Tag Archives: freedom

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Redux

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I wrote earlier about the Muslim Brotherhood and their assault on their fellow Egyptians’ freedom and on their very lives.

Here’s an update.

  • [Muslim Brotherhood] demonstrators torched two government facilities in Giza
  • attacks on Coptic Christians and their churches continued for a second day—as many as 39 incidents of violence against churches, monasteries, Coptic schools, and shops
  • protesters trapped a police Humvee on an overpass near the Nasr City camp and pushed it off…images…showed an injured policeman on the ground below, near a pool of blood and the overturned vehicle

Yet President Barack Obama is threatening a regime that answered the call of the people to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood dictator Mohammed Morsi.  He’s condemning their role in attempting to restore order and reopen parts of Cairo occupied by the Brotherhood while saying nothing about the Brotherhood’s violence, torchings, and murders beyond the usual Obamatalk blandishments about the need for…restraint.  And he’s cancelled joint exercises with the Egyptian military—cancelled them, rather than postponing them so they’re not a distraction while the Egyptians attempt to restore order.

Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo

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While the world, including our own government, decries the Egyptian government’s efforts to clear two Muslim Brotherhood encampments in downtown Cairo, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind, regardless of what we might think about that crackdown.

The violence, the bloodshed, is entirely on the hands of the Brotherhood.  The police went in with water cannon and tear gas, and they were met with gunfire (including mortar rounds in other cities, as the Brotherhood’s decision to riot spread).  They’re openly rioting, but they’re cynically not limiting themselves to opposition to the Egyptian police: they’re also butchering any Coptic Christians that they can reach (generally in southern Egypt, as the Christians have been hunted out in the north, by this gang and others), desecrating these Christian churches in the process.  Never mind, just kill them all, seems to be the Brotherhood’s attitude.

The Brotherhood could have kept their protests peaceful.  Think what a powerful statement that would have been in the face of the force—however gentle—the police would still have had to use to clear those encampments.  Instead, the Brotherhood demanded violence, demanded to be killed in their protests so that they could be martyred.

This is a violent movement, bent on violent destruction of all who disagree with them.

Responsibility

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The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero understood this in 55 BC.  Rome failed to recover her sense of responsibility—personal and individual, as communities, as a nation—at all levels.  Tyranny arrived shortly after Cicero published his realization.

Free Speech

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Much has been made of President Barack Obama and his colleagues’ assault on free speech through his IRS and apparently through his FEC and SEC.  It’s important to understand that, reprehensible and dangerous to America as these assaults are today, Obama and his are simply channeling one of their Progressive forebears.

Here’s President Woodrow Wilson on the usefulness of government censorship, during another war in which the US was, at the time, participating only peripherally.  He wrote this letter to Congressman Edwin Webb in May 1917.

My dear Mr. Webb:

I have been very much surprised to find several of the public prints stating that the administration had abandoned the position which it so distinctly took, and still holds, that authority to exercise censorship over the Press to the extent that that censorship is embodied in the recent action of the House of Representatives is absolutely necessary to the public safety.  It, of course, has not been abandoned, because the reasons still exist why such authority is necessary for the protection of the nation.

I have every confidence that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field who can not be relied upon and whose interests or desires will lead to actions on their part highly dangerous to the nation in the midst of a war.  I want to say again that it seems to me imperative that powers of this sort should be granted.

Cordially and sincerely yours,

WOODROW WILSON

The “recent action of the House” concerned a provision for explicit Federal government censorship of the press that Wilson had demanded be included in The Espionage Act of 1917, then under debate in both houses of Congress.  In the event, the Act was passed in June without the provision (the Senate having removed it by a one-vote margin) and signed into law by Wilson, even though he continued to protest the necessity of the “right” to commit censorship.

Authority to exercise censorship over the press is absolutely necessary to the public safety.

While Wilson didn’t get that power of censorship in the Espionage Act, he did get it in the Sedition Act of 1918:

Whoever…shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States…shall be punished….

The added invention of the Obama claque is that “some persons in a position to do mischief” are conservative persons who criticize the Obama administration.  Such criticisms are viewed by today’s Progressives as “disloyal” and “scurrilous.”  And plainly “abusive.”

Hmm….

Big Brother Behavior Mod

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You’ve seen in some of the news media reports on a new Federal government team designed to facilitate the government’s ability to persuade us to do various things it thinks appropriate for us.  The team being formed to spearhead this effort is colloquially called a “Nudge Team” because it’s ostensibly intended only to suggest to us better, more efficient ways to achieve goals.

As you might expect, I have some thoughts on this.

The formative document is called, interestingly enough, “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights,” and it has this illuminating statement in the opening paragraph:

In 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which through a process of rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government….

Notice that: advance government priorities, not those of a Sovereign citizen.  The next paragraph fleshes this out:

The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help…scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials.

The government intends to engage in “behavioral interventions” to “persuade” us to their (more efficiently achieved) goals.

But wait—isn’t that just ordinary advertising, something every business man, from a one-man home office business to the GEs and Bank of Americas, does to get us to buy their products?

Investor’s Business Daily talks about the government not having a clear idea of what is “good for us” (never minding the primacy of the government’s goals for us), that the government can’t be trusted to stop at any particular point—the slippery slope concern—and the (subtle at first) loss of our individual liberties as the government gets this sort of program rolling along.

IBD is right on all counts, but it’s that last that’s most important of the three.  And that leads me to my concerns.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising when businesses or individuals do this.  It is, after all, limited to more or less friendly persuasion.  We’re also free to walk away from it at any time, whether by changing the channel, hitting the mute button, turning the page in our magazine or newspaper, or closing the door on the salesman.

Not so much when it’s the government doing the “advertising.”  Government has too many ways to suggest that we heed its blandishments, from the way it “guides” potential contractors in its project notices, or “encourages” folks to get onto its food stamp program, all the way up to, and including, enemies lists and open assaults by Federal agencies on organizations that disagree with the government.

Along with that is a concept that’s being lost in modern America (and which loss facilitates government dominance of our activities): not everything done in the private sector is appropriate for the government to do also.  More strongly than that, most things done in the private sector are wholly inappropriate for government to do.  When the government does engage in what is for the private sector, freedom is put in peril.

One source of the risk is that government tends, in the end, not to do alongside private individuals or enterprises the things that we do, but to do those things instead.  This isn’t because government can do these things more efficiently.  Rather, it’s because government can do them more cheaply than the private sector: government can—must—do this with OPM, with taxpayer money.  From the beginnings of this crowding out, government winds up saying to us, “No need for you to do these things; we’ve got this.”  From there it’s a short step to, “Butt out.  This is government business.”  It’s a (subtle, but the more insidious for that) threat to our liberty.

Nudge team “persuasion” is on that latter list; it’s wholly inappropriate for our government to involve itself in such a thing.  Especially given the avowed behavior modification aspect of it.

The government’s central…Nudge Team…document can be seen here and here.