From Vox Day, anti-feminist knuckle-dragger, regular WorldNetDaily columnist, and self-proclaimed Christian libertarian:

Dear Jorge plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security — resources which will never materialize — in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America’s wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic — it’s just not going to work.

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

— Vox Day, WorldNetDaily column (2006-05-16): Against a fence

Well, at least you can’t accuse him of weaseling about his position, or about the kind of instrumental means that he’s willing to consider.

Some days From the Horror File just isn’t enough to describe it.

Update 2006-05-17: WorldNetDaily has silently edited Vox Day’s column this morning to remove the reference to the Holocaust from the third paragraph, without any notice either of the content of the change, or even that a change has been made. Here are the edits:

You can compare and contrast for yourself by consulting Vox Day’s unedited archival copy of the column.

Meanwhile, Vox cites the following as a reasonable question about his choice of examples:

Why exactly did you go with Nazi Germany, when Slobodan Milosevic’s tactics toward Kosovar Albanians seems more in line with what you’re proposing?

Well, then. That clears it all up, doesn’t it?

In a remark on my last post on Iraq, Sam Haque points out:

The situation is that occupation forces have taken for themselves the role of guardians by and large without the consent of those who they are ostensibly protecting.

— Sam Haque, comment (2006-05-10) on GT 2006-05-08: Why We Fight

This is true, and not just of the situation in Iraq. It is as accurate and concise a description as you could make of what governments do for a living, always and everywhere. It’s war that brings this into the sharpest relief, because the normal restraints on brutality are released, the beneficiary-victims are strangers in a faraway land, and the public intellectuals and the official press line up to shout down any serious challenge to the progress of war aims. But war and occupation are only the starkest and most explicit expression of what State power essentially means, not just with bombers and soldiers and tanks, but also with every spook, cop, G-man, prosecutor, jailer, and hangman whose paychecks we are forced to cover. Consider, for example, the local cops in New Britain, Connecticut, who protected the hell out of an 11 year old boy and his mother in the name of serving a drug search warrant without interruption, or last week’s riot and reign of terror by Mexican police asserting their authority to protect and serve the people of San Salvador Atenco, whether they like it or not.

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

Or, as Ezra Haywood once put it, A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors. And so it is for us civilians, facing the doorkeep before the Law.

Further reading:

• Randolph Bourne (1918): War is the health of the State
• Lysander Spooner (1867–1870): No Treason

So that moderate cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani can exercise his God-given right to organize anti-gay death squads:

[Fourteen-year-old boy] Ahmed Khalil was shot at point-blank range after being accosted by men in police uniforms, according to his neighbours in the al-Dura area of Baghdad.

Campaign groups have warned of a surge in homophobic killings by state security services and religious militias following an anti-gay and anti-lesbian fatwa issued by Iraq’s most prominent Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

… Neighbours in al-Dura district say Ahmed’s father was arrested and interrogated two days before his son’s murder by police who demanded to know about Ahmed’s sexual activities. It is believed Ahmed slept with men for money to support his poverty-stricken family, who have fled the area fearing further reprisals.

The killing of Ahmed is one of a series of alleged homophobic murders. There is mounting evidence that fundamentalists have infiltrated government security forces to commit homophobic murders while wearing police uniforms.

Human rights groups are particularly concerned that the Sadr and Badr militias, both Shia, have stepped up their attacks on the gay community after a string of religious rulings, since the US-led invasion, calling for the eradication of homosexuals.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani recently issued a fatwa on his website calling for the execution of gays in the worst, most severe way.

The powerful Badr militia acts as the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which counts Ayatollah Sistani as its spiritual leader. Another fatwa from the late and much revered Ayatollah Abul Qassim Khoei allows followers to kill gays with a sword, or burn him alive, or tie his hands and feet and hurl him down from a high place.

Mr Hili said: According to our contacts in Baghdad, the Iraqi police have been heavily infiltrated by the Shia paramilitary Badr Corps.

Mr Hili, whose Abu Nawas group has close links with clandestine gay activists inside Iraq, said US coalition forces are unwilling to try and tackle the rising tide of homophobic attacks. They just don’t want to upset the Iraqi government by bringing up the taboo of homosexuality even though homophobic murders have intensified, he said.

A number of public homophobic murders by the Badr militia have terrified Iraq’s gay community.Last September, Hayder Faiek, a transsexual, was burnt to death by Badr militias in the main street of Baghdad’s al-Karada district. In January, suspected militants shot another gay man in the back of the head.

The US State Department has yet to document the surge in its annual human rights reports. Iraq’s neighbours, however, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are often criticised for their persecution of gays.

Darla Jordan, from the US State Department said: The US government continues to work closely with our Iraqi partners to ensure the protection of human rights and the safety of all Iraqi citizens.

— Jerome Taylor, Independent (2006-05-05): Iraqi police killed 14-year-old boy for being homosexual

Please bear in mind, if you are in the United States, that your money has been taken from you by force, in order to make you pay for the arms and the training for this police force. Please also bear in mind, if you are in the United States, that the polite functionaries and well-dressed men and women who have collaborated with al-Sistani, who are now turning a blind eye to this and covering it over with some diplomatic words in the name of nation-building, are also pretending to do so in your name and with your authorization.

You need to understand that anger and facile sarcasm are the way that I make it through the newspapers these days without collapsing into tears.

Further reading:

• GT 2003-05-29: Rumsfeld: What an Awful Outcome
• GT 2002-08-24: With allies like these, who needs terrorists?
• pink-triangle.org

I appreciate them where I can find them. Here’s one from Washington, DC, announced this evening:

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 3 — A federal jury rejected the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday, deciding instead that he should be sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The verdict seemed to surprise most people in the courtroom here, notably Justice Department prosecutors. They had relentlessly urged the jurors that Mr. Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in April 2005, should be executed for his role in the deaths and destruction of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jurors left the courthouse without speaking about their reasoning. But court officials read aloud details of what factors the jurors had voted to consider as they decided Mr. Moussaoui’s fate, including his troubled upbringing in a dysfunctional immigrant Moroccan family in France.

The decision means that the sole individual charged in a United States courtroom in connection with the worst attack on American soil will spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Colorado with no possibility of release.

… Under the federal death penalty law, Judge Brinkema is obliged to impose the sentence chosen by the jury, and she said she would formally sentence Mr. Moussaoui on Thursday morning.

— Neil A. Lewis, New York Times (2006-05-03): Moussaoui Given Life Term by Jury Over Link to 9/11

As I said in an earlier case, mutatis mutandis,

It is also good to see that justice for Rudolph will come untainted by wrath. The last thing we need is a martyr for the terrorist wing of the anti-abortion movement, and the last thing I need is to be stuck with defending the rights of yet another ghastly shell of a human being who is obviously guilty as hell to be free of the hangman’s noose. Thank Heaven for small mercies.

Of course, the usual pack of ruddy-faced chest-beaters will be screaming for blood. In fact, they’ve already started. There’s not much to say to those who revel in fantasized torture and slaughter. There is a lot more to say to those who have an argument rather than just a snarl, but most of it I’ve already said in GT 2004-12-15: God damn it and GT 2005-12-13: Murder in the first. The New York Times, though, does leave us with this attempt at a parting shot:

Rosemary Cain, who lost her son George, a New York firefighter, said she heard the verdict on her car radio. I had a kind of sinking feeling in my stomach, Ms. Cain said. I was absolutely hoping they would put him to death.

He is just an empty, empty person, she said. There are just some people who cannot be rehabilitated.

— Neil A. Lewis, New York Times (2006-05-03): Moussaoui Given Life Term by Jury Over Link to 9/11

This may very well be true–both in principle and in application. But saving the souls of the wicked is not a legitimate aim for a system of criminal justice in the first place. Neither is avenging the dead, or indulging victims’ loved ones in a sadistic quest for closure through inflicting pain and death. If it has a legitimate purpose, it is to restrain criminals from harming anyone else. The jurors did that today, with a sentence as stern as anyone has a right to demand, and I say good on them for it.

Is there anything as ridiculous and petty, in the end, as the arrogance of power?

But it was a different story when Westword and then the Rocky Mountain News published more extensive excerpts from Harris’s writings. The excerpts showed that Harris had developed detailed plans to attack the school a year in advance, while he was in a juvenile diversion program and supposedly being investigated for building pipe bombs and making death threats (I’m Full of Hate and I Love It, December 6, 2001). Now officials were outraged that their top-secret investigation had sprung yet another leak.

So was the Denver Post. Tired of getting its ass whupped in the leak department, the Post went to court to demand the release of the rest of the materials seized from the killers’ homes. Attorneys for the county and the killers’ parents responded with a flurry of dire warnings about copycat effects, including one from David Shaffer, a psychiatrist and expert on adolescent suicide. In addition to a 27-page resumé, Shaffer submitted a four-page affidavit asserting the toxic nature of the basement tapes, which he hadn’t seen.

Some judges involved in the Columbine litigation have uncritically embraced the copycat argument, saying the disclosure of the materials would have a potential for harm or, in fact, would be immensely harmful to the public. [District Judge Brooke Jackson], who ultimately may have to decide the matter, has been more skeptical. In one hearing on the basement tapes, he pointed out that there were plenty of Columbine imitators before the existence of the tapes was even disclosed. All the more reason, [Assistant County Attorney Lily Oeffler] responded, not to release them.

What evidence do you have today that release of the documents is going to cause some calamity, or are we just speculating? Jackson demanded.

Unless you release the evidence and they actually cause the calamity, Your Honor, the question cannot be responded to, Oeffler shot back.

Does that mean I can’t, and no court can ever release them because maybe some additional copycat is going to be inspired?

I don’t think it is a maybe, Your Honor, Oeffler responded gravely.

— Alan Prendergast, Westword (2006-04-13): Hiding in Plain Sight: Are Columbine’s remaining secrets too dangerous for the public to know — or too embarrassing for officials to reveal?

(Link courtesy of Rox Populi 2006-04-19: Doomed to Repeat It.)

It’s hard not to find the whole thing grimly funny, and not just because the Oeffler sounds exactly like the sort of name Dr. Seuss would invent for some otherwise anonymous, off-screen minion of paternalistic censorship. And then, just to add insult to injury, there’s this:

One proposed solution to the question of the killers’ tapes and writings, advanced by Ken Salazar before he left the post of Colorado attorney general for the U.S. Senate, was to turn over the materials to a qualified professional, who would author a study about the causes of Columbine while keeping the primary materials in strict confidence. The proposal soon fell apart, though, after the killers’ parents refused to cooperate with Salazar’s anointed expert, Del Elliott, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.

— Alan Prendergast, Westword (2006-04-13): Hiding in Plain Sight: Are Columbine’s remaining secrets too dangerous for the public to know — or too embarrassing for officials to reveal?

Or maybe it’s because they couldn’t find John Ray Jr., Ph.D., to take on the job.

Further reading:

• Council of Trent (4 December, A.D. 1563): Rules concerning Prohibited Books