The War Party's Jihad in Oklahoma

A small but passionate segment of the population is sick with worry over the incalculably small possibility that Muslims may someday force their daughters to wear burqas, yet indifferent to the fact that those same daughters can't board a commercial flight without being virtually strip-searched or physically molested by a TSA functionary. Former Oklahoma state legislator Rex Duncan, recently elected District Attorney for Osage County, is the dutiful tribune of that myopic and misguided constituency.

Duncan is a polyester Pharisee, an embodiment of punitive populism. Like many contemporary "law and order" conservatives, Duncan holds forth at considerable length and with great passion about the evils of government power, except when it is exercised in its purest and most malignant form by way of the State's apparatus of regimentation and destruction. 

Duncan has consistently pressed to expand the reach and power of the domestic police state. His enthusiasm for the Warfare State was displayed a few years ago when he sponsored a measure creating a specialty state license plate memorializing the "Global War on Terrorism."



 Oklahoma ranks fourth among the states in the percentage of its male population behind bars, and leads the nation in imprisoning women. Each inmate costs Oklahoma taxpayers $22,000 a year. Reducing that population would do much to reduce the size, power, and expense of government. Yet as a state legislator, Duncan -- perhaps in anticipation of his new career as a prosecutor -- worked to expand the state's prison-industrial complex.

Hi -- I'm the Church Lady, and it's time for Church Chat!

In 2008, Duncan (who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee) and like-minded colleagues submitted 73 bills either creating new felony offenses, or enhancing existing criminal offenses and their corresponding penalties. One amplification suggested by Duncan would have imposed the death penalty for repeat sex offenders.

Cheerfully anticipating a windfall for the "corrections industry," Duncan suggested that the state government throw some money at the good people who build and operate "private" prisons. He also sought to exploit the supposed immigration "crisis" to expand the odious practice of property forfeiture.


During Oklahoma's 2010 legislative session, Democratic Representative Mike Shelton proposed a measure to "crack down" on the sale of drug paraphernalia. To provide a tactile illustration of the supposed threat his legislation would address, Shelton bought a bagful of glass crack pipes at a local convenience store and attempted to hand them out to his colleagues. When approached by Shelton, Rep. Duncan refused even to touch such an accursed object.

"It's drug paraphernalia," Duncan sniffed, according to an eyewitness to the incident. "It's a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in county jail just to have one in your possession." 

Duncan appears to believe that possession of a Koran should likewise be seen as a criminal offense, or at least evidence of criminal intent. There is an element of irony here, given that Duncan's hyper-punitive and highly sectarian view of government authority isn't all that different from what one would expect from a medieval Mullah.


Three years ago, the Oklahoma Governor's Ethnic American Advisory Council attempted to give Duncan -- and every other state legislator -- a copy of the Koran embossed with the state seal as a gift commemorating the state's centennial. Duncan could have politely accepted the gift (publication of which was paid for by private funds), perhaps burying it wherever he keeps his unopened wedding presents. But this would have meant foregoing an opportunity for a public display of self-enraptured sanctimony.


"I object to the use of the state Centennial Seal and the state Seal all in an effort to further their religion," Duncan complained. He pointed out that he had gladly received a Centennial edition of the Bible presented to him by the Baptist General Convention in Oklahoma. "Mine is proudly on my desk on the Capitol and I don't think I ever read a part of it that condones the killing of women and children in furtherance of God's word," Duncan commented, apparently ignorant of the moral implications of that observation regarding the murderous foreign policy he and like-minded Religious Rightists endorse without qualification. 


Marjaneh Seirafi-Pour, chairwoman of the Advisory Council and a practicing Muslim, explained that handing out the Centennial-themed copies of the Koran was "a peaceful, thoughtful project [intended]to introduce ourselves to leaders." It's difficult to escape the impression that Duncan is offended not by anything Seirafi-Pour and her fellow Muslims have done, but rather by their simple existence -- or, at very least, their perverse insistence on being treated as law-abiding individual citizens of Oklahoma, rather than part of an undifferentiated mass of menace. 


Duncan's most notable accomplishment as state legislator was his central role in composing Ballot Question 755, which would amend the state constitution to forbid courts from considering or using international law" or "considering or using Sharia Law." Duncan and his colleagues grandly entitled the measure the "Save our State" amendment. 

According to Duncan, Question 755 was a "preemptive strike" against an effort to impose Sharia Law. Professor Joseph Thai of the University of Oklahoma's College of Law described it as "an answer in search of a problem." However one characterizes the measure, it was approved by 70% of those who cast a ballot in Oklahoma's mid-term election.

Two days later, the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint on behalf of Oklahoma resident Muneer Awad, seeking a restraining order against implementation of the amendment. Federal District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange granted a temporary restraining order, opining that the amendment amounts to a constitutionally impermissible burden on those who adhere to one particular religious tradition. 


Awad, who directs CAIR's Oklahoma branch, insists that the purpose of his lawsuit is to
"show our fellow Oklahomans that Muslims are their neighbors and that we are committed to upholding the U.S. Constitution and promoting the benefits of a pluralistic society." Duncan maintains that such conciliatory talk is mere persiflage intended to give cover to the ongoing "hideous invasion" of the Sooner State by the Mohammedan Horde.

As is the case with several other states, Oklahoma has seen an increase in Muslim immigration in recent years, much of it composed of refugees from countries that have been on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence. If he were sincerely concerned about stopping that "invasion" of Oklahoma Duncan would be agitating for an end to the military meddling that helps generate it.

Like many others who share his worldview, Rex Duncan eagerly supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, in which U.S. military personnel -- most of whom were Christian, many of whom were Jews -- were used to install Sharia Law at gunpoint. This is leading to the religious cleansing of Iraq's Christian population, many of whom are part of congregations with roots going back to the apostolic era. 


As Syrian Catholic Archbishop Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka of Baghdad pointed out in an October 15 address, Iraq is the land where Abraham was born, where many of the events chronicled in the Old Testament took place. Christians in that land have endured persecution and great periods of suffering -- the "last being the American occupation." Since the "liberation" of Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been killed, terrorized, or driven from their homes.


"The invasion of Iraq by America and its allies brought to Iraq in general, and especially to its Christians, destruction and ruin on all levels," lamented the Archbishop. "Churches were blown up, bishops and priests and lay persons were massacred, many were the victims of aggression. Doctors and businessmen were kidnapped, others were threatened, storage places and homes were pillaged."

"Seven years have passed and Christianity is still bleeding," he continued. "Where is the world conscience? All the world remains a spectator before what is happening in Iraq, especially with regards to Christians.... We ask the question of the great powers: is it true what is said that there is a plan to empty the Middle East of Christians and that Iraq is one of the victims?"

This is authentic persecution -- not the cartoonish fantasies that clutter the adolescent minds of comfortable, self-satisfied Babbitts like Rex Duncan. Oh, how such people are titillated by the fantasy of standing in the gap like Horatius at the bridge, gallantly defending hearth, home, and feminine virtue from savagely bearded heathens! 

Luxuriating in their suburban mega-church madrassas, invincibly certain of their collective righteousness, they can often be heard chanting praises to the Regime's military arm as it visits death and misery on innocent people on the other side of the globe -- including people whose faith they supposedly share.

Duncan's "Save our State" amendment wasn't written to address a legitimate threat; it is a form of political pornography that will almost certainly find an audience elsewhere, where we can find people peddling even grimier versions of the same product. Among the purveyors of such prurient fare can be found the Rev. Elijah Abraham. 

A native of Iraq who converted from Islam to Christianity and now runs an organization called Veterans Against Jihadism, Abraham supports aggressive war against Muslims abroad and suppression of the individual rights of Muslims domestically.

In a recent interview with The New American magazine, Rev. Abraham was asked: “How should Americans view the mosques that are springing up all over our country?”

“When you look at a mosque … please don’t look at it as you would look at a church or a synagogue or Buddhist temple," he replied, since a mosque can also serve as "a base of political operations" and also "a storage place for weapons.”

“Would you contend that most mosques in the United States are also serving as weapons repositories?” the interviewer asked Abraham, to which the Reverend offered an eager and emphatic affirmative reply:

“Sure! Now, are there any weapons right now if I go to the mosque down the street? Do they have them? Maybe, maybe not. But that does not mean they would not have them.”

Apparently, American Muslims have the burden of proving that they are not secretly stockpiling weapons in anticipation of waging a war of extermination against the infidels. Just to be safe, preemptive action of some kind might be necessary. On that subject, Rev. Abraham endorses a course of action much more assertive than Rex Duncan's legislative "preemptive strike":

“The best example I could give you is from the battle for Fallujah in April 2004 when the Marines went into a mosque and killed everyone in the mosque. The liberal media and the Muslim community in the West cried out…. If those are honest worshipers, what are they doing with bazookas and other weapons?”

The answer to that question, which should be obvious to any honest observer, is this: Those people were exercising their God-given right to defend their homes, families, and places of worship against criminal aggression by a foreign army that occupied their country without legal or moral authority of any kind. 

That right inheres in every human being. If we assume that individual Muslims are people, we have to recognize that each of them has the right to armed self-defense.  It would be interesting to learn if Duncan recognizes the right of a Muslim to self-defense. His actions are highly suggestive of his likely answer.


Three years ago, when he rejected the gift of a Koran from fellow Oklahoma residents, Duncan unctuously proclaimed that "most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology." The planted axiom in the ideology to which he and those of his ilk subscribe is that no Muslim -- of any age or station in life -- can truly be considered "innocent." You do the math.

 If you can, please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Slaughter as "Stimulus"

Their Fascists, and Ours: Fuhrer, Il Duce, and FDR.

Militarism is the one great glamor public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement. -- 

John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (1944)




The Keynesian welfare state is best described as the mild-mannered alter ego of the totalitarian welfare state. The official alchemists responsible for transmuting debt into political power eventually find it impossible to siphon wealth out of the productive class in amounts sufficient to meet the needs of the political class. When this happens, the ruling elite will inevitably turn to bloodshed as a source of economic "stimulus."

David Broder of the Washington Post  scandalized the punditocracy by openly reciting this formula in a recent column as a prescription for both the ailing economy and Barack Obama's increasingly enfeebled presidency.

The Panel wonders: "Who is this elderly dimwit, and why should we listen to him?"

"Look back at FDR and the Great Depression," advised Meet The Press's resident droning dullard. "What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.... With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, [Obama] can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve."

"I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected," lied Broder immediately after doing exactly that. "But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history"

How Iran, or any other country on earth, could threaten the world more than a regime capable of concocting a conflict as an economic stimulus program, Broder didn't explain. His suggestion shocked Washington's jaw-waggers and chin-pullers -- not so much because of its content, but rather because of its candor. It may be obvious to perceptive adults that wars are manufactured in such cynical ways, but it's bad form to offer unvarnished admissions of that kind in public.

Broder has never been unduly burdened by intellect, and he is miraculously untainted by originality. It's possible that Broder, like William Shatner's character in the Twitter feed-turned-sitcom $#*! My Dad Says, has seen his inhibitions abraded away by time's relentless march and no longer has the discipline to keep socially unsuitable opinions to himself. In any case, Broder's view of using bloodshed to prime the economic pump, while repulsive, is quite commonplace within the ruling elite. 

Like Broder, John T. Flynn understood the way that Washington made use of "militarism as an economic weapon." Unlike Broder, Flynn used his influence as a writer to combat the Warfare/Welfare State, and his heroic stand for principle cost him a great deal. 

Flynn's astringent criticism of the New Deal's authoritarian corporatism so infuriated FDR that America's first fascist president-for-life arranged to have Flynn fired from his position at The New Republic. Broder, by way of contrast, is hardly the stuff from which martyrs of that kind are made.

As a freelance writer and organizer of the America First Committee, Flynn continued his effort to combat FDR's regimentation of the economy and his ill-disguised campaign to entangle the country in a foreign war as a final installment of his "stimulus" program. 

In his indispensable book As We Go Marching, Flynn examined the undeniable but little-appreciated kinship between the Italian and German corporate states and the one that had been inflicted on the U.S.A. The real test of one's commitment to defeat fascism, he emphasized, was not the intensity of his loathing for the Axis powers, but rather his eagerness to oppose and reverse America's descent into militarism and corporate socialism. 

"Among all the means for producing government-created income none is so successful as militarism," observed Flynn, tracing the progression of that disease in Italy and Germany and demonstrating its ominous parallels in this country. Echoing James Madison's warning that the Warfare State is the greatest enemy of "public liberty," Flynn observed that the key symptom of militarism is the maintenance of "large national armies and navies in time of peace," a condition that rarely persists as long as governments have perverse incentives to entangle their subjects in wars.

"Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic doctrine, we will do what other countries have done," Flynn predicted in 1944. "We will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon imperialistic enterprises of our own."

That observation reminds me irresistibly of Broder's dutiful invocation of the supposed global menace posed by Iran, which -- he insists -- threatens the entire world, despite the fact that it occupies not a single acre of territory outside its borders. Meanwhile, the all-devouring monstrosity in Washington presumes to organize the entire globe into regional "commands" over which the Pentagon implicitly claims hegemony.

As has been noted elsewhere, the Pentagon itself institutionalizes the dual nature of the Welfare/Warfare State: Maintaining a globe-straddling military means operating one of the world's largest welfare distribution bureaucracies. Harry Hopkins, a key architect of the New Deal and intimate adviser to FDR (and likely Soviet agent) managed to embody that same duality all by himself.

Hopkins and Stalin.

To adherents of the New Deal cult, Hopkins was Aaron to FDR's Moses: When Hopkins spoke, his voice was giving form to the will of the Dear Leader himself. Following a career as a social worker, Hopkins was appointed as FDR's vicar in charge of warfare. In January 1941 he was dispatched to assure Churchill that FDR would contrive to get the United States involved in the European war.

After FDR successfully opened the back door to war by manipulating Japan into firing the first shot (as Henry Stimson so memorably put it), Hopkins was placed in charge of the Lend-Lease abomination. In that capacity he did more than his share to see that many of the urban poor whose plight had moved him to such distress would be relieved of their burdens by dying in distant battlefields on behalf of London's declining empire and to the greater glory of Stalin's expanding one.

Like the unspeakably evil Bernard Baruch, who presided over Woodrow Wilson's version of war socialism, Hopkins was enchanted by the prospect of collectivizing the entire economy in the name of war planning. Hopkins memorably gave voice to his ambitions in "You Will Be Mobilized," an essay published in the December 1942 edition of American Magazine (and excerpted a few months later in Reader's Digest).

American students muster in the service of the state...

Historian Thomas Fleming, in his important book The New Dealers' War, describes Hopkins' essay as "a draconian sermon" on the supposed virtues of a totalitarian planned economy, in which the author eagerly anticipated "an American Sparta laboring under the grim-visaged bureaucrats of the OPA and other war agencies."

"No one knows how the mobilization of workers will actually operate," admitted the commissar, "but probably at first able-bodied persons in non-essential work will be given a wide range of choice as to what they will do and where they will work." Of course, the only real option would be for workers to "choose" to do as instructed by their superiors: "If they don't move voluntarily, their manpower organization will direct them to specific jobs."

Hopkins cheerfully predicted that earnings and expenditures -- in fact, every facet of life -- would likewise be regimented by the war planning elite:

...while their German counterparts do likewise.

"Through forced savings and taxes, our spending will be limited and priorities far more widespread than at present will determine the kinds of food, clothing, housing and businesses which we will have and will affect every detail of our daily lives. We should not be permitted to ride on a train, make a long distance telephone call, or send a telegram without evidence that these are necessary."

Sacrifices such as these were intended only for the hoi polloi, of course; they were not to be shared by the Warfare State's nomenklatura. Just a few days after Hopkins' totalitarian homily saw print, Cissy Peterson of the Washington Times-Herald published a detailed account of a multi-million-dollar dinner dance arranged by Baruch at Washington's Carlton Hotel to celebrate Hopkins' marriage to fashion writer Louise Macy.

At a time when productive Americans were being subjected to rationing, ordered to eschew rudimentary creature comforts, and piss away their earnings on government war bonds, Hopkins and other New Deal commissars feasted from a menu offering dozens of expensive, exotic delicacies, most of them garnished with French names that wouldn't fall gracefully from the lips of working people who were enduring food rationing and being constantly hectored about the necessity of saving scraps as part of the war effort.

"At every place was an expensive gift from the host," observes Fleming. "Vintage champagne flowed without stint, along with a plethora of other French wines." Those assembled for the event represented "a who's who of the top echelon of wartime Washington," who gathered to enjoy a brief respite from the rigorous work of plundering other people's wealth and sending their children off to die.

Most of the American public either ignored such official hypocrisy or accepted it with sullen resignation. However, there were a hardy few who joined John T. Flynn in decrying America's descent into militarist totalitarianism, despite the social inconvenience -- and the very real personal danger -- they confronted.

"We used to get all worked up over the bombing of civilians but that was before the United Nations took the initiative in bombing cities," protested Syracuse resident Benjamin Le Roy Candee, Jr. in a letter published in a Quaker anti-war newsletter. "We used to condemn the practice of shutting up innocent people in camps surrounded by barbed wire, but that was before the term `relocation center' became part of the American vocabulary."

"Recently there has been much breast beating about the evil of the Nazi model of training youth for war -- `education for death,'" continued Mr. Candee. "How awful, we said, to get hold of children before they know better and mold them into believing in the supremacy of the state and into believing that the greatest aim in life is dying for the state. Well, we won't have to condemn it much longer because the Victory Corps is coming to American high schools."

The Victory Corps, organized under the aegis of the U.S. Office of Education's Wartime Commission, was a public-private initiative intended to mobilize "the high-school youth sector in the all-out effort of our total war," explained an official publication.

 Military conscription of "every able-bodied male, 18 to 45 years of age," would be necessary in order to build a 10,000,000-man army; this would be supported by "a force of 20,000,000 persons in direct war production and transportation," and an agricultural army (of the sort described in the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto, perhaps) of 12,000,000 more.

 

Public high schools would thus be converted into recruitment and indoctrination centers, and students would be required to make the war the central defining reality of their existence.
"The most important test of every day's decisions must be this: What can we do to hit the enemy harder; to contribute to his destruction?" insisted the Victory Corps organizing manual. "If what we are doing is not clearly an immediate or remote contribution to winning this war, then we should not be doing it." Of course, the "contributions" made by champagne-swilling commissars like Hopkins were less painful than those demanded of conscripts send to bleed on the battlefield, but them's the breaks, I suppose.

Only by accepting the yoke of the Warfare State could Americans avoid the horrors of life under Fascist rule, which -- as described in the Victory Corps manual -- honestly doesn't sound dramatically different:

"Let us not forget what happens to youth when the Nazi slave drivers are in position to crack the whip. Consider that more than 3,000,000 youngsters from the Balkan States have been rounded up for compulsory labor service (slavery) in Germany; that Gestapo agents in Belgium have been kidnapping mere boys for military service. That's why we mean to win this war for survival" -- that is, for the survival of an American-grown variant of the same ruling ideology.
  
With the current depression growing deeper and nastier, the Obama administration and the banking cartel controlling it have run just about every option in the Keynesian playbook, save one: The "Hail, Ares!" play Broder suggests. All that's necessary to make this happen is the arrival of a Congress under the influence of the most militaristic element of the GOP. It's quite likely that those nostalgic for the reign of FDR's nation-breaking war commissars will soon have reason to break out in a chorus of "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Your donations help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!