May 13, 2026

Essays

The Spirit of Pedophilia: Part One – From the Time of Moses to Rousseau

The Spirit of Pedophilia: Part One – From the Time of Moses to Rousseau

Paul Collier September 7, 2023 4

By Paul Collier, Editor

“The gods did not enrich man with a knowledge of all things from the beginning of life. Yet man seeks, and in time invents what might be better.” – Anakreon, Greek poet, 5th Century B.C.

Read part two here

INTRODUCTION

Throughout documented history, mankind has long sought to make the world in his image. It is as natural an impulse to humanity as breathing. One of these natural impulses, breathing, is required for life, but the other impulse, making the world in man’s image, inevitably leads to death. The adult seeking to make himself or his collective a god here on earth requires the assurance that his ideational or ideological DNA be transferred from one generation to the next, lest he be a mere mortal.

The child is a threat to the man-god so long as that child can become a steward of its own preferences and beliefs. Man must make the child in his corrupt image in order to assure the transference of his DNA to the next generation.

What follows is a brief outline of the development of methodologies to control the emergence of adulthood in children in an effort to serve the self-centered desires of the man-god-wannabes throughout human history.

This writer calls this the spirit of pedophilia, fully crystalized in Michael Foucault, the post-structuralist philosopher most influential on the current ideology now laying siege to America, thanks to the Democratic Party and its market vassals.

Foucault serves as the face of the attempt by the Left to undo the progress made thanks to Christianity to protect children from the ravages of the pedophilic spirit, the man-god impulse within fallen man that caused him to attempt to build a Tower of Babel to reach the throne room of God so he could overthrow God and replace Him with man’s own image.

Part One of the report lays the groundwork for what fueled the father of the modern pedophilic spirit. Part Two of the report documents Marxism’s assault on children leading up to Foucault and the unholy children that came after him.

The purpose of this report (both parts one and two) is to convince you, the reader, that the current prevailing political ideology in America is formed by a spirit of pedophilia that continues to be an existential threat to the health and well-being of the most innocent of Americans, our children, starting from the unborn and continuing through to adulthood (if the children are allowed to be born).

If you are already convinced of this fact, then this report seeks to give you the resources to make an informed case against the rise of the pedophilic spirit in America by the party of pedophilia, the Democratic Party, or the DNC, and its market vassals, Foucault’s children.

This part of the report gives you the ancient and historical development of the pedophilic spirit. The second part gives you the spirit made flesh (Marxism) and America’s current-year assault by this same pedophilic spirit on the American Republic and, more significantly, on the innocent children now being brutalized by this unholy attempt to make man a god, collectively, beholden to the experts given authority by the elites of the Democratic Party, the party of pedophilia.

ED.NOTE: You can read part two of this report here.

THE SPIRIT OF PEDOPHILIA

“They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the whore in their deeds.” – Psalm 106:36-39

1. THE SPIRIT OF UNEARNED SALVATION – In the orthodox interpretation of scripture, man is born fallen as the seed of Adam, in need of a redeemer. He is destined to sin and thus is in need of salvation, deliverance from sin, though nothing he can do can earn such salvation. He is given unearned grace if he would but bend his knee in fear of the Lord and walk in the love of God, as demonstrated and witnessed by the son of God, the Christ, who is God over all.

That same Christ descended from heaven, taking the form of man, the Word made flesh, the first fruit of the dead, the second Adam who, by his nature, could pay for the sins of man, being a man himself. Because of His perfection, being God as well, his blood alone could atone for our sins. He became the final sacrifice of the Old Covenant that ripped the veil in the temple, ushering in the New Covenant where God’s law is written on our hearts.

Christ shed His blood on the cross so that fallen man’s sins will be forgiven if he worshipped the Christ, taking up His cross and following Him and forgiving one another as Christ forgave them. He conquered death and Satan, the father of lies and pedophilia, ushering in the spiritual Kingdom of God.

This worldview was, and is, unlike any other worldview in human history. It is a worldview that binds the human’s ambitions to become a god himself, compelling him to forgive as he has been forgiven and to leave vengeance for the Lord. It is a worldview that compels us to recognize that by the grace of God alone we are saved, not through works, lest we should boast, and thus, even as we are being perfected, we are yet compelled not to view ourselves as better than anyone else, even the wicked, who can be forgiven even as we have been forgiven.

If lived out, the spirit of unearned salvation conquers tribalism, racism, bigotry, and hate, in humility, not pride.

The innocent Christ sacrificed Himself, becoming like sin, our sins, with full volition and consensuality. He did so to free us from the wages of sin, which is death, leading us through sanctification to reject sin and live righteously according to God’s laws, through the Holy Spirit within us.

This spirit, the spirit of unearned salvation, is imperfectly reflected in the founding of the American nation, whose constitution created a state that was not given the power to make man in its image, but rather to allow man, and thus children, to steward their preferences, to steward their beliefs, to define their own happiness and be free to seek it.

The spirit of unearned salvation is born from an innocent sacrificing himself of His own free will to redeem the fallen so they can escape the slavery of sin.

2. THE ANTITHESIS OF THE SPIRIT OF UNEARNED SALVATION – There is an anti-Christ spirit, the spirit of pedophilia, which takes on many forms throughout human history. It is a spirit that demands the innocent among us, the child, sacrifice himself (or be sacrificed) to empower man to continue to live in sin. It is not only antithetical to the Christian spirit, but also to the American spirit. It requires the violation of individual liberty, both of children and their parents, and the re-creation of a priest-king class of elites who dictate to the masses the terms of their conditions, conditions designed to empower the elites and preserve their god-like advantages over the many.

At the heart of the spirit of pedophilia is the notion that children are not created by God to be stewarded by adults but are impersonal objects, disposable if they fail to meet the needs of the collective god, the social man (as defined by the appointed priest-kings of the god-state). It is reflected not only by sexualizing children but by murdering them in the womb should their lives be inconvenient for adults.

THE CARROT AND THE STICK

Adults throughout the ages have used two methods to prevent the deviation from social man’s imposed image on individuals by the generation of humans emerging, the children. One method is the carrot, to offer the child indulgence in sin that leads to bondage to a system that sacrifices the child in the end for the good of the whole, whether literally through murder or spiritually by crushing the child’s sense of self-stewardship, a spiritual murder. The other method is the stick, to control through force the potential for stewarded action, not just of the child but of the parent.

In America, both the carrot and the stick are being deployed by the party of pedophilia. Nothing new is under the sun, and the current iteration of the spirit of pedophilia is no exception. Its examples go back generations and can be reflected both in history and in the arts.

1. PLEASURE ISLAND – “And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. And the people will oppress one another, every one of his fellow and every one of his neighbor: the youth be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable.” – Isaiah 3:4-5

In the story of Pinocchio, the wooden boy seeking to become a real boy is led astray by the Coachman, who promises him a life of indulgence and ease on the island that, in the novel, is called the Land of Toys. In the 1940 Disney classic, the island is called Pleasure Island.

On this island, children can indulge in adult vices like gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars. Pinocchio enters the Land of Toys with his friend Lucignolo. Behind him, the Coachman’s henchmen, in looming silhouettes, lock the doors behind them. As Pinocchio and Lucignolo indulge their fantasies, acting like adults in all the vice-like ways, they are slowly being turned into donkeys, which was a symbol of ignorance in 19th-century Italian culture, where the book that became the movie was originally created (1883).

The Coachman and his henchmen can later be seen capturing the now-converted donkeys of other children and sending them off to a life of slavery. Pinocchio would ultimately escape and face more challenges in learning how to be human by becoming a stewarded self, an individual aware of the consequences of his actions and the need for some form of salvation outside the self. However, most of the children in this story did not escape, as most, this writer fears, of the children in this land and this time will not escape the Land of the Toys trap being set for them.

In the current year, the Democratic Party and its market vassals are offering children a Pleasure Island that gives them the “freedom” to be sexual, the “freedom” to define their genders as they please, and an escape from accountability based on the lie that their parents invented evil or were helpless to stop them, and so now they are the heads and their parents are the tail.

2. THE SPARTAN WAY – The Spartans may have been the first people to aggressively adopt some form of the spirit of pedophilia in a systematic way rivaled only by the Democratic Party of today. The goal of the engineered work was to glorify the collective god of the state, which for the Democrats is the party itself.

It started at birth, when the child was scrutinized to determine if he was a useable form. Any deformities in the child would lead to that child being dashed on the rocks or exposed to the elements, a practice that was widespread in the ancient world before the rise of Christianity but which was perhaps never more zealously executed by anyone else other than the Spartans until current year with the legalization of abortion, thanks primarily to efforts by the Democratic Party.

After that, the Spartan child would be given to the family to be raised by a nurse until he was 7 years old. Then he was shipped off to state school where he would live and study, being groomed to be an instrument of the state, which would be to become a warrior for boys and a matron for girls. Any deviation from the social orthodoxy imposed on the child by the few elites would be met with physical punishment, ostracism, or death. The Spartans were the masters of the stick method of the pedophilic spirit.

In Sparta we see the seeds of fascism and socialism that have reared their violent ugly heads again and again throughout human history, causing death and trauma wherever they go. It appears the Democratic Party would like America to follow a similar path. They use the stick as well as the carrot, with the stick being social ostracism and removal from paths that lead to good standing in the “social man,” which is being imposed on them by the few elites dictating to the many through violence.

LEFTISM RESTORES THE SPIRIT OF PEDOPHILIA

Politics as a justification of authority alone is relatively new to most of human history. Previously, the primary foundation of authority was divine authority, claiming in some form to have divine authority, be it Christ in the West or the Mandate of Heaven of the Chinese.  This was often coupled with genetic legitimization in the form of royalty, a family deemed to be the heirs of divine authority exclusively.

2. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION – The birth of the modern nation-state is often cited to have begun with the French Revolution and the subsequent reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. What distinguishes the nation-state from past states is the emergence of a bureaucracy whose authority is derived from some form of contract, such as a Constitution, which was legitimized by claims of moral and/or philosophical correctness that could be reliably used as tools of accountability which restrained the power of the state over the citizens. It is the structure of rational language alone that the political uses to justify its claims.

It is as the French were doing away with their divinely appointed King and seeking to justify authority based on “ideals” that the terminology of the primary divide in the political arena took place. That terminology classified those who favored a preservation of tradition in the form of Kingship as being “the right” while those who favored the creation of a republic based on the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality came to be called “the left.”

The terminology emerged from the Tennis Court Oath on June 20th, 1789 in Paris, France during a meeting of the Estates General when members of the Third Estate, comprised of non-royals and non-elites, held a meeting at a nearby tennis court in defiance of the first two estates they feared would block their efforts to reform the French government.

They took an oath not to disband until the French government was bound by a constitution. The members who sat on the right happened to support a constitutional monarchy while the ones who sat on the left happened to support a republic.

Thus we inherit this terminology to describe the fundamental divide in the game of politics, between those who seek to use government to make man anew and those who seek to use government to mitigate conflict. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but this writer asserts that this is the essential divide in the justification of authority using ideas, or ideology, alone.

With this, the birth of the modern political state began, and thus leftism began, and thus the systemic spirit of pedophilia began to spread across the earth, leaving millions dead and wounded behind it.

But even before the Tennis Court oaths, the ideas that formulated these divides were emerging in the immediate centuries leading up to this moment. One such precursor was Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas would codify the notion that humans are born innocent and become evil through oppression, a core assumption for those who seek to use the state to make man in their image rather than allow for the stewardship of the self discovering the true sovereign, God alone.

3. THE BORN-FREE CHILD OF ROUSSEAU – “And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me’.” – Matthew 18:2-6

Jean Jacque Rousseau is considered by many to be the father of the French Revolution and the creator of childhood, with the former claim having far more credibility than the latter. The fact that he himself forced the mother of his five children to give them away to a Paris hospital is an irony not lost on the claim that Rousseau invented childhood. Rather, he “invented” (really, gave sophistic justification of ideas as old as civilization itself, that children are instruments of the state) the justification for using the state to mold the child in a new image that must, by necessity, break with the traditions from which evil was invented, mainly, the creation of the notion of private property.

From Hub Pages:

“Rousseau is the first one to write about childhood as a distinct period in the life of a person, as opposed to what was the norm in time that regarded children as miniature adults which were expected to act and think like adults. It is said that he created the childhood theory.”

4. THE BIBLICAL REBUTTAL – Scripture makes a distinction between adults and children, creating different standards in how God judges one versus the other. After the Israelites gave a bad scouting report on the promised land God told them He would conquer for them, God punished the Israelites by consigning them to forty years in the wilderness to assure that those then alive would never enter the promised land.

“Your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and all of your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me.” – Numbers 14:29

Those under the age of twenty were spared this fate, for reasons that are explained in Deuteronomy 1:39 when God tells Moses, “And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there. And to them I will give it and they shall possess it.”

The Christian notion of childhood existed long before Rousseau, though not in the same “ward of the state” way that would emerge from Rousseau. We see it in the verse from Matthew 18, where Christ describes very different attributes to children than He does for adults, though, unlike Rousseau, the assumption is not that children are born innocent. We are all born under the sin of Adam, as Paul spells out in Romans 5, where he says, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned – for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.”

5. ROUSSEAU’S JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PEDOPHILIC SPIRIT – For Rousseau, then, the human is inherently good, able to engineer the good through the state. The only savior needed is the state, who will know more about how to raise the child in the good than his own parents would.

The author of the pedophilic spirit in the political game, Rousseau, demonstrates the true nature of such a spirit in how he treated his own children, who were all rejected due to their potential inconvenience to his libertine lifestyle. That tendency in those who follow such spirits has not disappeared. If anything, in America, it has only increased.

Rousseau gives sophistic justification for unbinding the state to not be constrained by self-stewardship and seek to use its monopoly on violence to force people to be free. He is famous for writing “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” as a condemnation of individual property standards that recognize the stewardship rights of self.

The notion that the self is “born free” gives sophistic justification for the state to claim it can know the true social self and can thus use tyranny and oppression to FORCE people to be “free” as defined by the same oppressing state.

Rousseau might blush at just how far his pedophilic spirit might go if he were to witness the policies of the Democratic Party today. Nonetheless, he is the left-identified father of the political pedophilic spirit who will lead to the father of current year’s version of this pedophilic spirit, Michel Foucault.

SUMMARY

Leftism takes on many forms in the centuries that followed Rousseau, but they all have a few things in common, such as the assumption that the individual is born free, that experts can define what the ideal self should be, that the self is only fulfilled when it conforms to the centrally planned and designed social man, and that children must be conditioned by the state, not the parents.

In part two of this report you will see the depraved outcomes of the potential patterns of governance in this political game that Rousseau gave voice to, Marx gave structure to, and Foucault gave spirit to, the spirit of pedophilia that emerges from the political left over and over and over again whenever they put their thoughts to innocent flesh, the children of whatever land these wannabe man-gods happen to hold.

America’s Show Trials: Donald Trump Vs. The United States

America’s Show Trials: Donald Trump Vs. The United States

Freedomist Editor September 5, 2023 1

By Joshua Bontrager, Political & Cultural Correspondent

ED.NOTE: This article originally appeared in our monthly publication, Freedomist Intelligence Advisor (formerly McAlvany Intelligence Advisor). To subscribe and receive our monthly PDF to your email, go here).

“Law in the Soviet Union is not conceived as a check on power; it is openly and proudly an expression of that power.” – Richard M. Nixon, 1960

“Stalin, Hussein, Putin, Hitler, Mao, and Castro all got their guilty verdicts. This will be no different. This is a show trial that is completely fixed. There is no reason to give it the legitimacy of legal analysis. Call it what we all know it is. A show trial.” – Mollie Hemingway, responding to the Trump indictments

“If Putin did this to a political opponent that was polling higher than him in an election year –  Biden would call him a dictator.” – Jackson Hinckle

“To use the justice system against the political opponent, in Hungary, I think it’s impossible to imagine. That was done by the communists. It’s a very communist methodology to do that.” – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

INTRODUCTION

The left claims that the unprecedented act of jailing a former president and Biden’s chief political rival (Donald Trump) for over 700 years is necessary to save “our democracy” from “far-right fascists.” But American Jacobins are not the only ones conspiring to eliminate freedom and all opposition to the globalist “New World Order.”

Last year, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” “lost” a close election amid widespread reports of voter fraud and irregularities. The country’s leftist Superior Electoral Court not only refused to investigate reports of fraud, but has now banned Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030 for even daring to question the results.

The German government is considering banning the “far-right extremist” Alternative for Germany Party after it surged to 21 percent in the polls. This same German establishment has convicted author and playwright CJ Hopkins for comparing the Covid cult to the Nazi era. A German whistleblower warns that the German state is returning to “Stasi era” surveillance and snitching.

In Pakistan, former populist Prime Minister Imran Khan now sits in jail, after he was ousted by the Pakistani and U.S. Deep State (with the likely help of State Department regime-changer Victoria Nuland). Revolver News reports, “Khan now languishes in a small 6×9 cell, not allowed a phone, books, newspaper, or human contact, with only insects and flies to keep him company. If the Pakistani deep state can send Pakistan’s beloved populist leader Khan to prison, surely Biden is salivating at the prospect of a similar fate for Trump.”

Several weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin had his chief political rival, Alexei Navalny, sentenced to 19 years in prison. Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded: “The United States strongly condemns Russia’s conviction of opposition leader Alexei Navalny on politically motivated charges. The Kremlin cannot silence the truth. Navalny should be released.”

Yet Blinken’s response reeked of hypocrisy, deliberately ignoring three important facts: (1) The politically motivated indictment of Donald Trump was handed down on the same day as Blinken’s self-righteous tweet. (2) Blinken ran election interference by organizing the phony letter signed by 51 intelligence officials dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation” in October 2020. (3) If convicted on all counts and given the maximum sentence, Joe Biden’s chief political rival, Donald Trump, would serve over 700 years in prison.

Throughout history, corrupt, power-crazed, and genocidal tyrants – Caesar Augustus, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Adolf Hitler – have ruthlessly eliminated their opposition when able to do so. In the light of history, the indictments of Trump are a declaration of war against the American Republic, an indictment of an illegitimate regime, and a frightening portension of far worse to come if this lawfare is not stopped in its tracks.

This article will cover the latest two indictments against Trump, the 14th Amendment scheme to keep Trump off the ballot, and the greater crimes of the left. We will explore why these indictments are so dangerous, why most Republican politicians are still missing in action, and how this lawfare could end.

  1. THE JANUARY 6 INDICTMENT

“Always accuse your enemy of what you are doing yourself, as you are doing it to create confusion.” – Karl Marx

“These prosecutors are very left-wing, and they’re in left-wing jurisdictions, and they depend on left-wing grand juries and eventually a left-wing trial jury. They’re assuming that otherwise, they don’t have a good case.” –  Victor Davis Hanson

  1. THE THIRD INDICTMENT – On August 1, just one day after Hunter Biden’s close friend and former business associate Devon Archer testified before Congress regarding Biden family corruption, DNC lawfare activist Special Counsel Jack Smith announced the third indictment of Donald Trump, over alleged efforts to “subvert” the 2020 election. Ironically, Trump was charged for the very crimes committed in 2020 by the DNC and their RINO allies in key swing states. The indictment builds on the work of the sham partisan January 6 Committee and the previous trials of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other January 6 political prisoners. It carries four counts:
  2. Conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
  3. Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding
  4. Obstruction of justice and an official proceeding
  5. Conspiracy against voter rights

The case rests on the novel argument that (1) Trump knew his 2020 election claims were false, but (2) he spread them anyways. Former Trump Senior White House Advisor Stephen Miller says, “This indictment says…that if we, the Department of Justice and prosecutors at the Department of Justice, believe that you, as a citizen or as an elected official, are not telling the truth as we recognize it, that we can throw you in jail.” In other words, only Democrats can legally exercise their First Amendment right by questioning elections or speaking their mind; Republicans can now be jailed for speech not approved by the ruling regime.

  1. LEFT-WING PROSECUTOR, JUDGE, AND JURY – Special Counsel Jack Smith’s previous accomplishments include covering for Biden family corruption and securing a bribery conviction against Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, which was so weak that it was eventually overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court 8-0.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is a radical Marxist ideologue who has handed down some of the harshest sentences thus far to January 6 political prisoners. The New York Post reports that the Obama-appointed Chutkan “is the scion of a family of revolutionary Marxists in her native Jamaica” and “is the granddaughter of Frank Hill, a Jamaican communist revolutionary, who along with his brother Ken were briefly jailed by the island’s British governor during World War II over suspicions of ‘subversive activities.’” Chutkan is also a previous employee of Boies, Schiller, & Flexner LLP (BSF), the law firm that employed Hunter Biden and lobbied Burisma. To remove any lingering doubts, Chutkan has compared January 6, 2021, to September 11, 2001, and the Boston Marathon bombing.

The judge and prosecutor are not impartial arbiters of justice; they are Communist activists who specialize in using lawfare to destroy the American republic. The trial will take place in deep blue Washington, D.C., ensuring a leftist jury eager to mete out injustice.

  1. DNC ELECTION INTERFERENCE – Trump’s attorneys requested an April 2026 trial date, which they said would give them time to review the millions of documents involved in the case. Judge Chutkan had previously allowed January 6 political prisoners to languish for years in prison before even having a trial. But she set the Trump trial date for March 4, 2024, one day before Super Tuesday, when around one dozen states will vote in the Republican primary. Donald Trump, the current clear frontrunner for the GOP nomination, will not be allowed to campaign the day before the most important voting in the primary season! Yet Democrats fastidiously claim, “It’s not interference if we commit the same behavior for which we jail Republicans. Even if it is interference, you can’t (or won’t) do anything about it.”
  2. THE GEORGIA INDICTMENT

“The Georgia Indictment is the most insane yet, by the looniest prosecutor yet. It claims tweets are conspiracies, legal advice is a crime, Constitutional law is a criminal act, and demanding officials do their job is criminal solicitation. It is an embarrassment to the state of Georgia.” – Attorney Robert Barnes

  1. THE FOURTH INDICTMENT – On August 14, days after the Biden DOJ appointed a sham special counsel for the Hunter Biden case, election denier and Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis announced the fourth indictment of Donald Trump. Former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said a trusted source told him that Willis was told to proceed with the indictment to cover for the Biden special counsel “screw up.”
  2. THE REAL FRAUD – Attorney Robert Barnes, who helped prepare Trump’s 2020 legal contest in Georgia, says that “constitutionally unqualified ballots” exceeded Biden’s margin of victory by “more than 10 times. Unlawfully, Fulton County courts [the same courts that will try Willis’ case] blocked the case from ever being heard.” Willis is not indicting her fellow party members who perpetrated fraud; instead, she is indicting Trump and his allies for daring to question that same fraud.
  3. THE INFAMOUS PHONE CALL – The indictment stems largely from a January 2 phone call in which Trump allegedly asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes to “overturn” the 2020 election. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz observes, “Al Gore, his legal team, and I tried to find uncounted presidential votes, lobbied officials, and fought in the courts in 2000. The only difference now? The candidate’s name is Donald Trump… That’s why this prosecution is an outrage.”

The 41 sham charges were accidentally posted online one day before the grand jury voted. The charges leveled against Trump and his 18 co-defendants (mostly attorneys who provided legal counsel) included violation of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is seeking to move the case to federal court. If he is successful, other defendants (including Trump) might be able to do so as well, and the case could break down.

  1. 14TH AMENDMENT HAIL MARY

Democrats have concocted another “anti-democratic” scheme to “save democracy. Constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe and retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig have advocated keeping Trump off the 2024 ballot under the 14th Amendment’s “Insurrection” clause. In other words, “Trump is so dangerous to ‘our democracy’ that you cannot be allowed to exercise your free will in voting for him.” The scheme is nothing more than a fraudulent rebuke of the American voters and an illegal backup plan in case the indictments fail. Law Professor Michael McConnell warns, “We must not forget that we are talking about empowering partisan politicians such as state Secretaries of State to disqualify their political opponents from the ballot, depriving voters of the ability to elect candidates of their choice. If abused, this is profoundly anti-democratic.” Law professor Jonathan Turley, a former Bill Clinton voter, responded, “I think this is the single most dangerous constitutional theory I have seen pop up in decades.”

John Daniel Davidson explains how this could play out, “A summer 2024 conviction sets up the real play here, which is for blue states and counties to remove Trump from the ballot, citing a faulty and blatantly lawless reading of the 14th Amendment. Assuming Trump wins the GOP primary, this will leave Republicans with no candidate on the ballot across vast swaths of the country heading into the fall. Even if the Supreme Court steps in, if Democrats time it just right, it will be too late to send out corrected, lawful ballots in time for Election Day.”

  1. THE GREATER CRIMES OF THE LEFT

At the Georgia courthouse, Donald Trump said, “This is a sad day for America. I thought the election was a rigged election, a stolen election – and I should have every right to do that. As you know, you have many people that you’ve been watching over the years do the same thing…Whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams or many others.”

  1. DEMS STOLE THE 2020 ELECTION – The Covid-19 lockdowns (which Trump unwisely fell for) provided the perfect excuse to radically overhaul America’s election system and “win” via mass mail-in ballots and counting shenanigans in key swing states. Trump’s attorneys say that the indictments give them a platform to “fully re-litigate every single issue that occurred during the 2020 election.”
  2. 2. DEMS HAVE LONG QUESTIONED ELECTIONS – Democrats have questioned every Republican presidential victory since 2000. (See here for ten straight minutes of Democrats protesting election results.)

Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams repeatedly claimed that Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election was stolen for her, but she has yet to be prosecuted by Fani Willis. Hillary Clinton not only claimed the 2016 election was stolen, but put forth the false “Russian collusion” narrative and encouraged faithless electors to choose Hillary instead of Trump after the 2016 election. But Hillary was never indicted.

  1. BIDEN FAMILY CRIMES – Every Trump indictment thus far has been perfectly timed to coincide with and distract from damaging new information on the Biden family crimes. Journalist Glenn Greenwald summarizes, “At exactly the same time the Biden administration is prosecuting Donald Trump, they are also shielding Hunter Biden, who is guilty of far more blatant and obvious criminality, just blatant political corruption, tax evasion, and hiding assets in a way that most people go to jail for many years.”

But once again, the establishment is sending a clear message that all who advance their globalist agenda (Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden) will be protected; any who dissent (Donald Trump and his supporters) will be ruthlessly crushed.

  1. 4. ANARCHO-TYRANNY – The DNC is promoting what conservative columnist Sam Frances described as “anarcho-tyranny.” As in the Soviet Union, Biden’s regime is far more concerned with prosecuting alleged “treason” against the state than with punishing the lawlessness that is tearing apart America’s cities. Author Valery Chalidze observed of the Soviet Union, “[T]he new regime concentrated its oppressive efforts on political opponents and class aliens. Amid the crowd of real or supposed enemies of the regime, non-political criminals were still regarded as sociallyakin; they received shorter terms of imprisonment and served them in less severe conditions.”

Americans may now be terrorized by the IRS and FBI for praying outside an abortion clinic or failing to report a $700 transaction on Venmo. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, Antifa rioters, and San Francisco looters will walk free.

  1. E. IS THE GOP COMPLACENT OR COMPLICIT?

The verdict of history will harshly judge both Jacobin Democrats and the spineless or traitorous Republicans who enabled them.

Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao’s brutal cultural revolution, reacted to Trump’s Fulton County mugshot, “I have to say I think America is quickly becoming a communist country and our rule of law has been turned into what Marxists call proletarian dictatorship. The party in power is after its political opposition, and it is not just the president, but people like activists are now in jail, as political prisoners in the free country of the United States…Now it is Donald Trump and MAGA, but eventually, it is everybody because a communist regime does not tolerate any opposition, any dissenting voice. So they are coming after all of us, including those who are cheering now for Trump’s indictment and think they are on the winning team. They are not. We all will become victims if we let them succeed.”

Van Fleet concluded, “I really have a word for everybody, including the conservatives: learn a little bit about history and about the Cultural Revolution. What’s happening here is a repeat. Only when people understand the history and the nature of what’s going on, will they wake up. We are dealing with communism, we are dealing with Marxists, who want to transform our country into a dictatorship.”

If the script were flipped, and Republican prosecutors under a Republican President were handing down coordinated indictments to the leading Democratic opposition candidate, the media would be beside themselves with fury against the “right-wing fascist Republicans.”

Yet why are most Republican leaders strangely silent? Are they ignorant of history and reality? Or are they secretly bought off (or even in alliance with) the other side?

The disconnect between Republican leaders and their voters was clearly seen in the contrast between the Fox News-hosted GOP debate, which virtually ignored the weaponization of justice and gained a paltry 13 million views, and Tucker Carlson’s interview of Donald Trump, which aired at the same time and reached a staggering over 260 million views.

  1. EXHIBIT A: GEORGIA REPUBLICANS – Rather than defend Trump against the ridiculous indictment from Fani Willis, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who won with Trump’s help in 2018 and ignored thousands of sworn affidavits detailing election crimes in Georgia in 2020, doubled down on his claim that “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen.”

When Georgia State Senator Colton Moore called on Kemp to convene a special session to impeach Fani Willis, Kemp refused. Like Kemp, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has been silent and refused to use his power to stop the persecution.

  1. WEAK D.C. REPUBLICANS – Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) says the U.S. House (led by Trump-endorsed Kevin McCarthy) could use a special select committee to legally immunize Trump from false charges: “Unfortunately, none of those things are happening. Instead, Congress is not in Washington, not assembled. And I think the timing is on purpose. No timing in DC is ever just a mere coincidence. And so right as Congress is leaving town, right as we are walking away from our responsibility to be just and fair, we see this acceleration of activity against Trump.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has yet to commit to impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden.

  1. GOP PROSECUTORS – Charlie Kirk and Attorney Stephen Miller discussed how conservative prosecutors and attorney generals could level hundreds “of criminal cases” for the DNC’s real crimes against the Republic “in response to the unprecedented legal offensive from the left.”
  2. 2024 GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES – Most of Trump’s opponents know they stand little chance unless Trump drops out or is otherwise removed from contention. Vivek Ramaswamy (an untested Big Pharma billionaire with a record of contradictory statements and shifting positions) is seriously threatening to pass up Ron DeSantis – America’s most successful Governor, who defied Covid lockdowns, stood for families, defeated Disney, and turned the biggest swing state bright red.

Why? DeSantis has repeatedly talked about “moving on” from the rigged 2020 election and January 6, claimed that the 2020 election was not stolen, and given far weaker responses to the Trump indictments than has Vivek. By contrast, Vivek has consistently defended Trump against Marxist lawfare, and because of that, voters are seriously considering him for second place.

  1. HISTORICAL PARALLELS – By doing nothing to stop the DNC’s lawfare, Republican leaders are complicit in the criminal conspiracy against the American republic. These leaders are like Pilate, unwilling to use their power to stop the rage of the crazed mob (the DNC’s increasingly radical coalition) and its Pharisaical leaders (establishment elites who stir up the people to demand the guilty go free and the innocent be destroyed). These spineless Republicans want the benefits that come with position, but they disdain the sacrificial responsibility demanded of true public service.

Over 700 years ago, Scotland’s freedom fighter William Wallace resisted English tyranny with little help from the Scottish nobility. The nobles had the power to fight the English, but they valued comfort more than the liberty of their people and were content to receive favors from their English overlords in order to safeguard their lands and lives. At the critical battle of Falkirk, Wallace and the Scots lost in part because most of the Scottish cavalry in reserve, led by John Comyn, fled rather than fight the English. Britannica notes that their “allegiance to Wallace was questionable; many of them had English estates or relatives who were hostages in Edward’s hands.”

  1. THE UGLY PURPOSE BEHIND LAWFARE

The anti-Trump lawfare is far more dangerous than many American and most Republican leaders realize.

  1. LEGITIMIZE DESTRUCTION OF THE REPUBLIC – Donald Trump is the convenient boogeyman the left uses to channel their anti-American hate. The DNC cult tells its followers, “Trump is as bad as Hitler; therefore, we must take extreme measures to ensure Orange Man never gets close to the White House again. To save ‘our democracy’ from the menace of Trump and his fascist ‘domestic terrorist” followers, we must criminalize all opposition, destroy free speech, and give the regime total authority to protect us from lies. The regime and its goons at the FBI, IRS, and DOJ must have expanded budgets and unlimited power to censor, audit, imprison, or intimidate anyone who threatens our safety.”

Unfortunately, most DNC voters appear to agree. They want their enemies punished, and they do not understand that if the law can be weaponized against their opponents, it will eventually be weaponized against them. Former Democratic strategist Dr. Naomi Wolf relates her August 3 experience from the liberal West Coast:

“Happy Indictment Day!” shouted the neighbor of my host, as my host and I sat out on a balcony. The neighbor was emerging from a car, three stories below us. The building must have contained thirty apartments. The man was certain that everyone who was in earshot of his joyous shout agreed with his sentiments.

He witnessed my silence. “Don’t you agree?” he goaded me, a near-stranger, still shouting. “Don’t you?”

Finally, I responded, “I am not sure that this sets a great precedent. Every sitting President in the future will try to indict his or her political opponent.” He cut off the discussion – a reaction from the Left, to which I am getting accustomed – and headed inside.

  1. 2. NEUTRALIZE AND DESTROY THE OPPOSITION – The Georgia case especially, with its 18 co-defendants and 31 unindicted “co-conspirators,” is designed to financially bankrupt Trump-friendly attorneys and to frighten away attorneys from giving legal counsel to conservative campaigns in the future. With the indictments, the regime wants to terrify everyday American patriots into doing nothing for fear that they will be imprisoned just like Trump or the J6-ers.

Professor James Lindsay believes those waging lawfare want to deliberately provoke conservatives into overreacting, thereby creating another January 6 event and justifying a massive crackdown on liberty. Lindsay explains the Marxist strategy, “You don’t hit them too hard, you don’t hit them too soft, so you’re clearly not the aggressor…and then you make use of their reaction.”

Austen Ruse writes, “It’s not just about getting rid of Trump. It’s really about getting us, smelly conservatives and Christians, patriots who love this country. By taking out Trump, they are taking out everybody associated with him, including those who voted for him and put him into office.” The message is clear: “If we can destroy Donald Trump, the former President, just imagine what we can do to you.”

PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS: 2024 AND HOW THIS ENDS

President Donald Trump will face multiple trials in 2024, designed to drain his campaign financially and destroy it politically. Each trial will be scheduled to overlap perfectly, not just with the Republican primary but with the general election.

Trump could very well end up in a jail cell in 2024, although he could still legally run for office from jail. However, leftists are hoping Trump’s campaign will be restricted (by the jail or courtroom), and he will have become so bloodied and unsavory that a majority of Americans reject him. Simultaneously, Democratic and DNC-controlled states will seek to deny their voters, who they fear will make “the wrong choice,” by keeping Trump off the ballot in the name of “saving democracy.” If all of that doesn’t work, Dems will try to rig the election once again, maybe with the help of a war or another pandemic.

There is a high probability that the Trump lawfare will end up at the Supreme Court, with the court having to uphold or strike down the sham indictments and the 14th Amendment scheme. Attorney Alan Dershowitz predicts that a Trump conviction in the January 6 case would be overturned by the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court fails to uphold Donald Trump’s innocence and repudiate the DNC’s lawfare, it will reveal its complicity in the death of America. On the other hand, if it rebukes the left, Justices will face death threats, mass Antifa-style protests, and cries of “illegitimacy!”

Like the Scottish nobles in the days of William Wallace, most Republican leaders will cower in silence, but some, like Robert the Bruce, will find the courage to stand. The Republican Party will only continue to exist as a viable opposition party if it denounces and acts against the regime’s lawfare against Donald Trump. If the GOP responds to the DNC lawfare by dumping Trump from the nomination by foul means, they will certainly lose in 2024.

The biggest question is this: “How will the American people respond, specifically those in the middle who could be swayed either way?” In 1960, corrupt Fulton County prosecutors took the mugshot of a man who was deeply unpopular nationwide, much more than Donald Trump is today. However, Martin Luther King Jr.’s popularity soared after he was jailed and his supporters were attacked by a corrupt system. If the more than seven in 10 Americans who think Trump can’t get an impartial jury see Trump’s indictments as a mortal threat to their own liberties, the DNC’s lawfare will backfire massively.

History’s two alternative visions lie before us: “the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order” or “the ant heap of totalitarianism,” as described by Ronald Reagan. DNC totalitarianism means a“New World Order” in which America is a pawn of global elites in Davos, Beijing, and Silicon Valley; snitching, show trials, and gulags are the norm; and those who love the republic are sub-humanized and even genocided (just as unborn babies have been). If the left wins in 2024, the Marxist takeover of the legal system will accelerate. Show trials will come for the rest of us.

The other path is that trod by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce against the English, William of Orange against the Spaniards, English citizens against the tyrannical Stuart kings, and American Patriots against the British. Rebirths of freedom have occurred throughout history, but almost always against overwhelming odds.

Our enemies are powerful, ruthless, and coordinated. But they are not Sovereign, they can be defeated, and their very existence clarifies those precious things that are worth fighting for. Regardless of setbacks, we never lose hope, and our fight never ceases.

Attorney Jeffrey Clark, one of the victims of Fani Willis’ rogue “justice,” put it this way: “They indicted Trump. So America, you have two options. Which do you choose? (1) Curl up in your basement. (2) Oppose the insane lawfare.” May most Americans oppose the truly “insane” lawfare.

Founding Father Samuel Adams said, “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

FURTHER RESEARCH:

They Don’t Just Hate Trump. They Hate You! – John Zmirak

The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties – Robert Conquest

Purges, Purges, and More Purges – Diana West

Trump Indictments Meant to Demoralize and Provoke Americans – James Lindsay

An Inconvenient Trump: Republicans Are Living an Enormous Lie – Melissa MacKenzie

Republican Party Sets Up Trump for Democrats – Paul Craig Roberts

Save the Rule of Law By Destroying It? – Victor Davis Hanson

The Trump Indictment and 2024 – Steve McCann

What Does Trump’s Mugshot Represent? – Trevor Loudon

Trump’s Mugshot Is A Symbol Of The Right’s Struggle Against Tyranny – Evita Duffy-Alfonso

You Never Go Full ‘Don Quixote’ – Or, When ‘Crazy Eddie’ Throws Pasta

You Never Go Full ‘Don Quixote’ – Or, When ‘Crazy Eddie’ Throws Pasta

Michael Cessna September 1, 2023 1

 

 

 

In 1974, authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, writing in their seminal science fiction novel “The Mote In God’s Eye”, coined a character concept called “Crazy Eddie”, a concept-figure who would appear in a society’s mindset at time of extreme social stress, and take the most insane and contradictory actions possible, which usually resulted in accelerating the collapse of a society or civilization.

The world is in a remarkable state of tumult as of September 1 of 2023. The war in Ukraine is well into its second year. In Africa, a wave of military coups is obliterating France’s sixty-plus year old “totally-not-an-empire”, sending the region and the wider world into a frenzy of impotent rage, as no one wants to wade into a quagmire against black nations standing up to imperialist and corporate interests. Russia and China, aside from rattling military sabers to whet the appetite of the ravenous bloodlust of the Western media and entertainment spheres, are quietly marching towards an economic checkmate against the West, in a move that will not simply destroy the Western business models, but will smash Western economies flat, potentially reducing many Western European economies to a state no scene since the post-World War 2 recovery, and the Marshall Plan…only there won’t be a Marshall Plan this time. Maybe a Putin-Xi Plan, but not a Marshall Plan.

Pretty heavy for an opening bit, eh?

Amid all of the current tumult in the United States – the possible return of Covid lockdown restrictions not least among those – there is a quietly increasing crescendo calling for actual military intervention – meaning, “invasion” – of Mexico, in order to “deal” with the flow of illegal drugs.

I wish I were joking.

The current power bloc in Washington, DC – supported by their cohorts in The City of London, Paris, and Brussels – had goaded Russia into what they thought would be a “warm-n-fuzzy” kind of “Cold War, 2.0”; what they got was a full-on invasion. Although there initial, hysterical screams to “go to war” with Russia, both from within the power blocs and from those in the general public who should probably be on emotional-management medications, it soon dawned on most people that “going to war” with Russia would almost certainly mean a “nuclear” war, that no one would “win”.

Then came Africa: Beginning in 2017 (YouTube link), people seemed to suddenly remember that there were still islamist jihadi’s out in the world, burning, looting, raping and killing people in order to serve the warped vision of religion espoused by a tortured political prisoner. However, murderous religious maniacs were “so three years ago”, and virtually no one on the “Western Street” considered barely-literate bandits hiding under the cloak of religious fervor to be an existential threat to Western civilization. Likewise, the recent wave of coups – not coming at the behest of Western governments and corporations – aren’t exactly revving the martial engines of Western populations being crushed under rancid economies and continual political scandals.

Something else was needed…And in the United States that answer is, increasingly, the illicit drug problem.

And it is a problem: tens of thousands of Americans die every year from drug overdoses, a large percentage involving the drug fentanyl. Unlike the normal cries for “Bayonets UP!”, however, this group of calls comes from the opposite side of the aisle: instead of Democrats leading the charge for military intervention, this time, the main thrust is coming from the Republican side of the fence.

This should not be a surprise, given the GOP’s continuous cries against illicit drugs. After all, it was no less a figure than Richard Nixon, who authorized the placing of cannabis (aka, “marijuana”) on the list of drugs as a Schedule 1 compound, right next to heroin – a position it retains to this writing – in 1970. And, like the vigorously enforced alcohol raids of the Prohibition Era – also enforced by successive Republican administrations – the GOP’s “war on drugs” has directly sparked the explosive growth of massive, high-revenue and well-armed and frighteningly well-equipped drug cartels, who have an international reach, and who have now diversified into human trafficking.

Given the abject inability of the US military to deal with the opium trade in Afghanistan during its twenty-year long occupation of the country – which saw opium poppy fields expand five-fold – the idea that a smaller military, struggling with recruiting efforts, and quietly speaking the dreaded “D-Word” out loud, can deal with the various drug cartels is not a matter for political or military debate, but a matter to be dealt with by mental health counselors.

The US military is having trouble recruiting people with bonuses exceeding $50,000 to sign up. As Mexico itself has discovered, military recruiters have a hard time competing with their counterparts in the Cartels, especially if the Cartel recruiters can use Mafia-like threats against potential recruits’ families. Likewise, the Cartels not only pay what regular forces term “combat pay”, but offer bounties against specific targets.

As well, with revenues between US$20 billion and US$60 billion per year (minimum), and far less overhead than conventional corporations and nation states, the Cartels have plenty of cash left over for high-intensity R&D: the wave of combat footage coming out of Ukraine, showing drones – from both sides – dropping small bomblets into trenches and bunkers are merely the current state of a technology pioneered by the Cartels, and refined in Syria in the aftermath of the rise of ISIL.

Much worse, from both a tactical and an operational standpoint, is the ability of Cartel members to blend into the general population. While islamist jihadis are comparatively easy to target, as they belong to a very narrow slice of the US population, Cartel members are a subset of the largest minority group in the United States. Where – to get rather “ugly” about it – potential jihadists tend to limit themselves to Muslim mosques, Cartel soldiers are largely Catholic, and are thus able to circulate freely among the Catholic population, the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the world.

The Cartel’s leadership echelons are not idiots. In fact, a distressing number began as military professionals, as is clear from their ability to organize a military-style logistics system. They are watching the rhetoric coming from within Washington, DC and various other organs, both from within the government, and from government-adjacent groups – nothing presented here is new to the Cartels.

Decades of neglect of border security, up to and including the recent encouragement of millions of desperate economic refugees to cross the southern border of the United States illegally – an action which helps to fuel the cartels’ diversified revenue structure, to say nothing of the very real physical dangers of the northern Mexican deserts and the human trafficking predations of the “coyotes” – has fueled an massive surge in drug-related deaths across the United States. Communist China is certainly complicit in this, as they are the Cartels’ prime suppliers of fentanyl precursor drugs…something they have no issue supplying, as Beijing sees this as “payback” for the Opium Wars…but that is a whole other story.

With the hyperventilating actions of people who should know better, calling for a Presidential authorization to use military force against the Cartels, alongside equally breathless and stentorian calls to designate the Cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (FTO’s), and coupled to a military establishment that has seemingly lost its way, to the point where it is quietly considering a return to a military Draft, the notion of an all-out “hot” war on the southern border of the United States is the height of lunacy, a lunacy driven by both sides of increasingly incompetent power blocs.

“We, the People” have allowed our “elected” leaders to paint us into a corner, a corner from which there is no real way out, except through the use of extreme levels of violence.

Kind of like Africa in the last few months.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
When ‘Forever Wars’ Fail – Delusions vs Realities

When ‘Forever Wars’ Fail – Delusions vs Realities

Michael Cessna August 26, 2023 0

 

 

 

 

 

On July 26 of 2023, a military coup unseated the president of the West African nation of Niger; details of this situation and its wider implications are the subject of a Freedomist monthly, subscription-only article, set to go to press as this article is being written. While coups d’état are not unusual in post-1960 Africa, what made this one unusual was that it was the sixth since 2020, and was only the latest in a string of some twelve coups in the region, beginning in 2008. Another unique feature in Niger is the open public praise of Russia, complete with homemade Russian flags.

And this is aside from the absolutely remarkable statements from both the US State Department and the Pentagon’s AFRICOM command that they have no idea and no way to track what happens to the Third World military officers (some of whom earn Master’s degrees in US and British military universities) that they train.

These coups are not complex events to understand – not that the various “think tanks” advising policy makers around the world seem to understand them. At all. In fact, the tone-deaf mewlings of people overly impressed by the letters after their own names begs inquiry as to whether or not they are using word-salad AI Chatbots to write their papers.

Additionally, the non-military sphere is heating up as well, as the BRICS Group has just extended invitations for membership to six states: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. This is no small thing…again, however, not that the US, British of Western European foreign policy, military and financial power structures seem to care.

And this is also separate from the catastrophically embarrassing failures of the same nation’s attempts at training Second- and Third World military forces to something approaching a Western military standard. From the nation of Georgia in 2008, to the collapse of the Iraqi Army in 2014, that of the Afghan National Army in 2021 and the abysmal performance of the “retrained” Ukrainian Army in 2022-23, Western – meaning, United States and NATO countries – military training programs have consistently failed (and failed miserably) to train up effective forces. Given that the current US Secretary of Defense, retired General Lloyd Austin, testified before Congress (YouTube link) on the spectacular $500 million failure to train more than a handful of “friendly” anti-regime forces in Syria, it would seem obvious that rather penetrating questions should have been asked, on numerous occasions.

But, I digress…Back to the original question: Why is it so hard to understand what is happening in world affairs?

There are only three realistic possibilities: incompetence, delusion and/or corruption.

Incompetence at this level, while alarming to the uninitiated, is depressingly common in areas of higher education. Classroom theories about lofty and obtuse notions of “democracy”, finance, resource management and social equity fail instantly and completely when confronted with the stark realities of the real world – as education widens in the population base, the “common folk” begin to learn just how badly they are being screwed…and eventually, they will stop taking it, rise up, and either stand on their own, or at least look for a new partner that isn’t insultingly paternalistic and slimy.

That, in a nutshell, is what just happened in Niger, as the population is fed up with France acting as the glowering, judgmental schoolmaster, desperately trying to hold on to a zombified economic dominion over its former “colonies.” Russia – while certainly no saint – has no real colonial history in Africa, and is remembered by many as a reasonably friendly power from the Cold War era.

Turning to the possibility of delusion, that is also an easy, if depressing, possibility to grasp. The sad fact is that Western institutions of education have spent at least forty-odd years hammering at the nail of “democracy”, as if it were a panacea to all of the world’s ills. This is done despite the bald facts that “democracy” is extremely fickle, and fails abjectly when forcibly introduced into a populace who has little, if any, history or inclination to properly use what is a notoriously clunky system, a system that encourages discrimination at virtually every level if not carefully carried out. Countries and peoples that have political systems imposed on them with little education or even training quickly spiral into internal unrest, if not civil war. This is the historical record, from Sri Lanka to Iraq, to Niger; where exceptions appear, those simply ‘prove the rule.’

Corruption, too, is a distinct possibility. The Western “establishment” deeply fears an Africa whose national peoples – even though their “nations” are, for the most part, wholly artificial constructs with boarders drawn by distant colonial powers with delusions of adequacy – might someday agree to set aside their differences, overthrow their corrupt “leaders”, and tell the West that their free lunch is over…and lest you, the Reader, dismiss this as an empty threat, you would be wise to remember that cheap African minerals are why you were able to afford the computer, tablet and/or smartphone you are reading this article on.

In contrast to the incoherent bleatings of people with more letters after their names than actual experience, critical thinking and/or “plain common sense,” the issue at hand is not that the United States, France and other Western powers are somehow deliberately scheming to topple governments with whom they are already friendly (because they stage-managed the elections that put those governments in power), using officers trained in their own advanced schools of military education, in order to install governments antithetical to those Western states’ views and desires while aligning themselves with said Western states’ semi- (if not full-on) hostile opponents (read that again, if you need to; I did)…it is far more a matter of “keeping the pot simmering,” to keep the local “partner nations” off-balanced, and in dire need of “friendly support”…the notion that local military officers, professionally trained by Western militaries, might go home, look at the rank corruption and incompetence of their “democratically elected” governments, and decide that “drastic measures” are required to save the country, is apparently unfathomable inside the air conditioned think tanks of Washington, DC, London, Paris and Brussels.

No word on how the Western troops at the sharp end feel about this. (YouTube link)

There is, however, another dimension to this situation: Grand Strategy.

 

African countries that have had coups between 2020 and 2023 (July 2023). Credit: Discombobulates. CCA/4.0

 

The BRICS Group, led by Communist China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has used the wave of coups across the African Sahel region – the so-called “Coup Belt” – to their distinct advantage. When zooming out to a wider Africa map, it is clear that the pattern of coups in the African Sahel region stretch in a near-unbroken line from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean…and every coup in those states in the last fifteen odd years has been done with at least tacit Russian or Chinese support. With the BRICS Group inviting in new members, this opens the possibility of a revival of a British idea from their imperial days in Africa: instead of a “Cairo to Cape Town Railway”, the wave of Russia-friendly governments produced by the wave of recent coups opens the possibility of a “Port Sudan to Dakar Railway”, cutting across the breadth of the continent, causing a vast and violent shift in global commerce, as it would allow a transshipment route for cargoes that would bypass the Suez Canal…All that is needed for such a project is money (see: Saudi Arabia joining BRICS, above), and a much-improved security situation, neutralizing both “islamist insurgents” and general banditry. This would also open the possibility of reviving the “Cairo to Cape Town” route, as well as additional north-south spur lines. Russia is well-versed in the impacts of a continent-spanning rail line, as their more-than-a-century-old Trans-Siberian Railway remains a vital economic artery for the Russian state.

Another dimension, is the neutralizing of ECOWAS, the “Economic Community of West African States”, an economic cooperation sphere which has been increasingly flexing its military muscles, intervening in several member states over the years, for a variety of reasons. In Niger, however ECOWAS’s immediate order to the coup’s ruling junta to immediately return the deposed Nigerien president to power, was met with a blunt refusal – a refusal that has now been formally backed up by the nations of Burkina Faso and Mali, both of whom are currently led by military junta’s who also succeeded in their own recent coups. And in the broader ECOWAS nations, there is very little support for the idea of a military intervention, especially in light of increasing attacks by AQIM and Boko Haram in recent months.

On top of this, the Organization of African Unity (the “OAU”) has also taken action that is not being well received on the “African Street”. These unpopular actions in recent weeks hold the possibility of seriously fragmenting both organizations.

Which, to return to the corruption angle, also brings up an ugly possibility, one verging into full-on “Conspiracy-Theory Land” (a place that is increasingly “Conspiracy-Fact Land”): that Western militaries are being deliberately hamstrung in fighting islamist insurgencies – not simply in Africa, but around the world.

This is in no way the fault of the Western troops at the “pointy end of the spear” – major policy theories and decisions are presented to troops detailed to execute them far less often than they are presented to the general public, regardless of country. But there is a clear pattern in the preceding thirty or so years: Western forces are sent into a state which – although theoretically rich in natural resources – is almost hopelessly backward, and kept that way by Western interests who want both cheap resources, no matter the cost, and “strategic positioning,” also no matter the cost.

Military force has its limits. The problem with Georges Clemenceau’s tired saw, that “war is too important to be left to the generals”, is that politicians – and the “political” generals advising them – are almost always in a far worse position to be making military decisions than their generals.

This is as true in Africa as it is in Ukraine. In the latter case, the hysterical incompetence and base greed of “corporate donation”-driven politicians has brought the world closer to open nuclear conflict than at any time since at least 1983. (YouTube link)

But in Africa, this hysterical incompetence actually presents a far greater danger to the West: African states with enough military competence to make it difficult to invade them all, who can form a solid negotiating bloc – especially one with support from Russia and Communist China – can up-end Western technology and transport infrastructures to the point of collapse, without firing a shot. Those directing affairs in Washington, London, Paris and Brussels believe that they can “manage” these coming “adjustments”; they cannot, but that is not stopping them from proceeding with their plans, plans driven by arrogance, hubris, and not a little racism.

The people running things in the West are playing a game by rules that they think that wrote, and which they assume cannot be changed unless they want to.

The Universe will only tolerate a certain amount of stupidity. When that limit is passed, the Universe has a habit of collapsing things, in any of a number of way – none of them good.

To quote the Athenian scholar and general, Thucydides, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”

Prepare accordingly.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
“The Other Guys” – The Unsung Heroes of Military Vehicles

“The Other Guys” – The Unsung Heroes of Military Vehicles

Michael Cessna August 18, 2023 0

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s face it – tanks are sexy. So are “combat vehicles.” We’ve all seen them on television for years: big, brutalist vehicles, racing around a course, firing monstrous cannons, or grinding their way across the desert. Massive engines of war, practically defining the idea of the “warrior ethos.”

 

A Brigade of the U.S. 3rd Armored Division masses for the invasion of Iraq during the Gulf War, February 1991. US Army photo. Public Domain.

 

Or, perhaps, they are carrying infantry, dramatically exiting their vehicle, perhaps under fire. These kinds of vehicles fulfill another part of the “warrior ethos” equation, with warriors heading into violent, close-range, face-to-face battle with a dogged opponent. Very Audie Murphy.

 

US Army soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, dismount from a Stryker APC, Mosul, Iraq, 2005. US Army Photo. Credit: SPC Jory C. Randall, US Army.

 

The idea of “sex” selling military equipment is alive and well, as can be seen by the marketing at any international arms show.

But this, of course, begs the question: Is this all there is? Of course, there are other aspects of “militarydom” that news media outlets and “infotainment” channels talk about relentlessly, as long as the public expresses interest in “things war-like.” These include paratroops, Rangers, or commandos, or special forces either stealthily creeping through enemy territory, or storming a “bad guy” hideout to neutralize said bad guys, or to rescue the hostages in dramatic fashion, especially if news cameras are present. Again – we’ve all seen these images and videos repeatedly, either on the news or in popular entertainment…and, for the most part, these all definitely deliver and validate that sort of drama, courage and honor.

 

The SAS storm the Iranian embassy’s burning windows, 5 May 1980. ©Crown Copywrite. Combined Military Services Museum, Maldon, Essex, 1980.

 

This, of course, brings us once again to the question: it that it? In a word – no. Not by a long shot.

Combat troops require support. While combat troops are certainly capable of improvising, they are far better at executing their combat missions when the “non-combat” troops are relentlessly driving food, fuel, ammunition and spare parts forward, and doing the jobs that the combat units do not need to expend time and energy to learn: maintenance, medicine above the 1st Aid level, building (or destroying) structures – occasionally under fire – all of which are things that the combat forces need, but are too busy to spend time doing.

In “the biz,” this is expressed as the “tooth-to-tail ratio”, or, the proportion of combat to support troops. This is a very dense subject to get into, and there are a wide array of opinions on the subject, most of which disagree at one level or another with all of the other opinions. The point, however, is that any group with pretensions to military force is going to have more support troops who are unlikely to see actual fighting, than combat forces intended for straight up combat.

And those support forces need equipment – a LOT of equipment – and the unique supplies and spare parts to keep those running. And a main component of that equipment is armored support vehicles.

Lurking in the background, seldom photographed, and even less talked about or reported on, are the “combat support vehicles.”

These vehicles are not cargo trucks, but the sort of vehicles you can see on your daily commute when passing a construction site – everything from road graders to backhoes, bulldozers. These vehicles frequently have a coat of “military green” paint slapped onto them; hopefully, they have slats of armor plate welded onto them to protect the operator. They are then sent out to build anything from roads, to towns and camps for refugees, to large airfields.

 

A United States Navy Seabee uses a grader to construct a parking lot during the combined US/Honduran training operation “AHUAS TAR” (BIG PINE), 1983. Photo Credit: TSGT Ken Hammond. US National Archives. Public Domain.

 

But these vehicles also include highly specialized vehicles, such as minefield breachers and high-speed trenching machines, like the Soviet BTM-3. The BTM, in particular, has made a resurgence in the Ukraine war (YouTube link), as both Russia and Ukraine quickly turned to trench warfare, as the war bogged down into a bloody stalemate. With trench systems resembling those of World War 1, the BTM and its later derivatives and cousins have worked frantically to construct vast trench systems far faster and more efficiently than individual soldiers can. After a trencher slices through the area, troops need to do no more than to expand the position, “filling in” the parts that the trencher vehicle cannot easily do.

This is what “force multiplication” is all about.

 

Bosnian BTM-3 trenching vehicle. Bosnia, c.1999. Author Unknown.

 

Unfortunately, since these vehicles, as highly effective and vital as they are, are rarely given any kind of real consideration…because they are not “sexy.” And, disappointingly, the leaders of most countries have little interest in these vehicles (because they are not “sexy”), so the vehicles sit, rarely used or considered when discussions of “militarydom” occurs…until, of course, tensions suddenly escalate into actual war, and those vehicles – many times, barely running – become a decisive combat multiplier, usually outweighing actual “combat vehicles” in value.

And that’s before we talk about trucks.

If you’ve read this far, I will offer you the following advice: The next time your elected officials start talking about the “defense budget,” spend some time, and look into what they actually want to spend your money on. It’s your tax money, after all, that is spent to “defend” you.

You might want to look into how it is being spent.

 

 

Improvised Sharks – A New Face of Shoestring Warfare

Improvised Sharks – A New Face of Shoestring Warfare

Michael Cessna August 12, 2023 0

 

 

 

 

 

 

The genesis of this article came from a completely different angle, namely, the deployment of laser weapons to the battlefield. However, as things frequently go, that initial idea led to something of much more immediate interest.

Previously, the Freedomist has covered some aspects of “improvised warfare” that some seem to take as James Bond-like fantasy. Yet, as we progress through the third decade of the 21st Century, remotely controlled drones – available in most countries through their local Amazon store – capable of both conducting tactical combat surveillance, as well as tactical air support by dropping small fragmentation grenades, are serious and maturing battlefield threats, threats that military and security forces are struggling to counter.

“Improvised warfare” has been around since the first caveman grabbed the jawbone of his last dinner to bash in the noggin of another caveman trying to muscle in on the first one’s turf. Throughout military history, outside of the heroically vast and sweeping battles of storied yore, there has always lurked the “PBI” – the “Poor, Bloody Infantry” – struggling to make do with usually-substandard weapons and equipment, improvising on the fly, on the idea that “if it looks stupid, but works – it isn’t stupid.”

This is also true in naval warfare. “Suicide boats,” in the form of “fire ships”, go back to at least the 3rd Century AD in China, and the 5th Century AD in the Mediterranean, and those dates are only the earliest we have on record. The use of fire ships in combat has always been problematic, as controlling the vessels after the skeleton crews abandoned them was impossible, and the abandoned vessels could easily come back on the attackers.

 

Chinese fire ships used by the navy as floating incendiaries, from the Wujing Zongyao military manuscript written in the year 1044 during the Song Dynasty. Public Domain.

 

As naval technology advanced however, fire ships, as such, disappeared, replaced by explosive-laden boats propelled by early steam engines. These boats had some advantages, not being as subject to winds as the old ships, and their explosive warheads were much more capable of inflicting serious, if not fatal, damage to large warships. Still, the inability to steer the boats remotely left their utility still strictly limited.

As with so many things in the military sphere, during World War 2, everything changed. The intersection of technologies with mass production and sincere desperation, allowed the first tactically useful guided weapons, not simply on land and in the air, but at sea, human control was still the primary aiming method until the last moment.

Post-WW2, the use of explosive motorboats continued, eventually evolving into actual “suicide boats”, where the crews rode the craft directly into their targets. While this was always a danger for the operators of these boats, very few navies outside of WW2 Japan set out with this as their operating profile. Beginning in the 1980’s, this began to change, first with the LTTE in Sri Lanka and with Iran in its “WW1, 2.0” war with Iraq. This is, in fact, what happened to the USS Cole (DDG 67) when it was attacked at anchor in October of 2000, as the suicide crew happily “saluted” the American crew before detonating their massive charge, nearly destroying the ship.

And then – another “sea change” (no pun intended) happened.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, and Communist China finally figured out how mix capitalism with a brutal, totalitarian governmental system, the West welcomed the Communist remnants into a burgeoning world trade system with open arms. As the global economy shifted and changed, the technology sector exploded in its own form of “business as war.” Technology once reserved only to the “Great Powers” became ‘democratized’, available at reasonable prices to the general public. While major nations certainly had far better and more capable – and much more expensive – systems, smaller states (and groups) suddenly had access to technology and manufacturing bases that significantly increased their capabilities versus local opponents (including their own citizens, but that’s another conversation, entirely).

 

Container port in operation. Credit: Piqsels.com. Public Domain.

 

All that was waiting was another spate of desperation to drive improvisation.

As the “Global War on Terror” (the “GWOT”) drove on in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the many small, localized wars it spawned drove desperate innovation, once again. Various ethnic and religious factions around the world desperately sought some sort of advantage. This has led to everything from “homemade tanks”, to artillery, to ‘sci-fi’ weapons manufacture.

But now, desperation-induced technological innovation has caught up with the navies of the world.

On January 30, 2017, the Saudi Arabian frigate RSN Al Madinah (FG 702) was struck and seriously damaged by an explosive-laden speedboat. Initially, it was believed that the craft was a piloted suicide boat deployed by the Shi’a Islam Houthi rebels of Yemen, which country has been in its most recent civil war since 2014. Soon, though, it became apparent that the attack craft was actually a remotely- controlled craft.

Speculation immediately turned to Iran. Iran, in addition to being co-religionists to the Houthis, was already supplying the rebels with short-range ballistic missiles and combat drones. In this regard, Iran differs from Ukraine only in that they supply their craft externally.

 

Ukrainian naval drones, c.2022. Unknown author.

 

Given the rapid advances in remote-operations technology, it would be no great task to re-engineer common pleasure boats to function as drone attack craft; as well, the issue of a simplified, “standard issue” refit kit (similar in theory to an aircraft JDAM unit) is virtually guaranteed.

But ultimately – what does all this actually mean, in the grand scheme of things?

Simply, insurgents and guerrillas are now much more capable than they were in the past, as they are now capable to extend remote-controlled warfare into the nautical dimension. With the democratization of military training, this opens the ugly possibility of radical forces being capable of enforcing localized (if not regional) combined-arms dominance over all the most capable of national militaries.

The fact that this is an operational possibility worthy of consideration is not something that should alarm only strategic planners – it is something that average citizen needs to seriously consider.

Act accordingly.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
God’s Battalions – The Holy See’s Hidden Military Potential

God’s Battalions – The Holy See’s Hidden Military Potential

Michael Cessna August 5, 2023 1

 

 

 

 

 

Unless a person is a member of the Catholic faith, most people don’t give a great deal of thought to what they think of as “the Vatican”, unless there is some noteworthy story concerning the Church. Most historians (both professionals and amateurs) are well versed, in varying degrees, about the Church’s history. Historians know that the Holy See – the actual leadership of the complex structure that is Catholicism – is an independent and sovereign nation, a condition settled by the Lateran Pacts of 1929, after seventy years of upheaval. But really – it’s not like the Catholic Church is actually a nation, right?

Right?

Well, no, actually. That is not the case, at all. And while it of course is a matter of immediate impact to the 1.3 billion-odd Catholics in the world, it is also a major concern – or should be – for non-Catholics, including non-Christians, throughout the world.

The Catholic Church – the strictly religious organization – has certainly existed in some form for over two thousand years; in fact, our formal dating system (i.e., “2023AD”, where ‘AD’ means “Anno Domini”, or, literally, “in the Year of our Lord”) is based on the Church’s established interpretation of the historical timeline.

During those twenty-odd centuries the temporal authority of the Holy See has waxed and waned. Where it once held immediate and direct sway over the secular affairs of much of the Christian world, in the minds of most people – even of most Catholics – the notion of the Pope as a secular leader is somewhat bizarre. In 1870, when Italy was finally united, the Holy See was stripped of its “Papal States”, although the Pope of the day, Pius IX, flatly refused to recognize the “Law of Guarantees” imposed on his rule, and referred to his rule, as well as that of his successors, as the “Prisoner in the Vatican” era.

This was the situation that remained in force until the signing of the aforementioned Lateran Pacts in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, which created the modern division between the Holy See, and the Vatican as a sovereign city-state, albeit a tiny one, only holding some 108 acres within the city of Rome. However, these remain technical differences. Among those differences is that Vatican City the City-State retains its own military forces…whose “commander in chief” (to use the modern term) is the Pope.

And it is here, that we reach the subject of this article.

Unlike most of the articles like this at the Freedomist, this is not a historical piece. Instead, we will consider the Vatican’s potential to impact current affairs through creating and applying military action.

While the Holy See is no stranger to maintaining military forces – some of which still exist – it has not had “operationally deployable forces” (again, to borrow the modern vernacular) since 1870. It does retain military and police forces, specifically the Pontifical Swiss Guard and the less-well known Gendarmerie Corps of Vatican City State.

While the Swiss Guard, famous for their Renaissance-period ceremonial armor and uniforms, directly protects the Pope (or the College of Cardinals, when they gather to elect a new Bishop of Rome), the Gendarmerie conducts more police-like duties within Vatican City, mostly managing tourist traffic. The Swiss Guard has significantly improved their protective training in the decades since the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Still, these two forces comprise barely two hundred and fifty troops, and are only armed with the lightest of small arms.

 

Swiss guards after a celebration inside St. Peter Dome, 29 June 2006. Photo credit: Alberto Luccaroni. CCA/3.0

 

Additionally, of the Church’s remaining military orders, only the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is really “military” in any way: SMOM maintains a military medical detachment, providing medical support to the Italian Armed Forces.

 

Troops of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, during an army parade in Italy, 2007. Photo Credit: Utente:Jollyroger. CCA/2.5

 

Should the Holy See decide to expand its secular military, finances are not an issue, should the Vatican decide to reform an operational military arm. Accusations of certain fiscal shenanigans aside, the Holy See is fully capable of mobilizing all of the vast capital (much of it not easily tracked down) that it controls. At the same time, a program soliciting remittance-like donations (even tithes) from Catholics would provide a significant boost to the Holy See’s income stream. Spent wisely, Vatican finances are more than sufficient to field a very large force, and very quickly, as the world is awash in arms and equipment.

But surely, this is all hypothetical. It’s not like the Vatican is going to suddenly militarize. Right?

States have a habit of changing their nature quickly, and sometimes functionally overnight; take modern Iran as one example. How would such a thing happen to the Holy See?

While the current leadership of the Holy See and Vatican City are well known for “liberal” policies that could easily change. Granted, it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance, but a change to a staunchly conservative, even reactionary, leadership within the Church is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. In such a circumstance, assuming that a reactionary Pope ascended to the Throne of St. Peter, and decided to field a functional military, how would that take shape?

First, the reactionary Pope would need to define a mission for the expanding Papal forces. Given the nature of the modern era, this could easily begin with a revival of the Papacy’s long-disbanded Papal State forces, including its navy.

One of the curiosities of the Covid pandemic was that many cruise lines retired their older cruise ships, selling them off for scrap, using the suspension of cruise travel to purchase new ships. Many of the ships that were scrapped were still usable, and could have been converted into hospital ships, with a land component to handle the more delicate surgeries at dockside. This is completely in line with the current mission of SMOM, and could be presented as an expansion of the Order’s mission…Of course, the docked vessels would need armed guards.

 

A French Georges Leygues-class destroyer moored alongside a cruise ship and other military vessels at a pier in Bahrain, following Operation Desert Storm. TSGT Paul J. Page, USAF, March 19, 1991. USAF Photo. Public Domain

 

An expansion of this mission is where things start to get dicey. With the active persecution of Catholics and other Christians (to say nothing of other religious groups) by terror groups like ISIL, it would be entirely plausible to see Papal “peacekeeping forces” inserting into conflict zones to defend refugee camps from attack. As has been painfully learned in the last two decades, such defense measures require serious weapons and training. That requires an army, an army with equipment…and bases.

This is not an implausible thought exercise. The Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with some one hundred and eighty nations, giving it all the diplomatic ‘in’ it needs to open a dialogue with a potential host nation. Likewise, there are many Third World states that would welcome a Vatican military base inside their borders, even with limited extraterritoriality.

 

World map of the foreign relations of the Holy See; dark green: diplomatic relations, light green: other relations, gray: no official relations. Credit: Muso, 2011. CCA/3.0

 

But – where would all the necessary military talent come from? It’s not like this is the Renaissance, with large number of experienced troops and officers available for hire at short notice, even given the vast numbers of PMC’s available for hire. The answer is unsettlingly simple.

With an estimated worldwide population of 1.3 billion Catholics – many of them, from many countries, being former soldiers and officers, many with recent combat experience – the Holy See has no shortage of potential recruits to recruit from, including many officers and long-serving enlisted personnel with all the necessary skills to train a force that would resemble the French Foreign Legion in character, given the disparate origins of its recruits.

Numbers-wise, it should be remembered that India – with a population similar in size to the Catholic Church – currently fields a force of around 2.5 million troops, counting reverses. The Holy See would not need anything approaching that number…at least, not initially. However, given the money and space to house and train troops, it could easily assemble a comparable force.

…Now, all of the preceding is speculation. There is no sign that the Catholic Church is going to suddenly “arm up”, drawing in hundreds of thousands of Catholics from around the world to join a massive military force, and no indication that it is even thinking about it.

But it is possible…And possibilities offer options.

Deus Vult, indeed.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Discount War – How The ATGM Changed Everything

Discount War – How The ATGM Changed Everything

Michael Cessna July 28, 2023 0

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the tank appeared on the battlefields of World War One, it sparked terror among armies, who had no answer to it at first. The Germans attempted to counter it with new artillery tactics and later, new artillery weapons to destroy the armored beasts, followed by their first attempt to copy the British behemoths. After World War One ended, all of the militaries involved (the professional ones, at least) reviewed their activities during the war, trying to learn what had gone right, and – more importantly – what had gone wrong.

Regarding the tank, it was found to be useful, certainly, but it suffered from all the ills of any prototype concept, being ridiculously unreliable, too large, too slow, and poorly armored by the end of the war. The next two decades saw continual developments in all of the nations who felt that they might well be on the front line of the next war which – platitudes and wishful thinking about the “war to end all wars” aside – knew was coming.

World War two proved to be the watershed in tank design that most militaries expected. Designs were refined, weapons were improved, and tactics were evolved by force. In general, the things that didn’t work were ruthlessly cast aside, in favor of what worked. This cycle, of course, worked in both directions.

Tanks have severe weaknesses. For the crews, the most important weakness was a painfully limited view. Sticking one’s head outside a tank in the middle of a fight was not conducive to long life, and the visions blocks inside the tank had severely limited fields of view (and still do), limiting the crews’ ability to see anything outside of their steel box. For this reason, specially trained infantry had to escort the tanks across the battlefield to protect them long enough to make it into contact with the enemy…whose infantry could be expected to be armed with whatever anti-tank weapons they had access to, usually in large quantities.

The infantry forces of the world were not about to concede the battlefield to the metal beasts, however.

From the beginning, in WW1, non-armored forces struggled to find countermeasures against the tank. By 1946, dedicated anti-tank artillery had been joined (albeit briefly) by anti-tank rifles. During the “interwar period”, anti-tank hand grenades were developed; while effective, the grenades were really desperation weapons, given how they had to be used. Another weapon was the anti-tank landmine. A very effective class of weapon, they are strictly defensive in nature, and could be problematic in use, as the mines themselves could not be easily re-positioned at need.

Then came the “bazooka”.

A combination of simple rocket technology pushing a small warhead based on the “Monroe Effect”, the first crude “bazookas” deployed by the US Army proved to be highly effective tools for the infantry. Their only real downside was their very short range, compared to tank cannons. Still it was a major advance.

 

Soldier holding an M1 “Bazooka”, 1943. US Army photo. Public Domain.

 

The American bazooka was copied directly by the Germans, in their “Panzerschrek” (or, “tank’s bane”), who had jump-started their own research program early in 1943 with their “Panzerfaust” (or, “armor-fist”), a one-shot weapon much like a conventional hand grenade. Both weapon concepts continue today, in a variety of models.

But, it was quickly recognized early on that a ‘middle ground’ was needed. Where conventional – if specialized – artillery was effective, the materials involved in building the dedicated weapons took away from more conventional artillery fire missions. At the same time, hand-held weapons – while also effective – were quickly being countered with better tank armor, and better coordination between enemy tanks and infantry.

In the aftermath of World War 2, the victorious states quickly divided into two mutually hostile camps, initiating the “Cold War”. And, like their fathers in the interwar period, continued the search for the middle ground.

To a great extent, anti-tank artillery disappeared after WW2, in a concession to realism, because the class of weapons was simply not dynamic enough to keep pace with the speed demands of a modern battlefield. It was here, however, that the next development arrived.

Although very crude versions of the “recoilless rifle” were developed in World War 1, the Second World War would see their mechanical maturity, and the first deployments in combat, in the hands of German paratroopers.

 

A U.S. Special Forces soldier fires a Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle during a training exercise conducted in Basrah, Iraq, May 2, 2009. US Army Photo. Public Domain.

 

Resembling a conventional artillery tube, the recoilless rifle barrel is much thinner, for its caliber. Recoilless rifles work, basically, by firing a shell from a specially designed shell casing. This casing is perforated to allow a portion of the ballistic gases to vent to the rear, through a hollow breach. While not completely “recoil-less”, these weapons were a serious threat to tanks, as their warheads were fully capable of destroying a “main battle tank” of the day in one shot. And, while too heavy to be carried by hand, they were still light enough to be mounted in the back of a Jeep or pickup truck.

 

Mounted M40 Recoilless Anti-Tank Rifle. Photo credit: Vijay Tiwari. CCA/4.0

 

The recoilless rifle, in its turn, was sidelined by improvements to tank armor. Replacing it, however, was the ATGM. The Anti-Tank Guided Missile dawned in the early 1950’s. They were crude by modern standards, were hard to control in flight, and had a limited range, but technology was advancing rapidly, and the weapons improved dramatically in the 1960’s, especially in warhead technology.

The 1970’s dawned, and with it, the ATGM. In 1972, the US Army deployed the TOW Missile System to Vietnam, where it quickly began destroying tanks, being fired from helicopters. But this was just the proverbial ‘opening round’.

On October 6, 1973, the armed forces of Egypt invaded the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. The furious, three-week long battle that resulted fundamentally changed the landscape of war for the first time since World War 1.

The Israelis had built up a well-deserved reputation for military prowess, one that would hold true in 1973…but not without taking a severe bruising in the process.

When Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and overran the Israeli defensive line, they halted and set up their own line, waiting for the Israeli counterattack. That should have been the first sign of trouble. Israeli tank commanders, however elected to not wait for more infantry to come up to support them, and attacked directly into the Egyptian line. The result was a bloodbath: the Israelis lost more than sixty tanks in a matter of minutes, as Egyptian ATGM troops cut the unsupported tanks to shreds.

 

An Israeli M60 Patton destroyed in the Sinai. Photo credit: Sherif9282. Public Domain.

 

The Israelis had met the Malyutka.

The 9M14 Malyutka (NATO Reporting Name : AT-3 ‘Sagger’), first produced by the Soviet Union in 1963, is probably the most-produced ATGM in history, a weapon still in both production and use as of this writing.

 

Serbian-made modified Malyutka wire-guided anti-tank missile on display at “Partner 2009” military fair. Photo credit: Kos93. CCA/4.0 Int’l.

 

A tiny weapon, the Malyutka/Sagger fits into a briefcase-sized carrier. Assembled at its launch sight, the missile has an effective range of 500-3,000 meters. Its warhead remains potent even today: although no longer effective against most tanks, it remains very effective against buildings and light vehicles. The weapon’s warhead is in the same general category as that of the RPG-7, but has a much longer range.

Armies – and other groups – took note.

Now, there are a wide array of ATGM’s prevalent throughout the world. From the European MILAN launchers mounted to Toyota Hilux pickup trucks in the Chadian desert, to American Javelin missiles destroying invading Russian tanks in Ukraine, lightweight military forces around the world have finally found the balance they need to meet heavier forces equally on the field.

 

U.S. Army paratrooper engages targets with Javelin shoulder fired anti tank missile during a live-fire exercise as part of Exercise Rock Sokol at Pocek Range in Postojna, Slovenia, March 9, 2016. U.S. Army photo by Paolo Bovo. Public Domain.

 

The dust these changes have stirred up have not fully settled as of 2023. Tanks remain dangerous actors on the battlefield, pundit declarations to the contrary aside. But, as we increasingly enter a period of “discount war”, high-powered weapons in the hands of light, fast-moving forces with tiny logistical footprints and easy-to-acquire and -operate combat vehicles is forcing a serious rethink of the scope of military action…

…At least, among those who pause long enough to reflect on the question.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Cutlass Rattling – World Powers Face Off Over Commercial Shipping & Grain

Cutlass Rattling – World Powers Face Off Over Commercial Shipping & Grain

Michael Cessna July 21, 2023 0

 

 

 

 

 

Since 2021, there has been a war simmering between the United States and Iran. The US began seizing – via court-based “arrest” orders – ships carrying cargo (mostly oil) –out of Iran, to various nations that the United States has under economic sanction. The nations under US sanctions, such as Venezuela, have no real method to respond to the United States.

Iran, however, is a different matter.

Iran has begun seizing ships in the Persian Gulf by force, and in earnest, in response to the actions by the United States; the number is now up to twenty vessels. Additionally, some firms in the United States have begun to refuse to unload ships seized with Iranian cargo, fearing Iran seizing their vessels in retaliation.

Because of the clear threat presented to the “freedom of the seas”, the United is now responding to Iran by reinforcing its forces in the Persian Gulf with additional destroyers…and a few thousand US Marines.

While the first inclination of many will be to recall that the United States severely damaged the Iranian Navy in 1988’s Operation Praying Mantis – launched in response to an Iranian naval mine severely damaging the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) – that was some thirty-five years ago.

 

Iranian frigate IS Sahand (74) burning on 18 April 1988 after being attacked by aircraft of U.S. Navy Carrier Air Wing 11. US Navy photo. Public Domain.

 

Iran’s naval capability – while still no match for the US Navy in a direct fight – has significantly improved since their defeat, very likely enough to cause serious damage to United States forces in the process. Such a defeat, were it to happen, would almost certainly spark hysterical screams from within Washington, DC, demanding an all-out invasion.

 

LtGen Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (retired), c.1995. LtGen Van Riper led the “opposing force” in the “Millennium Challenge 2002” exercise. USMC official photo. Public Domain.

 

This is certainly not a whimsical or marginal threat. There has been a long-standing resistance within the Washington establishment to any rational negotiations with Iran; indeed, this escalated after then-President Donald Trump called off a disproportionate attack in response to Iran shooting down an unmanned US surveillance drone in 2019. In fact, hysterical calls for war with Iran have been a steady feature of US rhetoric for over a decade.

While the reasons for this hysterical behavior by long-serving chickenhawks in the Washington Swamp are unclear, they are nonetheless real. And with the weak, disconnected and floundering administration currently in place in the Swamp, wallowing in failures both domestic and foreign, highly irrational decisions are a serious possibility.

Iran is not Iraq. An irrational and ill-advised war against the current iteration of Ancient Persia – no matter how technically weak it may appear – would be an absolute disaster for the United States in the immediate sense, but also for the wider world, as the impact on the global trade system would not simply be catastrophic, but could swiftly escalate out of control.

For far too long, the people of the United States have bought into the mythology of “American Invincibility”. While this belief was justifiable until about 2010, it is no longer the case. The US Navy currently fields less than 300 vessels; all of the armed services except the Marine Corps have admitted that they expect to fall short of their recruitment targets by at least 20%, if not more. As the Biden administration openly admitted less than two weeks before this writing, US industry has not been able to step up the production of basic artillery ammunition to meet the needs of the administration’s support to Ukraine.

There is nothing left for the United States’ potential need for combat operations, should that happen.

 

Munitions Production on the Home Front, 1914-1918. Imperial War Museums. Public Domain.

 

And there are painfully few options available, if any still exist at all. Despite some twenty-odd years of near-continuous combat, neither US industry nor the wider population have been mobilized for the possibility of a major war…or wars. In 1941, as the forces of Imperial Japan were attacking Pearl Harbor, the United States had been girding for war for nearly two full years, mobilizing a “command economy” to increase the production of war materiel to support Great Britain in its war against Hitler’s Germany, and instituting the first peacetime military draft in the country’s history, giving all of the armed services of the day time to bring in and train troops in readiness for war.

None of that has been happening in the last 20+ years. And the cold reality is that it is likely not possible, without twenty years, minimum, of corrective measures: Thirty years of globalism’s industrial and business realities have removed the bulk of heavy industrial manufacturing from within the borders of the United States. Likewise, there is virtually no chance of the Draft being reactivated; while it is certainly still on the books as a legal option, the social policies instituted, promoted and encouraged by the Democrat Party in the last fifteen years have poisoned the recruiting well for the military, encouraging the armed service’s core demographics to pointedly not step forward to enlist. Basic training has been eroded to the point where the vast majority of troops with under ten years service are not psychologically prepared for combat at any level.

And yet – the chickenhawks of the Swamp persist, thinking that their actions to please their vote base have had no impact on military readiness – despite facts to the contrary – because they are so disconnected from the real world…

…Now, if the issue were simply Iran and a shortfall for materiel’s shipments to Ukraine, this might not be that large of a problem. A problem, certainly, but not a critical one.

However, as many chickenhawk cheerleaders crow over the recent attack on the Kerch Bridge over the Sea of Azov, Russia’s response was swift and decisive: Russia has abandoned the deal it agreed to previously, which allows the export of Ukrainian grain crops to supply the world’s food needs.

 

Satellite picture of Crimea, 05-16-2015, with location of the Kerch Bridge in red. NASA. Public Domain.

 

Russia is now actively targeting the port city of Odessa with long-range missile strikes, and is laying naval mines to close off Ukraine’s remaining coastal regions. Moscow has also hinted at the possibility that it will attack commercial vessels attempting to reach Ukraine.

The real danger in this series of moves lies far to the south, where Egypt is critically dependent upon Ukrainian wheat to feed its population. In the face of this loss, Egypt – already struggling with massive unemployment and the irrational and childish dismissal of its concerns over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dame (GERD) project by the government in Addis Ababa.

This is important, because if Egypt lashes out against Ethiopia in desperation – using an air force largely reequipped by the US – it could easily spark a much wider war, a war that could easily result in the closing of the Suez Canal…an act that, as was demonstrated by the grounding of a single container ship in 2021 for less than a week, would up-end the world trade system.

Which loops us back to Iran.

If the United States tilts that windmill, it will destroy the International North–South Transport Corridor, the decade-old project by Russia, China, Turkey, India and Iran to build a trade corridor designed to drastically shorten the transit of commercial cargo, bypassing the Suez Canal entirely.

This is a hair-trigger environment that is capable of sparking World War 3. This is not hyperbole, in any way.

It is solely the construct of the Swamp – a body that imagines itself as completely immune to anyone it deems “lesser”…which term includes you and I.

Let that sink in.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
House of Cards – Victory Disease, Unhinged Greed and the Pentagon’s Darkest Fear

House of Cards – Victory Disease, Unhinged Greed and the Pentagon’s Darkest Fear

Michael Cessna July 15, 2023 1

 

 

 

 

‘MERICA

 

There is a perception in the world, a perception with solid reasoning behind it, that the United States of America is the most powerful nation in the recorded history of the world. In fact, the world system of the early 21st Century is hinged on that very concept.

But – is it true?

Economically, the United States is certainly a powerhouse. As measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the US economy is almost larger than the next three economies in the world. However, in GDP per Capita the US is seventh, and in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) (a measure of the ratio of the price of a “basket of goods” in different countries, that is used to compare the absolute purchasing power of national currencies), the US is in 10th place. In exports, the US is in second place to China, and even then, the vast bulk of US exports are limited to petroleum, aircraft, pharmaceuticals and medical instruments, due primarily to the high costs of US labor. Dangerously, the imbalance of imports shows that the US is reliant on the willingness of the rest of the world for a vast amount of its real goods, like industrial machinery.

We could talk about how reporting on the quality of education in the US is “cooked”, but we’ll let the World Population Review discuss that.

But really – that’s not why you’re reading this, right? After all, if the Reader has been reading the Freedomist for any length of time, you are fully aware what my focus is. So, let’s go there.

Militarily, the United States Armed Forces possess a set of demonstrated structures that maximize its global reach and power projection…in theory. The state of the US military – and, critically, its supporting industrial base and capacity – is abysmal. This is not a question solely of culture or corruption, although those things are certainly major factors. The issue to keep in mind, here, is that the United States military is an apolitical and a-cultural bellwether for the nation – if the military works, the nation’s political and cultural problems are not insurmountable; conversely, if the military isn’t working, metaphorically speaking, the nation is in danger…How much danger, we will look into below.

Why is the military in the poor state that it is? On the surface, the issues started to became public, albeit in a very quiet way, in 2001…not with the 9/11 attacks, but with the release of the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review. The 2001 QDR – one of a series of documents issued every 4 years from 1997 to 2017 by and for the Washington, DC bureaucratic swamp that describes a “4-year plan” (…) – was the first to explicitly state the plan to replace the notion of “strategy” (in the historical sense) with “capabilities-based planning”.

Basically, “strategy” was too hard to do effectively in an “asymmetric environment”, where hostile actors could erupt anywhere, at any time, and act in unpredictable ways. So…it followed that traditional strategic planning model no longer functioned. The solution – “capabilities-based planning” – posited the notion that if an issue arose, a “basket” of units with various capabilities appropriate to the nation, region and operational environment could be quickly assembled, and thrown into action, until the problem went away.

Given what should have been the obvious disaster in the making with such a childish idea, it should be no surprise that it failed, miserably, utterly and completely, almost from its first use.

But the problem is much deep than this.

 

JUNGLE GHOSTS

 

The United State Armed Forces were badly scarred, in a psychological and cultural sense, by the collapse of the Western effort in the Vietnam War. This is well known. What is not so well known, at least among the general public, is the US military’s responses to the defeat.

 

South Vietnamese refugees aboard a U.S. Navy vessel during Operation Frequent Wind, the final evacuation of Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. April 29, 1975. US Department of Defense. Public Domain.

 

The US military, as a group, essentially abandoned “counterinsurgency” in the aftermath of the Vietnam defeat. It had deployed massive forces, conventional and special, which had uniformly fought hard, in a confusing and frustrating environment. And it had failed. In the bizarre world of guerrilla warfare, while US and Allied units won every engagement above the level of the infantry company, they had still lost the war, because South Vietnam had ultimately fallen, seemingly rendering the efforts moot.

The reasons for South Vietnam’s collapse are many, and not the subject for this article. But, the reaction by the US military was to refocus all of its efforts towards very likely fights with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, in effect, “World War 3”, ala, “World War 2, but with lots more nukes.”

To do this, the US military – primarily the Army – had to rethink its concept of strategy, following the failure of its “Pentomic Army” experiment. The answer seemed to arrive in 1976, when John Boyd, Colonel, USAF (ret.) first presented his “Patterns of Conflict” work, that outlined what is now known as the “OODA Loop”. The OODA concept took the US military establishment by storm in the mid-1970’s, and resulted in two things: the revitalization of the Opposition Force (OPFOR) concept, and in a new battle strategy for winning the conventional side of World War 3 – “AirLand Battle”.

The US military had maintained the idea of an “opposing force” as a training model since 1946; in fact, the Freedomist covered this unique and seminal organization in May of this year. In the late 1970’s, the program was completely overhauled, and centered on a then state of the art training facility at Ft. Irwin, CA, and later at Ft Polk, LA (now renamed as Ft. Johnson), which focused on counterinsurgency as operations in Iraq and Afghanistan shifted in focus, in concert with the US Marine Corps’ facility at 29 Palms, CA. The concept has been maintained and updated over the years. The concept created the most realistic combat training facility ever established, that trained a generation of primarily US Army armor officers and troops in how to fight and win on an armored battlefield. The armored warfare training program fell out of extensive use during the Global War on Terror, as there was little need for massed armored formations after the successful invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003.

Coupled to the success of the AirLand Battle concept in 1991, it seemed that the US military had recovered from Vietnam, and was back in the dominant position it had seemingly enjoyed since the end of World War 2.

 

A Brigade of the U.S. 3rd Armored Division masses in northern Saudi Arabia in preparation for the invasion of Iraq during the Gulf War, February 1991. US Army photo. Public Domain.

 

 

COLLAPSE?

 

But, lurking beneath the surface, there was a palpable, unsettled feeling – something just didn’t…“feel right”. There was suspicion, whispered in private, that we were actually training potential combat leaders how to “win the battle, but not the war”. Those concerns, however, were mostly forgotten as “bumps in the road” and “just bad luck”, as Iraq and Afghanistan metastasized into the quagmires they became.

But, hey – counterinsurgency is hard and messy, right? It’s comparatively a lot harder than the good, old-fashioned smash of the armored fist into the bad guy’s face.

Right?

But then – Russia formally invaded Ukraine. (The war had actually been going on for some eight years by 2022, but no one wants to talk about that.) And, after a year of intense combat – the very type of “main-force” combat Western combat leaders thought AirLand Battle was designed to fight – the Ukrainians launched a counter-offensive in the summer of 2023, using troops given a “quickie” training course in US/NATO AirLand Battle concepts, and fortified with deliveries of US M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and German Leopard 2 main battle tanks…..the results were as dismal as they were alarming.

 

A Ukrainian Leopard 2 tank and several Bradley fighting vehicles destroyed by the Russian forces in Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, June 2023. Photo: Mil.ru. CCA/4.0

 

The US military, as well as the armed forces of the wider NATO Alliance, is getting a ringside to the live practice of the war they planned to fight…and it doesn’t look good.

The reality is that the AirLand Battle concept was never designed as an “attack” strategy, like its predecessor, the misnamed “Blitzkrieg” – it was always implicitly a defensive strategy. While people in the higher levels of the Army and the wider Pentagon establish speak confidently and relentlessly about “combined arms” and “maneuver warfare”, the cold fact is that their operational plans remain rooted in Airland Battle doctrine, a doctrine that does not play well on the offense…unless, of course, your opponent is a badly-trained, badly-equipped and demoralized rabble, who hate their leaders so much, they are willing to allow a foreign invader to enter and conquer their nation, wholesale.

The situation with Ukraine and Russia is spiraling out of control. What began as a craven attempt to restart the Cold War for “fun and profit” has now grown, until it is beginning to run off of the rails. This naked corruption, coupled to unsustainable recruiting numbers in the armies facing Russia – and soon, perhaps, those of Belarus and the People’s Republic of China – and an exhausted and flagging industrial base that cannot keep up with the vast needs for munitions and weapons – and not simply advanced weapons, but even basic arms – has led the White House to the highly unusual (and frankly rather alarming) decision to activate individuals within the “Inactive Ready Reserve” for immediate deployment to the European Combatant Command.

In 1941, as the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had spent well over a year building up its military forces in the first peacetime military draft call-up in the nation’s history. As well, war industry production had been steadily increasing since 1939; Lend-Lease would be formalized in early 1941, vastly increasing the production of war materials.

That is most emphatically not the case, as of July of 2023.

Neither the United States nor its allies have been able to increase production of basic military supplies like artillery ammunition. No one willing to support Ukraine seems to be able increase its production rates to serious war levels, even after some eighteen months of fighting. Western defense firms do, indeed, produce very high quality weapons…but that quality comes at an equally high price, in that those weapons frequently require special materials and/or complex components, all of which cost a lot of money.

And, just as there is no desire in the West to “gear down” to use simpler weapons and equipment, there is no desire to implement a peacetime draft to flesh out military numbers; in fact, a peacetime draft may be impossible, not only in the US, but in most of Western Europe…

And meanwhile – Russian industry is working multiple shifts, not simply producing war material for Ukraine, but fulfilling foreign orders as well. China is expanding its influence in resource-rich Africa, while securing “back door” supply chains to support Russia through its “Belt & Road” corridors in Asia.

The outlook is grim. For far too long irrational, incompetent and openly corrupt corporations and politicians have been inventing ways to sustain the “Great Green Machine”. For twenty-odd years, “Achmed the Goat-Herder” was touted as an existential threat to Western Civilization. When that failed – not simply because the general public realized that presentation for the lie that it is, but because using a $100million+ fighter plane to bomb Achmed is stupid and wasteful in the extreme – it was decided to push Russia into a “cold” conflict, to boost sales numbers.

And now…the incompetents in charge have no way out. They think that they do – but they do not. They are playing at a craps table, where failure will lead to a nuclear exchange.

And that exchange is aimed at you and me.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

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