Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Anglospherics

Sovereignty

NORTH YEMEN IS A NATION:

Yemen’s Endless Wars (James Snell, 5 May 2021, History Today)


Mountainous and dry, with a tendency to anarchy in the ample spaces between its cities, Yemen has long been hospitable to insurgency. Yet in ancient times it was home to the Sabaeans and had claims to be the biblical land of the Queen of Sheba. Its fertility and beauty were such that the Romans called it Arabia Felix, ‘happy Arabia’. The people there are mostly Arabs and like much of the rest of Arabia, became subject to the distant domain of the Ottoman sultan. The fate of the peninsula was influenced significantly by Britain, which in 1937 took the port city of Aden as the centre of its colony (on independence in 1967, it became South Yemen). Britain exercised significant influence over who ruled Muscat and Oman; assisted succession to the monarchy and imamate of North Yemen; and together with the US confirmed the al Saud family as hereditary rulers of what became Saudi Arabia. Now combined, the former North and South Yemen are together Sunni by bare majority, but the Zaidi Shia remain a large, mainly northern minority.

Since Yemen was unified in 1990, successive governments have claimed that the country can be governed as one, a right that a number of rivals currently contest. Yet the number of guerrilla wars fought in the country’s north in the last hundred years show that the old cliches about Yemen are at least partly true. Wars of insurgency take root there and, each time, the same players and similar countries are involved.

Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthi movement after its leaders Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi (1959-2004) and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi (b.1979), is the latest organisation to conduct an insurgency in the territory of the former state of North Yemen. The Houthis’ antecedents fought enemies, both internal and external, including Egyptian troops sent by Gamal Nasser, the president of the then United Arab Republic (UAR), in the 1960s. […]

That war began with an attempted coup. In 1962 the newly crowned king and imam of North Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, was overthrown by a military which desired to establish an Arab republic in an age when two Arab states, Egypt and Syria, had already united as the UAR. The officers behind the coup were trained by Egypt and their efforts to usurp power were supported by Nasser.

Muhammad al-Badr was a Zaidi Shia, who drew his support from this religious group. Within weeks of the coup he began marshalling resistance among the country’s tribes.

Losing of WWI

VERSAILLES DID NOT TREAT THE ALLIES HARSHLY ENOUGH:

False Messiahs (Barnett R. Rubin, January 4, 2024, Boston Review)

Neither the British nor the Zionist movement considered the views of the people who lived in Palestine, 96 percent of them Arab. By Herzl’s own account in his diary, he did not speak to a single Arab during his 1898 visit to Palestine.

As historian Rashid Khalidi documents in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Balfour wrote in a 1919 memo to the British cabinet that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. . . . Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” Winston Churchill, in his 1937 testimony to the Peel Commission appointed by London to make recommendations on Palestine, was more emphatic:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Why did Zionism and many Jews accept this bargain? As Europeans, even if oppressed ones, they largely shared the virtually unchallenged assumptions of European colonial thinking. Circumstances also provided them with little choice. Given the opportunity, many—perhaps most—of the Jewish refugees from Hitler would have gone to the United States rather than Palestine. But by the 1930s, the tightening grip of anti-Semitism on the Western world convinced even erstwhile Jewish opponents of Zionism that they had no choice. Zionism’s claim that Jews could never be safe among other nations was proving true, not only in Nazi Germany but also in the “liberal” west. Jews trying to flee Nazi anti-Semitism butted up against anti-Semitic immigration laws in the United States and UK. The British—indeed Home Secretary Balfour himself—had enacted the Aliens Act in 1905, introducing immigration restrictions. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 was explicitly intended to stop the massive immigration of Eastern European Jews, among others. In July 1938, thirty-two nations assembled on Lake Geneva at the Evian conference to consider what to do about the mounting tide of Jewish refugees. Every delegate expressed sympathy for the refugees, but only Ecuador and the Dominican Republic offered to admit any of them.

The Mandate for Palestine given by the League of Nations to Britain in 1920—which came into effect in 1923—gave the Zionist organization legal status as “a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine.” It also provided that the mandatory authorities “shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage . . . settlement by Jews on the land.” The mandate forbade discrimination by the British in Palestine against other members of the League of Nations but offered neither protection nor any form of representation to the Palestinian Arabs.

As colonial subjects, the Palestinian Arabs, unlike the Americans or British, had no sovereign power to regulate immigration into their territory. The combination of the Nazi regime, the exclusionary consensus expressed at the Evian conference, and the British mandate on Palestine together imposed a disproportionate burden of accepting Jewish refugees on the Palestinians, whose tiny country had nothing to do with the origin of the crisis and was deprived of any means of self-government.

Israel/Palestine

THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF PALESTINE:

Could Barghouti be the Palestinian to make peace with Israel? (Alain Catzeflis, 1/19/24, the Article)

For decades the international community has clung to the idea that peace in the Middle East could be imposed from the outside: essentially by American power and Arab money. Time and again this has proved a dangerous illusion. A go-between can, well, go-between warring parties. But, as every peace initiative in history shows, all you can do is take a horse to water.

Ami Ayalon is a straight-talking Israeli war hero with the ageing good looks of a combat veteran from central casting. Ayalon headed both Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, and the country’s navy. He thinks he has the answer.

Ayalon believes the Palestinian who ticks all the boxes has been sitting in an Israeli jail for 22 years. He’s talking about Marwan Barghouti, the most senior Palestinian leader behind bars and by far the most popular, though not a man widely known to the world beyond.

A veteran of the 1987-93 and 2000-2004 intifadas or uprisings, Barghouti is serving five life sentences for his role in the death of Israelis during the second intifada.

Ayalon told the Guardian recently, that Barghouti is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel “because he believes in a two-state solution and because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”

Identitarianism Republican Liberty

Of Insurrections and Republics: Considering the plausible constitutional theory behind Sec. 3 of the 14th Amend., as well as wrestling with whether January 6th was an insurrection & if Donald Trump offered aid & comfort to the same. (JUSTIN STAPLEY, JAN 19, 2024, The Freemen Newsl-etter)


Like most of the American founders, I strongly distrust pure democracy. As John Adams once wrote, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy.”

I view democracy from a very utilitarian perspective, in that democratic processes are indispensable to a functioning constitutional republic but no more indispensable, and arguably less indispensable, than other aspects of republicanism, such as meritocracy, the rule of law, liberty, etc. I’m, therefore, less inclined to herald democracy as a principle or ideal, one that holds value and virtue in and of itself. As the quote from Adams suggests, every majoritarian democracy in history has ended in tyranny. In such attempts, the unvarnished will of the people inevitably empowered demagogues who played off the anxieties of the people toward achieving unchecked power. That’s why the American founders crafted a republic, one with checks and balances upon every exercise of power, including the voice of the people.

We often think of constitutions as limits on governing power and protections for the rights of the people. And they are that. But in the broader context of constitutional theory, the function of a constitution extends to purposes conducive to wrestling with the realities of human nature. Consider that, in any form of representative government, a limit placed on governing authority is a limit placed on the majoritarian will of the people and that protections for rights and liberties are, once again, limits placed on what a political majority can do to a political minority. A constitution is nothing more and nothing less than a circumscription of power—all avenues and repositories of power, including the people themselves.

Clearly, the purpose of a constitution’s circumscription of power is not to enable the unvarnished voice of the people. The very idea of limited governance is counter to the idea of democracy as an unadulterated good. To the contrary, the basic theory of constitutional governance recognizes pure democracy as one of the great evils to be avoided and democratic processes as, to at least a certain extent, a necessary evil. Constitutional theory, then, is not dedicated to establishing democracy as its ultimate aim but utilizes democratic processes as an ingredient toward the ultimate aim of establishing and preserving the sovereignty of a people.

What is the sovereignty of a people? That can prove to be a complicated question to answer. But the easiest and most straightforward way to understand popular sovereignty is Abraham Lincoln’s conception of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Under the concept of popular sovereignty, the people, as a whole and not simply a majority of the people, are the reservoir of ultimate and supreme power in society. The authority of any form of government under such a scheme derives from the consent of the governed (by the people), and its legitimacy is maintained through representation (of the people) whose responsibility is to provide for the common good (for the people).

While democratic processes help provide a framework that assures government of the people and by the people to a reasonable degree, history has demonstrated that democracy is ill-suited to provide the common good for all people in a society. The unavoidable development of factions, the inevitable spirit of party, and the inescapable shortfalls of majority rule all guarantee that the effects of pure democracy cannot ever be conducive toward the common good. There must be auxiliary precautions enshrined in a political compact, a constitution, that checks and balances majoritarian power if the common good of the people can even become a possibility. Further, even government of the people and by the people is impossible through majoritarian democracy, because, once again, we’re talking about all of the people, not simply government by whichever faction or interest can cobble together a 50+1 majority.

Sovereignty, not democracy, is the ultimate aim of constitutional governance, and sovereignty, as I’ve demonstrated above, is aided by democratic processes but only secured through a strong and well-constituted form of limited government. The sovereignty of a people relies upon a constitution that is maintained as the supreme law of the land and effectively checks and balances the exercise of all power, especially the power of majorities. And this is my crucial point: the sovereignty of a people is assaulted, rather than preserved, if the provisions of a constitution are discarded or defenestrated in the name of democracy.

The Right frets about liberalism lacking a “common good” but the requirement of republican liberty that laws be applied universally enforces one.

Israel/Palestine

NATIONALISM DOESN’T WORK:

Return of the False Messiah: The Blind Ambitions of Benjamin Netanyahu. (David Stromberg, 1/18/24, Hedgehog Review)

Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective. Many people have noted that October 7, 2023, was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. But the evocation of the Holocaust, even when accurate, conceals part of the complexity of this Black Shabbat: namely, that it took place amid one of the greatest crises that has ever gripped Israel, all of it orchestrated and overseen by a single person with unmatched power. Many have noted that Bibi is not solely responsible for every mistake or miscalculation that led to this disaster. But there is no question that he failed to take steps to avoid the kind of division that tore Israel’s social fabric apart in the months leading up to this Black Shabbat and that he failed to establish any lasting unity among its peoples. If Bibi is Israel’s leader, he leads the nation straight into darkness. And while Israel’s citizenry has shown unparalleled heroism and leadership since the attack, putting the political echelon to shame, Israel’s politicians—led and enabled by Bibi—continue to reveal the depths of their cynicism.

We should consider these developments in relation not only to the relatively few years of modern Israel’s existence but to the millennia of Jewish history. Considered against the sweep of Jewish history since the destruction of Jerusalem, the disaster of October 7 actually pales in comparison to the violence of the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Khmelnytsky massacres, and it certainly pales in comparison to the Holocaust. So what makes this event so singular in the minds and hearts of Jews across the world today? Certainly, it has to do with the sense that this Black Shabbat echoes the barbarity of these horrific events. But it also appears to substantiate one of the more ostensibly radical claims that certain Israeli writers, journalists, and scholars have been making for quite some time: that Bibi is the most dangerous Jewish leader to have emerged since the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi.

Unlike the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, or the repeated expulsions from one corner of the world to another—all of which forced Jews to contend repeatedly with extreme violence as well as attempted annihilation—the influence of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) could not be attributed to outside powers. As a cataclysmic event, it shaped Jewish history from within, precipitating the greatest internal crisis that is known to have taken place in centuries and leading to such internal upheavals across so many communities that scholars today consider him as ushering in the modern Jewish era across the globe—including the rise of the secular Zionist movement. Because, mysticism aside, what Sabbatai Zevi tried to bring about —in practical terms—was a mass return of Jews to Zion.

The movement that came to be known as Sabbateanism was not self-propagated. It is true that Sabbatai Zevi was banned from his hometown of Smyrna, modern-day Izmir in Turkey, after declaring himself the messiah at the age of twenty-two and spending the next two decades traveling through Turkey, Greece, Palestine, and Egypt. But it was not until he met a mystic and ascetic named Nathan of Gaza that he was proclaimed messiah by someone else. Nathan of Gaza, who claimed to be Sabbatai Zevi’s prophet, spread his prophecy to Jewish communities throughout the world with letters and pamphlets, some of which were fake texts attributed to ancient figures. Nathan of Gaza was able to establish a cult of personality that eventually led much of the Jewish world to believe that the messianic era had arrived and that a return to Zion was imminent. But in 1666, the year in which Nathan of Gaza declared that redemption would arrive, Sabbatai Zevi ended up converting to Islam, setting off a crisis that would reverberate across Jewish culture for hundreds of years.

We are now at the threshold of a crisis no less severe. Watching Bibi speak ever since October 7, one senses that, for far too long, he has been told that he is King Bibi—and that he truly believes in the prophetic claims of his role as Israel’s unrivaled and divinely installed leader. Even though Bibi is not religious, he presides over the most religiously extreme and messianic coalition in Israel’s history, a throwback to the kind of ideologically tainted mysticism invoked by Nathan of Gaza to elevate Sabbatai Zevi to the status of messiah—and to promise a new era to Jews across the world. Bibi’s promises at the 2023 United Nations General Assembly of “a new Middle East that will transform lands once ridden with conflict and chaos into fields of prosperity and peace”—just a few weeks before the Hamas massacre and the destruction of Gaza that ensued—smack of the kind of delusional dreams that seemed just as real to Sabbatai Zevi when he was brought before the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV for sedition.

Israel/Palestine

“ALL MEN”

Misunderstanding antisemitism in America (Musa al-Gharbi, 1/11/24, Slow Boring)


Contrary to widespread narratives, students do not internalize the views of their professors very often. Young people’s attitudes tend to be fairly stable throughout their college careers, and the limited change that occurs seems to be driven much more by peers than professors.

And far from pushing politics in the classroom, surveys suggest that more than 80 percent of scholars who work on Middle East issues self-censor on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Overwhelmingly, this self-censorship entails refraining from criticism of Israel, typically out of fear of retaliation by external stakeholders, university administrators or student mobs.

Moreover, rather than education pushing people to hold antisemitic or anti-Israel views, college attendance and completion are inversely correlated with antisemitism. The overwhelming majority of college graduates embrace one or fewer of the Anti Defamation League (ADL)’s fourteen antisemitic attitudes. And even people who just attended some college but didn’t graduate tend to be significantly less antisemitic than those who didn’t go to college at all:

Higher education also corresponds to greater knowledge about the Holocaust and lowered propensity to engage in Holocaust denial.

And although this question is importantly distinct from antisemitism per se, the more college Americans get, the more likely they become to express positive views of Israel (and the less likely they become to view Israel unfavorably).

Why are so many people convinced that the opposite is true?

In part, it’s because, as has chronically been the case in “campus culture war” discourse, narratives about colleges and universities after October 7 have been driven heavily by sensationalized events at a small number of elite schools whose culture, policies and students are deeply unrepresentative of higher ed writ large.

Exacerbating this problem, many inappropriately conflate trends among young people as a whole with trends among college students in particular and then inappropriately blame institutions of higher learning and “radical professors” for trends that are common among young people writ large, even those that did not attend college.

The widespread tendency to conflate opposition to Zionism, criticism of the Israeli government, or support for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism reinforces these misperceptions.

There’s nothing more American than the insistence on universal self-determination.

Republican Liberty

DENYING CONSENSUAL GOVERNANCE:

The Constitution’s Overlooked Road Map for an Accountable Bureaucracy (Alison Somin, 1/18/24, Discourse)

Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of officials in the federal government who exercise expansive power who are not confirmed by the Senate, are not accountable to the president, or both. To fix this broken system, it’s necessary to revitalize the president’s powers to appoint and remove executive officials.


In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the progressive movement grew increasingly critical of the original constitutional design. The progressives wanted to move power away from the democratically elected president and direct appointees into the hands of supposedly impartial, nonpolitical experts.

Their moment came in the 1930s, when the crisis of the Great Depression led to demand for extraordinary measures. Congress created a slew of new executive agencies and made it impossible for the president to fire many of the officials who populated those agencies except for cause. And over the ensuing decades, as these agencies pushed the bounds of their own power, decision-making power accumulated with officials who were never constitutionally appointed.

Early progressives and contemporary defenders of the administrative state have defended removal protections for federal officials because they allow those officials to be “insulated from politics.” But put another way, this is ultimately an attempt to wrest the levers of government power away from the people. It’s incompatible with the Constitution’s promise of self-government, the beating heart of the American experiment. The people deserve the government they choose, whether it comports with the preferences of the “experts” or not.

There is value to having the executive branch staffed by experts with technical knowledge. But technical knowledge is only one part of the puzzle that is policymaking. Values also matter, and the ability to make tradeoffs among competing values is one of the most important parts of governing. Those tradeoffs must be made by the people’s representatives or, at the very least, officials who are directly accountable to them.

Unlike the intentional spread of removal protections, the plethora of federal officials who wield government power without being vetted by the Senate developed as much by default as by design. The New Deal and the Great Society vastly expanded the footprint of government interference in the lives of everyday Americans. All those rules and enforcement actions overwhelmed the capacity of officials who had been appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Rather than appointing more of these officials, the executive branch devolved lots of power to employees who were never appointed in an accountable manner.


Regulatory overreach by officials who are not constitutionally appointed appears to be all too common. One Pacific Legal Foundation study found that 71% of rules issued by the Department of Health and Human services were unconstitutional because the officer signing them was never appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Taiwan

THERE IS NO CHINA:

In Taiwan’s high-stakes elections, China is the loser (Ellen Ioanes, Jan 14, 2024, Vox)

Taiwan under Tsai shored up its relationship with the United States, as well as creating closer ties with Japan and European nations; all three candidates emphasized the importance of the US-Taiwan relationship, with little daylight on their foreign policy.

Where Lai broke away from his competitors, and particularly Hou, was in his framing of Friday’s election as a choice “between democracy and autocracy,” as David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a panel discussion Wednesday.

All the candidates indicated that they would continue Taiwan’s defense partnership with the US and would increase the island’s defense budget, which currently stands at $19.1 billion, or 2.6 percent of GDP, indicating, as Sacks said, broad agreement that relying on dialogue with Beijing or Xi’s “goodwill” isn’t enough to keep China from trying to take the island by force. While Lai signaled that he’ll raise that percentage, it’s not yet clear by how much.

Israel/Palestine

HOIST ON OUR OWN DECLARATION:

Biden faces growing internal dissent over supporting Israel’s war on Gaza (Brooke Anderson, 16 January, 2024, New Arab)


This initiative by federal workers follows at least two significant resignations from the Biden administration over his handling of the war. In October, Josh Paul, a State Department official, resigned, saying in a (now unavailable) LinkedIn post that he made the decision “due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel.”

Earlier this month, Tariq Habash, who served in the Department of Education, himself a Palestinian American, became the first Biden appointee to resign over the war. In his resignation letter, he wrote, “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives…”

Adding to the pressure on Biden is South Africa’s accusation of genocide by Israel in Gaza at the International Court of Justice.

“We unequivocally join world leaders and international human rights organizations in support of South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice alleging Israel violated the Genocide Convention,” said the congresswomen in a joint statement on Thursday.


“There must be an end to the violence—and there must be accountability for the blatant human rights abuses and mass atrocities occurring in the region,” they continued.

The congresswomen noted the historical importance of South Africa as a post-apartheid state being the country to bring the case to court, and they vowed to continue advocating for a ceasefire.

Identitarianism Religion

YOU CAN’T BE BOTH CHRISTIAN AND IDENTITARIAN:

Christian theology and identity politics (Martin Davie, 16 January 2024, Christianity Today)

[F]rom the standpoint of Christian theology the whole idea of dividing the world into good people and bad people has to be seen as completely mistaken. The reason this is the case is that the Christian faith, based on the teaching of the Bible, holds that every human being, with the sole exception of Jesus Christ, is a bad person in the sense that they are a sinner against God and their neighbour.

This basic Christian conviction is well expressed in To be a Christian, the catechism published by the Anglican Church in North America in 2020. The section on ‘Salvation’ in this new catechism declares:

“1.What is the human condition? Though created good and made for fellowship with our Creator, humanity has been cut off from God by self-centred rebellion against him, leading to lawless living, guilt, shame, death, and the fear of judgement. This is the state of sin. (Genesis 3:1–13; Psalm 14:1–3; Matthew 15:10–20; Romans 1:18–23; 3:9–23).”

The key point to note is that all human beings are sinners. In the words of Paul in Romans 3:23 ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ This applies to rich and poor alike, men and women alike, white, black and brown people alike, and heterosexual people and sexual minorities alike.

The consequence of this fact is that although we can (and must) distinguish between the deeds that people perform and say that some are good and some are bad, we cannot divide the world into good and bad people.

We cannot say that we are good while others are bad. As Jesus made clear, all we can ever say is ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’ (Luke 18:13). We also cannot say of other people that X is good, and Y is bad. Viewed against God’s standards, everyone is bad. Thus, the conflict in the Middle East is not between bad Israelis and good Palestinians (or conversely between bad Palestinians and good Israelis).

From what I have said thus far it might appear that Christianity takes a very pessimistic view of things since it says that we are all sinners and all we can look forward to is ‘darkness, misery and eternal condemnation.’ However, three further things need to be considered.

First, even if Christianity is pessimistic this does not mean that it is wrong. If we are honest about ourselves, we know that we do not live as we should and that therefore, to quote C S Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, if God exists and is absolutely good he ‘must hate most of what we do…. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves his enemies.’

Secondly, while insisting that we are all sinners, the Bible, and mainstream Christian theology following the Bible, has always insisted that because they have been created by God in his image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27) fallen women and men retain an awareness of the distinction between good and evil, and an ability, albeit limited, to perform morally good actions. It is because that is the case that it is realistic from a Christian point of view to seek to ask people to take action to at least mitigate the consequences of conflicts such as the current conflict in the Middle East. That is not asking for the impossible.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Christianity offers hope for everyone.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Energy

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Republican Liberty

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM INHERENT IN LIBERTY…:

Energy

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

Homocentric Universe

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.