The International Monetary Fund often is in the news, but rarely in the U.S. That changed when Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn ended up at New York’s Rikers prison charged with rape. Strauss-Kahn’s travail well symbolizes the IMF: an institution of entitlement and privilege focused on mulcting the rest of us.
Now that the Romanian govt has declared witchcraft to be an official govt recognized “profession”, its practicioners are going to have to pony up….The move, which went into effect Saturday, is part of the government’s drive to crack down on… Read more: Witches can’t avoid taxman anymore in Romania
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Witches can’t avoid taxman anymore in Romania
The left has found a new face for the “injustice” committed in America’s name: Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army private alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of State and Defense Department classified e-mails. Manning is now the focus of a campaign that accuses his jailers of torture. Liberal core values — to the extent that liberals have any values at all — proceed from two assumptions. First, that American criminal law must be unjust because people are not prosecuted — or protected — on the basis of their political beliefs. Second only to that, is that America — and by derivation, its secrets — are not worthy of defense. Pity Wesley Cook, the Philly cop killer also known as Mumia abu Jamal. For decades, ballads to Mumia’s “innocence” were sung, t-shirts printed and protests made loudly in his name because, to the left, he was a victim of racism, not a murderer. Now, still rotting in well-earned imprisonment, Mumia is passé. Enter Bradley Manning, a more fortuitous blend of modern liberal values. Pfc. Manning is gay and was for months characterized as having leaked the classified documents because he was angry at the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law which prevented him from proclaiming his homosexuality elsewhere than his Facebook page. Manning, who allegedly copied the vast quantity of classified material onto “Lady Gaga” rewritable music disks, has been in custody since May. Since his arrest, he’s been called a “political prisoner” by no less than WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, the CodePinkos have held rallies to protest his innocence. The most celebrated leaker of days gone by, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers infamy, said, ” Anybody who believes Julian Assange can be distinguished from the New York Times … is on a fool’s errand.” Ellsberg, of course, is wrong. At least so far, WikiLeaks stock isn’t traded on the New York Stock Exchange. But that is not enough. Now his lawyer, David Coombs, is apparently managing a media campaign that seeks to enshrine Manning as a hero and condemn his jailers as torturers the likes of which we haven’t seen since Abu Ghraib. It is, comprehensively, nonsense. (My weekend e-mail seeking an interview with Coombs went unanswered.) Manning was arrested by the Army in May and charged in July with leaking classified material. He is being held in the brig at the Quantico, Virginia Marine Base in conditions of solitary confinement. Blogger Glenn Greenwald has been hyperventilating that for months ” Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything . ” Greenwald repeated those charges in a BBC debate with me, citing as one of his sources attorney Coombs. Greenwald’s — and others’ — frothing follows the usual liberal pattern. Characterize the facts in terms that fit the accusation, write about the conclusions of “experts” who have no direct knowledge of the matter, and then demand that the accused — in this case the military justice system and the proprietors of the Marine brig at Quantico — surrender to the political demands. At this point, the Coombs-managed campaign has enlisted the UN’s “special rapporteur” on torture, Manfred Nowak, to investigate the conditions under which Manning is being held. But why the UN? This is the heart of the matter: If there were reason to believe that Manning is being abused (which would be a major crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for which his jailers would be liable to punishment), Coombs and his crew would have gone to the independent agency having immediate authority to investigate: the Navy (and/or) Defense Department Inspectors General. If Coombs & Co. were interested in protecting Manning from torture, they would have complained to either of the IG’s who have the power — and the clear duty — to investigate the allegations. The IG is entirely independent by law. Commanders and civilian military chiefs cannot overrule his decisions to investigate, and it can have access to classified material at the highest levels. The IG can get access to the prisoner, get psychiatric experts to examine Manning, and interrogate any and all who are in charge of his imprisonment. The fact that the defense team has instead gone to the liberal media and UN make it clear that Manning’s condition is being maintained properly by professionals. In the BBC debate, I asked Greenwald why there is no IG complaint, and he had no answer. I challenged him to make the complaint himself, which he could do if he has a legitimate reason to make the accusation. We shall see if he does. He probably won’t, because of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001. Under that law, knowingly making a false accusation to a federal law enforcement agency is a federal crime. I’m betting neither Greenwald nor any of the others involved will make that complaint. The UN has no jurisdiction over the U.S. military justice system: the Marines should never allow Nowak & Co. access to a prisoner of any sort, far less one whose custody is being challenged solely on political grounds. The charge that the Marines at Quantico are torturing Manning is of the stuff with which farmers’ fields are fertilized. A gentleman of my acquaintance, Ion Mihai Pacepa, is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet sphere. He was, for a time, a general and Romania’s intelligence chief. Mike Pacepa often reminds me of the difference between propaganda and disinformation. When a government (or, in this case, a defense team for an accused criminal) spouts a falsehood, it is propaganda. But when it succeeds in getting someone else to publish the falsehood for it, that is disinformation. There will always be useful idiots such as Greenwald eager to spread disinformation aimed at discrediting America and its legal system. The only proper response is to ignore the disinformation and let the military justice system work.
It’s been quite a week for American’s most execrable Congressman. Apparently not content to definitively and irrevocably align himself with enemies of America , Ron Paul has decided to make sure everyone knows that he is the only Member of Congress not opposed to brutal totalitarianism . As in, literally the only one – from Pence to Pelosi, every member of the House (other than Paul) voted to honor Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and Pelosi is even making plans to visit the Nobel ceremony personally. Pelosi’s support for Xiaobo has led to the unprecedented event of Nancy Pelosi being praised on the front page of RedState . Over at Hot Air , Allahpundit does a magnificent job of obliterating every one of the moronic arguments that are usually trotted out in defense of Paul’s votes on resolutions like these. As Allah notes, it can’t be because Paul believes these resolutions are a waste of money, because he votes all the time in favor of equally meaningless resolutions honoring sports teams and the like. It can’t be because he is generally opposed to resolutions that meddle in foreign internal affairs, because he has certainly done that before as well: If he’s opposed on principle to meaningless House resolutions, how come he voted yes on this one during the summer to honor golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez for his contributions to Latino youth programs? And if he’s against telling foreign nations how to conduct their business — even when it comes to standing up for core libertarian values — why’d he vote for this one a few years ago urging Romania to relax its rules on intercountry adoptions? That’s proof enough that he’s not above rhetorically pressuring other countries, but if you need more, you can always revisit his floor speeches and YouTube videos criticizing Israel. Indeed. So how come when America needs a hero to stand up against wasting money on a resolution honoring Chi Chi Rodriguez (or, you know, research on shrimp marketing), Ron Paul is conspicuously absent, but whenever America wants to send a message that this country stands united in opposition to totalitarianism or terrorism, Ron Paul suddenly decides to become a principled libertarian and pennypincher? It’s almost as though one could assume without fear of being faced with evidence to the contrary that Ron Paul’s allegedly principled and “quirky” beliefs are really a fig leaf to cover the obvious fact that Ron Paul is far more sympathetic to totalitarians and terrorists than he is to his own country. Unlike Allah, I am not interested in the Ronulan explanation for Paul’s vote. I am quite sure that if Paul had voted in favor of the resolution, we’d be treated today with a deluge of praise by these exact same people who will defend to the death his “no” vote. The average Ronulan I have encountered is simply not capable of assessing any vote cast by Ron Paul in an objective fashion; to them, if Ron Paul cast the vote, then it was a good one, and whatever justification he gives for it is automatically correct. Thus, whatever they have to say is meaningless and irrelevant. What is not meaningless or irrelevant is that this man is a perpetual cancer and embarrassment to the House Republican caucus. It is long past time for leadership to take action to declare, in the most public manner possible, that standing with totalitarianism does not make one a member in good standing of the caucus.
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Ron Paul Stands With the Totalitarians
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage , armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. “It was,” as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, “a settling of scores between the travelers and the gendarmerie .” The coming weeks would provide ample evidence that the clashes had in no wise settled any scores. By the next day three hundred soldiers were patrolling the streets of Saint-Aignan, and soon thereafter France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy was vowing that the rioters would be “severely punished,” and that the ” the problems created by the behavior of certain Travelers and Roma” would be addressed once and for all. The ensuing measures, Sarkozy continued, would be part of the “implacable struggle the government is leading against crime” and the “veritable war” being waged against those “delinquents” threatening France’s ordre publique . Pierre Lellouche, France’s Minister for Europe, concurred: ” we are faced with a real problem and the time has come to deal with it.” It was not long before French ministers were considering corrective measures ranging from the tightening of immigration controls to the systematic evacuation and dismantling of illegal encampments, the better to deal with the “sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and of crime.” Such rhetoric in reaction to the events in Saint-Aignan was altogether predictable, given the emphasis placed on matters of law and order by France’s governing U nion pour un Mouvement Populaire (with Sarkozy himself having made international headlines with his 2005 comments about the need to “hose down” lawless estates and root out criminal “scum”), but in this case it cannot be said that the French government was engaging in mere posturing for popular consumption. Some three hundred Roma camps were quickly targeted for demolition, and on August 12, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that some 850 Roma would be systematically deported to Romania and Bulgaria (albeit each with 300 euros in hand). The first repatriations followed two weeks later, with more planned for the month of September. A lawyer for the Roma leadership, Henri Braun, cautioned that the government was “preparing to open a blighted page in the history of France,” but Sarkozy’s administration may in fact be setting a continental precedent. On August 21, t he Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, told the daily Corriere della Sera that ” if anything, it’s time to go a step further, ” calling for outright ” expulsions just like those for illegal immigrants, not assisted or voluntary repatriations.” For the various itinerant communities of France — the tsiganes , the manouches , the gitanes , the Roma, and the Sinti — the ongoing crackdown occurring in France, and now threatened elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a centuries-old story of tribulation and alienation. The zhalvini gilyi , or dirges, of the Roma folk tradition invariably stress the pitfalls of a peripatetic life on the lungo drom , the “long road.” “Oh Lord,” bemoaned Bronisława Wajs, the mid-twentieth century Polish-Romani poet, “Where can I go? What can I do?” now that “time of the wandering Gypsies has long passed.” A Transylvanian dirge laments: ” God, oh God! How you have thrashed me,/Perhaps nobody more than me,” before concluding “Oh, what can I do, all alone?” The dislocation and unfocused nostalgia that are part and parcel of the itinerant lifestyle, coupled with centuries of persecution, in turn led to widespread fatalism, with one Serbian Gypsy song resignedly foreseeing that “The crack of Doom/is coming soon./Let it come,/it doesn’t matter.” For the Roma and other Travelers, the “crack of Doom” has indeed sounded out with some frequency over the years, as European anti-ziganism is of considerable vintage. Anti-Gypsy sentiment, long a feature of the European social landscape, was first institutionalized in early modern Central Europe, with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I outlawing the community in 1500, and with Ferdinand I expelling the scapegoated Roma from Prague after an unexplained 1541 fire. By 1548 the Diet of Augsburg had declared that “whosoever kills a Gypsy, shall be guilty of no murder,” and by 1710 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I would go a step further, demanding “that all adult [Roma] males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever.” Thirty-nine years later the Spanish monarch Philip V was still taking aim at “this multitude of infamous and noxious people” that needed to be “contained and corrected”; round-ups occurred in Spain and France up through the Napoleonic period. The situation for the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri was even worse in the east, and it would not be until 1856 that the outright enslavement of Gypsies was abolished in Moldavia and Wallachia. The 20th century would bring no respite, with the coming of the Holocaust (known in Romani as the Samudaripen , “the murder of all,” or the Pharrajimos , “the devouring”). During those berša bibahtale , those “unhappy years,” in Hitler’s Germany, Pavelić’s Croatia, and King Michael I’s Romania, hundreds of thousands of Roma would lose their lives in concentration camps, in hastily dug ditches, and in the laboratories of Josef Mengele. As Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized the transport of Gypsies to the various death camps of the east, later testified: “i ntervention on behalf of the Gypsies was impossible from any side at all. Obviously, the prejudice against this group was the strongest.” That the grounds of the Lety concentration camp (in the modern Czech Republic), constructed seventy years ago for the Nazi internment of Romani men, women, and children, now hosts an industrial pig farm provides some evidence of the extent to which the Pharrajimos has yet to adequately penetrate the modern European psyche. Even the end of Nazi rule would bring no end to the suffering of the Roma, again particularly in the east, for, as Florinda Lucero and Jill Collum have observed, under Communist rule “a chilling ‘solution’ to the proliferation of the Roma came about: the uninformed and non-consenting sterilization of Roma women, often under the guise of caesarean sections and abortions, and under pressure from social workers who would get their uninformed consent with promises of cash and tangible goods.” (Instances of coercive sterilization of Romani women in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary have also occurred in the post-socialist era, indeed as recently as 2008.) Today, discrimination against this marginalized community is routine in central and southeastern Europe, with racially motivated assaults on the rise, Roma communities routinely denied access to sufficient electricity and water, and, in the Czech Republic, to take one example, fully two-thirds of Roma children placed into remedial programs for dysfunctional students. Anti-Roma violence has been on display in Italy, where in May of 2008 a Gypsy settlement outside of Naples was burned to the ground while crowds gathered to cheer, and i n Hungary, where anti-Roma demonstrations in 2009 prompted then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to warn that ” we have to act while we can, not wait until the prejudices and the urge to vigilantism distill into unmanageable social phenomena.” Such outbreaks of overt anti-ziganism have led János Ladanyi of Budapest’s Center for Social, Regional and Ethnic Conflicts to further caution that ” this road is a dead end. It leads to the Balkans. ” YET THE ROAD THE GYPSIES of Europe are on is not itself at a dead end, as is appropriate for a people historically accustomed to looking at the lungo drom . There have been occasional victories in European courts, including a 2003 ruling in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords ( Wrexham County Borough Council v. Berr ), which held that zoning regulations should not ” impose an excessive burden on the individual whose private interests — here the gypsy’s private life and the retention of his ethnic identity — are at stake,” as well as a 2010 European Court of Human Rights decision finding that Croatia had erred in placing Roma students in Roma-only classrooms. A 2005 photographic exhibit entitled ” Lety Detention Camp: History of Unmentioned Genocide” was prominently featured in the European Parliament, and later was displayed in foyer of the Czech Senate in Prague, prompting President Václav Klaus to acknowledge that “o f course it is necessary to appropriately commemorate this place.” Meanwhile, in Romania, a Comisia pentru Studierea Robiei Romilor , or “Commission for the Study of Roma Slavery,” was established in 2007, and consists of Roma and Romanian historians and social scientists investigating the deep history of southeastern European anti-ziganism. EU Roma summits have taken place in 2008 and 2010, and b y August 2, 2010, the Council of Europe had declared a day of remembrance of the genocide against the Roma, and pledged support for the promotion of Samudaripen education, given that the Roma genocide “is nowhere to be found in European educational materials but should in fact be an integral part of national education curricula.” It seemed a distinct possibility that attitudes towards the Roma might be changing, and that the “Gypsy question” might some day be answered. Yet the expulsions from France, which by the end of August had resulted in 151 obligatory (” de manière contrainte “) and 828 voluntary (” de manière volontaire “) repatriations to Bulgaria and Romania, have overshadowed such progress. Concerns voiced by Roma groups, certain Bulgarian and Romanian politicians, the United Nations, and the European Union have only prompted France to double down on its method of controlling the gens du voyage and their perceived ” menace à l’ordre public .” France’s Immigration Minister, Eric Bresson, has hinted at further measures to crack down on the clandestine immigration of Roma, particular at the French border, while Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux continues to insist that “the objective announced by the president of the republic, that half our country’s illegal camps will be dismantled in three months, will be met.” The French government has roundly rejected any suggestion that these expulsions in any way resemble the infamous rafles , or round-ups, of the Second World War. Deputy Jean-Pierre Grand responded to critics (including Catholic archbishops and opposition politicians) thusly: “Persons are arrested, their identities are verified, and they are offered money to return to their homeland; I would like for someone to explain the connection to the roundups of the Second World War [ Les personnes sont interpellées, leur identité est vérifiée, on leur propose de l'argent pour retourner dans leur pays d'origine: j'aimerais bien qu'on m'explique quel est le lien avec les rafles de la seconde guerre mondiale ].” Pier re Lellouche has proven more defiant still, insisting that the expulsions were designed to guarantee the “first of human rights, which is the right to safety.” While a French court in Lille recently rejected the notion that illegal Roma camps are by their very nature threats to public order, the government has pressed on, planning amendments to French national law that will make “repeated theft or aggressive begging” grounds for expulsion. With crimes committed by Romanians (many of whom are Roma) reported to have increased by 259 percent in Paris over the last eighteen months, with some one in five Parisian thefts perpetrated by a Romanian, and with constant strains on the welfare system exacerbated by the presence of illegal aliens, it was inevitable that the French government would step up measures against unlawfully-present Roma and their camps, brooking no opposition in the process. And it is no coincidence that the crackdown has occurred alongside an overall government-led “debate on national identity” that has been taking place in France over recent months. (That the Roma are paying something of a price for Gallic resentment of other immigrant communities that have likewise yet to fully assimilate cannot be discounted either.) The French government has even raised the possibility of contesting Romanian and Bulgarian entry into the Schengen (border-free) European zone in March of 2011 due to the regular egress of Roma from those countries. Thus the Roma controversy in France figures to have more than merely domestic political ramifications.
