bound by the Constitution, but rather is the Living Constitution. 

As a guarantee of individual liberty, a political constitution is about as intrinsically valuable as a paper currency. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are irredeemable unless they are backed by a noble metal – lead, in the form of privately owned ammunition. Nonetheless, and for the record, this must be said: 

There is nothing in the Constitution or laws of the United States of America that permits a president to order the summary execution of any human being. Only Congress can declare war. Only a jury can find someone guilty of a crime. Only a judge can impose a death sentence. Or such would be the case, were we still living in a constitutional republic, rather than the militarist empire into which that republic inevitably degenerated. 

The vertically integrated murder apparatus that killed Awlaki and fellow U.S. citizen Samir Khan is entirely autonomous – and increasingly automated. Awlaki was added to a “kill list,” and his execution “sanctioned” by a secret legal memorandum, on the basis of things he had said in public. Within a few years, the machinery of mass murder will be refined to the point where people – including U.S. citizens – may find themselves targeted for execution on the basis of behavior “patterns” that suggest unexpressed by impermissible thoughts. 

 As Thomas Englehardt points out:

“In 2007, [then-] CIA director Michael Hayden began lobbying the White House for `permission to carry out strikes against houses or cars merely on the basis of behavior that matched a “pattern of life” associated with al-Qaeda or other groups.’ And next thing you knew, they were moving from a few attempted targeted assassinations toward a larger air war of annihilation against types and `behaviors.’”

Unmanned, automated drones are an ideal instrument for this variety ofall-encompassing warfare against dissent. “They are capable of roaming the world,” Englehardt continues. “Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of `hive minds.’”

According to retired General Wesley Clark, the murder – or, to use his term, “takedown” -- of Anwar al-Awlaki heralds a “transformation” of the Regime’s strategy in waging open-ended warfare. Awlaki’s death “makes his final legacy a proof of the effectiveness of America’s active defense against terrorists,” enthuses Clark. 

He goes on to emit one of the purest specimens of totalitarian agitprop ever recorded:

“For the United States, the journey continues: Awlaki’s death … moves us closer to the time when we must transition, psychologically and practically, from being a nation under threat to a nation that once again champions its openness and welcome to the whole world.”

Mere acceptance of the presidential power to execute anybody on a whim isn’t sufficient. It must be celebrated openly – nay, it must be extolled as a selling point to the rest of the world: Come visit this uniquely blessed land of killer drones and murder by executive decree! 

Inspired by Clark’s exhortation, and eager to display my patriotic zeal to eradicate those who have aided and supported terrorism, I would like to submit two nominees for the next drone-inflicted counter-terrorist “takedown”: Retired Generals Wesley Clark and Michael Hayden. 

Clark (l.) with KLA chieftain Hashim Thaci (r).

As noted above, there is no evidence that Anwar al-Awlaki ever actively collaborated in armed violence by Jihadists. Wesley Clark, however, was the commanding general during the NATO’s 78-day terror bombing of Serbia. 

Hundreds of civilians were murdered in that act of international terrorism, which resulted in the installation of a criminal syndicate called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as the government of that Serbian province. 

The KLA has a remarkable pedigree: It is descended on one side from the notorious WWII-era Skanderbeg militia organized by the Nazi SS; the other half of its heritage is Stalinist. It received material and technical assistance from the CIA , and financial aid from Osama bin Laden -- who were partners in supporting jihadist elements during the wars of Balkan secession.

As CIA director under George W. Bush, Michael Hayden was deeply involved in recruiting, arming, and supporting a large number of unreconstructed jihadist, among them an enchanting Somali warlord named Indha Adde, who now refers to himself as Gen. Yusuf Mohammad Siad.

In an on-the-scene account, Jeremy Scahill of The Nation observes that Siad has “pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda” and “openly admits to having sheltered some of the most notorious Al Qaeda figures—including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 1998 bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania….”

Stipulating that the term “al-Qaeda” is, in effect, shorthand for “any group of Muslims Washington has not succeeded in bribing yet,” the critical point here is that Siad openly admits doing the kinds of things Awlaki was accused of doing. Hayden and Clark, on the other hand, have committed crimes well beyond Awlaki’s capacity: As heads of military and intelligence bureaucracies, they offered material aid and support to terrorists. In fact, they – and a number of other veterans of the military-intelligence establishment – continue to do so in retirement.

Retired Generals Clark and Hayden are among the War Partyluminaries who are on the payroll of the Iranian Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), orthe so-called “People’s Mujahadeen,” which is listed as a terrorist group bythe State Department. Clark and Hayden, along with former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton and Peter Pace, former NATO commander James L. Jones, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former 9-11 Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton, Rudolph Giuliani, Michele Bachmann, andseveral other luminaries have been hired by the MEK to lobby the StateDepartment to remove the group from its list of Foreign TerroristOrganizations. 

MEK Flag.

The MEK was created in 1965 as part of a Soviet-sponsored international terrorist network that waged wars of "national liberation" throughout the developing world. Human Rights Watch, which describes the MEK as an "urban guerrilla group," points out that the group's ideology is a Muslim variation on "liberation theology." 

In his July 7 testimony before the House Committee on ForeignAffairs, Ray Takeyh, who is (of all things) a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out that the MEK “sought to … amalgamate Islam and Marxism. Islam was supposed to provide the values while Marxism offered a pathway for organizing the society and defeating the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and feudalism…. [F]rom Lenin they embraced the importance of a vanguard party committed to mass mobilization, and from Third World revolutionaries they took the primacy of guerilla warfare as indispensable agents of political change.” 

In 1970, 13 members of the MEK received training (most likely under Soviet supervision) at PLO camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Upon their return, the PLO-trained MEK cadres shared their newly acquired skills with their comrades, and the group embarked on a wave of attacks and bombings intended to bring down the Shah. During one rampage, MEK terrorists killed several U.S. military personnel – including Colonel Lewis Hawkins, the Deputy Chief of Military Mission in Tehran. 

Although the group suffered some attrition in its conflict with the SAVAK, the Shah’s hideous secret police, it survived long enough to participate in Khomeini revolution. MEK cadres were involved in the seizure of American hostages in October 1979. But the MEK’s ambitions and ideology made it a poor fit for Khomeini regime, so the group was purged from the ruling coalition in 1981 and much of its leadership was driven into exile in Iraq. There it was, in Takeyh’s words, used “as Saddam’s Praetorian Guard.”

Following Saddam’s U.S. supported invasion of Iran, the MEK began a hit-and-run guerrilla war against the Iranian regime in the hope of triggering a popular uprising. When that proved unsuccessful, the group set up a political front group called the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) in Paris. In 1985, notes Human Rights Watch, the MEK's "leadership was transformed when Masoud Rajavi announced his marriage to Maryam Uzdanlu.... The husband and wife team became co-leaders" of the MEK and announced an "ideological revolution." 

Everyday life in Camp Ashraf.

All of the group's members were required to undertake an individual "ideological revolution" by engaging in Maoist-style "self-criticism" sessions. Adherents were expected to listen raptly "to radio messages and explanations provided by [their] commanders" in order to "gain a deep insight into the greatness of our new leadership, meaning the leadership of Masoud and Maryam.... To believe in them as well as to show ideological and revolutionary obedience to them." 

By 1987, the MEK had acquired "all the main attributes of a cult," writes Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian, with Masoud Rajavi claiming the titles Rahbar (leader) and Imam-i hal (the Present Imam), and the forerunner to the impending second advent of the Mahdi. In 1994, the House Foreign Relations Committee described the group as a violent, Marxist-influenced cult. The Committee Chairman at the time was Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-Indiana), who is now on the group’s payroll.

“Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden” to those recruited into the MEK, writes Elizabeth Rubin of the New York Times magazine, who has spent time at the group’s headquarters at Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad. “From the time they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and thoughts.” Maoist “struggle sessions” and severe punishment for “deviationism” are commonplace. 

Expelled from France in 1986, Masoud Rajavi was welcomed in Baghdad, where he and his followers built a "National Liberation Army" that joined the Iran-Iraq war on Saddam's side. The MEK's plan was to recruit a huge army of suicide commandos whose sacrifice would inspire the “liberation” of Iran.

“We will not be fighting alone; we will have the people on our side,” proclaimed Rajavi. “They are tired of this regime, and ... they have every incentive to get rid of it forever. We will only have to act as their shields, protecting them from being easy targets for the [revolutionary] guards. Wherever we go there will be masses of citizens joining us, and the prisoners we liberate from jails will help us lead them towards victory. It will be like an avalanche, growing as it progresses.”

When the war ended in 1988 without victory for Iraq or the "National Liberation Army," the MEK leadership imposed yet another "ideological revolution" on its followers, this one including compelled mass divorces and widespread torture of those suspected of espionage or ideological deviation. Following the first Gulf War, the MEK collaborated in Saddam's crackdown on Shi'ites and Kurds.

In its campaign to build support for the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration mentioned MEK camps in Iraq as evidence of Saddam’s support for international terrorism. Following the invasion, U.S. forces disarmed MEK fighters who operated several camps within 60 miles of the Iranian border. Rather than treating them as terrorists, the Bush administration designated the MEK fighters as "protected" persons under the Geneva Convention. 

In fact, the Bush administration was so intent on sheltering the MEK – which, recall had killed Americans and taken part in the seizure of American hostages – that it rebuffed an offer from Iran to exchange MEK leaders for al-Qaeda suspects being held in Tehran. In exchange for protection, the MEK began to produce a series of lurid – and entirely fabricated – “intelligence” reports regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

The MEK has no support among reform-minded Iranians; in fact, the group is immensely useful to the incumbent regime as a way of discrediting its opposition, which in official propaganda is depicted as allies of the bizarre Islamo-Leninist cult. The current Iranian government is awful; if it were to seize power, the MEK -- which is the Persian equivalent of the Khmer Rouge -- would be dramatically worse. 

As the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald has observed, the retired U.S. officials who have become paid propagandists for the MEK are providing material support for an international terrorist organization. Staten Island resident Javed Iqbal, who operated a cable TV company, was recently convicted of that charge and sentenced to 69 months in federal prison for the supposed offense of carrying programs produced by a television network owned by Hezbollah. And of course, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were summarily executed without trial for allegedly rendering the same service to al-Qaeda. 

Clark, Hayden, and the MEK's other American courtesans are members of the American nomenklatura, which means that they are on the "who" side of Lenin's "who does what to whom" formula. The murder of Anwar al-Awlaki was intended as an object lesson to those of us on the other side of that dichotomy, demonstrating what can and will be done to anyone who is identified by the Regime as what the Soviets used to call a "socially dangerous person." 

An Update, and an Urgent Appeal 

"For the second time this year, Americans can celebrate the elimination of another enemy of the state," proclaims columnist Mark Paredes in Utah's Deseret News. No, seriously -- he really wrote those words. See the blog at LewRockwell.com for my reaction to that Stalinoid screed.

During the past couple of months, I've been doing some editorial work and writing for Republic magazine (and some related properties); this explains why my output here at Pro Libertate has declined during that period. This is very much a full-time job -- but, in all candor, it pays next to nothing, which is pretty typical of activist-oriented publications. It is the first regular paying work I've had since getting thrown under the bus by TNA five years ago today, and I'm certainly grateful for it -- but it's not enough to support a family of eight. 

I recognize that there is nothing unique about our predicament, and that many of you are in similar straits. I would be deeply and abidingly grateful for any help you can provide. 

Thanks so much for your help in keeping Pro Libertate on-line! God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!