Op-Eds

Joe Biden Reaffirms Washington’s Message to the World: Never, Ever Trust Us

1 Comment
3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines - Afghanistan
3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines — Afghanistan. Photo by Corporal James L. Yarboro, USMC. Public Domain.

In February 2020, US President Donald Trump announced a peace deal with the Taliban, giving US forces 15 months to get out of Afghanistan. Nearly a year later, with  the withdrawal nearly complete and only 2,500 US armed forces members remaining on Afghan soil, incoming President Joe Biden took the oath of inauguration and instantly began complaining that the May 1 deadline would be “hard to meet.”

The claim is silly on its face. The US military is great at moving people. Eight months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. Five months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had moved 697,000 troops to the theater of operations for what became Operation Desert Storm. For any competent commander, moving 2,500 troops from Point A to Point B is a weekend hobby project, not a major undertaking. All Biden had to do was give the order.

On February 13, the White House leaked a new date: September 11, 20th anniversary of the attacks that President George W. Bush cited as casus belli for what was supposed to be a short, sharp war to liquidate al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but quickly turned into a 20-year failed (and deadly) “nation-building” project.

Should we be surprised? Well, no. Biden is just following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Given the long, sorry record of US perfidy, the Taliban shouldn’t be surprised either.

“The United States acknowledge the lands reserved to the Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga Nations,” reads Article II of the Treaty of Canandaigua, ratified by the US Senate in 1795. “[T]he United States will never claim the same nor disturb them.”

Between then and 1868, the United States continuously negotiated, then sooner or later violated, hundreds of treaties with the continent’s native tribes. By 1920, the extent of Oneida land “acknowledged” in the Treaty of Canandaigua had been reduced from six million acres to 32.

Abroad, the US government takes a similar tack, always treating other parties’ agreed obligations as non-negotiable and its own such obligations as optional.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty requires the US to work toward getting rid of its nuclear arsenal. Instead, recent administrations have gone in the other direction with a focus on “modernizing” that arsenal, while demanding that the Iranian regime go beyond its NPT obligations … then defaulting on its end of THAT deal, too.

As David A. Koplow of the Georgetown University Law Center points out, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention required the US to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles by 2012. At last check, the US Army promises to get that done … in 2023.

Also per Koplow, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires governments to inform foreign arrestees of their right to communicate with their countries’ consuls and seek assistance. The US demands that of other governments when Americans are arrested abroad, and routinely “forgets” its own such duty when foreigners are arrested in the US.

At this point, no one should be surprised when the US government lies. It would be far more surprising if Joe Biden told the truth for once.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Joe Biden’s Latest “Gun Violence” Fairy Tale

1 Comment
Gun photo from RGBStock
Free photo from RGBStock

A White House “fact sheet” tells us that “the President is committed to taking action to reduce all forms of gun violence.”

The “fact sheet” departs from the facts starting with its title, which characterizes gun violence as a “public health epidemic.” Gun violence is a set of volitional human behaviors, not an infectious disease spread by gun cooties and amenable to “public health” remedies.

The “fact sheet” announces six “initial actions,” none of which any sane person would expect to substantially impact gun violence.

Ineffectual initial action #1: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of ‘ghost guns.'”

“Ghost guns” are homemade firearms. They’re not made in government-licensed facilities, nor do their makers generally report them to the government. While some are built from commercially sold kits, firearms are simple technology. You could probably build one from items lying around your house, even if you don’t have machine tools or a 3D printer. No matter how many rules DOJ proposes,  the vast majority of ghost guns will remain beyond its reach.

Ineffectual action #2: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.”

That’s even dumber than the “ghost gun” rule. Stabilizing braces are even easier to build at home than guns. And if anyone paid attention to a rule against them, that rule would only magnify the carnage of mass shootings as violent criminals sprayed more bullets, less accurately, into their targeted areas.

Now we move from merely ineffectual to idiotically counter-productive with action #3: ‘The Justice Department … will publish model ‘red flag’ legislation for states.”

“Red flag” laws allow police to seize guns from people who haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of crimes on the claim that they “present a danger to themselves or others.” When a bunch of gun-waving cops show up unexpectedly to confiscate someone’s firearms, that someone sometimes DOES start presenting a danger to themselves or others, when he or she hadn’t before. And if he or she doesn’t respond that way, it’s evidence that the order was unnecessary in the first place.

In addition to likely being 99% ineffectual and counterproductive, the first three “initial actions” are also 100% unconstitutional.

Initial actions number 4 and 5 are just bureaucratic showboating to justify throwing taxpayer money in a hole and setting it on fire: “The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions” and “[t]he Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking.”

Action #6 — the appointment of former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives thug (and Waco massacre revisionist) David Chipman to head that agency — is probably a subject for a whole column of its own. It might actually be consequential.

The first five “initial actions” are a mix of pro-gun-violence idiocy and public relations fluff that the White House should be embarrassed for even trying to put over on the public as non-fiction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

“Vaccine Passports” and the Holocaust: An Invalid Comparison?

3 Comments
Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: "This city is free of Jews." September 1939. Public domain.
Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: “This city is free of Jews.” September 1939. Public domain.

On March 29, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky issued a tweet that aroused considerable controversy (not least among partisan Libertarians themselves):

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?”

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called the tweet “shameful” and implied it was “anti-Semitic.”

Rabbi Shlomo Litvin called the comparison “morally wrong,” but treated it, kindly, as part of a widespread habit of “using Holocaust comparisons to make literally any political point you want to make.”

Was the tweet over the top? Well, maybe.

Was the tweet anti-Semitic? Ask the Jewish protesters in Israel who equate that country’s vaccine passport scheme not only with the yellow Star of David badges forced on Jews by the Nazis, but with  death camp prisoner tattoos.

Was the comparison valid? To at least some degree, yes.

Early on, the Nazis used a “public health” excuse for their targeting of Jews and the imposition of the patches. Jews, they said, spread typhus, and needed to be identified so that others could avoid them and stay healthy.

Yes, that supposed “public health” concern was completely false.

But the notion that COVID-19 represents a permanent, existential threat to humanity, that we can never return to “normal” again, and that those who choose not to get vaccinated represent a significant danger to those who choose to get vaccinated is completely false, too.

Novel viruses hit humankind hard occasionally, then recede as we learn to treat them and vaccinate for them, and as they weaken through mutation. No sane society completely remakes itself around them.

Supporters of vaccine passports tout them as a way to “allow” us to do things such as attend concerts and sporting events.

We’ve never needed health-based government permission to do those things before, and there’s no compelling argument that we should be required to seek such permission in the future.

Vaccine passports aren’t needed to “allow” things. They’re not designed to include, they’re designed to exclude. They’re designed to do something with a long history that includes, yes, the Holocaust: They’re designed to ghettoize (“put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated place, group, or situation”).

Absent government involvement, if a business doesn’t want to accept un-vaccinated customers (or any other kind of customers), that’s, well, their business. But they should shoulder the costs themselves instead of asking governments to create and impose uniform identification schemes for them.

A federal vaccine passport would create yet another government surveillance tool. It would also inevitably be used by local governments to legally exclude the un-vaccinated from particular types of businesses (such as nightclubs), particular expressions of public life (such as youth sports), and quite possibly entire zones of public commerce (such as large shopping centers), all in the name of “public health.”

And the scheme wouldn’t end with COVID-19. It would be continually repurposed and probably made permanent.

I’d like to see everyone choose to get vaccinated, but we should all be opposed to forcibly ghettoizing those who don’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY